99 Percent Invisible: The Universal Page

In 1786, Haüy printed the first machine-embossed book for the blind. It was a treatise on blind education. It’s written in print — the kind that sighted readers would recognize — but the text was all raised so that blind students could feel the shape of the letters. It was a radical move — not just the first book for blind readers in history, but the beginning of the idea that blind people can be systematically educated… But there were a few problems. [...]

This idea was really important to Howe. He didn’t want blind people to use a system — like braille — that was separate from what sighted people used. He thought it would isolate blind people and prevent them from integrating into the wider world. Long before the concept of “universal design” had been articulated, it was informing Howe’s thinking about how to design for people with disabilities. [...]

Catherine Kudlick directs the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State, where she’s also a history professor. And she doesn’t even really buy Howe’s argument that Boston Line Type was “universal.” “He might have thought of it as universal, but it’s universal in that way that the colonizer thinks things are universal. It’s like you know these poor native peoples need educating and will try to bring them up to my level and make them like me.” Howe failed to pay attention to the expertise of the blind.

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Aeon: Marxism and Buddhism

At least since Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, commented on his Marxist inclination in 1993, it is evident that Buddhism and Marxism have something in common:

Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability … The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason, I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist. [...]

From a Buddhist perspective, the capitalist motor is fuelled by humankind’s deepest vice: its trṣṇa. Marx understood that the whole economic system is based on consumption, and marketing agencies know how to push trṣṇa to the realms of utter perversion, thereby warranting a continuum of consumption and labour. The worker is the hamster, consumer culture is the hamster wheel. People are tricked into believing that Furbies, iPads and all those other pointless goods and services are necessary for a happy and fulfilled existence. A sense of ‘meaning’ has been replaced with instant, short-term, on-demand happiness. [...]

If something is empty of substance, then it is relations that define the thing. In other words, everything is what it is in virtue of bearing certain relations to other things and, as those things are related to other things, ultimately in virtue of bearing relations to everything else. Everything stands in a unique set of relations to other things, which thereby individuates it without its having to assume a unique and individual substance. You stand in countless relations to your parents, spouse, but also to your car and bank account. The impression that there are such things as houses, selves, spouses, bank accounts, hammers and so on, all independent of a network of relations, is actually a conceptual illusion. This, in short, is the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The notion of emptiness includes the notion of self. The self, too, is empty in that it is exclusively defined by its relations, not some underlying substance. This is the idea of no-self.

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The Guardian: How the state runs business in China

When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he extolled the importance of the state economy at every turn, while all around him watched as China’s high-speed economy was driven by private entrepreneurs. Since then, Xi has engineered an unmistakable shift in policy. At the time he took office, private firms were responsible for about 50% of all investment in China and about 75% of economic output. But as Nicholas Lardy, a US economist who has long studied the Chinese economy, concluded in a recent study, “Since 2012, private, market-driven growth has given way to a resurgence of the role of the state.” [...]

The relationship between the party and private sector companies is, up to a point, flexible – certainly more so than with state companies. The party doesn’t habitually micromanage their day-to-day operations. The firms are largely still in charge of their basic business decisions. But pressure from party committees to have a seat at the table when executives are making big calls on investment and the like means the “lines have been dangerously blurred”, in the words of one analyst. “Chinese domestic laws and administrative guidelines, as well as unspoken regulations and internal party committees, make it quite difficult to distinguish between what is private and what is state-owned.” [...]

In the early optimistic glow of Xi’s ascension to the leadership, a number of western commentators talked up his appreciation of markets. After all, from 1985 to 2007, Xi had served in two provinces, Fujian and Zhejiang, which were thriving bastions of private enterprise. Starting in the 1980s, Fujian was an important gateway for investors from nearby Taiwan, while Zhejiang was home to a number of China’s most famous private companies, such as Jack Ma’s Alibaba. The arc of Xi’s father’s career, from revolutionary to reformer, reinforced this optimism about China’s new leader. Lu Guanqiu, a businessman who owned and ran Wanxiang, a private car parts group, told Bloomberg: “When Xi becomes general secretary, he’ll be even more open and will pay even more attention to private enterprise and the people’s livelihood. It is because he was in Zhejiang for five years.” [...]

In some ways, codifying in public documents the party’s role in managing companies was both an instance of rare transparency and part of an increasing trend of the party openly displaying its power. In the past, Chinese state-owned listed companies had customarily filed misleading prospectuses ahead of their stock exchange listings, omitting the party’s pivotal role in the hiring and firing of senior executives. Similarly, company boards had long been legally and theoretically independent of the party, but not in practice. “The same individual who is chairing a party committee meeting on a Monday might well be chairing a board meeting later in the week,” notes a 2018 report on Chinese corporate governance.

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TLDR News: What Deal Does the EU Want From Brexit?

There's been a lot of talk, on this channel and elsewhere, about what kind of Brexit deal the UK wants. There's been significantly less conversation about what the EU wants out of it. So in this video, we discuss what the EU27 want from Brexit (and more specifically what France, Germany and Ireland are looking for).

CNN: 100 years ago, white mobs across the country attacked black people. And they fought back

Chicago wasn't the only city besieged by mob violence in the months after World War I. White gangs were eager to maintain Jim Crow-era laws but African-American soldiers returning from the war were demanding their rights and an end to second-class citizenship. Between late 1918 and late 1919, the US saw 10 major anti-black riots, dozens of minor, racially charged clashes and almost 100 lynchings, writes David F. Krugler, author of "1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back."

Scores of black men and women were killed that year in racial violence. Nobody knows how many. The official death toll, Krugler says, was more than 150 people -- the majority of whom were black -- across the country between late 1918 and 1919. The Arkansas State Archives says 200 blacks were killed in Arkansas alone over several days in September 1919. [...]

There were seeds back then, she said, of issues American society is still grappling with today. Issues like racial inequality in the job market, the distrust between the blacks and the criminal justice system and biased news outlets.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why a Thriving Civilization in Malta Collapsed 4,000 Years Ago

To survive, they reared dairy animals rather than prioritizing meat—killing off newborn livestock before they had a chance to graze. They mixed livestock manure back into the soil and may even have made back-breaking journeys carting soil washed into the valleys back uphill to refresh the upland fields. The evidence for this lies in strange, parallel ruts in the ground that may be cart tracks, as well as signs from the skeletons that soft tissue had sometimes been worn completely away by hard, repetitive activity. Oddly, says Malone, they ate almost no fish.

To achieve such complex collaborative effort something powerful must have held the community together: the temples. Until now, the Temple Culture was thought to have centered on the worship of a mother goddess, but Malone thinks it was more of a clubhouse culture, focused on ritual and feasting but where food—rather than a deity—was revered. In the complexes it is now clear that the people displayed their livestock and harvests on special benches and altars, feasted, and also stored food. There is no skeletal evidence of violent death and no fortifications, said Malone. Instead the society appears to have survived through cooperation and sharing. [...]

Islands can be used as laboratories for understanding change in the wider world, Malone says. However, the geographical peculiarities of islands can also present problems by rendering conventional research techniques redundant. In Spain’s Canary Islands, for example, ancient pollen is not well-preserved in the local terrain. What’s more, many important plants on the islands—such as its emblematic laurel trees—produce no, or little, pollen, and the environmental conditions have also eroded other pieces of evidence, such as macrofossils.

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