Ta-Nehisi Coates

Does EVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET baselessly hate Anne Hathaway? I took a quick straw poll. "She is that theater kid with good intentions but secretly annoys the shit out of you," said one friend, adding, "You want to be excited for her and you are but deep down you are kind of rolling your eyes." Another replied, "I think someone told her she was America's sweetheart and she believed it." One friend placed her in the category of "really affected drama queens," saying, "I can imagine her non-ironically yelling 'Acting!'" In other words, she's always onstage, always calculated -- not someone with whom you'd want to party or share your deepest secrets. "I am an Anne Hathaway supporter," said a friend who sidestepped the question of whether or not she finds the actress likable. "Sure, she's kind of needy, but so are all actors."

What does it really mean when we say an actress "annoys the shit" out of us, anyway? That we hate the roles she chooses? The paparazzi'd version of her life we see in US Weekly? Her insufficiently funny quips on the red carpet? Or, as Salon asked today, is it her face? In some ways, the point of sitting on the bleachers of celebrity culture is the thrill of judging with impunity. Unlike our neighbors or co-workers, we convince ourselves that famous actors, by dint of making their living entertaining us, have chosen to be judged. And judge we do. (This isn't just a byproduct of our Twitter-enforced instapundit culture, either: "Let's get Entertainment Weekly and play my favorite new game: Love Her/Hate Him," exclaims Will in a 1999 episode of Will & Grace.)

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Something is happening to lives and spirits that will never show up in the great housing shortage of the late 40s. Something is happening to the children which might not show up in our social record until the 1970s.

The difference in wealth between typical households in each racial group ballooned to $236,500 in 2009, up from $85,000 in 1984, according to the study, released Wednesday. By 2009, the median net worth of white families was $265,000, while blacks had only $28,500...

Income gains are also a major differentiating factor, even when whites and blacks have similar wage increases. Whites are typically able to put more of their raises towards accumulating wealth because they've already built up a cash cushion. 

Blacks are more likely to use the money to cover emergencies. Inheritances also make it easier for some families to build wealth. Among the families studied, whites were five times more likely to inherit money than blacks, and their typical inheritances were 10 times as big.

[Scarlett] Johansson isn't even on MacFarlane's list for a film she made. Instead, she made her way into the song because of a real-life invasion of privacy, where her nude photos were stolen from her phone and leaked to the Internet. That is an actual, not fictional violation, and MacFarlane played it for laughs.

This kind of terrorism was never as effective as the kind of racist power deployed by the upper classes -- at the University of Chicago, for instance. Indeed, Hirsch's study left me thinking of terrorism as a weapon of the weak -- the unsubdued weak, but the weak all the same. Still, terrorism was a kind of power in Chicago, and Hirsch shows how it made it significantly harder for the advocates of integration to create housing across the city. Think of it like this: Al Qaeda can't end air travel, but it can certainly alter it. Likewise, the White Circle League couldn't stop black succession. But they could seal blacks in and thwart integrations.

Unable to do anything to alter the plans that shaped their lives, Chicago's blacks responded viscerally, charging the planners with conspiracy and reviving an old strain of nativism in response to their ethnic antagonists. The dimensions of the conspiracy varied. Some believed the "plan" was to drive all blacks out of the area between 12th and 63rd streets; others stretched the territory to be "reclaimed" by whites down to 67th. The same new governmental agencies and powers that frightened white ethnics similarly affected blacks - only the latter saw no communists or subversives. "Land-grabbing" realtors, bankers, businessmen. and institutions provided explanation enough. 

There were as many reasons for the perceived conspiracy as there were villains: Blacks were to be pushed out of their desirable inner-city locations and herded to the outskirts of the city or to undesirable suburbs such as Robbins to make way for Loop workers (there was at least some truth to this - not all conspiracies were fantasies); the dispersal of black population was designed to dilute that community's political strength; the use of eminent domain was intended to reduce black property owners to tenancy. 

Whatever the validity of these contending explanations, the blacks employing them - as the whites who discovered their own conspiracies - were responding to the fact that large forces beyond their influence were controlling their lives, a perception as accurate as it was distressing.

One of the great contributions of Arnold Hirsch's Making The Second Ghetto is the conception of racism not as deviancy, moral degeneracy, or stupidity, but as a political ideology whose employers' tactics differ according to class, but whose goals remain the same. 

The goal of post-war white Chicago was to keep African Americans sealed in the ghetto. Working-class and ethnic whites worked toward this goal through what Hirsch calls "communal violence," which is to say entire communities angling toward terrrorism:

Rioting was undertaken for particular reasons and not as a generalized expression of racial hostility. Those reasons, and not the external forces of social control, were primarily responsible for the development, intensity, and duration of disorder.

This politicized violence erupted with some regularity between the 1940s and 1960s in Chicago. It was it's most spectacular in Cicero. But it occured throughout the city -- at the Airport Homes, in Fernwood Park, in Englewood, in Bridgeport, in Park Manor. Violence was not restricted to "working-class" areas. African-American chemist Percy Julian was named Chicagoan of the Year in 1949. In 1950, white terrorists firebombed Julian's new home in suburban Oak Park. Twice. 

This kind of terrorism was never as effective as the kind of racist power deployed by the upper classes -- at the University of Chicago, for instance. Indeed, Hirsch's study left me thinking of terrorism as a weapon of the weak -- the unsubdued weak, but the weak all the same. Still, terrorism was a kind of power in Chicago, and Hirsch shows how it made it significantly harder for the advocates of integration to create housing across the city. Think of it like this: Al Qaeda can't end air travel, but it can certainly alter it. Likewise, the White Circle League couldn't stop black succession. But they could seal blacks in and thwart integrations. 

The point here is two-fold: First, terrorism in the mid-20th century, in the cradle of the North, was common. Second, the terrorism at least partially worked, and when considered as a compliment to the structural violence of developers and the forces of urban renewal, it certainly worked.

The ghetto is not a mistake. The racism of white ethnics in Chicago was not due to brainwashing, false consciousness or otherwise being too stupid to recognize their interests. On the contrary, it was the political strategy of one community, attempting to subvert the ambitions of another. The strategy was successful. 

....Imagination, therefore, is nothing but decaying sense; and is found in men and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking. 

The decay of sense in men waking is not the decay of the motion made in sense, but an obscuring of it, in such manner as the light of the sun obscureth the light of the stars; which stars do no less exercise their virtue by which they are visible in the day than in the night. But because amongst many strokes which our eyes, ears, and other organs receive from external bodies, the predominant only is sensible; therefore the light of the sun being predominant, we are not affected with the action of the stars. 

And any object being removed from our eyes, though the impression it made in us remain, yet other objects more present succeeding, and working on us, the imagination of the past is obscured and made weak, as the voice of a man is in the noise of the day. From whence it followeth that the longer the time is, after the sight or sense of any object, the weaker is the imagination. For the continual change of man's body destroys in time the parts which in sense were moved: so that distance of time, and of place, hath one and the same effect in us. 

For as at a great distance of place that which we look at appears dim, and without distinction of the smaller parts, and as voices grow weak and inarticulate: so also after great distance of time our imagination of the past is weak; and we lose, for example, of cities we have seen, many particular streets; and of actions, many particular circumstances. This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, as I said before. But when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt but God can make unnatural apparitions: but that He does it so often as men need to fear such things more than they fear the stay, or change, of the course of Nature, which he also can stay, and change, is no point of Christian faith. 

But evil men, under pretext that God can do anything, are so bold as to say anything when it serves their turn, though they think it untrue; it is the part of a wise man to believe them no further than right reason makes that which they say appear credible. If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with it prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience. 

And this ought to be the work of the schools, but they rather nourish such doctrine. For (not knowing what imagination, or the senses are) what they receive, they teach: some saying that imaginations rise of themselves, and have no cause; others that they rise most commonly from the will; and that good thoughts are blown (inspired) into a man by God, and evil thoughts, by the Devil; or that good thoughts are poured (infused) into a man by God, and evil ones by the Devil. 

Some say the senses receive the species of things, and deliver them to the common sense; and the common sense delivers them over to the fancy, and the fancy to the memory, and the memory to the judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood.

Last summer, an eruption on the sun's surface scored a solar weather hat trick, racking up all three of the major phenomenon scientists observe: a solar flare, a coronal mass ejection (CME), and coronal rain, "complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere," NASA explains. The solar flare in the video is not massive, by the sun's standards, but "moderately powerful," as NASA calls it. But what makes the show special is the coronal rain, charged plasma slowly dripping in fiery loops along the sun's magnetic fields.

The decision by the national police commissioner to remove the investigator, Warrant Officer Detective Hilton Botha, was the latest in a series of abrupt twists and setbacks in the prosecution of Mr. Pistorius, the double amputee track star accused of murdering his girlfriend on Feb. 14 by firing four shots through a locked bathroom door while she was on the other side. 

Riah Phiyega, the commissioner, said at a news conference that a divisional police commissioner, Lt. Gen. Vinesh Moonoo, would be assigned to preside over "this very important investigation." 

After widespread media reports about the charges against Detective Botha, Gerrie Nel, the prosecutor, said at the start of the hearing on Thursday that he had just learned about them. The news only compounded questions about Detective Botha's work on the Pistorius case. Under cross-examination on Wednesday, he was forced to acknowledge several mistakes in the investigation and to concede that he could not rule out Mr. Pistorius's version of events based on the existing evidence.

Why the reelection of the first black president matters even more than his election

On November 7, 1492, people around the Alsatian city of Ensisheim heard an explosion, accompanied by crashes of thunder. The air lit up with fire. A smoky flash streaked, screaming, through the sky, hurtling toward Earth at a sharp angle. The source of the chaos -- a celestial stone -- finally slammed into a wheat field on the outskirts of the town. 

The only direct eyewitness to this unusual event, it seems, was a young boy. He proceeded to lead the stunned residents of Ensisheim to the charred-but-shiny rock, an object whose impact had carved a hole in the ground that was more than three feet deep. 

The people assumed it had been sent from God. They also assumed it might be an omen. The Austrian emperor Maximilian I, who happened to be in Ensisheim at the time -- adding, no doubt, to the superstitions -- ordered residents to expose the rock at the local church. Chaining the object on holy ground, it was thought, would mitigate any evil it might bestow on the town.

It was not:

For years, rumor had it that Bobby Brown had introduced Whitney Houston to drugs--but Michael Houston, one of the singer's two older brothers, has revealed to Oprah Winfrey that the real story was quite different. It's a story that has Michael Houston "living, but not alive" since his younger sister's death almost a year ago.

"I feel responsible for what I let go so far," he told Oprah in a Monday interview on OWN that primarily featured mother Cissy Houston, who has a new tell-all memoir out. In that book, Cissy says she didn't understand her children doing drugs then, and she doesn't understand it now.

Said Michael Houston, "We were always, you know, being together most of the time, and her following behind me -- I taught her to drive. We played together -- everything that you do together as you're growing up -- and then when you get into drugs, you do that together too, and it just got out of hand."

Then Oprah presented what she called "the big question": Did he introduce her to drugs?

"I would say, yeah, we did everything together, so once I was into that, then she followed suit," he said.

From a human perspective, I understand why an older brother would feel responsible for Houston's death. But it's been my feeling that the country at large has trouble accepting that Whitney Houston was a person, endowed with all the attendant flaws. One reason they had trouble was because Houston's image was engineered to make them think that way. I'd argue that Bobby Brown, as a black man from the projects, was tailor made for the role of despoiler of virgins and author of mad villainy.

The inability to accept that Houston, as free as any man, engaged in the drug use that destroyed her voice and killed her, is parcel to an inability to accept the full humanity of women as a class. Houston's handlers capitalized on that inability and sold her as goddess of femininity. America bought this. Thus the pairing of the patron saint of ladyhood with the patron saint of unreconstructed niggerdom could only be explained by magic and time travel.

Aristotle, like Hobbes, did think that knowledge came from the senses, but he had a very different view of how senses worked. Aristotle believed that every physical object has a form or essence, and a substance. So a clay model of a tree and real tree share commonalities of form, although their substances are totally different. Aristotle also thought that the psyche is an instrument whereby we can receive the form of objects without the substance. He compares sensation to a signet ring making an impression of wax.

Hobbes, however, does not really believe that the concept of "essence" is useful in explaining the world. He is basically a materialist. He believes that the only things worth talking about are matter and its interactions. Therefore, his account of how we obtain knowledge through the senses has to rely on interaction between matter.

This might sound like an obscure difference, but it has a lot of consequences for how one studies the world. If you agree with Aristotle, the implication is that by observing the world, you can get an idea of the real essence of things. Acquiring theoretical knowledge is then a matter of thinking rationally about the implications of this knowledge. Thus physical science is a matter of everyday observation followed by rigorous thinking.

However, if the information you get from the senses is just a bunch of particles bouncing off of your sensory organs, as Hobbes believes, then there's good reason to be worried that the senses are unreliable, and you need to spend time carefully tweaking the information you get from the senses to make sure you have it right. This gives rise to an experimental model (which Hobbes' contemporary, Francis Bacon, focused on far more than Hobbes did).

As for how commonplace it was - Aristotelianism was basically the dominant philosophy from the time of Thomas Aquinas (1200s) up until the 1600s. Hobbes is writing around the time of transition away from Aristotle's position as the preeminent thinker on matters such as this. I actually am not sure how dominant the view still was among academics by the time of the Leviathan.

As an aside, the reason Hobbes talks about mediate and immediate interaction is that, at the time, people who subscribed to this materialst view did not believe that matter could interact with other matter at a distance. The only interactions allowed into the theory were direct ones. The view of no interaction at a distance was thrown out after Newton's theory of gravity became the consensus view - since gravity is interaction at a distance.

A few notes: first, when Hobbes talks about the scholastic view of knowledge, ("they say the thing understood sendeth forth an intelligible species", etc.), this is not similar to the way we now understand smell. Scholastics, following Aristotle, thought that objects were composed of matter and form. I.e., a computer is a bunch of metal and plastic and silicon and stuff (the matter), arranged in a particular way (the form). If you had exactly the same matter, but it was a bunch of molten metal and a pile of sand, it would not be the same object; likewise, if you had an identical computer made of different bits of metal and silicon and whatever. 'Species' is scholastic-speak for 'form'; the objects are (according to the scholastics) giving off forms of themselves, whereas (as I understand it) we now think that objects we smell give off matter.

Second: I don't recall how significant this is in the rest of Hobbes' work, but the claim that ALL thoughts concern "a representation or appearance of some quality, or other accident of a body without us, which is commonly called an object" is significant, and probably false. Can we think about abstract objects, nonexistent objects, logical arguments, etc.? Are all these "objects without us"? You could argue, as Hume did, that all our thoughts are either about objects of internal or external sense, but can be cut and pasted to create e.g. nonexistent objects. But is it obvious at all that thinking about (for instance) logical validity is in any sense thinking about an object outside us, or is the product of cutting and pasting concepts originally derived from such thoughts? Not to me.

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