{"id":110863,"date":"2017-05-15T09:06:10","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T13:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110863"},"modified":"2017-05-15T10:26:14","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T14:26:14","slug":"speak-prairie-dog-and-other-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/15\/speak-prairie-dog-and-other-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Speak, Prairie Dog, and Other News"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_110864\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wild_animals_of_north_america_intimate_studies_of_big_and_little_creatures_of_the_mammal_kingdom_page_538_6217228862.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-110864\" class=\"wp-image-110864\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wild_animals_of_north_america_intimate_studies_of_big_and_little_creatures_of_the_mammal_kingdom_page_538_6217228862.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"659\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wild_animals_of_north_america_intimate_studies_of_big_and_little_creatures_of_the_mammal_kingdom_page_538_6217228862.jpg 1093w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wild_animals_of_north_america_intimate_studies_of_big_and_little_creatures_of_the_mammal_kingdom_page_538_6217228862-300x198.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wild_animals_of_north_america_intimate_studies_of_big_and_little_creatures_of_the_mammal_kingdom_page_538_6217228862-768x506.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wild_animals_of_north_america_intimate_studies_of_big_and_little_creatures_of_the_mammal_kingdom_page_538_6217228862-1024x675.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-110864\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sup, dog.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People think they\u2019re so special, with their tools and their language and their consciousness. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing like us in the universe,\u201d people say. \u201cWe\u2019re <em>people<\/em>!\u201d It\u2019s enough to make you sick. How grand, then, to see the pillars of anthropocentrism begin to fall. Con Slobodchikoff, a biology professor, has been studying the sounds of prairie dogs for three decades, and it\u2019s his belief that they have a distinct language. They know what\u2019s up. Whenever intruders approach their little prairie-dog towns, they can sound very precise alarms. Slobodchikoff told Ferris Jabr that he prefers the term <em>language <\/em>to <em>communication<\/em>: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/12\/magazine\/can-prairie-dogs-talk.html\" target=\"_blank\">Calling it communication sets up that us-versus-them divide<\/a> \u2026 I don\u2019t think there is a gap. I think it all integrates in there. You can go to Barnes &amp; Noble and pick up book after book that says humans are the only ones with language. That cheats our understanding of animal abilities and inhibits the breadth of our investigation. I would like to see people give animals more credence, and I think it\u2019s happening now, slowly. But I would like to push it along a little faster.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Masha Gessen with a quick reminder that the best words are the most precise words, for in them we know where we stand: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2017\/05\/13\/the-autocrats-language\/\" target=\"_blank\">A Russian poet named Sergei Gandlevsky once said that in the late Soviet period he became obsessed with hardware-store nomenclature<\/a>. He loved the word <em>secateurs<\/em>, for example. Garden shears, that is. <em>Secateurs <\/em>is a great word. It has a shape. It has weight. It has a function. It is not ambiguous. It is also not a hammer, a rake, or a plow. It is not even scissors. In a world where words were constantly used to mean their opposite, being able to call secateurs <em>secateurs<\/em>\u2014and nothing else\u2014was freedom.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In which Samuel R. Delany goes to a sex party for the Prime Timers, a group of older gay men who meet monthly in New York hotels: \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/literature-culture\/samuel-r-delany-ash-wednesday\" target=\"_blank\">I\u2019m known as a \u2018sex radical, Afrofuturist, and grand master of science fiction,\u2019 but the fact is, I am nowhere near as sexually radical as many, and for all my interest lots of things have passed me by<\/a>. I felt there was a world of experience that had been slipping away. I wanted at least to know something about it, to write about it \u2026 It is very easy to divide the world into binary groups and then a supplementary group is postulated as a mediator: friendship, affection, sex, celibacy. Raw, cooked, boiled, burnt. Hell, purgatory, paradise. Conscious, unconscious, dreaming \u2026 I think of myself as somebody who is interested in the differences, the differences between straight society and gay, the differences between male and female, but all of those presuppose a set of similarities on which those differences have to be marked out.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Bill Clinton is collaborating with James Patterson on a political thriller. Why? Probably, as Mark Lawson writes, because he has all this specialized presidential know-how he needs to get off his chest: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2017\/may\/13\/james-patterson-bill-clinton-how-politicians-have-helped-political-novels\" target=\"_blank\">In a form that prizes believable detail so highly, the American presidency is tough to research<\/a>. Numerous people can tell you what it\u2019s like to be a senator, submarine commander or secret-service agent, but only six living men have sat behind the Oval Office desk \u2026 Clinton, in coauthoring fiction, is making official a long informal arrangement. Politicians cooperate partly because they tend to be keen thriller\u00a0readers\u2014perhaps an adrenaline-raising genre suits the temperament of those who seek power\u2014but also because they can reveal details and incidents in the knowledge that they will be untraceably disguised, and which could not be confided to journalists or the ghost-writers of their memoirs.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>A new exhibition at the National Building Museum explores the design of mental asylums, whose ever-changing architecture speaks to the evolution of mental health. In the U.S., for instance, the Kirkbride Plan made sure that our earliest asylums had plenty of sunlight and fresh air, as Allison Meier writes: \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/373920\/architecture-of-an-asylum-building-museum\/\" target=\"_blank\">Although they later became overcrowded and plagued by abuse, the Kirkbride institutions represented\u00a0a turning point toward more\u00a0humane treatment of mental illness<\/a>. Unfortunately, their design\u00a0heritage is now disappearing. From Greystone Hospital, demolished in New Jersey\u00a0in 2015, to\u00a0Fergus Falls Regional Treatment Center, which remains in limbo in Minnesota after a proposed redevelopment\u00a0fell through, these structures struggle for preservation. The challenge is due not only\u00a0to\u00a0their colossal, purpose-built size, but also to their complex history, in which some methods\u00a0of\u00a0\u2018moral treatment,\u2019 like Thorazine, were successful and others, like lobotomies, were cruel. Even Kirkbride himself was into some of the nineteenth century\u2019s curious\u00a0fads, such as\u00a0magic-lantern\u00a0slides showing scary images, which he thought could replace\u00a0\u2018delusions and morbid feelings, at least for a transitory period.\u2019 \u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In today\u2019s roundup: the language of prairie dogs; Samuel R. Delany at a sex party; and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2512],"tags":[28822,1657,3705,5654,28824,10790,687,7041,18041,28821,12317,28825,28823,2393],"class_list":["post-110863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-shelf","tag-anthropocentrism","tag-architecture","tag-asylums","tag-bill-clinton","tag-garden-shears","tag-james-patterson","tag-language","tag-masha-gessen","tag-mental-hospitals","tag-prairie-dogs","tag-samuel-r-delany","tag-sergei-gandlevsky","tag-sex-parties","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>If Prairie Dogs Can Talk, What Makes People So Special?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In today\u2019s arts and culture news: the language of prairie dogs; Samuel R. 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