Category: Whatever
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Travis Wright reviews Latour’s Down to Earth
Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth is, functionally, a call to rethink and re-describe our political reality in accordance with the changing forces that shape it. Latour lays out his argument in 20 brief sections, each deceptively quick to read. Section 14, for example, consists of 37 paragraphs, 16 of which…
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New Patreon Podcast
I finally created my Patreon page, Call Me Maggie, and I look forward to working with whomever decides to join up.
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Unchained Mind-walking
My visit to Abilene this last week has been quiet and refreshing after teaching two courses during the second part of Summer school. Humble thanks to my colleagues Doug and Loni who co-taught one course with me at UNT. First online course to prepare me to teach online in the…
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Silent road, cloudless mind
Saturday, I went to visit my mother at the nursing home in Abilene, TX. Almost 91, she has become much less active, sometimes sleeping most of the day. I brought with me Bashō-Sensei’s beautiful haibun, The Narrow road to the deep north and other travel sketches, given me on my…
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Wonder of dawn
The shared reason of the day says, “See, the sun comes up in the east as the earth stands still.” Or maybe, “See, the earth turns on its axis as it swings around the sun.” Yet neither truly responds to the wonder of dawn… “Look! How this marvelous daybreak?” —…
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The Other Uncertainty: The View from Disaster History
From my beloved comrade Prof. Scott G. Knowles, Ph.D. (Drexel University) …The “certainty” of the historical record is an artifact of a time when women, minority groups, workers, and nonhuman life/the environment were not part of the inquiry. When only a few main narratives are allowed into the record it…
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On Bullshit Jobs – RSA
According to a 2015 YouGov poll, 37% of the UK population believe their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world. And despite the time-saving advances promised by technology, we’re now working longer hours than ever. How has this situation come to pass, and what is the future of work…
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Team Human – RSA
Influential thinker Douglas Rushkoff argues that there is an anti-human agenda embedded in our markets and technologies, which has turned them from means of human connection into ones of isolation and repression. Our corporations and the culture they create glorify individualism at the expense of cooperation, threatening the sustainability not…
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Nice addition to the list of fifteen books I posted yesterday. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of…
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When anything goes, no one is safe
“A new and chilling normal is coming into view,” Miliband concluded. “Civilians seen as fair game for armed combatants, humanitarians seen as an impediment to military tactics and therefore unfortunate but expendable collateral, and investigations of and accountability for war crimes an optional extra for state as well as nonstate…
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15 History Books You Didn’t Get Assigned In School But Definitely Need To Read
They say that history is written by the victors, but what happens when those victors decide to leave the important details out? All too often, history texts and academic courses leave out the narratives of indigenous Americans, immigrants, forced and otherwise, black Americans, including slaves, the LGBTQ community, and the…
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Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider review – the best criticism of identity politics | Books | The Guardian
Identity politics finds critics everywhere. Throw a rock at a rack of newspapers and you’ll probably hit an editorial condemning it. Conservatives such as Republican House speaker Paul Ryan blame it for polarisation, while liberals like the Columbia University historian Mark Lilla hold it responsible for Donald Trump’s victory, applying…
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AOC visits CBP concentration camp
I am not in any way outraged or even slightly surprised by the kinds of things that folx are seeing in these camps. I am not outraged or even slightly surprised because THIS IS NOT ALL THAT NEW. This is how America treats prisoners–and that is what the current administration…
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2019 — Summer Course
Here you will find the readings for my 2019 Summer II course. Check back frequently for updates. Back to Call Me Maggie homepage Have the assigned readings completed by the time you get to class. The first part of class each day will talk about the reading and Maggie will…
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Warp and woof
Late June after the solstice is the time when I lose sight of writing and reading. Usually there is a burst of both just after school is out—that is how conditioned I am by the school year at the age of 54. Since I was in first grade in 1970-71,…
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Concentration Camp Czar Quits
Trump’s Border “Protection” chief–John “I Love To Make Foreign Children Suffer” Sanders–has resigned from his position. Vice News reports that not long after attorneys working for refugees and migrants found kids separated from parents by Custom and Border Patrol in Texas facilities that were living in complete squalor, the senior…
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Neoliberalism promotes addiction
We live in a sociocultural situation that maximizes alienation at every turn. It’s the reason that even when most folx are “celebrating” in social spaces like bars, they mostly experience “being together alone.” This is why I have come to object to how much QUILTBAG* spaces center on alcohol or…
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