[NOTE: This is the second in a series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] The second episode of Season 3 (“Playtest”) is what I imagine many people who have heard about Black Mirror but never actually watched the series would expect the show to be like. “Playtest”…
Read More[NOTE: This is the first in a series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] All of the episodes of Charlie Brooker‘s brilliant sci-fi series Black Mirror take place in a near-distant future, but in the first installment of the third season (“Nosedive”) that future is far…
Read Moreby Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which…
Read MoreThere’s an old anecdote about boiling frogs that is often employed by philosophers to explain the sorites paradox. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, the story goes, it will immediately sense the heat and the danger, jump out of the pot, and be spared its life. But if you put…
Read MoreWomen’s voices, ideas, engagements, and critiques are constantly being erased and/or appropriated– in academia, on the internet, at workplaces of every ilk– sometimes through slick and malicious moves, but much more often as a consequence of careless inattention. Also, water is wet. I was just recently “disappeared” in an essay by my friend Joshua Miller…
Read MoreLast semester, I conducted a test-run on a new assignment I had devised for my courses– the “Technology and Human Values” project— and I was, quite frankly, floored by the work that students did for it. The basic assignment is for students to work in groups of four or fewer to devise a merely-possible technological solution…
Read MoreThere are so many things about Netflix’s original comedy series Grace and Frankie (now in its second season) to recommend it, not least of which is its pitch-perfect gallows humor. Orbiting around the decidedly 21st century lives of four septuagenarians– the eponymous Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and their now ex-husbands, Saul (Sam Waterston)…
Read MoreYesterday’s piece by Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden’s in NYT‘s The Stone (“If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is”) has already generated some of the most interesting online discussion about the discipline and profession of Philosophy that I’ve seen since our last salacious exposé. (What are we at now, philosophers? 190 days…
Read MoreOnly a couple of weeks ago, I noted on this blog (in “Philosophy’s Gatekeepers”) that it had been 190 days since the last major breaking-news story about sexual harassment or assault in professional Philosophy. That was a noteworthy fact, And then, last Friday, the Thomas Pogge story broke. I’ll just direct readers to the news coverage…
Read MoreThis morning, I was reading an engaging and superbly well-written book that I’ve been asked to review for philoSOPHIA and found myself, in spite of its merits, grumbling aloud about the very experience of reading it. Why? One word: Endnotes. I truly hate the maddening inconvenience of endnotes. All those unnecessary interruptions, all that flipping back…
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