The charade that the US is a law-abiding nation has been exposed (once again) by the statements made by Donald Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton that the US will retaliate against the International Criminal Court if it proceeds with its investigations of war crimes committed by the US and its allies in Afghanistan and by Israel in Gaza.
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If you blinked, you might have missed the media flutter about the New Yorker magazine reversing its decision to invite Stephen Bannon, one-time Svengali to Donald Trump, to be interviewed at its festival. The reversal was caused because editor David Remnick received a lot of criticism and pressure, with other invited celebrities such as Judd Apatow and Jim Carrey saying they would not attend if Bannon was there. Of course, this has resulted in the usual right-wing whining about the ‘intolerant left’, that they are being ‘de-platformed’ and denied the chance to voice their views.
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Nir Shafir is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire at the University of California, San Diego. In preparing to teach his class on Science and Islam he was looking at some books and discovered something about the illustrations that seemed a little off.
As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off.
Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The telescope was known in the Middle East after Galileo invented it in the 17th century, but almost no illustrations or miniatures ever depicted such an object. When I tracked down the full image, two more figures emerged: one also looking through a telescope, while the other jotted down notes while his hand spun a globe – another instrument that was rarely drawn. The starkest contradiction, however, was the quill in the fourth figure’s hand. Middle Eastern scholars had always used reed pens to write. By now there was no denying it: the cover illustration was a modern-day forgery, masquerading as a medieval illustration.
In recent times, there has been greater awareness of the major but overlooked contributions that women have played in the sciences, and attempts to lift them out of the obscurity to which they had been consigned. The recent film Hidden Figures told of the women mathematicians, African-American women in particular, who worked in the US space program in the 1960s doing critical complex calculations despite the Jim Crow laws that heaped all manner of indignities on them.
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The sales of Nike merchandize over the Labor Day weekend rose 31% over the previous year, seemingly vindicating its decision to make Colin Kaaepernick the face of its ad campaign to commemorate the 30th anniversary of its ‘Just do it’ slogan, overcoming all the threats of boycotts and Donald Trump’s opposition.
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When it comes to science, the coin of the realm, the measure by which ideas and scientists are evaluated, is by being published in peer-reviewed journals. The journals are run either by professional organizations of scientists as a non-profit arm, such as all the journals run by the American Institute of Physics or the American Physical Society or are purely commercial private operations, such as the prestigious journal Nature. Journals subscriptions are then sold to individuals and libraries. But over time, a combination of rapidly rising subscription costs, shrinking library budgets, and the rise of the internet has created both a crisis and an opportunity for radical changes.
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One of the strange stories to come out of the new Bob Woodward book about the Donald Trump administration is the story of how advisors to Trump would swipe documents from his desk that they thought he should not see or sign. A specific case that was cited was former economic advisor Gary Cohn seeing a letter on Trump’s desk that was awaiting his signature calling for an end to a long standing trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn took the letter away and apparently that was the end of the story. Cohn apparently did something similar with a letter about NAFTA.
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The presidency of Donald Trump has given white nationalists and other xenophobic and racist groups in the US a sense of validation and suddenly we are hearing of organizations holding rallies openly. What has been less noticed is that these groups are even attracting members from an unlikely demographic: young men of color As Arun Gupta writes:
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Serena Williams is a tennis phenomenon, dominating the sport for two decades even as she had a baby during that period. She will easily go down in history as one of the greatest tennis players ever. But earlier today, the 36-year old lost the final of the US Open 3-6,4-6 to 20-year Naomi Osaka for whom this was her first major final. But what was noteworthy was how ugly the match was.
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Many businesses have realized that society is changing and that targeting their advertising campaigns to exclusively young, white, heterosexual, conventionally attractive people is not longer acceptable even as a purely marketing strategy, since the majority of consumers do not fit into that narrow demographic. But advertisements that include more diverse people seem to anger some people who then go on social media to rage in the ugliest ways against the people shown.
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