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Following up on our live episode, we further ponder the 1869 novel, revisiting the "problem of evil" arguments and how the various brothers cope with an imperfect world.
Plus, we relate Dostoevsky's views of freedom and ethics to those of other existentialists.
The post Ep. 317: Character Philosophies in Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.Guest post by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Molly Wallace, and Ned Dobos
Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid since the Russian invasion began one year ago. The international consensus seems to be that supporting Ukraine means financing its war effort. But a few dissenting voices have emerged of late, more ambivalent about the prudence—and ethics—of the current policy. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a former advisor to the US Secretary of Defence, has warned that the choice of cure could turn out to be worse than the disease.
At least 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have already perished in the war. Thousands more have been injured, and millions have been displaced. MacGregor’s primary concern is that the bleeding will continue for as long as the fighting does. Russian forces advance, Ukrainian forces resist with violence, Russia responds with counter-violence, and the bodies continue to pile up. The Ukrainian state retains its sovereignty, but eventually we get to a point where, to quote MacGregor, “There are no longer any Ukrainians left!” This is hyperbole, of course, but that should not distract from the valid point MacGregor is making. States exist for the sake of their citizens, not the other way around. Therefore, if a given method of defending the state is causing its citizens to be killed or to flee en masse, that is a compelling reason to explore alternatives.
What is often overlooked about armed resistance is that, when it “works,” it does so by producing a mental rather than physical effect. Wars are won by breaking the enemy’s will to fight, not necessarily its ability to fight. Victory usually comes, if it comes, long before there are no enemy soldiers left; it comes when those soldiers who remain and/or their leaders are no longer motivated to fight, or in more extreme cases, when the soldiers are so demoralized that the leaders can no longer mount enough coercive pressure to make them continue fighting. Everything hinges on how the remaining members of the opponent group react to the destruction of their compatriots’ lives and their military or civilian infrastructure, not on the destruction itself.
Once we realize that the condition of surrender is not physical but psychological, it is only natural to wonder: Is there no way to change minds except through violence against bodies?
Nonviolent resistance is an alternative strategy for breaking the will of the aggressor. Protests and fraternization can engage the moral sentiments of the aggressor’s functionaries and citizenry, leading to a loss of popular support. Boycotts and blockades can alter the material cost-benefit equation of the aggression, so that it is no longer worth it. And nonviolent sabotage can directly diminish the aggressor’s capabilities by physically disabling military, transportation, or communications infrastructure.
Ukrainians have been engaged in various forms of such nonviolent resistance since the Russian invasion began. It took more visible forms at first—ordinary civilians demonstrating in Ukrainian colors or standing between Russian tanks and their towns—and has since shifted to less visible, more dispersed methods in response to Russian occupation and repression—graffiti, non-cooperation with Russian authorities, alternative communication, and governance institutions. There were even overtures to the Russian public and soldiers, eliciting responses from significant scientists, clerics, and journalists.
Unlike the militarized resistance, however, the nonviolent resistance has received no significant material support from the international community. Consider for example the Ukrainian government’s early offer of money and amnesty to Russian deserters, which circulated via SMS messages containing instructions on how and where to surrender and collect payment. According to The Times (UK), there was some initial uptake—a Russian soldier was photographed surrendering himself and his tank to Ukrainian forces in March, in exchange for cash and an offer of permanent resettlement in Ukraine. But consider what might have been.
Suppose the international community were to double the Ukrainian government’s offer of $50k per deserting soldier, as economist Bryan Caplan suggested. Desertion is a risky proposition, but for twice the payoff perhaps many more Russian soldiers might have considered the risk worth taking. Additionally, countries besides Ukraine could have offered Russian deserters amnesty and even citizenship within their own borders. This way deserters would need not worry about Russia eventually winning the war, occupying Ukraine, ousting its government, and taking its vengeance against them. The recent involvement of Wagner Group mercenaries on the Russian side only underscores the utility of economic incentives to alter the motivation of soldiers.
Of course, we cannot say for certain that a nonviolent approach will work. But we cannot say for certain that violence will work, either. So far it hasn’t.
If there are nonviolent ways to break Russia’s will to fight, why the reluctance to exploit them?
One possible reason is the widespread belief that nonviolence, although it can be effective, is not nearly as effective as military force. But this belief is more an a priori assumption than a rational conclusion based on an impartial appraisal of the evidence. Scientific research suggests that, during 1900–2006, nonviolent resistance outperformed violent resistance by a ratio of almost 2:1.
Maybe our desire to see wrongdoers not simply thwarted but punished explains the preference for violence here. Perhaps our sense of justice recoils at the thought of paying Russian combatants to desert, instead of making them suffer for what they have done—though this stance ignores the coercion and manipulation that Putin’s government has used against its own armed forces.
In any case, surely what matters most in all this is the welfare of the Ukrainian people. The reality is that massively financing the war effort has produced a state of attrition with no end in sight. Persisting with the current policy regardless, expecting things to change while the casualties mount, is a combination of delusion and depravity. We should now turn the spotlight onto those Ukrainians who—despite the loud calls for military weaponry—have been steadily engaged in various forms of nonviolent resistance and defense since the invasion. Their actions deserve more support—both moral and material—than the international community has so far provided.
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos is a reader (associate professor) in politics and international relations at Loughborough University, and his publications are listed on his website. Ned Dobos is a senior lecturer in international and political studies at UNSW Canberra, and author of Ethics, Security, and the War Machine: The True Cost of the Military. Molly Wallace is adjunct assistant professor in conflict resolution at Portland State University, senior contributing editor at the Peace Science Digest, and author of Security without Weapons: Rethinking Violence, Nonviolent Action, and Civilian Protection. The three of them are the editors of the new Journal of Pacifism and Nonviolence.
On Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1880 existentialist novel, focusing mostly on the "Rebellion" and "Grand Inquisitor" chapters.
How can we reconcile ourselves to the existence of evil and suffering? The character Ivan argues that we can't, that children's suffering can't be justified by any alleged Divine Plan. Dostoevsky's answer to this challenge is practical, concrete love and service to others, but does this really address or merely sidestep Ivan's challenge?
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The post Ep. 316: Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”: PEL Live in NYC (Part One) first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.'Challenge runs' are a strange and simultaneously irresistible thing. Take a suitably open-ended and pliable game, like Dark Souls, Minecraft or Fallout, impose a set of arbitrary restrictions on yourself, and watch the hilarity ensue. Whether it's beating Dark Souls with only a hundred arrows and no other weapons or trying to have sex with every possible partner in New Vegas as quickly as possible, there's nothing like challenge runs to give you a different perspective on these beloved games and a real appreciation for all these interlocking systems. — Read the rest
There's a new op-ed in The New York Times from Noam Chomsky and two of his academic colleagues — Dr. Ian Roberts, a linguistics professor at University of Cambridge, and Dr. Jeffrey Watumull, a philosopher who is also the director of artificial intelligence at a tech company. — Read the rest
By Timothy Sisk
The row between International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over potential Russian and Belarussian athlete participation at Paris 2024 exposes the Achilles’ Heel of the Olympic Games: the peace-promising celebrations are inescapably ensnared in nation-state power politics.
The IOC announced on January 25 a proposal to facilitate participation in the 2024 Olympic Games for individual athletes from Russia (and close ally Belarus) individually and neutrally in the Paris games. The statement reversed an IOC Executive Board decision from February 28, 2022, to impose more sweeping participation sanctions on Russia following the Ukraine invasion.
The International Paralympic Committee announced on January 23 that it would “follow” the IOC decision for the paralympic events, with President Andrew Parsons noting that “We wish to reiterate that we hope and pray that the conflict comes to an end, that no more lives are taken, and that we can run sports and politics separately.” Parsons gave a rousing denunciation of the Ukraine invasion from the podium in his opening-ceremonies speech as the Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv, demanding “dialogue and diplomacy, not war and hate.”
The potential of Russian athletes participating at the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris while the horrors and war crimes unleashed by Russia in Ukraine and documented by a United Nations independent commission continue to unfold would constitute, Zelensky said, “a manifestation of violence.” Addressing a February 10 meeting of 35 foreign ministers convened to consider a boycott if Russians were to appear in the Olympic arena, he said, “If the Olympic sports were killings and missile strikes, then you know which national team would occupy the first place.” Reversing her earlier stance, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said she supports Zelensky’s call and journeyed to Kyiv on February 9 in solidarity.
Olympic powerhouses including the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand together with Nordic and Baltic states are drawing a line in the beach-volleyball sand against Russian and Belarussian participation at Paris. Some want to allow for a “dissident team” from these countries to be formed.
In a slope-side appearance at the World Alpine Skiing Championships in Courchevel on February 12, Bach defended the IOC’s position: “No, history will show who is doing more for peace.”
The IOC’s approach to addressing the thorny question of Russian participation in the 2024 Games is similar to the sporting world’s response to the sprawling Russian state-sponsored doping scandal and cover-up when it hosted the 2014 winter games in Sochi. In December 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency slapped a set of four-year sanctions on Russia, including banning Russian teams from Olympic-related events, barring use of its flag and anthem, and imposing diplomatic and other sanctions. Athletes could participate but could not represent Russia as such, but rather the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC).
No worries for Russia, however, as the ROC and individual athletes easily evaded the athlete-representation sanctions. The uniforms of the Russian athletes at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games were fashion-forward, black splashed with the colors of the Russian flag. Nancy Armour writes in USA Today Sports that in Tokyo 2020 (which happened in 2021, delayed by the pandemic), 45 of the Russians’ 71 medals were won by members of the Russian Army’s Central Sports Club, according to the Ukrainian foreign ministry. Russian gymnast Ivan Kuliak was slapped by the International Gymnastics Union with a year-long ban for “shocking behavior” for sporting on his chest the invasion-related “Z” symbol on the podium standing next to a Ukrainian athlete (Kuliak won bronze; the Ukrainian, Illia Kovtun, won gold).
Despite rules against political speech, athletes are increasingly turning to tattoos, nail polish, hairstyles, and other clever non-verbal ways to communicate patriotism while staying just inside the non-political appearance rules of the IOC and the sport federations. Symbols are amorphous and consistently changing, so the IOC wages a Sisyphean struggle to contain political speech within the Olympic arena. In the run-up to Tokyo 2020, following the recommendations of the IOC’s Athletes Commission, the Executive Board reformulated its Rule 50.2 code on athlete political speech to allow more personal political speech outside its venues, ostensibly to prevent future “Black Power”-type salutes from the podium as courageously seen in the 1968 Mexico City games.
The IOC appears to see national de-identification as a way to cope with its Achilles’ Heel vulnerability to power politics. It touts the idea of a modern-day Olympic Truce similar to that found in the ancient Greek Olympics, on which the modern spectacle is at best loosely based; the truce allowed athletes to travel to the festivals unimpeded.
The IOC and sport federation bodies need the Russia participation question to be resolved soon, as qualifying events for Paris 2024 are in motion around the world. But the row continues. The Olympic Council of Asia has apparently invited Russian and Belarussian gymnastics and wrestling athletes to qualify through its auspices, while two United Nations special rapporteurs have backed the IOC approach on the basis of athlete human rights.
Russia’s February 2022 invasion rendered any Olympic truce a scrap of paper. The Kremlin unleashed the deadly operation on Kyiv just days before the Opening Ceremonies of the 2022 Beijing Paralympic Winter Games. In the year since, a reported 228 Ukrainian athletes and coaches have been killed.
In waging war while the Olympic flame burns, Russia is a serial offender: its military invaded Georgia in the period between the 2008 Olympic and paralympic events, and then seized the Crimean peninsula in 2014, in a similar window between these events.
The close association of the Olympic Games with the power politics of nation-states may well explain why the IOC, its president, nor any global sports body or figure have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in its 121-year history roughly commensurate with the Olympics. (The Prize was won by an Olympic medalist in 1959—UK diplomat Philip Noel-Baker—but not for his Olympic achievement; the Norwegian Nobel Committee cited his disarmament efforts).
The power-politics Achilles’ Heel of the Olympics disables its potential for furthering international peace. For how sport might contribute to peace, one must look elsewhere in youth-based development and peacebuilding programs, in the public good work of celebrity and everyday athletes, coaches, and humanitarian organizations, or in the Olympic Refugee Team which debuted in Rio 2016 that allows athletes displaced abroad to participate.
Beyond the Olympic Refugee Team, it is time for any athlete as an individual to have a path to qualifying for the Olympic Games with no broader representation of national identity beyond legal citizenship. Such a step might begin to free the Olympics from its disabling ensnarement in the power politics of nation-states and begin to give meaning to the right of individuals to participate in global sport outside of truce-destroying nation-states.
“Love the earth and sun and the animals,” Walt Whitman wrote in his timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life — advice anchored, like his poetry, in that all-enveloping totality of goodwill that makes life worth living, advice at the heart of which is the act of unselfing; poetry largely inspired by the prose of Emerson, who had written of the “secret sympathy which connects men to all the animals, and to all the inanimate world around him.”
A quarter century after Leaves of Grass, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) took up this bright urgency in his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (public library | public domain) — one of the great moral masterworks in the history of literature.
Dostoyevsky — who felt deeply the throes of personal love — contours the largest meaning of love:
Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!
In our era of ecological collapse, as we reckon with what it means to pay reparations to our home planet, the next passage rings with especial poignancy, painting the antidote to the indifference that got us where we are:
My young brother asked even the birds to forgive him. It may sound absurd, but it is right none the less, for everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but, then, it would be easier for the birds, and for the child, and for every animal if you were yourself more pleasant than you are now. Everything is like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds, too, consumed by a universal love, as though in ecstasy, and ask that they, too, should forgive your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.
Complement with Shelley’s prescient case for animal rights and Christopher Hitchens on the lesser appreciated moral of Orwell’s Animal Farm, then revisit Dostoyevsky, just after his death sentence was repealed, on the meaning of life.
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A compilation of links and a video to incisive analyses of ChatGPT and what it means for the future.
The post Thinking About ChatGPT and the Future — Where Are We On AI’s Development Curve? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Enlarge / The Milky Way's Galactic Center and Jupiter (brightest spot at center top) are seen from the countryside near the small town of Rebolledo, Department of Florida, Uruguay in August 2020. (credit: Mariana Suarez/Getty Images)
Humans are naturally afraid of the dark. We sometimes imagine monsters under the bed and walk faster down unlit streets at night. To conquer our fears, we may leave a night light on to scare away the monsters and a light over the porch to deter break-ins.
Yet, in huddling for safety under our pools of light, we have lost our connection to the night sky. Star counts by public awareness campaign Globe at Night revealed that, between 2011 and 2022, the world’s night sky more than doubled in artificial brightness. Yet local interventions can create meaningful change.
Light pollution is cutting us off from one of nature’s greatest wonders, harming wildlife and blocking research that could help fight climate change. Stars are more than pretty glimmers in the night sky. They have shaped the mythology of every human civilization. They guide birds on their astonishing migratory journeys. And now we need to do our bit to prevent light pollution so stars can be part of our future.
I wrote the first sentences that appear in Wolfish almost ten years ago, during the summer of 2013. I was about to be a senior in college, and I was doing my best to blink away the pending maw of where-to-go, of what-comes-next.
I had left my family in Oregon to attend a college in Maine. It was there that I learned who Joan Didion was, and about how it had taken her living in New York City to turn her gaze back home. “I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs . . . and wrote myself a California river,” Didion later said about Run River. Her words seemed like a decent writing prompt: to write about the place I had left, a place I was not sure I would ever live again. I remember sitting beneath the peeling wallpaper of my summer sublet, listening to the rumble of the tenant below, a man who, we later learned, was breeding pythons. Oregon, I wrote at the top of a new document. A place, like so many others, where white settlers had killed all the wolves. A place, as I was researching for my Environmental Studies thesis, where wolves were coming back.
“Visit someplace you have ‘roots’ and it is easy to encounter the landscape as a strata of story,” I write in Wolfish. Beneath the crust of one’s lived, sensory experience sits the fossilized lore of family arrival. The thickest part, that bedrock of environmental and social history, underlies everything but is too rarely glimpsed. The best writers on this subject dirty their fingernails as they move between the layers. I am interested in place because I am provoked by the experience of being a body in the current of time. What does it mean to be me, here, now? One node in an ecosystem of not only species but stories, mythologies of belonging and fear and love. My favorite writing about place moves kaleidoscopically between art and science, past and present, humans and non-humans, internal and external lives. The author’s relationship with place is not always the explicit subject of the following books—nor is it in Wolfish—but it’s a thread that runs through the pages. A stitch that sews both self and world into being.
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Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala
Deraniyagala’s memoir is one of the most haunting books I’ve ever read, about the author’s unfathomable grief of surviving Sri Lanka’s 2004 tsunami while losing her husband, children and parents. I’ve returned again and again to the book for how lyrically Deraniyagala writes emotion into landscape, calling attention to the ways we project ourselves into the natural world, and vice versa. “I spurn its paltry picture-postcardness,” she writes at one point about Sri Lanka, where she was born. “Those beaches and bays are too pretty and tame to stand up to my pain, to hold it, even a little.” How to write about an ocean full of beauty, which has taken so much beauty from you? It is both “our killer” and a place of sunset calm, a sea coated in “crushed crimson glass.”
The Second Body, by Daisy Hildyard
In this book-length essay, Hildyard posits that we have two bodies: one contained by skin, the other the sprawl of one’s biological life as it overlaps with other species. “Your body is not inviolable,” she writes. “Your body is infecting the world—you leak.” She strives to understand this ‘second body’ by probing how humans define and interact with animal life, interviewing both a Yorkshire butcher and a criminologist who speaks to silver foxes kept as pets. This book put language to feelings I’d sensed but never been able to articulate, redefining the ways I think about intersections of human and non-human lives.
Small Bodies of Water, by Nina Mingya Powles
Powles’ mother was born in Borneo, where the author learned to swim, but Powles herself was born in New Zealand, and grew up partially in China, then moved to London. Moving between modes of memoir, art criticism, and nature writing, Small Bodies of Water is like swimming through a dream populated with the crystalline detail of both “the Atlas moth with white eyes on its wings” and a viral Twitter clip of “flame being whipped into spirals by the wind.” She writes beautifully about migration and belonging and girlhood, and as a writer, I felt particularly attuned to how carefully she pins her world to the page: “Our language for colours shifts according to our own experiences and memories: the blue of a giant Borneo butterfly’s wings pinned in a glass case; the yellow at the centre of a custard tart.”
Cold Pastoral, by Rebecca Dunham
Weaving elegy, lyric, documentary, and investigation, this poetry collection holds at its center the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, confronting the question of how to witness a world that is both natural and unnatural, simultaneously mangled and tended by our touch. After the explosion, workers jump off the rig into a “sea stirred to wildfire,” while miles away, in her own yard, “lilies / startle [the] garden pink / and gold.”
Bright Unbearable Reality, by Anna Badkhen
I bought this book on the perfection of its cover alone, then swiftly fell for the roaming logic of Badkhen’s essays, which unspool themes of communion and human migration, often while the author herself is on the road, in Ethiopia or Oklahoma or Chihuahua City. “The travel I witness often happens under duress,” she writes. “I have spent my life documenting the world’s iniquities, and my own panopticon of brokenness comprises genocide and mass starvation, loved ones I have lost to war, friends’ children who died of preventable diseases.” So much heartache in these pages, but I was persistently buoyed by the tenderness she brings to the world and its inhabitants. Even a pronghorn on the horizon, Badkhen tells us, is related to a giraffe.
In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, by Etel Adnan
Made up of lyrical vignettes, this genre-crossing memoir is testament to Adnan’s transcultural and nomadic self, as the text moves between Lebanon, France, Greece, Syria, and the U.S. Her translingual research and progressive activism underlie her observations about self and world. “I reside in cafes: they are my real homes,” she writes. “In Beirut my favorite one has been destroyed. In Paris, Café de Flore is regularly invaded by tourists.” I’m perhaps most compelled by how she writes about rootlessness: “feeling at ease, or rather identifying with drafts of air, dispersing dry leaves and balloons, taking taxis just because they were staring at me.”
Groundglass: An Essay, by Kathryn Savage
Full disclosure: because I overlapped with Savage in my MFA program, I’ve been admiring this hybrid project and her lyrical research process for years, but this book would have jumped off the shelf at me regardless. “Could there be something humbling and revolutionary in understanding myself as a site of contamination?” writes Savage. It’s a book about illness and grief and motherhood and U.S. Superfund sites (they appear like “confetti flecks” on the map), but also, implicitly, about the act of trying to understand pollution while, “Upstairs, Henry laughs, playing video games.” The book made me think not only of the porousness between earth and self, but between elegy and ode.
White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
“When I felt myself shredded, I used to wade into Lake Washington…The land put me back together,” writes Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe indigenous to the region. She now lives in Ohio, where “the land and I talk like strangers,” and tensions around place animate this hypnotic memoir. “I love living in Ohio, I love my forever house, but my missing of Seattle feels almost violent inside of me sometimes, and that is probably the real heartbreak the book is about,” Washuta said in an interview. Moving from the colonial history of Columbia River land treaties to Twin Peaks and the Oregon Trail II video game, Washuta makes visible that which is too often unseen: the modes by which place is created, inherited, metabolized.
River, by Esther Kinsky
Translated from German by Iain Galbraith, Kinsky’s novel constellates the life of a woman who, for unknown reasons, moves outside London near the River Lea (“small…populated by swans”), reminiscing about other rivers from her past while she goes for long solitary walks. The novel moves essayistically, which is to say, like a river, “constantly brushing with the city and with the tales told along its banks,” ebbing with ecological observation and memory.
Borealis, by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
An expansive collage encompassing soundtracks, flashbacks to past lovers, conceptual art, and snippets from nature documentaries and overheard dialogues, Borealis is a constellation of observations about queer relationships, blackness, and Sabatini Sloan’s life in a small Alaskan town. The animating pulse of the book could be the quote Sabatini Sloan includes by Renee Gladman: “You had to think about where you were in a defined space and what your purpose was for being there.”
Of course, you’ll also want to scoop up a copy of Erica Berry’s Wolfish—preorders are like gifts to your future self <3
— The Eds.
“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”
So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.
As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
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Marlon M. Bailey, a professor of African and African American studies and of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, was granted tenure. Before coming to Washington University, Dr. Bailey taught at Arizona State University and Indiana University. He is the author of Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013).
Professor Bailey is a graduate of Olivet College in Michigan, where he majored in theatre and speech education. He holds a master of fine arts degree in theatre performance from West Virginia University and a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in African American studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Salome Brooks has been appointed clinical professor, chair, and program director of the department of physical therapy at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. She was the founding program director and professor of the doctor of physical therapy program at Gordon College in Massachusetts. Earlier, Dr. Brooks served as associate professor and assistant professor of physical therapy at Springfield College in Massachusetts.
Dr. Brooks is a graduate of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, where she majored in physical therapy. She holds an MBA from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, a master’s degree in motor control and education from Columbia University, and a doctorate in educational leadership and policy studies from Southern Connecticut State University.
Arnetta Villela-Smith was named co-chair of the ethnic studies department at Skyline Community College in San Bruno, California. For the past six years, she had been teaching ethnic studies with an emphasis on Africana studies, queer and gender studies, and media studies at Fullerton College in Orange County, California.
Villela-Smith earned a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies and a master’s degree in ethnic studies at San Francisco State University.
Valentine's Day is nigh and social activist Skylar Munday aka Femmmeow has humorously altered vintage valentines for the occasion. For those with delicate sensibilities, these are not the valentines for you. But if sass is your love language, head to her Instagram to see the whole collection. — Read the rest
Brooklyn- and San Francisco-based interdisciplinary design studio Office of Tangible Space recently completed the global headquarter office of ScienceIO, a healthcare AI platform that transforms medical text into data that can help improve patient care. The new interiors are bright, airy, and inviting, thanks to its material palette of oak, stone, and lime wash. Several distinctive features, including custom white wire grid room dividers and custom furnishings, set the office parts from similar project types.
While there’s no shortage of natural light in this office, OTS created custom standing desks that feature a curved armature that holds a pendant lamp. This allows the desk to be raised or lowered without affecting the height or rewiring of the lamp in case the desk needs to be moved. This hybrid desk typology frees the user from the restraints of typical desk solutions and offers flexibility and mobility while working.
The wire room dividers help to designate zones within the open layout of the office without completely blocking off the rooms, while also adding spatial and visual interest in a minimalistic way.
A variety of minimalist pendant fixtures can be found throughout the office. Some add a bold impact with their size or color, others fade from the ceiling as to avoid drawing the eyes up towards the convoluted maze of piping and duct vents.
Lush greenery and wood furnishings add natural textures and tones to the mostly white office. In the conference room, a calming accent wall painted in a grassy lime wash repeats the zen-like theme.
Project Team of Michael Yarinsky, Kelley Perumbeti, Zoë Mowat.
Photos by Charlie Schuck.
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