David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

Last weekend’s deadly attack on an international hospital in Afghanistan was a reminder of the terrible war that grinds on there, with Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire.

Doctors Without Borders, a globally respected group, has charged that the deaths of 22 patients and staff members at its hospital in Kunduz was a “war crime.” The United States has promised to investigate what Gen. John Campbell, the NATO commander in Kabul, says was a mistake.

The hospital bombing comes as the United States is quietly exploring some diplomatic options that could reduce the violence in Afghanistan — and perhaps even curb the danger of a nuclear Pakistan next door. As with most diplomacy in South Asia, these prospects are “iffy,” at best. But they open a window on what’s happening in a part of the world that, except for disasters such as the Kunduz incident, gets little attention these days.

The United States recognized more than four years ago that the best way out of the Afghanistan conflict would be a diplomatic settlement that involved the Taliban and its sometime sponsors in Pakistan. State Department officials have been conducting secret peace talks, on and off, since 2011. That effort hasn’t borne fruit yet, as the Taliban’s recent offensive in Kunduz shows.

But the pace of negotiations has quickened this year, thanks to an unlikely U.S. diplomatic partnership with China.

More here.

Darling Coffee

The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me ‘This too?’—
query of tenderness
under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
Let’s find a room
with a window onto elms
strung with sunlight,
a cafe with polished cups,
darling coffee they call it,
may our bed be stoked
with fresh cut rosemary
and glinting thyme,
all herbs in due season
tucked under wild sheets:
fit for the conjugation of joy.

by Meena Alexander
from Poem-a-Day
Academy of American Poets

Steven Pinker in The Guardian:

People often ask me why I followed my 2011 book on the history of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, with a writing style manual. I like to say that after having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial comma.

It’s not much of an exaggeration. After two decades of writing popular books and articles about language, I’ve learned that people have strong opinions on the quality of writing today, with almost everyone finding it deplorable. I’ve also come to realise that people are confused about what exactly they should deplore. Outrage at mispunctuation gets blended with complaints about bureaucratese and academese, which are conflated with disgust at politicians’ evasions, which in turn are merged with umbrage at an endless list of solecisms, blunders, and peeves.

I can get as grumpy as anyone about bad writing. But as a scientist who studies language for a living (and who has had to unlearn the bad habits of academic writing) I long ago developed my own opinions on why so much prose is so egregious.

Contrary to the ubiquitous moaning about the imminent demise of the language, this is not a new problem. Similar lamentations about the slovenly habits of the young and the decline of English have appeared regularly since the invention of the printing press.

More here.

A Japanese mathematician claims to have solved one of the most important problems in his field. The trouble is, hardly anyone can work out whether he's right.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Sometime on the morning of 30 August 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki quietly posted four papers on his website.

The papers were huge — more than 500 pages in all — packed densely with symbols, and the culmination of more than a decade of solitary work. They also had the potential to be an academic bombshell. In them, Mochizuki claimed to have solved the abc conjecture, a 27-year-old problem in number theory that no other mathematician had even come close to solving. If his proof was correct, it would be one of the most astounding achievements of mathematics this century and would completely revolutionize the study of equations with whole numbers.

Mochizuki, however, did not make a fuss about his proof. The respected mathematician, who works at Kyoto University's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences (RIMS) in Japan, did not even announce his work to peers around the world. He simply posted the papers, and waited for the world to find out.

Probably the first person to notice the papers was Akio Tamagawa, a colleague of Mochizuki's at RIMS. He, like other researchers, knew that Mochizuki had been working on the conjecture for years and had been finalizing his work. That same day, Tamagawa e-mailed the news to one of his collaborators, number theorist Ivan Fesenko of the University of Nottingham, UK. Fesenko immediately downloaded the papers and started to read. But he soon became “bewildered”, he says. “It was impossible to understand them.”

More here.

From Phys.org:

A plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe – has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing 'teeth' that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal's legs when it launches into a jump.

The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the “first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure“.

Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.

The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.

Each gear tooth has a rounded corner at the point it connects to the gear strip; a feature identical to man-made gears such as bike gears – essentially a shock-absorbing mechanism to stop teeth from shearing off.

The gear teeth on the opposing hind-legs lock together like those in a car gear-box, ensuring almost complete synchronicity in leg movement – the legs always move within 30 'microseconds' of each other, with one microsecond equal to a millionth of a second.

This is critical for the powerful jumps that are this insect's primary mode of transport, as even miniscule discrepancies in synchronisation between the velocities of its legs at the point of propulsion would result in “yaw rotation” – causing the Issusto spin hopelessly out of control.

More here.

Alex Needham in The Guardian:

On forgiveness

“The really vile and violent and bestial treatment of slaves and their descendants did not succeed in making those descendants reproduce that violence and that corruption and that bestiality. It’s contemporary, but the survivors and the family members who were killed in that church [in Charleston] did not say of the killer ‘I want him dead’ – it was something grander and more humane. It was eloquent and elegant, the response of forgiveness. We sometimes understand that generosity, and I’m not going to tear you up, as a kind of weakness whereas I always thought that that was extreme strength.”

On her experience of community in the deep south

“When we were travelling in the south, there were carriages where black people sat but the most important thing was the porters, who gave you twice as much orange juice and four sandwiches and two pillows – they were so excessively generous and kind that it was like a luxury car. I was thinking not too long ago that when I was at Cornell and I saw a black man I would run toward him – then I thought that these days, with all the discussion about black men as threats, I may not do that. But I certainly wouldn’t run toward a white man, I might just have to flip along by myself.”

On her father’s hatred of white people

“Was he racist? Big time. He wouldn’t let white people in the house. My mother was just the opposite – she didn’t care who you were if you were nice to her. Later, I went down to the little town in Georgia where my father was born and one of the men who was a child at the time said that my father had seen two black men lynched on his street – they were businessmen, they had little stores and so on. He was 14 and he left and went to California and ended up living in Ohio. I think seeing that at 14 – the lynching of two neighbours – and that’s why he thought that white people were incorrigible.”

More here.

Aatish Taseer in The New York Times:

I spent the duration of the election shuttling between its crucible, in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the drawing rooms of Delhi, where the political elite of the city, a cozy cabal of like-minded journalists and politicians, quaked at the rise of Mr. Modi. I had grown up in this world, and it was one in which class mattered much more than political difference. Nor was its cynicism confined to any one party. I remember being present when the son of a B.J.P. chief minister, a woman now in trouble over corruption, was asked why he wanted to enter politics. “Money,” he said easily, and no one minded. That was the kind of world it was.

Mr. Modi posed a mortal threat to the safety and entitlement of this world, and it was part of his appeal. Nor was there anything sinister in the mandate. Given his background in Hindu nationalism, he was justly an object of suspicion. But when journalists from Delhi would prod voters into giving sectarian reasons for electing him, a majority would stoutly reply, “Why are you asking us about temples, when we’re telling you that we’re electing him because we think he’ll bring development?” That was the mandate. It was very moving, and like many, I held my breath. I see now that I was focused too much on the world the election would supplant, and too little on the one it would bring into being. Because if the Modi election has made anything clear, it is that, one, a social revolution of a kind has already occurred in India; and two, the people, now in charge, might not possess the intellectual power needed to run the country. The cabinet, save for the rare exception, is made up of too many crude, bigoted provincials, united far more by a lack of education than anything so grand as ideology. At the time of writing — and here the one will have to speak for the many — Mr. Modi’s minister of culture had just said of a former Muslim president: “Despite being a Muslim, he was a great nationalist and humanist.” Some 10 days later, there was the hideous incident in which a Muslim man was lynched by a Hindu mob in a village outside Delhi, on the suspicion of slaughtering a cow and eating beef. It was a defining moment, the culmination of 16 months of cultural chauvinism and hysteria under Mr. Modi, the scarcely veiled target of which are India’s roughly 170 million Muslims. This ugliness is eclipsing Mr. Modi’s development agenda, and just this week, there was yet another incident in which a Kashmiri politician was attacked in Srinagar for hosting “a beef party.”

More here.

.
then I came home
I threw my heavy bag
off of me in the corridor
you stood waiting for me

those were steps
I made beside you on the ground
one by one
someone bombed the station

a Rumanian shot
another Rumanian with a gun
last year a man lay in this street
blood stayed behind on the pavement

before you leave I gaze after a tram driving away

without us nothing could begin
without us everything’s been done

by Els Moors
from er hangt een hoge lucht boven ons
publisher: Nieuw Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2006
translation: 2008, Willem Groenewegen

Read more »

Jeffrey Zuckerman at The Quarterly Conversation:

And so Pitol writes early in the first volume of his “Trilogy of Memory” that “Lately, I have been very aware that I have a past. Not only because I have reached an age when the greater part of the journey has been traveled, but also because I now know fragments of my childhood that until recently were off-limits to me.” What results from this declaration is a very unusual book that diverges from the standard tropes of memoir. Rather than attempt to divulge personal details or set the record straight, Pitol seeks to do something more personal and internalized: to fill in the gaps and holes of his memory before they grow bigger and deeper. The end result may have been aestheticized after the fact, but we are ultimately reading something that was written for the author alone. We are invited to forget ourselves, to put on the persona of Pitol himself and close up the wounds of time and memory by reading these words of his various travelings, readings, and meetings across the Western world.

After some four hundred pages of The Art of Flight, readers could be excused for thinking ofThe Journey’s 165 pages as a continuation of or an appendix to its predecessor. But to do so would be to underestimate the canvas on which Pitol is now working. When herida reappears in the middle volume of the “Trilogy of Memory,” it does so on a broader scale. In describing a Czech woman who would teach him Russian, Pitol writes that “Like all Czechs, she felt the wound of history in her marrow; she no longer believed in the possibility of a revival of socialism.”

more here.

John Lloyd at the Financial Times:

At the peak of her powers in the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher confronted enemies within the UK and without, some of them created by her own abrasive nature. But the most important were systemic and largely independent of her, and her engagement with them was of global importance. No surprise, then, that the second instalment of Charles Moore’s three-volume authorised biography of the late prime minister should be devoted just to this pivotal five-year period, 1982-87.

From a domestic UK perspective, the episode that loomed largest was the 1984-85 miners’ strike. The trade unions were then getting a measure of the government’s determination to reduce their powers, a policy made starkly apparent by the ending of union representation (albeit with overwhelming staff acquiescence) at the GCHQ secret communications centre in Cheltenham.

To Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, this played to his default position of full-throated militancy. So too did the replacement of the National Coal Board’s corporatist leadership by the free market-inclined Ian MacGregor, a Scots-American business executive.

more here.

Jean Strouse at The New York Review of Books:

At the age of fifty-one, with his work in high demand on both sides of the Atlantic, John Singer Sargent swore off painting portraits. He had been eager for some time to escape the confines of the studio, the pressures of multiple sittings, and society portraiture altogether. “No more paughtraits,” he wrote to a friend in 1907. “I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes.” He had been charging a thousand guineas a portrait “in order to have fewer to do,” he told another friend, but price did not discourage his affluent clientele.1 A Max Beerbohm cartoon shows the portly, bearded artist peering out the window of his London studio in alarm at a queue of fashionably dressed ladies, with uniformed bellhops holding places in line for more.

Sargent made exceptions to the portrait ban for friends, and for eminences such as Lord Curzon, the archbishop of Canterbury, John D. Rockefeller, and Woodrow Wilson (he turned down Pierpont Morgan). Yet for the most part, once he had slipped the silken shackles of commissions, he turned his attention to painting murals for the Boston Public Library, and to doing more of what he had loved all his life: traveling, often with artist friends, and working outdoors in natural light.

more here.

Barbara Ransby in In These Times:

Grace Lee Boggs died yesterday at the age of 100 and the world is better for the century that she walked it with us. As a writer, insurgent intellectual, revolutionary organizer, mentor, community builder and friend to many, Grace will be dearly missed.

When I was a teenager in Detroit and a wannabe revolutionary in the 1970s I heard the names Grace and Jimmy Boggs all the time. I knew they were beloved and respected in Detroit’s Black activist community, and I just assumed they were both Black. I was surprised to finally meet Grace and discover she was Chinese-American. I had to recalibrate my notions about the Black struggle, “my people” and race itself.

Long after many of Detroit’s young black revolutionaries left Detroit and the revolution, Grace stayed. She was so immersed in the life and struggles of Detroit’s predominately Black communities that she said her FBI file described her as “probably Afro-Chinese.” Alongside her partner in life and politics, former auto-worker and black activist and leader, Jimmy Boggs (who died in 1993), Grace fought the good fight over five decades, writing books, building organizations, organizing campaigns, and teaching by example that “revolution” is a protracted process—not a single event or a spate of protests. She saw the Black struggle as the cutting-edge struggle of her lifetime, intricately linked to many others, and she was humbled to be a part of it.

More here.

Amy Dru Stanley reviews Alex Gourevitch's From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century in Dissent:

In October 2010, workers at a McDonald’s restaurant in Canton, Ohio opened their pay envelopes to find political leaflets, printed on the McDonald’s letterhead, warning about the upcoming midterm election:

If the right people are elected we will be able to continue with raises and benefits at or above our present levels. If others are elected we will not.

The leaflet named three Republican candidates—John Kasich for governor, Rob Portman for Senate, and Jim Renacci for Congress—who would help McDonald’s “business grow in the future.”

The purpose was clear: to intimidate voters exercising their right of franchise by highlighting their economic dependency as workers. A spokesman for McDonald’s U.S.A. apologized for the leaflet campaign, explaining that the tactic did not reflect company policy. A week later, Kasich, Portman, and Renacci were elected.

Nationwide, more than half the families of fast food workers, whose pay hovers near the federal minimum wage, depend on public assistance programs to survive. Food stamps, earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) offer a lifeline to employees like those at McDonald’s, according to Fast Food, Poverty Wages, a 2013 report produced by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Low wages and lack of benefits “come at a public cost”—about $7 billion a year, which is what is required to fund these aid programs.

The public cost of economic dependency is nothing new in the American polity. As Thomas Jefferson wrote of the urban working class just after the American Revolution, “dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” His concern was not with poor relief but with the loss of freedom rooted in property ownership. “The mobs of great cities,” he observed, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” The problem was the decay of republican government due to the declension of a citizenry lacking economic independence and therefore subject to political coercion.

Today, workers earning poverty wages are at risk of the unfreedom feared by the founders: equal pursuit of happiness seems barely possible for makers of Happy Meals scraping together a living. The McDonald’s pay envelope stuffed with a political message made all too explicit the abuse of economic power.

More here.

Michele Filgate in The Brooklyn Quarterly:

Writers of biography are translators of the human experience, responsible for reconstructing a life and deciphering it for us.

It’s a form that has evolved over time—one which Virginia Woolf examined closely in her famous essay, “The Art of Biography.” She wrote that “almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection…He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.”

What matters to many contemporary readers is that these fertile facts have the weight of truth behind them. “By telling us true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline,” Woolf elaborated, “the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the very greatest.”

To document a life through biography, Woolf’s essay seems to say, is to perform a radical and creative act.

The word “document” comes from the Latin word documentum: lesson and proof.

We document other people’s lives in order to understand our own, in order to humanize history, in order to make a narrative out of everything. One person’s life can be told in many different ways. It’s a matter of interpretation.

The biographer’s perception of her subject is key. She gives us a life that has already been lived, so that we can live it again in a condensed amount of time—the amount of time it takes to read the book. To do this, she must spend countless hours sifting through manuscripts, letters, diaries, articles, thousands upon thousands of words.

Which lives are worth documenting in biography and which facts within those chosen lives are worth endowing with meaning? These are not foregone conclusions. They reflect and perpetuate our societal shortcomings, especially in considering women. Rachel Holmes’ book, Eleanor Marx: A Life, is a biography of a protofeminist, and is also a feminist biography. The author’s approach tackles head-on the multiple facets of Marx’s professional and personal life—documented and undocumented—in a pursuit of a richer portrayal that looks beyond the simply scandalous or the adjacent-to-fame. “Eleanor Marx the politician, thinker, feminist, and activist leaves us with our own question of personal responsibility to the common interest that is essential to social existence,” (448) Holmes writes. She was more than just someone who lived an extraordinary life; she is a reminder of “how we got here, where the democratic liberties we enjoy came from.” (448)

More here.

Craig Lambert in The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

George Scialabba is no wild man. A soft-spoken, introverted soul, he doesn’t drink or smoke; no alcohol, tobacco, or recreational drugs. Healthy, moderate eating (no red meat, and “a kind of cerebral Mediterranean diet”) keeps Scialabba, at age 67, lean to a degree that is downright un-American. He has never married nor fathered children, and lives alone in a one-bedroom condo he has occupied since 1980. He doesn’t play sports (“I don’t exercise — I fidget”). For 35 years, Scialabba, a Harvard College alumnus, held a low-level clerical job at his alma mater that suited his low-profile style. For the past decade, his desk has occupied a windowless basement in a large academic building.

That’s the physical Scialabba: a bespectacled reed who could slip into any cocktail party nearly unnoticed.

The intellectual Scialabba is another story. Over those same 35 years, he has written nearly 400 essays and book reviews for The American Conservative, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Dissent, Grand Street, The Nation, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. His acuity, erudition, and polished prose have earned him thousands of readers and the admiration of some of the country’s leading minds.

The Harvard English professor and New Yorker contributor James Wood calls him “one of America’s best all-round intellects.” The author Barbara Ehrenreich asserts that “he is not only astoundingly intelligent, he knows just about everything — history, politics, culture, and literature.” The political theorist Daniela Cammack, currently a visiting lecturer at Yale, declares, “For my money, George is the finest living writer of nonfiction English prose. I know that’s a grand claim, but I stand by it. Every time a new book of [his] essays has come out, I’ve stayed up ’til 4 a.m. devouring it. That doesn’t usually happen.”

More here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

The World Bank and the United Nations have set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, but achieving this target will be very difficult. Today, close to half of all extreme poverty is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which, despite some recent progress, is still beset by war, disease, and a lack of properly functioning institutions. In addition, it is important not to read too much from the extreme-poverty figures as regards the fight against poverty as a whole. If you are an African, an Asian, or a South American, just because you have edged above the World Bank’s bar doesn’t mean that you aren’t still poor. In the poorest forty per cent of countries, according to the bank’s own figures, about half the population is still in “moderate poverty,” which it defines as existing on less than four dollars a day of income.

Furthermore, some of the recent decline in the rate of extreme poverty may be an artifact of how the bank calculates it, which changed recently. In a skeptical piece in the Financial Times, Shawn Donnan explained some of the tricky technical issues, which largely revolve around how to compare prices across countries and across time. Meanwhile, Francisco Ferreira, a senior economist at the World Bank, defended its procedures in a blog post arguing that, whichever numbers are used, the trend in extreme poverty is a downward one.

That does seem to be true, and it’s something to celebrate. Above all else, it reflects the entry of China, India, and other developing countries into the global trading system, not merely as sources of raw materials and cheap labor but also, increasingly, as independent players in global capitalism. In industries ranging from steel to autos to energy to solar panels, Chinese and Indian companies are now competing head-to-head with western rivals. The global market that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about in 1848 is now largely a reality, with individual countries and corporations vying for the spoils.

That’s what trade agreements like the T.P.P. are all about.

More here.