After eight years of argument, Britain finally decided to tear down Grenfell Tower. (NY Times, BBC) My piece on the tower disaster is here.
Bizarre essay that purports to be about "post-feminism" but is really a cry of anguish against the modern world, where women retreat from competitions they can't win into illness (real or imagined), convents, online scams, witchy covens, tradwife fantasies, or "fainting couches." What, exactly, does this writer want? Life without pain or struggle? I diagnose her as caring too much about stuff that doesn't matter and suggest Buddhism.
Japan's "keyhole tombs."
Alex Tabarrok reviews a book about the "licensing racket." I agree we have far too much licensing, but I consider it a hard problem to decide where to draw the line; somewhere between RNs (definitely) and yacht sellers (definitely not), but exactly where?
The Bridges of Old London, photo set.
Boom Supersonic claims to have achieved one of their goals, supersonic flight with no audible sonic boom. (Corporate web site, news story)
Cambridge, MA, one of the most liberal cities in America, has gone full YIMBY, raising the height limit to 6 stories across most of the city. The crusade over the past decade to make affordable housing a social justice issue is starting to have major impacts on local policy, which is where it matters most. (Twitter/X) The Harvard Crimson reported in December (good article) that advocates for the reform "said low density zoning is a relic of exclusionary and racist housing policies that barred residents of color and low-income residents from parts of the city."
The Czech environmental agency wanted to build a wetland to protect critical habitat from acid runoff, but before they finished wrangling over land-use issues and so on they discovered that beavers had already built enough dams to create a wetland twice the size of the one they had planned. (NY Times, AFP)
Purple and gold shroud from an early Christian tomb put on display in France.
What archaeologists think are the foundations of Roman London's first basilica have been found deep under the modern city. (NY Times, Guardian, BBC)
Valentine's Day in Egypt.
Detecting super powerful neutrinos, and wondering where they came from.
Water Babies as an attempt by a Victorian thinker to bridge the growing gap between religion and science. Which is interesting, since I sometimes see all fantasy literature as a sort of end-run around scientific rationalism toward a reassuring spirituality.
Some discoveries in a field I know next to nothing about, the archaeology of medieval Korea.
Pondering the work of artist Henri Michaux as a way to understand what mescaline does to the brain.
Some on the left are seeing Trump's war on DEI as a chance to make a shift they have long supported, focusing on matters of money and class rather than race and gender. I used to know an upper class woman (her father was an ambassador) who made a lot of money from her woman-owned business, and I regularly teased her about being "disadvantaged." She at least had the grace to find it absurd, but she still cashed in.
3 comments:
To me, your post on the post-feminist essay misconstrues the author's intent. So far as I can tell, the author's not uttering quite, or just, "a cry of anguish" (and what if she was?). She does report on phenomena of depression, retreat, over-obsession with self-care, escape into supernaturalism, etc., etc., and owns (and why not tell the truth?) that she has participated in some of this. But she also speaks of this stuff with heavy skepticism and irony (and some pretty clear unhappiness, for example, with her friend who becomes a nun), even while admitting her own experiences along some of these paths. She detects a strain of futility in all these approaches. In the end, she turns to holding up a sort of reality principle, as exemplified in the works of Austen. Now, feminist disillusionment essays do seem regularly to end up with some sort of "refuge in Austen," so that's not exactly new, like disillusioned religious believers making a last stand on some beloved passage of scripture. But it has to be acknowledged that a certain careful, non-bombastic confrontation with social reality is where she ends up. Perhaps that deserves more respect than you allow.
The above comment was from me. Google did one of the mysterious things it does, and signed me out for some reason.
Some on the left are seeing Trump's war on DEI as a chance to make a shift they have long supported, focusing on matters of money and class rather than race and gender.
To be fair, tremendous progress has already been made in the quest to get society to treat women and minorities more equally. Obviously that work should continue, but it throws into start relief how much progress has NOT been made regarding money and class over the same period of time.
We may well be overdue for a change of focus. There's certain fertile enough ground for it in general, with the ultra wealthy having reached absurd levels of avarice and arrogance at the expense of ordinary people, prompting quite a lot of resentment on the ground.
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