Sean O'Brien at the Times Literary Supplement:

One of the worst experiences for soldiers in the trenches seems to have been the sense that landscape itself had been dissolved and unwritten by the continuous bombardment known as drum-fire, and replaced by what David Jones called “the unformed voids of that mysterious existence”. Place, ground to stand on and comprehend, took on especial importance in a war of attrition. The places from which the war poets came, and to which they looked back, were often as bloodstained as Otterburn – Wilfred Owen’s Romano–Welsh border, Jones’s half-legendary Welsh interior, Siegfried Sassoon’s Sussex where the Normans invaded, and Rupert Brooke’s more generalized England, dulled, as apparently it seemed to him, by the long post-Napoleonic respite from direct military threat.

Wild Northumberland would have appealed to Julian Grenfell (1888–1915), who lived for the hunt and who in peacetime also felt an aristocratic liberty physically to attack those of whom he disapproved. In Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the poets knew, Max Egremont writes that, at Oxford, Grenfell “chased a Jewish millionaire undergraduate round the quad with a stock whip and beat up a cab driver who overcharged him”. He viewed the battlefield as an extension of his estate, as Keith Douglas’s “Sportsmen” would later bring the amateurism of the hunt to tank warfare in North Africa.

more here.

Toby Lichtig in The Telegraph:

From PhysOrg:

Humankind is capable of great accomplishments, such as sending probes into space and eradicating diseases; these achievements have been made possible because humans learn from their elders and enrich this knowledge over generations. It was previously thought that this cumulative aspect of culture—whereby small changes build up, are transmitted, used and enriched by others—was limited to humans, but it has now been observed in another primate, the baboon. While it is clear that monkeys like chimpanzees learn many things from their peers, each individual seems to start learning from scratch. In contrast, humans use techniques that evolve and improve from one generation to the next, and also differ from one population to another. The origin of cumulative culture in humans has therefore remained a mystery to scientists, who are trying to identify the necessary conditions for this cultural accumulation.

Nicolas Claidière and Joël Fagot, of the Laboratoire de psychologie cognitive, conducted the present study at the CNRS Primatology Center in Rousset, southeastern France. Baboons live in groups there and have free access to an area with touch screens where they can play a “memory game” specifically designed for the study. The screen briefly displays a grid of 16 squares, four of which are red and the others white. This image is then replaced by a similar grid, but composed of only white squares, and the baboons must touch the four squares that were previously red. Phase one of the experiment started with a task-learning period in which the position of the four red squares was randomized. Phase two comprised a kind of visual form of “Chinese whispers” wherein information was transmitted from one individual to another. In this second phase, a baboon's response (the squares touched on the screen) was used to generate the next grid pattern that the following baboon had to memorize and reproduce, and so on for 12 “generations.”

More here.

Saraswati Nandini Majumdar in Open the Magazine (Photo: Majority World/UIG/Getty Images) [h/t: Tunku Varadarajan]:

Any plan for the revitalisation of the Ganga and the ghats would ideally have to demonstrate a holistic understanding of the heritage that they together constitute and all the interwoven layers of living, evolving culture that they have given birth to and continue to nourish—rather than focusing on any one aspect of development over another, such as economic or environmental. In order to be truly meaningful and impactful, such a plan should work closely with the needs and desires, fears and dreams of the hundreds of individuals whose lives are inseparable from the river. That is, revitalisation and conservation should happen for the people of Benares themselves and for Ganga itself, which have always been interdependent.

The two main governmental efforts at revitalising the Ganga and the ghatshave been the Ganga Action Plan and the National Ganga River Basin project. The Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was conceived during Rajiv Gandhi’s term and consisted of three portions of funds allocated to UP, Bihar and West Bengal, aiming to put into place drains, sewers, sewage treatment plants, and electric crematoria, and also to beautify the ghats. For a number of reasons, despite the massive funds allocated and plans drawn up, the GAP was never successfully implemented or seen through to satisfactory results by the state and municipal governments.

The second major effort, the $1.5 billion National Ganga River Basin project, has been undertaken by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, supported by the World Bank since 2011. But, similar to the Ganga Action Plan, the National Ganga River Basin project has also failed to deliver, perhaps in large part because, as Vijay Jagannathan notes, the work has been channelled through the same state engineering agencies that were engaged in the GAP.

Today, the Ganga continues to suffer from the pollution of untreated sewage that flows directly into the river at a number of point sources. Water becomes dangerous for drinking or bathing when the Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BoD) level exceeds 3 mg/L. The BoD level at Benares is 3.4 mg/L, lower than that at Allahabad or Kanpur, but still exceedingly dangerous for humans, as well as for aquatic life such as the Ganges River Dolphin, now endangered.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times:

Homo sapiens has long sought to set itself apart from animals — that is, apart from every other living species. One of the most enduring attempts to define humanity in a way that distances us from the rest of animal life was Aristotle’s description of the human being as a “political animal.” By this he meant that human beings are the only species that live in the “polis” or city-state, though the term has often been understood to include villages, communes, and other organized social units. Implicit in this definition is the idea that all other animals are not political, that they live altogether outside of internally governed social units.

This supposed freedom from political strictures has motivated some, such as the 19th-century anarchist aristocrat Piotr Kropotkin, to take nonhuman animals as a model for human society. But for the most part the ostensibly nonpolitical character of animal life has functioned simply to exclude animals from human consideration as beings with interests of their own.

What might we be missing when we cut animals off in this way from political consideration? For one thing, we are neglecting a great number of solid scientific facts.

More here.

Bill Gates in his blog:

I’m in New Orleans, where I just had the honor of speaking at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH). As you can imagine, given that this is a gathering of experts on infectious diseases in poor countries, Ebola is on everyone’s mind.

Even though I am confident that the U.S. and other countries with strong public health systems will contain the cases that are popping up within their borders, it’s devastating to see what this virus is doing to entire families in West Africa. At times like this, it’s easy for organizations like ASTMH to make the public case that global health matters to all of us in our increasingly interconnected world. I hope that will help strengthen the public will to do more to help poor countries lift the burden of disease—not just from emerging killers like Ebola but also from pathogens that have held back human potential for thousands of years.

That’s why, in my remarks at the conference, I addressed the Ebola crisis but devoted the bulk of my time to another killer disease: malaria. Based on the progress I’m seeing in the lab and on the ground, I believe we’re now in a position to eradicate malaria—that is, wipe it out completely in every country—within a generation. This is one of the greatest opportunities the global health world has ever had. Melinda and I are so optimistic about it that we recently decided to increase our foundation’s malaria budget by 30 percent.

More here.

Will Self in The Guardian:

In 2006, as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were undertaking their second major incursion into Lebanon, I resigned as a Jew. I did it publicly in an article for the London Evening Standard. My resignation wasn’t a protest against Israeli aggression – why would they care about such a gesture? – but aimed, I believed, against prominent leftwing English Jews, who, despite the complete contradiction between their espoused values and the undemocratic, apartheid and territorially expansionist policies of the so-called Jewish homeland, continued vociferously to support Israel. A couple of years earlier, on Question Time, I had also challenged Melanie Phillips over her campaign to force British Muslims to take a loyalty oath, saying: if British Muslims, why not British Jews? But on that occasion, when she had accused me of being an antisemite, I was still able to play my trump card: I’m Jewish.

The reaction to my resignation was pretty muted. I did receive an email the following morning from a pressure group called Jews for Justice in Palestine, urging me to reconsider on the basis that it was perfectly possible for me to retain my Jewish identity while objecting to the activities of the Zionist state. In fact, I’d been surprised by my own apostasy (if it can be called that), and it’s only now, having read Shlomo Sand’s elegant and passionately felt essay, that I’ve come to understand why it is I resiled from … what? This heritage? Or is Jewry a people, a religion, or possibly – if pejoratively – a tribe?

Sand, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, is the author of The Invention of the Jewish People (2009), a discursive yet polemical work that systematically undermines the claim that Jewishness is necessary – let alone sufficient – to justify the claims of the Israeli state to the territory formerly known as Palestine. Now comes this short, highly personal text, which repurposes some of these arguments to serve existential ends; Sand asks the question: what, in this day and age, exactly is a secular Jew?

More here.

“To each Begum is to be delivered as follows:
one special dancing-girl of the dancing-girls of Sultan Ibrahim,
with one gold plate full of jewels – ruby and pearl,
cornelian and diamond, emerald and turquoise,
topaz and cat’s-eye and two small mother-o-pearl trays full of ashrafis.”
………………………………………………. –Babur, royal letter

Dancing Girl
.

I was born with a gift but now I have become one.

Kabul is cold.
Hardly the place to be dancing with naked feet.

The women I live amongst understand nothing
Of the craft I was bred for.

I would be lying if I said I no longer miss home,
Though I try not to dream of my years in the south.

The few friends I had died on our way here.

When those geese flew past the fortress turrets last night
I knew what I had guessed often before:

That all flight was impossible.

The stern ridges we crossed to get here,
Stare back at me now like the walls of a tomb.

They speak a tongue I am only beginning to learn.

When the Emperor’s men came for us,
I knew our world had ended.

The commander-in-chief had me first,
Then the other soldiers who came to fetch me.

I gave myself with rehearsed compliance.
This ensured it would be over quickly.

I was neither broken nor enraged.
I am used to this sort of thing.

When we were taken from our homes
I pitied myself,

But feel sorrier now for the woman I serve –

Poor, closeted wretch,

Read more »

Sarah Kerr in NYRB:

Wonder Woman stories showed women shackled in endless yards of ropes and chains—a constant theme in art from decades earlier demanding the right to vote. The traditional allegory of an island of Amazon princesses appears in feminist science fiction early in the twentieth century; the rhetoric of a nurturing, morally evolved strongwoman opposed to the war god Mars goes back even further. At the same time, the early comics often included a special insert, edited by a young female tennis champion and highlighting women heroes. Those chosen ranged from white suffragettes to Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, professional and sports pioneers, and a founder of the NAACP. It’s unlikely that any platform for American girls’ role models was as popular as this one until three decades later.

Wonder Woman was, in short, an explicitly feminist creation. Yet younger generations of feminists have lacked an awareness of the degree to which this is so, just as 1970s feminists were baffled when asked to identify pictures of the early suffragettes. So Wonder Woman is also the symbol of a culture-wide amnesia, part of the more general problem that American feminists can’t be inspired or taught the most useful lessons by their past until they gain a more cohesive sense of it.

On a literal level, too, Lepore has telling details to add to the feminist backstory of Wonder Woman. Officially, the comic (not a comic strip in a newspaper but a book following the serial adventures of a hero or in this case a heroine) was launched in 1941 by a man named William Moulton Marston. Marston, working under the name Charles Moulton, was without doubt the creator, but in practice he was assisted by his wife, Sadie Elizabeth Holloway Marston (sometimes called Sadie, sometimes Betty), and by a younger woman, Olive Byrne, who had lived with the married couple for years. After Marston died, in 1947, Sadie and Olive would live together for several more decades. The trio’s domestic arrangement has often been called “polyamorous,” a shorthand label that doesn’t quite capture its alternating vibes of sexual fluidity, personal and professional fusion, and the convenience of its work–life balance.

In any case, Olive became the main rearer of both women’s children by Marston. And Olive was none other than the niece of Margaret Sanger.

More here.

May Rice in The Morning News:

How scary is Chicago? People usually talk about how dangerous it is instead, and that’s certainly the more quantifiable trait. You can use police data to model the probability of being murdered: seven or 18 in 100,000 as of 2013, depending how you do the math. Fear matters to quality of life, too, though, and it’s tied to the same crime data. It’s just conceptually different. Danger is the probability you’ll be the victim of a crime; fear is the probability you see crime as a real possibility in your daily life, something worth thinking about and taking precautions against. Fear is being the friend of a friend of a murder victim, or hearing gunshots while you’re making dinner. Each crime generates a lot less danger than fear.When I first started thinking about fear in Chicago—around the time I was seeing alley guy in the street a lot—I looked mostly at murder numbers. They’re tough to fudge, and there’s a database worth of them, laid out on a beautiful interactive map, on the Chicago Tribune site. But the stats prompt more questions than they answer.

In 2013, Chicago had 440 murders. That’s less than half the 900-ish homicides per year the city endured in the 1990s. In fact, as Andrew Papachristos noted, Chicago’s recent violent crime rates put it in the middle of the pack for American cities—eons from the country’s murder capital, which is currently Detroit. Chicago’s on track for even fewer homicides in 2014 than it had in 2013. Still, over this year’s Fourth of July weekend, there was a towering murder spike: 14 people killed in one weekend, and 84 shot. It was bad enough that Roland S. Martin argued, in the Daily Beast, that Obama should send the National Guard to Chicago. Not a popular opinion, but in a Gawker roundtable critiquing Martin’s “narrow-minded” solution, no one contested the problem’s magnitude. Jason Parham referred to it as “the terror taking place.”

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker:

Basinski’s music is difficult to classify. Minimalist composers and sampling artists are related, but only somewhat. His loops are being voiced neither by humans—who repeat figures in a way that involves a fairly high level of variation—nor by digital devices like samplers and software programs, which come close to no variation at all. Basinski’s music is based on the flutter in the machine. Digital technology flattened out the analog machine: tape-deck speeds vary, but the speed of iTunes doesn’t. Basinski’s innovation was to step back not a hundred years, and pick up a banjo or a steel guitar, but maybe forty or so years, and find the organic change—the aging, if you will—at the heart of early audio machinery. Basinski’s loops are defined by the fact that machines are always in the process of failing, and that change itself is a form of composition. Like hip-hop producers, who develop sample banks of favored snares and hi-hats from old songs, Basinski has built a career from fragments of thirty-year-old tape.

The changes in his loops are infinitesimal and almost imperceptible, very close to the adjustments a musician might make when repeating a phrase, but slightly more dependable. It’s a loose repetition: a train going across the tracks, the sound of coins dropping into a farebox on a city bus, the flutter of an oscillating fan in summer.

more here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

People overrate the chances of dying in a plane crash and guess incorrectly at the odds that a coin toss will yield 'heads' after a string of several 'tails'. Yet humans have an innate sense of chance, a study of indigenous Maya people suggests. Adults in Guatemala who have never learned a formal number system or a written language did as well as formally educated adults and children at estimating the probability of chance events¹, the researchers found.

Children are born with a sense of number, and the roots of our mathematical abilities seem to exist in monkeys, chickens and even salamanders. But evidence has suggested that the ability to assess the chances of a future event is not as innate. In a 1972 study, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, and the late psychologist Amos Tversky found that educated adults incorrectly judged the sequence of coin tosses 'heads-heads-heads-tails-tails-tails' as less probable than 'heads-tails-heads-tails-tails-heads'². (Any such sequence has the same exact probability, 1/64, of occurring.) Other researchers have pointed to the fact that the mathematics of probability were not worked out until the seventeenth century to argue that probabilistic reasoning is not innate and relies on formal education. More recent research has pointed to a primitive sense of probability. In a study published in December 2013 and titled “Apes are intuitive statisticians”, researchers found that chimpanzees, gorillas and other great apes made decisions on the basis of the chances of receiving a preferred treat such as a banana over a less-coveted carrot³.

More here.

Jan Morris at Literary Review:

In death as in life, Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor, DSO, etc., etc., marches epically on.

Paddy (as he is known to nearly one and all) left us three years ago, but since then he has been commemorated by majestic obituaries everywhere, a magnificent biography, a reconstructed final volume of his own masterpiece of travel writing, an eager book of travel that follows in his footsteps and a website largely dedicated to his memory. Now we have a book that specifically commemorates him not as an adolescent adventurer, or as a scholar-linguist, or as a gypsy-wanderer, or as a legendary hero, or even as the wonderful writer that he ultimately became, but as a soldier. Not so much as a regimental soldier – he would surely have been a curse to stickler adjutants – but as a born guerrilla, in a military métier that the British enthusiastically adopted in the Second World War.

When they found themselves outgunned, outnumbered and often outfought in that conflict, they threw, with Churchill's keen support, many talents into the unconventional ranks of the Special Operation Executive, formed particularly to wage war behind the enemy lines. It was this cloudy outfit that in 1942 sent Captain Leigh Fermor as an undercover operative into German-occupied Crete.

more here.

Craig Raine at The New Statesman:

John Updike has unnecessarily acquitted Schiele of the charge of pornography, on the grounds that his women are too gaunt and too ugly to be arousing. Julian Barnes, in a paroxysm of primness at the end of a piece about Lucian Freud’s nudes, claimed that Freud’s women are so mercilessly, so punitively exposed that it would be difficult to masturbate to them successfully. Really? Both writers seem to me to be lying about male interest in sexual fundamentals, in genitalia, and the role that obscenity and ugliness play in sexual excitement. Beauty isn’t a requirement and sometimes, like love, it can be a disadvantage. Look at Lucian Freud’s breathtaking and definitive Portrait Fragment (1971) and contemplate the undiluted sexual impulse. It is a painting of pure male desire in all its impurity. To the fore, a pair of open thighs and the indelicate, fundamental female thing in all its inextinguishable power. It is the business. The rest of the body – torso, breasts, the underside of the chin – is there but it’s beside the point.

There is very little Schiele in England – one drypoint etching in Birmingham and one in the V&A. So this exhibition is important. The 38 nudes on show at the Courtauld are deliberate provocations to desire – contorted, splayed, semi-clothed and often, therefore, candidly pornographic. The models display themselves to the painter and us “as to a midwife”, in the words of John Donne’s “To His Mistress Going to Bed”.

more here.

Robert Wade on the economic occupation of the West Bank in the LRB:

[O]n a dusty dirt road outside Nablus, with the Israeli security fence on one side and an olive grove on the other, I met two brothers walking towards the town some three kilometres away, where they lived. They had been working on their (ancestral) land on the Israeli side of the fence. The Israelis manned a gate closer to the town, they said, but opened it for only one hour in the early morning, one hour at midday and one hour in the late afternoon. If they wanted to come or go at other times they walked, or sometimes drove a tractor, several kilometres to the next gate, which had more extended opening hours. They also each needed a permit to cross the fence. The permits didn’t last long. The period varied but was commonly about two months. When it expired the men had to apply for another permit, which could take weeks. Last year they applied for a permit to cover the period for harvesting their greenhouse tomatoes, their main source of income. But it took 40 days to arrive, by which time the crop had rotted. They had two more brothers who were not allowed to cross the fence under any circumstances, because years before they had been jailed for protesting against Israeli rule.

On to a nearby herder community, where fifty households tend several thousand head of sheep and goats on barren land. Electricity lines run overhead, water and sewage pipes run below, but the herders have no access to them. They buy water from an Israeli-owned water depot some distance away. They can pay for an Israeli-owned tanker to bring water to their cistern; but it was cheaper for them to tow their own water container to the depot behind a tractor, fill it, and pull it back home. In 2008 the Israeli authorities confiscated their water container, saying it did not meet standards. Now they pay the extra for the Israeli-owned tanker delivery.

The Palestinian Hydrology Group, an NGO, has been working for more than twenty years to improve water and sanitation facilities throughout the West Bank. The Nablus office has provided toilets to fifty poor communities, including this settlement of herders. In Israeli eyes the toilets are illegal, because built without a permit. The PHG knows from experience that the chances of getting a permit are practically zero. So, backed by Spanish aid, it built quickly collapsible toilet cabins. With just a few minutes’ notice the components can be spirited out of sight and reassembled when the soldiers are gone. In Area C of the West Bank (more than 60 per cent of the territory) it is illegal even to mend a failing water cistern without a permit – which is rarely given. Solar panels would require a permit, too.

The same restrictions mean that areas A and B of the West Bank (40 per cent of the territory), where Palestinians have greater scope for self-government, cannot be connected to scale-efficient infrastructure networks for electricity and water. The areas are fragmented (ghettoised) into small enclaves surrounded by area C land, where infrastructure projects require Israeli permits, which are rarely given. This greatly increases the cost of infrastructure services and restricts their supply to most of the West Bank population.

More here.

Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari in the NYRB blog (Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos):

Osvaldo Ferrari: Many people still ask whether Borges believes in God, because at times they feel he does and at times that he doesn’t.

Jorge Luis Borges: If God means something in us that strives for good, yes. If he’s thought of as an individual being, then no, I don’t believe. I believe in an ethical proposition, perhaps not in the universe but in each one of us. And if I could I would add, like Blake, an aesthetic and an intellectual proposition but with reference to individuals again. I’m not sure it would apply to the universe. I remember Tennyson’s line: “Nature red in tooth and claw.” He wrote that because so many people talked about a gentle Nature.

Ferrari: What you have just said confirms my impression that your possible conflict about belief or disbelief in God has to do with the possibility that God may be just or unjust.

Borges: Well, I think that it’s enough to glance at the universe to note that justice certainly does not rule. I recall a line from Almafuerte: “With delicate art, I spread a caress on every reptile, I did not think justice was necessary when pain rules everywhere.” In another line, he says, “All I ask is justice / but better to ask for nothing.” Already to ask for justice is to ask for much, too much.

Ferrari: Yet, you also recognize in the world the existence of happiness—in a library, perhaps, but other kinds of happiness too.

Borges: That, yes, of course. I would say that happiness can be momentary but that it also happens frequently, it can happen, for instance, even in our dialogue.

More here.

From The Huffington Post:

Ashura, an optional fast day for Muslims that commemorates different things for Sunnis and Shiites, falls on Nov. 2-3, 2014. The word itself, ashura, means 10, and the holiday is the 10th day of the Islamic month of Muharram. The Islamic calendar is lunar, so the date of Ashura can vary depending on sighting of the moon. Ashura marks many things: the creation of the world, Noah's departure from the ark, Moses' flight from Egypt and the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Hussein ibn Ali, in 680 A.D. Sunni Muslims consider Ashura a fast day for two reasons: Muhammad fasted then and Moses fasted in appreciation of the successful Exodus for Egypt. Shiite Muslims mark Ashura as a day of mourning for the Prophet Muhammad's grandson. In fact, Hussein's martyrdom is one of two major events that led to the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam. Shiites, who constitute Islam's second-largest denomination (about 10-15 percent of the world Muslim population), consider Hussein to be the one true heir of Muhammad's legacy. Shiite Muslims observe Ashura through mourning rituals such as self-flagellation and reenactments of the martyrdom. Many travel to Karbala in Iraq, where Hussein was killed, as a pilgrimage on Ashura. Most observers wear black and march through the streets chanting and hitting themselves in the chest. Some use whips and chains — or cut themselves on the forehead — to ritually punish their bodies. This practice has been condemned by some Shiite leaders, so Ashura blood drives are often organized as a substitute.

More here.

Michael Dirda at the Washignton Post:

Friday night, at least a few vampires and Frankenstein monsters will knock on our doors even as old Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi films play once more in darkened family rooms. Some of us may even sit down to reread Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” or Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

But how many people even know about John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the first story in English about a magnetically charismatic aristocrat who acquires renewed vitality by preying thirstily on beautiful young women? While Polidori may call this fiend Lord Ruthven, he nonetheless obviously is modeled after the poet who was notoriously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”: Lord Byron.

In “The Poet and the Vampyre­,” Andrew McConnell Stott, a professor of English at the University at Buffalo, has produced a learned, constantly entertaining and deliciously gossipy account of the erotic and personal entanglements that led up to, and away from, the most famous wet evening in Romantic literature: As the rain poured down outside the Villa Diodati in Switzerland on June 16, 1816, the restless, self-exiled Byron announced to a group of friends, “We will each write a ghost story.”

more here.