All posts tagged: understood

What Shannen Doherty Understood About Brenda Walsh

What Shannen Doherty Understood About Brenda Walsh

Published by skeptic

When Ezra Pound said “Make it new,” he was not talking about teen soaps. So much of their appeal lies in their predictable storytelling and immediately recognizable characters: the beautiful girl group with the just-complicated-enough underbelly, the standoffish and misunderstood boys who’ll fall in love when the right girls come their way. Even Beverly Hills, 90210—which popularized, and arguably remains the apotheosis of, the genre—was bound by the formulaic demands of network television. When Brenda Walsh, played by Shannen Doherty, complains to her mom in the show’s first episode that she has nothing to wear and doesn’t “have the right hair,” what she means is that she’s a brunette in a world of blondes; complexity, variation, the unexpected and wholly new did not appear often on ’90s TV. Still, Doherty, who died of cancer earlier this month, was able to make something unforgettable out of Brenda. In a fictional world of tried-and-true tropes, she wasn’t a good girl or a bad girl; she was something more human altogether. Her smirk, those bangs, her roiling, earnest …

What Fertility Doctors Wish You Understood About IVF

What Fertility Doctors Wish You Understood About IVF

Published by skeptic

On Friday, Feb. 16, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that several couples whose embryos had been destroyed when they were removed from a hospital freezer could sue for “wrongful death,” meaning the embryos are considered children in the eyes of the law. The text of the ruling refers to embryos as “unborn life” and “extrauterine children,” arguing that each one is a person made in God’s image, per language enshrined in the state’s constitution. Reproductive health care had already been curtailed in Alabama, which has some of the country’s most restrictive legislation regarding abortion. Abortion procedures are banned entirely, with limited exceptions to protect the life of the pregnant person. In the wake of this recent ruling, Alabama residents are already losing access to IVF. The IVF program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has halted fertilisations and embryo transfers to protect doctors and patients from legal repercussions. Hannah Echols, a spokesperson for the university, told HuffPost this week: “We are saddened that this will impact our patients’ attempt to have a baby through …

Vladimir Putin has never understood why Ukrainians want to control their own destiny

Vladimir Putin has never understood why Ukrainians want to control their own destiny

Published by skeptic

Ten years ago, Ukraine looked to the democratic world like a faraway place. But this was just before Ukraine’s “Euromaidan” protests toppled the country’s pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, paving the way for the election of a pro-western president, Petro Poroshenko. As scholar of east European studies Peter Vermeersch has put it, whereas Ukraine was once seen as “the western edge of eastern Europe”, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 2022, the country has transformed in the eyes of the world into “the eastern edge of western Europe”. It was a transformation that had taken place not least because of the popular will of much of the Ukrainian people. In 2003, Leonid Kuchma, who was then acting president of Ukraine, published a book called Ukraine is not Russia. With his choice of title, Kuchma – a person with an exemplary Soviet background as a former member of the central committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine – sent a powerful message about the divergence between otherwise “brotherly” nations. What Kuchma had in mind, …

What to Do When You Feel Too Different to Be Understood

What to Do When You Feel Too Different to Be Understood

Published by skeptic

I first learned the clinical term “enigma predicament” while attending a training in radically open dialectical behavioral therapy, but it’s a concept I’ve related to since childhood. The words describe an experience of feeling different and often alone. A person within this paradox might feel so unlike others that there is a sense that others couldn’t understand them (Lynch, 2018). It’s a particularly familiar experience for neurodivergent people and those living with mental health conditions. We might genuinely integrate information differently, leading us to feel, well, different. This feeling of being different can lead to a sense of negative exception—that one is almost inherently “less than” others and ought to be treated as such. For some, the predicament conversely links to a sense of entitlement—that one should be treated as exceptional because they are. The reality is that, as humans, we have more in common than we do differently. We have worth because we are. Not that we are “smart,” “pretty,” or generally what others want us to be, but because we just are. Still, …

I’ve Been Divorced Twice And Wish Everyone Understood These 3 Things | María Tomás-Keegan

I’ve Been Divorced Twice And Wish Everyone Understood These 3 Things | María Tomás-Keegan

Published by skeptic

If you’re getting a divorce or going through a difficult life transition, there are some important life lessons you can take with you that make the heartbreak easier. Learning how to move on after a divorce is a big step, whether you’ve just made the decision to get a divorce or you’re struggling in other areas. Relationships are often fragile and breakups can be devastating, and you need to rely on your resources to bring you through. RELATED: I Didn’t Properly Grieve My Divorce — Until I Lost My House The good news is that oftentimes, life lessons can even come from other sources, and learning from other people’s decisions can help empower you to make your own. Believing you’ll be okay and that there is something better awaiting you helps to get you through, along with leaning on your life lessons. For those who know me or have been following my journey, you know that I have been through a lot of transitions in my life, including divorce — twice. As I look back on those times, …

Ancient philosophers understood a key truth of modern cosmology

Ancient philosophers understood a key truth of modern cosmology

Published by skeptic

Sometimes we must go back to go forward. Old ideas seem to keep resurfacing, even if in different guises. Similar concepts and intuitions emerge in different cultures, as people try to understand what they see in the world. The vocabulary and the cultural context changes, the fundamental concepts, methodology, and even the goals of the explanations are different, but the core ideas are essentially the same. Amazingly, this is the case with how matter arranges itself into the structures that we see — from atoms to galaxies.  Around 600 BCE in Ancient Greece, Anaximander of Miletus, one of the first Western philosophers, had a powerful vision of the cosmos. He believed that everything was made from a primordial substance and that everything that we see in the world and the skies — from frogs to trees to people to stars — were temporary structures that “in the assessment of Time” revert to this primordial goo. Anaximander called this stuff the “Apeiron,” which translates loosely to the “Boundless.” Whatever the Boundless was, it was part of …

Key climate language poorly understood by majority in UK, poll finds | Climate crisis

Key climate language poorly understood by majority in UK, poll finds | Climate crisis

Published by skeptic

The British public has a worryingly low understanding of language around the climate crisis and environmental policies to reduce waste, according to the findings of a survey. Only a quarter of people questioned clearly understood the term “green” and about the same number could accurately describe what “sustainable” – making something in a way that causes little or no damage to the environment – meant. The study, released on Wednesday and conducted by the insights company Trajectory and the communications agency Fleet Street, suggests even terms in widespread use by businesses, such as “environmentally friendly” and “locally grown”, are understood only by a minority of people. Government policy initiatives driven by reducing waste were also not clearly understood. Three months after a ban on single-use plastic cutlery and plates was introduced, less than half of consumers questioned, or 47%, were confident at defining “single-use plastics” – plastic items that are used once and then thrown away. Mark Stretton, a co-founder of Fleet Street, said the research suggested more needed to be done to engage customers …

The 5 Things A Period Expert Wishes You Understood About Your Menstrual Cycle

The 5 Things A Period Expert Wishes You Understood About Your Menstrual Cycle

Published by skeptic

I think like a lot of people, I really confronted my periods in my mid 30s. Up until then it was literally a pain in the uterus. Usually, it’s around having a baby or not that brings our periods and hormones into our awareness. I knew I didn’t want to have children, and as it turned out, I was grateful to feel that way. I had a long history of rubbish periods; by that I mean painful, heavy, and irregular. I was put on the pill to combat this, which it sort of did until it didn’t. The pain and heaviness never really went and if anything, things began to get worse. After years of trips to the GP and A&E I was eventually diagnosed with cantaloupe sized cyst hanging off my left ovary. My consultant told me I would need surgery to remove the melon which I had named Persephone. They were going to just chop my ovary off, because I didn’t want children. I advocated for that ovary, saying I would absolutely like …

Israel’s Deep State Understood the Dangers of Extremism

Israel’s Deep State Understood the Dangers of Extremism

Published by skeptic

During the fall of 2022, my family and I lived in Tel Aviv, where my wife and I were visiting professors at Reichman University, in Herzliya. I taught a class called “Democracy and Dictatorship.” It was a fraught time. Almost all of my students were in the military or veterans. Several were deeply concerned that Benjamin Netanyahu would bring a new era of antagonistic nationalism to Israel, at a time when they felt the country needed cohesion instead. One said she would likely leave the country if he won. As the former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, I was asked to speak at the university’s annual World Summit on Counter-Terrorism conference, on a panel about the dangers of far-right terrorism in the United States. In my presentation, I recounted a chilling conversation I’d had in June 2017 with a civil servant from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. He told me that Trump-administration officials had basically instructed his office to stop talking about white nationalists when they referred to domestic terrorism in the United States. …

Capturing spread is a powerful but less understood business model available for some startups

Capturing spread is a powerful but less understood business model available for some startups

Published by skeptic

Mohit Agarwal Contributor Mohit Agarwal is a leader at a global management consulting firm based in New York, where he drives large business transformations. It is now close to gospel that internet advertising and B2B SaaS are among the last century’s most profitable (legitimate) business models. They have more similarities than differences. Both internet advertising and B2B SaaS benefit from a meager marginal cost of production (which is the core driver of their margins). Once the platform and audience are in place, an additional advertisement doesn’t cost much, just as selling an additional license doesn’t require a new software build. Both rely on a strong B2B sales motion — selling licenses to enterprises or selling ads to SMBs. Both have sizable go-to-market and customer success functions, ensuring the all-too-critical sales and service motion is well run. Both attract and incentivize account executives with lucrative variable compensation packages. These businesses are as much about sales excellence as they are about product. The product needs to be great, but without sales, the business doesn’t generate those nosebleed …