Phone conversations activity

This post is published in three parts. Please click on the link below for Part 2. For those of us who hold compassion as a central value, and perhaps are actively working to create a more compassionate world, one of the most frustrating and demoralizing experiences is having to deal with uncompassionate people. These are people who, despite being made aware of widespread suffering or of their harmful impact on those around them, seem not to care and to prioritize their own self-interest over the well-being of others. Ironically, though, our frustration with those who are disconnected from their compassion is often precisely what causes us to disconnect from our own compassion. We may struggle to feel charitable, to maintain a sense of goodwill toward these individuals, and we may therefore interact with them in a way that brings about the opposite effect of what we want. For example, perhaps you explain to someone that eating more vegan foods supports the well-being of animals … [Read more...] about Compassion Privilege: Why Caring People Are Sometimes Unkind

Darius Marder ’s Sound of Metal went into 2019’s Toronto International Film Festival without a distributor. Now, a year-and-a-half on, it’s a six-time Oscar nominee and perhaps the most hard-fought of all of this year’s crop of Best Picture candidates. Joe Utichi meets Marder and stars Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci to take stock of a film that transformed its key players in ways they hadn’t expected. They say Oscar loves a narrative, and they don’t come much more inspiring than Sound of Metal ’s. Even before he got his debut feature to set, Darius Marder spent more than a decade honing his tale about a heavy metal drummer and recovering addict who loses his hearing, butting up against the many hard realities of filmmaking that told him a movie like this could not work. As he did it, he learned more and more about deaf culture, and heard moving stories about people pursuing recovery in dedicated deaf sober houses. In Riz Ahmed, he found an actor willing to immerse so fully … [Read more...] about How ‘Sound Of Metal’ Changed Everything For Riz Ahmed, Darius Marder & Paul Raci, Even Before It Earned Six Oscar Nominations

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union is lobbying state governments to regulate Internet service providers as utilities. The CWA, which represents more than 150,000 workers at AT&T and over 30,000 at Verizon, announced on Monday a "multi-state effort to pass state legislation that would establish public utility commission oversight of broadband in public safety, network resiliency and consumer protection." "Legislation has already been introduced in California, Colorado and New York, and CWA is in active conversations with policymakers in state houses across the country about its model bill, the Broadband Resiliency, Public Safety and Quality Act," the union said. In addition to broadband regulation, the model bill calls for regulation of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) home phone services offered by cable companies and other ISPs, which have replaced the old copper-wire landlines for many consumers. The Federal Communications Commission is likely to … [Read more...] about AT&T/Verizon workers’ union urges states to regulate ISPs as utilities