Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

The warty pig in question is a depiction on the inside of a cave in Indonesia. The painting was discovered last year. It was painted, the carbon daters say, about 45,000 years ago. That’s more than 10,000 years older than the famous paintings at the Chauvet Cave in France. Warty pig is, for now at least, the oldest work of representational art, by far, that exists anywhere in the world. 45,000 years. A long time. Also not a long time, geologically speaking. Just a blip. For us, though, for us, a very long time.

Anyway, the painter of warty pig, whoever this person was, seems to have been working on a domestic scene going on between at least three warty pigs. And what might have been the important business amongst the warty pigs on the island of Sulawesi during the forty-fifth-thousand-and-first century BCE? Well, the Sulawesi warty pig lives on the island to this very day. So, we have a pretty good sense of what the pig would have been doing 45,000 years ago. It would have been wandering around in the mornings and early evenings, rooting around in the underbrush looking for goodies to eat. It would have been working out whatever things needed to be worked out in the small social groups in which the pigs tend to live. Maybe that’s what the cave painting is showing us, an impromptu meeting of warty pigs 45,000 years ago. Unfortunately, the images of the other pigs have been lost to us but for a few scraps of color and shape. We’ll never know exactly what was the greater context for this image.

But here are a few things that I love about this fragment that has passed down to us from the deepest recesses of the past.

More here.

Stefano Mancuso in Longreads:

Darwin writes: what animals could you imagine to be more distant from one another than a cat and a bumblebee? Yet the ties that bind these two animals, though at first glance nonexistent, are on the contrary so strict that were they to be modified, the consequences would be so numerous and profound as to be unimaginable. Mice, argues Darwin, are among the principal enemies of bumblebees. They eat their larvae and destroy their nests. On the other hand, as everyone knows, mice are the favorite prey of cats. One consequence of this is that, in proximity to those villages with the most cats, one finds fewer mice and more bumblebees. So far so clear? Good, let’s go on.

Bumblebees are the primary pollinators of many vegetable species, and it is common knowledge that the greater the amount and the quality of pollination the greater the number of seeds produced by the plants. The number and the quality of seeds determines the greater or lesser presence of insects, which, as is well known, are the principal nutriment of numerous bird populations. We could go on like this, adding one group of living species to another, for hours on end: bacteria, fungi, cereals, reptiles, orchids, would succeed one another without pause, one by one, until we ran out of breath, like in those nursery rhymes that connect one event to another without interruption. The ecological relationships that Darwin brings to our attention tell us of a world of bonds much more complex and ungraspable than had ever previously been supposed. Relationships so complex as to connect everything to everything in a single network of the living.

More here.  [Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Callum Watts in Prospect:

Over the past decade, populism has emerged as an invasive species which has disrupted a previously stable political ecosystem. Liberal democracies across the world have been left in disarray, and occasional victories by establishment parties offer only temporary respite from its onslaught. That is an interpretation that Prospect readers—and all “right-thinking” opinion—will by now have heard many times.

However, in reality, populism is a symptom of the dysfunction, not the cause. It is a corrective response to a political organisation that is already suffering from an underlying pathology. Like many reactions, it can certainly sometimes end up doing more harm than good. But there is no hope in dealing with it decisively—still less of achieving full health to our polity—if the underlying issue isn’t addressed.

To grasp the nature of populism and how to address it, we must first understand what it means to govern well. Opinions will of course differ on the exact criteria. But there would surely be broad support for the inclusion of three qualities: it is legitimate, effective and provident.

More here.

Bone of My Bone Flesh of My Flesh

I can’t always refer to the woman I love,
my children’s other mother,
as my darling, my beloved,
sugar in my bowl. No.
I need a common, utilitarian word
that calls no more attention to itself
than nouns like grass, bread, house.
The terms husband and wife are perfect for that.
Hassling with PG&E
or dropping off dry cleaning,
you don’t want to say,
The light of my life doesn’t like starch.
Don’t suggest spouse—a hideous word.
And partner is sterile as a boardroom.
Couldn’t we afford a term
for the woman who carried that girl in her arms
when she was still all promise,
that boy curled inside her womb?
And today, when I go to kiss her
and she says “Not now, I’m reading,”
still she deserves a syllable or two—if only
so I can express how furious
she makes me. But
maybe it’s better this way—
no puny pencil-stub of a word.
Maybe these are exactly the times
to drag out the whole galaxy
of endearments: Buttercup,
I should say, lambkin, mon petit chou.

by Ellen Bass
from The Human Line
Copper Canyon Press, 2007

From BBC:

Oliver Eagleton in The Guardian:

Those who find writing a chore are better off not knowing about the literary method of Adam Phillips. Every Wednesday he walks to his office in Notting Hill. On this brief journey some idea begins to take shape, usually related to his day job (Phillips is a Freudian psychoanalyst who spends the rest of the week seeing patients). So long as this notion sparks his interest it will – by the time he sits down at his computer – have been transmuted into his first sentence. The next hours are spent unfurling that sentence into an essay, which typically forms part of a collection. Over 30 years this routine has produced almost as many books, in Phillips’s breezy, aphoristic style, on topics ranging from monogamy to sanity to democracy.

The ease of Phillips’s prose is conditioned by his reluctance to “convince” anyone, including himself. The author treats his readers like his patients, aiming to provoke and stimulate rather than persuade. Yet if psychoanalysis – and psychoanalytic literature – is a discourse concerned with change, how is this achieved without arguing, lecturing or coaxing? Is there a paradigm for altering another person from which coercion is entirely absent? That is the question Phillips poses – with a note of anxiety about his own literary and therapeutic practice – in On Wanting to Change. If there is “something pernicious about the wish to persuade people; or rather to persuade people by disarming them in some way”, then psychoanalysis offers “a form of honest persuasion. Or that, at least, is what it aspires to be.”

“Conversion” is Phillips’s byword for dishonest persuasion. When converted, we experience something akin to regression: helplessness, dependence, over-identification with an all-knowing Other.

More here.

Alejandro Anreus at Commonweal:

In 1792, the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746–1828) became gravely ill. His convalescence and recovery lasted for more than a year, leaving him completely deaf. (Lead poisoning was suspected.) Had he died right then, at the age of forty-six, Goya would have been remembered as a competent, even elegant, Rococo painter with realist tendencies, but nothing more. Instead, his illness transformed him into an extraordinary artist, one marked by great emotional depth and inventive formal technique.

There’s no denying Goya’s prowess as a painter. Just recall his arresting portraits and still lifes, or his masterful frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida Chapel in Madrid. There’s also his powerful Executions of the Third of May 1808 (1814) and his unsettling Black Paintings (1819–23), made near the end of his life. To fully grasp the extent of Goya’s achievements, though, one must consider his drawings and prints.

more here.

Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:

Sanders retained a feel for the joyful and raucous immediacy of R. & B. The producer Ed Michel later said, “Pharoah would take an R&B lick and shake it until it vibrated to death, into freedom.” But he soon became a star of the new, experimental wave of sixties jazz, often referred to as the “New Thing” or “free jazz.” At the time, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and others were breaking from traditional approaches to rhythm and harmonic structure. Sanders’s compositions were open and atmospheric, and his playing moved restlessly between smooth, serene melodies and blaring, hyperactive improvisations. You didn’t passively listen to someone like Sanders so much as receive a transference of energy or take in a brilliant explosion of light. Not everyone was ready for it.

more here.

Christine Jacobson in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

WHEN I FIRST held a book bound in human skin, the little hairs on my neck did not stand up, and chills did not run down my spine. The book looked unremarkable; its pale-yellow binding blended in with its antiquarian neighbors on the shelf. I was holding Des Destinées de l’âme (Destiny of the Soul) by philosopher Arsène Houssaye and standing in the bowels of Houghton Library, Harvard’s rare book and manuscript repository. As a graduate student, I had been hired to truck material between the underground stacks and the reading room, where researchers came from all over the world to pore over the library’s collections. Not long after I arrived, Harvard announced that the 19th-century philosophical treatise I held in my hands was the first proven example using peptide mass fingerprinting of anthropodermic bibliopegy, the practice of binding books in human skin. (Human: anthropos; skin: derma; book: biblion; fasten: pegia.) At my first opportunity, I stole away on a break to get a look at the volume. Holding the book didn’t give me goosebumps, but it did raise many questions. Whose skin was this? What kind of person would bind a book in human skin? And why?

Megan Rosenbloom has spent the last six years pursuing answers to those questions. The results of her efforts are compiled in Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin. Readers who relish the “dark academia” vibes of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or the historical medical accuracy of The Knick will love spending time in Rosenbloom’s company, though the book holds broader appeal as well.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Scientific American:

So how are we to gauge the 4.2-sigma discrepancy between the Standard Model’s prediction and the new measurement? First of all, it is helpful to remember the reason that particle physicists use the five-sigma standard to begin with. The reason is not so much that particle physics is somehow intrinsically more precise than other areas of science or that particle physicists are so much better at doing experiments. It’s primarily that particle physicists have a lot of data. And the more data you have, the more likely you are to find random fluctuations that coincidentally look like a signal. Particle physicists began to commonly use the five-sigma criterion in the mid-1990s to save themselves from the embarrassment of having too many “discoveries” that later turn out to be mere statistical fluctuations.

But of course five sigma is an entirely arbitrary cut, and particle physicists also discuss anomalies well below that limit. Indeed, quite a few three- and four-sigma anomalies have come and gone over the years.

More here.  [Thanks to Bill Benzon.]

Erica X Eisen in the Boston Review:

On April 14, 1945, as a group of American soldiers were leading him down the road in the village of Wittbräucke, German steel magnate Albert Vögler bit into a concealed cyanide ampoule, collapsed against an armored car, and died almost instantly. “I am ready to take part in the reconstruction of Germany,” he had told fellow industrialist Friedrich Flick earlier that year. “But I will never let myself be arrested.” Across the country, businessmen were doing the same thing: Siemens alone saw five of its board members kill themselves as the Red Army advanced through the streets of Berlin and captured its factory.

Those industrialists who remained behind, shredding documents and wrenching portraits of Hitler off the walls, would soon find themselves on the list of candidates for war crimes prosecution at Nuremberg—executives from Krupp, IG Farben, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and elsewhere whose companies had collectively smelted steel for tanks and purified aluminum for gunbarrels, formulated the synthetic rubber and gasoline necessary for tires and engines, built airplanes and U-boats and V-2 rocket circuit boards, and manufactured nerve gas and Zyklon B. They had seized Jewish property and swallowed up businesses sold off for pennies by those fleeing Nazi persecution. They had contracted with the German government to exploit the labor of concentration camp internees and sited factories with the specific goal of better leveraging this free and disposable workforce. They had planned, profited from, and above all else made possible the Nazi war machine and its genocides.

More here.

Michael Barany at JSTOR Daily:

In 1935, one of France’s leading mathematicians, Élie Cartan, received a letter of introduction to Nicolas Bourbaki, along with an article submitted on Bourbaki’s behalf for publication in the journal Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences (Proceedings of the French Academy of Sciences). The letter, written by fellow mathematician André Weil, described Bourbaki as a reclusive author passing his days playing cards in the Paris suburb of Clichy, without any pretense of overturning the foundations of all of mathematics (that more disruptive part of Bourbaki’s oeuvre and ambitions would come later). On the strength of Weil’s recommendation, Cartan helped launch what would become one of the most storied and notorious careers in the history of mathematics.

Weil, for his part, was playing a prank, propagating an elaborate in-joke that continued among mathematicians for decades. The math was real. Nicolas Bourbaki was not.

more here.

Ella Whelan in Spiked:

Queen’s University Belfast’s Pro-Life Society is under investigation by the students’ union over social-media posts. It stands accused of failing to respect the ‘spirit’ of the SU and its posts allegedly had the potential to bring the university ‘into disrepute’. The two posts featured images. The first compared abortion to slavery, with a man in chains captioned ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ alongside a fetus with the line ‘Am I not a baby and a sister?’. On Holocaust Memorial Day, the society posted a second image which compared abortion to both slavery and the Holocaust.

There are few things more grotesque than the penchant among anti-choicers to compare a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy with the Holocaust or slavery. QUB’s Pro-life Society claims that it contacted the UK ambassador for a Holocaust remembrance organisation, who assured it that the post ‘was not disrespectful in any way to Holocaust victims or survivors’. I know a few Jews who would disagree. Undermining the specific horror of the Holocaust by relativising it to score political points against abortion is degrading, to say the least. In the same way, using Josiah Wedgwood’s abolitionist image of the ‘supplicant slave’ alongside a fetus in utero says something about the society’s understanding of racism. The organised enslavement of black people for economic gain, like the institutionalised murder of Jews under the Nazis, is clearly incomparable with abortion. To suggest the two are the same shows historical ignorance and a worrying lack of moral clarity.

More here.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid in The Spectator:

Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan has once again blamed women for an appalling rise in rape cases. Khan used a televised question and answer session this week to say that sexual violence was a result of ‘increasing obscenity’. Women in Pakistan should remove ‘temptation’ because ‘not everyone has willpower’, he added, urging females to cover up to help reduce the sexual violence which has plagued our country.

Khan pointed the finger of blame at Bollywood and Hollywood, for spreading ‘vulgarity’. He also repeated the growing divorce tally of the UK as evidence of the ‘ethical plunge’ of the West, which he said is messing up the moral compass of the Muslim world and Pakistan. ‘World history tells when you increase vulgarity in society, two things happen: sex crimes increase and the family system breaks down,’ Khan said.

All this is hard to take from a twice–divorced former playboy, who appears to see his life prior to taking charge as prime minister as evidence of societal immorality, without saying, or realising, as much. Since coming to power he has upped the ante on his misogynistic views, objectifying nurses, condemning feminism, and hurling sexist abuses at his political opponents. Even more worryingly, born-again Muslim Khan is now upholding a merger of his personal chauvinism and the wider Islamist marginalisation of women in Pakistan.

More here.

Alexander Wells at the LARB:

IN A NABOKOV short story from 1945, some cultured English people hobnob about the Dresden bombing at a cocktail party: “‘My Dresden no longer exists,’ said Mrs. Mulberry. ‘Our bombs have destroyed it and everything it meant.’” For Anglo-Americans since World War II, Dresden has become an icon of ruin, first moral then physical — a sensational reminder of the evils of war. Recent histories like Sinclair McKay’s Dresden (2020) tend to conjure the firestorm as an act of sheer destruction, a brutish assault on a culture city that, if you squinted, was comparable to Vienna or Paris. (Such accounts tend to overstate Dresden’s innocence — the city was an important site for industry and transportation.) Heavily bombed during the war, then only haltingly rebuilt by Communist East Germany (GDR), Dresden is now a global symbol for atrocity against the run of play.

For contemporary Germans — and for Dresdeners in particular — it is far harder to talk constructively about the bombing. German wartime suffering remains a thorny moral question, especially for authors like Durs Grünbein, whose poetry collection Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City, originally published in German in 2005, has been translated by Karen Leeder and released roughly to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the bombings.

more here.

Jennifer Wilson in The Nation:

The thing about big plans is that they require people to carry them out. The problem of personnel particularly plagued Peter the Great. Convinced by his European advisers that his country was backward and stuck in a medieval mindset, he spent much of his reign on a series of modernizing initiatives intended to get Russia “caught up” with the West. To implement his reforms—which included establishing a navy, imposing a tax on beards, and eventually drafting half a million serfs to build a city (named after himself) on nothing but marshland—he needed a robust bureaucracy and a standing military that could manage the demands of his new, spruced-up empire. Peter thus made service—civil or military—compulsory for the Russian nobility, and he implemented a new class system, the Table of Ranks, under which one could be promoted according to how long and how well one served.

The Table of Ranks included 14 classes, from collegiate registrars (which included lowly copy clerks) at the very bottom to the top civil rank of chancellor. While it was pitched as the introduction of a modern meritocratic system in Russia, in practice the table produced sharp class divisions, prevented people from working in fields that did not correspond to their rank, and tied social status to the name and nature of one’s profession. A version of this system continued in Russia all the way up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and yet, in much of the literature of the 19th century, the civil service—which structured almost every aspect of life, particularly in the capital of St. Petersburg—feels weirdly merged into the background, more a fact of life than a facet of literary fiction, save for in the work of one writer: Nikolai Gogol.

More here.