Oliver Sacks in the New York Review of Books:

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs, one about the grand science museums in South Kensington, which were so much more important than school to me when I was growing up; the other about Humphry Davy, an early-nineteenth-century chemist who had been a hero of mine in those far-off days, and whose vividly described experiments excited me and inspired me to emulation. I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated, rather than sated, by these brief writings, and late in 1997, I launched on a three-year project of writing a memoir of my boyhood, which I published in 2001 as Uncle Tungsten.¹

I expected some deficiencies of memory—partly because the events I was writing about had occurred fifty or more years earlier, and most of those who might have shared their memories, or checked my facts, were now dead; and partly because, in writing about the first fifteen years of my life, I could not call on the letters and notebooks that I started to keep, assiduously, from the age of eighteen or so.

I accepted that I must have forgotten or lost a great deal, but assumed that the memories I did have—especially those that were very vivid, concrete, and circumstantial—were essentially valid and reliable; and it was a shock to me when I found that some of them were not.

More here.

Karl Sharro in Karl reMarks:

Philosopher, intellectual, diva, poster boy for humanitarian interventionism, post-Foucauldian striptease artist. Bernard Henri Lévy has been called many things over the years, but none of those descriptions quite capture the essence of France’s Numéro Un public intellectual (now that all the others have died). Who is the real BHL, as he is lovingly referred to in France, and why does his moniker sound like the name of a French department store? In order to answer those questions, and have an excuse to call him a few more things, we spent seven minutes inside his head. Here’s the transcript narrated by the Gallic Über-coif himself.

I woke up feeling rather good this morning. We had taken Timbuktu. My heart pumps with anticipation at the thought of handling the ancient erotic manuscripts from Timbuktu’s library. And the locals that we liberated from the tyranny of the barbarians of course. But those manuscripts! The glistening naked bodies under the hot desert sun, depicted with love and attention by great artists. I am breathless. (At this stage, we had to interject and tell BHL to move on, it was getting awkward.)

I spend a mere 35 minutes in front of the mirror arranging my hair in its classic form, a visual allusion to Napoleon’s famous hat, recreated in the gentle upward curves of my hair strands. I am of course the embodiment of his persona and political will. I reminded, what’s his name,… oui, Hollande, of this the other day. I said, ‘Philip, we must go into Mali. This is your chance to leave your mark on history.’ Then I remembered his name was Francois, but he didn’t seem to mind. The Napoleon analogy was attractive to him. A simple man.

More here.

Nathan Schneider in Killing the Buddha:

It took three vehicles to get to Jenin. The first and last were shared taxis that played pop music the whole way; the one in the middle was a bus driven by a handsome and solemn man with a big, religious beard, whose television played music videos memorializing martyrs. If the West Bank is shaped like an hourglass, Jenin is at the top of the upper bulb, where the sand is when it’s full. Thousands of years ago, the dusty city was named after its gardens, but more recently Ariel Sharon called it a “hornet’s nest of terrorism.”

My destination, a place called the Freedom Theatre, adjoined a refugee camp that was completely flattened by made-in-the-USA Israeli bulldozers during the Second Intifada. On the walls of buildings all over town were posters celebrating young men with big guns. At the time, one of the Freedom Theatre’s founders, Zakaria Zubeidi, was sitting in a Palestinian Authority jail with no formal charge. Before turning to theatrical resistance, he had been the local commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which for a time put him at number one on Israel’s most-wanted list. A year earlier, a gunman murdered the Freedom Theatre’s half-Israeli co-founder, Juliano Mer-Khamis, in the courtyard where the final taxi dropped me off.

I had come for the inaugural tour of the Freedom Bus, a ten-day sequence of performances across the West Bank. The other internationals along for the ride made for a varied group, the main factions being college students from the United States and retirees associated with the Swedish National Touring Theatre. The first night at our lonely hotel in Jenin, fatigue led me to fantasies of escape, of hiding back across the Green Line in Israel-proper, where for the previous day the half-Jew in me had felt the rare and guilty pleasure of being among my own.

More here.

One of the most astonishing things about the western involvement in Afghanistan of the past decade, and the British shambles in particular, has been the failure to learn from or, indeed, to read accounts of previous failed interventions – even those by the officers of British regiments whose later incarnations are fighting in the country today. Ignorance of Afghan history has not stopped a procession of contemporary “experts” from throwing about the cliché that we are in the grip of a new “Great Game”. Aside from its lack of imagination, this parallel misses the most important point about the original: that, far from being a vital issue in 19th-century geopolitics, it was in fact something between a sideshow and an illusion. Within a few years of Rudyard Kipling’s coining the term, the British and Russian empires wound up their rivalry in the region when faced with the real common threat of Wilhelmine Germany. This belated recognition of the pointlessness of the entire affair did not, of course, bring back to life the countless people who had died in the course of these imperial adventures over the previous 70 years.

more from Anatol Lieven at the FT here.

Nonetheless, there is no arguing with the claim that Agassiz, a Swiss immigrant, was pivotal to the making of American science. He was “one of the first,” Irmscher writes, “to establish science as a collective enterprise.” He was extraordinarily prolific and influential in many fields, including paleontology, zoology, geology and glaciology. He pioneered field research and was among the first to propose that the Earth had endured an ice age. A charismatic teacher whose students in natural history went on to become the teachers and scientists of the next generation, he was also an obsessive collector, enlisting the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural history specimens so he could build a remarkable museum of comparative anatomy. The range of Agassiz’s interests and expertise seems remarkable to a modern reader, given the narrow specialties of contemporary scientific practice, but in many ways, it was this restless curiosity that made him a transitional figure. He may have forged the path for research as a profession ensconced in universities endowed with posts and chairs, but he also belonged to the older age of the ­polymathic natural philosopher.

more from Rebecca Stott at the NY Times here.

In the three decades since he committed suicide, singer Ian Curtis has become both a symbol and a caricature. Curtis’ seemingly tortured life as a member of the English post-punk band Joy Division and early death in 1980 have been transformed into myth and Curtis into a modern-day Thomas Chatterton or Sylvia Plath. His life offers a perfect narrative for disaffected, sun-averse souls the world over: a young genius too pure to live. As described in former Joy Division and New Order bassist Peter Hook’s honest, punchy and rough-hewn document of that period, “Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division,” Curtis was as tragic and magnetic a figure as the legend suggests, though at the time Hook saw him mostly as a beer-drinking, prank-playing pal.

more from Randall Roberts at the LA Times here.

From NPS:

Abraham Lincoln is often referred to as “The Great Emancipator” and yet, he did not publicly call for emancipation throughout his entire life. Lincoln began his public career by claiming that he was “antislavery” — against slavery's expansion, but not calling for immediate emancipation. However, the man who began as “antislavery” eventually issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in those states that were in rebellion. He vigorously supported the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery throughout the United States, and, in the last speech of his life, he recommended extending the vote to African Americans. This brief study of Lincoln's writings on slavery contains examples of Lincoln's views on slavery. It also shows one of his greatest strengths: his ability to change as it relates to his public stance on slavery.

At the age of 28, while serving in the Illinois General Assembly, Lincoln made one of his first public declarations against slavery.

The following protest was presented to the House, which was read and ordered to be spread on the journals, to wit:

“Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same.

They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.

They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power, under the constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.

They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.

The difference between these opinions and those contained in the said resolutions, is their reason for entering this protest.”

Dan Stone,
A. Lincoln,
Representatives from the county of Sangamon

More here. (Note: At least one daily post throughout the month of February will be devoted to African American History Month)

From Nature:

How cancers cells make that journey has long puzzled researchers: the cells that make up cancers in epithelial tissue, such as the surface cells of the lung and breast, generally prefer to stick together and are not suited for a rough-and-tumble trip through the bloodstream. One theory holds that metastasizing tumour cells activate pathways that are normally reserved for ‘mesenchymal’ cells, which move around in developing embryos². This has been termed the epithelial–mesenchymal transition, or EMT, and some companies have been hard at work developing drugs that target this switch. But most of evidence supporting a role for the EMT in cancer spread has come from animal models. And analyses of tumour cells circulating in the blood has been limited because the techniques tend to pick up only epithelial cells. “It was pioneering technology, but we’ve always been worried that if EMT was happening, we’d miss the mesenchymal tumour cells this way,” says Dive.

Daniel Haber and Shyamala Maheswaran, both at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, and their colleagues, therefore developed a new suite of markers to identify tumour cells circulating in the blood. They then tracked these cells, and characterized their gene expression, in 11 people undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. The team found that when tumours responded to treatment, the proportion of circulating tumour cells harbouring mesenchymal features began to drop. Failure of therapy was followed by resurgence of mesenchymal tumour cells.

More here.

Shubh Mathur in Guernica:

On Saturday June 9, 2012, Major Avtar Singh, formerly of the Indian Army and living in Selma, California, shot his wife and three children. Before turning the gun on himself, he called the Sheriff’s office and told them that he had killed four people. The SWAT team that responded to the call found his youngest and oldest sons, ages three and seventeen, and his wife, dead of gunshot wounds to the head; the middle son, fifteen years old, was critically injured, but alive. He died a few days later, from wounds to the head.

The execution-style gunshots to the head were identical to those which killed Major Singh’s most famous victim, the Kashmiri human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi. Andrabi was abducted, tortured and murdered in 1996 for exposing abuses carried out by the Indian Army in Kashmir. Major Avtar Singh was also wanted by Kashmir’s courts and Interpol for the murder of twenty-eight people in Kashmir in the course of his career as an officer in 35 Rashtriya Rifles, a counterinsurgency unit of the Indian Army. The story of his crimes and the manner in which he evaded justice for sixteen years is a grim chronicle of Indian crimes against humanity in Kashmir and of the silence of the international community which has abetted these. The impunity exploited by India and enabled by the international community clearly corrupted Singh’s conscience, to judge by the murder of his family and his subsequent suicide. Until it deals with the gross human rights violations in Kashmir and an impunity that harkens back to its colonial past, India’s proud claims as the world’s most populous democracy are fatally tainted.

More here.

Wyatt used to be imagined as a lover, courtier and chivalric hero. The ambiguities of courtly love were supposed to have prepared him for the veiled language of international diplomacy. But Brigden shows Wyatt’s world to have been tougher than this – as tough as anything in Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall. For the Wars of the Roses – a nobility vying for power and control of the Crown, eliminating rivals and enemies – ended in barbarism. Honour was reduced to tribal loyalty, and revenge commonly meant beheading. Wyatt’s father, Sir Henry Wyatt, had been interrogated by Richard III: force-fed a mustard-and-vinegar emetic, he remained silent, faithful to Henry Tudor. Thomas was a hard man like his father, a ruthless agent of Henry VIII. At the age of twenty, he was entrusted with carrying a huge sum in gold to pay the garrison of the northern marches. Wyatt probably was brought up as a page in a noble household, much as he himself later arranged for his nephew Henry Lee, the future Champion of Queen Elizabeth. The curriculum included theory of chivalry, horsemanship, swordsmanship and the mimic war of hunting.

more from Alastair Fowler at the TLS here.

Bernhard was not easy to love. In his first letter to Unseld, dated October 22, 1961, he was formal and professional, mindful that he was addressing the German publisher of Hermann Hesse, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Benjamin. “I possess a few books produced by you and they are among the best of the recent time,” Bernhard wrote in one of the hundreds of letters collected in Der Briefwechsel von Thomas Bernhard, Siegfried Unseld (2009). (An English translation of selections from the volume is forthcoming from Seagull Books.) He requested a conversation, explaining that he knew people who knew Unseld, and then declared, “But I go it alone.” This was the first hint of Bernhard’s obsession with independence. Once, in September 1971, Bernhard turned up in Unseld’s office, requested the original of a contract he had signed the day before, tore it out of the publisher’s hands and crossed out one of its clauses. (“It was a definite low point,” Unseld noted in his chronicle of the meeting.) The main character in his novel Correction (1975) channels Bernhard’s frustration: “Our ambition is to get out of these contracts and written agreements, for life.” Though he often needed and demanded safety nets, Bernhard feared becoming entangled in them and struggled constantly against their embrace.

more from Holly Case at The Nation here.

There are ways in which Silicon Valley is nothing like this: it’s clean, quiet work, and here to stay in one form or another. But there are ways in which technology is just another boom and the Bay Area is once again a boomtown, with transient populations, escalating housing costs, mass displacements and the casual erasure of what was here before. I think of it as frontierism, with all the frontier’s attitude and operational style, where people without a lot of attachments come and do things without a lot of concern for their impact, where money moves around pretty casually, and people are ground underfoot equally casually. Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like one face of Janus-headed capitalism; it contains the people too valuable even to use public transport or drive themselves. In the same spaces wander homeless people undeserving of private space, or the minimum comfort and security; right by the Google bus stop on Cesar Chavez Street immigrant men from Latin America stand waiting for employers in the building trade to scoop them up, or to be arrested and deported by the government. Both sides of the divide are bleak, and the middle way is hard to find.

more from Rebecca Solnit at the LRB here.

From BBC:

The exact numbers of Africans shipped overseas during the slave trade are hotly debated—estimates range between 10 and 28 million. What is undisputed is the degree of savage cruelty endured by men, women and children. Up to 20% of those chained in the holds of the slave ships died before they even reached their destination. Between 1450 and 1850 at least 12 million Africans were taken across the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic—mainly to colonies in North America, South America, and the West Indies. The Middle Passage was integral to a larger pattern of commerce developed by European countries. European traders would export manufactured goods to the west coast of Africa where they would be exchanged for slaves. The slaves were then sold for huge profits in the Americas.

More here. (Note: One daily post throughout the month of February will be devoted to commemorate African American History Month)

From DAWN:

Film director Deepa Mehta is no stranger to controversy. Two of her movies – “Fire” and “Water” – were hit by protests from right-wing groups in India, and there were fears her latest cinematic offering would meet a similar fate. “Midnight’s Children”, Mehta’s adaptation of the Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie, opens in Indian cinemas on Friday. The film, which chronicles the story of an Indian family living through the tumultuous events of the country’s recent past, features a voice over by Rushdie. The book’s depiction of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s role during India’s Emergency in the 1970s had thrown the film’s screening into doubt. Mehta, 63, spoke to Reuters about “Midnight’s Children,” adapting a book for the screen and “un-filmable films.”

Q: Many people had said that “Midnight’s Children” might be un-filmable. Was it an easy book to adapt?

A: “This is not the first book that I have adapted. I worked on Bapsi Sidhwa’s book for ‘Earth’. All books, by their very nature, don’t have to make good films. I think it depends on the filmmaker– if the filmmaker finds that something in that inherent story has resonance for them, then you say let me try and do it … One of the things you have to be aware of is that the film is not a facsimile of the book. It was the same with Midnight’s Children. Yes, it was an iconic book. Yes, people said it was un-filmable. For me, it was a very clear narrative.”

Q: Were there parts that you wanted to leave out?

A: “Absolutely. Early on I told Salman (Rushdie) … to write down in narrative form what he thought the flow of the film should be and I’ll do the same. Separately, we wrote down what we felt the progress of the story should be in the film. We found, much to our surprise, that the points were almost identical. You know then, that your vision is the same.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Cebrian and colleagues analyzed 80,000 interactions between 290 students in a collaborative learning environment for college courses. The major finding was that a higher number of online interactions was usually an indicator of a higher score in the class. High achievers also were more likely to form strong connections with other students and to exchange information in more complex ways. High achievers tended to form cliques, shutting out low-performing students from their interactions. Students who found themselves shut out were not only more likely to have lower grades; they were also more likely to drop out of the class entirely.

“Elite groups of highly connected individuals formed in the first days of the course,” said Cebrian, who also is a Senior Researcher at National ICT Australia Ltd, Australia's Information and Communications Technology Research Centre of Excellence. “For the first time, we showed that there is a very strong correspondence between social interaction and exchange of information – a 72 percent correlation,” he said “but almost equally interesting is the fact that these high-performing students form 'rich-clubs', which shield themselves from low-performing students, despite the significant efforts by these lower-ranking students to join them. The weaker students try hard to engage with the elite group intensively, but can't. This ends up having a marked correlation with their dropout rates.”

More here.

Over at The Immanent Frame:

“What is justice in the wake of large-scale injustice?” Daniel Philpott asks. Just and Unjust Peace is his deep and hopeful answer that question. Analyzing mainstream thought in the United Nations, developed countries, and the human rights community, Philpott challenges current peacebuilding practices. Instead, he introduces an ethic of reconciliation rooted in the three Abrahamic religious traditions and consistent with modern constitutional-democratic and international norms, presenting six practices to be applied in post-crisis contexts to effect a peace that is at once just, fulfilling, and long-lasting. This forum brings together academic participants from a range of related disciplines as they reflect on Philpott’s quest for a universal standard of reconciliation and soulcraft.

Bronwyn Leebaw, Leslie Vinjamuri, Colleen Murphy, Mark Freeman and Nukhet Sandal comment on the book. Vinjamuri:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrated its ten-year anniversary last summer. During its first decade of life, both the shadow and the actuality of international justice in the form of investigation, trial, and judgment have become a central feature of many conflicts, ongoing and concluded. Nearly a decade before the ICC opened its doors, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission attracted enormous global attention, and the moral sanction against racial violence at its core resonated across the globe. And yet, the concept of reconciliation that defined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has not occupied the same coveted (if also contested) international space that international justice—through trials—does today. If anything, advocates of justice and trials have subsumed reconciliation and truth seeking into a package of justice that has trials at its core. In his new book, Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott forces us to rethink this ordering. Political reconciliation is at the center of Philpott’s conception of justice. The ethic of reconciliation is, in Philpott’s words, “a concept of justice that aims to restore victims, perpetrators, citizens, and the governments of states that have been involved in political injustices to a condition of right relationship within a political order or between political orders—a condition characterized by human rights, democracy, the rule of law, respect for international law; by widespread recognition of the legitimacy of these values; and by the virtues that accompany these values.” The six practices that Philpott identifies as core to reconciliation (building socially just institutions, acknowledgments, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness) encompass much that is central to liberal peacebuilding, including trials, but together these present a far more ambitious standard for just peacebuilding. These practices aim to restore relationships, a task that Philpott identifies as fundamental to securing a peaceful future.

Ed Yong over at National Geographic's Not Exactly Rocket Science (via Jennifer Ouellette):

In 1907, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 villagers to guess the weight of an ox. None of them got the right answer, but when Galton averaged their guesses, he arrived at a near perfect estimate. This is a classic demonstration of the “wisdom of the crowds”, where groups of people pool their abilities to show collective intelligence. Galton’s story has been told and re-told, with endless variations on the theme. If you don’t have an ox handy, you can try it yourself with beans in a jar.

To Iain Couzin from Princeton University, these stories are a little boring. Everyone is trying to solve a problem, and they do it more accurately together than alone. Whoop-de-doo. By contrast, Couzin has found an example of a more exciting type of collective intelligence—where a group solves a problem that none of its members are even aware of. Simply by moving together, the group gains new abilities that its members lack as individuals.

Couzin has spent his whole career studying animals that move in shoals, flocks and swarms. His early work involved ants and locusts but when he started his own lab at Princeton, he thought he’d upgrade to a smarter group-living species. Unfortunately, he ended up with the golden shiner—a small, bland, minnow-like fish that’s dumb beyond the telling of it.

Niharika Mandhana in the NYT’s India Ink:

Ashis Nandy, an eminent Indian sociologist and political analyst, now finds himself in what he described as an “astonishing and ironic position,” in an interview Tuesday.

He has championed the rights of India’s lower castes and tribal groups for the better part of half a century, he said, but is now being accused of making remarks that some have cast as “anti-Dalit,” a reference to India’s lower castes, formerly known as “untouchables.”

Speaking last week at the Jaipur Literature Festival, an annual  gathering of writers, thinkers and commentators, Mr. Nandy acknowledged that what he was about to say was “undignified” and “vulgar,” but then said, “It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the Other Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes, and increasingly the Scheduled Tribes. And as long as this is the case, the Indian republic will survive.”

(For our readers outside India, the Indian government classifies some of its citizens according to socioeconomic status, grouping them under the labels Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.)

His comments followed those of the journalist and editor Tarun Tejpal, who characterized corruption in India as a “class equalizer.”  Mr. Nandy’s statement was instantly picked up by television news channels, often in an abbreviated form, and many portrayed his words as a slur against lower castes.

“Ashis Nandy says OBC, SC, ST most corrupt,” the Press Trust of India reported.

After his comments were publicized, small demonstrations broke out in Jaipur, and a complaint against Mr. Nandy was filed with the police under a law that aims to prevent and punish crimes and atrocities committed against Scheduled Castes and Tribes.

India Ink spoke Mr. Nandy about the recent furor, the correlation between caste and corruption, and the state of free speech in India, at his New Delhi apartment on Tuesday as the 75-year-old waited to receive a warrant from the police for questioning.

Q. The current controversy arose as a result of a statement you made where you suggest that most of India’s corrupt belong to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. What did you mean when you said that?

A. That’s not what I wanted to say. That can’t be empirically supported, because there’s no real survey.

The point I was trying to make was this: if you remove all corruption from society, that’s good. But that will take decades. In the interim period, those who are on the brink of desperation, those who have been deprived of access to power for centuries, deserve to get a share of the loot. Their corruption is a sign of their empowerment and the growth of the Indian republic. In fact, it should be encouraged.

(Here, in Outlook India, you can find a transcript of his comments and a video of the session.)