Criticism on grounds of diversity is familiar and extremely fair, especially given that the recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests has prompted the discipline to reexamine its relationship with race. The Nobel Prize in Economics has only ever been awarded to two women and three non-white economists out of 86 recipients and has once again gone to two white dudes from the United States, neglecting not just the work of women and people of color within the mainstream of the discipline but also a vast array of approaches outside it—work disproportionately done by marginalized groups. Catriona Watson of the organization Rethinking Economicscalled it “disappointing” that the prize had gone to “two white men from the global north working on auction theory.” Devika Dutt, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, called it “predictable” that the prize had been awarded to “two old U.S. white men from the same Ivy League uni” adding that “we are in a moment of reckoning as regards structural discrimination” and that this prize “looks like closing ranks around the existing power structures in econ.”
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/11/abolishing-the-economics-nobel-isnt-enough
1962. On August 5, the day of her death, Marilyn Monroe showed signs of advanced rigor mortis, leading coroners to believe she died between 8:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on August 4. The toxicological analysis determined the cause of death: acute barbiturate poisoning.
1968. U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark requested four physicians to examine photographs, X-rays, and other evidence and to evaluate their significance relating to the medical conclusions in the autopsy report pertaining to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. They concluded that Kennedy was struck by two bullets fired from above and behind him, one of which traversed the base of his neck on the right side, without striking bone, and the other entered the skull from behind and exploded its right side.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a25633042/autopsy-history/
- Most cities plant only male trees because it’s expensive to clear up the fruit that falls from female trees. Male trees release pollen, and that’s one of the reasons your hay fever is getting worse. [Jessica Price]
- In China, ? doesn’t mean happy, it means “a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude”. Use these, instead: ???. [Echo Huang]
- The hold music you hear when you phone Octopus Energy is personalised to your customer account: it’s a number one record from the year you were 14. [Clem Cowton]
The idea that the Earth itself is like a single evolving ‘organism’ was developed in the mid-1970s by the independent English scientist and inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis. They dubbed it the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, asserting that the biosphere is an ‘active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis’. Sometimes they went pretty far with this line of reasoning: Lovelock even ventured that algal mats have evolved so as to control global temperature, while Australia’s Great Barrier Reef might be a ‘partly finished project for an evaporation lagoon’, whose purpose was to control oceanic salinity.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-gaia-hypothesis-reimagined-by-one-of-its-key-sceptics
The key to understanding the strategies pursued during the Hitler dictatorship is the concept of ‘territoriality’ – a concern with Raum, a word usually rendered not very successfully in English as ‘space’. When the term was first used by the German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, it was understood not to refer to a particular geographical location, but rather to denote the space necessary for a people to be supplied with adequate land and resources in order to permit a superior race and culture to survive. Ratzel was the first to call this kind of space ‘living space’ (Lebensraum). With this deeper meaning, the concept of ‘space’ had an essentially geopolitical character, because additional territory was regarded as the fundamental condition for the political health and economic viability of the race. The idea of space as a fundamental issue for German identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries derived in part from a continual concern with the nature of the geographical character of Germany as a very recently created nation. The Reich, founded in 1871, was an artificial construction and as such prompted uncertainty not only over the internal unity of the federal system, but also over the ‘unfinished’ character of the German nation, which had failed to incorporate all Germans (the ‘Gross- deutsch‘ solution) or to acknowledge the wide cultural and linguistic influence that Germans had historically exercised in central and eastern Europe.
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/in-search-of-lebensraum/
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