“Let’s Make the Future” presents: Deafness and Genetic Engineering

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, they say. Unsurprising, then, are the polemics of jurisdiction over genetic material. A question like that posed by the Journal of Medical Ethics -- "If [genetic preimplantation] could be employed to produce deaf children, would it be acceptable for deaf parents to do so?" -- is well-suited for philosophy,...

Iran so far away.

In inviting you to "learn Farsi, the Persian language of Iran!", the online learning platform mangolanguages commits a party foul as common and condoned as having one too many. One might even argue that calling Persian "Farsi" makes the party more fun. After all, that's what everyone else is doing: easypersian, learnpersianonline,  the Collins English...

deaf here, Deaf there, deaf everywhere (II)

As of the first chapter of Deaf in the USSR, we were in 1917, on the tail of a revolution from centuries of despotic rule by a series of tsars. Inclusion and unification were at the top of the revolutionary agenda, and the deaf were perfect mascots for the new Soviet ideal of human perfectibility...

deaf here, Deaf there, deaf everywhere

You may have already learned that sign language isn't universal, but it's a common assumption to have. We think sign language as a brain app that clicks on when a human is running on deaf mode, as if deaf experience itself were universal. But the only thing universal about deafness, apart from not hearing, is...

Marx et la poupée (Marx and the Doll)

A novel wins an award, and I wonder: what makes one person's story stand out among the thousands of others being published that year? Sometimes a story is no more than very well done, but performs better than it otherwise would because it resonates with the fetishes and fears of its time. That serendipity (or...