I visited Shipton’s Arch, an eerie, otherwordly physical feature a few hours drive west of Kashgar. Despite its obscurity it is reputedly the tallest natural arch in the world, able to fit the entire height of the Empire State Building in its void.

The Arch is named for an English explorer, Eric Shipton, who did a brief survey of these mtns in 1947. Subsequently the arch’s location became lost to the outside world until a joint National Geographic / Chinese govt expedition in 2000.

Controversial take, Indiana Jones was already completely exhausted as a movie concept by the 1990s, bc it turns out there are no other esoteric Macguffins with mass-appeal besides Holy Grail and Ark of Covenant. Lucas/Spielberg already knew this after Raiders, that the "esoteric Macguffin" thing wouldnt work that well for a movie franchise. That's why they went in a totally different direction in Temple of Doom, with the whole "justification for colonialism" thing, which...

Map from 1899 of historical African interior slave trading routes. Numerous details in the map make it unusual, and deeply informative (if interpreted carefully). Map-focused 🧵 (apologies if some visuals are blurry, Twitter sometimes converts map-res poorly).

Nussbaum's evil proposal in the New York Review of Books to manipulate predator species away from their natural behaviors of hunting and killing. Nussbaum is shamelessly projecting her own human culture war baggage onto species who are not in fact to blame for whatever it is in the Romantic movement or tourism culture or whatever which she doesn't like.

Snippets from my new article w/ Compact:
"The freezing of protesters’ digital bank accounts is a new technique of social control and suppression of dissent...Yet left intellectuals who critically study the machinations of power are oddly silent about it."
compactmag.com/article/the-be…

Academics' unwillingness to point a theoretical/critical lens at the issue of protestors losing their digital bank account access reveals a massive shift in the role of the academic in societal deliberation. As an anology: academics' treatment of the Boer War (thread) 15 yrs ago I remember academics being willing to openly theorize and critique the British Empire's use of concentration camp tactics against the Boers during the 1899-1902 Boer War -- despite academics not really sympathetizing with the politics of the Boers.

This has always been the inherent awkwardness of the Berniecrat desire to swing more resources to the public unis and make them free for their local populations. At end of day the Berniecrats value the same internationalism the Ivy League does.

https://twitter.com/JacobAShell/status/1593274983089930241

Asserting a prole internationalism as distinct from, opposed to, the PMC internationalism of Harvard and Yale would have resolved this, but the Berniecrats never really had the desire to intellectually conceptualize this.

The WWF report is deeply upsetting. It also promotes the idea of making wildlife pop loss and climate change one and the same issue. I think that's a mistake. 🧵
theguardian.com/environment/20… From the Report:
"We are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet’s resources. Scientists are clear: unless we stop treating these emergencies as two separate issues neither problem will be addressed."