… “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies” really exists, and my is it in earnest. How many things had to go wrong — intellectually, socially, morally — to account for prose like this:
Because milk is produced by female mammals, a feminist perspective seems to offer a logical foundation for such inquiry. From the start, feminism has been a movement for justice: at its heart is the centrality of praxis, the necessary linkage of intellectual, political, and activist work. Feminist methodology puts the lives of the oppressed at the center of the research question and undertakes studies, gathers data, and interrogates material contexts with the primary aim of improving the lives and the material conditions of the oppressed. Using standard feminist methodology [standard feminist methodology?], twentieth-century vegan feminists and animal ecofeminists challenged animal suffering in its many manifestations (in scientific research, and specifically in the feminized beauty and cleaning products industries; in dairy, egg, and animal food production; in “pet” [note the scare quotes] keeping and breeding, zoos, rodeos, hunting, fur, and clothing) by developing a feminist theoretical perspective on the intersections of species, gender, race, class, sexuality, and nature. Motivated by an intellectual and experiential understanding of the mutually reinforcing interconnections among diverse forms of oppression, vegan feminists and ecofeminists positioned their own liberation and well-being as variously raced, classed, gendered, and sexual humans to be fundamentally interconnected to the well-being of other nondominant human and animal species, augmenting Patricia Hill Collins’s definition of intersectionality to include species as well.
Professor Irwin Corey would be hard-pressed to surpass the inanity of this.
I ask Letts why this kind of play keeps coming back. He was driving at the time, but I think I heard him do that writerly shrug, the one that means he does not wish to line his works with the costly stuff of explanation. “Yeah, well, it will take someone smarter than me to explain why that is the case. I am sure there are all sorts of good sound sociological reasons why, as Americans, we have always been fascinated with the family. We don’t seem to be capable of writing the purely political play or social satire that you guys seem to excel at, so who the hell knows?”
I was raised by factory workers. I wouldn't get this sort of thing, either, if I hadn't got out into the world and mixed with my social betters, whose family dynamics have always struck me as peculiar.
One might think the board of directors of the Good Intentions Paving Co. are all liberals, but they are not. One of the firm's most impressive undertakings was hatched in the Oval Office among George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Why not, they decided, knock off a wretched tyrant and bring democracy to a Middle Eastern country and thereby stabilize the region—all in one bold action? Tens of thousands of violent deaths and many billions of dollars later, with car bombs regularly exploding in downtown Baghdad, and with Sunni and Shiite hatred not in the least abated, the Good Intentions Paving Co. deserves to take another bow.
Kerrigan's territory is chiefly Dublin and the surrounding area. His subject, broadly speaking, is the state of Ireland: the crimes and cover-ups of the country's politicians, property developers, financiers, and the whole old-boyo network which so ardently and self-regardingly embraced the calling of "entrepreneur" during the years of the Celtic Tiger, now itself a species of roadkill.
Part of the reason for philosophers to engage with literature, and particularly novels, is that so much literary criticism from professional literary scholars is formalist in nature, or perhaps more concerned with arguing for one fashionable theory or another. Here Goldman comes to the rescue in the second part of this book. The novels chosen are not from the fringe, but rather canonical works familiar to many readers outside the hard core of literature lovers.
Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries. If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.
Did that computer you ordered online arrive late, by any chance? Most transparent administration ever my ass.
The author … displays that crucial social skill in the modern world, the ability to talk endlessly about himself without revealing anything of any importance or interest whatever. This skill comes naturally to those who are self-obsessed without self-examination. Psychobabble is to self-knowledge as political correctness is to political philosophy.
You know what would be nice? If the people who make and shape culture — TV producers, journalists, activists and the like — would take this moment to reflect on how ignorant and intolerant they are of their own country, and the world beyond their cultural bubble. Here’s a reading assignment for them: The Moral Mind, a 2012 book by UVA research psychologist Jonathan Haidt.Haidt, a secular liberal, explores social science findings that educated, upper middle class Americans are the most extreme moral outliers in the world. That is, the moral framework they impose on human thought and behavior is radically alien to the moral perceptions of the overwhelming majority of humanity. This doesn’t make them wrong, but it does make them extremely unusual.
I was at a luncheonette recently and the TV was tuned to some music channel and one current pop tune after another played. I remember one was by Miley Cyrus, but they were all by performers as well known as she. They all sounded to this first-generation rocker as if they had been written by machines.
Lordkipanidze and colleagues say their work shows the entire early fossil record for Homo – comprising perhaps nine species dating between about 2.3 and 0.5 million years old – is in fact a single long-lived group.
Here’s the list of now apparently defunct species: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo gautengensis, Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo soloensis, Homo pekinensis and Homo mauritanicus.
All of them would now be sunk into Homo erectus according to the study findings.
Their work also has major implications for later Homo, implying that a further six species should all be sunk into our kind, Homo sapiens. The species no longer required would be: Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis, Homo antecessor, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo helmei and Homo floresiensis.
Three years ago the genetic analysis of a little finger bone from
Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains in northern Asia led to a complete
genome sequence of a new line of the human family tree - the Denisovans.
Since then, genetic evidence pointing to their hybridisation with
modern human populations has been detected, but only in Indigenous
populations in Australia, New Guinea and surrounding areas. In contrast,
Denisovan DNA appears to be absent or at very low levels in current
populations on mainland Asia, even though this is where the fossil was
found.
Published today in a Science opinion article, scientists Professor Alan Cooper
of the University of Adelaide in Australia and Professor Chris Stringer
of the Natural History Museum in the UK say that this pattern can be
explained if the Denisovans had succeeded in crossing the famous Wallace's Line, one of the world's biggest biogeographic barriers which
is formed by a powerful marine current along the east coast of Borneo.
Wallace's Line marks the division between European and Asian mammals to
the west from marsupial-dominated Australasia to the east.
I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?
“Christians have been naïve to think that they can prosper in a society and not be engaged in cultural creation,” Gioia says. “Christians are naïve to think that they can be engaged positively in society and ignore culture. If you turn your back on the arts, essentially you are leaving all of those stories, those images, those forms of communication in the hands of others. And that’s what we’re seeing. People of faith have unambiguously lost the culture wars. They complain about it but they aren’t doing anything about it.”
All
my love to each of you, and to the families of those who have them,
this holiday season. To those who have much, remember your neighbor who
has little. To those who have little, and to those who are suffering,
all you may be able to do is hold on. But hold on and believe, in God
if you can, and in love. Because you are loved.
A new poll by Pew Research, just in time for Christmas, shows 73
percent of Americans believe in Jesus’ virgin birth by His mother Mary.
Even 32 percent of the self-professed religiously unaffiliated said they
believe. White evangelicals were the most believing (97%), followed by
black Protestants (94%), white Catholics (88%), Hispanic Catholics
(81%) and Mainline Protestants (70%). By comparison, other polls show
about one third of the British people profess belief in the Virgin
Birth.
Popular lore claims America is always growing more secular, like
Europe. But attachment to core Christian beliefs remains high and shows no major sign of falling.
It’s become a common complaint—almost a joke—that time seems to whiz by faster and faster as we get older.
Of course, aging doesn’t grant us the power to disrupt the space-time continuum, so it’s not a real problem. But why do we perceive it to be?
“Hallucinatory” is a much-abused word in critical writing, usually applied with great laziness, but in Blinding it does seem appropriate, along with “rapturous” and even at times “exhausting.” How quickly Cartarescu takes us from scenes of Communist tedium to a fantastical New Orleans, while also inviting us to inspect the intricately detailed biblical scenes painted on a woman’s toenails!
Shock can do little for us … when we seek other adjustments to our moods or perceptions. We may be paralyzed by doubt and anxiety and need wise reassurance; we may be lost in the labyrinth of complexity and need simplification; we may be too pessimistic and need encouragement. Shock is pleasing to its adherents in its assumption that our primary problem is complacency. Ultimately, however, it is a limited response to impoverished thinking, timid or ungenerous reactions, or meanness of spirit.
Borges calls himself a “hedonic” reader—he seeks pleasure in books, and beyond that, a “form of happiness.” He advises his students to leave a book if it bores them: “that book was not written for you,” no matter its reputation or fame. As a reader, he hunts for specific passages, or even just phrases, that move him. “One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author,” he says. “Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.”
I am sorry my editor at NR does not grasp the stakes. Indeed, he seems inclined to “normalize” what GLAAD is doing. But, if he truly finds my “derogatory language” offensive, I’d rather he just indefinitely suspend me than twist himself into a soggy pretzel of ambivalent inertia trying to avoid the central point — that a society where lives are ruined over an aside because some identity-group don decides it must be so is ugly and profoundly illiberal.
Whether you agree or not overall, there is lot here that ought to be thought about. Regarding hipsters, they are not necessarily hip, in fact, they are almost necessarily not hip, since aping the hip really isn't something someone hip would do. The hip are born, not made.
Or is the artistic impulse so strong that you think people
will do it and it will be found? Or does a culture of “free” lead to
less culture?
I think people will perform and create
music because it’s fun. It’s a social thing. It might be something they
only do on weekends or something like that. That’s certainly possible.
I
agree with a lot of those people that the copyright laws have extended
way to far and they’re crippling creativity. It’s just too much and it’s
just too extensive. And it’s too controlling.
It’s not always
about the artists. The companies grab that copyright But on the other
meaning of it, where there’s a feeling that no one should pay for
anything that creative people make, well, go down that road and it means
that people aren’t going to make things. It’s happening
in the media as well: If all news is free, there are fewer jobs, and
sometimes the information you get is less valuable. You end up with city
halls or town meetings without any reporters there to keep an eye on
people.
There’s no money for research into pieces. All
those kinds of things. Those kinds of things have changed the course of
history, and they keep the government in check, they make a democracy
work. And if you take that away then the scales have kind of tipped in a
really bizarre way.
When
W.B. Yeats wrote, almost a century ago, that “Out of the quarrel with
others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make
poetry,” he would not likely have guessed that the phrase would someday
apply to a gay, deeply Catholic Latino living in California. Richard
Rodriguez is more than just a string of contradictory signifiers; ...
Rodriguez’s new book, “Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography,”
looks at the state of religion after 9/11 – the hatred of Islam, the
revival of atheism, the disorientation of secularism. The 2001 attacks
sent Rodriguez, literally and intellectually, to the Middle Eastern
desert as a way of making sense of the three great monotheistic faiths —
Islam, Judaism and Christianity — by experiencing their origins. It’s
his first book in more than a decade, since the 2002 publication of “Brown: The Last Discovery of America.”
The new book also muses on Cesar Chavez, California’s tradition of
disappointment and the death of newspapers. “When a newspaper dies in
America,” he writes, “it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has
failed; a sense of place has failed.” Lyrical and rigorous, “Darling” is essentially travel literature — a kind of journey.
Christopher Hitchens wrote of Kingsley Amis that his work was an amalgam of Waugh and Wodehouse.
Having recently finished Lucky Jim, I'd like to agree: Amis articulates that hapless quality of Wodehouse, while writing with the same perceptive (and damning) qualities of Waugh.
For me, there was something of Brideshead in Lucky Jim. But there was something of Jeeves, too. Frankly, I enjoyed Lucky Jim - more than I thought I would at the start.
At least part of that enjoyment was a result of Amis' prose, which I found to be a wonderful mixture of patience, rhythm, and comedy.
The comedy here is jaded, of course, but that's because the academic life that Amis captures is equal measures cloistered and absurd. His main character, Jim Dixon, confronts that absurdity with a sinister indifference, one that ultimately gets him drunk and sacked.
And that's where Amis seems to make his most strident point: to be ejected from the academy is to be liberated. Dixon is freed at the end of the book, despite the embarrassment that comes with it. That, for Amis, is the great comedy, the great joke. Dixon is better off without the struggle.
Research into academic life yields one revelation for Amis: that it quickly spirals into provincialism, petty quarreling, and a smug sense of self-satisfaction.
Not that I necessarily agree. But Amis does have a point.
One of the foundations of the scientific method is the reproducibility
of results. In a lab anywhere around the world, a researcher should be
able to study the same subject as another scientist and reproduce the
same data, or analyze the same data and notice the same patterns.
This is why the findings of a study published today in Current Biology are so concerning. When a group of researchers tried to email the authors
of 516 biological studies published between 1991 and 2011 and ask for
the raw data, they were dismayed to find that more 90 percent of the
oldest data (from papers written more than 20 years ago) were
inaccessible. In total, even including papers published as recently as
2011, they were only able to track down the data for 23 percent.
Just read somewhere that walking for 20 minutes a day can reduce stroke and heart attack risk by 8 percent. Hell, I walk several times that just about every day, and I have for almost my entire life. Even gimpy knees don't deter me from my appointed rounds.
As an observer of the human scene Dickens wasn't the cosy sentimentalist to whom we were introduced at school, any more than he was just an angry protestor against Victorian injustice. As he saw it, if I read him right, human life was fickle, erratic and inherently unruly. There was no prospect of remoulding things according to some more exalted plan. Yet this wasn't for Dickens an altogether melancholy thought, for he had a powerful sense of excitement when he contemplated the intractable human world.
All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For
while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the
matter from the form, and the understanding can always make
this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.
That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely,
its given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a picture,
the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a
landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the
handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an
end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is
what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different
degrees.
...
Low-keyed though it was, The Renaissance was unmistakably a manifesto, and its message ran counter to some of the most deeply held
convictions of his society. The secret of living well, it affirmed, was
to live beautifully. “Not the fruit of experience but experience itself
is the end”—experience judged in terms of intensity, “stirring of the
senses,” aesthetic satisfaction.
Although it was his mother, Connie, who instilled
in O'Toole a strong sense of literature, by far the biggest influence in
his young life was his father, Patrick, a bookie who was often drunk.
One day, Patrick stood his young son up on the mantelpiece and said: "Jump, boy. I'll catch you. Trust me."
When Peter O'Toole jumped, his father withdrew his arms, leaving the boy
splattered on the hard stone floor. The lesson, said his father, was
"never trust any bastard".
Am I envious of the young? Would I want to be young again? On the first count – not really, which surprises me. On the second – certainly not, if it meant a repeat performance. I would like to have back vigour and robust health, but that is not exactly envy. And, having known youth, I'm well aware that it has its own traumas, that it is no Elysian progress, that it can be a time of distress and disappointment, that it is exuberant and exciting, but it is no picnic. I don't particularly want to go back there.
I reviewed Terry
Teachout's biography of Louis Armstrong, and I missed the racism in it. I think that's because there wasn't any. But I'm just another white guy, so what do I know? Only wait, I'm not even a white guy, since, according to this fellow Payton, there aren't any white people:
To be Italian, Spanish, Jewish, or Polish, now that means something, but what does it mean to be White? It means that the basis of your history starts with a lie. Black is synonymous with being African, but being White is synonymous with no nation or culture in particular. To be White is to align yourself with centuries of violence and oppression. To be White is to say that you’re a part of those who went into Africa and told them your White Jesus is more powerful than their Black Ancestors. You came into our villages and told us we would go to hell if we didn’t serve your God. You separated children from their families, you emasculated and effeminated [sic] our boys and men, you raped our girls and women….
Wow. Dare I suggest that the Ibo, Kikuyu, and Bantu — and many others — might take exception to this. Bear in mind, one of my college classmates was the son of a Kikuyu chieftain. As for my own ethnic background, my brother and I call ourselves Heinzes, since we may have most of the 57 different varieties in us.
Where was all the great investigative journalism when it came to Obamacare, or Fast and Furious, or Benghazi, or Solyndra, the NSA, or the IRS? In the meantime, we have this: The best and worst media errors and corrections in 2013.
I was a child for whom those lights were stars and that angel was more than a decoration. I read “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” to remember that what Eliot says was once true for me, and to hope that it might be true again. But December after December my memory fades and “the spirit of wonder” seems like something traced in the vapor of a breath on a cold windowpane: once visible, but long since disappeared.
When I returned from my 28 days in rehab, in January 2010, it was harder
to ignore the near criminal disconnect between Washington and the rest
of the country, especially in an industry that has turned neighbors
against each other while its instigators clock out and meet for a beer
together, skilled actors who in many cases spend the day feigning hatred
for each other on camera but are actually bound by their shared
nihilism and reckless self-absorption. In Washington, a divided America is good for business.
Marcus Thomas, former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in Quantico, said in a recent story
in The Washington Post that the FBI has been able to covertly activate a
computer’s camera — without triggering the light that lets users know
it is recording — for several years. Now research from Johns Hopkins University provides the first public confirmation that it’s possible to do just that, and demonstrates how.
While the research focused on MacBook and iMac models released before
2008, the authors say similar techniques could work on more recent
computers from a wide variety of vendors.
"A certain type of person becomes a reporter, and generally speaking —
generally speaking, I'm not saying every reporter in the world — the
kind of person who is a reporter in Washington, D.C., or New York City
has never worked a minimum-wage job outside of high school, has never
experienced poverty, is not an evangelical Christian, like much of the
country is," Tapper said. "There are a lot of experiences that the kinds
of people who are reporters, editors, producers in Washington and New
York City have not had."
Fitzgerald’s novels, Byatt concludes, are best approached as ‘very English versions of European metaphysical fables’ – English, maybe, in the sense that Muriel Spark was Scottish and Isak Dinesen Danish, and that Marguerite Duras was French. Byatt does not make this point, but it’s worth noticing, surely, that this minor modern tradition often attracts women writers, maybe because its minority and smallness work well with limited resources, or because its irony makes sense to writers in secret protest over the limitations within which they work. As a conventional literary career, Fitzgerald’s life’s work was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an awful hash’. But really and truly, in what universe does the phrase ‘literary career’ make the slightest sense? Not on a leaky houseboat, when life is a daily struggle to look after all the people you have to look after. Nor, presumably, in the realms of ethical life and spirituality. Though she said and wrote little about it, Fitzgerald was a practising Anglican, and when she went on a coach tour of ‘the Holy Land’ in the early 1990s, headed straight for the Jordan to be rebaptised.
The Stream represents the triumph of reverse-chronology, where importance—above-the-foldness—is based exclusively on nowness...
84 inWhat was exciting in 2009—this pairing of reverse-chronological content with the expectation that the web's traditional and social media would be real-time— feels like a burden in 2013.
The early indications were when people started tossing around ideas
like digital sabbaths and talking about FOMO (fear of missing out). But
it was easy to think this was a niche feeling only for the media class
and its associated hipsters across the country.
Nowadays, I think all kinds of people see and feel the tradeoffs of
the stream, when they pull their thumbs down at the top of their screens
to receive a new updates from their social apps.
However, no two people see the external world in exactly the same way. To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is - in other words, not a thing, but a think.
From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America, and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.
Harper’s book makes plain that the modern spate of works on sexuality and on the construction of gender in Roman and early Christian times, ingenious though they may be, are lightweight confections compared with this gross, ever-present fact of Roman life. We must look up from our literary games and see what is almost too big to be seen—the fact of slavery, towering above us like the trees of an immense forest of unfreedom that covered the Roman world. What mattered, in Roman law and in Roman sexual morality, had little to do with sex. It had everything to do with whose bodies could be enjoyed with impunity and whose could not be touched without elaborate formulas of consent.
Tears ago, when this forest was filled with vitality and
effervescence, Galadriel had uttered these words, found with little pomp
in J. R. R. Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings (LOTR), yet running like lightning throughout the pages of his seminal work:
". . . together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat."
I really didn't think things were this bad. I taught freshman English in college for all of one semester once. I have it on good authority that those in both classes went on to be regarded as good writers. This probably had something to do with the fact I was already at the time a professional writer and editor (even if still in the larval stage). But it a had a lot to to with the fact that all of my students had the basics of grammar and usage down. I just taught them techniques.
Why do we trust, or distrust, photographs? What are the forces that exist behind these images and why do they command such authority? Is it the subject of the photograph, or the photographic technology itself that commands this reverence? These questions, which have been debated for at least a century, lie at the heart of the medium’s history. These are the problems of photography, the sources of its central contradiction. From the beginning, the medium has had a fickle status: it’s been, at once, a tool of science and a tool of art; a servant ofobjective fact, and a creator of subjective experience.
Many observers insist that gestures of modesty and compassion cannot alter basic beliefs. But Francis has said, “I would not speak about ‘absolute’ truths, even for believers.”
