What I've Been Reading/Watching/Listening to:

Audiobooks:
Jane Eyre—Regarded as one of the first psychological novels, it follows a young woman's journey through 18th century England. I find it remarkably similar to Wuthering Heights by Brontë's sister and also found antecedents of parts of recent works (Harry Potter and Beauty and The Beast).
The Bhagavad Gita—I've been meaning to read the great works of the world's most common religions. The Bhagavad Gita is captivating in its beauty and wisdom. From my lay understanding, it seems to anticipate a lot of modern ideas in psychology and physics.

TV:
How to Get Away with Murder—I love this show. How had I not seen it yet? The plot is salacious, and the characters pop off the screen. 

 Film:
Love, Simon—Finally a gay movie with a happy ending. I had hoped Call Me By Your Name would be it, but it wanted an Oscar. I hope there will be many more light, good-but-not-great movies like this.
The General—I'm trying to work through some of the top film directors of all time and had never seen anything by Buster Keaton. Every time I see a silent movie I'm struck by their visual imagination and by how much less visual imagination is shown by many films with sound.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Much Do Wild Animals Suffer? A Foundational Result on the Question is Wrong.

Image
NOTE: I would like to clarify that the post below and the published paper show that a result from 1995 does not hold, but they do NOT make the case for the 1995 model being correct. There are many reasons the models in both papers are likely to be deeply flawed: path dependency, dynamic ecosystems, philosophical problems with the definition of suffering and enjoyment, and so on. The primary point here is to treat the 1995 result and other work on wild animal suffering with caution. In 1995, Yew-Kwang Ng wrote a groundbreaking paper, "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering"  that explored the novel question of the wellbeing of wild animals as distinct from the conservation of species. As perceptive as it was innovative, the paper proposed a number of axioms about evolution and consciousness to study which animals are sentient, what their experiences are, and what might be done about it. Among the many results in the paper wa
Read more

We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It: A Lesson the Animal Rights Movement Could Learn

Image
This fall, I've been listening in on a course I always intended to take as an undergraduate, U.S. Gay and Lesbian History by George Chauncey, and I've had to pinch myself for the last week or two as I read my way through Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities  by John D'Emilio to remind myself that I'm not reading about the animal rights movement. The debate is so similar to, and the rhetoric so evocative of, the modern animal rights movement that it's impossible for someone in this movement to miss. So I've decided I should share some of the most interesting parallels in the book with a wider audience. The book covers the early (pre-Stonewall) movement for gay and lesbian rights, particularly centering around the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two 1950s groups. The movement was known as the homophile movement in those decades. I don't think many of these examples are that biased by D'Emilio's own perspective, as the previous book
Read more

What I Learned from a Year Spent Studying How to Get Policymakers to Use Evidence

Image
Source: http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/on-evidence/ The past year I was a senior research analyst at Northwestern University's Global Poverty Research Lab on a study of evidence-based policy. Specifically, our goal was to work on a question often on researchers' minds: how can I get my ideas acted upon? To do this, I dug through a number of bodies of evidence on how science influences policy. One area I looked at is what is called "implementation science" in medicine, which looks at how to get doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators to adopt evidence-based practice. Another was a series of papers by social scientist Carol Weiss and her students on how policymakers in government agencies claim to use evidence. There is also a small literature on how to implement evidence-based policy in public schools, and a little work on policymaker numeracy. I've included a bibliography below that should be helpful for anyone interested in this topic. Most of my yea
Read more