Tomorrow we are expected to hear from Istanbul that the Hagia Sophia, which Atatürk declared to be a museum in 1935, will be converted back into a mosque. Whatever one might think of this decision, this 1,500 year old building will continue standing in all its glory. I took these photos a couple years ago. Walking through the Hagia Sophia takes one's breath away.
Excellent Tweets from Paul Graham:
Thus, we should guard the right to free speech like we should guard (though we often don't) against restraining competition. Everyone is free to speech and to be heard it is not often easy. The temptation is to gag the competition rather than to prevail on the merits in the marketplace of ideas. Putting undue pressure on an organization to fire someone from their job to deplatform them is not having one's ideas prevail in the marketplace of ideas. The only type of fair fight is ideas versus ideas, and these days anyone with a computer and an internet connection has a right to compete.
If you have having difficulty keeping up with all of the things purported to be racist in recent times, "Radical Intersectionalist Poet" Titania McGrath offers this scorecard (click the charcoal rectangle on the right).
John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley has been one of my favorite podcasts for several years. His general topic is linguistics and McWhorter makes it all educational, humorous and even musical. This is McWhorter's side gig. For his day job, he is a professor of English at Columbia University.
In this particular episode, McWhorter takes a look the origin and meaning of some of the words and phrases we use to discuss today's racial reckoning, words and phrases such as "Black," "white," [capitalizations are intentional] "defund," "Black Lives Matter" and "Karen." If you haven't yet experienced Lexicon Valley, this episode is a timely one: "Defund Karen: On the insults, acronyms, and sloganeering of America’s racial reckoning."
According to this 2016 Pew Research, racial discrimination is far more nuanced that one would assume based on the rhetoric from recent protests. This study contains nuanced stats on gender too. Many charts to consider in this article, including this one:
