Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In 1602, a Spanish fleet was sailing up the Pacific coast of Mexico when the crew became deathly ill. “The first symptom is pain in the whole body that makes it sensitive to touch,” wrote Antonio de la Ascensión, a priest on the expedition. “Purple spots begin to cover the body, especially from the waist down; then the gums become so swollen that the teeth cannot be brought together, and they can only drink, and finally they die all of a sudden, while talking.” The crew was suffering from scurvy, a disease that was then both bitterly familiar and deeply mysterious. No one knew why it struck sailors or how to cure it. But on that 1602 voyage, Ascensión witnessed what he considered a miracle. While the crew was ashore burying the dead, one sick sailor picked up a cactus fruit to eat. He started to feel better, and his crewmates followed his example. “They all began to eat them and bring them back on board so that, after another two weeks, they were all healed,” the priest wrote. Over the next two centuries, it gradually became clear that scurvy was caused by a lack of fruits and vegetables on long-distance voyages. In the late 1700s, the British Navy started supplying its ships with millions of gallons of lemon juice, eradicating scurvy. But it wasn’t until 1928 that the Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi discovered the ingredient that cured scurvy: vitamin C.

Szent-Gyorgyi’s experiments were part of a wave of early-20th-century research that pulled back the curtain on vitamins. Scientists discovered that the human body required minuscule amounts of 13 organic molecules. A deficiency of any of the vitamins led to different diseases — a lack of vitamin A to blindness, vitamin B12 to severe anemia, vitamin D to rickets. Today, a huge amount of research goes into understanding vitamins, but most of it is focused on how much of them people need to stay healthy. This work does not address a basic question, though: How did we end up so dependent on these peculiar little molecules?

More here.

The Tragedy of Hats

Haji Habib-ur-Rehman, or Haji Sahib, who has been painting trucks, vehicles, and crafts since 1955, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

“They are everywhere. Those heavy-set Gods of the highway, those mammoth trucks in their entire jazzy splendor. The swirls, the motifs, the colours, the patterns, the tigers, the peacocks, the parrots, the lions, and the roses, the thick lashes on singular eyes, the lips, and (at times) the face of a politician, a star, thrown in for good measure …” from Allah Rung Laave by Sonia Rehman.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Nighat Mir.

by Liam Heneghan

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I walked, without having given it very much forethought, nor having fortified myself with breakfast, nor even with sufficient tea, a distance of about 7 miles from my home to discover the confluence of the North Shore Channel and the Chicago River. The digging of the former waterway was completed in 1909 in order to bear the sewage from Chicago’s prosperous North Shore communities away from Lake Michigan and into the Chicago River. By that time the Chicago River was itself a marvel of engineering, its flow having been reversed so that all soluble, floatable and mobile waste ran west into the Mississippi watershed rather than into the lake.

Breakfastlessly I walked alongside this water, keeping the channel to my left for the first few miles then crossing over into the parks to the east of the channel. In many places buckthorn, a dominant invasive species in the Midwest, and by some accounts the most common woody plant in Chicago, is so dense that I only rarely saw water. At its densest the soil under these plants is litter-less and rivulets have rent passageways through the channel bank.

Although it was past 10 AM when I walked under the bridge on Lincoln avenue, a homeless man swiveled in his sleeping bag, his head almost fully submerged, trying, on that cold morning, to stay aslumber. His radio played a Christmas carol on low; a paperback best seller peeped out from one of his bags. A little further along a woman behind me asked if I had enough food to keep me going. I turned but she was talking to another homeless fellow so on I walked.

I had not checked on a map where the confluence occurred, nor did I have a phone that I could consult. I knew that it could not be too far since I had kayaked the Chicago River north of Addison, though that spot was still a few miles to my south. As I walked through a park near Foster Avenue, the Canada geese glanced up from their listless grazing, and I finally spotted the fork where the two waters co-mingle. I could not, however, get close as I was separated from the water by a chain link fence and by phalanxes of those invasive shrubs. I leaned there for a moment against a spindly hackberry.

Read more »

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Bernard Williams was one of the most brilliant philosophers of his generation. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites, Adrian Moore, who knew him well, discusses his views about ethics.

Philosophy Bites is currently unfunded. If you enjoy our podcast, please support us by using the Paypal buttons on this site to subscribe or donate to the podcast.

Listen to Adrian Moore on Bernard Williams on Ethics

John Hibbing makes the case in the Washington's Post's Monkey Cage:

Larry Bartels recently asked what studies of genes and politics — “genopolitics”– add to our “understanding of politics” and suggested the answer is “not much.” Bartels’s question is perfectly legitimate but his answer deserves more considered reflection.

I suppose those of us involved with genopolitics should be heartened by the tone of Bartels’ essay. After all, if the three stages of scientific discovery are “that can’t be true,” “that’s not important,” and “we’ve known that all the time,” it would appear that the genopolitics movement has entered the second stage.

From my perspective, it is unfortunate that Bartels focuses entirely on genopolitics given that much of the new work on biology and politics does not explicitly involve genes. Early (even pre-natal) development, salient environmental experiences, and genetics all interact to mold people’s biological predispositions, which then shape individuals’ responses to given environmental stimuli. Biology, not genetics alone, is the key and it is now possible to measure politically relevant biological predispositions with physiological, endocrinological, cognitive, and neurosciencetechniques.

But why would we want to? Here we come to an important potential contribution of work on biology and politics. Whether the preferred phrase is implicit attitudes,internalized information, motivated social reasoning, antecedent considerations, orpredispositions, much research shows that, though change is possible, people’s politics are quite consistent over the course of a lifetime.

More here.

Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

“In many ways I've been writing personal stories all my life,” she said in Bailey's. If you are a Munro fan, you will know about the struggling mink and fox farm of her Depression-era childhood; the family's house at the end of the road; the burden of her mother's Parkinson's disease in her early 40s; her scholarship to university; her early marriage to a bookish student, young motherhood and divorce. And you will recognise the watermarks of shame and guilt running through each collection: “I was brought up in a community where there was shame,” she says of her Scots-Irish Presbyterian rural upbringing. “We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves,” she writes in the last line of Dear Life about her failure to visit her mother during her last illness or even to go to her funeral. “But we do,” she continues with characteristic insistence on absolute truthfulness – “we do it all the time.”

She says her feelings about her mother are “probably the deepest material of my life. I think when you are growing up you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs, you've got to go your own way, and that's what I did. And of course she was in a very vulnerable position, which in a way was also a position of power. So that was always a central thing in my life – that I did pull away from her when she was deeply in need. And yet I still feel I did it for salvation.” Her mother's illness meant that Munro took over the housework and care of her younger brother and sister from when she was around nine. “I wanted the house always to be clean. I would bake on Saturdays and I would iron everybody's clothes. It was a way of keeping up respectability. Superficially I was very kind to my mother, but I never allowed myself to enter into her predicament or I would have stayed and become the person who ran the family until she died and then it would have been too late for me to go.”

More here.

Lee Lawrence in The Wall Street Journal:

Whether recounted in sweet-smelling tea shops or presented in illustrated manuscripts, the “Shahnameh” has entertained and inspired Iranians for more than 1,000 years. Of all their artistic treasures, Abu'l Qasim Firdausi's “Book of Kings” is the one Iranians most prize. They may not have its 50,000 verses memorized, but they are all familiar with this blend of myth and history filled with tales of heroes slaying demons, portents so fierce that kings fear “their liver will split in terror,” and maidens—oh, what maidens—”as elegant as cypress” and as pure as smokeless candles. From the start, however, the epic has also repeatedly served as a political tool. When Firdausi was penning his verses in 1007-10, Muslim Arab dynasties had ruled Persia for more than 31/2 centuries. Yet he avoided using Arabic words almost entirely and incorporated no elements of Islamic thought. His motive? To stir national pride and resistance to foreign rule by celebrating Persian culture. In the short run, Firdausi's gambit failed. For some 200 years the epic lay dormant, gaining traction only after the Mongols invaded in 1219. Scholars posit that courtiers advised the new rulers to win their subjects' hearts by commissioning sumptuous, illustrated copies of the “Book of Kings” or, as it is sometimes translated, the “King of Books.”

Over the coming centuries, rulers gave manuscripts to dazzle, curry favor or, as happened in 1829, avoid war. Two months after the Russian ambassador was murdered in Tehran, the shah sent a lavish gift package to the czar. Its most precious offerings, says Firuza Abdullaeva, head of the Shahnama Centre at Pembroke College, included Arab horses, gold, an 88.8-carat diamond and a 1651 “Shahnameh” with 192 miniatures. The shah hoped his largesse would so appease the czar that Russia would not only refrain from retaliation but forgive some of the indemnity Iran owed as part of a recent treaty. It worked.

More here.

I Had a Revelation

I had a revelation
at the SuperCenter in the mall
I was trying on a polo shirt
of an apple-green shade
and between the two mirrors
I saw my face
and my exposed chest
and it occurred to me that I am ripening
and that soon I will drop like an apple
and will crash onto the warm ground
and a thump will sound

and the earth will not shake
and the sea will not flood
and the sun and moon will not go dark
.

by Mordechai Geldman
from Halachti Shanim Le-Tzidcha
publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad,
Mossad Bialik, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, 2011
translation: 2013, Tsipi Keller

Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine:

This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era.

While its depiction of physical torture has commanded the most attention, I found the psychological torture more disturbing. To make a person a slave requires making them complicit in their own subservience, through rituals of degradation, such as forcing them to clap their hands to mocking songs, dancing for their masters, or being stripped, or compared to animals. The one time Northup tries to escape, he wanders immediately onto a lynch party, which underscores the threat of violence lurking invisibly everywhere. (And the threat of the noose survived in the South a century past the threat of the lash.)

More here. [Thanks to Richard B. Bernstein.]

Bob Herbert in Jacobin:

Even though it had been expected, I was jolted when I got the phone call with the news that after many long decades the defiant fire of resistance had gone out and Nelson Mandela had died. He was the only truly great public figure I’d ever covered, an authentic revolutionary who refused to cower in the face of the most malignant of evils.

I knew that the tributes would be pouring in immediately from around the world, and I also knew that most of them would try to do to Mandela what has been done to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: turn him into a lovable, platitudinous cardboard character whose commitment to peace and willingness to embrace enemies could make everybody feel good. This practice is a deliberate misreading of history guaranteed to miss the point of the man.

The primary significance of Mandela and King was not their willingness to lock arms or hold hands with their enemies. It was their unshakable resolve to do whatever was necessary to bring those enemies to their knees. Their goal was nothing short of freeing their people from the murderous yoke of racial oppression. They were not the sweet, empty, inoffensive personalities of ad agencies or greeting cards or public service messages. Mandela and King were firebrands, liberators, truth-tellers – above all they were warriors. That they weren’t haters doesn’t for a moment minimize the fierceness of their militancy.

More here.

Deborah Smith at The Quarterly Conversation:

With any luck, 2013 should mark a watershed moment for Korean literature in English translation, thanks to the ten volumes being released by Dalkey Archive. They arrive with the support of the indefatigable LTI Korea, an institution whose existence—and budget—is frequently the cause of teeth-gnashing envy on the part of translators from less well-supported languages. All told, these ten—to be followed by ten more, currently scheduled for release in spring 2014—do an admirable job of showcasing the great range of talent to be found among modern Korean literature, which, in its contemporary iteration, seems to me to be one of the world’s most exciting, dynamic, and consistently impressive. This excellence is thanks, variously, to three things: the relatively stringent gate-keeping role still played by Korean publishers; a longstanding regard for the intellectual and the highbrow; and a traditional focus on short stories that has enabled the Korean novel to develop as a far more fluid, hybrid form than the calcified monoliths that have sometimes played a stultifying role elsewhere.

These ten Dalkey translations also cover a wide range of periods, from the colonial 1930s to the hyper-technologized postmodernity of the 21st century. Though this range makes the books useful in terms of providing a broad sweep for the uninitiated, it does make it somewhat tricky to draw any meaningful connections or comparisons between the works, aside from the obvious one of their being “Korean.”

more here.

Matthew Engel at The Financial Times:

Nairn didn’t even have a script: he pottered round in his Morris Minor convertible, saw buildings he either loved or loathed, said his piece, usually looking uneasy and unsociable, and moved on. He was a hugely influential figure in alerting the populace to the disasters created by the architect/planner/government-knows-best attitude that prevailed.

The critic Deyan Sudjic sees him as one of four men who shaped the way Britain saw its architecture 30 and 40 years ago, along with the cataloguer Nikolaus Pevsner, the lyrical nostalgist John Betjeman and the Los Angeles-lover Reyner Banham. Pevsner and Betjeman have never gone out of fashion; Banham’s exuberant theories have not weathered well.

Nairn, meanwhile, was the youngest of the four but the first to die – in 1983, aged 52, of cirrhosis. The drink had already done for his career as both a broadcaster and writer. For two decades he had blazed across the scene, first in the architectural press, then in books, finally on TV and in the Sunday newspapers. The creative industries have some tolerance for wayward geniuses but it is always finite, especially when alcohol makes them intolerable, and Nairn had stretched the tolerance beyond its limits. The obeisances were muted when he died, and then he was largely forgotten.

more here.