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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" > <channel> <title>JSTOR Daily</title> <atom:link href="https://daily.jstor.org/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>https://daily.jstor.org</link> <description>where news meets its scholarly match</description> <lastBuildDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2021 16:51:05 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency> <image> <url>https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/cropped-new_daily_favicon-300x300.png</url> <title>JSTOR Daily</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org</link> <width>32</width> <height>32</height> </image> <item> <title>Smoking Banana Peels to Get High Was Briefly a Thing</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/smoking-banana-peels-to-get-high-was-briefly-a-thing/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Jonathan Aprea]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Sun, 20 Jun 2021 12:19:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Education & Society]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Politics & History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Quirky History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Social Sciences]]></category> <category><![CDATA[fake news]]></category> <category><![CDATA[newspapers]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org?p=274081&preview=true&preview_id=274081</guid> <description><![CDATA[But it didn't work. The rumor, spread by the underground press in 1967, probably led to many disappointed hippies. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/smoking-banana-peels-to-get-high-was-briefly-a-thing/">Smoking Banana Peels to Get High Was Briefly a Thing</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[In the 1960s, many authors, publishers, and readers of <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/community-collections-campus-underground-newspapers/">underground papers</a> understood them as alternatives to what they considered mainstream news sources, or the “aboveground press”: network television news, daily newspapers, national magazines. The dailies covered the war in Vietnam, racism, and youthful unrest, but with certain assumptions, especially that violent protest was never justifiable but the Vietnam War was. (This would change somewhat after 1968.) At the same time, these outlets touted themselves as upholding the time-honored tradition of “objective reporting.” But much of the success of the underground press stemmed from the fact that alternative papers were written and published from perspectives that many readers didn’t see in mainstream media. Underground authors, because they were often participants in the counterculture, vehemently opposed the idea that mainstream news sources were objective, because the daily papers’ assumptions about the world were so different from their own. <figure id="attachment_274955" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-274955" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28043054"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-274955 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/tripping_on_banana_peels_rumors_fake_news_and_alternative_news_1_1050.jpg" alt="The cover of The Rag, November 20, 1967" width="1050" height="1617" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-274955" class="wp-caption-text">The cover of The Rag, November 20, 1967</figcaption></figure> This might sound familiar. During former President Donald Trump’s campaign and after his election, many people on the political right claimed that news sources like CNN that are generally considered mainstream are in fact “<a href="https://daily.jstor.org/media-literacy-fake-news-a-syllabus/">fake news</a>.” Some right-wing media outlets also call themselves alternative. But underground periodicals of the 1960s fell on the opposite end of the political spectrum. They considered the US military, racial injustice, and any form of conservatism anathema. Because of the ad-hoc ways in which they were published, however, they were prone to printing the occasional rumor. <figure id="attachment_274956" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-274956" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28038209?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-274956 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/tripping_on_banana_peels_rumors_fake_news_and_alternative_news_2_1050.jpg" alt="From page 8 of the April 13, 1967 issue of Helix " width="1050" height="1323" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-274956" class="wp-caption-text">From page 8 of the April 13, 1967 issue of Helix</figcaption></figure> One of the most entertaining of these rumors was what historian John McMillan has called “<a href="https://believermag.com/electrical-bananas/">the Great Banana Hoax of 1967</a>.” In the spring of that year, publishers of underground papers printed a recipe for smoking banana peels. It involved freezing the peels, blending them into a pulp, baking the residue at 200 degrees, and then smoking it in a cigarette or pipe (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28033118?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents">The Berkeley Barb, March 17, 1967</a>). This supposedly produced an experience similar to that of smoking marijuana. <figure id="attachment_274957" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-274957" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28045415?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-274957 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/tripping_on_banana_peels_rumors_fake_news_and_alternative_news_3_1050.jpg" alt="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28045415?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents" width="1050" height="1593" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-274957" class="wp-caption-text">Page 3 of the April 1, 1967 issue of The Sun (Detroit)</figcaption></figure> Despite the lack of any scientifically identifiable psychotropic effects, banana-peel smoking soon became a nationwide phenomenon, with bananas a symbol of the counterculture. The recipe was reprinted in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, Seattle, Detroit, Austin, and New York. According to The Sun, from Detroit, “Thousands of turned-on hippies all over the country are rushing to their neighborhood stores and boosting the economy by snapping up all the bananas in sight!… Chiquita Banana stickers are turning up everywhere” (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28045415?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents">Sun, April 1, 1967</a>). The presumably turned-on young woman pictured in the article does indeed sport a Chiquita Banana sticker on her forehead. <figure id="attachment_274958" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-274958" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28033121?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-274958 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/tripping_on_banana_peels_rumors_fake_news_and_alternative_news_4_1050.jpg" alt="From page 4 of the April 7, 1967 issue of Berkeley Barb" width="1050" height="541" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-274958" class="wp-caption-text">From page 4 of the April 7, 1967 issue of Berkeley Barb</figcaption></figure> The fad lasted a matter of months, but many participants in the counterculture basked in the quirkiness of the fact that something as innocent and commonplace as a banana could be used to expand consciousness. For as long as people believed that smoking bananas was effective, they printed posters of bananas and incorporated banana smoking into demonstrations. The Berkeley Barb printed a large advertisement that humorously read, “Trip on a Banana Peel” (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28033121?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents">Berkeley Barb, April 7, 1967</a>). <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-east-village-other/">The East Village Other</a> contained multiple ads for <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/when-posters-went-psychedelic/">countercultural posters</a> promoting consciousness expansion. In June 1967, those ads included images of Ken Kesey’s bus Furthur, morning glories (whose seeds are hallucinogenic), and “Banana Power” (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28035815?seq=22#metadata_info_tab_contents">East Village Other, June 1, 1967</a>). Perhaps the most visible moment of banana smoking occurred at a <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/remembering-the-human-be-in/">Human Be-In</a> attended by at least 10,000 people in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1967. According to Students for a Democratic Society’s paper New Left Notes, cameramen were eager to film a “Banana Deity and its parading followers” (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28044298">New Left Notes, April 13, 1967</a>). The followers reportedly “waved Chiquita emblems, gave the banana pledge (‘one nation, under Banana, with liberty and justice for all…’) and the Banana salute (middle finger up and bent)” (2). The banana was featured a few months later in August at a demonstration for the legalization of marijuana (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28035819?seq=17#metadata_info_tab_contents">East Village Other, August 1, 1967</a>). <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> As fun, if not necessarily effective, as banana smoking might have been, it was not without risks. According to The Rag, two people were taken into custody for possession of what turned out to be a banana peel: according to the Los Angeles Free Press, Donald Arthur Snell of Santa Fe Springs, California, was charged with driving while under the influence of drugs—the drug being banana peel (<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28033125?seq=15#metadata_info_tab_contents">Berkeley Barb, May 26, 1967</a>). Although kind of ridiculous, the Great Banana Hoax is not without significance. As McMillan points out, the speed with which this rumor spread throughout the country is evidence of the national influence that underground newspapers had in the late 1960s. It also reflects countercultural values and the quirky aesthetics they often expressed. If the hoax shows that many readers believe simply what they want to, it also reminds us that even though alternative news might be, like mainstream news, prone to bias and misinformation, it is hardly a recent phenomenon. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fsmoking-banana-peels-to-get-high-was-briefly-a-thing&dt=Smoking%20Banana%20Peels%20to%20Get%20High%20Was%20Briefly%20a%20Thing"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/smoking-banana-peels-to-get-high-was-briefly-a-thing/">Smoking Banana Peels to Get High Was Briefly a Thing</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>What Does It Mean to Call Helen Keller a Fraud?</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/what-does-it-mean-to-call-helen-keller-a-fraud/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Livia Gershon]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Sat, 19 Jun 2021 12:22:59 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Education]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Education & Society]]></category> <category><![CDATA[disability studies]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Helen Keller]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org/?p=274877</guid> <description><![CDATA[A TikTok trend is only the most recent example of how people often question the abilities of marginalized groups. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/what-does-it-mean-to-call-helen-keller-a-fraud/">What Does It Mean to Call Helen Keller a Fraud?</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[Earlier this year, TikTok was filled with young people arguing—with varying degrees of sincerity—that Helen Keller’s accomplishments, including writing many books, couldn’t have been possible for someone who was blind and deaf. It wasn’t the first time Helen Keller was accused of trickery. Back in 1892, when she was only eleven, Job Williams, principal of the American Asylum in Hartford, Connecticut, wrote an article for the American Annals of the Deaf entitled “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44461452">Is Helen Keller a Fraud?</a>” Williams detailed a controversy over a story Keller had written, “The Frost King.” At the time, readers noticed close similarities with a previously published story, “Frost Fairies.” Some observers suggested that Keller and her teachers knowingly misrepresented a plagiarized work as original writing. Williams confirmed that the stories were very similar. Digging into the situation, he found that a woman who briefly took care of Keller had apparently read “Frost Fairies” to her when she was eight. Williams concluded that Keller’s remarkable memory allowed her to reproduce the story three years later, while legitimately believing she was inventing it herself. <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">In Keller’s time, “disability, including blindness and deafness, was inextricably linked with ideas of intellectual idiocy and spiritual vacuity.”</div> </aside> “It will not do to write down Helen Keller as ‘a fraud,’ ‘a humbug,’ ‘a back number,’ however much we may feel annoyed by the ‘Frost King’ composition,” Williams wrote. “She has been in the full blaze of public curiosity too long, and been tested by too many scientific men and educational experts, to be a successful deceiver.” Writing more than a century later, education and disability researchers Christopher Kliewer, Douglas Biklen, and Christi Kasa-Hendrickson pointed to the notion that Keller was a fraud as an example of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699417">rejecting the possibility that certain types of people could be literate</a>. They write that in Keller’s time, “disability, including blindness and deafness, was inextricably linked with ideas of intellectual idiocy and spiritual vacuity.” <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> Kliewer, Biklen, and Kasa-Hendrickson compare attacks on <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/historys-odd-couple-mark-twain-helen-keller/">Helen Keller</a>’s abilities to similar attitudes directed toward eighteenth-century poet <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-privileged-and-impoverished-life-of-phillis-wheatley/">Phillis Wheatley</a>, who was kidnapped from West Africa as a child and enslaved in Boston. Like Keller, Wheatley became an accomplished writer, composing hundreds of poems by age seventeen. But many of her contemporaries considered Africans incapable of creating art or literature. Immanuel Kant, for example, argued that they “have by nature no feelings that rise above a trifling.” Keller and Wheatley were each brought before a panel of expert judges who confirmed their abilities. These were victories not only for the writers but for the marginalized groups they were part of. And yet, as the TikTok trend of dismissing Keller’s achievements makes clear, continuing doubts about the abilities of people who belong to such groups will keep cropping up as long as much of the culture perceives them as less capable than others. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fwhat-does-it-mean-to-call-helen-keller-a-fraud&dt=What%20Does%20It%20Mean%20to%20Call%20Helen%20Keller%20a%20Fraud%3F"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/what-does-it-mean-to-call-helen-keller-a-fraud/">What Does It Mean to Call Helen Keller a Fraud?</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>When Tornadoes Strike at Night</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/when-tornadoes-strike-at-night/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Allison Miller]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2021 13:37:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Arts & Culture]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Natural Science]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Science & Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[storms]]></category> <category><![CDATA[weather]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org?p=274715&preview=true&preview_id=274715</guid> <description><![CDATA[Injuries and fatalities tend to be higher if people are asleep. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/when-tornadoes-strike-at-night/">When Tornadoes Strike at Night</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[Tennessee may not be a part of the infamous <a href="https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/what-is-tornado-alley-2/432271">Tornado Alley</a>, but it’s certainly no stranger to the tornado as a severe weather phenomenon. In fact, <a href="https://www.weather.gov/ohx/20200303">on March 2, 2020</a>, it was the site of a devastating outbreak that took the lives of twenty-five people. The first twister that day touched down around 11 p.m. in central Tennessee, followed by the subsequent formation of nine more tornadoes that appeared across the state over the next four hours. When all was said and done, the number of tornado-related casualties from the event was <a href="https://www.weather.gov/hazstat/">unusually high</a>. “[I]t’s hard to know whether middle Tennessee residents awoke to sirens, cell phone alerts or other alarms,” Kelsey Ellis, a researcher from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, <a href="https://theconversation.com/tornadoes-that-strike-at-night-are-more-deadly-and-require-more-effective-warning-systems-132955">wrote after the event</a>. <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">Many also falsely believed that local geography, like nearby hills and rivers, would keep them safe.</div> </aside> Unfortunately, based on <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26492319">a 2018 study</a> that Ellis coauthored, there’s a high likelihood that many never did wake up. The study found that out of 900 surveyed participants, more than half indicated that there was little to no chance they’d receive a tornado warning if it was issued after they fell asleep. One reason for this is that many of the most common ways of receiving important weather information, such as television and radio, can’t wake people up in the event of an emergency. These sources of information are also prone to losing power during a storm, <a href="https://www.newschannel5.com/news/nes-confirms-47k-outages-crews-working-to-restore-power">as they did on March 3</a>, which can also end up limiting their effectiveness. In addition, many residents had misconceptions about their area’s risk of experiencing a tornado at night, which the study showed can affect whether they’ll receive a timely warning or take necessary proactive measures before heading to bed. For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0245.1">only 28 percent</a> of surveyed residents were aware that half of Tennessee’s tornadoes strike after sunset, which indicates that many people might drop their guard as night falls. Many also falsely believed that local geography, like nearby hills and rivers, would keep them safe. But as Ellis pointed out in an <a href="https://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/ut-study-shows-many-tennesseans-are-misinformed-about-tornadoes/51-3eca612f-3a1e-4b4e-89d1-528f0461835b">interview with TV station WBIR</a>, “once a tornado is on the ground it’s not going to be stopped by a hill…so people think they are going to be protected when they are not.” <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> Of course, <a href="https://www.weather.gov/lmk/ref_night">there are ways to remedy this situation</a> and ensure the safety of as many people as possible, regardless of when or where a tornado appears. For members of the public, it’s important to be able to receive up-to-date weather information through multiple methods, especially ones that can operate on battery power and options that can wake them up. For the latter, the easiest way is to ensure that they have enabled wireless emergency on their cell phone and that the phone is fully charged. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fwhen-tornadoes-strike-at-night&dt=When%20Tornadoes%20Strike%20at%20Night"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/when-tornadoes-strike-at-night/">When Tornadoes Strike at Night</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The Mediums Who Helped Kick-Start the Oil Industry</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/the-mediums-who-helped-kick-start-the-oil-industry/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Jessica Romeo]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Fri, 18 Jun 2021 12:11:45 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Politics & History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Quirky History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[oil]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org/?p=274757</guid> <description><![CDATA[Apparently some people communed with spirits to locate the first underground oil reserves. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-mediums-who-helped-kick-start-the-oil-industry/">The Mediums Who Helped Kick-Start the Oil Industry</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[In the 1860s, the petroleum industry was in its infancy. As with the gold rush, hordes of inexperienced prospectors tried to strike it rich. But according to oil historian Paul H. Giddens, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40167748">they didn’t trust scientists to tell them where to drill</a>. The few professional geologists who tried to use “scientific means” to locate wells were “regarded as quacks” by the practical oilmen. Instead, oilmen trusted people who relied on “spiritual, sensory, or extrasensory sources” for their authority, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23259139">writes literary scholar Rochelle Ranieri Zuck</a>. <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">These people utilized “trick guessing, superstitious devices, and spiritualistic means” to sniff out oil.</div> </aside> That’s right—skeptical oilmen didn’t trust the eggheads, so they turned to diviners, mediums, and <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/when-women-channeled-the-dead-to-be-heard/">spiritualists</a>. As Zuck writes, these people utilized “trick guessing, superstitious devices, and spiritualistic means” to sniff out oil—sometimes literally, as with “oil smellers” (who did exactly that). Mediums used a variety of other divinatory methods, too, including dream interpretation and dowsing rods. These rods, y-shaped twigs made of witch hazel or peach-tree wood, quickly became the most acceptable form of well location. A medium would grip the wood, passing around the property. “A swift downward dip of the wood, often imperceptible to the naked eye, would show where one should locate a well,” writes Zuck. <figure id="attachment_274862" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-274862" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-274862 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/the_mediums_who_helped_kick_start_the_oil_industry_2_1050x700.jpg" alt="A ouija board that spells "OIL"" width="1050" height="700" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-274862" class="wp-caption-text">via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ouija_board_-_Kennard_Novelty_Company.jpg"> Wikimedia Commons</a>/Jonathan Aprea</figcaption></figure> There were also more elaborate oil-finding devices, like the doodlebug, which “consisted of bells, whistles, and dials attached to a large black box that a man operated while seated and covered with a shroud.” Four men were needed to carry the medium—and his device—around prospective oil fields. One of the most famous “Oil Wizards” of the time was Abraham James, a mysterious figure who used his psychometric powers to place the Harmonial well in Pennsylvania. It was a well-known tale, according to Zuck: <blockquote>James was forcefully possessed by his spirit-guides and conveyed out of the buggy and over a fence on the east side of the road. He did not know if he was “in the body or out,” and was moved around a field and thrown violently upon the ground. James then stuck a penny into the ground and fell into a “psychometrical condition,” during which “Indian spirits controlled his body mechanically, while wisdom spirits induced the trance condition.”</blockquote> The spirits communicated that James was standing on an immense oil deposit. Harmonial No. 1 was sunk on that exact spot. And, just as the spirits predicted, the well struck oil. These enterprising mediums often claimed to channel the “spirits” of Native Americans (sometimes they even “communed” with specific historical figures, like the Shawnee chief Tecumseh). Zuck argues that this fit neatly within the <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-myth-of-manifest-destiny/">American myth of Manifest Destiny</a>, as “the oil fields were constructed as a new kind of frontier, where once again Native people were imagined to pave the way for white ‘progress.'” <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> By the early 1900s, professionally trained scientists were allowed into the oil industry. Petroleum geology established itself as a reputable discipline. Nowadays, writes Zuck, “Abraham James [has been] recast as an object of derision and a curious relic of a bygone era.” This erasure wasn’t an accident: “In an attempt to distinguish the modern ‘scientific’ oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings,” Zuck observes, accounts of the early oil industry spent decades quietly reframing these practitioners of divination “as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly.” <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fthe-mediums-who-helped-kick-start-the-oil-industry&dt=The%20Mediums%20Who%20Helped%20Kick-Start%20the%20Oil%20Industry"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-mediums-who-helped-kick-start-the-oil-industry/">The Mediums Who Helped Kick-Start the Oil Industry</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The Anatomical Machines of Naples’ Alchemist Prince</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/the-anatomical-machines-of-naples-alchemist-prince/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Benjamin Winterhalter]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2021 14:10:50 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Politics & History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Quirky History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[alchemy]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Renaissance]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org?p=270536&preview=true&preview_id=270536</guid> <description><![CDATA[Rumor had it that these machines were once the Prince’s servants, whom he murdered and transformed into anatomical displays. Scholars showed otherwise. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-anatomical-machines-of-naples-alchemist-prince/">The Anatomical Machines of Naples’ Alchemist Prince</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[Two skeletons stand in a chapel in Naples. Their bones are <a href="https://www.museosansevero.it/en/the-anatomical-machines/">knit together</a> with an intricate web of veins and arteries that crawl over their ribs and skulls like gray lace. These were the “anatomical machines” of Prince Raimondo di Sangro, an alchemist, Freemason, inventor, and military historian. For centuries, eerie legends have swirled around these two figures. The rumor goes that they were once the Prince’s servants, whom he murdered and transformed into anatomical displays. In 2007, however, a pair of scholars, Lucia Dacome and Renata Peters, published <a href="http://29aqcgc1xnh17fykn459grmc-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/osg-postprints/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2015/02/osg014-10.pdf">research</a> revealing that the veins were in fact artificial, an astonishingly complex network of silk, wax, and wire, rather than the preserved remains of a living body. <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">He developed a method of mixing fireworks that detonated with the sound of birdsong, and lit up with an array of new colors.</div> </aside> Nothing could be more emblematic of di Sangro’s enduringly bizarre and contradictory legacy. The man seems to have resided somewhere between a true Renaissance polymath and a carnival huckster. Di Sangro’s inventions tended toward the spectacular. He developed a method of mixing <a href="https://www.museosansevero.it/en/experiments-and-inventions/">fireworks</a> that detonated with the sound of birdsong, and lit up with an array of new colors: the hues of milk, lemon peels, grass, rubies, and turquoise. In the pyrotechnical theaters he designed, fireworks seemed to trace in fiery light the outlines of temples, huts, and fountains. Di Sangro was nothing if not theatrical. One writer <a href="https://www.academia.edu/44175505/THE_FANTASTIC_ANATOMY_OF_RAIMONDO_DE_SANGRO_PRINCE_OF_SANSEVERO">described</a> the scene on the street outside the alchemist’s laboratory: <blockquote>Wandering flames, infernal lights—the people said—passed through the huge windows that look out, from the ground floor, onto Vico Sansevero… The flames disappeared, darkness returned, and then thuds and prolonged noises were heard there. From time to time, in the silence of the night, there was a sound like the clink of an anvil struck by a heavy hammer, or the cobble of the alley throbbed and trembled, as if with the nearby passage of huge invisible wagons.</blockquote> At one point, an accidental fire in his laboratory revealed to him the <a href="https://www.museosansevero.it/en/experiments-and-inventions/">formula</a> for a “perpetual lamp” fueled by gunpowder mixed with pulverized human skull. He knew how to make faux<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MO9eDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA218&lpg=PA218&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false"> lapis lazuli</a> that was indistinguishable from the real thing, and how to bleach sapphires until they looked like diamonds. The floors of his palace were paved not with marble, but with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44972934">a paste he invented</a> which hardened into something with the appearance and texture of real stone. <figure id="attachment_275151" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275151" style="width: 798px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.museosansevero.it/en/the-anatomical-machines/"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275151 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/the_anatomical_machines_of_naples_alchemist_prince_800.jpg" alt="" width="798" height="1200" /></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275151" class="wp-caption-text">Museo Cappella Sansevero</figcaption></figure> Then there are the more dubious “discoveries.” Di Sangro claimed to have found a means of extracting <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=uSzVDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false">blood</a> from manure. He claimed to have reduced river crabs to ash and then <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24429753?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">resurrected</a> them with infusions of ox blood, and to have caused fennel plants to grow again from their cinders. Bringing Cicero back to life, one writer <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=uSzVDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA247&lpg=PA247&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false">suggested</a>, might be as simple as giving di Sangro one of the philosopher’s bones. Some part of the prince’s mystique comes from superstitious rumors of murder and black magic; others come from the flattering myths that he himself spread. But both sources, positive and negative, center around one image: a gifted man on the threshold between life and death, capable of both killing and resurrection. This is perhaps most clear in the legend of di Sangro’s death, which <a href="https://www.academia.edu/44175505/THE_FANTASTIC_ANATOMY_OF_RAIMONDO_DE_SANGRO_PRINCE_OF_SANSEVERO">recounts</a> that before di Sangro died, he had himself hacked into pieces and placed in a chest. But the chest was opened too soon, “while the pieces of the body were still welding together.” He awoke for an instant, tried to rise, then shrieked and fell to pieces once again. <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> Di Sangro’s friend Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio Ganganelli, later to become Pope Clement XIV, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=gDprDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false">wrote</a> that the prince’s alchemical skill was powerful enough to create “a second world from the first.” It was a bit of a flim-flam world, however: wax and wire in the place of veins and arteries, hardened pastes in the place of gemstones, palaces of light that flicker into existence and then go out. Nonetheless, you have to admire his sense of style. In one of his final public appearances, di Sangro stunned the citizens of Naples with a beautiful <a href="https://www.museosansevero.it/en/carrozza-marittima/">carriage</a> that traveled not on the street but over the waves; it churned along on paddle-wheels, led by a pair of floating seahorses fashioned out of cork. The alchemist within was nearing the end of his life, suffering from an illness possibly brought on by inhaling the fumes of his own experiments. But what the Neopolitans saw was the glittering carriage riding proudly over the waves. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fthe-anatomical-machines-of-naples-alchemist-prince&dt=The%20Anatomical%20Machines%20of%20Naples%E2%80%99%20Alchemist%20Prince"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-anatomical-machines-of-naples-alchemist-prince/">The Anatomical Machines of Naples’ Alchemist Prince</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>James Baldwin and the FBI</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/james-baldwin-and-the-fbi/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[ashawnta_jackson]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2021 12:22:27 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Politics & History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[U.S. History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[FBI]]></category> <category><![CDATA[LGBTQ]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org/?p=274626</guid> <description><![CDATA[The author was monitored for his political activities, but also for being gay. The surveillance took a toll on him. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/james-baldwin-and-the-fbi/">James Baldwin and the FBI</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[When author James Baldwin and his brother David arrived at the Selma, Alabama, airport in 1963 to support a voter registration drive for Black voters, someone was there to see them land. Baldwin and the event had gained the notice of the FBI. And as author James Campbell explains, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/4384813">the federal agency knew about the Baldwins’s plans and followed them throughout their time in Selma</a>. The brothers “were tailed and photographed,” Campbell writes. “They were snapped outside the county courthouse, in the company of [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] leader James Foreman, [and] arguing with the police,” who were restricting Black would-be voters from registering. That Baldwin was the victim of government surveillance isn’t particularly surprising; many figures in the Civil Rights Movement were. But <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jcivihumarigh.2.2.0151">LGBTQ activists like Baldwin were especially targeted</a>, as historian Jared Leighton explains. “The tactical use of homosexuality and ‘deviant sexuality’ came to epitomize the FBI’s offensives against African American activists and their allies[.]” <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">In 1963, the FBI added him to the Security Index, a “list of citizens who would be arrested first in the event of a state of emergency.”</div> </aside> Baldwin was certainly <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/black-americans-in-the-popular-front-against-fascism/">no stranger to activist causes</a>, and that attracted FBI attention. As Campbell notes, his file with the agency was 1,750 pages long, opened in 1960 after Baldwin signed a petition for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In 1963, the FBI added him to the Security Index, a “list of citizens who would be arrested first in the event of a state of emergency,” according to Campbell. Beyond his political activities, the bureau was also interested in Baldwin’s personal life. As Leighton writes, in 1963 an FBI supervisor reported that “‘Information has been developed by the Bureau that BALDWIN is a homosexual, and on a recent occasion made derogatory remarks in reference to the Bureau.'” The next year, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover chimed in, asking in a memo, “Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?” The FBI was notorious for surveillance of political activists, so Baldwin was hardly alone. Other prominent LGBTQ civil rights activists like <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/who-was-bayard-rustin/">Bayard Rustin</a>, Lorraine Hansberry, Pauli Murray, and Barbara Deming were also being monitored. As Leighton points out, “Making accusations of homosexuality against activists in the movement, as well as deepening dissension over the alliance between Black Power and gay liberation groups, could effectively further the FBI’s goals.” <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> The FBI eventually closed Baldwin’s file in 1973, but the damage was done. As Campbell points out, the “constant presence in his life of FBI informers and agents…greatly contributed to his own private state of emergency” and reduced his writing output, with only one novel published between 1963 and 1972. Fighting for civil rights was dangerous, emotional, and difficult work under the best of circumstances, but as Leighton points out, the FBI’s actions “added constraints that LGBT activists and their allies in the movement faced in their efforts to advance racial and sexual-orientation equality.” <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fjames-baldwin-and-the-fbi&dt=James%20Baldwin%20and%20the%20FBI"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/james-baldwin-and-the-fbi/">James Baldwin and the FBI</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>The Soap Bubble Trope</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/the-soap-bubble-trope/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Benjamin Winterhalter]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2021 15:30:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Art & Art History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Arts & Culture]]></category> <category><![CDATA[painting]]></category> <category><![CDATA[soap]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org?p=273635&preview=true&preview_id=273635</guid> <description><![CDATA[Throughout the history of philosophy, literature, art, and science, people have been fascinated with the shimmering surfaces of soap bubbles. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-soap-bubble-trope/">The Soap Bubble Trope</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[What do the roof of the Munich Olympic Stadium, Glinda the Good Witch, Disney’s Cinderella, the art series “Unweave a Rainbow” by neo-surrealist painter Ariana Papademetropoulos, Sir Isaac Newton, the first “viral” ad campaign of the late Victorian era, and morose Dutch still-life paintings have in common? They all reflect a preoccupation with soap bubbles, with shiny, shimmery, and iridescent spheres that we tend to associate with children and play. Far from being objects that just feed our natural proclivities toward shiny and shimmering surfaces, bubbles are a recurring trope in the history of philosophy, literature, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.15647925">the arts</a>, and science. “Make a soap bubble and observe it; you could spend a whole life studying it,” Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, allegedly said in the late nineteenth century. <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> Interest in bubbles in the arts, literature, and sciences reached a high point in the seventeenth century, when they became closely associated with the concept of vanitas vanitatum, the fragility and transience of human life. Homo bulla (man is a bubble) was a concept dear to the baroque era. The symbolism of homo bulla was already proverbial by the first century BCE. Varro (116—27 BCE) wrote the following in the first line of the first book of De Re Rustica: “for if, as they say, man is a bubble (homo bulla), all the more so is an old man,” he wrote. In his Satyricon, Petronius (1st century CE) has a character bemoan the sudden death of a friend whose funeral he just attended by saying, “We are meaner than flies; flies have their virtues, we are nothing but bubbles.” <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">“The foam which is made up of bubbles? The tiny ones break and vanish immediately…. That’s what man’s life is like.”</div> </aside> One of the most eminent early examples appears in a dialogue by second-century CE Greek-language writer Lucian of Samosata. In his Dialogue between Charon and Mercury, the former says: <blockquote>I’d like to tell you, Mercury, that to me all men and their lives seem alike. Have you ever watched those bubbles that form in the pool of a waterfall? The foam which is made up of bubbles? The tiny ones break and vanish immediately…. That’s what man’s life is like.</blockquote> When it comes to the visual arts, we have to credit Dutch artists for making bubbles a popular subject. In 1574, the Dutch painter Cornelis Ketel depicted a husky putto (cherub) standing against a cloudy sky on a bed of grass, in the act blowing bubbles. The inscription above, in Greek, reads “man is a bubble.” This panel is on the reverse of a portrait of Adam Wachendorff, the secretary of the London offices of the Hanseatic League, a trading alliance of European cities. “It is likely that Ketel’s painting provides the first appearance of a soap bubble, as opposed to the more traditional air bubble on a water surface as in the Dialogue of Lucian,” writes the mathematician Michele Emmer in the journal Leonardo. (In 2019, Emmer curated a monographic exhibition on bubbles across the arts in Perugia, Italy.) In 1594, Hendrik Goltzius completed bubble- and putto-themed engravings that cemented the soap bubble as an enduring theme in Dutch art. In one titled “Homo Bulla,” a putto languidly leans on a skull as he absent-mindedly looks at the bubbles he just blew. <figure id="attachment_275075" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275075" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275075 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/soap_bubbles_1_1050.jpg" alt="" width="1050" height="1305" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275075" class="wp-caption-text">Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles by Karel Dujardin, 1663 via <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.12343497">Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark) on JSTOR</a></figcaption></figure> Throughout the seventeenth century, the putti started being “downgraded” to mere children. As the literary scholar Sarah Tindall Kareem wrote in her 2015 article “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24575130">Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds</a>:” <blockquote>The popularity of the subject of children blowing soap bubbles might be partly attributable to seventeenth century Dutch culture’s valorization of children’s play evident in the new genre of compendia of children’s games in which blowing bubbles is standard part of the repertoire.</blockquote> The 1663 painting “Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles” by Karel Dujardin sees a boy looking with satisfaction at the bubbles he has just sent flying. He is balanced on a soap bubble resting on top of a shell, which is the only surrealist element of what would otherwise look like a realistic, if slightly mythologized, depiction of a youth entertaining himself. <figure id="attachment_275076" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275076" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275076 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/soap_bubbles_2_1050.jpg" alt="" width="1050" height="741" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275076" class="wp-caption-text">The Dancing Couple by Jan Steen, 1663 via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Steen_-_The_Dancing_Couple_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></figcaption></figure> Of course, not all depictions of bubbles feature children. In David Bailly’s “Vanitas: Self-portrait of the Artist, Still Life,” from 1651, floating bubbles appear alongside busts, candles, portraits, and skulls in a standard still-life setting. Similarly, Jan Steen’s “The Dancing Couple” (1663), leaves childhood imagery behind to depict a tavern scene where people are definitely having fun: musicians play, people dance, eat, and drink, while children play with their toys. The presence of cut flowers, broken shells, and soap bubbles are there to remind us of the transience of merriment and pleasure, but that does not necessarily have to mean doom and gloom. “When, in overly moralized interpretations, we reduce such paintings to pictorial sermons on vanity, we fail to grasp…the ambiguous wholeness of these images,” writes the art historian <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23208074">Paul Barolsky</a>. This wholeness “prompt[s] us to reflect not upon mortality alone, but upon the ways life and death define each other.” <h2>Literary Bubbles</h2> Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bubbles also became a popular subject in literature. In 1591, Francis Bacon asserted that “The world is a bubble.” In other words, a bubble is a microcosm of the world: each individual element bends toward fulfilling its purpose within the whole. The seventeenth-century poet Richard Crashaw, who is best known for his religious poetry in English, also wrote erudite poems in Latin. One of them, “Bulla,” extensively describes a soap bubble in hallucinogenic detail: “There by the contiguous waters pale little torches droop. Here the vein of a very delicate wave full of the neighboring flames learns the purple paths and leaps from the red channel,” reads one translation. “Here is the intricate labor of heaven: orbs are in the path of orbs; here the herd of the golden fleece is the pellucid herd of the ether; which wear down the black pasture of night in pure bites.” <figure id="attachment_275077" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275077" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275077 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/soap_bubbles_3_1050.jpg" alt="" width="1050" height="1046" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275077" class="wp-caption-text">Soap Bubbles by Charles Amédée Philippe Van Loo, 1764 via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Amédée_Philippe_Van_Loo,_Soap_Bubbles,_1764,_NGA_32579.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></figcaption></figure> These passages record the ever-changing play of light and color on the surface of the bubble, while also acknowledging how hard it is to put into words. “The task Crashaw set himself in the poem is doomed to fail from the outset,” writes the Renaissance poetry scholar <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40339614">Stephen Guy-Bray</a> in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. “But while ‘Bulla’ may not accurately describe a bubble, it could certainly be argued that it provides more information than a painting could: if we take ‘Bulla’ as an example of the popular Renaissance debate over the respective merits of painting and poetry we could argue that poetry wins.” A bubble becomes a conceit that allows for the conceptualization of other things, of fictionality. As the literary scholar Kareem writes: <blockquote>The bubble’s liminal status, materially between water and air, spatially between ground and sky, temporally between inflation and bursting, parallels fiction’s own boundary-crossing nature, making the bubble uniquely suited to metaphorically rendering the temporary transport fiction provides.</blockquote> <h2>The Play of Light</h2> Towards the end of the seventeenth century, scientists latched onto the subject of bubbles as well. “It is probably not insignificant that this same period saw soap bubbles achieve their greatest fame as a subject for painting,” Emmer (the mathematician) writes. “It is thus likely that children’s games and works of art stimulated scientists to try to understand the workings of these phenomena that were attractive and entertaining.” In 1672, the English scientist Robert Hooke made this observation to the Royal Society in England: <blockquote>A mass of bubbles was created in a soap solution by blowing into it through a glass tube. At the beginning of the experiment, one could easily see that the soap film enclosing each bubble of air was a clear white colour, without any trace of other colours. But after a while as the film gradually became thinner, one began to see all the colours of the rainbow on the surface of the bubbles.</blockquote> In his Opticks: or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light published in 1704, Sir Isaac Newton described the surfaces of bubbles in great detail. He argued that their colors are produced “on the same grounds that thin plates or bubbles do reflect or transmit those rays [of color].” Colors of bubbles, to him, were “a common observation” from which a theory could be built. <figure id="attachment_275080" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275080" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275080 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/soap_bubbles_4_1050.jpg" alt="" width="1050" height="805" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275080" class="wp-caption-text">Newton’s Discovery of the Refraction of Light by Pelagio Palagi, 1827 via <a href=" https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pelagio_Palagi_-_Newton%27s_Discovery_of_the_Refraction_of_Light_-_WGA16864.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></figcaption></figure> In 1827, the Bolognese painter Pelagio Palagi painted “Newton Discovers the Refraction of Light,” where Newton is depicted in being struck by the discovery of the phenomenon of light refraction as he observes a child blowing bubbles. In the painting, the bubble becomes the world, or at least its formal analog: just like a globe is placed on the right-hand side of Newton, the bubble occupies a similar position with the child. “Bubbles were to be to optics what apples had allegedly been to gravitation,” the historian of science Simon Schaffer once wrote. <h2>An Enduring Fascination</h2> In the following centuries, bubbles remained a subject dear to the arts. Jean-Baptiste Chardin’s “Les Bulles de Savon” (circa 1734) depicts two children who are playing at the moment when a bubble, already formed, is about to escape from the pipe. The search for complex moral or philosophical significance, beyond the evident allusion to the fragility of human life, is totally absent. The art historian <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3257493">Theodore Rousseau Jr.</a> writes: <blockquote>Judging from contemporary accounts, it appears unlikely that Chardin painted under the direct influence of any idea derived from classical or literary sources. His father, a carpenter, who is described as “distinguished by a talent for making good billiard tables,” was a poor man and unable to give him a formal education…</blockquote> So, rather than focusing on the symbolism, Chardin concentrated on the technical aspects of his paintings. <figure id="attachment_275090" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275090" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275090 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/soap_bubbles_5_1050.jpg" alt="" width="1050" height="1300" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275090" class="wp-caption-text">Les Bulles de Savon by Jean Baptiste Chardin, ca.1734 via <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.18576558">JSTOR</a></figcaption></figure> <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.9970435">Nineteenth century artists including Édouard Manet</a> tended to away from the connotations of vanitas. The fourteenth canto of Byron’s “Don Juan” suggests how the bubble becomes a child’s plaything and a cosmic globe. Sarah Tindal Kareem writes that “[h]e moves away both from the bubble on a water surface as a symbol of vanitas and from connotations of puffery, embracing instead the soap-bubble as an emblem of verse’s sheer, ludic joy.” On the other hand, John Keats famously accused Newton’s Opticks of “unweav[ing] a rainbow,” both at a dinner party hosted in December 1817 by Benjamin Haydon and in his poem “Lamia.” He claimed Newton “had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to prismatic colors,” according to Haydon’s own account. Nineteenth-century physicists and mathematicians, most notably the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, would devise a formula that could predict and explain the iridescent patterns of soapy films. Yet they <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.1096330">kept evoking a sense of wonder</a>. “They are soap bubbles, pure chimerae that attract the imagination,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain stated, “A soap-bubble is the most beautiful thing, and the most exquisite in nature… I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap-bubble if there was only one in the world.” In the late nineteenth century, pre-Raphaelite painter <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.24884127">John Everett Millais</a> departed from the medieval settings of his earlier paintings, which featured sensuous maidens, to depict a boy blowing bubbles. Due to the fickle nature of bubbles, he had to resort to a glass globe to render their surface. It then became the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pears_(soap)">official poster for Pears brand transparent soap</a>, the first publicity campaign to use bubble (the first of many instances throughout the next two centuries). “Bubbles no longer symbolize ‘Vanitas,’” Emmer writes, “but rather the more down-to-earth qualities of freshness and cleanliness.” <a href="https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=soap+bubbles&groupefq=WyJjb250cmlidXRlZF9pbWFnZXMiXQ%3D%3D">Explore more images of soap bubbles on JSTOR</a>. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fthe-soap-bubble-trope&dt=The%20Soap%20Bubble%20Trope"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-soap-bubble-trope/">The Soap Bubble Trope</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Plant of the Month: Sarsaparilla</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/plant-of-the-month-sarsaparilla/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Allison Miller]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 16 Jun 2021 12:02:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Plants & Animals]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Science & Technology]]></category> <category><![CDATA[plants]]></category> <category><![CDATA[poison]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org?p=275002&preview=true&preview_id=275002</guid> <description><![CDATA[From an early modern treatment for syphilis to Saturday-morning cartoons, the meaning and significance of the plant has transformed through time and space. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/plant-of-the-month-sarsaparilla/">Plant of the Month: Sarsaparilla</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[Everyone who grew up with Saturday-morning cartoon television in the 1980s or 1990s is surely familiar with the universe of the Smurfs. During many years of adventures, however, the diet of the little blue creatures remained somewhat of a mystery. The principal ingredient of many of their dishes was “Smurf berries,” which grew on bushes, but the indistinct appearance of the bushes gave few clues about their botanical nature. This was a deliberate move of the Smurfs’ creator, Belgian cartoonist Peyo (Pierre Culliford, 1928–1992). When the Smurfs were still only a European phenomenon, the Smurf berries were referred to by the French name salsepareille. Peyo chose this name for its exotic sound, initially being unaware that the name referred to very real plants. The name sarsaparilla or salsaparilla, as the plant is known in English, had been used for various species of the genus Smilax for centuries. When the Smurfs became a phenomenon in the United States, the sarsaparilla shrub lost its berries, because many American viewers were thought to be familiar with sarsaparilla as a real plant. Smilax species are typically climbing vines (not Smurf shrubs) that can be woody, prickly, or both. They appear in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. The fact that an American audience might sooner recognize sarsaparilla than a European audience has everything to do with the plant’s history, which mainly revolves around Smilax species like S. aristolochiifolia and S. ornata, from Mexico and Central America. The best-known episodes from sarsaparilla’s history—first as a medicine and later as a tonic drink—are indeed about species from the New World. <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">The thorns of Smilax aspera were understood to resemble snake teeth, thus pointing to the plant’s usefulness as an antidote.</div> </aside> The introduction of the Smurfs in the United States signified, in fact, sarsaparilla’s second Atlantic crossing. The oldest references to sarsaparilla are from Old World antiquity, where Smilax aspera was used as an antidote for poisons. The Roman medical writer Dioscorides (first century CE) devoted a chapter to this plant in his work about medicinal plants from the Mediterranean (De materia medica, book IV, chapter 142). He described the leaves and red berries as both a preservative and an antidote for poisons. This description survived many centuries and became firmly embedded in the European medical tradition. Smilax aspera, which was the common Latin name for this plant <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27896656">long before Linnaeus classified it as an official binomial species name</a> in the eighteenth century, became an antidote that could be recognized along the lines of the “doctrine of signatures.” According to this European ethnopharmaceutical tradition, diseases and their corresponding remedies co-occurred in the same places, in a balance ordained by God Himself. Humans could recognize the right medicinal plant for an illness by the “signs” it gave. The thorns of Smilax aspera were understood to <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435058043829&view=1up&seq=327">resemble snake teeth</a>, thus pointing to the plant’s usefulness as an antidote. When European naturalists explored the plants of the New World in the sixteenth century, they tended to relate new species to better-known plants whenever they could. Sarsaparilla is a case in point. Smilax species found in America were recognized as variants of Smilax aspera and therefore also began to be called sarsaparilla. Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588) described different kinds of American sarsaparilla in his work Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1565). His descriptions carried a commercial touch. For instance, he tried to convince his readers that the whitish sarsaparilla from Honduras was better than the black variety from Mexico. Similarly, he aimed to embed the new American kinds of sarsaparilla in the traditional framework of European medicine. When American sarsaparilla began to be used in European medicine around 1545, physicians first administered it as a broth to be taken in the morning, the same way as it was used by Native Americans at the time. Monardes, however, argued that it should be given in a syrup, a conventional mode of administration for his European readers. The old name sarsaparilla began to be associated not only with new Smilax species from different geographical regions, but also with new diseases. American sarsaparilla was not used as an antidote in cases of poisoning by venomous animals, but to cure syphilis. Syphilis had swept Europe since the days of Columbus, and the market for syphilis remedies was booming. Yet a range of botanical substances had to compete with preparations that contained mercury. The most famous botanical antisyphilitics were of exotic origin: <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41111660">guaiacum wood, China root, sarsaparilla root, and sassafras wood</a>. All these plant parts became staple drugs in European pharmacies, even though mercurial remedies remained the most important treatment for syphilis until the early twentieth century, and even though none of these remedies actually cured the disease. <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> Still, like many exotic plants, their range of applicability broadened with time, both within the domain of medicine and beyond. Sarsaparilla was used as a rheumatic remedy, for example, and was also valued as a flavoring ingredient in medicinal tonic drinks, often along with sassafras. As such, sarsaparilla was to enjoy another wave of popularity in a later age. As a medical commodity, sarsaparilla enjoyed great commercial success early on. Between 1568 and 1619 alone, 670 tons of sarsaparilla were imported in Seville, Spain, equivalent to some 7.5 million doses. But as with so many other exotic substances, the precise nature of sarsaparilla remained obscure for European botanists, physicians, apothecaries, and patients. In his Species Plantarum (1753), Linnaeus classified the medicinal sarsaparilla as Smilax sarsaparilla (currently regarded as a <a href="http://www.worldfloraonline.org/taxon/wfo-0000741746">synonym of S. glauca</a>), but years later, Carl Sigismund Kunth (1788–1850) classified another species S. officinalis, to signify what was then regarded as the true product used by pharmacists. <figure id="attachment_275048" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-275048" style="width: 1050px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" class="wp-image-275048 size-full" src="https://daily.jstor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/plant_of_the_month_sasparilla_1050.jpg" alt="Image of sarsaparilla" width="1050" height="1451" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-275048" class="wp-caption-text">Image of sarsaparilla in Peter Gofman, Sobranie. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection via <a href="https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:491708212$94i">Harvard</a></figcaption></figure> Meanwhile, sarsaparilla was used in every corner of the globe as an ingredient in a range of medicines. The continuing interest in sarsaparilla is exemplified by Peter Gofman, a physician from Germany who worked at the Kalinkinskii Institute for sexually transmitted diseases in Saint Petersburg. Gofman published a multivolume work, Sobranie liubopytstva dostoinykh predmetov iz tsarstva proizrastenii (“A collection of curiosities from the kingdom of plants”), between 1797 and 1810. A partial copy, addressed to members of the Russian imperial family who were Gofman’s patrons, is preserved in the Rare Book Collection of Dumbarton Oaks. The beautiful images of plants in this work reveal that it was addressed not only to scholarly readers. Gofman explicitly aimed to give his work broad appeal, and in accompanying pamphlets he described the plants as useful both in medicine and in the household. Naturally, as a physician working on sexually transmitted diseases, Gofman was interested in sarsaparilla. He urged his readers not only to regard sarsaparilla as a substance of medicine, but also to give the plant its place in Russian gardens and greenhouses, as a commercial asset and as an item of prestige. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the borders between medicinal and other uses of sarsaparilla blurred. Proprietary remedies with sarsaparilla abounded, with the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.24754661">Ayer</a> and <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.10884623">Hood</a> companies from Lowell, Massachusetts, turning the production of sarsaparilla into big business. In <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.24758373">advertisements</a>, it was usually promoted as a <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.26295861">tonic</a>, to <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28559344">purify the blood</a>, and to create appetite. Because it was of American origin, it was supposedly especially suitable for American patients. By this time, then, sarsaparilla had lost many of the Old World medical and cultural connotations that had been associated with the plant since European botanists and physicians had started to compare European and American Smilax species. The divide became so pronounced that European fans of the Smurfs in the twentieth century were no longer expected to recognize the name of a plant that had been a mainstay of pharmaceutical practice there for centuries, while the name sarsaparilla lived on as a soft drink in the United States. These kinds of shifts in appreciation of plants across time and space are precisely what the <a href="https://www.doaks.org/research/mellon-initiatives/plant-humanities-initiative">Plant Humanities Initiative</a> aims to bring to light. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fplant-of-the-month-sarsaparilla&dt=Plant%20of%20the%20Month%3A%20Sarsaparilla"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/plant-of-the-month-sarsaparilla/">Plant of the Month: Sarsaparilla</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Patriotism and the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/patriotism-and-the-lgbtq-rights-movement/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Wills]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jun 2021 13:37:45 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Politics & History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[U.S. History]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Americana]]></category> <category><![CDATA[LGBTQ]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org/?p=274582</guid> <description><![CDATA[Charged with being "un-American" during the Cold War, activists appealed to American ideals in their quest for full citizenship. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/patriotism-and-the-lgbtq-rights-movement/">Patriotism and the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[During the Cold War, homosexuality was associated with communism and portrayed as a national security threat. The State Department’s 1950 purge of supposed homosexuals under President Harry Truman unleashed “<a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-lavender-scare/">the lavender scare</a>,” which cost thousands their jobs. In the face of these charges of being “un-American,” historian Simon Hall argues, early gay-rights groups <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24485877">professed patriotism and appealed to “the nation’s founding ideals of liberty and equality.”</a> Hall writes that post-World War II activists insisted that they posed no threat to the country or society. Instead, they claimed citizenship rights and a place in the Cold War’s “fight for freedom.” In this they followed in the tradition of the abolitionists, union organizers, suffragists, and civil rights advocates who invoked the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in their cause. By demanding inclusion, due process, and equal rights, they argued that they were the ones acting in the best tradition of America and that their opponents were the real un-Americans. In the spring and summer of 1965, for example, there were gay-rights protests at the White House, Pentagon, Civil Service Commission, and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Activists held up signs reading “First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals;” “America, the Land of the Free. For Homosexuals Too?” and “Civil Service Commission Is Un-American.” <aside class="pull-quote center"> <div class="pull-quote__text tweetable">The Gay Activists Alliance, a “leading force” for gay rights during the 1970s, fought to repeal New York’s consensual sodomy law by appealing to the “Spirit of ’76.”</div> </aside> The activists argued that excluding homosexuals from government service, including in the military, actually weakened the country by depriving it of well-qualified citizens who wanted to serve. They also argued that it was the fact of an individual’s being in the closet that “created the possibility for blackmail that was, supposedly, at the root” of the national security threat. After the Stonewall riot of 1969, more radical organizations like the Gay Liberation Front arose to confront police brutality, legal restrictions, and homophobia. Yet Hall argues that the “appeals of Americanism have remained an important feature of the gay rights movement.” He cites the first openly gay man on the cover of a news magazine (Time, 1975): Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich. Winner of the Bronze Star and Purple Heart in the Vietnam War, Matlovich waged a high-profile, though ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to overturn his discharge from the military by appealing to traditional American liberties. <div class="daily_email_signup weekly-digest "> <h4>Weekly Newsletter</h4> [contact-form-7] </div> Likewise, the Gay Activists Alliance, a “leading force” for gay rights during the 1970s, fought to repeal New York’s consensual sodomy law by appealing to the “Spirit of ’76” and the “philosophy of freedom on which the republic was founded.” (That statute would be declared unconstitutional by the New York Court of Appeals in 1980, twenty-three years in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision Lawrence v. Texas, and the state legislature formally repealed it in 2000.) Decades after the lavender scare, the appeal to Americanism was revived during the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the early 1990s, and then again during the fight over gay marriage in the 2000s. Not surprisingly, supporters of such inclusion appealed to American ideals of liberty and justice for all. <hr /> <a href="https://bit.ly/30jM88p">Support JSTOR Daily! Join our new membership program on Patreon today.</a> <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fpatriotism-and-the-lgbtq-rights-movement&dt=Patriotism%20and%20the%20LGBTQ%2B%20Rights%20Movement"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/patriotism-and-the-lgbtq-rights-movement/">Patriotism and the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> <item> <title>Ant Baths, a Gay Road Trip, and Viruses in Labs</title> <link>https://daily.jstor.org/ant-baths-a-gay-road-trip-and-viruses-in-labs/</link> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Livia Gershon]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jun 2021 11:58:36 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Suggested Readings]]></category> <category><![CDATA[news]]></category> <category><![CDATA[suggested readings]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://daily.jstor.org/?p=274913</guid> <description><![CDATA[Well-researched stories from Culture Study, Christianity Today, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship. The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/ant-baths-a-gay-road-trip-and-viruses-in-labs/">Ant Baths, a Gay Road Trip, and Viruses in Labs</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/curious-crow-behavior-known-as-anting-looks-like-violent-dirt-bath-1.6053823">Fancy an ant bath?</a> (CBC News) by Cathy Kearney When a photographer spotted an apparently healthy crow covered in ants, he was confused. But scientists say “anting,” intentionally putting ants on their feathers, is perfectly normal bird behavior, even if humans don’t know for sure why they do it. <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a36651331/the-incredible-true-adventure-of-five-gay-activists-and-the-black-panther-party/">Gay liberation road trip: An oral history</a> (Harper’s Bazaar) by Hugh Ryan In 1970, five gay liberation activists drove across the country, spreading the word about an upcoming Black Panther convention. Historian Hugh Ryan collects their memories of communal life, drugs, fast food, and revolutionary dreams. <a href="https://theconversation.com/working-with-dangerous-viruses-sounds-like-trouble-but-heres-what-scientists-learn-from-studying-pathogens-in-secure-labs-161721">Why bring viruses into labs?</a> (The Conversation) by Jerry Malayer Why would scientists mess with potentially dangerous viruses in their laboratories anyway? It’s true that there are risks to this work, but there are also very serious risks to not finding out everything we can about biological hazards. <a href="https://annehelen.substack.com/p/this-is-de-facto-segregation-its">Black preschools, white preschools</a> (Culture Study) by Anne Helen Petersen US preschools are highly segregated by race and class. That affects the experiences kids have, regardless of programs’ educational quality. <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/june-web-only/parenting-kids-teens-pastors-cross-wires-purpose-church.html">What is church for?</a> (Christianity Today) by Lyman Stone Christian parents generally want church to help their kids figure out how to make good choices and be happy. For youth ministers more concerned about the transcendental aspects of religion, that can be a challenge. Got a hot tip about a well-researched story that belongs on this list? <a href="mailto:jstordaily_submissions@jstor.org">Email us here</a>. <img style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important; position:absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0;" width="1" height="1" src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-20266811-3&cid=daily&aip=1&dp=%2Fsyndicated%2Frss%2Fant-baths-a-gay-road-trip-and-viruses-in-labs&dt=Ant%20Baths%2C%20a%20Gay%20Road%20Trip%2C%20and%20Viruses%20in%20Labs"/>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org/ant-baths-a-gay-road-trip-and-viruses-in-labs/">Ant Baths, a Gay Road Trip, and Viruses in Labs</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="https://daily.jstor.org">JSTOR Daily</a>. ]]></content:encoded> </item> </channel> </rss>