Non-fiction
‘I Need My Literature to Know About it’
What becomes evident is not so much a portrait of Daylight as a reader, but her skill as a critic, her ability to distill enough detail from a work to understand – and convey something of – its essence, to trace the author’s thinking and engagement with the world.
Don’t call me I’ll call you, Ishmael
Fathoms presents itself as a sensorium – a study in synaesthesia. Its style is in fact a collision between two modes of expression, representing distinct ways of understanding the world. There is the intoxicated, subjective, extravagantly metaphorical mode in which Giggs conveys her thoughts and impressions. And there is the sober, objectifying mode of scientific and scholarly writing – which, of course, comes with its own elaborate technical lexicons and formal tics. Fathoms moves between the two, sometimes holding them apart, sometimes seeking to combine them. Ultimately, it wants to reconcile them.
Naomi Oreskes: Feminist Science Is Better Science
Science thrives when it is open to anyone who has the talent for it, and the taste for the hard work involved. And society thrives when our institutions are seen to be fair. But my argument is that the case for diversity is epistemic as well as moral. I’ve never heard a scientist say, Yeah, it’s really great that the feminists pointed this out because once we understood the epistemic benefits of diversity, we realized that we could do better science.” My goal is that, in the future, scientists will say that.