Jessie Wender in National Geographic:

In honor of International Women's Day, we asked seven National Geographic photographers to reflect on a time where being a woman played a pivotal role in documenting a particular story, whether it be in gaining privileged access to a situation or bringing a nuanced approach to a subject. From Lynsey Addario's embed with an all-female combat patrol unit to Erika Larsen's intimate portrait of a woman with a double mastectomy, these images show the power of a shared sisterhood and exemplify the necessity to see the important stories of our time through a woman's lens.

Amy Toensing

I love how being a woman can be an instant ticket to community, like when I was at a Bedouin wedding in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The scene was incredible with camel races, feasting, and dancing. When I told one of the hosts I had a present for the bride they suggested I give it to her myself. In traditional Bedouin culture, men and women who are not from the same family don’t often mix, but because I am a woman, I was allowed. They led me to a house where access was restricted to women and immediate male relatives of the bride. I made this picture while sitting next to the bride as these beautiful young girls danced in her honor. We didn’t speak the same language, but we connected.

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Zack Colman in Christian Science Monitor:

Fatima Ait Moussa paces in front of 13 women sitting on the floor of a rectangular room in this village in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. She’s shy, avoiding most eye contact, but Ms. Moussa is an accomplished woman. She commands the room with a familial tone and motherly smile.

“Who is your husband?” she shouts out.

“Argan!” they respond in unison. Moussa, dressed in a flowing black djellaba, repeats her question. One person responds, “Argan is my wallet!”

In reality, argan isn’t literally a husband or a wallet. It’s a tree that happens to play a vital role in sustaining the livelihoods of these entrepreneurial farmers. For the 149 women spread across 20 villages in Moussa’s cooperative, the trees and the oils they provide – used in expensive cosmetics, soaps, and food products – are the primary source of income. Moussa’s actual husband died in the mid-1990s, saddling her with massive debt. Around that time, she witnessed a similarly cash-strapped woman try, unsuccessfully, to convince a grocer to accept argan oil as payment. The encounter sparked the idea for the business venture she now runs. It’s a success, judging by the women’s enthusiasm and the framed certificates and photographs with leading politicians that decorate her office. Yet the cooperative is also beset by serious challenges, from drought and climate change to deforestation and global competition, that squeeze the women’s $5 daily incomes.

What’s happening here is emblematic of forces that reach far beyond Moussa’s venture in these arid, windswept mountains of southwestern Morocco. Worldwide, 3.4 billion people live in rural areas, often in poverty and with lifestyles that expose them disproportionately to the effects of changes in Earth’s warming climate. From Afghanistan to Bolivia, as well as in large swaths of Africa, many of them cultivate land that’s dry or growing drier. The challenge for farm communities is to adapt and respond before climate change starts to erode agricultural productivity. For governments and development groups, the challenge is broader: They are recognizing that it’s not just that climate change is affecting farmers, it’s also that farmers are affecting the climate. While plants like argan trees can help store excess carbon that would otherwise add to the world’s emissions, many agricultural practices create greenhouse gases. They, in fact, account for about a quarter of such emissions worldwide.

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John Freeman in Literary Hub:

Sharon Olds can still remember how furious editors became when she started submitting her poems, 40 years ago. “They came back often with very angry notes,” the 74-year-old poet says, sitting in her small, light-filled apartment overlooking NYU’s campus in Greenwich Village. We’re speaking on a warm afternoon last summer, before the news blossomed into an ongoing outrage. This memory of hers stirs up bewilderment like a warning. For two hours, however, the future president’s name doesn’t pass either of our lips. Wearing sweats and a hand-me-down t-shirt, her face sculpted by curiosity, Olds is illuminated, patient and quick to praise: a benevolent siren on an island as a storm approaches in the distance. “They used to say, ‘Why don’t you try the Ladies Home Journal?’ she continues, her face now crinkling into a frown. ‘We are a literary magazine.’ Very snooty, very put-me-down… women, you know… poems about children?”

A season later, even if bragging about grabbing women by the genitals did not derail a presidential campaign, Olds’ poems about children and desire, about so-called women’s issues—family, and how the complications of loving what can nearly break you—continue to make her one of Americas’s most beloved poets. Her books sell tens of thousands of copies, her poems were viral before there was an internet. They were and still are taped to the inside of dorm rooms, copied down into notebooks, covered in songs, even tattooed onto readers’ bodies. (“Do what you are going to do, / and I will tell about it” is a popular line). They also render novelists speechless. I once stood in a room of Pulitzer-, Booker- and Nobel Prize-winning writers—“Is that Sharon Olds?” was the question I kept hearing the novelists under 50 asking of the woman with long grey hippy hair tied up in pigtails.

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George Philip LeBourdais in The Point:

The diminutive iceberg was an afterthought by the time it broke apart. I was riding a soft inflatable boat towards one of the great glaciers of Spitsbergen, an island located north of Norway and east of Greenland. Spitsbergen is part of the remote archipelago of Svalbard, deep within the Arctic Circle and about halfway between mainland Europe and the North Pole. A tall ship had carried me there along with a troop of photographers and writers and scientists for an improbable artist residency. We stared at the glacier’s calving face in Fuglefjord, where it stops gouging the earth and splinters into the sea. We were trying to catch one of those awesome, humbling instances when ice splits like marble in a quarry and crashes into the water. Momentary respects had been paid to a distinctive but small iceberg (no bigger than a stout Victorian house in San Francisco) but we puttered past en route to the glacier itself—where we thought the action was.

We shuddered when the iceberg broke at our backs. Turning in unison with my shipmates, I felt the air change. It had become so fresh it was almost repellent, as though an ancient sepulcher had cracked open to release a saturated gush of oxygen. Dark, clear ice below the berg’s surface began to rotate upwards, cranking horologically into its new position. After a collective gasp, we hushed and watched.

Once a land on the margins, the Arctic has become a global center of attention for climatologists, environmental activists and tourists. The rhetoric of the sublime is no longer required to imagine the epochal changes that happen there; we can watch the footage ourselves. Time-lapse videography has made the retreat of the world’s glaciers dramatically clear. James Balog, photographer for the award-winning 2014 documentary Chasing Ice and director of the Extreme Ice Survey, calls ice “the canary in the global coal mine … the place where we can see and touch and feel climate change.”

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Shashi Tharoor in The Guardian:

Many modern apologists for British colonial rule in India no longer contest the basic facts of imperial exploitation and plunder, rapacity and loot, which are too deeply documented to be challengeable. Instead they offer a counter-argument: granted, the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit? In particular, political unity and democracy, the rule of law, railways, English education, even tea and cricket?

Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.

Unfortunately for this argument, throughout the history of the subcontinent, there has existed an impulsion for unity. The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas. If this “sacred geography” is essentially a Hindu idea, Maulana Azad has written of how Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”, hailing from a recognisable civilisational space. Numerous Indian rulers had sought to unite the territory, with the Mauryas (three centuries before Christ) and the Mughals coming the closest by ruling almost 90% of the subcontinent. Had the British not completed the job, there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.

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Emily Wolahan at The Quarterly Conversation:

What I most appreciate about In Praise of Defeat, however, is that it coveys the length and breadth of Laâbi’s career as an artist. His early work is very powerful, but since 1985 he has been in exile in Paris (though he has recently been able to return occasionally to Morocco). Because Laâbi’s political activism and imprisonment came at the beginning of his career, most of Laâbi’s poems are written in the thirty years since his release. As with anyone who suffers something as horrific as imprisonment and torture, it’s not something Laâbi can leave behind. And the experience permanently places him in the in-between. In “Suns Under Arrest,” dedicated to Nelson Mandela and Abraham Serfaty, he writes:

The prison that our man inhabits
is round and square
near and far away
it is of yesterday and tomorrow
subterranean and lost in the clouds
carnivorous and vegetarian
it is a hutch near a mosque in a shantytown

By evoking the in-between, the prison our man inhabits also becomes any place where we are caught in stasis.

Laâbi is the man in prison who survived and therefore he has the opportunity to continue to develop as an artist. This is evident in the wonderful “Fragments of Forgotten Genesis” from 1998. Laâbi adopts the form of fragments, in between sentence and utterance, and shifts between witness, memory and reflection.

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Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants and a graduate of Harvard, Batuman is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” (2010). That book was a witty and melancholy tour de force about reading and love and the pleasures of travel as against tourism.

That same voice is poured into “The Idiot.” It’s memorable to witness Selin, via Batuman, absorb the world around her. Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations.

Only Batuman would send a character in search of new clothes and have her think, “what was ‘Cinderella,’ if not an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping?”

Selin notes the “death roar” of an institutional toilet. She observes how, lighting a cigarette, “when the flame came into contact with the paper, it made a sound like the needle coming down on a record player.”

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Shortly before Angela Carter’s death in 1992 — from lung cancer, at age 51, after a lifetime of smoking — I reviewed her last novel, the marvel-filled, magnificent “Wise Children,” a century-long saga covering the melodramatic lives and amours of an English theatrical family. Suffused throughout with a Shakespearean air of enchantment, it included an Ophelia-like mad scene, myriad echoes of “King Lear” and “The Tempest,” twins substituting for each other with lovers, knockings at the gate, rude mechanicals, a kitschy Hollywood production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” near-incest, fathers belatedly recognizing daughters, the dead returning to life and, on every page, an atmosphere of mummery and carnival where, in the end, every Jack gets his Jill and all’s right with the world — hey nonny-no! I loved it then, and still do.

Nonetheless, Edmund Gordon’s “The Invention of Angela Carter,” while an exceptionally thoughtful and engrossing biography, has left me wondering whether it’s such a good idea to read about contemporary writers one admires. In the case of Carter, Gordon traces an inner life of intense self-scrutiny, marked at times by melancholy desperation, an almost hysterical search for love, and periodic callousness toward family and friends.

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Monica Uszerowicz in Avidly:

Grandma Eva was interned in the ghetto with most of her family—a few lucky siblings escaped to the U.S.—for two years before her transport to Auschwitz. She was hungry, as it were, for two years, and would never again understand fullness, even when food touched her lips. When she was alive, she’d tell me the story of her brother, Pesach—named for the holiday—eating a particularly watery soup, shoveling it into his mouth quickly, then tapping the bowl with his spoon. He tapped it loudly, a request for more he couldn’t make with his tongue, because in that same moment, he collapsed and died. She’d spend her time at Auschwitz hiding bread beneath her pillow, hiding the thinness of her frame in clothes that masked her bones. She became little more than a body, and her attempts to transcend the limitations to which she’d been reduced were as clandestine as she was ill. She was a secret who kept more secrets, though there was nowhere for them to hide. When liberation came, it took Grandma a year to recover from her injuries; she stayed in a hospital bed, bound by a metal brace. The doctors fed her apples and wine—the apples strengthened her teeth; the wine, her blood. She was biting into an apple when she heard her sister, passing by the hospital and calling for her, her sister who’d returned from the States to scour Łódź for her familial survivors.

My father knows how to eat, but doesn’t know how to stop. “I don’t have a mechanism that says ‘stop,’” he tells me. “I always ate until I was stuffed, growing up. Now I unconsciously do the same.” Dad will clean his plate, and mine, too. It’s not a particularly healthy habit; it points to the problem of “intuitive eating,” of “eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full.” What if fullness is relative to trauma? What happens when your intuition is ancestral?

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Dilip M. Menon in Africa is a Country:

In April 2015, the statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Gandhi Square, Johannesburg was almost covered with white paint by a young protestor before he was arrested. The previous months had seen a sustained agitation at the University of Cape Town for the taking down of the statue of Sir Cecil Rhodes – the imperialist and racist benefactor of the University. The statue came to stand in for a colonialism yet to end. In this attack on pigeon perches all over South Africa, a statue of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in Durban was covered in red paint; perhaps only because he was white, and not as an indictment of his poetry. There was some irony to the fact that the statue of Gandhi was almost whitewashed, considering the better part of his life was spent in fighting white imperialism. This month, professors at the University of Ghana called for the removal of the statue of Gandhi that had been unveiled by the President of India in June. All of these instances are reflective of a rethinking happening in Africa of the role of colonialism, anticolonialism and the idea of African identity.

The politics of statuary represents a deeper crisis located in questions of belonging, entitlement and exclusion in postcolonial Africa. In 1986, the Kenyan writer and intellectual Ngugi wa Thiong’o (formerly James Ngugi) wrote his manifesto Decolonising the Mind, arguing for linguistic decolonization and combating the continuing influence of English as a language and European thought in politically decolonized, but intellectually still-colonized Africa. Thirty years down the line, the same issues have resurfaced; Ngugi, Frantz Fanon, and the South African thinker of black consciousness, Steve Biko are back on the agenda as South Africans and Africans, more generally, ask themselves, what has not changed. African universities have been ravaged by the attack of neo-liberal thinking and privatization that have made universities into factories and leeched them off politics. In South Africa, a battle has just been joined. The Feesmustfall movement that commenced in late 2015 challenged both high fees and the exclusion of youth from universities. The movement also protests against a syllabus that is nothing more than a version of courses taught in Euro-American campuses. The universities in Africa are haughtily monolingual in a multilingual landscape and the issue of African knowledge systems is not even considered. We gave up this battle, if it was ever fought, in Indian universities fairly early on, producing generations of academics to service the Euro-American knowledge economy, much as we produced clerks for the British colonial service.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Gandhi and statues of him?

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Darryl Pinckney in the New York Review of Books:

When James Baldwin died in 1987, at the age of sixty-three, he was seen as a spent force, a witness for the civil rights movement who had outlived his moment. Baldwin didn’t know when to shut up about the sins of the West and he went on about them in prose that seemed to lack the grace of voice that had made him famous. But that was the view of him mostly on the white side of town. Ever-militant Amiri Baraka, once scornful of Baldwin as a darling of white liberals, praised “Jimmy” in his eulogy as the creator of a contemporary American speech that we needed in order to talk to one another. Black people have always forgiven and taken back into the tribe the black stars who got kicked out of The Man’s heaven.

Baldwin left behind more than enough keepers of his flame. Even so, his revival has been astonishing. He is the subject of conferences, studies, and an academic journal, the James Baldwin Review. He is quoted everywhere; some of his words are embossed on a great wall of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Of all the participants and witnesses from the civil rights era, Baldwin is just about the only one we still read on these matters. Not many pick up Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) or The Trumpet of Conscience (1967). We remember Malcolm X as an unparalleled orator, but after the collections of speeches there is only The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964), an as-told-to story, an achievement shared with Alex Haley. Kenneth Clark’s work had a profound influence on Brown v. Board of Education, but as distinguished as his sociology was, nobody is rushing around campus having just discovered Clark’s Dark Ghetto (1965).

Baldwin said that Martin Luther King Jr., symbol of nonviolence, had done what no black leader had before him, which was “to carry the battle into the individual heart.” But he refused to condemn Malcolm X, King’s supposed violent alternative, because, he said, his bitterness articulated the sufferings of black people.

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Catherine Caruso in Scientific American:

Elite memory athletes are not so different from their peers in any other sport: They face off in intense competitions where they execute seemingly superhuman feats such as memorizing a string of 500 digits in five minutes. Most memory athletes credit their success to hours of memorization technique practice. One lingering question, though, is whether memory champs succeed by practice alone or are somehow gifted. Recent research suggests there may be hope for the rest of us. A study, published today in Neuron, provides solid evidence that most people can successfully learn and apply the memorization techniques used by memory champions, while triggering large-scale brain changes in the process.

A team led by Martin Dresler at Radboud University in the Netherlands used a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans to compare memory champions with the general population. It found top memory athletes had a different pattern of brain connectivity than controls did, but also that subjects who learned a common memorization technique over a period of weeks, not years, greatly improved their memory skills, and began to exhibit brain connection patterns resembling those of elite memorizers.

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Rebecca McCray in Slate:

On Tuesday night, Rolando Ruiz was executed in Texas after spending more than two decades on death row. The legal team representing Ruiz, who killed Theresa Rodriguez as part of a murder-for-hire scheme in 1992, filed multiple petitions with the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, one of which argued that his fate constituted cruel and unusual punishment. All of those petitions were denied.

Justice Stephen Breyer, who dissented from his colleagues’ denial of certiorari, believed Ruiz’s Eighth Amendment claim was “a strong one” and worth a closer look. “This Court long ago, speaking of a period of only four weeks of imprisonment prior to execution, said that a prisoner’s uncertainty before execution is ‘one of the most horrible feelings to which he can be subjected,’ ” wrote Breyer. Ruiz, Breyer notes, endured that uncertainty for 22 years.

Ruiz was one of the nearly 40 percent of death row prisoners in the U.S. who have spent 20 or more years awaiting execution. Breyer pointed out that like most inmates sentenced to death, Ruiz lived in solitary confinement, where he suffered hallucinations, suicidal thoughts, and depression. These psychological symptoms are common among prisoners placed in solitary confinement, and they run rampant among Texas inmates.

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