Quoting Paul Auster

“It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do.”
Paul Auster, Oracle Night

photograph of Paul Auster via

The Deaf Snow White. By Kanika Agarwal. An Excerpt.

The great king and his queen were married for five years and were still waiting for a child. The mother often prayed for a girl whose skin and heart would be white and pure as snow. In their sixth year, their prayers were answered and they finally got a baby girl. However, the queen died a month after the birth of the child. The king was left to care for their only daughter and put his heart and soul into it. He named her Snow White in remembrance of his wife’s wishes.

As the years passed by, Snow White blossomed into a beautiful girl fair as snow. She had a gentle heart and a soothing voice. She grew up playing in the gardens of their palace, and most of her friends were the plants, bushes and her favourite three little birds – Brownie, Bluie and Ruie. She talked to them endlessly as her father presided over his court. Days turned into months and months turned into years. In the blink of an eye, Snow White was ten years old. It was then that she started losing her hearing. Her father knew that he would not be able to care for Snow White alone now. So, he remarried – primarily to provide care to his deaf daughter. But no one knew what fate had in store for Snow White.

(..) 

Snow White started sensing that her stepmother was using her deafness to fill her father’s ears against her. She observed that her father had become sterner towards her. He once came and sat beside her to talk. She saw his lips moving: “My dear little child, you need to work harder and make sure you treat your mother and your sisters fairly.”

(...) 

Snow White woke up to the pecks of her little birds on her body. “How did you find me?” she asked. They rubbed their beaks against her nose sweetly. Suddenly, Snow White realised that someone was in the house. She peeped out of the bedroom door to find seven little people sipping wine by the fire. She was scared of what awaited her and wanted to run out. So, she tried tiptoeing, only to realise that she was too big to escape the house unnoticed.

She spoke up hesitantly, apologising to them for her intrusion and tried walking away. They moved their lips but they were too tiny for her to read. That is when she had to tell them about her deafness. While many of them did not believe her and accused her of lying, one of them, Sheram, gestured to her to sit and explain her story. Tabish and Sheram listened patiently. By the time she finished her story, her fear had turned into grief and she sobbed inconsolably.

Kanika Agarwal
 

An excerpt taken from Parita Dholakia's version of Rapunzel (via): 

The prince falls in love with Rapunzel and invites her to his palace ...

“I can’t. There is no ramp from the room to the garden.”
“We will find a way. I can carry you down,” says the prince.
“Carry me? I don’t think I would like that. I always go everywhere wheeling my own chair.”

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- Agarwal, K. (2024). The Deaf Snow White. In: Rising Flames (ed.) And They Lived ... Ever After: Disabled Women Retell Fairy Tales. HarperCollins India.
- More: The Guardian, link
- photograph of Nikki Giovanni (1972) via

Identity Politics and Vaccine Distribution

"For me, the most important and the most shocking was the way in which the United States rolled out vaccines in 2021. We had these amazing life-saving vaccines, but there were too few of them, so what were we going to do? Virtually every country in the world did it by age. But the key advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control, called ACIP, said that even though that course of action is much easier to implement, we're not going to do that. It would, they said, be unethical because a disproportionate number of older Americans are white. Even though, according to their own causal models, adopting a different rule would increase the number of deaths by between 0.5 and 6.5%, could lead to thousands more people dying, simply prioritizing older people would be the ethically wrong thing to do. 

Instead, they recommended putting essential workers, who supposedly are more diverse, first. A couple of things happened because of that. One is that it's really hard to communicate who's an essential worker. And immediately the politicking started about being included as essential workers: Film crews were essential workers. Finance executives were essential workers. I was an essential worker, as a college professor in Maryland, at a time when I was not allowed to teach classes in person…

Then what happened is that you had way too many people eligible for the vaccine at a time when there were barely any appointments. So who got the appointments? The people who were able to refresh the websites for hours a day, or who could write computer programs to find eligible spots, or who were able to drive hours out of town in order to get to some rural pharmacy that had more capacity for some reason. They were the ones to get it. In other words, more privileged people who were probably at slightly less risk of death. AI suspect that this policy even killed more non-white people, because if you give a vaccine to two 25-year-old black Uber drivers, rather than one 80-year-old black retiree, more black people are going to die.

So here's a policy that is a life or death question; is capable of inspiring just the worst kind of zero-sum racial competition in our politics; and can easily be exploited by the political right (...)"

Yasha Mounk

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- photograph by Dennis Feldman (1969-1972, Hollywood) via

- Yasha Mounk, full interview: link