Corey Robin in Jacobin:

Tablet has a moving piece by Samantha Shokin, a Brooklyn-based writer, on how a semester in Israel helped change the way she felt about herself, particularly her bodily self-image as a Jewish woman.

Shokin writes:

I spent a lifetime hating my Jewish hair — straightening it, covering it, or otherwise finding ways to diminish its presence. A trip to Israel is what it took for me to realize my hair was wonderful all its own, and much more than just an accessory.

Shokin does a wonderful job describing how her hair was caught up with her feelings of awkwardness, shame, and exclusion, how difficult it was as an adolescent to contend with images of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera from the vantage of “frizzy brown hair and glasses.” This was no simple matter of teenage angst, Shokin makes clear; it cut to the heart of her Jewish identity, not to mention a long history of anti-Semitism. For centuries, Jewish looks, including hair, have been a dividing line between the drowned and the saved. As that simple line from Paul Celan reminds us: “your golden hair Margarete/ your ashen hair Shulamit.”

More here.

From Guernica:

Kamila Shamsie: The decision to give the Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan was heavily criticized by many writers, not because of his work’s literary merit, but on the grounds that he had refused to sign a petition calling for the freedom of Liu Xiaobo, a fellow laureate. The criticism grew even stronger when Mo Yan defended censorship, comparing it to airport security. You’ve always been politically outspoken, and have expressed your frustration with writers who remain quiet over political issues. You might have been expected to join the chorus of disapproval. Instead you turned around and criticized those who were criticizing Mo Yan. Is there a contradiction here in your own position?

Pankaj Mishra: I should say right away that at no point did I defend Mo Yan’s political positions, and that in fact made clear my own strong disagreement with them. What I objected to was the attempt to delegitimize his literary achievement through some selective reference to his political choices, like his refusal to sign a petition. If we were to take that narrow measure to many of the canonical figures of Western literature—from Dickens with his bloodthirsty writings during the Indian Mutiny, to Nabokov, who adored the war in Vietnam—those writers would have to be dismissed as worthless.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Over the long years, people would forget about the inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov. And then an AK-47 would end up in a news story, next to a teenager in the Ivory Coast maybe, and people would ask him again, “Are you troubled by your invention?”

And then, upon the death of Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov at the age of 94, was the revelation of a letter, written by Mikhail Kalashnikov to the head of Russia's Orthodox church with the help of his local priest. The letter, typed onto Kalashnikov’s home stationary, was published by the Russian paper Izvestiaand patchy translations soon found their way into the international media. It was the anguished confession of a terrified old man on his deathbed.

“My spiritual pain is unbearable,” he wrote. “I keep asking the same insoluble question. If my rifle deprived people of life then can it be that I … a Christian and an orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?

“Yes! An increasing number of churches and monasteries in our land. And yet evil does not decrease! … Light and shadow, good and evil, two opposites of a whole, that can't exist without each other?”

more here.

Rohan Maitzen at Open Letters Monthly:

Mead read Middlemarch for the first time when she was seventeen and found it “riveting, from the very first sentence of its first chapter.” Speaking as someone who has assigned Middlemarch to hundreds of students not much older than that, I would say that her reaction is not entirely typical (though speaking as someone who read Middlemarch for the first time at eighteen, loved it, and has been rereading it ever since, at least as often and as appreciatively as Mead, I would also say that I find it entirely credible, and not a little endearing). Many readers approach Middlemarch with trepidation or leave it in frustration.

Not that the novel is not difficult in the way, say, James Joyce’sFinnegans Wake is difficult. It is, as the subtitle promises, “A Study of Provincial Life.” It chronicles the intersecting stories of a range of characters in a small English town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Bill that, by altering the balance of political power in Britain, launched an era of broader reform and modernization. There’s idealistic Dorothea Brooke, whose naïve yearnings for an intellectually significant life blind her to the faults of her unlikely suitor, the pedantic scholar Mr. Casaubon; ambitious Dr. Lydgate, whose hopes to reform his profession are derailed by the limpid blue eyes of the Mayor’s self-centered daughter Rosamond; shrewd, forthright Mary Garth and her faithful but feckless sweetheart Fred Vincy; Mr. Casaubon’s bright but erratic cousin Will Ladislaw, who adores Dorothea, flirts with Rosamond, and struggles to find his place in a rapidly changing world.

more here.

Jim Morrison at Smithsonian Magazine:

Captain Robert Posey and Pfc. Lincoln Kirstein were the first through the small gap in the rubble blocking the ancient salt mine at Altausee, high in the Austrian Alps in 1945 as World War II drew to a close in May 1945. They walked past one sidechamber in the cool damp air and entered a second one, the flames of their lamps guiding the way.

There, resting on empty cardboard boxes a foot off the ground, were eight panels of The Adoration of the Lamb by Jan van Eyck, considered one of the masterpieces of 15th-century European art. In one panel of the altarpiece, the Virgin Mary, wearing a crown of flowers, sits reading a book.

“The miraculous jewels of the Crowned Virgin seemed to attract the light from our flickering acetylene lamps,” Kirstein wrote later. “Calm and beautiful, the altarpiece was, quite simply, there.”

Kirstein and Posey were two members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allies, a small corps of mostly middle-aged men and a few women who interrupted careers as historians, architects, museum curators and professors to mitigate combat damage. They found and recovered countless artworks stolen by the Nazis.

more here.

Ghost Story

—for Matthew Z and Matthew R

I remember telling the joke
about child molestation and seeing
the face of the young man
I didn't know well enough
turn from something with light
inside of it into something like
an animal that's had its brain
bashed in, something like that, some
sky inside him breaking
all over the table and the beers.
It's amazing, finding out
my thoughtlessness has no bounds,
is no match for any barbarian,
that it runs wild and hard
like the Mississippi. No, the Rio Grande.
No, the Columbia. A great river
of thorns and when this stranger
stood up and muttered
something about a cigarette,
the Hazmat team
in my chest begins to cordon
off my heart, glowing
a toxic yellow,
and all I could think about
was the punch line “sexy kids,”
that was it, “sexy kids,” and all the children
I've cared for, wiping
their noses, rocking them to sleep,
all the nieces and nephews I love,
and how no one ever
opened me up like a can of soup
in the second grade, the man
now standing on the sidewalk, smoke smothering
his body, a ghost unable
to hold his wrists down
or make a sound like a large knee in between
two small knees, but terrifying and horrible all the same.

by Matthew Dickman

From Blackpast.org:

Following the Union Army victory at Antietam, Maryland on September 17, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation. This document gave the states of the Confederacy until January 1, 1863 to lay down their arms and peaceably reenter the Union, if these states continued their rebellion all slaves in those seceding states were declared free. Fearing the secession of neutral border slaveholding states such as Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, excluded those states which left almost one fifth of the four million slaves in bondage. Their freedom would come with the 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation also allowed freedmen to enlist into the Union Army. This provision struck a series blow to the economic structure of the seceding states as many black slaves labored for the Confederate Army or were engaged in vital agricultural or This Proclamation was not without its criticismindustrial production for the Confederacy.

This Proclamation was not without its criticism as as slavery and the issue of black freedom and equality were highly divisive issues even in the North. Confederate leaders threatened to summarily kill any black man they captured wearing a Union uniform. Anti-War Northern Democrats, who often attacked Lincoln’s policies, claimed that this one would irreparably harm the nation. Many northerners felt that freedmen would flock to the north and compete with white workers. That fear helped fuel the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Others feared the Proclamation would generate a race war between blacks and whites in the Confederacy.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Justin Gillis in The New York Times:

Scientists refer to global warming because it is about, well, the globe. It is also about the long run. It is really not about what happened yesterday in Poughkeepsie. The entire United States, including Alaska, covers less than 2 percent of the surface of the earth. So if the whole country somehow froze solid one January, that would not move the needle on global temperatures much at all. In fact, even this year’s severe winter weather has affected only part of the country. The Arctic blasts were caused by big dips in the jet stream that allowed frigid air to descend from the polar regions into the central and eastern United States. But toward the west, those dips have been counterbalanced by unusual northward swings of the jet stream that sent temperatures soaring. So while New Yorkers have been shivering this winter, California has been setting record or near-record high temperatures. The state is in its third year of a drought so severe that some towns have started to worry about running out of drinking water.

Alaska has been downright balmy for much of the winter. “Record warmth, confused plants: An Alaska January to remember,” The Anchorage Daily News declared. Likewise, large parts of Russia, Canada and Europe have had bizarrely warm temperatures this winter. Though the case is as yet unproven, a handful of scientists think the 50-degree temperatures in London and the frigid weather in Minneapolis might be a consequence of climate change. They contend the massive decline of sea ice in the Arctic has destabilized a weather pattern that normally keeps frigid air bottled up near the pole. That pattern is known as the polar vortex and its boundary is a fast-moving river of air called the jet stream. When the vortex weakens, the jet stream can develop big kinks, creating zones of extreme heat and cold.

More here.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, Rupert Read, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb elaborate why under the precautionary principle GMOs should be banned but not nuclear power in a draft paper on the precautionary principle:

Genetically Modified Organisms, GMOs fall squarely under PP not because of the harm to the consumer [but] because of their systemic risk on the system. 

Top-down modifications to the system (through GMOs) are categorically and statistically different from bottom up ones (regular farming, progressive tinkering with crops, etc.) To borrow from Rupert Read, there is no comparison between the tinkering of selective breeding and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from an organism and putting itinto another. Saying that such a product is natural misses the statistical process by which things become ”natural”.

What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global. I do not wish to pay—or have my descendants pay—for errors by executives of Monsanto. We should exert the precautionary principle there—our non-naive version—simply because we would only discover errors after considerable and irreversible environmental damage…

In large quantities we should worry about an unseen risk from nuclear energy and certainly invoke the PP. In small quantities it may be OK and a matter of risk management—how small we should determine, making sure threats never cease to be local. Keep in mind that small mistakes with the storage of the nuclear are compounded by the length of time they stay around. The same with fossil fuels. The same with other sources of pollution.

More here.

Johan van Mullem. Sans Titre. 2013.

Ink on board.

More here , here, and here.