Political Animal

We are chimpanzees. Ok, no, we are not chimps. But the metaphor "we are chimps" is so useful that I am going to use it freely here. I'm going to use it to refer to the fact that we share so much with our bio-relatives chimps (and bonobos too) that many of our behaviors are best understood against the backdrop of such metaphor.

Thus and so,  "we chimps" have a deeply rooted need to find our place in the hierarchy of our polis (/ˈpɒlɪs/; Greek: πόλις pronounced [pólis]), plural poleis (/ˈpɒleɪz/, πόλεις [póleːs]: "city" in Greek). It used to be the case that our "polis" consisted of "tribes" of about 50ish fellow hominini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominini). Nowadays, however, the "polis" has diluted into this blurry thing we call "society." Our networks of hominin connectivity have become very fuzzy; we no longer hold to a specific group of people. We connect at different places at different times of the day with different people at different degrees of attachment. Some are lucky enough to have a few very close "friends," and they meet probably once a week. Some of us live a more "solitary" life, insomuch as we don't visit nor receive any visits from any "friends." And, yet, this doesn't mean we do not socialize. Persons like me socialize in conventions, conferences, symposia, fora, colloquia, congresses, seminars, and so on, and so forth. In these, I have met wonderful people of all sorts; and so I would like to share here some photographs of such people. In most cases, I have not met with them again, and yet these brief encounters have meant so much for me insorfar as these are people who have inspired me to strive for higher intellectual reaches.