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What Does It Mean to Tear Down a Statue?

Protesters throwing the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into a harbour.

    Statues of historical figures, including slave traders and Christopher Columbus, are being toppled throughout the U.S. and around the world. This follows years of debate about public display of Confederate symbols. We interviewed the art historian Erin L. Thompson about the topic. Read the excerpt from the interview.

    Q. What are some of the issues that arise when we talk about statues being torn down?

    A. We have as humans been making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have torn them down. So it’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today.

    Q. What do the recent attacks on statues tell us about the protests themselves?

    A. The current attacks on statues are a sign that what’s in question is not just our future but our past, as a nation, as a society. These attacks show that we need to question the way we understand the world, even the past, in order to get to a better future.

    Q. What’s a statue?

    A. I think a statue is a bid for immortality. It’s a way of solidifying an idea and making it present to other people. It’s not the statues themselves but the point of view that they represent. And these [the ones being destroyed] are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.

    Also, many Confederate statues are made out of bronze, a metal that you can melt down. The ancient Greeks made their major monuments out of bronze. Hardly any of these survived because as soon as regimes changed, as soon as there was war, it got melted down and made into money or a statue of somebody else.

    We have been in a period of peace and prosperity — not peace for everybody, but the U.S. hasn’t been invaded, we’ve had enough money to maintain statues. So our generation thinks of public art as something that will always be around. But this is a very ahistorical point of view. I wish that what is happening now with statues being torn down didn’t have to happen this way. But there have been peaceful protests against many of these statues which have come to nothing. So if people lose hope in the possibility of a peaceful resolution, they’re going to find other means.

(www.nytimes.com, 11.06.2020. Adaptado.)

Why do we buy into the 'cult' of overwork?

By Bryan Lufkin, 9th May 2021

Although many of us associate overly ambitious workaholism with the 1980s and the finance industry, the tendency to devote ourselves to work and glamourize long-hours culture remains as pervasive as ever. In fact, it is expanding into more sectors and professions, in slightly different packaging. Overwork isn't a phenomenon exclusive to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. People work long hours all over the world, for many different reasons

In Japan, a culture of overwork can be traced back to the 1950s, when the government pushed hard for the country to be rebuilt quickly after World War Two. In Arab League countries, burnout is high among medical professionals, possibly because its 22 members are developing nations with overburdened healthcare systems, studies suggest. Reasons for overwork also depend on industry. Some of the earliest researchers on burnout in the 1970s asserted that many people in jobs geared toward helping others, like employees in clinics or crisis-intervention centers, tended to work long hours that led to emotional and physical exhaustion – a trend which is shown up in the pandemic, too. But millions of us overwork because somehow, we think it’s exciting – a status symbol that puts us on the path to success, whether we define that by wealth or an Instagram post that makes it seem like we're living a dream life with a dream job. Romanticization of work seems to be an especially common practice among "knowledge workers" in the middle and upper classes. In 2014, the New Yorker called this devotion to overwork "a cult".

According to Anat Lechner, clinical associate professor of management at New York University. "We glorify the lifestyle, and the lifestyle is: you breathe something, you sleep with something, you wake up and work on it all day long, then you go to sleep. Again, and again and again."

Adapted from: Home - BBC Worklife.

TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO

    Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.

    Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systemsto many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.

    “Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager‐to‐ please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’”, the report said.

    “The assistant holds no power of agency beyond what the commander asks of it. It honours commands and responds to queries regardless of their tone or hostility. In many communities, this reinforces commonly held gender biases that women are subservient and tolerant of poor treatment.”

    The Unesco publication was entitled “I’d Blush if I Could”; a reference to the response Apple’s Siri assistant offers to the phrase: “You’re a slut.” Amazon’s Alexa will respond: “Well, thanks for the feedback.”

    The papersaid such firms were “staffed by overwhelmingly male engineering teams” and have built AI (Artificial Intelligence) systems that “cause their feminised digital assistants to greet verbal abuse with catch‐me‐if‐you‐can flirtation”.

    Saniye Gülser Corat, Unesco’s director for gender equality, said: “The world needs to pay much closer attention to how, when and whether AI technologies are gendered and, crucially, who is gendering them.”

The Guardian, May, 2019. Adaptado.

Is breakfast always a good idea?

By Philippa Roxby

Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day, but eating it won’t help you lose weight, research suggests

    Those who ate breakfast consumed 260 more
[5] calories per day and gained 1 lb. (approximately 500
kilograms) more than those who skipped it, a review
of previous studies found. But experts say a healthy
breakfast can be a good source of calcium and fiber.
It has also been shown to improve concentration and
[10] attention levels, particularly in children. Breakfast
gives you energy, stops you snacking later in the day
and supplies essential nutrients – so we are told.
Its reputation as the nutritional backstop to our day
stems from observational studies showing a positive
[15] link between people eating breakfast and having a
healthy weight.

    But this new Australian research in the British
Medical Journal, which reviewed the results of 13
separate trials on breakfast eating, weight change
[20] and energy intake, found little evidence for those
views. The findings of the Monash University research
team suggest that skipping breakfast might in fact be
a good way to reduce total daily calorie intake. They
found that breakfast eaters consumed more calories
[25] overall and breakfast skippers did not have a greater
appetite in the afternoon. And they say caution is
needed when recommending breakfast for weight
loss in adults – because it could have the opposite
effect. However, the researchers added that there
[30] were limitations to their study. The participants in the
studies were only followed for short periods – from
between two and 16 weeks – and the difference in
calorie intake between breakfast eaters and skippers
was small. The researchers concluded that working
[35] out the long-term effect of skipping or adding breakfast
to diets still needed more research.

Calcium and fiber boost

    Prof Kevin Whelan, dietetics expert and head
of King College of London’s nutritional sciences
[40] department, says we should not get too hung up on
calorie intake first thing in the morning. “This study
does not say breakfast is bad for the health,” he said.
“Breakfast is important for nutrient intake, such as
cereals and milk which are good for calcium and fiber.”
[45] But the BMJ research did not look at this aspect of
breakfast. “We are not talking about breakfast being
the cause of obesity,” he said.

Available at: https:www.bbc.com/news/health-47070173?intlink_ from_url. Retrieved on: Jan. 31, 2019. Adapted.