Month: June 2018

The Surprising Literary History of Skin Care

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/07/the-surprising-literary-history-of-skin-care/

In Europe, alchemists were obsessed with generating gold, but in China, they preferred to work on youth elixirs. A string of Chinese alchemists claimed to have created a rejuvenating potion; Joseph Needham, the historian, scientist, and Sinologist, was so struck by the frequency with which Chinese emperors were poisoned by these drugs that he tabulated a list of victims. In around 300 A.D., a Chinese alchemist called Ge Hong collated various recipes. Three centuries later, a more detailed treatise specified the inclusion of obscure, exotic substances such as mercurial salts and compounds of sulfur. There are more than a thousand different names for these potions, most of which carried the same basic mineral ingredients.

A debate over plant consciousness is forcing us to confront the limitations of the human mind — Quartz

Source: A debate over plant consciousness is forcing us to confront the limitations of the human mind — Quartz

That said, Marder admits that we can’t know if plants are self-conscious, because we define both the self and consciousness based on our human selves and limitations. “Before dismissing the existence of this higher-level faculty in them outright, we should consider what a plant self might be,” he says.

Marder points out that plant cuttings can survive and grow independently. That suggests that if plants do have a self, it is likely dispersed and unconfined, unlike the human sense of self. It’s notable, too, that many scientists and mystics argue that the human feeling of individuality—of being a self within a particular body—is a necessary illusion.

He further argues that because plants communicate with one another, defend their health, and make decisions, among other things, they may well have some sense of self, too.

Get Your Gender Binary Off My Childhood!: Children’s Right to Gender Self-Determination | Feminist Pigs

The fact that reporting on trans children like Nicole has been far more sympathetic than reporting on Kathy Witterick and David Stocker’s decision not to gender their child Storm is itself very telling.  While it may be confusing and shocking for the general public to imagine raising a transgendered child, the story of trans children becomes relatable by making transgenderism analogous to medical disability.  It’s less than ideal, but no one can help it, and thankfully there is a course of treatment to be pursued.  But the idea that parents like Kathy and David would willfully choose to offer gender self-determination to their child is apparently an outrage.  Kathy and David’s parenting has been subject to pathologizing and hateful commentary from expert psychologists concerned about Storm’s development.  While Nicole’s parents are portrayed as compassionate and reasonable, Kathy and David have been depicted as selfish, deceitful, impulsive, and manipulative radicals using their child to enact a damaging social experiment.  The experts are also concerned about Storm’s older siblings, whom they believe should not be expected to conceal “the truth” about Storm’s gender.  Never mind that in the story about Nicole, it was Nicole’s twin sibling who was the first person in the family to name and accept Nicole’s desired gender; in the story about Storm, asking siblings to participate in the conscious project of decentering gender is tantamount to child abuse. 

Source: Get Your Gender Binary Off My Childhood!: Children’s Right to Gender Self-Determination | Feminist Pigs

Picturing Haiti’s Freemasons | by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/06/02/picturing-haitis-freemasons/

Elsewhere in the Americas, racism kept blacks from joining lodges or embarking on the series of initiations, or “degrees,” around which Masonic rites revolve. (One result was the Prince Hall Lodges to which many African Americans and West Indians still belong today.) But in French Saint-Domingue, Masonic ideas held great interest for the colony’s freedmen of color—the forerunners of Haiti’s political elite—and Freemasonry also seems to have overlapped, in untraceable but fascinating ways, with warrior societies brought here by slaves from Kongo and Dahomey, who won their freedom by force.