S’bu Zikode and Richard Pithouse in the Boston Review:

Richard Pithouse: Mandela was released from prison on February 11, 1990, suddenly opening up the field of political possibility after a long and exhausting stalemate between the progressive forces, which were largely organized in two groups: the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the trade unions, and the apartheid state. What did Mandela’s release mean to you?

S’bu Zikode: I was fourteen years old, and in school. At that time, we were divided. It was the time of the war between [the right-wing Zulu nationalist organization] Inkatha and the UDF. People could easily draw the line between the two sides along a river or a road. Everyone on one side was Inkatha; everyone on the other side was UDF. A lot of people were killed or had their homes burnt down just because they were living on this or that side of the line.

Some people had guns; we young people had sticks. If you turned back from a battle you would be shot. You had to face bullets from the front and the back. Terrible things happened, very painful things. We don’t talk about it.

More here.

Katrina Gulliver in JSTOR Daily:

In the years following American independence, many questions would be asked, in different spheres, of what it meant to be a citizen, and what it meant to be an American. New England schoolmaster John Jenkins focused on penmanship as the key to building a strong American middle class, creating his own book of instruction for handwriting.

“Writing in the shadow of the American Revolution, Jenkins recognized that subtle changes in everyday cultural practices like handwriting could have significant effects on the character of the new nation,” explains historian Richard S. Christen.

Literacy on both sides of the Atlantic had increased during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a fine hand tended to be the mark of the well born and well educated.

More here.

Roy Datanielson in Medium:

Longevity and eternal youth have frequently been sought after down through the ages, and efforts to keep from dying and fight off age have a long and interesting history.

“Six days and seven nights I mourned over him, and I would not allow him to be buried until a maggot fell out of his nose. I was terrified. I began to fear death, and so roam the wilderness.”
-Gilgamesh

Written in Stone
History is the story of humanity’s quest for immortality. And anyone who examine it closely enough in a serious attempt to find the cultural roots and philosophical antecedents of modern immortalism, shall discover that mankind’s seemingly endless quest to conquer death has been expressed several times down through the ages. In fact, the earliest attested record of a mortal man’s pursuit of immortality can actually be found in what is considered to be the first great work of literature ever made: ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, an Akkadian poem about Gilgamesh, or Bilgamesh, a Sumerian king who reigned in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Uruk, somewhere between 2800 and 2500 BC. The epic most likely existed in oral form long before it was written down on stone tablets around 2200 BC, and the main character of the story, Gilgamesh, is widely considered by scholars to be the historical 5th king of Uruk.

More here.

Rune

The word in the bread feeds me,
The word in the moon leads me,
The word in the seed breeds me,
The word in the child needs me,

The word in the sand builds me,
The word in the fruit fills me,
The word in the body mills me,
The word in the war kills me,

The word in the man takes me,
The word in the storm shakes me,
The word in the work makes me,
The word in the woman rakes me,
The word in the word wakes me.

by Muriel Rukeyser
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

Parul Sehgal at The New Yorker:

Butler is soft-spoken and gallant, often sheathed in a trim black blazer or a leather jacket, but, given the slightest encouragement, they turn goofy and sly, almost gratefully. When they were twelve years old, they identified two plausible professional paths: philosopher or clown. In ordinary life, Butler incorporates both.

Butler apologized for the mess in their car, an old BMW, when we went for a drive one day—this amounted to a few books by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, strewn around the back seat. Butler’s marginalia in those books are in a precise, hunched hand. Merleau-Ponty propounded the idea that the body, not consciousness, is our primary instrument for understanding the world. To be in a body is not to be contained but to be exposed to the world; from our first breath, we are in need of care from other people. Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking. “I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control,” they have said.

more here.

Marion Turner at the LRB:

Scholars of medieval literature and history have been thinking about the idea of the ‘global Middle Ages’ for twenty years or more. Books such as Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350 (1989) laid the groundwork that has been built on by scholars such as Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes, who set up the Scholarly Community on the Global Middle Ages (its website features projects ranging from ‘Global Jerusalem’ to ‘East Africa between Asia and Mediterranean Europe’ to ‘The Story of Global Ivory in the Premodern Era’). There are problems with the concept, of course: Nora Berend has argued that the term ‘Middle Ages’ is Eurocentric, and that ‘global’ is anachronistic when applied to the period.

One of the structures that underpinned medieval European culture was multilingualism. Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio all wrote in both Latin and Tuscan. In later medieval England, educated men were trilingual, fluent in French, Latin and English, and some knew more (Chaucer, for example, was proficient in Tuscan). At the Council of Constance, in 1417, the English cleric Thomas Polton reported that the English spoke five different native languages: English, Welsh, Irish, Gascon and Cornish.

more here.

Thomas Meaney in Sidecar:

If the battle of Điện Biên Phủ – the Stalingrad of decolonization – were in need of a symbol, you could do worse than a bicycle. One saddled with pieces of Katyusha rocket artillery, en route to be reassembled on the rim of the highlands overlooking the valley where the army divisions of Võ Nguyên Giáp smashed the French imperial forces seventy years ago. To commemorate their victory, the Vietnamese state this week staged a full-scale re-enactment of the events, with thousands taking up the roles of peasant porters and army regulars who won the First Indochina War. Everything was in place except for actors to play the French, though if the invitation had gone out to veterans of the French New Wave, it’s hard to see them turning down the call. Jean-Pierre Léaud as Henri Navarre!

One of the central dramas of Điện Biên Phủ is that both sides wanted the showdown. The commander of the French, Navarre, was confident they could rout the Vietnamese army just as they had done at Nà Sản two years before. He wanted to shut off any Vietnamese incursion into Laos in the north, turning Điện Biên Phủ into an ‘entrenched camp’ populated by 12,000 French troops, while simultaneously dispatching 53 battalions to root out the Vietnamese forces in the southern river delta. His second in command, René Cogny, wanted to meet Giáp’s soldiers out in the open in the style of battles of the previous century: ‘I want a clash at Điện Biên Phủ. I’ll do everything possible to make him eat dirt and forget about wanting to try his hand at grand strategy.’ Giáp was happy to take up the gauntlet, telling his planners that ‘Điện Biên Phủ could be the battle’.

More here.

Musa al-Gharbi in Compact Magazine:

To understand broad trends, it can often be helpful to dig into a particular case. With respect to the tumult over the encampments protesting the US-backed Israeli offensive in Gaza, it would be hard to find a more illuminating example than Columbia University. Here, we may observe students’ sincere concern for the least among us, on one hand, and their ambitious social climbing, on the other. Here, we can clearly recognize elite institutions’ deep commitment to sterile forms of activism—and we can readily see how identitarian and safetyist approaches to “social justice” are weaponized in the service of the status quo. At Columbia, we can most readily perceive the jarring dissonance between the spectacle of unrest over Gaza and the realities of the conflict that has been overshadowed by the spectacle.

But let’s start with some basic facts.

On April 17, Columbia’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, appeared before the US House of Representatives to testify about the prevalence and nature of anti-Semitism on campus. Eager to avoid the fate of her peers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, Shafik kept her head down and assented to assertions that Columbia, and universities writ large, are awash in Jew-hatred, and that Columbia wasn’t doing enough to fight it. Over the course of the three-hour hearing, she paid comparatively little attention to pro-Palestine students who have faced assaults, doxxing, and alleged harassment—including by professors—under her watch. She also didn’t voice any objection when the term “intifada” was equated with hate speech, despite knowing well—as a native Arabic speaker born in Egypt—that the term is used broadly for mass uprisings in many contexts; it’s how the Warsaw Uprising is described in Arabic.

More here.

Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

We live in a dysfunctional system in which money flows out of the countries that need it most and into the coffers of the wealthiest. In 2023, the private sector collected $68 billion more in interest and principal repayments than it lent to the developing world. International financial institutions and assistance agencies extracted another $40 billion, while net concessional assistance from international financial institutions was only $2 billion—even as famine spread. The result is that as developing economies make exorbitant interest payments to their creditors, they are forced to cut spending on health, education, and infrastructure at home. Half of the world’s poorest countries are now poorer than they were before the pandemic.

At The Polycrisis we have been tracking the whipsaw of the global financial system amid private finance mantras, interest-rate hikes at the Fed, and the explosion of debt in the global South. In our dispatches on IMF meetings, the Paris conference on debt and climate, the BRICS summit, Barbados, Brussels, Ukraine, and Pakistan, we have sought to throw light on the political economy of financial distress. Who is in need? What do they get from whom, and under what conditions?

The polycentric financial “order”

The World Bank boosted its lending in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but is still well short of meeting the financing needs of developing countries. At the Spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank this week, the question of who adds capital for development, climate resilience, and the energy transition is high on the agenda.

Long-term finance is one thing, but in a crisis, it’s liquidity that counts most—and it can be key to warding off the kind of panic that drives investment away.

In all this, the dollar remains king. Want to make payments? Send an invoice? Store your wealth? Borrow across borders? Chatter about any replacement of the dollar as the dominant reserve currency is overblown. No other contender is willing to run the current-account deficit necessary to be a global reserve issuer. And when a storm arrives, liquidity flows to those with “safe assets” closest to the imperial core, while the burden of “structural adjustment” falls on the poorest and weakest shoulders in each society.

More here.

Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo in Foreign Policy:

It is in the context of this creeping eschatological position that one can assess the originality and importance of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. White, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers an original reading of the current crisis of democracy by defining it as a temporal regime and arguing that an “open future,” one that is not predetermined but is shaped by human agency, is a precondition for the successful functioning of democratic regimes. In his view, “When the future seems to be closing in, institutions organized around the idea of persistent disagreement and changing opinion start to look out of place.”

By contrast, the reigning characteristic of our “age of emergency” is that there is no room for error. If certain decisions are not taken today, it no longer matters whether they will be taken up tomorrow. It will be too late.

More here.

Emily Willingham in Scientific American:

The chorus of the theme song for the movie Fame, performed by the late actress Irene Cara, includes the line “I’m gonna live forever.” Cara was, of course, singing about the posthumous longevity that fame can confer. But a literal expression of this hubris resonates in some corners of the world—especially in the technology industry. In Silicon Valley, immortality is sometimes elevated to the status of a corporeal goal. Plenty of big names in big tech have sunk funding into ventures aiming to solve the problem of death as if it were just an upgrade to your smartphone’s operating system.

Yet what if death simply cannot be hacked and longevity will always have a ceiling, no matter what we do? Researchers have taken on the question of how long we can live if, by some combination of serendipity and genetics, we do not die from cancer, heart disease or getting hit by a bus. They report that with things that usually kill us omitted, our body’s capacity to restore equilibrium to its myriad structural and metabolic systems after disruptions still fades with time. And even if we make it through life with few stressors, this incremental decline sets the maximum life span for humans at somewhere between 120 and 150 years. In the end, if the obvious hazards do not take our lives, this fundamental loss of resilience will do so, the researchers conclude in findings published in May 2021 in Nature Communications.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has learned over the course of her eight decades on this earth, inspiration can come from some unlikely places.

In 2000, she happened across a news photograph of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which had been bombed into rubble during the long stretch of devastating wars between Russia and the Caucasus. The photo prompted Painter to wonder how “Caucasian” became a term for white people; that in turn led her to an 18th-century German naturalist who picked out five skulls to embody the five “varieties” of mankind. What he deemed “the really most beautiful form of skull” belonged to a young Georgian woman and would therefore represent Caucasians, whom he called “the most beautiful and best formed of men.”

From a photograph of bombed-out Grozny to the absurd methodology of a German naturalist: Painter’s research for the best-selling “The History of White People” (2010) was born. “It was as though I lost my head, you boiled off all the flesh and the brains and eyeballs out of it, and you called it ‘New Jersey Variety of Mankind,’” she writes about the Georgian’s skull in “I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of her essays and artwork that includes a number of such characteristically irreverent asides. Painter was a historian at Princeton before enrolling in art school at the age of 64. In 2018, she recalled the experience in a freewheeling memoir. “I Just Keep Talking” presents Painter in full, gathering personal reflections, scholarly essays and images spanning several decades to convey the range of her interests and ambition.

More here.

To the Young Protestants holding Portraits of Martin Luther on
the steps of the Catholic Cemetery in Bielsko on All Souls Day

When Luther couldn’t convert his Jewish neighbors, he wrote:

Set fire to their synagogues and schools in honor of our Lord
and of Christendom, that God might see we are Christians.

Between us iron grates and the cries of blackbirds on graves.
Wind circles the firs. A child bounces a red ball.

You stand smiling after five hundred years. You ask for nothing
more than a coin from history, the blessing of pigeons nibbling

crumbs at your feet, but it was never this simple. How young
I was when my parents converted from Catholicism, entered

the plain nave of a Protestant chapel and its Bach cantatas.
Condemned by priests, shunned by our Irish relatives,

we became devout Presbyterians. My Polish grandfather,
a religious and political rebel, wouldn’t let a priest in his house.

In Sunday school, I was taught about the Reformation’s doctrines,
martyrs, exiles. What can a child understand of cruelty

and dogma? I missed my cousins in their First Communion
finery, their frosted cakes. In Europe, in Ireland, death came

for centuries with the swing of a censer, a bare cross replacing
the crucifix, families divided with the slice of a cake knife.

We stand in this land where the people of the book visit us
in the fall wind—Jews and Christians, who’ve strayed,

says the Quran, from God’s true faith. Enough, the blackbirds cry.

by Tersa Cader
from Plume Magazine

Lisa Abend at Afar:

Since the 19th century, large numbers of villagers in the poorer parts of Italy have migrated to more prosperous regions and countries. The migration continues; in some places, populations have shrunk so dramatically that there are no longer enough patients to keep the local doctor in business, or enough children to fill the school. Young people who moved away to study or work didn’t want to return, and when their parents died, the family homes stood empty, sometimes for decades. Around 2010, the village of Salemi in western Sicily was one of the first towns to come up with an idea: What if you could fill them again by offering the properties for sale at a ridiculously low price?

I wasn’t in the market for a house, one euro or otherwise. But I wanted to know if the program worked.

More here.

Joanna Thompson at Undark:

Vaccination led to the global eradication of smallpox in 1980. Even today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lists one of the goals of its malaria program as “ending malaria for good.” In recent years, Tufts University launched its Lyme Disease Initiative with the stated aim to “eradicate Lyme disease by 2030.”

But as new zoonotic diseases emerge (and resurge), the goal of a world free of such diseases is beginning to feel like a pipe dream to an increasing number of researchers.

“Trying to put a lot of money into the eradication of these diseases with complex ecologies is just throwing money away,” said Susan Jones, an ecologist and historian of life sciences at the University of Minnesota. Instead, Jones and her colleagues argue, we should invest more into control and protection against certain diseases — and learn to live alongside them.

More here.