Felipe Fernández-Armesto at Literary Review:

In the course of his investigation Finkel sheds much light on philological and literary problems of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but one revelation dwarfs all others: in the earliest surviving description, the ark was round. The text is unambiguous on this point and includes detailed instructions for building a giant coracle out of more than 300 kilometres of coiled palm fibres, strengthening the structure with wooden ribs and decking, and coating everything in a waterproof mixture of pitch and lard. Finkel's painstaking and lively investigation of coracle-weaving traditions on the Euphrates makes the concept intelligible. He also clears up a puzzle in the flood story that forms part of Gilgamesh, where the gods seem to ordain an obviously unwieldy square ark; a round shape, like a square, is as broad as it is long and really the Gilgamesh scribe intended a circle (or was perhaps himself deceived into squaring it). With a vivid eye for what life was like in the Euphrates valley 4,000 years and more ago, Finkel argues – riskily but plausibly – that his tablet represents a fragment from the script or record of a dramatised version of the story for court performance, and that the arithmetical precision of the calculations involved in determining the ark's dimensions and assembling the materials for its construction derives from ancient Mesopotamian schoolroom exercises. There are other remarkable scholarly insights to admire. Finkel argues convincingly that the British Museum's famous Babylonian world map contains an allusion to the resting place of the ark. His image of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king from 704 to 681 BC, engaged in the first hunt for relics of the foundered vessel is brilliant.

more here.

Moira Donegan at n+1:

In Washington Square, his 1880 novella, Henry James goes out of his way to tell us that Catherine Sloper is a little bit fat. The shy daughter of a well-off New York City physician, Catherine spends much of her free time embroidering, and when she has pocket money she uses it to buy sweets, which she eats alone. In The Heiress, William Wyler’s 1949 adaptation, the scope of her pleasures is just as narrow. When the film opens, Catherine, played by Olivia de Havilland, is a grown woman of 21, living in her father’s comfortable house in the company of a silly, giggling aunt. She is unmarried, and poised to inherit a lot of money when her widowed father eventually dies.

But for all her wealth and education, Catherine has not inherited any of the self-assured equanimity of the rich. Her father is openly disappointed in her, and it’s not hard to see why. Catherine is unsociable and childishly timid; she seems fearful, and unfit to cope with even the minor daily violences of adult life. In one early scene, she sheepishly asks a fishmonger to remove the head of a large cod, and averts her eyes as he chops it off with a thudding meat cleaver. When she is dragged to a party, the man she dances with offers to go get her a glass of wine, and never returns. Catherine waits on a bench for him for the length of a waltz, her eyes nervously scanning the crowd. One of the first statements that The Heiress makes about gender is that women are easier to taxonomize than men.

more here.

James Santel in The Hudson Review:

In 2000, Rolling Stone sent David Foster Wallace to report on John McCain’s presidential campaign. The resulting essay operates on a simple premise: that to just about anyone who came of age in what Wallace calls the “post-Watergate-post-Iran-Contra-post-Whitewater-post-Lewinsky era,” American politics is a kabuki of tired rhetoric and hollow promises. It is, Wallace writes, “an era in which politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability,” one of the consequences being that young voters between 18 and 35 were voting in lower numbers than ever (of course, that would change in 2008). As if that weren’t enough, Wallace points out (following Joan Didion’s “Insider Baseball,” her classic essay on the 1988 national conventions) that it’s in the interest of the powers that be to preserve this status quo of indifference and cynicism, a task that proves easier than one might think, because politics is “complex, abstract, dry, the province of policy wonks and Rush Limbaugh and nerdy little guys on PBS, and basically who cares.” In other words: at the root of America’s political malaise lies a short attention span.

This is a central theme of The Pale King, the novel about IRS agents Wallace was working on at the time of his suicide in 2008. Part of the unfinished novel’s plot concerns an intra-agency struggle between old-guard employees who see their work as a public service and newcomers who are interested in maximizing revenue. The novel thus allegorizes the ascendancy of privatization and self-interest at the expense of the commonweal.

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

An ancient Norse code which has been puzzling experts for years has been cracked by a Norwegian runologist – to discover the Viking equivalent of playful text messages.

The mysterious jötunvillur code, which dates to 12th or 13th-century Scandinavia, has been unravelled by K Jonas Nordby from the University of Oslo, after he studied a 13th-century stick on which two men, Sigurd and Lavrans, had carved their name in both code and in standard runes. The jötunvillur code is found on only nine inscriptions, from different parts of Scandinavia, and has never been interpreted before.

“The thing that solved it for me was seeing these two old Norse names, Sigurd and Lavrans, and after each of them was this combination of runes which made no sense,” said Nordby, who is writing his doctorate on cryptography in runic inscriptions from the Viking Age and the Scandinavian Middle Ages. He then realised, he continued, that in jötunvillur, the rune sign is swapped for the last sound in the rune's name, so for example the “m” rune, maðr, would be written as the rune for “r”.

“I thought 'wow, this is the system, this is the solution, now we can read this text,” said Nordby. But the code turned out to be extremely confusing, because many runes end in the same sound, “so you have to decide which one to choose”.

More here.

From The Week:

Sunday Times columnist AA Gill has won the Hatchet Job of the Year award, presented by The Omnivore website for his scathing review of Morrissey's autobiography.

“It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability,” Gill wrote in his 1,200 word demolition of Morrissey's work, published in October last year. “It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness.”

Gill was also scathing about Morrissey's insistence that the book be released as a Penguin Classic. “Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn't diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.”

The review was hailed as an “expert caning” by a panel of judges including Rosie Boycott, Brian Sewell and John Sutherland.

“The 30 reviewers on the long list were easily reduced to eight, and then, as we knocked them off the list from bottom to the top, the winner emerged without argument,” said Sewell.

More here.

Brendan Borrell in Nature:

Scientists have a crystal ball on their hands: bursts of activity in the energy-producing mitochondria in a worm’s cells accurately predict how long it will live. The findings, published today in Nature¹, suggest that an organism’s lifespan is, for the most part, predictable in early adulthood. Unlike other biomarkers for ageing, which work under limited conditions, these mitochondrial bursts are a stable predictor for a variety of genetic, environmental and developmental histories. “Mitochondrial flashes have an amazing power to predict the remaining lifespan in animals,” says study lead Meng-Qiu Dong, a geneticist who studies ageing in the Caenorhabditis elegans worm at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. “There is truth in the mitochondrial theory of ageing.”

The mitochondria are organelles that power the cells of plants, animals and other eukaryotic organisms. During energy production, they produce reactive oxygen molecules, such as free radicals, that can cause stress and damage the mitochondria. Although mitochondria break down over time, the mitochondrial theory of ageing, first proposed² in 1972, remains controversial and unproven. For instance, some long-lived organisms, such as naked mole rats, endure with high levels of oxidative damage. Nevertheless, many scientists think that mitochondria remain the primary drivers of ageing.

More here.

Jared McCallister in Daily News:

“The Black Power Mixtape: 1967–1975,” a new book by Sweden-born filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson and based on his 2011 documentary, looks at the Black Power Movement in America through archival information, color photographs, and historical speeches and interviews with Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Emile de Antonio, and Angela Davis. There is also new commentary in the book from Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, John Forte, and Questlove, in addition to a preface by actor/activist Danny Glover. “We have much to learn from these visionary organizers who sought to redefine and re-imagine democracy, whose sense of empowerment derived from the belief that the people could be the architects for change,” wrote Glover in the preface. The documentary was shot by Swedish journalists chronicling the Black Power Movement in the U.S., and edited by Olsson. In a review of the film, which screened in theaters and aired in PBS’ Independent Lens series, the Hollywood Reporter said, “If one of the roles of documentaries is to record and preserve history, The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 admirably performs its duty. Assembled from extraordinary footage uncovered in the Swedish Television archives and augmented by contemporary audio interviews, the film presents a powerful reminder of the black power movement, often neglected, misrepresented or forgotten in this country. This is a film that should be seen by anyone who wants to learn where we’ve come from as a nation. The Black Power Mixtape is not a static, talking heads record of the past.”

Picture: The art work “Malcolm Little “is a creation of Warren Lyons.

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

Rhys Southan in Modern Farmer:

I have no farming background. I was born and raised in the suburbs, and I spent more time in a shopping mall playing video games and eating fast food than I did outside. “Animals” meant cats and dogs. Of course I knew the McDonalds hamburger I ate came from a cow, but that cow had no real existence for me. It wasn’t until I started farming that livestock animals became real and individuated. And that’s when my ethical struggle began.

I pursued a PhD in political philosophy for a number of years. I focused on postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophies, and this and identity, power and symbolization are very much at the root of my ethical crises.

Watching the pigs shows me over and over again, in countless and sometimes very subtle ways, that there is much more to the life experiences of animals than most of us know or are willing to believe.

One morning, I woke up absolutely certain that killing animals to eat their meat was wrong. So it might seem like I’ve sided with animal-rights advocates, but the long view that I’m taking on this makes my position more complicated than that. My feelings about the ethics of livestock farming ebb and flow. I have no plans to stop eating meat or raising animals for slaughter. But I believe that we as a species need to evolve into the sorts of beings that do not kill to eat. For now, I justify non-industrial farming as a necessary compromise that will gradually shift how we think about using animals as food.

More here. [Thanks to John Ballard.]

Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal:

When I first picked up “The Hindus” — a tome seemingly rich with scholarship and, at 780 hardbound pages, as hefty as the legendary demon Kumbhakarna — I was struck most of all by the author's name on its cover: Wendy Doniger. A mist of apprehension spritzed my Hindu soul. Could this lady (a professor at the University of Chicago) be the same Wendy Doniger who wrote last year — in one of the more batty commentaries in an election season replete with unhinged scrivenings — that Sarah Palin's “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman”? If so, could this author really be trusted with a history of my people, the Hindus?

I should report that it is the same Wendy Doniger. But in the book in question, Ms. Doniger has eschewed the pamphleteering arts — perhaps because there is no trace of the Palin tribe in any Sanskrit yarn. She has, instead, concentrated her prodigious learning on making modern sense of the texts and tales of Hindu society, as well as of the rituals and symbols of the Hindu people.

Let us be clear: Ms. Doniger's book is not a history of Hinduism, still less an attempt to render the religion comprehensible to all. It is not a work of theology either but a loosely chronological cultural history of “the Hindus.” She begins, naturally, with an examination of their origins in the Indus Valley (now, ironically, in Pakistan) and is particularly illuminating on the relationship between humans, animals and gods in the “Rig Veda,” the most ancient Hindu sacred text, from 1,500 B.C. In keeping with her promise to deliver an “alternative history,” she pays as much attention to the role in ancient Hindu texts accorded to women, pariahs, ogres and the like — the beings on the margin, as it were — as she does to Brahmin and Kshatriya (warrior) males, the more conventional power-players in the Hindu tableau vivant.

More here.

Sasha Archibald at Cabinet:

Cinema tends to make beautiful people look more beautiful, but it wasn’t always so. In its earliest days, film had an adversarial relationship to beauty, exaggerating the tonal and textural variations of the human face so that even the most stunning heroine became a blotchy caricature. Early black-and-white film stocks—first, orthochromatic film, dominant until 1927, and to a lesser degree its successor, panchromatic film—rendered dark colors darker and light colors lighter, turning features that seemed innocuous off camera (rouged cheeks, a constellation of moles) into distracting blemishes when seen on the screen. Pimples and freckles looked like spots of mud and blue eyes seemed colorless; lipstick made the mouth a cavernous hole and a complexion with sallow or pink undertones appeared, in the term of the time, “negroid.” Techniques borrowed from the stage also proved problematic: face paint used to suggest wrinkles to a theater audience, for example, read as tattoos on film. Cinematic makeup, then, was not born from vanity—it was a necessary antidote to the flawed medium of film.

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

To celebrate the opening of the Sochi Olympics, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, is staging “The Russian Avant-Garde and Sport”, an exhibition that shows just how close beneath the skin of sport politics has always been in Russia. It is a largely photographic show, because most Soviet artists regarded the camera as a truer implement of the machine age than paint and canvas. This was particularly true of Rodchenko, whose monochrome triptych in 1921 – squares of red, blue and yellow – represented, he thought, the end-point of painting: “It’s all over,” he said.

Having a camera in his hand did not, however, change his aesthetic. If, as a painter, his art involved the careful placing of geometrical shapes in space, then he looked for the same things through the viewfinder. Sport, with its bodily distortions and rapid spatial changes, provided the perfect subjects. He took his pictures from unusual angles and made a diver in mid-air, an athlete spinning off the high bar or a runner crossing the track’s grid of lanes into unfamiliar shapes in a void rather than recognisable bodies in motion. Rodchenko believed that art should be a part of everyday life but that didn’t mean he wanted it necessarily to resemble everyday life. His innovations have become sporting photography’s commonplaces.

more here.

Volodymyr Yermolenko at Eurozine:

There is the Europe that presents a more or less emotionless face of rules and regulations. This Europe ends somewhere along the frontier between Germany and Poland. A kind of Euro-protestantism prevails: it has lost faith in European civilization but preserved its sense of morality. The European idea has been transformed into a set of rules and a collection of institutional procedures. Where there is no faith, rules become paramount.

The other Europe is spontaneous and emotional, the Europe of faith. This is Young Europe, comprising in the main the countries of the former socialist bloc. For the people living in these countries, Europe is still a vision, an ideal, utopia. They believe in Europe but often ignore its rules. For them Europe is a kind of mystical ecstasy in which they can forget about legal codes. In the face of Euro-catholicism and Euro-orthodoxy, they are filled with faith and ready to die for Europe, but not always ready to live for it. For them rules are too trivial for them to be concerned with.

Us Ukranians, we are that other Europe.

more here.

Phone Survey

We're doing a phone survey, asking
average people like yourself, attractive, cynical, smart, etc.,
people who cook with garlic, who, if married,
it's not the first time. People who have had
two or more jobs in the last three years.
We want to know what your preferred response is
when you hear,
if in fact you do hear,
the voices. Shall I clarify?
Voices that converse
on the great unhappiness and failure
that is yours. How often
would you swear you're not drunk, no,
but the trees are swaying. We're calling to ask
if you ever get confused and mistake
the swaying of trees for the lapping of water,
until you can't get your bearing. Is that when
the voices advise you, smooth
as a nail going in? Are there certain words that,
can I say, sneak in from behind, know all
the back entrances? Would you agree
the secret of their strength
is that they will not let you give in
to your hunger? How often
all you've said and all you've done, torn
like meat from a bone. Is that when you go out, walk
past lighted windows? Go to a movie? Have a coke?
Or do you hang around, drift off
till the voices wake you with a jolt or slap: “Payback time.”
Like a street person in front of a diner, begging for change,
who will not let you go in and get your lousy cup of coffee
though the sign on the diner flashes: OPEN ALL NIGHT.
Are the voices familiar with, say,
streets you walked as a kid,
torn signs, dead trees?
We're asking if the voices, now or in the past,
have ever told you that you have to go back
to the path by the precipice. Because that is your path.
Would you mind answering? Or am I interrupting something?
Shall I call back later? What time would be best?
.

by Carole Glasser Langille
from Late In A Slow Time
Mansfield Press, 2003.

Genevieve Fussell in The New Yorker:

In “White Mischief,” in this week’s issue of the magazine, Kelefa Sanneh writes about Carl Van Vechten, a “New York hipster and literary gadabout” who was an unlikely champion of the African-American experience as it unfolded on the streets of Harlem in the nineteen-twenties. Van Vechten, a white man from the Midwest, arrived in New York in 1906 and took a job as a music and dance critic for the Times. He was quickly drawn to the night clubs of Harlem, and became, in his own words, “violently interested in Negroes.” Sanneh explains how Van Vechten eventually considered himself not only a supporter of the Harlem Renaissance but a vital part of it. He and his second wife, the actress Fania Marinoff, hosted integrated parties at their apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street; he also developed close friendships with black artists like Langston Hughes, who, Sanneh writes, was “widely perceived as Van Vechten’s protégé.”

Although Van Vechten made his name as a writer, he began to explore photography in the early nineteen-thirties, shooting black-and-white portraits of people like Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, and Georgia O’Keeffe. In 1939, Van Vechten switched to color film, after discovering the vibrancy of Kodachrome. He started photographing luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, many of them his friends, posing his subjects against colorful swaths of silk and velvet or brightly patterned tapestries. Van Vechten’s photographic project, which lasted a quarter of a century, represents a rich and lasting record of one man’s interest in a culture that he believed represented the “essence of America.”

Picture: James Baldwin, 1955.

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

Ray Kurzweil in KurzweilAI:

Her, written, directed and produced by Spike Jonze, presents a nuanced love story between a man and his operating system. Although there are caveats I could (and will) mention about the details of the OS and how the lovers interact, the movie compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can — will — be believably human and lovable. This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way that The Matrix presented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality. Jonze started his feature-motion-picture career directing Being John Malkovich, which also presents a realistic vision of a future technology — one that is now close at hand: being able to experience reality through the eyes and ears of someone else. With emerging eye-mounted displays that project images onto the wearer’s retinas and also look out at the world, we will indeed soon be able to do exactly that. When we send nanobots into the brain — a circa-2030s scenario by my timeline — we will be able to do this with all of the senses, and even intercept other people’s emotional responses.

As a movie, I thought Her was very successful, with a well-crafted script, excellent directing, and outstanding performances by Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the lonely, needy and nerdy protagonist Theodore, and Scarlett Johansson, who provides the sultry and seductive voice for Samantha, the OS. As a couple, Theodore and Samantha have their differences, which, as with many romantic stories, provide a dramatic tension. The most significant difference is that he has a body and she does not. Their relationship is seen as real by some observers (for example, by Amy, another love interest of Theodore’s, played by Amy Adams), and as unreal by other observers (for example, by Theodore’s alienated and ultimately ex-wife, Catherine).

More here.

Gary Taubes in the New York Times:

Nearly six weeks into the 2014 diet season, it’s a good bet that many of us who made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight have already peaked. If clinical trials are any indication, we’ve lost much of the weight we can expect to lose. In a year or two we’ll be back within half a dozen pounds of where we are today.

The question is why. Is this a failure of willpower or of technique? Was our chosen dietary intervention — whether from the latest best-selling diet book or merely a concerted attempt to eat less and exercise more — doomed to failure? Considering that obesity and its related diseases — most notably, Type 2 diabetes — now cost the health care system more than $1 billion per day, it’s not hyperbolic to suggest that the health of the nation may depend on which is the correct answer.

Since the 1960s, nutrition science has been dominated by two conflicting observations. One is that we know how to eat healthy and maintain a healthy weight. The other is that the rapidly increasing rates of obesity and diabetes suggest that something about the conventional thinking is simply wrong.

More here. [Thanks to Syed Tasnim Raza.]

Alvin Plantinga makes the case to Gary Gutting in The NYT's The Stone (image from Wikimedia Commons):

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

A.P.: Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.

G.G.: But isn’t there also plenty of evidence against theism — above all, the amount of evil in a world allegedly made by an all-good, all-powerful God?

A.P.: The so-called “problem of evil” would presumably be the strongest (and maybe the only) evidence against theism. It does indeed have some strength; it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low. But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

In Tom Stoppard’s 1970 play “Jumpers,” the philosopher hero broods unhappily on the inexorable rise of the atheist: “The tide is running his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history. . . . There is presumably a calendar date—a moment—when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” Well, when was that date—when did the noes have it? In 1890? In 1918, after the Great War? In 1966, when Time shocked its readers with a cover that asked whether God was dead? For that matter, do the noes have it? In most of the world, the ayes seem to be doing just fine. Even in secularized Manhattan, the Christmas Eve midnight Mass is packed tight with parishioners, and the few who came for the music are given dirty looks as they sheepishly back out after the Vivaldi.

The most generous poll never seems to find more than thirty per cent of Americans saying they are “not religious or not very religious,” though the numbers get up to around fifty per cent in Europe. But something has altered in the course of a century or so. John Stuart Mill said in the early nineteenth century that he was the only youth he knew who was raised as a skeptic; by the end of his life, skeptics were all around him. Yet, though the nineteenth-century novel is roiled by doubt, there isn’t one in which the doubters quite dominate. Whatever change has occurred isn’t always well captured by counting hands. At a minimum, more people can say they don’t think there is a God, and suffer less for saying so, than has been the case since the fall of Rome. The noes have certainly captured some constituency, obtained some place. What, exactly, do they have?

More here.