Seyla Benhabib in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

Of course, the Wisconsin protesters and the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutionaries are battling for different goals: the first are resisting the further pacification and humiliation of a citizenry, nearly converted into docile and hopeless homebodies by the ravages of American and global financial capitalism visited upon them in the last twenty years. Arab revolutionaries are struggling for democratic freedoms, a free public square, and joining the contemporary world after decades of lies, isolation, and deception. But in both cases, transformative hopes have been kindled: the political and economic orders are fragile and susceptible to change!

Yet we know that the spring of revolutions is followed by the passions of summer and the chilling discord of fall. At least since Hegel’s analysis of the follies of the French Revolution in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, it has become commonplace to think that the Revolution will devour its own children. Such warnings were expressed not only by Hillary Clinton in the first days of the Egyptian uprising, but many commentators who have hid their distrust in the capacity of the Arab peoples to exercise democracy, are now rejoicing that the first signs of contention between religious and secular groups are breaking out in Egypt and Tunisia. The journalists and intellectuals of the European right, who have spilt a lot of ink on whether or not “Islamophobia” is racist, are now attempting to cover their own tracks, while the “pseudo-friends” of Israel among European conservatives are warning of doomsday scenarios of imminent attacks on Israel by Hizbollah in the North and Egypt cum Hamas on the South.

None of this is inevitable: it is not inevitable, or even likely, that fundamentalist Muslim parties will transform Tunisia or Egypt into theocracies; nor is it inevitable that Iran will gain ascendance and that the Arab states will conduct a new war against Israel. What we have witnessed is truly revolutionary, in the sense that a new order of freedom – a novo ordo saeclorum – is emerging transnationally in the Arab world.

More here.

Joel Whitney in Tricycle:

I step from my taxi onto the driveway of the Koko-an Zendo in Honolulu, three hours early for my interview with the eminent Zen master Robert Aitken. I had planned to use the time for extra research; instead, I’m hijacked by another visitor. Kobutsu Malone is a Zen priest, visiting from Maine. Portly, bald as a pink bowling ball, with wild white eyebrows that jut from his face like jagged tumbleweeds or lightning bolts, he wears green-brown Zen robes and steps slowly down the center’s lawn to meet me. Hands in a thoughtful posture behind his back, he resembles a medieval European monk, a character out of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Taking him first as the sangha’s manager, through whom I’ve arranged the interview, I thank him for coming out to meet me and ask for a place to keep reading. Malone’s first words are a threat—namely, to chain me to the radiator so I won’t get into trouble. He pauses for the joke to sink in, erupting in a hoarse roar of laughter. I smile awkwardly.

I had been invited by Tricycle to fly to Maui and interview the new U.S. poet laureate, W. S. Merwin. A longtime fan of Merwin’s writing, I jumped at the chance, not hesitating when asked if I could also interview the Zen roshi Merwin originally went to Hawaii to study under. Recognizing Aitken’s name from my older habit, hardly kept up, of reading Zen classics, and knowing this would make the trip all the more worthwhile for the magazine, I said yes enthusiastically. Only later did I realize I’d have little time to prepare for both interviews. All of which would prove even more complicated when, the day after I sent follow-up questions to a difficult interview, Robert Aitken Roshi died of pneumonia.

More here.

Scott Atran in The National Interest:

For Sam Harris morality is “an un-developed branch of science” that is all about separating lies from truth. Evil stems from lies, willfully blind to facts and reason. Good comes from rational, evidence-based standards for debunking lies and evaluating truths about the human condition. In this worldview, “Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals.”

But here’s the rub: the road to redemption is blocked by religious conservatives who “believe that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind.” Then, seeping from “the ivory tower,” come “secular liberals,” with their “multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness” borne of collective guilt “for the crimes of Western colonialism, ethnocentrism, and racism,” which leads to cowardice in the face of dogmatic bullies. So blow ye the trumpet and sound the alarm: if we don’t act soon in the ways this man suggests, then Western civilization could well succumb: “The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt . . . has hobbled the West in its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe into a new Caliphate.”

More here.

An ongoing trial in Tel Aviv is set to determine who will have stewardship of several boxes of Kafka’s original writings, including primary drafts of his published works, currently stored in Zurich and Tel Aviv. As is well known, Kafka left his published and unpublished work to Max Brod, along with the explicit instruction that the work should be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Indeed, Kafka had apparently already burned much of the work himself. Brod refused to honour the request, although he did not publish everything that was bequeathed to him. He published the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika between 1925 and 1927. In 1935, he published the collected works, but then put most of the rest away in suitcases, perhaps honouring Kafka’s wish not to have it published, but surely refusing the wish to have it destroyed. Brod’s compromise with himself turned out to be consequential, and in some ways we are now living out the consequences of the non-resolution of Kafka’s bequest.

more from Judith Butler at the LRB here.

In an early essay reproduced in Doubling the Point (1992), J. M. Coetzee chose to “put it baldly” when he wrote that “in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore of the body”. When we think of those novels imaginatively connected with the state of the South African nation – Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), say, or Age of Iron (1990) – it is hard to ignore their vivid testimony about bodily reality, the suffering of the afflicted. We recall the frail form of Elizabeth Curren and the “cold, obscene swellings” of her cancer (that “parody” of pregnancy), or the Magistrate creepily fingering the “firm-fleshed calves, manipulating the bones and tendons” of the tortured barbarian girl. But to put the case for Coetzee even more baldly (or boldly): in all of his fiction, he is our best authority on suffering, our most credible literary authority on the body. Coetzee has elsewhere sought to affirm this belief in the importance of physicality: “the body with its pain becomes a counter to the endless trials of doubt. (One can get away with such crudeness in fiction; one can’t in philosophy, I’m sure)”. We must learn, however, that Coetzee never writes in bold. The self-sealing parentheses are a giveaway: by ostentatiously highlighting what he wishes to convince us he is so “sure” about, Coetzee is pointing out the artificiality of its separation from the “trials of doubt”. A body with “its pain”, its own pain, may be something certain, but the nature of someone else’s pain must always be in question. Indeed, we can read the Coetzeean canon as a sustained investigation into the notion that pain can be shared, and its inevitable recognition of the doubtful results.

more from Stephen Abell at the TLS here.

This article is posted in honor of Black History Month:

From Smithsonian:

The waters beside Biloxi, Mississippi, were tranquil on April 24, 1960. But Bishop James Black’s account of how the harrowing hours later dubbed “Bloody Sunday” unfolded for African-American residents sounds eerily like preparations taken for a menacing, fast-approaching storm. “I remember so well being told to shut our home lights off,” said Black, a teenager at the time. “Get down on the floor, get away from the windows.” It wasn’t a rainstorm that residents battened down for, but mob reprisals. Hours earlier Black and 125 other African-Americans had congregated at the beach, playing games and soaking sunrays near the circuit of advancing and retreating tides. This signified no simple act of beach leisure, but group dissent. At the time, the city’s entire 26-mile-long shoreline along the Gulf of Mexico was segregated. Led by physician Gilbert Mason, the black community sought to rectify restricted access by enacting a series of “wade-in” protests. Chaos and violence, though, quickly marred this particular demonstration.

To comprehend how a beautiful beachfront became a laboratory for social unrest, consider Dr. Mason’s Biloxi arrival in 1955. A Jackson, Mississippi native, the general practitioner moved with his family after completing medical studies at Howard University and an internship in St. Louis. Many of Biloxi’s white doctors respected Mason, who died in 2006. “Some would ask him to scrub in for surgeries,” said his son, Dr. Gilbert Mason Jr. Still, gaining full privileges at Biloxi Hospital took 15 years. In northern cities, he’d dined at lunch counters and attended cinemas alongside whites. Here, change lagged. “Dad was not a traveled citizen, but he was a citizen of the world,” his son noted. “Things that he barely tolerated as a youth, he certainly wasn’t going to tolerate as an adult.”

More here.

From The Paris Review:

5:45 A.M. I wake up in a panic—an anxiety dream about an e-mail argument, which is prescient given the early-morning realities of my inbox. To calm myself, I buy music online manically. The new Iron and Wine cover is neurosis-provoking neon, but I buy it anyway. While listening on headphones, I fall back asleep and iTunes continues and mysteriously plays Paula Deen’s “Thanksgiving Special,” in which she makes oyster dressing. I actually like her accent, although the way she pronounces the word for (as in, “I’ll let this fry up here for a minute”) strikes me as uncharacteristically Vietnamese.

12:00 P.M. Car trip into downtown Reykjavík with my boyfriend! An assistant is sorting through this afternoon’s brass sheet music, so I feel at liberty to give my boyfriend free run of the iPod in the car. He deftly assembles an outgoing play list of “Canadians” (Tegan and Sara, the Arcade Fire, Katy Perry—we both assume she is Canadian but cannot verify) and an incoming play list of “Lesbians of Color” (Tracy Chapman and Toshi Reagon).

6:00 P.M. This afternoon’s work is to record brass arrangement for the upcoming album of Mia Maestro, an Argentine songstress. I’m still surprised by the magical lift the two horns and two trombones offer to the surface of a song. The trick is to delay their entrance longer than you think is right, and then, after one more bar’s worth of waiting, sneak in.

More here. (Note: For Anjuli Raza Kolb…in case you missed it!)

Tariq Ali in The Guardian:

The refusal of the people to kiss or ignore the rod that has chastised them for so many decades has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab nation. The absurd, if much vaunted, neocon notion that Arabs or Muslims were hostile to democracy has disappeared like parchment in fire.

Those who promoted such ideas appear to the most unhappy: Israel and its lobbyists in Euro-America; the arms industry, hurriedly trying to sell as much while it can (the British prime minister acting as a merchant of death at the Abu Dhabi arms fair); and the beleaguered rulers of Saudi Arabia, wondering whether the disease will spread to their tyrannical kingdom. Until now they have provided refuge to many a despot, but when the time comes where will the royal family seek refuge? They must be aware that their patrons will dump them without ceremony and claim they always favoured democracy.

If there is a comparison to be made with Europe it is 1848, when the revolutionary upheavals left only Britain and Spain untouched – even though Queen Victoria, thinking of the Chartists, feared otherwise. Writing to her besieged nephew on the Belgian throne, she expressing sympathy but wondered whether “we will all be slain in our beds”. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown or bejewelled headgear, and has billions stored in foreign banks.

More here.

Early in the protests, many signs drew comparisons between Mubarak and just-ousted Tunisian President Ben Ali, depicted here asking his Egyptian counterpart to become Facebook friends (above) and here's Mubarak as Colonel Sanders (below):

Anna Louie Sussman in The Atlantic:

Revolutions can be messy. They can be tragic. As long as the Internet is working, they can be tweeted. And, as Egyptians demonstrated during their 18 days of protest, they can also be funny.

In the English-language press, the post-game wrap-up of Egypt's uprising has largely focused on the role of new media tools (as well as old ones, namely satellite television), which allowed people to connect, organize and inform. Absent from most of this analysis was an examination of one of the oldest and most subversive political tools there is: humor. The steady stream of comedy flowing throughout the square functioned much as Twitter and Facebook did: to build community, strengthen solidarity, and provide a safe, thug-free outlet for Egyptians to defy the regime.

More here.

Hisham Matar in The Observer:

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first began to think about what profession I should go into. It was 1978, I was seven and had just been handed over by the women of my family to the earnest and self-important gatherings of the men. I was no longer the responsibility of my aunts and older female cousins. I was now a man. This was a tragedy. Women were fun. They produced things: feasts and gossip. They sang, played the goblet drum and danced that miraculous Libyan dance where the hips seem to move independent of the body. They painted their hands and feet with henna. They cut up aloe plants to extract the slimy stuff for their skin. They were like mad scientists, whisking up egg, honey, olive oil and God-knows-what to bathe their hair in the mixture. They plotted social manoeuvres, planned parties and funerals, and had an opinion about everything. As a young boy in Libya it was hard to escape the conclusion that the women were the most feeling and most functional part of society.

As part of the ritual of becoming a man, my maternal uncle, a judge, and his four sons, each older than me, took me deer hunting. I had heard about these trips before, and once saw the Range Rover return caked in yellow sand. There were carcasses roped to the roof. One deer had its head over the rail of the roof rack, its mouth open and, like an offering, a bright purple tongue hung out of it.

More here. [Thanks to Laila Lalami.]

Shadi Hamid in Slate:

During an otherwise bizarre, incoherent speech on Tuesday, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi clarified one thing: He is ready and willing to slaughter his own people if his survival requires it.

In confirming what many had already suspected, Libya has moved from one stage of conflict to another. The more appropriate model here is not Egypt or Tunisia but rather Bosnia, Kosovo, or Iraq after the first Gulf War—civil conflicts in which leaders perpetrated premeditated, mass killing of noncombatants.

Only a few days after pro-democracy protests first broke out, the death toll has risen as high as 1,000, according to some estimates. It is likely to get worse, threatening a repeat of Syrian President Hafez Assad's destruction of Hama in 1982, which claimed at least 10,000 lives. To prevent a similar outcome, the international community—specifically the United States, the United Nations, and NATO—must intervene.

The international response to the Libyan crisis has so far been lacking in both vision and resolve. Initial reactions, with their by now tiresome phrasing—”expressing grave concern” and “urging restraint”—suggested a limited vocabulary that was not commensurate with the gravity of the crimes being committed.

More here.

Read more »

Launched under several aliases and in near-secrecy in 1974, Dia was the well-funded lovechild of a German art visionary named Heiner Friedrich and Philippa de Menil, a strikingly beautiful spiritual seeker and youngest scion of the Schlumberger oil fortune. De Menil’s largesse had created a kind of refuge from the speculative market in art then taking shape in New York, and a new canon of monumental, spiritually charged epics: a SoHo gallery floor buried, permanently, with black earth; a hollowed-out volcano, transformed into a science-fictional archaeo-astronomical laboratory for perceptual flight; a Promethean bed of nails poking dangerously into the desert sky, awaiting some gargantuan penitent. … But it took even less time to come apart. Amid falling share prices and rumors of an investigation of financial improprieties by New York’s attorney general, a group of concerned de Menils had launched a coup in 1984, replacing the original board with a respectable firewall of uptown lawyers and suits, putting much of Dia’s real estate and art holdings on the auction block and sequestering Philippa’s money in a trust. The stage was set for an epic confrontation between the suits and the dreamers… that never quite came to pass. The enigmatic Friedrich quit New York, disappeared into a wandering, art-mad exile; Philippa de Menil, the embattled heiress, had long since ceased to exist. In 1980, the woman she was had become a Sufi dervish named Fariha al-Jerrahi, and when the house of Dia fell, she moved on.

more from Alexander Keefe at Bidoun here.

In general outline at least the historical record is not in dispute. In 1946 Karl Popper addressed the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club on the subject Are There Philosophical Problems?. The subsequent discussion, chaired by Russell, is known to have been lively. At one point Wittgenstein, brandishing a poker, is said to have demanded of Popper that he offer an example of a moral rule: “Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers”, Popper is said to have replied. At which point Wittgenstein, perhaps deciding it was a case of “thereof one must be silent”, stormed out. It has been suggested that the title and content of Popper’s paper were intended to provoke Wittgenstein who by this time is thought to have become sceptical of the existence of philosophical problems, and to believe that such “problems” were instead reducible to the misuse of language. Whether his scepticism was as well defined as many think is open to question. An alternative reading of Wittgenstein might be that he was developing a metaphilosophical perspective from which standard philosophical problems were drained of their force. Thus in the Blue and Brown Books he remarks that “philosophy really is purely descriptive”. Presumably, also, Popper thought that Wittgenstein, a former pupil of Russell and Moore, and by this time a Cambridge Don, had never come across a philosopher who took seriously the existence of philosophical problems. None of this is important of course. What is most notable about the “Poker incident” is its delicious status as an originator of that most wonderful thing: the philosophical feud.

more from Andy Walsh at Talking Philosophy here.

The miners take turns chopping the coalface. All around us a jury-rigged jumble of tree trunks is wedged against the tunnel’s ceiling, our only protection from being crushed by the five hundred meters of rock between here and the floor of the northern Afghan desert. My claustrophobia mounts with every chunk of coal that dings off my plastic helmet. One miner crouches in the access shaft and shovels coal into an iron railcar. My headlamp catches his face, and I see his teeth are flecked with black. His wiry muscles are straining with the effort, but he works fast. The afternoon shift divides a two-dollar bonus for every tonne of coal they haul. The crew is a half-hour into the afternoon shift, and they’re already filthy. Sweat mixed with coal dust trickles in rivulets down their bare backs. Superfine particles of coal swirl through the beams of their lamps. No one wears a mask; everyone breathes the black mist. The miners work down here, eight hours a day, for next to nothing—about a hundred dollars a month. And the statistics show they’ll spend ten percent of that income on petty bribes to the Afghan government. The whole of the Karkara coalmine runs on a budget of only four hundred thousand dollars a year, less than a sixth of what director Abdel Munir says he needs to hire a full complement of workers and to bring the mine up to international safety standards.

more from Elliott D. Woods at VQR here.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Are Our Writers As Lousy As Our Bankers?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Bringing It All Back Home (to Shillong)
3. 3 Quarks Daily: In Praise of Yamato Spirit(s) : Passing By in Tokyo Part II
4. 3 Quarks Daily: Joothan: A Dalit’s Life
5. 3 Quarks Daily: New York’s Empire State of Mind: The Colonization of ‘Up’ Part I
6. 3 Quarks Daily: Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Tokyo, Almost-Encounters, and “Passing By”
8. 3 Quarks Daily: What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather
9. Abbas Zaidi Writes, Innovates & Educates: Perspective Enrichment For A Better World
10. Accidental Blogger: The Leopard _ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa
11. Amardeep Singh: The Demand’s of Honesty: On Amitava Kumar’s “Nobody Does the Right Thing”
12. AngelSpeak: If I Wasn’t Scared Before… Writing Memoir in Genzlinger’s Age
13. Belonging to a Different Macro-Quantum State of Mind: Time, talk to me!
14. Bibliographing: Let us keep each other’s secrets
15. Bookslut: In Search of Spiraling Time
16. Book Snob: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
17. Busy Being Born: If Facebook Didn’t Exist, It Would Be Necessary to Invent It
18. Butcheredswitch: Subway Writing
19. Chapati Mystery: I am a Bhains
20. Chapati Mystery: Oscar, Wow!
21. Chapati Mystery: Peccavistan
22. Chapati Mystery: The Stay-at-Home Man
23. Fame and Fortune: The Honesty of the Person
24. Fernham: Pearls and Power
25. Ground Views: We Regret To Inform You That Your Condolences Cannot Be Accepted At This Time
26. Guernica: The Un-Victim
27. Hundred Mountain: Thinking of Turtles
28. I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection: I Wonder How Long I Could Sit There
29. Jadaliyya: The Poetry of Revolt
30. Kuzhali Manickavel: Conversations–The Gee Oh
31. Kuzhali Manickavel: What Is Your Native
32. Literal Life: Freedom ~ Jonathan Franzen
33. M. A. Peel: Oh Frabjous Day: Woolverton’s FanFic Love for Alice
34. Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes: Adam Haslett, Lionel Shriver, and the Bygone Age of Order
35. Millicent and Carla Fran: On The Face That Launched a Thousand Clicks, Or What The Social Network Isn’t About
36. Millicent and Carla Fran: Why Don’t Women Submit?
37. Novel Readings: Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn
38. Open Letters Monthly: Second Glance: The Daringly Sensible Majorie Hillis
39. Pank: This Modern Writer: 28, NO, MAKE THAT 30, ABSOLUTELY TRUE BLACK HISTORY FACTS ON THE OCCASION OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH (FORMERLY NEGRO HISTORY WEEK). 1 FOR EACH DAY, PLUS 1 IN THE CASE OF LEAP YEAR & 1 FOR GOOD LUCK
40. Plum: Hair Myth
41. Religious Left Law: Sufi Poetry
42. Sepia Mutiny: Letter to a Young Islamophobe
43. Stuck In A Book: Is there no balm in…
44. Tales from the Reading Room: The Precious Things
45. Tang Dynasty Times: A vase filled with perfumes (proust & the king of bhutan)
46. Tang Dynasty Times: Shipwrecked
47. The Awl: If You Have Only One Week in L.A.
48. The Millions: Beyond Harry, Oz, and Narnia: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians
49. The Millions: Brideshead Revisited
50. The Millions: Chasing the Whale: Banksy, Obsession, and the Sea
51. The Millions: Dispatch from the Borders-Land
52. The Millions: Every Day I Open A Book
53. The Millions: Her Story Next to His: Beloved and The Odyssey
54. The Millions: In Search of Iago
55. The Millions: In the Room: Against a Cultural Boycott of the Galle Literary Festival
56. The Millions: On Bad Reviews
57. The Millions: Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction
58. The Millions: The Sorry State of the Rejection Letter
59. The Morning News: A Song for Aretha
60. The Nervous Breakdown: Authors and Tattoos, Part I of II
61. The Nervous Breakdown: Authors and Tattoos, Part II of II
62. The Platform: which is to say: time bends like a weak knee, or so fresh and so clean, clean
63. This Space: The Shadow Cast by Writing
64. [TK] Reviews Blog: Aspiring Grownups: Editorial Assistants
65. Tolstoy Is My Cat: Flash Fiction: Snow
66. Vanity Fair Online: The Venerable, Vulnerable Taxi Drivers of New York
67. Vanity Fair Online: The Ground Zero Mosque’s Missing Muslims
68. Walter Kirn’s Permanent Morning: My Honest Impressions of Islam in the Biographical Order They Occured
69. Wellywood Woman: I feel the earth move under my feet
70. Writing Without Paper: Consider the Pomegranate

From the website of Credo:

Amazing. Inspiring. This is what people power can do.

When Republican Governor Scott Walker attacked state workers and threatened to call out the National Guard if they protested, it sparked a popular uprising in Wisconsin. And now the extreme proposal to take collective bargaining rights away from public employees is temporarily blocked as a result of mass protests.

Tens of thousands of people — including members of CREDO Action — have been out in the streets and in the Rotunda in Madison, Wisconsin. Students and citizens are protesting in solidarity with nurses, teachers and workers.

And the people are not alone. Instead of caving to the opposition, their elected representatives are fighting with them. In fact, Democratic state senators boldly left the state in order to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass Governor Walker's radical anti-worker, anti-union bill. As long as every Democratic state senator refuses to go to the capitol, a vote cannot be held.

More here.

Jonathan Kirshner in the Boston Review:

…the economy is poised to head down the same road that led to the recent collapse. This is the dispiriting conclusion of four recent books by particularly well-positioned observers. Nouriel Roubini can take credit for getting the crisis almost exactly right, long before it hit; this alone should make his Crisis Economics (coauthored with Stephen Mihm) required reading. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz reprises his role as one of the world’s foremost critics of “market fundamentalism” in Freefall. Richard Posner is closely associated with the free-market “Chicago School” of economics, and, as such, his bracing and intellectually admirable A Failure of Capitalism demands attention. (Posner explores similar themes in a recent academic work, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy.) Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and James Kwak, a businessman and consultant, wrote the best book of a fine bunch. Their 13 Bankers is a brilliant, important, and extremely unsettling work. Four big lessons emerge from these analyses.

Keynes was right and classical economics wrong. The economist John Maynard Keynes argued that the market has its limits. Most markets work well most of the time, but financial markets left alone are prone to dysfunction, and an economy stuck in a rut can stay in a rut for some time. Thus the necessity of the stimulus.

More here.