Thomas Bird at the BBC:

The creature stretched, then clung upright against the tree with its sharp claws and began to groom. Its skin required some attention as it had, frankly, a lot of it. A membrane stretched from its neck via its hands and feet to its tail, a kite-like feature that distinguishes the colugo, once popularly known as the flying lemur, from other night gliders like the flying squirrel, which has a long tail that it uses to fan itself through the air. Because they don’t fly, nor use a tail to fan, colugos, with the logic of a hand glider launching from a hillside, typically climb high into a tree before attempting to glide. Still, their range is impressive. According to Miard they’ve been recorded gliding a full 150m, although hops of 30m or less are far more common.

More here.

[Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Joanne Randa Nucho in Public Books:

The Treaty of Versailles—a contract that changed the course of the century and beyond—has been all but forgotten in the public sphere and in popular discourse. As a result, few people think about the world we live in as being made by the Treaty. In fact, most don’t think about it at all.

Now, at the 101st anniversary of the Treaty coming into effect, on January 10, 1920, the authors in this series look back. They do so to think about how Versailles helped build our present, and to consider what was lost in the aftermath of this often-overlooked moment in the history of the 20th century. The fate of the Middle East; the treatment of former Ottoman subjects; the triumph of finance over democracy; the weakness of the statesmen rebuilding after the war; the entrenchment of antisemitism across Europe; even the extraordinary renditions of the 21st-century US War on Terror: all this and more flows from the Treaty of Versailles, now just over a century old.

More here.

Liz Day in The New York Times:

Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review:

What she was up against were, in short, warnings. These were most explicit each Lent and Easter. In April 1932, Eliot said he had gained so much that he could not give up his journey towards what he termed “reality”: as he put it in the Quartets, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” The real thing lay beyond life, and he could no longer accept the kind of love that would mean giving that up. If he were to rank his two narratives, the supernatural did come first. Desire was evil, he believed, and talking to Hale more frankly than to anyone, he explained how difficult it was to fight this evil when he woke in the morning. When she notes his diminished expressiveness in the spring and summer of 1932, he explains this as a strategy, inseparable from unsatisfied desire. His typewriter stumbles, he crosses out and picks up the thought again with more deliberation, putting companionship before passion, then dependence, reverence and a protective instinct. He decides to label his feeling for her “respect.” True enough, though only one strand. He was not so earnest that he did not sometimes fix on her bathing costume and wavy hair.

more here.

Jana Larson at The Paris Review:

Bismarck, North Dakota, is a six-hour drive from Minneapolis, but it takes about ten hours by bus. You sit toward the back, next to an old man who sleeps with his mouth hanging open and an older woman with a red checkered shirt and dyed black hair in curlers. She reads a coupon circular like it’s a novel. Just in front of you, three Amish brothers talk among themselves in a thick Germanic language. You eavesdrop and try to figure out what they’re saying. It sounds biblical at first, but occasionally they say things in English, like “solid oak door,” and you second-guess that theory.

You settle in, take out your video camera, and start to film the landscape going by outside the window. You try to imagine you are Takako Konishi—that you’ve watched the movie Fargo, believe it’s a true story, believe there’s a suitcase full of money buried somewhere on this road, and believe you can find it.

more here.

Luvell Anderson in Boston Review:

What is racial fraud and how is it possible? The answer would be clear enough, perhaps, if race were a biological reality. But the consensus seems to be that race is a social construction, a product of human ingenuity. So why can’t you choose to be any race you want?

Rachel Dolezal, the former president of the Spokane NAACP who identifies as Black despite being born to white parents, clearly believes we are free to choose our racial identity. Her case would seem to expose the limits of thinking of race as a social construction. If races are social rather than biological, some commentators on Dolezal suggest, we are free to make of them what we will; there are no rules. Yet responses to Dolezal tell a different tale. A 2015 Rasmussen survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters found that 63 percent believed Dolezal was being deceitful in claiming to be Black: she was engaged in a kind of racial fraud.

Is it incoherent to believe both that race is a social construct and that racial fraud is possible? In other words, does endorsing the notion of racial fraud require believing races are biological, after all? Literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels makes this sort of argument in his 1994 essay “The No-Drop Rule,” and versions of that idea endure. Michaels’s claim basically amounts to this: in order for a charge of racial fraud to have any normative power—that is, the kind of authority we generally grant to statements about what we should and should not do—it must rely on the claim that race is an essential, biological part of who we are.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Pantoum For The Gyn That Asks If I Really Want More Children

She insists three kids are more than enough
Puerto Rican Tías are missing wombs
Tells me I’m still young, more than “just a mom”
Calls it a quick, simple operación

My Tías dug graves for their missing wombs
White coats whittled Atabey from their core
Gave la operación without consent
Severed roots & limbs, carved their initials

This doctor wants to slash & burn my core
Thinks me savage, an invasive species
Assures me she won’t carve her initials
These operations are routine for her

Boricuas are not an invasive species
Madre is thicket, lush, more than “just a mom”
Bloodletting brown bodies is routine for her
She insists three kids are more than enough

by Peggy Robles-Alvarado
from Split This Rock

Joan Didion in Literary Hub:

Of course I stole the title for this talk from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you.

More here.

Robert Langreth in Bloomberg Businessweek:

In January 2017, a lengthy proposal showed up at the offices of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in Washington. Running 112 pages, the document described a strategy for stopping future pandemics. It outlined a number of vaccine technologies to pursue, including messenger RNA and adenovirus vectors, and recommended that a team of 180 scientists, doctors, and other experts be created to carry out the plan. There were intricate technical details, an org chart, and an estimated cost: $595 million over 10 years.

Congress created Barda, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2006 for precisely this kind of thing. It’s charged with developing and procuring drugs and vaccines, and ensuring that the country is researching countermeasures to combat bioterrorism and chemical warfare, as well as pandemic influenza and other emerging infectious threats. The agency has historically been small, though, and the proposal, which came from the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline Plc, would have entailed one of its more ambitious efforts.

More here.

Brady Africk in The Factual:

Have you ever felt uncomfortable sharing your opinion on politics — whether online or with friends? If so, you’re not alone. Americans are becoming increasingly cautious about sharing their political opinions. In a recent survey, 62 percent of Americans described today’s political climate as one that “prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.” Further, this was not a sentiment limited to one side of the political spectrum. More than half of liberals and three-quarters of conservatives are hesitant to share some of their political views. Both of these percentages have risen in recent years, in tandem with the rising debate over so-called “cancel culture.”

But it’s not just everyday Americans that feel limited in their speech. In July 2020, 153 notable academics, authors, journalists, and others published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in Harper’s Magazine. In the letter, signees ranging from liberal philosopher Noam Chomsky to conservative author David Brooks voice their concern over “cancel culture” and the preservation of free speech. While the extent to which “cancel culture” endangers free speech is debated, the letter demonstrates that some academics and media professionals consider it a serious threat.

This prompts several key questions…

More here.

Fara Dabhoiwala in The Guardian:

In the endless catalogue of British imperial atrocities, the unprovoked invasion of Tibet in 1903 was a minor but fairly typical episode. Tibetans, explained the expedition’s cultural expert, were savages, “more like hideous gnomes than human beings”. Thousands of them were massacred defending their homeland, “knocked over like skittles” by the invaders’ state-of-the-art machine guns. “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire,” wrote a British lieutenant, “though the General’s order was to make as big a bag as possible.” As big a bag as possible – killing inferior people was a kind of blood sport.

And then the looting started. More than 400 mule-loads of precious manuscripts, jewels, religious treasures and artworks were plundered from Tibetan monasteries to enrich the British Museum and the Bodleian Library. Countless others were stolen by marauding troops. Sitting at home watching the BBC antiques show Flog It one quiet afternoon in the early 21st century, Sathnam Sanghera saw the delighted descendant of one of those soldiers make another killing – £140,000 for selling off the artefacts his grandfather had “come across” in the Himalayas.

More here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family.

…Influenced by the civil-rights movement, Moynihan focused on the black family. He believed that an undue optimism about the pending passage of civil-rights legislation was obscuring a pressing problem: a deficit of employed black men of strong character. He believed that this deficit went a long way toward explaining the African American community’s relative poverty. Moynihan began searching for a way to press the point within the Johnson administration. “I felt I had to write a paper about the Negro family,” Moynihan later recalled, “to explain to the fellows how there was a problem more difficult than they knew.” In March of 1965, Moynihan printed up 100 copies of a report he and a small staff had labored over for only a few months.

The report was called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Unsigned, it was meant to be an internal government document, with only one copy distributed at first and the other 99 kept locked in a vault. Running against the tide of optimism around civil rights, “The Negro Family” argued that the federal government was underestimating the damage done to black families by “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment” as well as a “racist virus in the American blood stream,” which would continue to plague blacks in the future:

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary—a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have … But it may not be supposed that the Negro American community has not paid a fearful price for the incredible mistreatment to which it has been subjected over the past three centuries.

That price was clear to Moynihan.

More here.

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.
It is winter
………. and the stars are hidden.
Read more »

Shaul Magid at Marginalia:

There are relatively few books, and this is one, that could have only been written by one scholar, in this case Elliot Wolfson. Some scholars have the requisite understanding of Heidegger, and very few others, the requisite expertise in Kabbalah. But no one to my knowledge has both sufficient to create such a study. The distinctive nature of this combination raises the question: who is the audience for this book? The answer, I submit, must include that Wolfson wrote this book for himself; it is the culmination of decades of intense reflection on both Heidegger and Kabbalah. But more interestingly, and importantly, this is a book that will create its audience. It is more than a book about Heidegger and/or Kabbalah (others have written on, or noticed the affinity between, Heidegger and Judaism, including Altmann, Fackenheim, M. Wyschogrod, E. Wyschogrod,  Scult). Wolfson’s book demonstrates how to think more broadly about each refracted through the lens of the other. It is not comparative in any conventional sense. Rather, it is a book that trains its reader along the way in how Wolfson wants us to read both Heidegger and Kabbalah, and to read and think with, through, and beyond, philosophical canons. Thus only after reading the book from beginning to end does one then understand what the book is about. There is no introductory guide to the argument or even the project. One jumps into a deep end that only gets deeper.

more here.

Zach Finch at The New England Review:

Back outside in the summer air, the summer frost heaves passed beneath my feet. I thought of Robert Walser, his little essay on walking, seeing everything afresh, the teeming world, the sap running, the beautiful phenomena, or his essay about Kleist walking around Thun, the mountainous Swiss village—“Bells are ringing. The people are leaving the hilltop church.” In those days, Walser wrote most of his stories in a micro-script so tiny it was assumed illegible for years, until two scholars with a magnifying lens revealed that the script, which looked like termite tracks, was actually Kurrent, a form of handwriting, medieval in origin, used by German speakers until the mid-twentieth century. Why am I describing Walser? Because I thought of him as I was walking on the sidewalk. Because Sontag describes Walser’s writing as a free fall of innocuous observations not governed by plot, in which “the important is redeemed as a species of the unimportant.” For instance, he ends the story “Autumn (II)” with the sentence, “In the city where I reside, a van Gogh exhibition is currently on view,” apropos of nothing. We don’t know what the broken white line means until much later. That’s why dream journalists write. That’s why journalists dream.

more here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

It was often the case in the late 19th century that if you wanted to add a little prestige to your life you had your portrait painted by a notable portrait painter. Or you had your family painted, or just your wife. This latter idea was the thought that occurred to Sir Andrew Agnew, the 9th Baronet of Lochnaw Castle in Wigtownshire, Scotland. He was proud of his wife, perhaps in the way one is proud of a horse, or an elegant piece of furniture. He wanted others to be proud too. There was a lot of pride going around.

So, Sir Andrew hired a fashionable portrait painter and, in 1892, a portrait was painted. The painting is known today by the name of its sitter, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. The painter was a Mr. John Singer Sargent.

The portrait shows a person of great wealth and privilege engaged in the act of enjoying that wealth and privilege. To this, we might respond with complete indifference or even hostility. We’re also given, in the portrait, all the trappings of docile femininity. The soft gauzy fabrics of the chair, backdrop, and dress highlight the soft gauziness that adheres to Lady Agnew herself. The painting is staid in every possible meaning of the term.

And yet, I want to say that the painting is also exciting.

More here.