Maddy Crowell in The Point:

There’s a scene early on in the French documentary Salafistes (“Jihadists”) where the camera spans over a throng of people gathered in a village in northern Mali: the crowd is there to watch as the “Islamic Police” cut off a 25-year-old man’s hand. The shot zooms in as the young man, tethered in ropes around a chair, slumps over, unconscious, while his hand is sawed off with a small, serrated blade. Young boys in the background howl incoherently. In the next scene, the same young man is filmed lying in a bed cocooned by a lime green mosquito net, his severed limb wrapped in thick white bandages. “This is the application of sharia,” he tells the camera. “I committed a theft; in accordance with sharia my hand was amputated. Once I recover I will be purified and all my sins erased.” The trace of a drugged smile lingers across his face.

If the uncensored brutality of the mutilation seems gratuitous, it is hardly an anomaly in Salafistes. This is part of the point of a documentary that gained rare and dangerous access to the usually closed-off backyard of jihadi territory. After the amputation, the Islamic Police—members of Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups—surround the young man in a halo of bored silence, as their leader, Sanda Ould Boumama, clutches his shoulder.

More here.

People We Will Never See Again

Today, in a crowded doctor’s waiting room,
sat a sad little man of maybe fifty,
wearing a baggy black suit, a black shirt
buttoned to the neck, and black work shoes,

his thinning silver hair oiled back,
and he began singing, but softly, the words
to a song that played from hidden speakers
somewhere above our heavy silence,
music we hadn’t noticed before he began,
in his whispery voice, to sing for us.

by Ted Kooser
from Kindest Regards
Copper Canyon Press, 2018

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

In 1142 Empress Matilda escaped from Oxford Castle where she was being held by her dynastic rival, Stephen of Blois. Since it was a snowy December, the self-proclaimed “Lady of the English” wrapped herself in a white fur cloak to blend into the snowy landscape before skating down the frozen river Thames to freedom. As a bedtime story for history-mad girls, Matilda’s flight has always had everything: a heroine outtricking a boy and a nod to the enchantment of Narnia.

Catherine Hanley, though, is writing for grown-ups, and her intention in this impressive study is to remove Matilda’s cloak of invisibility – there have been remarkably few books written about the woman who was arguably England’s first regnant queen – and restore her to full subjecthood. For while Matilda never actually led her troops into battle like Jeanne d’Arc, she was present in the generals’ tent, directing the next stage in her campaign to conquer the country.

more here.

Stephen Phillips at The LA Times:

The explosion on April 26, 1986, at the V.I. Lenin, or Chernobyl, Atomic Energy Station in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is thought to have “vaporized” one worker on the spot. Another 30, drenched in fatal doses of radiation, died gruesome, lingering deaths. As of 2005, as many as 5,000 additional cancer deaths were projected locally — among 25,000 extra cancer cases Europe-wide. Contamination rendered 1,838-plus square miles “uninhabitable.” And a spectral column of radioactive gases escaped into the atmosphere, setting people on edge from Stockholm to San Francisco. It was the worst nuclear accident in history and could have been far worse.

It also helped precipitate the demise of the Soviet Union. And this — the dissolution of the geopolitical entity in which it occurred — has contributed to its effacement: buried under the accretions of history like the radioactive debris smothered by “absorbents” during its cleanup. Thirty-three years later, what happened exactly at Chernobyl?

more here.

Julian Wolfreys and Paweł Huelle at The Quarterly Conversation:

Gdańsk was a city of the borders for many years, with a prevailing influence of German culture, German music, German language, because even the Polish proletariat when they came from the villages were Germanized, because with the German language they had better chances. But there used to be about 15%-20% Polish speaking people, 3% French people, 2% English people, 3.5% Russians, Scottish people as well, a lot of Dutch people; this was a typical city of the borders. This was over after the Polish partition of 1795. And then Gdańsk, which used to be a rich merchant city, a merchant emporium, became a provincial Prussian city. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these were periods of the great German nationalisms, which end up with the crime of 1939, because most of the Polish people here were murdered at that time. Surprisingly, the Jews could leave. Because this used to be the Free City of Gdańsk, the so-called ‘Free City’, and the authorities of Gdańsk signed an agreement with the Jewish Community in 1939, more or less, perhaps one year earlier, and while the war was still going on, until 1940 the Jewish population was still leaving. So, the multicultural city was over with the Prussian partition. Then, after the war, 99% of the German population left, and Polish people from various parts of former Poland came, from burned-down Warsaw, from Wilno, or from the Eastern borders, from those parts; so, people only came back to the idea of multiculturalism, after 1989, with the end of Communism. But, if ever we speak of multiculturalism in Gdańsk, we speak of the distant past. Of course, it’s a very good example of something to reach for, but it’s a deep past.

more here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

As we await the final season of Game of Thrones, curiosity settles on a single question: how will it end? Fan sites buzz with speculation about what the most convincing conclusion could be. Surely Jon Snow’s true lineage will be revealed to him? Won’t we have to find out the truth about Cersei’s pregnancy? Will the White Walkers finally be defeated? And above all, who will reign at the end? The makers of the series have set themselves a challenge: conjuring what the great literary critic Frank Kermode called “the sense of an ending”, and they can no longer rely on the original novels of George RR Martin.

…The most extraordinary example is one of the best of all 19th-century novels, Great Expectations. For this story, which had been appearing in weekly instalments in his own magazine, All the Year Round, Dickens wrote one of the few unhappy endings of his career. In the first draft, Pip returns from years working abroad. He is walking down Piccadilly with the young son of Joe and Biddy, named Pip after him. A lady in a carriage summons him; it is Estella. She is now married to a doctor who lives in Shropshire: “I am greatly changed, I know; but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella, too, Pip. Lift up that pretty child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.) I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.

Piercingly, Dickens and his narrator allow Estella to depart on a misunderstanding: she believes that Pip has married and had a son – but in fact he is alone, his capacity for love cauterised by his experiences. He does not get Estella; he does not get anyone. When Dickens’s friend and fellow novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton read this he was horrified. What would the author’s loyal readers, who expected their usual happy ending, think? Dickens was persuaded to write a new ending, in which Estella is husbandless when she meets Pip again in the ruins of Satis House. This time the narrator sees “no shadow of a future parting” from the woman he loves. Dickens, who scanned his monthly or weekly sales with just the attention a TV producer might give to viewing figures, succumbed to fears about what his audience wanted. He scrapped a brilliant ending in favour of a merely serviceable one. Have the scriptwriters of Game of Thrones been worrying in a similar fashion about what their devotees want and expect? Or will they give us an ending as arbitrarily brutal as the world they have created?

More here.

Timothy Egan in The New York Times:

These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.”

She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that rise from the rot of the Trump presidency on a daily basis. But in blaming God for Trump, Sanders echoed a widespread Republican belief that the most outwardly amoral man ever to occupy the White House is an instrument of divine power. He’s part of the master plan. Mocking Sanders and the many Ned Flanders of the G.O.P. team is unlikely to make much of a dent. Nearly half of all Republicans believe God wanted Trump to win the election. To them, secular snark is a merit badge on the MAGA hat. But there is a better way to sway the electorate of faith, as the rising Democratic stars Pete Buttigieg and Stacey Abrams have shown us. They apply something like a “What Would Jesus Do?” test to rouse religious conscience on the political battlefield.

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan, a Rhodes scholar, married to a junior high school teacher. He’s gay and, more surprising for a modern Democrat, he is an out Christian, as quick to quote St. Augustine as Abraham Lincoln. On Sunday, he is expected to formally announce his run for president. Like Abrams and Senator Cory Booker, Mayor Pete says his faith made him a progressive. Scripture directs him to defend the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the societal castoffs.

But Buttigieg goes much further than mere Bible-citing. He’s taking it directly to Trump and to Vice President Mike Pence, who flashes his piety like a seven-carat diamond on his pinkie finger. It’s hard to look at the actions of President Trump, Buttigieg said, “and believe they are the actions of somebody who believes in God.”

More here.

The Great Hall of Mirrors

Once I wrote, “On the mule of time
we sit backwards. It carries us forward
anyway, though things appear a little askew.”
Now I walk into a room with a hundred
rearview mirrors from lost and forgotten
vehicles and think, “At my age, I’m on no mule,
but in a fast car, on a freeway, exceeding
the speed limit,” and think again, “Even the sun
is eight minutes ago,” and think again,
“Consciousness is a rearview mirror.
Whatever you see has been already.”

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Caesura Editions, 2019

Drawing, Rearview,  Jim Culleny

Mary F. Corey at the LARB:

In Prophet of Freedom, Blight allows us to experience both the exuberance and the difficulties of a life acted out on stages. We see Douglass, as a small boy, gathering damp pages from a discarded Bible out of the gutter so he could learn how to read. We are shown the young, proud orator being shunted into filthy, segregated train cars even as he traveled to address throngs of adoring fans. And we are at the Rochester train station to see his wife Anna rush to meet him with a bundle of freshly ironed shirts before returning to her job making shoes, or caring for their five children, while the abolitionist rock star continued on his way. We are with him near the end of his life when he climbed a rocky crag near the Acropolis and lingered there to read St. Paul’s famous “Address to the Athenians,” in which the Apostle declared all people to be the “offspring” of God and that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

more here.

Olivia Laing at The Paris Review:

Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of small boards.” The first was painted on January 1, 2018, “the worst day of the year,” not that the rest of the year was that much brighter. Joffe’s marriage was breaking up. She painted herself nearly every day, sometimes at night, always in fairly pitiless light.

Speaking broadly for a minute, she looks in this extraordinary series of self-portraits like someone almost warping under a heavy weight. Bowed down, weighted by feeling, she peers back at herself, artist prowling after sitter, avid to catch pouches, moles, sags, bags, and quirks of flesh.

more here.

Samuel Clowes Huneke at The Point:

Eighty percent of women living in communist East Germany always reached orgasm during sex, according to the Hamburg magazine Neue Revue in 1990. For West German women that figure was only 63 percent. Those counterintuitive findings confirmed two earlier studies, which East German sex researchers had published in 1984 and 1988. Those had found East German women reported high levels of sexual satisfaction outpacing those in the West.

The 1984 study’s authors contended socialism was to thank for women’s enjoyment of sex, specifically “the sense of social security, equal educational and professional responsibilities, equal rights and possibilities for participating in and determining the life of society.” In short, they claimed, women had better sex under socialism than under capitalism because socialism treated women better.

more here.

Hayden White and Robert Pogue Harrison in The Chronicle:

Hayden White, the philosopher of history whose classic Metahistory (1973) has had an enduring influence on the humanities, died last year. In a career spanning half a century, White, whose appointments included Stanford University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, provoked, alarmed, and invigorated professional historians and lay readers alike. In Metahistory and elsewhere, White insisted that “facts do not speak for themselves. The historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is … a purely discursive one.” Because such fashioning of fragments is a kind of storytelling, White believed that historians need a theory of literary narrative, a way of grasping their work’s adherence to the laws of tragedy, comedy, and farce. Though influential, this fundamentally interdisciplinary position remains controversial, as the dust-up around a recent Chronicle Review essay extolling White demonstrated.

Such literary concerns inevitably turn on questions of scholarship’s purpose and ethos. What is the point of historical writing? What kind of author is a historian? What is education good for? In a never-published 2008 interview with Robert Pogue Harrison, a professor of literature at Stanford University, White reflected on a topic of particular urgency in 2019: the purpose of the humanities.

More here.

Gal Koplewitz in The Economist:

Few people ever observed Emma Kunz, a Swiss alternative healer and artist, at work. One of the only accounts comes from a man called Anton Meier, who first met Kunz when his parents asked her to cure his childhood polio. Kunz was a spiritualist who used drawing as a way to divine the future. Meier recalled watching her in the early 1940s as she attempted to predict the outcome of a meeting between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

Standing in front of the sheet of graph paper and concentrating on her question, she held her pendulum in her right hand above the paper. The movements of the pendulum indicated points, which she marked down; the drawing thus began with an array of pencilled dots. She then used the pendulum to establish the main lines and drew them directly on the paper, before starting to connect the dots with lines in pencil, coloured pencil and crayon.

The drawings Kunz created through this unusual process – more than 400 in total – are kaleidoscopic, hypnotic and enigmatic. They remained in her workroom during her lifetime, and weren’t exhibited until 1973, more than a decade after her death, when they went on show at a museum in Switzerland. Now, around 60 of them are on display at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Kunz was born in Switzerland in 1892 into a family of handloom weavers, and developed an early interest in the paranormal. As the exhibition catalogue puts it (perhaps too matter-of-factly), she “[discovered] her telepathy and extra-sensory powers as a child.” In 1910 she took up radiesthesia, a form of divination she practised with a pendulum. She had a strong independent streak and at the age of 19 travelled to America in pursuit of a pastor’s son. The trip was not a success, and she returned to Brittnau, the town where she grew up, where she was given the cruel nickname “Mrs Philadelphia”. She never married, although she did live with Jacob Friedrich Welti, an art critic, for five years, after working as a part-time housekeeper for his family.

More here.

Jayson Greene in Vulture:

We left our E-Z Pass in the apartment. Stacy and I realize this only upon arriving at the mouth of the tunnel en route to the Weill Cornell ER. The gate fails to lift as we approach and we almost plow through it. The man at the tollbooth tries to reckon with us, incoherent and hysterical and blocking traffic.

“Our daughter’s been in a serious accident,” Stacy yells to him.

He peers behind us at the empty car seat, confused. “Where is she?” he demands.

“She’s with my mother!” Stacy says. Cars honk as the pressure of the line builds behind us.

“Please, she is in the hospital,” I interject. “Please just let us go.”

He waves us on. “Just don’t get in an accident!” he calls into our window as the bar lifts.

More here.  [Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette.]

Christie Wilcox in Quanta:

Our planet formed a little over 4.5 billion years ago, and if the most recent estimates are correct, it wasn’t long before life arose. Not much is known about how that happened because it’s maddeningly difficult to investigate. It’s also proved tough to study what happened next, during the first billions of years of evolution that followed, when the main domains of life emerged.

A particularly vexing mystery is the rise of the eukaryotes, cells with well-defined internal compartments, or organelles, which are present only in animals, plants, fungi and some microbes like protists — our evolutionary kin. The earliest eukaryotes left no clear fossils as clues, so researchers are forced to deduce what they were like by comparing the structural and molecular details of later ones and inferring their evolutionary relationships.

Right now is “an incredibly exciting time” for such research, said Michelle Leger, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain. With modern genetic sequencing technologies, scientists can read the entire genomes of diverse life forms, and as microbial life is revealed in ever-increasing detail, new species and other taxonomic groups are coming to light. With that wealth of data, researchers are tracing lineages of organisms backward through time.

More here.

Shankar Vedantam, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, and Jennifer Schmidt at NPR:

“This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion,” says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. “There’s more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in the past thirty years in the United States than there ever has been in recorded attitudes in the United States on any issue.”

Public opinion rarely shifts on contested issues. Given the long history of discrimination against gays in the United States and abroad, this change has social scientists scratching their chins.

More here.

Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone:

Oh, it could get very bad.

In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”

A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been trapped in the permafrost. The exposed body released anthrax into nearby water and soil, infecting two thousand reindeer grazing nearby, and they in turn infected some humans; a twelve-year-old boy died. As it turns out, permafrost is a “very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark” — scientists have managed to revive an eight-million-year-old bacterium they found beneath the surface of a glacier. Researchers believe there are fragments of the Spanish flu virus, smallpox, and bubonic plague buried in Siberia and Alaska.

Or consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust.

More here.

Niruj Mohan Ramanujam in The Wire:

What has the Event Horizon Telescope actually seen?

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has imaged the silhouette – or shadow – of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. To create this image, astronomers combined data from eight different telescopes across the world in an observation run conducted in April 2017. The data in question was electromagnetic signals with a frequency of 230 GHz, or a corresponding wavelength of 1.3 mm. Using this, astronomers formed the image of a black hole for the first time.

The event horizon of a black hole is the ultimate boundary. Nothing from inside it can escape to the outside. The ring of fire in the EHT image is light from the gas falling into the event horizon, and its shadow is the dark hole in the centre. The exact shape of the ring is due to the way the incredible gravity of the black hole bends the light around it, and the extreme speed at which the gas is falling in. The ring is not seen to be uniformly bright because these numbers are uneven.

More here.

Donna Murch in the Boston Review:

Since the late 1990s, yearly rates of overdose deaths from legal “white market” opioids have consistently exceeded those from heroin. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2017, opioid overdoses killed nearly 400,000 people with 68 percent of those deaths linked to prescription medications. Moreover, as regulators and drug companies tightened controls on diversion and misuse after 2010, the American Society of Addiction Medicine determined that at least 80 percent of “new heroin users started out misusing prescription pain killers.” Some data sets point to even higher numbers. In response to a 2014 survey of people undergoing treatments for opioid addiction, 94 percent of people surveyed said that they turned to heroin because prescription opioids were “far more expensive and harder to obtain.”

In the face of these statistics, the claim that the opioid crisis is the product of Mexican and Central American migration—rather than the deregulation of Big Pharma and the failures of a private health care system—is not only absurd, but insidious.

More here.