My first book, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge has just been published by the MIT Press. The MIT page has a summary and quotes from Laleh Khalili and Stefan Helmreich, two people whose work I really admire. The book is available online via independent bookstores in the Netherlands and the US, and it's… Continue reading The book exists!
Category: writing
Student of Segregation
An Israeli Professor's Trip through the Jim Crow South I've been thinking about the international circulation of racist expertise. James Q. Whitman has published a new book, Hitler's American Model. It's about how the Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s studied the racist legal system of the United States as part of their efforts to take away the rights of… Continue reading Student of Segregation
Magical Minions
Update: For a related post on orcs, see this related post, Orcing the Other. Magical Minions: Dominance and Diversity in the US Popular Media Privilege and Performativity Privilege is a complex concept that has different meanings in specific contexts. I’m just back from the Judith Butler conference at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and one of… Continue reading Magical Minions
Sherlock Explains It All
"From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link to it." "By a man’s finger-nails, by his… Continue reading Sherlock Explains It All
Primate Planet
“My people will crouch and conspire and plot and plan for the inevitable day of Man's downfall—the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind…. When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland….“ I want to write about the difficulty of being open and responsive… Continue reading Primate Planet
Patent Time
During a recent trip, I stopped off at the apartment in Bern where Einstein lived when he worked as a patent clerk. It's now a small museum, including a desk with this broken clock in it. The clock seemed especially poignant since Einstein's research involved a fundamental rethinking of the nature of time. Einstein famously worked by inventing… Continue reading Patent Time
Young Astronauts
Nautilus magazine was kind enough to include my entry on being in the Young Astronauts in their Spark of Science series, which consits of short posts about how people first became interested in science. Submission is open, and there are some really cool entries, like Hope Jahren on playing with lasers in her father's lab, Caleb Scharf on his rural childhood and being… Continue reading Young Astronauts
Jess Bier 