From Life:

So many scenes from the August 28, 1963, March on Washington are now familiar to so many of us — and the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is so much a part of the national consciousness — it’s easy forget that for the hundreds of thousands of people who marched and rallied that day, the event was wholly, thrillingly new. There had been, of course, other civil rights protests, marches and demonstrations. But none had been so large (estimates range anywhere from 200,000 to 300,00 people) and none garnered so much attention before, during and, especially, after the event itself. The landmark 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, for example, which also took place in the nation’s capital, had shown everyone — segregationists and civil rights proponents, alike — that large, peaceable rallies in the heart of Washington were not only possible, but in fact were necessary if the movement was ever going to achieve its central, early goals of desegregation and voting rights reform. But the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was on a scale so much larger than anything that had come before that it is rightly recalled as a touchstone moment: a single event so significant that the history of the movement can, in a sense, be measured in terms of Before the March, and After the March. The day, meanwhile, is remembered almost exclusively for MLK’s “Dream” speech, famously delivered to the throngs from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. (“I Have a Dream” itself was, in a way, a work in progress; King had delivered a speech to 25,000 people in Detroit several months before, for example, that included several sections and phrases that he would include, verbatim, in his magisterial address in August 1963.)

Here, five decades later, on Martin Luther King Day, LIFE.com presents a selection of pictures — most of which never ran in LIFE magazine — commemorating that day. But what is especially moving about so many of these pictures (those shot “on the ground” by Paul Schutzer, in particular) is that they illustrate the scene as witnessed not by those who led and organized the event, but by those in the crowd. There is huge emotion here, and excitement and pride — but above and beyond everything else, these photos evince a near-palpable sense of inclusion and, if only for a moment, a suggestion that power was, at last, passing to the people.

More here.

From The Paris Review:

The Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow made a career of disassembling the body, of exposing its weaknesses, its many vulnerabilities, whether through the uses and abuses it’s been put to in the abattoir of twentieth-century history or at the mercy of the more mundane, if no less fatal, everyday mortality. If that sounds like a bit of a downer, worry not: Szapocznikow managed to keep a sly tongue firmly in cheek, and her work, for all its startling beauty, its nearly unbearable intimacy, its sublime evocation of pain and disease and suffering, is witty, even funny.

Her sculptures—on display, through January 28, at the Museum of Modern Art, where they are presented as part of a retrospective entitled “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972”—indulge in the darkest shade of black humor, extracting their punch lines from abysmal pockets of human experience. Take, for example, her Lampe-bouche (Illuminated Lips) (1966), a series of resin casts of a female mouth set atop metal stands and wired to work as lamps. These resonate as blazoned bits of romantic poetry, the celebration of the mistress’s body through its reduction to component parts, but also as morbid enactment of the apocryphal human-skin lampshades made by the Nazis. Here is the human body, desecrated and unmade, and it is glorious to look at, an illuminated, illuminating display of power and its subversion. Something similar is at work in Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I) (1970–1971), the lower half of a woman’s face, done up in colored polyester resin, sumptuously melting beyond a glass saucer, like an over-scooped sundae breaching the borders of moderation. And there is Cendrier de Célibataire (The Bachelor’s Ashtray) (1972), which transforms the female visage into a vessel for cigarette butts.

That Szapocznikow was a Holocaust survivor helps contextualize her concern with abjection, with how easy it is to destroy other bodies, how difficult to control and maintain the integrity of one’s own.

More here.

Brad Plumer in the Washington Post's Wonkblog:

Brad Plumer: You spend a lot of time dissecting the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the big collaboration between greens and businesses to push for a cap-and-trade bill that could win support from Republicans. It wasn’t a crazy strategy—cap-and-trade had picked up a fair bit of bipartisan support between 2003 and 2007. So why did it ultimately fail?

Theda Skocpol: The whole USCAP strategy was based on this very reasonable idea that you’d get Republicans in Congress to go along with Democrats. But by the time we get to 2009, Republicans just weren’t going to be there. And I don’t think environmentalists were able to see the shifting ground at the time.

BP: But was there really that big a shift among Republicans? I mean, even in the 2008 campaign, John McCain was in favor of cap-and-trade.

TS: One of the things that really surprised me in my research came from pulling together scores from the [League of Conservation Voters]. And you see a clear pull on politicians from grassroots conservative opinion around 2006 and 2007. Climate-change denial had been an elite industry for a long time, but it finally penetrated down to conservative Republican identified voters around this time. That created new pressures on Republican officeholders and candidates. And I don’t think most people noticed that at the time.

Even John McCain. I have this figure that shows him moving up on LCV scores for most of the last decade [i.e., casting more pro-environmental votes] and then pulling back suddenly to the lowest level starting in 2007.

An interview with George Church in Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal?

Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone.

SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother.

Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society.

SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology.

Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were too realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).

“All gurus try to undermine their followers' egos and expectations, so does it matter if the teacher is a real fraud?” Erik Davis tries to answer the question in Aeon:

To say that we live in a post-secular era does not mean that we are done with the disenchantments of modernity, or that religion – goddess forbid – will regain its previous hold over human affairs. True, many of the convictions and clarities that once undergirded modern secular society have dissolved, leaving many things — including our rational selves — up for grabs. But while radical atheists can rant all they want, the resonant claims of religion and the insistent calls of the spirit remain far from ‘behind’ us.The major religions are not leaving the world stage anytime soon, and what is more the largely secular zone that the global elites now inhabit plays host to a wide array of spiritual identities and transformative practices, of which yoga, meditation, and some manner of Buddhism are only the most visible.

Religion (and its shadowy ally, the occult) has always managed the boundaries between things — life and death, order and chaos, self and world, novelty and tradition, the knowable and the infinite. It is absurd to imagine that the force of such preoccupations should dissipate at a time of cultural crisis and confusion such as ours. Many of those ever-fluctuating boundaries, once patrolled by religion, have erupted into border wars, just as the very notion of a border has been dissolving. It's easy to take up a simplistic position when we try to appreciate how spirituality and the secular, belief and scepticism, dance their tango, but surely it's far better to pay attention to how and when these boundaries get drawn — and what happens when they dissolve, or turn out to be not what they seem.

This is what makes Vikram Gandhi’s trickster documentary Kumaré(2011) — for all its considerable problems — one of the more thought-provoking and unexpected takes on the dynamics of modern spirituality I’ve come across in many a moon. I’m happy that the film is now available for digital download after a year or so of touring the festival circuit to rather mixed — and sometimes puzzled — reception.

Poetry has always been the handmaiden of ­mythology, and vice versa. Sometimes poets are in the business of collecting and tweaking existing myths, as with Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the Poetic Edda. Other times poetry applies a mythological glamour to stories and characters from history, legend or even other myths (the hero of the “Aeneid” is a minor character from the “Iliad”). Then there are poets who equate the idea of myth with the supposedly irrational essence of poetry itself. Here is Robert Graves in 1948: “No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, . . . with a monotonous chant of ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ and ‘Blood! blood! blood!’ ” Which might sound more like a strip club picnic gone badly awry, but you get the idea.

more from David Orr at the NY Times here.

“To be able,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, “to bray that ‘as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them,’ is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a life-long socialist, I say don’t let’s bomb the shit out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow. Predictable as hell.” That was in 1985. In 2002, he took a different view of the matter. As long as the bombs were hitting the bad guys, then “it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else … They’ll be dead, in other words.” Predictable as hell or not, this transfiguration placed Hitchens (pictured in 1978) in a recognisable category: the left-wing defector with a soft-spot for empire.

more from Richard Seymour at The Guardian here.

William Dalrymple in The Telegraph:

Gary Francione in The Point:

Every year, the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services releases data on the number of animals killed at the Commonwealth’s animal shelters, including the facility operated by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), located in Norfolk, Virginia. And every year, peta kills a higher percentage of animals than are killed at most of the “kill” shelters located throughout the country.

The 2011 numbers were certainly disturbing. peta reported that out of the 2,050 animals that it took in (1,214 cats; 778 dogs; 58 “other” companion animals), it killed 1,965 (1,198 cats; 713 dogs; 54 “others”). That’s an overall kill rate of almost 96 percent, with 91 percent for dogs and almost 99 percent for cats. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the national kill rate at shelters is 60 percent for dogs and 70 percent for cats.

PETA’s kill rate would be high if it were a traditional “kill” shelter. But it promotes itself as an animal rights group; indeed, it claims to be “the largest animal rights organization in the world, with more than 3 million members and supporters” and states that it “has always been known for uncompromising, unwavering views on animal rights.”

How can an animal rights group kill any animals, much less kill more animals than plain-vanilla shelters that have no pretense to being animal rights organizations?

More here.

Steven Pinker in Edge.org:

Today the vast majority of the world's people do not have to worry about dying in war. Since 1945, wars between great powers and developed states have essentially vanished, and since 1991, wars in the rest of the world have become fewer and less deadly.

But how long will this trend last? Many people have assured me that it must be a momentary respite, and that a Big One is just around the corner.

Maybe they're right. The world has plenty of unknown unknowns, and perhaps some unfathomable cataclysm will wallop us out of the blue. But since by definition we have no idea what the unknown unknowns are, we can't constructively worry about them.

What, then, about the known unknowns? Are certain risk factors numbering our days of relative peace? In my view, most people are worrying about the wrong ones, or are worrying about them for the wrong reasons.

Resource shortages. Will nations go to war over the last dollop of oil, water, or strategic minerals? It's unlikely. First, resource shortages are self-limiting: as a resource becomes scarcer and thus more expensive, technologies for finding and extracting it improve, or substitutes are found. Also, wars are rarely fought over scarce physical resources (unless you subscribe to the unfalsifiable theory that allwars, regardless of stated motives, are really about resources: Vietnam was about tungsten; Iraq was about oil, and so on.) Physical resources can be divided or traded, so compromises are always available; not so for psychological motives such as glory, fear, revenge, or ideology.

Climate change. There are many reasons to worry about climate change, but major war is probably not among them. Most studies have failed to find a correlation between environmental degradation and war; environmental crises can cause local skirmishes, but a major war requires a political decision that a war would be advantageous. The 1930s Dust Bowl did not cause an American Civil war; when we did have a Civil War, its causes were very different.

More here.

American mythology was forged in the early part of the 20th century, in the overlapping years between the final days of the Wild West and the beginnings of Hollywood. Some of the west’s most fabled characters realised that the overlap could be fruitful: the famous lawman and Nietzsche-lookalike Wyatt Earp was a deft handler of his own public relations, while Buffalo Bill’s stage show, which the bison-hunting showman took to London and Paris in the 1880s, was an object lesson in how to dramatise the life of a cowboy, and an inspiration for early film-makers, whose uncomplicated take on subjects such as the Great Train Robbery found mass appeal. It is both a boon and a curse for American civilisation to be the only one mythologised in modern popular culture. In a fledgling nation, this art form immediately resonated with a public anxious to establish an ethical code. The frontier: beautiful metaphor, scary place. America needed its heroes to be better, and badder, than the baddest guys in town. It needed expert gunslingers to persuade people that their future prosperity should not depend on guns. In that respect, the cowboy was a self-destructive hero, which doubly ennobled him.

more from Peter Aspden at the FT here.

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan in the NY Review of Books blog:

Since the sad death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, there has been a lot of discussion of the extent to which the criminal prosecution hanging over him contributed to his suicide. Some have pointed their fingers at MIT, suggesting that, by failing to waive its complaint against him for using its network to download files, the university bears some responsibility for his suicide. MIT has now set up an internal investigation. The prospect of a felony conviction and aprison sentence would be enough to make anyone think that his or her life is effectively over. For a young and exceptionally talented person who acted from noble motives, the idea of going to prison must have been even more shattering, and the depression from which he suffered would have magnified its impact in ways that those of us fortunate enough not to have experienced that condition cannot fully imagine.

The fact that JSTOR has made millions of documents freely available, after Swartz had downloaded them, shows that his actions have had what many people—perhaps to some extent even JSTOR, which after all is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing access to scholarly publications—believe to be a public benefit. Thousands of researchers are currently putting all of their downloaded PDF files online, often in breach of copyright, as a tribute to Swartz.

There is no doubt that we should improve access to scientific resources, and the Internet makes it almost inevitable that this will happen. The only question is when. As Lawrence Lessig argues, this is knowledge paid for in large part by our taxes. More important still, in the long run, will be raising the level of general access to information throughout the world. The price now asked for a single journal article is equivalent to a month’s earnings in many countries. The Internet makes the ancient dream of a universal library possible. Why should not everyone, anywhere in the world, be able to use, without charge, all the available knowledge that humans have created?

Deborah Baker in Caravan:

Since the Gurkha War of 1814, the Kingdom of Nepal had been off limits to foreigners, especially the English; available maps had been entirely the work of Indian surveyors unsupervised by British colonial officials. But with the permission of the Maharaja of Nepal, the Geological Survey of India (GSI) sent a small team to investigate the devastation, led by an English geologist. The four men left Calcutta in early February and travelled for several months in bullock carts and on royal elephants, completing three separate traverses over ranges in both Nepal and Bihar before completing their trek at Darjeeling.

Comparing seismographs from Bombay and Kew, England, the long-legged, bearded and alarmingly pale-skinned team leader, 31-year-old John Bicknell Auden, had first judged the earthquake’s epicentre to fall in southeastern Nepal. On reaching the area to camp, however, he read the landscape as a detective might study overturned furniture to reconstruct a violent crime. He concluded that the epicentre was not in the Nepal Himalaya but in the Gangetic alluvium, further south, in north Bihar. In the seismological report he eventually filed with the GSI, Auden’s observations were largely geological. His account of the same journey for the Himalayan Journal, however, revealed a mountaineer’s agenda: to get a close-up view of Mount Everest’s southern face. He would be the first European to take in this view, and the first in over a century to visit the region.

Despite thick spectacles, Auden had a mountaineer’s eye for what he called “the great Himalayan tide”. He used his annual furlough, not to return to England where every stone had been turned over at least once, but to join path-breaking British expeditions in the high Himalayas whenever he could.

In the NYT:

What was the last truly great book you read?

Primo Levi, “If This Is a Man” (original, “Se Questo È un Uomo,” 1947). At one level, Levi’s book is about how as a young Italian Jewish chemist joining the resistance during World War II, he was captured, sent to Auschwitz, and survived. At another level, the book is about our everyday life issues, magnified: the life-and-death consequences of chance, the problem of evil, the impossibility of separating one’s moral code from surrounding circumstances, and the difficulties of maintaining one’s sanity and humanness in the presence of injustice and bad people. Levi dealt with these issues and was lucky, with the result that he survived Auschwitz and went on to become one of the greatest authors (both of nonfiction and fiction) of postwar Italy. But he survived at a price. One of the prices, the loss of his religious beliefs, he summarized as follows: “I must say that the experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away any remnants of the religious education that I had had. . . . Auschwitz existed, therefore God cannot exist. I find no solution to that dilemma. I seek a solution, but I don’t find it.”

From The New York Times:

Sotomayor’s father died when she was 9, and she thinks to herself, with the sharp pragmatism of a child that age, “Maybe it would be easier this way.” But Sotomayor’s mother did not rise with relief from her loss; she shut herself in her dark bedroom for a long season of grief. So Sotomayor became a library rat, though without any guidance. (She’d never heard of “Alice in Wonderland” until she got to Princeton years later.) Finally, after months of lonely reading and evenings spent silent with her younger brother in front of the television, Sotomayor literally hurled herself at her mother’s door and screamed at her not to die too. It’s another example of her will, and of her instinct for self-preservation. She tells us that her anger with her mother lingered — another bracing dose of honesty. But she also credits her mother with taking steps to better her children’s future: speaking English with them; buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sotomayor responded by figuring out how to excel in school. She asked the smartest girl in her class how to study. In high school, she joined a debating team, and learned how to structure an argument and speak in public. An older student told her about something she’d never heard of — the Ivy League — and she followed him to Prince­ton. “Qualifying for financial aid was the easiest part,” she writes. “There were no assets to report.”

More here.