Wonderstricken

you come here with your eurocentric standards of beauty and mock our faces and our bodies. you come here with your narrow-minded beliefs about masculinity and misgender and belittle our men. you come here with your ignorance and group hundreds of proud cultures with rich histories far surpassing your own into one shakily-defined entity, simply to suit your self-centered purposes.

and then there are some of you who come here with your fetishization and believe us to be submissive and exotic, suitable for your twisted fantasies. you come here with your “yellow fever” and loudly profess your desire to sleep with us, as if we should be throwing ourselves at you upon hearing this. you come here with your “white man’s burden” - or perhaps i should say, in these modern times, the “western man’s burden” - and proclaim our women to be oppressed, in need of a savior. (you may think you’re not being racist. please think again.)

no one will tell you to stop when you commit microaggressions against asians. we’ve been raised to be quiet, humble, polite, to think for the greater good instead of for ourselves. we’ve been taught not to “rock the boat”. the “angry black woman” stereotype? in our “model minority” attitude, we’ve come to think ourselves above that behavior. (i’m sorry.) but we as a community need to change that now, because this can’t go on any longer. we can’t simply accept our second-class status - favored, but not equal. 

our eyes that are so often mocked are the eyes of soldier-kings that ruled over vast domains while europe was still terrorized by uncivilized savages. our men were emperors and scholars, warriors and poets, long before the renaissance and the enlightenment. our women were empresses, priestesses, goddesses even, when elsewhere women were being burned as witches. our cultures had third genders and fluid sexualities, centuries if not millennia before such “liberal” thinking was no longer taboo in the west.

So that’s cool and everything, but maybe some of you would be interested to know why this is a significant find? Beyond just its record-setting bigness.

Since Einstein, physicists have accepted something called the Cosmological Principle, which states that the universe looks the same everywhere if you view it on a large enough scale. You might find some weird shit over here, and some other freaky shit over there, but if you pull back the camera far enough, you’ll find that same weird and/or freaky shit cropping up over and over again in a fairly regular distribution. This is because the universe is (probably) infinite in size and (we are pretty darn sure) has, and has always had, the same forces acting on it everywhere.

So why is this new LQG so radical? (It stands for ‘Large Quasar Group,’ btw, not ‘Light Quasar Group.’)

Well, let’s try to comprehend the scale we’re dealing with. A ‘megaparsec,’ written Mpc, is about 3.2 million light years long. The Milky Way is about 0.03 Mpc across (or 100,000 light years). The distance between our galaxy and Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor, is 0.75 Mpc, or 2.5 million light years. LQGs are usually about 200 Mpc across. Assuming a logarithmic distribution of weird shit outliers (if you don’t know how logarithmic distribution curves work, don’t worry about it), cosmologists predicted that nothing in the universe should be more than 370 Mpc across.

This new LQG is 1200 Mpc long. That’s four billion light years. Four BILLION LIGHT YEARS. Just to travel from one side to the other of this one thing. I mean for fuck’s sake, the universe is only about 14 billion years old! How many of these things could there be? 

Right now it looks like the Cosmological Principle might be out the window, unless physicists can find some way to make the existence of this new LQG work with the math (and boy, are they trying). And that’s totally baffling. It would mean—well, we don’t have any idea what it would mean. That the universe isn’t essentially uniform? That some ‘special’ physics apply/applied in some places but not in others? That Something Happened that is totally outside our current ability to understand or quantify stuff happening?

By the way, no one lives there. The radiation from so many quasars would sterilize rock.

BOOK OF THE DAY: 

The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan 

Effortlessly brilliant, David Levithan has composed a uniquely formatted plot, where he unfolds the relationship between a nameless narrator and their partner in the style of dictionary entries.

Although there are no chapters in The Lover’s Dictionary, Levithan introduces each page with a new word offering a glimpse into the intimate world of a couple and the heartbreak, which proceeds. 

Levithan’s words are honest and heartfelt. His cleverly composed dictionary entries cover all the emotions and circumstances, which erupt in a relationship: from insecurities, anger, tenderness, romance, comfortability, and cheating. 

Poetic and bittersweet, Levithan’s language is beautiful and evocative. Since the dictionary entries are not presented in chronological order, piecing the relationship adds to the dimension of creativity Levithan establishes. When asked about his nonlinear presentation Levithan sincerely commented:

“I loved writing in a nonlinear way. Because it feels to me like a more accurate way of how we recount relationships. They never come back to us as a narrative, told beginning-middle-end. Whether it’s over or ongoing, we remember it in flashes. Different moments from the past hit us at different moments in the present. So when the narrator sits down to recount the relationship to the lover, it makes sense to me that the relationship would appear to him in this way, with the words as the catalyst for the memories, and the memories adding up to the truth.”

A quick read, we recommend you open The Lover’s Dictionary during your morning commute, in between classes or when you are simply seeking inspiration. If you are anything like us, we will find over 50% of your book highlighted. 

Get the book here!

Read excerpts from the book here! 

College students with an .edu email address click here!

Can we please stop making fun of people who are not interested in sex/are repulsed by sex

Type in “topic” (replace topic with whatever you’re looking for) followed by pdf into Google. All your search results will constitute PDFs which makes it much easier to find fact sheets, journal articles/academic papers and conference papers.