Natasha Lennard and Brad Evans in The NYT's The Stone:

Natasha Lennard: The premise of your book “Disposable Futures” is that “violence is ubiquitous” in the media today. There seems to be plenty of evidence to support this claim — just look at the home page of this news site for a start. But the media has always been interested in violence — “if it bleeds, it leads” isn’t exactly new. And the notion that there is just more violence in the world today — more violent material for the media to cover — doesn’t seem tenable. So what do you think is specific about the ubiquity of violence today, and the way it is mediated?

Brad Evans: It is certainly right to suggest the connections between violence and media communications have been a recurring feature of human relations. We only need to open the first pages of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” to witness tales of victory in battle and its communicative strategies — on this occasion the medium of communication was the burning beacon. But there are a number of ways in which violence is different today, in terms of its logics intended, forced witnessing and ubiquitous nature.

We certainly seem to be entering into a new moment, where the encounter with violence (real or imagined) is becoming more ubiquitous and its presence ever felt. Certainly this has something to do with our awareness of global tragedies as technologies redefine our exposure to such catastrophic events. But it also has to do with the raw realities of violence and people’s genuine sense of insecurity, which, even if it is manufactured or illusionary, feels no less real.

One of the key arguments I make throughout my work is that violence has now become the defining organizational principle for contemporary societies. It mediates all social relations. It matters less if we are actual victims of violence. It is the possibility that we could face some form of violent encounter, which shapes the logics of power in liberal societies today. Our political imagination as such has become dominated by multiple potential catastrophes that appear on the horizon. The closing of the entire Los Angeles city school system after a reported terrorist threat yesterday is an unsettling reminder of this. From terror to weather and everything in between, insecurity has become the new normal. We see this played out at global and local levels, as the effective blurring between older notions of homeland/battlefields, friends/enemies and peace/war has led to the widespread militarization of many everyday behaviors — especially in communities of color.

More here.

Dinaw Mengestu in Guernica:

Growing up, we had strange bedtime rituals. In Peoria, Illinois, when my sister and I were very young, my father would sit between our beds and tell us stories of animals who fought, lied, and cheated their way through the jungle world he invented for us. There were dense forests, green hills, and rivers. There were lions, crocodiles, zebras, giraffes, and laughing hyenas, which my father, in his raspy scarred voice, would imitate. The heroes of the stories were always two mischievous monkeys who could cheat all the other animals who, while taller, stronger, and more ferocious than them, lacked their wit. In the end the monkeys always found refuge at the top of the tallest trees—a vantage point from which, in retrospect, they would have had a clear view of all the havoc they had caused.

As a child, I didn’t think of the stories as being particularly related to Ethiopia, or, on a broader scale, Africa. I didn’t think about where this landscape, with trees that, according to my father, were larger than anything I could imagine, came from, or what these animals, whom my father spoke of as if real intimates, were doing in the crowded and deeply divided bedroom my sister and I shared. They were ordinary fictions, bedtime tales invented wholesale each night, sprung effortlessly from my father’s mind like a long, deep breath. And so there he is, in both memory and imagination, straddling the narrow space between our beds with these stories that my sister and I were both desperate to hear, clueless as to how far they had traveled to wash up, as if by accident, in Middle America.

My father, of course, eventually stopped with the stories. He might have done so because we no longer asked him to tell us them, or because we were old enough to read on our own, or because it was the mid-1980s, and Caterpillar, where my father worked, was going through a round of layoffs that would bankrupt my parents’ plans of buying their first home. Or perhaps he stopped because suddenly, everywhere we turned, Ethiopia, or one tragic version of it, was staring back at us.

More here.

Brittany Patterson in Scientific American:

Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice! Or at the least take solace that your beloved pork belly may be better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than the lettuce that accompanies it on the classic BLT.

This is according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who found that if Americans were to switch their diets to fall in line with the Agriculture Department's 2010 dietary recommendations, it would result in a 38 percent increase in energy use, 10 percent bump in water use and a 6 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason for this is because on a per-calorie basis, many fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood—the foods the USDA pushes in the guidelines over sugary processed food and fats—are relatively resource-intensive, the study finds. Lettuce, for example, produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than bacon.

“You cannot just jump and assume that any vegetarian diet is going to have a low impact on the environment,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy and one of the authors of the study. “There are many that do, but not all. You can't treat all fruits and veggies as good for the environment.”

The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of life-cycle assessments quantifying the water, energy use and emissions for more than 100 foods. They found fruits have the largest water and energy footprint per calorie. Meat and seafood have the highest greenhouse gas emissions per calorie.

More here.

McKenzie Wark in Berfrois:

“I’m not proof of myself, myths are.” We are made of myths, among other things. They seem like they are personal, but myths are not really personal. They are pervasive, invasive. “The Wizard of Oz is on TV after I spend the entire day singing ‘If I only had a brain’ to myself.” Myths are a technology, produced and circulated by other technologies.

Whether voiced in the first, second or third person, I take the stories that Masha Tupitsyn tells about her person to be selectively true. As in Chris Kraus, they are neither entirely confessional nor fictional. They are in part a personal mythology, but they are also accounts of the techniques via which the myth of the self gets made out of situations, using bits and pieces, faces and voices, clipped and mixed from the media of a time. Our hearts and brains are transplants, but no less ours for all that. It’s a question of what one makes of it.

There are two places that figure in her origin stories: New York City as a place of everyday life; and summering in Provincetown, which is the site of a kind of utopian experience, another city for another life. Later, there will be other places: London, Rome, Berlin, the California coast. “Your fantasy has always been to run away. To a faraway place, into a book and into love with just one person.” The lost utopian moment never quite returns. The gap between its memory and the possibilities of loving and thinking, here and now, animates a certain critical energy.

This Provincetown of memory is a place of oceanic freedom. Going to the movies, sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone. The resource that is cinema, for the young: “Everyone thinks desire is make believe when it comes to famous people and movies. In that case, you can go all the way. Go for it.” Young Masha rides her bike around everywhere, with a headphone sound track, cruising with a kind of tomboy autonomy. “I was being the kind of boy I wanted boys to be with me.” This Provincetown is a place of wonder and growth, of being and letting be. It’s a place of being understood but alone.

More here.

Doug Ahler and David Broockman in The Monkey Cage:

Donald Trump is one of the most extreme presidential candidates to gain widespread support in contemporary American politics. Despite championing policies like the end of birthright citizenship, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and a registry of Muslims living in the United States, Trump has consistently polled atop the Republican field since July. A popular perspective thus attributes Trump’s success to a “right wing fringe” of GOP voters.

But this conventional wisdom misses something important: Trump meets the textbook definition of an ideological moderate.

Trump has the exact “moderate” qualities that many pundits and political reformers yearn for in politicians: Many of Trump’s positions spurn party orthodoxy, yet are popular among voters. And like most voters — but unlike most party politicians — his positions don’t consistently hew to a familiar left-right philosophy.

At Tuesday night’s debate, for example, Trump flanked the Republican party on the right and left — calling for killing civilians and saying the Iraq war was a mistake because it diverted money from domestic spending priorities. CrowdPAC thus lists Trump as far more moderate than the other Republican candidates.

How can Trump be both a moderate and an extremist? Our research has shown why support for extreme policies and so-called “ideological moderation” often go together — people who appear “moderate” on a left-right ideological spectrum often have extreme views on individual issues.

Here’s how this works: Measures of voters’ left-right “ideology” primarily capture the frequency with which their opinions fall on the liberal or conservative side on different issues. Many Americans’ policy opinions are mixed bags of liberal and conservative positions, earning them the distinction of being called “ideological moderates.” Just like Trump.

But, as Trump shows, holding ideologically mixed positions across issues, which political scientists call “ideological moderation,” doesn’t guarantee that those individual policy views are moderate at all.

More here.

John Mullan New Statesman:

Letter writing was an important part of Iris Murdoch’s life. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, admiring and conscientious editors of this large selection of her letters, tell us that “she would spend up to four hours a day on her correspondence”. She took pride in her abilities as a letter writer. “I have in fact only once corresponded with anyone . . . who was as good at writing letters as I am,” she told the philosopher Philippa Foot, who was her correspondent for half a century. Readers who dip into this large volume might be puzzled by the self-estimation. The brilliant thinker, witty conversationalist and powerfully idiosyncratic novelist are hardly here at all.

Murdoch moans about having to write philosophy lectures or prepare academic papers but there is hardly any philosophical rumination. She warmly praises the books she is sent by friends, but otherwise there is very little about what she reads or thinks. The only work of fiction she discusses in any detail is Watership Down (“the bunnies that I love”). The earnest PhD student researching Murdoch will have a tough job extracting anything about her literary intentions or intellectual development. She travels the world but, apart from when she finds herself surprisingly intoxicated by first Australia and then California, she invariably sounds as though she is somewhere near Oxford. She meets interesting and important people but they hardly get into the letters.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Kathinka Evers in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: In your view there are two types of neuroethics: fundamental and applied neuroethics and that the ‘fundamental’ aspect has been unrepresented in the field. Is your thought here that if the fundamental aspect isn’t worked out the applied aspect won’t be able to fully work?

KE: Yes. So far, researchers in neuroethics have focused mainly on the ethics of neuroscience, or applied neuroethics, such as ethical issues involved in neuroimaging techniques, cognitive enhancement, or neuropharmacology. Another important, though as yet less prevalent, scientific approach that I refer to as fundamental neuroethics questions how knowledge of the brain’s functional architecture and its evolution can deepen our understanding of personal identity, consciousness and intentionality, including the development of moral thought and judgment. Fundamental neuroethics should provide adequate theoretical foundations required in order properly to address problems of applications.

The initial question for fundamental neuroethics to answer is: how can natural science deepen our understanding of moral thought? Indeed, is the former at all relevant for the latter? One can see this as a sub-question of the question whether human consciousness can be understood in biological terms, moral thought being a subset of thought in general. That is certainly not a new query, but a version of the classical mind-body problem that has been discussed for millennia and in quite modern terms from the French Enlightenment and onwards. What is comparatively new is the realisation of the extent to which ancient philosophical problems emerge in the rapidly advancing neurosciences, such as whether or not the human species as such possesses a free will, what it means to have personal responsibility, to be a self, the relations between emotions and cognition, or between emotions and memory.

Observe that neuroscience does not merely suggest areas for interesting applications of ethical reasoning, or call for assistance in solving problems arising from scientific discoveries, as scientists of diverse disciplines have long done, and been welcome to do. Neuroscience also purports to offer scientific explanations of important aspects of moral thought and judgment, which is more controversial in some quarters. However, whilst the understanding of ethics as a social phenomenon is primarily a matter of understanding cultural and social mechanisms, it is becoming increasingly apparent that knowledge of the brain is also relevant in the context. Progress in neuroscience; notably, on the dynamic functions of neural networks, can deepen our understanding of decision-making, choice, acquisition of character and temperament, and the development of moral dispositions.

More here.

Ivan Hewett in The Telegraph:

Ask anyone to name the archetypal genius, and chances are it will be Ludwig van Beethoven. This is hardly surprising, as Beethoven largely created the image of what genius should be. When he was young, he was compared to Mozart; when he was old, to Shakespeare. His music could be loftily spiritual, blazingly dramatic, sweetly domestic, suavely aristocratic and rudely demotic, often within the space of a single work. It embraced much of music’s past, and even foreshadowed the future. What other composer born in the 18th century looked back to Palestrina and anticipated Chopin, Schumann, Wagner and even boogie-woogie? A giant reach, combined with common humanity: this is what Beethoven shares with other candidates for the title of “exemplary genius”. Then there are those qualities that mark him out as special: his determination to strike out on new paths, whatever the professional cost (as Roland Barthes put it, “Beethoven won for artists the right to reinvent themselves”). His scorn of high-born patrons, however much they revered him. His difficulties in love, which pointed to the impossibility of genius ever finding a true soulmate. His dreadful catalogue of illnesses, which he bore with stoic fortitude. Above all, his deafness. As a symbol of the tragic and tormented creator, it’s almost too perfect. Such a figure was bound to be mythologised, a process that started even before his death. We know now that Beethoven’s factotum Anton Schindler made things up in his memoirs. The earliest biographers and critics such as E  T  A Hoffmann vied with each other in hymning the world-changing nature of Beethoven’s music. Once he’d been lifted into the realm of myth, Beethoven could be remade to suit each new world view. For romantics he was the arch-romantic; for communists he was the great revolutionary artist; for modernists he was the great radical. More recent critics have tried to cut Beethoven down to near-human size, by revealing the mythmaking process at work.

Tia DeNora in her Beethoven and the Construction of Genius went further. She argued that Beethoven’s pre-eminence was due to the scheming of certain Viennese aristocrats, who “created” Beethoven to demonstrate the cultural superiority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

More here.

Camille Paglia in Hollywood Reporter:

The entertainment industry has seen feminist spurts come and go. Helen Reddy's 1972 smash hit “I Am Woman” became the worldwide anthem of second-wave feminism. In 1985, Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox did the slamming duet “Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves.” The Spice Girls encapsulated sex-positive third-wave feminism with their 1997 manifesto Girl Power! Performing at the 2014 Video Music Awards, Beyonce flashed “FEMINIST” in giant letters behind her, but questions were raised about the appropriation of that word by a superstar whose career has always been managed by others, first her parents and now her domineering husband, Jay Z. With gender issues like pay equity for women actors and writers coming increasingly to the fore, girl squads can be seen as a positive step toward expanding female power in Hollywood, where ownership has been overwhelm­ingly male since the silent film era. For all its dictatorial overcontrol, however, the early studio system also provided paternalistic protection and nurturance for young women under contract. Marilyn Monroe was a tragic victim of the slow breakdown of that system: The studio made her, but in the end it could not save her from callous predators, including the Kennedys.

Young women performers are now at the mercy of a swarming, intrusive paparazzi culture, intensified by the hypersexualization of our flesh-baring fashions. The girl squad phenomenon has certainly been magnified by how isolated and exposed young women feel in negotiating the piranha shoals of the industry. A dramatic example of their vulnerability was the long-lens pap photo of Swift sitting painfully sad and prim on a Virgin Islands taxi boat after her tumultuous 2013 holiday breakup with pop star Harry Styles. Given the professional stakes, girl squads must not slide into a cozy, cliquish retreat from romantic fiascoes or communication problems with men, whom feminist rhetoric too often rashly stereotypes as oafish pigs. If many women feel lonely or overwhelmed these days, it's not due to male malice. Women have lost the natural solidarity and companionship they enjoyed for thousands of years in the preindustrial agrarian world, where multiple generations chatted through the day as they shared chores, cooking and child care. In our wide-open modern era of independent careers, girl squads can help women advance if they avoid presenting a silly, regressive public image — as in the tittering, tongues-out mugging of Swift's bear-hugging posse. Swift herself should retire that obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props, an exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied in her scathing viral video “Please Welcome to the Stage.”

More here.

Recursive

More neurons
in the brain

than stars
in the Milky Way—

some structure,
however tentative—

and the fact
of other forms

doesn’t fail to
astound me

so much as
it renders me

speechless,
the lawful world

incomprehensible,
the arbitrary world

consumed by lapses—
coffee and oranges

in an office lonely
as a picture occurs—

your hand on a book—
and in this body

more transactional
than animal

the day goes by—
quite by—
.

by Shannon Tharp
from Ecotheo Review, 1/23/2015

Julie Lythcott-Haims in Quartz:

In Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, our adolescents kill themselves at four to five times the national average. The majority of the children who have taken their own lives have put themselves in the path of the CalTrain whose tracks cut through the very center of town. But their deaths only temporarily halt our community’s forward momentum.

As both a Palo Alto parent and a former Stanford dean, I believe it’s time for Silicon Valley to confront a heartbreaking paradox. We’ve sown a set of educational, technological, and economic opportunities that are meant to shape a brighter future for our own children, our nation, and the world. Yet growing up here can make our kids feel hopeless and helpless about whether they actually have any chance of attaining the grand futures we have in mind.

In theory, parents want to know what’s going on. But when The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin published a thoughtful, in-depth analysis after coming to town to interview teenagers, educators, clinicians, and families, the outrage over her article rivaled the outcry that followed our most recent spate of suicides.

How dare this “stranger” try to tell us about our own community, people complained in emails and social media posts. How dare she suggest that our problem is not simply severely depressed kids who didn’t get the help they needed because of a lack of resources and social stigma?

More here.

Olivier Roy's take from a conference organised by the German federal police (via Kenan Malik):

9) The religious dimension.

The revolt is expressed in religious terms for two reasons:

– Most of the radicals have a Muslim background, which makes them open to a process of re-islamisation (almost none of them being pious before entering the process of radicalisation).

– Jihad is the only cause on the global market. If you kill in silence, it will be reported by the local newspaper; if you kill yelling “Allahuakbar”, you are sure to make the national headlines. The ultra-left or radical ecology is too “bourgeois” and intellectual for them.

When they join jihad, they adopt the Salafi version of Islam, because Salafism is both simple to understand (don’ts and do’s), and rigid, providing a personal psychological structuring effect. Moreover, Salafism is the negation of cultural Islam, that is the Islam of their parents and of their roots. Instead of providing them with roots, Salafism glorifies their own deculturation and makes them feel better “Muslims” than their parents. Salafism is the religion by definition of a disenfranchised youngster.

Incidentally, we should make a distinction between religious radicalisation and jihadist radicalisation. There is of course an overlap, but the bulk of the Salafists are not jihadist, and many jihadists don’t give a dam about theology. None of the radicals has a past of piety.

More here (pdf).

Zander Sherman in The Believer:

At the end of April 1995, with just under a year left in the Unabomber’s nearly two-decades-long campaign of antitechnology violence, the New York Times published excerpts from a letter by the still-unknown, unnamed Ted Kaczynski in which he promised to “permanently desist from terrorist activities” if the Times or another nationally read publication printed his manifesto. The letter, like all of Kaczynski’s writing, was almost biblical in its moral pronouncements: technology is evil. The people who make technology are evil. Evil people deserve to die. People took from this only that the Unabomber was some kind of technophobe or Luddite or something—someone who hated modernity—and to get a more nuanced opinion, the Times sent a reporter to Eugene, Oregon, to interview a guy named John Zerzan.

Even then, Zerzan was probably the highest-profile anarchist in America. He was a fifty-two-year-old who earned his living as a babysitter. He lived in a housing co-op and didn’t own a credit card (even after computers became mainstream, Zerzan did most of his writing by hand). In appearance and temperament, he looked and sounded like Tommy Chong: a bearded baritone you could picture singing “Up in Smoke” while driving around with a doobie the size of a hot dog. If it weren’t for his two published collections of essays, Elements of Refusal and Future Primitive, Zerzan would have passed as another baby boomer with an aversion to adulthood. But in his writing, Zerzan espoused what is arguably the most extreme political philosophy on the planet: that the problem behind all the other problems—war, famine, disease, the environment—is civilization itself, and that the solution is to blow it up and start again.

More here.

Allison J. Pugh in Aeon:

When Gary Gilbert lost his job, it was devastating. A tradesman, he had joined his employer’s company only because he thought it offered a bit more security than endlessly chasing the next gig as a freelance operator, and that he could then provide a better future for his son. The layoff came without warning. ‘I was crushed,’ he recalled. ‘Oh God. I’ve cried at night about it.’

While the layoff shattered his hopes and, Gary believes, was unwarranted, he refused to blame his employer. ‘I had no reason to take that job,’ he explained. ‘I thought I was going to make a more stable environment, you know. And I was wrong, you know, but that – that was my fault. I shouldn’t have done it. I never should have let my guard down. I never should have put my livelihood in somebody else’s hands. It was the biggest mistake I ever made.’

Gary’s response is not untypical; recent research shows that Americans are more likely to blame themselves for job insecurity, even when it results from structural changes in the economy. I interviewed 80 people up and down the class ladder, and with varying experiences of job precariousness. I found that we do a lot to keep our strong feelings away from the employer – we shrug our shoulders in resignation, we talk about layoffs as new opportunities for growth, we even convince ourselves we are glad not to keep working there anyway. Most of all, we blame ourselves. And while that blame can be corrosive for both men and women, there is something unique in the scarring that results for men, who often see work as a primary measure of masculinity.

For working-class men, it is something of a crisis. There’s a lot of critical talk about the moral character of working-class men – generally conceived of as those with less than a college degree – and most of it revolves around work, reflecting some latent anxiety about who is shirking and who is carrying. We know they watch more television and do less childcare than working-class women, and are less likely than more affluent men to work long hours. Working-class men themselves value ‘being hardworking’ among the qualities they prize the most; for the white working-class men who march in the reserve army of US talk radio, working hard is highly prized, and deeply respected. It forms the bedrock of their outrage at those who, talk-radio culture likes to say, ‘refuse to work’.

More here.

Ruth La Ferla in The New York Times:

You would have to have lived on Saturn’s seventh ring to have missed that fact, or for that matter, Ms. Copeland’s repeatedly told saga of hardship, perseverance and ultimate triumph — one she chronicled in her 2014 memoir “Life in Motion: an Unlikely Ballerina.” The book described her rise from a chaotic childhood, trailing her oft-married mother and six siblings from cramped apartments to roadside motels, chasing fame and excellence under the wing of a well-to-do benefactor, and selected at 17 as one in a handful of African-Americans to dance with the vaunted American Ballet Theater.

It was a story recycled many times, on “60 Minutes,” in a Time cover profile, in the pages of The New Yorker, and once more Dec. 17 on ABC, when Barbara Walters named Ms. Copeland as one of the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2015. To say nothing of a flurry of glossies that extolled Ms. Copeland as a fashion plate.

All that fevered attention reached a crescendo last summer when Ms. Copeland emerged, calves rippling and en pointe, as the unlikely subject of “I Will What I Want,” a commercial for Under Armour, the athletic wear brand, that drew four million views on YouTube within a week of its July release.

Indeed, and by Ms. Copeland’s own account, the last 12 months have been an annus mirabilis – a time during which she fulfilled a cherished goal.

“I’m not trying to dilute the ballet world,” she said last summer. “But for a long time I wanted to be at the forefront of pop culture.”

That Ms. Copeland, 33, has so swiftly hit her mark raises a question: Just how and why did such a metamorphosis occur?

Talent and drive played roles, of course, as did Ms. Copeland’s uncommon beauty and athleticism. And there was the matter of race. “Her blackness was a big part, obviously,” said Nelson George, the culture critic and director of “A Ballerina’s Tale.”

“She isn’t a conventional looking ballerina,” Mr. George said, her 5-foot-2 frame and womanly curves rendering her relatable to an ever-widening public. “She could be one of those athletic girls in your gym,” he said. “In your mind you could be that girl.”

More here.

Ethan Linck in Hypocrite Reader:

Near the end June in 1929, a 25-year old German ornithologist named Ernst Mayr was sitting in a hut in New Guinea, skinning and stuffing birds, when he received a telegram. Carried by a Papuan runner, it was a decidedly unlikely event: at the time, New Guinea was almost unimaginably remote, and Mayr had been out of contact with his mentor at the University of Berlin for nearly a year. But the telegram’s contents proved to be as significant as its delivery was improbable. At the urging of his advisor, Dr. Stresemann, Mayr was to take the first steamer down the coast and board the freight schooner France, assuming duties as the ornithologist for the American Museum of Natural History’s Whitney South Seas Expedition. The Whitney Expedition’s own ornithologist had recently taken ill, the telegram explained, leaving the leader only with a gaggle of Yale college seniors who “knew nothing about birds.” Mayr followed Stresemann’s orders, and boarded the France from the island port of Samarai. He spent the next nine months building a collection of bird specimens from the Solomon Islands — and the subsequent decade using this collection to become one of the principal architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis, filling the lingering gaps in Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

How did shooting and skinning birds in an obscure corner of the South Pacific lead to one of the 20th century’s major scientific achievements?

More here.

Adrian Levy in Foreign Policy:

When laborers began excavating pastureland in India’s southern Karnataka state early in 2012, members of the nomadic Lambani tribe were startled. For centuries, the scarlet-robed herbalists and herders had freely crisscrossed the undulating meadows there, known as kavals, and this uprooting of their landscape came without warning or explanation. By autumn, Puttaranga Setty, a wiry groundnut farmer from the village of Kallalli, encountered a barbed-wire fence blocking off a well-used trail. His neighbor, a herder, discovered that the road from this city to a nearby village had been diverted elsewhere. They rang Doddaullarti Karianna, a weaver who sits on one of the village councils that funnel India’s sprawling democracy of 1.25 billion down to the grassroots.

Karianna asked officials with India’s state and central governments why the land inhabited by farming and tribal communities was being walled off, but they refused to answer. So Karianna sought legal help from the Environment Support Group, a combative ecological advocacy organization that specializes in fighting illegal encroachment on greenbelt land. But the group also made little progress. Officials warned its lawyers that the prime minister’s office was running the project. “There is no point fighting this, we were told,” Leo Saldanha, a founding member of the advocacy organization, recalled. “You cannot win.”

Only after construction on the site began that year did it finally become clear to the tribesmen and others that two secretive agencies were behind a project that experts say will be the subcontinent’s largest military-run complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories, and weapons- and aircraft-testing facilities when it’s completed, probably sometime in 2017.

More here.

I Ask Forgiveness

I ask forgiveness of all the poems
born misshapen because of my desire to write them
I ask forgiveness of all the people
whose lives were disrupted by my desire to influence
and of the world
for the superfluous things added to it
and those unnecessarily severed
because of my lust for symmetry
and happy endings.

I ask forgiveness of my mother
for not knowing how to love her in her misery
of my children
for the moments when I don’t want them
of my wife for every time I was too small
to contain her love.

I am lighter than a falling leaf
I am softer than grass
now a small bird could
build its nest in me.
.

by Alex Ben-Ari
from Haaretz
translation: Vivian Eden and Alex Ben-Ari

Cynthia Ozick in The New York Times:

When the world was just new, Story came into being, and it came with the beguilements of gossip, and talebearing, and rumor. Most pressingly, it came through truth-telling. After all, the garrulous serpent was no liar when he told Eve the secret of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eat of it, he whispered, and “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” Ever since Genesis, no story has been free of gossip, and how unreasonable it is that gossip has its mischief-making reputation. Had Eve not listened, had she been steadfast in the face of so unverifiable a proposition, what barrenness! Eden would still be what it was, a serene and tedious nullity, a place where nothing happens: two naked beings yawning in their idleness, innocent of what mutual nakedness might bring forth. No Cain and Abel, then no crime novels and Hitchcock thrillers. No Promised Land, then no Young Men From the Provinces setting out on aspiring journeys. No Joseph in Egypt, then no fraught chronicles of travail and redemption. In the absence of secrets revealed — in the absence also of rumor and repute and misunderstanding and misdirection — no Chaucer, no Boccaccio, no Boswell, no Jane Austen, no Maupassant, no Proust, no Henry James! The instant Eve took in that awakening morsel of serpentine gossip, Literature in all its variegated forms was born.

Scripture too teems with stories, including tales of envy, murder, adultery, idolatry, betrayal, lust, deceit. Yet its laws of conscience relentlessly deplore gossip, the very engine that engenders these narratives of flawed mortals. Everything essential to storytelling is explicitly forbidden: Keep your tongue from speaking evil, no bearing false witness, no going up and down as a talebearer among your people. The wily tongue itself is a culprit deserving imprisonment: There it is, caged by the teeth, confined by the lips, squirming like a serpent in its struggle to break free. Harmful speech has been compared in its moral injury to bloodshed, worship of false gods, incest and adultery; but what novelist can do without some version of these fundamentals of plot?

More here.