@strangemattersmag
A cooperative magazine of new & unconventional thinking in economics, politics, and culture Proudly worker-owned since our founding in 2020. ~ Pitch us: editors(at)strangematters(dot)coop ~ strangematters.coop
"There is something obviously erotic – and tortured – about the fervor with which undercover policemen have pursued sodomy charges through the ages...They would wave around their erections in bathrooms and cinema halls to entrap homosexuals."
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@seanmcarroll.bsky.social Thanks for promoting Rose Novick’s Zhuangzi translation/commentary! Would you be at all interested in having her on the pod? If so we can get you in touch. Just let us know!
This reminds me of something Toni Morrison wrote.
"Debord and Lebovici commissioned a quartet of lavish metal sets...bearing a starkly modernist design cast in silver-plated copper. (Debord was absolutely the sort of guy who’d shell out $30 extra for the metal coins in John Company.)"
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If you want more non-Western philosophical classics, consider subscribing. Every dollar we get after expenses goes to our writers, whose brilliant work is piece by piece assembling the canons of the next century's integrated world culture.
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Don't miss the footnotes in this one. If the the base text is an eager student with no background, the footnotes are a learned scholar steeped in the philology & historiography of Chinese classical philosophy. The gossip is as delicious as the citations are thorough.
You think it's saying one thing -- suddenly it concludes the opposite. Everything transforms into everything else with time. Opposed views can both make sense, each at their own scale & context. Literary form & philosophical argument work together to shake us.
But what truly elevates things for the lay reader is Novick's commentary, where she adopts the perspective of an intelligent but "naive" reader encountering the Zhuangzi for the first time -- with all the surprises and delights that entails.
In this piece, Novick goes even further, boldly deciding to write a verse translation of the Zhuangzi. Though usually considered prose, its classical Chinese is highly poetic. Novick's odd line breaks & striking images highlight the text's literary dimensions & bizarre leaps.
Novick, a brilliant philosopher of biology with an abiding interest in the global history of philosophy, has spoken beautifully about the Zhuangzi before.
Her dialogue with her friend @lastpositivist.bsky.social is a hidden gem of philosophy YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIvv...
A classic of world philosophy, the Zhuangzi revolutionized ethics and ontology forever with its Dao.
Now, in our latest issue, Rose Novick brings this masterpiece to a new generation of English readers with her magisterial translation & commentary.
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"If you’ve decided you need to make steel, then...you’re going to need to make steel – and there’s a very good argument that socialist steel, capitalist steel, and fascist steel will all more or less be the same and come about by the same process."
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gave a guest lecture at Princeton today and ended up using the very scientific phrase “belt to ass” while discussing the recent NYC nurses’ strike
"When this wonderful social-democratic government creates its green industrial policy or its job guarantee or its sovereign wealth fund, who will have the expertise to manage those programs? Podcast hosts who have never managed anything more than their clout?"
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"I was asking why everyone’s laughing, and they told me it’s funny because he had come to kill the guy, and now they’re taking his family to the hospital. I’m sure that if you show this film in Iran, no one will laugh at that sequence."
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"Lines have until now quietly been drawn around a whole category of crucial government functions, from which boundary the hungry fingers of oligarchs and their pet economists are to be smacked away."
strangematters.coop/critique-of-...
"When this wonderful social-democratic government creates its green industrial policy or its job guarantee or its sovereign wealth fund, who will have the expertise to manage those programs? Podcast hosts who have never managed anything more than their clout?"
strangematters.coop/critique-of-...
"I was asking why everyone’s laughing, and they told me it’s funny because he had come to kill the guy, and now they’re taking his family to the hospital. I’m sure that if you show this film in Iran, no one will laugh at that sequence."
strangematters.coop/an-interview...
"Lines have until now quietly been drawn around a whole category of crucial government functions, from which boundary the hungry fingers of oligarchs and their pet economists are to be smacked away."
strangematters.coop/critique-of-...
The floor plan for the planned ICE concentration camp in Social Circle, Georgia:
My essay 'After Orthogonality,' the culmination of 4 years of work on virtue-ethics, rationality, AI, decision-theory, and praxis is out on The Gradient
Many say our increasingly authoritarian government edges towards dictatorship.
Yet the very first thing it did was slash its state capacity. Why?
John Michael Colón takes up the question. His surprising answers cut to the heart of our grim political situation.
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"Cronenberg is neither for, nor against, the parasite – the thing simply serves its purpose: 'turn the world into one brilliant, mindless orgy.'"
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"Try as we might to make it otherwise, death is not invisible. It is pervasive; it is part and parcel of the experience of being alive. It lies beyond the reach of personal and societal control, just as the mystery of L’Inconnue’s true fate does."
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A dresser inside a museum in New York City has been discovered as a secret stop on the Underground Railroad — the first of its kind discovered in Manhattan in over 100 years
First they said critical ICE detention footage was "destroyed." Then, lost in a system crash. Then, never recorded.
Now, in the latest court docs, it shows the federal government lost three hard drives it was supposed to put footage on in a case where ICE detainees say they faced inhumane abuse.
"For Erdoğan, rooting out Kurdish self-determination is part of a larger project to restore the former glory of the Ottoman Empire...through expansionist policies across the region – not only in Syria and Iraq, but in Armenia, Greece, Cyprus, & elsewhere."
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"A modern-day concentration camp ... People have been killed by the staff here." Irish citizen Seamus Culleton has been in ICE detention since September, despite having a valid work permit and his own business in the US.
"The objects currently seen as tasteful then not only mimic the handmade, but also the old. It looks thrifted without dealing with the slowness of charity shop hunting; it is new without looking like it."
Piece for @strangemattersmag.bsky.social telling the strange story of the rise and fall of Europe's specialist grocery delivery apps, which were everywhere for a couple of years but have now almost completely disappeared.
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