Yona Harvey is a poet of the speculative, a poet of other worlds—other words—that turns out to be our worlds and words. Her first full-length collection of poems was Hemming the Water, which won the Kate Tufts in 2013, and her second was You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love which appeared when the pandemic was six months old. It’s not just that Mars is far from disturbed Earth, but also that it’s alien, that feeling human sometimes means feeling alien. She works slowly and deeply—there’s a third collection close to finished, but still a ways off—and sometimes she takes time away from poetry to write words for Marvel comics with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hemming the Water is a riff on sound and song, a book that gets in the head of—or into conversation with—figures like Mary Lou Williams, Toni Morrison, Ruth Stone, Pablo Neruda. “A door & the darkness,” a “song in the head of a heathen.” One poem is called “The Riot Inside Me,” one is titled “Chatterblue,” another “Gingivitis, Notes on Fear.” As a book of discovery, discovering the self and its histories and burdens, it registers, in brash delicate gorgeous styles, “The shock / Of your voice.”
Reading
Inverting the “tragedy plus time” formula Late night comics weighed in on the Republicans’ 15-round House Speaker fight (New York Times): “Things really started to spin out on the floor of the House. It got so out of control, I thought I was watching the Oscars.” — JIMMY KIMMEL “Ahead of the last round of voting for House speaker, Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers appeared to charge at fellow Republican Representative Matt Gaetz. And, out of habit, Gaetz yelled ‘I’ve never even met your daughter!’” — SETH MEYERS “That’s a face mask violation — 15 yards. It was really the most exciting hour of cable news in quite some time.” — JIMMY KIMMEL “Oh, my God. I don’t know if men should hold political office. They’re just too emotional!” — STEPHEN COLBERT “After 15 rounds of voting, McCarthy pulled off the impossible — he got people to watch C-SPAN for an entire week.” — JIMMY FALLON “I can’t even imagine what McCarthy was going through.
Museum of Sex to open new outpost in Miami (Thanks to Carlos Montage)
800 kilo ball filled with Swiss gin stolen from bottom of Lake Constance (Thanks to Alberto)
Scientists are freezing thousands of human POOS to create a 'vault of microbiota' that could one day bring humanity back from the brink of extinction (Thanks to Emily, Leslie and w)
Residents raising funds for memorial park and community hub A Liverpool community is coming together to raise funds to create a local memorial park named after Olivia Pratt-Korbel, who was tragically shot and killed aged nine when a gunman forced his way into her family’s home in the West Derby constituency last August. The planned […]
California National Guard general fired after he allegedly made troops take his mom shopping (Thanks to John Lobert)
New York University has launched a new interdisciplinary program to support, coordinate, and disseminate research about the well-being of wild animals. Co-directed by Becca Franks (environmental studies) and Jeff Sebo (environmental studies, philosophy, bioethics, law), the Wild Animal Welfare Program “aims to advance understanding about what wild animals are like, how humans and wild animals interact, and how humans can improve our interactions with wild animals at scale.” Of particular interest are questions such as “How much positive welfare (pleasure, happiness, satisfaction, and other such states) do wild animals experience, and how much negative welfare (pain, suffering, frustration, and other such states) do they experience? To what extent is humanity helping and harming wild animals at present?
Only God and Kevin McCarthy know how long George Santos, the disgraced Republican freshman congressman from Long Island whose antipathy for the truth stands out even by politician standards, will be able to remain in office. If and when he is forced to step down, say, after an explanation for his mysteriously improving financial...
The post May the Second-Best Person Win first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.A consultation closing next week has raised concerns with campaigners over the ‘hugely regressive’ plans Campaigners have attacked Government plans they say will turn bedsits and hostels into accepted housing for vulnerable older children in the care system. The Department for Education launched a public consultation last month on new rules for so-called ‘supported accommodation’ […]
Now we got'em on the ropes!
Russia’s budget deficit widens to a record as revenues plunge amid oil export restrictions and spending on the invasion of Ukraine grew https://t.co/duUhiufXzP
— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) January 10, 2023
As union laws become more draconian, activists are getting innovative. It's giving right-wingers the jitters
Opponents of free universal healthcare hope the current crisis will open the door to killing off the NHS altogether, writes Adam Bienkov
A project is underway to study self-control in contexts of poverty in the Global South, directed by professor of philosophy Juan Pablo Bermúdez (Universidad Externado de Colombia & Imperial College London). The project is supported by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Professor Bermúdez provides the following description of it: Research suggests that poverty reduces our ability to pursue long-term goals, but it is yet unclear how this effect occurs. Does poverty make temptations greater, and self-control failures more frequent? Or do agents respond to poverty’s harsher conditions by abandoning their longterm aspirations, choosing shorter-term goals instead? To our knowledge there is no direct test of these two possible mechanistic explanations. Using a method that allows us to take ‘psychological snapshots’ of everyday experiences, we will map out the influence of context on people’s decision-making process, in order to better understand the mechanisms of self-control in contexts of poverty. Our study will include the most diverse population yet in self-control studies: people from high and low SES backgrounds in urban Colombia.
The invasion of the capitol gives Lula the perfect justification for cleaning house, most importantly in the civil service, judiciary and military. It has also, however briefly, united the governments of Latin America against right-wing authoritarianism
*Ibizan “Phoenician punk” band are sacrificing and eating the hapless tourists on the island
As nurses from two New York hospitals fight for better treatment, the executives in charge have been boosting their own pay and slashing charity care.
In ten years from 2000, a decade of sustained investment by a New Labour government managed to repair much of the damage done to the NHS by twenty-one years of underfunding. Then, in 2010, David Cameron’s government threw that into reverse with a new decade of austerity. That’s why the performance of England’s NHS is […]
Stark contrast to treatment of Ukrainian refugees News has emerged today that the UK government has not accepted a single refugee under the Afghan Resettlement Scheme in the past twelve months. The scheme is meant to help Afghans and their familes who assisted western forces during the Afghan conflict, yet the complete absence of successful […]
- by Aeon Video
A new beginning.
- by Peter A Coclanis
- by Natasha Mason, Athena Demertzi & Johannes G Ramaekers