Steven Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Pause for a moment from your rapt attention to this review of Ian Mortimer's terrific new book Millennium and look up. Look around you. Try to see the layers of time that blanket every feature of your world. It's a gambit that Mortimer employs often throughout his study of “how civilization has changed over a thousand years,” and it's unfailingly instructive. You're able to read this at all, in the first place, whereas for most of the previous thousand years, you probably wouldn't have been able to, unless you were a member of the clerical or landed elite. You're reading it in English, which no national publication would have used in the 11th century or for a good deal of time afterwards. The review is about a book, which scarcely anybody would have owned. Likewise the review assumes a common readership, which would have been forbidden – sometimes by fire or the rack – for more than half of the centuries under Mortimer's consideration. And if you're reading this on some kind of electronic device, we suddenly exclude all of history right up until the last twenty years. But it's more than that. One of the most bracing aspects of “Millennium” is the breadth of factors it covers, from food production to sanitation conditions to the Christian Church Militant to the development of firearms to radical changes in transportation of both people and products. If you employ a similar wide angle, the sheer scope of the changes Mortimer analyzes becomes staggering.

…The four core changes he identifies in his book, the “four primary sources underlying change over the last millennium,” are a) the weather in terms of how it affected food supply, the need for security, the fear of sickness, and the “desire for personal enrichment.” And the method Mortimer uses to track the fluctuating fortunes of these four core items (and plenty more) is at once thought-provoking and self-evidently artificial: He looks at each of the last 10 centuries as discreet, watertight eras and tries to assess the predominant changes each century saw that the others didn't see, prefacing the whole exercise with a smile-inducing bit of understatement: “Many of the important developments in Western culture do not fit neatly within the borders of a single century.”

More here.

James Livingston in Aeon:

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.

Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.

More here.

Boris Dralyuk in the LARB:

For all the talk of seduction, depravity, and treason, Rasputin’s greatest crime was, it seems, to have been born a peasant with ambitions. The speed with which he had clambered up the social ladder, all the way into the throne room, left the country baffled. How did this happen? It had to have been his sexual prowess, or the work of “dark forces.” His growing philosemitism didn’t help matters. Here is another — and far profounder — irony in Rasputin’s story: superstition and mystical thinking, which had secured him the royal couple’s confidence, also fueled the frenzied reaction to his rise. The crumbling Russian Empire that emerges in Smith’s pages is distinctly pre-secular. It is also — in the parlance of today’s political analysts — distinctly post-factual.

From about 1908 until his death, Rasputin was the subject of near-constant surveillance. His code name in the Okhrana (secret police) files was first “The Russian,” then “The Dark One.” An agent’s report from 1912 reads: “‘The Russian’ […], when he is walking alone, particularly in the evening, talks to himself, waves his arms around, and slaps himself about the torso, which attracts the attention of passers-by.” Smith comments:

If these details are indeed accurate it should not be too surprising, for the pressure on Rasputin continued to mount and the scandals continued to grow […]. Throughout it all the press and the police had never left him alone. Rasputin was being hunted like an animal.

The countless investigations into Rasputin’s behavior were indeed witch hunts; so-called “reports” were biased allegations, either trumped-up or pulled out of thin air.

More here.

Bruno Diaz in 3:AM Magazine:

“I only know what I believe.” Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference Speech, 2004.
According to the likes of Faisal Islam, Ralph Keyes, and The New York Times we’ve entered the post-truth era. If they’re right, it’ll be a time when, like Tony Blair, we will eschew the achievements of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and base what we know not on what we prove through intellectual enquiry, but on what we believe as articles of faith. In this new world, as both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have shown, facts and experts will be pushed aside in favour of populism and emotion. Public opinion and government policy will be moulded by those whose words provoke the most hysteria. It’ll be a place where controversial opinion pieces, and the polemicists who write them, will be in great demand.
So with a cry of “The White House Here We Come!” these are some tips on how to get your opinions sounding like cast iron “facts” straight from the columns of Peter Hitchens, Owen Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.

1. Be Perfectly Reasonable

Whatever or whoever you’re criticising, start out by saying that you think they’re great.
If it’s a person or an institution you’re targeting, follow Tory MEP Daniel Hannan’s example in his critique of Guardian journalist Zoe Williams: “Williams is a great writer – original, clever and with a fine turn of phrase.”

If you’ve got a whole industry such as banks in your sights, take time to praise certain aspects of the financial sector, or to point out that you’re not talking about all banks, just a few bad apples. Whether or not you believe what you’re saying doesn’t matter – the point is to come across as someone filled with well-mannered common sense who would only be critical if it was absolutely necessary. Once the reader thinks of you in this way, it’ll seem perfectly reasonable, and believable, when you tar the Co-Op and Nationwide with the same brush as Bear Sterns, Lehmans and Deutsche.

As French playwright Jean Giraudoux put it: “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.”

More here.

Forrest Gander at Literary Hub:

I’m not going to foretell the poems that I can’t read out loud without tearing up. But it might be fun to consider a single poem, the oddest in the collection, the one that gave the Spanish-language editors fits. A typed version of this poem, dated June 1968, was found in a filing cabinet with some conference papers. Subsequently, a handwritten version turned up.

It begins: “Roa Lynn and Patrick Morgan / were moored in these waters.” In the next lines, Lynn and Morgan sail off “to sea or to hell” while the dark river bearing “grief and blubbering” and all the particulars of our tumultuous world rushes toward us carrying—what else is it carrying? Something remarkable, we gather from the last lines. For the editors of the Spanish edition, this is an apocalyptical poem and the names Roa Lynn and Patrick Morgan refer to two of the ships’ figureheads that Neruda collected and fondly nicknamed Jenny Lind and Captain Morgan. How Jenny Lind became Roa Lynn and why the famous pirate Captain (Henry) Morgan changed his name to Patrick remain unexplained. But to make matters a little less clear, the editors add a series of curious etymological details, starting with the information that “roa,” in some language, may be a nautical term for the prow of a ship.

more here.

Jennifer Percy at The New Republic:

Specialist Nicolas Plantiko burned dogs. Sergeant Thomas J. Brennan burned lithium ion batteries, flame-resistant FROG suits, and MK-19 rounds. He burned plastic chemical drums, nylon, tires, wires, and tarps. He burned shit and piss.Sergeant Bill Moody’s unit burned a Porta-John, dried-up MREs, and 500 loaves of moldy bread. Staff Sergeant Louis Levesque burned bunk beds. Private Johnnie Stevenson burned plastic bottles because he loved the way they hissed. Airborne infantryman Dennis St. Pierre burned radio batteries and chemlights. Sergeant Carlos Castro joked about burning another soldier for talking too much. Captain Matthew Frye burned a packet of Tabasco sauce that exploded and nearly took out the JTAC’s eye. Staff Sergeant Tim Wymore burned 25 loads of DEET-soaked tents and walked around with the taste of smoke in his mouth. Sergeant Zachary Bell burned batteries because the Taliban used the carbon rods for IED triggers. Specialist Dante Sowell burned burlap bags so he wouldn’t have to fill them up with sand. Captain Adrian Bonenberger watched a Christmas tree go into a burn pit. Private George Snyder burned Private Stuart Decker’s one confirmed kill. Sergeant Casey Rohrich burned a human toe. They burned magazines, movies, junk food, college brochures, and pamphlets for the GI Bill. They burned amputated body parts and Humvee parts. They burned human waste and plastic meal trays. They burned the blood and clothes of the wounded.

Everything—all the trash of the war—was thrown in a burn pit, soaked with jet fuel, and torched. There were hundreds of open-air garbage dumps, spread out across Afghanistan and Iraq, right next to encampments where American soldiers lived and worked, ate and slept. The pits burned day and night, many of them around the clock, seven days a week. There were backyard-size pits lit by patrols of a few dozen men, and massive, industrial-size pits designed to incinerate the endless stream of waste produced by U.S. military bases.

more here.

Robert Harrington 1558

Get you, with your almain rivetts (latest
fad from Germany), and your corselet,
and your two coats of plate! How much harness

does a man need? None, when he’s in his grave.
Your sons may have it, together with your
damask and satin gowns to show off in;

while you go to lie down in Witham church,
and the most armour I’ve seen in a will
rusts or turns ridiculous in this world.

by Fleur Adcock
from Glass Wings
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 2013

Rose Lichter-Marck at VQR:

Plane spotters—or “avgeeks,” as some call themselves—travel around the world in order to hang out near airport runways so that they can watch and document planes as they take off and land. Before the advent of the internet, spotters would meet up at conventions or connect in the back pages of enthusiast magazines in order to trade mounted film slides of their best shots. Now they post pictures on online forums such as Airliners.net, PlaneSpotters.net, and JetPhotos.net, as well as on Flickr and Facebook groups dedicated to the art and practice of aviation enthusiasm.

The details they collect provide an open-source trove of data about global commerce and politics, which has been invaluable to journalists and whistleblowers (not to mention various intelligence-gathering agencies) seeking to identify planes and their passengers. When Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s private plane flew to Florida in the summer of 2014, his visit was documented by spotters at Miami International, which allowed reporters to predict the return of LeBron James to his hometown. In December 2014, spotting data helped analysts track unlisted flights between Tel Aviv and the United Arab Emirates, despite the fact that Israel had a limited diplomatic relationship with the monarchies of Persian Gulf states. In the fall of 2015, Israel announced it would be opening it’s first diplomatic mission in the UAE. In 2007, Tunisian blogger Astrubal searched plane-spotting sites for Tunisia’s presidential plane. His crowdsourced effort revealed that although the president had made only three state-sanctioned trips, the plane had left the country more than ten times, with visits to European capitals where there was no record of official business.

more here.

John Freeman in Literary Hub:

I would like to say on his behalf that Colson Whitehead that he is overjoyed to be here, even if he does not show it. “I have a good poker face,” Whitehead wrote in Noble Hustle, his book about gambling and Las Vegas, “because I am half dead inside.” “I was a skinny guy, but I was morbidly obese with doom.”

We know him in NYC as Mr. Sunshine, and, to a small, small cadres, Cuddles, but no writer across all of America has had more fun with serious things in the last twenty years as Colson Whitehead. If Ishmael Reed & Thomas Pynchon collaborated to put together an absurdist theater group, they might call it Colson Whitehead. It would have been established in 1969, in Manhattan, nurtured at Harvard, and workshopped at the Village Voice, where Colson Whitehead was for a few years a TV critic.

He once said he liked that job because he could work four hours a week. It was in the other thirty that he began his first book, The Intuitionist, a parody of a detective story about a woman named Lila Mae in the Department of Elevator Inspectors who has stumbled on a moment of intrigue. That novel was a brilliant evocation of the notion of racial uplift in a city much like New York, just slightly different.

Across the rest of his career, Whitehead has been the dour-faced poet laureate of the city which is his home.

More here.

Josie Garthwaite in Scientific American:

If a tanker splits its hull and dumps oil into the sea, trained teams show up with specialized gear to begin the process of stanching the flow and cleaning up the spill. Today, there’s no equivalent team or tools for resolving a “spill” of genetic material into the environment, but that could soon change.

Over the next four years a new program in the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to cultivate, among other things, a kind of cleanup crew for engineered genes deemed harmful to or undesirable in an ecosystem. The initiative, called Safe Genes, comes at a time when so-called “gene drive” systems, which override the standard rules of gene inheritance and natural selection, are raising hopes among some scientists that the technology could alter or suppress populations of disease-carrying insects or other pests in as few as 20 generations.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sees so much promise in gene drive technology that it plans to double spending on its Target Malaria initiative, which aims to create systems for driving genes in two species of malaria mosquitoes, to $70 million. Yet without careful precautions, a gene drive released into the wild could spread or change in unexpected ways. Kevin Esvelt, head of the Sculpting Evolution lab at MIT Media Lab, which is applying for Safe Genes funding in collaboration with eight other research groups, predicts that eventually, perhaps around 15 years from now, an accident will allow a drive with potential to spread globally to escape laboratory controls. “It’s not going to be bioterror,” he says, “it’s going to be ‘bioerror.’”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

This year we give thanks for a feature of the physical world that many people grumble about rather than celebrating, but is undeniably central to how Nature works at a deep level: the speed of light. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of momentum, effective field theory, the error bar, gauge symmetry, Landauer’s Principle, the Fourier Transform and Riemannian Geometry.)

The speed of light in vacuum, traditionally denoted by c, is 299,792,458 meters per second. It’s exactly that, not just approximately; it turns out to be easier to measure intervals of time to very high precision than it is to measure distances in space, so we measure the length of a second experimentally, then definethe meter to be “the distance that light travels 299,792,458 of in one second.” Personally I prefer to characterize c as “one light-year per year”; that’s equally exact, and it’s easier to remember all the significant figures that way.

There are a few great things about the speed of light. One is that it’s a fixed, universal constant, as measured by inertial (unaccelerating) observers, in vacuum (empty space). Of course light can slow down if it propagates through a medium, but that’s hardly surprising. The other great thing is that it’s an upper limit; physical particles, as far as we know in the real world, always move at speeds less than or equal to c.

That first fact, the universal constancy of c, is the startling feature that set Einstein on the road to figuring out relativity. It’s a crazy claim at first glance: if two people are moving relative to each other (maybe because one is in a moving car and one is standing on the sidewalk) and they measure the speed of a third object (like a plane passing overhead) relative to themselves, of course they will get different answers. But not with light. I can be zipping past you at 99% of c, directly at an oncoming light beam, and both you and I will measure it to be moving at the same speed. That’s only sensible if something is wonky about our conventional pre-relativity notions of space and time, which is what Einstein eventually figured out.

More here.

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Sibtain Naqvi in Dawn:

It is a universally acknowledged truth that an overwhelming majority of Karachi’s immigrant intellectuals once lived in Nazimabad. Talking about it invariably turns into a litany of famous names who resided there. Some well-known former Nazimabad residents include artists Sadequain and Iqbal Mehdi, Justice Lari, actor Shakeel, film-maker Saeed Rizvi, actress Sangeeta, writers Mukhtar Zaman and Ibn-i-Insha, scholar Alia Imam, poet Ahmad Siddiq aka Majnun Gorakhpuri, journalist Mujahid Barelvi, columnist Nasrullah Khan, singer Salman Alvi (then known on radio as Salman Mian the banjo player), plastic surgeon Dr Mohammad Jawad (of Saving Face fame), and Aale Raza, brother of Hashim Raza.

This isn’t surprising as from the 1950s to 1970s Nazimabad was the centre of India’s Muslim culture and an inheritor of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. Partly this has to do with the way history unfolded: most refugees to Punjab or Bengal, who fled persecution, moved from the Indian part of the province to the Pakistani. As a result, homogeneity of language and culture in Lahore or Dhaka was maintained. Immigrants who came to Karachi, however, were different. Many did come due to unrest in their hometowns but most came for opportunities in a new nation. They originated from cultural centres of the subcontinent such as Lucknow, Delhi, Amroha and Hyderabad. Among these new immigrants was the first generation of educated, socially-mobile Muslims; graduates of Aligarh or Osmania University who had played an important role in the Pakistan movement. As Jaun Alia once acidly remarked, “Pakistan … ye sab Aligarh ke laundon ki shararat thi” (Pakistan — this was the mischief of boys from Aligarh).

More here. (Thanks to Sadia Abbas)

An old Thanksgiving Day essay from my days at The Smart Set:

It takes Satan to bring out the true spirit of Thanksgiving. That’s because it can be hard to give thanks unless you know why you are doing it. Plenitude is lovely. Abundance is a delight. I think of the famous painting by Norman Rockwell. A large American family sits around a comfortable table as the venerable mother carries a moose-sized turkey as the centerpiece. The painting was originally titled “Freedom from Want” and was part of Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series, meant to promote the buying of war bonds during World War II. If there is an unsettling message hidden in the Rockwellian sentimentality, though, it’s that these people, this nice American family, knows nothing of want. They are giving thanks for an abundance that is taken for granted.

When the devil is on your doorstep, however, thanks takes on a different timbre. The American most consistently preoccupied with thoughts of Satan was probably Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne never trusted in the good times. He saw the devil lurking in every moment of pleasure, waiting for the chance to pounce on the unsuspecting reveler when his guard was down. Hawthorne’s story, “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving,” is appropriately evil-obsessed. Utterly bleak, it is a difficult fit in the traditional American story of goods asked for, goods delivered, thanks given.

more here.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus at Bookforum:

In a 2005 essay for the New York Times Magazine, the critic A. O. Scott considered two recent and rather quixotic decisions, made in parallel by rival camps of young writers, to devise print magazines. One was The Believer, inaugurated in 2003 by Dave Eggers’s independent San Francisco publishing house McSweeney’s, and the other was n+1. WhereThe Believer gave itself over to historical whimsy,n+1 self-consciously styled itself the heir, in its mandarin ambition, to the little politics-and-culture magazines of midcentury. Its founders’ model was the later Partisan Review, a magazine they admired for its droll, caustic attitude, and for the flexible liberal intelligence exemplified by its successful reconstitution after its break with Stalinism. The editors of n+1 looked backward, as Scott put it, to “organize a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement.” Keith Gessen, one of n+1’s founders, proposed to Scott his own origin myth with deliberate understatement: “Here I am with all this fiction no one would want to publish, and here’s Mark with these essays no one’s going to publish, and after a while we felt like we had this critical mass of stuff that nobody would want to publish.”

Mark is Gessen’s colleague and friend Mark Greif, and those strange, uncategorizable essays “nobody would want to publish” remain, along with the early writing of Elif Batuman, the most distinguished, original, and consequential body of work to have come out of n+1’s first decade. They have now been collected in a volume called Against Everything. The individual pieces have been grouped into five sections: one on the basic necessities of food, sex, and exercise; another on varieties of pop music; a third on reality television, YouTube, and the evolution of the epithet hipster; a fourth on police and war; and one loose, interpolated sequence on Stanley Cavell and Thoreau and the “Meaning of Life.” Most of the essays appeared in n+1 and reflect the journal’s general complexion—academically current but free of jargon; discontented but free of resignation; gladiatorial but free of truculence; sincere but free of gentility.

more here.

Jürgen Habermas at Eurozine:

Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik: After 1989, all the talk was of the 'end of history' in democracy and the market economy; today we are experiencing the emergence of a new phenomenon in the form of an authoritarian/populist leadership – from Putin via Erdogan to Donald Trump. Clearly, a new 'authoritarian international' is increasingly succeeding in defining political discourse. Was your exact contemporary Ralf Dahrendorf right in forecasting an authoritarian twenty-first century? Can one – indeed must one – speak of an epochal change?

Jürgen Habermas: After the transformation of 1989-90, when Fukuyama seized on the slogan of 'post-history', which was originally coined by a ferocious kind of conservatism, his reinterpretation expressed the short-sighted triumphalism of western elites who adhered to a liberal belief in the pre-established harmony of market economy and democracy. Both of these elements inform the dynamic of social modernisation, but are linked to functional imperatives that repeatedly clash. The balance between capitalist growth and what was accepted by the populace as a halfway fair share in the average growth of highly productive economies could be brought about only by a genuinely democratic state. Historically speaking, however, such an equilibrium, one warranting the name of 'capitalist democracy', was the exception rather than the rule. That alone made the idea of a global consolidation of the 'American dream' an illusion.

The new global disorder, the helplessness of the USA and Europe with regard to growing international conflicts, is profoundly unsettling; the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria or South Sudan are unnerving, as are Islamist terror acts. Nevertheless, I can't recognise in the constellation you indicate a uniform tendency towards a new authoritarianism; rather, I see a variety of structural causes and many coincidences.

more here.

Sanjay Reddy in his blog reddytoread:

The shocking event that is the rise of trumpism has been by now analyzed widely. Most focus on the appeal of Donald Trump to those in the United States who for one another reason or another feel left behind, wish to retrieve an earlier, lost, social order, and rebuke establishment politicians who they feel do not serve their interests. In this, the recent American revolt echoes the shock of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and other recent events, but it is of far greater significance as it promises to reshape the entire global order, and with it the complaisant forms of thought that accompanied it.

…Finally, interpretations of politics were too restrictive in thinking of people’s political choices as based on instrumental and usually economic calculations, while indulging in a wishful account of their actual conditions (for instance, focusing on low measured unemployment but ignoring measures of distress and insecurity, or the indignity of living in hollowed-out communities). Mainstream accounts of politics recognized the role of identities in the form of wooden theories of group mobilization or of demands for representation. However, the psychological and charismatic elements, which can give rise to moments of ‘phase transition’ in politics, were altogether neglected, and the role of social media and other methods of mobilization in politics hardly registered. As new political movements (such as the Tea Party and then trumpism in the US) emerged across the world, these were deemed ‘populist’—both an admission of the lack of explanation and a token of disdain. The essential feature of such movements, the obscurantism that allows them to offer many things to many people, inconsistently and unaccountably, while serving some interests more than others, was little explored. The failures can be piled one upon the other. No amount of quantitative data provided by polling, ‘big data’, or other techniques comprehended what might be captured through open-eyed experiential narratives. It is evident that there is a need for forms of understanding that can comprehend the currents within the human person, and go beyond shallow empiricism. Mainstream social science has offered few if any resources to understand, let alone challenge, illiberal majoritarianism, now a world-remaking phenomenon.

Trumpism is a crisis for the most prestigious methods of understanding economic and social life, ennobled and enthroned by the metropolitan academy of the last third of a century. It has caused mainstream ‘social science’ to fall like a deck of cards. It can only save itself through comprehensive reinvention, from the ground up.

More here.

The Republic of Conscience

I

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II

Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs
woman having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.

by Seamus Heaney
from The Haw Lantern
Noonday Press, 1987

Read more »

Gregg Herken in the New York Times:

In a controversial lecture more than 50 years ago, the British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow suggested that natural scientists had “the future in their bones.” Snow was speaking in 1959, when the public still held scientists — particularly physicists — in a kind of awe, because of their role in the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. But Snow might well have had in mind the Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi, the subject of a new scientific biography by the husband-and-wife team of Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin. Fermi’s “intuito fenomenale” — phenomenal intuition — and his near infallibility in predicting the results of experiments were characteristics that prompted colleagues at the University of Rome to designate him “the Pope.” One of his graduate students marveled: “Fermi had an inside track to God.”

The title stuck, for a different reason, when Fermi; his wife, Laura; and their two small children emigrated to America in December 1938, a move hastened by the racial purity laws of Mussolini’s ally, Nazi Germany. (Laura’s parents were Jewish; both would perish in the Holocaust.) In contrast to other scientists who fled European fascism, Fermi exuded an almost ethereal calm, and he remained unflappable in the face of both triumph and disaster. Lacking Einstein’s nimbus of white hair, Oppenheimer’s tortured introspection or Teller’s mercurial temperament, Fermi — “small, dark and frail-looking” as a child, according to his sister — more closely resembled a middle-aged Fiat mechanic than a mover of the universe.

More here.

Neil Macdonald at CBC News:

They is hot nowadays.

No, not are. Is.

As grating as it may be to those of us who still carry Strunk and White's The Elements of Style around in our heads, the singular “they” – grammatically a contradiction in terms — is breaking out of the genderless pronoun pack, loping toward general acceptance.

The singular “they” was in fact voted word of the year last January by the American Dialect Society “for its emerging use as a pronoun to refer to a known person, often as a conscious choice by a person rejecting the traditional gender binary of he and she.”

As in: “Sally looked lovely. They wore a green dress, with their hair neatly arranged in a French braid.”

“It looks like 'they' is going to take the cake,” says Sali Tagliamonte, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto. “That's the way language works.”

More here.