Some links

May 24, 2021

Just taking this one day at a time.  

Hey--I read Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now this weekend, and I found it very thought-provoking.  It's a brief read--you can probably finish it in about two hours--but gives you lots of things to think about. (Also, Lanier is a very effective writer; I learned some good stuff just by watching how he did things.)  Check it out!

 

Also, some links:

Nice overview of the most recent findings about “world happiness.”  The findings are interesting, but for me the whole idea of the report is equally thought-provoking, both in terms of its ambitions, and in terms of the difficulties of finding acceptable metrics.

 

How did humans first populate the Americas?  Maybe by traveling across an archipelago of now-disappeared islands in the Bering Strait.

 

I think this is a really good article, I hope that I will read it again, about how politics polarizes and creates enmities.

 

This is a pretty rich and deep engagement with a new biography of Edward Said, but also a missed opportunity of an engagement, because this review disappointingly focuses on the immediate politics of Said, which are important but I think his less lasting scholarship, which was also political but in a wider and deeper sense.  This guy has very little time for thinking about Said on beginnings, on representation, on the relationship between cultural capital and imperial hegemony, and on late style.  The most we get is an (admittedly interesting) comparison with Sontag.  Maybe a disappointing missed opportunity.

 

Be well, everyone.  Get outside!