君子不器
“Theories about the origin of copacetic abound, but the facts about the word’s history are scant: it appears to have arisen in African-American slang in the southern U.S., possibly as early as the 1880s, with earliest known evidence of it in print dating only to 1919. Beyond that, we have only speculation. One theory is…
Systems fiction: a novel way to think about the present “At their best, when systems novels veer right into science fiction, they can hold infinity itself in their purview – and none come closer to that than Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson’s seminal Mars trilogy opens with humanity’s efforts to colonise our cosmic neighbour in Red…
slatternly Adjective Appropriate to or characteristic of a slattern. –> slattern (n.) I. (derogatory) A slut, a sexually promiscuous woman. II. (dated) A dirty and untidy woman.
Slavoj Žižek interview: “Trump created a crack in the liberal centrist hegemony” “What of Žižek’s own health? During appearances last year his face was semi-paralysed, leading to fears that he had suffered a stroke. This was, he explains, the result of nerve inflammation, before raising his T-shirt to show me where doctors removed a cancerous…
I’ve recently gotten back into Taiwan’s history of shipwrecks, savages, and pirates, perhaps because I’ve lately also been reading a lot of Conan novellas. The most famous shipwreck involved the Rover, an American merchant vessel that ran aground near Eluanbi (southern tip of island) in 1867. The ship didn’t quite sink after hitting a coral reef…
your professor at the end of semester…
Renaissance Humanism “Beauty was believed to afford at least some glimpse of a transcendental existence. This goes far to explain the humanist cult of beauty and makes plain that humanism was, above everything else, fundamentally an aesthetic movement. Human experience, man himself, tended to become the practical measure of all things. The…