Richard Wright in The New Republic:

I don't know what the book is about; the nearest I can come to indicating its theme is to refer to the Catholic confessional or the private office of the psychoanalyst. The characters, Negro and white, are “naturals,” and are seen from a point of view that endows them with a mythlike quality. The core of the book is the varied relationships of these characters to Singer, a lonely deaf mute. There are Mick Kelly, a sensitive, adolescent white girl; aged Dr. Copeland, the hurt and frustrated Negro; Jake Blount, a nervous and unbalanced whiskey-head; and Biff Brannon, whose consciousness is one mass of timid bewilderment. All these characters and many more feel that the deaf mute alone understands them; they assail his deaf ears with their troubles and hopes, thereby revealing their intense loneliness and denied capacity for living.

When the deaf mute's friend dies in an insane asylum, he commits suicide, an act which deprives the confessional of its priest. The lives of Miss McCullers' characters are resolved thus: Mick Kelly is doomed to a life of wage slavery in a five-and-ten-cent store; Dr. Copeland is beaten by a mob of whites when he protests against the injustices meted out to his race; Jake Blount stumbles off alone, wistfully, to seek a place in the South where he can take hold of realty through Marxism; and Biff Brannon steels himself to live a life of emptiness.

more here.

James Wood at The London Review of Books:

Sebald seems to know the difference between homesickness and homelessness. If there is anguish, there is also discretion: how could my loss adequately compare with yours? Where exile is often marked by the absolutism of the separation, secular homelessness is marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end. This is a powerful motif in the work of Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-American writer who came to the States from Sarajevo, in 1992, only to discover that the siege of his hometown prohibited his return. Hemon stayed in America, learned how to write a brilliant, Nabokovian English (a feat in some sense greater than Nabokov’s because achieved at a steroidal pace), and published his first book, The Question of Bruno, in 2000 (dedicated to his wife, and to Sarajevo). Once the Bosnian war was over, Hemon could, presumably, have returned to his native city. What had not been a choice became one; he decided to make himself into an American writer.

Hemon’s work stages both his departure and return. In the novella Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls, Pronek arrives in America on a student exchange programme. Like Hemon, Pronek is from Sarajevo, is trapped by the war, and stays in America. He finds the United States a bewildering, alienating place, full of vulgarity and ignorance. When, near the end of the story, he returns to Sarajevo, the reader expects him to stay.

more here.

From BlackPast.org:

“It is probable that this hall will intertwine itself with the history of our country,” said Andrew Carnegie in 1890, when he laid the cornerstone of the building that would become Carnegie Hall. In keeping with Carnegie’s firm belief in egalitarianism and meritocracy, the hall that bore his name maintained an open-door policy from the beginning. In June of 1892, at the end of the hall’s first full concert season, soprano Sissieretta Jones became the first African American artist to perform there on a concert presented by the black social organization The Sons of New York. Although this performance took place in the 1200-seat recital hall on the hall’s lower level (today known as Zankel Hall), Jones returned eight months later to sing in the main auditorium on a benefit for the World’s Fair Colored Opera Company, at which Frederick Douglass delivered an introductory address. Black social causes frequently found a platform at Carnegie Hall during its first half century. Booker T. Washington made the first of his 15 appearances there in 1896, delivering an address at a Presbyterian Home Missions rally. In January of 1904, Washington shared the stage with W.E.B. Du Bois on a three-day conference of African American leaders. Du Bois returned in 1918 to speak alongside Theodore Roosevelt on a benefit for the Circle for Negro War Relief. The more controversial Marcus Garvey, inspired by Washington but denounced by Du Bois, addressed Carnegie Hall audiences four times between 1919 and 1924.

…In the 65 years since Duke Ellington’s debut, representatives of nearly every facet of black culture have appeared regularly at Carnegie Hall, although any brief survey of necessity omits more names than it can possibly include. One thing is clear: Carnegie Hall has certainly fulfilled Andrew Carnegie’s founding wish by intertwining itself with the history of our country, regardless of race.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

From Nature:

It is just over a year since the publication of the first randomized controlled trial¹ investigating the medical use of human faeces. The 43 trial participants had recurrent Clostridium difficile infections, which cause dangerous, painful and persistent diarrhoea. Those in the control groups received antibiotics alone. Those in the test group received antibiotics along with a fluid derived from filtered faeces, which was delivered into the upper small intestine through nasal tubes. This small trial was stopped ahead of schedule because the faecal slurry was more than twice as effective in resolving symptoms as antibiotics alone¹. Non-randomized studies, with outcomes collected from hundreds of people suffering from recurrent C. difficile infections and treated with similar procedures, have had typical success rates of around 90% (ref. 2). First described³ in the scientific literature in 1958, faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), delivers processed stool from a healthy individual to the gut of a sick person through enema, colonoscopy or other means. The goal is to displace pathogenic microbes from the intestine by re-establishing a healthy microbial community. Interest has surged in the past five years (see 'Stool treatment'). At the same time, new regulatory barriers have made FMT more difficult to study or practice.

In May 2013, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a public announcement that it had been regulating human faeces as a drug. This classification requires physicians to submit a time-consuming Investigational New Drug (IND) application before performing FMT. The FDA reasoned that this requirement would make FMT safer by providing oversight, standardizing therapy and, eventually, encouraging development of commercial drug products. At a public meeting hosted that month by the FDA and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), patients, physicians and representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and several professional medical societies voiced concern about restricting access to care for these increasingly prevalent infections. Six weeks later, the FDA revised its position. The agency decided, for the time being, not to enforce the IND requirement for recurrent C. difficile infections. This compassionate exception is now enabling many people to receive much-needed care. But the long-term status of FMT for C. difficile infection is unresolved, and regulatory policy is complicating research into the exploration of FMT for other conditions, such as inflammatory bowel diseases or obesity.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

“Teleology” is a naughty word in certain circles — largely the circles that I often move in myself, namely physicists or other scientists who know what the word “teleology” means. To wit, it’s the concept of “being directed toward a goal.” In the good old days of Aristotle, our best understanding of the world was teleological from start to finish: acorns existed in order to grow into mighty oak trees; heavy objects wanted to fall and light objects to rise; human beings strove to fulfill their capacity as rational beings. Not everyone agreed, including my buddy Lucretius, but at the time it was a perfectly sensible view of the world.

These days we know better, though the knowledge has been hard-won. The early glimmerings of the notion of conservation of momentum supported the idea that things just kept happening, rather than being directed toward a cause, and this view seemed to find its ultimate embodiment in the clockwork universe of Newtonian mechanics. (In technical terms, time evolution is described by differential equations fixed by initial data, not by future goals.) Darwin showed how the splendid variety of biological life could arise without being in any sense goal-directed or guided — although this obviously remains a bone of contention among religious people, even respectable philosophers. But the dominant paradigm among scientists and philosophers is dysteleological physicalism.

However. Aristotle was a smart cookie, and dismissing him as an outdated relic is always a bad idea.

More here.

Ken Roth in Foreign Policy:

Feb. 17, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry released a report documenting atrocities that the North Korean government has been committing against its own people. For years, governments have largely ignored Pyongyang's domestic repressions — at least when compared with the intense focus on its nuclear capabilities. That may have been politically tenable in the feigned ignorance of earlier times, but it is unconscionable now that a UN body has formally documented these crimes. The report got widespread publicity in the West, but Beijing is where it should receive the most attention.

Because their country provides substantial military and economic support to Pyongyang as it commits ongoing atrocities, senior Beijing officials could be found liable for aiding and abetting those crimes if the matter comes to court. The report, which explicitly fingered Beijing for its practice of forcibly repatriating North Korea refugees, is a rare case of a UN body implying that officials of a permanent member of the UN Security Council are complicit in crimes against humanity. (The Chinese foreign ministry rejected this charge as “unreasonable criticism.”)

But Beijing's culpability is actually greater than the report states.

More here.

Josh Fattal in the Los Angeles Times:

On the morning of my appearance before an Iranian Revolutionary Court, where I was convicted on a fabricated charge of espionage, I heard the chant “Death to America!” from the world beyond my prison window. The chant, and the associated stereotype of Islamic Iran, was quite different from what I heard in Section 209, the grim area of Evin Prison where political detainees are beaten, tortured and held without charge. As Americans, my friend and cellmate Shane Bauer and I were denied contact with Iranian inmates during our imprisonment there. Yet time and again, they found the courage to defy that rule and lift our spirits.

When I'd sing anguished songs to the emptiness, I'd hear a knock of solidarity on my wall from an adjoining cell. Then another knock. Then a whisper from the hallway, and the soothing words in English, “We hope you become free!” Prisoners would hide candies in the washroom for us to find. I'd repay the kindness by sneaking chocolates, which my interrogators let me have, into the shower for my hall mates to discover.

Over the 781 days of my incarceration, I developed a deep sense of solidarity with these Iranians. I landed in Evin Prison by happenstance in the summer of 2009. Shane and his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, were living in Damascus, Syria, at the time, and I had gone to visit them after completing an international teaching fellowship. The idea of escaping the bustle of Damascus with a trip to the placid mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan appealed to us all. Without us knowing, our hike took us up to the unmarked frontier with Iran, where border guards detained us.

More here.

James Palmer in Aeon:

Mia could win over anybody who knew her. But to get those chances meant battling past a wall of entrenched prejudice and fear. Willy had been able to get past his initial feelings about her, motivated largely by his desire to ‘not be a peasant’, but others were complacent in their bigotry. Despite her intelligence, she had not received any university offers, and her chances of employment were worryingly slight. Chinese universities routinely reject qualified candidates with the excuse that their ‘physical condition does not meet the needs of study’ – a policy of discrimination written into some schools’ constitutions. Meanwhile, figures published in Chinese state media last year show that only a quarter of disabled people are able to find any form of employment.

If you judged the country by its laws alone, China would be a global leader on disability rights. The ‘Laws on the Protection of Persons with Disabilities’, introduced in 1990, offer strong and wide-ranging protection of the civil rights of the disabled, guaranteeing employment, education, welfare, and access. But despite the high concerns of the law, Chinese cities make little concession to disabled people. As the sociologist Yu Jianrong has documented, raised pathways for the blind often lead into dead ends, bollards, trees or open pits, or else spiral decoratively but misleadingly. Wheelchair access is non-existent, especially outside Beijing or Shanghai, and guide dogs are effectively forbidden from most public spaces, despite the authorities’ repeated promises of full access.

Read the rest here.

Sergei Krikalev on the Space Station Mir

this is for those people
that hover and hover
and die in the ether peripheries
–Michael Ondaatje, “White Dwarfs”

My name is Sergei and
my body is a balloon.
I want to come down. I
tie myself to things.

My eyes try to describe your
face, they have forgotten.
My ears echo your voice.

I am a star, you can
see me skating on
the dome of night. My blades
catch sun from
the other side of earth.

Days last an hour and a half.
No one else lives here.
My country has disappeared,
I do not know where home is.

I am a painter standing back.
I watch clouds heave like cream
spilled in tea, I see
the burning parrot feathers
of the Amazon forests,
ranges of mountains are
scales along the hide
of the planet, the oceans
are my only sky.

This is my refuge. There is
no one else near me.
Do you understand what that means?

Elena, I am
cold up here.
I hang over Moscow and
imagine you in our flat
feeding little Olga
in a messy chair.
When I drift out of signal range
I do things you
don't want to hear about.

These feet do not know
my weight. A slow
balloon bounces off the walls.
I do not feel like I am flying.

I want to come back and
swim in your hair.
I want to smell you.
I want to arrive in the world
and know my place.
Think of me. I am yours adrift.

Let me describe
my universe: I can see for years.

by Jay Ruzesky
from Painting The Yellow House Blue
House of Anansi Press, Concord, Ontario: 1994
.

Alice Shabecoff in Scientific American:

We can, thankfully, remove one threat to the future existence of the human male from our worry list: The male Y chromosome, after dwindling from its original robust size over millions of years, apparently has halted its disappearing act. But don’t start cheering yet. Contrary to cultural assumptions that boys are stronger and sturdier, basic biological weaknesses are built into the male of our species. These frailties leave them more vulnerable than girls to life’s hazards, including environmental pollutants such as insecticides, lead and plasticizers that target their brains or hormones. Several studies suggest that boys are harmed in some ways by these chemical exposures that girls are not. It’s man’s fate, so to speak. First of all, human males are disappearing. Mother Nature has always acknowledged and compensated for the fragility and loss of boys by arranging for more of them: 106 male births to 100 female newborns over the course of human history. (Humans are not unique in this setup: Male piglets, as an example, are conceived in greater proportion to compensate for being more likely than female piglets to die before birth.) But in recent decades, from the United States to Japan, from Canada to northern Europe, wherever researchers have looked, the rate of male newborns has declined. Examining U. S. records of births for the years between 1970 and 1990, they found 1.7 fewer boys per 1,000 than in decades and centuries past; Japan’s loss in the same decades was 3.7 boys.

Boys are also more than two-thirds more likely than girls to be born prematurely – before the 37th week of pregnancy. And, despite advances in public health, boys in the 1970s faced a 30 percent higher chance of death by their first birthday than girls; in contrast, back in the 1750s, they were 10 per cent more likely than girls to die so early in their lives. Once they make it to childhood, boys face other challenges. They are more prone to a range of neurological disorders. Autism is notoriously higher among boys than girls: now nearly five times more likely, as tallied by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are more susceptible than girls to damage from very low-level exposure to lead. Yet another problem: Boys also suffer from asthma at higher rates. There’s also a stronger link between air pollution and autism in boys. What is up here? Why do boys face such a burden of physical challenges?

The answer is that the male’s problems start in the womb: from his more complicated fetal development, to his genetic makeup, to how his hormones work.

More here.

From BlackPast.org:

In 1931 twelve year old Thomas J. Pressley witnessed the lynching of George Smith in Union City, the county seat of Obion County, Tennessee. Now a University of Washington historian and Professor Emeritus, Dr. Pressley describes that lynching in the article below.

When I was twelve years old, I saw the body of a young black man hanging from the limb of a tree where he had been hung several hours earlier. The lynching had taken place in April, 1931, in Union City, the county seat, of Obion County, in Northwestern Tennessee, not too far from the Kentucky line to the north, and from the Mississippi River to the west. I lived in Troy, Tennessee, a town of five hundred inhabitants, ten miles. south of Union City. On the morning of April 18, 1931, a friend of mine in Troy, Hal Bennet, five or six years older than I, told me that he had to drive his car to Union City to purchase some parts for the car, and he asked if I wanted to go along for the ride. I was not old enough to drive, and I was happy to accept his invitation. Neither Hal not I had heard anything about a lynching in Union City, but when we entered town, we soon passed the Court House and saw that the grounds were filled with people and that the black man's body was hanging from the tree.

We were told by people in the crowd that the lynched man was in his early twenties, and that on the previous night, he had entered the bedroom and clutched the neck of a young lady prominent as a singer and pianist, the main entertainer at the new radio station recently established in Union City as the first station in Obion County. The young lady said she had fought off her attacker and severely scratched his face before he fled from her house. Within hours the sheriff and his deputy, using bloodhounds, had tracked down a black man who had scratches on his face. They then brought him before the young woman who identified him as her assailant. Convinced he had the attacker, the sheriff put him in the jail, which occupied the top floor of the Court House. Before long, however, a mob of whites gathered, broke into the jail, overpowered the sheriff and deputy, and hung the victim from the limb of the tree near the jail. I did not know the name of the black man who died that day. I was later told that he was a high school graduate which was unusual for blacks or whites in my county in that period, and that he knew the family of the woman attacked.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Emily Rapp in the Boston Globe:

On Christmas Day I stood on a slow-moving conveyor belt in Mexico City at the modern shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, surrounded by penitents clutching rosaries, all of us inching by the centuries-old image that attracts millions. A woman standing next to me closed her eyes and voiced ardent prayers for protection and healing. I looked with a skeptic’s eyes. The scene puts me in mind of what Alan Lightman terms the “boundaries between science and religion” in his new collection, “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew.” Regardless of outstanding interests in science or religion, any reader will enjoy pondering, through well-organized and graceful prose, what can be objectively proven about the world in which we live and what remains a mystery.

Can science prove the existence of God? Is this universe we inhabit the only one? Can a religious experience be scientifically proven? Lightman ponders these timeless, unanswerable questions using his training as both a scientist and a novelist, always careful to include historical and contemporary perspectives on each argument or idea. Lightman’s style is wonderfully readable; he writes about quantum physics and religious philosophical traditions with equal grace and enthusiasm. He delicately probes the emotional questions raised by genetics, molecular biology, and other scientific disciplines, maintaining that despite a preponderance of scientific advancement and evidence about specific aspects of the world, “we must believe in what we cannot prove.”

More here.

Edward Frenkel in the New York Times:

In Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” the protagonist, a writer, burns a manuscript in a moment of despair, only to find out later from the Devil that “manuscripts don’t burn.” While you might appreciate this romantic sentiment, there is of course no reason to think that it is true. Nikolai Gogol apparently burned the second volume of “Dead Souls,” and it has been lost forever. Likewise, if Bulgakov had burned his manuscript, we would have never known “Master and Margarita.” No other author would have written the same novel.

But there is one area of human endeavor that comes close to exemplifying the maxim “manuscripts don’t burn.” That area is mathematics. If Pythagoras had not lived, or if his work had been destroyed, someone else eventually would have discovered the same Pythagorean theorem. Moreover, this theorem means the same thing to everyone today as it meant 2,500 years ago, and will mean the same thing to everyone a thousand years from now — no matter what advances occur in technology or what new evidence emerges. Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary and timeless.

What kinds of things are mathematical entities and theorems, that they are knowable in this way? Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Aeon:

In one experiment, subjects saw a photograph and a short description of a man or a woman. The photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life.

More here.

Mario Kaiser in Guernica:

They remained in their cells, silent. They no longer believed in life after Guantánamo. They resisted a system that kept them in the dark about their future. They refused to defend themselves against mere accusations.

They were three proud Arab men, and they despised the America they came to know in Guantánamo. They didn’t smile like the man at the end of the chain. They didn’t offer themselves as spies, hoping that America would let them go.

At some point during their captivity, these three men began to retreat. They no longer touched the food the guards pushed through the holes in the doors of their cells. Their bodies dwindled. Their lives hung on thin yellow tubes shoved down their nostrils each morning to let a nutrient fluid drip into their stomachs. In their minds, nothing changed. They didn’t want to stay, and one night, on June 9, 2006, they decided to leave Guantánamo. They climbed on top of the sinks in their cells and hanged themselves.

In the Pentagon’s view, the men hanging from the walls of their cells were assassins whose suicides were attacks on America. The Pentagon struck back.

The story of the lives and deaths of these prisoners is an odyssey of three young men who left for Afghanistan and ended up in Cuba. It is the story of a war against a terror that is difficult to define, a war that the United States government wages even in the cells of its prisoners. It is about a place, Camp Delta, that exposes the asymmetry of this war, and it leads to the front lines—and the American lawyers standing between them, struggling to defend presumed enemies of their country. It is the story of the internal and external battle over Guantánamo.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his personal blog:

I dreamt last night that I was sharing a taxi with Putin from Moscow to Sheremetyevo airport. He was being very friendly and I could tell he liked me. I felt like a coward and a moral cretin for not saying anything critical that would cause him to not like me, and at the same time I kept trying to convince myself that there were strong pragmatic reasons for maintaining good relations, at least for now, as this would enable me to eventually write more revealingly about him. I knew this was bullshit, however, and that I was really just a grovelling sycophantic underling who craved the approval of people in power. Then we got into a massive traffic jam, and I was so filled with self-hatred and dread that I woke up.

In real life I had shared a taxi from Moscow to Sheremetyevo, earlier that same day, with a kind, gentle, architect from Berlin. By 'architect' I mean one of those people from Berlin who talks about 'space' a lot and who participates in panels with philosophers. He has probably never built any buildings, but nor has he blown any up, which is why I am wondering why he got replaced by Putin in my dream.

We had been, earlier in the day, on a panel in front of a few hundred people and a number of angry journalists. We were a motley crew of philosophers and political activists, and to be perfectly honest my reason for accepting the invitation was somewhat disingenuous: it meant an opportunity to go back to Russia after what seems like a lifetime away.

More here.

Jessica Sequeira in the Boston Review:

Two days before I met with Uki Goñi, his analysis of president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the crisis in Argentina was the top article on the Guardian website. Goñi is a correspondent for British newspapers, covering events in Argentina, but his professional experiences before this are enough for a number of lives. He arrived in the city in his early twenties and began work as a journalist at the Buenos Aires Herald, an English language daily and the city’s only newspaper reporting on missing people during the dictatorship. Over the next decade he focused on his band Los Helicópteros, and then wrote three books: El Infiltrado. La verdadera historia de Alfredo Astiz, on the activities of the ESMA, an illegal detention center during the country's National Reorganization Process (1976-1983) responsible for disappearances, tortures, and illegal executions; Perón y los Alemanes, on Perón's involvement with Nazi spies in the country; and The Real Odessa, on Nazi criminals' escapes to Argentina.

Jessica Sequeira: Why did you come to Buenos Aires?

Uki Goñi: My life story is way complicated. I was born in the States, where I lived until I was fourteen, then my family moved to Ireland, where I lived until I was twenty-one, then I came here. But my family background is Argentine and my parents were Argentine. I wanted to stay in Ireland very much. Very much. But there was tremendous family pressure on me to come here. I am an Argentine citizen, and when I turned twenty-one—no, eighteen—the military service was still obligatory, so I had to come for that. I tried staying on in Ireland, enrolling at Trinity College. But basically I ran out of money, and they wouldn’t give me a scholarship because they said my father was an ambassador and I didn’t need it. I couldn’t really work because I wasn’t Irish either; I could be there as a student but I couldn’t work. I had like 300 pounds or something, that was all.

More here.

Alex Bellos in The Guardian:

Irishman Colm Mulcahy is a legendary cardsmith in the mathe-magical community, and his lovely new book Mathematical Card Magic is jammed with entertaining and thought-provoking tricks.

Here's one that's in the book.

The good thing about this trick is that you need an attractive assistant, which is one of the best things about being a magician.

Okay, the assistant doesn't need to be attractive. But I like to aim high, and will assume that she is for the remainder of this post.

The trick was invented by William Fitch Cheney Jr, a US mathematics professor, in 1951. It was originally called Telephone Stud since it could be done over the phone. Mulcahy calls it Fitch Cheney's Five-Card Twist.

First the magician leaves the room, leaving the attractive assistant with the audience. She gives a full deck of cards to an audience member, and asks him or her to shuffle it and then to choose any five cards.

The assistant takes the cards, looks at them, places one face down, and places the four others face up and side by side.

The magician is allowed back in. He glances at the table and – abracadabra – names the hidden card. The audience gasps in awe, since there was no way he knew which cards had been chosen.

So how did he do it?

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]