[go on sister sing your song]
go on sister sing your song
lady redbone señora rubia
took all day long
shampooing her nubia
she gets to the getting place
without or with him
must I holler when
you’re giving me rhythm
members don’t get weary
add some practice to your theory
she wants to know is it a men thing
or a him thing
wishing him luck
she gave him lemons to suck
told him please dear
improve your embouchure
by Harryette Mullen
from Recyclopedia
Graywolf Press, 2006
by Paul Bloomfield
Taylor is a self-described “race realist”, by which he means that race is a biologically legitimate category and from which he infers that because the races are scientifically real, “the races are not equal and equivalent”. He says, “The races are different. Some are better at some things than others.” Call this “Taylor's inference”.
The most common response to this argument is to deny “race realism”, accepting the now common view that race is “socially constructed”, thereby blocking Taylor's inference to racism. This strategy is a mistake, however, as it concedes too much.
Let's begin by asking, “How is it best to argue against racism?” Consider how the biologist Richard Lewontin argued against Jensenism in the late 1960s. Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist, argued that the education gap between blacks and whites was due to the fact that blacks are less intelligent than whites. Lewontin is not a realist about race, but his argument against Jensenism was nevertheless based on the fact that Jensen conflated the heritability of an evolved trait within a population with the heritability of that trait across two populations. He writes, “the genetic basis of the difference between two populations bears no logical or empirical relation to the heritability within populations and cannot be inferred from it”.[1]
So, Lewontin accepted the fact that the races count as “different populations” and argued from there, based on science alone. He did not attack Jensen's racist ideology. The lesson is that the soundest way to defeat racism is not on ideological grounds but on purely factual ones. Unfortunately, mainstream academic thinking about race cannot really adopt this strategy.
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
To be sure, we are not conservatives; however, we hold that conservatism is both a formidable tradition of political thought and a vital force within American politics. Although we rarely embrace the positive proposals advanced by American conservatives, we find that conservatism harbors forceful critical resources. Liberal or progressive political programs ignore conservative critique at their peril. Our political views need strong intellectual opposition, and, at its best, conservatism is among the most robust frameworks for political thinking.
It has been clear to us, and to many others, that today's Republican Party is no longer uniformly conservative in any standard sense. Exactly what the current GOP is committed to remains strikingly obscure, and it is doubtful that, apart from a few prevalent but vague slogans, there is any positive principle that unifies the Party today.
Many Diamonds
if I were to cross this bridge
a thousand times
no—
I’ve crossed this bridge a thousand times
along the length of its steel lattice rail
through which my small daughter
wanting to look down at small-town icebergs
sailing in the swift spring surge
had stuck her head, turned it just so,
and in trying to withdraw could not,
and cried, I’m stuck!
her wool cap caught in the top vertex
of one of the many diamonds
of the rail’s crossed straps
I reached my left hand over the top rail
and on the river’s side laid it on her cap’s wool ball,
while on the other, between her head and the strap’s steel,
placed my right; with both I eased her head
to the diamond’s wide center
to the spot through which her head could easily pass.
She stood, adjusted dignity and hat, grinned,
we laughed
by Jim Culleny
1/22/16
by Daniel Ranard
Luckily, I'm not going to talk about topological phase transitions. (I'll leave that to the professionals, like Philip Ball at Prospect.) But I am going to talk about bagels. Or really, I want to focus on the mathematical field of topology, which underpins these discoveries. Topology is the study of shapes. And while shapes are interesting in their own right, topology also demonstrates the unique ways that mathematicians conceive of objects and their properties.
First we can ask, what's a shape? Imagine explaining the concept to an alien whose language doesn't have the word for shape. Let's say our alien hasn't even grasped the basic schema of human perception.
Alien: “What's the ‘shape' of an object?”
Person: “The shape of something is just… how it looks.”
Alien: “So the shape of a basketball is orange and one foot long?”
Person: “Well, you need to ignore the color and the size, but…”
We've already learned something. Mathematicians and physicists are often trying to come up with new properties to describe and classify objects, whether they're talking about physical objects or abstract mathematical constructions. Sometimes, you can come up with a new type of description by asking what's left over in your description once you ignore certain other properties. For instance, the vague property of “how something looks” requires us to ignore exactly where the object is in space: we say that two stop signs look the same, even though they stand on different streets. If we picked up one stop sign and laid it on top of the other, they'd be hard to distinguish. That's what it means to “look the same.” Still, it can be hard to specify exactly what sort of description is left over when we choose to ignore certain properties like color and size.
by Jonathan Kujawa
Arrow's theorem warns us that there are flaws in every form of democracy. It should also spur us to think deeply about the potential consequences of how we choose to vote. As Donald Saari, an expert on math and voting, put it:
…rather than reflecting the views of the voters, it is entirely possible for an election outcome to more accurately reflect the choice of an election procedure.
That is, how you decide to count votes can have a bigger impact than the votes themselves. Stalin made the same point rather more ominously:
I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.
This is not just a theoretical worry.
Sughra Raza. For the Sake of Clarity. October 1, 2016.
Digital Photograph.
by Ahmed Humayun
Today, highly complex projects straddle multiple specialized disciplines and involve many different individuals and teams. We inevitably miss key steps in addressing difficult challenges, due to limited memory, faltering attention, poor communication, unforseen events, or other factors. In effect, while we know a lot more today, we often don't apply our knowledge effectively. Therefore, we are constantly faced with avoidable errors in fields such as surgery, disaster management, software design, intelligence failures, and finance – indeed, in any area of human endeavor that requires the quick application of enormous knowledge to challenging problems with uncertain outcomes.
by Mike Bendzela
Some ants (Formicidae) living under a certain wood stump were incapable of realizing that they didn't know anything. Their antennae were exquisitely tuned to find the airs of their own colony agreeable. The edicts that wafted down from their Queen filled them with an illusion of knowledge and reason. This motivated them to action, which felt to them just like free will.
The termites (Isoptera) in a mound nearby had developed a disposition almost identical to that of the ants: They imagined that the notions radiating from Royal Headquarters issued from their own heads, and they fancied themselves informed about the world.
It was revealed to the ants that the rotten stump under which they nested was the Holy Motherland. But this same stump had been vouchsafed to the termites instead as a delectable corpse. For the ants it was an abomination to think of their home being consumed; whereas for the termites it was a sacrilege to waste a corpse! After all, this stump was a gift from On High. They both believed this. So when a troop of termites arrived at the stump to consume what was rightfully theirs, the ants were waiting for them — with opened mandibles that snapped like traps.
The sense of belonging involves elevating group appetite over reason.
by Jalees Rehman
Here is an excerpt of both playlists
Artist Pro-social playlist Neutral playlist
P!nk Dear Mr. President Raise Your Glass
John Lennon Imagine Stand By Me
Michael Jackson Heal the World Dirty Diana
Nicole Ein bisschen Frieden Alles nur für dich
Pink Floyd Another Brick in the Wall Wish You Were Here
Scorpions Wind of Change Still Loving You
Wiz Khalifa See You Again Black and Yellow
The researchers then arranged for either the neutral or the pro-social playlist to be played in the background in a Würzburg café during their peak business hours and to observe the behavior of customers. The primary goal of the experiment was to quantify the customers' willingness to pay a surcharge of 0.30 Euros for fair trade coffee instead of regular coffee. Fair trade coffee is more expensive because it is obtained through organizations which offer better trading conditions to coffee bean farmers, prohibit child labor and support sustainable farming practices. Information about fair trade coffee was presented on a blackboard in the center of the café so that all customers would walk past it and the server was trained by the researchers to offer the fair trade surcharge in a standardized manner. The server also waited for a minimum of six minutes before taking the orders of guests so that they would be able to hear at least two songs in the background. During the observation period, 123 customers heard the prosocial playlist whereas 133 heard the neutral playlist.
by Brooks Riley
by Olivia Zhu
I wrote a few months ago on May Swenson’s “Untitled,” a love poem filled with the rain of many, many beautiful images. “You have found my root you are the rain,” she says. Today, I found myself caught in a rainstorm, took shelter under a tree, but it came with such a different kind of a feeling that even though my mind went back to Swenson, it seems more fitting to go somewhere new.
Billy Collins’ “Litany” is another poem that’s similar in its saturated nature, where almost every line includes a new metaphor. However, Collins, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, takes a different tack in producing his list of comparisons for his lover. Unlike Jacques Crickillon, whose lines are cited briefly in the epigraph of “Litany,” Collins does not take himself so seriously, and a slightly mocking tone is present throughout his work—a tone that makes it a bit hard to take him seriously while reading the poem, to be perfectly honest. A video of him reading invites friendly laughter from the audience as well:
Even the title of the poem is irreverent: litany can refer to either types of religious prayers involving petitions or to a long and tedious listing of items. Either seems to fit, as Collins may very well be petitioning his lover with his plaintive and sometimes appeasing comparisons or demonstrating to the reader that a recitation of several metaphors in a row is an overused and ineffective poetic technique.
by Dwight Furrow
Although wine is one of the most alluring products of culture, its attraction is in part due to its capacity to reveal nature. When made with proper care, wine in its structure and flavor reflects its origins in grapes grown in a particular geographical location with unique soils, weather, native yeasts, bacteria, etc. Although the grape juice becomes wine via a controlled fermentation process and is the outcome of an idea brought to fruition by means of technology, the basic material came into existence through natures' bounty– roots, trunk and leaves interacting with soil, sun, and rain. Despite the technological transformations that occur downstream, the character of the wine is thoroughly dependent on what takes place inside the clusters of grapes hanging on the vine in a particular, unique location. As any winemaker will tell you, you cannot make good wine from bad grapes and the character of a wine will depend substantially on those natural processes in the vineyard. When you savor a delicious wine you savor the effects of morning fog, midday heat, wind that banishes disease, soil that regulates water and nutrient uptake, bacteria that influence vine health, native yeasts that influence fermentation, the effects of frost in the spring, of rain during harvest—an endless litany of natural processes over which winemakers and viticulturists often have only limited control.
In this respect wine differs from most other beverages some of which are made in a factory by putting ingredients together according to a recipe; others which are directly a product of agriculture but don't display so readily the unique character of their origins. Orange juice from California tastes like orange juice from Florida. Beer can be made anywhere without significant geographical effects on flavor or texture. Not so with grapes. For most wine lovers, it is that taste of geographical difference that fascinates, a difference that is, in part, nature's murmuring.
by Shadab Zeesht Hashmi
In the sunlit verandah, where my grandmother reads, combs her hair, offers namaz, I find the slow pages of Plato’s Republic or Iqbal’s collected poems. She has been a professor for years and years; she spends all her time reading unless she is picking mulberries with me or telling me the story of King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Androcles and the Lion, or the one about the Qazi of Jaunpur, sometimes the story of Kashmir. She drinks tea, I eat kinnos. The stories are like homes in the wilderness— familiar, welcoming, fortifying. All the bullies at school, all the demons diminish and melt away. The art of the story has a peculiar majesty— it nurtures vision, it unties the knots of history.
At the time of my grandmother’s passing, I’m ten years old, and in shock for long. My mother later describes what was to be their last drive together—how she wiped her mother’s glasses as they passed the river Ravi and historical Lahore. Ravi means narrator, storyteller. I imagine my grandmother as being rapt in the view of Ravi and the twelve doorways of the Mughal bara dari. Years later, I’ll remember this moment of seeing through her eyes, when, in her beloved Kashmir, pellet guns are used by the Indian Military to blind Kashmiri protestors, many of them women—mothers—the unspeakable brutality of “dead eyes” in the midst of the living beauty of Kashmir.
by Maniza Naqvi
It has been all about the Towers hasn't it, that Mrs. Clinton should make the case about why Americans who are Muslim should not be humiliated or insulted—because they are needed to help fight terrorism. They make good Gold Star families.
It has all been about the towers hasn't it that pornographic words and sex trump the pornography of bombs, war and genocide and make us so outraged and indignant? That the feminism of today should be this? Why isn't the declaration of war, the arming of this and that militia, every which way, drone attacks, and sales of weapons locker room talk? Why is all this acceptable, as if it were just locker room talk.
It has all been about the towering terrorism case hasn't it? The towering overpowering love of all things military in this country. President Obama, who was elected on an anti-war vote in 2008 told America that it is the military that protects Americans civil rights. The towering diminishing of civilians. On the basis of the towers. The towering overplaying of shoe bombs, pipe bombs and knives. And those demented men attached to these who are always somehow in the orbit of the FBI and the War Security Agencies and who make the case for the war machinery which produces the bombs and weapons that can wipe out whole cities and that are actually wreaking destruction in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The American people are waking up. And in that blue haze just before the dreaming stops—Trump towers.
Lydia Kiesling in The New York Times:
In some parts of America today, “Muslim” is a slur. This is a grotesquely low bar by which to measure a non-Muslim’s engagement with Islam, but it is in fact the bar. Citizens in “Muslim garb” are attacked on American streets. One of our presidential candidates believes there is a “Muslim problem,” and he has plans to solve it. Self-styled experts analyze Shariah on right-wing talk shows. Toggling between Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and Hodgson’s “Venture,” it’s hard to believe they’re discussing the same religion. In Islam Hodgson found one of the most creative and the most excellent of our collective human enterprises. He was a committed Quaker, and his own religious beliefs allowed him to find deep resonance in both the unity and variety of Islamic experience. “Medieval” is a kind of slur now, too, but there was something medieval about Hodgson’s combination of study and belief. For much of history, Islamic and otherwise, the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of faith were a single project. This was likewise Hodgson’s motivation and his way of reckoning with the role of Islam in world history.
More here.
Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle in the New York Times:
Yet despite the richness and variety of these accounts, all of them pass over a momentous turning point: the locating of philosophy within a modern institution (the research university) in the late 19th century. This institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.
Take this simple detail: Before its migration to the university, philosophy had never had a central home. Philosophers could be found anywhere — serving as diplomats, living off pensions, grinding lenses, as well as within a university. Afterward, if they were “serious” thinkers, the expectation was that philosophers would inhabit the research university. Against the inclinations of Socrates, philosophers became experts like other disciplinary specialists. This occurred even as they taught their students the virtues of Socratic wisdom, which highlights the role of the philosopher as the non-expert, the questioner, the gadfly.
Philosophy, then, as the French thinker Bruno Latour would have it, was “purified” — separated from society in the process of modernization.
More here.
Ethan Siegel in Forbes:
1. Warm ocean water.
2. Wind.
That’s it. Those are the only two ingredients you need, and that’s what gives you, at least on Earth, a tropical cyclone. Here’s how.
More here.
Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:
But to see the strangest part of these birds, such as the macaroni and rockhopper penguins, you shouldn’t look to their comical plumes. Instead, you need to watch what happens when they lay their eggs.
They produce two in any given breeding season. The first—let’s call it the A-egg—is always smaller than the second, or B-egg. It’s smaller by between 18 and 57 percent, a greater difference than in any other bird. Because it’s smaller, the A-egg is almost always doomed. The mother penguin might kick it out of her nest. She might refuse to incubate it. On the off-chance that both eggs hatch, only one of the two chicks ever survives to become a fledgling, and it’s invariably the larger B-chick.
Evolutionary biologists have been puzzling over this bizarre trend since the 1960s. Why is the A-egg so much smaller than the B-egg? And since it almost always dies, why would crested penguins bother producing it at all? Why not simply concentrate their efforts on a single egg, as the famous emperor and king penguins do?
More here.
Lisa Rosman in Signature:
In a move that seems downright brilliant now, the film rights forPaula Hawkins’s dark mystery were bought months before its early 2015 publication, at which time it went on to sell more than eleven million copies, spend months on international best-seller lists, and, most importantly, capture us by the throat with its unnerving, elegantly wrought tension. Yet the early purchase of those rights was not eerilyprescient, for the book is cinematic in the very best of ways: At core, it is about the power and pain of the female gaze.
In her translation of Hawkins’s story, gimlet-eyed screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary,” “Chloe”) upholds the bones of its structure by deftly juggling the entwined narratives of three women living in the same suburban region. (The book is set in the outskirts of London; the film, New York.) Fired from her public relations job, alcoholic Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt, washed-out and sad-eyed as we’ve never seen her) still commutes to the city every day to hide her job loss from already-wary friend Cathy (Laura Prepon), who’s let her crash in a spare room since her divorce two years ago. Alas, that daily train ride passes Rachel’s former home, now occupied by her ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), his former mistress and current wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and their baby girl.
More here.
