Neel Mukherjee in New Statesman:

Classical Indian literary tradition is dizzyingly multicultural and multilingual. The vastness of the subcontinent and the number of peoples and languages it contains ensured this plurality. Administratively, too, a state of multum in parvo prevailed: successions of empires and dynasties only ever managed to rule limited (if large) parts, leaving autonomous regions under different powers. No one empire before the central Asian clan that came to be known in the 16th century as the Mughals managed to bring far-flung areas under a centralised administration and local societies continued to exist even under their expanding rule.

From around the beginning of the Common Era for a millennium, Sanskrit held a long, unbroken sway as the language of power and culture before being contested by vernacular languages. Knowledge of Sanskrit would certainly unlock a large quantity of classical Indian literature for modern readers but – as with Europe and Latin – it is possessed by only a select few. Yet Sanskrit allowed Prakrit languages, the “natural” or informal languages, to flourish in a way that, over time, gave them enough power, complexity and confidence to overthrow it as the language of literary production.

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.

Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.

At a Feb. 19 panel discussion on the future of work organized by the Hamilton Project, a centrist Democratic think tank, Summers defied economic orthodoxy. He dismissed as “whistling past the graveyard” the widely accepted view that improving education and job training is the most effective way to reduce joblessness.

More here.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

T. Ryan Gregory’s lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario is a sort of genomic menagerie, stocked with creatures, living and dead, waiting to have their DNA laid bare. Scorpions lurk in their terrariums. Tarantulas doze under bowls. Flash-frozen spiders and crustaceans — collected by Gregory, an evolutionary biologist, and his students on expeditions to the Arctic — lie piled in beige metal tanks of liquid nitrogen. A bank of standing freezers holds samples of mollusks, moths and beetles. The cabinets are crammed with slides splashed with the fuchsia-stained genomes of fruit bats, Siamese fighting fish and ostriches.

Gregory’s investigations into all these genomes has taught him a big lesson about life: At its most fundamental level, it’s a mess. His favorite way to demonstrate this is through what he calls the “onion test,” which involves comparing the size of an onion’s genome to that of a human. To run the test, Gregory’s graduate student Nick Jeffery brought a young onion plant to the lab from the university greenhouse. He handed me a single-edged safety razor, and then the two of us chopped up onion stems in petri dishes. An emerald ooze, weirdly luminous, filled my dish. I was so distracted by the color that I slashed my ring finger with the razor blade, but that saved me the trouble of poking myself with a syringe — I was to supply the human genome. Jeffery raised a vial, and I wiped my bleeding finger across its rim. We poured the onion juice into the vial as well and watched as the green and red combined to produce a fluid with both the tint and viscosity of maple syrup.

More here.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in In These Times:

Two parallel developments have contributed to the rise of the Islamic State (IS): the U.S. invasion of Iraq and consequent marginalization of its Sunni minority, and the abandonment of the people’s uprising in Syria by the international community.

Prior to the invasion, the Jordanian militant Abu Mus’ab al Zarqawi was a marginal figure. The war gave him a foothold: He stepped into the security vacuum and launched Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Zarqawi’s project was aided by the ham-fistedness of the occupying authorities. Viceroy Paul Bremer’s disbanding of the Iraqi national army and purging of Baathists from state bureaucracies created a large pool of disaffected Sunnis. With little to lose, many of them put their arms and military training in the service of the insurgency. The alienation was complete when, in its attempt to divide the nationalist uprising, the U.S. empowered sectarian death squads and deployed Shia and Kurdish forces to the restive Sunni stronghold of Fallujah.

After the new Iraqi government launched an assault on the Sunni town of Tal Afar in September 2005, Zarqawi declared war on Iraq’s Shia Muslim population, and AQI became a home for Sunnis fearful of Shia domination. But the majority of Iraq’s Sunnis remained wary of its motives: The scope of AQI’s ambitions—establishing a pan-Islamic Sunni caliphate—transcended Iraq’s borders, and, with its legions of foreign fighters, it remained an alien presence.

Conscious that the welcome might not last, Zarqawi decided to give his operation an Iraqi veneer. In January 2006, he formed the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC), bringing together six mostly local Salafi (puritan Sunni) groups with an Iraqi as its nominal head. Three months later, Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike and MSC folded shortly thereafter. It was superseded in October 2006 by the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).

But Sunnis resented interlopers like Zarqawi turning their political marginalization into an excuse for sectarian strife. They wanted a stake in Iraq’s future, not the endless insecurity that ISI guaranteed.

More here.

Homing

For years you kept your accent
in a box beneath the bed,
the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution
how now brown cow
the teacher’s ruler across your legs.

We heard it escape sometimes,
a guttural uh on the phone to your sister,
saft or blart to a taxi driver
unpacking your bags from his boot.
I loved its thick drawl, g’s that rang.

Clearing your house, the only thing
I wanted was that box, jemmied open
to let years of lost words spill out –
bibble, fittle, tay, wum,
vowels ferrous as nails, consonants

you could lick the coal from.
I wanted to swallow them all: the pits,
railways, factories thunking and clanging
the night shift, the red brick
back-to-back you were born in.

I wanted to forge your voice
in my mouth, a blacksmith’s furnace;
shout it from the roofs,
send your words, like pigeons,
fluttering for home.

by Liz Berry
from Black Country
publisher: Chatto & Windus, London

Emily Keeler in National Post:

Writing is an act against death. In ink or in pixels, to put something in writing is to will it into a future beyond one’s own. In 2009, four days before Nelly Arcan hanged herself in her Montreal apartment, she sent a draft of her final novel to her publisher. The novel (published later that year in French as Paradise, clef en main and, in 2011, translated by David Scott Hamilton into English as Exit) takes place in a very near future where people committed to ushering in death well before nature takes its full course can become patrons of a boutique suicide service. Exit is written in the form of a fictional bedside confession from a woman, Antoinette Beauchamp, who failed her own suicide. Like Dorothy Parker’s tragic “Big Blonde,” Antoinette suffers the indignity of not getting what she wants when all she wants is the end. After surviving her meticulously planned suicide — “the Grim Reaper right at hand, shot in close-up, a death that was conceived, planned and paid for in advance” — Arcan’s protagonist wakes up in a hospital, having lost the use of her legs as a side-effect of her botched beheading (in homage to her namesake, Antoinette had paid the boutique to kill her by guillotine). Beyond the end of her wits, she narrates the story of her life and near-death to the ceiling of her hospital room. “Since the moment I stopped walking,” Arcan’s final protagonist tells us, “I started talking. A real chatterbox. A continuous current of words.”

Arcan was 28 when her first novel came out in 2001. Between the publication of Putain (translated into English as Whore, by Bruce Benderson in 2004) and her death at the age of 36, she published four novels, an illustrated coffee-table book about looking at women, and some intermittent essays and stories, many of which have been translated into English by Melissa Bull, and anthologized into a slim collection, Burqa of Skin, which was published last December. Her third novel, Breakneck, will be translated into English, by Jacob Homel, for the first time this spring.

More here.

Sam Kean in The New York Times:

Steven Weinberg doesn’t think much of Plato or Pythagoras. Nor does he hold René Descartes or Francis Bacon in ­especially high regard. But in his new book on the origins of science, “To Explain the World,” Weinberg casts particular aspersions on science historians themselves. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Weinberg has set out to write a broad historical overview that can explain how humanity invented science. But he finds that historians disdain nearly everything that excites him. They mistrust overarching narratives and notions of progress. Some dispute the very idea of a scientific revolution.

…Certain numbers, called constants of nature, come up over and over in studying physics, and many physicists want to know the reason those numbers have the values they do. Why is gravity as strong as it is? Why do electrons have one specific mass and charge and not another? Scientists haven’t made much progress here, and Weinberg suggests that perhaps there isn’t any deep reason. Perhaps we live in one of many universes, each of which has constants with essentially random values. The universe is the way it is just because. It’s a prospect that would have horrified Newton, and probably depresses any number of modern scientists. It amounts to abandoning the search for deeper meaning. As Weinberg wrote in his book “The First Three Minutes,” “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” But “To Explain the World” ultimately undercuts such nihilism. It tells a rich, meaningful tale about the emergence of science, and evokes a sense of “how difficult was the discovery of modern science, how far from obvious are its practices and standards.” Maybe the universe at large is pointless and random, but we still have the triumph of science, Weinberg reminds us, this “extraordinary story, one of the most interesting in human history.”

More here.

Francis Fukuyama at the Financial Times:

Yet much of the current debate about inequality has a strangely abstract quality, focusing on the excesses of the 1 per cent without really coming to terms with what has happened to the American middle class over the past two generations. Into this void steps the political scientist Robert Putnam, with a truly masterful volume that should shock Americans into confronting what has happened to their society.

Putnam begins his analysis with a vignette of his home town of Port Clinton, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 1959. He notes that while there were class differences then, there was a much higher degree of social equality: children of the wealthiest families in town befriended kids from working-class backgrounds. This equality was underpinned by a critical social reality: virtually everyone, rich or poor, grew up in a two-parent family in which fathers had steady jobs. He then fast-forwards to the present, where deindustrialisation has led to a social transformation in which the proportion of children born to unwed parents rose to 40 per cent, while drug use and crime became rampant. In the meantime, a new tier of luxury gated communities has appeared on the nearby shores of Lake Erie.

Putnam moves seamlessly from these stories to social-science data that confirm a truth understood by specialists for some years now.

more here.

Nic Cavell at Dissent:

In the time since Deng’s southern tour, an entire class of China’s own Disney-style “imagineers” have sought to recreate the success of Shenzhen’s pint-sized utopia: over 2,500 theme parks were built across China’s cities, suburbs, and farmlands between 1990 and 2005 alone. And as the number of theme park visitors increases each year, construction continues on new parks—from the Qiaobo Ice and Snow World, constructed with advanced irrigation in Beijing’s arid northern suburbs, to the pearl-like Polar Ocean World, which will bring 500 species of arctic animals and 20,000 species of fish to Shanghai, to Wild Duck Lake Resort of Kunming, Yunnan Province, which recently invested $800,000 in special effects equipment capable of recreating the iconic scenes from the Chinese blockbuster, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The economic logic of this construction boom is a bit murky. Of the 2,500 parks constructed in China in less than two decades, hundreds have disappeared; of the 2,000 or so that remain, it is estimated that only around 10 percent are profitable. Still, according to a recent report, China’s restless imagineers are expected to build yet another fifty-nine theme parks and five water parks by 2020.

One explanation can be found in the increasingly prevalent use of what experts call the “park plus real estate” model.

more here.

Katy Diamond Hamer at New York Magazine:

I was totally startled by her ferocity and suggested we have some tea at the Kitchen down the street, as a way of calming her down and persuading her to let the piece remain in the show. On the way back, she fell on the cobblestones and I helped her up. She was a tiny woman and at that point already 70 years old, and I realized how vulnerable she was. The experience gave me my first insight into her high anxiety, and the fact that exhibiting her work made her frightened. I would later learn that Louise was one of those people who, when upset, attacks. It’s her projecting of her anxiety outward and is the same anxiety that she transfers into the materials of her sculpture. Eventually she let the piece stay in the show. We sold it to the National Gallery of Australia. After the exhibition, she invited me to her home in Chelsea and showed me some more of her work. She was somewhat secretive, and I felt is if she didn’t want me to see too much in one go. She was literally pulling drawings out from under her bed, some of which hadn’t been seen since the 1940s, when they were made. The basement was full of 40 years' worth of work. After the group show, I organized a solo show of her drawings and early paintings. It was just at that time in the art world where artistic concerns were changing, moving away from formalism and abstraction, towards figuration and narrative stories about identity and sexuality. Louise had been mining these themes for a long time.

more here.

Galen Strawson in the Times Literary Supplement:

“Many historians of philosophy, with all their intended praise, . . . attribute mere nonsense . . . to past philosophers”, as Kant pointed out in 1790. The history of ideas is a zoo – of myths about what happened and what people said. I used to think the mythologizing was a relatively slow process, because the passage of time was needed to blur the past. Twenty years ago, however, an instant myth was born: a myth about a dramatic resurgence of interest in the topic of consciousness in philosophy, in the mid-1990s, after long neglect.

It’s too late to uproot it now. It’s spread like Japanese kudzu or Russian ivy. Too many people have a stake in it, including those who believe that they lived through the resurgence (especially the graduate students of the time) and have a place, however modest, among its champions. It soared on a soaring internet whose massively accumulative character then fixed it in place. So it’s worth putting it on the record that it’s a myth.

In the case of psychology the story of resurgence has some truth. There are doubts about its timing. The distinguished psychologist of memory Endel Tulving places it in the 1980s. “Consciousness has recently again been declared to be the central problem of psychology”, he wrote in 1985, citing a number of other authors. The great dam of behaviouristic psychology was cracking and spouting. It was bursting. Even so, there was a further wave of liberation in psychology in the 1990s. Discussion of consciousness regained full respectability after seventy years of marginalization, although there were of course (and still are) a few holdouts.

In the case of philosophy, however, the story of resurgence is simply a myth.

More here.

Spencer Robins in The Paris Review:

By the time he decided to teach, Wittgenstein was well on his way to being considered the greatest philosopher alive. First at Cambridge, then as an engineer and soldier, Wittgenstein had finished his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, at once an austere work of analytic philosophy and—for some readers, Wittgenstein apparently included—an almost mystical experience. In it, he claimed charmingly and not without reason to have solved all the problems of philosophy. This was because of the book’s famous “picture theory of meaning,” which held that language is meaningful because, and only because, of its ability to depict possible arrangements of objects in the world. Any meaningful statement can be analyzed as such a depiction. This leads to the book’s most famous conclusion: that if a statement does not depict a possible arrangement of objects, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Ethics, religion, the nature of the world beyond objects … most statements of traditional philosophy, Wittgenstein contended, are therefore nonsense. And so, having destroyed a thousand-year tradition, Wittgenstein did the reasonable thing—he dropped the mic and found a real job teaching kids to spell.

At this time in his life—around 1919, when he turned thirty—Wittgenstein wanted badly to transform himself. Convinced he was a moral failure, he took extreme steps to change his circumstances, divesting himself of his enormous family fortune (which he dispersed among his siblings, making sure he could never legally access it again); leaving the palatial family home he’d grown up in (it was literally called the “Palais Wittgenstein”); and looking for the kind of hard and honest work he hoped would distract him from his despair and allow him to do something of value. In choosing teaching he was influenced by a romantic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d gotten from reading Tolstoy. His family was perplexed by his decisions. His sister Hermine told him that applying his genius to teaching children was like using a “precision instrument” to open crates.

Read the rest here.

André Naffis-Sahely in The Nation:

In his dotage, Henry Kissinger has come to resemble Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. After his five decades of insidious influence on US foreign policy, his face has crumpled into a ripple of wrinkles, but the eyes retain their wily luster. When he enters a room, he does so briskly, and his somber suits barely contain his contempt for those who repeat the accusations that have been gaining traction since the end of the Cold War—that during his tenure as secretary of state in the 1970s, Kissinger abetted, and sometimes incited, mass murder on three continents. The man’s dark aura is magnified by his raspy, Teutonic timbre, which habitually turns the scores of journalists sent to interview him into deferential scribes cowering at the pharaoh’s feet.

As was the case with Palpatine, Kissinger’s overconfidence may well turn out to be his weakness. Since 2001, judges in several countries have called for him to testify about his involvement in the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and activists have demanded his indictment for his role in some of the bloodiest chapters of Vietnamese history, to name only a few of the countries where he wreaked havoc. His travel schedule regularly inspires activists to protest his public appearances. For the moment, however, Kissinger remains a highly coveted pundit—passing judgment on the Ukrainian and Middle Eastern crises in some of the world’s most prestigious newspapers—and dinners are still held in his honor. Public anger, it seems, only invigorates Kissinger, and he is as unassailable now as when he haunted the White House with Tricky Dick.

More here.

[Chomsky section begins at 16:25 mark.]

Tim Bouverie in The Telegraph:

At first glance, a biography of Keynes which largely ignores the economics might seem like a biography of Mozart which skips over the music. But as Richard Davenport-Hines argues in his sprightly Life, or Lives, Keynes was a man so interesting, diverse and important that he is able to command attention beyond the field with which his name is indelibly associated. As his fellow Bloomsbury set member Leonard Woolf wrote, Keynes was “a don, a civil servant, a speculator, a businessman, a journalist, a writer, a farmer, a picture dealer, a statesman, a theatrical manager, a book collector, and half a dozen other things”. “Economist” is notable by its absence, as it is also from the seven thematic chapter headings of this book. For Davenport-Hines, this is entirely deliberate. As Keynes wrote, “the worst of economics is that it really is a technical and complicated subject”, unsuited to a general readership. But for Davenport-Hines there is also a more profound reason, which becomes apparent through this highly enjoyable series of portraits: Keynes’s economics were not created out of a theoretical or mathematical firmament but were the product of his wider life.

Born into the middle-class intelligentsia, Keynes was by birth, by education and inclination, a Liberal. A King’s Scholar at Eton, he went on to King’s College Cambridge where he was a member of the semi-secret debating club, The Apostles. There, members discussed philosophy and took it in turns to read papers from the hearth rug. It was here that Keynes developed that “unparalleled power of lucid exposition” (Austin Robinson) which was to enable him to become one of the great “persuaders” of his age.

More here.

Browse the nominees in the list below and then go to the bottom of the post to vote.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Delhi: the City of Rape?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Free-Floating Anxiety, Teens, and Security Theatre
3. 3 Quarks Daily: My Grandmother's Democratic Party (Part 2)
4. 3 Quarks Daily: Notes Of A Grand Juror
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Somewhere in Europe
6. 3 Quarks Daily: The Evil That Republicans Do
7. 3 Quarks Daily: The Undocumented Journey North, Through Mexico
8. Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
9. At War: Signs of an Afghan Crisis, There on Election Day in June
10. Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…
11. Hong Wrong: The Power of the Powerless: Hong Kong’s Last Stand
12. Huffington Post: You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
13. Jezebel: The Cops Don't Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
14. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Abandoning Ukraine
15. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Limits of Muslim Liberalism
16. Notes From Pakistan: The predominance of clergy in Pakistan
17. Opinionator: Privacy and the Pool of Information
18. Pacific Policy: Timor Leste's survival is an example for all nations
19. Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism
20. Peril: Modi in Oz: Turning Water into Mines
21. Proof I Never Want To Be President: It's Not a Competition
22. Religious Left Law: The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House
23. Scientia Salon: Why not Cynicism?
24. The Philosopher's Beard: The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income
25. U.S. Intellectual History: How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country
26. U.S. Intellectual History: Liberty Man: The Studliness of Exodus
27. U.S. Intellectual History: The Culture Wars Are Dead, Long Live the Culture Wars!
28. U.S. Intellectual History: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Charlton Heston
29. Warscapes: Cold Remains in Greenland

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Li Ho

Li Ho of the province of Honan
(not to be confused with the god Li Po
of Kansu or Szechuan
who made twenty thousand verses)
Li Ho, whose mother said,
“my son daily vomits up his heart”
mounts his horse and rides
to where a temple lies as lace among foliage.
His youth is bargained
for some poems in his saddlebag—
his beard is gray. Leaning
against the flank of his horse he considers
the flight of birds
but his hands are heavy. (Take this cup,
he thinks, fill it, I want to drink again.)
Deep in his throat, but perhaps it is a bird,
he hears a child cry.

by Jim Harrison
from Selected and New Poems
Delacorte Press, 1965

Chris Woolston in Nature:

Images of painted pterosaurs, ceramic diatoms and quilts depicting neurons have flooded scientists’ Twitter feeds, after the writers of Symbiartic, Scientific American’s art blog launched ‘SciArt Week’ this week. Researchers and artists have been posting a flurry of artwork highlighting the beautiful side of science, using the hashtag #sciart. Malcolm Campbell, a plant scientist at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, Canada, was one of the first researchers to announce SciArt week on Twitter. “Art captures the imagination in a way that science alone cannot,” he says. “It’s a wonderful way to make science more tangible to the public.”

The week began with a post on the Symbiartic blog calling for followers to tweet out at least three pieces of scientific art — including paintings, cartoons, medical illustrations and rough sketches — each day. Glendon Mellow, the Toronto-based artist and Symbiartic blogger who first conceived SciArt Week, says he was originally hoping for about 1,600 #sciart tweets per day, but was surprised to see nearly 5,000 on 2 March alone. One of his motivations, he says, was to expose artists to a wider audience of potential buyers. “We want people who love science to become aware of how easily they can reach out to artists.” The deluge of images has spanned just about every field of science. Adam Summers, a fish biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, shared his striking photograph of a leopard shark embryo with blue-stained cartilage.

Picture: Words frequently found in research papers about barn owls were used to create this image.

More here.