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On reading books in prison (which luckily I have never done).
In case you want to read more about mothers hurting their daughters to protect them from worse horrors, but you’ve already finished Toni Morrison’s Beloved and you want something longer than Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” you could pick up Morrison’s new God Help the Child. God Help the Child felt less powerful than Beloved (as do most books, honestly); the…
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On death (by gun violence) and taxes (progressive ones).
Devone Boggan’s opinion piece in the New York Times, which discusses a gun violence reduction program where counselors work with & pay at-risk young people to help them stay out of trouble, is lovely. Well worth reading, especially to get a sense of the numbers: these young men are being given such small amounts of…
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On racism and the empathy gap (while sneakily building toward the idea that teaching kids to root for your favorite sports team might be kinda evil).
There is an unfortunately compelling evolutionary model to explain why humans are so predisposed to racism. The rotten treatment of presumed outsiders may well be a corollary of our genetic inducements toward altruism. Which is grimly ironic, the idea that the same evolutionary narrative could explain both the best & worst sides of human nature. In…
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On undeserved forgiveness and global warming.
I wish there were more essays focused on philosophy in Freeman Dyson’s collection Dreams of Earth and Sky. I thought all his remarks on morals and philosophy were nuanced and compelling. His essay “Rocket Man,” for instance, is very powerful. This essay discusses Wernher von Braun, a German scientist who helped develop Nazi weaponry during…
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On family (my own) and music videos.
I had planned to post something serious today. Maybe a piece on Freeman Dyson’s writing about amnesty; I wrote & scheduled it a few weeks ago but have been bumping it since. Or an essay about the evolution of skin color that I’ve been taking notes for ever since reading early press coverage about the new human genomics data.…
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On memory (part 2).
Read part 1 here. Midway through spring, we found ourselves in Chicago for a wedding. K was asked to be best man, and since N was (is) still breastfeeding, she and I had to tag along. I’m not a big fan of weddings, but I did sneak in a lovely conversation with the groom’s younger…
analyzing a brain to see stored memories, Anthony Zador, differences between scientific findings and press releases, memory, mind reading, neurons, neuroscience, Quiojie Xiong, recovering data from broken brain, recovering data from broken computer, recovering data from dead brain, recovering memories, recovering memories from dead brain, Selective corticostriatal plasticity during acquisition of an auditory discrimination task, synaptic strength, wedding conversations -
On Charleston, the morning after.
tl;dr — This is horrible. To anyone who lost someone yesterday, & to anyone who finds the world a little more terrifying after seeing this in the news, you have my sincerest condolences, although I know they count for very little. I’m sorry. ************************ Given that I’ve written several posts about race & racial conflict…
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On Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and the current legality of slavery in the United States.
The prologue to Paul Beatty’s The Sellout is twenty-two pages of absolutely incendiary writing. The closest literary parallel I can think of is Mark Leyner; Beatty’s writing is hyperkinetic and reference-dense in the vein of Leyner’s “I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot” or Et Tu, Babe. Really beautiful, powerful stuff — and better…
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On fire myths and the origin of knowledge
EDIT 5/4/2018: a finished essay based on this research was published here. If you’re writing about conflicts between religious and scientific worldviews, there is absolutely no reason why you’d be forced to write about fire. But, c’mon… fire is cool. Eventually you probably would. While researching myths about the origin of fire, I realized that…
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Frank Brown Cloud 