SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
@plantmaize.bsky.social
1.5K followers 1.8K following 310 posts
ABD historian of diet & medicine in China (#FirstGen), creative non-fiction editor @tendonmag.bsky.social, companion to a really good dog named Barktholomew (號小聃) Taipei / Baltimore / Los Angeles they/them 🏳️‍🌈 all views my own (君子不器)
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plantmaize.bsky.social
This is also true of the phrase "food desert." In "Black Food Geographies," Ashanté Reese outlined historical factors limiting grocery competition around DC in the later 20th century, leading to neighborhoods undeserved by or without any grocery stores. It's a structural problem, not a natural one.
reprolawyer.bsky.social
🏜️Ahead of #IndigenousPeoplesDay, we have to talk about why it’s time to drop “health care desert” (and similar desert imaginaries) from our vocabularies. 🧵
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
disabilitystor1.bsky.social
It’s very fashionable to dunk on the humanities/liberal arts; I will nonetheless earnest-post (yes very uncool, I know) that turning out tech/physicians who think that they don’t have to think of the histories of their fields, of ethics, of their role in and impacts on the world is dangerous.
plantmaize.bsky.social
Reading de Las Casas and other primary source accounts made me loathe Columbus and the other conquistadors. A gold hungry, evil hearted man who wrecked devastation on the same Arawak days after praising their generous and trusting natures. Truly shameful this history isn't better taught in K-12.
pedsortho.bsky.social
Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.
But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died.
While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants.
Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....
plantmaize.bsky.social
Ahhh thank you for this reminder, I've been meaning to watch this film!
isanchezprado.bsky.social
Neo Sora’s Happyend, a stylish, earnest near-future story about being young in a society of normalizing authoritarianism, in a culturally diverse generatnion against the grain of accepted racism and xenophobia, timely no doubt. In theaters.
plantmaize.bsky.social
In Spring 2014 Searle gave an endowed lecture at UC Berkeley on universal human rights. Somehow his opening anecdote involved a lot of carping about the stoner kids who would toke up downwind of his office off Strawberry Creek. Never told him it was me, I was one of those kids 😆
eryk.bsky.social
I’ve just learned that John Searle, whose Chinese Room thought experiment is often used to challenge ideas of “understanding” in LLMs, died at age 93 on Sunday. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...
John Searle obituary
American philosopher whose Chinese Room thought experiment rebuts the idea that computers can think as humans do
www.theguardian.com
plantmaize.bsky.social
The only downside to Taiwan life is that Ethiopian food isn't a thing here 🥺 gosh I miss it
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
broadwaybabyto.bsky.social
Covid is not over.

People are still dying and becoming disabled every day.

We rushed “back to normal” for the economy, not because the threat had passed.

When you wear a mask, you’re not only protecting your health, you’re saying you don’t believe anyone is expendable.
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
katieholten.bsky.social
Nature and the environment permeate the language viscerally. Irish predates English by a millennium. Its early writing system, Ogham, written vertically as a series of lines and strokes, has an alphabet based on trees.​ The Irish language is a joy.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Illustration of a new Irish Tree Alphabet. Twenty-six trees represent each letter of the English alphabet. At the bottom of the image are lines representing the Ogham alphabet, horizontal and vertical lines, looking like simple trees.

The Irish Tree Alphabet draws trees from existing native as well as non-natives that are now calling Ireland home due to the changing climate. 

The trees are drawn in ink with colored water pencil filling in the leaves and fruit. 

The work is rooted in the medieval Ogham alphabet which was used to write the early Irish language. The characters or letters were called feda "trees", or nin "forking branches" due to their shape.

Each letter of the Latin alphabet is given a corresponding tree: A = Ailm (Scots Pine), B = Beith (Birch), B = Coll (Hazel), etc. 

The tree drawings were turned into a font called Irish Trees.  

Irish Tree Alphabet by Katie Holten was made for Visual Carlow in 2020. The font is available to download, so everyone can write with Irish Trees.
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
gavinyamey.bsky.social
MAGA hero Jay Bhattacharya says that “political priorities may override the scoring system provided by outside experts appointed to hundreds of review panels”

This is absolutely disgusting & utterly scandalous. If your study doesn’t fit with Trump & Bhattacharya’s right wing ideology, it’s toast 👀
plantmaize.bsky.social
Entire city neighborhoods radically shifted as a result. For ex, the "vacancies" (properties stolen from) Japanese Americans in SF's Western Addition were filled by Black migrants from the South. This is part of why SF has a Chinatown but no Japantown today: fillmorestreetsf.com/history/worl...
World War II and its Aftermath - Fillmore Street San Francisco
Beginning in the late 1930s, many of the original residents of the Fillmore began to move to the suburbs. But the greatest change in the neighborhood came with World War II, when hundreds of Japanese-...
fillmorestreetsf.com
plantmaize.bsky.social
This also happened to many Japanese-American families forcibly detained between 1942-45. Because there was no timeline in EO 9066, very few were able to prepare for long absence and returned to looted or foreclosed properties. Restitution wasn't made until 1988: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_L...
plantmaize.bsky.social
I think there are layered/multiple meanings to it and the play between those is interesting. Anyway enough of this, the original poster is a lovely find!
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
plantmaize.bsky.social
Sorry, I commend your instinct to choose gender neutral terms as a general rule. But the philologist and historian in me wins out over my contemporary nonbinary politics when issues of translation arise 😅 that said, Spanish/Catalan are not my primary working languages so I would defer to experts!
plantmaize.bsky.social
Unless you're remaking it for use today, a Catalan word from the 1930s should be translated as it was used at the time. I checked an online Catalan dictionary and it does seem that "camperol" was the masculine form (like the Spanish "campesino" I first mistook it as) www.diccionari.cat/GDLC/camperol
camperol | diccionari.cat
adjectiu Propi del camp; campestre. Costums camperols. Flors camperoles.masculí i femení Pagès. Un camperol.
www.diccionari.cat
plantmaize.bsky.social
Countryman captures campesino better to my ear
plantmaize.bsky.social
At what point does it become realistic to contemplate this but for global politics and climate change? (Asking for several billion friends.)
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
dryad.technology
The function of the waffles joke is an in-group signifier. Singal, Graber, and Oppiliappan are showing in-group solidarity; they're all in on a joke. The joke is they have institutional power, and you don't, and they feel contempt for you, that you still want to have opinions about how power's used.
plantmaize.bsky.social
Yep. So is a squirming 4 year old!
plantmaize.bsky.social
In many cultures women carry babies and toddlers on their backs while working. Baskets slung over the shoulders also were used to haul grain, foraged foods, water, laundry, etc. Thinking women are unfit is such modern gender role b.s. it shorts out my brain.
plantmaize.bsky.social
Whoa I thought having 4 migraines in the past 8 days was just a me thing 😑 thanks for the reminder
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
erinbiba.bsky.social
Since many of you are distracted by other things or not following any Jewish media, you should know that today, on one of the holiest days of the year, a man drove his car into a crowd gathering to go into a Synagogue in Manchester then got out and started stabbing people. Two people are dead.
Reposted by SJ Zanolini (李思捷)
prisonculture.bsky.social
Pick one or two lanes and keep at it. You are one person and cannot do everything or take 10 actions a day.