From The National Geographic:

This previously unknown squid was among 80,000 deep-sea organisms collected from the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a chain of undersea mountains halfway between Europe and North America.

The species, dubbed Promachoteuthis sloani, was caught along with around 50 other types of squid during trawls as deep as 1.2 miles (3 kilometers) by a Census of Marine Life team. The team, from the Norwegian-led MAR-ECO program, is investigating life along the world’s ocean mountain ranges. The new species has unusually small, semi-opaque eyes and large numbers of suckers on its arms. The shape of its beak suggests the squid is a powerful chewer, MAR-ECO researchers say.

Around 60,000 of the organisms collected during the Mid-Atlantic Ridge survey were fish, which experts are working to document and identify.

More here.

Philip Gourevitch made his name reporting the genocide in Rwanda. Since taking over as editor of the Paris Review, he is bringing reportage to ‘the biggest little magazine in history’.

James Campbell in The Guardian:

In a Paris Review interview almost half a century ago, Ernest Hemingway offered a tip to the would-be writer in search of material: “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down with mercy … At least he will have the story of the hanging to go on with.”

It is safe to assume the advice was meant to be taken loosely, but Philip Gourevitch entered into the spirit more boldly than most when, in May 1995, he skipped the hanging and went straight to a genocide. “I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom,” Gourevitch writes in the opening chapter of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, his book about the “100 days” of killings of Tutsi people by the dominant Hutus in Rwanda. “At least 50 mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing … Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.” A few paragraphs on, the awestruck reporter, who had never seen dead people before, reacts angrily when his guide steps blithely on skulls as he walks across the grassy courtyard. “Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.”

Gourevitch is now the editor of the Paris Review, “the biggest little magazine in history”, as Time magazine called it. The journal is known and admired for its consistent literary talent-spotting and the party-giving panache of its co-founder and editor George Plimpton who died in 2003.

More here.

From the New York Times Magazine:

This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.

The Aerotropolis

Air-Index Impressionism

The Ambient Walkman

The Ballot That Is Also a Lottery Ticket

The Beer-Gut Flask

Patrick Cockburn in CounterPunch:

Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was “largely unchallenged” in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush’s response was: “What is he, some kind of a defeatist?” A week later the station chief was reassigned.

A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse.” According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: “Is this guy a Democrat?”

More here.

Linda Baker in Seed Magazine:

Portland’s so-called “festival street,” which opened two months ago, is one of a small but growing number of projects in the United States that seek to reclaim streets used by cars as public places for people, too. The strategy is to blur the boundary between pedestrians and automobiles by removing sidewalks and traffic devices, and to create a seamless multi-purpose urban space.

Combining traffic engineering, urban planning and behavioral psychology, the projects are inspired by a provocative new European street design trend known as “psychological traffic calming,” or “shared space.” Upending conventional wisdom, advocates of this approach argue that removing road signs, sidewalks, and traffic lights actually slows cars and is safer for pedestrians. Without any clear right-of-way, so the logic goes, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

More here.

Emily Watson in Slate:

The Iliad and The Odyssey excite more historical curiosity than most works of literature. To be sure, the poems contain elements that are obviously mythical. In The Odyssey, there are the fabulous, ever-fertile gardens of Alcinoüs, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, or the bow that nobody but Odysseus can string. Although The Iliad has fewer monsters and marvels, its mode is hardly that of realism. Historians’ accounts of the fortunes of war do not usually include the councils of the gods, who may whisk a favored hero from battle or blind the soldiers with divine mist.

But both poems include details that apparently reflect ordinary life in archaic Greece. There are princes who co-sleep on windy verandas, royal houses with only one chair, babies frightened by war gear, princesses who do the laundry and like playing catch. Ordinary domestic life gets mixed up with mythical exploits. What, then, of the Trojan War itself? Did it ever take place at all? Modern scholarship suggests that the poems do, indeed, reflect historical events—but in a complex and unhistorical way. Rediscovering Homer—a new book by an independent scholar, Andrew Dalby—offers a concise account of the evidence, including ancient Hittite and Egyptian documents, archaic Greek art, and archaeology. His book is helpful as a more-or-less reliable guide and summation of modern Homeric historical study, which should be accessible to readers with no specialist knowledge.

More here.

When R. K. Narayan died, in the spring of 2001 at the age of ninety-four, his legacy seemed assured. Over seven decades of literary activity, he had produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories, the majority of his fiction set in a South Indian town that he called Malgudi. No more a feature of atlases than Trollope’s Barchester, Narayan’s Malgudi put modern Indian writing on the map. For although a handful of Indian novels had been written in English during the nineteenth century, and both Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand had found readers for their novels in English by the nineteen-thirties, it was Narayan—two generations before Salman Rushdie—who began to produce the first world-renowned body of work not rendered in any of India’s many vernacular languages. As such, there seemed little risk of hyperbole when Narayan’s obituary in the Guardian said that he was held to be “India’s greatest writer in English of the twentieth century.”

And yet if Narayan’s standing was consistently described in the most vigorous terms, assessments of his writing were less robust. His work was called “charming,” “simple,” “gentle,” “harmless,” “lightly funny,” and “benign”—applause so placid that it was unlikely to wake anyone dozing in the audience. V. S. Naipaul, in a tribute to Narayan in Time, recalled having been “immediately enchanted” by Narayan’s early work, but he seemed perplexed that Narayan, a writer of realist fiction, “was not interested in Indian politics or Indian problems”—that he did not see the India that Naipaul had dubbed “a wounded civilization.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Unless one is a poet, a war hero or a rock star, it is a mistake to die young. James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48. Physicists may be familiar with Maxwell, but most non-scientists, when they switch on their colour TVs or use their mobile phones, are unlikely to realize that he made such technology possible. After all, in 1864 he gave us “Maxwell’s equations” – voted by Physics World readers as their favourite equations of all time – from which radio waves were predicted.

Suppose Maxwell had lived one year beyond the biblical three score and ten. He would then have been alive on 12 December 1901, the day when Guglielmo Marconi, in St John’s, Newfoundland, received the first transatlantic radio signal from a transmitter in Cornwall, UK, designed by Maxwell’s former student Ambrose Fleming. Or consider relativity: mention it and everyone thinks of Einstein. Yet it was Maxwell in 1877 who introduced the term into physics, and had noticed well before then how the interpretation of electromagnetic induction was different depending on whether one considers a magnet approaching a wire loop or a loop approaching a magnet. It was from these “asymmetries that do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena” that Einstein began his work on special relativity.

more from Physics Web here (via TPM).

I must declare an interest. We owe the precarious survival of Georg Büchner’s works to the inspired perspicacity of my great-great-uncle, the Galician-Jewish novelist and publicist Karl Emil Franzos. It was he who began publishing Büchner’s writings in 1878, in the periodical Mehr Licht! – a characteristic homage to Goethe’s mythical last words. Franzos’s editorial labours began in 1875. Virtually no minutiae of textual, biographical, historical information, no particles in the history of Büchner’s reception to this day (there will be one glaring omission) seem to elude Henri and Rosemarie Poschmann, editors of these two volumes. Their edition of Büchner’s Dichtungen, Schriften, Briefe und Dokumente runs to some 2,300 pages on thin paper. Yet, so far as I can make out, they do not tell us how or why Büchner’s fragmentary, often scarcely legible “foul papers” came into Franzos’s caring hands. Nor do they elucidate the awesome clairvoyance which it must have taken at that date to recognize something of Büchner’s stature. My mother, a Viennese grande dame if ever there was, affirmed that it was an apothecary in Lemberg who drew Franzos’s attention to the material, when it ran the risk of becoming waste paper. This may be a family legend. But it would not be out of tune. Büchner’s resurrection is as miraculous as are his creations.

more from the TLS here.

From The National Geographic:

A biblical figure gets a controversial image makeover. A famous TV personality is killed by a stingray. A far-flung planet gets a demotion. These are just a few of the big stories covered this year by National Geographic News. Reload the year in nature, science, and exploration with the most popular news stories of 2006.

1. Lost Gospel Revealed; Says Jesus Asked Judas to Betray Him (April 6)
Hidden for 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas now offers a surprising take on Christianity’s most reviled man.

More here.

From Nature:

Laughter is indeed infectious, according to a new study. Researchers have shown that the mere sound of giggles tickles the same area of the listener’s brain that is activated when smiling. The brain’s response helps to prepare the facial muscles for a good hearty laugh. “It really seems to be true: ‘Laugh and the whole world laughs with you’,” says study co-author Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London in the United Kingdom.

The team of played pleasant sounds, such as laughter or cheering, and unpleasant sounds, such as screaming or retching, to volunteers. They then monitored their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). All the sounds triggered neural responses in the premotor cortex of the brain — an area known to prepare groups of facial muscles to respond accordingly. When a person in the study actually smiled or laughed, the neural activity moved to a primary motor cortical region.

More here.

In Slate, Hitchens on the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006):

Pinochet ended up like Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, with a series of deathbed farewells that were obscenely protracted and attended by numerous priests and offerings of extreme unction. By the end, Chileans had become wearily used to the way in which he fell dramatically ill whenever the workings of justice took a step nearer to his archives or his bank accounts. Like Franco, too, he long outlived his own regime and survived to see his country outgrow the tutelage to which he had subjected it. And, also like Franco, he earned a place in history as a treasonous and ambitious officer who was false to his oath to defend and uphold the constitution. His overthrow of civilian democracy, in the South American country in which it was most historically implanted, will always be remembered as one of the more shocking crimes of the 20th century.

His coup—mounted on Sept. 11, 1973, for those who like to study numinous dates—was a crime in itself but involved countless other crimes as well. Over the past decade, and especially since his arrest in England in 1998, these crimes began to catch up with him. Pinochet had arranged a lifetime immunity for himself via a lifelong Senate seat, as part of his phased withdrawal from power. But this deal was not binding on Spain, where a magistrate successfully sought a warrant for his arrest in connection with the “disappearance” of some Spanish citizens. That warrant from Judge Baltasar Garzón, served in London, was the beginning of the unraveling. By the time he returned to Chile, the general was faced with a newly aroused citizenry. I once went to testify in front of Judge Juan Gúzman, the magistrate who finally ordered him indicted and fingerprinted. He told me that he himself had been a supporter of the original coup and that he came from a conservative military family that had thought of Pinochet as a savior. It was only when he read through the massive and irrefutable judicial files, on murder and torture and kidnapping, that he realized that there was only one course open to him.

I will start with a personal story that I have told several times before. In 1993, I taught in Germany as a lecturer in Bulgarian language and literature at the university of Göttingen. One day, I was invited to a German student party together with a friend of mine, a Yugoslavian PhD student, who during the siege of Sarajevo realized that she is Bosnian and Moslem and became an anti-war activist. We decided to have a bite to eat before the party. Faced with the difficult choice between Italian, German, Chinese, and French restaurants, we chose – with a slight hint of shame – to go to a Greek tavern and enjoy the native culinary pleasures. Eating moussaka and souvlaki (not at all different from the Bulgarian-Serbian-Macedonian-Turkish shish kebab), we watched the weather forecast for Europe on the restaurant’s TV. The borders of the separate countries were delineated with white contours. For no apparent reason, Romania and Bulgaria appeared as one country with Bucharest as the capital. At the end of our dinner, we asked the Greek waiter for Turkish coffee – he said, however, that in this restaurant they only offered Greek coffee. We ordered it – it was the same “Ottoman” type: sweet and thick, unsuited to the German taste for filtered coffee, nevertheless known in Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Bosnia, and Turkey as Turkish coffee.

more from Eurozine here.

In 1927 Paul Valéry wrote that Europe dreams of being ruled by an American Commission, and for many Europeans America is still seen as having an enviable freedom from the burdens of the past. There may be few who would now want to be subject to American rule but there are still many who see America as standing for a kind of freedom and equality to which Europeans can still only aspire. It is a view as common on the left of politics as on the right. There seem to be plenty of ex-communists and former Trotskyites who regard the United States with a loyalty and reverence of a sort they once reserved for the Soviet Union, and who round on critics of US policies as enemies of progress. Right across the spectrum of opinion America is seen as the supreme modern society, which more than any other embodies the future.

If any one writer can be said to be responsible for this view, it must be Alexis de Tocqueville. This acutely observant, high-strung French nobleman has been hugely influential in disseminating the idea that America is the country in whose path all others are bound – sooner or later, one way or another – to follow.

more from Literary Review here.

I’LL BEGIN WITH THE BULLET HOLES. They were small, but by no means discreet, and surely everyone who visited the UCLA Hammer Museum in early 2006 saw them, pocking the lower flanks of Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated steel-and-aluminum Tropical House, 1951/2005–2006, which had been retrieved from its original site in the former French Congo and reassembled in the museum’s courtyard. At first glance, the structure had a quaint dioramic quality, like a life-size colonial dollhouse for a make-believe attaché, an impression that was only enhanced by the leafy bamboo plants that surrounded it. But then I noticed the holes, ominous punctures in the logic and presentation of an otherwise perfectly self-contained architectural relic. Given the meticulous restoration, it was clear the perforations had been left intentionally unrepaired, as if to preserve the contradictions inherent in memorializing such a prototype, whose innovations and “functionality” pertain pointedly to France’s colonial past: Prouvé’s “machine for living” was easily shipped, quick to put up or take down, and equipped with a ventilation system that promised comfort to the European unused to equatorial climates.

more from artforum here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

The nonviolent principles of Mohandas Gandhi may be the only way to bring peace to the world, Gandhi’s granddaughter said. Human rights activist and former South African member of parliament Ela Gandhi told about 160 people gathered in Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall that violent victory sows the seeds of its own destruction. It is only through nonviolent resistance and dispute resolution, the focus of Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha philosophy, that the world can become a peaceful place, she said.

Susan Hackley, the Program on Negotiation’s managing director, said Mohandas Gandhi’s principles provided the foundation for later movements by celebrated leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Lech Walesa. “The history of the last 100 years includes some breathtaking success stories … [by leaders who] brought about profound change without violence,” Hackley said. “All of these leaders would no doubt declare they owe a great debt to one person who 100 years ago developed a method and a philosophy for dealing with oppression that showed them how to stand up to overwhelming force.”

More here.

From Nature:

Younger brothers and sisters are usually considered pests for their whining and fighting. Now it seems they could also be a factor in whether older siblings grow a brain tumour. The cause of brain tumours is a long-standing and impenetrable mystery, because they are very rare and it is difficult to collect together enough cases to find a common cause. But one idea is that viral infections are involved, as they are in causing cervical and other cancers.

To explore this, a team led by Andrea Altieri of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, studied the number of brothers and sisters a person has as a surrogate measure for the number of infections they suffered. The idea, used by epidemiologists before, is that a greater number of snotty siblings generally exposes a child to more viruses. The team found that people with four or more siblings (either younger or older) were twice as likely to have developed certain types of brain and nervous-system tumours than those with no siblings.

Sibling count is “one of the highest risk factors we know for nervous-system cancers,” Altieri says.

More here.

About a month ago, a close friend who I don’t see often asked me at dinner, in an outraged tone, “How does it make you feel that at any moment you could be secretly whisked away to another country and held and tortured without trial by our government?”  Pretty shocking question, and certainly one that made me pause over my lamb ragu.  My first reaction was, yes, that sounds awful!  And then, “Strange, I’ve never worried particularly about such a thing happening to me, not at all.”  This was the truth.  Such eventualities, so hard to make real until, I suppose, the dread moment when they precipitate in your own life, occur to us mostly as dangers to others.  And it is with familiar liberal empathy that we grieve the possibility that such things might happen to another, especially in the name of our own polity.  That is the habitual structure through which I, as well as my friend, who I went to school with in Buffalo and who I have known for about twenty years, conceptualized the issue.   The issue being, of course, the current “state of emergency” under which the U.S. government authorizes itself to suspend fundamental jurisprudential rights: the right to counsel, the right to a trial, habeas corpus.

But here, instead of us both considering this situation in parallel, I could see that he was projecting that sympathy we reserve for the victim of flagrantly abused state power onto me, whereas I was proceeding as normal, seeing the potential victim abstractly.  My friend had personalized the issue (using his friend: me), and hence his sense of outrage up till that point exceeded mine.  Of course, I had to concede, I might be more susceptible to the whims of the state.  It’s not as if that never occurred to me when in an airport.  Certain external characteristics of mine fit into the realm of suspicion better than his: my ethnicity, my name, my passport stamps.  How many people have, as I had in 2005, traveled from New York City to Karachi, a twenty hour flight, and returned after twenty-four hours (an incident that followed two immediately successive family emergencies)?  On a purely statistical basis, surely I could be said to be a better candidate for interrogation and maybe even detention than he.  I had worried about other members of my family for this very reason.  Yet until the question was posed by my friend in this startling, menacing way, it had yet to occur to me to be scared of this possibility myself.

The question I became interested in on the way home from this conversation, then, was: why had I never personalized this issue, instead behaving the same way that my friend had towards me, concerned for the other and not myself.  I wouldn’t say I displaced my concern onto others so much as I had never placed it onto myself to begin with.  The first reason is clear enough: such detentions are happening to other people.  Some of those incarcerated at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, for instance, are being detained indefinitely without trial.  These people are really subjects not of “the state,” conceived as a legal framework subtended by the Constitution and other fundamental documents of the nation, but of an absolutist power.  It decides arbitrarily (in the sense of never providing justification) who is and who is not allowed the protections of a legal framework – and this decision is not taken by an elected official, nor a judge, nor even a named individual at all, but by anonymous administrative and military “officials.”  In sum, a part of our government has allocated to itself the power to operate utterly outside of national law (and also of international law).  As Judith Butler wrote in a powerful essay called “Infinite Detention,” this is “a ‘rogue’ power par excellence.”

The arbitrariness of the division of who is and who is not allowed to have rights, who is and who is not allowed even to be construed as human in the juridical realm, leads, I realized, to my second reason for not understanding this state of affairs as dangerous to myself.  To accept that I was in more danger than my friend was in some way, psychically, to accept some difference between us that was more than arbitrary, more than fictive.  Thinking about it, it would mean to distinguish levels of Americanness, levels in how securely one was ensconced in the nation.  I, by contrast, had constructed my understanding in the opposite way: the government’s current activities were that which failed to belong properly to the national framework, rather my own status with respect to that framework.  But perhaps, I thought, I should take seriously the implication of my friend’s question to me: was I naive to reject the possibility of differentiable levels of belonging?

A more direct way of posing this question would be: Are some Americans less American than others?  I wondered at this question.  Obviously, there are levels of discrimination amongst people within the spatial confines of the U.S.: native citizens, naturalized citizens, legal aliens, illegal aliens.  To engage with those categories is a hugely complex topic in political philosophy.  But even, for simplicity, sticking to those of one category, the question can be posed.  Am I as American as Dick Cheney?  Is my friend as American as Judith Butler?  Is Emeril Lagasse as American as Joan Didion?  In every such case I could imagine, the answer was: yes, how can there be a distinction?  Though it was equally clear to me that for many others, the answer to some of these would be no.  Nativism operates in the realm of culture: eating marshmallows in a salad, or admiring the novels of Cormac McCarthy, or liking football better than soccer, might be held in someone’s sympathies to be more American, whatever that might mean. 

That this kind of cultural fealty is so ill-defined and ephemeral does not stop it from mattering.  It contributes to the ability of our government to act in certain ways.  In that sense, it is important.  (I was reminded of this last week, when I saw Casino Royale, which starts out with the new, Nordic James Bond drowning a Middle Eastern man in a bathroom sink.  This scene of the lethal brutality of UK/US espionage agents apparently affected no one’s ability to identify with Mr. Bond.  Is it any wonder there is no sustained outrage over Abu Ghraib?)  For this reason, it is important to point out nativism’s incoherence (in the British context, it’s always nice to read Daniel Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman).  As Alon Levy pointed out on this site last week, yesterday’s dangerous outsider is today’s celebrated embodiment of ethnic authenticity.  I have my own genealogy of Americanness.  It is one whose members recognize one signal feature of America: its inconceivability.  Recall here the nature of the Great American Novel: as everyone knows, it’s a mythical beast.  The country holds too much.  Unless you want to argue that certain figures (who?  Jonathan Franzen? or Oprah Winfrey?  Maybe Bill Bennett?) “tap into” the inner sense of the nation.  That’s arrant journalistic nonsense.  Lobstermen.  Mobsters.  Cajuns.  Ladies who lunch.  Whatever. 

If I have a relation to Americanness, I think it consists in my belligerent confidence that I embody it as well as anyone else, despite (or maybe because of) my many departures from what is generally considered to be normative.  In fact, I believe the danger I face is that of succumbing to the sense that I am much more representative than others – just the thing I am rejecting.  But there it is: a strangely implacable sense that I am more properly representative of this contradictory mass of people and places than anyone who attempts to define it, that in some sense such people are the true aliens.  My Americanness is almost private, like a spiritual belief.  It features landmarks and people and ideas that are part of my experience.  It dissents from the idea of looking to past customs and habits for definition.  Perhaps prophets of American excess and incomprehensibility like Herman Melville or Walt Whitman would understand; perhaps not.  I ain’t waiting for an invitation, Jack.  This is a paradox: only by claiming not to understand and define what belongs, in my sense of things, can one belong to something worth belonging to.  (I know, that’s a claim as to what belongs. It’s a paradox, remember?)  For me, only in such openness can something as illusory as nationalism be understood.  I may be deluded.  Sometimes delusions are grander. 

See the rest of my Dispatches.

Jane Marsching. Bonnie and Tim on Columbia Glacier, Alaska, 2006.

Ms. Marsching is the 2006 Foster Prize Finalist, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Her work is currently at the ICA (Dec 10- Mar 11, 2007), as it opens in it’s fabulous new home on the waterfront.

More on her work here and here.

See the fascinating Arctic Listening Post video here.

John Lanchester in The New Yorker:

Burma stood out in my childhood as the place about which there were no stories. My parents moved there in March, 1963, when I was just over a year old. We spent six months in Rangoon, and for that entire period we were under house arrest. The military junta led by General Ne Win, which had seized power the year before, was shutting down all foreign activity in the country. My father was allowed to travel to the bank where he worked in order to help wind up its business, because the bank—like everything else in the country, including the Boy Scouts and the Automobile Association—was being nationalized. My mother and I stayed at home. Our camera was confiscated—it’s the only place we lived of which I don’t have any photographs. The house had a permanent staff of nine, so there was nothing to do. My parents had stories about everywhere we’d ever lived and everyone they’d ever met, but their experience of Burma was so weirdly isolated and isolating that they had next to nothing to say about it.

More here.