Lone Signal

Category: Society and Culture

  • Cross-posted from Tumblr: Unit 731

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    (In response to this post.) I’ve been interested in Japan’s Unit 731 since it came up in a bioethics class back in college. Recently, I read a journal article on the subject written by Tsuneishi Keiichi, one of Japan’s top biowarfare specialists, and several details stood out. “It is said that Ishii [Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, the…

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    Kate

  • On human rights and drug-related killings

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    I caught a really thought-provoking interview on human rights featuring the philosopher John Tasioulas recently. Being an (old) episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, which caters to a general audience, the interview focused on a basic1 question: What are human rights? Basic, but not simple, since “human rights” has become both a very charged term and,…

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    Kate

  • Ancient civilizations and failures of imagination

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    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…

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    Kate

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

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    “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…

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    Kate

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

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    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…

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    Kate