Oksana Balinskaya in Newsweek:

Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as “England” itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the “Authorized” or “King James” version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. “The powers that be,” it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, “are ordained of God.” This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: “When I was a child, I spake as a child”; “Eat, drink, and be merry”; “From strength to strength”; “Grind the faces of the poor”; “salt of the earth”; “Our Father, which art in heaven.” It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose.

more from Christopher Hitchens at Vanity Fair here.

Omar Sharif represented Egypt in the 1964 Olympics for the game of contract bridge, according to one of the more benign rumors circulating about him on the internet. The secular trinity of Google, Google Books, and Wikipedia are uncharacteristically useless in confirming or denying the story, but the fact is, it just can’t be true, because bridge isn’t an Olympic sport. Bridge players have tried for decades to make it one, and in the late 1990s, the Olympic Committee recognized as it as one of two “mind sports,” along with chess. But the committee, which apparently finds curling perfectly tolerable viewing, has yet to be persuaded that the bridge is, in any conceivable sense, watchable. After considerable digging, I was able to trace the source of the rumor to a 1966 story in the Washington Post, which reported that Omar Sharif had captained the United Arab Republic’s bridge team for the World Bridge Olympiad of 1964. So much for the legacy media: there was indeed something called the World Bridge Olympiad, held every four years between 1960 and 2004, but the United Arab Republic — the short-lived union of Egypt and Syria — ceased to exist in 1961. Still, there is something apt about the bogus story. If anyone could have turned contract bridge into a spectator sport, it would have been the Omar Sharif of the swinging sixties. He was religiously devoted to the sport, occasionally refusing films if they interfered with his bridge-playing schedule. And he tried valiantly to bring attention to the game, even forming a barnstorming “Omar Sharif Bridge Circus,” a caravan of crack players who traveled the world playing tournaments and exhibition matches. Truly, there has never been a more beautiful, more glamorous bridge ambassador than Omar Sharif. The only way he might have given the Olympic Committee something to watch is if he had agreed to compete, like Olympians in the age of Pindar, naked.

more from Curtis Brown at Bidoun here.

One April night in 1861, almost exactly 150 years ago, Walt Whitman decided to go to the opera. After watching a performance of Verdi, he walked into the New York air — and into a world that had changed completely. Paper boys were “rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual,” Whitman would later write, and he bought one of their extra editions and began reading it under the lamps of the Metropolitan Hotel. The previous day, Southern forces had fired on Fort Sumter. America’s Civil War had begun. Over the next four years, this war would become the most disruptive and transformative event in American history — something that was true in Whitman’s time and remains true in our own, as we begin marking its sesquicentennial this week. It’s no surprise that, in the intervening years, no other event has attracted more writers (or sold more books). But what is surprising is that the Civil War did not produce any great works of contemporary literature. This has puzzled critics and readers from the beginning. “Our war,” William Dean Howells wrote in 1867, “has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely.”

more from Craig Fehrman at the Boston Globe here.

Advice for blocked writers and aspiring poets from a Nobel Prize winner’s newspaper column.

Wisława Szymborska at the website of the Poetry Foundation:

To Grazyna from Starachowice: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?”

To Mr. G. Kr. of Warsaw: “You need a new pen. The one you’re using makes a lot of mistakes. It must be foreign.”

To Pegasus [sic] from Niepolomice: “You ask in rhyme if life makes cents [sic]. My dictionary answers in the negative.”

To Mr. K.K. from Bytom: “You treat free verse as a free-for-all. But poetry (whatever we may say) is, was, and will always be a game. And as every child knows, all games have rules. So why do the grown-ups forget?”

To Puszka from Radom: “Even boredom should be described with gusto. How many things are happening on a day when nothing happens?”

To Boleslaw L-k. of Warsaw: “Your existential pains come a trifle too easily. We’ve had enough despair and gloomy depths. ‘Deep thoughts,’ dear Thomas says (Mann, of course, who else), ‘should make us smile.’ Reading your own poem ‘Ocean,’ we found ourselves floundering in a shallow pond. You should think of your life as a remarkable adventure that’s happened to you. That is our only advice at present.”

More here.

From Salon:

Take an olive. Wring its pretty neck. Collect the juice, process it with algae-based gelifiers and calcium carbonate and — hey, presto! — the liquid turns into a tremulous globule of olive essence, beyond divine with your martini. It's subversive and witty, and Ferran Adria does equally outré, ravishing things to the likes of rabbit tongue, marinated fish liver, and prehistorically large cardoons, all in the service of flavor and slaying expectations, setting your hair on fire with his rarefied creations.

But all right already, enough ink has been spilled singing the praises of the avant-garde Spanish chef. What about those apprentices in the kitchen, asks Time magazine correspondent Lisa Abend, the ones actually making and plating much of the food served at the restaurant elBulli? Her book, “The Sorcerer's Apprentices,” spends a revealing, dexterously rendered six months in their company, this troop of unpaid kitchen disciples known as stagiaires, part of the feudal tradition whereby young cooks gain direction and purpose from a great mentor. They are an elect handful — Abend closely, sympathetically profiles a half-dozen of them — as lucky to get this apprenticeship as anyone else is to get a seat at elBulli, and thrilled with the opportunity, at least at first. “Like all great restaurants, elBulli's dazzle rests in large part on the willingness of the apprentices, in the name of education, to do the dreary work no one else wants to do.” Say, making 2,000 lentils a day out of clarified butter and sesame paste. That's right, lentils: typical Adria legerdemain.

More here.

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph:

He was born in 1928, when the British Empire was at its height, in Gujarat in what is now western India. But he and his family were forced to flee for their lives in 1947 when the division of India and creation of Pakistan inspired terrible communal tensions: millions were killed in mob violence and ethnic cleansing.

This was the moment Mr Edhi, finding himself penniless on the streets of Karachi, set out on his life's mission.

Just 20 years old, he volunteered to join a charity run by the Memons, the Islamic religious community to which his family belonged.

At first, Mr Edhi welcomed his duties; then he was appalled to discover that the charity's compassion was confined to Memons.

He confronted his employers, telling them that “humanitarian work loses its significance when you discriminate between the needy”.

So he set up a small medical centre of his own, sleeping on the cement bench outside his shop so that even those who came late at night could be served.

But he also had to face the enmity of the Memons, and became convinced they were capable of having him killed. For safety, and in search of knowledge, he set out on an overland journey to Europe, begging all the way.

One morning, he awoke on a bench at Rome railway station to discover his shoes had been stolen.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In the large and growing Orthodox Jewish communities around New York and elsewhere, rabbinic leaders are sounding an alarm about an unexpected problem: a wave of anorexia and other eating disorders among teenage girls. While no one knows whether such disorders are more prevalent among Orthodox Jews than in society at large, they may be more baffling to outsiders. Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size — and her mother’s — and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small. Rabbis say the problem is especially hard to treat because of the shame that has long surrounded mental illness among Orthodox Jews.

“There is an amazing stigma attached to eating disorders — this is the real problem,” said Rabbi Saul Zucker, educational director for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, or O.U., the organization that issues the all-important kashrut stamp for food. “But hiding it is not going to make it go away. If we don’t confront it, it’s going to get worse.” Referring to the high risk of death from heart problems and suicide in patients with anorexia, he said: “This isn’t a luxury type of disease, where, O.K., someone is a little underweight. People die.” As a teenager, Naomi Feigenbaum developed bizarre eating habits that had nothing to do with Jewish dietary laws: Cocoa Puffs and milk in the morning, when she figured she had all day to burn off the calories, and nothing but Crystal Light and chewing gum the rest of the day.

More here.

A message from former 3QD contributor, Dr. Shiban Ganju, founder of Save A Mother:

Save A Mother is a non-profit organization working to reduce maternal and infant mortality in India. Since our beginning in 2008, we have grown steadily in our operations in India and in number of supporting chapters in the USA, UK.

In 2008, we started working in partnership with local NGOs in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. We started in one districts and now expanded to five districts including one in Karnataka. We aim to minimize suffering and death due to pregnancy and childbirth. We are currently working in 854 villages in India and we will expand to 1400 villages by the end of 2011.

Health is not possible in the absence of health literacy. Save a Mother trains health activists from the community to spread health literacy. The trained health activists educate women about pregnancy, nutrition, immunization, delivery and care of the child. The activists not only complement the public and private health delivery system but also amplify their effect. They also educate the population about their rights to hold the health delivery system accountable. Some of the key services include: three day initial health literacy training followed by many one day refresher training sessions. We conduct about 8 training sessions a month and have conducted over 950 training sessions so far.

Save A Mother conducts periodic impact analysis to assess both quantitative data and as quality of life achieved. We collect data on the number of trained health activists, number of mothers registered, number of their prenatal visits, medicines supplied, immunization status and deaths due to pregnancy and delivery. Neonatal deaths are also recorded.

We have trained over 2000 activists so far. We have successfully reduced maternal mortality ratio by 93 % from 645 to 65 and neonatal mortality by 66% from 41 to 9. We spend about $100 per village in one year to achieve these results. Our cost is low because we are a volunteer organization and our administrative cost is zero. All donations go for field work.

Save-a-Mother recognizes the need of an aware, sensitized population, who would consider health care as a collective responsibility. Health care should begin with owning responsibility of personal and community health. Many other regions in the world are in a similar situation, and we hope to bring this special effort to other countries.

We believe that one preventable death is one too many. We urge you to support Save A Mother and together we can save millions.

More here. Please contribute using the widget in the right-hand column just above the “RECENT COMMENTS” section. Thanks.

Maria Lassnig. Spell. 2006.

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Asad Raza for the tip-off.

Nicholson Baker in the New York Review of Books:

One Saturday last month I went to Lafayette Park in Washington D.C., across the street from the White House, in order to protest several wars. The squirrels were out doing seasonal things. A tree was balancing big buds on the finger-ends of its curving branches; the brown bud coverings, which looked like gecko skins, were drawing back to reveal inner loaves of meaty magnolial pinkness. A policeman in sunglasses, with a blue and white helmet, sat on a Clydesdale horse, while two tourists, a father and his daughter, gazed into the horse’s eyes. The pale, squinty, early spring perfection of the day made me smile.

The demonstration wasn’t officially supposed to start until noon, but already off in the distance a few hundred people had gathered near a platform festooned with a row of black-and-white Veterans for Peace flags. It was March 19, the eighth anniversary of the shock-and-aweing of Iraq, and there was an air of expectancy: arrests were going to happen that day. I sat down on a bench and watched volunteers setting up loudspeakers. Birds were getting in as much chirping as they could before the human noise began. A woman with an armful of red and black signs passed by. Her signs said:

STOP THESE WARS
EXPOSE THE LIES
FREE BRADLEY MANNING

Jay Marx, head of Proposition One, a nuclear disarmament group, took the microphone. He was wearing a knit hat. “Testing, one, two, three,” Marx said into the microphone. “Testing our patience. Testing, four, five, six, seven, eight years of war. Eight years of lies! And we’re live! This park is live! The Vets for Peace are live in Lafayette Park!” (Cheering.)

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

We have a new verb, “to Goldstone.” Its meaning: To make a finding, and then partially retract it for uncertain motive. Etymology: the strange actions of a respected South African Jewish jurist under intense pressure from Israel, the U.S. Congress and world Jewish groups.

Richard Goldstone is an author of the “Goldstone Report,” an investigation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009. It found that Israel had engaged in a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” for which responsibility lay “in the first place with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.” It said both Israel and Hamas may have committed crimes against humanity in a conflict that saw a ratio of about 100 Palestinian dead (including many children) for every one Israeli.

Now Goldstone’s volte-face appears in the form of a Washington Post op-ed. It’s a bizarre effort. He says his report would have been different “if I had known then what I know now.” The core difference the judge identifies is that he’s now convinced Gaza “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”

More here.

Julian Baggini in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Sally Haslanger is angry. “I entered philosophy about 30 years ago,” she told me at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division meeting in Boston. “I had a budding feminist consciousness, and I thought then that there weren’t enough women on the reading lists in my classes or among my teachers. But I thought things would certainly change, given the importance of the feminist movement. I’ve been though the profession now and worked hard on the Committee on the Status of Women. I’ve worked hard in other forums like SWIP – the Society for Women in Philosophy – that were trying to advance women’s interests. After 30 years I was seeing that there wasn’t really that much change, and that made me mad.”

Haslanger is not alone. Women’s under-representation in philosophy has been well known for decades, but there does not seem to have been sufficient collective will to really grapple with the problem. Now, however, there are signs that things are changing. “There’s been a lot of momentum gathering in the UK dealing to a great extent with the under-representation of women in philosophy,” says Jules Holyroyd, one of the organisers of a well-attended conference in Cardiff last November, on the issue of all under-represented groups, not just women.

Although the dearth of women is obvious, until recently no one had tried to analyse the data to establish the facts. Two years ago, tpm conducted its own survey and found that only 18 percent of full-time permanent academic philosophers working in leading higher education institutions in the UK were female. The comparable figure in the USA was 22 percent. (See tpm 47)

Since then, Helen Beebee has been gathering more comprehensive data for the British Philosophical Association, of which she is director. What this shows is that women become scarcer the higher up the career ladder you go.

“Women start out not too badly under-represented,” she told me in Cardiff. “About 47 percent of undergraduates in philosophy in the UK, single or joint honours, are women. That goes down to about 30 percent at PhD level, then it drops to about 21 percent at permanent staff. It’s more than 21 percent at junior lecturer level and it goes down to about 15 percent at professor level.”

Similar patterns have been found in America and Australia. But why?

Allison Joyce in The Virginia Quarterly Review:

At the center of Dhanbad City, in the Jharia region of northeastern India, amid a handful of concrete buildings, stands the enormous bronze statue of a coal miner. He is shirtless, muscular, and handsome. He strides doggedly forward, a mining helmet on his head, a pickax slung over his shoulder. The message is clear: Coal is my life. The area around Dhanbad produces India’s highest grade of coking coal, which in turn fuels the blast furnaces used for smelting steel. Contained in twenty-three large underground mines and nine open cast mines across an expanse of 450 square kilometers, Jharia’s heart of coal also produces power: two thirds of all electricity in India is generated in coal-fired plants. The earth beneath Jharia contains one of the largest coal reserves in the world.

But the coal is also on fire.

Mining started in Jharia in the 1890s, and by 1916 newspapers were reporting underground coal fires. According to these accounts, most fires started by spontaneous combustion; the deep mine tunnels had been improperly vented, leading to a buildup of volatile gases. Those fires have now burned for nearly a century, smoldering and spreading over 60 square kilometers, both at the surface and underground, with some fires reaching depths of 140 meters. More than 12 percent of the total deposits in the Jharia coalfields, or about 1.45 billion tonnes of coal, are now blocked from further development by these fires.

The land around Jharia is dominated by open mines laced with fissures and shafts, which act as bellows and chimneys, feeding and venting the subterranean fires. In some places, smoke, gases, and flames shoot up from the earth, and the ground has been known to collapse—sometimes with fatal consequences. Waterways are endangered, infrastructure has been destroyed, and even for those who step carefully, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and methane permeate the air, and many of the eighty thousand people who live in the region suffer from respiratory and skin problems.

Bokahapadi Village is the deadliest part of this deadly region, so when I arrived in Jharia, I wanted to see it.

Jessica Holland in The National:

Gwen Dylan is an artist in her 20s living in Eugene, Oregon, who deals with the same issues as everyone else: relationships, needy friends, criticism of her work. There’s something else, though: she has to eat human brains once a month to survive. That’s the set-up of a smart new comic-book series by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred which turns the usual zombie narrative on its head.

Instead of one individual struggling to stay alive amid infected undead hoards, iZombie has our protagonist attempting to maintain her identity despite the fact that at some point – she can’t remember when – she died and came back to life hungry for human flesh. Out in May, iZombie is one more example of a trend that, like its subject matter, refuses to die. Once the preserve of B movies and nerds, zombie stories have gone mainstream in the past 10 or so years, with clever, knowing films such as Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later reinventing the genre as one with mass appeal. Mainstream releases such as Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, followed, along with countless books and television series.

In its original traditions, the zombie was a corpse reanimated by witchcraft – not brought back to life, merely moving. The basic premise of the current zombie story is simple: an infection (probably caused by human folly) turns huge swathes of the population into groaning monsters with below-average IQs. Classically, they shamble along slowly and feed on brains, although there have been variations.

The central metaphor is that it takes courage to be an individual and to think for yourself; if we’re not careful we’ll allow mass culture to rot our brains.

Over at The Immanent Frame, a few pieces on Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon and an interview with Lofton about her new book. Daphne Brooks:

If, like me, you’ve filled up your sabbatical time this year logging countless hours of watching The Oprah Winfrey Show’s Season 25: The Farewell Season, as well as its behind-the-scenes sister show on OWN, the Queen of All Media’s brand new cable network, then you’ll probably find it hard to select just one favorite moment from a season so awash with the spectacular celebration, tender adoration, (self-) righteous vindication, and tearful adulation of the most successful woman ever to work in the television industry. How to choose between the mega-“my favorite things” two-day gift giving extravaganza (an event that our lady of sumptuous philanthropy likened to the beauty of good things happening to good people) and the “come-to-Jesus” estranged friends truth-and-reconciliation episodes featuring Whoopi Goldberg and former self-help protégé Iyanla Vanzant?

But the scene that stands out in my memory, and the scene that crystallizes the arguments of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton’s arresting new study of “the good news” delivered and commodified by the “symbolic figure” that is Winfrey, is one in which the talk show host looked out tearfully across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia and registered her awe at seeing a garnet red “O” emblazoned in lights at the center of that country’s national landmark. O-vercome with emotion, Winfrey turned the magnitude of that gesture into a teachable moment with her audience the following day, by describing how this was the symbol of what it means to work hard and dream big.

And so O goes. As Lofton brilliantly observes (and I quote at length here, as it is my favorite passage in the book),

She is capitalist and capital; she is a commodity and consumer. Oprah is a product, but Oprah’s product is not individual objects. Her patents are not mechanical innovations or engineering improvements. She does not design fabric or copyright personal recipes. Rather, her taste is her product. Her O is what sells. The O is her signature, her initial, and her trademark. It is a sound, a reminder of her televised exclaimations: “Oh, no.” “Oh, yes.” “Oh, please.” “Oh, I never.” “Oh!” “Oh?” “Oh.” Awed, orgasmic, thrilled, worried and converted, an O is the noise of emotional presence and ready delight (what I feel right now, right here, before this new thing, new experience, or new encounter—Oh!) should not confuse the consumer with its earthy sheen. The O is never unscheduled or chaotic. It is cadence. For every girly (womanly, interviewing, ministerial, listening, awakening) “oh,” there is a corporate O labeling a magazine, a book, a bracelet, or a piece of stereo equipment. The O circles her consumer selections with her emboss, bequeathing her halo upon her beloved choices. The O envelops the commodities that she has chosen expressly for herself and now, expressly for you. She is a pitchwoman of her own consumption; her consumption is her commodity.

I have been enveloped by the O for some twenty-five years now, at once seduced, delighted, and irritated by—and yet drawn to—the image of a profoundly self-assured, brash, and at times entertainingly ego-driven baby-boomer African American woman who climbed the ladder of extreme wealth, fame, and social and cultural power in the post-Civil Rights era just as I was coming into intellectual and political consciousness as a black feminist scholar in the 1980s and ’90s. For me, Oprah Winfrey took the “temple of my familiar” (to borrow a line from brilliant novelist Alice Walker, a Winfrey “legend,” whose Color Purple opened a key chapter in her own self-professed spiritual awakening odyssey)—multicultural, middle-class woman-centered popular culture—and transformed that experience into universalized self-reckoning and a mega-million dollar empire.

From Seed:

Ms. Johnson’s 8th graders are gathering for art class. They collect their pastels and charcoals, their graphite sticks and Strathmore sketchpads. But today, instead of the fake-fruit basket that’s been collecting dust since summertime, Ms. Johnson pulls out a biology textbook. “I want you to pick one thing in here to illustrate,” she says. “It can be anything — a chloroplast or a reptile, mitosis or evolution. But here’s the catch: You have to cover up the picture in the book and just use your imagination. What color would your ribosome be? How would you show out-of-Africa? Imagine that you’ve never before seen the double helix…Could you sketch some DNA?” This scenario may sound far-flung, but it’s just what American school kids need, if you ask the scientists, artists, educators, business leaders, and policy makers gathering this week in Washington DC for The Art of Science Learning.