Login
It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
It’s a strange and wonderful time to buy a digital camera. Since smartphones have gutted the casual photography market, manufacturers are focusing on building technological marvels designed for very specific uses. Mirrorless cameras continue to improve in terms of autofocus, video and more. Action cams provide sharp, fluid video, compact cameras are targeted to both tourists and vloggers, and DSLRs are available at some of the best prices we’ve seen. With so many different types of digital cameras, though, you may need some guidance to find just the right one – and that’s where we come in. Whether you’re a creator looking for just the right vlogging camera, an aspiring wildlife photographer or a sports enthusiast, we’ll help you find the perfect model to match your budget and needs.
Best mirrorless cameras under $2,000
Best mirrorless cameras over $2,000
There are a lot of reasons to choose a camera over a smartphone. The larger image sensors in mirrorless cameras let more light in, and you have a wide choice of lenses, from wide-angle to telephoto lenses, with far superior optics. Where smartphones have one f/stop, cameras have many, which gives you more exposure control. You also get natural and not AI-generated bokeh, quicker shooting, a physical shutter, more professional video results and so on.
With that extra quality comes a lot of extra factors to consider, however. The first thing is sensor size. In general, the larger the sensor size, the better (and usually more expensive) the camera.
Full frame is available on models like Sony's new ZV-E1, the Canon EOS R6 II and Panasonic S5 II. At a size equivalent to 35mm film (36 x 24mm), it offers the best performance in terms of image quality, low-light capability and depth of field. It's also the most expensive and finicky. While bokeh looks incredible at f/1.4, the depth of field is so razor thin that your subject's nose might be in focus but not their eyes. This can also make video shooting difficult.
The next size category is APS-C (around 23.5 x 15.6mm for most models and 22.2 x 14.8mm for Canon), offered on Fujifilm's X Series lineup, Canon’s R10 and R50 and the Nikon Z50. It's cheaper than full frame, both for the camera body and lenses, but still brings most of the advantages like decent bokeh, high ISOs for low-light shooting and relatively high resolution. With a sensor size the same as movie cameras, it's ideal for shooting video, and it’s easier to hold focus than with full-frame cameras.
Micro Four Thirds (17.3 x 13mm), a format shared by Panasonic and Olympus, is the next step down in sensor size. It offers less bokeh and light-gathering capability than APS-C and full frame, but allows for smaller and lighter cameras and lenses. For video, you can still get reasonably tight depth of field with good prime lenses, but focus is easier to control.
The other common sensor size is Type 1 (1 inch), which is actually smaller than one inch at 12.7 x 9.5mm. That's used mostly by compact models like Sony’s ZV-1 vlogging camera. Finally, action cameras like the GoPro Hero 11 and DJI’s Osmo 3 have even smaller sensors (1/1.9 and 1/1.7 size, respectively).
For photographers, another key factor is autofocus (AF) speed and accuracy. Most modern mirrorless cameras have hybrid phase-detect AF systems that allow for rapid focus and fast burst speeds. The majority also feature AI smarts like eye-detect AF for people and animals. However, some models are just a bit faster and more reactive than others.
The electronic viewfinder (EVF) and rear display are also key. The best models have the sharpest and brightest EVFs that let you best judge a shot before taking it. For things like street photography, it’s best to have as bright and sharp a rear display as possible. You may also want a screen that flips out rather than just tilting.
DSLRs and mirrorless cameras let you change lenses, but you're stuck with what's built into a compact camera. While that's great for portability, a single lens means you're going to sacrifice something. Fujifilm's X100V, for instance, has a fast but fixed 35mm-equivalent f/2.0 lens and no zoom. Sony's RX100 V has a 24-70mm zoom, but it's slower at the telephoto end (f/2.8) and less sharp than a prime lens.
When it comes to video, there are other factors to consider. Does your camera do “pixel-binning” for video recording or read out the entire sensor? Better cameras tend to do the latter. Another key factor is sensor speed, as slower sensors tend to have more rolling shutter that can create a “jello” effect that skews video.
In addition, how’s the battery life? How do you like the handling and feel? How long can you shoot video before the camera heats up or stops? Does it support 10-bit HDR video? Is there a microphone and/or a headphone jack? (if you do a lot of interviews, it's preferable to have both.) How's the video autofocus? All of these things play a part in your decision – so now let’s take a look at the best models.
Mirrorless is far and away the biggest category of cameras for these days, so it’s the best way to go if you want the best camera for photography with the most advanced features. Both Canon and Nikon recently announced they’re discontinuing development of new DSLRs, simply because most of the advantages of that category are gone, as I detailed in a recent video. The biggest selling feature of a mirrorless camera is the ability to change lenses depending on the type of shooting you want to do.
The key features are sensor size, resolution, autofocus, shooting speeds and video specs. If you’re primarily focused on sports photography or outdoor photography, you’ll likely want fast shooting speeds and accurate autofocus. Portrait and landscape shooters will likely favor large sensors and high resolution to maximize image quality. And content creators will want to look for things like flip-out displays, high-end video specifications and good in-body stabilization. Price point is, of course, a major factor as well.
My top budget camera pick is Canon’s brand new 24.2-megapixel R50, which is one of the best cameras for photography, and content creators will love it. It can shoot bursts at up to 15 fps in electronic shutter mode, and offers 4K 10-bit at up to 30p with supersampling and no crop. It has a fully articulating display, and unlike other cameras in this price range, an electronic viewfinder. It uses Canon’s Dual Pixel AF with subject recognition mode, and even has a popup flash. The only drawback is the lack of decent quality lens that’s as affordable as the camera itself, and a lack of in-body stabilization.
Autofocus: Dual Pixel CMOS AF II with 651 points
Max shutter speed: 15 fps
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Full-frame cameras generally used to start at $2,000 and up, but Canon’s brand new EOS R8 is priced at just $1,500. It offers Canon’s excellent Dual Pixel AF with subject recognition AI, and can shoot bursts at up to 40 fps. It's equally strong with video, supporting oversampled 10-bit 4K at up to 60 fps. The R8 also offers a flip-out display, making it great for vloggers. The main drawback is a lack of in-body stabilization.
Content creators should take a hard look at Panasonic’s full-frame S5 II. It’s the company’s first camera with hybrid phase-detect AF designed to make focus "wobble" and other issues a thing of the past. You can shoot sharp 4K 30p video downsampled from the full sensor width, or 4K 60p from an APS-C cropped size, all in 10-bit color. It even offers 5.9K 30p capture, along with RAW 5.9K external output to an Atomos recorder. You also get a flip-out screen for vlogging and updated five-axis in-body stabilization that’s the best in the industry. Photo quality is also good thanks to the dual-gain 24-megapixel sensor. The main drawback is the slowish burst speeds.
Read our full review of the Panasonic Lumix S5 II
Equipped with the same backside-illuminated (BSI) 12-megapixel sensor as the A7S III, Sony’s ZV-E1 offers excellent low-light performance, 4K at up to 120p and a host of new AI features like auto framing, making it one of the best cameras for photography and videography. It also comes with an updated in-body image stabilization system aimed at vloggers that can smooth out even jolting movements like footsteps. The $2,200 price tag makes it enticing for vloggers as it offers features found on the $3,500 A7S III for considerably less money.
Autofocus: 759 points
Max shutter speed: 10 fps
WiFi: No
Bluetooth: Yes
If you’re OK with a smaller APS-C sensor, check out the Fujifilm X-H2S. It has an incredibly fast stacked, backside-illuminated 26.1-megapixel sensor that allows for rapid burst shooting speeds of 40 fps, along with 4K 120p video with minimal rolling shutter. It can capture ProRes 10-bit video internally, has 7 stops of in-body stabilization and a class-leading EVF. Yes, it’s expensive for an APS-C camera, but on the other hand, it’s the cheapest stacked sensor camera overall. The other downside is AF that’s not quite up to Canon and Sony’s level.
Read our full review of the Fujifilm X-H2S
For the ultimate high-resolution camera, check out Sony’s A7R V. With a 61-megapixel sensor, it shoots sharp and beautiful images at a very respectable speed for such a high-resolution model (10 fps). It has an equally fast and reliable autofocus system, the sharpest viewfinder on the market and in-body stabilization that’s much improved over the A7R IV. Video has even improved, with 8K and 10-bit options now on tap, albeit with significant rolling shutter. If you don’t need the video features, however, Sony’s A7R IVa does mostly the same job, photo-wise, and costs a few hundred dollars less.
Read our full review of the Sony A7R V
The most important features to look for in an action cam are image quality, stabilization and battery life. GoPro has easily been beating all rivals over the last few years in all those areas, but DJI made some strides last year with the Osmo Action 3. At the same time, GoPro’s latest models are more expensive than rivals.
GoPro didn’t change the design on its latest model, but it has a larger sensor that enables a couple of cool features – Horizon Lock stabilization and Full Frame mode that makes it easier to shoot for, say, TikTok and YouTube at the same time. It also offers a new wider, though slightly distorted Hyperview field of view.
Otherwise, the Hero 11 Black offers better video quality than ever (up to 5.3K 60p), Hypersmooth stabilization that’s still the best in the business (by far), battery life that’s improved by 40 percent over the last model, and more. It’s easily the best action camera on the market, but you pay for that: it’s $400 with a one year subscription ($500 without it), compared to $329 for the DJI Osmo Action 3 and $300 for the Insta360 RS 4K bundle. If you’re serious about filming extreme sports, though, it’s worth it.
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Read our full review of the GoPro Hero 11
After experimenting with an oddball modular design on the Action 2, design has gone back to a more classic action cam design on the Osmo Action 3. It also comes with a slick new magnetic quick-release mount that lets you connect the camera directly to a GoPro-style mount with or without the case. Video quality and stabilization are quite good, but fall short of the Hero 11 Black (the Action 3 tops out at 4K 120p resolution compared to 5.3K 60p on the GoPro). While it’s not quite as good as the Hero 11, it’s considerably cheaper.
Read our full review of the DJI Osmo Action 3
This category has fewer cameras than it did even a few years ago and many models are older, as manufacturers focus instead on mirrorless models. However, I’m still a big believer in compact cameras. This type of camera is a big step up from smartphones quality-wise, and a lot of people will take a compact traveling or to events when they’d never bother with the hassle of a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
Compacts largely have type 1-inch sensors, but a few offer larger options, particularly Fujifilm’s XF-100V. Another popular model, Sony’s XV-1, is primarily aimed at content creators looking to step up. In any case, desirable qualities include image quality, a fast lens, relatively long zoom, flip-out display, good battery life, a high quality EVF, decent video and good pocketability.
The X100V is the latest in Fujifilm's famous fixed-lens X100 camera series. Like other models in the lineup, it has an APS-C sensor and a 23mm f/2.0 lens, equivalent to 35mm on a full-frame sensor. You also get the same hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder, mechanical dials, film simulations and good looks as before. But the X100V is the most significant advancement in the series' history. It has Fujifilm's latest 26.1-megapixel X-Trans 4 CMOS sensor compared to 24.2-megapixels on the last model and a new, sharper lens to handle that extra resolution.
A new tilting rear display makes "shooting from the hip" street photography much easier, as does the fast 11 fps/20 fps shooting speeds in mechanical/silent shutter modes. You also get a better hybrid phase- and contrast-detect autofocus (AF) system with more AF points along with face and eye detection. Finally, it now has the same 4K video-shooting features as the X-T30. It doesn't come cheap, but the X100V is the ultimate camera if you're into street photography – assuming you can find one.
Max shutter speed: 20 fps
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Read our full review of the Fujifilm X100V
The ZV-1 is Sony’s first RX100-series camera designed specifically for vlogging. It does that job well thanks to a lightweight body, built-in high-quality microphone, flip-out display, best-in-class autofocus and excellent image quality. The 24-70mm lens is sharp, but it needs to be wider because of the 25 percent crop when using electronic stabilization. It also lacks a true touch display and a headphone port. That nitpicking aside, if you’re looking to step up from a smartphone or just want something simple, it does the job nearly perfectly.
Read our full review of the Sony ZV-1
For a value compact camera, the best option is Panasonic’s 20-megapixel ZS-200. It offers a lot of features for the price, like a 1-inch, 20.1 megapixel sensor, 5-axis stabilization, 4K, 30 fps video and more. Its main claim to fame, though, is the 24-360x lens that offers incredible reach for travel and more. Though it dates back to 2018, it’s actually one of the more recent compact models.
With mirrorless cameras taking over the interchangeable lens market, DSLRs still give you the ability to change lenses at relatively cheap prices. The defining feature is the reflex mirror that lets you look directly through the lens at your subject with no electronics in between. Most also have very fast autofocus thanks to a dedicated phase-detect sensor, and very fast battery life. However, many lack features you’d expect on modern mirrorless cameras like subject tracking, eye-detection and more.
Nikon's full-frame (FX) D850 is the best deal on a high-end camera and arguably the best camera for photography. With a 45.7-megapixel sensor and max 102,400 ISO, it gives you the best quality for the money, whether mirrorless or DSLR. It can also shoot fast, at up to 7fps, which is very good for such a high-res camera. In addition, the battery life (1840 shots on a charge) puts any mirrorless option to shame, and there’s a massive number of FX Nikkor lens options to choose from. Nikon has upped its video game as well with the D850 by introducing 4K internal recording. If you’d still rather have a live optical rather than an electronic view, the D850 is the best option available.
Autofocus: 153 points
Max shutter speed: 7 fps
WiFi: Yes
Bluetooth: Yes
Another one of the best cameras for photography is Canon’s 24-megapixel APS-C EOS Rebel SL3, which has a great blend of features, build quality and value. It offers features like a vari-angle touchscreen, 4K video (albeit with a crop) and Dual Pixel autofocus technology in live mode. You get shooting speeds of up to 5 fps, 1600 shots on a charge and an ISO range up to 51,200 (expanded). It also offers guided screen options for beginners. Best of all, it offers excellent picture quality for the price thanks to Canon’s skin-friendly color science.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-cameras-151524327.html?src=rss
Panasonic S5 II full-frame mirrorless camera review
Panasonic S5 II full-frame mirrorless camera review
Tinder’s new headquarters in West Hollywood, California designed by Rapt Studio could be imagined as a thoughtful response to the transformative changes that have affected the corporate workplace dynamics the last few years. The seven-story, 77,000-square-foot project, handled by the same creative consultancy responsible for developing other creative spaces for the likes of Google, Dropbox, and Vans, is imagined to reestablish the pandemic-frayed ties that bind individuals into creative collaborative teams – and by extension, between the app users they seek to support – designing a multi-level headquarters layered with a multitude of opportunities for collaboration and connection.
Rapt Studio began the project by researching existing public space typologies, from the town square to the speakeasy, that empower a progressive deepening of ties that bind workers with their work in an organic manner.
Modeled after a town square, The Commons is the largest and most expansive of the spaces, and also the entry point into Tinder’s new headquarters. The airy environment is intended to encourage casual interactions and large enough to accommodate for company-wide gatherings.
The café — or “Boost Bar” — sits on the second floor, giving employees access to the skills of an in-house barista, and in turn providing an informal space to work away from the desk.
The IT help desk is fashioned after the nostalgic memories of the neighborhood arcade.
Diffuse lighting, custom modular furniture on wheels, and walls clad in top-to-bottom whiteboards all inhabit La Galleria, a room drawing its atmosphere from the workshops and displays of an artist studio.
A custom hot-pink central table with cutouts along the edges offers a surprisingly idiosyncratic hue to the space’s otherwise muted purpose.
Floor six is dedicated to quieter activities and appropriately demarcated as The Stacks, a tranquil communal space fashioned after a library.
Deep blue hues across plush fabrics, with curvilinear walls and curtains framing windows overlooking the LA skyline give the pinnacle seventh floor a nightclub vibe. Seating arrangements are situated to encourage engagement within intimate groups – a “secret” employee getaway of sorts.
“Connection is at the heart of the Tinder brand,” says Rapt Studio CEO and Chief Creative Officer David Galullo. “To design a space that deepens connection within Tinder, we looked to the places where we typically build relationships and then mapped them onto a floor plan. The end project emphasizes how design itself can be a force of connection.”
Tinder’s new HQ shares some similarities to Rapt Studio’s previous project, The Schoolhouse, a creative office for The Google School for Leaders. Each share the goal to spur informal engagements between team members by carving out both shared and intimate spaces, and furnished to empower employees to adapt those spaces to their needs on an as-needed basis.
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Long before the 1947 Roswell incident brought “little green men” into the public consciousness and prompted an explosion in UFO sightings, writers and scientists have speculated about the existence of life beyond our planet. H. G. Wells laid the groundwork for modern science fiction with novels like The War of the Worlds (1898), one of the first books to imagine an extraterrestrial invasion. Before Wells, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) sparked the imagination by discovering “canals” on Mars. But for the first recorded instance of humanity pondering the possibility of alien life, we have to go all the way back to ancient Greek and Roman times. In the first century B.C., Roman poet Lucretius wrote, “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beast.” Not exactly a controversial supposition; still, whether or not such tribes have come to our planet remains impossible to prove, and those who claim to have encountered alien beings have long been dismissed.
That said, in recent years, the concept of otherworldly visitors has begun to shift toward the mainstream. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the latest governmental entity devoted to investigating unexplained sightings. Even the term of choice, “UFO,” has given way to “UAP”—unidentified aerial (or anomalous) phenomenon. And just this June, former U.S. Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch claimed that the U.S. government had retrieved remains of several aircraft of “non-human” origin. The fallout from Grusch’s claims is yet to be determined—as is their veracity—but it seems likely that, in the end, the world will settle back into the binary of believers and skeptics, with no concrete evidence to settle the debate. Regardless of which camp you fall into, some of us will always look skyward with hope; we may never be able to scour the entirety of the universe, but it’s hard not to thrill to Lucretius’ logic. In the meantime, the longform articles collected here offer a fascinating glimpse into the UFO community and the stories that have shaped our modern understanding of the topic.
For me, what makes alleged alien encounter testimony so compelling is that—regardless of whether I believe the person’s interpretation of events—the incident had an undeniable and profound effect on their lives. This may not be true in every case, but even if you write off many accounts as delusion or whimsy or simply fiction, you’re still left with a legion of people who have been dramatically changed by their perceived experiences. It’s comforting to know, then, that for those such as Jason Guillemette, a character in this piece about amateur ufologists, communities exist where one can share their experiences without judgment.
In Guillemette’s case, that community is the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a non-profit, volunteer-run organization active in more than 40 countries—and one whose members are as rigidly skeptical as Guillemette. For most MUFON alumni, this is a quest for truth, not validation; members work rigorously to find earthly explanations for reported sightings. And as Badelt widens his scope to other folks in other organizations, you can’t help but be moved by people’s stories. After all, if you were to have a life-changing close encounter, with whom would you share that knowledge?
Most of the time, he’s able to find an explanation, he says. He often sends videos to other volunteers at MUFON who specialize in analyzing computer images. He refers to websites that track the flight patterns of satellites and planes and the International Space Station—the usual suspects when it comes to UFO sightings, he says. Guillemette described a recent case in which a couple reported seeing strange lights hovering above a nearby lake. The lights circled above the lake and then dropped down into the water, only to rise up a moment later and zip away. It turned out to be a plane, he says—filling up with water to fight a nearby forest fire. “Not everybody likes what we come up with,” he says, “but sometimes it’s really evident.”
The history of UFO sightings in New Zealand dates back to the early 20th century. It seems such a tranquil and unassuming country—cinematic hobbit history notwithstanding—which perhaps makes the events recounted here even more unsettling. These are all-too-human tales of altered lives. Some cases, such as that of Iris Catt, a self-proclaimed alien abductee whose nightmarish encounters go back to her childhood, are heartbreakingly tragic. Others follow more positive narratives, believing that aliens are beaming down rays of positivity and openness, gradually bringing humanity to a point where it is ready for formal communication.
When I was at university in the 1990s, “regression therapy” became big news, with countless stories of trauma-blocked memories and past-life remembrances unearthed through hypnosis. Just as suddenly, regression therapy drowned in a flood of peer-reviewed criticism, relegated to yet another pseudoscience. The concept never went away entirely and it pops up again in Vaughan Yarwood’s story, cautiously approved by academic institutions for its utility in specific circumstances. It’s complex territory, but Yarwood navigates it with clarity and sensitivity.
Iris Catt, a mild-mannered, unprepossessing woman in her 40s, then introduces herself. She is an abductee. It appears certain aliens have had their eye on her from an early age. She recounts her night horrors calmly, the way people do who have learned to accept their scars, to make their hurt and anguish a part of themselves.
“It is happening every day, and it is happening in New Zealand,” says Iris. “It is not going to go away. I truly believe that more and more people are beginning to remember what is happening to them because the time is getting closer when we are going to have to recognise that we are not the only intelligent form of life in the universe.”
Her audience understands. She is among friends.
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Edward Mack spent many years engaging with people who claimed to have been abducted by extraterrestrials, in the process becoming a pioneer in his field. Not surprisingly, he attracted resistance from the scientific community—less because of his work than because, over time, he came to the startling and highly controversial conclusion that a number of alleged abductees were telling the truth. Mack’s research may be little remembered by his profession at large, but his warmth, humanity, and faith continue to inspire hope in a small community that gathers annually in Rhode Island. They prefer the term “experiencer” to “abductee,” and in this Vanity Fair feature Ralph Blumenthal interweaves their stories with Mack’s.
For more about one of the characters in Blumenthal’s story, a 1994 feature in Omni details Linda’s alleged experience.
Once again, for me, the fascination of this piece lies in the stories of these everyday folks. To some degree, it doesn’t matter what they actually experienced. What counts, as Mack understood, is they have experienced something, and that something left a profound mark on their lives. In seeking to apply rigor and structure to the stories he was collecting, Mack plowed a hard path with poise and compassion. As this piece eloquently shows, his work was not in vain.
“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack later wrote in his 1994 best-seller, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. He had always assumed that anyone claiming to have been abducted by aliens was crazy, along with those who took them seriously. But here were people—students, homemakers, secretaries, writers, businesspeople, computer technicians, musicians, psychologists, a prison guard, an acupuncturist, a social worker, a gas-station attendant—reporting experiences that Mack could not begin to fathom, things, he reflected, that by all notions of reality “simply could not be.”
I have long been fascinated with the so-called Wow signal, received in 1977 by Ohio University’s Big Ear radio telescope, which was then being used to search for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The tale of the signal makes for a great story in itself, but Keith Cooper’s piece sees that as merely a starting point. His narrative finds a central character in a man named Robert Gray: While the scientific community, including SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), gradually lowered the Wow signal to the status of “interesting curio,” Gray remained convinced that there was more to uncover.
Gray’s tenacity and belief in the face of mounting opposition is remarkable. Struggling for funding, unsuccessfully attempting to enlist help, and bartering for much-needed time on a limited number of radio telescopes, the frustrations he must have experienced make the twists in his story all the more poignant. Just when his enthusiasm began to wane, his work seemingly at a dead end, an exoplanet scientist reached out to Gray with a fresh idea, breathing new life into the man’s relentless quest. There is no neat, satisfying definitive end to this tale, but perhaps therein lies the true glory of Gray’s work. In the face of uncertainty, he carried on until the very end.
Nobody knows what the Wow signal was. We do know that it was not a regular astrophysical object, such as a galaxy or a pulsar. Curious the frequency that it was detected at, 1,420 MHz, is the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen atoms in space, but it is also the frequency that scientists hunting for alien life listen to. Their reasoning is that aliens will supposedly know that astronomers will already be listening to that frequency in their studies of galactic hydrogen and so should easily detect their signal – or so the theory goes. Yet there was no message attached to the signal. It was just a burst of raw radio energy.
If SETI had a mythology, then the Wow signal would be its number one myth. And while it has never been forgotten by the public, the academic side of SETI has, by and large, dismissed it, quite possibly because it hasn’t been seen to repeat, and therefore cannot be verified—the golden rule of a successful SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) detection.
Celebrities who have copped to believing in UFOs are numerous enough to populate a listicle. Politicians? Not so much. Yet, the U.S. Congress’ House Oversight Committee has announced plans for a hearing regarding UAP reports, and if you trace the conversation back a few years, you’ll find that this shift is at least partly thanks to the protagonists in this story: former U.S. senator Harry Reid and Tom DeLonge, a founding member of pop-punk band Blink 182.
There’s a lot to digest here. It’s a wonderful example of hidden history: a small group of like-minded individuals working behind the scenes to advance their cause, with potentially wide-ranging repercussions. That history would be far less engaging, however, were it not for Tom DeLonge’s gregarious personality and indefatigable belief in alien visitors. His company, To The Stars, devotes considerable time and money to researching UAPs and extraterrestrial matters in general; Bryan Bender’s feature tells the story of how the singer managed to recruit experts and politicians to his cause.
Hanging on DeLonge’s wall was what might be considered the medals he’s collected in his struggle: a display case filled with dozens of commemorative coins from his meetings with generals, aerospace contractors and secret government agencies. They trace his visits to the CIA, to the U.S. Navy, to the “advanced development programs” division at Lockheed Martin’s famously secretive “Skunk Works” in Southern California, where some of the world’s most advanced spy planes were designed.
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens
The video below this text is interactive.[1] To view, click play and follow the instructions you see on the screen. As you watch, look for areas that you can click with a mouse (or tap with your finger, if on a mobile device)[2] or see what appears when you mouse over different areas of the image at different times. What do you see?[3]
[1] This multimodal content, due to technological limitations, may not be accessible to all. If the multimodal experience is not accessible to you, please visit the text based version for visual and audio descriptions and full-text transcription or listen to the audio narration:
Audio Narration by Kara White
[2] On mobile devices, we suggest viewing the page in landscape mode and selecting “Distraction Free Reading” in the top-right corner.
[3] This is an interactive video. This video is designed to get the viewer or reader to “search” the image for interactive buttons. To navigate by keyboard, you can use the tab key to switch between objects. Press enter to click on each object. The text is revealed by interacting with objects that appear at various times during the video. As each object appears, the video will pause, and you will be instructed to click or press enter for the text to appear. When you’re ready to continue, click the play button object or press enter.
Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. 2021. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Medford: Polity Press.
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. International Library of Sociology. London ; New York: Routledge.
Kimberly Garza grew up going to the river, which depending on the day and her family’s mood could have meant the banks of one of a few bodies of water: the Frio, the Sabinal, or the Neuces. All three rivers are in close proximity to Garza’s hometown of Uvalde, Texas:
RIVERS ARE PLACES OF FORGETTING, of memory. But they are also places of healing.
The use of rivers and water in therapeutic practices is millennia old, employed by nearly every Indigenous culture known around the world. The term “river therapy” refers to the practice of swimming in a river or walking near one and drawing positive benefits and relief from the space and its elements. River sounds are used in relaxation training systems to soothe and calm people. Studies have shown that just listening to a river can alleviate stress.
The term “spa” derives from the Latin phrase sanitas per aquas—” health through water.”
UVALDE IS NO LONGER known for rivers but for tragedy. We are part of a terrible tradition of Texas towns with this fate, among places like Santa Fe, El Paso, Sutherland Springs, and Allen. Since the massacre of May 24, 2022—the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary—we have seen our unraveling, our sorrow and our rage, broadcast to the world. We have watched our town’s name, the names of our neighbors and families and friends, carried on a current farther away from us. We grieve, even today. Some part of Uvalde always will.
But the rivers are still here, the moments of respite in the waters around us.
I hope the healing is coming, too.
So there’s two reasons for this post. The first is that I was going through my list of those miscellaneous ideas that you can do at some point in the future that would be fun or helpful (hopefully) but that you never quite get around to, and I saw something on there that seemed like it would be quick and maybe hopefully useful to someone.
The second one is that, by the deadlines that I personally have set, today is the last day to publish a blog post that will make it into the June newsletter and if I put something out then I will have two blog posts in a newsletter for the first time since October 2022 (I need to blog more).
Anyway, I was going through my to-do list and in the section of “miscellaneous ideas for the future” I saw something about making a diagram of how the three systems of Domain of One’s Own work together. It’s something I have to explain a lot when training new admins, and while I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on the overarching metaphor by now, training usually focuses on each system’s user interface and what admins can do with that system, so I always worry I’ve skimped on making sure they’ve got the full picture.
To that end, I made a diagram.
This was very much something I saw on the list and went “Hey, I could do a pretty version of that in the future given a couple of days and some dedicated resources, or I could do a functional version of that right now using Google Drive’s weird photomanipulation-ish drawing platform.” And functional now is better than pretty later.
So, voila: The Diagram.
Hope I didn’t hype it up too much.
Is this accurate? That’s gonna be a strong “maybe.” But it’s close enough for our purposes, it only took about twenty minutes, and I got this blog post done in time for the Roundup deadline, so I’m going to call this a win.
It’s definitely not perfect. Looking at it now I’m thinking of all the little adjustments that I want to make, both in the text and in the design. But like I said back in October, sometimes you have to let perfection go.
Also, it’s here as a PDF too I guess, since Google Draw also offers that as an export format.
Our first encounter with Randy Rettberg was somewhat surreal. Not that the others weren’t—the sui generis atmosphere is always present—but that first meeting was set in a scenario so far from our everyday reality that it felt like we’d been thrown into a science fiction novel. It happened in 2022 and we were a bit disoriented after ten hours of transatlantic travel and two hours riding Bentleys to the British countryside. It was July, and we had left the cold and dry wind of our almost never rigorous Brazilian winter to find a pleasant summer sun that gently bathed the English lands. The people there were in a good mood and smiling. Someone told us that it was an atypical moment, that life was not so bright most of the time. We got lucky. At least the weather made us feel a little bit at home, but only that.
We were invited to participate in a workshop named “Safe, Secure, & Responsible Synthetic Biology Beyond Containment,” being part of a group of around 30 people, including biotechnology students, government regulators from around the world, union people, and scholars. We stayed in a 2400-hectares property called Wilton Park, in a building that reminded us of a castle—of course, in reality a Victorian mansion, named Wiston House. This event was jointly organized by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation, the independent, non-profit organization of which Randy—who was also attending the workshop—is president and founder. We got to know iGEM while we were studying for graduation at the University of São Paulo and participated in the student-organized Synthetic Biology Club. Clarissa was carrying out field work as an anthropologist with the club’s participants, and Érico was one of them. Participation in international competitions was one of the club’s main activities, and iGEM was one of those competitions. Created in 2003 as a spin-off of the MIT department Registry of Standard Biological Parts, the international competition iGEM aims to promote the international development of synthetic biology, engaging students, young scientists, and established scientists around the world.
At that first meeting, in the impressive Victorian mansion full of old paintings of men dressed in strange clothes and with menacing looks, we had the opportunity to talk with Randy about his participation in the development of the internet and about the connections of this previous experience with his interest in synthetic biology. A few months later, on an October afternoon, we had the opportunity to record a conversation lasting more than two hours in Randy’s office at iGEM’s Paris office. Both meetings were made possible because Clarissa was hired as a Human Practices Summer Fellow at the iGEM Foundation, working with a team assigned to develop projects and research on responsible practices and synthetic biology, while Erico actively participates as a volunteer in iGEM activities involving biosafety and biosecurity.
Randy is an enigmatic and extraordinary figure. He worked on a range of exciting and society-changing projects, including an important participation in the ARPANET[1] project while working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). There he worked on the first internet routers and packet switching protocols, as well as in parallel and distributed computing. Machines he helped create would be used to coordinate US military satellites and address what would become internet routing. He would then move to Apple Computer and to Sun Microsystems—two other leading companies in the personal computer and internet revolution—before joining MIT. Falling in love with synthetic biology through his long-time friend Tom Knight, now owner of NASDAQ-listed synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, Randy was invited to direct the MIT Registry of Standard Parts, a department that would spin off to create the iGEM Foundation.
Randy’s transition from the development of the internet to becoming a prominent figure in synthetic biology is something that has always caught our attention, as the internet carries with it important constituent elements of synthetic biology itself. We grew up along with the development of the internet. We lived our childhood in a world that no longer exists, nor will it ever exist again. We were formed in a cyberpunk broth, and perhaps due to the savagery of our condition as inhabitants of a forest city,[2] we were never able to ignore the intrusion of nature. Our curiosity to understand more about the roots of our roots—cybernetic and biological—led us to dig into the history of the internet with countercultural tools. We read books like “Neuromancer” and watched movies like “The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet” and “Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees.” It was from this cyber-bio-punk reference that we approached Randy and formulated our questions for him.
The exercise of listening to the trajectory of scientists is very interesting for an anthropology of science and technology based on a notion of localized knowledge, as proposed by Donna Haraway. By turning to the memories of scientists from an anthropological perspective, we are able to situate techno-scientific work in a given space and time and in relation to broader historical and social processes. At the same time, working with biographies and memories of scientists also makes us capable of bringing to the surface dimensions that account for the specificities of each trajectory. When questioned by us about the origins of the concept of information, Randy alternates between great historical facts, such as the second world war, memories of his work in laboratories, and intimate family memories. This complexity of the web of scientists’ memories is very interesting as raw material. For us, peripheral researchers from the global south who practice science and technology studies as a way of imagining different possible worlds, opening listening spaces in hegemonic places of knowledge production—especially linked to what is understood as the “frontier” of science such as synthetic biology—allows us a certain smuggling between different realities, a true exercise of anthropological alterity.
“Randomness must be in there, right? And you kind of think this is like earth, air, fire, and water. Those are the elements for a long time. Those were the elements.”
Randy Rettberg was born in 1948. He began the interview telling us that while he was growing up in rural Illinois in the 50s, several things drew his attention towards science and technology. His father, who was very religious (Randy’s grandfather was a lutheran minister) and had been a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II, came back to the US and, thanks to the GI Bill,[3] obtained a degree in Architecture, working in many urban buildings—schools, hospitals, prisons—after graduation. He says that his childhood and teenage years were lived in a “small world” where complicated machines would be farm machines, though his world kept expanding in several directions while he came in contact with several initiatives fostering curiosity and engagement in science and technology—from Bell Labs[4] films and pictures promoting their own technologies and marvelous inventions, to do-it-yourself science kits that you could buy from magazines. Randy remembers several scientific-fueled teenage adventures like building a radio from one of these kits, playing with chemical reagents with a friend whose father had a pharmacy, building a tin-can telephone network in the backyard, and playing with a huge recorder that came encased in a suitcase and that he bought selling newspapers door-to-door in the 7th grade. The television, a very “fancy” machine at the time, would bring technologic tales as well. A friend’s father was a professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, so Randy together with his friend would spend a huge amount of time playing in an electronic prototype board with switches and lights that could be reassembled to create different combinations of button and light activations. Two other important childhood memories were how computers were beginning to feature in public imagination at the time—as huge and expensive machines with buttons and flashlights—and the launch of the soviet satellite Sputnik[5] in 1957.
In Rettberg’s account, his world definitely expanded widely when he joined MIT in 1965. While during his basic education the teachers would often repress his curiosity, at MIT it was the opposite. Curiosity was rewarded and it would be the norm. Suddenly teachers would consider “taking things a level down” while searching for answers in a specific topic. Another thing that Randy remembers from this time was his first intense contact with a real computer. This computer was the size of a room and could be used by the university staff with individual accounts who could reserve computing time slots. He describes the operating interface as “a big big tube and a light pen.”
When Randy graduated, the Vietnam War was raging on and he didn’t want to fight in it, so he went back to Illinois to get a Master’s degree in Physics, describing it as a “really really hard” experience because of the complexity of the math involved. After obtaining his MSc, he contacted Nicholas Negroponte[6] from MIT’s Architecture Machine Group[7] and was hired as a “computer guy.” He operated an Interdata Model 3, a business computer already “small,” the size of a desk table. Randy remembers how “slow” it was: only 30 thousand instructions a second.[8] From Negroponte he heard of Bolt, Beranek and Neuman (BBN), a government contractor[9] that managed at the time several groups of highly motivated scientists and engineers working at very exciting projects at the edge of science and technology. Randy says BBN was created by three MIT professors who were renowned specialists in acoustics and began working for the Department of Defense in this field, but soon started providing services related to other fields of science and technology, receiving several government contracts including from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).[10] In 1972, Rettberg managed to get interviews in different teams within BBN and was invited to join one of the teams that was building the ARPANET project together with people from MIT Lincoln Labs.[11]
ARPANET was an ARPA project aimed at creating a network that would interconnect all US military bases and Department of Defense facilities in a way that information could be securely and effectively shared between them. The ARPANET project created most of the currently used internet protocols, for example, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). ARPANET was the prototype of what would become the internet. In Randy’s words, ARPANET at the time was “a four node network. It was the first packet switching network[12] and it was four different nodes connected together by 50 KB links. So we started very slow, with teletypes[13] terminals, 10 characters per second.” Randy recalls that the group had very interesting ideas about transforming and transporting information reliably. For example, there was the idea that systems fail often, so there must be ways for interconnected information processing systems to check the integrity of sent and received information. From this idea the Transport Control Protocol, one of the backbones of modern internet, would be born. This needed in turn to be coupled to a decentralized network—so it could withstand and route around problems in individual nodes of the network such as a power outage or a military attack—and this decentralized network should be able to be composed of machines of different manufacturers that would follow in hardware and in software certain common procedures and standards that would ensure compatibility and communicability between any type of device able to follow these procedures.
According to Randy—building from the idea of bit encoding from Shannon and early information pioneers[14]—some of the really innovative ideas regarding information transfer were related to packet switching. The use of a network of interconnected nodes (composed of digital computers for a collaborative and decentralized discovery of possible routes for the information to travel on) and the establishment of protocols designed for the computers to speak on a common language (which could be understood by computers of different manufacturers) was how the ARPANET team chose to solve the problem of the ability of information to travel from one place to another. Prior to travel however, the information needed to be encoded and packaged in what would become the “network packet.” The network packet would contain the proper information users wanted to transfer and an additional “header” of information, a complementary message that contained “control information”—needed for the nodes of the network to find the best routes for the information and for the effective forwarding of the messages from one node to another after the best possible way was found. The combination of all protocols and ideas above would form a “packet-switching network.”
Rettberg emphasizes that prior to ARPANET, data could be sent from one place to another, but this task would require specific and expensive equipment. At his account, even in the academy and in the telecom industry most people believed that things had their own essences and while transferring information, these “essences” should be transmitted. For example, music was composed of sound waves, so then the only way to transfer music was to physically reproduce the sound waves from the transmitter to the receiver—and that would require special equipment for each type of “essential” information. From the ARPANET on, everyone with a digital computer, peripheral equipment, and a common phone line could be connected to every other person with a similar setup and transfer any type of information such as audio, video or text in digital format—a format that would subsume the idea of the specific “essences” of each type of information, replacing it with the concept of “digital encoded” information where everything that can be represented can also be digitally represented.
Randy told us two or three times that he and most of his colleagues at the project were against the war in Vietnam and were heavily influenced by the rock and roll movement, so this forms a contradictory background against which these ideas were designed. In ARPANET the engineers embedded a diffuse but real feeling against central control and authority funded by the military itself. With this new technology, the United States military sector would transform itself towards a decentralized informational entity capable of operating anywhere on earth. In a prior conversation, Randy told us that at times the technoscientific problem presented for the team to solve was straightforward military, such as the coordination of military satellites and the livestream of video and audio between them. In fact, the network transfer of audio and video for the military was one the first purposes of the computer Rettberg helped create in the ARPANET project, the Butterfly BBN. BBN itself was brought to the ARPANET project because of the renown associated with the acoustical know-how of the company.
The Butterfly BBN is considered a wonder of the early digital computers. It was one of the first of the modern “supercomputers.” It used commercially available digital processors from Motorola and each machine had up to 512 of these 12-33MHz processing units. It was first programmed to act as a “router” machine in the late 70’s DARPA’s Wideband Packet Satellite Network, making possible a continuous 3 Mbits/s broadcast of digital data— mainly audio and video—around multiple US military bases. The machine would then be used both in the Terrestrial Wide Band Network, a network that physically connected several Department of Defense facilities through high speed capable data cables from the late 1980’s to 1991. From 1991 forward Butterfly BBN was the computer used as the first internet routers, implementing in hardware and in software the first version of the Internet Protocol (IP).
A “die image” (a photograph of the internal parts of an electronic chip) of the Motorola 6800, the processor used by the first ARPANET routers, including the Butterfly BBN mentioned by Randy. (Photo by Birdman86 at commons.wikimedia.org)
It is funny to note that while telling us everything above, Randy—who had a lutheran minister grandfather and a “very religious” father—refers multiple times to religion as a way of explaining how prior to everything above, ideas about information were kind of mystical and quintessential. We had the impression that, for Randy, the cybernetic revolution which he took part in was almost like a new step in the human relationship with the universe. He, for example, compares cybernetics to the role of religion in English literature, saying that the former formed the backbone to the latter. For Randy, cybernetics is the backbone of our current mode of existence and of understanding the world we live in: in his distinctive atheist mystical language, he likens the development of cybernetics to the addition of entropy[15] to the four “original” elements, earth, fire, air, and water.
In a future blog post, we will describe the second half of the interview on Randy Rettberg’s transition from early internet pioneer to early synthetic biology pioneer. The next blog post also takes a deeper look on Randy’s view of how cybernetics is connected to synthetic biology and to science and technology in general. Until next time!
[1] ARPANET was an Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) project aimed at creating a network that would interconnect all US military bases and Department of Defense facilities in a way that information could be securely and effectively shared between them. The ARPANET project created most of the currently used internet protocols, for example, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). ARPANET was the prototype of what would become the internet.
[2] São Paulo is the financial capital of Brazil, a city surrounded and restrained by both the Atlantic Forest and the booming agribusiness.
[3] The GI Bill, formally Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, was a US law aimed at rewarding war veterans for their participation in World War II. Through this law, war veterans would have a facilitated process for getting superior and technical education.
[4] Bell Labs was founded by Alexander Graham Bell and was one of the first R&D intensive companies in the world. It became a large and important government contractor, conducting research and development for the US government, especially the US military. Researchers from Bell Labs were responsible for the invention of several technologies that form the backbone of contemporary industrial mode of living. Some of these inventions were the transistor, laser technology, the UNIX operating system, photovoltaic cells, and several others.
[5] Sputnik was the first man-made satellite to be launched and successfully orbit the earth. It was launched by the Soviets on the 4th of October in 1957. It was one of the events that started the space race.
[6] Nicholas Negroponte is known to be the founder of the MIT Media Lab (and prior to that, the MIT’s Architecture Machine Group) and to be an early internet evangelizer, being one of the founders of the WIRED magazine.
[7] In 1985, the lab would be reassembled into the now famous MIT Media Lab.
[8] Today a personal computer can run at 1-10 trillion operations per second. A Geforce GTX 1080 graphic card used in gaming today runs at 8.9 trillion floating point operations per second (unit used to measure computing speed).
[9] A government contractor is a private company that works under contracts to governments.
[10] Advanced Research Projects Agency, now Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is one of the most important US government institutions dedicated to the creation of new technologies that could be used in defense purposes. DARPA funded projects include the modern jet engine, as well as the technologies behind the integrated circuits, super computers and the internet.
[11] Lincoln Labs is another R&D laboratory that works under government contracts. Founded in 1950 as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, recently it spun-off from MIT, becoming a private laboratory. Lincoln Labs is historically tied to the US Department of Defense, having developed the computer network called SAGE in the 50s (the first military computers to be connected to others and to have graphical user interfaces, used to coordinate radar sites around the US). Most of what Lincoln Labs does is classified, but we know they are also interested in synthetic biology because their staff participates in iGEM’s events.
[12] Packet switching is one of the theoretical basis of the current internet and of modern telecommunications. The idea behind it is to create a procedure that two or more computers must follow to securely and reliably exchange information. It involves a series of steps that the machines will have to know and follow in order to ensure that the information has really been transmitted between them, even if problems arise due to inconsistent connection.
[13] A teletype is an electromechanical device that could be used to send and receive messages from other teletypes and later, to and from computers. Teletypes would then be used as computer interfaces as Randy mentions here.
[14] Shannon – whose research was also funded by the US military – proposes the idea of encoding information as sequences of zeros and ones, what he calls “binary digits” or bits in his paper “A mathematical theory of communication” from 1948.
[15] In information theory, entropy measures the amount of information that a certain event contains.
Over the past couple of months I’ve been spending a lot of time with Joan Didion. In addition to re-reading her collected nonfiction, I made my way through Tracy Daugherty’s Read more
The post A Material World first appeared on Society for US Intellectual History.
[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
In a famous polemical essay (1986) in NYRB, my (recall) teacher, Myles Burnyeat, distinguished between two ways of entering Strauss’ thought: either through his “writings” or “one may sign up for initiation with a Straussian teacher.” That is, as Burnyeat notes, Strauss founded a school – he quotes Lewis Coser’s claim that it is “an academic cult” -- with an oral tradition. In the 1986 essay, Burnyeat spends some time on the details of Strauss’ teaching strategy and style that he draws from autobiographical writings by Bloom and Dannhauser[1] as well as by aptly quoting Strauss’ famous (1941) essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing." Somewhat peculiarly, given what follows, Burnyeat does not comment on the surprising fit he [Burnyeat] discerns between Strauss’ writing and teaching!
Burnyeat goes on to imply that without the oral tradition, Strauss’ writings fall flat, or (and these are not the same thing, of course) lack political influence. I quote:
“It is the second method that produces the sense of belonging and believing. The books and papers are freely available on the side of the Atlantic from which I write, but Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. No one writing in the London Review of Books would worry—as Stephen Toulmin worried recently in these pages about the State Department’s policy-planning staff—that Mrs. Thatcher’s civil servants know more about the ideas of Leo Strauss than about the realities of the day. Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated. Somehow, the interchange between teacher and pupil gives his ideas a potency that they lack on the printed page.”
I want to draw out to two themes from this quote: first, I’ll focus on the reception of Strauss in the UK. And, second, on the way governing elites are educated. So much for set up.
First, this is an extraordinary passage once we remember that already in 1937 Michael Oakeshott wrote an admiring and insightful review of Strauss’ ,The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: its Basis and its Genesis (1936) that is very much worth re-reading. (In his earlier, 1935, essay in Scrutiny on Hobbes, Oakeshott alerts the reader that he is familiar with Strauss’ (1932) French article on Hobbes.) It matters to Burnyeat’s empirical claim because while Oakeshott, who did have an impact British political thinking, certainly is not a slavish follower of Strauss, one would have to be confident that none of Oakeshott’s teachings weren’t taken from Strauss at all. Writing in the London Review of Books a few years later (1992), Perry Anderson alerts his readers to non-trivial differences between Strauss and Oakeshott (which is compatible with my claim), and more importantly for present purposes, treats Strauss as a major influence on the then newish resurgence of the intellectual right (although that can be made compatible with Burnyeat’s claim about Strauss’ purported lack of influence in the UK).[2]
But even when taken on its own terms, there is something odd about Burnyeat’s claim. For, even if we grant that Strauss has no following at all in British universities by the mid 1980s, this could have other sources than the lack of potency of Strauss’ ideas. After all, there had been a number of influential polemics against Strauss in the United Kingdom. Most notably, the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ of historiography (associated with Pocock, Dunn, and Skinner amongst others) polemically self-defined, in part, against Strauss and his school; this can be readily ascertained by, for example, word-searching ‘Strauss’ in Quentin Skinner’s (1968) "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."[3] One can also discern, as I have noted before, such polemics by reading Yolton’s (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review.[4] Yolton was then at Kenyon, but he had been an Oxford DPhil student of Ryle’s, who supervised his dissertation on John Locke.[5] Polemic is simply unnecessary with writings one foresees would have no influence or potency at all. So, I am afraid to say that Burnyeat’s presentation does little justice to even the broad outlines of the early reception of Strauss in the U.K.
As I noted, there is a second theme lurking in the quoted passage, namely Burnyeat’s interest in how civil servants are educated at university. This theme is developed by Burnyeat as follows in the NYRB essay:
The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are “the gentlemen” and “the philosopher.” “The gentlemen” come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it: they are not the wealthy as such, then, but those who have “had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner.” Strauss is scornful of mass education. “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” Such “gentlemen” are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by “the philosopher,” who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.
The name of this lesson is “the limits of politics.” Its content is that a just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about. In the 1960s this became: a just society is impossible. In either case the moral is that “the gentlemen” should rule conservatively, knowing that “the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.”
Burnyeat infers these claims from a number of Strauss’s writings in the 1950s and 60s which he has clearly read carefully. In fact, at the end of the second paragraph, Burnyeat adds in his note (after citing Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? p. 113), “where Strauss indicates that when this argument is applied to the present day, it yields his defense of liberal or constitutional democracy—i.e., modern democracy is justified, according to him, if and because it is aristocracy in disguise.”
Now, even friends of mass education can admit that modern democracy is an aristocracy in disguise. This is not a strange claim at all when we remember that traditionally ‘democracy’ was associated with what we now call ‘direct’ or ‘popular’/’plebiscite’ democracy, whereas our ‘liberal’ or ‘representative’ democracy was understood as aristocratic in form if only because it functionally preserves rule by the relatively few as Tocqueville intimates. This fact is a common complaint from the left, and, on the right, taken as a vindication of the sociological ‘elite’ school (associated with Mosca, Pareto, etc.). It is not limited to the latter, of course, because the claim can be found in the writing of Max Weber on UK/US party politics (which Strauss knew well.)
Of course, what matters is what kind of aristocracy modern liberal democracy is, and can be. And now we return, anew, to theme of the education of the governing elite(s) as Burnyeat put front and center in NYRB. That a liberal education can produce a ‘natural’ aristocracy is, in fact, staple of writings in what we may call ‘the conservative tradition’ as can be found in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The idea is given a famous articulation in the writings of Edmund Burke (1791) “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.” (I have put the passage from Burke in a note.)[6]
So, as summarized by Burnyeat, Strauss simply echoes a commonplace about how Burke is understood by post WWII conservatives. What’s distinctive then is that Strauss is presented as claiming that the ancient wisdom he discloses is that trying to bring about a fully just society would re-open the Hobbesian state of nature/war, that is, permanent chaos. It won’t surprise that Burnyeat denies this is the unanimous teaching of the ancients (although when I took a seminar with him about fifteen years later he came close to endorsing this himself as a reading of the Republic). For, the closing two paragraphs of his essay, drive this point home:
Plato’s Socrates attacks this very notion early in the Republic. No matter: Strauss will demonstrate that it is the only definition of justice from Book I which is “entirely preserved” in the remainder of the Republic. Plato’s Socrates argues passionately in the Gorgias for a revolutionary morality founded on the thesis that one should not return wrong for wrong. Strauss’s unwritten essay on Plato’s Gorgias would have summoned all his Maimonidean skills to show that Socrates does not mean what he says. Much more is at stake here than the correctness or otherwise of the common scholarly opinion that Xenophon, a military man, was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates. The real issue is Strauss’s ruthless determination to use these old books to “moderate” that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad, which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss was teaching and writing.”
That Xenophon was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates is, in the context of the debate with Strauss, a petitio principii. That’s compatible with the claim that Burnyeat is right about this. But it's worth noting that this is characteristic of analytic historiography. For example, in his early (1951) review of Strauss, Vlastos also describes Xenophon as having a “pedestrian mind.” (593)
Even so, that international justice between states is impossible is not a strange reading of the Republic (or the other ancients). Plato and Aristotle are not Kant, after all. (Plato may have thought that Kallipolis could have just relations with other Hellenic polities, but I see no reason he thought that this was enduringly possible with non-Greek barbarians.) And if we permit the anachronism by which it is phrased, it strikes me that Strauss is right that for the ancients civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners (even if many foreigners could be treated in pacific fashion and in accord with a supra-national moral norms). Part of Plato’s popularity (recall; and here) in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly due to the plausibility of reading him as a pan-hellenic nationalist. It doesn’t follow from this, of course, that for Socrates whatever justice is possible within the city has to be attenuated or imperfect. It is, however, peculiar that even if one rejects Strauss’ purported “great lesson” and if one grants that Kallipolis is, indeed, the ideal city one should treat the effort to bring it into being as anything more than a dangerous fantasy; and while I wouldn’t want to claim that a “just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about,” it is not odd to wish to moderate those that try knowing, as we do, the crimes of the Gulag or the Great Leap forward, if that's really what Strauss taught.
[1] “Leo Strauss September 20, 1899–October 18, 1973,” Political Theory 2 (1974), pp. 372–392, which Burnyeat commends, and Werner J. Dannhauser, “Leo Strauss: Becoming Naive Again,” The American Scholar 44 (1974–1975),
[2] Anderson, Perry. "The intransigent right at the end of the century." London Review of Books 14.18 (1992): 7-11. Reprinted in Anderson, Perry. Spectrum. Verso, 2005.
[3] Skinner, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in thef History of Ideas." History and theory 8.1 (1969): 3-53. (There is a huge literature on the debates between the Cambridge school and Straussianism.)
[4] John W. Yolton (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature." The Philosophical Review 67.4: 478.
[5] Buickerood, James G., and John P. Wright. "John William Yolton, 1921-2005." Proceedings and Addresses of The American Philosophical Association. American Philosophical Association, 2006.
[6] “A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted. It is formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths. To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenious art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.”
See also Kirk, Russell. "Burke and natural rights." The Review of Politics 13.4 (1951): 454.
Montblanc normally does quite a few special releases over the calendar year. Mostly, those releases are different designs of pen bodies.
In the recent time, however, Montblanc has also started to release special edition pens with speciality nibs, such as the MB 146 Calligraphy Flex nib – or now the MB 149 Calligraphy curved nib.
It is fantastic to see that companies such as Leonardo, Aurora, and now also Montblanc, bring back the variety of nibs that were commonplace back in the days – and that in the modern days we were only used to from specialty nib makers such as Sailor.
But let’s now have a look at what the Montblanc Diplomat 149 Calligraphy Curved nib is all about!
Before we hop into the review, I would like to take the opportunity to thank Appelboompennen for supporting the review of this pen. You can also buy the Montblanc 149 Calligraphy Curved Nib in their webshop (no affiliate – just a friendly pointer).
Check out the video-review below, which is as always preceded by some quick facts. Again, I hope the review is helpful and that you enjoy watching it!
Click on the photos to enlarge.
The post Video-Review: Montblanc 149 Calligraphy Curved Nib (Special Edition) appeared first on Scrively - note taking & writing.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
Perhaps because I recognize in myself a warmth toward Spinozism, but I am always inordinately pleased when I can recognize and act on the play of chance. After a raucous pub lecture to the members of student-club of the political science department (aptly named Machiavelli) in the Amsterdam red light district, I received Jan Patočka' Living in Problematicity -- a slim volume of essays (selected and translated by Eric Manton) -- as a gift with a touching inscription from a former student. I knew that Patočka (1907-1977) was a philosopher and a courageous co-founder of Charta 77. His clandestine discussion groups and his lectures at the under-ground university are legendary. I had never read anything by him, although his work is becoming increasingly accessible in English.
Yesterday, while in transit, I read "Platonism and Politics," which is a very short meditation on Bendas' La Trahison des clercs (1927; often translated as: The Treason of the Intellectuals); recall this post). Because in preparing a syllabus for a class on conservatism, I had stumbled on a 1944 note by T.S. Eliot engaging with Benda, I had just been musing about the use of Benda by contemporary intellectuals -- I tweeted this on june 4 (and no, Tweeting is not Thinking) -- so this post was born.
I don't mean to suggest I randomly muse about Benda. As regular readers know, I write in a philosophical tradition that feels entitled to be unlearned. And so in our controversies over 'public [facing] philosophy' and 'responsible speech' we end up repeating, over and over again, the same trite clichés without any sense of embarrassment. And this lack of shame is, of course, characteristic of a modern clerisy (in Benda's sense). Since I am a blogger, feel free to read this as self-indictment. Okay, so much for set up.
Now, for sociological reasons I do not fully understand, while Benda is wholly unknown inside my tradition, he does repeatedly get invoked in relatively serious public essays. With the help of Google, here's a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:
Mark Lilla December 7, 2021 Tablet Magazine (taken from his intro to a re-issue): Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in 20th-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority.... he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.
Antony Julius (reviewing Berman), May 14, 2010, The New York Time: The masterwork, however, is still Julien Benda’s “Treason of the Intellectuals.” This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line....For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds.
I listed these because each of these essays is worth reading as a window on their own polemical moment as well as a kind of an evolution of a meme/trope. What's notable here is the subtle shift in character among what Benda was supposedly inveighing against: political engagement by intellectuals; academic activists/political commitment; a betrayal of universal principles understood as disinterestedness; a betrayal of universal principles in the service of nationalism. I don't mean to suggest there is a mystery here: each essay has slightly different polemical contextual target(s) and so each also subtly rejigs Benda to their own local political-polemical ends (including, in the case of Lilla, criticizing Benda). That's what intellectuals do, after all, right? In general, on a left-right axis, the left-intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals serving power and moneyed-interests, while the right-leaning intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals who serve some (what we now call) social justice cause. All sides (correctly) invoke Benda when criticizing a nationalist-friendly intellectual, unless it's their own nation and they are prudently silent.
Now, what I like about Patočka's little essay (it’s shorter than some of my digressions) is that he inscribes Benda in a debate over the reception of Platonism (or "true philosophizing in general"), and to what degree what one might call the possibility of serving a certain (spiritual) kind of 'higher calling" (in the sense of Republic 487a to which Patočka appeals explicitly) associated with it (but rooted in philosophy), is still possible after Nietzsche (who goes unmentioned) and his death of God (which is intimated in various ways) in modern conditions. In context, it's clear that this Platonism is associated with an interesting mélange of Plato and Husserl. I quote from Manton's translation to give you a sense of what he has in mind:
The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one’s life. Thus Plato’s political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the “object” of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order.
Now, I am not interested here in trying to trace each of these claims back to Plato or, by contrast, to appeal to contemporary scholarship to show that any of this is only in a very attenuated sense to be found in Plato. Rather, let's stipulate with Patočka that this captures something of a familiar ideal. For Patočka, Benda's book raises two-fold question: the first is the Nietzschean one, is this ideal dead? The second-fold is, does the ideal “exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives?" Judging by the essays linked above, the answer to the first is: yes. And to the second, no. As Patočka suggests, Platonism so conceived "can only live where those vital hypothesis discussed above on which Platonism is built also exist."
Now Patočka is clear that his conception of Platonism is itself political in a higher sense (familiar, (recall) I hasten to add from Plato Republic, 592ab), although he gives a humanist spin on it (this is the debt to Husserl whom he quotes). Interestingly enough, for Patočka this entails that the impact of philosophy in life is "the permeation, gradually and usually distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness." This turns Platonism into a kind of Enlightenment project, despite the fact that philosophy itself is "a matter of the few." And, in fact, Patočka calls for a kind of 'new Enlightenment' ground in a new actualization of Platonism, while simultaneously criticizing what we might call the idol of collectivism. (I wouldn't be surprised if the essay were mined by biographers who see in it a prefiguration of his later courage under Stalinism with Czech characteristics.)
For, Patočka (who thinks Benda is confused on the proper task of intellectuals and the role of Platonism in this higher sense) what Benda get right (we might say) ‘formally’ is that proper myth, that is not falsehood but rather "an imaginative vestment of truth," is a useful instrument in the permeation of these concepts and for those (collectives) who do not wish to live a spiritual life. The main point of Patočka's essay is to call attention to the need for myths that express or manifest 'poetical, philosophical yearning.' The Spinozist in me understands this yearning, and Patočka grasps what makes Benda's diatribe so enduringly fascinating.
For Patočka the task of the clerisy is to use myths to help spread this new Enlightenment. This is not far removed (as I argue in this lecture) from how my friend José Benardete understood his task in his book on Infinity (although as always with José there are complications), so if you want an example of how this is supposed to work in the hands of a metaphysician go read it. I could stop here.
Interestingly and surprisingly enough, T.S. Eliot of all people, ridicules Benda: "Benda, as I remember, seemed to expect everybody to be a sort of Spinoza." In context, it's clear that Eliot's 'everybody' is 'every member of the clerisy.' Now, I lifted this sentence from the 1944 piece, which as a subtitle has ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy;" one of the questions Eliot asks in it is (unsurprisingly given that subtitle) what is the function of the clerisy. One of the proper functions of the intellectuals for him is to promote the right sort of change: "the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an influence for change." This leaves underspecified what change they promote, but it is at least sometimes compatible with Patočka's position.
In addition, according to Eliot it is, thus, inevitable that the clerisy ends up in conflict with the forces that defend the status quo: "To some extent, therefore, there is, and I think should be, a conflict between class and clerical elite." Eliot tacitly here presupposes that the ruling class is change averse. But even ruling classes can promote change if they think it will benefit them--this is something quite familiar in our own time; it does not follow we can always identify whether the clerisy is betraying its true vocation.
As I have hinted above, Eliot decouples the function of the clerisy from a higher calling. I don't mean to suggest he completely decouples it because for him "The clerisy can help to develop and modify [culture]; they have a part to play, but only a part, in its transmission." And presumably Eliot, who is no stranger to Platonism, does think that a culture might have a connection to a higher calling. In fact, when it does, then 'culture' just means an imaginative vestment of truth. Fair enough.
Now, Eliot recognizes a form of pluralism that Patočka finds difficult to accommodate (although it is compatible with his Platonism). For intellectuals share in being outcasts, and "are apt to share a discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they want to change them will be various and often completely opposed to each other." And while it is tempting to say that the opposition is merely over means (again compatible with Platonism), it is, of course, not impossible that the disagreement is also over ends which begins to look incompatible with Platonism if the unity of the virtues is broken as Eliot himself suggests in the remainder of his notes (and hard to disagree with in 1944).*
However, this all must seem rather quaint. Ours is not an age that wishes to gamble on a revitalized humanism. The transgender-wars take place when capital and the heirs of the once noble tradition of the radical philosophers are betting on transhumanism. Even the very idea of a human right, let alone a culture in the bildung sense assumed by Eliot is suspect. Talking about culture without naming the social sins on which it rests seems also a real betrayal of humanity. No high minded stance seems to be able to survive scrutiny.
But it is no better that the poetical, philosophical yearning(s) are met exclusively by hucksters, or worse. And if Platonism is wholly exhausted, what now? And while I dislike the word ‘problematicity,’ perhaps, if you follow me on this substack voyage, this is the question, if it is a single question, we must answer or the ‘problematic’ we must resolve.
*See especially his treatment "clerical small fry, we have what is called the intelligentsia...in Cairo and such places."
My friend Jenny Warner, who has died aged 87, was a speech therapist and one of the three founding members, in the mid-1970s, of the faculty in speech pathology and therapy at the University of Manchester. There she combined clinical practice with lecturing and writing academic papers and practical works.
Born in Kuala Lumpur in Malaya (now Malaysia), Jenny escaped the Japanese occupation of the country with her mother, Winifred (nee Herbertson), a secretary, at the age of six. After making their way to Singapore, they secured passage to Britain on the last evacuation ship to leave, in January 1942. Her father, Stanley Warner, who served in the RAF, rejoined the family in August of that year but was killed a few months later during a German bombing raid while he was a patient at the RAF officers’ hospital based at the Palace hotel in Torquay, Devon, in 1942.
Continue reading...While there is plenty of academics undergarment wadding over AI generative text (and please stop referring to it all as ChatGPT), I was first interested and still in the generation of images (a year ago Craiyon was the leading edge, now it looks like a sad nub of burnt sienna).
Get ready for everything to get upturned with Adobe Photoshop’s Generative Fill, now in beta. I spotted it and some jaw dropping examples in PetaPixel’s Photoshop’s New ‘Generative Fill’ Uses AI to Expand or Change Photos but was drawn in more by a followup post on So, Who Owns a Photo Expanded by Adobe Generative Fill? This gets into even more muddy, messy, and also interesting (time curse like?) waters.
That latter article has some really fabulous pieces of ?? Extended Album Covers found originally in the twitter stream of Alexander Dobrokotov. I’d post the tweets here for you to see, but twitter broke the capabilty to embed tweets.
The concept is rather DS106-ish a central image of an actual album cover is embedded into a much larger imagined scene (see the Petapixel post for the examples) where all the imagery around was created with this new Adobe Photoshop beta feature.
I have seen this many times with AI, you see these jaw dropping examples that imply someone just typed a phrase in a box, clicked the magic bean button, and it popped out. Most of the time, if you can find where the “making” of is shared, you will find it took hours of prompt bashing and more likely, extra post processing in regular Photoshop.
Hence why my attempts usually look awful (?)
Now I could just share say image (like the Katy Perry cover of her sleeping in soft material that turns out to be a giant cat) and say, this is cool! But I always want to try things myself. So I downloaded (overnight) the beta version of Photoshop.
The way it works is you use the crop tool to create space around a source image. This fills with just white. But then you select all that blank space along with an edge portion of the seed photo, and watch something emerge. In many ways it’s impressive.
I started with my iconic Felix photo, the one I took on his first days with me in 2016, the one I use often as an icon.
In Photoshop Beta, I enlarged the Canvas to the left a lot, and a little above, and let the magic go to work. Perhaps this is not the best example, since my truck in the background is blurred from depth of field effect.
Not quite magic.
That’s a rather awkward vehicle there. And since AI has no concept of a porch rail, it would likely extend those posts Felix is peeking through into the stratosphere.
I decided to try again, and added a prompt to the generative gizmo saying “Red truck towing a camper”
Well, that looks awkwarder too. But it generates something.
I took another stab, thinking how it might take on extending a wide landscape that is well known. This is tricky because if one knows something of Geology, they canyon to either side extends to a broad plateau.
I did one first where I went about 50% wider on each side
It certainly continues the pattern, and is not all that weird. You do get 3 variations, this one is about the same:
It’s odd, but not really too far from pseudo reality. I riffed off of this version, adding again another chunk of empty space on either side. Now its getting the geology pretty messed up and messy.
These are just quick plays, and there are also the other features in the mix to add and remove elements.
This definitely is going to change up a lot things for photographers and digital artist, and what is real and what is generated is getting so inter-tangled that thinking you can separate them is as wise as teetering off that canyon edge.
But getting back to the Petapixel leading headline, “So, Who Owns a Photo Expanded by Adobe Generative Fill?” oh my is ownership, copyright, and licensing going to get mashed up too. So all of those creative album cover expansions? It’s starting with copyrighted material. But the algorithmic extension, is that so far changed to raise a fair use flag? Heck, I have no idea.
At least if you start with an open license image, you stand on slightly less squishy ground.
I’m going back to my shed to tinker (that’s for Martin).
Featured Image: 100% free of AI!
On last week’s episode of the Intentional Teaching podcast, I talked with educators and authors James Lang and Michelle D. Miller about ways we might rethink our assignments and courses in light of new generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Since we situated that conversation in some other technological disruptions to teaching and learning, including the internet and Wikipedia, perhaps it was inevitable that one of us drew a comparison to the advent of handheld calculators in math classes.
Jim pointed out that we don’t just hand kindergartners calculators and expect them to do anything useful. We have to teach kids numeracy skills before they start using calculators so that they know what they’re doing with the calculators. In the same way, Jim argued, we shouldn’t have first-year composition students use ChatGPT to help them outline their essays since those students need to develop their own pre-writing and outlining skills. The chatbot might produce a sensible first draft, but it would also short-circuit the student’s learning. ChatGPT might be more appropriate for use by more experienced writers, who can use the tool to save time, just as a more experienced math student would use a calculator for efficiency.
I generally agree with this analysis, but I had a different kind of experience using calculators in school. When I learned calculus my senior year, we used graphing calculators regularly both in and out of class. My memories are admittedly a little hazy now, but I believe that there was something of a symbiotic relationship between learning the concepts of calculus and learning how to use a calculator to manage the calculations of calculus. For instance, we might try to come up with a polynomial that had certain roots or certain slope properties, then graph our function using the calculator to see if we were correct. The tool provided feedback on our math practice, while we also got better at using the tool.
Here’s another analogy: photography. I’m an amateur photographer. (Actually, I once got paid $75 to photograph an event, so technically I’m a professional photographer.) When I was learning photography, there was a lot of conceptual learning about light and depth of field and composition but also learning how to use my digital camera, what all the knobs and buttons did. As I experimented with taking pictures, my use of the camera helped sharpen my understanding of the relevant concepts of photography. And my better understanding of those concepts in turn informed the ways I used the knobs and buttons on the camera to take better photos.
Might AI tools like ChatGPT serve a similar role, at least for students with a certain level of foundational writing skills? It’s already quite easy to ask ChatGPT (or Bing or one of the other chatbots powered by large language models) to draft a piece of writing for you, and then to give it feedback or corrections to make. For an example, check out this post by John Warner in which he coaches ChatGPT to write a short story and then make it a better story. John is already an accomplished writer, but might a more novice writer use prompt refinement in this way to develop their own writing skills, much like I would use a bunch of different settings on my camera to take the same photo so I could better learn what those settings do?
All metaphors are wrong (to quote my colleague Nancy Chick), and none of the analogies I’ve laid out here are perfect. But I think there is some value in thinking about ChatGPT, etc., as similar to technologies like digital cameras or graphing calculators that we can use to learn skills and sharpen our craft as we learn to manipulate the tools.
While visiting the exhibition by the artist Xadalu Tupã Jekupé at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, one of the works caught my attention. It was a monitor on the floor. On the screen was a modification of the game Free Fire, where it was possible to follow a virtual killing taking place from the point of view of an indigenous character wearing a headdress. For a while I couldn’t look away. I remembered a conversation I had with Anthony, a Guaraní-Mbyá professor that works with the youth of his territory. At the time I was also a teacher, working with marginalized youth. I remember Anthony’s distressed words—he was concerned about the time and attention young people were putting into games like Free Fire, creating a situation very similar to the one I lived when I worked with teenagers in the outskirts of São Paulo.
It took a while for me to get rid of the profusion of shots, bodies, and feathers that were frantically intertwining in front of the monitor. I took a few steps away from the work when my partner, who was with me at the exhibition, called my name. “Did you see it?” he asked me, pointing at the monitor. “I saw the Free Fire….” Smiling from the corner of his mouth, he said, “No, you didn’t see it… it’s a trap!” I thought to myself, yes, I know, it’s a trap. It took me a few seconds to realize that the monitor was positioned inside a beautiful bamboo structure, a kind of hollow basket in the shape of a pyramid, resting on one of the edges on the floor, with the opposite edge suspended by an ingenious system of capture made of joined pieces of bamboo. It was an arapuca, a traditional trap set to capture those who let themselves be seduced by the offer placed inside. A trap that captured me without even having the opportunity to resist.
This text is an outline of a proposal for a feminist and decolonial strategy to be and remain working and producing techno-scientific knowledge within academic institutions. I present the trap as such a strategy, a kind of low-intensity guerrilla technique so that we, marked bodies, can establish alliances and move within structures that are essentially bourgeois, masculine, and Western. This strategy is especially important for those of us who research with other scientists, or who have science and technology as the main focus of our concerns. It allows us to experiment with ways of researching that are simultaneously capable of carrying out the necessary denouncements while also experimenting with possible ways of production of techno-scientific knowledge that interests us.
In The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding asks: “Is it possible to use for emancipatory ends sciences that are apparently so intimately involved in Western, bourgeois, and masculine projects?” (p. 9, 1986). In this way, Harding displaces the question of women in science from a concern with proportionality and representativeness and moves instead toward questioning the very structures of the production of techno-scientific knowledge. As a result of Harding’s provocations, Donna Haraway writes the article “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), a classic of feminist studies of science and technology. Even today, a few decades after the article was first written, the questions raised serve as support for us to elaborate our thoughts in a scenario that is still structurally very similar to the one Harding described—bourgeois, masculine, western.
In the last two decades, the composition of the higher education body in Brazil has been changing through struggles that resulted in affirmative public policies, implemented by leftist governments from 2003 onwards. Some of these actions were: the construction of universities in peripheral regions of the country; the establishment of quotas in public university entrance exams for people coming from the public education system, black people, and indigenous people; and the funding of programs for people from the working classes to access private higher education. I myself am the result of this process, a worker daughter of workers. With this never-experienced-before entry into higher education by a greater diversity of people than ever before, the resumption and transmutation of the issues raised by Harding and Haraway is a necessary and effervescent movement, so that our occupation of these spaces does not end up swallowing ourselves in our differences. The institution is a machine for shaping bodies and homogenizing possibilities of futures.
Something we inevitably end up asking ourselves as marginalized people is whether we should occupy these spaces. Stengers (2015) addresses this issue, defending our permanence in spaces of contradiction, including the academy, as a way not to resolve this contradiction once and for all, but to at least get to know the terrain through which we are forced to walk—and, who knows, build new alliances capable of establishing other trails. If we want to remain researchers, teaching and working within universities, we need strategies to make our permanence viable. This obviously includes a constant struggle for better material conditions, but that goes hand-in-hand with the need to remain honest with our differences—which is only possible with a radical change in the way science is produced. It is necessary to cultivate techniques of insistence that, on the one hand, protect us and, on the other hand, allow us to continue walking and facing the overwhelming monster we are facing. Knowing how to produce traps can be one of these techniques.
An arapuca, a traditional trap (image made by Clarissa Reche)
“The nature of the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped.” It is in this way that Stafford Beer (1974) summarizes one of the most interesting attributes of the trap: the cybernetic character between the object, who designed it, and what it is intended to capture. These three nodes are entangled in a feedback system that works like a game of mirrors where, when we look at any of the nodes (capture-trap-captive), we will inevitably find the other nodes. In this game of mirrors, we can see not only the relationship of nodes with each other, but also with the environments they compose. The trap therefore participates in complex fields of interactions.
Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1996) sought in African traps a tool to think about the tension between the piece of art, specifically Western, and the artifact, arising from the so-called “exotic” cultures. Gell argues that the possible conciliation between these poles lies precisely in thinking of both as traps, in an exercise of horizontality that, in a single movement, empties Western arts of their specificity, filling them with ethnicity. The anthropologist makes an exquisite description of the conceptual modes of operation of a trap.
For Gell, the trap is the knowledge of oneself and the other turned into an object. The trap is a functional model of the one who created it, replacing the presence of the one through a “sensory transduction” (p. 27, 1996). The capturer’s senses are replaced by a set of “sensors” attached to the trap, such as a rope or a stick that can simultaneously sense and act as triggers. In this sense, the trap is an automaton. But, at the same time, it is a model of what one wants to capture, since in order to function it needs to emulate and incorporate behaviors, desires, tendencies, functioning as “lethal parodies of the umwelt” (own world) of the captive.
In addition to this spatial dimension, the trap also has a temporal dimension whose structure is based on waiting. In this way, the trap incorporates a scenario of a dramatic nexus between the capturer-captive poles. Gell describes this waiting as a tragic theater, where the trap places the captor and the captive in a hierarchy. The metaphor would be that who sets the trap is God, or fate, and who falls into the trap is the human being in his tragedy. The task of creating traps would therefore be to experiment with controlling fate. However, if we take into account Amerindian conceptions of the trap, such as the Guarani-Mbya practice/thought, this relationship becomes more complex, since a prey is only captured in the trap if there is consent from its owners, who are non-human entities responsible for the animals. Here, the attempt to control fate slips through the bamboo stakes—the tragedy is shared between captor and captive.
From an Amerindian perspective, in particular Guaraní, the trap can be understood as a “memory card” (Caceres and Sales, 2019) capable of storing information that accounts for a profusion of knowledge such as: the behavior of the prey in its environment, modes of production of traps, cosmopolitical relationships involved in hunting, etc. But this potential for keeping memory has been gaining other contours with the increasing destruction of nature and traditional ways of life. With indigenous peoples without possession of their territories and abandonment in the face of deforestation and land grabbing that agribusiness and mining advance, hunting is no longer a possible reality. The maintenance of traps in this scenario becomes a form of resistance, a way of safeguarding what is possible and transmitting that memory to those who are growing up and will soon be responsible for the struggle.
Returning to the idea of thinking about the trap as a strategy to be and remain producing techno-scientific knowledge within an academic context, I would like to list the following characteristics that may be useful to us:
Acquiring the necessary knowledge to build a trap also helps us to know how to identify one when we come across it on our walk. Stengers points out how a moment of relative success, when you move from a position of contestation to a position of an interested party, is also a dangerous moment. For many of us who insist on working at the university, coming from classes historically far from that space, life becomes restricted, in an eternal non-belonging. On the one hand, it shows the impossibility of “integration” into the ideal body of those who produce technoscience—we have no way of doing that. On the other hand, we are haunted by a constant (self-)accusation of betrayal, and in fact something is lost from our previous relationship with “our own.” Faced with this impasse, Stengers proposes that we be able to “foresee that there will be tension” (p. 89, 2015), that is, share common knowledge and experiences that help identify and avoid predictable traps.
Image of an arapuca, a traditional trap (image by Clarissa Reche)
Some traps of the scientific knowledge production system are quite obvious. We come across well-set traps that straddle the path as we advance along our academic careers. We see the trap and look around. The alternatives are to abandon the trail or to stay in the same place. Since the food is just inside the trap, standing still means starving, or at best surviving in starvation. If we want to insist on the journey, we must voluntarily surrender ourselves to the cruel trap placed in our path, in the hope that even captive, though well fed, we may be able to retort before being devoured.
The list of traps is long, but I want to describe a specific type that is prostrating itself in front of me at this point in my journey: the trap of publishing in international academic journals. In Brazil, a researcher and/or scientist who wants to pursue a career within universities will necessarily find a scoring logic that allows, or not, their permanence and advancement to more prominent and better paid positions. As in other national systems of science and technology, research funding is linked to a good score, mainly arising from productivity and measured through, for example, number of publications and citations. An important characteristic in the case of Brazil, which differs from countries like the USA, is that funding for scientific research is mostly public, organized through state funding agencies. For this reason, most Brazilian academic journals are free, both for publication and for circulation.
In recent times, the internationalization of research has been a requirement of Brazilian funding agencies. In this scenario, publication in high-impact international journals has become a necessity. In some science and technology systems in other Latin American countries, this requirement is even tougher, with the acceptance of only articles published in journals indexed in repositories such as Web of Science and Scopus, both maintained by private entities seeking profits. The overwhelming majority of journals indexed in such repositories charge a lot of money for publication and access to the article. The amounts that researchers must pay to have their articles published can reach around R$ 20,000. For comparison purposes, the value of the minimum wage in Brazil is R$ 1,320 (about 15x less than the publication cost of the article).
Although most of the time the money to pay for such publications comes from the institutions, not being paid directly by the researchers, the effects produced by this logic of professional permanence are cruel. At the national level, it intensifies competition between researchers and research centers, who need to outperform each other in order to obtain funding. Internationally, such logic keeps the knowledge produced by the poorest countries in the corner, unable to circulate in large centers. This trap works like colonial shackles to which we often have to submit.
But the traps that we will find in our paths are not always so brazen and so painful. In fact, the most dangerous traps are precisely those that we don’t immediately notice and that offer us pleasure. When we are finally able to recognize our status as prey, we are so committed that we try at all costs to convince ourselves that it is better to become captive than to give up the delicious offer they make us. What we are offered is a biochemical comfort well adjusted to the “pharmacopornographic era” of Preciado (2008), which for many of us means a substantial distance from situations of physical suffering and the most varied humiliations, especially intellectual humiliations. In a scenario of growing public attention regarding the degradation of working conditions that researchers are facing, made explicit for example in a vertiginous decline in the mental health of workers who occupy laboratories around the world, this “pleasant” counterpart of working producing technoscientific knowledge that I mention in the last paragraph can only be understood from a class point of view—academic/intellectual work is essentially different from the overwhelming majority of jobs available to workers.
Money, prizes, publications, and recognition are some of the achievements that academic work brings and that activate these biochemical pleasures. Academic work offers comforts that many of us would not have if we had chosen other paths. An example is the possibility of traveling internationally. All the international trips I took were for my academic work. On these trips, we have the possibility of getting in touch with a dimension of cultural capital that was previously inaccessible. When we make our way back to our homeland, we are already transformed. In this movement, it is important to always plant your foot on the ground, exercise your memory, recognize the terrain to know where you are stepping, and always take very small steps. After all, many of the traps are hidden in the ground.
Image of an arapuca, a traditional trap (image by Clarissa Reche)
It took me a long time to understand why Isabelle Stenger’s proposal (2000) of “not hurting established feelings” resonated so much with my colleagues as a strategy to create alliances with scientists and engineers. In my naive rebelliousness, that phrase sounded like a conformist attitude. I wondered if, in exchange for maintaining a “good” relationship, we wouldn’t be giving up the best of what we have as social scientists—our critical capacity. In my master’s degree fieldwork with biohacker scientists, I was surrounded by people who, from within their disciplines, sought to produce science in more open and democratic ways. Maybe that’s why it took me a while to realize that a posture based only on confronting and denouncing the ills of technoscience is fruitless, as it produces an alienating and perverse result: it hides from us, people who research from the human sciences, our responsibility as co-inhabitants of this same space where the scientists we are denouncing.
Complaints are important, yes, and we have lists of them on the tip of our tongues. But Stengers, Haraway, and so many other feminists concerned with technoscience point to the importance of not stopping there. Recognizing our responsibility as co-inhabitants of the scientific knowledge production system is also learning to establish and maintain dialogues, however difficult they may be. And they are. Difficult, tiring, and frustrating. However, the possibility of establishing alliances around common knowledge is also a strategy to keep producing science from joy, as proposed by Stengers (2015) when claiming that the taste for thinking is only possible through encounters capable of increasing our power of understanding, action, and thinking. The trap can also be a bridge to establish such alliances without, at first, hurting established feelings.
The first time that the trap was presented to me as a possible tool for thought-action was when I participated with a group of friends in the speculative anthropology project called FICT, at the University of Osaka. In the group were artists and people from letters, history, and anthropology. The objective was to produce “artifacts” from different timelines, different possibilities created from a fictitious past event: the Black Death had killed many more people, and the European colonial enterprise of the 16th century had failed. Thinking about it was not only challenging, but also quite painful. We were living a pandemic ourselves, with a denialist government, and many people close to us were suffering. But beyond that, the starting point of the project struck us as somewhat violent. By proposing a non-colonial reality, we were forced to think of a world without us, people whose full-life identity comes precisely from the fact that we are daughters and sons of colonial violence.
We refuse to think of a world where we do not exist. The story of how science was established in Brazil is precisely the story of how the dominant classes—politically, economically and culturally—tried to deal with the “problem” of miscegenation. Our first scientists were renowned eugenicists. Their busts still rest in white peace on university campuses, and their names baptize streets and buildings throughout Brazil. Our starting point in the project was a rebellion against the suggested starting point, in an affirmation of our uncomfortable existence. We are the incarnate memory of the violence against the land, against the original peoples of our lands and those who were uprooted from the continent of Africa. We are the incarnate memory of (scientific) racism. But how to exist within a project that predicts our non-existence? How to be there, keep occupying space and communicate to those who hope that we don’t exist that yes, despite everything we are here?
It was Joana Cabral, an anthropologist who works with the Amazonian Wajãpi people, who proposed the trap as a way of occupying the crossroads we were at. Our issue was a communication issue. We needed to communicate the existence of something that shouldn’t exist in the cosmopolitics we were in, but that did exist. Something present but invisible. I believe that this thought was the trigger for Joana to remember the Amerindian traps, especially the trap to “catch” the caipora, an entity from Tupi-Guarani mythology, inhabitant of the forest and owner of all hunt, with whom hunters must negotiate to catch their prey. Such traps were described by Joana as beautiful pieces braided in straw, positioned along the dense forest in the places where caipora usually frequent. The capture system is quite simple: enchanted by the beauty of the piece, the caipora’s attention turns completely to the moths, and their curiosity to learn more about the braid makes them stay there, undoing the braids. Thus, caipora “waste time” in the trap, while people gain time to move through the forest more safely.
At the same time that it holds the caipora’s attention, the trap also communicates its existence to those who walk unaware. We finally managed to make our artifact, a kind of dream diary where we report receiving dream knowledge about how to manage having a party where the most different people can be at. Thus, we seek to face colonialism not as a historical period, but as an entity, a drive from which we will not be able to get rid of—just as we exist, the colonial impetus also exists, persists, and is alive among us. The making of the trap revealed to us that in order to be able to capture, we ourselves need to become aware of our diverse prey conditions.
But the perception of our prey condition cannot be paralyzing. Our malice can certainly enable us to escape from some traps set for us—but not all, never. My proposal is that we cultivate the necessary calm and attention to walk in more or less safe territory, but, at the same time that we perceive ourselves captured and entangled, we are also capable of designing and setting our own traps to make the issues that we formulate capable of going through the academic toughness. Traps capable of opening and sustaining impossible dialogues. What I propose is an insurgent counterattack, or counterspell, to stay with Stengers. It’s a kind of low-intensity direct action, a guerrilla strategy to keep producing scientific knowledge. And so that we can protect our vulnerabilities, remain with joy in the process. It is important to repeat: the trap is not only something to be avoided, but also to be produced. We need to take ownership of capture technologies, collectivize them, and scale them up.
Caceres, Rafael Rodrigues; Sales, Adriana Oliveira de. Memória e feitura de armadilhas Guaraní Ñandeva. II Seminário Internacional Etnologia Guarani: redes de conhecimento e colaborações, 2019.
Beer, Stafford. Designing freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1974.
Gell, Alfred. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” Journal of Material Culture, v. 1, p. 15-38, 1996.
Haraway, D. “Localized Knowledge: The Question of Science for Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (Autumn 1988): 575-599.
Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. New York: Cornell University, 1986.
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008..
Stengers, I. In Catastrophic Times Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
___________. The Invention of Modern Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
It's been about five weeks since I switched Digressions to Substack and last wrote an entry in my covid diary. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) It's time for an update on both. Also, some blog house-keeping at the end.
First, my new/replacement neurologist at the NHS long covid clinic in London was unhappy after listening to my narrative. Short version: much recovered by end of January; teaching went well in February/March, but have struggled since. Yes, I am doing much better since the last time one of his colleagues saw me (with apologies for canceling multiple appointments with me). But no, I shouldn't be taking naproxen so frequently at this stage in order to manage the effects of migraine.
The neurologist's concern was straightforward: I am not nipping the migraines in the bud, but rather masking symptoms. Bottom line, he wanted me to try out the treatment plan the long covid clinic had prescribed to me in June 2022 in order to get the covid induced migraines under control. These are primarily triggered whenever I am cognitively multitasking, that is, socializing, for any amount of time.
In addition, I have noticed an odd new symptom. It's a kind of tinnitus when I lie down to go to bed when I am fatigued. The low grade, but persistent noise 'sounds' like an air-conditioner, generator, or vacuum-cleaner in the distance. Luckily, it doesn’t prevent me from falling asleep because the simple meditation my sister taught me still works like a charm. After some testing with sound-meters and earplugs, I realized the sound is purely cognitive. I only 'hear' it at night when I go to bed, but again only when I am especially tired or migraine-y. (Upon reflection, I suspect I have had this symptom since last Fall and I hereby apologize to the Kimpton hotel in Cambridge in insisting on a room change because of the outside noise I heard.)
Problem is that the official June 2022 treatment plan involves rather serious meds, which were originally developed to treat high blood pressure, depression and/or epilepsy--all have serious (cognitive) side effects. I have not been especially eager to try any, especially if they prevent me from teaching, reading, and writing.
Now, a weird big glitch in the NHS is that the specialist generally does not send you home with the meds required (unless it falls under urgent care), and so I would need to go back with my treatment plan to my GP before I could start any of the treatments the neurologist prescribed. And at the moment any non-urgent appointment at my GP takes a lot of time to schedule. So by the time I met my NHS GP, I had devised an alternative plan.
As it happens when I first met my better half she suffered from awful, debilitating migraines that could last three or four days. But after a while she started a new treatment that has been very successful for her: Botox shots in the neck. Basically one poisons the muscles with Botox so that they can't reinforce a developing migraine with extra stress, and one cuts short the migraine cycle. In the NHS this is an approved treatment for migraine, but only after you try treatment with all the pills first. (Unfortunately, in Holland it's not an approved treatment of migraine so I can't get coverage there either.) Both the NHS neurologist and my GP warned me that if I skipped the pills I could never get reimbursed for the Botox shots, even if it worked. But the GP encouraged me to try it anyway, because he understood my apprehensions about the treatment plan.
So, about twelve days ago, I found myself in the most beautiful physician's office I have ever been in with one of the leading cosmetic eye surgeons of the UK (an old friend of my better half, who -- it was my birthday after all -- paid for my first treatment). fter going through the treatment with me, and ruling out some other medical issues, I got my first eight Botox shots at half dosage. (No, I didn't add a secret cosmetic treatment for eyes or chin!) The plan is to give it two to three weeks, and then, if necessary, add another dosage. If the treatment works, I would need the shots about two or three times a year.
After the first week of shots, I wasn't so sure. But in the second week I am seeing grounds for optimism. So, I'll report back later this Summer if the Botox shots have improved the quality of life structurally. It would be nice if it did because I start a full load of teaching in September. Before then, I am also key-noting this week in Utrecht and chairing a job search in the next few weeks so it would be nice not to live on Naproxen during this period. (I am not counting on that because I pulled a muscle in my back yesterday morning and I have had painful back spasms during the last 27 hrs! Hopefully, I can stand for my keynote on Thursday!)
So much for the Covid diaries update. As hinted in the previous paragraph, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. (This is the blog house-keeping.) Apologies for that in advance.
I want to close with sincere thanks to all the subscribers to my Substack. The good news is that since I switched to Substack, I seem to have doubled my readership, especially because a sizable chunk of my audience continues to read these posts at Typepad (where, for the time being, I re-post them a day later).
Unfortunately, less than 10% of my substack subscribers pays, so it's too early to contemplate a career switch or even reducing my professional appointment. I had been kind of hoping to blog my way to more structural sabbaticals as a way to manage my long covid on my own terms; but so far no cigar.
Going forward, I will experiment with giving my paying subscribers -- thank you, you are the best! -- more frequent, exclusive content during the Summer. (I have done that only once during the first month.) If you have any suggestions or requests, please don't be a stranger.
Either way, I am really enjoying the more intense engagement that Substack generates. I receive a lot more correspondence again about my near daily musings. Merci. And watch this space in June.
For many years now, I have been accused of “shaming” people for their sexual pastimes. This is in large part because of my criticisms of porn and the sex industry.
To be fair, I probably have written and said less than positive things about various kinks and fetishes, particularly of the violent nature. I’ve never been particularly shy about my view of men who need costumes, skits, creepy scenarios, or pornographic performances in order to get off. Your body is quite literally built to enjoy sex: just regular old penis in vagina sex. Now, of course, this “regular” sex is called “vanilla” in defense of the people who have conditioned their bodies and minds to need a bunch of bells and whistles just to do what nature intended, long before the invention of smart phones and Hentai. But requiring a silly costume or a near death experience for either you or the object of your ejaculation signals a problem to me.
While in the past porn was something you had to go out of your way to find, often in rather embarrassing ways — stealthily going into Red Hot Video after dark or purchasing a plastic-wrapped magazine from behind the counter at your local corner store — today, it is not only easily accessible, but unavoidable. You really can’t exist online without porn being pushed on you in one way or another — via porn bots in your comments or dms on social media, pop ups on torrent sites, or what is simply embedded into pop culture — music, movies, late night jokes, your fav Twitch streamers, etc.
It is far from taboo — rather, it is expected. Men will often tell women that any man who claims not to use porn is lying.
The overriding message is that porn is a normal — even healthy — part of men and boys’ lives. It is a long running joke in comedy films and locker rooms, but also something girls and young women expect to have to participate in. For the younger generations, “sending nudes” is part of dating, watching porn with your partner is recommended as a fun and sexy way to get in the mood, and performing pornographic scenarios in the bedroom is expected. For young women today, one’s social media feed is an opportunity to display one’s fuckability in exchange for validation from men and OnlyFans is viewed as little more than a side hustle.
Unfortunately, much of the fault lies with third wave feminism. Modern faux feminism embraced “sex work is work” as a mantra, insisting that porn and prostitution are just jobs “like any other.” Anyone who suggested these were not spaces of freedom, neutrality, or empowerment was guilty of “slut-shaming.”
The reality is, of course, that young women who get into the sex industry tend to get used up and spat out quickly, with little to show for it financially, but instead stuck with a lot of regret, often some trauma and additional mental health issues. The eternity of the internet becomes a lot more upsetting when there are videos of you at your most vulnerable out there for life. The lie told to young women by this industry-approved “feminism” is meant to empower them to feel proud of their choices but fails to tell them the truth: that some choices are harmful, even if you shroud them in a veneer of sexual liberation, and actual self-worth never comes from the superficial.
It isn’t, let’s be honest, sexually liberating to perform unpleasant, degrading, or painful sex acts with men who don’t care about you, that you would never engage in voluntarily. That’s someone else’s sex dream — not yours.
But while women often leave the sex industry with a heaping of shame, what of the consumer?
Men’s relationship to porn tends to leave out the woman factor. Odd, considering the whole point is meant to be the woman on the screen. But to the consumer, the question of how she got there, how she is being treated on set, whether or not she is in fact enjoying herself, or what mental, financial, or emotional state got her there is erased from path towards the main event: orgasm.
Considering the messages we are bombarded with — that porn is normal, a harmless fantasy, and a healthy release for men who can’t access the real thing — you would think men and boys (as I think we all know, most young men start watching at around 11 years old these days — sometimes earlier) would have let that old-fashioned shame go. But they haven’t.
If you talk to men about their porn use, as I do quite often, most will tell you that the minute they orgasm, the sense of shame rolls in. It is often, I’m told, quite nauseating — a sense of disgust with oneself: “What have I just done, I am an animal” kind of thing.
You might chalk this up to shame around sex, as some attempt to, but that doesn’t make much sense. It’s not as though after having sex with one’s partner you feel a sense of regret. In fact, sex is (if done properly) the thing that bonds us and brings us closer in an intimate relationship or marriage.
I posed a question about porn-related shame in my Substack chat yesterday, curious to see what insight men might offer, asking:
“I want to hear from you (men, in particular): why do men feel ashamed of their porn use? Porn has been fully mainstreamed and normalized–we are told it’s nothing more than a harmless fantasy, perfectly natural, and even a healthy outlet that reduces male sexual violence (this is a myth, for the record), yet I hear over and over again that men and boys feel shame after masturbating to porn. Why? Be honest.”
A number of responses stood out. One man named Des told me that “A lot of men have some pretty confused attitudes towards arousal,” pointing out that “Boys can become aroused by the weirdest of things… including things that are taboo or otherwise ‘wrong.’” He went on to say:
“The thing that is especially personal to me, because I wasn’t especially ashamed of my interest in porn when I was younger, is the insidious, creeping increase in the ‘extremity’ of pornographic content. It took an experience of being traumatised by some video I stumbled upon in my search for something “new” to make me stop and withdraw from porn altogether. I used this experience as an opportunity to learn about the problems porn presents and to work through the residual feeling of shock and disgust from the awful video I saw.”
This made a lot of sense to me, considering what male friends have told me about their sense of shame around porn use. Essentially, the nature of internet porn is that it drags you deeper and deeper down evermore extreme and gruesome holes. You are fed videos you might not be seeking out, but masturbate to anyway, leaving you with the knowledge you just jerked off to “daddy-daughter” porn, “step-brother gives unsuspecting sister a surprise,” or some facial abuse video, wherein a young woman (and hopefully not an actual girl) is choked and violated until she is brutalized and crying.
If you didn’t feel shame around watching this kind of thing there would be something seriously wrong with you. Yet this is mainstream porn now. It’s not some niche fantasy. It is what will pop up should you end up on Pornhub crusing for something “normal,” whatever that means…
A man named Jacob said:
“Shame serves a social function. I don’t think you do feel shame unless you anticipate/experience social alienation. The excuses and justifications are just defenses of people who are hiding feelings of insecurity. Porn itself is marketed as ‘naughty,’ ‘taboo,’ and ‘barely legal.’ That it’s shameful/anti-social is part of the engine that drives its compulsive use. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think if it really was normalized/mainstreamed to the point someone didn’t feel ashamed, i.e., still felt socially supported and connected, it would just become apparent that it’s not very satisfying or fulfilling. You’re punching a chemical reward button in the brain of a social animal that’s supposed to bring you closer to other humans. You need to feel disconnected first before porn provides any relief. It’s like the Rat City experiment. I don’t think men in really connected relationships would even want to use porn.”
I found this quite insightful. Sex is designed to bond us: our bodies release oxytocin, which is called the love hormone for a reason, bonding mothers with babies and couples with one another. If your body is producing oxytocin on account of watching porn, you’re bonding with a person who isn’t there, isn’t bonding with you, and in a way isn’t even real. You aren’t actually connecting with anyone. Instead, you’re training your brain to crave and seek out the scenarios and imagery you see in porn, which are often abusive or immoral, but also leave you lacking. You have the orgasm but the bond with another human doesn’t follow, so you end up feeling alone, empty, and isolated when you are meant to be feeling the opposite.
What follows is the addiction cycle, wherein you continue to seek the oxytocin, so use porn, get the rush, but then feel alone, empty, ashamed so must seek it out again.
In this context, the shame makes sense: you’re doing a thing that is meant to make you feel good but doesn’t in the long term, only for a blip. It’s never satisfying the thing it’s meant to satisfy.
But of course it isn’t only single, lonely men who use porn. Men with partners are avid users as well.
The fact so many women normalize this as nothing more than a harmless fantasy that has nothing to do with them has always baffled and troubled me. To start, those are real women and girls in the videos your partner is consuming — women and girls who are possibly being trafficked, abused, or raped. They are at very least mentally unwell, and are probably suffering physical consequences from what happens on porn sets as well. One would think you wouldn’t want your partner supporting the abuse and exploitation of women and girls, at least.
But beyond that, why on earth would you be ok with your partner “bonding” sexually with other women?? This doesn’t strike me as any different than cheating. Sure, you won’t end up with an STD, but your partner is engaging in sex acts with strange women regardless. Have a boundary. Come on. You deserve it.
Men in relationships, no matter how much they’ve told themselves porn is their right (After all, she’s not up for it all the time — what is he supposed to do while she’s tired or grouchy or out of town? Suffer?) must know, deep down, that jacking off to 18-year-olds in the basement is not a respectful or ethical act within a relationship. And because you’re probably hiding your porn use from your partner, knowing she won’t be happy about it, even if she is playing out-of-sight-out-of-mind, the porn use functions as an ever-growing mountain of lies, creating guilt — an emotion akin to shame. You might be hurting her, the person you claim to love; you’re hurting your own mental health and ability to connect sexually and otherwise in your relationship; plus you’re actually hurting a whole bunch of women and girls you don’t even know on the other side of the screen.
Not a great recipe for self-respect!
It’s almost like mantras can’t alter biology and people’s inherent sense of ethics. And it’s almost like these industries and ideologies are going out of their way to mindfuck you into being an unhealthy, unethical person so you’ll keep coming back.
Don’t let em.
The post There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention appeared first on Feminist Current.
Prison Agriculture Lab directors Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca discuss the ubiquity of carceral agriculture in the United States, its structuring logics of racial capitalism, and possibilities for abolitionist food futures.
The post Mapping the Unfree Labor of Prison Agriculture: A Conversation with Carrie Chennault and Josh Sbicca appeared first on Edge Effects.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I’ve spent the last few years working on a book about graduate writing. That process is now drawing to a close: Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be published in June! Between now and then, I’m going to use this space to share brief excerpts. In addition to my discussion of principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing, the book has short ‘asides’ that allowed me to engage with topics outside that main narrative. Over the next four months, I’ll share my favourites of those asides. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!
Breaking Points
Managing paragraph breaks sometimes works easily. You find that each topic fits comfortably within a single paragraph, with obvious breaking points. Other times, however, inserting a paragraph break can feel awkward. Here’s a familiar scenario: a paragraph that is too long to be a single paragraph but that has too much unity to naturally become more than one paragraph. If you choose to stick with one paragraph, you would likely need to lessen the detail to emphasize the unity. A second option, one that frequently makes the most sense, would be to create more than one paragraph. But if the first paragraph sets up the topic, can you break up the exploration of that topic into two or more paragraphs? This question is one that I’m asked all the time! The answer is that you definitely can, provided you manage the opening of the subsequent paragraph—or paragraphs—effectively. The beginning of the next paragraph would need to announce how it acts as a continuation of the larger topic. By echoing the language used in the first topic sentence, you can alert the reader that you are offering a continuation of that topic in the new paragraph. Finding breaking points can be challenging, but as long as you offer the reader the topic sentences that they need, you have the option of spreading your ‘single topic’ over as many paragraphs as you want.
Thriving as a Graduate Writer will be available in early June from the University of Michigan Press. To pre-order your copy, visit the book page. Order online and save 30% with discount code UMS23!
rcayley
Book Cover showing title: Thriving as a Graduate Writer
FreshRSS 
