CALL ME MAGGIE

  • Escape From the Trump Cult

    Escape From the Trump Cult

    Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it? …manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to a segment of the American public already primed to receive…

  • The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet

    The “Yellow Vests” Show How Much the Ground Moves Under Our Feet

    About the only class of people who seem unable to grasp this new reality are intellectuals. Just as during Nuit Debout, many of the movement’s self-appointed “leadership” seemed unable or unwilling to accept the idea that horizontal forms of organization were in fact a form of organization (they simply couldn’t…

  • Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

    Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

    Wow. Cyber capitalism fetishized to the point of apotheosis. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session to a literally captive audience of high-roller crypto investors, whose…

  • 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…

  • Nuclear Pasta: Strongest Material in Universe Discovered in Neutron Star Crust

    The strongest material in the universe has been discovered: nuclear pasta from neutron stars. The material is so intense it could never exist on Earth—if somehow a tiny amount were transported here, it would explode like a nuclear bomb. Instead it can be found deep inside the crust of the…

  • 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

  • The neuroscience of nostalgia | Al Jazeera America

    The term “nostalgia” was coined in the late 17th century by a Swiss physician named Johannes Hofer. He used the roots of two Greek words, “nostos” and “algos” — meaning “suffering” and “origins” — to describe what he thought was a neurological disorder affecting Swiss mercenaries. Although the clinical definition…

  • 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…

  • Greek Natural Philosophy

    The first edition of the text on Presocratic philosophy which I co-authored with J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren is now available for adoption from Cognella. Greek Natural Philosophy presents the primary sources on the Presocratics in a straightforward way in order to tell a coherent story about the…

  • 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…