[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

Sughra Raza. For the Sake of Clarity. October 1, 2016.

Digital Photograph.

Lydia Kiesling in The New York Times:

Viewed in the least charitable terms, academia is a small fraternity of ambitious backbiters engaged in the production of work so dense that only other members of the order can hope to understand it. But some scholars arrive on the scene bearing such a combination of intellect, urgency and charisma that their achievements resonate long after the Festschrift is printed and the memorial lecture empties out. One of these was Marshall Hodgson, a great American scholar of Islam who died in 1968 while jogging on the University of Chicago campus. He was 46, and he left behind a manuscript that would become a magisterial three-volume book, “The Venture of Islam,” published posthumously through the efforts of his widow and colleagues.

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:

The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods — ancient, medieval and modern. We can divide it into rival traditions (empiricism versus rationalism, analytic versus Continental), or into various core areas (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics). It can also, of course, be viewed through the critical lens of gender or racial exclusion, as a discipline almost entirely fashioned for and by white European men.

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:

The most destructive storms to occur on Earth — although they’re not limited to Earth — are hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. Strong, sustained winds coupled with torrential, downpouring rain often brings with it severe flooding, incredible property damage capable of cresting 100 billion dollars and, quite frequently, death tolls that rise into the thousands. These storms all the same phenomenon, just given different names dependent on where they form on our world; generically, they’re known as tropical cyclones. While the big, sweeping, cloudy arms surrounding a quiet “eye” are familiar sights to even casual storm-watchers looking at a radar image or photo from space, the scientific ingredients are so few and so simple you might not believe it:

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:

With their elaborate yellow eyebrows, crested penguins are both unmistakable and slightly clownish.

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:

First things first: “The Girl on the Train” is a wonderfully faithful adaptation.

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.

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me

Last time, I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez

A 17 year old brown queer, who was sleeping in their car

Yesterday, I saw myself die again. Fifty times I died in Orlando. And

I remember reading, Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before he passed

I was studying at NYU, where he was teaching, where he wrote shit

That made me feel like a queer brown survival was possible. But he didn’t

Survive and now, on the dancefloor, in the restroom, on the news, in my chest

There are another fifty bodies, that look like mine, and are

Dead. And I have been marching for Black Lives and talking about the police brutality

Against Native communities too, for years now, but this morning

I feel it, I really feel it again. How can we imagine ourselves // We being black native

Today, Brown people // How can we imagine ourselves

When All the Dead Boys Look Like Us? Once, I asked my nephew where he wanted

To go to College. What career he would like, as if

The whole world was his for the choosing. Once, he answered me without fearing

Tombstones or cages or the hands from a father. The hands of my lover

Yesterday, praised my whole body. Made the angels from my lips, Ave Maria

Full of Grace. He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral, in NYC

Before, we opened the news and read. And read about people who think two brown queers

Cannot build cathedrals, only cemeteries. And each time we kiss

A funeral plot opens. In the bedroom, I accept his kiss, and I lose my reflection.

I am tired of writing this poem, but I want to say one last word about

Yesterday, my father called. I heard him cry for only the second time in my life

He sounded like he loved me. It’s something I am rarely able to hear.

And I hope, if anything, his sound is what my body remembers first.

by Christopher Soto
from Literary Hub, June 2016

Jonathan Ree in The Guardian:

There was a time when every self-respecting egghead had to keep up with the latest developments in philosophy; not any more. Today’s intellectuals, if they do not ignore philosophy entirely, can content themselves with reading one or two books about its past. Hundreds of histories of philosophy are available, and they are all much the same: they tell the same basic story, with the same cast of leading characters. Act one: ancient Greek philosophy, where Socrates postulates an ideal world of which our own reality is but a shadow. Act two: modern European philosophy, which begins in the 17th century when René Descartes tried to cast doubt on everything, thus precipitating a civil war between rationalists who thought that knowledge is based on reason, and empiricists who said that it depends on experience. Act three: professional philosophy, in which Immanuel Kant’s investigations into the logic of philosophical disagreement set it on the path to becoming an introverted technical specialism, increasingly subservient to the natural sciences. The details of the plot may be vague but the message is clear: philosophers are very clever, but very stupid too, promising much and delivering little. Philosophy is history, LOL.

Anthony Gottlieb will have none of this. He is on a mission to show that the great dead philosophers have been misunderstood and that they deserve to be taken seriously. “It is because they still have something to say to us,” he says, “that we can easily get these philosophers wrong.” In 2000 he published The Dream of Reason, a brilliant retelling of the story of ancient Greek philosophy which brought out the lasting relevance of Plato’s idea that truth, happiness and virtue are inseparable, while vindicating Aristotle as a serious thinker about nature, art and society. The Dream of Reason is now joined by this much-anticipated sequel, which picks up the story with Descartes and carries it forward to the beginnings of the French Revolution.

More here.

Junot Diaz in Literary Hub:

I’ve spent past 20 years reading and writing short stories—which, given some careers, ain’t all that much, but it is more than half my adult life. I guess you could say I’m one of those true believers. I teach the form every year without fail, and when I’m asked to give a lecture on a literary form (a rarity), the short story is inevitably my craft subject du jour. Even now that my writing is focused entirely on novels, short fiction is still the genre I feel most protective of. The end-of-the-novel bullshit that erupts with measles-like regularity among a certain strain of literary folks doesn’t exercise me as much as when people tell me they never read short stories. At these moments I find myself proselytizing like a madman and I will go as far as to mail favorite collections to the person in question. (For real, I do this.) I hate the endless shade thrown at the short story — whether from publishers or editors or writers who talk the form down, who don’t think it’s practical or sufficiently remunerative—and I always cheer when a story collection takes a prize or becomes a surprise bestseller (rare and getting rarer). I always have at least one story collection on my desk or near my bed for reading—and there’s never a week when I don’t have a story I just read kicking around inside my head.

I am as much in awe of the form’s surpassing beauty as I am bowled over by its extraordinary mutability and generativity. I love the form’s spooky effects, how in contradistinction to the novel, which gains its majesty from its expansiveness, from its size, the short story’s colossal power extends from its brevity and restraint.

More here.

Virginia Morell at Science:

All great mind reading begins with chocolate. That’s the basis for a classic experiment that tests whether children have something called theory of mind—the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others. When they see someone hide a chocolate bar in a box, then leave the room while a second person sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, they have to guess where the first person will look for the bar. If they guess “in the original box,” they pass the test, and show they understand what’s going on in the first person’s mind—even when it doesn’t match reality.

For years, only humans were thought to have this key cognitive skill of attributing “false belief,” which is believed to underlie deception, empathy, teaching, and perhaps even language. But three species of great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans—also know when someone holds a false belief, according to a new study published today in Science. The groundbreaking study suggests that this skill likely can be traced back to the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, and may be found in other species.

“Testing the idea that nonhuman [animals] can have minds has been the Rubicon that skeptics have again and again said no nonhuman has ever, or will ever, cross,” says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. “Well, back to the drawing board!”

More here.

W. Tecumseh Fitch in Inference Review:

Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential—and controversial—intellectuals of our time, and his writings have had enormous impact in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and political discourse. If the breadth of these contributions is remarkable, the depth of his insights in each of these fields is formidable and daunting. This scope, combined with the fact that much of his scholarly writing is highly technical, sometimes makes the unity of his thinking difficult to discern. Indeed, until I read this short and accessible volume, I always found it difficult to reconcile Chomsky the linguist/philosopher with Chomsky the political critic—his focus on innate limitations in language and mind seemed at odds with his steadfast political championing of individual freedom against oppressive forces. This recent book, in refreshingly clear if sometimes still challenging prose, provides the answer, and reveals an underlying unity in Chomsky’s perspective and thought on these topics.

In the four essays that make up the chapters of this recent book, What Kind of Creatures Are We?, he clearly leads us through his thinking in the domains of language (“What is Language?”), philosophy of mind (“What Can We Understand?”), and politics and ethics (“What is the Common Good?”), returning in the final essay to the general question of human knowledge and the history of science (“The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?”). Of course, Chomsky is first and foremost a linguist, and it is natural that his own historical trajectory and that of this book start with language—in my opinion the most biologically special and cognitively precious capacity our species possesses. I will thus start this review with some historical context concerning Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics and cognitive science before turning to the contents of individual chapters.

More here.

A touching personal story by a graduate of Yale Law School. Video length: 14:42

Sarah Coolidge at The Quarterly Conversation:

After the suicide of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes wrote what he considered to be his most important poetic work, Crow: From the Life and Times of the Crow. At the book’s center is Crow, one of folklore’s iconic figures. Hughes uses this feathered symbol of death to take on mythology, Christianity, and conventional poetry.

Crow performs monumental tasks—in one poem, he binds the Heavens to the Earth—but always with the nefarious air of a trickster: when the nail he uses to join the terrestrial and the celestial becomes “gangrenous and stank . . . Crow / Grinned.” In another poem, aptly named “A Childish Prank,” we are given the origin story of the two sexes. Crow is the creator, biting a worm in two and sticking one end partially into man and the other end completely into woman.

This is more or less the same Crow we find in the pages of Max Porter’s debut novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Except that here, in a slim novel barely more than 100 pages, Crow is given the space to grow beyond his folkloric origins. The book’s premise is simple. A father and his two sons are mourning in the wake of the mother’s unexpected death. Dad, as the recent widower is called, was in the middle of writing a book about Hughes’s Crow when his wife died. And the boys, always referred to in the plural, are perplexed by the lack of chaos in the wake of tragedy. All three are unsure of how to proceed with their lives. Then one night Crow arrives on the doorstep of their London flat.

more here.

James Goodman at the New York Times:

“The African-Americans love me,” Donald Trump said back in January. Nine months later, evidence of that love is exceedingly rare. Polls put Trump’s black support in the low single digits, smaller in several samples than the margin of error. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the summer and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Klan in the fall, received 6 percent. Ronald Reagan received 12 and then 9 percent. Even John McCain, running against Barack Obama, received 4.

Whether because of those numbers or despite them, the academic study of black Republicans is booming. Last year, Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Harvard, published “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” a spirited study of conservatism, politics and race. Now we have Joshua D. Farrington’s “Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP” and Corey D. Fields’s “Black Elephants in the Room.” Other books have been published, and more are on the way. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.

more here.

Joshua Kurlantzick at The Guardian:

Goscha has provided quite simply the finest, most readable single-volume history of Vietnam in English. He takes on some persistent myths about the country. First, that Vietnam has been constantly preyed on. In the pre-colonial period, southeast Asia’s own empires constantly colonised each other. A series of Vietnamese empires conquered parts of modern-day Laos and Cambodia between the 15th and 19th centuries, while alternately fighting and placating China’s rulers, who saw Vietnam as a vassal state.

Second, Goscha shows that Vietnamese dynasties were actively modernising the country before French colonisation began in the mid to late 19th century. The Nguyen dynasty was establishing new tax and irrigation systems, new schools and a modern bureaucracy when France declared its rule over Indochina.

Under the Nguyens, the French and the two governments of South and North Vietnam, the country was hardly monoethnic, though the pictures most Americans saw of Vietnam were of ethnically Viet people. Vietnam, as Goscha argues, has long been influenced not only by the majority ethnic Viet and by Chinese Confucian culture, which spread south over centuries, but also by a far broader range of cultures and peoples.

more here.