Eunsu Lee

1 followers · 1 following · 872 views

on the atlas — 18

highlights — 46

In clinical training, none of us wanted to unleash the fury of modern medicine upon a 98-year-old with cancer who’d just lost his pulse, but we all inflicted some version of it: ramming his purpled breastbone against his stilled heart, sending electricity jagging through his chest, and breaching his throat, blood vessels, and penis with tubes, only to watch him die days later. I didn’t want that for my mom; I had no desire for her to cling futilely to life.
How Do I Make Sense of My Mother’s Decision to Die? - The Atlantic
You might be a hipster if you’re mistaking abstraction for transcendence.
'Meta' Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does - The Atlantic
In 1994, the summer after we finished middle school, Darci broke my heart. We were out at Greers Ferry Lake with a few others on an August day so hot, we struggled to move fast or take full breaths. The warm green water was barely an escape. We walked a good distance out, kicking up slimy mud from the bottom, negotiating the minnows that nibbled at our feet, then swam out to the floating orange buoys that marked the edge of the swimming area.
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young - The Atlantic
Adults had taught us girls to keep boys from touching us before marriage, but no one ever told us what to do if we wanted to touch them. In that space between Vanessa’s desire and her shame, other girls smelled blood.
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young - The Atlantic
The message at church was that we had to keep ourselves pure for our husbands, and the message at school was that sex would either kill us or leave us pregnant, and there was nothing we could do to prevent either scenario except abstain.
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young - The Atlantic
The girls who got pregnant were stigmatized—until their babies were born. Then they were revered as mothers.
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young - The Atlantic
Empire makes for compelling narratives, in art as in movies, and museums have long structured themselves in various heliotropic halls—Egypt, Greece, Paris, New York—each with its own shining cultural sun toward which the outer bits turn, recipients of light rather than instigators. But we all know that cultural production is less like a solar system or an org chart than a boisterous Venn diagram.
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
frica & byzantium” contains much that will capture attention and immediately impress, and it’s also full of things that won’t—tiny coins and shards of pottery inscribed in languages few visitors will be able to decipher. But this is inherent in the mission of the encyclopedic museum as well—a reminder that not everything can be yours at a glance. Finding the magic may require real work.
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
Nor is it clear how worshippers would have used this floor. As the art historian Liz James points out in the catalog, many floor mosaics included sacred imagery and patron portraits. “Were these also walked over, brushed and scrubbed clean, or overlaid with tables and chairs? Did they offer the enslaved a chance to grind their heels into the slaveholders’ face”? It would be nice to know.
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
Having thus dismissed the dominant framework that Western institutions have used to understand Africa (a framework that serves to keep the West at the center of the conversation, as perps if no longer heroes), this densely packed show surveys roughly 1,500 years and millions of square miles, telling viewers something about empire, something about religion, and a good deal about the human compulsion to make beautiful things.
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
Organized by Andrea Myers Achi, the Met’s associate curator of Byzantine art, the show and its catalog share an ambitious goal: “to present a narrative of Africa unconnected to colonialism and its legacies.”
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
Intentionally or not, it has tended to convey a particular worldview, described by the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne as a “unilinear path, leading from Athens to Rome, and from Rome to London, Paris, or Heidelberg … Everything else outside of it is a curiosity.” There is a center and a periphery. All roads and grand marble staircases lead to us.
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
Viewed benignly, the encyclopedic art museum is a great public library of things, illuminating the brilliant variety and shared impulses of our species, and promoting intercultural understanding and admiration. Viewed less benignly, it has been cast as the well-spoken child of imperialist shopaholics and kleptomaniacs who appropriated the art of other people to tell flattering tales about themselves.
The Disorienting Beauty of ‘Africa & Byzantium’ - The Atlantic
Almost everyone goes to an evangelical church, and in the halls of the town’s only high school, everyone knows everything about everyone else, or seems to: whom you dated, where you bought your clothes, how you acted on weekends, and even your destiny, inherited from the generations that came before you.
The Women of Rural America Are Dying Too Young - The Atlantic
A speck of hodgepodge knowledge and hungry consciousness amid the tidal movements of Lagos refuse, Aremu Hakeem needs a social system that knows how to put his yearnings to use. Until that day comes, he needs a great novelist, one who understands him from the inside, and who can tell the world of the possibility and waste that crowd all the sordid corners of our world.
Dickens in Lagos | Lapham’s Quarterly
which accounts for the spirit of striving that prevails in Lagos and molds people’s faces into a hard, weary, calculating expression.
Dickens in Lagos | Lapham’s Quarterly
Illusions quickly die, and he soon realizes what a young man who was cutting hardwood boards in a sawmill told me: “Nobody will care for you, and you have to struggle to survive.”
Dickens in Lagos | Lapham’s Quarterly
The special power of the late-nineteenth-century novel comes from the proximity of acute sentience and overwhelming circumstance. Its moral atmosphere depends on characters whose awareness and ambition are too large for the social order (described with relentless detail) into which fate has thrown them. They are painfully conscious of the contours of their society, the dominance of money, the price of transgression, the place on the scale of rank and clout of everyone they encounter.
Dickens in Lagos | Lapham’s Quarterly
The concerns of that literature—the individual caught in an encompassing social web, the sensitive young mind trapped inside an indifferent world, the beguiling journey from countryside to metropolis, the dismal inventiveness with which people survive, the permanent gap between imagination and opportunity, the big families whose problems are lived out in the street, the tragic pregnancies, the ubiquity of corruption, the earnest efforts at self-education, the preciousness of books, the squalid factories and debtor’s prisons, the valuable garbage, the complex rules of patronage and extortion, t…
Dickens in Lagos | Lapham’s Quarterly
Meir lost soldiers—people who had purposely put their lives on the line. Netanyahu lost civilians—the people the state and its soldiers were supposed to protect.
The End of Netanyahu - The Atlantic
The net result of The Same Fight is more pain. Less trust. Regardless of anyone’s intentions. This is how two well-intentioned people slowly fall apart.
A Dirty Dish by the Sink Can Be a Big Marriage Problem - The Atlantic
In every line of Homer, a feast of choices is laid before the translator. But every dish chosen means a dozen others left uneaten.
What Emily Wilson’s 'Iliad' Misses - The Atlantic
Her translation meets only the minimal definition of metrical verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, the business casual of English prosody), and in the bareness of her rendering, we get a refreshingly direct impression of this warrior’s unsentimentality.
What Emily Wilson’s 'Iliad' Misses - The Atlantic
The critic Guy Davenport, in a pan of Lattimore, wrote that translation is a game of two languages, and that “the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between.”
What Emily Wilson’s 'Iliad' Misses - The Atlantic
Her brother David said that he had once encouraged Loftus to go to therapy, but she told him, “I can’t, because the next time I take the witness stand they’d grill me with questions.”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
“There is something split off in Loftus,” the psychologist Lauren Slater asserted in her book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” from 2004. “She is the survivor who questions the validity of survivorship. That’s one way out of a bind.”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
When her gynecologist recommended that she have surgery to remove a fibroid from her uterus, she was so annoyed by the idea of missing days of work that she turned her surgery into an experiment. Her anesthesiologist read her a hundred words while she was unconscious, to see if she could recall them later.
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
Haaken said, “We have enough history behind us as a movement to demand more than the principle ‘believe women,’ which reduces us to children and denies us the complexity and nuances of everyday remembering.”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
Trauma was described as an extraordinary and idiosyncratic experience that could not be simulated in a lab, or even expressed by the rules of science.
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
“I was always struck by something similar in Beth’s ambiguous framing of her mother’s death,” Garry told me. “It was as if the death existed without causality or agency.”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
But, on some pages of her journal, she used a paper clip to attach scraps of paper, where she shared private thoughts that she called “removable truths.” She could pull them out if anyone ever demanded to read her journals. In one “removable truth,” she blamed herself for her mother’s suffering.
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
Loftus’s diaries read like an exercise in proving that she existed on a different emotional register from that of her mother. She summarized her mood with descriptions like “happyville,” “I’m so happy!” and “Everything’s GREAT!” It’s as if she were continually trying to outdo herself.
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
Loftus’s brother Robert said that he also faced an “empty canvas.” He told me, “I can’t grab an adjective or noun to describe my mother. There’s nothing that will allow me to say, ‘This is who she was as a person.’ There is no coagulation, no coherence.”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
“Here these women are blossoming into a world in which people are finally going to listen to them, and then they’re going to have some professor on the stand—someone they’ve never met before—tell the jury that they can’t be believed.”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
“The emotion is no guarantee that you are dealing with an authentic memory,”
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
“Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality,” she has written. “It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expan
How Elizabeth Loftus Changed the Meaning of Memory | The New Yorker
Sexual violence and its aftermath raise numerous philosophical issues in a variety of areas in our discipline. The disintegration of the self experienced by victims of violence challenges our notions of personal identity over time, a major preoccupation of metaphysics.
How Philosophy Attempts—and Often Fails–To Grapple With Experiences of Trauma ‹ Literary Hub
So much as we want to believe that we owe each other nothing but our firmly set boundaries, this rhetoric hurts us all. It’s tempting to believe that the solution is an individual one – that if only we find the correct therapy and journaling template we can escape the dread. The very experience of growing up, of becoming an adult, of being human, will always be a complicated one. It is messy and unpredictable.
Is this the worst time ever to be in your twenties? | Dazed
From nothing, we henceforth create ourselves in an image of our own making. In doing so we find our freedom, which is radical and full of responsibilities.
The Existential Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
If there is no designer (i.e., God), there is no intrinsic essence of human life, therefore there can be no human nature (what humans are supposed to be). Instead, we must invent our purpose, our own “essence”.
The Existential Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
A being-for-itself, on the other hand, can define its essence above and beyond what it simply is. In this way, a person is both being-in-itself and being-for-itself.
The Existential Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
In an ideal world, Langa and other researchers say, efforts to prevent dementia would begin in childhood with strong investments in education and the inculcation of healthy habits. Such efforts would be incorporated into the treatment of depression and other mental illnesses that often emerge in the teen and early adult years. Sadly, we do not live in that ideal world; mental illness continues to be stigmatized and undertreated. But given the high costs to society and the personal tolls exacted by both mental illness and dementia, it's hard to imagine a wiser investment.
Why Do Mental Illnesses--From Depression to Schizophrenia--Raise the Risk of Dementia? - Scientific American
“Impression” can be used as a scientific term for the stimulation of the sensory nerves, as for example the effect on the retinal nerves of light reflecting off objects. Strictly speaking, the term isolates this purely physical stimulus from any subsequent mental or emotional reaction to it. The retinal impression consists only of a pattern of colors, before the mind interprets what it is seeing and deduces information about mass, space, and texture, and before the viewer reacts emotionally
Impressionism as optical realism: Monet – Smarthistory
Laforgue states that the Impressionist “renders nature as it is [telle qu’elle est],” but he should perhaps more accurately say that the Impressionist concentrates on rendering nature as it appears to the eyes. In this sense, the Impressionists both limited the project of painting to a narrower goal than that pursued by traditional naturalism, and increased its accuracy with regard to that goal.
Impressionism as optical realism: Monet – Smarthistory
In traditional Renaissance and Academic naturalism, truth to reality entailed the inclusion not only of what we see, but also prominent visible evidence of properties of touch and space: the mass of objects, their textures, and the three-dimensional terrain in which they are located. Because paintings cannot literally reproduce space, mass, and texture, they must give an illusion of those qualities—and they frequently exaggerate the visual evidence that contributes to that illusion.
Impressionism as optical realism: Monet – Smarthistory
Although we tend to have powerful reflexive judgments about what is realistic in art and what is not, the basis for such judgments is frequently unclear.
Impressionism as optical realism: Monet – Smarthistory