The whimsy was born in New England, not the Florida it conjured. Don Featherstone had designed the first pink flamingo yard ornament in 1957, naming the bird Diego and his species Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus.
Therians feel themselves less than 100 percent human—and most prefer their internal species. Rare, new to the rest of us, and at first glance bizarre, the subculture is following the usual trajectory.
On May 11, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a California law—supported by 62 percent of California voters back in 2018—that bans the sale, in California, of pork from mother pigs so tightly caged or penned in that they cannot stretch, lie down, or turn around. The new law gives them an extra ten square feet. Not much, but if you are pregnant, any breathing room helps.
Ted Engelmann thinks a lot about memory—the traumatic sort, but also the historic, cultural, and sociopolitical memories that should never be erased.
During the First Indochina War, reporters filed stories using cable, and each word cost money, so it made sense to condense Viet Nam, Ha Noi, Sai Gon, and other names. But those days are long gone. Using the correct spelling is more than courtesy; it lets us see the place fresh, as a country with a rich history and culture, not a war we lost.
Like feisty academics or a team of investigative reporters, philosophers work together to solve problems, but as they do, they challenge and oppose each other, oppose the orthodoxy, in order to reach a new synthesis.
All the driver says is “I’m on my way,” and I grin, not caring how long it takes. Cocky now, I open both windows all the way. Nobody should have to be scared. Yet humans have always had to be scared.
Notes on the skies of America
Bessie Coleman’s real life made her something larger than most Blacks and most women could imagine themselves to be, and her fictionalizing made her large life larger. Blackness had become something ultra-modern with Coleman, a meta-fiction, the mastery of fabrication, of image, for public consumption. She was the heroine of velocity. She ushered Black people into the age of speed.
My father was there, the photograph says to me directly. But he was also not there. Not only not visible in the photograph—which, taken from the wing, shows no hunched shoulder or flying cap to indicate the person pressing the firing button—but not there at all. Concentrating, yes; in fear for his life, yes. Supremely there, of course, while the shipboard German gunners sprayed flak at him and he dropped his powerful twin-engine airplane into a dive. But also absent, in a reverie.