Attentional humility opens us to sympathetic reading—a willingness to receive from the text on the author’s own terms.
Reading
It’s not a happenstance or some sad mistake that, barring a surprise, Americans will go to the polls in November to vote for one of two distinctly ancient men, now 77 and 81, both of whom have clearly exhibited language and thought problems for a significant period of time. To put this in perspective, remember for a moment that, until Ronald Reagan entered his second term in office in 1985 (during which he would get dementia before leaving the White House at age 77), the oldest president was Dwight D. Eisenhower and he was 70 (yes, 70!) not on entering the Oval Office but on leaving it after his second term in 1961. Of course, that was another America in another... Read more
Source: The Decline and Fall of Presidential America appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
While the republic burns, the press chases clicks Watching Day 3 of RNC convention coverage last night on a couple of channels, I found most of it as horrible as Donald Trump finds Milwaukee. Republican speakers shamelessly spewed lies, distortions and smears. (Daniel Dale deconstructs just a few for CNN.) Republican conventioneers held signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! (CBS reports it was, in part, a deliberate troll intended to “make heads explode.”) The convention’s message is horrible, yes, but so is the coverage. But what made my head spin was a promo during a commerical break on MSNBC, the kind featuring a snappy clips of recent coverage. The montage was all Biden is old, will he or won’t he drop out, etc. Nothing about the stakes in this election for women and for international order and democracy. Nothing about Donald Trump’s incoherence, the GOP’s rejection of the rule of law, Project 2025 plans for terminating our republic (with extreme prejudice), our country teetering on the edge of dictatorship. The days of news divisions being loss leaders for TV networks were gone decades ago.
Been There, Smelled That explores the aromas of places around the world. Travel writer Maggie Downs investigates some of the world’s most potent smells, looks at how odor cultivates a connection to place, and presents how humans engage with smells, from scents that have endured generations to the latest innovations in aroma-making.
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On my first full day in Addis Ababa, I head to the basement of the National Museum of Ethiopia, where I spend the morning with the fossilized remains of early hominids.
The attraction here is Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old ancestor to humans. Her Ethiopian name is Dinkinesh, which means “you are marvelous” in Amharic, but she’s commonly known as “Lucy” because “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” played on a cassette tape while paleontologists excavated her bones from the dirt.
Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa "bigenerated" into a wax figure of the Fifteenth Doctor at Madame Tussauds London exhibition. Here's a look!
“Readers weigh in on Biden: Please go, Joe. Most don’t think he can win again and wish he’d make a graceful exit.” — Headline from op-ed in the Boston Globe, 7/17/24
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Once upon a time, there was a marvelous king. Well, “marvelous” may be an overstatement, but most reasonable people agreed that he’d done a decent job, considering the pragmatic impossibility of ruling his fractious land and the low bar set by many previous kings. More importantly, four years earlier, he had earned the people’s eternal gratitude by slaying a dragon that had seized the throne and terrorized them.
But now the dragon had come back to life, resurrected by its cowardly minions who could have kept it dead but, tired of putting out numerous fires it had set around the countryside, basically decided it was easier not to. Now, the dragon’s tail itched to smite those who had dared cross it, and flames of the deepest orange spewed out of its puckered maw.
BCTV Daily Dispatch: The Rookie, Shōgun, Cobra Kai, Alien: Earth, True Detective, Peacemaker, X-Men '97, Lanterns, The Boys, Superman & more!
Some news! I have a new book of poems for children coming out in a couple of months – Let Sleeping Cats Lie. It’s a collection of poems about pets (dogs, cats, goldfish, chinchilla, guinea pigs, snakes, budgies, rabbits, blue whales etc). I say it’s for children but it’s also suitable for grandchildren and, who…
Keir Starmer's party has just set our Parliament's agenda for the first time in nearly 15 years
The fallacy of composition basically consists of the false belief that the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts. In society and in the economy this is arguably not the case. An adequate analysis of society and economy a fortiori can’t proceed by just adding up the acts and decisions of individuals. The whole […]
- by Aeon Video
- by Samantha Rose Hill
- by Guido Corradi
Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, used to be a harsh critic of the former US president - now he's a "dutiful ventriloquist of the Trumpian gospel". Here's what happened
Camping out on campus was not how many students planned to end the academic year. But the past nine months have witnessed unprecedented mobilisations calling for an end to Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault against the Palestinian people. In late April and early May, the inspiring student encampments that started in the USA and have since […]
I’ve been saying it mattered a lot for quite some time, but, finally, some numbers:
Foreign policy debates rarely determine U.S. presidential elections, although polling suggests that 2024 might be an exception. Nationwide, nearly 4 in 10 voters (38 percent) say they are less likely to vote for President Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza, according to a July 2024 Century Foundation/Morning Consult poll of 1,834 registered U.S. voters. Many core constituencies—including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic Party activists—are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza.
Today (July 18, 2024), the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for June 2024, which shows that the labour outlook has improved somewhat from the last several months of plodding along not sure which way to turn. While it has been difficult to make any definitive conclusions about where…
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