As a white woman growing up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana, she had been forward-thinking about race. In 1944, she invited a black choir to sing at the Haas Auditorium, in Bunkie, causing community uproar. A burning cross landed on her front yard. After church one Sunday, she discovered some kids trying to set her house on fire. “I never let it worry me,” she later recalled. But her weapon of choice was history, and Solomon became her obsession
In the Sontag Archives
If most e-mails are not interesting (“The car will pick you up at 7:30 if that’s ok xxx”), others reveal unexpected qualities that are delightful to discover. (Who would have suspected, for example, that Sontag sent e-mails with the subject heading “Whassup?”)
Slave Capitalism
.. These Southerners saw themselves as engaged in a struggle for the future of the world. The slave system represented the natural way of things, they believed, not because it was a holdover they wished to preserve, but because it was the endpoint of social evolution, the condition of universality toward which all societies aspired.
.. Abolitionism and wage labor were the unhealthy symptoms of Northern society’s unnatural form. The Southern intellectuals saw the North rather as a later American elite saw the Soviet Union—a twisted version of modernity, progress gone down the wrong path. The problem for the South was not that they were dominated by Northern capitalists but that their own capitalist ambitions had come under the thumb of that Frankenstein’s monster of the North, free society.
Hysteresis: systems depend on past, not just current state
Hysteresis is the dependence of a system not only on its current environment but also on its past environment.
Hysteresis occurs in ferromagnetic materials and ferroelectric materials, as well as in the deformation of some materials (such as rubber bands andshape-memory alloys) in response to a varying force. In natural systems hysteresis is often associated with irreversible thermodynamic change. Many artificial systems are designed to have hysteresis: for example, in thermostats and Schmitt triggers, hysteresis is used to avoid unwanted rapid switching. Hysteresis has been identified in many other fields, including economics and biology.