The Grimm Brothers reproached their friends and fellow collectors, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, for altering the material they brought into print. In the Circular Letter Jacob Grimm sent out in l815, he began by asking correspondents to find songs and rhymes, but he moved on swiftly to the stories for which the Grimms have become the most widely read writers of fairy tales in the world. He specified “Local Legends [Sagen] not in verse, most especially both the various Nurses’ Tales and Children’s Tales [Ammen- und Kindermärchen] of giants, dwarves, monsters, kings’ sons and daughters spellbound and set free, devils, treasures and wishing objects, . . . Animal Fables in particular are to be noted . . .”. Philip Pullman’s half-century of tales includes a handful of the latter, cynical lessons in the world that fairy tales set out to refute with their “cunning and high spirits” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase), their improbable reversals of fate and happy endings. The Letter’s harvest was meagre, the Brothers’ richest sources remaining closer to hand in their own circle of family and friends, but its aims show the Brothers’ pioneering attempt at popular ethnography, around thirty years before the word “folklore” was introduced into English. The Grimms called what they were looking for “Folk Poesy”, and they stipulated that its origins must be unadulterated: “Above all”, Jacob wrote, “it is important that these items should be gathered faithfully and truly, without decoration and addition and with the greatest possible precision and detail, from the mouths of the story-tellers, where practicable in and with their own authentic words.”

more from Marina Warner at the TLS here.

Vijay Prasad in Jadaliyyah:

In the dark of night, on 14 November, the United Nations Security Council met to discuss Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. As elections in Israel are on the horizon, the Israeli Defense Force conducted an extra-judicial assassination of Hamas’ Ahmad Jabari, who only hours beforehand had received a draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel (according to Nir Hasson at Haaretz). Jabari’s assassination was followed by a barrage by Israeli aircraft and warships. A few rockets were fired from Gaza, but these have had a negligible impact. The war on Gaza is not between two armed forces, even matched, each flying the flag of a country; it is a war between a major military power and a people that it has occupied, whose means of warfare used to be the suicide bomber and has now devolved to the erratic rockets (propelled by sugar and potassium nitrate, a fertilizer, and made deadly by TNT and urea nitrate, another fertilizer). Most of the rockets fired over the past two days have been intercepted by Israel’s sophisticated Iron Dome system. No such luck for the Palestinians, who have faced US-designed F16 jetfighters and Apache helicopters and have no defensive systems.

Morocco and Egypt, on behalf of the stateless Palestinians, hastened to the UN Security Council, wanting to stop the violence and condemn Israel for its disproportionate use of force. The Council’s President, India’s Hardeep Singh Puri said, “All the statements that I heard resonated with one message – that the violence has to stop. There has to be de-escalation.”

The United States defended Israel. Susan Rice put the onus on Hamas.

More here.

Interesting political analysis from Meir Javedanfar, in The Times of Israel (via Hussein Ibissh):

By attacking Tel Aviv with its missiles, Hamas has crossed a major red line. No Israeli leader can ignore such an attack. The fact we have elections coming up in Israel makes it more difficult for the government to ignore today’s attack.

Tel Aviv is my city. I live here. It’s my home.

As much as I detest and condemn Hamas’s attack today, I am not sure how a massive ground invasion is going to solve the problem.

Why? because our officials are saying that “Israel won’t halt Gaza operation until Hamas begs for truce.” In terms of domestic politics, Hamas would loath to be seen as “begging” for peace. It would lose all legitimacy at home. That would mean holding our troops as well as the fate of our citizens hostage to Hamas’s domestic concerns. This must not be our exit strategy. If it is, then we are heading for an ending disaster as Hamas may prefer to engage Israel in a long drawn out guerrilla war in Gaza. This could sap the morale of our country while straining our relations with the international community.

Worst still, as my colleague Hossein Ibish points out in his interesting article, it could push Hamas and Morsi together. Lets not forget that when it comes to destroying Hamas tunnels, Morsi has done more than Mubarak did. Yes you read that right. Despite belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood organization, Morsi has actually made life for Hamas quite difficult.

Yesterday marked the launch of Rolling Jubilee.

Strike Debt is an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street. First started in New York City, but inspired by movements around the globe, Strike Debt now has affiliates across the country. We believe people should not go into debt for basic necessities like education, healthcare and housing. Strike Debt initiatives like the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual offer advice to all kinds of debtors about how to escape debt and how to join a growing collective resistance to the debt system. Our network has the goal of building a broad movement, with more effective ways of resisting debt, and with the ultimate goal of creating an alternative economy that benefits us all and not just the 1%.

How does it work?

Student debt has surpassed $1 trillion partly because it is one of the most protected forms of debt by federal law. Student debtors can rarely discharge their loans in bankruptcy and lenders have rights to garnish wages and social security payments. The vast majority of student loans have these federal guarantees. We cannot buy these loans because there is no secondary market. However, we believe it may be possible to buy private tuition debt of some sort that is not guaranteed by the federal government; Rolling Jubilee may attempt to purchase this kind of debt after doing further research.

Doug Henwood offers some critiques:

Call me old-fashioned, and I’m sure many have already done so, but I think that a discussion of those larger issues—stagnant wages, high unemployment, a crazy system of health care finance, madly expensive higher education—would lead inevitably to making demands on the state. (So too would debt relief: it would be a lot more powerful and effective if the Federal Reserve and the Treasury were buying bad debt and liberating debtors with their vast resources rather than a volunteer effort raising funds through Paypal.) And given the prominent role that anarchists and anarchism play in the Occupy movement, there’s not much inclination to make demands on the state. But what other institution in this society could raise the minimum wage, make it easier to organize unions, fund a Green New Deal to address climate change and create decent jobs, create a single-payer health care system, and provide universal free higher ed? The lack of those things in this very rich society contribute a lot to debt and deprivation. But that lack is not the product of a “debt system.”

Some of the critiques seem valid, but to quote Mark Blyth, “Why does everything have to be a panacea?” Also, see this NYT piece on the movement.

From Guardian:

We think we know where Johnson stood on women, so to speak, don't we? That crack about women preachers and dogs walking (“like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”). “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little,” is another one. In an argument about religion with one Mrs Knowles, Johnson got into quite a fury, and Boswell murmured an aside: “I never saw this mighty lion so chased before!” But, but … you should also know that Johnson was not so easily pinned down in anything, and certainly not as a misogynist. He entertained women's opinions to a greater degree than many of his contemporaries, and he certainly relished their company. His reputation for this had reached the ears of a young Mary Wollstonecraft, and Kate Chisholm begins her book with a short but well-imagined vignette of the occasion, when the future author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman walked from Newington Green to Fleet Street to get some advice and conversation from the ill and ageing Johnson. She was a feminist avant la lettre; he was a Tory, if an unconventional one; yet it was to him that she turned at the beginning of her career.

There have been not only quite a few books about Johnson already, but a few about his relationship with women. The thing is, though, that most of the contemporary accounts are filtered through the perceptions, and the prejudices, of others. Boswell, our prime source, may well have been jealous of Mrs Thrale's friendship with Johnson; he even seemed to be jealous of his earlier marriage to Tetty (who, when they married, was old enough, at 46, to be his mother). As for modern works concentrating on this aspect of the great man's life and character, they can be either too academic, or not academic enough. Chisholm's book strikes a happy balance. It wasn't always a great deal of fun being a woman in the 18th century, even if you had somehow managed to evade convention and learn something more intellectually challenging than needlepoint. The deck was stacked against women in so many ways. Here's just one: when Elizabeth Carter brought out a translation of Epictetus it sold hugely and was widely praised – but the reviewers expressed either astonishment or disbelief that it had been written by a woman. (It's still in print, by the way; you can even get it in a Kindle edition. So there.) So the fact that Johnson had what we might as well call a coterie of female friends he could converse with on more or less equal terms was, if not extraordinary, certainly worth noting.

More here.

The Tao Te Ching
—17 Not What Makes Tao Tick

The Tao flows everywhere
so everything is of it

uncreated

Every thing receives Tao’s work
but it claims nothing for itself

It feeds all worlds
but never enslaves them

The Tao and each thing
are merged

The heart of all things
are filled with Tao’s humility

Each thing comes and goes
from it and to it but

Tao endures
Call it great

But being great is not what makes
Tao tick which

…………….. makes it
…………….. great
.

by Lao Tzu
from An Understanding of the Tao Te Ching
by R. Bob

From MSNBC:

In a series of experiments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, more than 300 student participants were unconsciously exposed to words and equations through a research technique known as Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS). With this method, a static image appears in front of one eye while rapidly changing pictures flash in front of the other eye. The changing pictures dominate awareness at first, letting the still image register subliminally before popping into consciousness. In the first part of the study, one eye was presented with a static phrase or sentence, which was “masked” by changing colorful shapes flashing in front of the other eye. The students were instructed to press a button as soon as they became aware of the words. It usually took about a second, but negative phrases like “human trafficking” and jarring sentences such as “I ironed the coffee” typically registered quicker than positive expressions and more coherent phrases such as “I ironed clothes,” the study found. The researchers say these results suggest that the sentences were fully read and comprehended subconsciously, and certain phrases broke out of suppression faster because they were more surprising.

In the second part of the study, the scientists examined how the unconscious brain processes math problems. Using the CFS technique again, the researchers subliminally exposed the participants to three-digit equations, such as “9 − 3 − 4,” for two seconds or less. Then, the participants were shown a number (without CFS masking it) and told to say it out loud. The students were quicker to read aloud a number that was the right answer to the equation they had just subconsciously seen. For example, after being exposed to “9 − 3 − 4,” they were quicker to pronounce “2” than “3.” This suggests they subconsciously worked out the problem and had the answer on their lips. Other recent studies have shown that humans might be able to unconsciously perform tasks that have typically been associated with consciousness, such as learning and forming intuitions. The new study adds complex, rule-based operations to that list. Psychology researcher Ran Hassin, who was involved in the study, said the results suggest current theories about unconscious processes need to be revised.

More here.

Stephen T. Asma in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Every parent has heard the f-word, fairness, intoned ad nauseam by their negotiating kids. My own son was an eloquent voice for egalitarianism, even before he could tie his shoes or tell time. Of course, it's not exactly universal equality that he and other kids are lobbying for, but something much more self-interested.

Kids learn early on that an honest declaration of “I'm not getting what I want” holds little persuasion for parents. So they quickly figure out how to mask their egocentric frustrations with the language of fairness. An appeal to an objective standard of fairness will at least buy some bargaining time for further negotiations. This is not entirely duplicitous on the part of the child, who is often legitimately confused and cannot easily distinguish his private sufferings from larger and clearer social imbalances.

Fairness, however, is not the be-all and end-all standard for justice, nor is it the best measure of our social lives. As a philosopher, I've noticed a tremendous amount of conceptual confusion in our use of fairness. And though we're hearing a lot of the language of fairness hurled around lately in political rhetoric, it often hinders real conversation and debate more than it helps. Most people, for example, assume that the opposite of fairness is selfishness, and since selfishness is manifestly terrible, no one but a hapless Ayn Rand devotee would be so foolish as to critique fairness. But the real opposite of fairness is favoritism—filial, tribal, nepotistic partiality—not egoistic selfishness. If that's true, then a lot of us—on the left and the right—are unwitting daily sinners against fairness. And that's not a bad thing.

More here.

Mehdi Hasan in the Huffington Post:

1) “PRISON CAMP”

David Cameron once referred to Gaza as a “prison camp” and “some sort of open-air prison”. 1.7million Palestinians are crammed into just 140 square miles; Gaza is one of the most crowded places on earth.

Israel, despite withdrawing its troops and settlers from the Strip in 2005, continues to control its airspace, territorial waters and border crossings (with the exception, of course, of Gaza's land border with Egypt).

2) (UN)FAIR FIGHT

Remember: according to the Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem, in the last major conflict between Israel and Hamas – 'Operation Cast Lead' which kicked off in December 2008 – 762 Palestinian civilians were killed, including more than 300 children, compared to three (yes, three!) Israeli civilians.

We seem to be seeing a similar imbalance in bloodshed this time round: “More Palestinians were killed in Gaza [on Wednesday] than Israelis have been killed by projectile fire from Gaza in the past three years,” wrote Palestinian-American activist Yousef Munayyer on the Daily Beast website.

3) “COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT”

Why do they hate us, ask ordinary Israelis? Well, Gaza has been under siege since January 2006, after its residents dared to elect a Hamas goverment in free and fair elections. The subsequent economic blockade imposed upon the Strip by the Israeli government at one stage prevented the residents of Gaza from importing, among other things, coriander, ginger, nutmeg and, even, newspapers.

Most international lawyers, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), consider the blockade to be illegal under international humanitarian law; in 2009, a UN panel, led by distinguished South African judge and self-confessed Zionist Richard Goldstone, accused Israel of imposing “a blockade which amounted to collective punishment”.

More here.

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:

Amid the clamorous controversies of this election campaign, what strikes one here on the West Bank of the Jordan is the silences. Though the issue of Palestine promises to have a much more vital part in the volatile, populist politics of the Middle East’s new democracies—whose vulnerable governments actually must take some account of what moves ordinary people—here in Ramallah we have heard virtually nothing substantive about it, apart, that is, from Mitt Romney’s repeated charge that President Obama, presumably in extracting from Israel a hard-fought ten-month freeze on settlement building early on in his administration, had “thrown Israel under the bus.”

In fact, the West Bank is perhaps the place on the globe that has seen the least of President Obama’s promised “change you can believe in.” Nearly fifty years after Israel conquered the territories, its young soldiers are still on patrol, herding millions of Palestinians through and around an increasingly elaborate labyrinth of checkpoints, walls, and access roads, while Israeli settlers, now numbering in all more than half a million, flow over the hills, swelling their gated and fortified towns, creating one “fact on the ground” after another. Even as the land of the long-promised Palestinian state vanishes behind these barricades, the phrase “two-state solution” lives on, hovering like a ghost over the settlements, a remnant mirage of a permanently moribund “peace process” that has produced no agreement of consequence in twenty years, since the Oslo Accords vowed a Palestinian state would be declared no later than 1999.

More here.

Andrew Russeth in the New York Observer:

Before Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen sent his version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream to the auction block at Sotheby’s New York in May, where it sold for $120 million, he spoke to the press about what he thought the work meant. At the time, Mr. Olsen’s pronouncements sounded, at least to me, a little bit off. The Scream, we’re all taught, is about existential angst, the individual crying out, alone in the universe, but Mr. Olsen, who’d lived with the work his entire life, had a more expansive view.

“The Scream for me shows the horrifying moment when man realizes his impact on nature,” Mr. Olsen told the Financial Times, “and the irreversible changes that he has initiated, making the planet increasingly uninhabitable.” After last week’s storm, which killed more than 40 people in New York, destroyed homes, and damaged art, artist studios and galleries in Brooklyn and Chelsea, that reading of the painting seems painfully on point. Munch couldn’t have known about the coming climate change, but it’s all there in the work—in its original title (Scream of Nature) and in the sky and land that appear to undulate behind the bald figure.

Until visiting The Scream two weeks ago at the Museum of Modern Art, to which it has been loaned for six months by its new, anonymous owner, I had forgotten that it has three figures: besides the alarmed man who gets all of the attention, there is another man in a top hat, his head bowed as if in deep despair, and a third man, further in the distance, who stares out at the landscape, strangely unaware—or in denial—of the fact that the world is coming undone around him. Factoring in those other two, it’s easier to follow Mr. Olsen’s thinking: when it comes to the effects that humans are having on nature, most of us are the second or third person.

More here.

Editorial from the New York Times:

Israel has a right to defend itself, but it’s hard to see how Wednesday’s operation could be the most effective way of advancing its long-term interests. It has provoked new waves of condemnation against Israel in Arab countries, including Egypt, whose cooperation is needed to enforce the 1979 peace treaty and support stability in Sinai.

The action also threatens to divert attention from what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described as Israel’s biggest security threat: Iran’s nuclear program.

Engaging in a full-scale ground war is especially risky. Israel’s last major military campaign in Gaza was a three-week blitz in 2008-09 that killed as many as 1,400 Palestinians, and it was widely condemned internationally. It did not solve the problem. Hamas remains in control in Gaza and has amassed even more missiles.

Some Israeli commentators have suggested that Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to order the operation is connected to elections in January.

More here. [Photo from the Washington Post.]

From Aeon:

Our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality is changing faster than ever before. Gigantic observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope on the Paranal Mountain in Chile are probing the furthest reaches of the cosmos. Meanwhile, with their feet firmly on the ground, leviathan atom-smashers such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under the Franco-Swiss border are busy untangling the riddles of the tiny quantum world. Myriad discoveries are flowing from these magnificent machines. You may have seen Hubble’s extraordinary pictures. You will probably have heard of the ‘exoplanets’, worlds orbiting alien suns, and you will almost certainly have heard about the Higgs Boson, the particle that imbues all others with mass, which the LHC found this year. But you probably won’t know that (if their findings are taken to their logical conclusion) these machines have also detected hints that Elvis lives, or that out there, among the flaming stars and planets, are unicorns, actual unicorns with horns on their noses. There’s even weirder stuff, too: devils and demons; gods and nymphs; places where Hitler won the Second World War, or where there was no war at all. Places where the most outlandish fantasies come true. A weirdiverse, if you will. Most bizarre of all, scientists are now seriously discussing the possibility that our universe is a fake, a thing of smoke and mirrors.

All this, and more, is the stuff of the multiverse, the great roller-coaster rewriting of reality that has overturned conventional cosmology in the last decade or two. The multiverse hypothesis is the idea that what we see in the night sky is just an infinitesimally tiny sliver of a much, much grander reality, hitherto invisible. The idea has become so mainstream that it is now quite hard to find a cosmologist who thinks there’s nothing in it. This isn’t the world of the mystics, the pointy-hat brigade who see the Age of Aquarius in every Hubble image. On the contrary, the multiverse is the creature of Astronomers Royal and tenured professors at Cambridge and Cornell.

PICTURE: String Theory suggests that our universe may be like a page in a book, stacked alongside tens of trillions of others. Those other realities would be right next to us now.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

More than 40 countries around the world force cigarette companies to print graphic images of things like decaying teeth, open-heart surgeries and cancer patients on their packs, in an effort to discourage smoking by directly linking cigarettes with their most gruesome effects. The United States, however, is not one of these countries: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration unveiled graphic designs in November 2010, but repeated lawsuits by the tobacco industry have delayed implementation of the new warnings. If and when the labels do hit, the images could go a long way towards continuing the decline in smoking rates across the country. That’s because, as new research demonstrates, seeing these images every time a person reaches for a pack is a more effective deterrent than a text-only warning. The research also indicates that the graphic warnings are especially powerful in discouraging low-health literacy populations from smoking—the one group in which smoking rates have remained stubbornly high over the past few decades.

The study, published yesterday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine [PDF], was conducted by James Thrasher of the University of South Carolina and colleagues. A control group of 207 smokers saw text-only warning labels, while 774 smokers evaluated nine different graphic labels, both images proposed by the FDA and a selection of others currently used in foreign countries. The smokers were asked to judge each label on a scale of one to ten for credibility, relevance and effectiveness. The results were unequivocal: The text-only warnings’ average ratings were mostly in the fives and sixes, while simpler text messages combined with striking graphics scored in the sevens and eights across the board.

More here.

PERHAPS THE GREATEST IRONY concerning the profound legacy of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales (1812), celebrating its bicentenary worldwide this year, is that the fame of the tales is due in great part to Edgar Taylor, a British lawyer, who produced the first English translation, German Popular Stories, in 1823. Actually, Taylor adapted the Grimms’ tales, and thus transformed them into unusual jocose stories for children and middle-class families. He also included 22 hilarious illustrations by the great caricaturist George Cruikshank. Surprisingly, the serious Grimms, who never took care to have their tales enlivened with illustrations, were so impressed by Taylor’s highly successful book that they followed his example in all the editions they published after 1823 and until 1857. The Grimms remained true to their original scholarly intention of salvaging the great oral tradition of storytelling, while artfully editing the tales according to the tastes and values of their contemporary reading public. Meanwhile, Taylor, who published another translation called Gammer Grethel in 1839, continued to influence the reception and legacy of the Grimms in Great Britain and also in North America up through the twentieth century. Thanks to Taylor and other British translators, the Grimms became known as delightful writers for children whose books also had an appeal for adults, even though the original works were never intended for children.

more from Jack Zipes at the LA Review of Books here.

Christian Wiman in Slate:

I have forgotten the little killing ditty
whispered to the red birds and the blue birds and the brown birds
not one of which I ever thought to give a name.

In the tall mesquite mistaking our yard
for a spacious place, I plugged away with my pellet gun
and got them often even in the eye, for I was trained

to my craft by primordial boredom
and I suppose some generic, genetic rage
I seem to have learned to quell or kill.

They dropped like the stones I’d throw in Catclaw Creek
or fluttered spastically and panickedly up
whereupon I took more tenacious aim—

much more difficult now because they moved
—not me, frozen as if in a camera’s flash—
troubling the tyranny of the ordinary

as if a wave of meaning or unmeaning
went rippling like heat through the yard.
Fire and fire and they fell and they fall, hard.

I felt nothing, and I will not betray those days
if days are capable of being betrayed,
by pretending a pang in my larval heart

or even some starveling joy when Tuffy yelped.
I took aim at the things I could not name.
And the ditty helped.

Go here to hear the poet reading his poem and to read interesting discussion in the comments.