Supreme Court could reject California's Prop 8 on a technicality; Poll: Prop 13 still popular, but in need of reform; What can gay couples teach straight couples about harmony?; Deepa Fernandes reports on why your daughter may not have been born loving pink; Who decides what should be banned on social media?; David Kwong, the magician behind the magic, plus much more.
Poll: Prop 13 still popular, but in need of reform
Among the legislation being considered by California lawmakers are a number of amendments that would alter one of the state's most famous initiatives ever: Prop 13.
Voted into law back in 1978, Prop 13 places a cap on both residential and commercial property taxes. The proposition remains popular 35 years later.
According to a new poll out from the Public Policy Institute of California, nearly 60 percent of those surveyed said it's been a good thing for the state. But the same number of voters also said they'd be in favor of reforming it.
Who decides what should be banned on social media?
On Facebook, there were several pages and groups that joked about rape. But Facebook didn't take these pages down because they didn't violate the site's community standards.
It was only after a successful petition and boycott by advocacy groups and advertisers did Facebook promise to better crack down on these pages. But who's monitoring what's posted on the site, and how are they deciding what's offensive or not on social media?
"These are young kids, often 22-yo wearing flip-flops and t-shirts, and they're just making spot decisions on billions of pieces of content posted every week," said Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at George Washington University. "They have to decide within a matter of seconds whether or not a particular content violate the policies."
Princesses: Does American culture give girls the wrong values? (poll)
Trumpets played and fans cheered earlier this month at a gala event at Disneyland, to crown the newest Disney princess, Merida — a fierce, bow-slinging Scottish redhead.
But outside the gates, some parents, bloggers, and Change.org are outraged that the newly crowned princess is prettier and sexier than in the movie. She has higher cheekbones, wears more make up, has a thinner waistline and, in some dolls, her dress is seductively off the shoulder.
Peggy Orenstein, who writes a lot about gender issues for the New York Times magazine, the New Yorker and other publications, said girls' dolls are getting too sexy. She said even dolls of a generation ago — Rainbow Bright, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty — have been made over as thinner and sexier.
“When I started looking at the product lines that Disney and other companies want our daughters to go into, it becomes increasingly alarming,” she said. When a preschooler grows out of the Disney princess dolls, awaiting her in the toy aisles, Orenstein said, are decidedly more sexy dolls such as Bratz, Fashionista Barbie and Moxie Girlz dolls, among others.
Disney did not respond to questions by KPCC about Orenstein and others' complaints. In a statement the company said critics are reading too much into Merida’s makeover.
Losing ground?
Decades after feminists fought — and won — major battles for women’s rights, some researchers are worried that women are losing ground and point to an increasingly sexualized American childhood as a troubling sign of the values we are imparting to young girls.
“When we start looking at research about what puts little girls at risk later on in terms of body image, in terms of poor sexual choices, in terms of eating disorders, what we find is that an excessive focus on appearance is the thing that makes them the most vulnerable,” Orenstein said.
Orenstein points to Mattel's 2010 toy line called "Monster High," which featured dolls, apparel and Halloween costumes aimed at girls as young as 6. The Halloween costumes can get particularly sexy and can be bought in sizes that will fit preschool age girls. (Story continues below poll window.)
Doll manufacturers bristle at claims by Orenstein and others that they’re to blame.
“To our knowledge there are no scientific studies connecting Barbie with body issues. Girls understand that Barbie is a doll — she was never molded on the proportions of a real person,” Mattel said in a written statement.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, an American Studies professor at USC, agrees.
“There is no way to measure whether playing with a Barbie doll or a sexy doll will lead a girl to have a low body image or a low self image,” she said. The problem of girls’ and women’s body image extends far outside the princess isle at local toy stores, she said.
“When we blame the dolls, it allows us to not focus our attention on all sorts of other factors that are part of the culture of gender in the U.S.,” she said, “such as legislation and abstinence-only programs and fashion and advertising and branding.”
Civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom said she was horrified to learn that 50 percent of 3 to 6-year-old girls thought they were too fat. She wrote a book called “Think,” about American women’s obsession with looks and body image. She believes American culture “rewards girls for looks over brains.”
“I think the first message that most little girls get from adults is that their appearance is the most important thing,” Bloom said.
“When we see a cute little girl wearing the little dress and the shoes and the cute curly hair,” she said, “our first impulse is to say, ‘You’re so cute. … Let me see your dress. Let me see your nails.’ And often we never move on from that subject onto anything else.”
No hardwiring
Social scientist Rebecca Jordan Young, of Barnard College, said her review of brain studies find no evidence that infant boys’ brains start off hard wired to like baseballs and girls’ to love tiaras.
Instead, she said, we create that love when we inundate a baby girl with pink, along with all the cooing and love. With time, her brain comes to associate pink with pleasure, comfort and safety.
Young believes our society still stereotypes children into gender roles.
“We routinely undertrain boys for empathy, and I think that we routinely shortchange girls in terms of our and their imaginations about what they are physically capable of,” she said.
Deborah Siegel, a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University who studies gender issues, agrees.
“Studies show that in cultures and countries where boys and girls are both encouraged to tend house, you have greater work-life policies later on for men and women alike,” Siegel said during a recent TedX talk. “Parents' ideas about gender influence the way they behave towards their kids, which in turn influences the wiring of those young plastic brains.”
Ellen Veselock works with preschoolers every day. She and her colleagues at The Child Educational Center in La Cañada Flintridge, are so concerned about stopping gender sterotypes that they have made it a critical part of the preschool.
“It’s really important for children to be able to go the direction that they want to go,” she said. “And that means that if this little girl wants to spend her day playing baseball that should be perfectly fine — and she shouldn’t need a pink bat to do that.”
The school calls its approach “anti-bias.”
During a recent visit, little girls zoomed trucks down a hill in one part of its sprawling, kid-centered yard, and other girls played T-ball in another. A little boy pranced around the sandpit in a red gown.
When teachers came across a study that found girls are more likely to play with blocks if they are on the table rather than on the floor, Veselock said, one teacher tried it out.
“Immediately we had four girls around the table building and then taking their journals and sketching what they were building,” she said. “It kind of proved its point to us pretty clearly.”
South Korea's obsession with plastic surgery
Nowhere is the rate of plastic surgery higher than in South Korea. It's estimated that one in five Korean women under 50 go under the scalpel, but the Korean beauty ideal is not unique to Korea.
Many of the plastic surgery patients aren't from Korea, but from countries such as China and the United States, says Sharon Heijin Lee, an assistant professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University.
While 30 percent of plastic surgery patients in Korea are from China, many Korean-Americans are also traveling to the country to get plastic surgery.
"Growing up in the Korean-American community in Orange County, it was very common for Korean-Americans to get the double-eyelid surgery, or to want it — but in a different way than most Americans might think," Lee said.
But it was not necessarily that these Korean-Americans wanted to look white, she said.
"Often in my Korean-American circles, it would be girls (who) would think 'well, my mom did it, my auntie did it, my cousin did it and they look great,'" said Lee. "In that way, it's almost like a familial or a cultural procedure, or right of passage that I would see in the Korean-American community."
Korean pop culture and films are also reasons why many people are looking for the Korean beauty ideal. Some women are even bringing photos of their favorite Korean starlets to their surgeons.
"You can't really separate out these two industries any longer," Lee said. "I actually interviewed a representative of Korea's medical tourism industry and she said they really don't spend that much money, or as much money as one would think, because Korean pop culture is a global advertisement for the cosmetic surgery/medical tourism market."
Lee says there appears to be a standardized look in regards to the Korean beauty ideal.
The look encompasses a small face and wide eyes, Lee says, and one of the most common surgery is the jaw-shaving procedure, which makes the face smaller. The double eyelid procedure is even more common — so much that it is not even considered surgery.
"It's almost like a very expensive facial," Lee said.
Supreme Court could reject California's Prop 8 on a technicality
The future of gay marriage in California now rests in the hands of the Supreme Court. We're just weeks away from a decision — expected some time in June — and lawyers around the country are debating how various rulings would play out.
The court will either uphold the 2010 court ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional, or it will let the same sex marriage ban stand. There is also a chance that the whole case will be tossed out on a technicality.
Supreme Court justices could rule that those sponsoring the measure had no legal right to defend it in court. It would be the end of the road for the federal challenge to Proposition 8, but it's effect back home in California is far from clear.
For more on this, we're joined by David Codell, legal director at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law.
What can gay couples teach straight couples about harmony?
Two weeks ago, Minnesota became the 12th state to pass a law allowing gay marriage. Yesterday, France legalized the marriage of same-sex couples. And in a culture where divorce is becoming more and more commonplace, maybe same-sex couples can teach the traditional husband and wife pairing a thing or two about couple dynamics.
In a recent cover story in The Atlantic, “The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss,” Liza Mundy discusses how same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages. Her studies show that gay and lesbian couples, whether intentional or not, are more in sync than straight couples across many areas. For example, chores.
“Study after study has shown that these unions tend to be more egalitarian,” Mundy said on Take Two Thursday. “There's still a fair amount of traditional division of labor in straight households, whereas gay couples start with a blank slate, and have to negotiate every duty.”
Mundy mentions how in male-female couples’ household duties, the wife tends to clean the bathroom while the husband traditionally takes out the trash. In same-sex unions, however, each couple divvies up chores more based on their strengths rather than gender roles.
This same logic applies to an issue oft-debated in marriages: parenting. While the woman is generally assumed to play the major role in child care in many couples (though men are taking the role more and more), Mundy says that taking gender out of the equation can lead to a better parenting dynamic.
“When it comes to parenting, for example, in gay couples, both parents tend to be present more at the same time,” Mundy said on raising children. “They’re co-parenting… together.”
Mundy’s study showed that in contrast, straight couples being around children together were more likely to have the mother interacting by herself with the kids, with the father “off on his Blackberry or playing with Tinker Toys by himself.”
The role of specialization in couples, however, is anything but gone. Mundy found that same-sex couples frequently specialize, with one partner being the primary bread-winner and the other being a stay-at-home parent or supplementary earner. She found this especially prevalent in gay households, leading to the third point of her study: women are more likely to leave marriages.
“In Europe, lesbian couples are twice as likely to break up as gay couples are,” Mundy said. “Could it be that women just have higher standards for relationships?”
There are other sides of the argument. A possibly divisive factor that Mundy pointed out is more prevalent in same-sex couples, is non-monogamy. She mentioned that while a member of a gay or lesbian union today is less likely to have multiple sexual partners than in previous decades, some ministers in states that recently approved gay marriage laws, like Maryland, refuse to marry couples not planning to be monogamous.
Since the legalization of gay marriage is so recent, statistics contrasting the divorce rate between same-sex and straight couples are not yet available.
City Hall Pass: Garcetti's transition, new budget and more
Time for City Hall Pass, your ticket to all the latest news out of our halls of government with KPCC's Frank Stoltze and Alice Walton.
It's been more than a week since the election. Now that the dust has settled, we have a new mayor elect in Eric Garcetti who will take office July first. But what is he up to in the meantime?
What does Garcetti's election means for some of the different interests in the city? Who are the winners and losers here?
We've still got some time before Garcetti takes office, but in the meantime, business continues at City Hall. Last week the City Council approved a $7.7-billion budget.
LA politician Bob Hertzberg, who was once the speaker of the Assembly, has been out of politics for the last decade. Now he's running for Alex Padilla's state senate seat.
Sequestration cuts hurt California scientists more than most
This week, we've been reporting on what across-the-board spending cuts — known as sequestration — mean for California.
Most scientific research in the state is funded by federal groups like the National Institutes of Health, but the organization lost $1.7-billion due to sequestration.
KPCC's Sanden Totten says the cuts mean important discoveries will likely be delayed, and talented scientists may leave the state.
'Star Wars' to be dubbed into Navajo language
This summer, "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" will have an unique premiere when its dubbed into Navajo. It's the first time a major motion picture has been translated into a Native American language. Christine Trudeau of The Fronteras Desk reports from Albuquerque that the project may provide an important tool for Navajo families wishing to learn and preserve the language.
“Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” will premier this summer, dubbed into Navajo. It’s the first time a major motion picture has been translated into a Native American language. The project may provide an important tool for Navajo families wishing to learn and preserve the language.
When Dave Nezzie met his future wife Amanda, there were some clear differences.
“When I first moved from the south to Arizona, I thought roadrunners were six feet tall and blue, and that natives ran around with headdresses and no shirts,” Amanda Nezzie said.
Amanda is non-native and Dave is a citizen of the Navajo Nation.
But Dave and Amanda had one thing in common, and quickly fell in love over a galaxy far, far away.
“I think that was one of the first things that bonded Dave and I together, was our mutual love of “Star Wars,” Amanda Nezzie said. “Our children have also caught the “Star Wars” bug.”
The family now lives in Albuquerque, and one of the biggest struggles they have faced living off the reservation is teaching their kids the native Navajo language.
“Rosetta Stone has something, there’s an app on the iPad, but having alternatives is what we need,” Dave Nezzi said. “Having more resources available will help us teach the language to more people.”
Enter “Star Wars.”
“There are definitely “Star Wars” nerds out there who can repeat that movie verbatim and they speak no Navajo,” said Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, and the muscle behind the “Star Wars” translation project.
“And so when they're watching this and it's in Navajo, it's them learning Navajo,” Wheeler said.
With the help of Navajo Parks and Recreation, and Lucasfilm, the project recently went into hyperdrive.
“This way an idea that I felt was a way to promote our culture, promote our language, a way to save our language,” Wheeler said.
But translating the film into Navajo was no easy feat. Jennifer Wheeler, an assistant professor of English at UNM Gallup, is one of the translators working on the project. When dubbing a film into anther language, syncing the lines to fit the time a character is given to speak their lines is crucial to the pace of the film.
The script is under lock and key until the film’s release. However, the process, arduous as it may be, to the translators was an exciting, ambitious project.
“This will be one historic event that will celebrate and recognize the fact that we’re just part of society here, in this western society, in this country,” Wheeler said. “But who we are as Navajo people living in this century, we really need to celebrate.”
Back in Albuquerque, the Nezzies can’t wait to see what translators come up with, even though the film is months away from release.
Dave, Amanda, and the kids look forward to the next time they sit down to watch “Star Wars,” but this time, in Navajo.
“I wanna hear what Millennium Falcon is, I’m very curious. And that way our daughter, she’ll be able to speak Navajo, she’ll understand who she is,” Amanda Nezzie said. “And what more of a beautiful way to do that than put that in “Star Wars.”
“Absolutely,” Dave Nezzie said.
The film will premiere on July 4 in Window Rock, on the Navajo Nation.
Why one woman wants a one-way trip to Mars
For the past few months applicants around the world have been applying to be some of the first people to head to Mars for a one-way mission. A privately-run non profit called Mars One has launched a competition to find the four candidates that they hope to send to Mars by 2022.
So far, more than 80,000 people have paid between $5 to $75 to apply.
Erica Meszaros is one of them. She joins the show to explain why she'd want to be among the first to go to Mars, even though she wouldn't be able to come back.
David Kwong, the magician behind the magic in 'Now You See Me'
Tomorrow is the big reveal for the new film "Now You See Me," featuring Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson as a troupe of bank-robbing magicians. But to pull off the illusion of being illusionists, the cast needed to recruit a bonafide magician.
David Kwong is the head magic consultant on the film, but he's also a puzzle creator, writer, and producer. Kwong sees this movie as an opportunity to evolve the public image of his craft above the spectacle of David Copperfield and street magic of David Blaine.
"I think everybody is wondering what phase of magic is next, but we try in 'Now You See Me' to make magic cool and to portray the magicians of tomorrow," said Kwong on Take Two.
Kwong stopped by Take Two to talk about his craft, and explained why Jesse Eisenberg was too honest to be a great magician.
See the trailer for "Now You See Me:"
Interview Highlights:
On how he got into magic:
"I was about seven years old, and I saw a magician fool my father. My father is a biochemist, and he's kind of this omniscient figure to me. So when a magician at a pumpkin patch fooled my father with a little red sponge ball, I kind of knew I had to go into magic.
"It's a classic routine. Some magicians today still say it's one of the most powerful illusions out there. He takes the red sponge ball, he places it in your hand, and then he takes a second one, he vanishes it, and when you open up your hand you now have two red sponge balls. And he did that in my father's hand, so I was hooked from that moment on."
On how he made his career as a magician:
"I did work in Hollywood, most recently at Dreamworks Animation, in the story department. When I was trekking all these magic projects on the side, I started to realize that I could start influence the shape of those films, and I started working as a consultant with screenwriters."
Challenge of getting Jesse Eisenberg to be believable:
"Jesse Eisenberg says, as his character, that a magician is always the smartest guy in the room. As an actor and human being, Jesse Eisenberg is the smartest guy in the room. He confessed that he has trouble lying. He doesn't like deceiving people. So I would teach Jesse some tricks. I would walk away, go get a cup of coffee, and he would turn to the people next to him and say 'Here's how I do it.' I would get mad at him. He's a really wonderful actor, and he worked very hard at exhibiting these illusions, this real sleight-of-hand in his moments."
What's next for magic with both big magic shows and street shows:
"I think there is this alternative magic scene that's swelling up right now of a return to sleight-of-hand parlor shows, and we take those principles and we blow them out and we try to layer them into 'Now You See Me' to portray the magicians of tomorrow."
On his mind-blowing Scrabble trick:
"I believe that magic and puzzles are the same thing, so I am trying to create this new breed of illusion and enigmas that both challenge the audience. My entire show operates like one, giant puzzle. You'll see 10 different tricks, and each one has a little hanging piece of the puzzle. You might not realize it at the moment, but at the end they all add up to one final big reveal."
Dinner Party Download: Mammoth blood, Pac-Man and more
Every week we get your weekend conversation starters with Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam, the hosts of the Dinner Party Download podcast and radio show.
Cloning Could Benefit From a Mammoth Scientific Discovery
Scientists have found blood and muscle tissue perfectly preserved in the ice from a Siberian mammoth. The blood had dripped out of the giant animal into a natural ice capsule, and it had been preserved because it's in Siberia, where's it freezing… They think that the mammoth blood contains a type of natural antifreeze.
Pac-Man… or Pick-Up?
The guy who designed Pac-Man, Toru Iwatani, wanted to appeal to ladies because there was all these shooting games in arcades at that time. He wanted to bring ladies into the arcade, and for some reason thought that women especially liked food and he saw a pizza with a slice missing, and that where's the Pac-Man came from.
California Leads the Pack in Closing the Wage Gap
This site, NerdWallet, calculated the best places for working women in the United States. Number one: Los Angeles, where women make almost 91 percent of what men earn. They broke down the study in categories of large cities, medium cities, and small cities, and California has the most cities in each category. And there was one city where women earned more than men, and that is the town of Madera-Chowchilla, which is in (California's) Central Valley.