Tina Fey recently ate cake, and liberal America freaked out. On one side were those who insisted that Fey’s satire was brilliant, and that those who disliked it had missed the joke. You see, according to this narrative, Fey was playing a character: She was mocking herself and other white liberal women who turn to…
Author: Clio
James and the Giant Screed
I have a confession. I used to be a Men’s Rights Activist. I’ve been mulling an essay on this for a while now, but James and the Giant Screed has brought it to the surface. In case you’re not familiar with it, James Damore came to national attention recently when a memo he’d written and…
Why Privilege is White-Washed Supremacy
We are at what Lisa Hickey rightly calls an inflection point in the United States. White Supremacists and White Nationalists are marching around the nation, ostensibly to protest things like the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, VA. It is time for every white person in this country to decide where…
White Men and the Well of Actually
It seems like a lot of white men like to be experts about everything. Years ago, when I was in graduate school studying linguistics, I was visiting my father. We were chatting, and somewhat randomly, he presented me with a piece of information: “Korean has the same writing as Chinese.” He followed it up with,…
I dreamed a car crash (Sketch)
i dreamed a car crash, and my fingers burned with the sensate nothing that seared over me i could not scream because i had lost the right, and as the world melted around me torn and shorn in glass, metal, rubber burning in black flame and circling overhead then into my lungs i thought for…
Is Zero a Factor of Zero?
Generally speaking, if \(a \times b = c\), then \(a\) and \(b\) are factors of \(c\). This concept appears at the secondary level in two contexts: The factors of positive integers, and the factors of a polynomial. If we limit the domain and range to be positive integers, for instance, the factors of 7 are…
The Good and Bad of School Dress Codes
When I went to public school, the basic dress code for students was: Don’t cause trouble. We had what was ostensibly called “free dress,” but students did occasionally get sent home. The only one I remember involved a t-shirt with a cuss word on it. It was tacitly understood: Cover your basic bits. This is…
sometimes
sometimes i feel like tearing my chest wiiiiiide open because that way you could see my soul gasping in the great expanse sometimes i feel like staring into the sun and speaking out in the tongue in which it speaks to me sometimes i want to scream until i cough up blood and phlegm so…
Keeping an Eye out for Ableism
I have a prosthetic eye. I have had it since I was about a year old, before I could speak. I don’t know what life would be like without it. More importantly, I don’t know what my life would be like with two functioning eyes. According to my interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act,…
Number values and multiple representations
One of the questions my mind keeps returning to is: What is a number? I don’t mean this in a high-level set theory way. I’m not talking about aleph-numbers or other sorts of concepts. I’m restricting my thoughts here to the sort of numbers that are the domain of high school mathematics, nothing trickier than…