my week summarized by the most unique/interesting content i consumed (in no particular order)
“Secondly, this historicized view addresses my initial fear above, viz., that assimilating Asian perspectives into a black-white framework is too narrow. By situating racism within a broader constellation of social and economic tensions, we give ourselves some internationalist concepts (for, political economy is universal) to bridge the experiences of black and Asian-Americans — and also of Latino/a, Muslim, Jewish, indigenous people, etc. Emphasizing the modernity of racial ideology, for instance, makes a great deal of sense when you learn about the hardening of racial categories in fin-de-siècle Asia. Rather than diluting the significance of the black experience, it could strengthen it by connecting it to patterns of violence and exploitation faced by others around the world.”
2. Reply All: The Least You Could Do
“Black people all across the US are receiving the world’s weirdest form of reparations: Venmo payments from white people. Producer Emmanuel Dzotsi investigates.”
3. 1619: The Fight for a True Democracy
“America was founded on the ideal of democracy. Black people fought it make it one.”
4. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death — ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
5. Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
“He offered the library a deal: You let us borrow all your books, he said, and we’ll scan them for you. You’ll end up with a digital copy of every volume in your collection, and Google will end up with access to one of the great untapped troves of data left in the world. Brin put Google’s lust for library books this way: “You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books.” What if you could feed all the knowledge that’s locked up on paper to a search engine?”
“‘Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe — and telling ourselves that we ‘created’ them. To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility. As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the fact that we are discoverers and not creators.’”
