Rafia Zakaria in The Guardian:

No man who has read a page of Indian history will ever prophesy about the Frontier. We shall doubtless have trouble there again.” So wrote Lord Curzon, then viceroy, in 1904. The British were by then a little weary of the burdens of empire; they were having trouble with the tribespeople of the Frontier, who seemed uninterested in the sort of governance the colonialists wished for them. The smugly racist Curzon blamed it on the “fanaticism and turbulence” that “ferment in the blood” of the Pashtun. The neocolonialists of today cannot explain things away so easily. As Steve Coll documents in Directorate S, the current war has for ever altered the fates of all three countries involved – the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and, after 15 years, there is no end to the “trouble” in sight.

Directorate S, from which the book gets its title, lies buried deep in the bureaucracy of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency. Ensconced thus, the directorate works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”. It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden, the architect and financier of the 9/11 attacks, was the US’s most obvious target, and in order to get him, sights had to be set on Afghanistan. The scene Coll paints is riveting.

More here.

Lorraine Berry in Signature:

It is difficult to comprehend that The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s performance piece about women, their bodies and sexuality, is only celebrating its 20^th anniversary. Difficult because its impact – over $100 million raised for programs aimed at stopping violence against women – has been global, and each February, productions are ubiquitous. Performances have taken place in disparate locations, ranging from the bright lights of Broadway to underground performances mounted in secret in cities such as Islamabad, Pakistan.

Each year at around Valentine’s Day, hundreds of college campuses across the United States and the world present The Vagina Monologues as fundraisers for various local women’s agencies in each production’s area. In addition, other moneys can be donated to “VDay,” the foundation bringing attention to women all over the world that have been affected by violence. These college productions feature students, staff members, and faculty in the speaking roles and as part of the production staff. Some of the monologues require a chorus of voices, while others require the single voice of individual women – many of whom have no prior acting experience – but who are animated in their desires to articulate each story, written by Ensler after she had interviewed over 200 women and got them to talk about their vaginas.

The stories have moments of side-splitting humor, and other moments that make audience members weep. But a common reaction to being in the audience is the desire to get organized to resist the forces that keep women vulnerable to violence. And the play has new elements each year, as Ensler writes a new monologue for that year’s performances in response to current issues. The 20^th anniversary edition of The Vagina Monologuescontains a number of these new monologues, in addition to a history of the play’s production and reception.

More here.

John Domini at The Quarterly Conversation:

No longer than the lead piece in the latest literary quarterly, yet unearthing a teleology for some of humanity’s oldest stories, The Tongue of Adam sets a reader thinking of noble forebears. W.G. Sebald comes to mind, though there’s no meandering involved, and Anne Carson, though there’s no anachronism or toying with form. Jorge Luis Borges, especially, casts his shadow, given the erudite cool with which this text handles Adam and Eve, Eden and Babel, effortlessly switching between Quranic (as spelled by Kilito) sources and Judeo-Christian. Similar material, in the hands of the great Argentine, resulted in amazing aesthetic objects, and to say the latest from Abdelfattah Kilito doesn’t shrivel in comparison—well, that’s high praise. Even more noteworthy, however, may be what the book accomplishes, at this hour of the world, for Arab civilization in general.

The Tongue of Adam began as a series of lectures at a French university, as one of the author’s colleagues explains in the introduction (sensitive, if at times gushing). Then following seven short chapters—essays, meditations—Kilito himself provides the afterward, revealing that he taught in French, and often French literature, for forty years. Nonetheless this epilog, like his text, makes an argument for his culture of origin.

more here.

Jordan Lawson at Bookforum:

A woman with a set of fake names—Kata, Katya, Kasia, Katushka—has returned to New York after eighteen years in Dubai. Glass towers now crowd the Williamsburg waterfront and women yell at her to get out of the bike lane. Bodega cigarettes cost fourteen dollars and smoking in bars is against the law. It’s unclear why she’s come back, and even more unclear why, at eighteen, she left in the first place. “New York wants to trick me, make me think it’s gone soft,” she thinks. But bricks of heroin still come stamped: VERSACE and HERMÈS, then DRONE, RIHANNA, ISIS. She still works as a prostitute. “I have given myself a year to quit: heroin, whoring,” she announces, but life slides by all the same. “Again and again on a different day I wake up in New York.”

Ultraluminous, Katherine Faw’s second novel, envisions a life lived at the intersection of valuable and expendable. The book tracks the slight shifts and changes that its many-named protagonist—"K" for short—makes in her life as she half-heartedly wrestles with the forces that both ensure her survival and hasten her demise. In Faw’s cruel world there’s little to hope for, but plenty to fear. K wants a different life, but her days creep along with enough success to warrant surrender. In a universe trending only toward chaos, the novel seems to ask, how can you risk change?

more here.

Blake Morrison at The Guardian:

Should a murderer be allowed to serve as a minister of the church? Is such a person suitable to conduct marriages, open coffee mornings and suffer little children to come to them? Such were the questions facing the Church of Scotland in 1984, when a licence was sought by James Nelson, who after his release from prison on parole, having served a 10-year sentence, had studied divinity at St Andrews and taken up preaching. With the tabloids closely following the story (Nelson, not averse to publicity, had given an interview to the Glasgow Herald the year before), the Kirk’s General Assembly knew it would be criticised, whatever its decision. But after a three-hour debate, by 622 votes to 425, with a courage it’s hard to imagine today, they gave their approval to Nelson, thus making him, it seems, the first convicted killer to be ordained into the Christian church.

The Nelson case is the core of Stuart Kelly’s fascinating book. But it ranges widely, digressively, Shandyesequely even, to encompass so much more: theology, philosophy, literary criticism, the nature of evil and Kelly’s own intellectual development and struggle with faith: “Nelson for me is the keyhole through which I can see issues and ideas that have troubled and intrigued me for decades.”

Daybreak

Hands and lips of wind
heart of water
…………………..eucalyptus
campground of the clouds
the life that is born every day
the death that is born every life

I rub my eyes
the sky walks the land
.

Nightfall

What sustains it,
half-open, the clarity of nightfall,
the light let loose in the gardens?

All the branches,
conquered by the weight of birds,
lean toward the darkness.

Pure, self-absorbed moments
still gleam
on the fences.

Receiving night,
the groves become
hushed fountains.

A bird falls,
the grass grows dark,
edges blur, lime is black,
the world is less credible.
.

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet Books
Translation: Eliot Weinberger
.

Joana Ramiro in New Humanist:

Brigitte Fielder in Avidly:

At the 2017 Women’s March in Madison, Wisconsin, I carried a sign that read “I AM A WOMAN’S RIGHTS. –Sojourner Truth, 1851” I was citing an account of a speech Truth gave at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention, as it was recorded in the Anti-Slavery Bugle, an essay I often teach in courses on nineteenth-century African American women’s writing. Given mainstream white feminism’s habitual marginalization of nonwhite women’s voices, I deliberately chose to carry the words of a woman of color and to gesture towards black women’s long history of contributing to U.S. feminist discourse. I’d written the letters out in block form, mimicking the iconic “I AM A MAN” signs of the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Worker’s Strike. The comparison reminded me not only of the history of civil rights protest in the U.S. between Truth’s moment and my own, but also of Truth’s challenge to gender stereotypes. In this speech and others, she referred to her own physical size and strength. Truth was six feet tall and spoke and sang with a deep voice; on at least one occasion of her public speech on women’s rights, she was heckled by the crowd and accused of being a man.

Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker:

I didn’t know who William Kelley was when I found that book but, like millions of Americans, I knew a term he is credited with first committing to print. “If You’re Woke, You Dig It” read the headline of a 1962 Op-Ed that Kelley published in the New York Times, in which he pointed out that much of what passed for “beatnik” slang (“dig,” “chick,” “cool”) originated with African-Americans.

A fiction writer and occasional essayist, Kelley was, himself, notably woke. A half century before the poet Claudia Rankine used her MacArthur “genius” grant to establish an institute partly dedicated to the study of whiteness, Kelley turned his considerable intellect and imagination to the question of what it is like to be white in this country, and what it is like, for all Americans, to live under the conditions of white supremacy—not just the dramatic cross-burning, neo-Nazi manifestations of it common to his time and our own but also the everyday forms endemic to our national culture.

Kelley first addressed these issues at length in his début novel, “A Different Drummer.” Published three weeks after that Times Op-Ed, when he was twenty-four, it promptly earned him comparisons to an impressive range of literary greats, from William Faulkner to Isaac Bashevis Singer to James Baldwin. It also got him talked about, together with the likes of Alvin Ailey and James Earl Jones, as among the most talented African-American artists of his generation.

More here.

Stuart Russell, Anthony Aguirre, Ariel Conn and Max Tegmark in IEEE Spectrum:

Paul Scharre’s recent article “Why You Shouldn’t Fear ‘Slaughterbots’” dismisses a video produced by the Future of Life Institute, with which we are affiliated, as a “piece of propaganda.” Scharre is an expert in military affairs and an important contributor to discussions on autonomous weapons. In this case, however, we respectfully disagree with his opinions.

We have been working on the autonomous weapons issue for several years. We have presented at the United Nations in Geneva and at the World Economic Forum; we have written an open letter signed by over 3,700 AI and robotics researchers and over 20,000 others and covered in over 2,000 media articles; one of us (Russell) drafted a letter from 40 of the world’s leading AI researchers to President Obama and led a delegation to the White House in 2016 to discuss the issue with officials from the Departments of State and Defense and members of the National Security Council; we have presented to multiple branches of the armed forces in the United States and to the intelligence community; and we have debated the issue in numerous panels and academic fora all over the world.

Our primary message has been consistent: Because they do not require individual human supervision, autonomous weapons are potentially scalable weapons of mass destruction (WMDs); essentially unlimited numbers can be launched by a small number of people. This is an inescapable logical consequence of autonomy. As a result, we expect that autonomous weapons will reduce human security at the individual, local, national, and international levels.

More here.

Christian Smith in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.

BS is the farce of what are actually "fragmentversities" claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.

BS is the expectation that a good education can be provided by institutions modeled organizationally on factories, state bureaucracies, and shopping malls — that is, by enormous universities processing hordes of students as if they were livestock, numbers waiting in line, and shopping consumers.

BS is universities hijacked by the relentless pursuit of money and prestige, including chasing rankings that they know are deeply flawed, at the expense of genuine educational excellence (to be distinguished from the vacuous "excellence" peddled by recruitment and "advancement" offices in every run-of-the-mill university).

BS is the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games.

More here.

Mystic Bounce

Even if you love the racket of ascension,
you must know how the power leaves you.
And at this pitch who has time for meditation?
the sea walled in by buildings. I do miss
the quiet, don't you? When I said, "Fuck the deer
antlered and hithered in fur," it was because
I had seen the faces of presidents balled into a fist.
If I were in charge, I would know how to fix
the world: free health care or free physicals,
at least, and an abiding love for the abstract.
When I said, "All of history is saved for us,"
it was because I scorned the emancipated sky.
Does the anthem choke you up? When I asked
God if anyone born to slaves would die
a slave, He said: "Sure as a rock descending
a hillside." That's why I'm not a Christian.

by Terrence Hayes
from Poetry, March 2008

Kevin Duong at berfrois:

It is often observed that the French Revolution was a revolution of scientists. Nourished by airy abstractions and heartfelt cries to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its leaders sought a society grounded, not in God or tradition, but in what Edmund Burke decried as “the conquering empire of light and reason”. To be sure, if we tallied the professional affiliations of the members of the first National Assembly, we would find it overwhelmingly populated by lawyers. But the revolution’s symbols and motifs were not derived from legal practices and traditions, and it was not as men of law that Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat called for the death of their king and the creation of a democratic republic. Rather, they did so as scientists—middle class intellectuals who saw in government a field ripe for experimentation, innovation, and improvement.

Nowhere was this as clear as their approach to “the will of the people”. Of the many puzzles to which revolutionaries applied themselves as scientists, few seemed so pressing and so intractable. It is obvious what a king’s will looks like, or so we like to think. Kings are individuals, they have bodies, and they can tell us what to do. However they choose to communicate their will — through voice, a gesture, a written pronouncement — it is relatively clear when such acts belong to them.

more here.

Taney Roniger at The Brooklyn Rail:

While proponents of sci-art are given to citing the commonalities between the two fields (the primacy of curiosity and imagination, the thirst for disclosing the invisible) and their ostensive original unity, the impassable fact is that the two represent fundamentally dissimilar epistemological approaches: one that aspires to objective knowledge, and the other whose meaning derives from the production and transmission of tacit, or implicit, knowledge. While accuracy, precision, and discursive reason are indispensible to the one, the other tends to become sclerotic in their presence, relying instead on ambiguity, multivalence, and internal contradiction for its power. With such vastly different approaches to meaning, how can what’s essential to each remain intact in a synthesis?

The nagging question at the center of sci-art, then, is twofold. First, with the claim of “convergence,” is it really a synthesis of the two fields that’s being proposed, or something more like a complementary relationship? And if it’s the latter, what does each truly stand to gain from the partnership? On this there are some facile answers, but none withstands much critical scrutiny. On the side of art, the ostensive gains are clear: with its wealth of imagery, new technologies, and ever-more fantastical discoveries, science presents as an endless source of timely and relevant subject matter.

more here.

Josephine Balmer at the New Statesman:

“The cities are down,” observed George Steiner of the poem, “and survivors wander the face of the earth as pirates or beggars.” But late last year, Emily Wilson’s new translation appeared, like one of Zeus’s thunderclaps, to part the clouds. Heavily promoted by her publisher as the first by a woman in English verse (Anne Dacier produced a French prose version in 1708, used as a crib by Alexander Pope, while in 1952, the children’s author Barbara Leonie Picard published a complete prose retelling), some of the subsequent critical amazement perhaps recalls Samuel Johnson’s verdict of a woman preaching, “surprised to find it done at all”. As Butler countered the argument that only a male poet could have written the battle-hardened Odyssey: “A woman can kill… on paper as well as a man can.”

So what does Wilson, a renowned classical scholar and translator, bring to the text? Rather than any feminist revisioning as in Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella, The Penelopiad, Wilson’s fluid and immensely readable versification harks back to Lattimore’s close rendition of Homer’s original. She maintains line lengths – no easy task in a non-inflected, word-hungry language such as English – and writes in iambics, “the conventional meter for regular English narrative verse” as she explains.

more here.

From Phys.Org:

A team of researchers with the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in the Republic of Korea has developed a glucose monitoring contact lens that its makers claim is comfortable enough to wear. In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their contact lens and suggests it could be ready for commercial use within five years. Diabetes results in unmanageable glucose levels, requiring those who have the disease to monitor and adjust them with insulin or medicine. Monitoring, unfortunately, requires pricking a finger to retrieve a blood sample for testing, which most people do not like. For that reason, scientists seek another way. A new method employs a contact lens. Prior research has shown glucose levels in tears follows that of glucose levels in the blood in many respects. To date, there are no commercially available contact lens products because, as the researchers note, they are made of hard materials that are uncomfortable in the eye. They claim to have overcome that problem by breaking apart the pieces of their sensing device and encapsulating each in a soft polymer and then connecting them together in a flexible mesh.

The polymer is the same type used in conventional contact lenses. The components of the device consist of a graphene-based sensor, a rectifier, LED display and a stretchable antenna. Power for the sensor is still external—it is held in the air a minimum of nine millimeters from the lens. The LED glows during normal conditions and turns off when high levels of glucose are detected. The flexibility of the lens and sensor components also allows for removal of the device in the same way as normal contact lenses—by grabbing and bending.

More here.

Maren Meinhardt at the TLS:

Humboldt’s subordination of himself does not always make comfortable reading, especially as it clearly wasn’t even particularly welcome: “Every day this love and affection increases, the expression of which is so often irritating to you”. Nonetheless, he suggested that Haeften retire from his regiment in the next few months, and that “all of us (including my brother) move to Italy for a few years . . . . We’d fit perfectly into one carriage, and my brother with wife and child would fill the other”. Naturally, all would be subject to Haeften’s whim and pleasure: “where and how you want to travel, how soon you’d like to leave Italy – I shall vouch for it with my character, as well as with the record of our relations thus far, that you can command over me as over your child, and will encounter obedience without so much as a grumble”. After their return from Italy, they would all settle down together – “it doesn’t matter where, best in a place where nature is friendly and where old ties won’t embarrass us. There’s a lot to be said for Cleves [Haeften’s home town]. . .”.

more here.

Gavin Francis at the LRB:

The first case of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of days, and had already moved on, aided by the war machine. By mid-April it had reached the Western Front, where three-quarters of French troops and half the British fell ill; 900,000 German soldiers were taken out of action. In April it also surfaced in South-East Asia, and in May, as the Spanish cabinet took to their beds, it was spreading through North Africa. On 1 June the New York Times reported it spreading through China (possibly for the second time), and later that summer it reached Australia. That was the first wave; through the summer of 1918 the pandemic seemed to be on the wane.

But in August a second and more deadly wave struck all at once in Sierra Leone, Boston and Brest. The virus seems to have mutated, making it more transmissible and provoking a more florid inflammatory reaction. Ten thousand died in Addis Ababa; Haile Selassie said that he fell ‘gravely ill’, but ‘was spared from death by God’s goodness’. In Prague Kafka became ill; in Dublin Yeats’s pregnant wife, Georgie, was stricken, as was Ezra Pound in London.

more here.