Martin Enserink in Science:

Insecure about your height? You may want to avoid this tiny country by the North Sea, whose population has gained an impressive 20 centimeters in the past 150 years and is now officially the tallest on the planet. Scientists chalk up most of that increase to rising wealth, a rich diet, and good health care, but a new study suggests something else is going on as well: The Dutch growth spurt may be an example of human evolution in action. The study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that tall Dutch men on average have more children than their shorter counterparts, and that more of their children survive. That suggests genes that help make people tall are becoming more frequent among the Dutch, says behavioral biologist and lead author Gert Stulp of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection,” says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn't involved in the study. “It strikes at the core of our understanding of human nature, and how malleable it is.” It also confirms what Stearns knows from personal experience about the population in the northern Netherlands, where the study took place: “Boy, they are tall.” For many years, the U.S. population was the tallest in the world. In the 18th century, American men were 5 to 8 centimeters taller than those in the Netherlands. Today, Americans are the fattest, but they lost the race for height to northern Europeans—including Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Estonians—sometime in the 20th century. Just how these peoples became so tall isn't clear, however. Genetics has an important effect on body height: Scientists have found at least 180 genes that influence how tall you become. Each one has only a small effect, but together, they may explain up to 80% of the variation in height within a population. Yet environmental factors play a huge role as well. The children of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, for instance, grew much taller than their parents. Scientists assume that a diet rich in milk and meat played a major role.

The Dutch have become so much taller in such a short period that scientists chalk most of it up to their changing environment. As the Netherlands developed, it became one of the world's largest producers and consumers of cheese and milk. An increasingly egalitarian distribution of wealth and universal access to health care may also have helped. Still, scientists wonder whether natural selection has played a role as well.

More here.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in Bookforum:

In the months that have passed since three young men, two of them ex-convicts, gunned down the staff of a satirical magazine and patrons of a kosher grocery in Paris, killing seventeen people, including several artists—during which time another young man, also an ex-con, shot up a café and a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing two more, including a filmmaker—much has been written to put these events in context. With each new text, the narrative has thickened with nuance, anger, digression, and distraction, as writers, in accordance with their nature, have tied themselves in knots to make sense of the killings in terms of terrorism, religious intolerance, ideological indoctrination, postcolonial injustice, racial prejudice, economic depravation, government neglect, bad schools, terrible prisons, dangerous clerics, and the potential for radicalization among disaffected young men prone to messianic delusion.

In one way or another, all of these texts belong to what Adam Phillips, describing Freud, has termed “a long spiritual, religious tradition of crisis writing.” Perhaps that ever-expanding mass of storytelling, messy and oversensitive and argumentative as it may be, is truer to the experience of these events around the world, where reactions have been everywhere mixed, and nowhere the same, not even in the mind of a single person, to say nothing of the popular imagination of a single place.

In Europe and the United States, a story of the attacks has settled into a moment of much-needed but still dubious repose, as responsibility is passed to “moderate Muslims” around the globe to deal with religious extremism, reform their faith, and thicken their skin. “What is entirely out of the government’s control—out of anyone’s control,” argues Mark Lilla, writing about France in the New York Review of Books, “is what happens next in the larger Muslim world.”

This is true enough. But there are a great many cities out there in the not-so-distant, not-so-frightful Muslim world. In those cities, one might listen for the subtleties of a self-reflexive criticism and hear a brash and lively satire in return. One might discover a rich history of progressive ideas that have developed in close proximity to Islam over hundreds of years. Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul are three such cities. Others are just as relevant, but in these three, artists have established a particularly strong tradition of pushing public discourse. And in these three, regular people are dealing all the time with the kinds of dangers and ideological distortions that ripped through France and Denmark this winter.

Read the rest here.

Kathy Knapp in LA Review of Books:

Mad Men still has a half-season to go, but Don Draper’s obituary has already been written. We don’t know exactly how it will end for Don, but the critical consensus is that his fate is sealed: for the past seven years, we’ve watched him follow the same downward trajectory his silhouetted likeness traces in the opening credits, so that all that’s left is for him to land. In a piece lamenting the “death of adulthood in American culture,” A. O. Scott says that Mad Men is one of several recent pop cultural narratives — among them The Sopranos and Breaking Bad — that chart the “final, exhausted collapse” of white men and their regimes, but I’m not convinced. Don has a way of bouncing back. Where one episode opens with him on an examination table, lying to his doctor about how much he drinks and smokes as if his bloodshot eyes and smoker’s cough didn’t give him away (even bets on cirrhosis and emphysema), another finds him swimming laps, cutting down on his drinking, and keeping a journal in an effort to “gain a modicum of control.” Over the course of the past six and a half seasons, Don has been on the brink of personal and professional destruction too many times to count, and yet when we last saw him at the conclusion of “Waterloo,” the final episode of the last half-season, which aired last May, he was fresh-faced and back on top. The truth is that Mad Men has something far more unsettling (and historically accurate) to tell us about the way that white male power works to protect its own interests, precisely by staging and restaging its own death.

In fact, a closer look at “Waterloo” in particular makes clear that the show does not chronicle the last gasp of the white male, as Scott would have it, but outlines the way that a wily old guard has followed the advice of E. Digby Baltzell (who coined the acronym WASP in 1964) by “absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks” in order to maintain its grip on power. After several episodes of unrelenting humiliation for Don, this installment was so thoroughly upbeat that it had critics wondering just whose Waterloo it was, anyway. Unlike Napoleon, Don doesn’t defiantly march into a futile, fatal battle to save his job, but instead surprises everyone by stepping graciously aside, handing a big pitch for Burger Chef to his protégé, Peggy Olson. Peggy protests she can’t, because she’s a woman; it seems a clear sign that the times are indeed a-changing that Don concludes, “Maybe that’s better.

More here.

Lawrence Berger in the NYT's The Stone:

A cognitive scientist and a German philosopher walk into the woods and come upon a tree in bloom: What does each one see? And why does it matter?

While that may sound like the set-up to a joke making the rounds at a philosophy conference, I pose it here sincerely, as a way to explore the implications of two distinct strains of thought — that of cognitive science and that of phenomenology, in particular, the thought of Martin Heidegger, who offers a most compelling vision of the ultimate significance of our being here, and what it means to be fully human.

It can be argued that cognitive scientists tend to ignore the importance of what many consider to be essential features of human existence, preferring to see us as information processors rather than full-blooded human beings immersed in worlds of significance. In general, their intent is to explain human activity and life as we experience it on the basis of physical and physiological processes, the implicit assumption being that this is the domain of what is ultimately real. Since virtually everything that matters to us as human beings can be traced back to life as it is experienced, such thinking is bound to be unsettling.

For instance, an article in The Times last year by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, about whether we humans are “really conscious,” argued, among other things, that “we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.”

One feature of this line of thought that may strike us as particularly strange is that rather than being in direct contact with people and things, we are said to process bits of information that go to form representations of the world that are the basis for any relations that we have with our fellows. That would appear to be quite different from the way we actually experience things, but we are told to trust that science is more reliable because experience is often misleading in this regard.

More here.

Olivier Blanchard over at the IMF:

Seven years since the onset of the global financial crisis, we are still assessing how the crisis should change our views about macroeconomic policy. To take stock, the IMF organized two conferences, the first in 2011, the second in 2013, and published the proceedings in two books, titled “In the Wake of the Crisis” and “What Have We Learned?“.

The time seems right for a third assessment. Research has continued, policies have been tried, and the debates have been intense. But have we truly made much progress? Are we closer to a new framework? To address these questions, Raghuram Rajan, Ken Rogoff, Larry Summers and I are organizing a third conference, “Rethinking Macro Policy III: Progress or Confusion?” that will take place on April 15-16 at the IMF.

Much of the discussion in recent years has centered (rightly) on the policy issues of the day: What measures to take during a financial or sovereign crisis, what to do at the zero lower bound, how to design quantitative easing, at what rate should fiscal consolidation take place?

The focus of our conference will be instead on the architecture of policy when (hopefully) policy rates have become positive again, and most countries are growing and have stabilized debt-to-GDP ratios.

In other words, how will/should macro policy look once the crisis is finally over?

Here are some questions to start the discussion (I hope, in a later blog, to summarize the answers coming out of the conference).

It is now well understood that the financial crisis resulted from the interaction of excessive leverage in the financial system and extensive interconnectedness and complexity of balance sheets of both banks and non banks. In other words, the crisis revealed the presence of large, undetected, systemic risks. Since then, much effort has gone toward improving our understanding and assessment of systemic risk. Questions: Where do we stand? Are some dimensions of systemic risk easier to measure (e.g., leverage in the banking sector vs. interconnectedness of banks and non-banks or risks outside the banking sector)? How should we assess the experience with stress-tests? And have we made enough progress in reducing systemic risk since the crisis, e.g., with Dodd-Frank, the Vickers commission, the Financial Stability Board, etc?

More here.

Sue Prideaux at the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1887–8, August Strindberg wrote the experimental autobiographical novel Le Plaidoyer d’un fou; but only now is it available in a translation taken directly from the author’s original manuscript, lost shortly after its first publication in Paris in 1895. The manuscript resurfaced in 1973 in the safe of the Anatomy department of Oslo University – a curious location rendered curiouser when you remember that Strindberg, a Swede, never visited Norway.

Throughout his life, Strindberg wrote a series of autobiographies that shared no common style or language, each aiming at “an analysis of the soul or psychological anatomy” that was truthful to himself at the particular moment of writing. The whole was deliberately designed to display the discontinuity of his “evolution as a human being” and as a writer. Plaidoyer was written as Strindberg was approaching forty. He wrote it in French, hoping Paris would be receptive to a new form of literature “more realistic than Flaubert, more experimental than Zola”. It was to be the opposite of the French tradition of the novelist-observer reporting elegantly on the human condition, the reverse of a neat encapsulation of experience. Written in the first person, it recorded his tortured ambivalence during the thirteen years of his adoring passion for his first wife, Siri von Essen.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Kawara’s art is not always quite so -rarefied. His most familiar work is his “Today” series, better known as “date paintings,” which he began producing in 1966 and continued making throughout his life: they are signlike works in acrylic on canvas showing the date on which the painting was made, inscribed in white sans serif letters and numerals, usually on a dark gray background (although there are some red and blue date paintings too). Because Kawara doesn’t space the numbers and letters of the date in the smooth way a typographer would, there is quirky rhythm to the inscriptions. The nearly 3,000 paintings are of various sizes, but most are quite modest in scale, often as small as eight by ten inches. It is thanks to these date paintings that “Kawara is a brand,” one of the many self-declared experts on the booming art market proclaimed a few years ago, “and his branding stands as a beacon for every contemporary dealer and every aspiring conceptual artist.”

Each painting is housed in (or, in the case of the larger paintings, merely accompanied by) a cardboard box that also contains a clipping from that day’s newspaper. At the Guggenheim, the boxes and clippings are mostly displayed in vitrines beneath the corresponding paintings. The selections are unpredictable. Beneath a painting from New Year’s Day, 1970, is the front page of The New York Times, with items on, for instance, the inauguration of John Lindsay for his second term as mayor and a dispute between the city and the transit workers’ union, which had turned down the offer of a 12 percent wage increase (how times have changed).

more here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.

McKay, of Concordia University in Montreal, happened to pick up a mathematics paper in a completely different field, involving something called the j-function, one of the most fundamental objects in number theory. Strangely enough, this function’s first important coefficient is 196,884, which McKay instantly recognized as the sum of the monster’s first two special dimensions.

Most mathematicians dismissed the finding as a fluke, since there was no reason to expect the monster and the j-function to be even remotely related. However, the connection caught the attention of John Thompson, a Fields medalist now at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who made an additional discovery. The j-function’s second coefficient, 21,493,760, is the sum of the first three special dimensions of the monster: 1 + 196,883 + 21,296,876. It seemed as if the j-function was somehow controlling the structure of the elusive monster group.

Soon, two other mathematicians had demonstrated so many of these numerical relationships that it no longer seemed possible that they were mere coincidences. In a 1979 paper called “Monstrous Moonshine,” the pair — John Conway, now of Princeton University, and Simon Norton — conjectured that these relationships must result from some deep connection between the monster group and thej-function. “They called it moonshine because it appeared so far-fetched,” said Don Zagier, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany.

More here.

Sean Raymond in Nautilus:

Imagine that two very similar-looking neighbors undergo a genetic test. The exam shows that the pair’s genetic fingerprints are virtually identical. They feel a flash of shock and excitement. What does this mean? Could they be long-lost twins, separated in a hospital mixup? The Earth and Moon share a similar issue, one that poses a major scientific puzzle. At the isotopic level—the “genetic” level for rocks—the Earth and Moon are essentially identical. While they have different relative amounts of rock and iron, the Earth and Moon’s rocks share the same isotopic signatures in several different elements; oxygen is the most studied. This isotopic similarity has stumped scientists for decades. It must mean something about the Moon’s origin, but exactly what? Over the past century astronomers have come up with several theories for how the Moon formed. Perhaps the Moon was a wandering planet that was gravitationally captured by Earth (the capture theory). Perhaps the nascent Earth was spinning so fast that it barfed out the Moon (the fission theory). Or perhaps the young Earth was hit by another growing planet and this created the Moon (the giant impact theory). In recent years the third of these ideas has taken over as the preferred model.

The giant impact theory echoes what we know about the formation of the entire Solar System, which coalesced from a disk of gas and dust around the young Sun. The Earth and the other planets grew in a series of collisions, starting from dust particles and culminating in massive impacts between planet-sized bodies. The last giant impact involving the growing Earth may have spawned the Moon by creating a disk of rocky debris in orbit around the planet. The giant impact model has become so popular that the two bodies involved in the impact even have names: the proto-Earth (the progenitor of Earth) and Theia (the impacting body, named for the Greek goddess who was the mother of the Moon). To get a better understanding of these two bodies, we need to look at their genetics. Here, “genetic” information refers to exquisite geochemical measurements of different isotopes of certain elements.

More here.

Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings (image Young Vladimir and Véra Nabokov by Thomas Doyle from 'The Who, the What, and the When: 65 Artists Illustrate the Secret Sidekicks of History.'):

After a charming aside professing that he had begun writing a poem for her on the page but a “very inconvenient little tail got left” and he had no other paper on which to start over, he continues in his characteristic spirit of earnest lyricism with a sprinkle of disarming irreverence:

Most of all I want you to be happy, and it seems to me that I could give you that happiness — a sunny, simple happiness — and not an altogether common one…

I am ready to give you all of my blood, if I had to — it’s hard to explain — sounds flat — but that’s how it is. here, I’ll tell you — with my love I could have filled ten centuries of fire, songs, and valor — ten whole centuries, enormous and winged, — full of knights riding up blazing hills — and legends about giants — and fierce Troys — and orange sails — and pirates — and poets. And this is not literature since if you reread carefully you will see that the knights have turned out to be fat.

But Nabokov makes clear that his feelings supersede the playful and expand into the profound:

I simply want to tell you that somehow I can’t imagine life without you…

I love you, I want you, I need you unbearably… Your eyes — which shine so wonder-struck when, with your head thrown back, you tell something funny — your eyes, your voice, lips, your shoulders — so light, sunny…

You came into my life — not as one comes to visit … but as one comes to a kingdom where all the rivers have been waiting for your reflection, all the roads, for your steps.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

The single worst legacy of military rule since the 1970s, the time of the loss of East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—has been a ruinous foreign policy that has made enemies out of most of Pakistan’s neighbors owing to the safe havens that Islamic extremists from these countries have carved out in Pakistan. It is well known that such havens exist in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and Balochistan, but they are also located in many other parts of the country, from Lahore near the Indian border to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.

Because of its fear of India, Pakistan has been turned into a garrison state with a persisting paranoia about being surrounded by hostile countries and dominated by a demanding, belligerent United States. Yet the Pakistani army is the seventh-largest in the world with some 642,000 soldiers, 500,000 reserves, and an arsenal of 120 nuclear weapons.

Still, since September 11, 2001, the army has often been ineffectual. Pakistani extremists have killed up to 30,000 Pakistani civilians and 15,000 members of the Pakistan military. Pakistan is living in the midst of a partially self-created bloodbath of terrorism that is more comparable to Iraq and Nigeria than to India or Bangladesh.

More here.

Ryan Grim and Nick Wing in the Huffington Post:

This article is written as if the alleged murder of Walter Scott had not been captured on video that was made public Tuesday by The New York Times and other outlets.

A North Charleston police officer was forced to use his service weapon Saturday during a scuffle with a suspect who tried to overpower him and seize the officer's Taser, authorities said.

The man, who has a history of violence and a long arrest record, died on the scene as a result of the encounter, despite officers performing CPR and delivering first aid, according to police reports.

The shooting was the 11th this year by a South Carolina police officer. The State Law Enforcement Division has begun an investigation into the incident.

Police identified the officer involved as Patrolman 1st Class Michael Thomas Slager and the suspect as Walter Lamar Scott, 50, of Meadowlawn Drive in West Ashley. Slager, 33, served honorably in the military before joining the North Charleston Police Department more than five years ago. He has never been disciplined during his time on the force, his attorney said.

The incident occurred behind a pawn shop on Craig Street and Remount Road. Slager initially pulled Scott over for a broken taillight. During the stop, police and witnessessay Scott fled the vehicle on foot. When Slager caught up with him a short distance from the street, Scott reportedly attempted to overpower Slager. Police say that during the struggle, the man gained control of the Taser and attempted to use it against the officer.

It was during that scuffle that the officer fired his service weapon, fatally wounding Scott.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

A team of engineers from MIT, Penn State University, and Carnegie Mellon University is developing a novel way to isolate cancer cells that circulate in the bloodstream: using sound waves to separate them from blood cells. Cancer cells often break free from their original locations and circulate through the bloodstream, allowing them to form new tumors elsewhere in the body. Detecting these cells could give doctors a new way to predict whether patients’ tumors will metastasize, or monitor how they are responding to treatment, but finding these extremely rare cells has proven challenging because there might be only one to 10 such cells in a 1-milliliter sample of a patient’s blood.

…KurzweilAI has reported on several cancer-cell-sorting techniques. Most existing cell-sorting technologies require tagging cells with chemicals or exposing them to strong mechanical forces that may damage them, according to the MIT/Penn State/Carnegie team. To sort cells using sound waves, which offer a gentler alternative, the researchers built microfluidic devices with two acoustic transducers, which produce sound waves, on either side of a microchannel. When the two waves meet, they combine to form a standing wave (a wave that remains in constant position). This wave produces pressure nodes, or lines of low pressure. Because the sound waves are tilted so they run across the microchannel at an angle, each cell encounters several pressure nodes as it flows through the channel. As cells encounter each node, they are pushed further to the side of the channel; the distance of cell movement depends on their size and other properties, such as compressibility. In the previous study, the researchers were able to separate cancer cells from red and white blood cells, but the sample flow rate through the device was only 1 to 2 microliters per minute. At that rate, it would take more than 50 hours to process a typical patient sample of about 6 milliliters. The new version of the device has a working flow rate about 20 times faster, allowing it to process a patient sample in about five hours.

More here.

Anne Meneley in Gastronomica (Image courtesy of Sharaka – Community Supported Agriculture):

The practices of everyday commensality—producing, provisioning, and consuming food and drink in the West Bank of Palestine—are radically affected by the Israeli occupation. I discuss two very different Palestinian initiatives that envision production and consumption of food and drink as a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation: a craft beer called Taybeh brewed in the predominantly Christian Taybeh village close to Ramallah, and a local agriculture movement based in the Ramallah district known as Sharaka (“partnership” in Arabic). Theories of resistance in anthropology, from James Scott’s (1985) conception of resistance tactics as “weapons of the weak” to Lila Abu-Lughod’s (1990) idea of resistance as a “diagnostic of power,” still resonate in Palestine as the Palestinians are so clearly in a position of gross inequality in relation to their Israeli occupiers, whose power is hardly disguised enough to need a diagnostic. I have found Julia Elyachar’s discussion of how agency is embedded in infrastructure and infrastructure is implicated in resistance activities insightful. This is particularly salient given the peculiar status of infrastructure in the West Bank where, instead of facilitating connectivity, infrastructure is designed to impede and exclude flows—in this case, commodities of sustenance (Elyachar 2014: 460). I am primarily concerned with both Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank; while I did not have the opportunity to travel to Gaza, conditions in Gaza, including the shocking 2014 Israeli military offensive, affect political sentiments and actions in the West Bank, including resistance practices involving food, a topic I will return to briefly in the postscript of this article.

Local food and drink production and consumption have become sites of “agro-resistance.” Vivien Sansour, a journalist and activist, describes 78-year-old Abu Adnan as one of Palestine’s farmer revolutionaries, who “understand on an experiential level that healing for us as a community suffering from oppression and occupation requires the restoration of our sense of self—a self that is defiant but not defined by its oppressor” (Sansour 2010: 2). Dinaa Hadid cites a Palestinian farmer who, like Abu Adnan, envisions agricultural practice itself as a fertile resistance: “‘I don’t throw rocks,’ says farmer Khader, referring to young men who frequently hurl stones during demonstrations. He pointed to his rock-built terraces. ‘I use them to build our future’” (Hadid 2012: 3). I borrow my title from that of a recent article published in Al-Jazeera, “Resistance Is Fertile: Palestine’s Eco-War” (Brownsell 2011), itself a spinoff from the classic line by the Borg inStar Trek: The Next Generation, “Resistance is futile.” Describing Palestinian “guerilla gardeners of the occupied West Bank,” the author quotes Baha Hilo, then of the Joint Advocacy Initiative, responsible for planting olive trees on land that is in danger of being confiscated: “We’re not a militia, our weapons are our pickaxes and shovels, our hands and our olive trees” (ibid.: 3). Baha Hilo was my guide during my five years as an intermittent “guerilla gardener” myself, as we picked olives on Palestinian land threatened by Israeli military or settlers. Here, I examine how guerrilla gardeners are part of contemporary Palestine agricultural movements and, moreover, are deployed as a new form of nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

More here.

Yong Jie in 3:AM Magazine:

In considering how the chief necessity of literature to politics resides in the representation of the politically excluded, it is perhaps necessary to first explore the reasons for which literature is able to acknowledge those whom politics often overlooks.

I. a) The individual at the heart of literature

The first reason is the greater focus of literature on the individual. One notes how Calvino refers quite instructively in his quotation to the way literature may serve the individual: it gives “a voice to the one who does not have a voice”, “a name to the one who does not have a name”. The insight here is that the individual lays at the heart of literature, though his or her voice may be lost to the ear of politics.

For if politics purports – at least in democratic polities – to be in the service of individual citizens, it tends to perceive these citizens as finally a part of a collectivity, its vision attuned to the broad sweep. And thus one is either a part of the Democrats or Republicans in the United States, belonging perhaps to the Jewish-American bloc, or the African-American demographic; in Malaysia, one may be seen by politicians as simply a member of the Chinese, Indian or Malay community. The individual derives significance from being a part of a whole. Indeed, in the perspective of politics, strength is gained in numbers: the collective counts for more, possesses a weightier presence than the individual, by dint of its size and thus ability to influence political outcomes in elections. The significance of a group within politics is commensurate with size, and the single individual is the smallest grouping of all.

And even in exceptional instances whereby particular individuals are taken into account within politics, these invariably possess power of some sort, economic or political, rendering them therefore significant. The ear of politics thus registers the roar of the gathered masses, and is sensitive to the whispers of the privileged; the lone voice of an ordinary individual belonging to no politically significant grouping often remains unheard.

Yet it is the individual around which literature revolves. A work of literature is by its nature the work of a single consciousness. And we are often drawn to works of singularity – works in which a consciousness speaks and expresses its experience of the world in an individual, inimitable manner. We love best, as Salman Rushdie points out, those writers whose “voices are fully and undisguisably their own” , who, in William Gass’ unforgettable phrase, “sign every word they write”.

More here.

Philip Ball in Pandaemonium:

In a recent short review in Prospect of Steven Weinberg’s book To Explain the World, I took exception to his narrow and presentist view of the history of science. That perspective remains unchanged in Weinberg’s recent article in the Guardian, in which he gives us his take on both the history of science and popular science writing. In both respects his remarks are useful, insofar as they encapsulate the worst of what drives me to despair when some (most definitely not all) scientists talk about these things.

Weinberg’s view of the history of science is not down to ignorance. It’s important to say this because that’s what it looks like. But Weinberg does not write Whiggish history because he doesn’t know what historians of science do these days, but specifically because he does know and disapproves of it. Yes, this theoretical physicist believes that historians don’t really know how to write history. It is hard to know why he nonetheless expresses ‘enormous respect for professional historians of science, from whom I have learned so much’ – unless he means (as I suspect) that he is grateful to them for having dug all the facts out of the archives, but that he doesn’t believe they can be trusted to know what to do with them. Because Weinberg seems to have learned nothing from historians of science about how to be a historian.

If your view is that science was just blundering around and dragging its feet until Newton’s Principia, then it’s perhaps not surprising if you conclude that the use of mathematics in science by ancients such as Plato and the Pythagoreans was ‘childish’. Again we have to understand that, while a remark like this coming from an undergraduate would simply indicate ignorance, from Weinberg it connotes something else. I am quite sure that he knows how incendiary such a claim is. But I fear that, in making it, he comes across like James Watson, evidently thinking that by saying the ‘outrageous’ he is revealing himself as a bold and outspoken thinker, whereas in fact he just sounds silly.

More here.

A. M. Gittlitz in The New Inquiry:

The time is right to redraw the map, former US lieutenant colonel and Fox News talking head Ralph Peters argues, with a Free Kurdistan as the New Middle East’s crown. “Stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, it will be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan,” he says, continuing a century-long tradition of treating the Kurdish people as a talking point in negotiating borders, disciplining Turkey or invading Syria or Iraq. As the most effective fighting force against ISIS and the faction most likely to set up a stable secular democracy, Western hawks like Peters are once again championing the Kurdish cause, so long as it fits the daily agenda.

Often equally instrumentalizing, the Western left has taken a newfound interest in the allegedly revolutionary situation in the Kurdish-majority region of Rojava in northern Syria. There, a new system of stateless governance has formed and their rhetoric against patriarchy, neo-liberalism, and the nation-state quickly lead to both enthusiasm from those who see the embattled Kobane as the new Catalonia, and scorn from those who see it breeding short-sighted and faux-revolutionary nationalism.

In both cases, the voices of revolutionary Kurds are seldom heard, and Combustion Books’ collection of essays, A Small Key Can Open a Large Door: The Rojava Revolution, tries to fix this lack. Perhaps the first English language book on the subject, it includes an eclectic assortment of first hand accounts, including a letter from a 19 year old woman sent to her mother from the Kobane frontlines, a description of the situation on the border of Turkey by activists facing down Erdogan’s military police and newly translated essays from Turkish anarchist groups. Other selections compile a series of letters sent between Syrian and Iraqi Kurds and analyze the importance and mechanics of Kobane’s successful defense against ISIS.

The book reads as a primer for the situation in Rojava that the editors unhesitatingly refer to as a “revolution” in a 30 page introduction on the history of Kurdish resistance and the results of the PKK’s “libertarian turn”. In 2004, influenced by the works of Murray Bookchin, imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan determined that the authoritarian nature of Marxism-Leninism was behind the times and out of touch with Kurdish society, and the anarchistic model of governance by small councils of workers, youth, women, and neighbors would be a more pragmatic and truly communistic solution. Around this time Kurds in Syria attempted to enact the program, but were quickly and violently repressed by Assad.

More here.

Vivek Bald in Dissent:

On an early September night in 1907, fifteen hundred white lumber mill workers set off on a rampage against Indian immigrants in the coastal town of Bellingham, Washington. The Indians, also mill workers, were predominantly from Punjab; most were turbaned Sikh men. The rioters saw the Indians as aliens, outsiders, and racial inferiors who were taking away American jobs, jobs that should go to white men. As they made their way across Bellingham, the mob, according to historian Joan Jensen,

swept down to the waterfront . . . where many of the Indians lived. Battering down the doors, the mob . . . pocketed money and jewelry, and dragged Indians from their beds . . . Those who did not move fast enough were beaten . . . Fifty men stormed the surrounding mills, pulled Indians from their bunks and began to burn the bunkhouses.

By the end of the night, two hundred Indian men, beaten and bruised, had been rounded up like cattle into Bellingham’s City Hall. Over the next days, most of the Indians chose to leave Bellingham, and the United States, in search of work in British Columbia. Local white residents cheered as their train rolled out of the station.

An article from the September 16, 1906 Puget Sound American describing recent “Hindu” immigration to Bellingham, Washington. Courtesy of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

It is not well known among Americans today that immigrants from British colonial “India”—that is, from present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—were entering the United States alongside the Irish, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Poles, Russians, and other Europeans during the “golden age” of immigration between the 1890s and 1920s. It is also not well known that, though their numbers were small, these Indian or “Hindu” migrants (“Hindu” being a racial term applied to all South Asians) figured prominently in the public outcry for restrictions on immigration. Members and supporters of the West Coast-based Asiatic Exclusion League were the first to promote the idea that a nefarious horde of “Hindus” was about to swamp the United States. But their discourse became national in scope, and came to include claims that thousands of Indian and Chinese seamen (the former, primarily Muslims from present-day Bangladesh) were jumping ship, smuggling drugs, and engaging in human trafficking through northeastern ports. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, in newspapers, public speeches, and congressional testimony, Indian immigrants were portrayed as a looming threat to the United States. Alongside other Asian laborers, Indians were viewed in much the same way that immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Haiti, and elsewhere south of the U.S. border have been in recent years.

At the same time, as historian Seema Sohi has argued, Indians occupied a unique place in the broader anti-Asian rhetoric of the early twentieth century. Because Indian nationalist exiles had been using what they believed to be the safety of U.S. soil to plan and coordinate anti-colonial activities against the British, they became a focus of the state’s broad efforts to quell political radicalism in the 1910s. While West Coast labor leaders warned of a “Tide of Turbans” sweeping in from the Pacific to take away American workers’ jobs, congressional advocates for exclusion warned that Indian immigrants were promoting subversion, Bolshevism, and anarchism, and were a threat to national security.

More here.

Yvette d'Entremont in Gawker:

Hari's campaign last year against the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte drove me to launch my site (don't fuck with a Bostonian's Pumpkin-Spice Anything). She alleged that the PSL has a “toxic” dose of sugar and two (TWO!!) doses of caramel color level IV in carcinogen class 2b.

The word “toxic” has a meaning, and that is “having the effect of a poison.” Anything can be poisonous depending on the dose. Enough water can even be poisonous in the right quantity (and can cause a condition called hyponatremia).

But then, the Food Babe has gone on record to say, ” There is just no acceptable level of any chemical to ingest, ever.” I wonder if anybody's warned her about good old dihydrogen monoxide?

(AKA water.)

It's a goddamn stretch to say that sugar has deleterious effects, other than making your Lululemons stretch a little farther if you don't “namaste” your cheeks off. However, I implore you to look at the Safety Data Sheet for sugar. The average adult would need to ingest about fifty PSLs in one sitting to get a lethal dose of sugar. By that point, you would already have hyponatremia from an overdose of water in the lattes.

And almost enough caffeine for me.

And what about that “carcinogenic” caramel color? Well, it turns out that it's not the only thing in your PSL that's in carcinogen class 2b.

There's also coffee.

Coffee is class 2b because of the acrylamide accumulated during the roasting process. Coffee, before Starbucks turns it into a milkshake, is pretty healthy for you. Class 2b means that all possible carcinogenic effects haven't been ruled out (because we haven't tested drinking it while tightrope walking across the Grand Canyon and simultaneously attempting to eat fire… yet), but that it hasn't been shown to cause a single case of cancer.

This is a blatant attempt at getting you to look to her for answers by making you unnecessarily afraid. The goal of Hari's campaign was to… well, we're still not sure. Remove the caramel color? Smear Starbucks? After that campaign failed, she launched a failed attempt to get them to use only organic milk, which would have made their lattes far more expensive and no healthier.

More here.