Notes

One hot wet night in June it rained so heavily a voice said Go and I went. It was me. Everything went dark and introverted; smashed tulips, roadkill, cardboard gone to pulp. Life ran coursing madly through it all and promised to mix me in with it, make me soluble and synchronous with its most minute and seismic shudder.

Psychoanalysis begins with a mind in flight, a mind that cannot take the measure of its own pain.

Weil discusses the emotional and psychological violence one suffers if forced to submit to force even when not physically hurt, holding up the slave and the supplicant as examples. She goes on to say force is dangerous not just to the victim, but to whoever controls it, as it intoxicates, partly by numbing the senses of reason and pity. Force thus can turn even its possessor into a thing – an unthinking automaton driven by rage or lust.

Please recognize that the very types of remote access that universities now mandate for classrooms and conferences have been denied to disabled people.  Please also recognize that disabled people have long engaged in refining methods for remote access to protests, classrooms, doctor’s offices, public meetings, and other events. Mention this in your classes so that students know they are benefitting from crip technology and praxis. Commit to accessible teaching because it is crip technoscience and disabled ingenuity that has made remote participation possible.

One of those moments when he wanted fiercely to reach out and touch someone else. To be with them in their peopleness. But he didn’t know how. Except in the way of the desperate woman digging at his wrist or in the way of the kitchen manager wanting to behead him, which was to say, violence, hurt. Pain was a bridge between people. He knew this. It was why in the last moments before Darla left him, he felt so close to her. Because she had caused him pain. Her eyes had softened and she’d looked down at him, and he’d felt it between them, alive and fierce. He had never felt so close to her as when she had hurt him. It made him hard again, to imagine it, the idea of it.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

This is not the practice that seeks the “long term”, unless that can be reached through a series of incremental “what nexts”.

This relatively new fad (for a lack of a better word) is catching on in urban India, and it appears that practitioners of veganism share the ugly traits of food shaming and evangelism as certain other fundamentalist groups in the country.

Reducing an entire people to a few conveniently chosen activities, it has, in effect, declared that only violent deaths in clashes with security forces will be considered abnormal. To understand Kashmir today, however, it is important to understand how everyday life is being lived.

why does anyone need permission from Harvard to make a movie about Emily Dickinson? The answer involves theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature.

She had to forget all affectional need. She had to pretend she never napped.

certain wage and hour regulations don’t apply only if:    (A) that the worker is free from the control and direction of the hirer in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of such work and in fact;    (B) that the worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business;    and (C) that the worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.

By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo.

...the money was then laundered through as many as 12 bitcoin addresses before reaching a wallet maintained by the Iranians, according to an analysis by bitcoin tracing firm Chainalysis at our request.

It is important to understand that nowhere does ‘love of animals’ figure in this behaviour. That comes later, as an afterthought, when caste prejudice is challenged.