I was a Global Health Corps fellow, so I interacted with Barbara a fair bit. Honestly, she is an incredibly lovely, thoughtful, and obviously liberal person. She’s also a lot of fun. Getting to know her forced me to rethink my burning hatred of all things Bush. Whilst I’m still wildly opposed to basically all of his…

This could have been written verbatim by my best friend.

I once had a dude take me back to his place in Malibu - at the time, I was living in SF so I really had no idea what that meant. The two male friends I was with were like - NO, DON’T DO IT. But I was 24 and stupid and so I did.

Or my personal favourites, “I thought I was done with my period, but it turns out I was wrong” and “I thought I was just really turned on, but in fact it was the last gasp of a period I thought finished yesterday”

I’ve said self-oriented or making a selfish decision - not being selfish people. I don’t think a single decision or set of preferences qualifies a person for life. No one is saying you don’t have the right eat what you want - people are saying that you don’t have the right to decide whether or not people feel that…

Again, you’ve moved the focus onto the host’s emotional response - whom I’ve said nothing about. If you want to argue that a yoga teacher in a South Asian country is likely making as much as western tourists with enough economic privilege to take two weeks from work for a yoga holiday, that’s your prerogative I guess.…

Of course everyone is free to act as they like - no one was marshaling these people into eating the pizza. That’s a facile line of argument.

If you’re talking about a friend or a colleague who routinely ignores your dietary preferences (restrictions - a la allergies, are a different issue) then you are absolutely within the bounds of common decency to firmly decline.

This is kind of what I thought. You’re probably in the makeup chair by the time you figure out exactly what is going on, and you’re telling yourself, “It’s probably fine. Right? Surely people with more expertise than me have thought this through. Maybe I’m just being sensitive.” And half of that is honest to god…

For sure. I’d hope she would feel comfortable saying something. I guess I’m just fairly sympathetic to reasons why she might not. Not to excuse, necessarily, but to contextualise.

Yeah, I mean - I can see this being true. I can also imagine she has less upfront info about shoots like this. For instance, if her manager doesn’t anticipate it being an issue, so doesn’t say anything more than ‘Don’t forget you’ve got that Vogue shoot Friday” - and then she turns up and walking out would cause a…

Yeah, I mean - South Sudan also had a high civilian/gun ratio. All that ensures is prolonged, factionalised fighting. Oh, and lots of civilian death. If the Federal Gov’t can’t defend us from an invasion, we are not going to repel one with a civilian army led by handgun toting ex Marines and hunting enthusiasts. We…

This comment is weirdly judgemental. You’re implying she rushed into her marriage and that this is the wrong way to do it as per your own experience - it’s not. Sociological evidence collected over years of study suggest that the longer you are together, particularly living together, without getting married, the more…

Does anyone with modelling experience have any idea how much advanced warning these women get? As in, when she (or more likely, her agent) agrees to a shoot, does she know what she will be wearing and how it will be styled? Or does she get more of an overview, “I booked a Vogue shoot for you, its a diversity theme”. I…

I know the writing was sometimes poor and the characters were sometimes unlikeable, and the overall arc was wholly unrealistic - but damn, Gen 2 spoke to me. It was like the chaos I felt inside but couldn’t show, because I actually had to function in the real world of consequences, was playing out on screen. You know,…

I was a humanitarian worker in South Sudan.

I’m teaching a covert sex-ed class at a monastic school in Myanmar right now - 26 year old women don’t know their own anatomy. It makes me really sad, actually:(

She’s been a UN goodwill ambassador for 10+ years. She has also written and directed two docudramas on the experiences of women in war. In 2014 she was a driving factor in the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London, and she co-chaired the event. 

I mean, I agree with this. And I don’t mean to sound as though I think aid workers are superior to academics - I am extremely distrustful of the aid paradigm in general and in fact have ended up in research because I didn’t feel comfortable on the programmatic/intervention side of things. I see my role as largely one…

I agree there is a structural problem here. My perspective, however, is that this is a miniscule problem in comparison to the issues related to the relative lack of experience many in these departments have with the ‘realities on the ground’ - by which I mean the reality of compromising methodological rigour for…