Even feminist writers seem to react somewhat more harshly to women who disagree with them than to men. The men are sexist doofs. The women are traitors with terrible motives and worse morals.Since I’m a soft-libertarian squish, the beauty is that I get these things from both sides–many more from progressives, to be sure, but enough from the other side to know that it’s very much a bipartisan vice. And I’m hardly alone; name any female op-ed writer or politician, and I guarantee she gets the kind of cricisim that will make your eyes bleed. And that’s just the overt stuff–the covert stuff is probably more harmful.
It seems to be some sort of universal that women who make forceful political arguments garner a particular sort of vitriolic reaction. 150 years since the feminist movement really got going, it’s still the case that women doing “male things” get seen very differently from men–and not just by men, but also by women, as studies have repeatedly shown. Men who take charge in a business situation are forceful and competent; men who argue passionately for their political views are warriors. Women who do the same thing are … well, a word that I try not to use, whether or not I’m writing for a family blog.
Lord of the Rings demography in infographics. If you’re into that kind of thing.
Most people don’t appreciate the beauty and aesthetics in science. Consider mathematics. There are infinitely many theorems “out there” that a mathematician can devote him or herself to solving, but only a tiny fraction of them are interesting, surprising, elegant, gorgeous, awe-inspiring. These latter judgments aren’t themselves part of mathematics. Rather, it requires the mathematician to have an aesthetic opinion – it is through these choices of which theorems to try to prove that the mathematician becomes artist, just as the artist must select only certain stimuli from an infinity of stimuli to throw down on paper or in a score.And this applies to science just as well. There are infinitely many science “problems” I could be working on, but one has to remind oneself that not all of them are equally interesting, important, cool, kick-ass, stunning, lovely, etc. Most problems are disasters in this aesthetic sense, and so one keeps digging for the shiny gems, the ones worth spending a couple years or more trying to crack.
Yet another photo-essay, this one on the history of the London Underground
A young lion sleeps, indifferent to the thunderstorm rolling in behind him; from a collection of wildlife photographs of the year
From a photo essay on the disappearing old neighborhoods of Shanghai
The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm. On 22 acres of it, beginning in 2003, researchers set up three plots: one replicated the typical Midwestern cycle of planting corn one year and then soybeans the next, along with its routine mix of chemicals. On another, they planted a three-year cycle that included oats; the third plot added a four-year cycle and alfalfa. The longer rotations also integrated the raising of livestock, whose manure was used as fertilizer.The results were stunning: The longer rotations produced better yields of both corn and soy, reduced the need for nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides by up to 88 percent, reduced the amounts of toxins in groundwater 200-fold and didn’t reduce profits by a single cent.
In short, there was only upside — and no downside at all — associated with the longer rotations. There was an increase in labor costs, but remember that profits were stable. So this is a matter of paying people for their knowledge and smart work instead of paying chemical companies for poisons. And it’s a high-stakes game; according to the Environmental Protection Agency, about five billion pounds of pesticidesare used each year in the United States.
For expert writers like Bellow, Woolf, Carter and Nabokov, excess, somewhat paradoxically, is of the essence – so that excess might not even be the correct term after all. Life, they seem to say, is rarely transparent, and therefore neither are their sentences. More than this, their sentences do not merely reflect reality in any passive or apathetic sense, but actively work to create their own multiple realities. This is not to conflate their styles. They are fiercely individualistic writers. Excess serves very different functions for each of them, whether as an expression of wonder, adaptability, individuality, free will; or as a means of self-fashioning; even as a survival tactic. But whatever it embodies or performs, the sentence in their hands is expansive rather than constrictive. They demonstrate to us, again and again, that sentences are made up of multiple units – from the clause to the phrase to the individual word to the punctuation mark – and that each of these units can be its own little world, its own site of possibility. When the units are made to work in unison, the sentence becomes a powerful space of transformation and particularity that transcends any straightforward declarative utterance.
Above all else, language should be generous and liberating, and these writers remind us of the pure pleasure to be found in the free play and musicality of words. Their sentences sing rather than grumble or shout, and we are all the richer for them.
At last, having been (always attended by the cat) all over the house and having seen the whole stock of miscellaneous lumber, which was certainly curious, we came into the back part of the shop. Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands.“What are you doing here?” asked my guardian.
“Trying to learn myself to read and write,” said Krook.
“And how do you get on?”
“Slow. Bad,” returned the old man impatiently. “It’s hard at my time of life.”
“It would be easier to be taught by some one,” said my guardian.
“Aye, but they might teach me wrong!” returned the old man with a wonderfully suspicious flash of his eye. “I don’t know what I may have lost by not being learned afore. I wouldn’t like to lose anything by being learned wrong now.”
“Wrong?” said my guardian with his good-humoured smile. “Who do you suppose would teach you wrong?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Jarndyce of Bleak House!” replied the old man, turning up his spectacles on his forehead and rubbing his hands. “I don’t suppose as anybody would, but I’d rather trust my own self than another!”