Thanks to Mother Jones for the image of George Takei.
In the Mother Jones interview with George Takei he gives a fascinating insight into the role of future-Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren in Japanese Internment and the strategic historical silencing of the internments.
GT: Yes, for America it’s a shameful experience—embarrassing—and for some non-Japanese Americans, it’s something they don’t like to talk about. For example the attorney general of California at that time was very ambitious, he wanted to become governor. He saw that the single most popular issue was “getting rid of the Japs,” and he used this to get elected. After two terms he went on to become Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. His name was Earl Warren—a so-called liberal justice. He was prodded and challenged by Japanese Americans throughout his career. He only spoke about it when he was near the end of his life. That’s one reason why our history books are rather mute.
I don’t know anything about robotics, but I’m easily entertained. Despite the warning about math, this performance by robot-guru Katy Levinson is stunning. Enjoy this little jump in your brain and have a cocktail while watching.
Kiese Laymon is currently an Associate Professor of English and the co-director of Africana Studies at Vassar College. This essay was originally published on his blog, Cold Drank, and was republished with permission. It is an excerpt from Laymon’s forthcoming book, On Parole: An Autobiographical Antidote to Post-Blackness. Laymon is also the author of the forthcoming novel, Long Division, which will be released in early 2013.
I’ve had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I’ve helped many folks say yes to life but I’ve definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun.
The college decides that two individual fraternity members, Shonda and I will be put on disciplinary probation for using “racially insensitive language” and the two fraternities involved get their party privileges taken away for a semester. If there was racially insensitive language Shonda and I could have used to make those boys feel like we felt, we would have never stepped to them in the first place.
Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.
I just finished a nice essay from Bernadette Murphy about riding a motorcycle. It’s a great piece of writing. At the heart is an encouragement to take risks and to follow your desires. I’m not going to get a motorcycle, but I am going to do more stuff.
But what about when we voluntarily choose to do things that scare us? Even little things? That’s different. When we voluntarily wrestle with the boogieman of fear, we gain skills and self-knowledge that steel us for the rest of life – those soul-numbing, bone-crushing times when we have no say in how much hardship we can take, how long we can last, how strong at our core we might be. Nothing so strengthens our resolve as having a regular, intimate encounter with the fear that tries to stifle us, that tells us we’re not smart enough, or young enough, or pretty enough, or strong enough.
When we’ve made peace with our fears and have taken risks at our own volition, we learn the most powerful bit of self-knowledge possible: that we have what it takes. Joy often hides in the very things we’re afraid of, and if we can move past fear, we can see how much more there is to life.
I like the blog the Bike Snob. I ride a bicycle a couple times a week and I’m a snob, so it fits. The Bike Snob is heavy on witty trash talking. One of his favorite techniques is to make something ridiculous up, for instance imagining the septuagenarian founder of the Paris Review, George Plimpton riding around on an ugly Trek Y-frame.
Anyway, when my friend (I do actually have a friend) forwarded me the Paris Review post, my first thought was, “So by some extraordinary coincidence did George Plimpton actually ride a Y-Foil?” Then I wondered, “Maybe I didn’t make up the quote after all and I just think I did because it seems like something I’d come up with.” Finally though, it became clear that somehow the current editor of The Paris Review must have come across my bullshit quote and accepted it as fact. Furthermore, now that it’s actually been published on their website, everyone else will accept it as fact as well, and thanks to a certain popular search engine poor George Plimpton will be forever associated with one of the ugliest and Fredliest bicycles ever made.
It really makes you think about the complex relationship between reality and absurdity. Take religion for example. Sometime back in the Iron Age some wiseass probably made a joke about milk and meat, and now thousands of years later Jews need to have two dishwashers.
I’m feeling this little essay in the Atlantic on the history of pants. Turns out bicycles, horse riding and new rights for women were partially to blame for the development of this constricting fabric!
What all these examples suggest is that technological systems — cavalry, bicycling — sometimes require massive alterations in a society’s culture before they can truly become functional. And once it’s locked in, the cultural solution (pants) to an era’s big problem can be more durable than the activity (horse-mounted combat) that prompted it.
This is the University of Maryland’s Gamera II, a human-powered helicopter breaking a world record for human-powered flight.
Yep human -powered.
It makes me want to quit my job and start building my own Max-o-copter.
Of course yesterday while women scientists were helping to make the Gamera II fly for the extra couple of seconds it takes to break the world record, the European commission decided to unveil their “science: it’s a girl thing” campaign. I won’t insult you with a link, but it is a stunningly sexist take on why women might be interested in science. Pink clothes, music videos and lip gloss.
s.e. Smith has the insightful analysis of this video over at Tiger Beatdown:
This patronising, pathetic campaign in which science was swaddled in pink sparkles and packaged as something girls can totally do was ridiculous and self-defeating. The video focused entirely on fashion and cosmetics, and the organisation’s site was littered with pinkness and more cosmetics promotion, even though the actual profiles of real women scientists on the site focus on topics like veterinary virology and food security, all of which are fascinating and interesting and might attract interest from young women who would be totally turned off by the offensive framing, and thus are unlikely to see them.
Young women and girls do not in fact need everything to be wrapped in pink in order to be interested in it, nor do they need to see highly traditionalised performances of femininity to believe that something is ‘for them.’ In fact, for girls thinking about science, such displays could be a turnoff; maybe they aren’t interested in performing femininity, or they aren’t conventionally attractive, or, hey, they’re actually smart and independent enough to care about science regardless as to what scientists look like and what they wear in the damn lab, because they’re interested in the research, not the clothes.
In contrast to the human-powered copter, this misstep seems particularly noxious. Rather than simply including women in science projects, mentoring women, and encouraging all students to be inquisitive about the world around them, the desire to condescend helps to protect the sciences as the realms of sexism.
Humans are pretty awesome animals and when we get thinking creatively, wonderful stuff emerges. Cheers to those who believe that everyone is an intellectual. Cheers to those who trust and like women. Cheers to those who build flying machines without oil. And cheers to Zombie Marie Curie who told us all about this years ago . . .
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Life of refinement 