Raza Rumi in The Friday Times:

It is a pity that I got to discover Shahzia Sikander’s work only when I left Pakistan. After her initial successes in the 1990s, with her migration to the United States, she slowly disappeared from the local art scene and the narratives within her country of birth, almost rendered invisible, like the mythical characters one reads in the folklore. In a different country, she would be celebrated for being a global icon, intensely original and gifted. Not in her country of birth where talent is subjugated to the cliques that define ‘excellence’ and where history has to be doctored to make the present legible and comfortable.

…Sikander’s two decades of practice has seen three distinct phases: first pushing the boundaries of miniature and subverting the tradition; second the early 2000s where she distanced from the form but not its essence and delved into larger questions of global relevance. Her third and more recent phase is turning her art practice into a three dimensional endeavour where the form holds a dialogue with the content, the artist engages in a discourse with her medium; and the viewer is pulled into that conversation. This is reflected in her recent works such as Parallax and ‘The cypress despite its freedom is held captive by the garden’ based on a dilapidated cinema Khorfakkan and a Pakistani labourer. This amazing repertoire, unmatched by any artist of her generation, is nearly invisible in her own country. As Faisal Devji wrote last year in a hard-hitting piece entitled ‘Little Dictators’: “Sikander’s pioneering work is under threat, being routinely censored…”. Devji cited two books – Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia and Art and Polemic in Pakistan (by Iftikhar Dadi) Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting (by Virginia Whiles) that ignored the ‘foundational character’ of Sikander’s work. These are two major art histories of Pakistan and both omit Sikander’s vital contribution to contemporary Pakistani art at home and abroad. Devji added, “..If anyone can break this stranglehold on the narrative of Pakistan’s cultural history, it is Sikander, who achieved global fame in the pre-9/11 world and whose work is not over-determined by the “war on terror,” itself now an aesthetic commodity.”

Picture: Unseen, 2011-2012, Outdoor Projection at Doris Duke’s ShangriLa, Honolulu, Hawaii.

More here.

Roxane Gay in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

I am thinking about success, ambition, and blackness and how breaking through while black is tempered by so much burden. Nothing exemplifies black success and ambition like Black History Month, a celebratory month I’ve come to dread as a time when people take an uncanny interest in sharing black-history facts with me to show how they are not racist. It’s the month where we segregate some of history’s most significant contributors into black history instead of fully integrating them into American history. Each February, we hold up civil-rights heroes and the black innovators and writers and artists who have made so much possible for this generation. We say, look at what the best of us have achieved. We conjure W. E. B. Du Bois, who once wrote, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” We ask much of our exceptional men and women. We must be exceptional if we are to be anything at all.

Black History Month is important and a corrective to so much of America’s fraught racial history. But in the twenty-first century, this relegating of black ambition to one month of recognition feels constraining and limiting rather than inspirational.

In the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates published an essay about President Barack Obama and the tradition of black politics that reached me in a vulnerable place. Coates writes of the president’s ascension: “He becomes a champion of black imagination, of black dreams and black possibilities.” In that same essay, Coates also writes about how the narrative of personal responsibility is a false one that is, unfortunately, often parroted by our president, our brightest shining star, Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. At the end of his essay, Coates writes, “But I think history will also remember his [Obama’s] unquestioning embrace of ‘twice as good’ in a country that has always given black people, even under his watch, half as much.”

More here.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times:

Consider this post a kind of complement, maybe, to my anti-anti-Crusades commentary of late. The big foreign policy piece that everyone is talking about this week, and deservedly, is Graeme Wood’s deep Atlantic dive into the religious premises underpinningthe Islamic State’s vision and grand strategy. Wood’s argument is rich enough to defy easy summary, but his core point is that Western analysts tend to understate not only the essential religiosity of ISIS’s worldview, but the extent to which that worldview has substantial theological grounding. It isn’t just a few guys making up a cult out of random bits of scripture; its political-religious vision appeals precisely because it derives “from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” And we ignore the coherence of those interpretations at our peril: The Islamic State’s “intellectual genealogy” is intensely relevant to its political strategy, and its theology “must be understood to be combatted.”

As a longstanding believer in a “theology has consequences”approach to world history and current affairs, I agree with all of this … but I would append an important qualifier as well. Specifically, in taking Islamic-State theology seriously as a form of Islamic thought, we also need to take seriously the Islamic case against ISIS, and the reasons why the soi-disant caliphate’s interpretation of its faith, however internally coherent and textually-rooted, represents a stark departure from the way the faith has been traditionally interpreted and widely understood.

More here.

Henry Farrell in Aeon:

The Hidden Wiki holds the keys to a secret internet. To reach it, you need a special browser that can access ‘Tor Hidden Services’ – websites that have chosen to obscure their physical location. But even this browser isn’t enough. Like the Isla de Muerta in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, the landmarks of this hidden internet can be discovered only by those who already know where they are.

Sites such as the Hidden Wiki provide unreliable treasure maps. They publish lists of the special addresses for sites where you can use Bitcoin to buy drugs or stolen credit card numbers, play strange games, or simply talk, perhaps on subjects too delicate for the open web. The lists are often untrustworthy. Sometimes the addresses are out-of-date. Sometimes they are actively deceptive. One link might lead to a thriving marketplace for buying and selling stolen data; another, to a wrecker’s display of false lights, a cloned site designed to relieve you of your coin and give you nothing in return.

This hidden internet is a product of debates among technology-obsessed libertarians in the 1990s. These radicals hoped to combine cryptography and the internet into a universal solvent that would corrupt the bonds of government tyranny. New currencies, based on recent cryptographic advances, would undermine traditional fiat money, seizing the cash nexus from the grasp of the state. ‘Mix networks’, where everyone’s identity was hidden by multiple layers of encryption, would allow people to talk and engage in economic exchange without the government being able to see.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Between 5 and 7 million years of evolution separate us humans from our closest relatives—chimpanzees. During that time, our bodies have diverged to an obvious degree, as have our mental skills. We have created spoken language, writing, mathematics, and advanced technology—including machines that can sequence our genomes. Those machines reveal that the genetic differences that separate us and chimps are subtler: we share between 96 and 99 percent of our DNA.

Some parts of our genome have evolved at particularly high speed, quickly accumulating mutations that distinguish them from their counterparts in chimps. You can find these regions by comparing different mammals and searching for stretches of DNA that are always the same, except in humans. Scientists started identifying these “human-accelerated regions” or HARs about a decade ago. Many turned out to be enhancers—sequences that are not part of genes but that control the activity of genes, telling them when and where to deploy. They’re more like coaches than players.

It’s tempting to think these fast-evolving enhancers, by deploying our genes in new formations, drove the evolution of our most distinguishing traits, like our opposable thumbs or our exceptionally large brains. There’s some evidence for this. One HAR controls the activity of genes in the part of the hand that gives rise to the thumb. Many others are found near genes involved in brain development, and at least two are active in the growing brain. So far, so compelling—but what are these sequences actually doing?

To find out, J. Lomax Boyd from Duke University searched a list of HARs for those that are probably enhancers. One jumped out—HARE5. It had been identified but never properly studied, and it seemed to control the activity of genes involved in brain development. The human version differs from the chimp version by just 16 DNA ‘letters’. But those 16 changes, it turned out, make a lot of difference.

More here.

Scott Bradfield at the New York Times:

In many ways, the Maigrets were a sort of comfort food — the books that Simenon wrote to recover from the physical and psychological stress of writing his better, and far less comforting, novels. In these non-Maigret “thrillers,” often referred to as the romans durs (but to most aficionados known simply as the “Simenons”), the central, usually male character is lured from the stultifying cocoon of himself — and his suburban, oppressively Francophile (and often mother-dominated) life — into a wider, vertiginous world of sexual and philosophical peril, where violence, whether it occurs or only threatens to occur, feels like too much freedom coming at a guy far more quickly than he can handle.

Even though Simenon was widely published, and translated, in his lifetime, there still seem to be some very good “serious” books — like “The Mahé Circle,” which recently received its first English translation — falling loose from forgotten cupboards and laundry hampers. That novel’s Dr. Mahé is the quintessential Simenon protagonist: Raised in a provincial village, overshadowed by a local-legend father who died showing how far he could lift and carry a horse, and hemmed in by the always disapproving eyes of his family and neighbors, he discovers his first taste of existential freedom on holiday in the Porquerolles, where he falls in love (or in fascination) with a bohemian teenage girl in a red dress.

more here.

Philippe Sands at the Financial Times:

In the spring of 1945, governments came together to remake the world. Within a few years a new international legal architecture was in place, constructed on the pillars of economic liberalisation, limits on the use of force and the protection of human rights. That last idea, reflected in the UN Charter, drew on various sources including Magna Carta (1215), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the US Bill of Rights (1791). But its effect was truly novel, upending the convention that states could do more or less as they wished within their own borders.

It may seem remarkable today but, back in the 1930s, Germany was free under international law to mistreat its own citizens, even to kill them, because they were Jewish or communist or gay or disabled. This was the world that jurists such as Hersch Lauterpacht, author of the groundbreaking book An International Bill of the Rights of Man (1945), sought to banish. The hope that the individual might become “the ultimate unit of all law”, as Lauterpacht put it, would underpin the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed a non-binding list of “inalienable rights of all members of the human family”; it would form a basis, too, for the binding European Convention on Human Rights that followed a couple of years later.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

We're not accustomed to considering Pakistan with such subtlety, at least not in the United States. As such, “Discontent and its Civilizations” is at its best when Hamid takes time to deconstruct our preconceptions, as in the long essays “Why They Get Pakistan Wrong” — which reminds us that “[t]he country's annual death toll from terrorist attacks rose from 164 in 2003 to 3,318 in 2009, a level exceeding the number of Americans killed on September 11” — and “Why Drones Don't Help,” with its explication of the blowback provoked by our policies.

“To turn on one's TV's in Pakistan is to find oneself entering a world permeated with conspiracy theories,” he writes, before turning the argument on us: “Conspiracy theorists have numerous examples they can cite in support of their positions. But perhaps none is as emotionally potent as the claim that flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens. In the U.S., such a claim would be science fiction or paranoid survivor cultism of the furthest fringe-dwelling kind. In Pakistan, it is real.”

more here.

The Burial of the Poet’s Daughter

—for Susie Iremonger

What an assembly of the old!
Of tangled grey hair!
Of stooped backs and rheumatism!
Of baldness, wrinkles and weak eyes!
Their youth unrecognisable now –
Experts at death this poetic band.

But at the base of the altar
Where the coffin was laid
The glass houses of sorrow!
The teeming colours of Spring!
Blue, yellow and rose!

The sisters are weeping –
Cries like an awl piercing the heart –
But high in the rafters
I hear the bell of her laughter
Silvered and beautiful.

Old age is the common fate;
She chose the opposite.

by Máire Mhac an tSaoi
from The Miraculous Parish / An Paróiste Míorúilteach
publisher: O'Brien Press / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Dublin, 2011

Walt Bachman in Blackpast.org:

My fascination with Joseph Godfrey arose from the investigation of a family story told to me by my grandfather when I was a teenager in Minneapolis in the 1950s. One of our ancestors, Grandpa said, had been killed in the largest Indian uprising in the American West, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. A stone monument marked the scene of his killing, he added, and an excellent museum in New Ulm, Minnesota, had original accounts documenting the story of his death.

…In 1836, when Godfrey was just five years old, his master decided to keep him in bondage but to sell Courtney in St. Louis, the closest slave market. Remarkably, Courtney then made her way to one of the Missouri lawyers who later represented Dred Scott. She managed to procure her freedom via the courts of a slave state even as her son remained in slavery for another decade in supposedly “free” Minnesota. In the late 1840s, a conversation with an abolitionist missionary spurred Godfrey to risk a run for freedom. Fearing that he would be taken back into slavery if he stayed in the missionary’s home, he sought refuge among a band of Dakotas whose language and customs he had learned in the fur trade. Lacking free papers, he became Minnesota’s only home-grown fugitive slave. In the mid-1850s, Godfrey married a Dakota woman and lived with his wife and son on a new Dakota reservation in southwestern Minnesota. Fort Ridgely was built nearby in 1853 to keep order as hordes of white settlers arrived in the vicinity. To Godfrey’s disquiet, army officers continued to bring slaves to the new fort right up to Minnesota’s statehood. When the 1862 war broke out, Godfrey’s options were to leave his family to seek refuge among the army whose officers had enslaved his mother, or to stay with the Dakotas who had given him refuge. His life was imperiled no matter which way he turned; he remained on the Dakota side and reluctantly accompanied the war party to Milford.

Picture: Image of Fur Trading Post Near Shakopee, Minnesota, the Last Fur Trading Post Where Josephy Godfrey was held in Slavery.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Phil Klay at The American Scholar:

From the Iliad to Generation Kill, from the satire of Catch-22 to the hagiography of The Greatest Generation, we have an abundance of war stories throughout literature to help us make sense of the past decade, and Samet proves herself adept at navigating between the truths and falsehoods of the narratives we choose to tell ourselves about war. Part literary criticism, part intellectual memoir, and part reportage of the struggles, successes, and in two cases the deaths of her former students, No Man’s Land is a moving, insightful, and refreshingly iconoclastic guide toward a more nuanced understanding of America and the military that fights for it.

Samet divides her book into three long essays that explore the challenges of homecoming, the paradoxes of preparing for war, and her ultimate vision of the virtues necessary for the modern military leader—each smoothly incorporating literature, sociology, analyses of political culture, and the reflections of her former students. Her breakdown of homecomings, for example, takes us through the appeal that motorcycles hold for veterans, T. E. Lawrence’s love-hate relationship with his own legend, Dante’s and Tennyson’s decision to send Ulysses away again from Ithaca to the thrill of the open sea, comments by political and military leaders from George Washington to Admiral Mike Mullen on the responsibilities soldiers have toward their own citizenship, and a number of other examples and texts.

more here.

Omar Ali in Brown Pundits:

Razib put up an interesting post on this topic on his blog . I think his point is that no religion is a “religion of the book”. People make the religion and they remake it as time demands. Messily and unpredictably in many cases, but still, it moves. And in this sense, Islam is no more fixed in stone by what is written or not written in it's text (or texts) than any other religion.

Someone then commented (and I urge you to read the post and the comments, and the hyperlinks, they are all relevant and make this post clearer) as follows:

“Well, if you take the Old Testament and Koran at face value, the OT is more violent. The interesting question is then why Islam ends up being more violent than Judaism or Christianity, and for that I agree you have to thank subsequent tradition and reinterpretation of the violence in the text. It appears that for whatever reason Islam has carried out less of this kind of reinterpretation, so what was originally a less violent founding text ends up causing more violence because it is being interpreted much more literally.”

I replied there, and then thought I would put that reply up as a new post here because I want to see what people think of this quick and off-the-cuff comment. THEN, I can maybe improve it in a final new post this weekend. So, without further ado, my comment:

There is an easier explanation. Islam the religion we know today (classical Islam of the four Sunni schools and it's Shia counterparts) developed in the womb of the Arab empire. It is evident that it provided a unifying ideology and a theological justification for that empire (and in the case of various Shia sects, varying degrees of resistance or revolt against that empire), but at the very least, they grew and formed together; one was not the later product of the fully formed other. Being the religion of a (very successful and impressive) imperialist project, it's “official” mature Sunni version obviously has a military-supremacist feel to it.

More here.

Charlie Kurth at Aeon Magazine:

Immanuel Kant suggested an even graver problem with anxiety: it is incompatible with virtue. For Kant, the virtuous individual is someone who has brought ‘all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control’; therefore, he writes in The Metaphysics of Morals(1797), the ‘true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’. But when we’re anxious, our minds are anything but tranquil. We lack the rational control that’s distinctive of virtue: it is emotion, not reason, that determines our behaviour. That’s bad.

This picture of anxiety as a dark and pernicious force certainly has illustrious supporters. Even so, I believe that it is mistaken. It goes against the grain to say this, but anxiety can be a good thing. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that it is central to our ability to successfully navigate moral and social life. I won’t go as far as to say that we needmore of it, but we should cultivate it. Worry is important; we should get it right.

more here.

Paula Byrne at the Times Literary Supplement:

Re-reading the youthful writings, one is struck again and again by the violence. A group of characters threaten murder by dagger, which shall be “steeped in your hearts blood”. A sister poisons another sister and is “speedily raised to the gallows” for her perfidy. A child bites off her mother’s fingers. There is also notable violence against the self. One young heroine inadvertently enters into an engagement with two gentlemen in the space of a single evening and kills herself by plunging into the river. Another is addicted “to the bottle”, and drinks herself half to death. In “Love and Freindship”, the two heroines, indulging in a bout of sensibility, are momentarily distracted by a road accident. They see “Two Gentlemen most elegantly attired but weltering in their blood”. When the heroines discover that the gentlemen are in fact their husbands, they respond like characters in a sentimental novel: “Sophia shrieked and fainted on the Ground – I ran instantly mad”. Sophia faints for so long that she catches cold, develops a fever and dies. Her final advice is not to faint but to run mad: “Beware of swoons, dear Laura . . . . A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequence”.

Critics have long seen “Love and Freindship” as an embryo version of Sense and Sensibility. Both works, of course, are attacks on the novel of sensibility. Austen’s first published novel establishes the type of novelist she is not.

more here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Longtime readers know that I’ve made a bit of an effort to help people understand, and perhaps even grow to respect, the Everett or Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI) . I’ve even written papers about it. It’s a controversial idea and far from firmly established, but it’s a serious one, and deserves serious discussion.

Which is why I become sad when people continue to misunderstand it. And even sadder when they misunderstand it for what are — let’s face it — obviously wrong reasons. The particular objection I’m thinking of is:

MWI is not a good theory because it’s not testable.

It has appeared recently in this article by Philip Ball — an essay whose snidely aggressive tone is matched only by the consistency with which it is off-base. Worst of all, the piece actually quotes me, explaining why the objection is wrong. So clearly I am either being too obscure, or too polite.

I suspect that almost everyone who makes this objection doesn’t understand MWI at all. This is me trying to be generous, because that’s the only reason I can think of why one would make it. In particular, if you were under the impression that MWI postulated a huge number of unobservable worlds, then you would be perfectly in your rights to make that objection. So I have to think that the objectors actually are under that impression.

An impression that is completely incorrect.

More here.

Irvin D. Yalom in the New York Times:

Dr. Yalom, I would like a consultation. I’ve read your novel “When Nietzsche Wept,” and wonder if you’d be willing to see a fellow writer with a writing block.

No doubt Paul sought to pique my interest with his email. And he succeeded: I’d never turn away a fellow writer. As for the writing block, I felt blessed by not having been visited by one of those creatures and I was keen to help him tackle it.

Ten days later Paul arrived for his appointment. I was startled by his appearance. For some reason I had expected a frisky, tormented, middle-aged writer, yet entering my office was a wizened old man, so stooped over that he appeared to be scrutinizing the floor. Almost able to hear his joints creaking, I took his heavy battered briefcase, held his arm and guided him to his chair.

“All I know about you comes from your short email,” I said. “You wrote that you were a fellow writer, you’ve read my Nietzsche novel, and you have a writing block.”

“Yes,” he said. “And I’m requesting a single consultation. That’s all. I’m on a fixed income and can’t afford more.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “Tell me what I should know about the block.”

“I have to go back to my grad school days,” he began. “I was in philosophy at Princeton writing my doctorate on the incompatibility between Nietzsche’s ideas on determinism and his espousal of self-transformation. But I couldn’t finish. I kept getting distracted by such things as Nietzsche’s extraordinary correspondence, especially by his letters to his friends and fellow writers like Strindberg.”

More here. [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

It’s Our Dance
—for Lorna

Every Sunday
I play Nina Simone’s
‘My baby just cares for me’
& with a different flower
in your hair every week
you spring out from the bar
& I leave the mixing desk
& we dance with our hangovers,
yes we dance around the bar
& last week we ended up
outside briefly on Lewes Road
in the petrol hazes
& we even waltzed
out to the beer garden
& everybody smiles
when we dance together
to ‘My baby just cares for me’
& for a few precious minutes
it’s as if we have all swallowed the moon
& everyone is lighter
& the world might not ever end.

by Brendan Cleary
from Face
publisher: Pighog, Brighton, 2013

Eoin O'Carroll in The Christian Science Monitor:

Are humans inherently happy, sad, or somewhere in between? A new study suggests that, at least when it comes to our vocabulary, we tend to look on the bright side of life. A team of mathematicians, computer scientists, and linguists at the University of Vermont and the MITRE Corporation combed through 10 languages' literature, movie subtitles, music lyrics, and, of course, Web pages and social media feeds, collecting an estimated 100 billion words from Twitter alone. The team used this data – from 24 types of sources in all – to draw up lists of the 10,000 most common words in each language. Then, the researchers had native speakers of each language rate their emotional response to each word on a 9-point scale, from saddest to happiest. For each of the 10,000 words of each language, the scientists collected 50 ratings, for a total of about 5 million scores.

The result? Every source averaged above 5. Our words, which the study's authors describe as “the atoms of human language,” reveal a “universal positivity bias.” “In every source we looked at,” said UVM mathematician Peter Dodds in a press release, “people use more positive words than negative ones.” All of the languages seemed to skew positive, but some did so more than others. In descending order of happiness, they are: Spanish, Portuguese, English, Indonesian, French, German, Arabic, Russian, Korean, and Chinese.

More here.