#kipnis

[rogueish]

Sarah Shor, illustration for "Der Blinder", from Itzik Kipnis, A ber iz gefloygn (1924)

[theguardiackids]

Congratulations on a great career, Jason Kipnis!

Thank you for your time as one of Cleveland’s best second baseman!

[andweareunderway]

from cookie's ig 💔

[rbolick]

Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber's "Architectural Alphabet"

Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber’s “Architectural Alphabet”

[glitterybouquetchaos]

On Why Francisco Lindor Will Never Be Loved In New York

Francisco Lindor loved the moment last night when his base hit gave the Mets a walk-off win. Fans loved it too. But he will never be beloved. Francisco Lindor is a cut above most major league position layers. But he is not exceptional, even though he offers the look of being extraordinary. His smile is broad and engaging, often displayed on the field. In a nutshell, Francisco Lindor draws…

[we-were-all-kipnises]

🥹🫶🏻

[morfeminism]

"What now gets labeled feminism on [college] campuses," says Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis, "has to do with dialing back a lot the progress women have made establishing ourselves as consenting adults."

That was the main argument of an essay Kipnis published this past February in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled, "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe." After the article appeared, the Northwestern campus erupted in protest. Students demonstrated by carrying mattresses and pillows and wrote a public letter accusing Kipnis of "[spitting] in the face of survivors of rape and sexual assault everywhere.”

Then two students filed complaints with the university, and Northwestern brought Kipnis up on charges under Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlaws discrimination on college campuses that receive federal support. The charges were later dismissed, but not before Kipnis wrote a follow up essay in Chronicle, "My Title IX Inquisition."

Last week, Kipnis sat down with Reason's Matt Welch to talk about campus feminism, Title IX, why Hustler's Larry Flynt and anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin have a lot in common, and her recent book, Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation.

[jewishvitya]

972mag is a publication by Palestinian and Israeli journalists.

Quotes from here:

In a eulogy for her brother Hayim, an anti-occupation activist who was murdered in Kibbutz Holit, Noi Katsman called on her country “not to use our deaths and our pain to cause the death and pain of other people or other families. I demand that we stop the circle of pain, and understand that the only way [forward] is freedom and equal rights. Peace, brotherhood, and security for all human beings.”

Ziv Stahl, executive director of the human rights organization Yesh Din, and a survivor of the hellfire in Kfar Aza, also came out strongly against Israel’s assault on Gaza in an article in Haaretz. “I have no need for revenge, nothing will return those who are gone,” she wrote. “Indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and the killing of civilians uninvolved with these horrible crimes are no solution.”

Yotam Kipnis, whose father was murdered in the Hamas attack, said in his eulogy: “Do not write my father’s name on a [military] shell. He wouldn’t have wanted that. Don’t say, ‘God will avenge his blood.’ Say, ‘May his memory be for a blessing.’”

And people there talk about breaking the cycle, which has to mean us. We must be the ones to do that, we have the power and the freedom to allow us to do that. We keep Palestinians trapped and dying and give them no path out of this way of life.

Peace should not mean quiet subjugation. It should mean stopping the genocide, and it should mean no occupation, no apartheid, no ethnic cleansing, undoing whatever we can from the colonialist tactics Israel has been using from the start.

And it has to mean us.

[bottlecap-press]

From Nora Kipnis' chapbook, The Changeling House, available from Bottlecap Press!

[shakespearenews]

“Man, this thing could be super cool,” Mr. Martin said, recalling his reaction when Mr. Kaag approached him with the idea. “Then we started brainstorming.” He said Mr. Kaag suggested, “Imagine if we could get Laura Kipnis on ‘Romeo and Juliet.’” (They ended up hiring Ms. Kipnis, a cultural critic and essayist, to do just that.)

[campgender]

In this era of post-feminism, the utterly reasonable claim that women should be afforded sexual freedom – that they should be able to declare their desire loudly, to be perverse and lustful and up-for-it – slid into the more dubious insistence that women are and must be so. And something of this insistence – that in the name of sexual equality, women must hold their end up and be assertive, declamatory, unashamed – found its way into the affirmative and enthusiastic consent initiatives.

Critics then and now – Katie Roiphe and Laura Kipnis among them – have worried about the sexual timidity and fear conjured within consent culture. I’m arguing instead that the current consent rhetoric has taken something from post-feminism’s positioning of sexual uncertainty and fear as abject – from its framing of sexual hesitation as belonging to history. To be a contemporary and empowered sexual subject in consent culture, one has to be able to speak one’s desires out loud with confidence. Silence does not belong with us here; it belongs to the past and to the abject female subject of yore.

from Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent by Katherine Angel

[andweareunderway]

i have to remove him from tracked tags now

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 8, 2024

Sensory prediction error drives subconscious motor learning outside of the laboratory. Albert, S. T., Blaum, E. C., & Blustein, D. H. (2023). Journal of Neurophysiology, 130(2), 427–435.

Working memory load impairs transfer learning in human adults. Balter, L. J. T., & Raymond, J. E. (2023). Psychological Research, 87(7), 2138–2145.

Objects sharpen visual scene representations: evidence from MEG decoding. Brandman, T., & Peelen, M. V. (2023). Cerebral Cortex, 33(16), 9524–9531.

Specific patterns of neural activity in the hippocampus after massed or distributed spatial training. Centofante, E., Fralleoni, L., Lupascu, C. A., Migliore, M., Rinaldi, A., & Mele, A. (2023). Scientific Reports, 13, 13357.

Hormonal coordination of motor output and internal prediction of sensory consequences in an electric fish. Fukutomi, M., & Carlson, B. A. (2023). Current Biology, 33(16), 3350-3359.e4.

Subcortico-amygdala pathway processes innate and learned threats. Khalil, V., Faress, I., Mermet-Joret, N., Kerwin, P., Yonehara, K., & Nabavi, S. (2023). eLife, 12, e85459.

Neural mechanisms underlying uninstructed orofacial movements during reward-based learning behaviors. Li, W.-R., Nakano, T., Mizutani, K., Matsubara, T., Kawatani, M., Mukai, Y., … Yamashita, T. (2023). Current Biology, 33(16), 3436-3451.e7.

Monkeys exhibit human-like gaze biases in economic decisions. Lupkin, S. M., & McGinty, V. B. (2023). eLife, 12, e78205.

Widespread coding of navigational variables in prefrontal cortex. Maisson, D. J.-N., Cervera, R. L., Voloh, B., Conover, I., Zambre, M., Zimmermann, J., & Hayden, B. Y. (2023). Current Biology, 33(16), 3478-3488.e3.

Synaptic variance and action potential firing of cerebellar output neurons during motor learning in larval zebrafish. Najac, M., McLean, D. L., & Raman, I. M. (2023). Current Biology, 33(16), 3299-3311.e3.

Novelty and uncertainty differentially drive exploration across development. Nussenbaum, K., Martin, R. E., Maulhardt, S., Yang, Y. (Jen), Bizzell-Hatcher, G., Bhatt, N. S., … Hartley, C. A. (2023). eLife, 12, e84260.

Ants combine object affordance with latent learning to make efficient foraging decisions. Poissonnier, L.-A., Hartmann, Y., & Czaczkes, T. J. (2023). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(35), e2302654120.

VIP interneurons in sensory cortex encode sensory and action signals but not direct reward signals. Ramamurthy, D. L., Chen, A., Zhou, J., Park, C., Huang, P. C., Bharghavan, P., … Feldman, D. E. (2023). Current Biology, 33(16), 3398-3408.e7.

A stochastic model of hippocampal synaptic plasticity with geometrical readout of enzyme dynamics. Rodrigues, Y. E., Tigaret, C. M., Marie, H., O’Donnell, C., & Veltz, R. (2023). eLife, 12, e80152.

Sequence anticipation and spike-timing-dependent plasticity emerge from a predictive learning rule. Saponati, M., & Vinck, M. (2023). Nature Communications, 14, 4985.

Statistical inference on representational geometries. Schütt, H. H., Kipnis, A. D., Diedrichsen, J., & Kriegeskorte, N. (2023). eLife, 12, e82566.

High-resolution volumetric imaging constrains compartmental models to explore synaptic integration and temporal processing by cochlear nucleus globular bushy cells. Spirou, G. A., Kersting, M., Carr, S., Razzaq, B., Yamamoto Alves Pinto, C., Dawson, M., … Manis, P. B. (2023). eLife, 12, e83393.

Using occipital ⍺-bursts to modulate behavior in real-time. Vigué-Guix, I., & Soto-Faraco, S. (2023). Cerebral Cortex, 33(16), 9465–9477.

Octave illusion: stimulation frequencies can modulate perception. Whittom, A., Couture, F., Chauvette, L., & Sharp, A. (2023). Psychological Research, 87(7), 2183–2191.

Completeness out of incompleteness: Inferences from regularities in imperfect information ensembles. Zhu, J., Xu, H., Shi, B., Lu, Y., Chen, H., Shen, M., & Zhou, J. (2023). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49(9), 1203–1220.

[whitehotharlots]

On one of the staggeringly large number of white lady academics who pretended to be not-white

In a sad attempt to keep up engagement, I've decided to post some things I wrote in personal correspondence over the last few years but never bothered to translate into full-fledge posts. Going through these emails, I was astounded at how much I've lost the ability to process the timeline of political events since COVID. Things that I would have sworn happened a couple of months ago actually happened 5 years ago; stuff that seems like ancient history was actually just from this past summer, etc. I think there's some value in recapitulating some of these events, give ourselves a chance to reflect on how much and how little things have evolved.

This piece was originally written in early 2021:

I'm not in STEM and I only pay as much attention to MeToo bullshit as I need to, so the MeTooSTEM movement and its drama passed me by. Basically, it was started or popularized by a lady neuroscientist named BethAnn McLaughlin. By early last year she began facing the type of predictable criticisms that inevitably wreck all leftist movements, regardless of legitimacy. Basically people agreed with her movement but were upset that she had too much of a leadership role, didn't center the correct voices, sometimes criticized people from more disadvantaged groups, etc. Here's a neat example, from the piece linked above:

Last month, McLaughlin tweeted angrily at Hontas Farmer, a transgender woman of color who teaches physics at the City Colleges of Chicago. In a thread about student–faculty relationships, Farmer noted that it would be “unenforceable to forbid relationships.” “Get off my time line with your pro-preying on students garbage,” McLaughlin responded. “Grown ups are talking. #STEMTrollAlert.”

While this lady seems like a vicious shithead, it's important to note that this type of behavior is common in woke discourses. It's the natural result of a morally certain culture is which all dissent is considered proof of evil. In this case, I happen to agree with the trans woman: while student-teacher relationships are gross, blanket bans are unenforceable and will most likely wind up harming the least empowered teachers. But this teacher's concerns were only allowed to stand because of her status as a trans woman--Laura Kipnis made the exact same argument several years ago, before the MeToo furor had really kicked off, and it nearly destroyed her career.

The point here is that no one is actually arguing for or against the merit or logic of certain positions; it's all jockeying over who is even allowed to have a position in the first place, and then demanding that everyone else defer to this person's position, which is automatically validated by their identity statuses.

Nothing in the Buzzfeed profile seems very damning or specific. I'm not a fan of MeToo, but we see here the same general hatred of strong leadership that seems to plague all left spaces. Arguments in regards to how funding should be spent and what actions should be prioritized--things that happen in literally any organization of more than a few people and can only be resolved by designating leadership--are presented in terms of bodies and spaces and centering voices and yada yada yada. Once again, it's not about the morality or efficacy of the actions taken by this organization. It's about whose identity imbues them with moral authority.

Buzzfeed seemed to have a particular hard on for this lady so they posted another piece in February of this year, documenting even more dysfunction in her movement. Again, she seems like a shithead and her movement's goals are usually not good, but the accusations against her were still vague, woke bullshit that amounted to people framing an organizational power struggle as a civil rights issue. And this is where things get interesting...

What does a white lady shithead do when she finds herself automatically unable to criticize people who fall above her on the hierarchy of oppression? Why, she pretends to be an indigenous lady shithead! She fabricated the existence of an ASU professor of Hopi descent who posted under the name of sciencing_bi. Sciencing_bi just so happened to agree with everything the white lady posted, and was fiercely protective of the white lady when she found herself getting attacked by non-white people.

But then, sadly, the made up Hopi professor succumbed to Lady Corona last week. Woke STEM twitter mourned her passing by angrily blaming ASU for their failure to protect employees of color. This caused ASU to release a statement saying that, uhh, no one has died and they have absolutely no idea what any of these lunatics are talking about.

Just--dear god. At what point does hubris give way and become delusion? How insulated must someone feel to believe that they can not only create but kill off a fictional persona whose primary utilitity is to brown-wash your own opinions?

These are the people who have become the morality police of the twenty twenties. These people are the ones who decide what you can or cannot say or believe. They are insane and and they are stupid, and they control our world.

[noosphe-re]

...we are more interested in the direct physical and emotional impact, like the sound of music or the scent of a flower. We are not looking for meaning in our buildings. A building cannot be read like a book, it does not have any credits, subtitles or labels like pictures in a gallery. A building is a building. In that sense, we are absolutely anti-representational. The strength of our buildings is the immediate, visceral impact they have on a visitor. For us that is all that is important in architecture.

Jacques Herzog, Jeffrey Kipnis in conversation with Jacques Herzog Jeffrey Kipnis: "Una Conversación con Jacques Herzog (H&deM). A Conversation with Jacques Herzog (H&deM)." In: Fernando Márquez Cecilia, Richard C. Levene (Eds.). "El Croquis. Herzog & de Meuron 1993-1997." Vol. No. 84, Madrid, El Croquis, 1997. pp. 7-21.