Month: April 2014

Drowning in Light

Posted on by Robin Varghese

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Dirk Hanson in Nautilus:

In 1996, Yale economist William D. Nordhaus calculated that the average citizen of Babylon would have had to work a total of 41 hours to buy enough lamp oil to equal a 75-watt light bulb burning for one hour. At the time of the American Revolution, a colonial would have been able to purchase the same amount of light, in the form of candles, for about five hour’s worth of work. And by 1992, the average American, using compact fluorescents, could earn the same amount of light in less than one second. That sounds like a great deal.

Except for one thing: We treat light like a drug whose price is spiraling toward zero. In the words of sleep expert Charles A. Czeisler of Harvard Medical School, “every time we turn on a light, we are inadvertently taking a drug that affects how we will sleep and how we will be awake the next day.”1 Our daily metabolic cycles are not precisely 24 hours long, and this turns out to be a crucial evolutionary glitch in the mammalian circadian system. Circadian rhythms must be reset daily to keep us in behavioral synch with the earth’s rotation, so we will sleep when it is dark and wake when it is light. This process is called entrainment, and it is achieved by means of light exposure. In the brain, a region of the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus receives input from the retina, causing specialized “24-hour” cells to oscillate in specific patterns. This affects how we eat, sleep, and work. And in most people, the circadian response is intensity-dependent, meaning the greater the light, the greater the effect on the human circadian system.

To complicate matters, our relationship with light is profoundly psychological as well. In “Psychological processes influencing lighting quality,” published in Leukos, the Journal of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America in 2001, Jennifer A. Veitch analyzes the available scientific evidence concerning the manner in which lighting conditions affect mood and behavior in office settings. Veitch found that “preferences for illuminance levels are generally higher than the recommended levels.” Researchers in the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada have all documented the same tendency to “overlight” things.2 Veitch also references studies showing that “people with seasonal affective disorder or the milder, subsyndromal, form of this mood disorder consistently preferred higher room illuminance levels than matched, normal controls.”

More here.

Growing up in Kundera’s Central Europe

Posted on by Robin Varghese

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Jonathan Bousfield in Eurozine:

Thirty years ago, Czech novelist Milan Kundera dealt with cultural estrangement and its consequences in his celebrated essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” (first published in the French journal Débats in November 1983, then in the New York Review of Books the following April), sparking off a long-running debate about the fate of European cultures caught on the “wrong side” of the Cold War divide.

Kundera's essay initially made for pessimistic reading. Not only did it argue that Central Europe constituted a “kidnapped West” abducted by an alien, Byzantine-Bolshevik civilisation, but it also claimed that the rest of the continent was in too deep a state of decadence to be fully aware of what it had lost. What initially looked like a requiem, however, soon gained an altogether more optimistic sheen. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Kremlin, the Soviet Bloc showed signs of opening its windows and then the multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan Central Europe eulogised so evocatively by Kundera was quickly re-spun as a symbol of what Europe could be again, rather than what had forever been left behind.

Thirty years on, most of the countries in Kundera's Central Europe have been integrated into the European Union and NATO, and the very term “Central Europe” is no longer necessary, either as an anti-Soviet rallying cry or a badge of cultural belonging. However, the cultural concerns addressed by Kundera have not necessarily gone away simply because the context has changed. Europe is still sandwiched between two superpowers with differing worldviews, and small nations can still be the bearers of important truths.

More here.

climate change may not be the fault of rapacious humanity

Posted on by Azra Raza

Robert Colvile in The Telegraph:

Lovelock_2870245cAs the inventor of Gaia theory, James Lovelock is used to thinking big. Ever since he came up with the idea that the planet and its inhabitants form one vast, self-regulating system – initially scoffed at, but now taken seriously across a variety of disciplines – his focus has been wider than that of his more hidebound colleagues. In A Rough Ride to the Future, Lovelock outlines a new theory. He argues that since 1712, the year in which the Newcomen steam engine was created, we have moved into a new age, the Anthropocene, in which humanity’s ability to liberate energy and information from the Earth has rapidly outpaced both Darwinian evolution and the planet’s ability to cope.

What is refreshing about Lovelock’s approach to these issues is that it is blessedly free of dogma. He does not blame humanity for doing what comes naturally: exploiting the wonders available to it. And he is happy to outline the gaps in our understanding of climate science, not least the role of living beings in helping to regulate the system. This clarity extends to his conclusions. Ultimately, he suggests, climate change is down to ignorance, not negligence – but while we do not yet know its exact contours, the process is both extremely serious and probably unfixable. Unlike the situation with CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, a generation ago, there are too many actors – countries, companies and individual humans – that would need to be cudgelled into self-denial if the status quo were to be retained. Where he differs from the consensus, however, is in suggesting that this might not be such a bad thing. What we are seeing around us, Lovelock argues, may be the large-scale destruction of the planet’s ecosystem by rapacious humanity. But it may also be “no more than the constructive chaos that always attends the installation of a new infrastructure”. Humanity is already concentrating itself in bigger and bigger cities, so rather than trying to “save the Earth”, or restore some artificial version of a normal climate, why not live comfortable lives in clustered, air-conditioned mega-cities? This serves ants and termites perfectly well, he argues – as well as the inhabitants of Singapore.

More here.

Pieing for fun and profit

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Pietoface-1024x578Rex Weiner at The Paris Review:

Popular belief has it that the pie-in-the-face gag (a word derived from the Norse gagg, meaning “yelp”) originated in the silent-movie era. Performed by the slapstick director Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops, Fatty Arbuckle, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, and various imitators then and since, the stunt seems uniquely American. What better enforcer of the democratic dogma than a tossed pie? A gooey face is an instant social equalizer.

Of course, the self-important have always been targets for a takedown; even if pieing is a predominantly American phenomenon, the puncturing of pomposity is universal. I’m reminded of certain graffiti left behind in Egyptian tombs by workers who remarked on the pharaoh’s resemblance to the buttocks of an ox.

The French have a word for it, of course: lèse-majesté, “injured sovereignty,” an ancient crime from the Roman era, still on the books in such countries as Turkey and Thailand. Even in the Netherlands, a man was jailed in 2012 for calling Queen Beatrix a “con woman” and a “sinner,” and demanding abolishment of the monarchy. Royalty has always deserved, short of the guillotine, the pie.

more here.

WHEN YEARS ARE CELEBS

Posted on by Azra Raza

Simon Reid-Henry in More Intelligent Life:

InIn 1970 the great novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was putting the finishing touches to what he called “the chief artistic design of my life”. Its title, “August 1914”, was intended to convey to readers everything they needed to know about the content, even if they had never heard of the Battle of Tannenberg, the actual focus of the narrative, or read “The Guns of August”, the Pulitzer prize-winning account of the start of the first world war. This was the book with which Solzhenitsyn hoped finally to outdo his literary nemesis, Tolstoy, by blending history and fiction in a manner so “urgent…so hectic and choppy,” wrote his translator, Michael Glenny, that, “at times it almost leaves you breathless”. Alas, breathlessness can be tiresome over 6,000 pages, and “August 1914” never captured the public imagination. Yet Solzhenitsyn, the great inventor, was on to something. Today the market is in full bloom for what the writer Henry Grabar, tongue firmly in cheek, calls “annohistory”. The display tables are groaning with copies of Max Hastings’ “Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914”, Allan Mallinson’s “1914: Fight the Good Fight”, Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914” and Mark Bostridge’s “The Fateful Year: England 1914”. Any day now, something similar will happen with 1989.

What is it about some years that they come to hold such a prominent place in our culture, decades after their passing? Are some years really that much more important than others? Was what happened in them so dramatic that the dates themselves have become a rift that lifts up out of the earth, leaving all historical activity merely sloping away—“a drama never surpassed,” as Churchill once put it? What matters in history used to be a matter for the intellectual class to decide. For better and worse, those days are gone. Edinburgh University’s Tom Devine clearly thought he was criticising Britain’s education secretary, Michael Gove, when he said during a recent spat over the teaching of school history: “you cannot [just] pick out aspects of the past that may be pleasing to people”. But that is precisely what many history books do. And it is what readers do every time they walk into the history section of a bookshop.

More here.

Can a Single Book Sum Up a Nation?

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Rb_dirda_opt_85Michael Dirda at VQR:

Initially, the nineteenth-​century passion fordefining and creating “national” novels arose from what Buell dubs “cultural legitimation anxiety.” Early attempts at the GAN aimed to portray the distinctive character of the young United States, often celebrating Yankee virtues, such as drive and know-​how, but sometimes revealing how far the country had fallen away from the foundational ideals of liberty and equality. These days, of course, we have grown leery of “exceptionalist self-​imaginings” or grand unitary visions of our ethnically and culturally diverse society. According to critic Mark McGurl, the contemporary American writer often “ ‘disaffiliates from the empirical nation … in order to affiliate with a utopian sub-​nation, whether that be African-​ or Asian-​ or Mexican-​’ or Native.” Buell argues back, however, that American life has always been characterized by “the tension between synthesis and particularism.” Even the lack of glue, “the perceived (non)relation between fractious parts has itself been one of the drivers of GAN thinking from the start.”

Buell, as these quotations should make clear, has thought hard and carefully about his subject. He is, after all, a distinguished (if now emeritus) professor of American literature at Harvard, admired by some of the shrewdest scholars of our literature, including Robert D. Richardson (biographer of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James) and Philip F. Gura, who dedicated his last book,Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, to Buell.

more here.

SAUL LEITER IN BLACK AND WHITE

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Leiter_01Genevieve Fussell at The New Yorker:

Saul Leiter lived in an apartment on a quiet street in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood that evolved, during the six decades he lived there, nearly as much as Leiter himself. An undervalued photographer for most of his life, Leiter quietly amassed a body of work that has only recently begun receiving the credit it deserves. Since his death, last fall,the apartment has become Leiter’s de facto archive; Margit Erb, his gallery representative, and Anders Goldfarb, his long-time assistant, have spent months organizing the boxes of prints, negatives, portfolios, and books that he left haphazardly piled throughout the space.

The apartment today is far more organized than it was when Leiter died, but evidence of his life is everywhere. A high-backed wooden chair, where he painted and drank coffee, sits in a corner of a large room lit by a wall of windows. Old saucers that he used as palettes are stacked on the window ledge above a quiet courtyard. Figurative paintings by Soames Bantry, Leiter’s partner, hang alongside his own abstract watercolors. Primitive trinkets and vintage toys, including a Mickey Mouse doll, sit on the mantle; canvases of folk and Japanese art lean against the walls.

more here.

The 16th Century’s Line of Fire: ‘Infinitesimal,’ a Look at a 16th-Century Math Battle

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

John Allen Paulos in the New York Times:

08SCIB-master180Bertrand Russell once wrote that mathematics had a “beauty cold and austere.” In this new book, the historian Amir Alexander shows that mathematics can also become entangled in ugliness hot and messy.

The time was the late 16th and 17th centuries, and the mathematics in question was the proper understanding of continua — straight lines, plane figures, solids. Is a line segment, for example, composed of an infinite number of indivisible points?

If so, and if these infinitesimals have zero width, how does the line segment come to have a positive length? And if they have nonzero widths, why isn’t the sum of their widths infinite?

For reasons like these, Aristotle had argued that continua could not consist of indivisibles. But new developments were demonstrating that thinking of them this way yielded insights not easily obtained from traditional Euclidean geometry.

Huh? It’s natural to wonder how such a seemingly arcane issue could possibly arouse much passion. But this fascinating narrative by Dr. Alexander (an occasional book reviewer for Science Times) vivifies the era and the fault lines that the mathematical dispute revealed.

Let’s begin with the math. The mathematicians, Cavalieri, Torricelli, Galileoand others, were at the forefront of the new geometric approaches involving infinitesimals. If classical Euclidean geometry is conceived as a top-down approach with all theorems following by pure logic from a few self-evident axioms, the new approaches can be thought of as bottom-up, inspired by experience. For example, just as a piece of cloth can be considered a collection of parallel threads and a book a collection of pages, so too might a plane be considered an infinite number of parallel lines and a solid an infinite number of parallel planes.

But why was this so controversial?

More here.

On the Academic Boycott of Israel

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Torn pagesLet me begin with some personal disclosure. I am a half-Jewish American who has never been and has no personal connection to Israel. In the early 1960s before I was born, my mother, who has otherwise lived her entire life in The Bronx, spent two years on a northern Israeli kibbutz named Kfar Hanassi. Over the years she has occasionally told stories of her time there and maintained some long distance friendships. That one, small tangent is the full extent of my personal association with Israel; in other words, there is virtually none.

In addition to having never been to Israel and never having had any friends or known relatives who live there, I also have no spiritual connection to the place. Though raised Jewish, my inter-faith parents were ambivalent about religion and occasionally outright hostile to organized, institutional forms. I have also been an atheist my entire adult life. The city of Jerusalem and holy sites like the Wailing Wall have no more religious meaning to me than Catholic Cathedrals or Buddhist monasteries. I simply admire the architecture, as the old saying goes.

Yet despite all this, I'm well aware of the hold that the concept of Israel has on American Jewry in general, which is why I disclose my Jewishness. For many American Jews, regardless of their religiousness or lack thereof, Israel is a powerful symbol. As someone whose maternal Jewish grandparents fled Poland and Rumania not terribly long before WWII, and whose grandmother lost almost all of her entire extended family in the Holocaust, I understand that.

You can't grow up with family stories of violent, pre-war persecution, narrow escapes, the two cousins who survived unspeakable horrors, and seemingly countless dead relatives you never met, and not be affected. Refugee trauma is real and it often reverberates down through several generations.

So even though Israel is a place I have virtually no connection to whatsoever as a country or religious site, I am cognizant of the potent symbol it remains for millions of Jews who don't live there. For many Jews, the historical trauma of the Holocaust, not to mention the longer history of persecutions, violence, and ethnic cleansings in Europe and the Middle East, is real. Although most of today's Jews have never experienced a pogrom, survived a concentration camp, or been a refugee, for many of them the echoes of that past remain.

Thus, for many ethnic Jews, Israel continues to stand as the symbol of last resort, the theoretical lifesaver against the turbulent tides of history. I recognize the power that symbol has for many American Jews. It has the capacity to color people's interpretations, definitions, and understandings of Israeli affairs, particularly if they, like myself, have no real connection to Israel, thereby rendering it more abstract.

I do not believe that Israel, as a symbol to Jews, colors my own thinking of Israel the nation. Nonetheless, disclosure is important, particularly because I am going to discuss the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions ovement (BDS) against Israel. Some people may suspect that being half-Jewish (my father's family are White Protestants from North Carolina and California) affects my understanding and interpretations. I don't think it does, but I certainly won't hide the fact or pretend its irrelevant to everyone.

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The Insomnias of a Sleepless Dog

Posted on by Tom Jacobs

by Tom Jacobs

– Do you know the expression, “Let sleeping dogs lie?” You are better off not knowing…

– I have to know…

– Very well…

~ from Polanski’s Chinatown

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

~ Dante

DarkwoodSo there is a dark tunnel that stretches out into indefiniteness. There is the faint light of the lobby behind but really there is no direction to go but forward into the darkness. To do otherwise, to go back towards the light would be weak, cowardly—a failure of curiosity. After it is all over, the directions that are meant to explain what to expect and how to go about navigating the otherworldly blackness will become apparent; these directions and explanations would have clarified and demystified the whole thing and were right there for the seeing but somehow they went unobserved. But that comes later. Perhaps it is better to have passed them by, to not have seen them. So, again, nowhere to go but in.

There is nothing but darkness and no light, no wind, not even the faintest draft. Seemingly nothing ahead and, once the lobby light fades, nothing behind. Just a meaningless blankness that begins to seem weirdly seductive. Nowhere to go but in.

The air is filled with fear and ignorance and it is all ridiculously thrilling. To not know. To not know but to go on anyway, just to see.

Eventually the end of the tunnel presents itself, as do two chairs. After five minutes or so of sitting in the soundless nothingness the magic of proprioception becomes a kind of revelation. There is really nothing to observe but the rhythms of breath and blood.

After ten minutes the dark adapted eye begins to see, or at least to discern. An amorphous gray blob begins to shimmer and pulsate in the distance. This gray blob fascinates until eventually it doesn’t anymore and it’s time to leave.

Groping through the darkness of blackness, a vaguely irritating question emerges. What is actually out there in the darkness? What is that faint pulsating gray blob? Nothing? Something? An illusion? And where does the inner eye stop and the world of things out there begin? There is the certain knowledge that a trick of some sort is being played. The senses are being manipulated and played and the confusion of inner and outer is offered as a kind of weird gift. Enjoy it and don’t ask questions; float and luxuriate in the strange equilibrium of Turrell’s dark solution. But then, just then, the cell phone presents itself as something that might cut through Turrell’s riddle. A flash of digital light might cut through the murk.

The consequences of wrecking the mystery are considered and dispensed with, completely supplanted by the desire to know what’s really out there in the darkness.

The cell phone’s light flashes and a very mundane, delicately curved white space appears for the time of the flashing and then is gone again.

So that’s what it was. An empty space, a bannister, and two spare chairs. That’s all it was and nothing more. Maddened by the absence of anything, the dark-adapted eye seizes upon whatever light finds its way in to bounce off the blank walls and a confused and hungry retina. That’s it. It’s hard to say whether the plainness of the thing makes it more or less intriguing. More, probably.

Finally the lobby presents itself again, a far duller place than it seemed just ten minutes before, even if the inner ear and the inner eye take the rest of the day to realign and find concordance again. A certain regret begins to gnaw, an unformed inkling that perhaps it would have been better not to know. To just let the mystery ripen and be. It is funny that the pleasures of pursuing resolution and clarity and coherence almost always destroy the deeper pleasures of the enigma, the cryptic, the befuddling.

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Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

“Faith is a fine invention…”
…. ……… —Emily Dickinson, 56 Religious symbols

Different Choice

faith is a fine invention,
a spade to shovel doubt away
and bury apprehension,
keeping disbelief at bay
it sidelines skepticism,
confining incredulity to a box
it becomes a soothing salve
or cell with locks

faith may boost the probability
of inattention and final answers
discounting anything that challenges its ends
so that, faithfully, no mind will bend
to newer sets of circumstances

faith’s the up and the under side of willing
—it has a mothering voice,
but it’s also not averse to killing
anyone who’s made a different choice

by Jim Culleny
4/5/14

Disappearance and Return on the Klamath River

Posted on by Katharine Blake McFarland

By Katharine Blake McFarland

408px-Klamath_river_CaliforniaLast weekend I slept in the back of my car by a stream in the Klamath River Basin, a territory that stretches across the top of California and into Southern Oregon. This is how you camp when you don't have a tent, and it still does the trick. You still get to watch for shooting stars and you still wake up in the cold and the mist, with no one around for miles.

The Klamath River itself is a river upside down. Like most rivers, it flows North to South, but unlike most rivers, which begin as trickles high up in the mountains, the Klamath begins in farmland and then winds its way down to the mountainous Pacific coast. In other words, the terrain gets wilder and higher as the river runs south. In the droughty state of California, the Klamath's 266 miles of water are sought after like the gold once buried below its banks. Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen, conservationists—and at one point, even, Dick Cheney—have all thrown down the gauntlet over the river. Meanwhile, coho salmon, Chinook salmon, and stealhead trout follow their migratory patterns upstream as they've done for thousands of seasons; but fewer and fewer make the journey each year.

Seven thousand years ago, before the logging and lawsuits and fish kills, when the river's waters were cooler than they are now and cleaner than they'll likely ever be again, salmon were called ney-puy. Yurok Indians built their villages along the river's banks from keehl (fallen red wood trees), used dentalia shells, like tiny white elephant tusks, for money, and danced the u pyue-wes and mey-lee (White Deerskin dance and Brush dance). The first white settlers to meet the Yuork tribe in the early 19th century were fur traders, interested in the territory for its beavers. But interest outpaced supply, and soon both beavers and fur traders disappeared. This was the first time the river's ecology changed because of humans: beaver dams and ponds tempered the river's winterfloods and created wetland habitats for the Northern Spotted Owl and other animals; without them, flooding caused erosion and wetlands dried out.

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Patrick Leigh Fermor: The Hero Sings Himself

Posted on by Eric Byrd

by Eric Byrd

[the heroic] outlook which regarded action as the main end of life and attached to it an ideal which demanded that a man must make the utmost of his body and his mind.

C.M. Bowra, The Greek Experience

Productimage-picture-the-broken-road-393Incomplete and unfinished at Fermor's death in 2011, ending mid-sentence hundreds of miles from
Istanbul (Constantinople he always called it), destination of the famous walk the eighteen year old began in Rotterdam in 1933, the manuscript of The Broken Road was knit together by his biographer Artemis Cooper and the writer Colin Thubron. The draft title of this review was “Patrick Leigh Fermor at Journey's End” – but I realized that was pat, a cheap nod to the posthumous publication, and what is more, false to the story the book tells – the story of a beginning. This last volume of the trilogy has all the freshness and exuberance of the two previous books. It shows Fermor at the end of his peculiar education – the history of Europe studied in huts and in castles, in folk example and in manor archives – and poised on a long life of further adventure. In The Broken Road he enters the Balkans, and the Greater Greek world that would become the focus of his linguistic and ethnopoetic passions, the stage of his military heroism, and his permanent home.

A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) are famous for the digressions in which Fermor, if, say, recollecting a visit to a gallery, climbs into the portals of pictures and stalks around the sitters and figures, drawing elaborate reveries from costume and mien; or if on the march, he drops back, lets the rucksacked youth recede a little down the road, and conjuring from an adult erudition fills the foreground with phantom processions: the migrations of tribes and tongues, nomad cavalcades, royal progresses, coronations and beheadings, triumphs and massacres, the lugging of siege trains toward Vienna.

The best digressions of The Broken Road unfurl in Bulgaria – over a mosque, and over a complex of ruined Slavo-Byzantine churches. Karlovo's Muslims call up the pageant of Ottoman conquest – “Anatolian infantry, wild Asian troops of horse, Bedouin cavalry, mounted archers from eastern deserts, contingents of Albanians, Tartars and Tcherkesses, Negroes from Africa and, under their strange emblems and their fan-plumed helmets, the Janissaries” – which winds down to quiet scenes observed around the mosque. His host the hodja sits “cross-legged and absorbed in prayer,” raises his hands, “his palms uppermost, on either side of his body for a few seconds, as though he were offering a light and invisible gift.” Fermor naps and wakes at sunset to the hodja calling from the minaret: “The last hoop of the prayer had expanded to infinity. The famous words faded from the air and from these infidel mountains. The parapet…was empty; the invisible muezzin was already halfway down his dark spiral.”

Word of the murals of Tarnovo, capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire, the dominant Balkan kingdom of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its Czars “rivals and imitators of the Byzantines,” caused Fermor to break his easy southward track to Istanbul and turn north, up and over the Balkan Mountains. In Tarnovo he made friends with a grocer's son, a fiery nationalist student, and together they climbed to a windy ridge planted with the monastic mementos of the Bulgar Czars. Loitering in the churches, they craned their necks “to peer into the pictorial vaults and cupolas and domes” at the haloed ranks of “prophets and paladins and anchorites and holy men and headsmen” who stared down with “a thousand unblinking eyes.” Suddenly “the dim light of this vaulted world of interlocking haloes grew dinner still” – a storm arrives, rages, and passes. Fermor and his companion stepped out from the shelter of a twelfth century porch to see the Tarnovo's “amphitheater of hills” rinsed of late summer's haze and dust. The stones gleamed like mineral nuggets, the dun ploughlands were a “deep chocolate,” and the bushes and flowers and herbs, having shaken off their “long trance,” released “a confusion of scents” which roved the air.

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Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: Noah and Nate Silver

Posted on by Matt McKenna

by Matt McKenna

Noah-Movie-posterAs the wicked, soon-to-be-drowned warriors surround Noah and his famous ark in Darren Aronofsky's rendition of the well known, but well modified Bible story, one gets the sense that the ornery mob isn't just ornery because they're about to get super damp and dead in the biggest do-over the planet has ever experienced. These men would prefer to survive, of course, but what really sticks in their craw is how smug Noah is about the whole ordeal. As he stands before the mass of doomed humans, Noah (Russell Crowe) passionlessly explains how God has had it up to here with them and has decided to fill the planet with water until everyone is sufficiently dead. As you can imagine, these violence-prone, weapon-wielding gentlemen are quite displeased by Noah's dismissive indifference to their imminent demise and react the way any panic-stricken group of amoral marauders would react–by attempting to kill Noah and his family so they themselves may utilize the boat for their own seafaring, end-of-the-world adventure.

How appropriate it is then that in the very same month that Aronofsky released Noah, Nate Silver relaunched FiveThirtyEight, his data journalism blog and digital ark designed to survive the deluge of data raining upon the news world and threatening to submerge the partisan blogs, the cable news programs, and the opinion columns that have heretofore blighted journalism. Like Noah, Silver has come under fire from those who don't have a seat on the ark. These incensed media personalities and politicians, these rabble-rousing kerfuffle-mongers don't appreciate being judged by Mr. Silver and have attacked him for being too sensitive, untimely, and otherwise missing the point of journalism.

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To Kiss the Lips of John the Baptist

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

SalomeEnding her dance naked at his feet, the king tells her she can have anything her heart desires.

Salome doesn't even need to think about it–for she already knows what she wants.

King Herod, mad with love for her, asks if she wouldn't prefer jewels and half his kingdom instead. But Salome stands firm. And so the king has no choice but to deliver the head of John the Baptist on a silver tray.

Oscar Wilde's version of the story, while at first banned in England, was immediately popular in Japan in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods. One of Japan's most famous modern poets, Takamura Kotaro, even included the Wilde version of the story in one of his early poems, Awakening on Winter Mornings (冬の朝のめざめ):

On winter mornings
Even the River Jordan must be covered in a thin layer of ice
Wrapped up in my white blanket there in my bedroom
I imagine how John the Baptist felt a
As he baptized Christ
I imagine how Salome felt
As she held John’s severed head

Wilde was not the first—nor the last— artist to be fascinated by this idea of a woman gone so mad in love with John that she prefers to see him dead than to live with the thought that he did not love her. Strauss' opera ends with her passionately kissing the lips of his disembodied head in what must be one of the most badass moments in opera history.

And what then became of his beautiful head?

Entwined with the history of Jerusalem, some have claimed that his head was interred in Herod's palace- a city whose history is itself so gruesome and grisly that the story of Salome is but a mere blip.

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Bundling, Dream Space, Love, and the Farmer’s Daughter

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by Bill Benzon

The other day I was reading an old post an eBuddy of mine, Michael Cobb Bowen, had written about the possibly of a female viagra-type drug. Michael ended the post by observing:

Sex is dirty, complicated and embarrassing. You have to get naked and vulnerable. In fully formed human beings, that takes some doing and some mutual obligation. More than we think we know, and more than most are willing to say.

In thinking about it – how, say, vulnerability “takes some doing” in “fully formed human beings” – my mind wandered to bundling, an old courtship practice I'd learned about in my teens and, in the worldly wisdom of youth, thought rather prudish and quaint.

Of bundling the Wikipedia tells us:

Traditionally, participants were adolescents, with a boy staying at the residence of a girl. They were given separate blankets by the girl's parents and expected to talk to one another through the night. The practice was limited to the winter and sometimes the use of a bundling board, placed between the boy and girl, ensured that no sexual conduct would take place.

I am no longer an adolescent. I have learned that sexuality is not, in reality, so simple as it was in my pristine adolescent fantasy.

Perhaps there is wisdom in bundling.

The fact that precautions were taken against sexual activity indicates that people both were fully aware of sexuality, and that they wanted to prevent the practice thereof. That I can understand, but then why incur the risk by having the courting couple sleeps together in the first place? If the object is to have them talk, why not let them talk in the swing on the front porch, or sitting in the front parlor? Why have them talk at night, and in bed?

There is a possible answer. When we are sleeping we are, in the crudest possible way, most vulnerable. We are open to surprise physical attack. Thus we take great precautions to ensure that our sleeping places are safe. Moreover, no longer tethered to the here and now, the mind is free to wander.

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Reclaiming Liberty

Posted on by Joshua Yarden

by Josh Yarden

Liberty Bell

Photo:

The sound of money talking is echoing ever louder throughout the land. The recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court unfettered the ability of the wealthiest Americans to buy free speech in the form of deregulating contributions to political campaigns. In the words of Justice Stephen Breyer (writing for the minority in McCutcheon v. The Federal Elections Commission) “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.” We the people now have to raise our voices even louder if we are to have influence in our political system. It is all too easy to become discouraged, but we can begin to gather inspiration for social engagement by returning to explore first principles.

An old symbol for a new struggle

On any given day you might see a group of school children crowding around the Liberty Bell for a lesson on the history and the mythology of the United States of America. The Pennsylvania State House bell was commissioned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of William Penn's 1701 Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges. It later came to be known as the Independence Bell, associated with the founding of the nation, and eventually as the Liberty Bell, when it was adopted by the movement for the abolition of slavery.

The renaming of the bell by the abolitionists was inspired by the inscription, “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” quoted from the Book of Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 10. The part of the verse immediately preceding the quote speaks of hallowing the fiftieth year, known in biblical times as the jubilee year, and so it was fitting to choose this quote for a golden anniversary, but the rest of the text may surprise you. Leviticus 25 goes on to detail the requirements of the jubilee year. After seven periods of seven years, it is time to press the proverbial restart button on the nation's economy. “And you will return, each to his possession, each to his family will you return.” And it goes on from there to set forth what the inhabitants of the land are not allowed to do with the harvest that year.

The ancient Israelites were instructed that the process of amassing wealth comes to a halt every fifty years, when all property is returned to the original owners. (The books of Numbers and Joshua describe in detail the apportioning of the land to the families.) There can be no landed class lording over a peasant class. Come what may over the course of a lifetime, the system does not allow for the emergence of a sustained economic gap with a dispossessed impoverished population existing across the social divide from an institutionalized wealthy class.

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