Happy birthday to Georges Bataille, connoisseur of Eros, born on September 10, 1897, a simpler time he took it upon himself to complicate. Actually, to call him an erotic connoisseur grossly understates what so many readers find, uh, gross about him. Suffice it to say his work revels in varieties of sexual expression that remain taboo today; a given Bataille text presents you with a veritable…
If “no one is above the law,” that means the law is above all of us. It means that the law - any law, whatever law happens to be on the books - is more valuable than our dearest desires, more righteous than our most honorable aspirations, more important than our most deep-seated sense of right and wrong. This way of thinking prizes group conformity over personal responsibility. It is…
Nearly 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment, as a flood of research on animal cognition collides with debates over how various species ought to be treated. “The declaration says there is “strong scientific support” that birds and mammals have…
Fires on large-scale animal farms, or factory farms, are surprisingly common. Over the last decade, at least 6.5 million farmed animals, mostly chickens, perished in barn fires in the US, according to Washington, DC-based nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute (AWI). The fires are part of a broader pattern of mass casualty events on factory farms, where 99 percent of America’s meat, dairy, and…
For decades, programs providing tax breaks and incentives to a few high-profile black entrepreneurs have sucked all the air out of policy conversations addressing racial economic inequality. These dialogues focused on upper-middle-class black entrepreneurs obscure the plight of everyday black folks living in segregated areas. They ignore poor and working-class people, who need direct investment…
Polygyny is unusual, but that does not necessarily make it abusive. The conditions that facilitate abuse - poverty, isolation, patriarchal family structures - are not unique to Mormon fundamentalist communities. Neither sexual nor religious difference make abuse any more or less unlikely to occur. Under the Banner of Heaven and its pulp nonfiction ilk attempt to bring stories of abuse to light,…
The interviews I conducted with EVD (Ebola virus disease) patients, survivors, and their close contacts [in West Africa] provide different ways of understanding the vocabulary employed by epidemiologists to describe Ebola virus transmission. For example, after discussing the concept of “superspreader” with a number of people affected by the outbreak, not one agreed using the term to describe…
Recognizing, and making restitution for, the harm done, primarily to the Palestinian people but also to others … involves a major moral challenge to the international community, and particularly to the West, which bears a grave responsibility for helping to engender this conflict. Moreover, it has become clear in recent years that this is an issue that deeply moves major elements of international…
Of more than five hundred Arab villages in the territory of what became the state of Israel, by the end of 1948 over four hundred had been conquered by either pre-state Zionist militias (such as the Hagana, the Palmach, the Irgun, and the Lehi), or the Israeli army into which the militias were later incorporated, their populations were driven out or fled in terror, their land was confiscated, and…
Before the Second World War, non-human primates were already the subject of international western interest, with research stations and conservation areas fostered by France, Belgium, Russia, Germany, and the United States. Literally and figuratively, primate studies were a colonial affair, in which knowledge of the living and dead bodies of monkeys and apes was part of the system of unequal…
When Blau wrote his pioneering work [in 1898] , it was still customary to begin a study on magic - if one chose to write one at all - by apologizing for the choice of such an “unseemly” topic and for dealing with “superstitious” and “irrational” practices. Moreover, both before and after his time, any study on Jewish magic was written within the framework of…
If the eighteenth-century Swedish “father” of modern biological classification, Linnaeus, is cited at all by twentieth-century scientists, he is noted for placing human beings in a taxonomic order of nature with other animals, i.e., for taking a large step away from Christian assumptions. … But there is quite another way to see Linnaeus’s activity as the…
Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or “retro” games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they’re liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix ’s now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by…
Why am I particularly happy about the “end” of “anti-Semitism?” Because, as far as I know, it is the only example of a hater actually inventing the term for that hatred. In 1879, the German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet with a title that translates as “The Victory of the Jewish Spirit Over the Germanic Spirit.” He used the term Semitismus…
Allow me to be blunt: It is a waste of time to respond to this issue [of gentrification] by transforming the socioeconomic phenomenon into a rhetorical weapon that progressively loses its sting the more it’s used. Gentrification is not an abstract moral failing - a kind of transplant’s original sin - or an imported aesthetic worked into the fabric of a neighborhood. It is a result of…
Burning Man has countercultural roots and, once upon a time, it was a celebration of creativity and a counterpoint to mindless consumerism. Over the past few years, however, it has become massively commodified and started attracting some of the worst people on earth. Nowadays, it is an excuse for influencers and Silicon Valley types to take a bunch of drugs and party in the desert while pretending…
According to data published by Communities Count, a resource offered by Public Health-Seattle & King County, nearly a third of Black Seattleites over the age of 18 experience food insecurity. By partnering with local food banks, Black-led mutual aid networks and other community groups, the collective [Small Axe Farm] distributes the food it grows to those most in need. … Beyond that, Small…
A 1949 Supreme Court decision known as Joy Silk … stated that an employer had to voluntarily recognize and bargain with a majority of workers who wanted a union, and could only contest the unionization if it had “good faith doubt” about the union’s majority status. Joy Silk was abandoned in 1969 in favor of giving companies more leverage in the unionization process. But…
There is a long history in Phoenix of raids on sex workers. In 2014, the city faced national attention for prostitution stings in which hundreds of sex workers were rounded up and brought to Bethany Bible Church in Uptown to - as one investigation put it at the time - “save their souls.” The raids occurred under Project ROSE (Reaching Out to the Sexually Exploited), a collaboration…
As a teenager in Monsey, New York, [Devorah] Schwartz taught voice and dance at a local religious girls’ performance school. … When Schwartz started posting her songs to Instagram - with a disclaimer, “for women and girls only” - it was then everything shifted. At first she received pushback from community members. “People were like, ‘What are you doing?…