Dictionary.com Chooses Complicit As Word Of The Year
Here’s one for the word nerds. Dictionary.com chose complicit as its Word of the Year–“a symbol of the year’s most meaningful events and lookup trends.” The site noted that the first spike in searches for complicit occurred the day after Saturday Night Live aired a skit where Scarlett Johansson played Ivanka Trump. In the satirical ad, Johansson was selling a perfume called Complicit. A second and larger spike occurred after an interview where Ivanka Trump stated: “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit.” Dictionary.com chose the word, in part, because of noteworthy stories of people who refused to be complicit in the face of oppression and wrongdoing.
Baltimore Cops Are Studying James Baldwin And Plato
In Baltimore, Detective Ed Gillespie is incorporating the Humanities into officer training. In his classes at the city police department’s in-service training facility, Gillespie teaches officers Plato, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, and Baldwin. The detective’s methods include having his students discuss real stories of police misconduct in Platonic terms. Amidst calls for officer training on de-escalation and implicit bias following the death of Freddie Gray who suffered a fatal injury in the back of a Baltimore police van, Gillespie is trying to offer his students a way to ask questions about the human condition, themselves, and policing.
Rare 16th-Century Mesoamerican Codex Goes Online
The Library of Congress has made an extremely rare Mesoamerican manuscript available online. The Codex Quetzalecatzin (or the Aztec Codex) is one of the few surviving illustrated Mesoamerican manuscripts dating before 1600. Over at the Library of Congress site, you can take a look at the manuscript’s native Aztec and Nahuatl maps, hieroglyphs, illustrations, and more.