Christine Ro in JSTOR Daily:

Urban Dictionary, as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make fun of the comparatively staid Dictionary.com. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month.

Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends (uh, penis McFlurry?). This isn’t just a matter of trifling but ultimately harmless terms. Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. It’s clear from a quick browse through the trending terms that the users are particularly titillated by (or nervous about) women’s bodies (e.g., twatopotamus) and sex between men (e.g., vaginal intolerant).

With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries.

More here.

Christine Dell’Amore in National Geographic:

The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.

“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.

Moving in a straight line is crucial to dung beetles, which live in a rough-and-tumble world where competition for excrement is fierce.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated, but created a barrier to its creation. Nowadays computers are helping to reverse that trend, allowing casual users to create slick songs of their own. Not everyone is equally good at it, however; Grimes (who currently goes by c, the symbol for the speed of light) is a wildly successful electronic artist who writes, produces, performs, and sings her own songs. We dig into how music is made in the modern world, but also go well beyond that, into artificial intelligence and the nature of digital/virtual/online personae. We talk about the birth of a new digital avatar — who might be called “War Nymph”? — and how to navigate the boundaries of art, technology, fashion, and culture. Her new album Miss Anthropocene will be released in February 2020.

More here.

Cody Kommers in Quillette:

Republicans are traditionally hostile to what they call government “hand-outs.” This is not because they believe people shouldn’t get what they need. Rather, conservatives believe that people should get what they need in the most efficient way possible. Which, to the Republican mind, is almost certainly never going to be a program run by the federal government.

The basis for this argument is that big government has two major problems. The first is a knowledge problem. It doesn’t know exactly what is going on out there in the wider world, nor what the best solutions might be. The second is an execution problem. Whatever the government does set as a goal, it’s rarely in a position to enact this plan efficiently. The solution to the knowledge problem is decentralization: give more decision-making power to those closer to the ground where a policy is going to be implemented. The solution to the execution problem is the free market. Let businesses figure out what the best course of action is, because they’re actually incentivized to do so. This is, at least, the basic idea.

More here.

Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

Lawrence was a mystic, consumed with a vision of each person’s soul as utterly foreign to all others, and yet capable of finding a form of human connection that is so vast that it can contain, as he writes in The Rainbow, “bonds and constraints and labours” and still be “complete liberty.” There is no writer more keenly interested in how men and women relate to one another, or in relatedness as such: the tension between the self—inviolate, contained, individual, isolate—and the couple. He imagined the task of art is the same as the task of life—to be in true relationship to one’s surroundings, in a dynamic flow. He believed the novel was a worthwhile form because in it every part is related to every other. He was a mystic seeking absolute truth, which now seems passé, and precious. His voice is as heady and vague as it is pure and urgent, and even his “worst pages,” as his contemporary Catherine Carswell wrote, “dance with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s.”

more here.

Richard Moe at The American Scholar:

“Latin America doesn’t matter,” President Nixon told his advisors in 1973. “People don’t give a shit about the place.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agreed, saying “what happens in the south has no importance.” That same year, Arana writes, “Kissinger received concrete evidence of the massacres,” but “stated that ‘however unpleasant’ these circumstances might be, the overall situation was beneficial to the United States.” As he told the Argentine foreign minister as the killing was happening, “We want you to succeed.”

The story of the past hundred-plus years is replete with other examples of U.S. intervention in Latin America, most notably in the early 20th century when, during the nation’s brief flirtation with colonialism, it encouraged the people of Panama to separate from Colombia and allow the United States to build a canal. Curiously, Arana gives the episode only passing attention. President Theodore Roosevelt, who contributed to the chaos in Colombia by encouraging its revolutionaries, got what he had long sought: “exclusive control, in perpetuity, over the Canal Zone.”

more here.

An Irish Word

Canny has always been an Irish word
to my ear, so too its cousin crafty,
suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work,
fine-making, handwrought artistry,

but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive,
stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions,
“silence, exile, and cunning,” in Joyce’s admonition,
ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive.

Craft, akin to croft—
a shepherd’s crooked hawthorn staff,
wind-polished wolds and peat-spent moorlands
high in the Blue Stack Mountains.

Akin to draught—a pint of creamy stout
or a good stout draught horse
or a draughty old house
like the one in which my grandfather was born

near Drimnaherk, slate-roofed, hard-angled,
ringed by thistles in a soil-starved coomb.
His four brothers left home
bound for Australia, South Africa, Liverpool, and Los Angeles

Read more »

Anya Ventura in The Baffler:

IN 1971, AFTER THE UNITED STATES had declared a War on Poverty but before the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism, Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer: a battle against the bad cells that attack our bodies. Three months earlier, Lewis F. Powell, a lawyer on the board of Philip Morris and future Supreme Court justice, had written a confidential memo with lasting consequences that urged corporations to become more aggressively involved in politics in order to advance their own interests. In metaphoric terms, then, cancer was an apt disease of the times: a problem of unchecked growth, deadly and yet slow to materialize. Its elevated status was cemented over the following decades, as cancer became an economic, bodily, ecological, and spiritual question threaded through every facet of American life. It was against this backdrop, in 1975, that a merchant banker named Richard Stephenson bought up a community hospital in Zion, Illinois, a pious town along the western shore of Lake Michigan, just south of the Wisconsin state line. Eventually ballooning into a network of hospitals christened the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, it became a business catering to the most desperate—one of a boom industry’s most grotesque manifestations that in 2013 was valued roughly at $1.36 billion.

According to the company’s lore, a story I would hear recounted many times during my visits to Zion, Stephenson rebranded the Zion-Benton hospital in 1988 following the death of his mother from bladder cancer. In 1990, he acquired a second hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma—the former City of Faith hospital that had been constructed in 1978 by Oral Roberts after he received a vision from a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus. In addition to Tulsa and the flagship hospital in Zion, the CTCA would go on to open more treatment centers near Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Their treatment model became known as the “Mother Standard” and sought to treat the whole person: mind, body, and spirit. In addition to traditional medicine—chemotherapy, radiation—the CTCA offers patients acupuncture, chiropractics, nutritional advice, naturopathy, and spiritual support. They also promote expensive, cutting-edge treatments like immunotherapy. “It’s really unbelievable how one doctor can tell me I have two months to live, and then I go the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and they save my life,” says a woman featured in one of the CTCA’s many television advertisements, whose intertitle informs us that “You have no expiration date.” According to its slogan at the time, CTCA is “winning the fight against cancer, every day.”

When it’s not likened to a “fight,” cancer is often framed as a “journey,” a soul-fortifying pilgrimage through dangerous geography. In the opening passage of Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag dubbed it “the kingdom of the sick.” Christopher Hitchens called it “Tumortown;” Barbara Ehrenreich, “Cancerland.” But at the CTCA, patients are first welcomed in their journey by a concierge at what’s called “First Connections”; at the Zion hospital, a moss-colored oil portrait of Stephenson beams down from the front desk.

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

On 15 June 2017, scientists at a respected biological institute in Germany were thrown into crisis by an alarming announcement. An investigation into the Leibniz Institute on Aging had found that its director, cell biologist Karl Lenhard Rudolph, had published eight papers with data errors, including improperly edited or duplicated parts of images. Investigators didn’t find deliberate fraud, but Rudolph wasn’t able to present original data to explain the problems. The Leibniz Association, which runs the institute in Jena and had commissioned the probe, concluded that Rudolph hadn’t supervised his lab group properly, and so was guilty of “grossly negligent scientific misconduct”. It applied the strictest sanctions it could, barring the institute from applying for research funding from the association while under Rudolph’s leadership for three years. It also ordered the centre to undergo an international review, even though the last one had been completed only a couple of years earlier. Rudolph resigned as director.

It was the second calamity in a year for the centre, which is also known as the Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI). Police had raided it in 2016 after allegations that the centre had violated European regulations on animal experiments. The experiments were suspended, and although the FLI was cleared of the allegations, not all of the experiments had been re-authorized when the Rudolph affair broke. “The second crisis sent us into shock — it seemed more personal,” says molecular geneticist Christoph Englert, a group leader at the FLI, which employs 270 scientists. Most researchers at the centre hadn’t even known their director was under investigation. FLI leaders set about restoring the centre’s reputation. They began by phasing in mandatory electronic databases and creating a system of thesis advisory committees to replace single PhD supervisors. The FLI’s head of core facilities, Matthias Görlach, had a less conventional idea. He contacted Enrico Bucci, a molecular biologist who had visited the FLI for some PhD work 18 years earlier, and with whom he’d kept in touch. Bucci was now in the business of checking research papers, Görlach knew; in 2016, he’d founded a science-integrity firm called Resis, based in Samone, Italy. Could the company perhaps help the institute to avoid errors in future?

More here.

Elizabeth Landau in Quanta:

Beginning in 1991, Virginia Trimble read every single astronomy article published in 23 different journals. She would then write an annual “year in review” article, which astronomers everywhere used as a window into the rest of the field at large. Her characteristic dry humor came through even in the first installment: “Science, notoriously, progresses amoeba-like, thrusting out pseudopods in unpredictable directions and dragging in the rest of the body after or, occasionally, retreating in disorder.” She stopped in 2007, in part because, with online publishing, there were just too many articles to read.

This endeavor and others have given Trimble a perspective on the past half-century of astronomy that few others could claim.

Stardom was part of Trimble’s early years, and not just because she attended Hollywood High School. In 1962, while still an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, she achieved her first small measure of fame when Life magazine published an article about her titled “Behind a Lovely Face, a 180 I.Q.” Then in 1963, she became Miss Twilight Zone, the face of a publicity campaign to promote the popular sci-fi show with Rod Serling.

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Philip Kitcher in the Boston Review:

Why ask “Why trust science?” When many people worry about the safety of genetically modified food, parents resist the advice of pediatricians to vaccinate their children against common childhood diseases, religious people still say they take the earth to be fewer than 10,000 years old, and the president of the United States declares climate change to be a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, public trust in scientific research would seem to be in dire straits. The time is ripe for reassurance. Even to pose the question indicates that something has gone wrong.

The first thing to say, though, is that not all these failures of trust are equally significant. Doubts about the scientific consensus on the history of life on Earth, for example, are not especially troubling in themselves. It would be better, no doubt, if schoolchildren learned how geological evidence expanded the timescale of planetary history half a century before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Yet even if scientific education fails in these respects, it is not one of the world’s greatest tragedies; for much of everyday life, behaving as if the world were only a few thousand years old makes little difference. Failure to act to mitigate the effects of climate change is another matter entirely.

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Nargol Aran in The Point:

In December 2005, in his fourth month as president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth. This was during an interview with Al-Alam, an Arabic-language channel broadcast from Tehran. The interview wasn’t an outlier. A year earlier, under new leadership, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state-owned TV network that operates Al-Alam, broadcast a number of programs that described the Holocaust as a “made-up story,” a fiction or a myth. IRIB has always been hostile to what it calls the “Zionist Regime,” but prior to 2004 there had been no orchestrated campaign to cast the Holocaust as a lie.

Haroun Yashayaie is a past head of the Tehran Jewish Committee, an umbrella organization that oversees the administration of the city’s Jewish schools, kosher butcher shops and synagogues. A former film executive and newspaper editor, Yashayaie, who is 84, has always kept an eye on the media. When an IRIB channel labeled the Holocaust a fiction, he wrote an open letter in condemnation. When Ahmadinejad repeated the claim, he wrote another: “The Holocaust is, in fact, an open wound on the hands of Western civilization. … The Holocaust is not a myth in the same way that the massacre at Sabra and Shatila is not a myth.” After distributing the second letter to the media, Yashayaie personally delivered it to Ahmadinejad at a summit for religious minorities. The new president and his key cultural advisers were conflating criticisms of Israel with Holocaust denial, Yashayaie contended, and thereby whitewashing the crimes of fascism.

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Thora Siemsen and Andrea Long Chu at The Nation:

TS: Lines from Valerie Solanas’s play Up Your Ass open each chapter of Females. How did this choice help determine the book’s structure?

ALC: Verso had initially approached me about doing an introduction to Up Your Ass, which they were thinking about publishing. Eventually that idea morphed, and we decided I would just write a short book—but I still wanted Up Your Ass to be essential to it. I also wanted the book to be more experimental in form. I was thinking brief, numbered axioms, like Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. That [idea] was a disaster. While it was freeing to be able to jump around from idea to idea, it was also painful and exhausting. I ended up with all these fragments and no coherent book, and I still hadn’t worked Up Your Ass into it. So I turned in the draft, came back to revise it after my surgery, and realized that the play could serve as the spine of the book. I more or less follow the whole play from start to finish. That transformed the book from this bad archipelago of thoughts into a single whole. The play was the answer.

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George Blaustein at n+1:

THE MOST PLEASANT WAY to experience the Louvre Abu Dhabi is the same as with any monied museum: in total ignorance of the real circumstances of its creation. A broad steel dome of 7500 tons (the Eiffel Tower weighs about as much, in iron) rests on an archipelago of galleries and buildings. As you approach, it floats like a giant alien saucer from Independence Day. But from below the sunlight streaks through its delicate lattice of layered octagonal forms. This “rain of light,” both stunning and calm, evokes sun through palm leaves. The floors are gray, the walls are white, and all around is the blue of water and sky. The Louvre is on the island of Saadiyat, which means “happiness,” and Abu Dhabi’s gridded phalanx of skyscrapers stands at a relaxing distance across the water, like a shinier Chicago of the Middle East.

The circumstances of creation have not been harmonious for the first encyclopedic museum of art and civilization in the Middle East, nor has its western reception. “See humanity in a new light” is the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s slogan, but new light isn’t necessarily best light.

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John McIntyre at Poetry Magazine:

If you place their bodies of work end to end chronologically, Marianne Moore and Grace Schulman together created more than a century’s worth of American poetry. Moore’s first published poems appeared in Poetry in 1915; the 84-year-old Schulman’s most recent collection is Without a Claim (2013), although she’s published poems and a memoir since, and this year edited Mourning Songs, a compilation of poems about death and grief. Both women were poetry editors at major magazines, Moore during the latter years of Dial and Schulman at the Nation from 1971 to 2006. That tenure overlapped with a dozen years—1973 to 1985—during which Schulman helmed the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. She has also taught at Baruch College for decades, extending her knowledge and influence, and perhaps a bit of Moore’s influence by proxy, to generations of young poets.

Schulman has been candid about her connection to Moore, whom she met in 1949. Schulman was 14 at the time. “They said she was a great poet,” Schulman writes in her memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage (2018). “I was struck by the combination of her humility and gorgeous vocabulary. I liked her humor, ranging from deadpan to high comedy.”

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Sheldon Richman in Counterpunch:

Israel’s champions owe us an explanation. First, they insist that Israel is and always must be a Jewish state, by which most of them mean not religiously Jewish but of the “Jewish People” everywhere, including Jews who are citizens of other states and not looking for a new country. To be Jewish, according to the prevailing view, it is enough to have a Jewish mother (or to have been converted by an approved Orthodox rabbi). Belief in one supreme creator of the universe, in the Torah as the word of God, and in Jewish ritual need have nothing whatever to do with Jewishness. (We ignore here the many problems with this conception, such as: how can there be a secular Judaism?) The definition of Jew has been bitterly controversial inside and outside of Israel since its founding. The point is, as anthropologist Roselle Tekiner wrote, “When the central task of a state is to import persons of a select religious/ethnic group — and to develop the country for their benefit alone — it is crucially important to be officially recognized as a bona fide member of that group.” (This is from the anthology Anti-Zionism: Analytical Reflections, which is not online and is apparently out of print. But see Tekiner’s article, “Israel’s Two-Tiered Citizenship Law Bars Non-Jews From 93 Percent of Its Lands.”)

Second, Israel’s champions insist that Israel is a democracy — indeed, the only democracy in the Middle East. They vehemently object whenever someone demonstrates how Israel-as-the-state-of-the-Jewish-People must harm the 25 percent of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, most of whom are Arabs. Israeli law uniquely distinguishes citizenship from nationality. The nationality of an Israeli Arab citizen is “Arab” not Israeli, while the nationality of a Jewish citizen is “Jewish” not Israeli. Are citizens of any other country distinguished in law like that? The prohibition on marriage between Jews and non-Jews is not the result of political bargaining with religious parties but of a desire to protect the Jewish people from impurity. These contortions are required by Israel’s self-declared status as something other than the land of all its citizens. Early Zionists said they wanted Palestine to be as Jewish as Britain is British and France is French — a flagrant category mistake that has had horrific consequences for the Palestinians.

The insistence by Israel’s supporters — that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic — thus is puzzling. What does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state if that status has no real consequences for non-Jews?

More here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

There‌ are‌ ‌some‌ ‌crimes‌ ‌that‌ ‌are‌ almost‌ ‌impossible‌ ‌to‌ ‌forget. ‌For‌ me, ‌they‌ ‌include‌ ‌the‌ ‌death‌ ‌in‌ ‌1999‌ ‌of‌ ‌Kendra‌ ‌Webdale, ‌an‌ ‌aspiring‌ ‌young‌ ‌journalist‌ ‌who‌ ‌was‌ ‌pushed‌ ‌in‌ ‌front‌ ‌of‌ ‌a‌ ‌New‌ ‌York‌ ‌subway‌ ‌train‌ ‌by‌ ‌a‌ ‌29-year-old‌ ‌man‌ ‌with‌ ‌schizophrenia‌ ‌who‌ ‌had‌ ‌stopped‌ ‌taking‌ ‌his‌ ‌medication. ‌That‌ ‌same‌ ‌year, ‌two‌ ‌mentally‌ ‌ill‌ ‌teenage‌‌‌ ‌boys‌ ‌massacred‌ ‌12‌ ‌students‌ ‌and‌ ‌one‌ ‌teacher‌ ‌at‌ ‌Columbine‌ ‌High‌ ‌School‌ ‌in‌ ‌Colorado. ‌Thirteen‌ ‌years‌ ‌later, ‌a‌ ‌seriously‌ ‌emotionally‌ ‌disturbed‌ ‌20-year-old‌ ‌man‌ ‌murdered‌ ‌20‌ ‌young‌ ‌children‌ ‌and‌ ‌six‌ ‌adults‌ ‌at‌ ‌Sandy‌ ‌Hook‌ ‌Elementary‌ ‌School‌ ‌in‌ ‌Connecticut. ‌This‌ ‌year, ‌a‌ ‌homeless‌ ‌24-year-old‌ ‌man‌ ‌bludgeoned‌ ‌four‌ ‌men‌ ‌to‌ ‌death‌ ‌while‌ ‌they‌ ‌slept‌ ‌on‌ ‌the‌ ‌streets‌ ‌of‌ ‌my‌ ‌city. ‌Although‌ ‌New York is now far‌ ‌safer‌ ‌than‌ ‌when‌ ‌I‌ ‌was‌ ‌a‌ ‌child‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌1940s‌ ‌and‌ ‌’50s‌ ‌who‌ ‌walked‌ ‌to‌ ‌and‌ ‌from‌ ‌school‌ ‌unescorted, ‌like‌ ‌most‌ ‌big‌ ‌cities, ‌it still‌ ‌harbors‌ ‌untold‌ ‌numbers‌ ‌of‌ ‌men‌ ‌and‌ ‌women‌ ‌with‌ ‌known‌ ‌or‌ ‌undiagnosed‌ ‌severe‌ ‌mental‌ ‌illness‌ ‌that‌ ‌can‌ ‌and‌ ‌should‌ ‌be‌ ‌treated‌ ‌before‌ ‌yet‌ ‌another‌ ‌personal‌ ‌or‌ ‌societal‌ ‌tragedy‌ ‌occurs. ‌ ‌

What, ‌I‌ ‌wondered, ‌is‌ ‌or‌ ‌can‌ ‌be‌ ‌done‌ ‌to‌ ‌help‌ ‌them‌ ‌and‌ ‌avert‌ ‌further‌ ‌disasters? ‌ ‌

Contrary‌ ‌to‌ ‌politically‌ ‌motivated‌ ‌claims, ‌I‌ ‌learned‌ ‌that‌ ‌people‌ ‌with‌ ‌serious‌ ‌mental‌ ‌ills‌ ‌are‌ ‌not‌ ‌necessarily‌ ‌prone‌ ‌to‌ ‌commit‌ ‌violent‌ acts‌ ‌ — ‌they‌ ‌are‌ ‌far‌ ‌more‌ ‌likely‌ ‌to‌ ‌become‌ ‌‌victims‌‌ ‌of‌ ‌crime. ‌Rather, ‌the‌ ‌issue‌ ‌is‌ ‌that‌ ‌treatments‌ ‌known‌ ‌to‌ ‌be‌ ‌effective‌ ‌are‌ ‌underfunded‌ ‌or‌ ‌wrongly‌ ‌dismissed‌ ‌as‌ ‌ineffective‌ ‌or‌ ‌too‌ ‌dangerous; ‌basic‌ ‌research‌ ‌in‌ ‌university‌ ‌and‌ ‌government‌ ‌laboratories‌ ‌into‌ ‌new‌ ‌and‌ ‌better‌ ‌drugs‌ ‌is‌ ‌limited‌ ‌and‌ ‌also‌ ‌underfunded; ‌and‌ ‌pharmaceutical‌ ‌companies‌ ‌have‌ ‌shown‌ ‌little‌ ‌interest‌ ‌in‌ ‌developing‌ ‌and‌ ‌testing‌ ‌treatments‌ ‌for‌ ‌severe‌ ‌mental‌ ‌illness. ‌ Also‌ ‌at‌ ‌issue‌ ‌is‌ ‌that, ‌as‌ ‌was‌ true‌ for‌ ‌cancer‌ ‌until‌ ‌recently, ‌acknowledgment‌ ‌of‌ ‌mental‌ ‌illness‌ ‌carries‌ ‌a‌ ‌stigma‌ ‌that‌ ‌impedes‌ ‌its‌ ‌early‌ ‌recognition, ‌when‌ ‌it‌ ‌can‌ ‌be‌ ‌most‌ ‌effectively‌ ‌treated‌ ‌or‌ ‌reversed.

More here.

The Times

it is hard to remain human on a day
when birds perch weeping
in the trees and the squirrel eyes
do not look away but the dog ones do
in pity.
another child has killed a child
and i catch myself relieved that they are
white and i might understand except
that i am tired of understanding.
if this
alphabet could speak its own tongue
it would be all symbol surely;
the cat would hunch across the long table
and that would mean time is catching up,
and the spindle fish would run to ground
and that would mean the end is coming
and the grains of dust would gather themselves
along the streets and spell out:
these too are your children this too is your child

by Lucille Clifton
from Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems
BOA Editions, 2000