The Lightbone Floor Lamp Looks to a Japanese Bamboo Forest

It only takes a glance to see where the Lightbone floor lamp got its monicker – the connection point between the spherical glass globes and the wooden sections. Inspired by a bamboo forest on a trip to Japan and designed by FÄRG & BLANCHE for Oblure, Lightbone was originally exhibited during Milan Design Week 2017 as part of the “Armour Mon Amour” exhibition. At that point of the conceptual phase, the floor lamp was textile and measured up to three meters tall! In the following years it’s continued to evolve into the product you see here.

“We are really happy that we were able to develop this version of the Lightbone together with Oblure,” said the designers, Fredrik Färg and Emma Marga Blanche. “This time in solid Oak and all made in Sweden.”

The floor lamp can easily be used next to a sofa, but also looks amazing in a group or two or three. Multiples begin to resemble a small forest or act to divide spaces in hospitality projects.

Lighbone is available in natural Oak with a Black stain, Smoked Oak, and Cobalt Blue. It’s also available in custom colors on request.

To lean more about LIGHTBONE floor lamp, visit oblure.com.

Watch a heron use bait to catch a fish

This heron carefully places a tiny piece of bread in the water, then grabs the fish that comes to eat it.

Basically, the very human activity of Fishing.

Green heron using a piece of bread as bait to catch a fish.

— Read the rest

Governance by output reduces humanities scholarship to monologue

Drawing on a large-scale comparative study of scholars in the UK and Germany on how pressure to publish is experienced across research careers, Marcel Knöchelmann, argues that the structural incentive to publish inherent to research assessment in the UK shapes a research culture focused on output and monologue at the expense of an engaged public … Continued

Off for the US Holiday — More Grammar

We are off today and tomorrow for the US Independence Day holiday. Also included, a song that hews carefully to archaic rules about prepositions at the end of sentences.

The post Off for the US Holiday — More Grammar appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Relaxing Into Risk

Most Thursday mornings you’ll find me in a co-working session with members of the Productive Flourishing Academy. 

Part of the routine in our coworking sessions is to start off with a word pulled from a deck of motivational cards. My friend, the group leader, pulls the card, and the idea is to use the word that emerges to create alignment or a point of focus throughout your day. 

When my turn came, she pulled the word “Relaxation”.  

Ummm… no.

“I have a mountain of tasks ahead of me and I don’t have time to relax today,” was my instant reaction.

Luckily, I have my own set of this particular card deck, so before diving into the task I had planned (which ended up turning into this piece of writing) I decided to pull a new card. Take that, universe!

So what card did I pull?  

“Risk.”

Well-played, universe. Well-played. 

Hustle Culture Tells Us: “You’ve Got to Work to Relax”

What am I supposed to do with these mixed messages? These two words — that are now at the forefront of my mind — seem to be at odds with one another. 

As I moved into the work I had planned to do during this co-working session (namely a speech I had to give the following week for Toastmasters, a public speaking and leadership club I’m a part of in NYC), I couldn’t get these two words out of my head. 

These ideas, risk and relaxation, don’t seem to fit together. More than that, they seem to be on opposite sides of the spectrum.

When I heard the word relaxation, what came to mind was an extreme state of rest, inaction, becoming sloth-like. 

To enter a relaxed state is something too often we feel we need to earn. I’m allowed to just relax? Without doing anything or accomplishing anything first? 

So when my friend pulled that card for me, I rebelled. Because I have a too-long list of things that need to get done (yep, violating the 5 Projects Rule) before I can even think about allowing myself to relax. Calm will have to wait.

I recognize this mentality runs counter to a lot of what has been written about here at PF, including pieces I myself have written. It just goes to show, we’re all in a constant state of learning and unlearning.

Risk, or Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable  

Still, relaxation is a self-care practice — and a necessity — we can all get behind. But risk? Risk seems to imply anything but rest and relaxation, and seems, well, downright dangerous.

Risk implies action, making a change, getting uncomfortable, and putting yourself in a position to fail (the horror!).

It’s inevitably scary to take a step in a new direction. Our minds and bodies perceive this newness as danger and set off all sorts of alarms to try to get us to do anything but this risky behavior — fight, flight, or freeze.

Taking action, no matter how big or small, is inherently risky. 

Being Gentle with Ourselves: Ease Into Action & Risk

But what happens if I put these two words together? What if relaxation didn’t need to mean a full and complete stop to any activity, but instead it could mean an easing in? 

And what if risk didn’t require actual danger but simply meant trying something new? What if it was just about easing into the discomfort of putting myself in a slightly different position than yesterday? 

And as I was thinking all these thinks, and most definitely not writing my Toastmasters speech, it dawned on me that the exact combination of these themes — getting more comfortable (relaxation) with being uncomfortable (risk) — is one that continues to show up in my life. 

A recent example: I’ve been starting to get back into writing. More specifically, I’m starting to share my writing more frequently. Risk.

I’m leaning more and more into my instinct, and how it relates to both writing and sharing; this article is an example. Relaxation.

Ease can be about letting go. Letting go of expectations, of perfectionism, of the outcome. And that is inherently risky. Where are you holding on too tight? What small action can you take today to move yourself closer to where you want to be?

The post Relaxing Into Risk appeared first on Productive Flourishing.

Mizetto’s Summer Collection Tests Design’s Boundaries

Creative and fun, Mizetto’s Summer 2023 Collection lives somewhere between work and play. The brand has pushed its own capabilities, exploring new materials, production methods, and functionality. Made in Sweden, the latest release includes a wood chair, a versatile table with attachments, a leaning piece, modular planters, and a trash/recycling bin. All share the qualities of clean lines and curves and leave you wanting to experience each for yourself. Known for its color combinations, Mizetto has also added five new “Nordic noir” hues: rusty burgundy, cloudy latte, forest green, latte, and dusty blue.

Perhaps the most curious addition is Lumber by Addi, a piece meant for leaning, lingering, and loitering. The soft beam’s release marks the first upholstered product introduced by the brand. It’s a great answer to adding seating to small spaces, and we can’t help but note its resemblance to a dynamic piece of gymnastics equipment. A quick place to stop on the go for a coffee or email check, Lumber’s small tray-like table adds further functionality to a piece with no obvious front or back. It can even be hung on a wall for maximum space saving. Lumber’s upholstery is flameproof wool, with a cover that’s fully removable, repairable, and exchangeable. The legs are powder coated metal.

A wooden chair is new territory for Mizetto, so they turned to an expert for help – Finish-Swedish furniture designer and woodworker Sami Kallio. The Embrace armchair was a result of the brand lacking seating in their own spaces, and shortly after, Kallio walked in with a fully functioning prototype.

“A few alterations later, Embrace was born; a chair that seemingly hugs its user. I love how it can be hung on a tabletop and stacked, but still provide us with all the beauty and comfort we seek in a piece of furniture,” said Rickard Muskala, founder, and chief of product development.

Kallio is also behind the multi-purpose table in the Embrace series.

Playful, fun, and modular, Addi’s Plant Here gives our green friends a pedestal fitting of their mood-enhancing ways. The planter pays attention to the various needs of different varietals through its accessible design, whether you’re a balcony or office gardener. Features include a generous depth, transparent inner pot for easy planting, different heights, shapes, sizes, and colors. Combine two or more to form endlessly possible installations.

Trash and recycling bins are a necessity, but that doesn’t mean they have to look like one. Pelican by Studio Nooi turns them into minimal decorative objects with touchless interaction. Their semicircular shape allows for modular design, creating an oval when placed back to back. Pelican’s design is suitable for residential as well as commercial spaces, and comes in two sizes and a variety of colors.

To learn more about Mizetto’s Summer 2023 collection, visit mizetto.se.

Ginni and Clarence: A Love Story

This extraordinary profile of Clarence and Ginni Thomas—he a Supreme Court justice, she among other things an avid supporter of the January 6 insurrection—is a masterclass in everything from mustering archival material to writing the hell out of a story:

There is a certain rapport that cannot be manufactured. “They go on morning runs,” reports a 1991 piece in the Washington Post. “They take after-dinner walks. Neighbors say you can see them in the evening talking, walking up the hill. Hand in hand.” Thirty years later, Virginia Thomas, pining for the overthrow of the federal government in texts to the president’s chief of staff, refers, heartwarmingly, to Clarence Thomas as “my best friend.” (“That’s what I call him, and he is my best friend,” she later told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.) In the cramped corridors of a roving RV, they summer together. They take, together, lavish trips funded by an activist billionaire and fail, together, to report the gift. Bonnie and Clyde were performing intimacy; every line crossed was its own profession of love. Refusing to recuse oneself and then objecting, alone among nine justices, to the revelation of potentially incriminating documents regarding a coup in which a spouse is implicated is many things, and one of those things is romantic.

“Every year it gets better,” Ginni told a gathering of Turning Point USA–oriented youths in 2016. “He put me on a pedestal in a way I didn’t know was possible.” Clarence had recently gifted her a Pandora charm bracelet. “It has like everything I love,” she said, “all these love things and knots and ropes and things about our faith and things about our home and things about the country. But my favorite is there’s a little pixie, like I’m kind of a pixie to him, kind of a troublemaker.”

A pixie. A troublemaker. It is impossible, once you fully imagine this bracelet bestowed upon the former Virginia Lamp on the 28th anniversary of her marriage to Clarence Thomas, this pixie-and-presumably-American-flag-bedecked trinket, to see it as anything but crucial to understanding the current chaotic state of the American project. Here is a piece of jewelry in which symbols for love and battle are literally intertwined. Here is a story about the way legitimate racial grievance and determined white ignorance can reinforce one another, tending toward an extremism capable, in this case, of discrediting an entire branch of government. No one can unlock the mysteries of the human heart, but the external record is clear: Clarence and Ginni Thomas have, for decades, sustained the happiest marriage in the American Republic, gleeful in the face of condemnation, thrilling to the revelry of wanton corruption, untroubled by the burdens of biological children or adherence to legal statute. Here is how they do it.

The Lattice Day Bed Transforms Reverie into Reality

The Lattice Day Bed is a minimalist daybed made of grey quarry stone designed by Mexico-based designer Andrés Monnier. The original design features a stainless steel and marble base, while variations can also include white marble, travertine, volcanic rock, basalt, or granite rock.

“Is our human existence an interconnected reverie?” Such is the provocative question posed by the designer, an invitation to contemplate our roles within our perceived reality. The theory underscores the vast tapestry of human consciousness, where each individual weaves their unique interpretation of existence.

The daybed serves as both a physical representation of Monnier’s interpretation of dreams, while also functioning as the very conduit to actualize said dreams. He believes that the collective dream-state might not merely be an idle illusion, but a platform for transformative energy.

Division Twelve’s Twigz Is Small in Stature, Big on Impact

High impact meets compact design in Division Twelve’s new Twigz café collection, created in collaboration with design duo Jones & de Leval. The furniture family’s throughline is a minimal frame with a small footprint, proving you don’t need visual heft to make a big impact. Twigz’s design details are ready to add plenty of interest to any small space, with both indoor and outdoor options available. Combine stackable chairs, benches, and tables to create a unique setup that’s all your own.

Twigz offers plenty of options to make it happen. Steel or upholstered chairs, round or rectangular table, and 20 powder coat colors are your creative playground. The one thing you won’t have deliberate is whether to play up form or function – Twigz does it all. Furthermore, the collection does so while being fully carbon neutral. Watch below to learn more about Twigz:

The Fugitive Heiress Next Door

In a decrepit house in São Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:

In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.

When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)

Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.

“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.

During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.

She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.

She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie. 

Publicizing a new book?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I just published my first book! I would very much appreciate advice on what authors can and should do to publicize a new book. I know that my publisher will do some marketing on their end (send the book to journals for review, etc.) but is there anything more I can do on my end to increase the readership?

Good question! Aside from sharing it on social media, ensuring that journals get sent copies for book reviews, and trying to get journal symposia and the like, I'm not sure.

Do any readers have any helpful tips?

Guest Post — Making Research Accessible: The arXiv Accessibility Forum Moved the Action Upstream

Shamsi Brinn (UX Manager at arXiv) and Bill Kasdorf (Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC) discuss the recent Accessibility Forum hosted by arXiv. Over 2,000 people registered for the Forum; over 350 attended the live event; and hundreds more are accessing the recently published videos.

The post Guest Post — Making Research Accessible: The arXiv Accessibility Forum Moved the Action Upstream appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

SSP Conference Debate: AI and the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing

Will artificial intelligence fatally undermine the integrity of scholarly publishing? A formal debate from the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

The post SSP Conference Debate: AI and the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Ask the Community: What Did SSP 2023 Mean to You?

In the last of this series of posts about this year's Annual Meeting, SSP's Marketing and Communications Committee asked members of our community what the conference meant to them.

The post Ask the Community: What Did SSP 2023 Mean to You? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Ecological Rewriting is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/

Book description

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series. Supported by the COPIM project, it is the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela Méndez Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotate and remix The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original.

In the Mexican context, experiments with art, writing and technology have a history that is tied less to academic publishing or avant-garde scholarship and more to community-building and grassroots organising. It is important, then, that in creating Ecological Rewriting the collective led by Méndez Cota are inspired by locally influential Cristina Rivera Garza’s theorization of re-writing as dis-appropriation, rather than appropriation of another’s work. Alongside philosophical concepts such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘literary communism’, Rivera Garza’s ethical poetics is here turned into the proposition that the reuse of open access materials does not need to be understood as appropriation or reappropriation of ‘knowledge’. Instead, it can be conceived as a creative exercise in ‘unworking’ or ‘disappropriating’ academic authorship which responds to The Chernobyl Herbarium’s invitation to think through (vegetal) exposure and fragility. Thus, the authors challenge property and propriety by creating singular, fragmentary accounts of Mexico’s relation with Chernobyl. In the process they explore ways of bearing witness to environmental devastation in its human and non-human scales, including the little-known history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement in Mexico – which they intersect with an experimental history of plant biodiversity. The resulting book constitutes both a practical reflection on plant-thinking and a disruptive intervention into the conventions of academic writing.

Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium exists as an online version (https://doi.org/10.21428/9ca7392d.07cdfb82) and as a print version (forthcoming). The online version is an experimental publication with links to the original sections of The Chernobyl Herbarium that the writers responded to, so that the reader can follow an associative trail between the two publications.

Authors

Gabriela Méndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal Méndez, Sandra Hernández Reyes, Sandra Loyola Guízar, Fernanda Rodríguez González, Yareni Monteón López, Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, Xóchitl Arteaga Villamil, Carolina Cuevas Parra

Editor Bio

Gabriela Méndez Cota is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Inspired by deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her research explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of technological/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places, her work has appeared in New Formations, Media Theory, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits the open access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine (culturemachine.net). Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project led by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015).

Series

Ecological Re-writing is published as part of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/

Philosophy Journal Insight Project

Sam Andrews (University of Birmingham) writes in:

I lead the Philosophy Journal Insight Project [pjip.carrd.co]and believe that it might be of interest to readers at the Philosophers' Cocoon. 

The main resource of the project is a spreadsheet that provides a comprehensive overview of around 50 philosophy journals. It contains:

1) Standardisation of key information about journal submission; word counts, peer review anonymity, open access status, etc.

2) Collection of journal rankings from blogs and ranking sites; Leiter Rankings, SJR Rankings, SNIP Rankings, etc.

3) Estimates drawn from journals and APA surveys for acceptance rates, comment chance, average days for a desk rejection, average days for external review, etc.

4) Compilation of various impact statistics; total citations, CiteScore percentile, etc.

The site also contains a resources section that links to various places relevant to journal submission.

This is great service to the profession. Do check it out!

Just blah blah blah? Finding Why, when and where theory really matters

In many disciplines across the social sciences there are debates around whether research and research writing are under-theorised or over-theorised. Gorgi Krlev, argues that whilst these debates can provide insights, they fail to clarify why and when theorising can be useful at all. To promote better theory making he presents a framework for thinking through … Continued

Ask the Vendors: SSP 2023 Annual Meeting

We check in with scholarly publishing vendors for their experiences at the 2023 SSP Annual meeting in Portland.

The post Ask the Vendors: SSP 2023 Annual Meeting appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

New Site Collects and Standardizes Philosophy Journal Information

The Philosophy Journal Insight Project (PJIP) “aims to provide philosophy researchers with practical insights on potential venues for publication.”

Its main offering is a spreadsheet that provides information about journals’ subject matter, word limits, type of peer review, open access status, rankings, impact information, acceptance rates, review times, reviewing quality, and so on.

Put together by Sam Andrews, a philosophy PhD student at the University of Birmingham, the site, which he says is a work in progress, currently has information about 47 journals.

You can check it out here.

The post New Site Collects and Standardizes Philosophy Journal Information first appeared on Daily Nous.

Incorporating your previous work as assumptions in a paper without violating anonymity?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Let's say I'm working on topic X. I have a novel interpretation of Y, which is related to X, and I published a paper defending this interpretation of Y. In my new paper on X, I want to assume this interpretation of Y. How to do this without violating anonymity? Here are my thoughts:

- I can just cite myself as a third party, explain the view briefly, and then say that I will assume this view. But I think this approach would not realistically protect anonymity since I'm a very early career person, and no one is going to assume my views except for me.
- I can briefly explain the interpretation without citing myself. But this raises worries like: "this interpretation needs much more work to get off the ground" or the claims like "this view is already defended in an earlier paper that the author isn't aware of." So honestly, I don't know what to do.

How do you incorporate your published work into a new paper without violating the rules of anonymized peer review?

These are good questions--in fact it's an issue that I've run into many times myself, both as an early-career scholar and now as a mid-career scholar. While I've heard from many it's best to cite oneself in the third-person to preserve anonymity, this doesn't help all that much in a paper where one is primarily building on other work one has published previously. 

Another reader submitted the following reply:

I think you should worry about what you do assume in a paper if, as you note, "no one is going to assume my views except for me". Assumptions in philosophical papers are to be widely accepted (hence, widely held). Alternatively you can just say, I will assume "...". But if the assumption is not granted by the referee, then the paper is unlikely to be accepted.

I don't think this is exactly right. Assumptions don't have to be widely held to be legitimate to invoke in a philosophical argument; what they need to be is to be defended. But still, the practical problem here is real: if you're the only one who has defended the relevant assumption(s), then, particularly if you're early-career, any referee is likely to suspect that you're the author of the previous paper defending them.

So, what to do? Do any readers have any helpful tips?