Shauna's Writing

Day 1 of my Recurse mini batch is complete!

Next week I’ll be doing a mini-batch at Recurse.

I just fixed a Django bug that took me ages to solve.

I have read a great many non-fiction books in my life, and I remember the details of heartbreakingly few of them.

This twitter thread is a great example of “minding the gap”, that is: doing the necessary improvisational work to complete a task that has only been…

When chants of ‘equal pay!’

Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Estad at Boston Review:

Via Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice, an excerpt from Woodson v.

This TED talk by Shonda Rhimes underscores the importance of play:

It’s a Crisis of Civilization in Mexico by José de Córdoba at the Wall Street Journal:

The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are, The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him, The…

“Many scientists prefer not to think about politics, but the work that scientists do has always had political consequences, from the quiet tragedy of an…

One prominent idea of rights, common in the US political and legal tradition, understands rights to be barriers against interfering state action: if the…

Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they’ve built with their sandbox toys.

I posted a few months ago about negative capability – that is, the ability to tolerate uncertainty, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,…

With the exception of rare contrivances like king’s missives and broadcast television, we learn most of what we learn and meet most of the people we meet…

This link goes to a fascinating little explainer by Popehat on Twitter.

Last week I was on a panel about ‘Democracy and the Digital Commons’ at Suffolk University.

Back in high school and college, I had friends who offered to do tarot readings for me.

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We often talk about giving people the benefit of the doubt, but seldom talk about its opposite, to the point that no agreed upon phrase for it exists.

How to Survive America’s Kill List by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - an American citizen’s fight to escape assassination by the US executive branch:

“[Socrates] adds that as far as he himself is concerned he believes that “it would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I direct were out of tune and…

The problem is all inside your head she said to me The answer is easy if you take it logically I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free There must…

This old tweet has recently been making the rounds and sparked up some discussion among my Facebook friends:

There is a lot to be said about what happened to Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka yesterday, but this tweet by Jennifer Richeson captures the analysis of the…

I recently read David Ciepley’s “Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation”.

Last week I went to a rally to protest a series of raids by ICE in my city.

Principles are really important, and by and large you should try hard to stick to them.

It is in the very nature of a question like “What do I owe my parents?”

This is a quote from Norman Thomas’s Is Conscience a Crime?

How to Not Die in America by Molly Osberg at Splinter News:

PyCon is one of my favorite events - the only big conference I’ve been to that feels like a small one.

Socrates, however, who is commonly said to have believed in the teachability of virtue, seems indeed to have held that talking and thinking about piety,…

This originated as a post to a mailing list on the subject of blockchains and how they might help the cause of open science.

The point is partly an intergenerational one.

“Refusing the parlements their right of remonstrance was an act of despotism.

Here’s a summary of what we know as of the afternoon of Wednesday, March 21st:

I detest and fear dogma.

In an article about Milton Friedman in the Pacific Standard, Rick Paulas quotes from an article of Friedman’s published in 1970:

I wrote an ‘intro to operations’ guide.

Warning: Black Panther spoilers.

Bureaucracy is stupid, David Graeber writes in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.

To Be, or Not To Be by Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books:

“The antisemites’ belief that their claim to exclusive rule was no more than what the Jews had in fact achieved, gave them the advantage of a domestic…

The law locks up the man or woman

In an essay at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova sketches out a conception of identity as a collection of fragments which is, paradoxically, being repressed and…

From the studiously moderate Brookings Institution:

Back in college, I based my Division III (senior thesis) research on a set of empathy studies by Nancy Eisenberg.

In a previous post, I wrote that asking questions is harder than answering them, although I qualified that in a big way with “answering [questions]…