Blog

10 clues this guy doesn’t want to hear your trans-inclusive pitch
On an ‘Evening Standard’ column, in which Richard Dawkins gets mad imagining that trans people might double-score on cake. He’s managed to make trans rights about himself. He wants to eat his cake and have it.

No one should inflict hunger in Gaza. Famine is a choice.
Headlines on the crisis for those who have overlooked them. We can find ways to coexist. And not to weaponize the control of food. It’s an absolute minimum. This year’s Yom Kippur fast isn’t easy. We can do better.

You’re not my type
Trans man explains dating preferences to cis man. For gender and sexuality, self-ID is the tiebreaker. If the question is, How do I know if I’m a gay man?, the answer is never going to be, Ask Blake Smith.

The feeling of knowing
Steven Connor’s 2019 book ‘The Madness of Knowledge’. ‘Epistemopathy’ means the feeling of knowing. We have pleasant and unpleasant feelings associated with knowing. That’s part of why knowledge matters to us.

Turtles all the way down
Finding truth in emptiness. When we acknowledge there is no final turtle, we open ourselves to discover and live more. The turtle on which we are standing is never the last one.

We can’t prepare for this moment
‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel. What to make of this political and ecological moment, this chaos that arrives with no instructions? We can “see, collectively, in the dark.”

‘Do I want it? Life, that is.’
‘On Not Knowing‘ by Emily Ogden. What is there to hope for? Should we hope? We can work in the field, making bales of hay, but the work of the soul “never will be cut and dried.”

‘Agnotology’: The study of ignorance
Our ways of knowing can be corrupted. “We’re going to have to rethink our metaphors,” Proctor said, on persuading people away from science-denial. “We’ve got to think much more creatively.”

We knew it before we were quizzed
That truth remains valuable. We existed. We went to school and forgot ourselves for a while. Then we remembered who we are. We had this knowledge with us the whole time.