On May 25, 2022, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the strictest ban on abortion to date, a policy that prohibits the termination of any pregnancy “from the moment of fertilization.” This law endows an embryo, no matter the stage—long before it has discernible heartbeat—with the same legal status as an unborn child. Almost exactly one month later, on …
Tag Archives: United States
Plastic Pollution Goes Far Beyond Litter

Plastics in the oceans. Beaches littered with plastics. Images of whales and cows with plastics in their bellies. Calls for citizens not to litter, to throw away trash responsibly, to join clean up drives, to recycle. In the public imagination, the problem of plastics has largely become one of litter.
Plastic litter …
Mediated Intimacies: Teletherapy and the Changing Face of American Mental Healthcare

“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”
“I can, but your head is cut off. I just see your neck. Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you. There, is that better? Can you see me now?”
“Yes, that’s good.”
“Ok, good. I’m glad I have a head.”
“Me, too–it makes things much easier. How have things been for you?”
Such is the awkward start to …
Caring for home: The failures of vaccine nationalism, or, Why the pandemic will not be over soon
Para español aquí.
It was one of those early spring evenings where the sun was warm and the air fresh. My friends and I were at the park, in what has become a pandemic ritual. Seeing people of all ages running, reading, talking, walking their pets, and enjoying themselves while we also traded the confines of our small apartments for …
Visions of Black Futurity Amidst the Double Pandemic of COVID-19 and Police Brutality
When I ask Willow, an Afro-Puerto Rican young woman in her 20s, if quarantine has helped reduce the stigma of mental illness, she responds:
…I think it will because now we have something to compare it to. When we’re talking about having a hard time or feelings of not being able to escape ourselves, we can say, “Well, how was
Abou Farman’s On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience
On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience
Abou Farman
University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 360 pages.
Max More, a trained philosopher and the present Ambassador and President Emeritus of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, is of the opinion that most of us are caught in a “deathist”[1] trap. Aubrey de Grey, a noted gerontologist whose presence …