In the pink

 

The last stop on our 12-day trip last fall was Midland, a Texas city we’d never been to. On the morning of October 21st we spent time there at the I-20 Wildlife Preserve, whose website describes it as “one of the few urban playas in the state of Texas, an ecotourism destination, and a science education resource of the Permian Basin.” If you’re not familiar with playa lakes, you can read about them in a Texas Parks and Wildlife article. Along one edge of the lake densely flowering smartweed plants (Persicaria sp.) turned the area pink and made a pleasant contrast with the green of the cattail plants beyond them. Below, a black willow sapling (Salix nigra) had arisen in front of the smartweed colony.

 

 

For those of you interested in the craft of photography,
point 15 in About My Techniques applies to the top image,
and point 20 to the bottom one.

 

§

§        §        §

§

 

In English-speaking countries increasingly many institutions that once dedicated themselves to the quest for truth have been turning despotic:

The University of Sussex forced Kathleen Stock into exile for challenging the concept of gender identity. Evergreen State College ran out Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, after refusing to protect them from violent student protesters. Portland State did the same to assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian after he dared to question politicized scholarship. MIT canceled a lecture that University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was set to give, citing an op-ed he’d written opposing affirmative action. UC Irvine fired Aaron Kheriaty, a professor of psychiatry and its director of medical ethics, for refusing the Covid vaccine on ethical grounds. Princeton fired Joshua Katz—supposedly over a decades-old offense he had already been punished for—right after he wrote an essay criticizing anti-racism policies.

That’s from a January 7th article by Neeraja Deshpande in The Free Press titled “Will Jordan Peterson Lose His License for Wrongthink?” You can read the full article.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman