Troubled Water

Il paraissait certain, quand on ouvrait la porte et voyait l’escalier, plein d’un calme implacable, impersonnel et sans couleur, un escalier qui ne semblait pas avoir gardé la moindre trace des gens qui l’avaient parcouru, pas le moindre souvenir de leur passage, quand on se mettait derrière la fenêtre de la salle à manger et qu’on regardait les façades des maisons, les boutiques, les vieilles femmes et les petits enfants qui marchaient dans la rue, il paraissait certain qu’il fallait le plus longtemps possible — attendre, demeurer ainsi immobile, ne rien faire, ne pas bouger, que la suprême compréhension, que la véritable intelligence, c’était cela, ne rien entreprendre, remuer le moins possible, ne rien faire. Mais ils ne demandaient rien de plus, c’était cela, ils le savaient, il ne fallait rien attendre, rien demander, c’était ainsi, il n’y avait rien de plus, c’était cela, « la vie ». Rien d’autre, rien de plus, ici ou là, ils le savaient maintenant. Il ne fallait pas se révolter,...

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot - Louise Harduin (1831) Clark Art Institute , Williamstown, Massachusetts  As duas principais obras políticas aqui referidas, o Discurso e o Contrato Social , denunciam o poder dos fortes e a subserviência dos fracos. No entanto, o título não engana: Rousseau pronuncia-se sobre os homens e não sobre a humanidade. De facto, a desigualdade social e política das mulheres não é por ele considerada no mesmo plano. Embora tenha comentado o tema - elogiou o papel das mulheres em Esparta e Roma (tanto no Discurso quanto no Emílio ) -, reproduziu uma visão patriarcal de família e das mulheres como sujeitos passivos.  Rousseau usou o subterfúgio de sugerir que as mulheres, dominando os lares familiares, então dominam a sociedade, dado que o amor é «celebrado pelas mulheres com muita habilidade e zelo para estabelecerem a sua autoridade, e tornar dominante o sexo que deveria obedecer». Argumentou-o com uma mescla de valorização pouco subtil e de preconceito...

Hello? Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me Is there anyone at home? Come on, now I hear you’re feeling down Well I can ease your pain Get you on your feet again Relax I’ll need some information first Just the basic facts Can you show me where it hurts? بعد ما صار، ما ضلّ حدا ما ضلّ كلام، شو نفع السؤال؟ كل اللي راح… دار يا دار، يا دار سكت الليل وانهار وليلِك يا دار غصن الزيتون ضلّ شامخ بين النجوم مليان جراح… جرح مفتوح بيصرخ حرية I feel your pain from New York City I feel your pain across the sea A distant ship on the horizon Is calling out to you and me وأنا صغيرة كان حلمي حرية اليوم الأمل صار نار الهوية إحنا جذور بتكسر حجر من تحت الردم نرسم الطريق إحنا النور بعد العتمة إحنا الحلم إحنا الوعد بفجر جديد I will never become comfortably numb We never know about the Nakba I was only 5 years old in 48 We were unaware what was happеning over there It brеaks my heart I came on board so late You reached us all with your rallying cry Now here we stand at the gate يا كاتب الورقة...

Mrs. Hepburn, ladies and gentlemen: Many people come to Hartford to address meetings as advocates of some reform. Tonight it is not to advocate a reform that I address a meeting in Hartford. I do not come here as an advocate, because whatever position the suffrage movement may occupy in the United States of America, in England it has passed beyond the realm of advocacy and it has entered into the sphere of practical politics. It has become the subject of revolution and civil war, and so tonight I am not here to advocate woman suffrage. American suffragists can do that very well for themselves. I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle in order to explain - it seems strange it should have to be explained - what civil war is like when civil war is waged by women. I am not only here as a soldier temporarily absent from the field at battle; I am here - and that, I think, is the strangest part of my coming - I am here as a person who, according to the law courts of...

Andrew Wyeth -  Wind from the Sea ( 1947) «In 1851 Foucault carried out his famous experiment in which he observed a slow rotation of the vertical plane of the pendulum’s oscillation. This effect is due to the terms I (a southward force) and III (an eastward force); to a first approximation, the frequency of the plane’s rotation is given by Ωsin(Φ) . Soon after, many such experiments were carried out at different places by other experimentalists. They not only confirmed the original experiment but also testified to the great appeal a direct mechanical proof of the Earth’s rotation had to many, even if few would by then have doubted its reality.  There is an ironical twist here, for in fact the experiment had already been inadvertently done at a time when the Earth’s rotation itself was still under debate. In notes from the 1660s, members of the Accademia del Cimento mention their experiments on pendulums and report a clockwise rotation of the vertical plane. They ...

We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet. The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a festival of wonder: stories from the history of science — the history of our search for truth and our yearning to know nature — told live onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems — those emblems of our search for meaning and our yearning to know ourselves. Year after year, thousands of people gathered to listen, think, and feel together — a congregation of creatures concerned with the relationship between truth and beauty, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite. Poetry may seem an improbable portal into the fundamental nature of reality...

[...] One of the most deceptive narratives technology companies have been successfully peddling is that technology is neutral and it’s our use of the technology that determines whether it’s good or bad. How very convenient, to put all moral responsibility on the shoulders of people; I’m sure that is an entirely coincidental implication and not at all self-serving (eye roll). The crudest way to rebut this argument is to consider an extreme technology: a chemical weapon that would obliterate all life on Earth. Would it be morally acceptable to develop such an artefact under the pretence that technology is always neutral? No. Such a technology would not be neutral, and neither is any other technology. Every piece of technology is an artefact, which means that it has been designed by someone to do something, and that fact alone strips it of neutrality. Even a blank page is not neutral: it’s inviting you to write (or to make a paper plane). Technology is never neutral because it embodies th...