Antony Spawforth at Literary Review:

Religion reinforced Ptolemaic queenship. The influential Egyptian priesthood and the Ptolemaic court were politically co-dependent. In discussing this relationship, the author makes skilful use of the art and hieroglyphs found in Egypt’s temples. These showcased favourably the role of the Ptolemaic queen, hedging it with a prestigious divinity. How much this ‘propaganda’ rubbed off on ordinary Egyptians is debatable. Llewellyn-Jones also highlights the colonialist and racist character of the Graeco-Macedonian occupation of Egypt and describes the so-called Great Revolt of around 199 BC. Setting southern Egypt alight, it was put down by Alexandria only after a real show of force. 

By the time he gets to her, in chapter fifteen, Llewellyn-Jones has established that the famous Cleopatra, the seventh of that name, certainly had family history on her side – not all of it edifying – in gauging how to play the part of Ptolemaic queen regnant.

more here.

Older Love

His wife has asthma
so he only smokes outdoors
or late at night with head
and shoulders well into
the fireplace, the mesquite and oak
heat bright against his face.
Does it replace the heat
that has wandered from love
back into the natural world?
But then the shadow passion casts
is much longer than passion,
stretching with effort from year to year.
Outside tonight hard wind and sleet
from three bald mountains,
and on the hearth before his face
the ashes we’ll all become,
soft as the back of a woman’s knee.

by Jim Harrison
from Poetic Outlaws

Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian:

To answer the question of what we’re losing, think about what nightlife has given us. It was always a haven for outsiders trying to find, establish or shape their own communities. It brings people together and remains an insistently communal experience in an increasingly individualistic and closed-off late capitalist society. Gigs and clubs require us to be together – as friends, but also with those we don’t know. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, an academic who researches dance-music scenes, calls this “stranger-intimacy”.

Nights out are not always utopian, of course. Hedonism can lead to trouble of the negative kind, but it can also lead to trouble that changes the world. After dark, revelations and revolutions happen. Marginalised communities have found freedom in nightlife, and gone on to push that freedom into the daylight. People who were at the Stonewall riots say that their protest emerged from an insistence on the right to dance freely.

More here.

Thomas Zurbuchen in Quanta:

Our sun is the best-observed star in the entire universe.

We see its light every day. For centuries, scientists have tracked the dark spots dappling its radiant face, while in recent decades, telescopes in space and on Earth have scrutinized sunbeams in wavelengths spanning the electromagnetic spectrum. Experiments have also sniffed the sun’s atmosphere, captured puffs of the solar wind, collected solar neutrinos and high-energy particles, and mapped our star’s magnetic field — or tried to, since we have yet to really observe the polar regions that are key to learning about the sun’s inner magnetic structure.

For all that scrutiny, however, one crucial question remained embarrassingly unsolved. At its surface, the sun is a toasty 6,000 degrees Celsius. But the outer layers of its atmosphere, called the corona, can be a blistering — and perplexing — 1 million degrees hotter.

More here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

I was meeting my mother at the museum. My mother is both a great lover of art and completely unpretentious about it. Often, she simply stands in front of objects of art and smiles. We found ourselves in an exhibit entitled Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting. We were both suddenly astonished. I don’t know why exactly. I do know why un-exactly. The paintings are extraordinary. But what does that mean? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Indian Court paintings. I’ve seen a few here and there, including some in India. But I don’t know how to look at them. I don’t know the history or the context or the way that these paintings fit into a narrative. I don’t know the codes. So I just looked, without context, without codes.

More here.

Sudeep Dasgupta in the European Review of Books:

Palestine, before it named something else, named a region. The region emerged during Ottoman rule, between 1518 and 1920. It was called Filastin in Arabic, the language of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who lived in this region. The word « Palestinians » could apply to all of them. It could refer to « Palestinians » beyond Palestine, too, as when Immanuel Kant, for example, referred to European Jews in 1798 as « Palestinians living among us » in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. This is one of many things we’ve forgotten to remember.

Jews in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, identified as Ottoman citizens, and, in the Empire’s Arab-speaking regions, as Arab. « Arab » could encompass Muslims, Christians, Druzes, Alevis and Jews. Another thing we’ve forgotten to remember is an intimate relationality — Muslims, Jews, Christians and others — forged within the Ottoman project by those in Palestine and beyond, long before our time. As the Ottoman Empire fractured in the early twentieth century and collapsed after World War I, the term « Arab » would acquire an increasingly political or nationalist edge.

More here.

Tasneem Zehra Husain in New Humanist:

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor.

Why metaphor? Because that is how we think, how learn, how we parse the world. Metaphor comes from the Greek metaphora, a “transfer”; literally a “carrying over”. The very act of understanding (from the Old English: to stand in the midst of) implies the existence of a “between”, a bridge between new and known. In effect, a metaphor. How could it be otherwise? How else can we assimilate a new piece of knowledge, other than by linking it to something we already know? In doing so, we weave a web. When we wonder what something means, what we’re really asking is: what will it impact? If I pull on this thread here, where will my web tighten, where might it unravel?

When we can’t find a suitable metaphor to describe our scientific reality, we run into problems. Take, for instance, quantum mechanics. Most of the devices we use every day are built upon eerily accurate calculations made using quantum theory. Operationally, the theory is wildly successful, yet no one can make complete sense of it. Even scientists who wield the equations with ease don’t claim to truly understand quantum theory; we still don’t have a metaphor that works.

More here.

Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Nature:

An orangutan in Sumatra surprised scientists when he was seen treating an open wound on his cheek with a poultice made from a medicinal plant. It’s the first scientific record of a wild animal healing a wound using a plant with known medicinal properties. The findings were published this week in Scientific Reports¹. “It shows that orangutans and humans share knowledge. Since they live in the same habitat, I would say that’s quite obvious, but still intriguing to realize,” says Caroline Schuppli, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany, and a co-author of the study.

In 2009, Schuppli’s team was observing Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) in the Gunung Leuser National Park in South Aceh, Indonesia, when a young male moved into the forest. He did not have a mature male’s big cheek pads, called flanges, and was probably around 20 years old, Schuppli says. He was named Rakus, or ‘greedy’ in Indonesian, after he ate all the flowers off a gardenia bush in one sitting. In 2021, Rakus underwent a growth spurt and became a mature flanged male. The researchers observed Rakus fighting with other flanged males to establish dominance and, in June 2022, a field assistant noted an open wound on his face, possibly made by the canines of another male, Schuppli says.

More here.

How Insignificant We Are

Before I was six years old,
my grandparents and my mother
had taught me that

if all the green things that grow
were taken from the earth,
there could be no life.

If all the four-legged creatures
were taken from the earth,
there could be no life.

If all the winged creatures
were taken from the earth,
there could be no life.

If all our relatives who crawl and swim
and live within the earth
were taken away,
there could be no life.

But if all the human beings
were taken away,
life on earth would flourish.

That is how insignificant we are.”

By Russell Means,
Oglala Lakota Nation
(November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012).

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that’s almost too much at times. Here are hundreds of plants, exquisitely described; here is colour, energy and expertise. In a way, it’s akin to a garden itself; a place, almost a park, in which the reader never quite knows what’s around the next corner. But while this is invigorating – my imagination whirred across the verdant expanses of its pages like some crazy, old-fashioned lawnmower – it’s also tiring. Dizzy on its pollen, I often had to put it down. I began to think of the chapter breaks as conveniently placed benches on which I might for a while sit quietly, temporarily unassailed by endless common names, ongoing worries about honey fungus, and long disquisitions on privilege and exclusion.

Laing does two things at once. First and foremost, this book is a memoir, in which she describes her restoration of the garden attached to the house in Suffolk to which she moved in 2020, as Covid-19 raged on and so many of us sought respite in our backyards, balconies and window boxes (in the course of 2020, more than 3 million people in Britain began to garden for the first time, nearly half of them under 45).

more here.

Rachel Donadio at the NYT:

In April 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, two men arrived at the library of the University of Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city. They told the librarians they were Ukrainians fleeing war and asked to consult 19th-century first editions of works by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, and Nikolai Gogol. Speaking Russian, they said they were an uncle and nephew researching censorship in czarist Russia so the nephew could apply for a scholarship to the United States. Eager to help, the librarians obliged. The men spent 10 days studying the books.

Four months later, during a routine annual inventory, the library discovered that eight books the men had consulted had disappeared, replaced with facsimiles of such high quality that only expert eyes could detect them. “It was terrible,” Krista Aru, the director of the library, said. “They had a very good story.” At first, it seemed like a one-off — bad luck at a provincial library. It wasn’t. Police are now investigating what they believe is a vast, coordinated series of thefts of rare 19th-century Russian books — primarily first and early editions of Pushkin — from libraries across Europe.

more here.

Marie Morelli in Syracuse.com:

Former President Donald Trump testified in the New York civil fraud trial, earning rebukes from the judge for his off-topic comments. In the editorial cartoon gallery’s lead image, Nick Anderson pokes fun at Trump’s courtroom theatrics by showing him descending a golden escalator to the witness stand, a visual reference to the announcement at Trump Tower of his first presidential bid.

Trump and other defendants are accused of duping banks, insurers and others by inflating his wealth on financial statements. The ex-president’s children Ivanka and Donald Jr. also testified, provoking visual barbs from Jack Ohman and Drew Sheneman. Mike Luckovich draws Trump in an overvalued prison cell. Sheneman has him overseeing an overpriced garage sale.

More here.

Chris Molanphy in Slate:

Quick pop quiz: Prior to this week, what was Taylor Swift’s last new No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100?

I know, I know … it’s a little hard to keep up with her relentless output. If you are among the Americans only passively aware of Swift’s oeuvre, you might think her last No. 1 was the moody one where she says hi, she’s the problem, it’s her. But “Anti-Hero” hit No. 1 nearly 18 months ago. What about that percolating bop about the hottest days of the year? Improbably, “Cruel Summer” reached No. 1 last fall—not only late for summer, but four years after its original release as a Lover album cut. But nope, there was another new Taylor No. 1 after that.

…In short, you don’t need me to tell you why this song is No. 1. It’s obvious. What none of us can answer is whether “Fortnight” will be remembered as a classic Taylor hit or a side effect of Swift’s biggest album launch ever, the moment when she beat her own record by sweeping the Top 14 slots on the Hot 100. Other first singles from prior Swift LPs, like “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Cardigan,” and “Willow” made big Hot 100 splashes but fell off quickly and never became lasting radio hits. Will “Fortnight” go down as an “Anti-Hero,” an “Is It Over Now?,” or a “Look What You Made Me Do”? Could it maybe even be Taylor Swift’s “Billie Jean”?

More here.

………….

Letter l as in
Reliable, Indomitable, Chivalrous

……… For Loraine Lins

It’s hard not to like
……………………… l. Life
………….. Love. Luck. It’ so full
of lofty ideals. A natural born leader
………………………of all the laggard………….
………….. vowels, lugubrious u,
ever loitering e. loopy o.
………………………Think, l seems to say,
………….. of all you can accomplish
if you work at it as diligently
……………………….as an adverb.
………….. It latches on
to an adjective and sweetly
……………………….softly, almost indiscernibly,
………….. persuades it to
spread its goodwill to the rest
………………………of the sentence.
………….. Lambent. Luminous.
Lucent. What pleasure there is
……………………….in working certain words
………….. into sentences. l. changes
everything. Unflinching—
……………………….ly, unstintingly, it labors,
………….. Let the earth
put forth vegetation, plants
……………………….yielding seed, and fruit trees
…………… fruit in which is their seed.
That’s not just the Lord
………………………talking. That’s
………….. language. Let there be . . .
How lovely it feels
……………………….to tuck the tongue
………….. against the teeth
and let the lungs do the rest.

by Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Yan Lianke at Literary Hub:

In China we have a saying that reading a banned book on a snowy night is one of the true joys of life. From this, one can well imagine the kind of satisfaction that reading a banned book may bring—like candy locked up in a cabinet, it releases a sweet fragrance into solitary spaces. Whenever I travel abroad, I am invariably introduced as China’s most controversial and most censored author. I neither agree nor disagree with this characterization—I’m not bothered by it, but neither do I feel particularly honored by it.

Authors should be very clear that being banned is not synonymous with artistic success. Sometimes, being banned is equated with courageousness, and we can certainly understand Goethe’s observation that without courage, there would be no art. If we were to extend this logic, we could even say that without courage, there would be no artistic creation. However, many readers view censorship and controversy only at the level of courage—particularly in relation to authors from China, the former Soviet Union, and other so-called third-world countries.

More here.

Daniel Immerwahr in The Guardian:

The German forester Peter Wohlleben’s surprise bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees (published in English in 2016), has inaugurated a new tree discourse, which sees them not as inert objects but intelligent subjects. Trees have thoughts and desires, Wohlleben writes, and they converse via fungi that connect their roots “like fibre-optic internet cables”. The same idea pervades The Overstory, Richard Powers’ celebrated 2018 novel, in which a forest scientist upends her field by demonstrating that fungal connections “link trees into gigantic, smart communities”.

Both books share an unlikely source. In 1997, a young Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard (the model for Powers’ character) published with five co-authors a study in Nature describing resources passing between trees, apparently via fungi. Trees don’t just supply sugars to each other, Simard has further argued; they can also transmit distress signals, and they shunt resources to neighbours in need. “We used to believe that trees competed with each other,” explains a football coach on the US hit television show Ted Lasso. But thanks to “Suzanne Simard’s fieldwork”, he continues, “we now realise that the forest is a socialist community”.

The idea of trees as intelligent and cooperative has moved swiftly from research articles to “did you know?” cocktail chatter to children’s book fare.

More here.