Jay Parini in The Australian:

One does not hope for poetry to change the world. W.H. Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for W.B. Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen”. That is, it doesn’t shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn’t usually send masses into the streets to protest against a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.

Language defines us as human beings. We speak, therefore we exist. We have the miraculous ability to gesture in words, to make statements and requests, to express our feelings, to construct arguments, to draw conclusions. Poetic language matters because it is precise and concrete, and draws us closer to the material world. In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called spiritual. He puts forward three principles worth considering:

Words are signs of natural facts.
Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
Nature is the symbol of the spirit.

Those statements formed a platform of sorts for the transcendental movement, which studied nature closely for signs of spiritual life. The principles remain worthy of reflection. At some level, words suggest natural facts: rock, river, bird, cloud. The leap comes in the second statement, which posits a spiritual world. One can, I think, leap beyond conventional notions of spirituality here and acknowledge a deep interior world wherein each of us lives, no matter what our religious persuasion.

To call James Wood the finest literary critic writing in English today, as is commonplace, is to treat him like some sort of fancy terrier at Westminster. It both exaggerates and diminishes his importance. It exaggerates in its specious assignment of rank, an insult to Frank Kermode, Daniel Mendelsohn, Helen Vendler, Louis Menand and other fine critics. It diminishes insofar as its trophy is a consolation prize for being not only a dog but an ornamental one.

It would be better to say simply that Wood is among the very few contemporary writers of great consequence. There is, nevertheless, something to the desire to claim Wood’s incomparability. Not many people I know, upon returning home to find a new issue of the New York Review of Books, speed it open to discover without delay how Kermode has taken to the new Ezra Pound biography. But there is vast anecdotal evidence of subscribers to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books reading Wood’s essays huddled in entryways, coats and keys and umbrellas still in their hands. He has earned a rare and awesome cultural authority.

more from the LA Times here.

Richard Dawkins’ interviews with Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, PZ Myers, and Richard Buss can be seen here. A segment of the interview with Weinberg:

///

“The wasichu (white man) came like locusts from the east with promises not to devour our future.  But not one promise was fulfilled.  The destiny of the wasichu was to count coup on, then to kill and scalp our destiny.” –Sees Nothing New, a shaman of the Plains Indians

Brave World
Tony Hoagland

But what about the courage

of the cancer cell

that breaks out from the crowd

it has belonged to all its life
…………………………………

like a housewife erupting

from her line at the grocery store

because she just can’t stand

the sameness anymore?
…………………………………

What about the virus that arrives

in town like a traveler

from somewhere faraway

with suitcases in hand,
…………………………………

who only wants a place

to stay, a chance to get ahead

in the land of opportunity,

but who smells bad,
…………………………………

talks funny, and reproduces fast?

What about the microbe that

hurls its tiny boat straight

into the rushing metabolic tide,
…………………………………

no less cunning and intrepid

than Odysseus; that gambles all

to found a city

on an unknown shore?
…………………………………

What about their bill of rights,

their access to a full-scale,

first-class destiny?

their chance to realize
…………………………………

maximum potential?-which, sure,

will come at the expense

of someone else, someone

who, from a certain point of view,
…………………………………

is a secondary character,

whose weeping is almost

too far off to hear,
…………………………………

a noise among the noises

coming from the shadows

of any brave new world.
…………………………………

///

      

William Grimes in the New York Times Book Review:

In “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This,” his wispy inquiry into the history and philosophy of jokes, Jim Holt offers up a choice one from ancient times. Talkative barber to customer: “How shall I cut your hair?” Customer: “In silence.”

Bada-bing.

This knee-slapper comes from “Philogelos,” or “Laughter-Lover,” a Greek joke book, probably compiled in the fourth or fifth century A.D. Its 264 entries amount to an index of classical humor, with can’t-miss material on such figures of fun as the miser, the drunk, the sex-starved woman and the man with bad breath.

Let us not forget the “skolastikos,” or egghead: “An egghead was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. ‘Don’t cry,’ he consoled them, ‘I have freed you all in my will.’”

Bada-boom.

Holt, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, combs through a number of obscure texts, ancient and modern, in his fast-moving, idiosyncratic survey of humor and its vagaries through the ages.

More here.

Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine:

Louise Brown turns 30 on Friday. These days, her name elicits little more than a mystified head shake. Who was she again? Let me refresh your memory: Little Louise was the world’s first “test-tube baby,” what we now refer to as an I.V.F. kid, or simply “the twins down the block.”

Brown’s life today is as unremarkable as the circumstances of her conception have become: she’s worked as an administrative assistant in Bristol, England, and is married with a naturally conceived toddler of her own. It’s hard to imagine that she begat one of the major revolutions of the 20th century: since her debut, more than three million babies have been born worldwide using I.V.F. or other reproductive technologies.

The dire, Henny Penny predictions that accompanied the Brown’s blessed event now seem quaint. An editorial in this newspaper observed that “probably not since the invention of nuclear weapons has a scientific advance been received with such mixed feelings.” Elsewhere, I.V.F. was decried as a “violation of God’s plan.” Conservative ethicists warned that the technology would ultimately create freakishly malformed babies or, equally monstrous, designer children genetically engineered to be stronger and smarter than the rest.

More here.

More here from Newsweek.

Yoni Brenner in The New Yorker:

1. Top thick slices of country bread with fresh goat cheese. Sprinkle with herbs and bake until crusty; serve to everyone but Jeff.

2. Vegetarian friends? Try veggie rumaki: wrap a strip of imitation bacon around a water chestnut, spear with a toothpick, and broil—but instead of imitation bacon use real bacon, and instead of a water chestnut use veal.

3. Steal Cheryl’s famous potato-salad recipe. When Cheryl asks, “Why did you steal my recipe?,” say, “I don’t know, Cheryl, why did you break my heart?” Then laugh so she knows you’re just kidding.

4. Blend fresh crabmeat with diced avocado, scallions, and a dollop of mayonnaise for a canapé topping so delicious that it will take your guests a full minute to realize that they’re eating it off dog biscuits. Once they catch on, act mortified and stammer that you must have “mixed up the boxes,” until everyone calms down. Then start crying because the biscuits remind you that today marks exactly eight weeks since you had to put down Buster, and you just miss him so much.

5. Tell Marissa that you appreciate her concern, but in the two years since Cheryl broke off the engagement you’ve grown up a lot, and you’re really in a much healthier place now. Then say, “Speaking of fiancés, how’s Peter’s alcoholism?” (Note: This is not technically an appetizer.)

More here.

Elias Khoury in the Boston Review:

On February 14, 1948, during the 1948 War—called the War of Independence by Israelis, and the Catastrophe (Nakba) by the Palestinians—the Palestinian village Sa’sa’ was invaded by the Palmach, the elite unit of the Haganah, precursor to the Israel Defense Forces. The villagers did not resist, but thirty-five houses were destroyed and 60-80 people were killed.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes the incident in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, drawing on a report by the commander of the battalion responsible for the attack. Pappé—along with Benny Morris, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, and others—is a member of the group of “new historians” who have, since the ’80s, devoted their energies to reexamining their country’s founding myths and thus enlarged the space for critical discussion within Israel about the Palestinian tragedy. According to the report, a village guard in Sa’sa’ found himself caught in a verbal crossfire. Instead of asking, “Who is there?” (min hada) when the soldiers approached, he asked, “What is this?” (iesh hada). An Israeli soldier who happened to know Arabic replied, inverting the two words, “Hada iesh.” His use of “iesh” was not the Arabic, however, but the Hebrew in which it means “fire.” Thus mixing the two languages, he replied “this is fire,” before killing the astonished Palestinian.

The deadly reply was a mirror of the question, and the ways in which the response was understood and misunderstood—a mixture of knowledge and ignorance, real bloodshed and imaginary projections—reflect the intricate interdependence of identity that comes into play in both Palestinian and Israeli literatures.

More here.

More here from National Geographic. 

Amanda Gefter reviews the book, edited by Sean Miller and Shveta Verma, in New Scientist:

What first drew me to physics were the words. Cosmos. Entanglement. Spiralling galaxies and stars gone supernova, dark matter and charmed quarks. Physics brims with linguistic magic. And once you peer beneath the words, you find ideas can possess a poetry more poignant than any turn of phrase. String theory may turn out to be wrong. It might not be testable and it might not describe the real world. But it does describe a world that’s undeniably poetic.

Still, I’ll admit, when I picked up Riffing on Strings I was sceptical. Sure, the poetic building blocks are there, but creative writing and string theory? It’s got the potential to go horribly awry. So I was pleased to find such an eclectic, thought-provoking and entertaining collection of writing – perfect for toting along on travels in other dimensions. The book opens with Sean Miller’s introduction to string theory and its place in the arts, followed by a series of essays by acclaimed physicists. Michio Kaku’s piece on duality is especially informative. Then come short stories, poems and plays that show the myriad ways in which physics seeps into public consciousness, is absorbed by the artist and re-emitted as something entirely new. These are pieces inspired by string theory, not about it. It’s not a matter of whether the writers get the science right, it’s how they play with it.

Read more »

Lynne Duke in Root:

Who would ever have imagined the scene when South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and Mandela strode onto the field at Ellis Park Stadium wearing the jersey of the team captain. In a spectacularly powerful moment of symbolism, the throng of Afrikaners chanted, “Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!”—though Afrikaners at that time weren’t fully embracing black rule and often wouldn’t even sing the new national anthem.

Yes, Mandela would forgive. But he would not forget. His political agenda was crafted as corrective for all the damage the Afrikaners had done under apartheid. He had to transform an economy that had once served only whites; uplift the black poor; rewrite the legal canon; bring some human rights to a people who had for so long been denied. And the truth commission, under Archbishop Desmond Tutu, would tend to the healing, the forgiveness. He was often called the “father of the nation,” though he rejected the notion that he was a kind of messiah. But in the townships and shanties, where life was bitter but dreams were sustenance, people revered him and hung on his every word. So many times, ordinary people would tell me, sometimes using Mandela’s affectionate clan name: Madiba says we must forgive, so I must try.

More here.

From The New York Times:

This professor of Middle Eastern history walks into a bar in Fez, Morocco — right from the get-go, Mark LeVine’s “Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam” is not your typical dry academic slog. (Did I mention he’s also a longhaired Jewish rock guitarist whose bio lists gigs with Mick Jagger and Dr. John?) So when somebody in that hotel bar starts talking up the local punk and metal scenes, an incredulous LeVine is hooked. “There are Muslim punks? In Morocco?” Quicker than you can whistle “Rock the Casbah,” he’s on the trail of Western-influenced underground music movements that have blossomed under authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa.

Going to meet the seven-string guitarist Marz of Hate Suffocation, a Cairo band, LeVine confesses sheepishly, “I still couldn’t tell the difference between death, doom, black, melodic, symphonic, grind-core, hard-core, thrash and half a dozen other styles.” (Marz explains that his group plays a cross between death and black metal: “But it’s not blackened death metal!”) Despite a certain amount of scholarly dogma that goes with the territory — here any combination of “neoliberal” and “globalization” is as ominous an epithet as Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” — “Heavy Metal Islam” offers the hit-and-run (as well as hit-and-miss) pleasures of a lively road trip. Practicing a first-person brand of shuttle diplomacy as he moves between countries and cultures, musicians and Islamic activists, LeVine manages to unpack enough cross-cultural incongruities to mount his own mosh pit follow-up to “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.”

More here.

///
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall / I’ve heard their stories, heard them all /
but love’s the only engine of survival –Leonard Cohen

A Chinese Parable
Gwee Li Sui

Said the Premier: For a lifetime I have sought
only the common good and with bare hands wrought
a kingdom, whose vast wealth now stands testified
by pagodas, innumerable, sundried
as the blades of grass – a permanent fortune
locked from the barbarians of the warring dune
by the joining of walls. So long as we strive,
we shall enjoy our fruits; and he will survive
who works on diligently – for Work is Life.
God gave them the hands, I have given them tools;
and none starves in this kingdom except the fools.
Our magistrates are just and good law is praised.
Our governors are wise and the stores are raised.
Here are the foundations for millennial peace!
Is there more a people will desire than these?

Said the Mandarin: There is nothing lacking
in the provision of the body, seeing
our middle kingdom bodily strong, sinewy–
but there is more to Kingdom and Man than Body.
When a people clutch all gods as money gods,
you must be vigilant. Pieties are not rods
to fish material things; they form a World-Soul
to which one gives assent and he is whole
who lives in fellowship: this, too, is your goal.
Great cultures are not hewn from a heritage
for sons, but for great-great-grandsons of due age.
Some investments then must always seem pointless,
a fling into the well, but there’s some goodness
to be less than pragmatic. No work is ample
and no wall strong if you should slight the temple.

Thanks to Elatia

///

From the Columbia University Press blog:

Yesterday, at a press conference in Washington D.C., the authors of The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009 discussed the results of their groundbreaking study on the health and well-being of the United States.The report reveals some of the huge disparities in health, income, education, and living standards that exist in the United States.

You can find out much more about the report at the very impressive Web site, www.measureofamerica.org. The site lists key findings from the report (some of which are below), a Well-O-Meter which allows you to approximate your own human development index by answering a series of question, interactive maps, and tables. 

Finally, you can also download a podcast interview with the authors Sarah Burd-Sharps and Kristen Lewis.

Some key findings from the The Measure of America:

* The U.S. ranks #24 among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

* One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

* Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

* Educational expenditures vary significantly by state; New Jersey and New York spend around $14,000 per pupil, Utah spends less than $6,000 per pupil.

* African American students are three times more likely than whites to be placed in special education programs, and only half as likely to be placed in gifted programs.

* The top 1 percent of U.S. households possesses a full third of America’s wealth.

More here.

Seth Stevenson in Slate:

A while back, a friend of mine—a guy who does a lot of directing work—was asked to shoot some rather odd film footage. It was all brief scenes of people ignoring each other. Families talking on cell phones, couples tapping at adjacent laptops, everyone looking in opposite directions.

These vignettes were commissioned by a company that sells stock photos and video to various clients—including, in large part, advertisers. The hope was that footage like this would appeal to customers who need to visually convey a mood of modern disconnectedness. Leaving aside the bleak and omnipresent nature of the subject matter—they could have just put a tripod on a random street corner—I was startled to realize that stock photo and video purveyors actually create material in anticipation of demand. (I’d somehow failed to consider that stock pictures could be made, not just found.) These suppliers of the world’s commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future. Which made me wonder: What else, besides an ongoing technological dystopia, do they imagine waiting ahead?

To learn more, I got in touch with the creative research department at Getty Images—a major player in the “visual content distribution” field.

More here.

Joel Sartore in National Geographic:

My destination is the city of Malabo on Bioko Island. On a world map it’s a speck of land off the west coast of Africa, part of Equatorial Guinea. Malabo’s been called the Auschwitz of Africa for all the genocide that took place when the ruling tribe, ‘The Fang’ took over in the mid-1970s—one-third of the population either fled or was killed. The place has never recovered.

Once there, I’ll stay for a couple days in a tent on a soccer field that belongs to an oil company. They say they’ll have food, drinking water, and guards to protect the gear—and us.

Three days from now a boat will haul me, three other NG photographers, and a crew of students and scientists to the far side of the island. They’ll drop us off on a black sand beach at the base of a volcanic caldera, where the steep and rugged terrain has so far shielded most of the flora and some of the fauna from humanity. The goal is to photograph monkeys, some of the rarest in Africa. Easier said than done though. These primates have been hunted for years.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

In the last century, Mohandas K. Gandhi was India’s most famous and powerful private citizen. Today, Mr. Ambani is widely regarded as playing that role, though in a very different way. Like Mr. Gandhi, Mr. Ambani belongs to a merchant caste known as the modh banias, is a vegetarian and a teetotaler and is a revolutionary thinker with bold ideas for what India ought to become.

Yet Mr. Gandhi was a scrawny ascetic, a champion of the village, a skeptic of modernity and a man focused on spiritual purity. Mr. Ambani is a fleshy oligarch, a champion of the city, a burier of the past and a man who deftly — and, some critics say, ruthlessly — wields financial power. He is the richest person in India, with a fortune estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, and many people here expect that he will be the richest person on earth before long.

More here.

To be sure, there will be revisionist biographies in the future, and the icon will become more tarnished, possibly with some justification.  But he is  one of the few heads of a national liberation movement, who, having gained power, did not tragically disappoint. So, a happy 90th birthday to Nelson Mandela.  Drew Forrest in the Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg):

His lack of bitterness and readiness not just to forgive, but also to share a liberated South Africa with his former oppressors was the source of the now-vanished optimism of his presidential term.

He understood that apartheid could not be defeated by peaceful means, but is not a violent man. Holidaying in the Eastern Cape in 1955, he was mortified when he ran over a large snake. “I do not like killing any living thing, even those creatures that fill some people with dread,” he wrote.

No Easy Walk is strewn with touching examples of his kindness and old-fashioned chivalry. It describes, for example, the embarrassment of a white secretary at his first legal firm when she was seen taking dictation from him. “She took a sixpence from her purse and said stiffly: ‘Nelson, please go out and get some shampoo from the chemist.’ I left the room and got her shampoo.”

He returns again and again to the pain inflicted on his family by his activism and long jail term and his torment over the government’s persecution of Winnie while he was powerless to support her.

Ordinary people respond not just to Mandela the leader and emancipator, but also to Mandela the suffering man. Few could be unmoved by his testimony, during his divorce proceedings, of his terrible loneliness when he moved from prison to a dying marriage.

He is, at heart, an optimist who finds it hard to give up on his frail fellow creatures.

One of the central passages of No Easy Walk concerns the brutal Colonel Piet Badenhorst, who, assuming command of the prison in 1971, began rolling back the small gains the prisoners had accumulated. One of his habits was to urinate next to them at the quarry while they were eating.

Yet when Badenhorst was transferred after a determined campaign by the inmates, he summoned Mandela and told him, as one human being to another: “I just want to wish you people good luck.”

“It was a useful reminder that all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency,” was Mandela’s reading of the incident, “and that if their hearts are touched, they are capable of changing.”

Via normblog, the Russians are having a national poll on who’s the greatest Russian of all time.  The first of the two front runners, Nicholas II, was a racist and a bigot who regularly blamed Jews for his governments failings and incited pogroms throughout the empire.  The other, Joseph Stalin, developed the model for a totalitarian regime that murdered countless millions.  Simon Sebag Montefiore, who nominates Pushkin, in the Times (UK):

[B]y 2000, when Mr Putin was elected president, the Russians were sick of humiliation, poverty and insecurity. Now they saw in Stalin a stern glory: he was a world conqueror who expanded the empire from Berlin to Ulan Bator, defeated Hitler, built and thought in imperial style and industrialised his country, leaving a nuclear superpower. To the West, he was a murderous monster, but without Stalinist Russia we would have lost the Second World War. Stalin appreciated this: when the US envoy Averell Harriman complimented him for taking Berlin, Stalin answered: “Yes, but AlexanderI made it to Paris.” Stalin loved running his pipe over his empire on maps: “Yes we haven’t done badly…”

But he would have been bemused by the presence of Nicholas II – and so would Nicholas himself. If Stalin wins the poll, it’s a crime; if Nicholas, a farce. Nicholas and Alexandra have won an absurdly good press because they had a loving marriage, an ill son, a tragic death. Nicholas is being canonised by the Orthodox Church.

But Nicholas was not romantically unlucky: he was a rigid autocrat, bigoted racist, clumsy warlord, an enthusiastic anti-Semite who sponsored, organised and financed the Black Hundreds and Cossacks in their pogroms that killed many thousands of Jewish women and children. Savage to those helpless victims, he was too lenient to revolutionaries. During both his disastrous wars – the Russo-Japanese and the First World War – he was callously inept. Alexandra was worse: foolish, hysterical, deluded, yet in the last years Nicholas allowed her far too much power. When they were in Bolshevik captivity, he and Alexandra read primitive anti-Semitic literature. A more capable Tsar would have avoided the tragedies of the Bolshevik terror.

In Russia, history is real and the blood is fresh: in the archives one can virtually smell it on the deathlists. The truth is a golden privilege; the past in Russia is still a secret place. The Russians have a Janus-like amnesiacal view of history: they acknowledge the killing as “mistakes” then they celebrate the triumph and