Laura Thornton in Time Magazine:

For two decades in Asia and the former Soviet Union, I worked for democracy-promotion organizations, a central aim of which was bolstering democratic political parties. I trained them on internal party structure, platform development, constituent outreach, and, of course, candidate selection. With typical American hubris and pride, I often nudged parties toward the inclusive American primary system as a model for selecting candidates. “Primaries are the most inclusive and, theoretically, democratic,” I’d think to myself. “They allow everyday citizens to choose candidates rather than limiting this decision to party leaders.”

Expanding candidate selection to include more stakeholders made perfect sense. In the countries where I worked, a small group of party leaders selected candidates without transparency or competition, frequently based on the candidate’s financial contributions. This opaque process failed to provide nominees who were representative of or accountable to the public, stifling the competition of ideas and values. Unsurprisingly, in turn, the public disdained parties and politics.

More here.

Packing the Kitchen Utensils

How many years since we used
the potato masher, the apple peeler,
its stainless-steel blade and crank
tucked in the back of the bottom
kitchen drawer among the balled
clot of discarded rubber bands?
And the egg slicer, never touched,
its grille and clean wires taut
as the silver foil outlines
of the invitations we mailed out
years ago? We bought these
utensils ourselves: hardly anyone
came to a gay wedding back then.
Which of you is the bride? someone
scrawled beneath the box checked
“decline.” At least they answered,
you said. Husband, I lift two nesting
spoons from the cutlery drawer,
wrap them in a grocery circular.
Though their silver oval faces
are tarnished with wear, on the handles
you can still make out the brand,
the words Lifetime Guarantee.

by Steve Bellin-Oka
from Split This Rock

From the Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica:

Ragtime, propulsively syncopated musical style, one forerunner of jazz and the predominant style of American popular music from about 1899 to 1917. Ragtime evolved in the playing of honky-tonk pianists along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the last decades of the 19th century. It was influenced by minstrel-show songs, African American banjo styles, and syncopated (off-beat) dance rhythms of the cakewalk, and also elements of European music. Ragtime found its characteristic expression in formally structured piano compositions. The regularly accented left-hand beat, in 4/4 or 2/4 time, was opposed in the right hand by a fast, bouncingly syncopated melody that gave the music its powerful forward impetus.

Scott Joplin, called the “King of Ragtime,” published the most successful of the early rags, “The Maple Leaf Rag,” in 1899. Joplin, who considered ragtime a permanent and serious branch of classical music, composed hundreds of short pieces, a set of études, and operas in the style. Other important performers were, in St. Louis, Louis Chauvin and Thomas M. Turpin (father of St. Louis ragtime) and, in New Orleans, Tony Jackson.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

From Negro Spirituals:

The tunes and the beats of negro spirituals and Gospel songs are highly influenced by the music of their actual cultural environment. It means that their styles are continuously changing. The very first negro spirituals were inspired by African music even if the tunes were not far from those of hymns. Some of them, which were called “shouts” were accompanied with typical dancing including hand clapping and foot tapping.

SHOUTS
After a regular worship service, congregations used to stay for a “ring shout”. It was a survival of primitive African dance. So, educated ministers and members placed a ban on it. The men and women arranged themselves in a ring. The music started, perhaps with a Spiritual, and the ring began to move, at first slowly, then with quickening pace. The same musical phrase was repeated over and over for hours. This produced an ecstatic state. Women screamed and fell. Men, exhausted, dropped out of the ring.

Some African American religious singing at this time was referred as a “moan” (or a “groan”). Moaning (or groaning) does not imply pain. It is a kind of blissful rendition of a song, often mixed with humming and spontaneous melodic variation.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Rebecca Solnit at Literary Hub:

1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence. 

2) All of the O.P.’s feelings, experiences, interpretations, and values should be in the first sentence anyway. Only fascists hide those things in militarized outposts throughout the terrain of the piece. Which are basically ambushes. Which is violent and elitist.

3) If O.P. points out that your critique is baseless/ wrong/ high on its own fumes, whataboutism is your friend here. Just levy another charge, however unrelated. After all, any statement can be condemned for not including all other statements, aka O.P.’s concern about saving the whales is only a sign of his/her/their indifference about some other issue or cetacean or mammal or cause. There is always something.

More here.

Arbab Ali & Nadeem Sarwar in Undark:

Depending on the kind of sensor they’ve been armed with, drones can do a lot more than spray chemicals. Some can analyze the terrain for weeds, check moisture levels, assess for signs of pest infestation, suggest field planning, determine crop health, and even create a nutrient map of the growing harvest.

But buying a drone is no small endeavor, even for financially sound farmers, and renting it out is also fraught with risks. A battery-powered drone costs the equivalent of $8,000, whereas a petrol-powered drone costs about $15,000 —and there are also insurance and damage fees to consider.

More here.

Phillip McGarry in The Conversation:

Psychology researcher Eli Finkel and his colleagues have suggested that moral judgment plays a major role in political polarization in the United States. My research team wondered if acts demonstrating good moral character could counteract partisan animosity. In other words, would you think more highly of someone who treated you well – regardless of their political leanings?

We decided to conduct an experiment based on game theory and turned to the Ultimatum Game, which researchers developed to study the role of fairness in cooperation. Psychology researcher Hanah Chapman and her colleagues have demonstrated that unfairness in the Ultimatum Game elicits moral disgust, making it a good tool for us to use to study moral judgment in real time.

The Ultimatum Game allowed us to experimentally manipulate whether partisans were treated unfairly, fairly or even kindly by political opponents. Participants had no knowledge about the person they were playing with beyond party affiliation and how they played the game.

More here.

Yael Friedman at the LARB:

EARLY ON IN Wim Wenders’s new documentary Anselm, we hear the whispers of Anselm Kiefer’s famous headless female sculptures. “We may be the nameless and forgotten ones,” they whisper, “but we don’t forget a thing.” These full-bodied specters haunt us in the way only Kiefer’s art can. His body of work interrogates myth and memory, wrestling with Germany’s past in ways that helped form the foundation of its postwar present.

Both Wenders and Kiefer, two of Germany’s most iconic artists, were born in 1945, into the still-smoldering ruins of the war. Their engagement with the heaviness of history, and the “great silence” of the adults after the war, took dramatically different forms. Kiefer confronted it relentlessly, even bombastically, while Wenders has been guided by it more obliquely. In my recent conversation with Wenders, the filmmaker acknowledged that the two of them “had a very different approach—I wanted to leave it behind, and Anselm wanted to dig into it and put his finger on it. And that is also why I felt we had something to do together.”

more here.

Anna Della Subin at the LRB:

The​ earliest known author was married to the moon. In the 1920s, in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up the ruins of the ancient city of Ur in present-day Iraq. Near a ziggurat they unearthed evidence of the life and verse of the Sumerian priestess Enheduana. She was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, said to have created the world’s first empire around 2300 bce, when he forced dozens of independent city-states, from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, to acquiesce to his rule. In an act of religious imperialism, Sargon installed his daughter as ruler over E-kishnugal, the temple in Ur dedicated to the moon god, Nanna. As was customary for the role, she was ritually married to Nanna and acted as the mortal embodiment of his wife, the astral goddess Ningal. Enheduana managed the complex affairs of the temple and wrote poems, among them a collection of temple hymns that sought to accomplish in verse what her father did with axes and spears: to unify the resistant cities of the new empire into a coherent whole.

more here.

How to Deliver a Toast

To those who live in houses on streets
named after shady trees
with those that they share
meals, genes, and germs with.

And to the very old man
at a lake’s edge trying to reach
the stick a golden refused to fetch.
To whatever makes him risk falling in
to reach it, the reason
this particular stick matters more
to him than it does to the dog
who waits in the pickup.

And especially to whatever causes
the man to suddenly pause—forgetting
the stick—as if listening
though there’s just distant traffic,
assuming his hearing
aid can reach even that.
Maybe gauging how much
is left before sound ceases.

And of course, to you
walking past the lit windows
of strangers on Linden Street
rubbing your blood-filled hands
and ghosting your breath

by Daniel Hales
from Poet Seat Poetry

Sasha Frere-Jones at The Nation:

To write about Lou Reed is to fight with Lou Reed. It is difficult to say, however, who started what, and there is more than a little evidence that the sourness of rock males and their broadsheets were a somewhat common culprit. It feels inaccurate to blame any single party (even Jann Wenner). In 2018, Hat and Beard Press released My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters With Lou Reed, a collection of 36 tussles that range in character from amicable slap-boxing to tearful negotiations. Sometimes Reed is responding in nasty bad faith when being asked anodyne questions about his Poe adaptation; other times, he’s fielding provocative tabloid nonsense about the “greasers” who “get off” to his music. It’s a bad soup. Howard Sounes, who published The Life of Lou Reed: Notes from the Velvet Underground in 2019, told me over the phone recently that “the problem isn’t with the journalists; the problem is with him.” Sounes never had the chance to interview Reed, who died in 2013, but among the people who knew him, Sounes noted, “the word that kept coming up was ‘prick.’”

more here.

Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

There are certain images that slither past good taste and politics and sink their teeth straight into the subconscious. For instance: a man dressed in a tuxedo and a Ronald Reagan mask, using a gasoline pump as a flamethrower. He is torching his getaway vehicle and taking his time; the scene isn’t shot in slow motion, but I always remember it that way. In about thirty seconds, a cop will tackle him, prompting a long foot chase, but for now he waves his weapon like a kid with a sparkler on New Year’s Eve. We can’t see his expression, but Reagan’s face is grinning, and I’d like to imagine that the face underneath is, too. Don’t all bad guys dream of being children again?

The masked man is Patrick Swayze, the cop is Keanu Reeves, the woman who has sicced one on the other is the director Kathryn Bigelow, and the thing that binds them all together is “Point Break.” Those of us who love the film, which is showing in a new restoration, at Metrograph, talk about it in much the same way that others talk about “Showgirls”—i.e., as what used to be called a cult movie, before it became clear that there are only cults of varying sizes.

more here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Everyone knows politics makes people crazy. But what kind of crazy? Which page of the DSM is it on?

I’m only half joking. Psychiatrists have spent decades developing a whole catalog of ways brains can go wrong. Politics makes people’s brains go wrong. Shouldn’t it be in the catalog? Wouldn’t it be weird if 21st century political extremists had discovered a totally new form of mental dysfunction, unrelated even by analogy to all the forms that had come before?

You’ll object: politics only metaphorically “makes people crazy”; we just use the word “crazy” here to mean “irrational” or “overly emotional”. I’m not sure that’s true.

More here.

Benj Edwards in Ars Technica:

Last week, Austria-based Swarovski Optik introduced the AX Visio 10×32 binoculars, which the company says can identify over 9,000 species of birds and mammals using image recognition technology. The company is calling the product the world’s first “smart binoculars,” and they come with a hefty price tag—$4,799.

“The AX Visio are the world’s first AI-supported binoculars,” the company says in the product’s press release. “At the touch of a button, they assist with the identification of birds and other creatures, allow discoveries to be shared, and offer a wide range of practical extra functions.”

The binoculars, aimed mostly at bird watchers, gain their ability to identify birds from the Merlin Bird ID project, created by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As confirmed by a hands-on demo conducted by The Verge, the user looks at an animal through the binoculars and presses a button. A red progress circle fills in while the binoculars process the image, then the identified animal name pops up on the built-in binocular HUD screen within about five seconds.

More here.

Nandini Das in The Guardian:

Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld tells the story of Bartram and Kew as part of a nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it, and it is a story that is strikingly, remarkably alive to the contradictions inherent in its telling. For example, the technologies that facilitated the transporting of the plants and seeds that changed the English landscape and accelerated modern plant science also drove the large-scale cultivation of indigo, sugar cane, and rubber, and thereby determined the destinies of countless thousands of enslaved and indentured labourers in British-owned plantations across the world. And these enterprises, leading as they did to the kind of large-scale ecological destruction whose effects are still felt today, also created a need for conservation movements and environmental activism. Neither global communication, nor global cuisines, would be the same without any of this.

More here.

McKenzie Prillaman in Nature:

Lightning bolts of lime green flashed chaotically across the computer screen, a sight that stunned cancer neuroscientist Humsa Venkatesh. It was late 2017, and she was watching a storm of electrical activity in cells from a human brain tumour called a glioma. Venkatesh was expecting a little background chatter between the cancerous brain cells, just as there is between healthy ones. But the conversations were continuous, and rapid-fire. “I could see these tumour cells just lighting up,” says Venkatesh, who was then a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. “They were so clearly electrically active.”

She immediately began to think about the implications. Scientists just hadn’t considered that cancer cells — even those in the brain — could communicate with each other to this extent. Perhaps the tumour’s constant electrical communication was helping it to survive, or even to grow. “This is cancer that we’re working on — not neurons, not any other cell type.” To see the cells fizz with so much activity was “truly mind blowing,” says Venkatesh, who is now at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Venkatesh’s work formed part of a 2019 paper in Nature¹, which was published alongside another article² that came to the same conclusion: gliomas are electrically active. The tumours can even wire themselves into neural circuits and receive stimulation directly from neurons, which helps them to grow.

More here.