Category: Criticism
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“Being a queer girl isn’t something you decide. It’s something you survive, until you get old enough to claim it.”—Emily Pratt Slatin, Friendship Bracelets And Other Broken Promises This quote from my wife, Emily Pratt Slatin, is surgical. It names what so many queer femmes—especially lesbians and trans women—have lived: not a “choice” but a…
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“The idea that Mr. Spock could be a cross between a human being and a life-form independently evolved on the planet Vulcan is genetically far less probable than a successful cross of a man and an artichoke.” – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World Yeah we don’t like to think about that do we? Ironically, Star…
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“Why aren’t we using sports to teach science?” – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World Sagan was apparently a huge fan of basketball as a way to teach science and mathematics. In his book, The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan’s bit about using basketball to teach probability and logic is classic for him—he’s always looking for sneaky scaffolding.…
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“There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.” – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World Are some questions “dumb”? Maybe in the moment—but even the worst-formed ones come from a mental framework…
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In his 1993 book Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, Alan Cromer of Northeastern University suggests that we never would’ve invented science if not for what Carl Sagan refers to as “an unlikely concatenation of historical events.” Cromer writes, “This hostility to science, in the face of its obvious triumphs and benefits, is… evidence…
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“Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth.” — Bertrand Russell We love our insights, collecting them like shiny stones, tweeting them, tattooing them, and even weaponizing them in comment sections. But in our highly polarized digital age, Bertrand Russell’s warning rings louder than ever: insight alone—no matter how poetic, how emotionally satisfying—isn’t…
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“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” – Ansel Adams This axiom from Ansel Adams, one of the 20th century’s most acclaimed photographers, remains one of the most vital distinctions in visual art. It highlights a fundamental split in how we interact with the world, between passive extraction and active construction. To “take” implies…
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“We have a tendency today to think we occupy some exalted vantage point, and to pity the poor Newtonians for having so limited a world view. But within certain reasonable limitations, the same harmonic equations that describe clockwork really do describe the motions of astronomical objects throughout the Universe. This is a profound, not a…
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“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871) I’m starting to think I should read that book! In particular, this…
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“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.” – Simone Weil I found this quote from this great YouTube video from…