Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

If the great campaigners for free speech of the past, such as Baruch Spinoza or Mary Wollstonecraft or Frederick Douglass, were alive today, “they would surely declare the 21st century an unprecedented golden age”. So suggests Jacob Mchangama in his new history of free speech.

It’s a claim that might raise a few eyebrows. This, after all, is an age in which, from China to Saudi Arabia, dictatorial rulers imprison and kill political opponents with impunity. An age in which governments in formally democratic nations such as India use the judicial system to try to silence critics. An age in which more than 1,400 journalists have been murdered in 30 years. An age in which governments across the globe desperately seek ways of curbing speech on social media they consider dangerous. And in which, in the west, there is a constant debate about “cancel culture” and the erosion of academic freedom.

Mchangama, a leading campaigner for free speech, is not trying to dismiss the reality of contemporary censorship. He is suggesting, rather, that in historical terms, we have never been more free to speak our minds. But this leads to a paradox. The very fact that, certainly in the west, we live in far more open societies has led many to be sanguine and dismissive of the threat that restrictions on speech can impose upon us. The very success of historical struggles can obscure the lessons of those struggles.

More here.

Carly Nairn in Undark:

In a time of unprecedented species extinction, when seemingly every day brings news of yet another animal or plant on the precipice of population collapse, one of the creatures society depends on the most is fading with little fanfare: the humble, neighborly bumblebee. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, 12 of the 50 bumblebee species in North America are listed as at-risk, some declining by almost 90 percent in the last two decades.

As an avid honeybee keeper and environmental journalist, I don’t take any bee’s place within the world of pollinators lightly. But whereas there has been much ado about honeybees in recent years, there has been less angst over bumblebees. While their popular counterpart is making a comeback, several bumblebee species are now at risk of extinction. This contrast in fates says a lot about the different environmental pressures facing the two types of bees, but it also reveals a lot about our own, flawed ideas about conservation.

More here.

Joseph J. Fischel in the Boston Review:

Do laws criminalizing prostitution violate the Constitution? Probably. Until recently, such a proposition would have been as absurd as suggesting, in 1972, that the Constitution guaranteed a right to same-sex marriage. But cultural winds shift, social and sexual norms evolve, and political movements shape law.

A variety of reinforcing factors have, of late, changed how sex workers are popularly perceived. The collapse of the pornographic film industry shuttled many former and would-be adult-film actors into escorting and webcamming, a process accelerated by the embrace of the latter in the pandemic-era gig economy. Meanwhile, multiple state and municipal bills have sought to decriminalize sex work, an effort shaped in part by the newfound political clout of an ascendant sex workers’ rights movement. This is a significant shift from the tendency, until quite recently, for sex workers to be thought of as drug-addled moral degenerates or trafficked victims. Prostitutes are increasingly cognizable as people, people who ought to have the same opportunities as everyone else: to live, labor, and love free from violence.

Despite these meaningful shifts, in most United Sates courts today, a constitutional challenge to a state’s anti-prostitution law would still be dead on arrival. However, the argument for the constitutional protection of sex work is worth expounding, not only in the hopes of appealing to a future judiciary, but also in the service of a more expansive politics of sexual freedom.

More here.

Woofer (When I consider the African American)

When I consider the much discussed dilemma
of the African-American, I think not of the diasporic
middle passing, unchained, juke, jock, and jiving
sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets
and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother
Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child
of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish-
American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist.
I forgot all my father’s warnings about meeting women
at bus stops (which is the way he met my mother)
when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October
because I have always been a sucker for deep blue denim
and Afros and because she spoke so slowly
when she asked me the time. I wrote my phone number
in the back of the book of poems I had and said
something like “You can return it when I see you again”
which has to be one of my top two or three best
pickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten lucky
on a first date you can guess what followed: her smile
twizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatter
on my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothing
but shoes. When I think of African-American rituals
of love, I think not of young, made-up unwed mothers
who seek warmth in the arms of any brother
with arms because they never knew their fathers
(though that could describe my mother), but of that girl
and me in the basement of her father’s four story Victorian
making love among the fresh blood and axe
and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter
executed by a 3-D witch doctor houseguest (his face
was starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy American
poppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofers
because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to anything
remotely ritualistic or African, for that matter.
We were quiet enough to hear their chatter
between the drums and the scraping of their chairs
at the table above us and the footsteps of anyone
approaching the basement door and it made
our business sweeter, though I’ll admit I wondered
if I’d be cursed for making love under her father’s nose
or if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell.
I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightened
and bewildered, but when I consider the African-American
I think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed
by madness or that we were assigned some lousy fate
when God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Time
or that we were too dumb to run the other way
when we saw the wide white sails of the ships
since given the absurd history of the world, everyone
is a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonder
if outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?).
I think of the girl’s bark colored, bi-continental nipples
when I consider the African-American.
I think of a string of people connected to one another
and including the two of us there in the basement
linked by a hyphen filled with blood;
linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.

by Terrance Hayes
from Wind in a Box
Penguin, 2006

Alex Jovanovich at Artforum:

“If a fat person behaves badly in an artistic context, then they are doubly misbehaving. Being fat is a transgression in itself. . . . An obese person’s simple existence constitutes misbehaving,” Susiraja once remarked in an interview. The impropriety she mentions runs rampant throughout her self-portraiture. Part of this is fueled by her talent for turning commonplace items—food, toys, women’s shoes, boring underwear—into uncanny and even oddly visceral props. Take Happy Meal, 2011, in which various lengths of apple peel delicately grace the top of the artist’s plump bare foot, calling to mind old scabs, skin ulcers; or Let’s Call, 2016, a picture of Susiraja hunched over, an orange rotary telephone shoved between her legs and trapped in the crotch of a hideous pair of pantyhose that have been pulled down around her knees. The phone makes me think of a miscarried infant—the long, coiled cord of the handset, which is draped over the artist’s neck, feels more than a little umbilical.

more here.

Louis I. Kahn at The Paris Review:

One day, as a small boy, I was copying the portrait of Napoleon. His left eye was giving me trouble. Already I had erased the drawing of it several times. My father leaned over and lovingly corrected my work. I threw the paper and pencil across the room, saying “now it is your drawing, not mine.” Two cannot make a single drawing. I am sure the most skillful imitation can be detected by the originator. The sheer delight in the act of drawing has its way in the drawing and that also is a quality that the imitator can’t imitate. The personal abstraction, the rapport between subject and the thought also are unimitatable.

In the presence of Albi [Cathedral], I felt the belief in the choice of its architectural elements, and what exhilaration and patience were combined to begin it and work toward its completion.

more here.

Sean Wilentz in Lapham’s Quarterly:

From the moment it appeared in April 1903, The Souls of Black Folk caused a sensation. Among black readers, James Weldon Johnson later claimed, it had the greatest impact of any book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. William James, W.E.B. Du Bois’ undergraduate mentor at Harvard, dispatched a copy to his brother Henry, who privately praised it (a little backhandedly) as “the only ‘Southern’ book of any distinction published in many a year.” In Germany, Max Weber, whose lectures Du Bois attended while a student in Berlin, pronounced it a “splendid” effort and went to work finding a translator. Within two months, Du Bois’ American publishers had to arrange for a third printing, as the book became the subject of discussion in periodicals across the country, with the conspicuous exception of most white Southern newspapers and those controlled by the friends and supporters of Du Bois’ antagonist, Booker T. Washington. For a collection of mainly reworked, previously published essays on race relations and the Negro by a young black sociologist and historian at Atlanta University, it was an extraordinary success, unprecedented in the history of American letters.

The flashpoint of controversy was the book’s third essay, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” Du Bois had once been an admirer of Washington—he had praised him for his famous Atlanta Compromise speech urging racial accommodation in 1895—but he had moved in a more radical direction over the previous five years. Du Bois’ objections were political: he was scornful of Washington’s circumspection about racial equality. But they were also cultural. Like Washington, Du Bois was dismayed by the debased condition of the Negro masses, barely one generation out of slavery, but Washington’s view was tainted by a fundamental pessimism about the worth of black people’s cultural resources.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

The recent partial collapse of the Metaverse, when Facebook parent company Meta lost 26% of its market value (or $232,000,000,000) in a single day, as well as the proliferation of new images this triggered of the ongoing transformation of Mark Zuckerberg’s flesh-and-blood body into a dead-eyed simulacrum of the sort only billions of dollars can buy, appearing ever more as if made out of the same materials as Stretch Armstrong (Karo corn syrup, latex), seemed a good occasion to revisit, perhaps more compellingly than on my previous attempts, the so-called “simulation argument”: the idea that what we think is reality is in fact a “computer simulation”.

The other occasion is the publication of philosopher Dave Chalmers’s new book Reality+, whose title sounds like something you might also buy stock in, especially if you are banking on a future of increased technological mediation between human experience and the world, in which our very idea of what is to count as reality will be correspondingly less dependent on the old criterion that served us reasonably well for at least some centuries (even if it has by no means been the default view of human cultures in most places and time): that to be real is to be out there in the external world independently of our experience.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it’s hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet, there are strong indications from theoretical considerations and cosmological data that we need to do better. But the leading contenders, especially supersymmetry, haven’t yet shown up in our experiments, leading some to wonder whether anthropic selection is a better answer. Michael Dine gives us an expert’s survey of the current situation, with pointers to what might come next.

More here.

Julian Baggini in Prospect:

“Can you see me?” In the age of video calls, this has become a common question. But when posed to philosopher David Chalmers, it takes on a deeper significance. Regarding the basic version of virtual reality (VR) in which we’re having our conversation, Chalmers suggests that “some very conservative philosophers would say no, I am merely seeing a pattern of pixels on a screen and I’m not seeing you behind it.” But Chalmers has a different view: “Yes, I’m seeing you perfectly,” he replies, covering both meanings with his answer. His seemingly simple claim has implications not just for the possibilities of virtual reality, but the nature of actual reality, too.

Chalmers is one of the best-known philosophers of the 21st century. Although his latest book, Reality+, is the first aimed squarely at the general reader, he’s already managed to cross over from academia, helped hugely by his essay “The Matrix as Metaphysics,” which he wrote for the movie’s official website in 2003. He also inspired Tom Stoppard’s play about consciousness, The Hard Problem. Chalmers’s easy manner, scruffy attire and (for many years) unkempt long hair have led him to be plausibly labelled a “rock-star philosopher.”

More here.

Lee wanted to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a movie that was by China, for China, while the country was at this turning point. But though it was embraced around the world, it failed to meet that criterion of the holy grail production, since it was of little interest to audiences in China. There, moviegoers were watching True Lies because it was the kind of action-packed spectacular their own country’s filmmakers couldn’t produce. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which had seemed so novel in America, was old hat to Chinese moviegoers reared on kung fu.

Furthermore, while Chinese citizens were flocking to Hollywood movies, they found that the two storytelling modes could mix like oil and water. Michelle Yeoh, a new discovery in America, was a generation older than younger, hipper actors in China.

more here.

Shahidha Bari at Literary Review:

Sofi Thanhauser offers a simple but remarkable fact early on in her new book, Worn: today it is more expensive to make your own clothes than to buy them. This is a relatively recent and shocking development in the history of human dress. How did such a situation come to pass?

The answer to that question is globalisation and the devaluation of labour that it has unleashed. For two decades now, academics and journalists have been wrangling with the ecological and human consequences of the fast-fashion machine. See, for instance, Lucy Siegle’s To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?, Tansy Hoskins’s Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion and Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, as well as documentary films like The True Cost by Andrew Morgan and The Machinists by Hannan Majid and Richard York.

more here.

Thrift

What happens when an old black man,
Toothless and raggedy,
Walks into a bank, catches
Some young, white, middle-manager’s ear
With a slurred tale of coins
Hoarded from his wife and kids
(Who would only have spent them),
Leftovers from various hits
On the numbers, plus
God knows how many
Easy deceptions.

If you were this man, what
Would you do with this true believer
Who has walked through the door
Of your bank, fired up
With what he has pulled off,
Knowing that on some non-verbal level
He has encoded you
(Or someone like you)

As kindred, that only you
(Or someone like you)
Could understand this type
Of fidelity. And somehow
He guides you to the door
And through the glass you see
The trunk of this man’s car,
My father’s car, its springs
Low and ripe as the apricots
Sweetening on his tree
At home. He wants to give you

The weight he has built, penny
By penny. He wants you to lift
Away what you first thought of him,
Bag by precious. And he wants
You to do it, now.

by Carnelius Eady
from The Gathering of my Name
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991

From Goodreads:

One of the most famous and admired African-American women in U.S. history, Sojourner Truth sang, preached, and debated at camp meetings across the country, led by her devotion to the antislavery movement and her ardent pursuit of women’s rights. Born into slavery in 1797, Truth fled from bondage some 30 years later to become a powerful figure in the progressive movements reshaping American society.

This remarkable narrative, first published in 1850, offers a rare glimpse into the little-documented world of Northern slavery. Truth recounts her life as a slave in rural New York, her separation from her family, her religious conversion, and her life as a traveling preacher during the 1840s. She also describes her work as a social reformer, counselor of former slaves, and sponsor of a black migration to the West.
A spellbinding orator and implacable prophet, Truth mesmerized audiences with her tales of life in bondage and with her moving renditions of Methodist hymns and her own songs. Frederick Douglass described her message as a “strange compound of wit and wisdom, of wild enthusiasm, and flint-like common sense.”

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker:

Since the declaration of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s birthday as a federal holiday, our country has celebrated the civil-rights movement, valorizing its tactics of nonviolence as part of our national narrative of progress toward a more perfect union. Yet we rarely ask about the short life span of those tactics. By 1964, nonviolence seemed to have run its course, as Harlem and Philadelphia ignited in flames to protest police brutality, poverty, and exclusion, in what were denounced as riots. Even larger and more destructive uprisings followed, in Los Angeles and Detroit, and, after the assassination of King, in 1968, across the country: a fiery tumult that came to be seen as emblematic of Black urban violence and poverty. The violent turn in Black protest was condemned in its own time and continues to be lamented as a tragic retreat from the noble objectives and demeanor of the church-based Southern movement.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, in August, 2013, then President Barack Obama crystallized this historical rendering when he said, “And then, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that, during the course of fifty years, there were times when some of us, claiming to push for change, lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination.” That, Obama said, “is how progress stalled. That’s how hope was diverted. It’s how our country remained divided.”

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Rob Brooks in Psyche:

I recently encountered a man who goes by the rather unusual name of Davecat, and who describes himself using the even more unusual labels of ‘robosexual’ and ‘iDollator’. He prefers the company of life-size dolls over human partners. He’s done plenty of media, alongside his RealDoll ‘wife’ Sidore Kuroneko and their silicone-skinned live-in companions, serving as an open and articulate example of people who buy and use sex dolls.

Robosexuals eagerly await the promised arrival of sophisticated sex robots: talking, walking dolls that can carry a conversation, discern what a user wants, and give it to them. Realbotix, the Californian company that makes RealDolls such as Sidore, is a frontrunner in the nascent sex robot market. Today’s models exhibit some robotic movement and chatbot-style conversation. Within a few short years, we are promised, more life-like skin, more fluid movement and artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced personalities will pull robots out of their closets and thrust them into the mainstream.

My recent book, Artificial Intimacy (2021), considers the new ecosystem of digital lovers, virtual friends and algorithmic matchmakers that cater to deep human needs for social contact, friendship, intimacy, love and sex.

More here.