Two Decimal Sonnets
.

every hair of your head will stand up and hum and sing

The great green YES that sweeps the days up one by one,
unbuttons them and kisses spring into their bones;
the god of goldenrod and dog-rose, hawk and peewit –

whatever this is called, the year is bright with it,
fresh as watercress and hot enough to burn.
I’m hanged if I’ll be solemn. I am drunk on light.

That little bulb of bullfinch praising hawthorn,
the blackbird unlacing his dark song; both are lit.
It shines from mountain snowdrifts, calm and wild.
The year is bright with it, whatever it is called.

Not even from high mountains does the world seem so wide

A world that holds both porpoises and strawberries
is wild enough. The rest is background noise –
red buses, Stilton, Istanbul. Ankle deep in sand and
clean of other company, we only hear the wind;

crash and pummel, clout and cuff. The air is exercised.
It birls around the bay in thunderclaps. We stand
handfast and giddy, feel our hairs lift in the breeze.
This, then, is all the noise that counts. We understand

those pebbles in the bathroom stand for storms. Things
change. Now don’t just stand there. Sing.

by Jo Bell
from Reducing Everything to Love
publisher: Produced with Alastair Cook, 2013

Karen Armstrong in New Statesman:

As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

The Mediterranean diet appears to be associated with longer telomere length — a marker of slower aging and thus long life, a study published in the BMJ this week suggests. The Mediterranean diet has been consistently linked with health benefits, including reduced mortality and reduced risk of chronic diseases, such as heart disease. The diet is based on a high intake of vegetables, fruits, nuts, legumes (such as peas, beans and lentils), and (mainly unrefined) grains; a high intake of olive oil but a low intake of saturated fats; a moderately high intake of fish, a low intake of dairy products, meat and poultry; and regular but moderate intake of alcohol (specifically wine with meals).

Shorter telomeres, which are located on the end of chromosomes, are associated with lower life expectancy and greater risk of age-related diseases. Lifestyle factors, such as obesity, cigarette smoking, and consumption of sugar sweetened drinks, have all been linked to people having shorter telomeres than typically occur in people of a similar age. Oxidative stress and inflammation have also been shown to speed up telomere shortening.

More here.

Sarah Galo profiles Ayesha Siddiqi, the editor in chief of the New Inquiry, in The Guardian (Photograph: Manahil Siddiqi /Ayesha Siddiqi):

How did you begin writing online?

I joined Twitter to tell jokes that I couldn’t get away with on Facebook. I began to accumulate a following mostly because comedians would retweet my jokes. After a certain point, my awareness of that audience fostered a sense of responsibilty. I had grown up in communities where a lot of issues, which defined my experience and the experiences of others like me, were never discussed.

People were, and are, being bombed with impunity in Pakistan, where my family is from, and no one here knows about it. Between the jokes, I would mention that. I’m never really inclined to share personal details, but I knew that surveys found that people who have a fear and distrust of Muslims correlated with people who do not know Muslims. I thought, “Well, here’s a few thousand of you,” many probably like the ones I had grown up with who didn’t know of a lot of Muslims, and now at least they knew one. The reactions were encouraging, but underscored the mystification around Muslim identity: ‘Oh wow, you know pop culture.’ It’s like, ‘Oh you’re Muslim too? You don’t seem oppressed, or brainwashed, or unhappy or anything like that.’

I’ve been so grateful for the opportunity for dialogue. But we don’t have the time to hold someone’s hand and walk them through the basic fact of someone else’s humanity everyday. I’m less patient with going through the motions of that, and now I let things speak for themselves a bit more.

More here.

Brad De Long over at his website (image from Wikimedia commons):

Kephalos: I suppose that if you want to say that the *Old New Republic *was a national treasure because it provided a place where Spencer Ackerman could publish, gain an audience for, and afford to write 10000-word highly-passionate highly-informed and -informative world-class rants about the moral and practical collapse of American foreign policy, than argue away; and that Franklin Foer is an excellent editor because he cherishes cranky, talented, passionate people and provides them with space where they can write long-form pieces telling their readers what they should think–well, then, argue away. But I don't think you are going to get very far.

Glaukon: The problem was that the Old New Republic was not especially good in “telling its potential readers how to think”.

Artaphernes: Not to mention that when it did tell readers what to think, the subtext was always that one should be willing to go the extra mile to indulge and to suck up to the various and manifold bigotries of Martin Peretz and company…

Glaukon: In fact, Corey Robin quotes Alfred Kazin to the effect that the front-of-the-book of the Peretz New Republic*–even in its best Hertzberg and second-best Kinsley incarnations–was rather bad at telling readers what to think:

As things go now, I cannot imagine ever appearing outside the literary section…. What I read in the front of the book is informative, saucy, in tone terribly sure of itself. It gives me no general enlightenment on the moral and intellectual crisis underlying the crisis of the week, above all no inspiration. There is no discernible social ideal behind all the clever counter-punching. Washington is more beautiful and imposing than it has ever been, is a wonderful town to look at—-if you overlook Anacostia and Shaw…. The many clever people in and out of government are not “intellectuals” in the old sense–thinkers with a sense of prophecy–but “experts,” no-nonsense minds that can chill me….

I wish I conld think of TNR as moving beyond post-leftist crowing—-beyond a certain parvenu smugness, an excessive familiarity with the inside track and the inside dope, and, above all, beyond that devouring interest in other journalists that confines so many commentaries out of Washington to triviality. I wish I could think of TNR as moving beyond the bristling, snappv, reactive common-sense of the disenchanted liberal. There are worlds within worlds, even in Washington, that are [not] apparent… to the wearilv clever, easily exasperated, heirs and guardians of the liberal democracy that is the one tradition we seem to have left.

Thrasymakhos: And at its worst? The Kinsley Old New Republic was mostly snark, #slatepitch avant-le-lettre, and a strong desire to find some clever contrarian reason to agree with Reagan. And the Hertzberg Old New Republic–listen to Hertzberg talk about the 1986 “The Case for the Contras”:

Things could get heated, as they did—to take a paradigmatic example—when we debated what to say about how the United States should treat Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. The subsequent lede, titled “The Case for the Contras,” was published in the issue of March 24, 1986. It was an unqualified endorsement of the Reagan administration’s policy of trying to overthrow the Sandinistas by any means necessary, starting with military aid to the Contra guerrillas. The motives it attributed to critics of the Reagan policy were limited to isolationism, defeatism, willful blindness, and selective “scrupulousness” about the sovereignty of “states ruled by pro-Soviet Leninists.”…

The author of “The Case for the Contras” was Charles Krauthammer, the future Irving Kristol Award–winning, Bradley Prize–winning, William F. Buckley Award–winning (and, to be fair, Pulitzer Prize–winning) hero of conservative intellectuals and Fox News dittoheads alike. None of that could have been predicted when Charles joined The New Republic….

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in the New York Times:

Just after Christmas of 1938, a young woman named Marguerite Perey — then 29, with a plain, open face, her eyes intent upon her work — sat at a bench in the Radium Institute of Paris, a brick mansion near the Jardin du Luxembourg. In a glass vessel, she examined fluid containing metal salts. She carefully dosed it with lead and hydrogen sulfide, then with barium, causing the solution to separate into different substances. She was in the final stages of purifying actinium, one of the rarest and most dangerous elements yet discovered, from uranium ore. Ten tons of ore yielded just one or two milligrams of actinium; Perey, who joined the institute as a teenager to be the personal technician for Marie Curie, was an expert in its isolation.

The Curie laboratory hired researchers from across Europe, but Perey was a local girl, the youngest of five children of a flour-mill owner in Villemomble, just east of the city. The death of her father had left the family in financial straits. Her mother gave piano lessons to fill the gap, but Perey had to abandon the idea of going to medical school in favor of a vocational college for chemistry technicians. The Curies often hired the top student from the school as an assistant, and Perey, at 19, was called in for an interview. She later described her first impression of Marie Curie: “Without a sound, someone entered like a shadow. It was a woman dressed entirely in black. She had gray hair, taken up in a bun, and wore thick glasses. She conveyed an impression of extreme frailty and paleness.” A secretary, Perey thought — then realized she was in the presence of Curie herself.

More here.

Ken Roth at Reuters:

The publication of the long-awaited summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s torture provides a useful moment to consider the lessons learned from this sorry chapter in American history and the steps that might be taken to avoid its recurrence. With the truth now told about this blatantly illegal policy, President Barack Obama has a chance to reverse his misguided refusal to prosecute the officials who authorized the torture, ending the impunity that sets a horrible precedent for future United States presidents and governments worldwide.

There will undoubtedly be much debate about its finding that torture did not “work” — that it produced little if any intelligence of value that was not or could not have been obtained by lawful means. It is disappointing that the nation must even have this discussion, given the strength of the legal and moral prohibitions of torture and other ill-treatment. The Geneva Conventions, for example, forbid them absolutely, even in time of war. But when facing a serious security threat such as the September 11, 2001 attacks, it can be tempting to rationalize the illegal and immoral as necessary, so this finding is important.

The CIA vehemently contests this conclusion. It insists that torture — or, to use its preferred euphemism, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — did produce actionable intelligence, but of course it cannot tell us the details because they are classified. Yet it should give us pause that a majority of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as respected senators on both sides of the aisle, concluded that torture was ineffective, while the greatest proponents of its utility were the torturers themselves. The disputed pragmatic argument provides a weak rationale to breach so fundamental a prohibition as the ban on torture.

More here.

Eric Posner in The Guardian ( Photograph: Judith Haeusler/Getty Images):

We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties – there are nine “core” treaties – have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish. The use of “human rights” in English-language books has increased 200-fold since 1940, and is used today 100 times more often than terms such as “constitutional rights” and “natural rights”. Although people have always criticised governments, it is only in recent decades that they have begun to do so in the distinctive idiom of human rights. The United States and Europe have recently condemned human rights violations in Syria, Russia, China and Iran. Western countries often make foreign aid conditional on human rights and have even launched military interventions based on human rights violations. Many people argue that the incorporation of the idea of human rights into international law is one of the great moral achievements of human history. Because human rights law gives rights to all people regardless of nationality, it deprives governments of their traditional riposte when foreigners criticise them for abusing their citizens – namely “sovereignty” (which is law-speak for “none of your business”). Thus, international human rights law provides people with invaluable protections against the power of the state.

And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity.

More here.

New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe.

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward.

Of course the world we experience is entirely different. The universe is expanding, not contracting. Stars emit light rather than absorb it, and radioactive atoms decay rather than reassemble. Omelets don’t transform back to unbroken eggs and cigarettes never coalesce from smoke and ashes. We remember the past, not the future, and we grow old and decrepit, not young and rejuvenated. For us, time has a clear and irreversible direction. It flies forward like a missile, equations be damned.

For more than a century, the standard explanation for “time’s arrow,” as the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington first called it in 1927, has been that it is an emergent property of thermodynamics, as first laid out in the work of the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In this view what we perceive as the arrow of time is really just the inexorable rearrangement of highly ordered states into random, useless configurations, a product of the universal tendency for all things to settle toward equilibrium with one another.

More here.

Tim Parks in NYRBlog:

A pen is not a magic wand. The critical faculty is not conjured from nothing. But it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text. Like a hawk over a field, it is on the lookout for something vulnerable. Then it is a pleasure to swoop and skewer the victim with the nib’s sharp point. The mere fact of holding the hand poised for action changes our attitude to the text. We are no longer passive consumers of a monologue but active participants in a dialogue. Students would report that their reading slowed down when they had a pen in their hand, but at the same time the text became more dense, more interesting, if only because a certain pleasure could now be taken in their own response to the writing when they didn’t feel it was up to scratch, or worthy only of being scratched…

Some readers will fear that the pen-in-hand approach denies us those wonderful moments when we fall under a writer’s spell, the moments when we succumb to a style, and are happy to succumb to it, when suddenly it seems to us that this approach to the world, be it Proust’s or Woolf’s or Beckett’s or Bernhard’s, is really, at least for the moment, the only approach we are interested in, moments that are no doubt among the most exciting in our reading experience.

No, I wouldn’t want to miss out on that. But if writers are to entice us into their vision, let us make them work for it. Let us resist enchantment for a while, or at least for long enough to have some idea of what we are being drawn into. For the mindless, passive acceptance of other people’s representations of the world can only enchain us and hamper our personal growth, hamper the possibility of positive action. Some¬times it seems the whole of society languishes in the stupor of the fictions it has swallowed. Wasn’t this what Cervantes was complaining about when he began Don Quixote? Better to read a poor book with alert resistance, than devour a good one in mindless adoration.

Read the rest here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

Ten thousand times a hundred thousand dusty years ago

Where now it stands the Plain of Gold did once my river flow.

It stroked the stones and spoke in tongues and splashed against my face,

Till ages rolled, the sun shone cold on this unholy place.

That was the planet Mars as channeled by the folk singer and science writer Jonathan Eberhart in “Lament for a Red Planet.” Ever since the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli thought he spied lines that he called “canali” on Mars in 1877, earthlings’ romantic thoughts about our nearest cosmic neighbor have revolved around water and its possible consequence, Life as We Know It. We haven’t found life on Mars, but decades of robotic exploration have indeed strengthened astronomers’ convictions that rivers and perhaps even oceans once flowed on the red planet. Today Mars is an arid, frigid desert, suggesting that the mother of all climate changes happened there, about four billion years ago or so. The question that haunts planetary scientists is why? And could it happen here?

“I think the short story is the atmosphere went away and the oceans froze but are still there, locked up in subsurface ice,” said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist and Mars expert at NASA’s Ames Research Center. In September a new spacecraft known as Maven, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, swung into orbit around the planet. Its job is to get a longer answer to one part of the mysterious Martian climate change, namely where the planet’s atmosphere went. One idea is that it was sputtered away by radiation and particles from the sun, known as the solar wind. Maven was designed to test that theory by measuring how fast Mars is losing atmosphere today. The results could help scientists determine what the atmosphere was like four billion years ago, and just how warm and wet the planet was.

More here.

Philip Weiss in Mondoweiss:

Last Tuesday night, the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani gave a speech at Columbia University, where he is a professor, saying that Palestine has not yet reached its “South African moment.” Most of his speech is excerpted below. It followed Omar Barghouti’s speech, which I lately covered.

“The end of apartheid was a negotiated settlement,” Mamdani said. The South African anti-apartheid struggle did not succeed by military resistance so much as by education, bringing whites to understand that they would only be safe if they ceased to be settlers. They came to agree. In Israel and Palestine, the work is also educational. Israeli Jews and their western supporters have been indoctrinated in the wake of the Holocaust to believe that Jews will only be safe with a Jewish state. The majority Jewish population within the state of Israel is not yet convinced that it has an option other than Zionism. This is the real challenge. The Zionist message to the Jewish population of Israel is this, Zionism is your only guarantee against another holocaust. The opposite is the case. Jews can have a homeland in the Middle East, but their safety can only be achieved by dismantling the Jewish state, Mamdani said. His speech was a political challenge to Jewish anti-Zionists, now just a splinter, to launch a political struggle inside the Jewish community to liberate it from Zionism.

Substantial excerpts:

There was no military victory against apartheid in South Africa. I begin with that. The end of apartheid was a negotiated settlement. Boycott and collaboration are two ends of a spectrum of tactics. In the middle lie different forms of critical engagement. The Boycott was one instrument among many. To view the boycott in isolation would be misleading. To see the boycott in a larger context is to understand the politics that informed the boycott. Thus my question: What was the decisive moment of that anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, what was the South African moment?

My argument would be the following. I believe the South African moment involved a triple shift. It was first a shift from demanding the end of apartheid to providing an alternative to apartheid.

Second, it was a shift from representing the oppressed, the black people of South Africa, the majority, to representing the whole people of South Africa.

Third, it was a turn from resisting within the terms set by apartheid to redefining the very terms of how South Africa should be governed.

More here.

Slant

Yesterday, for a long while, the early morning sunlight in the trees was sufficient, replaced by a hello from a long-limbed woman pedaling her bike, whereupon the wind came up, dispersing the mosquitoes.
 Blessings, all.
 I'd come so far, it seemed, happily looking for so little.
  But then I saw a cow in a room looking at the painting of a cow in a field -- all of which was a painting itself -- and I felt I'd been invited into the actual, someplace between the real and the real.
  The trees, now, are trees I'm seeing myself seeing.
 I'll always deny that I kissed her.
 I was just whispering into her mouth.

by Stephen Dunn