#SayHerName

Brown and Ray in Brookings.Org:

“Today is a good day to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” This phrase started as a call for the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office to hold accountable the officers that shot and killed the 26-year-old Louisville resident in her home in March 2020. In the months after Taylor’s killing, social media influencers and celebrities adopted the phrase to draw attention to her death as a way to disrupt the picturesque and cavalier digital culture of platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok. Oprah Winfrey even gave up her coveted spot on the cover of O Magazine by putting a picture of Taylor, an emergency medical technician, on the cover. Winfrey also placed billboards around the city of Louisville (one of which were vandalized) to demand the arrest of the officers involved.

For a moment, this attention seemed to bring attention to Breonna and by extension Black women who are victims of police brutality.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Stanley Fish’s Cinematic Jurisprudence

Julie Stone Peters in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Feisty contrarian Stanley Fish has served us for decades as the public intellectual people love to hate. Feminist social critic Camille Paglia famously described him as “a totalitarian Tinkerbell.” Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton said he was “the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervour with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers.” A brilliant scholar of late medieval and Renaissance poetry, he came to prominence in the 1980s for his claim that “interpretive communities” determine how you interpret a text—a theory that offered liberal legal scholars an alternative to the rigid originalism and textualism of the conservative Rehnquist Supreme Court. Teaching at prestigious law schools (while secretly working toward a night school law degree), he began writing for public venues. The New York Times eventually gave him a syndicated column, where he opined on everything from the decline of the humanities to Hillary-hating and stepping on Jesus (on a scrap of paper). Both on lecture tours and in print, he has fought with all comers: conservative justice Antonin Scalia, liberal rights theorists Ronald Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum, radical law professor Duncan Kennedy.

At age 86, Fish is still at it. A heretic of the left, he still loves pillorying liberal pieties.

More here.

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Why I Am Not A Conflict Theorist

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Conflict theory is the belief that political disagreements come from material conflict. So for example, if rich people support capitalism, and poor people support socialism, this isn’t because one side doesn’t understand economics. It’s because rich people correctly believe capitalism is good for the rich, and poor people correctly believe socialism is good for the poor. Or if white people are racist, it’s not because they have some kind of mistaken stereotypes that need to be corrected – it’s because they correctly believe racism is good for white people.

Some people comment on my more political posts claiming that they’re useless. You can’t (they say) produce change by teaching people Economics 101 or the equivalent. Conflict theorists understand that nobody ever disagreed about Economics 101. Instead you should try to organize and galvanize your side, so they can win the conflict.

I think simple versions of conflict theory are clearly wrong. This doesn’t mean that simple versions of mistake theory (the idea that people disagree because of reasoning errors, like not understanding Economics 101) are automatically right. But it gives some leeway for thinking harder about how reasoning errors and other kinds of error interact.

More here.

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Wednesday Poem

Prometheus

I don’t want to live with your ghost
It’s you
you I love
the light in your eyes
in mine
your lips naming me
kissing me
the taste of your skin
the scent of your body
your fingers entwined
in my hair
your footsteps
showing me the way.
I don’t want to imagine you
in a cloud
or wait for you in my dreams
or chew on faded memories.
It’s you
you I love
your eyes
your lips
your hands.
Your absence is a crow
gnawing my entrails
and I am tied to time
and cannot escape.

by Claribel Alegría
from Sorrow
Curbstone Press
translation- Carolyn Forché
__________
The Spanish:

Prometeo

No quiero vivir con tu fantasma
a ti
a ti te quiero
a la luz de tus ojos
en los mios
a tus labios nombrándome
besándome
al sabor de tu piel
al odor de tu cuerpo
a tus dedos enredándose
en mi pelo
a tus pasos señalándome
el camino.
No quiero adivinarte
en una nube
ni acecharte en el sueño
ni masticar memorias
ya marchitas.
A ti
a ti te quiero
a tus ojos
a tus labios
a tus manos
es en cuervo tu ausencia
que me roe
y estoy atada al tiempo
y no puedo escapar.

by Claribel Alegría


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How quickly are you ageing?

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

If the number of on-camera screams is any indication, Kim Kardashian’s first encounter with epigenetics was a thrilling one. The reality-television star and her family shrieked and squealed in the season finale of The Kardashians in Los Angeles, California, last July as they each learnt the results of a commercial blood test that purportedly assessed their “biological ages”. Although Kardashian was 43, the placement of chemical markers on her DNA — her ‘epigenetic profile’ — matched that of a 34-year-old, according to the test. Her body, moreover, was ageing 18% more slowly than most people of her age. “You should give yourself a pat on the back,” said Matthew Dawson as he relayed the results. (Dawson is chief executive of TruDiagnostic in Lexington, Kentucky, the company that sells the test.)

On the other side of the country, neuropsychologist Terrie Moffitt says she was “mortified” when she saw the segment. Moffitt, who works at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had spent decades with her colleagues collecting data from around 1,000 people to create the basis for one of the tests provided by TruDiagnostic. She had hoped that her work might one day inform medical decisions or provide a way for researchers to assess whether an anti-ageing treatment is having a positive effect on health. A stunt on a reality-TV show was not the kind of publicity she was aiming for. “I have a snob’s view of reality TV,” she adds.

More here.

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A history of “wokeness”

Aja Romano in Vox:

Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.

In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Tuesday, February 25, 2025

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare

Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla at Asterisk:

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I’ve lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship’s proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?”

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.

After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.

More here.

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A new generation of AIs

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I have been experimenting with the first of a new generation AI models, Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, for the last few days. Grok 3 is the first model that we know trained with an order of magnitude more computing power of GPT-4, and Claude includes new coding and reasoning capabilities, so they are not just interesting in their own right but also tell us something important about where AI is going.

Before we get there, a quick review: this new generation of AIs is smarter and the jump in capabilities is striking, particularly in how these models handle complex tasks, math and code. These models often give me the same feeling I had when using ChatGPT-4 for the first time, where I am equally impressed and a little unnerved by what it can do. Take Claude’s native coding ability, I can now get working programs through natural conversation or documents, no programming skill needed.

More here.

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The Path to American Authoritarianism

Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in Foreign Affairs:

Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency in 2016 triggered an energetic defense of democracy from the American establishment. But his return to office has been met with striking indifference. Many of the politicians, pundits, media figures, and business leaders who viewed Trump as a threat to democracy eight years ago now treat those concerns as overblown—after all, democracy survived his first stint in office. In 2025, worrying about the fate of American democracy has become almost passé.

The timing of this mood shift could not be worse, for democracy is in greater peril today than at any time in modern U.S. history. America has been backsliding for a decade: between 2014 and 2021, Freedom House’s annual global freedom index, which scores all countries on a scale of zero to 100, downgraded the United States from 92 (tied with France) to 83 (below Argentina and tied with Panama and Romania), where it remains.

The country’s vaunted constitutional checks are failing.

More here.

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Men Actually Crave Romantic Relationships More Than Women Do

Clarissa Brincat in Scientific American:

Do you think women are more invested in romance than men? Rom-coms and women’s magazines may push this stereotype, but psychological research is increasingly telling a different story: multiple studies have suggested that men may actually place a greater importance on romantic relationships. Now researchers have identified a key behavioral factor that explains this surprising difference.

Drawing on more than 50 studies of mixed-gender relationships, researchers at Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Minnesota and Vrije University Amsterdam proposed that men, compared with women, expect to gain more from being in a romantic relationship and are thus more motivated to find a partner. According to multiple anonymous surveys, men also tend to experience greater mental and physical health benefits from being in a relationship, are less likely to initiate breakups and struggle more with the emotional toll of a breakup, the researchers wrote in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Elaine Hoan, who studies social psychology at the University of Toronto, says these observations align with a trend she has seen in her own research: “that single men are typically less happy with their singlehood than single women, even across different Western and Eastern cultural contexts.”

More here.

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The Art of Escape

Michael Carson at The Hudson Review:

Valéry said we see only through effort after we see for the first time. This is its own sort of trauma. We repeat the seashore of our youth until we die. Yeats did too, with his Irish myths and hopeless love for Maud, his Symbolist trappings and occult obsessions, and all the insecurities of the accomplished autodidact (he once failed to get a teaching job at Trinity College because he couldn’t spell “professor”), but there is a point when we realize art can take us further: It can let us see everything. It is the effort that changes utterly. Owen grasped this as well as Yeats.
 
So, today, now, thinking this through, weighing it, what do we do with this violence? Do we carry it with us like a secret heart? Do we make it into myth so as to share the secret? “All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong,” says Yeats in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Some men have eyes that glitter and some go dull to survive.

more here.

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Janet Frame Explored the Edges of Normalcy

Audrey Wollen at The New Yorker:

“The Edge of the Alphabet” is the third in a sequence of novels published after Frame left the hospital, following “Owls Do Cry,” in 1957, and “Faces in the Water,” in 1961. The novels’ deep-sea dive into her experience, the years of institutionalization, of forcible detachment from the social world, of being written off, made disposable—until she was suddenly holding the pen, writing, writing, writing. They haunt the alleys of the autobiographical, but never fully step onto the recognized thoroughfares of memoir, or even autofiction. Despite clear reference to the events of her life, the novels remain shadowy and irreverent, winding behind the normative façades of storytelling.

The loose trilogy begins with something like the truth, but molded by a stark counterfactual: in “Owls Do Cry,” for example, the protagonist, Daphne, undergoes the lobotomy that Frame herself narrowly avoided. The Withers family, presented first in “Owls Do Cry” and then picked up again in “The Edge of the Alphabet,” refracts Frame and her siblings: Daphne, locked up and deemed insane; her sisters, Chicks and Francie (who dies by falling into the fire pit at their local dump); and her brother, Toby, who struggles with epilepsy, are versions of Frame; her sisters Myrtle and Isabel, who each accidentally died by drowning, years apart; her surviving sister, June, and her brother, George, who was epileptic.

more here.

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Tuesday Poem

Being In Time

Scotland, St. Andrews — cricket chirp of electric watch,
cry of waking gull. A far church sounds a sweet bell seven
times. Quiet. Now the near Presbyterian kirk’s seven, —
………………………….up, up,
………………………….up, up,
………………………….up, up, up,

………….. no going back
………….. cliff-face-climb in front
………….. beneath, the indifferent sea

….. Sitting backwards on a train — rain, low gray fog, Distant cathedral
resolving into stand of poplars. Smoke from a sudden stack disappears
into  low  cloud. Now  stack  gone  along  with  hedgerows, houses, and
field,  field,  field  of  sheep  — the where you have been unknowing,
always unrolling before your eyes.

by Nils Peterson
 from 1001 Words
Thinking of Scheherazade

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Monday, February 24, 2025

Chatbots of the Dead

Amy Kurzweil & Daniel Story at Aeon:

In 2020, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson used a corpus of writing and lyrics from her late husband, Velvet Underground’s co-founder Lou Reed, to create a generative program she interacted with as a creative collaborator. And in 2021, the journalist James Vlahos launched HereAfter AI, an app anyone can use to create interactive chatbots, called ‘life story avatars’, that are based on loved ones’ memories. Today, enterprises in the business of ‘reinventing remembrance’ abound: Life Story AI, Project Infinite Life, Project December – the list goes on.

These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters and popularity of large language models increase and as personal data expands into the seeming permanence of the cloud. To some, chatbots of the dead are useful tools that can help us grieve, remember, and reflect on those we’ve lost. To others, they are dehumanising technologies that conjure a dystopian world. They raise ethical questions about consent, ownership, memory and historical accuracy: who should be allowed to create, control or profit from these representations? How do we understand chatbots that seem to misrepresent the past? But for us, the deepest concerns relate to how these bots might affect our relationship to the dead. Are they artificial replacements that merely paper over our grief? Or is there something distinctively valuable about chatting with a simulation of the dead?

More here.

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World History of Sexualities

Merry Wiesner-Hanks & Mathew Kuefler in the Politics & Rights Review:

The women’s and gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s inspired the first professional historians of sexuality. Many of them specialized in the modern histories of Europe and the United States, and they theorized mainly from the modern Western experience. This is beginning to change: the field has expanded to incorporate premodern histories and histories in all regions of the world, becoming increasingly transhistorical and global.

World and global history have encouraged broad cross-cultural comparisons and the study of longue durée trends, developments now also seen in the history of sexuality. Historians can now move beyond concentrated specializations in one time and place to create a more comprehensive image of sexuality throughout human history, which is what the Cambridge World History of Sexualities is designed to do.

More here.

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