From Blackpast.org:

On Sunday, September 9th, 1739 the British colony of South Carolina was shaken by a slave uprising that culminated with the death of sixty people. Led by an Angolan named Jemmy, a band of twenty slaves organized a rebellion on the banks of the Stono River. After breaking into Hutchinson’s store the band, now armed with guns, called for their liberty. As they marched, overseers were killed and reluctant slaves were forced to join the company. The band reached the Edisto River where white colonists descended upon them, killing most of the rebels. The survivors were sold off to the West Indies. The immediate factors that sparked the uprising remain in doubt. A malaria epidemic in Charlestown, which caused general confusion throughout Carolina, may have influenced the timing of the Rebellion. The recent (August 1739) passage of the Security Act by the South Carolina Colonial Assembly may also have played a role. The act required all white men to carry firearms to church on Sunday. Thus the enslaved leaders of the rebellion knew their best chance for success would be during the time of the church services when armed white males were away from the plantations.

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

As You Like It, Act I, Scene VII

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare

Justins Evans in The Point:

I sometimes get more pleasure from learning a thing’s name than from learning about the thing itself. When, a few years ago, my then girlfriend offered me a potato pancake, I wasn’t impressed, even though she told me about the history behind it. When she called it a latke, on the other hand, I was thrilled. The same thing happened when I found, in my college’s listings, the course title “Literature and Phenomenology.” I had no idea what the latter was, but—phenomenology—it had to be fascinating. This effect is heightened when it comes to the particularly useless or obscure. Take the jargon of rhetoric: anacoluthon, antanaclasis, asyndeton. Soraismus. Lovely. Now, I’m not praising myself. People like me are a less enthusiastic, less entertaining—“Did you say I’m self-righteous? I think you mean comminatory”—version of that guy who makes six to ten puns per day. Such close attention to the sound of language can come at the expense of attention to its meaning. I’m not proud of my tendency to ignore this fact.

I went to college in the late Nineties, which made the problem worse; back then new ideas could be expressed only in new and fun-sounding words or phrases (Rhizome. Ideological sublime). I hadn’t learned to write in the margins of my books, so if you flick through my copy of, say, The Foucault Reader, I won’t be embarrassed by over-enthusiastic exclamation marks or all-caps scribblings of yes! But I know what caught my ear because I marked passages in pen, sometimes quite insistently. And my love of big, complicated sounds (Captatio benevolentiae!) must have led to a love of big, complicated ideas; I obviously enjoyed the sound of “polymorphous techniques of power,” and at some point may even have come to understand what it meant.

More here.

Douglas Main in Popular Science:

Remove all the pieces from a chess board except for one knight. Then try to move the knight across all 64 squares of the board, touching each once. (As a reminder, knights move in a L-shape, two spaces in one direction, and then one space left or right, or up or down, at a 90- degree angle.) This so-called “knight's tour” is very difficult to achieve for a single person, but mathematicians have calculated that there are a mind-boggling number of ways to pull it off. If you end up at the spot you started, you'd be completing a so-called “closed tour.” There aremore than 26 trillion ways to do this. If you merely touch every spot, without returning to your point of origin, it's called an open tour. The number of ways to do this is so large that scientists haven't calculated it.

Searching for new solutions to the knight's tour, a problem that has intrigued mathematicians for centuries, University of Nottingham computer scientist Graham Kendall and a colleague turned to simulated ants. They used the ant colony optimization algorithm, a swarm intelligence technique based on the behavior of ants looking to find a path between their colony and a food source. It works like this, as Kendall explains at The Conversation:

A computer program is used to simulate a population of ants. These ants are assigned the task to find a solution to a problem. As each ant goes about their task they lay a pheromone trail – a smelly substance that ants use to communicate with each other. In the simulated algorithm, the most successful ants (the ones that solve the problem better), lay more pheromone than those that perform poorly.

This program is repeated hundreds of thousands of times, placing more “pheromones” on paths that complete a tour. But a balance must be struck between reinforcing paths that work, and emphasizing finding new trails.

Using the program, Kendall and his colleague found nearly 500,000 novel solutions to the knight's tour. Who knew that (simulated) ants could find new answers to a question that has intrigued peope for centuries?

More here.

Jennifer Schuessler in The NYT:

Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely divided an afterlife as Robert Frost.

Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage, beloved by a public raised on poems of his like “Birches” and “The Road Not Taken.” But that image soon became shadowed by a darker one, stemming from a three-volume biography by his handpicked chronicler, Lawrance Thompson, who emerged from decades of assiduous note-taking with a portrait of the poet as a cruel, jealous megalomaniac — “a monster of egotism” who left behind “a wake of destroyed human lives,” as the critic Helen Vendler memorably put it on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in 1970.

Ever since, more sympathetic scholars have tried, with limited success, to counter Mr. Thompson’s portrait, which was echoed most recently in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Harper’s Magazine last fall, depicting Frost as repellent old man angrily rebutting a female interviewer’s charges of arrogance, racism and psychological brutality to his children.

But now, a new scholarly work may put an end to the “monster myth,” as Frost scholars call it, once and for all. Later this month, Harvard University Press will begin publishing “The Letters of Robert Frost,” a projected four-volume edition of all the poet’s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date.

More here.

Jonathan Haidt in This View of Life:

Reason has long been worshipped by philosophers and intellectuals. In Plato’s dialogue Timaeus, the gods created humankind with a soul of perfect rationality and inserted it into our spherical heads, which were “the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us.” (The Gods then realized that they had to create necks, to keep reason insulated from the seething passions of the rest of the body.) During the “age of reason,” the French revolutionaries pulled the Christs and crucifixes out of the cathedrals and replaced them with images of reason. And in our own time, the New Atheists have written books and started foundations urging people to fight religion with reason.

The New Atheist Sam Harris has even gone so far as to argue, in his book The Moral Landscape, that reason and science can tell us what is right and wrong. Morality is—in his definition—limited to questions about “the well-being of conscious creatures.” Well-being can be measured objectively, he says, by methods such as fMRI scans. Therefore, whatever practices, customs, and ways of living maximize those measurements are morally correct; others are morally wrong. He does not say that there is a single best society (hence the image of a landscape, with multiple peaks). But he claims that moral values are facts, no different from the kinds of facts discovered by chemists. Scientific methods give correct answer to questions in chemistry, and they can therefore do so for morality as well. Harris’s confidence in his reasoned argument is so strong that he has issued The Moral Landscape Challenge: He will personally pay $10,000 to anyone who submits an essay so logically compelling that it makes him change his mind and renounce his views.

More here.

Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic:

If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s? If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of “personalized genres” need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe? This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created.

Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies. There are so many that just loading, copying, and pasting all of them took the little script I wrote more than 20 hours. We've now spent several weeks understanding, analyzing, and reverse-engineering how Netflix's vocabulary and grammar work. We've broken down its most popular descriptions, and counted its most popular actors and directors. To my (and Netflix's) knowledge, no one outside the company has ever assembled this data before. What emerged from the work is this conclusion: Netflix has meticulously analyzed and tagged every movie and TV show imaginable. They possess a stockpile of data about Hollywood entertainment that is absolutely unprecedented. The genres that I scraped and that we caricature above are just the surface manifestation of this deeper database.

More here.

Qiunn Slobodian and Michelle Sterling at The Baffler:

Enter the hipster. In the aughts, Berlin’s package deal of pilsner, falafel, Airbnb, and bleary nights at the famed Berghain (described by one in-flight magazine as “the best club in the world”) was a big success. The number of nights that tourists spent in the city doubled between 2003 and 2011—from eleven to twenty-two million. Beginning around the contested Bush victory of 2000, and accelerating after the recession of 2008, the face of the typical visitor to Berlin changed: from German to non-German, from the oversize sweaters of the academics to the zigzag haircuts and fluorescent sweatshirts of the artists or, at least, the arty. As rents peaked in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Vancouver, Melbourne, Copenhagen, and London, Berlin beckoned. Streams of young people with postsecondary degrees in literature, art, and theory arrived in the city seeking rooms in shared apartments. Craigslist became a clearinghouse for stolen cruiser bikes and homogeneous Ikea-furnished rooms where savvy landlords added one hundred euros to their usual asking price and promised proximity to the “current hipster district Berlin-Neukölln, with lots of bars, galleries, international artists.”

more here.

Simon Reynolds at Bookforum:

Following Wilde and the dandy tradition, Morrissey’s ideal is the hard-edged personality, standing out and apart from the mediocre mass. There is a war being waged, between the bored and the boring. As Morrissey puts it: “the monotonous in life must be protected at all costs. But protected from what? From you and I.” The dandy self is both a monstrous eruption of sheer freakish difference, innately against nature and against the grain, and also a persona that’s been zealously cultivated and shaped to goad the small minded.

Growing up in a dilapidated working-class neighborhood of Manchester during the ’60s and ’70s, Morrissey fashioned himself out of fragments of poets (Stevie Smith, Auden, Housman), dramatists (Shelagh Delaney), and actors (James Dean). He was also fascinated by certain characters in forgotten TV shows and movies: the highly strung, waspishly witty Dr. Zachary Smith in Lost in Space; the stylish spy Jason King; Mr. Cringle, from the obscure British comedy I’m a Stranger, who deploys his “weapon of words” against the dowdy dullards surrounding him. Morrissey gleaned other important clues, including Warholism, from Films and Filming, a covertly gay magazine that passed as a cineast periodical.

Most of all, though, Morrissey learned from pop stars. Glam rock gripped his imagination through its combination of effeminacy and toughness.

more here.

Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker:

Frost’s stone walls, old barns, cellar holes, birches, and brooks—the sedimentary, second-growth New England that, before Frost, had awaited its bard—imply a writer who cared, like Thoreau, only to be “admitted to Nature’s hearth.” But, wherever he went, Frost schemed to buy land or a house or a farm. Frost is sometimes still associated with the old-fashioned comforts of home, but in reality he was frequently on the move, spending, and often squandering, whatever investments of the heart and the wallet he had lately made. Those cozy houses and picturesque farms that litter the countryside make a trail of places Frost fled. Emerson, whose work he always kept nearby, suggests the fitting motto: “Everything good is on the highway.” And yet Frost never really lit out for the territories; instead, he moved among carbon-copy small farms with mountain views, and smart Victorians on the fringes of campuses, where, having escaped the “academic ways” he always said he loathed, he could return day after day.

Throughout his life, Frost moved into things so he could move out. He does this in language, too, veering toward certainties in order to evade them. He knew, like his “Oven Bird,” how “in singing not to sing.” Frost can be trying company, but he is company: no modern poet draws us so close, though what he does to us at close range is often impolite.

more here.

Tanner Colby in Slate:

The Rich Earth Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont, aims to shift how we think about our own waste. They want to “close the nutrient cycle” by using our urine to grow what we next consume.

Samantha Larson in National Geographic:

Today, most human waste in the U.S. flows down the pipes to a facility such as DC Water's Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest facility of its kind in the world. Blue Plains receives an average of 370 million gallons of wastewater, 94 percent of which is from residential sources in the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia. This includes what washes down the kitchen drain, fills up washing machines, and flushes down toilets.

Once at Blue Plains, it all goes through a multistage process in which it is passed from pool to pool of various hues of reddish brown, where the liquid is stirred, bubbled, fed to algae, and filtered until it is clean enough to get dumped back into the Potomac River.

Much of what this process is doing is removing nitrogen and phosphorous, elements that can be pollutants when too much of them get into our rivers and oceans. But they are also essential nutrients for plant growth—and thus, two of the basic components of fertilizer.

Most conventional farms invest in synthetic fertilizer, which requires energy to produce and is associated with many environmental problems of its own. But by separating out human urine before it gets to the wastewater plant, Rich Earth cofounder Kim Nace says they can turn it into a robust fertilizer alternative: a “local, accessible, free, sanitary source of nitrogen and phosphorous.”

More here.

If we do not mass produce products, we vie with one another
in the difficult, exquisite and useless art of dressing fleas
……………………………………………….—Octavio Paz

Dressing Fleas

Mr and Mrs Flea are dressed up
and ready for the celebrations.
He sports a neatly tailored waistcoat,
she silver-bordered asymmetric skirts.

They are the talk and toast of the party.

Sad to say, however,
a budding fashionista in the audience
catches sight of their duds,
and next year on the catwalks of Milan and London
the look is brazenly passed off
as the signature of the couture line
at the brand new House of Insect,
which in due course signs a cracking deal
with a high street shop.

I don’t need to say the Fleas never see a penny,
and neither does their tailor,
who, five months out of the punishing year,
wrecks his eyes
and racks sleep-heavy brains
in the decking out of his favourite customers.

Though for him it was never about the money –
the fleas, dearest, could hardly pay,
and the tailor is in any case not a tailor
but a farmer from the provinces
going about satisfaction in his own, yes,
his own unfathomable way
where the sun drops, faithless, to the littoral,
dead dark balling its fists against the light.

See him there, readied at the chipboard table.
He takes a swig of liquor.
See, dearest, how the inconsistent stars glitter and claw.
.

by Miriam Gamble
from Poetry Ireland Review, Number 104, August, 2011

Jonathan Hopkin in the Harvard Business Review:

The US has long had higher inequality than other advanced democracies, although many Americans see this as part and parcel of the “American Dream” of rising living standards and social mobility.

But recent research by Harvard University’s Equality of Opportunity Project has opened up a new front in this debate. The authors establish that social mobility between generations has in fact remained quite stable in America over recent decades, by calculating the likelihood of an individual’s rank in the economic pecking order corresponding to their parents’. This means that “children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s.” For some commentators these findings refute the connection between inequality and mobility that President Obama and liberal economists have been invoking, and others even go so far as to claim it proves the uselessness of a variety of social interventions to promote mobility, such as college grants for minorities.

So what exactly does this study show, and how reliable is it? It depends on how you define “mobility.” If you think it is about relative positions in a stratified society, it has stayed roughly the same. But if you think it is about relative incomes, it has gotten worse. A married couple where each partner earned $60,000 a year would make it into the top quintile, not exactly the stuff of riches, given America’s high cost of living. But that is still considerably higher than the bottom of the spectrum, where the top of the lowest quintile caps out at a household income of about $27,000 a year.

And the Harvard researchers are quick to underline that although they find that mobility has remained stable, the rise in inequality over the last 40 years means that the consequences of immobility are far more serious than in the past.

More here.

Nouriel Roubini in Project Syndicate:

The financial turmoil that hit emerging-market economies last spring, following the US Federal Reserve’s “taper tantrum” over its quantitative-easing (QE) policy, has returned with a vengeance. This time, the trigger was a confluence of several events: a currency crisis in Argentina, where the authorities stopped intervening in the forex markets to prevent the loss of foreign reserves; weaker economic data from China; and persistent political uncertainty and unrest in Turkey, Ukraine, and Thailand.

This mini perfect storm in emerging markets was soon transmitted, via international investors’ risk aversion, to advanced economies’ stock markets. But the immediate trigger for these pressures should not be confused with their deeper causes: Many emerging markets are in real trouble.

The list includes India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa – dubbed the “Fragile Five,” because all have twin fiscal and current-account deficits, falling growth rates, above-target inflation, and political uncertainty from upcoming legislative and/or presidential elections this year. But five other significant countries – Argentina, Venezuela, Ukraine, Hungary, and Thailand – are also vulnerable. Political and/or electoral risk can be found in all of them, loose fiscal policy in many of them, and rising external imbalances and sovereign risk in some of them.

Then, there are the over-hyped BRICS countries, now falling back to reality. Three of them (Brazil, Russia, and South Africa) will grow more slowly than the United States this year, with real (inflation-adjusted) GDP rising at less than 2.5%, while the economies of the other two (China and India) are slowing sharply. Indeed, Brazil, India, and South Africa are members of the Fragile Five, and demographic decline in China and Russia will undermine both countries’ potential growth.

More here.

Katie Cella in the Boston Review:

Aziza keeps all the files in her bedroom: expired passports, citizenship applications, letters from neighbors testifying to how long her family had lived in Ras al Khaimah. “It’s all proof,” she says, “so that when you write about us, people will know it’s not from your own mind.”

Aziza’s file records her family’s attempts to become citizens of the United Arab Emirates. For fifty years they have been writing letters, filing paperwork, petitioning officials, trying to make the right connections—and still, most of her family does not have citizenship. The experience is not unique. There is a class of people, in the U.A.E. and throughout the Arabian Peninsula, who have no nationality. They are called bidoun—Arabic for “without.”

Most bidoun were nomads in the territory of the U.A.E. or immigrated to it before 1971, when the Emirates became a formal state with borders and citizenship laws. Many immigrants, especially those who came from the hinterlands of Iran and Pakistan, never had national documentation to begin with. Others destroyed their passports en route, believing they could become citizens of the Emirates only if they held no foreign citizenship.

Today more than 100,000 stateless people live in the U.A.E., according to Refugees International and the Emirates Centre for Human Rights. In an oil-rich country famous for giving its citizens everything, the bidoun are citizens of nowhere, with little hope of being naturalized.

More here.

Leslie Jamison at The Believer:

My job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. I get paid by the hour. Medical students guess my maladies. I’m called a Standardized Patient, which means I act toward the norms of my disorders. I’m standardized-lingo SP for short. I’m fluent in the symptoms of preeclampsia and asthma and appendicitis. I play a mom whose baby has blue lips.

Medical acting works like this: you get a script and a paper gown. You get $13.50 an hour. Our scripts are ten to twelve pages long. They outline what’s wrong with us—not just what hurts but how to express it. They tell us how much to give away, and when. We are supposed to unfurl the answers according to specific protocols. The scripts dig deep into our fictive lives: the ages of our children and the diseases of our parents, the names of our husbands’ real-estate and graphic-design firms, the amount of weight we’ve lost in the past year, the amount of alcohol we drink each week.

My specialty case is Stephanie Phillips, a twenty-three-year-old who suffers from something called conversion disorder.

more here.