November 2011
5 posts
9 tags
“An Unimaginable Pit of Emptiness:” Emerson on...
In today’s popular imagination, New England Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller are known primarily as canonical literary figures, or in Thoreau’s case as a proto-hippie recluse who lived in the woods by Walden Pond and wrote a book about it. But these writers were engaged with some of the most pressing issues of their day, from abolition and...
About Pepper Spray →
nostrich:
One hundred years ago, an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the intensity of a pepper’s burn. The scale – as you can see on the widely used chart to the left – puts sweet bell peppers at the zero mark and the blistering habenero at up to 350,000 Scoville Units.
I checked the Scoville Scale for something else yesterday. I was looking for a way to...
James Baldwin vs. John Pike
braiker:
Also, somewhat speciously, the Atlantic has this: Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike:
Here’s what [James Baldwin] had to say in the New York Times about Jim Clark, an Alabama sheriff and staunch civil rights opponent whose state troopers viciously attacked peaceful protesters.
‘[Clark] cannot be dismissed as a total monster; I am sure he loves his wife...
3 tags
