Sanford Pinsker in VQR:

Enter the new generation of black intellectuals—everyone from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stephen Carter, and Cornel West to Shelby Steele, Orlando Patterson and Stanley Crouch. Taken together, they represent a direction that began 40 years ago with the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and continued through the civil rights movement. In short, the black intellectual voices now speaking out from our most prestigious universities are, as the title of Stephen Carter’s 1991 book would have it, “affirmative action babies.” From token representation in the 1950’s and 60’s-—when, say, Harvard typically admitted ten blacks per class—enrollments have fairly soared as Afro-American studies programs took root (often in response to student protest) and universities slowly but surely embraced a new educational paradigm based on race, class, and gender. In the process, culture became, well, one of those words. It was once spelt with a capital letter, defined by Matthew Arnold as “the best that has been thought and said,” and generally agreed to be a good thing. Now, many in the academy were not so sure, partly because selecting the “best” invariably means leaving out the “least,” and partly because culture itself often seems to be a suspect operation. Rather than “sweetness and light” (the title of the Arnold essay in which his famous definition appeared), “culture”— yet another term destined to be surrounded by inverted commas—stands for everything that first bullies and then silences minority voices.

No one would seriously argue with the proposition that black intellectuals have played a major role in the culture wars that define our time. Indeed, some would insist that they are what the New York intellectuals once were— namely, activist scholars who bring fresh blood and new perspectives to our understanding of American culture. At the same time, however, there are important differences. Regardless of how much the New York intellectuals were divided by temperament and later, by politics, they shared a fund of common experience that, for want of a better term, might be called “immigrant gratitude.” America, and perhaps more to the point, American culture, offered an escape from the hardships and parochial limitations that had narrowly defined the lives of their immigrant parents. Granted, the giddy possibility of self-transformation did not come without cost, and it would take a long arc indeed before many would rediscover the Jewishness from which they had fled. Not surprisingly, the conflict was the very stuff of which intellectuals, rather than scholars, are made, for as Daniel Bell once shrewdly observed, the scholar finds his place within an established tradition and adds his tiny piece to the mosaic. By contrast, the intellectual begins with “HIS experience, HIS individual perceptions of the world, HIS privileges and deprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities.”

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

Edward McPherson at Literary Hub:

‘‘Ready to go back in time?’’ the guy sitting beside me says, rather dramatically. He’s from Long Island and is also an amateur. We’re in a dusty Suburban pitching itself headfirst down a sharp slope into the Badlands. Through the cracked wind- shield, I see a moonscape eroded out of the prairie: a mottled topography of red, brown, black, yellow, green, and gray studded with naked buttes—the sediments of the sea, silt and clay deposited and then worn down, epochs later, by water and wind. In places, the buttes are scorched and collapsed by burning coal turned into ash. Nonnative sweet yellow clover has choked out the prairie grass that usually grows between the desolate washouts and draws; in parts, the clover stands waist-high. Above, sparse thickets of cottonwoods, maybe a green ash, a few ponderosa pines. Below, baked beaches where alien outcrops of rocks bloom in strangled, man-sized shapes. A landscape of hard eternity, home to rattlers, bull snakes, prairie dogs, pheasants, foxes, coyotes, pronghorns, bobcats, mule deer, minks, and ever-thirsty toads. My companions and I are dressed in paleontologist chic: tan pants, wide-brim hat, long-sleeve button-down, boots, bandanna. As our vehicle lumbers down the hill to the desolate floor, we pass a rock layer known as the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) boundary, a thin line of tan clay beneath a band of coal that pinpoints the ‘‘sudden’’ geological moment when the dinosaurs disappeared.

These aren’t the Badlands of South Dakota, which are thirty million years younger and far more popular. These are the Badlands that in 1864 Brigadier General Alfred Sully of the US Cavalry, busy marauding against the Sioux, described as ‘‘hell with the fires out.’’

more here.

Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker:

Ellison is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the putative left-wing answer to the brinksmen of the Freedom Caucus on the right, and he was an early and fervent supporter of Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Like Sanders, he consistently opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal sought by the Obama White House in its final two years which was attacked by populists in both parties. (President Donald Trump recently withdrew the U.S. from the T.P.P.) Ellison announced his candidacy for the D.N.C. chairmanship six days after the Presidential election. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, predictably endorsed him—but so did establishment figures, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and his predecessor, Harry Reid. One of the early objectives of Schumer’s leadership has been to placate the increasingly powerful Sanders, whom he made a member of his leadership team, and Schumer has said that he endorsed Ellison because Sanders recommended him. This may have been a canny bit of political maneuvering, but it also indicated to Sanders’s supporters that the populist wing of the Democratic Party was poised to lead the opposition against Trump.

The race for the chair has often echoed the acrimony and confusion of the Presidential primaries. Ten candidates are competing for the job, though few have a national profile. Ellison’s chief rival, Thomas E. Perez, was formerly Barack Obama’s Labor Secretary. Perez has consolidated support from much of the Democratic establishment, and increasingly appears to have seized the role of front-runner. Pete Buttigieg, the young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has positioned himself as a compromise candidate, saying, of the 2016 Democratic primary race, “I don’t know why we’d want to live through it a second time.”

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

One of the many complications that make the Bruegels the most confusing clan in art is the letter H. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the founder of the dynasty and its greatest artist, was the painter of such celebrated works as The Hunters in the Snow (1565) and The Tower of Babel (1563). Contrary to the elegance and elevating tenets of the Italian Renaissance, he made the peasant life of the Low Countries his subject, in all its scatological, rambunctious and therefore human detail. In 1559 he dropped the H in his surname and started signing in Roman capital letters – Brueghel becoming the rather more stately Bruegel.

Bruegel had two sons, Pieter and Jan, aged four and one at the time of his death in 1569. Both became painters, too, and as their careers took off Pieter the Younger reinstated the H his father had discarded (though in later life, to add to the disorder, he reversed the order of the U and E) and it remained the moniker of the innumerable painting Brueghels who followed. Rather more confusing than this alphabet jiggery-pokery, though, is the sheer number of painters in the dynasty – some 15 blood relations over the course of 150 years, before a plethora of apprentices, collaborators and intermarriages is factored in.

more here.

Paul Freedman in DelanceyPlace:

In the mid-1800s, unaccompanied women in America were generally not allowed to dine at restaurants: "Midday dining presented a challenge for women too busy or too far from home to return there for lunch. They might be in the company of other women or alone, but at any rate not escorted by men who were occupied with work and work-related socializing; men had their own luncheon habits. In the nineteenth-century United States, men made the rules about public dining and admitted women to restaurants on sufferance, according to a complex series of arrangements. Different practices governed the two main meals of the day. "Restaurants depended economically on women accompanying men at the evening meal. Lunch, however, was segregated by gender and involved a series of problems, according to the social customs of the nineteenth century. In the grand and even not-so-grand metropolis, men were increasingly likely to work at some distance from home and to stay near their workplace for the midday meal. The point at which women too absented themselves from the house created a demand for their sustenance. The growth of cities and the creation of specialized shopping districts meant that it was often incon­venient for women as well as men to return home for lunch.

"The public rooms at fancy restaurants were usually reserved at lunch for men only, but some of them allowed women to have lunch in private dining spaces. In the era before Prohibition, bars offered free food, which, along with a crowded and boisterous atmosphere, encouraged demand for drink. Free-lunch bars were hopelessly inappropriate spaces for respectable women, as alcohol-driven conviviality was inevitably coarse — the antith­esis of what was considered ladylike.

More here.

Tim Stanley in The Telegraph:

Can a white person ever really understand how a black person sees the world? Back in 1959, six years before Martin Luther King marched for civil rights in Selma, one man tried. A white Texan writer called John Howard Griffin walked into a doctor’s office in New Orleans and asked him to turn his skin colour black. Griffin took oral medication and was bombarded with ultraviolet rays; he cut off his hair to hide an absence of curls and shaved the back of his hands. Then he went on a tour of the Deep South. The result was a bestselling book called Black Like Me, which is still regarded as an American classic. Griffin wanted to test the claim that although the southern United States was segregated it was essentially peaceful and just – that the two races were separate but equal.

What he discovered tells us a lot about the subtleties of racism. In 1959, unlike today, it was legally instituted. But, like today, it also flourished at the personal level – in hostility, suspicion, fear and even self-loathing. Griffin was an extraordinary man. Born in Dallas in 1920, he went to school in France and joined the French Resistance after Hitler invaded. Griffin helped Jewish children escape to England before fleeing to America. While serving in the US army, he was blinded by shrapnel. Griffin took it all in his stride – he married, had children and converted to Catholicism. Griffin’s strong personal faith reminds us that much of the civil rights movement was in fact a Christian mission – made possible, in this instance, by what seemed like a miracle. Walking around his yard one afternoon, Griffin suddenly saw red swirls where hitherto there was only darkness. Within months his sight had returned. And it was a man determined to make the most of his second chance who hit upon the novel idea of crossing the colour line. Those reading the book today might regard Griffin’s attempt to change his colour as akin to blacking up. Certainly, the transformation was awkward. Griffin may well have had dark skin but he retained his classically Caucasian features, and one suspects that the awkwardness of his encounters with some black people was down to them wondering if he was one of them or just horribly sunburnt.

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

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Timothy B. Tyson has written a concise and urgent book about Emmett Till’s 1955 murder in a small Mississippi town, a crime that ignited civil rights defenders into a long, hard struggle against the Jim Crow regime in the South, and inspired an outraged Rosa Parks to defy segregation laws on a Montgomery city bus. It’s a macabre story of inhumanity and injustice, but also of resistance and unity across a divided nation.

The facts may be known, but bear repeating. Fourteen-year-old Emmett, during a visit from Chicago to his family’s hometown of Money, Mississippi, allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a grocery store. After Bryant claimed, untruthfully, that the black boy had also grabbed her, her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam abducted Emmett from his grand uncle’s house, beat, mutilated and shot him, then dumped his body into the Tallahatchie River, from where it was recovered three days later. Just another lynching in the Jim Crow South … until it wasn’t. If it weren’t for the specific time and place, it’s unlikely to have become arguably the United States’s most consequential hate crime, the first act in a drama of reckoning that tested a nation’s moral fiber.

Expertly, Tyson demarcates and mines the territory of Till’s murder, including why the killers assumed it would go ignored; of the trial, which indeed concluded with a not-guilty verdict; and of the countrywide reaction to both. Yet his analysis of the big national moment does not upstage his attention to the Till family’s unimaginable personal loss.

More here.

Victoria Jaggard in National Geographic:

Creatures that thrive on iron, sulfur, and other chemicals have been found trapped inside giant crystals deep in a Mexican cave. The microbial life-forms are most likely new to science, and if the researchers who found them are correct, the organisms are still active even though they have been slumbering for tens of thousands of years.

If verified, the discovery adds to evidence that microbial life on Earth can endure harsher conditions in isolated places than scientists previously thought possible. (See “Life Found Deep Under Antarctic Ice for First Time?”)

“These organisms have been dormant but viable for geologically significant periods of time, and they can be released due to other geological processes,” says NASA Astrobiology Institute director Penelope Boston, who announced the find today at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “This has profound effects on how we try to understand the evolutionary history of microbial life on this planet.”

More here.

Emily Dreyfuss in Wired:

In the past, the president has also promised to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. What he hasn’t promised to publish is a list of crimes committed by Americans. That’s not news. But his list is likely to create the false impression that undocumented immigrants are especially prone to commit violent crimes—an impression in which the human brain is complicit.

Lakoff, a University of California, Berkeley linguist and well-known Democratic activist, cites Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” as the signature “salient exemplar.” Reagan’s straw woman—a minority mother who uses her government money on fancy bling rather than on food for her family—became an effective rhetorical bludgeon to curb public assistance programs even though the vast majority of recipients didn’t abuse the system in that way. The image became iconic, even though it was the exception rather than the rule.

Psychologists call this bias the “availability heuristic,” an effect Trump has sought to exploit since the launch of his presidential campaign, when he referred to undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists.

“It basically works the way memory works: you judge the frequency, the probability, of something based on how easily you can bring it to mind,” says Northeastern University psychologist John Coley. “Creating a vivid, salient image like that is a great way to make it memorable.”

More here.

Ulka Anjaria in the Boston Review:

Arundhati Roy

In June of 1997, on the verge of graduating from high school, I received an award for my study of foreign languages, a book wrapped in blue shiny paper. As I opened it, a small clipping from TIME slipped out—an article on an Indian writer, Arundhati Roy, whose novel was taking the literary world by storm. My prize was Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things (1997). I sat down to read it immediately.

On a visit to India the summer before, I had poked around bookshops desperately seeking out new fiction—something other than the requisite thin copy of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) that seemed to be everywhere, dusty and unthumbed, the few books by Anita Desai and Gita Mehta, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve (1954), and a graying Sahitya Akademi translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chaturanga (1916). This was 1997 and, unlike today, most of Mumbai’s bookstores were hidden inside luxury hotels, Indian literature meant Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, and the bookshelves dedicated to India offered little more than old Lonely Planet volumes and coffee table books on the lives of the Maharajas. At age eighteen, I found Anand dry and Rushdie pompous. Desai and Mehta felt like they were writing for my parents’ generation. There was even something dull and unfashionable about the packaging of these books, most of which were published not in India but in England. Indian literature wasn’t cool—it was, somehow, embarrassing.

The God of Small Things changed all that. The idea that India could have a contemporary novel of its own, shorn of Anand’s unwieldy idioms or Markandaya’s awkward exoticisms, a novel whose writing style was new and fresh, whose irony and anger were youthful and contemporary, a novel that shouted rather than whispered, a novel by a young woman, was, to my mind, a revelation.

More here.

Hannah Devlin in The Guardian:

The woolly mammoth vanished from the Earth 4,000 years ago, but now scientists say they are on the brink of resurrecting the ancient beast in a revised form, through an ambitious feat of genetic engineering.

Speaking ahead of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston this week, the scientist leading the “de-extinction” effort said the Harvard team is just two years away from creating a hybrid embryo, in which mammoth traits would be programmed into an Asian elephant.

“Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” said Prof George Church. “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”

The creature, sometimes referred to as a “mammophant”, would be partly elephant, but with features such as small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair and cold-adapted blood. The mammoth genes for these traits are spliced into the elephant DNA using the powerful gene-editing tool, Crispr.

More here.

Beena Sarwar in The Wire:

I wonder if the bangle sellers outside the shrine are alive. I still have some chunky glass bangles I bought, bargaining more for the sake of it than to save money.

Did the woman bouncing a little girl on her shoulders, chanting and dancing to an inner beat before the drums sounded, go back last Thursday? Did they survive the blast?

I saw them one Thursday last April when I went to Sehwan Sharif with friends from India who were in Pakistan to attend a wedding. Every week, the day before the Muslim holy day, Friday, draws the most crowds at the Sufi shrines that dot the landscape across South Asia.

Devotees believe that you only go to the dargah – the shrine built over the grave of a revered religious figure – when you are “called” to do so. I have been “called” to Sehwan Sharif several times.

These Sufi dargahs are a symbol of the region’s syncretic culture – the unique blend of Islam with local cultures. It was the Sufi philosopher-poets’ teachings of peace and love that led to the spread of Islam in the sub-continent. It is what today’s hard-line Islamists who draw their stark puritan ideology from Wahhabi teachings, are trying to counter.

More here.

George Monbiot in Evonomics:

The events that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

This, at any rate, is how it was originally conceived. But by the time Hayek came to write The Constitution of Liberty, the network of lobbyists and thinkers he had founded was being lavishly funded by multimillionaires who saw the doctrine as a means of defending themselves against democracy. Not every aspect of the neoliberal programme advanced their interests. Hayek, it seems, set out to close the gap.

More here.

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

What causes aging? “Scientists have been thinking about this question for centuries,” says Harvard professor of medicine Vadim Gladyshev. It sounds almost simple, but in fact it’s thorny and complicated, and although several theories have emerged—that organisms are “programmed” by nature to die, or that aging is the result of “hyperfunction” of biological activities, or that it’s controlled by genetics—there are as yet no settled answers. But a study published today in Science Advances, coauthored by Gladyshev, offers evidence bolstering one long-held theory: that aging is caused, at least in part, by molecular damage accumulating in the cells. “This damage is generated by nearly every cellular process,” he says—by the work of enzymes and proteins and the life-sustaining metabolic processes that occur at every level of complexity, from simple molecules and cell components to whole cells and entire organs. “So over time we have many, many ‘damage forms,’ millions or billions”—unavoidable byproducts of enzyme function, for example, or of protein-to-protein interactions, errors in DNA transcription or translation. “And as a function of age, they accumulate.” Eventually, it’s more than the body can cope with.

…“Aging is the most important biological question.” It is at the root of so many diseases. “Even if we eliminate cancer, for example, the effect would be minor, because of all the other diseases of aging: diabetes, Alzheimer’s, sarcopenia, cardiovascular disease, and so on and so on.” All of those maladies will still add up. “But if we can learn how to slow down the aging process, we can deal with all of those diseases at once. We delay their appearance. That’s why it’s important to study these fundamental questions, to ask: what is aging?”

More here.