Lone Signal

Author: Kate

  • Ancient civilizations and failures of imagination

    ,

    A couple of months ago, the BBC reported new findings on puquios, which  are spiralling holes scattered across Peru’s Nasca region. Through satellite imagery, a team of Italian researchers deduced the purpose of the once-mysterious holes: based on their placement and proximity to settlements, puquios seem to be part of a complex water retrieval and…

    Written by

    Kate

  • Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells These Stories: Orlando and Narratives of Trauma

    , ,

    “There are no words.” There’s also no counting how many times I’ve said that in response to various facets of the Orlando shooting: first, the burst of reports; then the rising death toll; then the slow unraveling of each victim’s biography; and then, the aftermath, the responses — in forms both heartwarmingly compassionate and shamelessly…

    Written by

    Kate

  • On Enid Blyton, David Foster Wallace, and awareness as ethics

    , ,

    I had the pleasure of stumbling upon an article on morality in Enid Blyton’s work (of all things) from Aeon this week. Nakul Krishna looks into the ethical life as demonstrated by the schoolgirls of Blyton’s Malory Towers and comes out with a quote from Iris Murdoch: ‘Love,’ Murdoch wrote in an essay called ‘The Sublime…

    Written by

    Kate

  • Beer Tales

    , ,

    Two interesting stories popped up on my various feeds this week, and it just so happened that they were about beer. The Chemical is Cultural First, an article from Science Alert about the discovery of the oldest known brewery in China. Two points in particular caught my attention. First, this: According to McGovern, the brewery…

    Written by

    Kate

  • The Problem of Scale

    ,

    I’ve been awfully quiet lately, and that’s due, for the most part, to the nature of my current line of work. I’m immersed in one of the many campaign teams working towards the upcoming 2016 national and local elections, and confidentiality is among the defining attributes of my particular position. When something takes up most of…

    Written by

    Kate

  • Reboot

    I’ve decided on a more definite direction for this little blog, though I’m loath to erase the earlier blog posts on this site (few and scattered though they are). Those old posts will stay up; let’s tally those as the early steps in the endless process of a blog’s development. But what am I trying…

    Written by

    Kate