Stephen Cave at the Financial Times:

You might think we that we humans are special: no other species has, for example, landed on the moon, or invented the iPad. But then, I personally haven’t done those things either. So if such achievements are what makes us human then I must be relegated to the beasts, except in so far as I can catch a little reflected glory from true humans such as Neil Armstrong or Steve Jobs.

Fortunately, there are other, more inclusive, ideas around about what makes us human. Not long ago, most people (in the west) were happy with the account found in the Bible: we are made in the image of God – end of argument. But the theory of evolution tells a different story, one in which humans slowly emerged as a twig on the tree of life. The problem with this explanation is that it is much more difficult to say exactly what makes us so different from all the other twigs.

Indeed, in the light of new research into animal intelligence, some scientists have concluded that there simply is no profound difference between us and other species. This is the stance taken in new books by Henry Gee, palaeontology editor of the leading scientific journal Nature, and by animal behaviour expert Marc Bekoff. But other scientists of equal eminence argue the opposite: that new research is finally making the profound difference between humans and animals clear – and two of them, the psychologists Michael Tomasello and Thomas Suddendorf, have written new books purporting to tell us exactly what it is.

more here.

Victor LaValle in Bookforum:

Amasa Delano might not be remembered at all if Herman Melville hadn't written the novella Benito Cereno in 1855. Melville took one chapter from Delano's memoir and wrote the second-best book of his career. The best, Moby-Dick, had been published four years earlier and—famously—did not make Melville famous. Benito Cereno retells the story of Delano's contact in 1805 with the Tryal, a ship helmed by young Andalusian captain Benito Cerreño (Melville altered the spelling). Cerreño's vessel (the San Dominick in the book) appears to be in trouble as it enters the bay where Delano's ship is anchored. Delano takes a boat to help the Tryal. There he finds Cerreño, who explains that a storm killed most of his crew. There are also lots of Africans moving about freely on the ship. Delano spends the afternoon with Cerreño. He senses that something's wrong, but can't guess what. When Delano returns to his boat, the danger finally becomes clear: Cerreño leaps off the Tryal and into Delano's ship shouting that the Africans have rebelled. They've been playing docile, but they—not a storm—are in fact what killed the crew. The Africans cut the Tryal's anchor and sail off, but Delano's men recapture the ship and its rebellious cargo. This is the chain of events in both real life and the novella.

In The Empire of Necessity, Greg Grandin tracks backward from this episode like a sleuth, unearthing the motivations and machinations that collided on that day. We learn about not only Amasa Delano and Benito Cerreño but also, as records allow, the West Africans. Most important, the reader is given an overview of the era that is clear but never simplistic. “This was what historians call Spanish America's market revolution,” Grandin writes in summing up the economic background of the incident, “and slaves were the flywheel on which the whole thing turned.” Melville turned this episode into a rumination on subjugation and subterfuge, the lasting toll of slavery on the European soul. Grandin's vital book reads as a kind of ledger, relaying not just the cost of slavery but its profits, its lure.

…I can't say enough good things about The Empire of Necessity. It's one of the best books I've read in a decade. It should be essential reading not just for those interested in the African slave trade, but for anyone hoping to understand the commercial enterprise that built North and South America.

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

Delphi Gymkhana Club Ltd.
The Small Bar

I
There are two bartenders
Shankar and Ramshahai Singhvi Yadav.
Both of them are competent. But given
the choice, I prefer Ramshahai Singhvi Yadav.
Yet, each time one needs a drink,
I call for Shankar , even though I
know Ramshahai Singhvi Yadav will be quicker.
Why? Good question.
Shankar is easy to recall.
This is a truism.

One's name must be simple,
as in the case
with ones' personal philosophy.
And poetry.

II
What do the inebriated talk about?
Relationships.
The unipolar world.
Economic liberalization.
The Congress versus the BJP?
And of death.

Towards the end of the evening,
most people are into long-lasting relationships.
Liquor never lies. It amplifies.

III
There is an unwritten
law of liquor.
No one disagrees with the person
who pays for the round: his word is Law,
usually, till the end of the drink.
But, if one is with friends,
should it be so?

by Sanjeev Sethi
from Nine Summers Later
Har-Anand Publications, Pvt Ltd.1997

Helen Fisher in The New York Times:

In “The Devil’s Dictionary,” Ambrose Bierce defined love as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Enter Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and couples therapist who says that relationships are a basic human need and that “a stable, loving relationship is the absolute cornerstone of human happiness and general well-being.” To repair ailing partnerships, she has developed a new approach in marriage counseling called Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT, which she introduces in her new book, “Love Sense.” EFT draws on the work of the psychiatrist John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, who argued that humanity has evolved a strong, physiologically-based attachment system that drives the infant to attach to the mother. In the 1960s and ’70s, he and the psychologist Mary Ains­worth put forth the idea that children develop one of three basic styles of attachment that they carry into their adult relationships. Secure individuals grow up knowing they can count on their primary caregivers, so they don’t obsessively worry that they will be abandoned by their partners. However, if one’s primary childhood caregiver is inattentive, unpredictable or abusive, the individual forms one of two “insecure” attachment styles. Anxious individuals worry constantly that they will be abandoned, so they cling to their partners, seeking reassurance. The avoidant, meanwhile, eschew deep connections to protect themselves from being dependent.

Johnson believes EFT can help couples break out of patterns, “interrupting and dismantling these destructive sequences and then actively constructing a more emotionally open and receptive way of interacting.” She aims to transform relationships “using the megawatt power of the wired-in longing for contact and care that defines our species,” and offers various exercises to restore trust.

More here.

Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker:

Hayes had become accustomed to steady praise from his colleagues, but, when Syngenta cast doubt on his work, he became preoccupied by old anxieties. He believed that the company was trying to isolate him from other scientists and “play on my insecurities—the fear that I’m not good enough, that everyone thinks I’m a fraud,” he said. He told colleagues that he suspected that Syngenta held “focus groups” on how to mine his vulnerabilities. Roger Liu, who worked in Hayes’s lab for a decade, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, said, “In the beginning, I was really worried for his safety. But then I couldn’t tell where the reality ended and the exaggeration crept in.”

Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

Read the rest here.

Theo Hobson at The Guardian:

Atheism derives from religion? Surely it just says that no gods exist, that rationalism, or 'scientific naturalism', is to be preferred to any form of supernaturalism. Actually, no: in reality what we call atheism is a form of secular humanism; it presupposes a moral vision, of progressive humanitarianism, of trust that universal moral values will triumph. (Of course there is also the atheism of Nietzsche, which rejects humanism, but this is not what is normally meant by 'atheism').

So what we know as atheism should really be understood as an offshoot of deism. For it sees rationalism as a benign force that can liberate our natural goodness. It has a vision of rationalism saving us, uniting us. For example, AC Grayling, in his recent book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, argues that, with the withering of religion, 'an ethical outlook which can serve everyone everywhere, and can bring the world together into a single moral community, will at last be possible'. This is really Rousseau's idea, that if we all listened to our hearts, there would be 'one religion on earth'.

On one hand atheism is more coherent than deism – it neatly eliminates the supernatural. But on the other hand it has less self-knowledge: it does not understand that it remains fuelled by a religious-based vision of human flourishing.

more here.

Justin Evans at The Point:

Shields’s recent books have elated critics and reviewers. “The ideas he raises are so important, his interests are so compelling,” wrote Bookforum’s Jan Attenberg, “that I raved about this book the whole time I was reading it and have regularly quoted it to friends in the weeks since.” Other commentators have praised Shields, in less personal terms, for “challeng[ing] our most basic literary assumptions” (Andrew Albanese), and for offering the most “effective description (and example) of the aesthetic concerns of the internet age” (Edward King). Shields “succinctly addresses matters that have been in the air … waiting for someone to link them together,” wrote Luc Sante, in a New York Times review that compared the book to theSurrealist Manifesto.

The project certainly sounds exciting. Shields focuses on the problems of loneliness and ennuithat have worried many recent readers and writers, and he proposes a radical overhaul of literary form to address them. Meanwhile, he brings together dozens of men and women, from the ancient world to the present, who have thought and written about similar problems. Because his work is so broad and ambitious, it’s easy to complain that Shields misuses some of his sources. But he is not doing academic research, and part of the charm of his project is the way he makes such a wide range of figures speak directly to contemporary concerns.

Still, as I read Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life, I began to wonder if they really delivered in the way Shields said they did.

more here.

Oliver Bullough at The New Republic:

Beginning Friday night, hundreds of millions of people will tune in to the Winter Olympics, which Russia hopes will prove to the world that the country has re-emerged as a world power after its long, post-Soviet funk—and that Sochi itself deserves “international resort” status. Elided from this narrative, though, is what took place in exactly the same spot 150 years ago, when Sochi's indigenous residents were routed by the Imperial Russian Army, the survivors herded onto ships and exiled, never to return.

Unacknowledged by Vladimir Putin’s government, the ethnic cleansing of the mostly-Muslim Circassians is considered Europe’s first modern genocide by many historians, and provides a gloomy backdrop to the Olympic glamour in this subtropical city—not least for surviving Circassians who are furious over being excluded from the celebration in Sochi.

Ghost

After so much time you think
you'd have it netted
in the mesh of language. But again
it reconfigures, slick as Proteus.

You're in the kitchen talking
with your ex-Navy brother, his two kids
snaking over his tattooed arms, as he goes on
& on about being out of work again.

For an hour now you've listened,
his face growing dimmer in the lamplight
as you keep glancing at your watch
until it's there again: the ghost rising

as it did that first time when you,
the oldest, left home to marry.
You're in the boat again, alone, and staring
at the six of them, your sisters

& your brothers, their faces bobbing
in the water, as their fingers grapple
for the gunwales. The ship is going down,
your mother with it. One oar's locked

and feathered, and one oar's lost,
there's a slop of gurry pooling
in the bottom, and your tiny boat
keeps drifting further from them.

Between each bitter wave you can count
their upturned faces–white roses
scattered on a mash of sea, eyes fixed
to see what you will do. And you?

You their old protector, you their guardian
and go-between? Each man for himself,
you remember thinking, their faces
growing dimmer with each oarstroke.
.

by Paul Mariani
from The Great Wheel
W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

David Kaufmann in Poetry Daily:

John Ashbery once wrote of Frank O'Hara that he was too hip for the square and too square for the hip. The same might go for Robert Pinsky, who, in spite of his achievements and reputation, has not received the kind of scholarly attention one might expect. Of course, I would not want to claim that Pinsky is particularly hip. In spite of the fact that his fierceness increases with age, he is still the master of the Horatian middle style, and his work is still marked by the rigors of his early formalism. But for all that, Pinsky has indeed become somewhat unruly, and his poems range onto unexpected terrain. Though he does not belong to any avant-garde, living or dead, his work does not belong to any traditional school, either. While he is a deeply intellectual writer, his career displays an endearing and committed old-style populism. He just does not fit.

I want to argue that Pinsky has set himself the task of remembering the present. In a famous letter to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno reminds his friend that reification—the reduction of collective labor and shared history to atomized, isolated, and seemingly “natural” facts—is a kind of forgetting. Objects, he claims, become dead things to our perception and memory once we forget the nexus from which they come, the web of human relations and endeavors that inhere in them. One of the jobs of thinking, then, would be to reconstitute that nexus, to make it visible again. That, I will maintain, is the point of Pinsky's signature poem, “Shirt.” Further, although Pinsky never resorts to Adorno's language, the drive to overcome reified forgetting has become the project of Pinsky's work in poetry and prose.

More here.

Abstract: Nawaz Sharif should not cede further ground to the forces of violent extremism, as if he does, it would embolden their efforts to remake Pakistan in their image. Giving militants the writ of law effectively hands the state to extremists, allowing them to own the public space and ban all competing voices, while knocking off religious minorities and Muslims deemed insufficiently Islamic. Pakistan’s battered civil society would face further assaults, forced to retreat and retrench. Shi’as, Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus would face existential threats from militants. Such a peace deal would bring no peace.

Knox Thames in Thirty Years War:

Snooker is a popular game in Pakistan. Played on a billiards table, competitors wager on who can knock the most colored balls off into the side pockets. The winner is the one who wipes the table clean and scores the most points. In many ways, Pakistani militants are playing snooker against the country’s diverse and vibrant civil society and religious communities. Players include recognized terrorist groups like the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban or TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), but also mobs whipped up by unscrupulous religious leaders to commit violence. The election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in May 2013 brought a new player into this deadly contest. As PM Sharif returns to this office for the third time, will he crackdown on militants or give the game away in an attempt to win peace?

Make no mistake, Pakistani extremists groups are playing to win. A snooker hall was the site of a heinous act of sectarian terrorism in January 2013 when two suicide bombers attacked a Karachi game room frequented by Shi’a Muslims. Nearly 100 died. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi claimed responsibility in their declared war against Shi’a whom they consider the wrong kind of Muslim (Henderson, 2013). In September, splinter groups from the Pakistani Taliban executed twin suicide bombings on the All Saints Church in Peshawar that killed over 80 Christians as they left Sunday services (Boone, 2013). The Sunni Muslim majority has felt this onslaught too. The Pakistani Taliban targeted politicians deemed “secular” during the run-up to the May election and afterwards. Scores were reportedly killed from the more moderate Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Awami National Party (ANP), with a senior ANP member murdered in August (Gregory, 2013). In January 2014, six Sufi Muslims were killed at a Sufi shrine in Karachi, four with their throats slit and two beheaded (Menon, 2014).

More here.

Jenee Desmond-Harris in The Root:

“The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience,” says Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Gates, who is also The Root's editor-in-chief, is now offering that experience in the form of a six-part series he's written and directed for PBS, African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The series begins with the origins of slavery in Africa and covers five centuries of historic events right up to the present by highlighting 70 stories developed in collaboration with 40 historians. As the series host, professor Gates travels throughout the United States, leading viewers on a journey through African-American history. He visits key historical sites, debates with some of America's top historians and interviews eyewitnesses. Beyond providing a comprehensive black-history curriculum, the series is designed to make one thing clear: “There's no America without African Americans,” says Gates. He spoke to The Root about the program's surprises and lessons and how he hopes it will be received.

The Root: What about the series will be most surprising to viewers?

Ed Yong in Nautilus:

At first glance, a tree could not be more different from the caterpillars that eat its leaves, the mushrooms sprouting from its bark, the grass growing by its trunk, or the humans canoodling under its shade. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Zoom in closely, and you will see that these organisms are all surprisingly similar at a microscopic level. Specifically, they all consist of cells that share the same basic architecture.

These cells contain a central nucleus—a command center that is stuffed with DNA and walled off by a membrane. Surrounding it are many smaller compartments that act like tiny organs, carrying out specialized tasks like storing molecules or making proteins. Among these are the mitochondria—bean-shaped power plants that provide the cells with energy.

This combination of features is shared by almost every cell in every animal, plant, fungus, and alga, a group of organisms known as “eukaryotes.”

Bacteria showcase a second, simpler way of building a cell—one that preceded the complex eukaryotes by at least a billion years. These “prokaryotes” always consist of a single cell, which is smaller than a typical eukaryotic one and bereft of internal compartments like mitochondria and a nucleus. Even though limited to a relatively simple cell, bacteria are impressive survival machines. They colonize every possible habitat, from miles-high clouds to the deep ocean. They have a dazzling array of biological tricks that allow them to cause diseases, eat crude oil, conduct electric currents, draw power from the Sun, and communicate with each other.

Still, without the eukaryotic architecture, bacteria are forever constrained in size and complexity. Sure, they have their amazing skill sets, but it’s the eukaryotes that cover the Earth in forest and grassland, that navigate the planet looking for food and mates, that build rockets to Mars.

The transition from the classic prokaryotic model to the deluxe eukaryotic one is arguably the most important event in the history of life on Earth. And in more than 3 billion years of existence, it happened exactly once.

More here.

Tuan C. Nguyen in Smithsonian:

Bees possess a sense of smell 100 times more sensitive than the human nose. With 170 odor receptors at their disposal, they're able to recognize the presence of faint metabolic gases emitted by cancer cells during the earliest stages of disease. A handful of scientists are looking into ways that insects might better relay this information, and are keen to incorporate bugs with this unique ability in a clinical setting. Researchers at the University of Georgia, for instance, have invented a handheld device containing parasitic wasps trained to move toward certain odors. They then use computer software that analyzes film of the wasps' movements to determine which patterns indicate that a smell has been positively identified. As I covered late last year, Christina Soares, a British industrial designer, applied an elegant approach to behavioral training, in developing a glass apparatus called Bee's. She made it so that merely introducing gases containing disease biomarkers, like a patient's breath, would cause a colony of bees to swarm into the test chamber.

But perhaps the most promising method for using insects to diagnose tumors comes from a recent experiment carried out by researchers from the University of Konstanz in Germany and the University La Sapienza in Italy, which demonstrated that fruit flies can be genetically modified to glow the moment they come in contact with these volatile molecules. It doesn’t get more straightforward than that. A fruit fly possesses less than half as many odor-sensing receptors as a bee, but its olfactory system is apparently still sensitive enough to distinguish cancerous cells from healthy ones, according to the team's report. Moreover, the researchers found that the receptor neurons on the flies' antennae were able to differentiate between five types of breast cancer.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The Winter Olympics are, in essence, about putting things on your feet. This is a function of the weather. You cannot go barefoot into the snow and ice. In the summer, you can run around with nothing on at all. That’s what the ancient Greeks used to do when they had their Olympic games. You can see pictures of it on ancient vase paintings. The Greeks jumped and ran and threw things in a state of total nudity. The Olympic games – in their original form more than two thousand years ago – were about the beauty, grace, and possibility of the human body in its purity.

But what happens to the human body when you put it on frozen ground? It becomes a plodder, struggling laboriously through the snow. Or it becomes a slipper and slider, working to find traction on treacherous sheets of ice. Humans on frozen ground are, generally, comical and sad. It is only a matter of time before the human is going to fall down, ingloriously, limbs akimbo, and hit the ground with a crunch.

Or so it was until people started strapping things to the bottoms of their feet. Ötzi – the prehistoric iceman from the Italian Alps – was found wearing a broad-bottomed pair of snowshoes. He wasn’t skiing, exactly, or even snowshoeing in the modern sense of the term. But he had figured out the basic idea: You cannot traverse the snow and ice efficiently unless you take drastic action.

More here.

A. N. Wilson at The Times Literary Supplement:

Whereas some writers alternate between writing fiction and non-fiction, and there is little connection between the two activities, in Fitzgerald’s case, the three biographies are all in their different ways templates for reading her fiction. Hermione Lee makes the striking observation that it was not a novel, but the biography of an all but forgotten poet, Charlotte Mew, which marks the pivotal moment of Fitzgerald’s career as a writer: “[Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, 1984] is the crucial turning-point, the hinged door, between what, in another writer, you might call ‘early’ and ‘late’ work”. When, in Camden Town in 1928, Mew took her own life by drinking a bottle of Lysol, she was the age Fitzgerald was when she published her first book. A local paper, reporting the suicide, spoke of her as “Charlotte New, said to be a writer”. Characteristically, Fitzgerald, who had come to cherish the tragic poet, did not end her book on this grotesque note, but with a gentle diminuendo. “For a short while, she recovered consciousness, and said, ‘Don’t keep me, let me go’. This was her last attempt to speak to anyone, this side of silence.” Known only for a few poems (one of which, “The Farmer’s Bride”, was a great favourite of Thomas Hardy), Mew spent years of her life not writing at all, subsumed instead in her family’s various madnesses, and in domestic trivia – the difficulty of paying the rent for increasingly unpleasant lodgings shared with a demanding mother and a dippy artistic sister. Life was punctuated by the drama of falling painfully and unrequitedly in love with women. Mew clearly stood for something in Fitzgerald’s self-image. “She was struggling with the three great miseries of her life, the kitchen range (which kept going out), the boiler (which threatened to blow up) and ’flu.” Years and years would go by without Mew doing any writing, so obsessed was she by her mother’s illnesses or the boiler going wrong. Hard to know, then, in what sense she was a writer at all – except that she thought of herself as one.

more here.

From Phys.Org:

Nearly 70 percent of patients with advanced breast cancer experience skeletal metastasis, in which cancer cells migrate from a primary tumor into bone—a painful development that can cause fractures and spinal compression. While scientists are attempting to better understand metastasis in general, not much is known about how and why certain cancers spread to specific organs, such as bone, liver, and lungs. Now researchers from MIT, Italy, and South Korea have developed a three-dimensional microfluidic platform that mimics the spread of breast cancer cells into a bonelike environment.

The microchip—slightly larger than a dime—contains several channels in which the researchers grew endothelial cells and bone cells to mimic a blood vessel and bone side-by-side. They then injected a highly metastatic line of breast cancer cells into the fabricated blood vessel. Twenty-four hours later, the team observed that twice as many cancer cells had made their way through the vessel wall and into the bonelike environment than had migrated into a simple collagen-gel matrix. Moreover, the cells that made it through the vessel lining and into the bonelike setting formed microclusters of up to 60 cancer cells by the experiment's fifth day.

More here.

Toby Lester in the Boston Globe:

Where, exactly, was the Garden of Eden? Few people stay awake at night worrying about that anymore, but for more than a millennium, from the early Middle Ages well into the Renaissance, plenty of serious thinkers, especially in the Christian West, felt compelled to grapple with the question. And not unjustifiably. The Bible, after all, opens by describing Eden as an actual place in the world, located “away to the east” at the source of four great rivers, among them the very real Tigris and Euphrates.

The quest to locate paradise—a word used by the ancient Medians and Persians to mean a walled enclosure, by the early Hebrews to mean an orchard, and by the Greeks and Romans in Egypt to mean a well-watered royal park—began in earnest in the fifth century AD, after St. Augustine made the case for its physical reality. In the centuries that followed, medieval authorities matter-of-factly placed it at the easternmost limits of the world. “Asia includes many provinces and regions,” Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century. “I shall briefly list their names and locations, starting with Paradise.” Seven hundred years later, the conventional wisdom hadn’t changed. “The learned conclude,” the English chronicler Ranulf Higden declared, “that the Earthly Paradise is located in the farthest east”…

Starting in the eighth century or so, it seems, medieval Christians began putting paradise on their maps: a tiny walled garden here; four converging rivers there; a cute little Adam and Eve in the nude confronting a serpent. The illustrations—and the audacious idea of putting paradise on a map at all—suggest a fetchingly naive world view. But, as Scafi takes pains to point out in both books, geographical precision wasn’t the goal of most medieval cartography. Instead it involved something much richer and stranger: an attempt to project the full narrative of Christian history onto a geographical backdrop. That’s why paradise had to be on the map. It was the place on Earth where both time and space began. Farthest east, in other words, lay at the temporal and geographical edge of things, where the known abutted the unknown and the unknowable.

Read the rest here.

Glenn Dynner in OUP blog:

So much of East European Jewish history is viewed through the lens of antisemitism and violence. But there is a reason that the Jews of Eastern Europe (mainly in the vast Polish-Lithuanian areas annexed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria at the end of the 18th century) formed three-fourths of the world’s entire Jewish population. Jews inhabited crucial economic niches, especially the nobility-dominated liquor trade, as this image by the Polish artist Gustaw Pillati shows.

The Jewish-run tavern became the center of local Christians’ leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. Luckily for Jews, the nobles who owned the taverns believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably. However, reformers and government officials blamed Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, as the following image by Grabowski illustrates, and sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade.

Read the rest here.