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.

John Williams in The New York Times:

Black History Month this year brings with it a significant addition to the history of African-American literature: “Amiable With Big Teeth,” a “lost” novel by the notable Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay. In 2009, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, was working toward his Ph.D. at Columbia University when he came across a double-spaced manuscript that appeared to be by McKay among the archived papers of Samuel Roth, a publisher who had often found himself in First Amendment battles. When The Times reported on the manuscript’s authentication in 2012, the writer and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said McKay’s lost novel was important, in part, for the way it extended our view of the Harlem Renaissance, which “continued to be vibrant and creative and turned its focus to international issues” as the 1930s progressed.

“Amiable With Big Teeth” — with a subtitle equal to its wonderful title (“A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem”) — is about a group of activists in that neighborhood who banded together to support Ethiopia against Mussolini’s occupation. In their introduction, Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards call the book a “caustic, even overtly polemical, depiction of the complex Harlem political landscape in the mid-1930s as it shifted in the shadow of international events.”

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

Caryl Emerson in the TLS:

Perhaps the first thing a reader senses about a crisis-narrative is where the writer stands in time. Either the speaking voice has survived and can look back, or else it is caught on the cusp of the unfolding event. This is the difference between a memoir and a diary entry, the recollection of a dream and the experience of nightmare. In this anthology, Boris Dralyuk attempts a bold thing: to confirm us within the belly of the beast, to push us up against its heartbeat, all the while challenging the received notion that the Russian Revolution produced little literary art of lasting value in its early years. The work of fourteen poets and thirteen prose writers – some famous, others forgotten, several famous for other things – is sampled strictly within a two-and-a-half-year period, from the February Revolution that ended the Romanov dynasty to late 1919, the turning point of the Russian Civil War. The literature produced during these thirty-two months was without perspective, full of potentials and unclear about actuals. In his opening remarks to the prose section, Dralyuk notes that “fictional treatments of the upheaval are hard to find” because what was happening “was too real, too immediate to lend itself to fictionalization”. Verse and expository prose, with their intonations of “direct engagement”, seem more compatible with the revolutionary temperament than the more leisurely composition of stories. But such formal distinctions matter less than we expect. Both verse and prose in this book partake heavily of fable, parable, liberation rhetoric, ecstatic vision – modes that operate beyond literary genre, outside time, and that strive towards a truth prior to either history or fiction.

Thus narrowed and blind-sided, freed from tragic consequence, the paradoxes of 1917 emerge even more unanswerable. Revolutions bring bloodshed and impoverishment, but this one was to bring peace and plenty: an end to the Great War, to all war. As Mikhail Kuzmin writes in his poem “Russian Revolution” (1917): “No sentinel, policemen, pickets, / as if there never had been any guards or guns . . . . It’s like telling a starving man, ‘Eat!’ / And him replying. ‘I’m eating!’ with a smile”. The present-tense verb is proof that we are on the cusp; as-if becomes is. Most revolutions aim at political regime change, but this one saw itself enacting universal all-human change. As Alexander Blok insists in 1918, its music must be greeted with “every cell of your body”. The body politic is my body, your body. Politics becomes intimate; deeply private lyric poets create great civic verse. Blok’s masterworks from 1918, “The Twelve” and “Scythians”, very famous poems in outstanding new translations here, show the anthology at its eschatological best. Blok’s pretensions are millennial and stretch out over a continent, but the reader is left with palpable close-up images, the face of “slit-eyed” Eurasianism and marauding Red Guardists blessed by Jesus Christ. As the revolutionary capital is sanctified by its native poets it is cursed from the margins. The Georgian Symbolist Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937) contributes a lyric, “Petersburg”, that celebrates the sinking of the Bronze Horseman, the corpses of sailors bobbing in the Neva, and chaos swallowing up the city. Poetry rejects the well-plotted story and transmits moods: of exhilaration, of destruction, of eating this very minute after a long fast. Life gains in its savour and death loses its sting. Indeed, why die at all? As Mayakovsky bellows forth in “Our March” (December 1917): “Hey you there! Yes, you, Great Bear! / Demand we be taken to heaven alive”.

More here.

Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

Last October, British Prime Minister Theresa May shocked many when she disparaged the idea of global citizenship. “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world,” she said, “you’re a citizen of nowhere.”

Her statement was met with derision and alarm in the financial media and among liberal commentators. “The most useful form of citizenship these days,” one analyst lectured her, “is one dedicated not only to the wellbeing of a Berkshire parish, say, but to the planet.” The Economist called it an “illiberal” turn. A scholar accused her of repudiating Enlightenment values and warned of “echoes of 1933” in her speech.

I know what a “global citizen” looks like: I see a perfect specimen every time I pass a mirror. I grew up in one country, live in another, and carry the passports of both. I write on global economics, and my work takes me to far-flung places. I spend more time traveling in other countries than I do within either country that claims me as a citizen.

Most of my close colleagues at work are similarly foreign-born. I devour international news, while my local paper remains unopened most weeks. In sports, I have no clue how my home teams are doing, but I am a devoted fan of a football team on the other side of the Atlantic.

And yet May’s statement strikes a chord. It contains an essential truth – the disregard of which says much about how we – the world’s financial, political, and technocratic elite – distanced ourselves from our compatriots and lost their trust.

Start first with the actual meaning of the word “citizen.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth.” Hence citizenship presumes an established polity – “a state or commonwealth” – of which one is a member. Countries have such polities; the world does not.

Proponents of global citizenship quickly concede that they do not have a literal meaning in mind. They are thinking figuratively. Technological revolutions in communications and economic globalization have brought citizens of different countries together, they argue. The world has shrunk, and we must act bearing the global implications in mind. And besides, we all carry multiple, overlapping identities. Global citizenship does not – and need not – crowd out parochial or national responsibilities.

All well and good. But what do global citizens really do?

More here.

Adam Tooze over at his website:

Trump and the possibility of Trump may have brought down the curtain on American hegemony, but American power remains. Nowhere is this more evidently the case than with regard to the global currency regime. The dollar not only remains but is more than ever the anchor of the global financial system. The Economist has an excellent piece on the resulting risks, which draws on an important new paper by Ilzetki, Reinhart and Rogoff (Yes! Them again).

As The Economist puts it: “TRUMPISM is in part an expression of American exhaustion at bearing burdens it first took up 70 years ago. Donald Trump has moaned less about the dollar than about shirking NATO allies or cheating trade partners. Yet the dollar standard is one of the most vulnerable pillars of global stability. And the world is far from ready for America to ditch its global financial role. Unlike other aspects of American hegemony, the dollar has grown more important as the world has globalised, not less. … America wields enormous financial power as a result. It can wreak havoc by withholding supplies of dollars in a crisis. When the Federal Reserve tweaks monetary policy, the effects ripple across the global economy.

The dollar is central as an anchor for other currencies that are pegged to it. It is central as the currency in which key commodities like oil are priced. It is the main currency in which countries hold their reserves. It is the main currency of international lending.

What the Ilzetki, Reinhart and Rogoff paper allows us to do is to track the ebb and flow of the dollar’s functioning in the global economy over time and across space.

In the years after 1945 when the US was overwhelmingly the dominant economy in the world with a share of global output of 28 %, the dollar was also the lead currency with the currencies of 75 % of world economy (measured in GDP terms) anchored to the dollar. Since then America’s share of global output has declined to 18 % and in the 1970s the share of global GDP anchored to the dollar fell to 45 %. But since the 1970s the share of currencies anchored to the dollar increased again, reaching 75 % in 2015. This is what analysts mean when they say that we live in the era of a second Bretton Woods, created not by design but by the unilateral anchoring of other currencies to the dollar.

More here.