Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Wilson Alwyn Bentley was a snowflake man. So much so that he came to be known as “Snowflake.” Bentley was a Vermont man; it’s easy to understand his fascination with snow. I was just in Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, last weekend. Driving down Route 2 at night with the high beams on as the light catches the white flakes rushing horizontally at the windshield creates the feeling of warp speed.

A couple of years ago, you could hardly get through a winter week without someone telling a version of the Eskimos-words-for-snow story. We've only got one word for snow, the story went, but those Eskimos have 20, or a hundred, or a thousand, depending on the yarn-spinning skills of the teller. Hm, we'd say, ain’t it interesting how much language determines experience and vice versa. It turns out, unfortunately, that this story isn't true. As Steven Pinker pointed out in The Language Instinct, Inuit languages have about a dozen words for snow, roughly the same as English: snow, sleet, slush, and so forth.

But it makes sense that stories about snow have come to stand as metaphors for the variety of experience in general. Snow changes everything. It is a world-cloaker and a land-blanketer. When the snow comes, everything gets slower and more deliberate. Just look at how it falls, meandering without a care in the world. Contrast this with the rain, which quickens things most of the time.

More here.

From the Partners In Health website:

Cliff Landis is a librarian in Valdosta, Georgia who, until last week, was planning on a post-holiday replenish of his savings account. However, upon hearing about the suffering the earthquake has wrought, he decided to further deplete his own savings in favor of contributing to PIH’s relief efforts in Haiti.

But Cliff didn’t stop there. He also encouraged friends, family, and readers of his blog to give, promising them he would match every gift up to $10,000. Watch a video of what happened next:

Support from Cliff and his readers will enable us to continue our work to help Haiti recover from the devastating earthquake, including transporting desperately needed food, fuel, and medical supplies to our surgical teams treating patients around the clock. Thank you, Cliff, and thank you to all your supporters, and to all our partners in health.

Donate to Partners In Health here.

Pat Shipman in American Scientist:

The best thing about paleontology is the surprises.

No matter how carefully you have analyzed the fossils, no matter how insightful your understanding of the links between anatomical form and function, Mother Nature always comes up with something totally unpredicted.

Surprises certainly have been sprung by, and on, the international team of paleoanthropologists and paleontologists that looks for fossils in the remote Aramis region of Ethiopia where the Afar people live. The team is co-led by Berhane Asfaw of the Rift Valley Research Service in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Yonas Beyene of the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture in Ethiopia;the late J. Desmond Clark, formerly of the University of California, Berkeley; Giday Woldegabriel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley. With a nice touch of delicacy, White refers to Clark as “inspiring but no longer making decisions” about the project.

On October 2, 2009, the team published in Science their analyses of a hominin (member of the human lineage) called Ardipithecus ramidus. The best representative of the species is a partial female skeleton nicknamed Ardi; she is 4.4 million years old and is certainly astonishing and noteworthy. There are parts of at least 35 other individuals in the collection, in addition to thousands of specimens of plants, invertebrates, fish and assorted nonprimate mammals from the same location.

More here.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a story of 1926, at the height of the economic boom and his own creative powers. “They are different from you and me.” Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” he explained, which makes them cynical and haughty. “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” The passage is best known not for its psychological insight, but for Ernest Hemingway’s withering rejoinder. Yes, the rich are different, he conceded: “They have more money.” As with so many of their recorded exchanges, Hemingway is supposed to have come out on top. We are meant to feel that Fitzgerald, in his usual romantic way, believed that the rich really were better, and that he needed Hemingway’s bracing realism to bring him back to earth. But what if Fitzgerald had claimed instead that the poor are different? Even Hemingway entertained the idea that poverty–at least the bohemian frisson of being momentarily poor–might carry with it certain advantages.

more from Christopher Benfey at TNR here.

John Millei’s “Maritime” paintings (2004–07) and “White Squalls” (2005) are enormous, magnificent paintings, mural-like in their panoramic scope and imposing scale, and executed in what can only be called a grand Abstract-Expressionistic manner. Full of the raw, turbulent energy characteristic of what Harold Rosenberg called “action painting,” they have its famously “unfinished” look, suggestive of unfinished revolutionary business — the “revolution against the given, in the self and the world,” bringing with it a sense of “open possibility,” which he thought was the substance of avant-garde art.(5) For Rosenberg action painting is its climactic statement — a final Sturm und Drang enactment of primordial emotion breaking through the social facade, an instinctive cri de coeur against indifference, a release from everyday conventions of communication to express the incommunicado core of the self. Action painting is rebellious romanticism carried to its existential conclusion. It is a plea for authenticity in the midst of inauthenticity. Kandinsky, the first abstract expressionist painter, said that it was an assertion of spiritual freedom in a world that had become a materialistic prison, a rejection of its naive objectivity in the name of the radical subjectivity that he called “inner necessity, the all-important spark of inner life.”(6)

more from Donald Kuspit at Artnet here.

By the end of the month, a company called txteagle will be the largest employer in Kenya. The firm, started in its original form in 2008 by a young computer engineer named Nathan Eagle and, as of this coming June, based in Boston, will have 10,000 people working for it in Kenya. Txteagle does not rent office space for these workers, nor do the company’s officers interview them, or ever talk to most of them. And, in a sense, the labor that the Kenyan workforce does hardly seems like work. The jobs – short stretches of speech to be transcribed or translated into a local dialect, search engine results to be checked, images to be labeled, short market research surveys to be completed – come in over a worker’s own cellphone and the worker responds either by speaking into the phone or texting back the answer. The workers can be anyone with a cellphone – a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed. The jobs take at most a few minutes and pay a few cents each (payment is sent by cellphone as well), but a dedicated worker can earn a few dollars a day in a part of the world where that is a significant sum.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

Matt Taibbi in True/Slant:

A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.

Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski, and dedicated to Linta Varghese.]

Marching

At dawn I heard among bird calls

the billions of marching feet in the churn

and squeak of gravel, even tiny feet

still wet from the mother's amniotic fluid,

and very old halting feet, the feet

of the very light and very heavy, all marching

but not together, criss-crossing at every angle

with sincere attempts not to touch, not to bump

into each other, walking in the doors of houses

and out the back door forty years later, finally

knowing that time collapses on a single

plateau where they were all their lives,

knowing that time stops when the heart stops

as they walk off the earth into the night air.

by Jim Harrison

from Saving Daylight;

Copper Canyon Press, 2006

From Prospect Magazine:

From The New York Times:

When watching a Hollywood movie that has robed itself in the themes and paraphernalia of science, a scientist expects to feel anything from annoyance to infuriation at facts misconstrued or processes misrepresented. What a scientist does not expect is to enter into a state of ecstatic wonderment, to have the urge to leap up and shout: “Yes! That’s exactly what it’s like!” So it is time for all the biologists who have not yet done so to shut their laptops and run from their laboratories directly to the movie theaters, put on 3-D glasses and watch the film “Avatar.” In fact, anyone who loves a biologist or may want to be one, or better yet, anyone who hates a biologist — and certainly everyone who has ever sneered at a tree-hugger — should do the same. Because the director James Cameron’s otherworldly tale of romance and battle, aliens and armadas, has somehow managed to do what no other film has done. It has recreated what is the heart of biology: the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing the living world.

The real beauty of it, though, is that you do not have to be a scientist to enjoy the experience. “Avatar” is well within reach of becoming the highest-grossing film of all time. And while the movie’s dazzling animation and use of 3-D has received so much attention, it cannot be anything but the intense wonder so powerfully elicited, rather than merely the technical wizardry itself, that has people lining up to see it.

More here.

Thomas Hegghammer in The National:

Omar was initially in denial about his father’s responsibility for September 11, but he gradually came to terms with it and began distancing himself publicly from the elder bin Laden. In 2007 he married a British woman 24 years his senior, left Saudi Arabia for Qatar and began seeking political asylum in various European countries. According to Jean Sasson, Omar himself contacted the publisher with the book proposal in 2008. One suspects that the book is partly an attempt by Omar to convince the outside world of his peaceful intentions and to increase his prospects of moving to the West. Omar’s bitterness toward his father shines through in the text, but not to the point of undermining his own credibility.

It is much less clear what motivated Najwa bin Laden, who was still married to Osama when she wrote the book (and still is, as far as we know). Najwa, who has lived in her native Syria since 2001, seems to have been a reluctant participant of this book project. It was allegedly Jean Sasson who suggested she be a co-author, and she only agreed after being persuaded by Omar. Perhaps she is hoping that the book will help dissociate her children from their father’s legacy and make their lives easier.

At any rate, Najwa is considerably less critical than Omar toward Osama; she neither condemns nor supports her husband’s activities. She comes across as a naive, subservient figure with few political opinions of her own. She prefers to talk about family matters and wants to appear as a loyal wife while showing empathy with the victims of her husband’s attacks. Her position is understandable, but annoyingly spineless. Still, her description of events seems sincere. On the whole, the book must be taken seriously as a historical document.

More here.

Paul Farmer, founder of Partners In Health, in the Miami Herald:

A few months ago, I joined President Clinton as a volunteer to, in his words, help Haiti “build back better'' after a series of storms in 2008 destroyed an estimated 15 percent of already beleaguered Haiti's GDP. We had just been meeting about these efforts and a series of upcoming forums to be held in Port-au-Prince, and I was then going to join colleagues from Partners In Health in central Haiti, where I have had the good fortune to work with remarkable Haitian medical colleagues for many years. The day before our New York meeting, Port-au-Prince was flattened by an earthquake. There is not a lot left to be said, but having just returned from Port-au-Prince, there are some points worth underlining.

If Haiti is to “build back better,'' as President Clinton has been saying, there are lessons to be learned from our efforts, not always honorable or effective, to help Haiti over the past two centuries. This can change and must do so, if we are to be real partners in responding to this latest misfortune.

The scale of the disaster is coming into view. All of the clichés born of extremity came to mind as I saw the city of Port-au-Prince in the dark after this huge earthquake. Symbols of authority and some sort of civility were flattened or tottering. The National Palace looked like a meringue pie that had been sat on. A foul smell hung over the General Hospital, which had just run out of diesel fuel and was surrounded by the injured, the sick, and, of course, piles of those who did not make it. But contrary to rumors of looting and mayhem, the city of two million was quiet, which in itself was unusual. I had never experienced Port-au-Prince without the blaring of radios and car horns. And I expect it will remain this way — calm, as long as people are offered dignity and respect and the necessities of daily survival: food, water, sanitation and shelter.

More here. And this video with Dr. Farmer is from 60 Minutes:

Sughra Raza. Musandam Fjords, Oman. 2010.

Digital photograph.

More about the Musandam Peninsula here.