Considering the Octopus, Missing the Fords

October 7, 2014

Matter asked 10 women in eight countries to keep a record of every instance street-harassment for a week. The results … well, probably won’t surprise you, unfortunately.

“Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. She seemed to be on guard, lest they grow too enthusiastic—just as a driving instructor might not want his students to get too excited about their driving.” New fiction from Haruki Murakami.

Cpl. Ron Francis, the New Brunswick RCMP officer who complained he wasn’t allowed to smoke medicinal marijuana to relieve PTSD symptoms while in uniform and recently pleaded guilty to assaulting four fellow Mounties, has been found dead.

“‘I don’t know why I did it.’ Then you have not done the painful work of examining your own soul. You have not put in the time, you have not put in the effort, you have not looked at the parts of yourself you would rather ignore, you have not made amends to the ones you have hurt, you have not dealt with your own self.”

What

“I felt like these were the details that proved what I’d always known—that the whole thing was my fault in the first place. What kind of a victim lets her attacker buy her a veggie burger?

No Yeezy, no.

"By examining European skulls, Brace found that the typical way in which human teeth fail to meet, with the upper set overlapping the lower set in an overbite, is a phenomenon that is actually only 250 years old in the West. That shift that correlates almost exactly with the widespread adoption of the table knife and fork. Before cutlery, Europeans would clamp their teeth together on large chunks of meat, in order to hack off pieces with a dagger – a style of eating Brace christened the ‘stuff-and-cut’. Afterward, the cutting was done on the plate, and the overbite became common. By way of proof, Brace offers the Chinese, who had adopted chopsticks 900 years earlier – and whose overbite predates the European version by exactly the same amount of time. If Brace’s theory holds true, the implication is that the replacement of food with a liquid substitute could result in dramatic changes to the human jaw. ‘Soylent-face’ might become a recognisable look."

Hazlitt pal Navneet Alang says he’s going to miss the Fords. A new Forum poll threatens that he may not get the chance to.

“Even if my Manhattan productivity is powered by a sociopathic illusion of my own limitlessness, I’m thankful for it, at least when I’m writing.” Zadie Smith finds her beach.

Consider the octopus.