Ida B. Wells (1909) from infoplease.com:

During the last ten years, from 1899 to 1908 inclusive, the number lynched was 959. Of this number, 102 were white, while the colored victims numbered 857. No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization-the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.

Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily: always the same shameless falsehood that “Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.” Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, al once champion of lynching and apologist for lynchers, said, “The mob stand! today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race.” This is the never-varying answer of lyncher! and their apologists. All know that it is untrue. The cowardly lyncher revels it murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But truth is mighty and the lynching record discloses thehypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime. The Springfield, Illinois, mob rioted for two days, the militia of the entire state was called out, two men were lynched, hundreds of people driver from their homes, all because a white woman said a Negro assaulted her. f mad mob went to the jail, tried to lynch the victim of her charge, and, no being able to find him, proceeded to pillage and burn the town and to lynch two innocent men. Later, after the police had found that the woman's charge was false, she published a retraction, the indictment was dismissed, and the intended victim discharged. But the lynched victims were dead, hundreds were homeless, and Illinois was disgraced.

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

Caspar Henderson in The Guardian:

In March 1955, about a month before his own death, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” he wrote. “That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however stubbornly persistent.” I do not know whether Besso’s family was comforted by this claim, but most of those who have a solid grasp of the issues say that Einstein was right about the science. A debate going back at least to Heraclitus (535-475BCE), who said that the primary feature of the universe is that it is always changing, and Parmenides (who said that there is no such thing as change) appears to have been settled. Indeed in 1949, on the occasion of Einstein’s 70th birthday, Kurt Gödel presented him with a mathematical proof of the nonexistence of time. Nature, it appears, is governed by eternal laws that stand outside time.

Not so fast. Notable among those who disagree is Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Smolin is one of the bad boys of contemporary physics and cosmology; a generator of radical ideas and an iconoclast. In the mid 90s he proposed that black holes spawn baby universes. In the middle of the last decade he published a searing attack on string theory which, he said, had failed to create a single testable prediction. And in his 2013 bestseller, Time Reborn, he argued that time is real and nothing transcends it, not even the laws of nature. Such laws are, like everything else, features of the present, and can evolve. I’ve heard it said that many physicists in the academy groan at the very mention of Smolin’s name. But if he is wrong, he may at least be wrong in an interesting way. Strikingly, Smolin believes the reinstatement of time has implications for our daily lives. “If the flow of time is not an illusion, it makes our lives more precious and valuable,” he says. This might not seem as consoling as Einstein’s view that death does not have the finality we think it does. But if the laws of physics can change and evolve, so too can the space of possible futures. “The impression that we have that we can create novelty is true,” says Smolin. “This makes the universe much more hospitable. We can have free will. We have choices. I find that a much more comforting idea.”

More here.

Kevin Poulsen in Wired:

Hobbyist man flies a DJI Phantom 2 drone.

If you want to understand why the government freaked out when a $400 remote-controlled quadcopter landed on the White House grounds last week, you need to look four miles away, to a small briefing room in Arlington, Virginia. There, just 10 days earlier, officials from the US military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA gathered for a DHS “summit” on a danger that had been consuming them privately for years: the potential use of hobbyist drones as weapons of terror or assassination.

The conference was open to civilians, but explicitly closed to the press. One attendee described it as an eye-opener. The officials played videos of low-cost drones firing semi-automatic weapons, revealed that Syrian rebels are importing consumer-grade drones to launch attacks, and flashed photos from an exercise that pitted $5,000 worth of drones against a convoy of armored vehicles. (The drones won.) But the most striking visual aid was on an exhibit table outside the auditorium, where a buffet of low-cost drones had been converted into simulated flying bombs. One quadcopter, strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive, was a DJI Phantom 2, a newer version of the very drone that would land at the White House the next week.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Quanta:

On a November evening last year, Jennifer Doudna put on a stylish black evening gown and headed to Hangar One, a building at NASA’s Ames Research Center that was constructed in 1932 to house dirigibles. Under the looming arches of the hangar, Doudna mingled with celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch, Cameron Diaz and Jon Hamm before receiving the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in life sciences, an award sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentierof the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany, each received $3 million for their invention of a potentially revolutionary tool for editing DNA known as CRISPR.

Doudna was not a gray-haired emerita being celebrated for work she did back when dirigibles ruled the sky. It was only in 2012 that Doudna, Charpentier and their colleagues offered the first demonstration of CRISPR’s potential. They crafted molecules that could enter a microbe and precisely snip its DNA at a location of the researchers’ choosing. In January 2013, the scientists went one step further: They cut out a particular piece of DNA in human cells and replaced it with another one.

In the same month, separate teams of scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute reported similar success with the gene-editing tool. A scientific stampede commenced, and in just the past two years, researchers have performed hundreds of experiments on CRISPR. Their results hint that the technique may fundamentally change both medicine and agriculture.

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Daniel Brook in The Baffler:

In a speech to the financial elite of India delivered in Mumbai in 2010, president Barack Obama opted for an unusual form of flattery. He saluted “all the Mumbaikars who get up every day in this City of Dreams to forge a better life for their children—from the boardrooms of world-class Indian companies to the shops in the winding alleys of Dharavi.” It was a notable name-check. Despite the president’s mangled pronunciation, his audience of well-heeled Mumbaikars all knew what Obama was talking about. Dharavi is their metropolis’s most famous slum.

Were Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to come to America and do the same—hail the impoverished workfare mothers of Anacostia while on a state visit to Washington, say, or give a shout-out to the tenants of Harlem’s housing projects during a speech on Wall Street—it would be an uncomfortable moment. But, of course, it would never happen. If Modi’s speechwriters tried to throw in a mention of a famous impoverished neighborhood, higher-ups would surely excise it. The American myth of equal opportunity is greatly cherished, they would inform the prime minister, so in the interest of being a gracious guest, let’s not mention the places that call it into question.

But Obama’s tribute to Dharavi went over remarkably well. Those present at the tony U.S.-India Business Council summit seem to have taken it as the compliment he intended it to be. By the time the president sang the praises of Asia’s largest slum, as it’s known (although these days Karachi’s Orangi neighborhood is challenging it for that dubious distinction), the ideological precedent for this sort of thing was well established. Through a decade of academic apologetics and media mythologizing, Dharavi had been transmuted from India’s most shameful urban space—the warren of exploitation, filth, and disease that it plainly is—to the pride of Mumbai.

Read the rest here.

Lewis H. Lapham in The New York Times:

The portraits here are of men and women in their 80s and 90s, rich in the rewards of substantial and celebrated careers, and although I know none of them except by name and reputation, I’m asked why their love’s labor is not lost but still to be found. Why do they persist, the old masters? To what end the unceasing effort to discover or create something new? Why not rest on the laurels and the oars? The short answer is Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, in a letter to James Boswell in 1777: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” A longer answer is that of the 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai, who at 75 added a postscript to the first printing of his “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”: “From the time that I was 6 years old I had the mania of drawing the form of objects. As I came to be 50 I had published an infinity of designs; but all that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and every line, shall be instinct with life — and I ask all those who shall live as long as I do to see if I have not kept my word.”

…Now I am 79. I’ve written many hundreds of essays, 10 times that number of misbegotten drafts both early and late, and I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self. T. H. White, the British naturalist turned novelist to write “The Once and Future King,” calls upon the druid Merlyn to teach the lesson to the young prince Arthur: “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

Picture: Carmen Herrera, painter, 99, in her Manhattan studio. Herrera sold her first painting at age 89. Today her work is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern.

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John Thornhill at the Financial Times:

The portrait of Putin that Dawisha and Browder paint is so damning that one wonders how any sane Russian voter could possibly support him. Yet even if Russian opinion polls are to be partly discounted, Putin evidently remains popular among many voters for restoring a sense of national pride.

Peter Pomerantsev helps explain this phenomenon in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, his mesmerising account of the nine years he spent in Russia as a television producer. During that time, Pomerantsev recorded some remarkable human stories about life in modern Russia as well as observing first-hand the brilliant but cynical way that state television cast its spells over the population. The goal, as he put it, was to “synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment”, turning Russia into a country of canned laughter.

Along the way, Pomerantsev recounts his meetings with retired gangsters put out of business by the predatory state, a successful businesswoman sucked into the criminal quicksand, glamorous models who fall prey to scary sects, and nationalist bikers called Night Wolves, who style themselves on the Hell’s Angels.

more here.

Lee Siegel at The New York Times:

W. H. Auden said that a great book reads you. Eileen Simpson’s beautiful, recently reissued memoir of her doomed marriage to the poet John Berryman, “Poets in Their Youth” (1982), read me twice, just a few weeks ago and about 30 or so years before that, when I was in my early 20s. I might well have been two different people.

Back when I was green and carefree — to borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, who makes several appearances in the book — I was in awe of Simpson’s poets. Berryman numbered among his most intimate friends Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. I was convinced these figures were heroes of modern life.

“What the hell is happiness?” Simpson quotes Berryman saying to her “with a happy laugh” when they had been married just a short time. Then, she writes, he asks “more uneasily, ‘Should a poet seek it?’” I thought that was a question worth pondering.

more here.

Salt
.

Salt in a wound worth its weight in salt.
Kiss that picques like fleur de sel de bretagne.
Love preserved like lemon in salt.
Preserved lemon, reserved love.

Salt of you mixes with salt of me.
Fish baked in salt crust
Take a hammer to break it
Like they do in Livorno.
Non mi ricordo pui di niente
except the salt sea of Sardinia
where I swam everyday for summers in a row
and tasted salt of your forearm
on the beach in beckoning breeze.
.

by Carolyn Wells
from Alimentum, The Literature of Food

Marjorie Perloff at the Times Literary Supplement:

Aldous Huxley, who wrote one of the funniest pastiches, assumed, as did many of his Modernist contemporaries, that Poe’s French admirers praised his work largely because they had no ear for English and thus couldn’t hear what Harold Bloom, in a scathing indictment, calls “Poe’s palpable vulgarity”. But wrong as Bloom may be about “French Poe”, his essay “Inescapable Poe”, which was first published in the New York Review of Books as a review of the Library of America two-volumeCollected Edition of Poe’s poetry and prose, is perhaps the most vigorous version of the argument against the poetry that McGann’s book is designed to dispel, even though he unaccountably makes no reference to it. The authority of “French Poe”, Bloom declares, “vanishes utterly when confronted by what Poe actually wrote”. And he begins by citing four lines from “For Annie”: “Sadly I know I am shorn of my strength, / And no muscle I move / As I lie at full length – / But no matter! – I feel I am better at length”. Bloom concludes, “These dreadful lines are by no means unrepresentative of Poe’s verse”. Taken out of context and exhibited without comment, the lines may well seem weak, but as the argument unfolds, what really worries Bloom is less Poe’s diction or rhythm than the notion that his entire oeuvre is a “hymn to negativity”: “Poe, seeking to avoid Emersonianism, ends with only one fact, and it is more a wish than a fact: ‘I will to be the Abyss.’ This metaphysical despair . . . cannot be refuted, because it is myth, and Poe backed the myth with his life as well as his work”. Indeed, so murky is Poe’s vision that there were at least eleven nineteenth-century American poets (not counting Emily Dickinson and Whitman) who were better than Poe: in chronological order – Willian Cullen Bryant, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Jones Very, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Timrod and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. “Poe scrambles for twelfth place with Sidney Lanier”. This is an eccentric judgement and Bloom knows it, turning it slightly on its side at the end of his essay when he acknowledges that Poe, or at least the myth of Poe, is “central to the American canon”: Hart Crane, for example, places Poe squarely in “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge, where the descent into the “interborough fissures of the mind” of the subway symbolizes the loss of the Emersonian vision of Self-Reliance.

more here.

Caroline Moorehead at Literary Review:

Ravensbrück was never intended as a death camp. The only concentration camp built entirely for women, it was planned by Himmler as a place of labour and re-education for prostitutes, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and vagrants – all the 'undesirables' of the new Nazi Germany. But as Sarah Helm documents with meticulous thoroughness, such was the level of brutality that the women died, first in their tens, then in their hundreds and finally in their thousands. Of the 130,000 women estimated to have entered the camp during the six years of its existence, as many as half, and possibly three-quarters, did not survive. The French ethnologist Germaine Tillion, who was sent there in 1943, described it as a place of 'slow extermination'.

Ravensbrück took its name from a village fifty miles north of Berlin, which stood on the edge of a lake surrounded by forests and flat marshy land. Locals called it the 'little Siberian Mecklenburg' on account of the glacial winds coming from the Baltic. The first 867 women arrived on 15 May 1939. They were stripped, washed, checked for lice and handed blue and white striped dresses and jackets, socks, wooden clogs and a white headscarf. Each was given a number and a coloured triangle made of felt to be sewn onto their clothes: black for prostitute, beggar or petty criminal, green for habitual criminals, lilac for Jehovah's Witnesses.

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Ben Jeffery at The Point:

The philosopher Georg Lukács once said that there was something nightmarish in the experience of an intellectual with no vision of the future. Underneath all of its obstructions and code, DeLillo’s writing seems to express the same thought. The future is a kind of narrative category, after all: the projected goal that gives the present its sense of order and purpose. It’s something we suffer without. For an individual, the inability to imagine life improving, or changing in any way other than badly, is a kind of death sentence. On the collective level, too, a society without any aspirations toward a better shared existence is condemned to the unchallenged perpetuation of injustice and misery, the ineradicable underside of all human history to date (and a horror that weighs “like a nightmare” on the living, as Marx so famously put it). DeLillo’s entire project has been based on a sense of disorientation that’s fundamentally political—the loss of a collective narrative, the transformation of a once-shared experience of America into something enigmatic and foreign. Part of Lukács’s point was that a society can’t suffer something like that without the damage making itself felt in everyday life, through all the sensations that DeLillo has spent his career so expertly evoking: confusion, anomie, anxiety, isolation, fear.

The obvious question is then: What would it be to overcome that? The most electrifying moments in Cosmopolis are gestures in the direction of an immense world order beyond the limits of ordinary perception.

more here.

Nigel Warburton in Five Books:

NW: Can you begin by saying something about the philosophy of information? When I studied philosophy there weren’t any courses on the philosophy of information so I’m not exactly sure what it is.

Ewen Calloway in Nature:

In a historic decision, the United Kingdom's House of Commons has voted to legalize a gene-therapy technique that could help women to avoid passing genetic defects onto their children. The vote, decided by 382 members of parliament casting in favour and 128 against, is expected to lead to the United Kingdom becoming the first country in the world to allow the transfer of DNA from diseased human eggs to healthy ones in the clinic.

This technique, known as mitochondrial replacement or three-person in vitro fertilization, aims to prevent women passing on harmful mutations in their mitochondria, the cell's energy-producing structures. An estimated 1 in 5,000 children are born with diseases caused by such mutations, which typically affect power-hungry tissues such as the brain, heart and muscles. All mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother, and some women carry harmful mitochondrial mutations without experiencing symptoms themselves. “It's great news for the patients with mitochondrial disease. It gives them real hopes and that's just fantastic,” says Doug Turnbull, a neurologist at Newcastle University, UK, who has led the effort to bring mitochondrial replacement to the clinic.

More here.