Front and Center

Newsletter providing "a lighter, human interest side of the news" from the Boston University Medical Campus

Front and Center

Newsletter providing "a lighter, human interest side of the news" from the Boston University Medical Campus

Front and Center

Newsletter providing "a lighter, human interest side of the news" from the Boston University Medical Campus

Front and Center

Newsletter providing "a lighter, human interest side of the news" from the Boston University Medical Campus

A New Formal

The girl stood in the narrow doorway a moment before she went, slowly, into the living-room. She did not speak to her mother who was sitting in the dingy, brown leather chair by the window, did not seem to notice the anxious, gray eyes staring at her through old-fashioned, horn-rimmed glasses. She walked aimlessly about the room, then stopped to peer out of the window. Mother, the girl began, still looking through the window into the cold, December twilight

Universal Abelian H-spaces

The question of the existence of Universal homotopy commutative and homotopy associative H-spaces (called Abelian H-spaces) is studied. Such a space T(X) would prolong a map from X into an Abelian H-space to a unique H-map from T into X. Examples of such pairs (X,T) are given and conditions are discussed which limit the possible spaces X for which such a T can exist. The Anick spaces are shown not to be universal Abelian H-spaces for the corresponding Moore spaces, but conditions are discussed which could lead to a universal property with respect to a more limited range of targets.Comment: 22 page

The Workplace Comedy and Pandemic Politics in Greg Daniels’ Upload

This paper examines the critical potential and pedagogic possibilities of the workplace television comedy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is particularly interested in Greg Daniels’ Upload, a series that debuted during the first wave of infections in North America. Although it was produced before the current health crisis, Upload offers a prescient social commentary on the depravities of late capitalism, one that speaks to present concerns over access to vital health resources and the importance of “essential” workers, specifically in the service industry. However, Upload is driven by a liberal version of multiculturalism that emphasizes racial equality and ostensibly recognizes “difference” but downplays economic disparities and racial divisions of labor even as it draws on them repeatedly in its critique of inequality. Whereas the series effectively challenges the monetization of everyday life and death, a point of praise for many critics, it fails to disrupt or even call attention to how low-wage and purportedly low-skilled work is currently and historically racialized in the US. As a result, Upload’s efficacy as a social commentary and indictment of late capitalism is more interested in the unequal distribution of essential resources and services than the political economy of their provision, that is, the social relations of their production