REVIEW: THREE GREAT ESSAY COLLECTIONS ILLUSTRATE THE POWER OF NOTICING THE WORLD People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
— William Faulkner, born in 1897
“But is a story richer the second time it’s told?” asks Irish poet Micheal O’Siadhail. Surely the answer is a resounding yes, a sentiment with which all great critics, notably James Wood, Edmund White, and Vivian Gornick, agree.
REVIEW: THREE GREAT ESSAY COLLECTIONS ILLUSTRATE THE POWER OF NOTICING THE WORLD
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The Generalist Academy: “In 1896 Paul Otlet set up a bibliographic query service by mail: a 19th century search engine…Paul Otlet had a passion for information. More precisely, he had a passion for organising information. He and Henri La Fontaine made bibliographies on many subjects – and then turned their efforts towards creating something better. A master bibliography. A bibliography to rule them all, nothing less than a complete record of everything that had ever been published on every topic. This was their plan: the grandly named Universal Bibliographic Repertory…”
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Lockdown made cities friendlier for some birds
PopSci: “When much of the world went into lockdown in the spring of 2020, traffic disappeared and pollution levels dropped.
Under these conditions, dozens of bird species across North America seem to have flourished, scientists reported this week. The researchers analyzed observations from experienced bird watchers of more than 4.3 million birds representing 82 species that included songbirds, raptors, waterfowl, and more. The majority of the birds became more abundant in urban habitats during the pandemic compared with previous years and ventured closer to major roads and airports. “It’s remarkable that across the whole bird community all sorts of different species that were really very different from one another all showed these changes in habitat use,” says Nicola Koper, a conservation biologist at the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute in Winnipeg.
Recreating some of the reduced bustle that accompanied the early months of the pandemic through practices such as telecommuting would likely make cities more welcoming to birds in the future, she and her coauthors wrote on September 22 in Science Advances. Birds throughout North America are in decline, likely from a mix of factors including habitat loss, pesticide use, and declining insect populations. The study’s findings, the authors say, show that even a moderate reduction in human activity could help some species better thrive…”
Magical Moon Photo Made up of Over 50,000 Individual Images | Moss and Fog
Colors of the Moon
Marcella Giulia Pace, Greenflash Photo/Atmospheric Optics in Italy – “I have collected some of my Full Moon shots taken over the past 10 years. I selected the shades of color with which the Moon was filmed in front of my lens and my eyes. The atmosphere gives different colors to our satellite (scattering) based on its height with respect to the horizon, based on the presence of humidity or suspended dust. The shape of the Moon also changes: at the bottom of the horizon, refraction compresses the lunar disk at the poles and makes it look like an ellipse. And this is one of the reasons why I have chosen to present my Full Moons through a spiral arrangement that ends with a lunar eclipse…”
- Zombie Intuitions: “intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias” — a problem for thought experiments in philosophy, including (of course) zombie thought experiments
- “It is the duty of intellectuals and artists to reject enforced glee, to tell robot customer-service agents to fuck off, to carve out a preserve for the life of the soul as best they can, and to call madness by its name” — Justin E. H. Smith on phililistinism in philosophy, “awokening” and “STEMification,” technology’s creep into culture, and more
- “Grad school might destroy you. That’s the most important thing I would tell my pre-Ph.D. self if I could” — G. M. Trujillo Jr. (Louisville), now an assistant professor of philosophy, offers some advice to prospective grad students
- The Diversity Reading List is a resource for helping you include authors from underrepresented groups in your teaching — and now it is hosting a seminar series
- “Teaching [The Ethics of Killing] in the present context would have been a fascinating experience” but “the fear that my students might transmit the coronavirus to each other during these ‘ethics’ seminars… horrified me” — an interview with philosopher Jeremy Fischer, who resigned from his position to protest his university’s poor response to COVID
- “Despite being one of the most celebrated works of philosophy ever written, the Tractatus is also one of the most gnomic” — Ray Monk (Southampton) explains Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and how it came to be
- “We are not in favor of a shock-and-awe approach of springing distressing content on students without advance notice” — but a survey of recent research finds that “trigger warnings do not minimize anxiety and emotional distress, and might even do the opposite”