Jared Diamond in the New York Times:

Susan Watkins in The New Left Review:

Of all the opposition movements to have erupted since 2008, the rebirth of a militant feminism is perhaps the most surprising—not least because feminism as such had never gone away; women’s empowerment has long been a mantra of the global establishment. Yet there were already signs that something new was stirring in the US and UK student protests of 2010, the 2011 Occupy encampments at Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park. In India, mass rallies condemned the gang rape of Jyoti Pandey in 2012 and feminist flash-mobs have disrupted the moral-policing operations of Hindutva fundamentalists. The protests against sexual assault on US campuses blazed across the New York media in 2014. In Brazil, 30,000 black women descended on the capital in 2015 to demonstrate against sexual violence and racism, calling for the ouster of the corrupt head of the National Congress, Eduardo Cunha; earlier that year, the March of Margaridas brought over 50,000 rural women to Brasília. In Argentina, feminist campaigners against domestic violence were at the forefront of protests against Macri’s shock therapy. In China, the arrest in 2015 of five young women preparing to sticker Beijing’s public transport against sexual violence—members of Young Feminist Activism, an online coalition that’s played cat-and-mouse with the authorities—was met with web petitions signed by over 2 million people.

In January 2017, a ‘feminism of the 99 per cent’ declared itself with the million-strong march against the Trump Administration in the US. In Poland, mass women’s protests forced the Law and Justice government to retreat from tightening the already restrictive abortion law. Italy, Spain and Portugal saw huge marches against domestic violence and economic precarity. On 8 March 2017, these movements came together to put International Women’s Day back on the radical calendar, with demonstrations and strikes on three continents. The eruption of #MeToo in October 2017 and the convulsions that have followed are only the latest in a string of mass events around the world.

Yet any attempt to renew feminist strategy today confronts a series of dilemmas. First, we lack convincing assessments of the progress already made. What results have the old feminisms produced and how adequate have these been in meeting women’s needs? How, exactly—by what processes, to what extent—have conditions improved? What changes have been brought about, globally, in gender relations, and where do these now stand?

More here.

Coffee

The only precious thing I own, this little espresso
cup. And in it a dark roast all the way
from Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia
where coffee was born in the 9th century
getting goat herders high, spinning like dervishes, the white blooms
cresting out of the evergreen plant, Ethiopia
where I almost lived for a moment but
then the rebels surrounded the Capital
so I stayed home. I stayed home and drank
coffee and listened to the radio
and heard how they were getting along. I would walk
down Everett Street, near the hospital
where my older brother was bound
to his white bed like a human mast, where he was
getting his mind right and learning
not to hurt himself. I would walk by and be afraid and smell
the beans being roasted inside the garage
of an old warehouse. It smelled like burnt
toast! It was everywhere in the trees. I couldn’t bear to see him.
I sometimes never knew him. Sometimes
he would call. He wanted us
to sit across from each other, some coffee between us,
sober. Coffee can taste like grapefruit
or caramel, like tobacco, strawberry,
cinnamon, the oils being pushed
out of the grounds and floating to the top of a French Press,
the expensive kind I get
in the mail, the mailman with a pound of Sumatra
under his arm, ringing my doorbell,
waking me up from a night when all I had was tea
and watched a movie about the Queen of England when Spain was hot
for all her castles and all their ships, carved out
of fine Spanish trees, went up in flames
while back home Spaniards were growing potatoes
and coffee was making its careful way
along a giant whip
from Africa to Europe
where cafes would become famous
and people would eventually sit with their cappuccinos, the baristas
talking about the new war, a cup of sugar
on the table, a curled piece of lemon rind. A beret
on someone’s head, a scarf
around their neck. A bomb in a suitcase
left beneath a small table. Right now
I’m sitting near a hospital where psychotropics are being
carried down the hall in a pink cup,
where someone is lying there and he doesn’t know who
he is. I’m listening
to the couple next to me
talk about their cars. I have no idea
how I got here. The world stops at the window
while I take my little spoon and slowly swirl the cream around the lip
of the cup. Once, I had a brother
who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke
his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment
before his brain turned its Armadas against him, wanting to burn down
his cities and villages, before grief
became his capital with its one loyal flag and his face,
perhaps only his beautiful left eye, shimmered on the surface of his Americano
like a dark star.
.
by Matthew Dickman
from All-American Poem
Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Coffee

The only precious thing I own, this little espresso
cup. And in it a dark roast all the way
from Honduras, Guatemala, Ethiopia
where coffee was born in the 9th century
getting goat herders high, spinning like dervishes, the white blooms
cresting out of the evergreen plant, Ethiopia
where I almost lived for a moment but
then the rebels surrounded the Capital
so I stayed home. I stayed home and drank
coffee and listened to the radio
and heard how they were getting along. I would walk
down Everett Street, near the hospital
where my older brother was bound
to his white bed like a human mast, where he was
getting his mind right and learning
not to hurt himself. I would walk by and be afraid and smell
the beans being roasted inside the garage
of an old warehouse. It smelled like burnt
toast! It was everywhere in the trees. I couldn’t bear to see him.
I sometimes never knew him. Sometimes
he would call. He wanted us
to sit across from each other, some coffee between us,
sober. Coffee can taste like grapefruit
or caramel, like tobacco, strawberry,
cinnamon, the oils being pushed
out of the grounds and floating to the top of a French Press,
the expensive kind I get
in the mail, the mailman with a pound of Sumatra
under his arm, ringing my doorbell,
waking me up from a night when all I had was tea
and watched a movie about the Queen of England when Spain was hot
for all her castles and all their ships, carved out
of fine Spanish trees, went up in flames
while back home Spaniards were growing potatoes
and coffee was making its careful way
along a giant whip
from Africa to Europe
where cafes would become famous
and people would eventually sit with their cappuccinos, the baristas
talking about the new war, a cup of sugar
on the table, a curled piece of lemon rind. A beret
on someone’s head, a scarf
around their neck. A bomb in a suitcase
left beneath a small table. Right now
I’m sitting near a hospital where psychotropics are being
carried down the hall in a pink cup,
where someone is lying there and he doesn’t know who
he is. I’m listening
to the couple next to me
talk about their cars. I have no idea
how I got here. The world stops at the window
while I take my little spoon and slowly swirl the cream around the lip
of the cup. Once, I had a brother
who used to sit and drink his coffee black, smoke
his cigarettes and be quiet for a moment
before his brain turned its Armadas against him, wanting to burn down
his cities and villages, before grief
became his capital with its one loyal flag and his face,
perhaps only his beautiful left eye, shimmered on the surface of his Americano
like a dark star.

by Matthew Dickman
from All-American Poem
Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Alison Abbot in Nature:

Neuroscientist Michael Heneka knows that radical ideas require convincing data. In 2010, very few colleagues shared his belief that the brain’s immune system has a crucial role in dementia. So in May of that year, when a batch of new results provided the strongest evidence he had yet seen for his theory, he wanted to be excited, but instead felt nervous. He and his team had eliminated a key inflammation gene from a strain of mouse that usually develops symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The modified mice seemed perfectly healthy. They sailed through memory tests and showed barely a sign of the sticky protein plaques that are a hallmark of the disease. Yet Heneka knew that his colleagues would consider the results too good to be true.

Even he was surprised how well the mice fared; he had expected that removal of the gene, known as Nlpr3, would protect their brains a little, but not that it would come close to preventing dementia symptoms. “I thought something must have gone wrong with the experiments,” says Heneka, from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn. He reanalysed the results again and again. It was past midnight when he finally conceded that they might actually be true. Over the next couple of years, he confirmed that nothing had gone wrong with the experiments. Together with his colleagues, he replicated and elaborated on the results¹. Since then, numerous studies have bolstered the link between dementia and the brain’s immune system, highlighting the cells and signals involved². But none has managed to fully pin it down — the link seems to be slippery and dynamic, changing as the disease progresses.

More here.

Alison Abbot in Nature:

Neuroscientist Michael Heneka knows that radical ideas require convincing data. In 2010, very few colleagues shared his belief that the brain’s immune system has a crucial role in dementia. So in May of that year, when a batch of new results provided the strongest evidence he had yet seen for his theory, he wanted to be excited, but instead felt nervous. He and his team had eliminated a key inflammation gene from a strain of mouse that usually develops symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The modified mice seemed perfectly healthy. They sailed through memory tests and showed barely a sign of the sticky protein plaques that are a hallmark of the disease. Yet Heneka knew that his colleagues would consider the results too good to be true.

Even he was surprised how well the mice fared; he had expected that removal of the gene, known as Nlpr3, would protect their brains a little, but not that it would come close to preventing dementia symptoms. “I thought something must have gone wrong with the experiments,” says Heneka, from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn. He reanalysed the results again and again. It was past midnight when he finally conceded that they might actually be true. Over the next couple of years, he confirmed that nothing had gone wrong with the experiments. Together with his colleagues, he replicated and elaborated on the results¹. Since then, numerous studies have bolstered the link between dementia and the brain’s immune system, highlighting the cells and signals involved². But none has managed to fully pin it down — the link seems to be slippery and dynamic, changing as the disease progresses.

More here.

Dana Gioia at First Things:

The English poet Elizabeth Jennings had the peculiar fate of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong way. Her career began splendidly. Her verse appeared in prominent journals, championed by Oxford’s new generation of tastemakers. Her first publication, Poems (1953), launched the acclaimed Fantasy Poets pamphlet series, which would soon present the early work of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, and Geoffrey Hill. Her first full-length collection, A Way of Looking (1955), won the Somerset Maugham Award and became the Poetry Book Society recommendation. She was the youngest poet featured in the first Penguin Modern Poets volume (1962). Meanwhile Jennings achieved enduring notoriety as the only female member of “The Movement,” the irreverent and contrarian group that dominated mid-century British poetry. By age thirty, Jennings was a celebrated writer.

“To be lucky in the beginning is everything,” claimed Cervantes, but Jennings’s luck did not hold. In the great expansion of universities and literary publishing following World War II, her Movement peers gained academic appointments, lucrative book deals, and critical esteem. Jennings’s career stalled. Her fame as a Movement poet proved a dead end. She never belonged in that Oxbridge boys’ club. She shared The Movement’s commitment to clarity and traditional form, but her politics were to the left of their mostly conservative stance.

more here.

Walter Benn Michaels at nonsite:

Again, the point is not to highlight the discrepancy between the egalitarian ideals of these students and their class position since, if the equality you’re committed to is between groups, there is no discrepancy. And just as no hypocrisy is required at the elite college where you fight hard against racism, none will be required at the NGO or the job as a consultant or in finance (“Why Goldman Sachs? Diversity!”15) where you start making enough money (average salary of a Princeton grad at 34: $90,70016) to enable your kids to carry on the struggle. Actually, the need for a little hypocrisy—for virtue to pay its symbolic tribute to vice—would be an upgrade. The problem here is the literal tribute virtue’s paying to virtue—the complete identity of idealism and careerism. In other words, it’s not ethical but political.

And the demand for a working-class politics cannot be met by adding class to race and gender. This is in part because most actually existing intersectionalists are not very interested in class, but even if they were, the great attraction of intersectionality is precisely that it can absorb class too into the logic of discrimination, which is to say, into the neoliberal theory of inequality. On this theory, the fact of being born poor is a problem in the way that the fact of being born Black or Latino or a woman can be—if it keeps you from having an equal opportunity to succeed. In other words, we should treat class difference like race and gender by understanding poverty not as something we should get rid of but as something we should help people overcome.

more here.

Walter Benn Michaels at nonsite:

Again, the point is not to highlight the discrepancy between the egalitarian ideals of these students and their class position since, if the equality you’re committed to is between groups, there is no discrepancy. And just as no hypocrisy is required at the elite college where you fight hard against racism, none will be required at the NGO or the job as a consultant or in finance (“Why Goldman Sachs? Diversity!”15) where you start making enough money (average salary of a Princeton grad at 34: $90,70016) to enable your kids to carry on the struggle. Actually, the need for a little hypocrisy—for virtue to pay its symbolic tribute to vice—would be an upgrade. The problem here is the literal tribute virtue’s paying to virtue—the complete identity of idealism and careerism. In other words, it’s not ethical but political.

And the demand for a working-class politics cannot be met by adding class to race and gender. This is in part because most actually existing intersectionalists are not very interested in class, but even if they were, the great attraction of intersectionality is precisely that it can absorb class too into the logic of discrimination, which is to say, into the neoliberal theory of inequality. On this theory, the fact of being born poor is a problem in the way that the fact of being born Black or Latino or a woman can be—if it keeps you from having an equal opportunity to succeed. In other words, we should treat class difference like race and gender by understanding poverty not as something we should get rid of but as something we should help people overcome.

more here.

Burhan Wazir at The New Statesman:

Hawkins grew up in a single parent family in Brooklyn and Park Hill on Staten Island. Whenever he inquired about the family patriarch, his mother would reply, “God is your father!” Unlike Mane, who describes being orbited by grandparents, aunts and uncles, Hawkins’s childhood was blighted by black-on-black crime and drugs-related violence. He describes witnessing his first death when he was four years old and watched a woman leap or fall from the roof of an apartment building. “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton was playing on a radio in the street. Hawkins was a member of gangs called Baby Cash Crew, Dick ’Em Down and Wreck Posse. He carried a gun from the ages of 14 to 21 and recalls watching one of his babysitters shooting up heroin on the couch. Years later, Staten Island’s rappers would describe Park Hill as “Killa Hill” in their music. “Dudes would shoot dogs and leave their carcasses behind our building all the time,” writes Hawkins. “It was like a concentration camp for poor black people.”

While Raw is full of the despairing tales that inform the Wu-Tang’s music, it is also fuelled by the gallows humour that runs through albums staffed by fictionalised gangsters called Tony Starks or Lex Diamonds. Hawkins describes watching thieves steal his mother’s handbag on five separate occasions. One day, as she walked him home from school, a young man pulled the jewellery off her ears. Years later, she saw a man on TV who she swore was her attacker – it was Mike Tyson.

more here.

Burhan Wazir at The New Statesman:

Hawkins grew up in a single parent family in Brooklyn and Park Hill on Staten Island. Whenever he inquired about the family patriarch, his mother would reply, “God is your father!” Unlike Mane, who describes being orbited by grandparents, aunts and uncles, Hawkins’s childhood was blighted by black-on-black crime and drugs-related violence. He describes witnessing his first death when he was four years old and watched a woman leap or fall from the roof of an apartment building. “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton was playing on a radio in the street. Hawkins was a member of gangs called Baby Cash Crew, Dick ’Em Down and Wreck Posse. He carried a gun from the ages of 14 to 21 and recalls watching one of his babysitters shooting up heroin on the couch. Years later, Staten Island’s rappers would describe Park Hill as “Killa Hill” in their music. “Dudes would shoot dogs and leave their carcasses behind our building all the time,” writes Hawkins. “It was like a concentration camp for poor black people.”

While Raw is full of the despairing tales that inform the Wu-Tang’s music, it is also fuelled by the gallows humour that runs through albums staffed by fictionalised gangsters called Tony Starks or Lex Diamonds. Hawkins describes watching thieves steal his mother’s handbag on five separate occasions. One day, as she walked him home from school, a young man pulled the jewellery off her ears. Years later, she saw a man on TV who she swore was her attacker – it was Mike Tyson.

more here.

From The New Yorker:

Elif Batuman: One of my most memorable encounters with Shakespeare took place in the Taurus Mountains, in 2012, where I was reporting a story about the Arslanköy Women’s Theatre Group, a rural Turkish theatre company, founded in 2000 by Ümmiye Koçak, a forty-four-year-old farmworker with a primary-school education. Koçak wrote most of the group’s plays herself—they were about village life—but she was also really proud of having once played the title role in her own adaptation of “Hamlet,” titled “Hamit,” in 2009. Hugely popular in the village of Arslanköy, “Hamit” went on to tour several Turkish cities. They staged the graveyard scene using pumpkins for skulls. The women still talked about “Hamlet” all the time—about what Hamlet’s problem had been.

Anyway, one night, after I had been hanging out with Koçak and the village women, who were shooting their first feature-length movie (based on a script by Koçak), I drove back to the hotel where I was staying, in the nearby city of Mersin. It was a weirdly fancy hotel, with a glass globe on the ceiling that could light up in all different colors—you controlled it with a remote control. It could change to something like thirty-six different colors, and there was a strobe function. I remember lying on the bed under pulsing disco lights, eating a fruit basket that someone had sent to my room by mistake, and buying “Hamlet” on my Kindle, just to see what in there had been so captivating to the village women.

To be honest, a tiny part of me had worried that they were only (“only”) excited about “Hamlet” because it was famous, and Western, and the very opposite of what people in their village thought that they, Turkish peasant women, were capable of. But when I reread “Hamlet” after spending a few days with the women, and read some of the other plays that Koçak had written, it was immediately clear what had resonated for them.

More here.

Cathy Lynn Grossman in Publishers Weekly:

Stephen Asma, a philosophy professor at Columbia College in Chicago, was a childhood Catholic altar boy who grew up to become a “cultural Buddhist” and religion-skewering writer for Skeptic magazine. Now, at 51, he's finds himself agnostic about God, but is asserting Why We Need Religion in his new book due out from Oxford in June.

You write in Why We Need Religion that “… the irrationality of religion does not render it unacceptable or valueless.” Will your unbelieving friends think you’ve lost your mind?

Maybe! But there are a number of people like me who are skeptical about the belief claims of religions yet nonetheless respect it. They haven’t had the voice for what they are thinking. I say religion is actually very good therapy for our emotional lives. It resonates. There are levels of suffering that art and science can’t do much with and religion is very good at. People think of religion as a system of beliefs but it is fundamentally an emotional management system, one that science and any other kind of “cultural technology” cannot offer.

Are we all – including you — inherently “religious” but some of us don’t ‘name it and claim it’?

Yes. We are mammals. Our brains evolved to seek help. Sometimes there is no help to be found with other human beings so your brain and emotions reach out to the universe. Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson don’t need to tell a grieving mother that the religion that gives her solace and the strength to get up and keep going is all fictive. We evolved things such as prayer to manage our spontaneous yearning to survive and flourish. I’m not embarrassed and I don’t think it is intellectually cowardly. Religiosity is in human nature. I don’t kneel down and pray as I did in my childhood. But I allow myself to have spontaneous conversations with the universe.

More here.

Andrew Elrod in the Boston Review:

For the past fifty years, after all, among the easiest and most widely accepted formulas for people to work together to change their futures has been through patterns of personal consumption. We invest our savings, purchase private equipment, place our bets in the enthralling spectator sport that is the clash of powerful personalities and organizations—and then we wait.

It is this sleek, efficient temple of opportunity and security that Musk has cultivated and we have bought in to that justifies the massive government spending behind his projects. Indeed, the most potent collective action behind Musk’s success has come from the state. In today’s political climate, projects such as his, which promise a return on investment and private-management practices, are the only ones deemed worthy of public investment. The states of California, Nevada, New York, and Oregon, have all joined the federal government in offering direct grants and loans to Musk’s companies, and hundreds of millions of dollars in consumer rebates are ultimately paid into Tesla through consumers (the federal government, for example, pays a $7,500 tax credit to purchasers of electric cars; California pays a further $2,500). As early as 2015, the Los Angeles Times attempted to sum the total public aid to Musk’s operations and arrived at $4.9 billion.

Yet Musk’s profitability—his success by the conventional standard—still hasn’t materialized. Tesla was run at a $671 million loss in the third quarter of 2017—$117 million paid in interest on the company’s debts alone. In fiscal year 2017, losses summed to $2.2 billion, about three times what the company lost in 2016.

Moreover, Tesla has repeatedly missed every deadline promised to its customers and is currently under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board for denying employees the right to collective bargaining. The company faces numerous shareholder lawsuits alleging managerial violations of fiduciary duty, with a raft of class-action suits following a recent investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Musk’s career thus illustrates the central challenge of U.S. industrial planning. Because of taboos against government ownership and income-tax financed public services, the public must find ways of persuading businessmen to manage private property to meet public objectives.

More here.

Simina Mistreanu in Foreign Policy:

Rongcheng was built for the future. Its broad streets and suburban communities were constructed with an eye to future expansion, as the city sprawls on the eastern tip of China’s Shandong province overlooking the Yellow Sea. Colorful billboards depicting swans bank on the birds — one of the city’s tourist attractions — returning there every winter to escape the Siberian cold.

In an attempt to ease bureaucracy, the city hall, a glass building that resembles a flying saucer, has been fashioned as a one-stop shop for most permits. Instead of driving from one office to another to get their paperwork in order, residents simply cross the gleaming corridors to talk to officials seated at desks in the open-space area.

At one of these stations, Rongcheng residents can pick up their social credit score.

In what it calls an attempt to promote “trustworthiness” in its economy and society, China is experimenting with a social credit system that mixes familiar Western-style credit scores with more expansive — and intrusive — measures. It includes everything from rankings calculated by online payment providers to scores doled out by neighborhoods or companies. High-flyers receive perks such as discounts on heating bills and favorable bank loans, while bad debtors cannot buy high-speed train or plane tickets.

By 2020, the government has promised to roll out a national social credit system. According to the system’s founding document, released by the State Council in 2014, the scheme should “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” But at a time when the Chinese Communist Party is aggressively advancing its presence across town hall offices and company boardrooms, this move has sparked fears that it is another step in the tightening of China’s already scant freedoms.

But it has been hard to distinguish future promises — or threats — from the realities of how social credit is being implemented. Rongcheng is one place where that future is visible.

More here.

Dustin Illingworth at the Paris Review:

“If one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do,” the British writer and journalist Rebecca West wrote to a friend in 1952. “First, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writing well just can’t be forgiven.” West, ignoring her own advice, neither died prematurely nor blunted the fineness of her writing. As a young woman, she made her name with witty, digressive book reviews that were often wonderfully cutting. (On Henry James: “He splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.”) She also wrote several novels and covered world events for prestigious magazines, including the trial of the English fascist William Joyce and the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle. Her final book, an idiosyncratic history of the year 1900, was published just before her death at the age of ninety. It was the capstone to a career that spanned almost seven decades. West’s true audacity was not merely “to go on writing,” as she put it, but to flourish in an insular, nepotistic intellectual culture that was largely hostile to women. She was ambitious, unafraid, and prodigiously gifted—in a word, sharp.

The literary critic Michelle Dean’s new book of the same name, a cultural-history-cum-group-biography, examines the lives and careers of ten sharp women, among them Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Dorothy Parker, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, and Zora Neale Hurston. What unites this disparate group, Dean claims, is the ability “to write unforgettably.”

more here.

Carrie Battan at The New Yorker:

If you need more proof that reality television and social media are this era’s greatest cultural incubators, look no further than Cardi B (born Belcalis Almanzar), the twenty-five-year-old Bronx native who has taken an unprecedented but well-documented path to pop-world domination. In 2014, while working as a stripper, she launched a grassroots campaign for her personality on Instagram and Vine, posting bawdy, unflinching videos in which she monologued about whatever was on her mind—unfaithful boyfriends, the indignity of backhanded compliments, the relative merits of ihop and Philippe Chow—in a thick New York Spanish accent. She sometimes wore nothing but a shower cap. “I ain’t gon’ lie to y’all, these terrorist attacks got my mental a li’l finicky. That’s why I been in the Bronx,” she said in one video, from 2015. “Keep me away from downtown. Ain’t nobody tryna blow up the hood. ”

These little gems of street wisdom got her cast in Mona Scott-Young’s VH1 reality series “Love & Hip Hop.” A chatterbox with a refreshingly unvarnished self-presentation, Cardi, in perhaps her greatest accomplishment, inverts the uses of the platforms she first called home: in her universe, social media and television serve as megaphones for candor and exuberance rather than for deception or artifice.

more here.

Peter Moore at Literary Review:

That Alexander von Humboldt was not dead by the age of thirty-five was a minor miracle. In 1794 he nearly suffocated while testing his miner’s lamp in a subterranean tunnel. The next year he subjected his body to such an extreme series of galvanic experiments that his doctor felt compelled to intervene. In 1800, among the ceiba trees beside the Apure River in Venezuela, he disturbed a resting jaguar (‘never had a tiger appeared to me so enormous’). On that occasion, Humboldt tiptoed to safety, but weeks later he almost paralysed himself while pulling on a sock contaminated with curare, the lethal arrow poison.

Humboldt’s narrowest escape of all, perhaps, came in 1802, during one of his series of high-altitude ascents in the mountains of Ecuador. Nearing a summit, he glanced down to see a bluish light glowing through the snow. He smelled sulphur. ‘He realised with a shudder,’ writes Maren Meinhardt in this evocative and perceptive biography, that he and his companion ‘were on top of the crater itself’. The only thing separating them from the volcano was a ‘thin bridge of compacted snow’.

more here.