Describing their experiences participating in PoC group sits and activities, a recurring sentiment was the embodied feeling of being relaxed, and feeling safe and comfortable.

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in California with BIPOC practitioners of mindfulness, this article examines their efforts to create “safe spaces” to collectively experience and process painful embodied emotions around racialized trauma. These collective spaces, I argue, help meditators move from experiencing painful emotions as internal to their personal experience as individuals, and instead help relate their difficult emotions with those experienced and shared by other racialized minorities.

little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag…

This is the world I want to live in.

Nostalgia is for feeling, not for expecting to be real.

As we get more influential, we can expect more scrutiny and criticism.

Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.

What role does gossip play in human societies?

The cockfight (tetadjen; sabungan) is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. […] Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.

Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations.

A shinbyu is a religious donation in the full sense of the term, crucial in the lives of the Buddhist Burmese. While the shinbyu has been studied for its symbolic and ritual aspects by various anthropologists, this article proposes to analyse it through the social scenes in which different types of transfers intertwine with the religious donation. It focuses especially on “The Plate Scene”, an ambiguous moment where uncertainty about the meaning of the staging reveals the political work at play in interpreting transfers when an elderly lady refuses to be caught in the game.

An anthropological analysis of a single gesture at a community meal offering.

Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests.

Why not
tend to your own horse

A poem in response to Auden’s poem about Bruegel’s painting about the fall of Icarus asking what it is that we owe one another and what is the correct response to the tragedy of craft.

MBCT was associated with decreased emotional reactivity to social stress, specifically during the recovery (post-stressor)

When these coins get given out, they are a physical reminder of the fact that the military is not some faceless monolithic structure. The coins show that the military is an organization made of human beings.

Many modern Japanese women are bored with their lives and they use ‘organ language’ to express this frustration…

Medication and the small life-style modifications suggested by professionals for some women no doubt often help to ease the sense of oppression that patients experience. At the same time, medicalization can act as an ‘opiate,’ and can deflect attention away from the social origins of distress.

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

A poem celebrating generosity in all its forms.

Lecturers in the experimental condition added a transcript of their names in Arabic. Our findings revealed a substantial and positive impact on Palestinian student’s sense of belonging, class participation, and overall grades.

Our intervention demonstrates that small institutional changes when carefully crafted can have a significant impact

Notable to me in the study was that even the Jewish kids in the experiment saw a slight improvement in their GPA from the increased inclusivity of their virtual classroom, despite disliking it.

Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convinced he’s lying.

Who can be held accountable for violence if everyone is, at once, perpetrator and victim? Given this mode of being-in-the-world, how do people find resilience in the face of past trauma?

At a time when bandits are strong, kings are weak…

Nonverbal signals of racial biases are abundant in children’s everyday social environments. Studies show that preschool children acquire social group biases when they observe other people’s social interactions and nonverbal behaviors.

Just as a pulley system transforms minimal muscular strength into significant lifting capability, institutions act as cooperative pulleys, transforming weak reputational incentives into powerful drivers of cooperative behavior.

Stateless people do not elect officials, enjoy diplomatic representation, or possess the lucre of a corporate lobby. Without political rights they can exert only so much pressure; activist groups, charities, and NGOs are their main source of support. This makes people without a citizenship uniquely vulnerable to exploitation

why you take it personally when someone buys different things than you.

Master Gotama, I have four sons. At their wives’ order my sons chased me out from my house.

The Buddha gives him a verse to recite in the village council, contrasting his faithless sons to his trusty wooden staff. Ashamed, the sons take back their father.

The history of Facebook from its beginning ‘til now is the story of numerous crucial moments in the development of the internet: rubicons that can’t be uncrossed. It’s the story of the transformation of our behavior and the story of how legal rules built for the era of TV and print are struggling to keep up…

Value capture happens when your environment presents you with simplified versions of your values, and those simple versions come to dominate your practical reasoning. Value capture offers you a quick shortcut—an opportunity to take on prefabricated values. You do not have to go through the painful process of value deliberation if you can get your values off the shelf.

I want to focus on one particularly clear, and quite common, form of value capture: when an institution presents you with some metric, and then you internalize that metric.

I mean to exclude here from the category of value capture those cases where we use external values as proxies and heuristics under full reflective control—when we select, monitor, and adapt those heuristics in the light of our own richer values.

… we will flourish when we have the capacity to adjust and tailor our values in light of our rich experience of the world living under them. When we tailor our values to ourselves in light of those rich experiences, then our values will be better fit to promote our flourishing, as the very specific people we are.

To make an idea system pristine you have to contain the contradictions. One way to minimize the contradictions is to build a filtering system so that people don’t get the ‘wrong’ ideas. But if you can relate all the different ideas out there to a framework, that creates a much more resilient idea system because you can account for all the, say, scandals.

A sociology professor talks about his monograph on how ideologies function in society.

Identities are something extremely useful to humans. Holding a particular identity makes it easier to do difficult, unrewarding things associated with that identity.

This economic situation is also of critical relevance to the ideological context of media content. As the media is funded by commercial (primarily corporate) organisations, the materials which are produced by this system are highly unlikely to be overtly critical of corporate capitalism and consumerism.

An introduction to basic concepts in the theory of mass media and its effects on society.

First, a primary form of intersubjectivity was necessary for language to have begun evolving in our species in the first place. Second, language then transformed the nature of our intersubjectivity, through its defining properties of inferentially articulated description, self-reflexivity, and productive grammatical flexibility. Social accountability—the bedrock of society—is grounded in this linguistically transformed and enhanced kind of intersubjectivity.

Let him be able, and upright and straight,
Easy to speak to, gentle, and not proud…

“What should be done” by us Buddhists.

But the thing about a lot of problems is that they’re not a single prisoner’s dilemma. Impalas see each other day after day and the same situation keeps happening over and over again. So that changes the problem…

Axelrod’s main takeaways still hold: be nice, forgiving, but don’t be a pushover.

For, of course, at bottom, no subject is naïve. Every hoodwinked widow, every deceived lover, every betrayed friend, every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, and remains in the relationship anyway, impelled by something stronger than his reason.

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father.

If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

The moral ambiguity of journalism lies not in its texts but in the relationships out of which they arise—relationships that are invariably and inescapably lopsided.

A unique lawsuit against a murderer’s “best friend” (the journalist) lays bare the deception at the heart of the journalistic encounter.

Over Canada / or two hours of frozen waves I assume is Canada /
I’m surrounded by babies / so many babies…

Human horrors
are not inevitable. Some people stop
themselves, before they cross moral divides.

They looked generic. Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane…

The definitive history of the One Direction Fandom.

… your conscious mind is more a press secretary. You’re not the president or the king or the CEO. You aren’t in charge. You aren’t actually making the decision, the conscious part of your mind at least. You are there to make up a good explanation for what’s going on so that you can avoid the accusation that you are violating norms.

Most people find you unlikable and unlovable. You have lots of enmity and many faults. You feel lost when you die.

The five drawbacks of intolerance.

Why do we see more information [about other people’s stuggles] as threatening rather than as clarifying? At the point that we can see that things are hard for all of us, then we [should] know that it’s a structural problem.

Why is the solution always “my kid is going to be one of the twenty” rather than “why are there only twenty slots?” The inability to make that [mental] shift [from competition to solidarity] is what keeps messing us up.

An inability to engage with our communities hurts everyone

While the article is a bit parochial (focusing on the pandemic-era United States) its conclusion is broadly true under advanced, global Capitalism.

You can get to know a person’s ethics by living with them. But only after a long time, not casually; only when attentive, not when inattentive; and only by the wise, not by the witless.

A diverse group of ascetics passes by, and Pasenadi asks the Buddha if any of them are perfected.

Of course, there will be instances where a stranger will not be amenable to your overtures (this isn’t permission to harass people on the street), but your intention should be to brighten someone’s day without worrying what they think about you.

Pride is a highly pleasant emotion; this internal reward can incentivize people to undertake and persevere at costly but socially valued courses of action. Pride has a full-body display featuring an erect and expanded posture and gaze directed at the audience and thus it appears to generate common knowledge about the individual’s enhanced value. This display conveys achievement and dominance, is produced by congenitally blind individuals, and is recognized by young children and by adults across cultures.

Pride is a universal system that is part of our species’ cooperative biology.

See also this research group’s related article on shame.

Rather than “total prohibition”, [the Tongan word “taboo”’s] original denotation had to do with sacredness and uniqueness.

Many of [Hoi An’s new restaurants] specialized in fish and seafood, but others served expensive animal flesh attributed with virility, strength, and sexual potency, such as he-goat or wild animals. The virility and potency embedded in the flesh of these animals was further exacerbated by the hot, libido-enhancing spices such as chili, lemongrass, ginger, and rau răm. […] these venues were practically brothels.

The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth

Participants who were asked to talk with another person expected to learn significantly less from the conversation than they actually reported learning afterward, regardless of whether they had conversation prompts and whether they had the goal to learn (experiments 1 and 2). Undervaluing conversation does not stem from having systematically poor opinions of how much others know (experiment 3) but is instead related to the inherent uncertainty involved in conversation itself.

… miscalibrated expectations about how much can be learned from other people may keep people from learning more in everyday life, frustrating their desire to know by keeping them from approaching a surprisingly informative source of knowledge.

… a call to a hotline of sorts, though one I’d never heard about before and was surprised to learn existed…

… feeling close to the match is associated with an 86% increase in the probability of assimilation of political views. Our analysis also uncovers an asymmetry: Interacting with someone with opposite views greatly reduced feelings of closeness; however, interacting with someone with consistent views only moderately increased them.

… seeing this danger in association,
fare singly as the rhino’s horn.

If you can’t find a good teacher, it’s better to wander alone than to consort with fools.

Why do we feel this and what can we do about it?

… a bad person and a worse person, a good person and a better person

Is it better to preach the Dhamma or to practice it?

They get a good reputation and grow in fame,
those who develop the direct route

… the act of disappearing is not illegal in and of itself. You have the right to go missing. But believing that no one would miss you? That’s ridiculous

Some questions to ponder and discuss after watching this video:

• Are there any minority groups that have not historically or still might not feel welcome in your community?
• What norms or behaviors contribute(d) to that?
• Are there any people you’d have a hard time “greeting with a smile” if they showed up at your temple?

Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen

… the history, myth and cult of a Burmese Buddha image standing in the middle of the [Shan] city of Chiang Tung and the ways in which religious visual culture expresses ethnic-religious identity.

Religious art, as a symbol of culture, is inevitably political. And yet, for whatever reasons an icon might be installed, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes adopted by its hosts.

All these problems with information have always been a problem for human beings. Then you get the internet, which is the informational equivalent of giant cities and now it’s an existential crisis. So we’ll have to develop the generational equivalent of both sanitation at the platform level and best practices as individuals—the “washing your hands” of misinformation. Both things will have to happen

On what it takes to change someone’s mind, and a reflection on whether you should even try in the first place.

Craving is a cause of seeking. Seeking is a cause of gaining…

Nine things that are rooted in craving.

Possessions, honor, and popularity are brutal, bitter, and harsh.

Even someone who would not lie for the sake of their mother could do so when corrupted by material possessions.

The panic attacks started after Chloe watched a man die.

What it takes to keep social media clean.

You read the road as if it’s encrypted with what a father should say on a drive like this.

The key is to think of what we offer as a gift.

Some “sage advice” on how to find—and be—a “hero.”

What should one who desires the good not give away?
What should a mortal not reject?

Dharma principles are manifested in the social construction of norms and beliefs and in the ways macro-level social structures and change are founded on micro-level social interactions embedded in mundane moments

… the fight for disability rights in the UK and India, the remarkable life of Helen Keller, how a Rwandan Paralympic volleyball team made history, and the invention of the Invacar

… can you point out a fruit of giving that’s apparent in the present life?

The Buddha teaches General Sīha the benefits of giving.

We wrote our names all over the city because we felt invisible. And it was fun. I existed when I did graffiti.

Sexual harassment is more prevalent for women supervisors than for women employees.

… studies suggest that diversity statements [should] be aspirational, emphasize autonomy, and express a value for difference

… here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.

… a defense against reality

Therapy assumes that someone is sick and that there is a cure, e.g., a personal solution. I am greatly offended that I or any other woman is thought to need therapy in the first place. Women are messed over, not messed up! We need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them.

A highly influential, feminist essay which is still informing leftist thought today.

For a conversation on what it means, check out Chris Hayes’ interview with Brittney Cooper.

Aśvaghoṣa twice refers to a story in which the ṛṣi Vyāsa was kicked by a prostitute…

… two stories of people trying to figure out what to say or if they should say anything in this moment of backlash.

Hearing about the latest reality TV show with 20 beautiful women chasing after a rich bachelor, watching a commercial showing a woman getting excited about a kitchen cleaner, or even taking a class with a White instructor are all ways the environment can conspire to make us think about our social identities.

Hannah Arendt knew what was at stake. In 1951, she published a hefty book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which traced the roots of what was happening in Europe…

… how we see the world is dependent upon what we expect to see

Across from me she
was crying badly…

Morning: walking my neighborhood, I come upon a colony
of ants busy at work…

when the day calls i will answer

i open the screen door slowly
n wait for Abuela n her red walker
to begin the procession
from the back door out to the street

I too have had my hands full of what keeps me
contained…

The people I love the best
jump into work

But beauty wasn’t enough.

… of all the grounds for making worldly merit, none are worth a sixteenth part of the heart’s release by love.

Goodwill far outshines all other ways of making merit.

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled…

We were thirty-one souls, he said, in the gray-sick of sea…

… a simple guide that shows you the term isn’t as cringey or scary as it’s all made out to be

You can get the student workbook here.

… engineering education successfully turns potential critics into agents of cultural reproduction

… studies gave statistically significant positive results indicating that people really could tell when they were being looked at from behind

A review of the studies investigating this common form of telepathy.

Are diversity and harmony necessarily at odds?

When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse…

A writer for The New Yorker gets a second chance to prove her innocence.

… during this season we remember and celebrate the lives of all our departed loved ones

A brief introduction to the idea behind the Japanese “ghost” festival.

… how do you come to understand, make sense of, listen to, take seriously the observations and the reflections that come from people’s lived experiences?

… ways of understanding their [group’s] distinctiveness which challenge dominant characterizations with the goal of greater self-determination

A definitive introduction to the subject.

I would frequently see adults recount something a child had said that was particularly provocative or deep by describing it as “adorable.” “How cute they are.” Even well-meaning adults just kind of dismiss children’s larger questions and ideas.

On taking children seriously as philosophers and as fellow human beings.

… the real enemy of man is not man. The real enemy is our ignorance, discrimination, fear, craving, and violence.

Each year, Ma collects more and more superstitions

… in order to understand the truth of any situation, you have to start from the position that every person is equally valuable, and that what they have to say must be heard. And whether that is in a clique where somebody is being shunned and blamed for everything, or whether that’s an entire class of people whose experiences are not taken into account, it’s the same formula from the bottom to the top: let everyone speak and let everyone be heard.

We have brains in order to get along with each other […] Trauma destroys the capacity to imagine

How PTSD operates as a personal, cognitive response to a social breakdown and what that says about society and recovery.

Are we really living according to our ideals?

A talk on overcoming philosophical laziness.

… what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?

… you should ignore that person’s impure behavior

A series of remarkable similes illustrate the lengths we should go to to remove resent.

Power allows the ego to be with him- or herself in the other. It creates a continuity of the self.

An exploration of power reacting to a few modern philosophers on the subject.

I found the work engaging and impressive, despite its odd avoidance of the psychological. As a Buddhist, I can’t agree that “life as such cannot be understood in terms of causal relations,” though I appreciate the book, insofar as it advocates and “leads to […] an ethics and aesthetics of the no one: friendliness free of intentions, even free of wishes.”

Deepa’s Russian pens pals were obsessed with Bollywood

On the cultural exchange between newly-independent India and the U.S.S.R.

Welcome to the Sunshine Hotel, […] the end of the line.

A portrait of the last of the Bowery’s great flophouses.

We always say “Nobody knew,” and that means that everyone who knew was a nobody.

… as the number of cargo ships has increased, so has a problem: workers stuck on ships that have been completely abandoned by the owners, leaving them stranded out at sea without basic supplies like food.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

A book about how our trusting and generous nature has been systematically undermined by aggressive policies and its tragic consequences for Sandra Bland and our society as a whole.

I recommend starting with chapter three (available for free here!) and four and then skipping ahead to the last two chapters because the middle chapters are awful and the first couple simply aren’t important. These four chapters (3, 4, 11, and 12) give you all the meat of the book while sparing you some horrific and unnecessary diversions into e.g. pedophilia.

While the monograph exists in written form, I recommend listening to the audiobook. With archival recordings of the original interviews used wherever the book quotes a primary source (or actors where such recordings don’t exist), original music, and narration by, of course, the author himself, the book sounds more like a slick podcast than a scripted robot. Hopefully the future of audiobooks!

… these hours were often spent in the company of close friends: women and adolescent girls used the twilight to enjoy the company of female friends, while some youth reported visiting friends’ houses where they played and listened to music, completed their homework or chatted. Others spent their pocket money on movies or karaoke.

On the nightlife of the Karen refugee camps.

If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence—to make such relations seem moral—than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.

A thorough deconstruction of the idea of money and a scandalous exposé of the history of our global order from the perspective of one of man’s most powerful ideas.

… power need not be only repressive. Think of how our parents, schools, employers, and even peers mold our behavior. This molding doesn’t just stop us from doing certain things. It makes or encourages us

A short pamphlet defining power in the political sense. When we think about how the sangha works, it’s useful to reflect on the complex and variable nature of power and authority.