Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

The success of We Should All Be Feminists has made Adichie as prominent for her feminism as for her novels, to the extent that “now I get invited to every damned feminist thing in the whole world”. She has always been an agony aunt of sorts, “the unpaid therapist for my family and friends”, but having the feminist label attached has changed things, and not just among her intimates. “I was opened to a certain level of hostility that I hadn’t experienced before as a writer and public figure.”

…In response to her new book, a reporter emailed her the question: “Why not humanism?” (instead of feminism). To which, she says, “I thought, what part of the fucking book did this person not read?”

It’s like the people who go around saying All Lives Matter, I say, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. “Right, which I find deeply offensive and very dishonest. Because we have to name something in order to fix it, which is why I insist on the word feminist or feminism.” This, she says, in spite of the fact that many of her friends, particularly black women, “resist that word, because the history of feminism has been very white and has assumed ‘women’ meant ‘white women’. Political discussion in this country still does that. They’ll say, ‘Women voted for…’ and then, ‘Black people voted for…’ And I think: I’m black and a woman, so where do I fit in here?” As a result, “Many of my friends who are not white will say, ‘I’m an intersectional feminist’, or ‘I’m a womanist’. And I have trouble with that word, because it has undertones of femininity as this mystical goddess-mother thing, which makes me uncomfortable. So we need a word. And my hope is we use ‘feminism’ often enough that it starts to lose all the stigma and becomes this inclusive, diverse thing.”

More here.

Ibram X. Kendi in Black Perspectives:

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded The Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a “Modern Moses,” becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process. His successor wielded the newspaper’s clout to elect mayors and presidents, including Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, who would have lost in 1960 if not for The Defender’s support. Along the way, its pages were filled with columns by legends like Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King. Drawing on dozens of interviews and extensive archival research, Ethan Michaeli constructs a revelatory narrative of race in America and brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and policemen’s clubs to do their jobs, from the age of Teddy Roosevelt to the age of Barack Obama.

Ibram X. Kendi: Please share with us the creation story of your book—those experiences, those factors, those revelations that caused you to research this specific area and produce The Defender.

Ethan Michaeli: I decided to write the first comprehensive history of The Chicago Defender because I worked there from 1991 to 1996, and knew this was a story that needed to be told. I am white and Jewish, raised in a suburb of Rochester, New York, and arrived at The Defender as a fresh graduate of the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. I had no particular interest in civil rights or racism or African American history, which is not to say that I was dismissive, but just to underscore how much I thought race was an issue which had been dealt with in the ‘60s. So that when a friend–another white, Jewish, University of Chicago graduate–offered to recommend me for a job he was leaving at an “African-American-owned newspaper,” I didn’t appreciate the significance. I reasoned that in this putatively post-racial era, some newspapers would have white owners while others would have black owners, and what was the big deal? In those years at The Defender, then still holding its own as one of the city’s three daily newspapers, I received a crash course in African-American history as well as the mechanics of journalism.

More here.

Video length: 4:25

Christopher Lydon in Literary Hub:

Cornel West: You said, Why Baldwin?

Christopher Lydon: Baldwin today.

CW: Baldwin today. Well one is that we live in an age in which there is such a paucity of eloquence. Baldwin exemplifies eloquence at its highest level. Now, when Cicero and Quintillian define eloquence as “wisdom speaking,” I think we’d have to add it’s “wisdom speaking” that’s rooted in a courage that refuses to sell out. We live in an age in which everybody’s for sale, everything is for sale. Baldwin would never have sold out. He was true to himself. He was true to his soul. This is in many ways the Baldwin moment, and it’s primarily because we know here’s somebody who’s committed to intellectual integrity, committed to a moral honesty.

Remember what he says at the end of Notes of a Native Son in the introduction: “All I want to be is an honest man and who, like Hemingway, endures in my work.” Now you see, in an age of mendacity and criminality, which is our own, just telling the truth and having integrity is revolutionary. It’s subversive. It’s countercultural. So, Baldwin comes back bringing this rich tradition of eloquent, truth-telling, witness-bearing, soul-stirring writing, and he’s got the black church as a backdrop. He’s listening to Bessie Smith. He’s listening to Mahalia Jackson when he’s writing, so you could feel the vibrations and the vibes on the page that are connected to the sonic expressions of geniuses like Bessie Smith and like a Ray Charles, of course, was probably his favorite. They were together at Carnegie Hall. That was a very historical moment at Carnegie Hall with the two of them.

All that to say is what? In this Trump moment, Baldwin comes back with tremendous power, potency, vitality and vibrancy, in part, because he’s willing to speak the truth not just about the country in the abstract but the truth about legacies of white supremacy, the truth about indifference, the truth about callousness, the truth about the spiritual blackout, which is the relative eclipse of integrity, honesty and decency in public life in the country. That’s true for Democrats, true for Republicans, true for right-wing, true for left-wing.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

A few Fridays ago, Tracy Van Houten drove to a registrar’s office to pick up the paperwork she would need to run for Congress. Doing so would mean giving up her role as an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—a dream job that she had held for 13 years. Her plan was to pick up the papers, think about them over the weekend, and make a decision afterwards.

Sitting outside the building, she wavered, and decided to call her senators to voice her opposition against Betsy DeVos—the since-confirmed nominee for Secretary of Education. She got a busy tone. She tried again. Another busy tone. “It was at the fifth one that I thought: Okay, I need to get to Washington and get a seat at the table,” she says. “That motivated me to get into the building and get on with it.”

Van Houten is now officially running to represent the 34th Congressional District of California in the U.S. House. The seat’s former occupant, Xavier Becerra, was appointed as attorney general of California last December, and 23 candidates are now vying to replace him in a special election, to be held in April. The roster includes experienced politicians, activists, and lawyers. Van Houten, who is something of a wildcard, is the only rocket scientist.

More here.

Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker:

The quality of the art is astonishingly high for someone who—because he “felt antsy” in retirement, he writes, after “I had been an art-agnostic all my life”—took up painting from a standing stop, four years ago, at the age of sixty-six. Bush’s eye and hand have improved drastically since hacked images of a couple of clumsy, apparently nude self-portraits in a bathroom surfaced, in 2013. (He made those, he said, to shock his painting tutor—the first of three plainly crackerjack ones whom he acknowledges in the book.) Bush now commands a style, generic but efficient, of thick, summary brushwork that aims to capture expression as well as physiognomy. There’s a remoteness in the use of photographs. The subjects aren’t present to the artist. They’re elsewhere. But they look honestly observed and persuasively alive.

More here.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow in The Nation:

In 1956, Jane Jacobs was 39 years old, working as a staff writer at Architectural Forum. Her boss, unable to attend a conference at Harvard, asked her to go in his stead and give a talk on land banking. Jacobs, skittish about public speaking, reluctantly agreed, on one condition: that she could speak on a subject of her choice. That subject, it turned out, was the utter wrongheadedness of many of the ideas cherished by her audience, the era’s luminaries of urban planning. The prevailing wisdom at the time held that “urban renewal” required clearing “slums” and starting over. The rebuilt cities would tidily disentangle residential and commercial areas and include plenty of open space. These ideas may have looked good in architectural drawings, but in real life, Jacobs had come to believe, they were a formula for lifeless monotony. In East Harlem, she noted, 1,110 stores had been razed to make way for housing projects. Jacobs argued that these little shops couldn’t simply be replaced by supermarkets. “A store is also a storekeeper,” she said. Stores were not just commercial spaces; they were also social centers that “help make an urban neighborhood a community instead of a mere dormitory.” Even empty storefronts had a function, often sprouting into clubs, churches, or hubs for other civic activities. When these spaces were destroyed, the community was gravely wounded.

This speech, a turning point in Jacobs’s career, appears in Vital Little Plans, a new collection of her short works; Robert Kanigel’s new biography of Jacobs, Eyes on the Street, fills in the context. The men in the room—including the mayor of Pittsburgh, the head of the New York City Housing Authority, and The New Yorker’s architecture critic, Lewis Mumford—took the rebuke remarkably well, and Jacobs won some distinguished admirers. The speech was also the germ of what became her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), one of the seminal books of the 20th century.

More here.

Carole Boyce Davies in AAIHS:

My sense is that we are on the threshold of a new “conjuncture” in which 42% of millennials in the U.S. say they would vote for a socialist government and the white working class seems bereft of any union or left organizing and have therefore been allowed to remain totally illiterate about their social conditions though with an innate sense of being left behind. Trumpism enters that space of misinformation, illiteracy, inadequacy and absence. And what of Black left thought today? We are still clearly in the looking back mode—a “fifty years after” framings of major events—without theoretical guidance for the future. A Black Lives Matter movement exists but its actions remain sporadic and more responsive than proactive. Elaine Brown former chairwoman of the Black Panther Party is quoted in Spiked as critiquing their tendency to be more pacifist than assertive, still requesting rights instead of assuming them.

A number of questions remain to be engaged. For me, the primary one is this: what kind of theoretical/practical ideas can be generated–given the still tenuous lived reality of black peoples worldwide–that can admit the limitations of past movements (intellectual and/or political) but still move forward with new agendas that refine past agendas and re-define new projects?

More here.

Emily Wolahan at The Quarterly Conversation:

In, Alice Iris Red Horse, a range of poetry from throughout Yoshimasu’s career has been gathered and translated by a group of very talented translators (nine in total, though most not working collaboratively). A few interviews are also included, as well as a translator’s note attached to every poem. While some might resistance the idea of using text to scaffold text, an artist like Yoshimasu invites such ways of reading. Just as a good essay about Brice Marden’s marble paintings can contextualize and articulate the emotions they convey, the translator’s notes and handful of interviews in Alice Iris Red Horse shed light on how these poems function beyond the page. As many of these poems are intended to be accompanied in performance by noise and vocalizations, the scaffolding that these “extra” texts provide go some way to help contextualize Yoshimasu’s vision.

Sawako Nakayasu’s translation notes, for example, don’t merely scaffold or provide context for Yoshimasu, but engage in a conversation with him, perhaps revealing the core work in any translation. Discussing “…Stones Single, or in Handfuls,” she explains the first lines of the poem, which refer to a “narrow road.” To my ear this recalls Basho’s book (sometimes translated as) Narrow Road to the Interior, But Nakayasu reveals that Yoshimasu refers not to Basho but to a children’s song “Toryanse”: “This narrow road, where does it go? / This narrow road is the Road of the God Tenjin.” This nursery rhyme has a tune and “many pedestrian crossings in Japan have adopted the melody of ‘Torynase.’”

more here.

George Saunders at The Guardian:

What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down” and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of brevity.

But why did I make those changes? On what basis?

On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.

more here.

Jack Miles in the New York Times:

In the Myth of Er, told or retold by Socrates at the end of Plato’s “Republic,” we learn that after death souls are reincarnated only after crossing Lethe, the River of Oblivion. In his 2013 novel “The Childhood of Jesus” and now in its sequel, “The Schooldays of Jesus,” J.M. Coetzee has written a pair of stylistically realistic novels with, however, a Lethe premise more at home in myth. Everyone in the Spanish-speaking country where these novels are set has arrived by ship, and the voyage has washed every immigrant’s memory clean of all recollection of a previous life. Page by page, the larger portion of both novels is taken up by quasi-Platonic dialogues that struggle back toward a-Lethe-ia — Greek for “truth,” a truth left behind on the far side of Lethe. But, by a brilliant turn, the central symposiasts are Simón, a man in his 40s, and Davíd, a boy who is 5 as “Childhood” opens and 7 as “Schooldays” ends.

The brilliance of this turn is that it allows Coetzee to create a kind of fusion genre blending the energy of philosophical dialogue, the warmth and unprogrammed humor of father-son repartee, the emotional potency of a family romance and finally the uncanny suggestion of allegory (womb as ship, birth as disembarkation). The result is rich, dense, often amusing and, above all, full of inner tension and suspense.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1895, the Lumiere Brothers—among the first filmmakers in history released a movie called The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Just 50 seconds long, it consists of a silent, unbroken, monochrome shot of a train pulling into a platform full of people. It was a vivid example of the power of “animated photographs”, as one viewer described them. Now, 122 years later, The Arrival of a Train is breaking new ground again. It has just become one of the first movies to be stored in DNA.

In the famous double-helices of life’s fundamental molecule, Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski from the New York Genome Center and Columbia University encoded the movie, along with a computer operating system, a photo, a scientific paper, a computer virus, and an Amazon gift card.

They used a new strategy, based on the codes that allow movies to stream reliably across the Internet. In this way, they managed to pack the digital files into record-breakingly small amounts of DNA. A one terabyte hard drive currently weighs around 150 grams. Using their methods, Erlich and Zielinski can fit 215,000 times as much data in a single gram of DNA. You could fit all the data in the world in the back of a car.

More here.

Debarati S. Seni in the Times of India:

Thirty-three years ago, on a cold winter night in Delhi, when everyone was swathed up in their blankets, braving the chill, 18-year-old William Dalrymple, landed in India. He wasn't interested in this country back then, but over the years that changed and how — thanks to his many books about the rich Indian history. If you are someone who finds history boring, then you are among those who haven't read Dalrymple. The prominent historian, author, broadcaster and critic, has many awards to his credit, has an innate knack with words, as he showcases bygone, ancient tales to you in a fascinating way.In an exclusive chat with Bombay Times, William tells us about how enthralling history really is with sagas of loot, murder, torture, violence, deceit and colonial greed and more…

Do you think non-fiction has finally found its feet in India?

India has seen an enormous growth in non-fiction. They are actually selling more than fiction now, which was impossible to imagine a decade ago. There are amazing non-fiction writers in India — Suketu Mehta, his book on Mumbai, I think is a masterpiece of my generation of writers. At a recent literature festival, I must have had around 250 writers and at least 50 Indian non-fiction writers.
I agree that narrative history is only beginning to find its feet now with works of people like Ram Guha and Sunil Khilnani. And up to now, since the 50s, the history of India has been preserved in academic writings in prose, more about social economic history, peasant history and worker history, than readable tales of romping Mughals.

More here.

Erica Brenner in The Guardian:

If you’re a political outsider who wants to move fast to the top job in a democracy, how to do it? You could start by dipping into a book written 500 years ago by an out-of-pocket Italian civil servant. The quickest way, it says, is to have fortune on your side from the outset, with plenty of inherited money and a leg up through family connections. If lying and breaking your oaths help you crush the opposition, so be it. Make the people your best friend. Promise to protect their interests against predatory elites and foreigners. Fan partisan hatreds so that you alone seem to rise above them, saviour of the fatherland.

The book is The Prince, its author Niccolò Machiavelli. Minus television and Twitter, it seems the techniques of ambitious “new princes”, as he calls them, haven’t changed a bit. But why did Machiavelli write a whole book about them, peppering it with men who soared to power by greasing palms and exploiting weaknesses: Julius Caesar, Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia? Most people today assume that Machiavelli didn’t just describe their methods, he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective has come to mean “cunning, scheming, and unscrupulous, especially in politics”. Along with our daily news, popular culture has brought legions of Machiavellian figures into our homes and made them both human and entertaining: Tony Soprano, Frank and Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Lord Petyr Baelish from Game of Thrones. These Machiavellians are scoundrels, but subtle ones. In watching their manoeuvres on screen we, like their victims, can’t help being a little seduced by their warped ingenuity. So it no longer shocks us to think that a highly intelligent man who lived five centuries ago, in times we imagine were far crueller than ours, spent night after night at his desk in the Tuscan countryside, his wife and children sleeping nearby, drafting the rulebook for today’s cynical populists and authoritarians.

Picture: Machiavellian scoundrel … James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in the HBO TV series The Sopranos.

More here.

Robert Service in Science:

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks. But whether the technology takes off may depend on its cost. DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it. “DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

Scientists have been storing digital data in DNA since 2012. That was when Harvard University geneticists George Church, Sri Kosuri, and colleagues encoded a 52,000-word book in thousands of snippets of DNA, using strands of DNA’s four-letter alphabet of A, G, T, and C to encode the 0s and 1s of the digitized file. Their particular encoding scheme was relatively inefficient, however, and could store only 1.28 petabytes per gram of DNA. Other approaches have done better. But none has been able to store more than half of what researchers think DNA can actually handle, about 1.8 bits of data per nucleotide of DNA.

More here.