— Beyond Catastrophe A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View - David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 26, 2022
“But perhaps the more profound questions are about distribution: Who gets those seeds? Who manages to build those dikes? Who is exposed when they fail or go unbuilt? And what is the fate of those most frontally assaulted by warming? The political discourse orbiting these issues is known loosely as “climate justice”: To what extent will climate change harden and deepen already unconscionable levels of global inequality, and to what degree can the countries of the global south engineer and exit from the already oppressive condition that the scholar Farhana Sultana has called “climate coloniality”?”
— Exclusive: British Novelist John le Carré on the Iraq War, Corporate Power, the Exploitation of Africa and His New Novel, “Our Kind of Traitor” - Democracy Now!, Oct. 11, 2010
“I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies. Mussolini, I think, defined fascism as the moment when you couldn’t put a cigarette paper between political and corporate power. He assumed, when he offered that definition, that media power was already his. But I worry terribly that the absence of serious critical argument is going to produce a new kind of fanaticism, the new simplicities that are as dangerous as the ones which caused us to march against Iraq and as misunderstood.”
— Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century - Howard W. French, The Guardian, Oct. 27, 2022
“It is not immediately obvious where the income necessary to sustain this kind of commercial strip comes from. Some surely derives from work in the offshore oil business based nearby, some from a recently expanded regional port, some from a combination of old-line cocoa farming and new jobs in tech. And this points to the reality of what makes this megaregion so distinctive from earlier ones. Since at least the 18th century, as the writings of Hegel and Hume show, Africa has been widely regarded in the west as if it existed outside the flow of history – scarcely a participant in the global present, and even less relevant to the future. This has never been true, but those who cling on to such misapprehensions would do well to visit this stretch of coastline. In Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, or even in much smaller places like Takoradi, meanwhile, globalised enclaves with strong links to the rich world jostle with expanses of ragged urbanity, half hopefully striving, half congealed in poverty.”
— To Decode White Male Rage, First He Had to Write in His Mother’s Voice - Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 8, 2019
“In “The Topeka School,” Lerner’s extraordinary new novel, the story of the chewing gum is recounted by Jane Gordon, a fictionalized version of the author’s mother. Like Harriet, Jane is a therapist at a leading psychiatric clinic and a best-selling author. When her son, Adam — Lerner’s alter ego — pays her and her husband, Jonathan, a night visit with his gum-encased genitals, she has recently shot to fame with the publication of a book about women’s anger. It isn’t hard to see why it has struck a chord. Reagan is in office, the backlash against the second wave of feminism is in full swing and Jane has begun to receive anonymous phone calls from aggrieved men, analog precursors of today’s digital trolls. “There were variations on the theme of rape,” she tells us. “I’m going to rape you; Somebody should rape you; You were probably raped; If you weren’t so ugly, you’d get raped.” Jane suspects that Adam has been listening in on these calls and worries they may be doing lasting damage to his psyche. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; but a penis wrapped in gum is never just a penis wrapped in gum. “I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a kind of simulated castration thing, an attempt not to be a boy, a man, one of the Men,” says Jane, ever the analyst.”
— This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible - Yasemin Saplakoglu, WIRED, Oct. 30, 2022
“Memories that link disparate ideas—like “berry” and “sickness” or “enjoyment”—are called associative memories, and they are often emotionally charged. They form in a tiny almond-shaped region of the brain called the amygdala. Though traditionally known as the brain’s “fear center,” the amygdala responds to pleasure and other emotions as well.”
— How Chloé’s Gabriela Hearst Turned Her Climate Obsession Into High Fashion - Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair, Nov. 16, 2022
““Fusion is the main source of energy in the universe,” Hearst says, referring to the process of stellar nucleosynthesis, by which protons fuse at the core of all stars, emitting heat and light. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for fusion, because we are made out of dead stars.” One could say the same of her spring-summer collection, which was inspired by site visits to labs in the Pacific Northwest, New England, and the South of France, where hundreds of scientists and engineers are working to develop technology that will produce a net energy gain through fusion—an as yet unattained goal. Hearst and others refer to them as star-builders. Nuclear fusion, unlike fission, doesn’t produce long-term waste, lacks the potential for meltdown, and has the capacity to produce a lifetime’s worth of energy from the hydrogen atoms in a single glass of water—something of a climate crisis silver bullet. The Chloé models were clad in appropriately physics-inflected designs: Hearst sent a board of eight fuchsia fabric swatches to one company so that their team could color-match the pinky-purple shade of a fusion reaction; hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, appear as abstract patterns across the clothes. They walked a runway designed to resemble a tokamak, the doughnut-shaped device that produces energy through the magnetic fusion of atoms. The Mexico-based light artist Paolo Montiel-Coppa created enormous incandescent rings, representing magnets, which floated above the stage.”
— They Called Him a Gangster Out for Revenge. The Evidence? 6 Text Messages. - Selam Gebrekidan, The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2022
“Ms. Legane attended court daily, standing in for the defendants’ parents who could not risk their paychecks. She transcribed every word and tweeted daily trial updates. She became a chaperone and fierce advocate for the defendants. She raised money for lunches and Uber rides for Mr. Adedeji and three other defendants who were out on bail. The teenagers handed her their cellphones whenever they went into court.”
— Is the effective altruism movement in trouble? - Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò and Joshua Stein, The Guardian, Nov. 16, 2022
“At worst, the scandal calls into question the “altruism” part. The branding of the champion Bankman-Fried, alongside the collaboration of effective altruist organizations, makes its techno-utopian picture look much more sinister. Former effective altruists have proposed “structural reforms”, some of which echo broader calls for “participatory funding” – democratic control of philanthropic organizations by those who are impacted by the organizations’ endeavors. These criticisms seem to have been largely ignored in favor of a tech and capital-friendly research agenda – and a system controlled by the few with enough money or access to participate.”
— The US Academy and the Provincialization of Fanon - Muriam Haleh Davis, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 9, 2022
“The field of “Fanon studies” in the United States has been relatively uninterested in the Algerian Revolution, which was a central conjuncture for Fanon’s thought. The philosopher and critic David Marriott terms it a “civil war” (repeating a French perspective incompatible with that of an anticolonial revolution). He also characterizes the writings on Fanon by the Algerian-born Alice Cherki, a psychiatrist who worked with Fanon and centers their shared struggle for Algerian independence, as “unduly biographical.” Whereas Cherki views Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis as rooted in a realization that the existing models of psychoanalysis (notably those developed by Octave Mannoni) were undergirded by colonial racism during his time in Algeria, Marriott insists that these ideas were derived from a concern with the conditions by which the “black can only perform itself as a sovereign subject with a capacity for power.” This reading leaves little space for the fact that heated debates between Mannoni and Fanon occurred at a time when, as Cherki insists, Fanon had “firsthand knowledge of the direct interaction with the suffering body and alienated self of another human being.” This firsthand knowledge, of course, came from his experience in North Africa.”
Currently reading: Tinderbox: HBO's Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers by James Andrew Miller
Currently listening: Britney Spears - Toxic (Anthony Vincent Korn Cover)