Spring 2014 TEDx Special

TEDx EVENT COVERAGE

TEDx 2014 www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

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By Carla Sinclair | Pipe Dream News TEDxBinghamton University 2014 presented a packed Osterhout Concer Theater with topics ranging from digital currencies to the algorithms of romance, challenging students to “stray the course.”

Mathematician Hannah Fry, actor Ruben SantiagoHudson, drug policy advocate gabriel sayegh (who chooses not to capitalize his first or last name), entrepreneur Sebastian Walker, engineer Jeff Garzik, editor Anna Holmes and doctoral candidate Ben “Unidan” Eisenkop shared their ideas with the audience. The Binghamton Crosbys provided a musical interlude.

This year’s theme was ‘straying the course.’ All of the speakers’ topics touched on ideas involving innovative technologies and thinking, like Garzik’s discussion on Bitcoin as the newest advent of the internet, or sayegh’s insight on reforming drug policy.

“The speakers were unbelievable,” University President Harvey Stenger said at intermission. “From drug addiction to new currencies … it’s just things you would’ve never heard in a normal conversation, if you watched

every channel on television all day long, you would not have heard what you heard in the last hour and a half.”

TEDxBinghamtonUniversity was organized by students Stephen Prosperi, Stephanie Izquieta and Gina Kim, along with a team of volunteers.

Holmes talked about protesting media stereotypes by quitting her job at prominent women’s magazines such as “Elle” and “InStyle” to begin the alternative women’s blog “Jezebel.” Actor and alumnus of the class of ‘78 Ruben SantiagoHudson gave the last talk of the afternoon, focusing on building on the failures of life. Eisenkop detailed the changing climate of funding research, a topic Stenger said could influence the way information is both demanded and received by the public.

“We have so much research for the population but we have this middle person in between, that tries to maximize and broker the population’s ideas and funding,” Stenger said.

“Now we can go directly to the population and find out what they want to learn.”

Prosperi, a co-director of last year’s TED talk at BU and

a junior majoring in finance and marketing new media as a part of the individualized major program, explained the speaker selection process as a way to expand the breadth of the talks.

“We decided to have seven speakers, and once four or five of them got back to us, we decided that that ‘straying the course’ was a theme,” Prosperi said. “If we pick a theme ahead of time, you’re limiting yourself to speakers who fit within that theme, and a school this big with this many majors, I don’t see a point in limiting our theme with speakers of one type when we can hit so many different areas.”

According to Izquieta, a junior majoring in philosophy, politics and law, organizers focused on issues relevant to this generation.

“We look at what’s trending, what’s popular; something that the students are interested in,” Izquieta said. “Drug policy wasn’t a coincidence; it’s something that’s in the news right now, something that’s prevalent in our generation, as voters … We look at speakers who have an idea worth sharing, and something that we want our campus to be exposed to,

that might not have been there before.”

George Bishai, a junior majoring in political science, agreed that the talks addressed important topics.

“The issues discussed were very thought-provoking and the speakers managed to take some very abstract ideas and simplify them in a way that would relate to your average college student,” Bishai said. “The gabriel sayegh talk about sensible drug policy was definitely the best part of the whole event.”

Tina Williams, a first-year graduate student in public administration, disagreed. She said that she found the quality of some of the talks to be lacking.

“I thought it was so-so,” Williams said. “It could have addressed more substantial issues. Especially Walker, they sold his topic as some secret all important issue, and it was about cricket. Like are you kidding? The way he connected it to apartheid was insulting. It solves racial disparities when you’re playing the game, sure, but what about after?”

Williams also said she was dissatisfied with the explanations of some of the new

technologies.

“Bitcoins have potential, but the way he presented it was really dry,” Williams said. “I also didn’t understand when he used the argument that 80 countries don’t have access to credit cards for Bitcoin promotion; they probably don’t have access to Internet either. He made himself and the idea more selfimportant.”

According to Student Association Executive Vice President Samson Widerman, the group that runs TEDxBinghamtonUniversity is part of the Philosophy of Science club, and the event itself is sponsored by an array of different organizations on campus. These include the Office of the President, the Alumni Association, the Political Science department and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Widerman said.

“We hope the attendants get inspired. We want them to realize that straying the course is okay,” said Kim, an organizer and a junior majoring in neuroscience. “And I hope that everyone in the audience got a little taste of that, and wants to hone in on it, and stray the course themselves.”

The issues discussed were very thoughtprovoking and the speakers managed to take some very abstract ideas and simplify them George Bishai BU Junior

gabriel sayegh www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

The war on drugs, which began in 1971 with the Nixon administration, may not just be putting criminals behind bars.

Gabriel sayegh, the State Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, says its creating a system of mass incarceration, which he says is having extremely negative consequences on society.

“Wars are not fought against imaginary objects, they are fought against people,” said sayegh, who chooses not to capitalize his first or last name.

Sayegh said that the war on drugs started to pick up steam in New York in 1973 when then Gov. Nelson Rockefeller said that he believed that a treatment approach to drug addiction did not work, and that it was time to start prosecuting and incarcerating drug users. Over 40 years ago, the Rockefeller Drug Laws became the strictest and most stringent in the country, according to sayegh.

These laws mandated jail time for even first time offenders, with a sentencing of 15 years to life in prison for possession of four ounces of narcotics. Other states began to follow suit, and in the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan relaunched the war

on drugs, he was able to spend money hiring police and building more prisons and courts.

“When Reagan relaunched the war on drugs, he had something that Nixon didn’t. He had a national infrastructure at the state based level ready to move that war forward,” sayegh said.

“After 40 years, $1 trillion and 45 million arrests, we have built a system of mass incarceration.”

Currently in the United States, there are 2.3 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons and 7.5 million under correctional control, meaning they are incarcerated, on parole or on probation, according to sayegh. These numbers have risen 800 percent since the war on drugs began. The U.S. is now the number one jailer in the world, incarcerating more people for drug crimes than the European Union jails for all crimes combined, despite having 100 billion more people than the U.S. The largest drug treatment provider in the state of New York is the prison system, and one of the largest mental health providers in the country is Cook

Q&A Pipe Dream: What role do policies like “stop and frisk” in New York City play in this institutional bias? gabriel sayegh: It’s a major factor. Hundreds of thousands of people are stopped every year in New York City, and the overwhelming majority of them are young black and Latino men. The vast majority were doing nothing at all to warrant even a ticket or the charge of a crime. Ninety percent of the people stopped are let go without being given a ticket or a summons. The number one arrest that results from these stops is marijuana possession, and so even though that we know that young white men are more likely to be using marijuana, it is young men of color that are the ones being targeted and swept into the system, often times beginning with a stop and a frisk that more often than not turns into an illegal search. Its almost like a “Head Start” program for the criminal justice system.

PD: Here in the City of Binghamton, our police commissioner recently declared that we have a heroine epidemic, and police officers are now being trained to use and carry Narcan spray. What can be done about a city like this one, which is under a lot of financial stress and is now facing a massive drug problem?

GS: I think one of the first things to do is to have really honest conversations about what’s going on and what the problems are. We’ve often times been stuck in situations when we talk about drugs where there is a great deal of misinformation that is shaping policies and programs. I think that’s one of the first things, to use actual science and evidence to guide interventions; that’s number one. Number two, the

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Narcan program is good, but it shouldn’t just be police who have Narcan. The University here should have both Narcan and be trained to identify an overdose and learn how to reverse it. It should be more widespread and Narcan should be more available. Number three, we should be telling people how to stay alive if they are using heroine. We can tell people all we want that they shouldn’t be using heroine, but as you’re noting, people are using it anyway. There’s ways to keep people safer in that use. Do they have access to programs and services that help them get their lives back together if its are falling apart? The stigma associated with drug use and addiction is profound.

PD: There is a lot of talk about how marijuana legalization is a big issue for the Millennial generation.

Do you think that shifting demographics will have an impact on the potential for future legalization?

GS: There is no doubt that that shifting demographic is going to have an impact here. The polls are showing that quite clearly as reforms sweep across the country. I think the question for me, is what millennials are going to do in terms of leadership and addressing these problems.

Without question there is more openness towards legalization of marijuana, but what about other drugs? Maybe we don’t get to a point of legalization, but what do we do? Even if we say that we are going to end this war on drugs and we are going to move on, we’re going to legalize or do something else; you’ve got generations of people in the United States that have been the target of that war. They have permanent records, they have been

County Jail.

“I think that we can all agree that with the many things that prisons and jails are, what they are not are treatment facilities and mental health care facilities,” sayegh said.

Though people are being incarcerated in large numbers, sayegh said that drug laws are not being applied evenly.

“The racial disparities associated with these practices are egregious, they are ugly, they are indefensible and they are inhumane,” sayegh said. “They distort our democracy.”

He pointed to marijuana, the most highly used illicit substance in the country, as a case study for racial discrimination in the application of drug policy. The use of marijuana across racial groups is relatively the same, according to sayegh. However, the arrest rates for marijuana possession in every major city in the U.S. are highly skewed, and in New York City roughly 85 percent of the people arrested for possesion are black and Latino. Sayegh compared it to Apartheid policies in South Africa.

“This is a huge problem,” sayegh said.

incarcerated, they have lost family members, they have been shunned and kept out of mainstream society. We have to do something to rectify that, and I think that’s partly where millennials are going to come in, and my hope is that they’ll provide some leadership and bring us into a new era where we fix some of these harms.

PD: Can you tell me a little bit about the work that you do and some of the projects you are working on?

GS: We do work on the marijuana arrest issue. We have a huge campaign we’re doing right now on overdose prevention. But a big thing that we’re doing right now, and Binghamton plays a role in this, is working on the medical marijuana law in Albany.

There’s a proposal to make marijuana legal for people who have severe and debilitating conditions like cancer, MS and other things. That bill is stuck right now in the State Senate.

Its been under consideration in Albany for 17 years, and there is a whole state-wide campaign of people across New York working to pass it: patients, doctors, family members and caretakers. Sen. Libous, who is the senator from Binghamton, is the number two person in the Senate, and has cancer.

He has said that if his doctors recommended it, he would use marijuana, but he has done nothing to move this bill forward. So we’re trying to get people like Sen. Libous help get that bill to the floor of the Senate and deliver it to the governor for signatures so that sick people can get the relief that they need and deserve.

PD: Lastly, is there a reason that your name is always lowercase? Can you tell me about that?

GS: I will, but that is a conversation for a different time.

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DRUGS, "THUGS," AND OTHER THINGS WE'RE TAUGHT TO FEAR: RACISM, THE WAR ON DRUGS, AND THE FIGHT TO END MASS INCARCERATION

By Rachel Bluth | News Editor

“This has created a scenario where laws are being applied differently to different people based upon the color of their skin.”

According to sayegh, the tragic part of employing a system of mass incarceration is that people are dissuaded from seeking medical attention and help for overdoses for fear of facing legal repercussions.

Overdoses have now surpassed car accidents as the number one cause of accidental deaths, according to sayegh.

“They are afraid of getting a ride in a cop car instead of an ambulance if they call 911. That is a reasonable fear in a country that has spent the last 40 years locking people up for drug offenses,” sayegh said.

His approach to solving these problems was three-fold. First, he advocated for a health-based approach, noting that the strategy of criminalization was producing sub-optimal outcomes, given that rates of addiction have remained constant as rates of incarceration have risen. The way to accomplish this would be to pursue policies of decriminalizing all drugs, which he said would de-stigmatize the

struggles that addicts face and provide more opportunities for them to get help.

He also advocated for the formation of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to deal with the legacy of mass incarceration, especially on black communities.

“We cannot just go ahead and start reforming laws and not account for the fact that for 40 years we’ve been doing something that has lead to disproportionate outcomes and we didn’t do anything about it,” sayegh said.

Lastly, he noted that informing people about drug use, even how to use drugs safely, will greatly decrease accidental overdoses and keep people safe.

“We need to understand that people are going to use drugs whether we like it or not,” sayegh said. “But we need to create policies that help us establish a baseline of treating people like human beings and not monsters.”

Sayegh first began researching drugs and drug policy after overcoming his own problem with methamphetamine, which he developed as a high school student in northern California.

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www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

BEN ‘UNIDAN’ EISENKOP Alternative Futures of Science Funding

By Christina Pullano | Editor-in-Chief For many, scientific research conjures foreign images of lab coats and pipettes. Promising the audience that “scientists are people, too,” Ben Eisenkop spoke about how crowdsourcing research projects can get anyone perusing the Internet involved — and maybe even inspire new scientists to get started.

Eisenkop discussed websites like Experiment. com, which take the same approach as the website Kickstarter to fund science research projects. The sites enable donors to contribute to the projects that they think have the best ideas.

Having used both Kickstarter and Experiment. com to fund projects he worked on, Eisenkop explained the difference between the sites in terms of contributors’ expectations.

“With Kickstarter, you’re promised a gift,

so you’re getting something back in return,” Eisenkop said. “Science ‘Kickstarter’ is different because you’re promising data, and no one is like, ‘Yes! An excel spreadsheet!’ No one is super jazzed about that.”

Eisenkop, who achieved fame on Reddit under the username Unidan, used Experiment. com to fund a project studying the patterns and effects of American crow movement. The project was successfully funded on March 12, and Eisenkop said support came from a number of online communities — centered on birding, ornithological studies or broad scientific areas — he discovered through Reddit.

“I was able to interact with in a real way and get their input on things,” Eisenkop said.

Several thousand dollars of that funding came through cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Dogecoin, which Eisenkop explained to an

Q&A Pipe Dream: Since it is based on public interest, how can crowdsourcing affect what research is getting funded?

Ben Eisenkop: I don’t want to say that everything should be crowd sourced. I don’t think that’s true. You have some things, like if you want to do Alzheimer’s research, you might say, ‘I’m going to do a Kickstarter and raise $50,000.

And you may do that, and that’s great. [But] that may be one day in an Alzheimer’s’ research lab.

And you need those million dollar grants coming from the government and tax money to keep that kind of thing going. So those kind of projects, I think, don’t work really well. The kind of stuff I do want to talk about is breaking up smaller projects that are more feasible — that may only say, ‘OK, I need gas money to go from here to here’ or ‘I need to refurbish some equipment that I have.’

So those little projects, that people have a vested interest in, are something that I’m interested in.

And that’s something that I think crowd funding is really good for. So if there’s niche project that a lot of people want to get involved with, and you have a close tie with a community that’s involved in that, that’s something that I think works really well for Kickstarters or Kickstarter-type things.

PD: Do you think it’s a negative aspect of crowd funding that if there’s not enough public interest there, a project won’t get as much money?

BE: Yeah. And that’s where I’m saying a lot of the government grant stuff needs to still be there. So you can have people that have really uninteresting, un-sexy projects that are like, ‘I want to study mud bacteria.’ No one is like, ‘Woo! Mud bacteria!’ — you know, it’s going to be harder to get that funding. But having a government grant that can assess that on a separate note, that’s interesting.

PD: I know sometimes projects will be funded by both federal money and crowdsourcing. Do you think that already having crowd funding could help you maybe to get some of those grants, or vice-versa?

BE: Doing some public talks doesn’t necessarily help you get the grants, because you have a peer review board that will assess your grand kind of independent of everything. And that’s purely based on merit of your grant. But

there are parts, if you do get a grant — for NSF (National Science Foundation), for example, there’s “Broader Impacts,” which is a new thing that they’ve brought in so you now need to go out and advance things outside of just your research. So you need to go help high schools, or integrate it for low-income families, or get minority students involved. So they try to get you out there as well, so building this rapport between communities is already really helpful because if you have that base, then your “Broad Impacts” is kind of already taken care of, you don’t need to think to much more ahead on that.

PD: Do you think that during those talks and outreach initiatives, one would pitch their project differently to the public than to something like NSF? BE: We definitely pare things down. So for the crow project that I did, I had an NSF grant that went in, and that was extremely technical, meant for a scientific audience. For Experiment. com, it was pared down quite a bit. Parts of the project were omitted just to make it more tackleable. That, I think, is a big thing too — you want to break your huge project into little, bite-sized pieces. And then also making it understandable by the public, too.

PD: Do you think that these crowdsourced projects can give science, which tends to be more institutionalized, a kind of grassroots feel?

BE: Yeah. The thing that you need to do, I think, to be successful is you need to identify the communities that would be interested in your project. [For the Experiment.com project] we went to birding communities, these are people that are outside, looking at birds, that are interested in this stuff already but don’t necessarily have the means to look and review those topics. So what was cool was we would talk to them and tell them what we were doing, and they have a vested interest because they have a connection with that personally. And because of that, they’re more likely to then share that information … and it becomes organic that way.

PD: Are there any other options out there beyond federal grants and crowdsourcing?

BE: There are smaller grants you can apply for, but it’s the same kind of deal. Some of them [have] really, really low approval ratings in funding rates. And it’s a little disheartening. And in some ways it’s good because it filters out bad proposals — and that’s one the downsides of crowd

amused audience.

“You have an Internet meme that just got so hilariously popular that it eventually became a cryptocurrency in and of itself, and all it is is silly dog photos,” Eisenkop said. “And it was bizarre, because we were like, ‘we’re getting funded by dog pictures right now.’”

Eisenkop admitted that crows aren’t the most beloved animals — “they’re a gigantic, black, ominous bird that eats corpses” — but he said using Experiment.com and Reddit reached a whole new community that took a real interest in his project.

“They’d seen BBC documentaries about animals they’ll never see, but they had never questioned the animals in their backyard,” Eisenkop said.

He said he hopes to see more projects like this reach people to get them thinking about things

that are important to them.

“If you can do that, if you can reach these people and try to get them invested in you, then that builds the future of funding,” Eisenkop said.

“And you can get people to repeat this again and again, and then try to come back, and then become scientists themselves — even if it’s only a small proportion of those people.”

Eisenkop said he hopes to see more people inspired to get into science, particularly within their own backyards.

“Being able to get people to interact with the world around them and realize that there’s a lot out there, and that they can build questions and answer them — even if they can’t get answers from other people — they can do these small projects and get answers themselves. Its’ some thing that I’d rally like to see for the future of science,” Eisenkop said.

funding, if someone’s just really charismatic, they can put forth a bad plan and get it done.

But at the same time, there’s academics that are still out there that are going to evaluate those plans, so I think the next step is trying to find a way to bring some peer review, or at least get this more popular where there will be a site that maybe has a panel of experts that can go through and kind of look at the validity. So instead of just saying ‘OK the U.S. government is the only thing I can crowdsource, we’ll bring this out and make smaller, decentralized crowdsourcing, but it will still have a peer review process.’

PD: Could it be potentially good or bad to have the public have so much influence in funding these projects?

BE: Could be good. Certainly, like I said, it could be bad where you could fund a bad project.

But what’s good about it is you’re not using taxpayer money; it’s entirely individual-based.

PD: You mentioned you think crowdsourcing sites are better used for smaller niche projects.

Should there be any type of regulation on that?

BE: Right now it’s hard to get regulation just because you’re not going to get all these experts to come out and go to all these individual sites.

Though it’s kind of interesting to see where the community is shifting itself, and I think we’re going to have to wait a couple years to see what the hell happened.

PD: Last question.

This year’s TEDx topic

is ‘Stray the Course.’ How does that tie in with your talk?

BE: I think a lot of it is trying to buck the system of ‘the only way that you can fund science is through science-approved channels.’ And that may very well be true for very good science.

And I think that doing this alternate way, in conjunction with the other way, helps you reach a lot of people that may not have that channel available to them. And even if their data isn’t perfect, it can still inform us. So there’s plenty of citizen science that goes on that wouldn’t be perfect data, but because so many people are collaborating on it, you still get a great idea of what’s going on … Even if those aren’t the things that get published, [they] can help us concentrate and focus in on areas that we do want to study.

Q

Hannah Fry

www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

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THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE

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By Nicolas Vega | Assistant News Editor

It’s time to forget about that high school relationship, because the numbers say that the future is bright.

Hannah Fry, a mathematician and complexity scientist at the University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, discussed ‘the mathematics of love’ during her TEDx talk at Binghamton University.

“I think we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love,” Fry joked. “But it’s not just because of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases. It’s also because we’ve actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find our favorite partner.”

Fry took the stage to share her love for math and her top three tips for finding love.

Her first tip, “how to win at online dating,” covered key steps to creating an OKCupid profile that gets attention.

Fry chose OKCupid, she said, because it was created by mathematicians who studied the patterns that people follow when looking for partners.

She said that honesty is important when crafting an online profile.

“It turns out that on online dating websites, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are,” Fry

said. “If you’re ugly, it can actually work to your advantage.”

To back up her point, Fry gave the example of actresses Portia de Rossi and Sarah Jessica Parker. De Rossi, she explained, is more likely to be considered very attractive by a large amount of people, while Parker is considered “seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures that has ever walked the face of the earth” by some, and much less attractive by others.

“It’s this spread that counts,” Fry said. “It’s this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. If some people think you’re attractive, you’re actually better off having some people think you’re a massive minger. That’s much better than everyone just thinking you’re just the cute girl next door.”

Fry said that though most people try and hide the aspects of their appearance that they feel others might find unappealing, they should actually show them off.

“You should play up whatever it is you think makes you different, even if you think some people will find it unattractive,” Fry said. “Because the people who fancy you will just fancy you anyway.”

Q&A Pipe Dream: Binghamton University is a long way from London. How did you end up giving a talk all the way in upstate New York?

Hannah Fry: I have a policy where I don’t like saying no to any opportunities.

I actually received an e-mail a few months back, and I thought it was for a TED event in Birmingham. If you don’t know, Birmingham is a little shithole in England, like three hours out of the way.

And I really didn’t want to go there. But, luckily, a few weeks later, I looked again and I realized that it was actually Binghamton in New York, and I got very excited. When someone offers to fly you out to New York to give a talk about mathematics, you can’t turn it down.

PD: How do you feel when you make trips to the U.S. and you hear people calling it ‘math’ instead of ‘maths’?

HF: [Laughs] I used to mind, you know? In the U.K., whenever you hear an American say ‘math’ people always turn away and whisper the ’s.’ I used to get really annoyed about it. But then I saw a video by Numberphile, which is this math YouTube channel, and they explained the origins of why the U.K. call it ‘maths’ and the States call it ‘math.’

And after that, I didn’t really mind it anymore. It turns out the U.K. is wrong!

PD: You now have a grand total of two TED Talks under your belt. How did you feel about the second one?

Her second tip went over how a person might know when is the right time to settle down into a meaningful, long-term relationship.

She referenced a study called “Why I don’t have a girlfriend” by Peter Backus, where he used the Drake Equation — which is usually used to estimate the number of highly evolved civilizations that might exist in the Milky Way Galaxy — to find how many ideal mates he had in the U.K. According to Fry, Backus’ answer of 26 was about 400 times smaller than the amount of intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are.

She explained that in order for one to maximize their chances of finding an ideal partner, assuming they are searching from when they turn 15 to when they turn 35, is to reject every partner that shows up during the first 37 percent of that stretch in time, and to settle with the next person that appears who is better than all of his or her predecessors.

This procedure, which is called optimal stopping theory, is apparent in nature, according to Fry. “In the wild, there are certain types of fish that follow this exact structure,” Fry said. “They reject all the fish that come up to them during the first 30

HF: It went better than the first, actually. I think that it was a better topic and I was better prepared. I was more experienced as well, which I think was important PD: In your talk, you go over the mathematics of love and you bring in a lot of the work that you have done in a manner that engages the crowd. You brought up ‘optimal stopping theory,’ which is the theory that you don’t settle for a partner until after a certain period of time has passed, and then once that period of time has passed you settle with the next best candidate who presents himself or herself. One question I have to ask: Did you follow that theory?

HF: [Laughs]. Well I suppose I did subconsciously. I think that because I’m ginger — and in the U.K. people don’t like ginger people very much — I think I automatically had people think I’m a massive minger. But yeah, subconsciously everyone does a little bit of optimal stopping theory.

Everyone has a bit of time where they get to know what’s available to them and what the market’s like. I think that I — like everybody — sort of did that automatically.

PD: You talked a lot about online dating websites and the keys to successful online dating. Did you online date?

HF: I have online dated in the past.

But, yeah, no. I didn’t know about [the keys].

PD: Does ‘optimal stopping theory’

percent of the mating season. Then after that is finished, they accept the next fish that is bigger and burlier than those that had come before.”

Fry’s last tip for the audience was how to avoid divorce. She referenced work done by John Gottman, a scientist who, by studying dozens of variables in the relationships between couples, was able to predict with 90 percent accuracy whether or not they would get a divorce.

According to Fry, the couples with the healthiest relationships are not the ones who put up with each other the best, but instead are the ones who have the lowest negativity thresholds, meaning that they are most willing to be vocal with one another about what is bothering them.

“These are the couples that don’t let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain,” Fry explained. “These are the couples that continually try to repair their own relationship and have a much more positive outlook on their marriage.”

Fry ended her talk with a few hopeful words for the audience.

“I hope that for a few of you, a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love can persuade you to have a little bit more love for mathematics,” Fry said.

change if you’re searching for a partner online or if it’s in your everyday life?

HF: The two of them don’t necessarily link in together. Let’s say that you have a number of people who you can date over your lifetime. The optimal stopping theory is: Given that you have dated lots of people or you have the ability to date lots of people, how do you know when to stop?

When I was talking about online dating, I just wanted to show the audience how to maximize their chances of getting a date.

PD: Tell me a little bit about what mathematics means to you.

HF: Oh it’s everything! [Laughs] But if I’m honest, right, you know how poetry or music sometimes manages to communicate things that are not not possible through words? It sounds quite cheesy, but that’s basically how I feel about mathematics. I think what when you play with an equation, you’re kinda seeing into the structure of the universe, or the structure of the world that is not possible to describe in any other way. I think that when you’ve had that experience, or when you’ve had that kind of lightbulb moment where you’re like ‘this is the structure of the universe,’ there’s nothing that really compares to it.

I think that maths is really important.

I think that lots of other subjects like physics and chemistry and engineering people have a natural appreciation for. But people don’t have a natural

appreciation for maths. I think that people at school had a really hard time with it and it’s got a really bad reputation. People are willing to say ‘oh, I’m bad at maths’ in a way that they would never say ‘oh, I’m bad at writing’ or ‘I’m bad at reading.’

I think it’s really important that people see how important and relevant maths

is. But I want to take it away from just talking about the abstract. I think that maths communication should be about sharing how relevant it is in the real world.

Jeff Garzik

6

TEDX SPECIAL

www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

Bitcoin, the organism

By Geoffrey Wilson | Assistant News Editor

Q&A Pipe Dream: How would you describe the benefits of cryptocurrencies to someone unfamiliar with them?

Jeff Garzik: First, I would caution people because it is still an experimental currency, so you don’t want to assume this is going to be as stable, being a brand new currency, as the U.S. dollar or something like that. So with that caveat in mind, I would say that it’s very easy.

You could just download some software to your computer, to your smart phone or visit, say blockchain.infor, and you have your own Bitcoin wallet, and from there it’s easy to purchase Bitcoins at a Bitcoin exchange such as coinbase.com and you can just play with it with as little as a dollar or two.

PD: What is your general opinion of the regulation of Bitcoin? Is it beneficial or negative?

JG: It’s beneficial. It’s better to have clarity than to live in a legal gray area, and so now people know how Bitcoins are taxed and what regulations they have to follow. In March 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department’s FinCEN released a guidance which basically said Bitcoins are legal. Traditionally, they were de facto legal prior to that because private currencies have always been legal in the U.S. for hundreds of years. I could start JeffBucks if I wanted to and that would be perfectly legal. The Treasury Department in 2013 explicitly said that Bitcoin transactions were legal which cleared the way for the Bitcoin Venture Capital and Silicon Valley boom that’s really going on today. But in terms of overall benefits, I think the benefits and future promise of Bitcoin is just huge.

Bitcoin itself is sort of the first time that you can send digital property to another person without a trusted intermediary, whether that’s money or a house or a car or virtual digital property on “Second Life.” This is the first time in history you can securely send digital value to someone else, and Bitcoin enables that.

Obviously there are many other benefits such as lower transaction costs. When I sent $1,000 to my uncle in Croatia, Western Union charged me about $124 to send that $1,000. Bitcoin, it would

be about a penny to do the same. So there’s clear usefulness in the remittance markets; there’s clear advantages to people who are unbanked, that is you’re too poor or your credit is so bad that a bank won’t give you an account or in emerging markets where there simply aren’t banks. Bitcoin enables all of those situations to have access to the banking system, to have access to money, to easily and securely transfer money.

PD: Where do you see the future of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin going, and what directions might it be taking?

JG: It’s not going to be any nation’s currency. One of the primary economic values of Bitcoin is that it’s frictionless — it’s very easy to enter Bitcoin and it’s very easy to leave Bitcoin; there’s no lock in. And so that’s why many of the transaction costs are much lower. In terms of the future, you’ll see a lot of big banks, which are right now conducting Bitcoin trials, they’ll roll out Bitcoins to their customers. You’ll see more Bitcoin laws on the books, and you’ll see a lot more penetration into emerging markets.

Right now, Bitcoin is big in Western Europe and America, and you’ll see the greater growth in Asia, Africa and some of the other continents as the major tech companies roll out their Bitcoin support.

So, is Bitcoin itself going to succeed and be the world’s greatest cryptocurrency?

I don’t know. Right now, it benefits not only from momentum, but network effect. It’s the biggest and the strongest, therefore you have a direct incentive to use the biggest and the strongest, because that’s where you get the most security; it’s simply mathematically more secure.

If another coin comes along that’s better than Bitcoin, then that might be the [cryptocurrency] the world uses in the end. So Bitcoin 1.0 might not survive, but the Bitcoin technology itself is leading all sorts of tech — it’s catalyzing all sorts of technical, economic and computer science changes throughout those various industries. For example, in the accounting industry, completely separate from cryptocurrency, there’s interest in triple-entry accounting and cryptographically-secured accounting, which is fundamentally what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin is fundamentally an accounting

ledger that’s cryptographically secured, and imagine if all the Fortune 500 companies and governments of the world used cryptographically provable accounting. You might not see precisely where the Pentagon’s black budget goes, but you can audit your own government, and for the sake of transparency and democracy, that’s a win for all.

PD: What are your thoughts on the opponents of cryptocurrencies?

JG: We’ve had a number of really good conversations with government officials, and most recently Sen. Manchin from West Virginia. He made headlines several weeks ago saying that he would like to ban Bitcoin. Several days ago, news stories appeared in the Washington Post and elsewhere noting that he has tempered his stance, and he’s not really interested in banning Bitcoin. The most vocal critics tend to be outside the government space where they haven’t really been educated about Bitcoin very much. They just form conclusions based on reading headlines. While there are plenty of Bitcoin critics, in say 90 percent of my personal interactions, education always tempers criticism over time. Bitcoin is just so damn complex that it’s tough, even for technical people to fully understand the system, much less nontechnical people. I view Bitcoin criticism largely as a need for additional education.

PD: While it’s not entirely anonymous, can Bitcoin move even further away from anonymity without compromising its core components?

JG: One of the interesting problems and lines of questioning from journalists is about Bitcoin as anonymous, and my responses tend to be in the exact opposite direction, because right now Bitcoin secures every transaction against counterfeiting by posting that transaction to a public ledger. Every single Bitcoin transaction is available for viewing to the entire world. That’s how the system maintains its security, and so if I make a Bitcoin purchase at Starbucks today, and someone is looking over my shoulder, then they can go online and they can trace my Bitcoin purchases.

Contrary to the media headlines, the Bitcoin is not really private at all once you move past the surface. Government regulators actually recognize this and are noting that Bitcoin needs additional consumer privacy, because right now it is not very private if some snooper or whatever wants to find out your financial information.

For Jeff Garzik, core developer for Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency may be the biggest game changer since the Internet.

“I do think it’s very disruptive, it’s very exciting, and I agree … that it’s the next major internet technology,” Garzik said, “and it’s going to impact the world in a big way.”

Garzik spoke Sunday during the fourth annual TEDxBinghamton University during his presentation, titled “Bitcoin: the organism.”

While the Bitcoin has surged in popularity, breaking into the mainstream, Garzik said there is a lot of confusion surrounding it.

“What is Bitcoin? It’s in the headlines quite a bit,” Garzik said. “I got a text message from my landlord the other day telling me that Bitcoin had filed for bankruptcy. That was interesting because I didn’t know that was possible.”

Garzik examined the Bitcoin as a technology. According to Garzik, there are three building blocks that served as the foundation for Bitcoin: open source software, the freedom of information and the Internet.

Open source software is free to license and redistributed universally, allowing others to improve on it. Garzik compared it to the peer review process in academia, and contrasted it to the cathedral model, in which only the developers have access to the code.

According to Garzik, Edward Snowden’s leak of thousands of classified government documents is just one example of the fact that information inherently wants to be free.

“That’s not a philosophical statement,” Garzik said, “That’s a statement of engineering reality.”

Garzik attributes this to the nature of digital file sharing, as copies can be made without a loss of quality and that it’s more

challenging to hide information than to reveal it.

The final component of Bitcoin is a global decentralized communication system: the Internet.

“Bitcoin is a global, decentralized way that — for the first time in history, the first practical way to do business over the Internet with no prior relationship, no central administrator and no central hub to trust,” Garzik said.

While Bitcoin is generally regarded as a currency, Garzik said it’s capable of much more.

“Any digital asset can be securely transferred over the Internet to anywhere in the world, completely borderless, within seconds,” Garzik said.

Garzik compared Bitcoin to a cashier’s check, an “irreversible guaranteed payment,” but similar to cash, as if it is stolen, it’s gone forever. Transactions are publicly broadcasted information to prevent counterfeiting.

While Bitcoin is an experimental currency, Garzik said it has many advantages, including the inability to inflate supplies and low cost remittances.

However, Garzik said that Bitcoin as a technology will have the most long term effects, with governments and companies adopting transparency policies.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go to a Fortune 500 company or our own government and look exactly at every line item in their books,” Garzik said.

Overall, Garzik said the future is unclear for Bitcoin, and while it may impact future software, it isn’t set in stone.

“Bitcoin is … an experiment,” Garzik said. “It’s a social experiment, it’s an economic experiment, it’s a technology experiment.”

I could start JeffBucks right now if I wanted to and that would be perfectly legal Jeff Garzik TEDx Speaker

Sebastian

TEDX SPECIAL

www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

Q&A

7

The Greatest Spectacle You've Never Seen

Walker

Pipe Dream: Why did you decide to keep your topic a secret?

Sebastian Walker: It just occurred to me at the time. I thought, ‘people always give away their topics,’ so I figured I’d keep it a secret for a change.

PD: Why did you decide to speak about cricket and not your career or studies?

SW: Everybody talks about consultancy, and what they do for a career and their research and everything else. I wanted to do something totally different, and obviously for an American audience. If I was giving a talk to an English audience, or an Indian audience or an Australian audience, I would have given a totally different speech. So I rewrote the speech 20 times, and my wife kept saying ‘you can’t say that, you can’t say that, you can’t say that, American’s won’t understand this, American’s won’t understand this.’ So it was particularly challenging to convey the message of what it is about and not be demeaning toward the audience. I’m not talking about sports, not particularly about sports — it’s not particularly about cricket. Cricket is just the vehicle to get the message across.

It could be about rugby, it could be about baseball. It’s a vehicle I used.

PD: In what ways did you change the speech for an American audience?

SW: Cricket is kind of a complex game. And I started to try and explain some of it, but there’s too much. I could spend a week doing it, there too much. First of all, unless you have strong interests, you won’t understand this. So there was no basic knowledge so some of the jokes had to be cut out. Some of the funny stories I had to cut them out cause they wouldn’t have made sense. Like some of my friends found them very funny, but I kinda had to cut some of them out, so it’s making it a U.S. interest.

PD: Is the sport important to everyone in the Commonwealth nations or is it age and generational?

SW: Regardless of age. My nephew is five, he plays it avidly.

He is obsessed about it. Whenever I visit South Africa, all he wants to do is play cricket with me.

From the moment I see him he just wants to play cricket. So at a very young age they start. I said it’s Commonwealth cause all the Commonwealth countries — cause the British — introduced it to the world. In those countries it is most popular. But I think there are 92 countries now that play it to good standard, and it continues to grow. In the U.S.,

you don’t see a lot of it, but there is a lot, especially in the Indian and Pakistani communities. It’s played right across the U.S., hundreds of thousands that play it now, but nobody sees it cause they go from playing fields far away, but it is becoming more and more popular.

PD: What else is your talk about?

SW: How it has influence.

How it has influenced South African’s history. Its kind a microcosm for what is happening.

And a microcosm for life, and a lot of the lessons are very important actually. A lot of the lessons I’ve learned in life, I learned at a very young age in cricket. It made me grow up very quickly. I was held to a high standard to play first league cricket, which was kind of two below the highest standard you could play in South Africa if you are good enough to play it.

It was extremely challenging. It made me grow up really really quickly playing against adult men who were really tough on me, really really tough and I was a very shy 17-year-old, extremely shy. And it made me come out of my shell. Either you were crushed or you grow up extremely quickly, and it did me a world of good. It’s based on honor and

By Paige Nazinitsky | Managing Editor

integrity, and people try not to cheat, it a very old fashioned game. The world has kinda lost a lot of what cricket represents.

PD: How have you stayed the course?

SW: I think I’ve strayed the course by leaving my home country at a young age and setting off into the world all by myself and ending up in London and in America. Completely by chance.

When I left when I was 22 or 23 I never imagined id be living in D.C. doing this. I never imagined I’d be using cricket as a vehicle that actually in a way bought me my ticket — and the connections I’ve made as I’ve traveled around the world. It’s helped me to find a base in every city, and I’ve lived in multiple cities. It’s helped me find a base of people who speak the same language as me. It allowed me to stray the common course of staying in Johannesburg and marrying a South African woman.

It’s allowed me to travel the world and meet so many people that have had so many wonderful experiences.

Pipe Dream: You’re famous for being a multi-tasking artist — you’re an actor, a writer, a director. When you split your time and effort among so many disciplines, do you find it difficult to excel at an individual one?

Ruben Santiago-Hudson: No, every challenge that I take on, I want to be the best at it. That’s attributed to hard work, research, craftsmanship and as well as applying your craft, learning it. So anything you can do — you can do anything as long as you put the proper amount of time and work into it. You can’t assume you’re going to be good at something. It can’t be a whim.

It has to be a definitive course that you take, a plan that you make, to get good at something. And if you have the talent and you discipline yourself, you can be good at it.

PD: Do you think that working in different disciplines informs your work in other disciplines? For example, your work as a director — does it help your work as an actor, or vice-versa?

RSH: Absolutely. Everything that I do, not just my work. Every experience I have adds to who I am, adds to the fabric of who I am. So yeah, my life experiences have made me better and my experiences in other forms of art make me better at it. If I draw, it makes me a better actor, it makes me a better director. So if I sing, it makes me a better performer. Anything you do builds.

PD: I know that you recently directed a

revival of August Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson” and you played Wilson himself in the autobiographical play “How I Learned What I Learned.” I’m wondering, what attracts you to his work?

RSH: The celebration of AfricanAmerican culture. The opportunity to see people of color as whole human beings. Not devices, not attitudes, but whole human beings. They don’t become one figment of being human, but they become total human beings. And August — no one celebrates African-American life with the vigor, with the integrity, with the truth, with the poetry, of August Wilson. He’s the top.

PD: So I know that your father was Puerto Rican and your mother AfricanAmerican. How is your racial identity important to your career?

RSH: My career is secondary. It’s very important to me as a human being, because I embrace both cultures with the same amount of love, with the same amount of passion and compassion. I embrace being boricua as much as I embrace being AfricanAmerican. I was raised by an AfricanAmerican woman so my demeanor — the way I present myself, my language and my style and my accent is her accent — but my heart is still as Puerto Rican as it is black.

So it means a lot because I’m representing both of those people and I’m representing them with the highest form of integrity.

PD: The theme of this TEDx is “stray the course.” How do you feel that your career

strayed the course?

RSH: The course that was set for other people was not the same course I took. I took the course of life that was gonna take me to a goal that I wanted, and that meant taking a lot of detours, taking a lot of pit stops. Being pulled and pushed in a lot of different directions other than the direction I was going. But I had to maintain my decorum and get back on the road of being successful. My goal was as an entertainer, a storyteller. So my life has been a life where I’ve taken a lot of courses to get to where I call success.

PD: How has your time at Binghamton influenced your career?

RSH: Binghamton, you know, I spent five years here.

So I learned a lot, I saw a lot, I had great mentors. I had people that didn’t believe in me and people who did believe in me. Both of them, equally, gave me fuel. It made me want more, made me want to climb to the next rung on the ladder whether you appreciate me or did not appreciate me. … And then I had people I won’t name, who thought I was not worthy. And so they inspired me as well.

Not to prove to them that I was worthy, but I wondered why they felt that way. So I always just said “be the best I can be.” So if I approach something, I’m coming at it in

Actor, writer and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson brought words of inspiration to the TEDx crowd in the last speech of the day. In his talk, the artist spoke about straying off course in life and how those experiences define who you are.

Santiago-Hudson’s career since graduating from Binghamton University in 1978 has mostly been on the stage. In 1996, he won a Tony for acting in August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars.” In 2001, he staged “Lackawanna Blues,” a play he wrote about the life of his childhood nanny. It won an Obie and later turned into an Emmy-

nominated 2005 HBO film. Aside from work in theater, Santiago-Hudson has acted in television and film, most notably in the AMC series “Low Winter Sun” last year and the ABC show “Castle” from 2009 to 2011.

In his talk, titled “Stray the Path … The Story of My Life,” Santiago-Hudson shied away from discussing his career. Instead he decided to talk about a word from this year’s TEDx theme, “Stray the Course.”

“I thought to wrap this whole thing up, I wouldn’t get too analytical and I wouldn’t get too cerebral, that I would just have a conversation with you about that course,”

Santiago-Hudson said.

Santiago-Hudson defined a course as “something that you follow to get to a goal.”

He said that his resume showed the times people said “yes” to his projects, but it was the failures — the times people said “no” that made him work harder.

“People think that’s what I’m built on — all the things that I have achieved,” Santiago-Hudson said. “I’m equally built on all the things that I failed at. I’m equally built on all the ‘noes’ that I received.”

For Santiago-Hudson, experience is just as much about quantity as it is about

Highlighting that it’s more than just a sport from “Downton Abbey,” Sebastian Walker presented cricket as having the power to unite cultures during his TEDx talk on Sunday.

In his presentation, “The Greatest Spectacle You’ve Never Seen,” Walker argued that cricket has important lessons for all, even if it isn’t the dominant sport in America.

Forgoing the often covered TEDx topics of research and innovation, Walker explained why citizens of current and former British Commonwealth nations will endure five-day-long matches and what the athletes learn through playing. Walker himself spends nearly $5,000 dollars a year, traveling 7,000 miles just to play the game.

Walker knows firsthand the challenges of explaining the sport to those who are unfamiliar with it, talking on an experience he once had with his wife.

“I took [my wife] to Cape Town to watch a match between South Africa and Australia who at the time were the two best teams in the world … for two hours, she asked an incessant number of questions,” Walker said. “Two huge white guys in front of us turned around and gave us a look of ‘one more question from your girlfriend or we will shut you up.’”

He explained that he pursues what he referred to as his “obsession” because of three lessons the game teaches.

“One, it is very much so about the individual, but is played in a team environment,” Walker said.

“You learn at a very young age,

that when you are batting, it is you against the ball, one-on-one, no one is there to help you. If you fail, it is entirely because of yourself.

However, without your teammates, you cannot succeed. Just as in the work environment, your projects will fail, if your teammates are unsupportive. So it is in cricket.”

The second lesson, Walker said, is that cricket can be a metaphor for life.

“Cricket is a sport where the strongest, fittest … most talented team is certainly not assured of victory … hard work and determination can overcome a pitfall of shortcomings,” Walker said. “How many 65-year-olds do you see beating 18-year-olds at basketball or soccer?”

According to Walker, the third lesson is the most important.

Cricket has the power to unite culture.

“I grew up in the 1980’s where South Africa was very much segregated by race. South Africa’s history is dominated race,” Walker said. “It is now totally normal to play cricket with people of all races and colors and creeds. What seemed impossible to a child of the 1980’s growing up in South Africa is now entirely normal.”

By looking at the integration of the national team, and the interracial games that now exists, cricket acts as a vehicle to demonstrate social change in South Africa. Walker further states that cricket is a microcosm through which we can trace racial integration in South Africa. “[Cricket] unites us in a way the United Nations could only dream of,” Walker said.

Stray the Path...

The Story of My Life

Reuben Santiago-Hudson quality because no one knows when a past experience might help in an unrelated discipline. He suggested taking classes outside of a specific course of study or comfort zone, like a theater major taking chemistry classes.

“One of the greatest roles I ever played was Doctor Percy Julian, a chemist,” Santiago-Hudson said. “And I learned how to pour my own test tubes, I learned how to make water into crystal and all that. It was interesting. That was the first time in my life that I was extremely interested in chemistry, because I was never good at that.

I was the best I could be when I played that role.”

Failure and success, according to Santiago-Hudson, are secondary to integrity.

“Because there cannot be a price on it and it cannot be bought or sold. It is earned.

By the life you live, by the way you present yourself, by the respect you have for your fellow man and the respect you have earned from them,” Santiago-Hudson said.

ANNA TEDX SPECIAL

The birth of

Jezebel

By Davina Bhandari | Assistant News Editor Daring to escape the comfort of a steady paycheck from the largely male-dominated industry she had come to know and disdain, Anna Holmes left her work with women’s magazines to begin the feminist blog Jezebel.

Holmes moved from a small town in California to New York City when she was 18-yearsold. She said she felt contempt for her hometown and its demographic; that and her interest in writing encouraged her to make the move.

By 2006, she had worked with magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Glamour, Star and InStyle. According to Holmes, these publications both supported her financially and disappointed her morally.

“Just like when I was a kid, I had this nagging feeling, this kind of ever-present unhappiness and frustration.

Except this time it was professional and not personal,” Holmes said.

Holmes explained that her work in the women’s magazine industry eventually brought her to hate it, referring to it as “cynical” and “phony,” though at the time she saw no way of abandoning it.

“Almost every female writer I knew at that point, and I knew a lot of them, had worked or was working at women’s magazines,” Holmes said.

“Women’s magazines … were where we paid our bills, but also where we damaged our souls.”

According to Holmes, the message being sent by these publications were simple: Sex appeal demand is sacred, marriage and motherhood are paramount and every celebrity engagement ring or baby bump should be accounted for and analyzed.

“I can laugh about this now, but the fact of the matter is that these messages were being journalized by millions and millions of young women and many of them young enough that they didn’t know, or remember, that there was once a world that didn’t so aggressively or explicitly scrutinize the female body or a woman’s marital status and use it as a barometer of which to measure her human worth,” Holmes said.

She said she remained complacent with her place in the industry until she was approached by another female writer with the idea to start a women’s website with Gawker media, an online media company and blog network.

At first, Holmes rejected the

www.bupipedream.com | March 31, 2014

HOLMES Q&A

proposition.

“What if it failed? I had a steady job at a successful magazine … I got a regular paycheck deposited into my checking account every two weeks, I had health insurance, I had a 401(k), I had access to a company cafeteria,” Holmes said.

After a decade of disappointment, Holmes decided to go along with her friend’s idea and began Jezebel. com in 2007 to use pop culture as a gateway to address larger issues from a new perspective.

“Rather than patronizing or dismissing female interest in mass media and pop culture as a complete distraction or a waste of time, we’re going to use it as an opportunity to make points about the status of women in contemporary, Western society,” Holmes said.

Holmes went on to say that she wanted to provide tools, examples and opportunities for women with which they could approach the world differently, instead of providing for an industry that feeds off of insecurity.

“Maybe, just maybe, more young women would be willing to embrace, or reclaim, both the idea of feminism and the word itself,” Holmes said.

According to Holmes, it was anger and opportunity, not ingenuity or idealism, which allowed her to “stray the course” and pursue her dream of inspiring new thinking in readers.

Holmes said that Jezebel allowed her and her staff to translate their feelings of disappointment and disgust with the status quo into a shelter for likeminded individuals.

“Feeling like you’re on the outside looking in, whether that’s because of your economic class, or your racial background, or your sexual or gender orientation, or your political views, provides you with a way to see the world with fresh eyes,” Holmes said.

“I promise you that someday, no matter how uncomfortable those feelings get, they will serve you well both personally and professionally.”

Pipe Dream: What was the driving force behind creating Jezebel?

Anna Holmes: My frustration with women’s magazines both as a person who has worked for them and as a reader of them. I felt that they were patronizing young women and what young women’s interests are. I think that young women are interested in clothes and romance but they’re interested in a lot more than just that. It was basically me feeling that there had to be a space for other sorts of discussions, and I couldn’t be the only one who thought that the sort of stuff young women were being given and taught was subpar.

PD: How would you define the modern feminist?

AH: I don’t think there’s any way to define the modern feminist because I think that feminists are very different and they’re not monolithic. I think that young women, young feminists, tend to be using the Internet and social media as a way to organize, as a way to communicate, put across ideas — which is different than say 20 years ago … so that they can find people more easily than let’s say women of my mother’s generation could. But I’m not able to make any generalizations about modern feminists other than that they believe in the political and social and economic equality of the sexes. I think in the feminism we see now that there are people who are trying to bring in discussions about sexual orientation and race more strongly than they did in previous generations, so that’s a way that it feels more modern

than contemporary — is that a lot of feminist thought is being informed by how women who aren’t white and upper-middle class experience the world and experience the world as women.

PD:What are some of the greatest obstacles that the feminist movement is facing right now?

AH: I don’t know if these are obstacles that are new, I think that they are obstacles that have probably been there as in any social justice movement. There is a lot of critique, circular critique, that I don’t always think is the most productive. I think that we should be fighting people who want to take rights away from women rather than fighting other feminists. I think that outside of feminist conversations, the biggest hurdle that feminists have to deal with is this continued assault on women’s productive rights in the United States, and the turning back the clock on access to safe and legal abortion, not to mention contraception. I mean it feels like we’re living in a different century sometimes when you read the news. Some people think that abortion is a fringe issue but the ability to control your reproductive health, the ability to control when and if you have children, is very much tied into your ability to control your life, to control your economic circumstances, to control how you move about in the world. They’re all connected.

It’s not about women who don’t want kids, who are selfish … it’s about deciding when and where to have children if you want to have them at all and be able to control your economic destiny, which is true freedom. I get annoyed when people, outside of

feminism, suggest that abortion is some sort of fringe issue. It’s very much tied up with female freedom and agency and being able to control their destinies.

PD: Do you think transawareness is a feminist issue?

AH: I think that you can make the argument that feminism isn’t just all about women, but about equality for all and the intersection of all those social justice movements, so whether that is anti-racist work or activism on behalf of trans people … I think my answer would be yes. Do I think that it is the most pressing feminist issue?

I wouldn’t say that, but I also don’t know what I would say is the most pressing feminist issue right now other than perhaps … reproductive rights. But I do think the trans issues are being talked about by feminists, I think they’re important … that people have a struggle with trans issues because they like to be able to put people in boxes. I think that the people both within feminism and outside feminism are only now beginning to learn how to talk or think about trans issues. I think a lot of people don’t have the vocabulary for it or the literacy for it, including myself. I’m not saying that I’m completely ignorant about it but I’m not an expert about this certain stuff.

PD: In your time working at Jezebel, did you ever take your male audience into consideration?

AH: No. I really didn’t care about them. The thing is, there was part of me that was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that there were guys who were reading it, but men had been tailored to in every arena in the world and life for long enough … especially in media. Even women’s media was about women tailoring themselves to be attractive to men. A lot of it was always about men when it came down to it. I couldn’t really care less. … I didn’t want it to be unwelcoming, but they were something that I just

wasn’t taking into consideration at all. People would complain and say, ‘why don’t you have any male writers?’ and I’d be like, ‘because there are male writers everywhere else.’ I don’t need to have a quota of men speaking out on the site. If they want to say stuff they can send me emails or put comments in. I was totally disinterested in what guys had to say about women or women’s media or feminism. And maybe that sounds harsh but I really was not interested.

PD: You said you no longer run the site. Do you do any work with it still?

AH: After I quit from running the site, I agreed to do a book that was branded to the site … that came out last fall so I did publicity for that. But I don’t run the site anymore … I don’t have any sort of input into what goes on there which is fine, because the thing is it was a very exhausting job and the reason I had to quit was because I was burnt out. It was not sustainable. I look at it as a reader from time-to-time. I like to think that some of my DNA is still there, but I’m not actively involved.

PD: Who named the site, and why do you dislike the name of the site?

AH: The owner of the company named the site. I think he wanted something that would feel “subversive,” the idea of reclaiming a word that was used as criticism at women. The reason I didn’t like it was because it felt very obvious. It would be like naming the site “dirty whore dot com.” To me it just felt too obvious, and I think maybe I just don’t like the word; there are just some words you don’t like … there’s something about the way it rolls off your lips that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Obviously it’s a memorable name and it has some resonance, but I never liked it.