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.

Nathan Dunne at Aeon Magazine:

Rothko’s paintings, and their context within the chapel, resonate in ways not dissimilar to Graceland. The chapel allows for contemplation and prayer through painting, where the album embeds notion of inequality, alienation and racism among spritely 1980s synths and loose dance rhythms. Put simply, apartheid is burbling under the surface of Graceland, while in the Rothko Chapel the paintings create a highly personal response, one that, at least in Timothy’s case, resonates with the plight of the disfranchised and the unseen.

The landscape, the nude or the teapot generally require the viewer to see a certain object. Rothko’s abstraction allowed Timothy to hear the subject of representation

Perhaps there is something inherently musical in the experience of abstract art. Wassily Kandinsky’s abstractions were the result of a lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between sound and colour. He discovered his synaesthesia at a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin in Moscow: ‘I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.’ Synaesthesia unites the senses in such a way that the stimulation of one acts like a powerful domino for the others, involuntarily collapsing them together.

more here.

Tribhuvan died in 1955, his promises unfulfilled, and left the throne to his son Mahendra. A struggle ensued between the new king and a Congress-led transitional government formed in 1951. In 1959, Mahendra unilaterally promulgated a multi-party constitution that preserved much of the monarchy’s power, which the political parties accepted in return for the guarantee of democratic elections. When the Congress swept those polls, Mahendra seized power by force, banned all parties, and suspended the constitution.

more here.

Jed S. Rakoff in the NYRB (Brittany Murray/Long Beach Press-Telegram/AP Images):

[T]he information-deprived defense lawyer, typically within a few days after the arrest, meets with the overconfident prosecutor, who makes clear that, unless the case can be promptly resolved by a plea bargain, he intends to charge the defendant with the most severe offenses he can prove. Indeed, until late last year, federal prosecutors were under orders from a series of attorney generals to charge the defendant with the most serious charges that could be proved—unless, of course, the defendant was willing to enter into a plea bargain. If, however, the defendant wants to plead guilty, the prosecutor will offer him a considerably reduced charge—but only if the plea is agreed to promptly (thus saving the prosecutor valuable resources). Otherwise, he will charge the maximum, and, while he will not close the door to any later plea bargain, it will be to a higher-level offense than the one offered at the outset of the case.

In this typical situation, the prosecutor has all the advantages. He knows a lot about the case (and, as noted, probably feels more confident about it than he should, since he has only heard from one side), whereas the defense lawyer knows very little. Furthermore, the prosecutor controls the decision to charge the defendant with a crime. Indeed, the law of every US jurisdiction leaves this to the prosecutor’s unfettered discretion; and both the prosecutor and the defense lawyer know that the grand jury, which typically will hear from one side only, is highly likely to approve any charge the prosecutor recommends.

But what really puts the prosecutor in the driver’s seat is the fact that he—because of mandatory minimums, sentencing guidelines (which, though no longer mandatory in the federal system, are still widely followed by most judges), and simply his ability to shape whatever charges are brought—can effectively dictate the sentence by how he publicly describes the offense. For example, the prosecutor can agree with the defense counsel in a federal narcotics case that, if there is a plea bargain, the defendant will only have to plead guilty to the personal sale of a few ounces of heroin, which carries no mandatory minimum and a guidelines range of less than two years; but if the defendant does not plead guilty, he will be charged with the drug conspiracy of which his sale was a small part, a conspiracy involving many kilograms of heroin, which could mean a ten-year mandatory minimum and a guidelines range of twenty years or more. Put another way, it is the prosecutor, not the judge, who effectively exercises the sentencing power, albeit cloaked as a charging decision.

The defense lawyer understands this fully, and so she recognizes that the best outcome for her client is likely to be an early plea bargain, while the prosecutor is still willing to accept a plea to a relatively low-level offense. Indeed, in 2012, the average sentence for federal narcotics defendants who entered into any kind of plea bargain was five years and four months, while the average sentence for defendants who went to trial was sixteen years.

More here.

Zeynep Tufekci in Medium:

I’ve taught “introduction to research methods” to undergraduate students for many years, and they would sometimes ask me why they should care about all this “method stuff”, besides having a required class for a sociology major out of the way. I would always tell them, without understanding research methods, you cannot understand how to judge what you see.

The Hollaback video shows us exactly why.

The Hollaback video also shows why “data” without theory can be so misleading—and how the same data can fit multiple theories. Since all data collection involves some form of data selection (even the biggest dataset has selection going into what gets included, from what source), and since data selection is always a research method, there is always a need for understanding methods.

First, let’s list all the hypothesis compatible with the “data”, this video:

Hypothesis 1- Men of color are disproportionately more likely to catcall, especially to a white, conventionally attractive female.

Hypothesis 2- All men are equally likely to catcall but the makers of the video were biased, consciously or unconsciously, against black men (and edited out men of other races on purpose.)

2.a Consciously: they are racists and are playing to the “white women endangered by black men” trope — which has a long and ugly history, hence the concern raised by many over the past week.

2.b Unconsciously: There is a methodological twist to the research which creates this outcome.

2.c. Both 2.a. and 2.b are true.

Hypothesis 3- It’s a spurious correlation: there is some other reason that caused these two events to go together

The important methodological point is that the video, without further reflection, can support all three wildly incompatible propositions. In other words, if you just look at the video, you can believe any three, and you will likely choose whichever fits your existing conclusions and prejudices.

Let’s start with 3, the easiest to dismiss.

A spurious correlation occurs when a third, unrelated variable, causes a change in other variables, which then seem like they are causally connected even though they are not. And since the human brain is a narrative writing machine, seeing A and B together makes people write stories that tie A and B. A silly, but correct, example is the correlation between ice cream and murder: during months when more people eat ice cream, there are more murders. This is not because popsicles are good murder devices. This spurious correlation caused by a confounding variable: the season.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover and Peter Byrne in Quanta (image Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine):

If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable.

To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite “multiverse” would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life. In this scenario, our good luck is inevitable: A peculiar, life-friendly bubble is all we could expect to observe.

Many physicists loathe the multivere hypothesis, deeming it a cop-out of infinite proportions. But as attempts to paint our universe as an inevitable, self-contained structure falter, the multiverse camp is growing.

The problem remains how to test the hypothesis. Proponents of the multiverse idea must show that, among the rare universes that support life, ours is statistically typical. The exact dose of vacuum energy, the precise mass of our underweight Higgs boson, and other anomalies must have high odds within the subset of habitable universes. If the properties of this universe still seem atypical even in the habitable subset, then the multiverse explanation fails.

But infinity sabotages statistical analysis. In an eternally inflating multiverse, where any bubble that can form does so infinitely many times, how do you measure “typical”?

More here.

Jeffery DelViscio in The New York Times:

In February, William Sanford Nye, better known as Bill Nye the science guy, stepped onto a stage in Kentucky and faced down a hostile crowd in a debate that pitted evolution against creationism. It wasn’t his first time in the ring in science’s corner. In recent years, Mr. Nye has transitioned from the zany, on-screen face of an educational show on PBS, which ran from 1993 to 1998, to a hardened warrior for science on cable news programs and speaking tours of colleges and universities around the United States. In the news media, the final scorecard at the end of the science versus creationism debate was itself debated. Some said Mr. Nye won. Some suggested the in just showing up, he lost. One certainty did come from it: Mr. Nye said that it compelled him to drop everything he was doing to write a book. That book, “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation” has just been released. I talked to Mr. Nye, 58, last month about bumblebees, the debate and why it made him think of death and the need to write the book. Here is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Q: Talk about the title, “The Science of Creation.” It seems like clever wordplay with creation science. Is that what you meant?

A: Well, creation for me is all that we can see. It’s the universe, all the stars, and I guess now the dark matter and dark energy and you and me. And I would claim that it’s an older, more traditional use of the word creation. It’s nature.

You bring up nature early in your book and you talk about the flight of bumblebees and how that fascinated you at a young age.

It still does. If you ever look at a bumblebee, it’s a pretty big rig. It’s a pretty big abdomen, thorax head situation with these tiny wings. And yet they’re able to flop and fly like crazy, hover backwards and forwards, up and down, find their way to flowers, fill up the pollen basket. If you really take time and watch a bee with a pollen basket, it’s full. I mean, it’s carrying a load like a couple buckets of water slung over your shoulder. To me, it’s remarkable.

More here.

Just There

We have not given up hope
though we know
in the end
we will live in the place
we do not wish to.

At the beginning
we will be unhappy
even restless,
we will not like –
the peepul tree opposite,
the ever-coughing neighbour,
children yelling out film songs
tunelessly,
hordes of pariah dogs barking
throughout the night,
the unseasonal weather too.

Then we will reassure ourselves
what have we to do with all this –
a few days more
and we move on.

As time passes
in the evenings
we too will sit on the platform
under the peepul tree,
greet, with folded hands,
the old man passing by,
scatter grains in the courtyard
for birds to peck at.

Read more »

Imran Mir. Untitled. 2014.

Photo sent to me by the artist in March 2014.

Imran Mir, pre-eminent Pakistani graphic designer; serious, inspired, thoughtful, whimsical, prolific artist; a man of great heart, and an immensely generous soul; died on October 28, 2014.

Photo taken by Sughra Raza in Bentota, Sri Lanka, Jan 2010.

When I joined the Central Institute of the Arts Council in Karachi as a first year student, Imran, a senior student, immediately became a friend and an inspiration. For the next forty plus years while I moved to the US and took a different path, Imran never for a moment faltered in his encouragement and insistence that I continue to be an artist. Because of Imran, my Karachi identity was forever as an artist rather than a doctor and I loved that respite!

The thought of Karachi without Imran feels painfully hollow. His incredible loyalty, generosity, thoughtfulness, creativity, sense of humor, and passionate joie de vivre is etched in his wife and sons, and will continue to be deeply cherished by family and countless friends.

With deepest appreciation for the very fine human being you were, and for your love of music, Imran, I offer this most sublime lament, Beethoven's Opus 131, string quartet #14: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW8wdpfkpM0

The following is from Imran's forthcoming memoir (printed here with permission from Nighat Mir and Noorjehan Bilgrami). Imran had planned the book launch for November 22nd, 2014.

Read more »

The following is excerpted and adapted from the epilogue to the paperback version of Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, out this month from Vintage Books.

Betty Medsger in TruthOut:

It was clear to Judi Feingold what she should do after she and seven other people broke into an FBI office near Philadelphia in 1971, removed every file and then anonymously distributed them to two members of Congress and three journalists:

Get out of town.

She took drastic steps. Remaining in Philadelphia seemed dangerous, so she left town and headed west, moved into the underground and lived under an assumed name, moving from place to place west of the Rockies for years, owning only a sleeping bag and what she could carry in her knapsack. As she was about to detach herself from her past geography and her personal connections, she called her parents and told them she had committed a nonviolent direct action “and was possibly being pursued by the federal government. I told them I could not be in touch by phone, and I would do my best to let them know how I was, but not where I was.”

During the forty-three years since the burglary, none of the other burglars knew anything about Feingold’s whereabouts. Efforts to find her in recent years had failed. Some even thought she might have died.

More here.

Zachariah Mampilly in The Monkey Cage (Issouf Sanogo/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images):

As events in Burkina Faso move ahead at breakneck pace, I’m struck by how much they encapsulate different political struggles that have defined African protest since the anti-colonial period. Political transformations across Africa have rarely come piecemeal. Instead, they tend to come in waves, sweeping across the region and leaving massive social transformations in their wake.

I am currently finishing a book on African protest with Adam Branch. In it, we examine the two prior waves of African protests and offer evidence that we are currently in the midst of a third. The first wave includes the nationalist protests of the 1950s, a set of uprisings that culminated in the formal independence of almost all African states. The second wave encompasses protests centered in West Africa that occurred between the mid-1980s to early 1990s. These protests, a response to brutal austerity measures imposed upon African states by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, sparked a major era of formal democratization across the continent. With only three democracies prior to the protests, by the mid-1990s Africa could boast 20 democracies, with numerous more states holding elections.

Yet, despite these earlier waves and the political transformations they initiated, African protests are often ignored. We document more than 90 popular uprisings in more than 40 African states since 2005. By our measure, the heralded North African protests of 2011 represented not the first ripple of a wave, but rather its crest, with 26 African countries (including Burkina Faso) experiencing popular protests that year. Since then, protests have continued but have rarely generated the sort of attention devoted to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Why? Political change in the rest of Africa is often thought to result from violent conflict or external intervention. Africans themselves are presumed to be too rural, too ethnic or too poor for popular politics to lead to political transformation. Even today, as protests increasingly shake up ossified regimes and de facto one-party states, little attention is paid to the broader wave of protests unfolding across Africa and what it portends for the future of the continent.

More here.

Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood.

Penny Bailey in Mosaic:

His doctor drove him over the border. It was quicker that way: if the man donated in Switzerland, his blood would be delayed while paperwork was filled out and authorisations sought.

The nurse in Annemasse, France, could tell from the label on the blood bag destined for Paris that this blood was pretty unusual. But when she read the details closely, her eyes widened. Surely it was impossible for this man seated beside her to be alive, let alone apparently healthy?

Thomas smiled to himself. Very few people in the world knew his blood type did – could – exist. And even fewer shared it. In 50 years, researchers have turned up only 40 or so other people on the planet with the same precious, life-saving blood in their veins.

More here.

Sarah-Jane Stratford in the LA Review of Books:

LOS ANGELES does not, perhaps, get enough credit for feeding the imaginations of science fiction writers. Our original cinematic visions of imagined futures — often dystopian wastelands — were shaped by their film locations on what was then undeveloped land outside Los Angeles. Even the futuristic worlds on soundstages called back to Los Angeles, a city whose rapid growth was multi-pronged and haphazard. But despite the sprawl and isolating car culture that fueled dystopian fancies, the city has certainly not been a dystopia. When we talk about the pace and occasionally impractical results of LA’s development, often conducted without long-term considerations, we tend to overlook the beauty, inventiveness, and quirky charm of so much of LA’s architecture. It’s no wonder Los Angeles has long been a home to writers who found comfort, space, and privacy to let their minds wander through the thicket of human experience.

Some of LA’s most inventive residents, like Ray Bradbury, attempted to use the conduit of literature to prevent LA from actually becoming the dystopian world it had helped people envision. But while LA’s isolation and tension, and excessive concrete, may themselves not have been a problem, they are being met with a new difficulty: mansionization. And as this trend gains apace, the city is in danger of inadvertently creating exactly the sort of desolate society it has excelled in rendering as entertainment.

Plenty of people knew that for over 50 years, Bradbury lived in the peaceful enclave of Cheviot Hills, nestled in West LA, but it was only when photos of his home were published prior to its sale this past June that admirers were able to revel in the writing sanctuary he’d carved for himself in the basement of the comparatively modest 1937 home. The story and photos were seen and discussed in newspapers around the world, and for a moment, people felt connected to the mechanics of story-making. Literature touches us, offers guidance as we wend our way through life’s daily labyrinth, and when a door is opened onto the business of its creation, we can’t help but feel awed and grateful, both for the work and the privilege of understanding its physical origin, even if we can’t — and shouldn’t — access the emotional nucleus. Bradbury’s house offered a glimpse not only of his own writing process, but also of the magical space that LA can make available to writers.

More here.

Alana Massey in Jacobin:

Just as opponents of reproductive self-determination rely heavily on the images of babies murdered by their mothers in an attempt to shame women seeking abortions, those that oppose sex work use the specter of trafficked young women to condemn any movement seeking to decriminalize sexual labor.

And because sex work activists are primarily female, they’re expected to have a sympathetic and thoughtful response to trafficking, to be a kind of caregiver for trafficking victims. As a result, arguments are reduced to caveats and apologies; discourses about labor rights take a backseat to those about trafficking.

To understand how labor conversations are so easily co-opted, a brief look at the current state of sex work discourse is instructive. In September, the International Human Trafficking, Prostitution, and Sex Work Conference was held in Toledo. It was hosted exclusively by anti-trafficking groups and prominently featured material framing all commercial sex as a form of slavery.

The Huffington Post recently aggregated a series of posts from Ravishlyentitled, “Is Sex Work Empowering or Enslaving?” and even in the absence of more nuanced or relevant options, it was considered progress by some that anyone thought to ask rather than preemptively conclude.

And earlier this year, Katha Pollitt wrote a review of Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work in which she hoped for another book entirely instead of critiquing the substance of Grant’s work: “Grant says barely a word about the women at the heart of this debate: those who are enslaved and coerced — illegal immigrants, young girls, runaways and throwaways, many of them survivors of sexual trauma, as well as transwomen and others cast out of mainstream society.”

With her highly visible status, Pollitt is free to determine the real heart of the debate around sexual labor — and overlook evidence showing most women in the sex industry do not feel more exploited than other workers.

The notable absence from most of these conversations is sex workers themselves, as Lindsay Roth, a sex worker activist with Project SAFE in Philadelphia, told me via email: “Anti-trafficking advocates usually are not asking the questions, they are setting the agenda. They do not engage with us. They have created a discourse that continues to engage with the women we work with as invisible.”

More here.