In a Dream Sometime Ago I Was a Woman

In a dream some time ago I was a woman
To the left of the road leading out of Jerusalem
At the end of a miraculous bypath
Between cornfields
Behind barbed-wire
I climbed onto a stage
In a square near a church
Whose entire facade
Was crammed with statues
I undressed
And stood with wonderful tits
In front of me was a microphone
But I didn’t have to say a thing
I leaped with joy
And the world leaped with joy
The world undressed and danced
Men and women
Each dance different
Some exposed
The statues came to life
The square is filled with people
[One can holler with pleasure]

by Zali Gurevitch
from Days
publisher: Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 2002

© Translation: 2002, Zali Gurevitch with Peter Cole and Gabriel Levin
from Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies Vol. 2 (2002)

Read the original after the jump

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Haley Sweetland Edwards in The Atlantic:

Qatar is a tiny country with a big problem.

This Connecticut-sized nation, sticking out like a loose tooth in the Persian Gulf, is one of the most obese nations in the world, with residents fatter, on average, than even those of the United States, which often takes the cake in such competitions.

According to recent studies, roughly half of adults and a third of children in Qatar are obese, and almost 17 percent of the native population suffers from diabetes. By comparison, about a third of Americans are obese, and eight percent are diabetic. Qatar also has very high rates of birth defects and genetic disorders — problems that, along with the prevalence of obesity (PDF) and diabetes, have worsened in recent decades, according to local and international health experts.

So what's going wrong in little Qatar?

To misappropriate a well-worn phrase: It's the economy, stupid. In September, Qatar officially became the richest nation in the world, as measured by per capita gross domestic product. It also recently became the world's biggest exporter of natural gas, and earned the title of fastest growing economy in the world. By international development standards, all this growth has happened virtually overnight, making Qataris' lifestyles much more unhealthy, and at the same time leading many to hang on resolutely to what's left of their fleeting tribal traditions — practices that include inter-marriage between close family members and cousins.

More here.

In corrals of the carniverous
every lowly muscle twitches.
—Anon

Easter in the Oven

The goat kept on bleating hoarsely.
I angrily opened the oven what’s all the noise I asked
the guests can hear you.
Your oven’s not hot, it bleated
do something otherwise your cruelty
will go hungry and at festive time too.

I put my hand inside. It was true.
The head the legs the neck
the grass the pasture the crags
the slaughter all cold.

by Kiki Dimoula
from A minute´s licence
publisher: Poetry Greece, Corfu, 2000
translation: David Connoly

Original Greek after the jump

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From The New York Times:

Five or six years ago, my mother and I sat in a darkened theater talking about a couple we knew. The wife was an executive with Ivy League degrees. The husband had some nebulous part-time job, but mostly he stayed home with the kids. What, I wondered, does he have that’s attractive to her? There was a pause. Sperm, my mother replied. Today, that conversation is as obsolete as “The Feminine Mystique.” For one, as The New York Times recently reported, more women are having children without marrying. In 2009 more than half of all births to women under 30 occurred outside marriage — an institution that is losing popularity in historic proportions.

Male underemployment, the surge in women’s economic fortunes and the decline in marriage swirled into a meme in 2010, when an article in The Atlantic asked, “What if the modern, post­industrial economy is simply more congenial to women?” The next year, the magazine ran a long essay in which the writer observed that the pool of those considered “traditionally ‘marriageable’ men” — the highly educated, the financially secure — was “radically shrinking.” This is the terrain Liza Mundy strides into in her ambitious new book, “The Richer Sex.” Mundy predicts that women’s economic rise above men, which she calls “The Big Flip” — one of several cutesy terms she uses, along with “bread­women,” her word for female breadwinners — will benefit everyone. “Women’s earnings will bring about a new liberation for women but also for men,” she writes. “More women will marry down; more men will marry up.” (Sounds like something that happened on “Downton Abbey.”)

More here.

From Smithsonian:

While I was doing some research this week, I came across a hominid species I hadn’t heard of before: Homo helmei. The name was first given to a 259,000-year-old partial skull found in Florisbad, South Africa in 1932. The skull resembled early Homo sapiens but possessed many archaic features. Today some researchers think many of the African hominid fossils from around this time should be lumped in the H. helmi species; others call them Homo heidelbergensis, considered by some anthropologists to be the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals. And then there are those who don’t really know what to call them. It turns out I should have known H. helmei. It’s mentioned once in my college human evolution textbook. I even underlined the passage. Still, it’s not a species name that’s frequently used. And it’s just one of several obscure species of Homo that anthropologists don’t universally accept. These unfamiliar members of our genus are often based on a few fossils—sometimes just one—that don’t fit neatly into existing hominid species. Here are a few examples:

Homo gautengensis (lived about 2 million to 820,000 years ago): Earlier this year, Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales in Australia announced the possible discovery of a new species of Homo found in China. It wasn’t the first time he had identified a new type of hominid. In 2010, he reanalyzed fossils from the South African caves of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans and Drimolen and decided that some of the specimens had strangely shaped molar teeth relative to the known South African hominids, such as Australopithecus africanus. He grouped the weird forms into their own species, Homo gautengensis, claiming it was probably the earliest member of the genus Homo.

More here.

From Phys.org:

American students need a dramatically new approach to improve how they learn science, says a noted group of scientists and educators led by Michigan State University professor William Schmidt.

After six years of work, the group has proposed a solution. The 8+1 Science concept calls for a radical overhaul in K-12 schools that moves away from memorizing scientific facts and focuses on helping students understand eight fundamental science concepts. The “plus one” is the importance of inquiry, the practice of asking why things happen around us – and a fundamental part of science.

“Now is the time to rethink how we teach science,” said Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor of statistics and education. “What we are proposing through 8+1 Science is a new way of thinking about and teaching science, not a new set of science standards. It supports basic concepts included in most sets of state standards currently in use and compliments standards-based education reform efforts.”

The renowned group of scientists has met with Schmidt in an effort to rethink how science should be taught since 2006, when it was originally part of the PROM/SE research project (Promoting Rigorous Outcomes in Mathematics and Science Education) funded by the National Science Foundation.

The 8+1 concepts were derived from two basic questions: What are things made of and how do systems interact and change? The eight concepts are: atoms, cells, radiation, systems change, forces, energy, conservation of mass and energy, and variation.

More here.

Tyler Cowen in The Atlantic:

At fancy and expensive restaurants (say, $50 and up for a dinner), you can follow a simple procedure to choose the best meal. Look at the menu and ask yourself: Which of these items do I least want to order? Or: Which one sounds the least appetizing? Then order that item.

The logic is simple. At a fancy restaurant, the menu is well thought-out. The kitchen’s time and attention are scarce. An item won’t be on the menu unless there is a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good.

Many popular-sounding items, on the other hand, can be slightly below the menu’s average quality. For instance, you should be careful not to get too enthusiastic about roast chicken, especially if you are in a restaurant that, like virtually all restaurants, does not specialize in roast chicken. Roast chicken is an exceedingly familiar dish, and many people will order it to experience the familiar. Consider the incentive this provides the chef. And consider that a few items may be on the menu specifically because they are generally in demand, not because the chef cooks them with special brilliance.

So order the ugly and order the unknown. You’ll probably get a better and more interesting meal.

More here.

Axel Honneth in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

In an article with the suggestive title “Courage, Sympathy, and a Good Eye,” Michael Walzer energetically sets the debate about social criticism on the track of virtue ethics. The argument with which he grounds this reorientation initially sounds as plausible as it is timely. Since social theory can provide neither necessary nor sufficient grounds for successful social criticism, its quality cannot be measured primarily by the merits of its theoretical content but, rather, more urgently by the qualities of the critic. According to Walzer, he or she must have developed a capacity for sympathy and finally a sense of proportion when applying it.

What sounds plausible in this conclusion is the fact that the forcefulness and practical effect of social criticism seldom results from the measure of the theory in which it is invested but, rather, from the perspicuity of its central concern. And today this results in a turn to the virtues of the critic, since it feeds the devaluation of sociological knowledge and meets up with the tendency to personalize intellectual contexts. All the same, the self-evidence with which Walzer still regards even the intellectuals of our day as born governors of social criticism is surprising. He does not speak of bold Enlighteners—we might think of figures on the model of Émile Zola—but of the ubiquitous sort of author who participates with generalizing arguments in the debates of a democratic public sphere. Is this normalized intellectual, a spiritual agent in the fora of public opinion formation, really the natural representative today of what was once called “social criticism”? Here I first trace an epochal transformation in the form of the intellectual before outlining a completely different physiognomy of the social critic than that found in Walzer’s work.

More here.

It is 100 years since the Titanic went down. Even as it happened, there were those who felt it was a metaphor for the end of the Victorian age. The great, self-confident ship, with its rigid social classifications, was clearly an emblem of the Britain that had sent the ship forth in April 1912. GK Chesterton, in The Illustrated London News, saw “our whole civilisation” as being “very like the Titanic” … “There was no sort of sane proportion between the extent of the provision for luxury and levity, and the extent of the provision for need and desperation. The scheme did far too much for prosperity and far too little for distress – just like the modern State.” The statistics for the deaths among the passenger lists seemed to bear out not simply the unfairness of the divisions between rich and poor, but also the differences between national characteristics. The death toll was 1,514, at least. Of these, 1,352 were men and 162 were women and children. Most of those who travelled first class were able to get into the lifeboats. Only four out of the 144 first-class women died, and three of them chose to remain on the ship. In second class, 154 men out of 168 died. In third class, 381 men out of 456 perished, and 89 women out of 165.

more from AN Wilson at the FT here.

With the deaths last year of Lucian Freud and Richard Hamilton, David Hockney suddenly catapulted into position as England’s leading painter. Although the cultivated image of a dandified English schoolboy in white pants, mismatched socks, polka-dot bow tie and beanie is long out of date for an artist who, at 74, is identified with iconic 1960s paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools, the thought is a bit of a shock. Still, the timing couldn’t be better for this enjoyable and well-sourced book, which — like Hockney’s own work — is both conversational and perceptive. The artist’s paintings serve as chapter headings in the first, fluent volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’ planned two-part biography. The list, roughly but not rigidly chronological, is not a gimmick.

more from Christopher Knight at the LA Times here.

“The Jews are like rats,” Peter Beinart’s grandmother told him when he was a boy. “We leave the sinking ship.” This grandmother — who was born in Egypt and lived in South Africa but dreamed of joining her brother in Israel — believed that Israel was the last refuge of a hounded people, and she made Beinart, who was born in the United States, believe it, too. But Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now runs a blog called Open Zion, has a problem: he finds Israel, morally, a sinking ship. Instead of simply swimming away, he has written “The Crisis of Zionism,” in which he sets out to save the country by labeling many of its leaders racist, denouncing many of its American supporters as ­Holocaust-obsessed enablers and advocating a boycott of people and products from beyond Israel’s 1967 eastern border. While saving Israel, Beinart hopes with evangelical zeal to save America from a handful of Jewish organizations that in his view have not only hijacked American liberalism but also stolen the spine of the president of the United States, who, despite having received 78 percent of the Jewish vote, is powerless to pursue his own agenda.

more from Jonathan Rosen at the NY Times here.

Joseph Gregory in the NYT:

Tall, athletic, handsome and charismatic, Mr. Ben Bella was known for his quick mind, courage and political cunning, traits that became tools of survival in a turbulent life. He faced heavy combat in wartime France and Italy, escaped French assassination attempts as well as a prison, then survived the murderous intrigues of political rivals as he struggled to impose socialism on his sprawling, divided country in the anarchy that followed independence in 1962.

On June 19, 1965, after less than three years as prime minister and president, he was ousted in a coup led by an old ally. He spent the next 14 years in confinement and never again held power. But he remained a powerful voice for the third world amid the conflicts of the cold war and the unrest within the Arab world over Israel, Iraq and radical Islam.

“My life is a life of combat,” he told an interviewer in his last years. “It is a combat that started for me at the age of 16. I’m 90 years old now, and my motivation hasn’t changed; it’s the same fervor that drives me.”

Ahmed Ben Bella was born on Dec. 25, 1918, in Marnia, a small town in the mountains of western Algeria, to a family with Moroccan roots. His father, a Sufi Muslim, supported his five sons and two daughters by farming and small-time trade. The oldest brother died from wounds received in World War I; two other brothers died from illness, and another went to France and disappeared in the mayhem of the Nazi victory in 1940.

Mr. Ben Bella chafed at colonialism from an early age — he recalled a run-in with a racist secondary school teacher — and complained of France’s cultural influence. “We think in Arabic, but we talk in French,” he said.

His education was truncated when his father officially changed the year of Ahmed’s birth to 1916 so that he could return to work on the farm. The move had unintended consequences: Ahmed was conscripted in 1937, two years ahead of his class.

He took to soldiering as readily as he had taken to soccer back home. He was promoted to sergeant and won celebrity as a soccer star in Marseille, France, where his regiment was based. In command of an antiaircraft section during the German invasion of 1940, he kept to his post, firing away as others fled, as waves of Stuka dive bombers pounded the city’s port. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Also here, Alistair Horne revisits Savage War for Peace, his study of the Algerian war of independence.

Maya Jaggi on Orhan Pamuk's museum of innocence’, in the FT Magazine:

In a dark-red Ottoman town house in Istanbul’s antiques district, a fast-gentrifying quarter where brassware spills on to steep, cobbled lanes, an idiosyncratic museum has been taking shape. The first display as you enter is an entire wall spiked with evenly spaced cigarette butts – testament to the prolonged agony of a man who furtively saved 4,213 of his beloved’s fag ends after she married someone else. Yet “the word ‘obsession’ is discouraged”, says the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, as he supervises the final touches to his Museum of Innocence.

Pamuk, an artist manqué, studied architecture but switched to novel writing aged 23. His “sentimental museum” was conceived in the mid-1990s as a counterpart to his eighth novel, The Museum of Innocence (2008) – published after he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. Like the author, its hero Kemal is born into Istanbul’s well-heeled bourgeoisie. But after an affair with Fusun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant poor relation, Kemal breaks off a society engagement to try to win her back. The story has the contours of Turkish television melodrama (Pamuk had a stint writing scripts in the 1980s). But the pain is real in a novel that, like much of Pamuk’s fiction, probes the anxieties and inauthenticity of living in what feels like a backwater while imitating a westernised modernity. Kemal’s beloved dies, and – unable to find peace – he builds a museum from the objects she touched, as Pamuk gathered memorabilia to inspire the narrative.

Neil Easterbrook on China Miéville's fiction and his philosophy of language, in the LA Review of Books:

The most recent example of science fiction’s aesthetic power is the extraordinary new novel by China Miéville, whose tenth book demonstrates that fiction can be both serious and fun, a light fancy of the imagination and a deep investigation into what makes us human. Miéville is widely known for a string of bestselling and prize-winning novels that splice together elements of fantasy, horror, noir, and science fiction Embassytown is his first unequivocally science fiction text, his least hybridized book yet.

Part space opera and part planetary romance, set in our distant future, Embassytown is the tale of a young woman born and raised in the human enclave on the planet Arieka. Avice Brenner Cho leaves home to become an interstellar sailor, one of the few people capable of negotiating the “immer,” the subspace or hyperspace “altreality” that permits faster-than-light travel. Having met and married Scile, an academic linguist fascinated by the language of the indigenous Ariekei, whom the Embassytowners call “Hosts,” Avice agrees to indulge his curiosity and return to Arieka. The Hosts’ language, always called “Language,” is a very curious phenomenon. Their speech comes in the form of two words spoken simultaneously, something possible because the Ariekei have two mouths. To inscribe Language, the humans present a graphic image, rather like a mathematical fraction, with a numerator (the “cut”) and a denominator (the “turn”), as in the case of the Host named Surl Tesh-echer, which is written as:

surl

______

tesh-echer.

While this sort of inscription initially seems a precious affectation, it proves central to Miéville’s thematics.

Host Language has two features. First, the Hosts only recognize it when it is generated by living beings — by conscious minds — so Language generated by a computer, however semantically and syntactically perfect, isn’t even heard, though a broadcast recording of a conscious being is. Second, Language is exclusively literal; only things that are empirically true can be said. Since Language contains no figurative dimension — no irony, no metaphor, no oxymoron — the Ariekei cannot lie. While the Hosts always have polyphony, they do not have polysemy — the two words always have one meaning.

Embassytown is a novel of ideas — a novel about the philosophy of language, about how language is linked to ethics, and about our “biopolis,” the structure of the links between individual humans and the larger human community.

In his 48 years on planet Earth, Beck has been a teenage misfit; an amateur magician; an alcoholic and a pothead; a Catholic turned nonbeliever turned Mormon; a twice-married father of four; a top-rated radio talk-show host; a New York Times best-selling author in four genres; a polarizing, tearful television talking head; and a multi-media, multi-millionaire entrepreneur, now with his own online magazine and Web TV show. Just because he may have fallen off your radar since he left Fox News, last summer, doesn’t mean that millions of faithful listeners don’t still harken to his every dog-whistle warning. They do, and their views—and their votes—carry weight. For public consumption Beck styles himself as a performer, but this is pretense. He aspires to something greater. Beck is like Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes, the faux-bumpkin demagogue in A Face in the Crowd, who shouts, “I’m not just an entertainer. I’m an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force … a force!” And he is—a force and, as he sometimes suggests, a seer. Trying to parse his every utterance leads to madness. He’s more readily comprehensible as a vortex. Glenn Beck is a full-time pre-millennial prophet predicting, if not the end of days, at least something like a new Dark Age, with a collapsing global financial and political system and an onslaught of Evil Forces that will require an every-man-for-himself mind-set to survive. If he had lived in the first century A.D., Beck could well have displaced John of Patmos as the author of the biblical book of Revelation, that bizarre, brooding, apocalyptic amalgam of seven seals, seven stars, and a lamb with seven horns.

more from Todd S. Purdum at Vanity Fair here.

Popular commentators on evolution, such as Richard Dawkins, have become overly enamoured with the idea of the gene. Genetics is certainly the most powerful mechanism of evolution and was unknown in Charles Darwin’s time but although we have learned much from sequencing DNA, the idea of the gene does not explain everything about the living world and certainly not about the human world. However, just as Herbert Spencer used the notion of the “survival of the fittest” to explain why some people are rich and others are poor, so Dawkins argues that culture has genes, too – self-replicating particles of information that he calls “memes” (think of the dumb jokes and “viral” videos that proliferate on the internet). If all evolution happens for the sake of proliferating selfish genes, then everything we see in living creatures has to be useful and practical. But that’s not at all how Darwin saw it. He envisioned as at least two distinct processes: natural selection and sexual selection. The former concerns the survival of the fittest. The latter, however, is an aspect of evolution that is too often overlooked today.

more from David Rothenberg at The New Statesman here.

Even those people who claim to know little of Africa have heard of Rwanda. Like Auschwitz and Srebrenica, the name is forever linked to one of the 20th century’s defining acts of depravity. Possibly more than 1m people, predominantly Tutsi, were hacked to death with hoes, machetes and whatever came to hand; the international community failed to take action and a United Nations mission was left floundering in the chaos. Some may have watched Hotel Rwanda, a film which tries to capture the brutality of what happened in 1994. More recently, President Paul Kagame has been credited with turning Rwanda into an African success story, although his growing number of critics cite the suppression of public debate, the murky handling of the 2010 election (all the opposition parties pulled out of the contest alleging fraud and vote rigging) and the worry that, as with previous African “big men,” he will fail to stand down at the 2017 election as the constitution requires. But few will have heard of Rwanda’s “evil twin.”

more from Will Paxton at Prospect Magazine here.

From Edge:

THE FOREWORD
By Charles Simonyi

AN EXCEPTIONAL BOOK SUCH AS THIS could have been created only under exceptional circumstances. My father was a working physicist and a beloved university professor who taught a whole generation of Hungarian electrical engineers. His textbooks on the foundations of electrical engineering have been translated into many languages. Yet, in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s in Hungary, his quasi-apolitical personal conduct, based on the age-old virtues of hard work, good character, and charity, was interpreted as political defiance that could not be countenanced by the state. Hence, he progressively lost his directorship at the Physics Research Institute, his post as department head, and finally his teaching position altogether. I was still a minor when I left the country—and my parents—in search of a better life. It was understood by all that my doing so—a political act in a totalitarian era—would make my father’s situation even more difficult.

Besides being a scientist, my father was a great humanist, not only in terms of his concern for his fellow man but also in the sense of a scholar of the humanities: he was extremely well read in the classics as well as in contemporary literature and history. The break in his career at midlife did not drive him to despair; his humanism instead commanded him to work on the subject he had perhaps always wanted to work on: the history of the interplay of science and the humanities. His first notes became a lecture series, first given off campus, in the evenings at the invitation of student organizations. Much later, when I was able to return to Hungary, I was privileged to listen to one of these lectures, still filled to more than capacity with students and young intellectuals, hearing my father convey the excitement and wonder of scientific development—how difficult it was to make progress in science, not simply because of ignorance but because the arguments were complex and the evidence was often ambiguous, and how the scientists gained courage or were otherwise influenced by the humanities. The success of these lectures gave rise to the present book that he continued to revise and extend almost until his death in 2001.

More here.