Declan Walsh in the New York Times:

For decades, royal Arab hunting expeditions have traveled to the far reaches of Pakistan in pursuit of the houbara bustard — a waddling, migratory bird whose meat, they believe, contains aphrodisiac powers.

Little expense is spared for the elaborate winter hunts. Cargo planes fly tents and luxury jeeps into custom-built desert airstrips, followed by private jets carrying the kings and princes of Persian Gulf countries along with their precious charges: expensive hunting falcons that are used to kill the white-plumed houbara.

This year’s hunt, however, has run into difficulty.

It started in November, when the High Court in Baluchistan, the vast and tumultuous Pakistani province that is a favored hunting ground, canceled all foreign hunting permits in response to complaints from conservationists.

Those experts say the houbara’s habitat, and perhaps the long-term survival of the species, which is already considered threatened, has been endangered by the ferocious pace of hunting.

That legal order ballooned into a minor political crisis last week when a senior Saudi prince and his entourage landed in Baluchistan, attracting unusually critical media attention and a legal battle that is scheduled to reach the country’s Supreme Court in the coming days.

More here.

Richard Seymour in Lenin's Tomb:

Syriza has been defeated in the first round of negotiations.

Nandini Ramachandran at Caravan:

The horizons of Indian women have long been defined by the peculiar demands of Indian sovereignty. Scholars such as Tanika Sarkar and Partha Chatterjee have argued that the female body—especially the Hindu female body—was crucial to the shaping of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Nationalist thinkers, eager to find a space “free” from colonialism within which they could locate an essential Indian culture that had to be liberated, settled upon the “Hindu home.” Hindu wives, who presided over those homes, thus became inextricably linked to patriotism. These wives—pure, virtuous, spiritual, submissive—were the soul of the motherland. They had to be saved from the depredations of modernity and colonialism, even when this meant they had to be saved from themselves. This ideology, that women are repositories of a cultural legacy, is as prevalent today as it was two hundred years ago—consider the violent policing of inter-caste marriages by khap panchayats, or the hysterical conversation about “love jihad” that presents Muslim men as existential threats to the Hindu family. This ideology, moreover, is also why most Indian women who survive outside the conventions of marriage must resign themselves to living with a submerged self.

The more interesting question remains, however, how women are to navigate such circumstances. One way would be through the discourse of empowerment, which suggests that women make choices that benefit them as individuals rather than those that benefit them as members of collectives such as the family or society. It demands that independent, self-respecting women defy the social strictures that hold them to home and hearth, and thus replace their pain with pleasure.

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Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Most of what we believe about the South, wrote W.J. Cash in the 1930s, exists in our imagination. But, he wrote, we shouldn’t take this to mean that the South is therefore unreal. The real South, wrote Cash in The Mind of the South, exists in unreality. It is the tendency toward unreality, toward romanticism, toward escape, that defines the mind of the South.

The unreality that shaped the South took many forms. In the South, wrote Cash (himself a Southern man), is “a mood in which the mind yields almost perforce to drift and in which the imagination holds unchecked sway, a mood in which nothing any more seems improbable save the puny inadequateness of fact, nothing incredible save the bareness of truth.” Most people still believe, wrote Cash — but no more than Southerners themselves — in a South built by European aristocrats who erected castles from scrub. This imaginary South, wrote Cash, was “a sort of stagepiece out of the eighteenth century,” where gentlemen planters and exquisite ladies in farthingales spoke softly on the steps of their stately mansions. But well-adjusted men of position and power, he wrote, “do not embark on frail ships for a dismal frontier… The laborer, faced with starvation; the debtor, anxious to get out of jail; the apprentice, eager for a fling at adventure; the small landowner and shopkeeper, faced with bankruptcy and hopeful of a fortune in tobacco; the neurotic, haunted by failure and despair” — only these would go.”

more here.

Daniel Torday at The Paris Review:

Since I started writing, I have sought forebears who might have had literary aspirations. Were there writers in the family? My great-uncle György, who was exiled to the Ukraine during World War II and afterward became a functionary in Hungary’s Communist government, was a novelist, but my father has always been dismissive of his work. He says György wrote a variety of socialist-realist novel that’s hard to take seriously, hard not to see as propaganda. His books have never been translated into English, and my Hungarian isn’t nearly good enough to understand what’s in them. The only existing copies I know of sit on a shelf in my Cousin Hajnal’s house in the Buda Hills. I don’t have the heart to ask to take them and have them translated. When I’ve asked her about them in the past, she’s simply said that they are books, yes, and that her father wrote them.

In their stead I have purchased rare used copies of two books written by Frederic Neuburg, author of a large trove of letters to my father’s Aunt Traute that he keeps in an old teak box in his house in Los Angeles. My father is not Bellow or Updike, and I am not the son of Bellow or Updike, but it is the book I have, in two editions, an art book containing photographs of Neuberg’s glass collection and extensive commentary on the pieces.

more here.

Heather Murphy in The New York Times:

The faces here, which look a bit like video game avatars, are actually portraits drawn from DNA. Each rendering was created by plugging an individual genetic profile into a predictive tool created by Mark D. Shriver, a professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State University. Dr. Shriver and his colleagues have studied the ways that genes influence facial development. Their software yields an image in a matter of minutes, rapidly drawing connections beween genetic markers and points on the face. In less time than it takes to make a cup of coffee, a sketch emerges inferred solely from DNA.

How accurate or useful are these predictions? That is something that Dr. Shriver is still researching – and that experts are still debating. Andrew Pollack writes about the issues in an article on genetic sleuthing in Science Times. On The New York Times’s science desk, we wondered whether it would be possible to identify our colleagues based on the formula that Dr. Shriver has developed. So we tried a somewhat unscientific experiment. John Markoff, a reporter, and Catherine Spangler, a video journalist, each volunteered to share their genetic profile, downloaded from 23andMe, a consumer DNA-testing company. The files we sent to Dr. Shriver did not include their names or any information about their height, weight or age. Dr. Shriver processed the genotype data and sent us renderings of the donors’ faces.

More here.

From The Hindu:

In an interview to Rajgopal Saikumar, Prof. Bilgrami, the Sidney Morgenbesser Chair in Philosophy; Professor, Committee on Global Thought; Director, South Asian Institute at Columbia University and author of Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014) explained what autonomy and intellectual self-determination could mean to India in the current political context. Edited excerpts:

What does ‘svaraj in ideas’ imply in the current Indian political context?

It could mean something very important, if thoughtfully elaborated. There is a widespread tendency to say that what has happened in Europe or the West must inevitably happen in the rest of the world. For instance, in response to the protest over the dispossession of peasants for corporate projects in the Indian countryside, our economists were known to say, “England had to go through its pain to create its Londons and Manchesters; India will have to do so, too.” This suggests that there are some sort of economic laws that govern history. But this is a superstition. By that I mean we take it on trust, even though nobody knows when it was proved and no one has shown how it helps us to live better. Marx is often mistakenly said to believe this. But he did not. If you turn to the work he did in the last decade of his life, you will find that he strenuously argued that Russia did not, by any means, have to go through a western-European-style capitalist incubation as some sort of inevitable rite of passage.

When people try to justify the claim that what happened in the West must happen elsewhere, they do so on the grounds that what happened in the West was rational. In other words, not only that it will happen [elsewhere] but that it ought to happen. So, ‘svaraj in ideas’ for us could consist of showing in detail why many of the developments of the West were not always rational, but are rather the result of the greater might of some worldly forces over others.

More here.

Loris Gréaud. The Unplayed Notes Museum. 2015

“What exactly will happen during the opening on Saturday? “If I tell you too much,” the artist says, following something like secret-agent protocol, “It will kill the idea.””

…

“On the evening of Saturday, January 17, the artist Loris Gréaud opened The Unplayed Notes Museum, his solo exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary, to a private audience—and then immediately destroyed it. A riot, choreographed by Gréaud and carried out by actors, stuntmen, and museum security, broke out that left the show in pieces, patrons in the parking lot, and the museum in complete darkness.”

More here , here, and here.

Phil McKenna in The Big Roundtable:

“In this area you should go just behind me,” the stout man says, the th of his this buzzing like a bee. Then, as if to reassure me, he adds, “I’ve been here before, with other colleagues and journalists, and no one died.” I’ve traveled here, to the former Iron Curtain, still studded with the occasional land mine, in pursuit of a love story. It’s an improbable tale about two boys, a friendship, and a passion for birds.

Twenty-five years earlier, in 1989, the man in front of me had hatched a plan to transform the former no-man’s land that separated Western Europe from the Eastern Bloc into an eco-corridor running through the heart of Europe. It was a preposterous idea. The Iron Curtain had been just that—a series of steel-reinforced barriers. Electrified fences, razor wire, land mines, trip lines, and machine guns: If it could stop, maim, or kill you, the Soviets put it there. Not exactly “eco.”

What’s more, the corridor would bisect one of the most heavily settled and fully domesticated continents on earth. Central Europe’s ecosystems have been so thoroughly reduced that locals don’t even bother hanging window screens.

Yet if returning lynx, wolves, and other wildlife are any indicator, it might just work. If it does, the European Green Belt, as proponents call it, will be one of the greatest conservation success stories of all time.

More here.

Emma Woolf in Newsweek:

“I caused some slight argument with Leonard this morning by trying to cook my breakfast in bed. I believe, however, that the good sense of the proceeding will make it prevail; that is, if I can dispose of the eggshells.” (13 January 1915)

So wrote Virginia Woolf 100 years ago, musing on her latest domestic experiment. This attempt to cook eggs in bed was a light interlude in what was to become one of the worst years of her life. Reading her letters and diaries recently in the London Library, I discovered a more playful side to the modernist writer, who we have come to think of as stern, humourless, even tortured. Virginia’s daily journal and correspondence reveal a sensitive, perceptive young woman who loved a “debauch of gossip” with her friends. And this time in her life, January and February 1915, was a precious lull before the storm: one month later she plunged into a nervous breakdown so severe that she lost the rest of 1915.

Sadly, these breakdowns were nothing new. The sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever in 1895 had provoked Virginia’s first breakdown at the age of 13. Her father’s death in 1904 triggered her second collapse; her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell wrote: “All that summer she was mad.” She also endured the death of her half-sister Stella in 1897 and her beloved brother Thoby in 1907; the repeated bereavements took their toll on her mental health. Virginia’s third breakdown in 1913, aged 31, occurred less than a year after her marriage to Leonard Woolf.

More here.

Simon Dedeo in Nautilus:

John Ruskin called it the pathetic fallacy: to see rainstorms as passionate, drizzles as sad, and melting streams as innocent. After all, the intuition went, nature has no human passions.

Imagine Ruskin’s surprise, then, were he to learn that the mathematics of perception, knowledge, and experience lie at the heart of modern theories of the natural world. Quite contrary to his stern intuition, quantitative relationships appear to tie hard, material laws to soft qualities of mind and belief.

The story of that discovery begins with the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, soon after Ruskin coined his phrase at the end of the 19th century. It was then that science first strived, not for knowledge, but for its opposite: for a theory of how we might ignore the messy details of, say, a steam engine or chemical reaction, but still predict and explain how it worked.

Boltzmann provided a unifying framework for how to do this nearly singlehandedly before his death by suicide in 1906. What he saw, if dimly, is that thermodynamics is a story not about the physical world, but about what happens when our knowledge of it fails. Quite literally: A student of thermodynamics today can translate the physical setup of a steam engine or chemical reaction into a statement about inference in the face of ignorance. Once she solves that (often simpler) problem, she can translate back into statements about thermometers and pressure gauges.

The ignorance that Boltzmann relied upon was maximal: Whatever could happen, must happen, and no hidden order could remain. Even in the simple world of pistons and gases, however, that assumption can fail. Push a piston extremely slowly, and Boltzmann’s method works well. But slam it inward, and the rules change. Vortices and whirlpools appear, streams and counter-streams, the piston stutters and may even stall.

More here.

—From the Washington Post – November 13, 1980:

“It defies the laws of orbital mechanics as I understand them but two components of the fifth ring out are braided,” said Dr. Bradford Smith of the University of Arizona, one of the scientists gathered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study photographs being transmitted from [Voyager I]. “If the distribution of these braids is uniform around the entire ring then there are as many as 1,000 braids in the ring.”

Not only is the fifth ring in braids, Smith said, but the 500-mile long braids appear to have kinks in them. Smith said that as bizarre as the braids are the kinks are even more bizarre. “If you look closely, you see abrupt bends in the braids, as if somebody took the surface and bent it,” Smith said. “I don't even pretend to understand what this means.”

Don't Even Pretend
.

Saturn's rings was all nappy

spread out from her head

like she just woke up

took a shower & aint dried them yet

dread locks

cluttered with moons/meteors/mysteries

so God, She said:

“girl…now you know

I can't let you be orbiting round me

looking like that. suppose we have company.

what they gon think of me?”

God took off from work

unscrewed Her Afro Sheen jar

washed Her comb & pick

sat under constellations

& told Saturn to sit on the space

between Her legs.

Read more »

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Darwin Day, February 12th, passed last week without much fuss, even from those of us who have written at length about the man it honors. Celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday has some of the vibe of Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin—there’s a hope, and a ritual, but it can be pretty lonely. There was, however, one striking sort of counter-ceremony: the Wisconsin governor and would-be Republican Presidential candidate Scott Walker, asked, in London, if he “believed in evolution,” took a pass. “I’m going to punt on that one as well,” he said. “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other.”

It does seem slightly odd to ask a man running for President—or, for that matter, for dogcatcher—to recite a catechism on modern science. It somehow puts one in mind of the stern and classic catechism of the Catholic Church, and the questions posed, in memorably ironic form, in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone attends his godson’s christening even as his boys are killing the heads of rival families. The priest asks, “Do you renounce Satan … and all his works?” Michael responds, “I do renounce them,” even as he doesn’t. One hears a British voice similarly demanding such things of American politicians: “Do you believe in an expanding universe with a strong inflationary instance in the first micro-seconds?” “I do so believe.”

But the notion that the evolution question was unfair, or irrelevant, or simply a “sorting” device designed to expose a politician as belonging to one cultural club or another, is finally ridiculous. For the real point is that evolution is not, like the Great Pumpkin, something one can or cannot “believe” in. It just is—a fact certain, the strongest and most resilient explanation of the development of life on Earth that there has ever been.

More here.