Orlando, written as a romp, a love letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of an exploding freedom in her style. Writing Orlando did Woolf good. Begun as a gift to Sackville-West it became a gift to herself. It is the most joyful of her books. Woolf’s mind was always first-rate, but when she came to write her next book, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she carried across the full-heartedness of Orlando. A Room of One’s Ownis a masterpiece because it is more than a polemic; when she writes about women, about men, about the interplay of the mind, about creativity – above all, about writing – all her thoughts are steeped in feeling. The tract is much more than an argument; it is a passion for life as it could be lived. Sackville-West, who was not a great writer or a deep thinker, and certainly not a faithful lover, released something in Woolf – something that had been pressing at the bars since Mrs Dalloway (1925). The quality of mind that Woolf (following Coleridge) called “androgyny” is really an adventure of the spirit (think Emily Dickinson).

more from Jeanette Winterson at The New Statesman here.

We’ve known for a while that dung beetles always roll straight, without doubling back. “If they don’t roll straight,” said Eric Warrant, a co-author of Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation, “something is wrong.” Yet how beetles manage this, even when they hit a road bump or get temporarily off course, was, until recently, a mystery. The researchers eventually found that dung beetles orient themselves by day with sunlight and by following moonbeams at night. But what continued to intrigue Dr. Dacke, the study’s leader, and her colleagues was how the dung beetles stay their course even on dark nights when the moon is new. What they found was that the earthbound dung beetle can also steer by the stars, using star clusters or the band of the Milky Way as a compass. Our tiniest astronomers, dung beetles are the only known insect — and the only known animal save seals, birds, and people — to navigate by watching the galaxy. If most of human civilization has been designed around the avoidance of dung, the rest has been designed around the avoidance of insects. Insects with a fancy for excrement, like the dung beetle, are even more anathema than many parasites, like mosquitoes.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Forever

Forever some customer happy to sing along with the supermarket muzak, no matter how hackneyed or crass.

Forever the plangent sound of a motorcycle in the early hours, conjuring a world you once had access to.

Forever the young couple shutting the front door, leaving to conjecture what their next move may be.

Forever the van driver slowing down to check a house number against a delivery invoice.

Forever an old boy on a rickety bike with a loyal following of one terrier-type mongrel.

Forever the husband skulking outside the boutique while his wife seeks approval from a mirror.

Forever the kind who believe in God (a little) and horoscopes (a lot) and cannot resist a buy-one-get-one offer.

Forever those with a lump in the throat at every reconciliation scene, the theme music’s pathos never failing to work its way straight to the left atrium of the heart.

Forever the cleaning woman tapping the pub window with a coin and the helmeted courier leaning his gob to the intercom.

Forever a caller so long on hold she wonders should she redial and brave the bossy touch-tone menu again.

Forever a youngster hacking the grass with bat or stick in what serves as a green space near the housing estate.

Read more »

From BlackPast:

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court declared public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. The Board of Education. One year later the Court reiterated its ruling calling on school districts throughout the United States to desegregate their public schools “with all deliberate speed.” While some school districts began developing strategies to resist public school desegregation, school officials at Little Rock, Arkansas stated that they would comply with the Supreme Court's ruling. School district officials created a system in which black students interested in attending white only schools were put through a series of rigorous interviews to determine whether they were suited for admission. School officials interviewed approximately eighty black students for Central High School, the largest school in the city. Only nine were chosen, Melba Patillo Beals, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls Lanier, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey, and Thelma Mothershed Wair. They would later become known around the world as the “Little Rock Nine.” Although skeptical about integrating a former white-only institution, the nine students arrived at Central High School on September 3, 1957 looking forward to a successful academic year. Instead they were greeted by an angry mob of white students, parents, and citizens determined to stop integration. In addition to facing physical threats, screams, and racial slurs from the crowd, Arkansas Governor Orval M. Faubus intervened, ordering the Arkansas National Guard to keep the nine African American students from entering the school. Faced with no other choice, the “Little Rock Nine” gave up their attempt to attend Central High School which soon became the center of a national debate about civil rights, racial discrimination and States’s rights.

On September 20, 1957, Federal Judge Ronald Davies ordered Governor Faubus to remove the National Guard from the Central High School’s entrance and to allow integration to take its course in Little Rock. When Faubus defied the court order, President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched nearly 1,000 paratroopers and federalized the 10,000 Arkansas National Guard troops who were to insure that the school would be open to the nine students. On September 23, 1957, the “Little Rock Nine” returned to Central High School where they were enrolled. Units of the United States Army remained at the school for the rest of the academic year to guarantee their safety.

More here. (Note: At leas t one daily post throughout February will be devoted to African American History Month)

From The Telegraph:

Ecological economists in contrast believe that humans are complex creatures with a variety of needs and wants. Society has multiple economic goals about which reasonable people can disagree. All economic production requires energy and raw materials, and generates waste. The raw materials we use also serve as the structural building blocks of ecosystems, and their conversion to economic production and hence waste inevitably degrades the life-sustaining services provided by healthy ecosystems. These services are largely non-substitutable. The ecological economic system is highly complex, characterized by both positive and negative feedback loops, emergent phenomena and surprises. For example, under some conditions, an increase in prices will lead to a decrease in demand, but under other conditions, such as we recently witnessed with speculative investments in land, food, and oil, rising prices increase speculative demand, leading to further price increases. Positive feedback loops in a finite system are self-limiting, and must ultimately collapse in another positive feedback loop where falling prices reduce demand. Facts are scarce and uncertain, and both the economic system and the global ecosystem that sustains and contains it are rapidly evolving.

more from Joshua Farley and Almantas Samalavicius at Eurozine here.

IN CONVERSATIONS, social theorist Ashis Nandy fondly recalls an exchange between philosopher Ramachandra Gandhi and poet Umashankar Joshi. The philosopher argued that MK Gandhi was inconceivable without his spiritual strivings, while the poet—and one suspects Ashis Nandy too—insisted that Gandhi’s significance lay in his willingness to engage and transform the “slum of politics”. This divide between the religious, spiritual Gandhi and the political one or, more aptly, the divide between Gandhi the ashramite and Gandhi the satyagrahi has come to shape not only our academic engagement with the life and thought of Gandhi, but also our memory of the man whom we revere, revile or remain indifferent to. The dichotomy is a superficial one. Gandhi saw himself as a satyagrahi and an ashramite. His politics was imbued with spiritual strivings and his relationship with religion was a deeply political one. A long, rich and diverse biographical tradition, which has deepened our understanding of Gandhi’s life and his strivings, has not escaped this divide either.

more from Tridip Suhrud at The Caravan here.

I used to think that it was a bad thing to mention dreams in fiction. I’d read an essay by John Leonard, I believe it was, in The New York Times Book Review sometime in the late Seventies, in which he said that dreams in novels were a mistake. But I rejected that notion ages ago. Dreams are part of the truth of life and the job of a book is to feel its way forward through a character’s days and nights. In the book I just finished writing, I included a dream in which my narrator finds an old bicycle horn on a set of subway stairs somewhere near Columbia. Why not? It’s a dream I actually had a few years ago. The letter O is a good dream letter. It begins the word “oneiric,” which is a dark interesting sharp-edged word that college professors used to use in class in place of “dreamlike.” I used to dream fairly frequently and oneirically that my mouth was full of masses of unchewable, exhausted, flavorless chewing gum. I realized that what I was dreaming about was my own boring tongue. I wrote about this dream in a novel and because I wrote about it, the dream stopped recurring and I missed it.

more from Nicholson Baker at the NYRB here.

From BlackPast:

This is certainly a very serious question, and one that now for the first time has been brought for decision before this court. But it is brought here by those who have a right to bring it, and it is our duty to meet it and decide it. The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution.

… It may be safely assumed that citizens of the United States who migrate to a Territory belonging to the people of the United States, cannot be ruled as mere colonists, dependent upon the will of the General Government, and to be governed by any laws it may think proper to impose. The principle upon which our Governments rest, and upon which alone they continue to exist, is the union of States, sovereign and independent within their own limits in [60 U.S. 393, 448] their internal and domestic concerns, and bound together as one people by a General Government, possessing certain enumerated and restricted powers, delegated to it by the people of the several States, and exercising supreme authority within the scope of the powers granted to it, throughout the dominion of the United States. A power, therefore, in the General Government to obtain and hold colonies and dependent territories, over which they might legislate without restriction, would be inconsistent with its own existence in its present form. Whatever it acquires, it acquires for the benefit of the people of the several States who created it. It is their trustee acting for them, and charged with the duty of promoting the interests of the whole people of the Union in the exercise of the powers specifically granted….

But the power of Congress over the person or property of a citizen can never be a mere discretionary power under our Constitution and form of Government. The powers of the Government and the rights and privileges of the citizen are regulated and plainly defined by the Constitution itself. And when the Territory becomes a part of the United States, the Federal Government enters into possession in the character impressed upon it by those who created it. It enters upon it with its powers over the citizen strictly defined, and limited by the Constitution, from which it derives its own existence, and by virtue of which alone it continues to exist and act as a Government and sovereignty….

Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried there by the owner, with the intention of becoming a permanent resident.

More here. (Note: At leas t one daily post throughout February will be devoted to African American History Month)

Jerry Haber in The Magnes Zionist:

Liberal Zionists want to end Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza, abolish institutional discrimination between the Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Israel, and witness the establishment of a Palestinian state that will allow Palestinians to live as a free and secure people in their own homeland. As liberals, they insist on preserving the civil and human rights of both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. These objectives are virtually identical with two of the three aims of the Palestinian BDS National Committee. The sticking point is the third, which is “respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in U.N. resolution 194.”

I don’t agree with Mira Sucharov that an endorsement of the Palestinian right of return is incompatible with the State of Israel having a Jewish character or that such an endorsement will lead to millions of Palestinians returning to their homes and properties. Conjuring up that scenario (which has zero likelihood of coming about) allows Zionists to justify the demographic cap of “only 20 percent Arab” that they consider necessary for the continued existence of a Jewish ethnic state.

Still, I realize that the right of return is a red flag for the vast majority of liberal Zionists, who use it to explain why they won’t endorse the Palestinian BDS movement. So let me argue why I think this is the wrong approach for them to take.

More here. [Thanks to Huw Price.]

John Markoff in the New York Times:

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.

Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month.

More here.

Nick Cohen in The Observer:

The Shahbag junction in Dhaka has become Bangladesh's Tahrir Square. Hundreds of thousands of young protesters are occupying it and raging against radical Islamists. Even sympathetic politicians cannot control the movement. The protesters damn them as appeasers, who have compromised with unconscionable men.

Theirs is a grassroots uprising for the most essential and neglected values of our age: secularism, the protection of minorities from persecution and the removal of theocratic thugs from the private lives and public arguments of 21st-century citizens

Naturally, the western media show little interest in covering the protest. The indifference is all the more telling because the Shahbag movement is a response to a crime westerners once deplored, but have almost forgotten.

The young in Dhaka have revolted over the war crimes trials of members of Jamaat-e-Islami. That useful leftwing term “clerical fascist” might have been invented to describe what they did. In 1971, the oppressed “eastern wing” of Pakistan rose against its masters to form Bangladesh. The Pakistani army responded with a campaign of mass murder and mass rape, which shocked a 20th century that thought it had seen it all.

More here.

From RDMag:

Researchers employing a century-old observational technique have determined the precise configuration of humulones, substances derived from hops that give beer its distinctive flavor. That might not sound like a big deal to the average brewmaster, but the findings overturn results reported in scientific literature in the last 40 years and could lead to new pharmaceuticals to treat diabetes, some types of cancer, and other maladies. “Now that we have the right results, what happens to the bitter hops in the beer-brewing process makes a lot more sense,” says Werner Kaminsky, a University of Washington research associate professor of chemistry. Kaminsky is the lead author of a paper describing the findings, published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. There is documentation that beer and its bittering acids, in moderation, have beneficial effects on diabetes, some forms of cancer, inflammation, and perhaps even weight loss.

Kaminsky used a process called X-ray crystallography to figure out the exact structure of those acids, humulone molecules, and some of their derivatives, produced from hops in the brewing process. That structure is important to researchers looking for ways to incorporate those substances, and their health effects, into new pharmaceuticals.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Carol Westbrook)

To a Love Poet

I

Fortysomething did you say? Or more?
By now, no one could care less either way.
When you swoop into a room, no heads turn,
no cheeks burn, no knowing glances are exchanged,

no eye contact is made. You are no longer
a meaningful contender in the passion stakes.
But a love poet must somehow make love,
if only to language, fondling its contours,

dressing it in slinky tropes, caressing
its letters with the tongue, glimpsing it darkly
as though through a crackling black stocking
or diaphanous blouse, arousing its interest,

varying the rhythm, playing speech against
stanza like leather against skin, stroking words
wistfully, chatting them up, curling fingers
around the long flowing tresses of sentences.

II

Never again, though, will a living Muse
choose you from the crowd in some romantic city —
Paris, Prague — singling you out, her pouting lips
a fountain where you resuscitate your art.

Not with you in view will she hold court to her mirror,
matching this halterneck with that skirt, changing her mind,
testing other options, hovering between a cashmere
and velvet combination or plain t-shirt and jeans,

watching the clock, listening for the intercom or phone.
Not for your eyes her foam bath, hot wax, hook-snapped lace,
her face creams, moisturisers, streaks and highlights.
Not for your ears the excited shriek of her zip.

Look to the dictionary as a sex manual.
Tease beauty’s features into words that will assuage
the pain, converting you — in this hour of need —
to someone slim and lithe and young and eligible for love again.

by Dennis O'Driscoll
from New and Selected Poems

Sughra Raza. Kigali Nights. Februaury 2013.

Digital photograph.

Chemi Shalev in Haaretz:

Far more Americans know of the Palestinian BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement today than did a week ago. Many millions of people have been exposed for the first time to the idea that Israel should be boycotted, divested and sanctioned for its occupation of the territories. Many more Americans, one can safely assume, have formed a positive image of the BDS movement than those who have now turned against it.

Tafasta merube lo tafasta, the Talmud teaches us: grasp all, lose all. The heavy-handed, hyperbole heavy, all-guns-blazing campaign against what would have been, as Mayor Bloomberg put it, “a few kids meeting on campus” mushroomed and then boomeranged, giving the hitherto obscure BDS activists priceless public relations that money could never buy.

Rather than focusing attention on what BDS critics describe as the movement’s deceitful veneer over its opposition to the very existence of Israel, the disproportionate onslaught succeeded in casting the BDS speakers who came to the Brooklyn campus as freedom-loving victims being hounded and oppressed by the forces of darkness.

More here.

Michael Bérubé reviews Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture by Lisa Zunshine, in American Scientist:

Lisa Zunshine has a theory—a theory about theory of mind. It goes something like this (and in order to paraphrase it, I have to exemplify it, by getting inside her head as best I can): Our brains evolved in such a way as to render us all eager but flawed mind readers. Whenever we see each other, we try to figure out what other people are thinking; it is a necessary skill in a deeply social species—or, rather, we are a deeply social species precisely because we have this skill. We try to read each other by look, posture, expression, gesture. And, to make things more complicated (and/or fun), we know this about each other, so we also try deliberately to produce certain readings in others by feigning certain looks, postures, expressions and gestures. All the world’s a stage—and the world we have created includes millions of actual stages, where actors embody the principle that all the world’s a (self-reflexive) stage.

Zunshine’s earlier book, Why We Read Fiction, argued that we read fiction in order to give our restless brains a good workout: In novels and short stories, we are given up-close and intensely personal representations of how characters succeed or fail at reading each other’s motives and desires. For extra added cognitive benefit, we watch characters succeed or fail at reading other characters’ attempts to read other characters’ motives and desires. According to Zunshine, the mental exercise involved in reading fiction serves an evolutionary purpose, deploying our theory of mind so as to flex and build the cognitive muscles that will help us navigate a bewilderingly complex world of subtle social cues. Drawing widely and judiciously on recent research in neuroscience, Getting Inside Your Head expands this theory to cover all of human culture, from novels to films, plays, musicals, paintings and reality shows.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

In my last post, on The Enlightenment’s “Race Problem”, I questioned the idea that the modern roots of the idea of race lie in the Enlightenment. The relationship between race and the Enlightenment is, I argued, far more complex than much contemporary discussion allows for. It was the transformation of Enlightenment attitudes through the course of the nineteenth century that helped mutate the eighteenth century discussion of human variety into the nineteenth century obsession with racial difference. This is the story of that transformation.

In March 1800, Captain Nicholas Baudin proposed to the French Institut National a journey of scientific exploration to New Holland (as Australia was then known). The Institut agreed to sponsor the expedition and asked the newly-formed Société des Observateurs de l’Homme for help in preparing instructions for the study of the ‘physical, intellectual and moral’ bearing of the indigenous peoples.

The Société provided two memoirs of instruction for Baudin’s voyage. The first,Considerations on the Diverse Methods to Follow in the Observation of Savage Peoples was written by the philosopher and educator Joseph-Marie Degerando. The second, An Instructive Note on the Researches to be Carried out Relative to the Anatomical Differences between the Diverse Races of Men, was penned by Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was one of the founders of the science of palaeontology and would become France’s most distinguished scientist of the early nineteenth century. Where Degerando was a child of the French Revolution, and a great believer in education as a motor of social change, Cuvier was deeply conservative in both his politics and his science, a lifelong opponent not just of revolution, but also of evolution. In the space between the respective views of Degerando and Cuvier emerged the nineteenth century concept of race.

More here.

Philip Ball in Aeon:

When the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked at a drop of pond water through his home-made microscope in the 1670s, he didn’t just see tiny ‘animals’ swimming in there. He saw a new world: too small for the eye to register yet teeming with invisible life. The implications were theological as much as they were scientific.

Invisibility comes in many forms, but smallness is the most concrete. Light ignores very tiny things rather as ocean waves ignore sand grains. During the 17th century, when the microscope was invented, the discovery of such objects posed a profound problem: if we humans were God’s ultimate purpose, why would he create anything that we couldn’t see?

The microworld was puzzling, but also wondrous and frightening. There was nothing especially new about the idea of invisible worlds and creatures — belief in immaterial spirits, angels and demons was still widespread. But their purpose was well understood: they were engaged in the Manichean struggle for our souls. If that left one uneasy in a universe where there was more than meets the eye, at least the moral agenda was clear.

More here.