botany, shoes, books, and justice
Today as I’m paging through reviews for $800 HEPA filters in an early smoke season during a pandemic, I’m remembering a sci-fi story where you had to buy clean air and poor people coughed and scrimped for air canisters and died.
If we’d fixed ventilation and air purification instead of just shutting restaurants and gyms down repeatedly, we’d have gone a long way toward dealing with covid – plus the flu and colds. But we’d also have set ourselves up for less disruptive smoke seasons.
It is hard to see how a figure so marvelously intemperate could ever be bridled to the satisfaction of the Anglo-American mainstream. Still, the intellectual historian Robert Zaretsky has made an impressive attempt to win over skeptics in his new book, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. Somewhere between biography and philosophical overview, Zaretsky’s study sorts Weil’s views into five central categories. Each of the corresponding chapters integrates discussion of her personal eccentricities with analyses, rehabilitations, and critiques of her thought. The results are lucid and informative, but the restraint inherent to the medium, in this case the sensible academic monograph, threatens to undermine the extremity of Weil’s fiercely singular and ferociously subversive message.
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/distinctions-that-define-and-divide/articles/principled-to-a-fault
Instead of hoping that I get well enough that I don’t have to sleep with this tacky plastic basin next to my bed, I’m just going to find a vomit receptacle that blends in with my room’s decor.
I could puke in a nice vase.
CBC Lite | Quebec ERs ‘on the verge of a breakdown’ and need help, emergency doctor says
— Read on www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6099487
We don’t have healthcare capacity for even small additional covid waves. We don’t even have healthcare capacity for non-covid issues right now.
Some interesting thoughts on how the way we medicalize gender affects what it means to be trans today.
— Read on octodon.social/web/statuses/106556971060369069
Alex de Waal’s myth-shattering new book deconstructs COVID-19 and two centuries of epidemics. Five deadly misconceptions.
— Read on thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/07/09/All-Plagues-Are-Political/
Great to see these incredibly important ideas filtering out of academia.
CBC Lite | ‘I quit’: Wave of resignations prompts concerns over labour shortage
— Read on www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.6093867