I actually saw the Barbie movie in a theater, and I think it'd be fun to have a thread about it.

Here are my rules:
- Spoilers allowed on plot or tone.
- Absolutely no spoilers related to jokes. (Unless you black them out for others to highlight.)

If you want to participate in this thread and haven't seen it yet, I think the jokes are charming enough to sustain the experience, but you will lose something obviously from having the movie discussed.

My thoughts under the jump.

I can't think of another kid's movie that has left the adult-level rage at the patriarchy so intact. And while the plot is resolved happily in Barbie Land, the darkness of the patriarchy in the real world is left to stand exactly as is.

If you go in expecting to see rage at the patriarchy, you'll be underwhelmed. It's a kid's movie, not a Sinead O'Connor SNL performance. But I was not expecting it, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Second, they do a nice job of being feminist while being both mainstream and being feminine. Kind of like Legally Blonde in that way. (Which I actually didn't enjoy that much, but it's been awhile since I saw it.)

The whole thing is totally great, especially the first half when you're mostly just exploring the Barbie World and the real world. The plotline is weak, but good enough.

This Texas A&M story is pretty shocking: the school of Journalism made a tenure-track offer to Dr. Kathleen McElroy, an A&M alum who is currently at the UT School of Journalism - and who is black.

What originally was a tenure-track offer was reduced to a five-year position after conservative backlash arose in response to the hire. It was then lessened again to a one-year position from which she could be fired at any time. McElroy ultimately walked away from the negotiations, saying the final offer "makes it clear they don't want me there."

It sounds like the president initiated the second two offers, going around the department's wishes. When the scandal broke, the president resigned.

We didn't actually discuss the whole "slavery was good for blacks!" crap oozing out of Florida. This big ol' world sure is depressingly racist.

On the topic of technology, I don't know if there's any appetite for discussing this weird dumb rebranding of Twitter, but it certainly won't be worth posting about anymore a day from now, so we might as well strike while the iron's hot.

Bostoniangirl writes: Tech bleg here:

Apple decided to update my operating system and killed off a slow but functioning 8 year-old iMac. All of a sudden it doesn't recognize the disk. Anecdotally, this update broke at least one other person's mac. We bought a new Mac. Apple discontinued Time Capsule a while ago, but Time Machine software still exists and our stuff was backed up on a Synology Drive. We still aren't exactly sure how you recover the files.

Three questions:

(1.) Does anyone know how to restore from the drive or just grab the files?
(2.) Do people have good forums/places to find this kind of information that they recommend?
(3.) Since it looks like it we're not the only people who this happened to, is there a way to give Apple feedback?

Back when computers were harder to use and less useful, the manuals explained things and tech support helped you.

Heebie's take: I try Reddit for these things, but I bet someone here has some know-how, too.

Hydrobatidae sends in "How Your House Makes You Miserable: The Rise of the Market-Reflected Gaze":

We're so accustomed to the discipline of the male gaze, the white gaze, the hetero gaze, to just generally internalizing others' expectations of how we should behave and look and be and making them our own....And just as the beauty and diet industry has been built on the insecurities incurred by those primary gazes, the remodeling industry thrives on the unspoken but totally spoken agreement that we should all feel bad about our homes. Hence: you stop feeling quite so bad, so less-than, so always-unsatisfied about your body....and start feeling really bad about your cabinets.

The main driver of this is definitely remodeling shows.

Grant and Handelman argue that the proliferation of home remodeling shows has intensified and normalized the market-reflected gaze, which is further strengthened by real estate agents (who advise potential homeowners on how they could modify a potential purchase), contractors (whose advice trends towards "standards"), and interior designers. The general advice is to make the home broadly palatable, of course, but in a way that also "professionalizes" the space. Hence: every bathroom should look like a spa bathroom (absolutely clutter-free, bland but vivid art, "hotel-grade" towels); every kitchen should look like the open kitchen at a swanky restaurant.

The entire article is incredibly interesting (to me, who loves thinking about interior design) and I'm struggling to limit myself to just a few excerpts.

All of it is at once objectively ridiculous and incredibly familiar. How do you make your home entirely your own -- a reflection of your good taste! -- while also making it wholly acceptable to the market-reflected gaze? The only solution is to make the market-inflected taste your taste. And that experience can be incredibly alienating, particularly when you convince yourself that you're doing a remodel that you're going to love, spend a ton of time and energy on it, and then look around and think meh. Sure, your bathroom looks "nice." But that's because it looks like the bathroom at the Hilton, fulfilling a very specific, very bland, and very bourgeois understanding of what "nice" looks and feels like. As a result, many homeowners experience a feeling of what Grant and Handelman call "dysplacement" in their own homes. They're unhappy when they haven't remodeled, and they're still unhappy after they do.

I'm just going to brag now: we're redoing our bathroom, and I am twisting our contractor's arm to convince him that I really do want a lime-green-and-rattan-caned-wallpaper-with-dark-floors bathroom. The contractor's first renderings were hideous. (If you're curious, scroll down here.) It literally looked like the assignment was "Put some chartreuse into a convention center bathroom" and I recoiled in horror. The gorgeousness of the tile still shines through, though. It's going to look so good when it's done.

NickS writes: Something I've been musing about lately -- The first time I heard the NRA slogan, "An armed society is a polite society" I believed the logic. I didn't think it would be worth it, and that would be a poor way to pursue a polite society, but I thought it was, on some level, accurate.

I no longer believe that. I don't think widespread carry of firearms will affect politeness very much.

I'm curious what other people think, the possibilities that I've thought of are:

1) I am wrong now, and an armed society would be a polite society.
2) That people are just contrary by nature, even when logic would suggest caution.
3) That people acclimate to familiar threats. Even if they initially change their behavior based on a perceived threat of gunplay in response to quarrels, that will fade over time.
4) Alternatively, there may be psychological reasons to challenge somebody who's making an (implicit or explicit threat) and force them to make good on the threat or back down. My sense of primate societies is that there are frequent challenges to whatever monkey is in the top position.

Other ideas? Am I way off-base?

Heebie's take: Right: firearms do not increase civility. I think 3 is mostly it.

The closest you can say is that after a dispute escalates out of control, the actual moment that someone draws a gun, will have a faux-calming appearance as everyone else will usually prioritize their own mortality over their desire to win the dispute. That's not polite in any sense, though. And it brings us back to 3: you can't maintain that kind of vigilance all the time. (Or rather, that's what abusive relationships demand - for the victim to maintain that kind of vigilance all the time. But I don't think most of us can maintain it when we're at the grocery store, or driving around, or especially when we're an 18-25 year old male with a few beers in them.)

But I'll add a 5) the general possibility of guns actively decreases civility in a society. Bringing along a possible way to kill someone is wildly anti-social. An armed society does not utililize all their best de-escalation techniques.