Lanre Bakare in The Guardian:

In the opening to his 1962 New Yorker essay Letter from a Region in My Mind, James Baldwin remembers walking around his neighbourhood of Harlem as a 14-year-old, wondering if his fate would trap him there. “What I saw around me that summer in Harlem was what I had always seen,” he wrote. “Nothing had changed.” More than 50 years on, Baldwin’s words and philosophy have travelled thousands of miles from 110th street. His public image has been on a journey, from literary sensation with his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain in 1952 to his searing non-fiction work in the 60s that saw him revered as one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. Thirty years since he died of stomach cancer in 1987, an expat in the south of France, there is reinvigorated interest in Baldwin and his ideas. February sees the release of I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary by Haitian director Raoul Peck that takes Baldwin’s final, unfinished project – a book about the lives and murders of his friends Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers – as a starting point, before analysing Baldwin’s sometimes strained and difficult relationship with the civil rights movement. In March, Taschen will publish a special edition of The Fire Next Time with images from Life magazine photographer Steve Schapiro.

Peck’s film is the latest in a string of events and retrospectives that have put Baldwin back in the public imagination. The ball began rolling in 2014 with Columbia University’s year-long programme pegged to his 90th birthday. Since then, there have been film festivals, exhibitions dedicated to Baldwin, and musical theatre inspired by his writing. As the Black Lives Matter protests unfolded around the US, there was a collection of writing – including an entry from the Pulitzer winner Isabel Wilkerson – which took inspiration from Baldwin. His work has been used to explain everything from Trump to Dylann Roof and the Charleston church shooting. Then, in 2015, came Ta-Nehisi Coates’s bestseller turned must-read commentary on contemporary race relations in America, Between The World And Me, which was inspired by Baldwin’s own essay collection, The Fire Next Time.

More here.

Nancy McLean in National Humanities Center:

Looking back, it’s clear now that the real work of winning equal treatment began after the legislative victories once thought to signal the movement’s denouement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not simply open public accommodations, such as lunch counters and bus stations. It made possible the first large-scale progress in breaking down job segregation, a primary goal of civil rights activists from at least the 1940s onward. Using the Act’s Title VII, which outlawed employment discrimination, hundreds of thousands of workers ended their exclusion from higher-paying jobs and stopped discrimination in benefits, promotions, and day-to-day treatment. While some fought discrimination using the Civil Rights Act, other black workers organized to improve conditions in their existing jobs, as the Memphis sanitation strike inspired a vast wave of union organizing. Led by black municipal and hospital workers, the public sector became the best organized part of the U.S. labor market over the next two decades. There, African American men and women, especially, achieved their greatest income and promotion gains. In the area of school segregation, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and subsequent court victories enabled other activists to make the first significant headway in breaking down since the Supreme Court had issued its Brown v. Board of Education decision over a decade before. Still others, using the Voting Rights Act of 1965, opened electoral politics to African American voters and candidates as never before. In the South, the impact was stunning, as newly enfranchised black voters partnered with liberal and moderate whites to elect more African Americans than the region had seen since Reconstruction. In the cities of the North and West, black communities gained representation as never before. Nationally, forty-three black candidates won election as mayor in 1973, a number that quintupled over the next fifteen years.

As African Americans gained new access to white-dominated institutions, the freedom struggle moved inside from the streets. On college campuses, black students fought for and won the creation of Afro-American Studies programs and financial aid policies that would allow children of lower-income families to get college educations. In the military, one of the largest employers of African Americans, affirmative action and other policies produced one of the most racially equitable workplaces in the nation—indeed, the only one in which whites routinely have black supervisors. In just about every occupation, from auto work to librarianship, black caucuses arose to create a “safe space” where members would no longer be lonely “tokens”; they could raise consciousness about white privilege and organize for fair treatment and other institutional changes. The Congressional Black Caucus was only the best-publicized and most influential of these. Created in 1969 by Shirley Chisholm (D-NY, 1924-2005) and others, it joined together a new critical mass of African American representatives as it enabled them to speak with a common voice on issues of concern to their constituents.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout February will be in honor of Black History Month)

Justin E H Smith at Cabinet Magazine:

Hoover’s philosophy is continuous with a long American tradition, born in England, of engaging with nature, both for the wonder of the thing itself and for the more practical empiricist aim, typified already in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon, of discovering better ways to dominate it and to put it to use for us. The idea that philosophy might be practical in this way has been almost completely erased from our consciousness today, above all in the professionalized bubble of academic philosophy. Yet, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the period from which Hoover drew the most, common usage of the term makes perfectly clear that what a “philosopher” does primarily is to inquire—as Socrates was, wrongly, accused of doing—into what goes on in the heavens above and the earth below (and everywhere between as well). In a characteristic usage of the term, John Evelyn, in his 1661 workFumifugium; Or, The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated, speaks of “these unwholsome vapours, that distempered the Aer, to the very raising of Storms and tempests; upon which a Philosopher might amply discourse.”² Or, as Agricola himself explains, “there are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things.”³

Thomas Jefferson would amply discourse on the floral and faunal diversity of the New World, not least with his contemporary, the French natural historian Buffon, and also participate in ethnolinguistic surveys of the Native American groups of the Northeast. This sort of practical undertaking was one of the principal tasks of philosophy as commonly understood into the eighteenth century, and particularly so in the United States, where it was the only conception of philosophy that seemed appropriate for the nascent nation.

more here.

Matthew Phipps at The Millions:

“I speak the way I speak inside,” wrote the great Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. “Not with the voice intent on sounding human, but with the other one, the one that insists I’m still a creature of the forest.” Pizarnik, whose ubiquity in 20th-century Latin-American literature is indicated by the fact that many critics refer to her simply as “Alejandra” or “A.P.,” has not, historically, been on a first-name basis with English-reading audiences; that may change following the publication ofExtracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972, an invaluable 2016 release from New Directions that compiles new translations of three full-length collections and numerous uncollected poems Pizarnik left behind. This volume charts the final decade of the poet’s life, a period of her career in which she turned her gaze away from the world, facing inward to focus on the dark voices she channeled. On the page she carves out spaces of solitude and silence in which language is reduced to its very essence, a limited collection of recurring images and symbols. “When the roof tiles blow away from the house of language, and words no longer keep—that is when I speak,” Pizarnik resolved. Drawing from the dream-languages and word games of the surrealists, Pizarnik turns notions of lyrical subjectivity inside out with her kaleidoscopic procession of masks and personae; the strange music of her poems invites the reader in, and her revelations — cathartic and unsettling — are very nearly overwhelming.

more here.

Pádraig Murphy at The Dublin Review of Books:

A striking element in the book, which is referenced all through it, is the extent to which the quality and the availability in the shops of what we call salami was a gauge of quality of life for people in the Soviet generation. As Alexievich puts it, giving voice to a common view in most of this generation (this is not her own view), “the man who chooses from a hundred different varieties of salami in the shop is freer than the man who chooses from ten varieties”. (She adds, provocatively and controversially, freedom also means “to be unwhipped, but we can never expect an unwhipped generation; the Russian doesn’t understand freedom, he needs the Cossack and the lash”.) There can be little doubt that the salami question points to a significant reason for the failure of the great experiment in transforming human nature. A striking example of its centrality is provided in the report of Yeltsin’s visit to the US in 1989. He toured a medium-sized grocery shop in Texas. Leon Aron in his Yeltsin biography quotes one of the entourage: “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” The accompanying official went on: “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: ‘the pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments’.”

This very question of the place of salami in an ideal society will, like a revenant, persist in those who come after the collapse of the Soviet system, as an index of where each situates himself or herself in relation to that vanished past. Most have become totally cynical. One businessman diagnoses “a mental revolution of one hundred and eighty degrees”. There is now no talk of the Gulag or anything like it.

more here.

Sally J. Goerner in Evonomics:

According to a recent study by Oxfam International, in 2010 the top 388 richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population– a whopping 3.6 billion people. By 2014, this number was down to 85 people. Oxfam claims that, if this trend continues, by the end of 2016 the top 1% will own more wealth than everyone else in the world combined. At the same time, according to Oxfam, the extremely wealthy are also extremely efficient in dodging taxes, now hiding an estimated $7.6 trillion in offshore tax-havens.

Why should we care about such gross economic inequality? After all, isn’t it natural? The science of flow says: yes, some degree of inequality is natural, but extreme inequality violates two core principles of systemic health: circulation and balance.

Circulation represents the lifeblood of all flow-systems, be they economies, ecosystems, or living organisms. In living organisms, poor circulation of blood causes necrosis that can kill. In the biosphere, poor circulation of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. strangles life and would cause every living system, from bacteria to the biosphere, to collapse. Similarly, poor circulation of money, goods, resources, and services leads to economic necrosis – the dying off of large swaths of economic tissue that ultimately undermines the health of the economy as a whole.

In flow systems, balance is not simply a nice way to be, but a set of complementary factors – such as big and little; efficiency and resilience; flexibility and constraint – whose optimal balance is critical to maintaining circulation across scales. For example, the familiar branching structure seen in lungs, trees, circulatory systems, river deltas, and banking systems (Fig. 1) connects a geometrically constant ratio of a few large, a few more medium-sized, and a great many small entities. This arrangement, which mathematicians call a fractal, is extremely common because it’s particular balance of small, medium, and large helps optimize circulation across different levels of the whole. Just as too many large animals and too few small ones creates an unstable ecosystem, so financial systems with too many big banks and too few small ones tend towards poor circulation, poor health, and high instability.

More here.

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:

Civil society is a notoriously loose term – Marx, Gramsci, Bobbio and a whole host of political theorists and writers in the 1990s mean very different things by it. So how can we make it useful? One good place to start is the work of Ernest Gellner.

Gellner’s book on civil society, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals, was published in 1994. My hardback copy was remaindered from the library of the American Enterprise Institute, which suggests a micro-history of the American conservative movement in itself. Gellner’s account of civil society makes it clear that what’s important about civil society is that it’s not the ‘civic society’ that Bannon is talking about, and in many respects is its antithesis.

Much of what Gellner has to say isn’t immediately relevant today. He’s writing in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites of which Gellner, an idiosyncratic social democrat, was not a fan. He also has a lot to say about the role of the umma in the Islamic world, stressing the ways in which Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ is a product of a set of very modern conditions. Yet what he has to say about civil society is highly relevant to Europe and the US. He writes with some skepticism about the efforts to build civil society in Eastern European countries where the state had atomized its citizens, and in which the local substitute for bourgeois modernizers were a clatter of spivs and former apparatchiks. This skepticism seems to have been born out in many cases, at least as things stand at the moment. The politics of the governing parties in Poland and Hungary, for example, are in part a deliberate retreat away from civil society into more traditional forms of identity such as religion and nationalism. It’s no coincidence, comrades, that the great hate figure of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic is George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation is dedicated exactly to building up the kind of civil society that Gellner and his old sparring partner Karl Popper wanted to see.

And for Gellner, the cultural conditions of civil society are essential. Civil society involves a relationship of power, in which the forces within society and the economy are sufficiently strong to constrain the state. Yet it also involves a set of associated beliefs, or, more precisely, a pluralism of beliefs and identities, in which no identity is so overwhelmingly strong as to become a prescribed faith or universal moral order.'

More here.

Jennifer Senior in The New York Times:

In a nub: “Homo Deus” makes the case that we are now at a unique juncture in the story of our species. “For the first time in history,” Harari writes, “more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined.” Having subdued (though by no means vanquished) famine, pestilence and war, Harari argues, we can now train our sights on higher objectives. Eternal happiness. Everlasting life. “In seeking bliss and immortality,” he writes, “humans are in fact trying to upgrade themselves into gods.” If you’re acquainted with the story of Icarus, you know that these prideful efforts don’t tend to end well. Harari imagines that in attempting to refine ourselves to utter perfection — the logical apotheosis of humanism, whose history and evolution he traces over many pages — we will destroy humanism itself. Our slow creep toward the uncanny valley has already begun. We take pills that change our affect and select embryos with the best odds for optimal health. Google has an offshoot, Calico, whose modest mission is to slow the aging process. Throw in advancements in biological and cyborg engineering, and our radical transformation, in Harari’s view, seems quite feasible.

“Relatively small changes in genes, hormones and neurons,” he points out, “were enough to transform Homo erectus — who could produce nothing more impressive than flint knives — into Homo sapiens, who produce spaceships and computers.” Why should we assume that Sapiens are the end of the evolutionary line?

Yet a question arises: If we aren’t at the end of the line, what comes next?

More here.

From the American Heritage Dictionary website:

In contemporary English, here refers to the speaker’s location regardless of whether the sentence involves things or people remaining in that place, moving to that place, or leaving that place. We say I have been waiting here for hours or Come here! or Get out of here! But historically English has used three separate adverbs to convey these three different relations to place. A speaker of the sixteenth century might have said I have been waiting here for hours, but she would have said Come hither! instead of Come here! and Get thee hence! instead of Get out of here!

Likewise, when referring to a location other than where we are, we now use there indiscriminately: Who is there? I will take you there. We sailed from Ireland to Iceland and from there to Greenland. Our sixteenth-century speaker, for her part, might have said Who is there? but I will take you thither or We sailed from Ireland to Iceland and thence to Greenland.

Finally, for asking about places, though English relies now on just where, there were once three separate adverbs. If our twenty-first-century speaker says Where am I? or Where are you going? or Where is that smell coming from? our hypothetical Elizabethan speaker might say Where am I? or Whither goest thou? or Whence cometh that reek?

More here. [Thanks to Steven Pinker.]

Shannon Stirone in Astronomy Magazine:

Astronomy may be the oldest natural science in the world. Before humans ever took to systematically studying the skies, we were craning our necks upwards, observing the curious movements of some bright points of light, and the stillness of others. Civilizations around the world have incorporated astronomical observations into everything from their architecture to their storytelling and while the pinnacle of the science is most commonly thought to have been during the Renaissance, it actually began a thousand years earlier and 5,000 miles to the East.

Around the 6th century AD, Europe entered what’s known as the Dark Ages. This period of time from around 500 AD until to the 13th century witnessed the suppression of intellectual thought and scholarship around the continent because it was seen as a conflict to the religious views of the church. During this time the written word became scarce, and research and observations went dormant.

While Europe was in an intellectual coma, the Islamic empire which stretched from Moorish Spain, to Egypt and even China, was entering their “Golden Age”. Astronomy was of particular interest to Islamic scholars in Iran and Iraq and until this time around 800 AD, the only astronomical textbook was Ptolemy’s Almagest, written around 100 AD in Greece. This venerable text is still used as the main reference for ancient astronomy in academia to this day. Muslim scholars waited 700 years for this fundamental Greek text to be translated into Arabic, and once it was, they got to work understanding its contents.

More here.

Zachary Biondi in Quartz:

That decency always overcomes evil is an axiom of American exceptionalism. We gird ourselves with quotes about the “arc of history,” spoken by exceptional individuals or presidents who were ‘presidential,’ and wait for history to bend. When we—the people Donald Trump has in mind as the “true Americans”—think about past atrocities like American segregation or Nazi Germany, we are confident that had we lived then, we would have been on the frontlines fighting against evil.

Evil is what monsters and terrorists do—it’s tangible violence carried out by real bodies against real bodies. Meanwhile, we sit in our homes, offices, and churches, and hope our government keeps us safe from the “evil.”

We assume that evil arises out of contempt, misplaced pride, or even mental disorders, but we are wrong. Decency and evil are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the greatest atrocities require masses of decent people.

In 1961 philosopher Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a man who helped carry out the Holocaust genocide. He was responsible for unspeakable horror. Yet, as Arendt observed, Eichmann was not a vicious or menacing monster. He wasn’t snarling and spewing hate. He was normal—a “half a dozen psychiatrists” had even certified it. He was like anyone you might pass on the street or sit next to on a bus. She writes that “he personally never had anything whatever against the Jews,” yet he oversaw their systematic execution with no compunction.

More here.

Stephen Lovell at The Times Literary Supplement:

We are left pondering several related questions: how did Rasputin survive as long as 1916; what was it about him that made the imperial couple shut their eyes to his ostensible turpitude; and what did his influence on them amount to? The reasons for Rasputin’s longevity lie partly within the imperial couple themselves. Nicholas was reserved and diffident, Alexandra was mystically inclined and pathologically private, but they both believed absolutely in the prerogatives of autocracy. They craved emotional support from someone who was not part of or beholden to the court elite around them. As Smith points out, Rasputin was not the first “Our Friend” at the imperial residence of Tsarskoe Selo: in the early 1900s Nicholas and Alexandra had been intimate with a renowned occultist named Monsieur Philippe, parting with him only after being told repeatedly of the damage he was doing to their reputation. It was only a matter of time before the Frenchman was replaced by someone closer to home. Rasputin was the right candidate at the right moment: as an authentic Russian peasant, a native of Siberia, that bastion of fearless and uncorrupted national values, he offered the imperial couple a direct line to “the people” and indulged their belief that they ruled in the interests of common folk and in defiance of treacherous urban elites. Perhaps Nicholas and Alexandra were not entirely misguided: the elites of court and high officialdom were hardly the most reliable source of disinterested information or intelligent insight, as Smith shows us at many turns.

more here.

Alexandra Coghlan at The Spectator:

‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal to submit to the Inquisition, is a familiar one. It’s the battle cry not of a reformer but of a revolutionary, a passionate teller of truths.

It’s a credo he shared with composer Claudio Monteverdi. Born barely three years after the astronomer, Monteverdi faced his own inquisition. Defying those who would make music an immoveable sphere, bound in place by harmonic proprieties and structural conventions, he made works that rejected tidy formalism in favour of messy, fleshy humanity. His was music that moved in every sense, that lived as vividly as those who inspired it. He may celebrate his 450th anniversary this year, but Monteverdi was the first modern composer.

‘It solicits the ear and roughly, harshly strikes it… those dissonances are crude, ugly and insupportable.’ Provoking critical scorn with his experimentation long before Stockhausen or Boulez, Monteverdi’s musical prescience cannot be overstated.

more here.

Sarah Weinman at The New Republic:

Two men in particular had reason to celebrate the evening of July 9, 1981. One received the Pulitzer Prize the year prior, having refashioned his literary career after a series of controversies, failures, and skirmishes. The other was barely a month out of prison, a murderer whose letters, collected in book form, promised an inside look at the horrors of incarcerated life.

The latter was Jack Henry Abbott. His book was toasted with white wine that July night at Il Mulino in Greenwich Village. The former was Norman Mailer, who had provided the introduction, an extended thank-you for Abbott’s help on writing that Pulitzer winner, The Executioner’s Song.

The celebration was short-lived. Nine days later, the day before In the Belly of the Beast received a rave review in theNew York Times, Abbott was a fugitive. He had murdered again. Freedom evaporated. Once captured, in late September, Abbott would never see the outside world again.

Writers like Michael Mewshaw and Felice Picano assigned blame to Mailer in subsequent essays on Abbott’s book, arguing Mailer went out of his way to ignore Abbott’s lengthy criminal record stretching back to age eleven.

more here.

Sheherzad Preisler in Tonic:

Social-media-driven #fitspo is all the rage, so why not measure the nation's health using Twitter? A new study does just that in a brutal state-by-state comparison of calorie burn. The Lexicocalorimeter creates a ratio of caloric input to output in geotagged locations. It does so by sifting through countless tweets, looking for mentions of food and physical activities. The former can be anything from "nacho cheese Doritos" to "tofu"; the latter ranges from "The Carlton Dance" to "bear hunting." The numbers used to calculate the calories found in certain foods—caloric input—and calories burned during physical activities—caloric output—are based on generalized values. The study, led by researcher Peter Dodds and a team of scientists at the University of Vermont, provides an analysis of each state. As it turns out, New Jersey burns fewer calories than the average state; "getting my nails done" is the most prevalent activity on its low-intensity list and "running" appears less frequently than America's overall average. Colorado's input-to-output ratio was the most balanced of all the states (meaning they burned lots of the calories they inhaled), while Mississippi's was the least balanced.

Analyzing 50 million tweets from 2011 and 2012, the researchers found that the largest contributor to calories burned nationwide was "watching TV or movies" (calories burned!), and the food responsible for most calories consumed in each state was pizza. The only exceptions were in Wyoming, whose largest caloric contributor was cookies, and Mississippi, where ice cream was the calorie-bomb of choice. Some results from the analysis come as no surprise—that a lot of people note eating lobster in Maine and Massachusetts, for example. Other results strike as more arbitrary, as with the relative popularity of talking on the phone, showering, and sitting in Delaware, Virginia, and Tennessee, respectively.

More here.

From Roll Call Magazine:

Often called "one of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement ever produced," John Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights, securing civil liberties, and building what he calls "The Beloved Community” in America. His dedication to the highest ethical standards and moral principles has won him the admiration of many of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle in the United States Congress. He has been called "the conscience of the U.S. Congress,” and Roll Call magazine has said, "John Lewis…is a genuine American hero and moral leader who commands widespread respect in the chamber.”

He was born the son of sharecroppers on February 21, 1940, outside of Troy, Alabama. He grew up on his family's farm and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama. As a young boy, he was inspired by the activism surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which he heard on radio broadcasts. In those pivotal moments, he made a decision to become a part of the Civil Rights Movement. Ever since then, he has remained at the vanguard of progressive social movements and the human rights struggle in the United States. As a student at Fisk University, John Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1961, he volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis risked his life on those Rides many times by simply sitting in seats reserved for white patrons. He was also beaten severely by angry mobs and arrested by police for challenging the injustice of Jim Crow segregation in the South. During the height of the Movement, from 1963 to 1966, Lewis was named Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped form. SNCC was largely responsible for organizing student activism in the Movement, including sit-ins and other activities.

While still a young man, John Lewis became a nationally recognized leader. By 1963, he was dubbed one of the Big Six leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. At the age of 23, he was an architect of and a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. In 1964, John Lewis coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year, Lewis helped spearhead one of the most seminal moments of the Civil Rights Movement. Hosea Williams, another notable Civil Rights leader, and John Lewis led over 600 peaceful, orderly protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. They intended to march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate the need for voting rights in the state. The marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers in a brutal confrontation that became known as "Bloody Sunday." News broadcasts and photographs revealing the senseless cruelty of the segregated South helped hasten the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout February will be in honor of Black History Month)

Anjuli Raza Kolb in the Boston Review:

There is a word that has been hovering around me like a familiar since the morning after the U.S. presidential election. It comes from the title of the Palestinian novelist and politician Emile Habiby’s bizarre and wonderful 1974 book, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (al-mutasha’il, a mashup of mutafa’il [optimism] and mutasha’im [pessimism]). Through the oxymoronic condition of pessoptimism, the novel—which Edward Said styled the national epic of Palestine—describes life for a fairly ordinary Arab on and across the borders of Israel, roughly from the Nakba in 1948 through the June War of 1967. The facts of this ordinary life for Saeed, whose first name means “happy,” include separation from his family, a politically expedient marriage arranged by a party boss, a stint in jail for overzealous loyalty to the Israeli state, the loss of his child and wife, multiple relocations, forced anti-communist spying, the constant threat of expulsion, the stripping of rights, and, most importantly, a radical, deranging solitude.

In one of the letters to an anonymous correspondent in which he chronicles his adventures, Saeed the Pessoptimist explains how he inhabits his name under such conditions: “I don’t differentiate between optimism and pessimism and am quite at a loss as to which of the two characterizes me. When I awake each morning I thank the Lord he did not take my soul during the night. If harm befalls me during the day, I thank Him that it was no worse.” A self-consciously quixotic type, Saeed compares his adventures to those of Cervantes’s antihero, as well as to Candide’s. Fellow Palestinian writer Salma Jayyusi situates the Pessoptimist in a genealogy of three archetypes of Arabic literature going back to the eighth century: the picaresque hero, the fool, and the traitor/informer.

More here.

Rae Ellen Bichell at NPR:

About 3,000 years ago, a potter near Jerusalem made a big jar. It was meant to hold olive oil or wine or something else valuable enough to send to the king as a tax payment. The jar's handles were stamped with a royal seal, and the pot went into the kiln.

Over the next 600 years, despite wars destructive enough to raze cities, potters in the area kept making ceramic tax jars, each one stamped with whatever seal represented the ruler du jour.

They didn't know it, but in the process, the ancient potters were not just upholding centuries of tax bureaucracy.

As a group of archaeologists and geophysicists wrote Monday in the journal PNAS, they were also creating a long-lasting record of activity some 2,000 miles beneath their feet. And that record is now yielding clues to a big mystery about this planet: how its magnetic field has changed over time.

More here.