CALL ME MAGGIE

Category: Whatever

  • American Geographic Polarization

    Research shows that partisans aren’t purposefully walling themselves off. There is no intentional Big Sort. Such geographic polarization—where supporters of one or the other party cluster together in homogeneous enclaves, producing localities with lopsided distributions of political preferences—has been growing steadily in the United States since the 1970s. According to…

  • ‘Do Not Track’ Privacy Tool Doesn’t Do Anything

    When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that…

  • Unwashed Dishes Reveal the Diets of a Lost Civilization

    The potsherds yielded proteins from numerous plants—barley, wheat, peas and bitter vetch—as well as the blood and milk of several species of animal, including cows, sheep and goats. Of even greater interest to the researchers was the precision with which they could identify the proteins. They didn’t just see barley,…

  • Yet again, the right-wing appropriation of Nietzsche

     “The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.” –F. Nietzsche Nice overview of how Nietzsche gets misappropriated by urfascists and misogynists. Read at The Guardian www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/06/exploding-nietzsche-myths-need-dynamiting

  • Surprising Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News – POLITICO

    The top editor at the New York Times, A.M. Rosenthal, hit Agnewesque notes in a 1969 internal memo from which Pressman quotes:   I get the impression, reading the Times, that the image we give of America is largely of demonstrations, discrimination, antiwar movements, rallies, protests, etc. Obviously all these…

  • We need to understand that disaster is slow

    Defining a disaster as an “event” has a history extending to the 1960s, when federal funds were spent to model the social impact of a nuclear attack. To do this, Civil Defense officials commissioned studies of proxies of an attack, like earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, all disasters that affect multiple…

  • This Changes Everything | Vanity Fair

    Hollywood’s most powerful women appear in the Geena Davis-produced documentary This Changes Everything, which draws a direct line between the president and the industry’s sea change. — Read on www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/this-changes-everything-toronto-film-festival-documentary-weinstein-trump-me-too “Hours after This Changes Everything concluded to a standing ovation, director Tom Donahue told Vanity Fair why it was so…

  • Toxic masculinity endures on

    Serving up bloody violence as a $10 pay-per-view on YouTube and charging as much as $200 for floor seats in the arena, this was an affirmation of the enduring bankability of toxic masculinity. In executing their contrived feud, the two pairs of brothers sought to assert their superior manliness through…

  • Militarized policing not so popular

    Study also finds that images of cops in military gear diminish support for increasing funding to police agencies. — Read on www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/08/22/militarized-policing-doesnt-reduce-crime-and-disproportionately-hits-black-communities/ The high militarization treatment also caused support for police funding in the United States to fall by roughly four points in the M-Turk survey and two points in…

  • Variation in the hominid rhizome

    New report out on a hybrid hominin from 90000 years ago whose mother was Neanderthal and whose father was Denisovan. apple.news/AgSsUivGbS5yWPq54mnX_-Q

  • What is Philosophy?

    What is Philosophy?

    As always, most excellent thinkering from a most excellent person. I recommend engaging this to get some touchstones for the importance of beginnings. As Meister Eckhart encourages us all, “Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.” For me, that is how philosophy shows itself as an always contemporary…

  • Max Liboiron at #AnthropocenePHL

    The opening keynote at the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia was Prof. Max Liboiron: How We Do Science on Permanent Plastic Pollution. Max Liboiron is a feminist environmental scientist, science and technology studies (STS) scholar, and activist. As an Assistant Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Liboiron directs Civic Laboratory for Environmental…

  • Socrates in the Anthropocene

    Socrates in the Anthropocene

    I want to thank Scott Knowles for encouraging me to leave my little town of Denton, Texas, and come up here for the Anthropocene Campus Philadelphia at Drexel University. A word of warning as I follow up my colleagues on the roving plenarist panel: I never say anything new because there is…

  • Abnormal Responses: Coaxing Animal Being into a Clearing

    Abnormal Responses: Coaxing Animal Being into a Clearing

    There is a great responsibility in being those who not only name things but gather the world. Surely a part of that responsibility rests in letting things simply be themselves and not be turned toward some human end. It means being silent alongside those who do not speak words yet…

  • One study from Ball State University estimates that 87% of the manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010 were attributed to automation and improved efficiency

    https://apple.news/A0bCkkHK8SOO1CYPWlR7JzA

  • The revolutionary spectator

    …there is another way to understand the seeming paradox presented to us by nonviolent activists and their occasional praise of violent actors. And that is to see them as partaking in a tradition of “revolutionary spectators,” who simultaneously refuse to commit acts of violence themselves while witnessing with approval the…

  • New TV AntiHeroes as archetypes of the American nightmare

    This seems right to me. The dark heroes or antiheroes of TV–and I would go back to The Sopranos for the beginning of this–represent the fundamental fear of the “middle class” losing everything in one fell swoop. Life becomes about the happenstance safety nets we weave for ourselves and the…

  • Caring less

    Andrew Taggart at QUARTZ… Once we’ve gotten the knack for embracing the idea that certain things in life are wondrous because they’re not focused on getting through, onto, or ahead of something, we can turn our attention to ourselves, inquiring into our own lives. Socrates’ great insight involved showing his…