"Je sais, je sais que je sais jamais: I know, I know that I never know." - attributed to the French chef Jean-Pierre Philippe [Harold McGee in his introduction to his 2004 revised edition of his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen relates the origin of this quote in Chef Philippe's recognition of the problems with unwavering certainty: "Food is an infinitely rich subject, and there's always something about it to understand better, something new to discover, a fresh source of interest, ideas, and delight." (4) Michael Benton - I believe this qualified knowing, with the understanding that you can never know all aspects or angles, and to be open to new information/understandings, is the best way to proceed in all explorations of the world of ideas/practices.]
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adscititious \ad-suh-TISH-us\
adjective 1 : derived or acquired from something on the outside; 2 : supplemental, additional
EXAMPLES
"We should choose our books as we would our companions, for their sterling and intrinsic merit, not for their adscititious or accidental advantages." — From Charles Caleb Colton's 1832 book Lacon
"I thrilled to crates of chilly hardware—coffee tins of rusty nails and mismatched bolts and nuts, odd attachments, gimcrack, rickrack, and adscititious crap…." — From William Davies King's 2008 book Collections of Nothing
"Adscititious" comes from a very "knowledgeable" family—it ultimately derives from "scire," the Latin verb meaning "to know." "Scire" also gave us "science," "conscience," "prescience" ("foreknowledge"), and "nescience" ("lack of knowledge"). "Adscititious" itself comes to us from "scire" by way of the Latin verb "adsciscere," which means "to admit" or "to adopt." This explains why "adscititious" describes something adopted from an outside source.
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Aguilar, Anthony. "Green Beret Gaza Whistleblower: Israel's War Is 'Annihilation.'"' Breaking Points (July 31, 2025) [“What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland,” says Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. soldier who worked as a subcontractor with UG Solutions in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid delivery operation. “We, the United States, are complicit. We are involved, hand in hand, in the atrocities and the genocide that is currently undergoing in Gaza.” (source)]
Alstadsæter, Annette and Tarcisio Diniz Magalhaes. "The 15% solution part 1: why global tax reform is long overdue." The Conversation Weekly (June 5, 2025) ["For decades, multinational corporations have used sophisticated strategies to shift profits away from where they do business. As a result, countries around the world lose an estimated US$500 billion annually in unpaid taxes, with developing nations hit particularly hard. In the first episode of The 15% solution, we explore how companies have exploited loopholes in the global tax system. We speak to Annette Alstadsæter, director of the Centre for Tax Research at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and Tarcisio Diniz Magalhaes, a professor of tax law at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. In 2021, after years of international negotiations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development unveiled a global tax deal designed to address tax avoidance through a minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. But will this new framework actually work? And what happens when major economies refuse to participate? The 15% solution explores why a new global tax regime is needed, whether it can fix a broken system, and what’s at stake if it fails."]
Danks, Adrian. "The Long Goodbye." Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["For her part, Brackett, unlike many other writers who bristled at the liberties taken by Altman with their scripts, enjoyed working with the director and embraced the riffs, improvisations and idiosyncratic points of emphasis that he brought to the film. What also attracted Altman was the chance to work once again with Elliott Gould, one of the two stars of his breakthrough smash hit MASH (1970), but who had become persona non grata in Hollywood after a couple of failed and abandoned productions. But when looking at the finished film, it is hard to imagine that it wasn’t a project conceived by Altman, as its sensibility, visual style, sound, idiosyncratic choice of “actors” from within the cinema and beyond, exploration of environment, and revisionist approach to a classic genre all seem tailormade for and by the filmmaker. But this also reveals the indelible stamp that Altman placed – as always – on his material during production: stacking the cast with a rogue’s gallery of figures rarely used in or new to the cinema (like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson, baseball player Jim Bouton, and Danish folk singer Nina van Pallandt); exploring the cramped and then capacious locations he carefully selected including his own home in the Malibu Colony; experimenting with a relentlessly mobile camera that shifts and zooms in and out of Marlowe’s perspective crafting a diaphanous, fluid and fully dimensional sense of environment (it is one of the great LA films); embracing the possibilities of collaboration; and allowing actors to add bits of business and improvise lines during filming. One of the most memorable and even charming aspects of The Long Goodbye is Marlowe’s “interior” monologue, dreamed-up and delivered by Gould as an almost stream-of-consciousness muttering that displaces and even reverses the common device of the controlling voiceover so central to many examples of the detective film and classic film noir. Gould’s often jazzy and insular line readings rarely communicate a sense of control or superior knowledge – and are almost never heard by anyone but us, him and maybe his cat – but they do draw us closer to his view of the world."]
Fensom, Sarah. "Familiar Touch." Reverse Shot (June 20, 2025) ["Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s debut narrative feature about an octogenarian woman entering a full-time memory care facility, exists along the edges of the coming-of-age film. Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), a chic Southern Californian, must manage new and pre-existing relationships within her changing circumstances and state-of-mind—much like her typically teenage counterparts in the genre. Friedland pulls many of the usual emotional levers—anger, rebellion, sexual angst, and the desire for freedom—but it’s set to the pace of Ruth’s life—how she moves, thinks, breathes. The film’s adagio rhythm doesn’t mean it’s sedate, however. Familiar Touch is a deeply kinetic work. Friedland, who is also a choreographer, infuses the film with graceful bodily gestures and overtures to the senses. In its bounty of movement and sensorial pleasures, it finds its compassionate voice—even though the memories of the life Ruth lived before she entered the care facility are slipping away, her body is still expressive, still free to actively experience being alive. It’s rare for a work of art about cognitive decline to focus on what is rather than what’s lost."]
Goi, Leonardo. "The Current Debate | James Gunn’s Superman Battles Fatigue." Notebook (August 7, 2025) ["A far cry from Zack Snyder’s po-faced take, a new “Superman” tries to square the idealism of its hero with the irreverence of its director."]
Greenwald, Glenn. "Iraq War 2.0: Glenn Greenwald Exposes Media's Iran PSYOP." Breaking Points (June 17, 2025) ["Krystal and Saagar are joined by Glenn Greenwald to discuss the latest on Israel and Iran in the US media."]
Hecht, Jennifer Michael. "A History of Doubt." Being (January 8, 2009) ["Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht says that as a scholar she always noticed the “shadow history” of doubt out of the corner of her eye. She shows how non-belief, skepticism, and doubt have paralleled and at times shaped the world’s great religious and secular belief systems. She suggests that only in modern time has doubt been narrowly equated with a complete rejection of faith, or a broader sense of mystery."]
Kannas, Alexia. "Chinatown." Senses of Cinema #113 (March 2025) ["The impact Roman Polanski’s 1974 film has had on the mythologisation of Los Angeles is hard to understate. Written by L.A. native Robert Towne, Chinatown draws on and refigures the history of the California water wars, instigated in the first decades of the 20th century by the city of Los Angeles’ efforts to secure the water needed to sustain its rapid growth. Key to this enterprise was the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was built between 1905 and 1915 to divert water from the Owens Valley in Eastern California towards the city. This development caused considerable tension between the city and Californian farmers, which played out over the course of the following decades. In his lauded essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004), which enacts the circulation of images that Polan describes, Thom Anderson points out that this history has always been public. But in transposing it to a 1937 setting and recasting the city’s capitalist expansion as a story of deep-seated corruption, Towne’s screenplay left an indelible mark on the popular conception of how Los Angeles got its water."]
Khouri, Rami. "“Will Western Powers Take Action?”: Rami Khouri on Scholars Declaring Genocide in Gaza." Democracy Now (September 2, 2025) ["In Gaza, Israeli attacks since dawn have killed at least 54 Palestinians, including people seeking food. The attacks came as Gaza health officials recorded another 13 deaths due to starvation — three of them children. That brings the number of hunger-related deaths in Gaza to more than 360. According to a leading global monitor, more than half a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are suffering “catastrophic” levels of hunger due to Israel’s blockade. This comes as the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association has approved a resolution establishing that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide as found in the Genocide Convention, constituting war crimes and crimes against humanity. Palestinian American journalist Rami Khouri says the declaration shows “even conservative scholars” now consider Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. But, he adds, the question is, “Will any of the major Western powers take action?”"]
Lababidi, Yahia. "Piercing the Veil: Laura Makabresku’s Mystical Testimony." World Literature Today (July 22, 2025) ["Makabresku identifies as a storyteller and creates haunting, sometimes hallucinatory scenes that feel like visual psalms or quiet reminders, amid the chaos of modern life, of what is indestructible. Her artwork inhabits liminal spaces—between seen and unseen, waking and dreaming, presence and absence—inviting us to dwell at thresholds. We are summoned into her enchanted world for a prayerful pause illuminated by candlelight, shrouded in gauze—to contemplate subjects that are less real-life portraits than apparitions: spirit-bodies caught between wound and wonder. A student of magical realism and fairy tales, Makabresku draws deep inspiration from mysticism. Her figures, imbued with a devotional undercurrent, resemble modern-day icons calling us to surrender to the Unseen. It’s the spirituality of saints and martyrs, of longing and visions—Julian of Norwich meets Sylvia Plath. In her evocative visual lexicon, birds, doves, wings, and feathers recur frequently: symbols of the soul in flight, messengers of peace, and echoes of the Holy Spirit. As someone personally enamored of winged creatures and who tends to see our feathered friends as angels in disguise, I’m especially drawn to how this subtle artist centers avian creatures amid grounded suffering. ... In times of upheaval, personal or collective, I often turn to art as a kind of silent scripture. Makabresku’s spectral compositions remind us not to be deceived by the darkness of our age and that the sacred still breathes persistently among us. As a visual poet, Makabresku uses her camera not to document our mutilated world but to consecrate it. Her ethereal art evokes a sacred interiority: timeless figures wrapped in linen, captured in states of ache or ecstasy; mythical and historical tableaux where breathing slows and the soul draws near to its Source."]
Lodge, Guy. "Eddington: Feeling Seen." Reverse Shot (July 17, 2025) ["“Hindsight is 2020” states the film’s tagline, a bit ruefully and even gleefully. Though first written by Aster in the early months of the pandemic, Eddington plays now as a kind of anti-nostalgic period piece, evoking 2020 with a needling specificity that extends from mask discourse to political sloganeering to social media trends. (If you, like millions of others, posted a black square to Instagram in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, prepare to cringe.) It’s all recognizably past tense, but not because it’s over. In picking out a surfeit of tensions consuming the eponymous town—and, by extension, America at large—in May 2020, Aster invites us to consider just how those conflicts have lingered and metastasized in the years separating the end of President Trump’s first term and the beginning of his second. The memes have changed and the masks are off, in all senses, but otherwise the meticulously reconstructed recent past of Eddington isn’t nearly past enough. There’s no cozy retro quality, either, to the arid, tumbleweed-strewn western styling applied by Aster to a story that actually supports the genre callbacks, with its clash of predominantly male egos at the site of a crumbling southwest American frontier."]
Mahdawi, Mohsen. "“They Want to Silence Me”: Columbia Student Mohsen Mahdawi on ICE Jail, Palestine, Activism, Buddhism." Democracy Now (May 16, 2025) ["In his first live interview since his release from ICE detention, Columbia University student and Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi recounts the traumatic experience of his arrest and incarceration. Mahdawi, a green card holder who was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, was arrested in Vermont on April 14 when he appeared for what he was told would be a citizenship interview, and spent more than two weeks in U.S. immigration custody, where he was held in retaliation for his speech in support of Palestinian rights. Mahdawi’s detention has led him to reflect on the “interconnectedness between injustices,” as multiple members of his family in Palestine have been “unjustly” incarcerated in Israeli jails. “Now I can feel their pain,” says Mahdawi. Despite the U.S. government and pro-Israel groups’ attempts to silence his calls for an end to genocide in Gaza, he adds, “I share my pain with the world.”"]
Rank, Mark R. "Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty." New Books in Public Policy (July 26, 2025) ["Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. Our current era of fake news, alternative facts, and media partisanship has led to a breeding ground for all types of myths and misinformation to gain traction and legitimacy. Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty (Oxford UP, 2021) is the first book to systematically address and confront many of the most widespread myths pertaining to poverty. Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock powerfully demonstrate that the realities of poverty are much different than the myths; indeed in many ways they are more disturbing. The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. But what if this picture is wrong? What if poverty is an experience that touches the majority of Americans? What if hard work does not necessarily lead to economic well-being? What if the reasons for poverty are largely beyond the control of individuals? And if all of the evidence necessary to disprove these myths has been readily available for years, why do they remain so stubbornly pervasive? These are much more disturbing realities to consider because they call into question the very core of America's identity.
Armed with the latest research, Poorly Understood not only challenges the myths of poverty and inequality, but it explains why these myths continue to exist, providing an innovative blueprint for how the nation can move forward to effectively alleviate American poverty."]
Reynolds, Jason and Kessley Janvier. "On Being Young in America." On Being (May 8, 2025) ["A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the digital revolution and AI to the ecology and society, they have wisdom and instincts in their bones that will be essential if we are all to flourish and not merely survive this century. In November 2024, the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues brought Krista together with esteemed children’s and young adult writer Jason Reynolds and Georgetown student Kessley Janvier. The encounter between the three of them spans generations from the 20s to the 40s to the 60s and extended out to a room of people of all ages and walks of life. The wisdom that unfolded is as much about who we will be and how we will be as what we have before us to do, each in our own lives."]
Runciman, David. "Politics on Trial: Socrates vs Democracy." Past Present Future (May 22, 2025) ["The first political trial in our new series is the one that set the template for all the others: the trial of Socrates in Athens in 399 BCE, which ended with a death sentence for the philosopher and a permanent stain on the reputation of Athenian democracy. Why, after a lifetime of philosophy, was Socrates finally prosecuted at the age of 70? Was the case motivated by private grievance or public outrage? What should Socrates have said in his own defence? Why, in the end, did he choose defiance instead?"]
---. "Politics on Trial: Thomas More vs the King." Past Present Future (May 29, 2025) ["In today’s episode another trial that forms the basis for great drama: the case of Thomas More, tried and executed in 1535, events dramatised by Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons and Hilary Mantel in Wolf Hall. How did More try to argue that silence was no evidence of treason? Why was his defence so legalistic? Was he really ‘the Socrates of England’? And who was the true villain in this case: Thomas Cromwell, Richard Rich or the King himself?"]
Runquist, Karsten. "Wes Anderson's Existential Trilogy." (Posted on Youtube: June 7, 2025) [An analysis of The French Dispatch, Asteroid City, and The Phoenician Scheme.]
Shields, Chris. "Ghost Trail: Search Options." Reverse Shot (May 29, 2025) ["The protagonist in Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail goes by many names, among them Saleh and Amir. His real name is Hamid, but this, like his true purpose in Strasbourg, is something the viewer learns only later as Millet’s subtle and complex film unfolds. Millet and Florence Rochat’s script weaves together identity (cultural as well as personal), nationality, suspicion, loss, revenge, and justice into the strands of a tautly wound rope that vibrates with dramatic and political urgency. Millet has crafted a humanist spy thriller set amid the lingering memories of the Syrian civil war and the atrocities perpetrated by Bashar al-Assad’s regime that is both satisfyingly tense and gently hopeful."]
Tolson, Franita. "Nomology (The Constitution)." Ologies (July 2, 2019) ["If you've never read The Constitution, you're like most of us. What does it even say? Most of Americans aren't law scholars, which is why we sat down with a Dean of USC's Gould School of Law, Professor Franita Tolson, to have her give us the crib sheet on the most important document in the free world. What's up with the amendments? What are the articles? What does it mean to be an American? What rights do we have? How did we get them and how do we keep them? ... By the end of the episode, you'll be able to wink at the Constitution and say "I get you" and you also might be engaging in more peaceful protests or applying to law school or hanging Professor Tolson's portrait on your wall."]
West, Stephen. "Albert Camus - Kafka and The Fall." Philosophize This! #228 (May 12, 2025) ["Today we talk about Camus' book The Fall and what the main character represents in his larger project. We also talk about someone Camus deeply admired, Franz Kafka, and how to think of the images he created in his work. We talk about the experience of the modern individual in relation to politics. We also talk about what Camus and Kafka disagreed on."]
---. "Kafka and Totalitarianism (Arendt, Adorno)." Philosophize This! #229 (May 24, 2025) ["Today we talk about Kafka's book The Castle and how the symbolism is interpreted by two powerhouse philosophers: Theodore Adorno and Hannah Arendt."]
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