Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals. Living in fear of benefit sanctions. A lack of community facilities.

Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.

But here’s the odd thing: people from the working class and minorities are rarely seen as facing the same kinds of issues. Instead, in political debates from Brexit to welfare benefits, minorities and the working class are seen as having conflicting interests and often set against each other. We are Ghosts: Race, Class and Institutional Prejudice, a report published last week by the thinktanks Class and the Runnymede Trust, attempts to address this this issue of common experiences yet conflicting perceived interests. Based on interviews and focus groups, almost entirely in London, the sample may not be statistically valid but the subjective experiences of the interviewees are revealing.

More here.

James Lord at The New Criterion:

What a surprise to discover that modernism starts with Degas! And all the while we’d thought that Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Seurat, even Gauguin were the ones who readied the diving board for the great plunge. They had the obvious influences, of course, but a radically original, authentically modern means of making images into works of art was already fully formed in the creations of Degas while all the others were still testing their talents. To be sure, he was older, far more precocious. He also had a gift for modesty and the wit to know that artistic consummation is not to be had through technical virtuosity. Above all, he had the strength of character to measure his progress according to the pitiless standard of tradition. No innovator of the modern era has known better than Degas what full resources for future originality could be gleaned from self-effacing concentration upon great attainments of the past. It was his luck, perhaps, to come along at just the right time; it was his genius to make the rightness of the time hinge upon his own imperious and fleeting vision of a world real to him only because his pictures looked like it.

more here.

Karen Van Dyck at the Paris Review:

“That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one.” The beginning of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, at once vivid and hazy, evokes the season and the story of adolescent girlhood that the book will unfold. The novel tells the story of three sisters living outside Athens: Maria, Infanta, and Katerina, the youngest, who tells the tale. The house where they live with their mother, aunt, and grandfather is in the countryside. Focusing on the sisters’ daily life and first loves, as well as on a secret about their Polish grandmother, the novel is about growing up and how strange and exciting it is to discover the curious moods and desires that constitute you and your difference from other people. It also features a stable cast of friends and neighbors, all with their own unexpected opinions: the self-involved Laura Parigori; the studious astronomer David and his Jewish mother, Ruth, from England; and the carefree Captain Andreas. The book is adventurous, fantastical, romantic, down to earth, earthy, and, above all, warm. Its only season, after all, is summer.

more here.

Seamus Perry at the LRB:

Many poets end up having a hard life but W.S. Graham went out of his way to have one. His dedication to poetry, about which he seems never to have had a second thought, was remorseless, and his instinct, surely a peculiarly modern one, was that the way to nurture his creativity was to have a really bad time. ‘The poet or painter steers his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far from bestsellers he had no money for most of his life until, in his mid-fifties, he was awarded a Civil List pension. ‘I am completely broke just now and the people I might borrow from are also broke,’ he wrote in an early letter, striking a wholly characteristic note. Twenty-five years later he was still writing to friends saying things like, ‘How terrible to think I never get in touch with you but to ask you for money. Can you please let us have £5?’ The letters convey a persistent sense of want which makes for sorry reading, as he runs out of paraffin again or makes omelettes with seagull eggs, though you often detect a flicker of stoic comedy: ‘I get on making tea and putting a sheep’s head on the hob to simmer – the beginning of a good graham broth’; ‘I’m terribly desperate for a pair of shoes or boots … I keep thinking there must be lots of men with old army boots they’ll never use’; ‘I’ve never been broker in all my life, ridiculously so … What a carry-on it certainly is.’​

more here.

Sam Jordison in The Guardian:

Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find our strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” So Primo Levi describes the beginning of the process of “the demolition of a man”, the “offence” that Auschwitz inflicted on so many people. “Häftling,” he writes in If This Is a Man, using the German word for prisoner, “I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517.” Throughout If This Is a Man, Levi reiterates that survival was mainly a matter of random events, coincidences and fortune. But it also required stubborn resistance. As Levi explains an afterword, he remained “determined to recognise always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things.”

Levi holds on to this humanity until the camp is liberated. But he has been hollowed out by hunger, toil and unremitting horror. His sense of self has been undermined by mental and bodily weakness and the moral compromises needed for survival. If This Is a Man finishes with Levi in a kind of perilous limbo. He hasn’t “drowned”, as he terms it, but nor does he show us much about salvation. The last pages are strange and abrupt. The Russians arrive as Levi and a companion – Charles – are carrying a corpse outside their hut. They tip over the stretcher. Charles takes off his beret; Levi regrets he doesn’t have one too. We get a hint that Levi has resumed life, because he tells us he’s been writing letters to other survivors. And that’s it.

It’s in the sequel The Truce that Levi tells us how he rebuilt his humanity after it was demolished in Auschwitz. It’s a long climb into the light and – remarkably – it’s frequently beautiful. More than that, it’s funny.

More here.

Barbara Oakley in Nautilus:

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell—with lots of difficulty! After all, I’d flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science. In fact, I didn’t start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I’d be Exhibit A.

Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering. But these hard-won, adult-age changes in my brain have also given me an insider’s perspective on the neuroplasticity that underlies adult learning. Fortunately, my doctoral training in systems engineering—tying together the big picture of different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) disciplines—and then my later research and writing focusing on how humans think have helped me make sense of recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology related to learning.

In the years since I received my doctorate, thousands of students have swept through my classrooms—students who have been reared in elementary school and high school to believe that understanding math through active discussion is the talisman of learning. If you can explain what you’ve learned to others, perhaps drawing them a picture, the thinking goes, you must understand it.

More here.

Monument Valley, 2050

East Mitten: The crowds have left.
West Mitten: They won’t be back.

East Mitten: Seems darker now.
West Mitten: I see more stars.

East Mitten: It’s quiet too.
West Mitten: The hum is gone.

East Mitten: The dust has settled.
West Mitten: For good, it seems.

East Mitten: They’re really gone?
West Mitten: They are no more.

East Mitten: Just you and me?
West Mitten: Back to eternity

by Brooks Riley
.

Sheldon Lee Glashow in Inference Review:

I first encountered Gell-Mann in the spring of 1959, when he invited me to describe my work at a seminar in Paris. Having completed my Harvard thesis with Julian Schwinger, I was spending my first postdoctoral year in Copenhagen at what would become known as the Niels Bohr Institute. Gell-Mann was on sabbatical at the Collège de France. Not yet 30, he was already a renowned theorist. Among much else, he had explained the puzzling features of what were called strange particles. Gell-Mann proposed a new particle attribute S, which he called strangeness. He assumed it to be conserved by the strong nuclear force but not by the weak.¹ Ordinary particles, like protons and neutrons, have no strangeness, whereas strange particles are variously assigned S = ±1 or ±2. They can be produced copiously by energetic particle collisions, but always two at a time and never singly. Their lifetimes are so unexpectedly long because their decays necessarily involve the weak force. Puzzle solved!

After my seminar, Gell-Mann invited me to a tête-à-tête dinner at a two-star Michelin restaurant, where I was cured of my lifelong aversion to fish as food. Gell-Mann seemed to appreciate my algebraic explanation for the universality of weak and electromagnetic coupling strengths. He presented my ideas, duly crediting me, at the 1959 International Conference on Elementary Particle Physics in Kiev, which I, being a mere postdoc, could not attend.

A year later, as my two-year National Science Foundation fellowship was running out, I was surprised and delighted to receive an invitation from Gell-Mann to spend a third postdoctoral year at Caltech. I accepted immediately: to learn from such luminaries as Richard Feynman and Gell-Mann, to enjoy California’s warm weather, and because I had few alternatives.

More here.

Oscar Schwartz in The Guardian:

This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, up until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.

But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness as something that exists “in the blood”.

The raw memory of this racism made any suggestion of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone “looked Jewish” my grandmother would respond, “Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?” Yet evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn’t stop my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an ancient identity “confirmed” by modern science was too alluring.

More here.

Alec Nevala-Lee in the New York Times:

“Consider how the titles of tyrants change,” the historian William Frederick Kohler once wrote. “We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen’s Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of ‘Il Duce,’ ‘Der Führer,’ the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the C.E.O. of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.”

Kohler’s words seem especially resonant today, and their power is undiminished by the fact that their author exists only as a character in a novel by William H. Gass. Gass, who died in 2017 at the age of 93, began working on “The Tunnel” in the late 1960s, and he finished it a quarter of a century later, when it was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Even under the best of circumstances, this plotless book of over 600 pages would have been one of the least commercial novels ever released by a major publishing house, and it had the additional misfortune of appearing halfway through a decade that was uniquely unprepared for its despairing vision of America. The critic Robert Kelly wrote in The Times Book Review: “It will be years before we know what to make of it.”

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Almost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1837, aphoristically—that is to say, with a neat if slightly dubious finality. (“How wofully the reverse is the case with systems of philosophy,” he added.) We prefer collections of aphorisms over big books of philosophy, Mill thought, not just because the contents are always short and usually funny but because the aphorism is, in its algebraic abbreviation, a micro-model of empirical inquiry. Mill noted that “to be unsystematic is of the essence of all truths which rest on specific experiment,” and that there is, in a good aphorism, “generally truth, or a bold approach to some truth.” So when La Rochefoucauld writes, “In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us,” he is offering not a moral injunction saying “Take pleasure in the misfortune of your best friends” but a testable observation about what Mill termed “the workings of habitual selfishness in the human breast.” The aphorism means: We do take pleasure—not in every case, perhaps, but more often than we might admit—in the misfortune of our best friends.

We don’t absorb aphorisms as esoteric wisdom; we test them against our own experience. The empirical test of the aphorism takes the form first of laughter and then of longevity, and its confidential tone makes it candid, not cynical. Aphorisms live because they contain human truth, as Mill saw, and reach across barriers of class and era. “Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples,” another La Rochefoucauld classic, is not only humorous in its tidy reversal; it is also still rather persuasive, as we watch the drift from rebelliousness to reaction in every generation.

Aphorisms come at us in so many forms and from so many periods that one might think an academic study of aphorisms would aim to give them a family tree—tracing the emergence of the humanistic aphorism from its solemn white-bearded grandfather, the proverb; the descent of the clever, provocative epigram from its sly guerrilla progenitor, the parable (the form that allowed Jesus to spread subversion while seeming merely obscurely elegant). And then we might learn how those later forms have spawned such contemporary commercial descendants as the one-liner and the meme.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Extended parental care is considered one of the hallmarks of human evolution. A stunning new research result published today in Nature reveals for the first time the parenting habits of one of our earliest extinct ancestors.

Analysis of more than two-million-year-old teeth from Australopithecus africanus fossils found in South Africa have revealed that infants were breastfed continuously from birth to about one year of age. Nursing appears to continue in a cyclical pattern in the early years for infants; seasonal changes and food shortages caused the mother to supplement gathered foods with breastmilk. An international research team led by Dr. Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Southern Cross University, and by Dr. Luca Fiorenza and Dr. Justin W. Adams from Monash University, published the details of their research into the species in Nature today.

“For the first time, we gained new insight into the way our ancestors raised their young, and how mothers had to supplement solid food intake with breastmilk when resources were scarce,” said geochemist Dr. Joannes-Boyau from the Geoarchaeology and Archaeometry Research Group (GARG) at Southern Cross University.

More here.

Claude Monet, Argenteuil, 1875

It was a lot of things.
It was the algae blooms swimming against the tide.
It was the convent of masts, making partial signs of the cross across the sky’s chest.
The eyes & brow suspended in clouds passing.
You could almost feel the dew on the nose
of the bows
………………………………….quivering.
………………………………………………………………………..I know the sun,
tinged red, sat somewhere above the blue, burning
into the day.

It was a thousand miles ago,
& now I can only imagine
those deep December nights in Ohio.
Selling the house. Coming to visit you, frail
& fevered pressing your cold hands together & together
watching the dancers across the street
in the one room studio.

Each night, the same couple
curving over the hardwood, knees bent …  bending
lead & follow, chest to chest, smooth
…………………………………………………… then slow … slow.

I think of the night you whispered
how you wanted just one more
summer. Just one more chance to see the geese
floating through the ravine. The deer
in the middle of the rain-kissed leaves.

The tiny Monet postcard in white frame on the nightstand.
“I’d like to go there,” you said. Your hand crumpling
around a tissue.

Calls were made. Come now.
Come get your goodbyes. Come touch
each light blue bead of the rosary with us,
passing it gently
through the calm of our fingers.

That night,
I stepped outside onto the wet black brick of the patio,
blew smoke
…………… under the glow of the yellow bulb & noticed him

across the street, locking the front door of the studio.
…………………………………………………………………………. He turned,

looked me in the eyes
offered a short nod as I stood
still as a fawn
scarved in the steam of its own breath.

The snow staring back into us
like white on a cloud.

by Adam J. Gellings
from The Ecotheo Review