Interesting reads this week include a look at drone warfare, the essay, and the loss of a murdered child.
The Ill-Defined Plot – – “French scholars have been debating what precisely Montaigne meant by essai for going on half a millennium, and I don’t pretend to be qualified to intervene in that discussion. I’ve read about it, but as an interested and biased practitioner, not a linguist. Rest assured that when the French see us walk up to the front of our classrooms and intone the familiar explanation, “An essay … from the French essai … meaning ‘attempt’ ” (as I have watched professors do, as I have done in turn before students), ruthless Gallic laughter is occurring on some level.” The New Yorker
Why do we keep repeating Milgram’s experiments – Malcolm Harris – – “In what he later called an ‘incandescent moment’, Milgram became more interested in the control than the test. He wondered how far people would go to follow his orders, and so he shifted the experiment’s focus from conformity to obedience. He planned to try it on Americans in New Haven, after which he would perform the experiment in Germany to see how the two compared. But once he saw the first results, Milgram knew the German comparison wouldn’t matter.” Aeon
To Raise, Love, and Lose a Black Child – – “Last Friday, I called Jordan Davis’s mother Lucia McBath. It’s been almost two years since her son was murdered by a man who took offense to his music. The murderer was Michael Dunn. After shooting the boy, Dunn drove to a motel with his girlfriend. He ordered pizza. He mixed a few cocktails. Then, the next day, he turned himself in and claimed that he was defending himself against a shotgun-wielding Davis. No shotgun was ever found. In his first trial, Dunn was convicted of attempted murder, for shooting—unjustifiably—at Davis’s friends. He was not convicted of murdering Jordan Davis after the jury deadlocked. The state of Florida retried the case, and this time convicted Dunn of first-degree murder.” The Atlantic
Drones and Everything After – “If you were creating, from scratch, a taxonomy to describe all machines, these drones would not belong to the same species. They would probably not belong to the same phylum. The technology of unmanned flight has diversified so rapidly that there are now 1,500 different kinds of drones being manufactured, and they are participants in nearly every type of human endeavor, composing a whole flying-robot ecology so vast that to call every one by the same name can seem absurd. But drone, an impossible word, is also a perfect one. “ NYMag
