All posts
-
On slow driving as protest.
My apologies to anyone who has been stuck driving behind me recently. I’ve been driving very slowly. As in, actually following traffic laws. Whereas most people drive between one and fifteen miles per hour over the posted speed limit, I’ve been driving about two miles per hour below posted speed limits. It can be frustrating. …
-
On depictions of (non)violence for the cause of justice.
Graphic novelist Nate Powell, alongside his March co-authors John Lewis & Andrew Aydin, will be speaking in Bloomington next month. I’m excited about the talk. I first learned about Powell’s work by reading The Silence of Our Friends about the civil rights movement in Texas. That book was especially meaningful for me because I’m generally non-confrontational, preferring…
Andrew Aydin, armed rebellion, Between the World and Me, Charles Deslondes, civil rights movement, graphic novels, human violence, John Lewis, March, March book one, March graphic novel, Nat Turner, Nate Powell, nonviolence, protest, racism, racist high school history curriculum, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Silence of Our Friends, violent rebellion against slavery, when is violence justified -
On playing outdoors, and allergies.
K has been on a big kick reading books about sending students outside. Obviously, I approve. Being outdoors seems to make most humans happier, and people who spend time outside seem more likely to care about preserving our environment. Plus, K even has scholastic reasons to ask students to sit contemplatively outside — it’s reasonable…
allergies, allergy, allergy epidemic, AP biology, asthma, autoimmune disorders, cute kid photos, David Strachan, eating peanuts to cure a peanut allergy, expecting to fight makes us more aggressive, farm animals, farmed-animal sanctuary, fatherhood, fieldwork, Hay Fever Hygiene and Household Size, hygiene, hygiene hypothesis, immune system, immunology, let your kid eat dirt!, oral immunotherapy, outdoor learning, outdoors, outside, parasites, parasites as medicine, parenting, pathogens, peanut, play, spending time on a farm to prevent allergies, The Watchmen, Uplands PEAK, vegan animal sanctuary -
On uncertainty (with cartoon ending).
I solved equations Robert Johnson crossroads style, except I had a Texas Instruments graphing calculator instead of a guitar.
-
On witchcraft and mass psychogenic illness.
Because she is N’s best friend’s grandmother, I recently had the pleasure of meeting the researcher who first proposed that the Salem witchcraft trials were inspired by ergot poisoning of rye crops. And that, of course, is one of the papers I read while researching mass psychogenic illness / conversion disorders / violence against women. Does…
bistable switch, Caporael, conversion disorder, dancing sickness, did drugs cause the Salem witch trials, did PTSD cause the Salem witch trials, ergot, ergot poisoning, history of women not being taken seriously by medical doctors, how to explain complicated mathematics to people without a math background, hysteria, Intoxication, Le Roy, lysergic acid, mass psychogenic illness, oppression, ordinary differential equations, pop psychology, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Ronald Siegel, Salem witch trials, self-reinforcing behavior, stress, tarantism, the tipping point, tics, witchcraft
-
Links to my writing elsewhere: On Darth Vader and the Homunculus Theory of the Mind.
This piece went up on Literary Orphans‘ “Tavern Lantern” blog a few weeks ago, but now it has a stable link. Here’s the entire LO issue, or you can click the image to go directly to my essay (thanks to Rashard and Erika at LO for the cool pic): I learned about Literary Orphans from reading their…
-
On baby books.
Today is the first day of school in town (which seems so early! It’s still clearly summer outside), so I’m back to being primary daytime parent. Which means I’ll be doing a lot of reading. Which, okay, that in itself isn’t so different from how I spend my work time normally, but what I read…
Anthropology of Childhood, baby books, baby books with strong women, baby books with suicidal characters, Ben Hatke, best baby books, board books, David Lancy, depressing baby books, Everywhere Babies, Fuzzy Bee and Friends, Julia’s House for Lost Creatures, kid’s books with strong women, Marla Frazee, misnamed baby books, parenting, Susan Meyers, worm suicide -
On inflammatory language & music.
I recently spent an afternoon sitting in the “undergraduate resource room” at Indiana University reading Randall Kennedy‘s The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (which is not the book’s entire title… but that’s kinda the whole point of this essay). The book is good — a thorough history of our most damaging racial epithet, with special emphasis…
-
On identical twins & opportunity.
If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and look up Susan Dominus’s article on accidentally-swapped identical twins (who were then raised as two sets of fraternal twins) in the New York Times Magazine. It’s long, so it might take you a while. But your time will have been well spent. I was…
Frank Brown Cloud 