Western science gradually catching up to Polynesian oral history On Hawaii’s Napo’opo’o pier, Christina Thompson’s husband, Seven, walks over to one of the “big Hawaiian guys with tattooed calves” overseeing the kayak rentals. Seven asks, “how much for a kayak?” “Thirty dollars,” says the man, then, “twenty for you, brother.” This nameless […]
POEMS, LIKE BAROQUE LASERS
Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus, a call for celebration There are two title poems—poems entitled “Oculus”—in Sally Wen Mao’s second collection, Oculus: The first poem elegizes a “nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram”; the second reflects, ekphrastically, on a performance by Solange Knowles. The poems rhyme. That is, Mao’s obsession […]
BOOK REVIEW: ANXIETY AND THE EQUATION
It’s not a textbook, but there’s “something you can learn from it” Ludwig Boltzmann was an excruciatingly anxious person and also one of the best scientific minds of his generation. Boltzmann’s revolutionary work on entropy paved the way for Einstein’s quantum revolution of the early 20th century, and yet he still spent hours, […]
THE DEMOCRAT: JAY GONZALEZ ON TAXES, EQUITY, AND HIS PLAN TO WIN
“The wealth gap, the income gap in our society has gotten to the point where it is starting to drag us backwards. And it’s going to really start dragging us backwards if government doesn’t step in to address it.”
A MEMOIR OF WORKING HARD AND BEING BROKE IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY ON EARTH
These two characteristics—physical distance and material wealth—also separate America’s newsrooms and publishing houses from the life experiences of people like Smarsh.
BOOK REVIEW: TWO VEGETABLES THINK BETTER THAN ONE
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants by Stefano Mancuso In one of Roald Dahl’s creepier short stories, “The Sound Machine,” an inventor rigs together a listening device that converts the inaudible screams of plants into human frequencies. When the inventor, named Klausner, plucks a daisy, he hears “a faint high-pitched cry, curiously inanimate.” Do […]
MEET THE VOLS WHO HELPED AYANNA PRESSLEY WIN
“As a person of color, I have so much pride right now because not only are we sending another person of color to the Congress, but we are sending the first woman of color to Congress from Massachusetts.”
SPECIAL FEATURE: PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND THE PATRIARCHY
Brown is retiring this year, and the university she leaves is very different from the one of her tenure suit that began more than 30 years ago. But while much has changed, Brown’s story contains a certain timelessness, particularly in the current struggle by women against institutions traditionally dominated by men. Like an Austen novel, Brown’s battle forces a reckoning with the type of sexism society tries to hide from itself. As Brown says, “Making the people who had done this have to defend themselves and be accountable, that was worth it.”
