Monthly Archives: March 2018

Disability Erasure And The Apocalyptic Narrative – Shoshana Kessock

Uncategorized

https://shoshanakessock.com/2017/08/28/disability-erasure-and-the-apocalyptic-narrative/

And so it brought me back to the inherent problem about post-apocalyptic narratives: they are, by nature and design, ableist in the extreme. Apocalyptic fiction doesn’t just embrace the erasure of the disabled and medically compromised, it normalizes their obliteration. It presents stories where we’ve re-embraced survival of the fittest as the only moniker and lionizes those who overcome hardship through leaving behind the injured and ill.

Small Things Considered: Fungomania III. Everybody Talks About the Weather But Mushrooms Do Something About It.

Uncategorized

http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2018/03/fungomania-iii-everybody-talks-about-the-weather-but-mushrooms-do-something-about-it.html

Why when you feel the cap of a mushroom in the woods, does it feel cool and somewhat moist? If you blamed evaporation, you would be right. But how come this takes place? It turns out that evaporation leads to the creation of air currents, and that is a good thing for the dispersal of the mushrooms’ spores. Mushrooms have an intense preoccupation for spreading their spores afield, a way to ensure the occupancy of new and distant sites.

…

In conclusion, mushrooms make their own climate.

Rape Isn’t Personal in the Film Beauty and the Dogs—It’s a Public Problem – Film/TV – The Stranger

Uncategorized

https://www.thestranger.com/film/2018/03/28/25959376/rape-isnt-personal-in-the-film-beauty-and-the-dogs-its-a-public-problem

And why should she have to endure it alone? Rape is the product of societal attitudes toward women and their worth. Everyone wants her to keep it private, but her effort to register the rape is precisely to make it a matter of public record. If it is public, then everyone has to deal with it. The individual, the hero of American freedoms and democracy, is, in this brilliant work, forced to be an enemy of the state.

Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages

Uncategorized

If disfluencies appear to generally help communication more than they hinder it, why are they so stigmatized? Writer and linguist Michael Erard argues in his book Um… that historically, public speakers have been blissfully unconcerned with disinfecting their speech of disfluencies until about the 20th Century—possibly because neither hearers nor speakers consciously noticed them until it became possible to record and replay spoken language in all its circuitous and halting glory. The aversion to disfluencies may well have arisen from speakers’ horror at hearing their own recorded voices. Erard suggests that the modern repugnance for disfluencies is less an assessment of a person’s speech than it is a “deeper judgment about how much control he should have over his self-presentation and his identity.”

Source: Your Speech Is Packed With Misunderstood, Unconscious Messages