They were scientists and thinkers in love with the challenge of understanding other human beings. The deepest science of humanity, they believed, was not one that taught us what was rooted and unchangeable about human nature. Rather, it was one that revealed the wide variation in human societies--the immense and diverse vocabulary of propriety, custom, morals, and rectitude. Our most cherished traditions, they insisted, are only a tiny fraction of the many ways humans have devised for solving basic problems, from how to order society to how to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood. Just as the cure for a fatal disease might lie in an undiscovered plant in some remote jungle, so too the solution to social problems might be found in how other people in other places have worked out humanity's common challenges. And there is urgency in this work: as countries change and the world becomes ever more connected, the catalog of human solutions necessarily gets thinner and thinner (11). -- King, Charles. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Doubleday, 2019.
"Coronavirus." Issues in Science and Technology (Ongoing archive of articles)
"Forty years on, Edward Said's 'Orientalism' still groundbreaking." Ideas (October 23, 2019) ["Edward Said's seminal book, Orientalism (1978), proposed one of the most influential and enduring analyses of the relationship between the West and the Middle East. In many ways, his ideas seem uncontroversial, perhaps even obvious today. But four decades ago, what Said proposed was radical. It still is."]
McMillan, Candice. "How Trump and #metoo Have Scared Us Into the New Decade." Chaz's Journal (March 10, 2020)
Shambu, Girish. "Cold Water: Dancing on the Ruins." Current (September 11, 2018) ["Like the makers of these movies, Assayas has his own personal, signature style, one that owes much to the unencumbered shooting methods he was afforded on Cold Water; central to this style is the idea of movement. Critic Kent Jones has written that it is “hard to recall anyone in a state of repose” in Assayas’s work. The restless bodies in his films are captured by a visual style to match: a lyrical camera, often moving, that is preternaturally sensitive to tiny details of facial expression, nonverbal gesture, clothing, hair, and body movement. Meanwhile, this camera is forever reframing, recomposing the image from one moment to the next, almost miraculously uncovering elements of visual interest. In describing this effect, Jones memorably writes that Assayas “makes an event out of every shape and spatial configuration that crosses his camera’s field of vision.” The director’s style has an analogue in Situationist practice: that of the dérive, which is a drift, an exploratory movement through an urban environment in which the wanderer remains poetically aware of each moment, each small discovery."]
Tallerico, Brian. "Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always." Roger Ebert (March 13, 2020)
Tallerico, Brian. "The Plot Against America." Roger Ebert (March 13, 2020)
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