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By Lydia Love • 11 years ago

Please stand by; the world will now be saved

For those of us fighting tirelessly to better the state of humanity and raise awareness of the evils that plague our world, it will give you great relief to know that the world will soon be saved. A straight, white, middle-classed male has astonishingly found that the source of evil is institutional corruption.  In his book, “The Lucifer Effect”, Philip Zimbardo outlines how it is not individual people who are evil, but their institutional circumstance that promotes their evil doings evil or passive inactivity when presented with evil. For those racking their brains as to why the name Zimbardo sounds familiar, he was the maniac professor who created the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. Why has he resurfaced on the pop-culture awareness vibe? TED talks. In 2008, Zimbardo gave a TED talk promoting his book, linking the Abu Ghraib military prisoner abuse scandal with his prison experiment. Perhaps now that he is conducting his research in an ethical way, people are listening to him.

Counterpoint to the evil he outlines is being a “hero-in waiting.” He calls upon the educational system to train children in developing their “heroic imaginations” and, when the time is right, give up their ego-centric values for socio-centric ones. In his talk, he states, “In order to be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant. [This is] because you’re always going against the conforming of the group (sic).” As he paints this picture of a ...
By Lydia Love • 12 years ago

Kate Millet, my neighbor

Three years ago, I started volunteering at the WOW Cafe Theater on East 4th Street.  The first time I entered that building, I noticed Kate Millet’s name on the buzzer.  I was like, cool, I know that name!  I was fairly new to New York and had so many things on my mind that it couldn’t really affect me as profoundly as I would have liked.  The years passed and talking about her living upstairs was mostly a noise concern than anything (our noise, not hers ;b). Until yesterday, when Sophie Keir, another wonderful artist in residence in the building, invited me over to talk about the noise problems with WOW.  At the time, I was dreading the meeting.  I had to ...

Three years ago, I started volunteering at the WOW Cafe Theater on East 4th Street.  The first time I entered that building, I noticed Kate Millet’s name on the buzzer.  I was like, cool, I know that name!  I ...