Nicholas Gordon in the Asian Review of Books:

We can sometimes forget that “India”—or the idea of a single unified entity—is not a very old concept. Indian history is complicated and convoluted: different societies, polities and cultures rise and fall, ebb and flow, as the political makeup of South Asia changes.

Namit Arora, author of Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, details some of these changing cultures. From the early Harappans, to the Buddhist centers of Nagarjunakonda and Nalanda, and ending at Varanasi, Arora takes his readers on a journey through South Asia’s rich and diverse history.

Namit Arora chose a life of reading and writing after cutting short his career in the Internet industry. Raised in the Hindi belt of India, he lived in Louisiana, the San Francisco Bay Area and Western Europe, and traveled in scores of countries before returning to India over two decades later in 2013.

More here.

Ryan Ruby at The Believer:

What exactly did Wittgenstein learn from his students? More than a few answers lie in Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Word book for elementary schools), a curious artifact from his schoolmaster years. Wittgenstein was dissatisfied with existing spelling books, which were expensive and bulky and therefore scarce. One of the tasks in his classroom was for his students to create their own vocabulary list copied from what he wrote on the chalkboard. But production was time-consuming, and the quality was hard to control. If every student had their own slim wordbook, though, they could correct their own errors. These issues with the standard ways of making vocabulary lists led Wittgenstein to write the Wörterbuch, which was published in 1926, the year he quit teaching. For a few years it was used in Austrian village schools, and then it went out of print.

On the face of it, the Wörterbuch is just that: a list of words. But its features are worth paying attention to, as they prefigure the radical change in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which began in earnest upon his return to Cambridge in 1929.

more here.

John Burnside at Literary Review:

‘Art, considered as the expression of any people as a whole, is the response they make in various mediums to the impact that the totality of their experience makes upon them, and there is no sort of experience that works so constantly and subtly upon man as his regional environment,’ wrote Mary Austin in The English Journal in 1932.  ‘It orders and determines all the direct, practical ways of his getting up and lying down, of staying in and going out, of housing and clothing and food-getting; it arranges by its progressions of seed times and harvest, its rain and wind and burning suns, the rhythms of his work and amusements. It is the thing always before his eye, always at his ear, always underfoot.’

In this short article, one of the most precise definitions of regionalism ever written, Austin was talking specifically about American fiction, but her reasoning could just as easily be applied to George Mackay Brown, whose work, throughout a long and varied career, not only captures the totality of Orcadian life but also draws from that life a humane vision of creaturely dwelling, of man’s symbiotic relationship with the land and its history that, to his mind, was becoming dangerously eroded by the treacherous mythologising of ‘progress’.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

MALALA YOUSAFZAI IS FREAKING OUT about the future. The now twenty-three year old says so in an interview given to British Vogue, which has featured her clad in a blood-red outfit with matching headscarf on its July cover. Inside is a luscious photo spread and the kind of cutesy confessions that one would expect from a woman sentenced to being a girl forever: she was not chosen as head girl at school, she confesses; she loved being at Oxford and ordering takeout whenever she pleased. In this interview, as in most others of the thousands she has given, the interviewer emphasizes her ordinariness; Malala likes to take selfies, we learn, and her standing order at McDonalds is a sweet chili chicken wrap and a caramel frappe. In these revelations is the assurance that Malala Yousafzai, the girl wonder who fought the Taliban, is still the innocent and monochromatic figure the world needs her to be.

An exception to this assessment, which may be worse, can be found in Pakistan. Over there, the need to counter the country’s reputation as the site of Malala’s cruel militant mauling in 2012 has produced a vicious desire to police her life and movements abroad. When a photo of Malala wearing skinny jeans made the rounds on social media a few years ago, the Pakistani right was only too willing to list in great detail all the ways in which she had failed her faith/country/tribe and so on. If the West wishes to see Malala as the perpetual brave girl, the Pakistani religious right wants to present her as a crafty woman, and an errant one at that. It makes sense, then, that Malala has not chosen, at least at the moment, to live in Pakistan, where her scars remind everyone of their shameful inability to protect a young girl who spoke out for girls’ rights to education.

Pakistan is in Malala’s past. The celebrity world of international renown, red carpets, and millions and millions of dollars for her Malala Fund NGO are her current reality. It’s the flip side of Pakistan, a realm that is particularly attuned to the framework of her story as a young Muslim girl shot in the head by rabid and bloodthirsty Muslim men. As the scholar Shenila Khoja-Moolji has noted, the enduring and all-encompassing strength of this narrative is such that the individual, even Malala herself, is erased from it.

More here.

Diana Kwon in Scientific American:

Few harbingers of old age are clearer than the sight of gray hair. As we grow older, black, brown, blonde or red strands lose their youthful hue. Although this may seem like a permanent change, new research reveals that the graying process can be undone—at least temporarily. Hints that gray hairs could spontaneously regain color have existed as isolated case studies within the scientific literature for decades. In one 1972 paper, the late dermatologist Stanley Comaish reported an encounter with a 38-year-old man who had what he described as a “most unusual feature.” Although the vast majority of the individual’s hairs were either all black or all white, three strands were light near the ends but dark near the roots. This signaled a reversal in the normal graying process, which begins at the root.

In a study published today in eLife, a group of researchers provide the most robust evidence of this phenomenon to date in hair from around a dozen people of various ages, ethnicities and sexes. It also aligns patterns of graying and reversal to periods of stress, which implies that this aging-related process is closely associated with our psychological well-being. These findings suggest “that there is a window of opportunity during which graying is probably much more reversible than had been thought for a long time,” says study co-author Ralf Paus, a dermatologist at the University of Miami.

More here.

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
Read more »

David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful:

My impression is that the police in New York have tempered their initially confrontational approach to the protesters. There were no barricades or cars set up to entrap and enclose marchers. It seemed to me that, slowly, some lessons are being learned. But not everywhere — in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks was murdered, shot in the back as I write this. In many places, nothing has changed.

We talked (distanced) as we rode. We asked each other: What next? What changes can be instituted? (New York is banning chokeholds.) Are the changes being considered enough? And maybe, most importantly, are there policies that have shown documented success in stopping the killings, combating systemic racism and fostering better relationships between neighborhoods and the police?

The answer is: Yes, there are changes that have been proven to work.

There are two types of policies: Ones that reduce the risk of violence during an encounter between a citizen and the police, and ones that reduce the number and kinds of encounters altogether. I’ll start with what happens during an encounter.

More here.

Kurt Schwenk in The Conversation:

As dinosaurs lumbered through the humid cycad forests of ancient South America 180 million years ago, primeval lizards scurried, unnoticed, beneath their feet. Perhaps to avoid being trampled by their giant kin, some of these early lizards sought refuge underground.

Here they evolved long, slender bodies and reduced limbs to negotiate the narrow nooks and crevices beneath the surface. Without light, their vision faded, but to take its place, an especially acute sense of smell evolved.

It was during this period that these proto-snakes evolved one of their most iconic traits – a long, flicking, forked tongue. These reptiles eventually returned to the surface, but it wasn’t until the extinction of dinosaurs many millions of years later that they diversified into myriad types of modern snakes.

As an evolutionary biologist, I am fascinated by these bizarre tongues – and the role they have played in snakes’ success.

More here.

Robert Tracinski in his Substack Newsletter:

The signature of our current debate about free speech is that it is not primarily about protecting speech from the government. Rather, it is about the “culture of free speech.” It’s about intellectual openness and diversity as a cultural norm to be embraced by private individuals and private institutions.

Symposium held a recent discussion about what this culture of free speech means, and over at Discourse, I have made my own effort to define it more exactly. But in his new book, Jonathan Rauch has taken on this issue from a far broader perspective, not merely defending the culture of free speech but defining its institutional architecture and giving it a grander and more useful name: The Constitution of Knowledge.

The fundamental arguments for freedom of speech have always been epistemological, that is, relating to the basic requirements of thinking. The freedom to doubt, question, argue, and consider alternative hypotheses is necessary to discover the truth and to debunk error. Rauch describes how this gives rise to a whole implicit system governed by an unwritten constitution.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Fiction:

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
What is the internet doing to our minds and hearts? The American comic memoirist’s first novel, shortlisted for the Women’s prize, begins as a savagely witty deep dive into the black hole of social media, then confronts real-life tragedy and transcendence.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara, the “artificial friend” to sickly teenager Josie, is our naive guide through Ishiguro’s uneasy near-future, in which AI and genetic enhancement threaten to create a human underclass. Klara’s quest to understand the people and systems around her, and to protect Josie at all costs, illuminates what it means to love, to care – to be human.

Luster by Raven Leilani
This Dylan Thomas prize winner introduces a brilliant new voice. Edie is a young black woman in New York who starts a relationship with an older white man, and gets complicatedly close to his wife and adopted black daughter. The sentences crackle in a virtuosic skewering of race, precarious modern living and the generation gap.

More here.

From Nature:

In February, China more than doubled its number of protected species, with 517 additions, including the wolf, large-spotted civet and golden jackal. It was the first update since 1989, and to pioneering conservationist, Lu Zhi, it was a good sign. “I think the government is changing, especially the top leaders, who are sincerely into the environmental issues, not just [related to] wildlife, but also ecosystem restoration and pollution control,” she says. Attitudes towards conservation in China have shifted greatly in recent decades. In the mid-1980s, when Lu was an undergraduate student at Peking University in Beijing, she says the field of conservation biology was not yet recognized in China. Since then, local governments have been designating a growing number of protected areas and the state has announced a ‘red line’ initiative, which defines limits to human encroachment into ecologically sensitive and vulnerable areas totalling more than 2.4 million square kilometres — roughly one-quarter of the Chinese mainland. Such strategies have great potential. In the Beijing municipality, for example, forest cover has increased from 7% in the 1950s to 43% today, says Lu.

At the same time, the public has become increasingly attuned to the natural world. Since the 1990s, organized bird-watching has become a popular activity on the Chinese mainland, and it feeds valuable data collected by local community groups into population studies. Last year, Lu and her colleagues used data from the Bird Report, the largest nationwide project involving the submission of birdwatching records in China, to simulate changes in the range and habitat of 1,042 bird species through to the year 2070 and identify those most at risk (R. Hu et al. PLoS ONE 15, e0240225; 2020). Although the global trend of species loss and habitat destruction is desperate everywhere, says Lu, “in my own life history, in 30 years, I do see positive changes in China and in the world”.

More here.

Inventory

closet

The shirts and shoes,
of course, the French cuffs,
double-buttoned cuffs.
The bowl of buttons,
spares that came
in little plastic baggies,
emptied and unused.
His first suit, his second suit,
all the suits he didn’t need
after losing the desk job
when I was twelve.
The sneakers. The lone pair
of oxfords I never
saw him wear. The holes
in the elbows of the flannels,
the patches patching the holes.
The shirts I’ll take with me,
the ties I’ll give away.
The ties with flowers,
with paisleys. The Tabasco ties,
the Looney Toons ties.
The too-big pants, bagged up
to send to Goodwill.
The fraying sweat shirt.
The new sweat shirt from
my college. The sweaters,
the wool and cotton sweaters,
the yarns in the sweaters,
the fibers spun and knitted
into the approximate shape
of a father. The yarns
that gradually return
to their original shape,
slowly forgetting his form.

by Jim Whiteside
from Southern Review
Louisiana State University Press,
Volume 57, No. 1

Anatol Lieven in Spectator World:

To understand the strength of Putin’s position when it comes to defending Russian international interests (as opposed to domestic interests, where his deeply corrupt set-up is becoming increasingly unpopular), it is vital to understand that while Putin is obviously much more personally powerful than Western leaders, he is still the leader of the Russian foreign and security establishment — or as former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes dubbed the US equivalent, a blob.

Every major country has such a blob, which conducts national foreign and security policy on the basis of certain relatively fixed and enduring beliefs (often virtually dogmas) national interests and their country’s place in the world. These beliefs may seem strange and irrational to outsiders (including some of their own fellow citizens), but generally stem from deeply-held sentiments of national identity and historical experience. It can be a form of patriotism.

Russia’s blob is determined to maintain Russia’s role as a great power on the world stage (which may lead Russia into an even more dangerous dependence on China); to exclude potentially hostile foreign alliances over Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia, and to defend the minorities in those countries that look to Russia for support.

More here.

From Lapham’s Quarterly:

Shortly after Kurt Vonnegut returned in 1945 from Dresden, where he had spent months as a German prisoner of war, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, hoping to earn a master’s degree in anthropology. He had dropped out of Cornell University before enlisting in 1943, and had to wait until 1971 to be awarded his degree after advisers had rejected his thesis, which he later declared was too elegantly simple and fun for academic tastes. (“They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon,” he later rejoined in an essay.) After Vonnegut became a best-selling writer, his novel Cat’s Cradle was accepted as a thesis, and as a celebrity author he became a frequent giver of advice about postcollegiate life. “He was in such demand as a commencement speaker,” Charles J. Shields wrote in his biography of Vonnegut, “that when the Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich wrote a humorous address to college graduates in June 1997 headlined advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young, it was misattributed to Vonnegut. As a result, the ‘Wear Sunscreen Speech,’ as it came to be known, supposedly delivered by Vonnegut at MIT, has been credited to him for years.” Here is a speech that Vonnegut actually did deliver, at Syracuse University on May 8, 1994, titled “How I Learned from a Teacher What Artists Do.”

More here.

William Wall at The Dublin Review:

Some years ago a friend brought us to see the town of Acitrezza in Sicily where, arguably, the first great neorealist film was made. La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) was, according to its director, Luchino Visconti, filmed with actors “chosen from among the inhabitants of this town: fishermen, girls, labourers, stonemasons, fish wholesalers”. The dialogue was Sicilian, very much a language in itself and coeval with Italian. Our friend told us that the woman who played one of the sisters, Lucia, who is seduced by the marshal Don Salvatore in the film, was afterwards rejected by her community and never found a husband because they believed she had become a whore. The story may be a kind of urban legend, but there are so many layers to it that it’s worth unpacking a little.

First of all, the implication is that the citizens of what was then a tiny and remote fishing port interpreted what they saw on screen as a kind of reality; because the woman had been seduced on screen, and part of the seduction took place before their eyes, she had, in fact, been seduced.

more here.

Clint Smith at The Paris Review:

The Emancipation Proclamation, some forget, was not the sweeping, all-encompassing document that it is often remembered as. It applied only to the eleven Confederate states and did not include the border states that had remained loyal to the U.S., where it was still legal to own enslaved people. Despite the order of the proclamation, Texas was one of the Confederate states that ignored what it demanded. And even though many enslaved people escaped behind Union lines and enlisted in the Federal Army themselves, enslavers throughout the Confederacy continued to hold Black people in bondage throughout the rest of the war. General Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, in Appomattox County, Virginia, effectively signaling that the Confederacy had lost the war, but many enslavers in Texas did not share this news with their human property. It was on June 19, 1865, soon after arriving in Galveston, that Granger issued the announcement, known as Gen­eral Order Number 3, that all slaves were free and word began to spread throughout Texas, from plantation to plantation, farmstead to farmstead, person to person.

more here.