Coal

I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.

by Audre Lorde
from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997

Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times:

When von Neumann was alive, before the full import of his influence could be gauged, his brilliance marked him not as a time traveler but as an alien — one of the so-called Martians, the nickname for the Hungarian-Jewish emigrés, including Edward Teller, who worked on the secret atom bomb project at Los Alamos. Naturally, the intellectually omnivorous von Neumann came up with his own theories about the “Hungarian phenomenon” (the shorthand term for the scientific accomplishments of von Neumann and his countrymen), deciding that it had something to do with the Austro-Hungarian mixture of liberalism and feudalism that allowed Jews some avenues for success while keeping them away from the true levers of power. This provoked “a feeling of extreme insecurity,” von Neumann said, making him and his fellow Martians believe that they needed “to produce the unusual or face extinction.”

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

On at least a few occasions in my adult life, I have conducted myself with what may have looked to an outside observer like courage. I have for example put myself between a raving junkie, with a broken bottle in his hand, and the girlfriend he intended to slash with it, thus interrupting my routine evening stroll across the Place de Stalingrad. Such scenes of violence are not uncommon there, as if there were something about Stalingrads in general, and I confess I have let many similar scenes continue without my intervention.

The broken man slinked away with his broken bottle, presumably because I appeared to present to him a credible threat of force. The meaning of this phrase, so often heard in the context of great-power politics, does not entail a demonstrable threat of force, and indeed had the man with the bottle tried to strike me with it, I really don’t know what I would have done. The truth is I have no idea how to “fight”, just like I have no idea how to dance ballet: I can see that there is some distinct human capacity that fighters and dancers are deploying, but I don’t know what it is.

More here.

Sue VandeWoude, Angela Bosco-Lauth, and Christie Mayo in The Conversation:

How are so many animals catching the coronavirus? And what does this mean for human and animal health?

We are veterinary researchers who investigate animal diseases, including zoonotic diseases that can infect both humans and animals. It is important, for both human and animal health, to know what species are susceptible to infection by the coronavirus. Our labs and others across the world have tested domestic, captive and wild animals for the virus, in addition to conducting experiments to determine which species are susceptible.

The list of infected animals so far includes more than a dozen species. But in reality, infections may be much more widespread, as very few species and individual animals have been tested. This has real implications for human health. Animals can not only spread pathogens like the coronavirus, but also can be a source of new mutations.

More here.

Giulio Boccaletti in Aeon:

A great river encircles the world. It rises in the heartland of the United States and carries more water than the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers combined. One branch, its oldest, streams over the Atlantic, heading for Europe and the Middle East. Another crosses the Pacific, flowing towards China. Countless tributaries join along the way, draining the plains and forests of Latin America, Europe and Asia.

You probably have never heard of such a river, even though almost all of us draw from it. You cannot fish in it, float on it, drink from it. If you were to look, you would not find it: it is invisible. Yet there is no doubt that it flows.

The river starts anywhere water feeds agriculture. But from there, physical water vanishes, replaced by a flow of crops that carry only the memory of the water used to produce them. Crops then travel along the shipping lanes of the global trade system, eventually displacing the water that would have otherwise been used to grow them locally. Thus, water flows from source to destination ‘embedded’ in its products. It is a flow of ‘virtual water’, an idea first developed in the 1980s by the late geographer Tony Allan.

More here.

A World of Ignorance

Ignorance is a notorious killer
Always one step ahead of you
You think you learned something new
Only to find out that you are just scratching the surface…

Ignorance is a notorious killer
Sneaking in the back door of your home, unnoticed
Stealing your goods, taking your children
Silent and invisible, lethal and dangerous…

Willful or neither;
It’s like the “song that never ends
It goes on and on my friend
People start to singing and not knowing what it was
And they’ll just keep singing it forever just because..”

by Darryl Howard

J. Hoberman at The Nation:

Magazine-like compilations of newspaper comic strips first appeared in the early 1930s, around the time that newspaper strips increasingly became vehicles for action and adventure tales. The mid-’30s saw the emergence of original comic books with titles like Thrilling Wonder Stories. These began to flourish, and the year 1938 brought their apotheosis with the creation of Superman. Soon, each monthly installment of his adventures, published in National Periodical’s Action Comics, was selling nearly 1 million copies.

Located in New York City, the comic book industry was a sort of sweatshop Hollywood. Overhead was low, piecework was the norm, and business was good, albeit exploitative.

more here.

Philip Ball in Conversation with Samuel Loncar at Marginalia Review:

If you’ve read any of Ball’s remarkable books, you might have noticed something I found extraordinary, which led to the question that began our conversation. Ball has written books on subjects as diverse as the history of China (The Water Kingdom), physics, chemistry, biology, music (The Music Instinct) and Chartres Cathedral (Universe of Stone). In all of his books, he brings the highest quality scientific and scholarly research, often from vastly different fields, into a coherent, intellectually original, and exciting story. Besides writing popular books, he actively publishes peer-reviewed research, and his written scientific articles in fields as diverse as astrobiology, physics, chemistry, and biology. It is a remarkable and uncommon combination of breadth and depth, even among the many brilliant writers in the world of science.

more here.

Panashe Chigumadzi in The Guardian:

Towards the end of 1997, the year before I turned seven and went to big school, I asked: “Mama, at big school next year, can they call me Gloria?” Gloria is my second name. My mother looked at me, a little confused, and simply said, “No. Your name is Panashe, so they will call you that.” Without the words to explain why I preferred Gloria, I went along with the name that had been so badly mangled in the mouths of my white teachers at my predominantly white pre-school – everything from Pinashe, Panache to Spinasie.

At the age of six I had already begun the dance that many black people in South Africa know too well, with our names just one of the many important sites of struggle as we manoeuvre in spaces that do not truly accommodate our blackness. I had already taken my first steps on the road to becoming a fully-fledged coconut, that particular category of “born free” black youth hailed as torchbearers for Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation” after the fall of apartheid; the same category of black youth that are now part of the forefront of new student movements calling for statues of coloniser Cecil John Rhodes to fall, and for the decolonisation of the post-apartheid socio-economic order.

We all know what a coconut is, don’t we? It’s a person who is “black on the outside” but “white on the inside”. This term came into popular South African usage in apartheid’s dying days as black children entered formerly white schools. At best, coconuts can be seen as “non-white”. At worst, they’re “Uncle Toms” or “agents of whiteness”. I’ve chosen to appropriate the term and self-identify as a coconut because I believe it offers an opportunity for refusal. It’s an act of problematising myself – and others – within the landscape of South Africa as part of the black middle class that is supposed to be the buffer against more “radical elements”.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Mark Vendevelde in Financial Times:

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Kwame Anthony Appiah is a black, gay, American man who is descended from aristocrats and speaks English with one of those BBC accents you pick up at the better British schools. You probably think these facts tell you a certain amount about him. Highlight text Appiah, a professor of philosophy in New York, knows such badges matter — he has made a career studying concepts like blackness and gayness, social labels that guide us through humanity’s ungraspable diversity — but he wants you to know that most of what they signify is pure baloney. Consider race. Thomas Jefferson, often described as one the most enlightened of American thinkers, thought black people smelled worse than whites, required less sleep, had comparably good memories, but couldn’t master geometry. Today no one could count such outrageous views as enlightened; but as Appiah understood, they were the product of a time in which white colonialists had used the idea of an inferior race to justify mass exploitation. “The truth is that there are no races,” he declared in a 1985 essay that earned him fame among philosophers and social theorists, and notoriety among some of his African-American peers. “The ‘whites’ invented the Negroes in order to dominate them,” he later wrote in the award-winning essay collection In My Father’s House (1992).

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Kate Clanchy in Unherd:

What did the sensitivity readers say? And did I care? Of all the aspects of the recent attempt to cancel my work, the one that seems to fascinate most people is the moment when my publishers sent my Orwell Prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, to be assessed by experts who would detect and reform its problematic racism and ableism.

Of course I cared. I’m horrified that people found prejudice and cruelty in my book. And I went into the process willingly: I’ve always enjoyed and benefited from editing and saw this as an extension. I did an initial rewrite — there were many things I was eager to change — in the autumn of 2021 and sent it off full of interest and optimism. I received the reports on it before Christmas. They were never formally used and I share the content here — anonymously, of course — because sensitivity reads are being used more and more widely, and mine gives a valuable insight into how they might work with non-fiction and memoir.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Masayuki Nakahata has been waiting 35 years for a nearby star to explode.

He was just starting out in science the last time it happened, in February 1987, when a dot of light suddenly appeared in the southern sky. This is the closest supernova seen during modern times; and the event, known as SN 1987A, gained worldwide media attention and led to dramatic advances in astrophysics.

Nakahata was a graduate student at the time, working on what was then one of the world’s foremost neutrino catchers, the Kamiokande-II detector at the Kamioka Underground Observatory near Hida, Japan. He and a fellow student, Keiko Hirata, spotted evidence of neutrinos pouring out of the supernova — the first time anyone had seen these fundamental particles originating from anywhere outside the Solar System.

Now, Nakahata, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, is ready for when a supernova goes off.

More here.

Jonathan Steele in The Guardian:

An increasing number of politicians and media analysts claim Putin may be mentally unstable, or that he is isolated in a bubble of yes-men who don’t warn him of dangers ahead. Many commentators say he is trying to restore the Soviet Union or recreate a Russian sphere of influence on his country’s borders, and that this week’s intrusion into eastern Ukraine is the first step towards an all-out attack on Kyiv to topple its government and even move against the Baltic states. None of these assertions is necessarily true.

The Russian president is a rational man with his own analysis of recent European history. Coming from a former Communist, his blaming of Lenin for giving excessive scope to local nationalism in drawing up the Soviet constitution is remarkable. Similarly, his criticism of the way national elites destroyed the Soviet Union in its final years is sharp.

Does he want to turn the clock back? People often quote his statement “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. But it bears pointing out that he enlarged on it later, saying: “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”

It is crucially important for those who might seek to end or ameliorate this crisis to first understand his mindset.

More here.

Brandon Spektor in Live Science:

Two hundred thousand years ago, the earliest shared ancestors of every living human on Earth rested their feet at a verdant oasis in the middle of Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Here, in a patchwork of now-extinct lakes, forests and grasslands known as the Makgadikgadi paleowetland, our greatest grandmothers and -grandfathers hunted, gathered and raised families for tens of thousands of years. Eventually, as Earth’s climate changed, shifts in rainfall opened up fertile new paths through the desert. For the first time, our distant relatives had the chance to explore the unknown, putting behind them what a team of researchers now calls “the ancestral homeland of all humans alive today.”

…”We’ve known for a long time that humans originated in Africa and roughly 200,000 years ago,” study author Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and University of Sydney, both in Australia, said in a news conference. “But what we hadn’t known until this study was where, exactly this homeland was.”

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Hilton Als in The New Yorker:

“What I’m interested in is disrupting these really narrow ideas that people unfortunately still have about Blackness onstage,” Harris says.

“I’m just trying to get authentically to that,” the actress Stephanie Berry told her director, Whitney White, as they stood in a spacious rehearsal room in the East Village in mid-January. They were working out a bit of business that might or might not end up in “On Sugarland,” Aleshea Harris’s third full-length play, which premières at New York Theatre Workshop on March 3rd. “On Sugarland” was inspired by “Philoctetes,” Sophocles’ play about an expert archer plagued by chronic pain and exiled because of the smell of a wound on his foot. (A snake bit him while he was walking on sacred ground; so much for hubris.) Sophocles’ character may be powerful and gifted, but he is also set apart by the stench of his difference. Eventually, the god Heracles promises to heal Philoctetes’ foot if he returns to Troy to fight in the Trojan War. This is the mythology that jump-starts Harris’s new play, which is itself about mythology: one myth being that, by serving your country, you are protecting your community and yourself; another being that love can vanquish pain.

“On Sugarland” is sour with heartache and bristling with unexpected words and sounds. Saul (Billy Eugene Jones) is a vet who wants to reënlist, despite the fact that part of his foot was torn off in combat. Being in the military gives him an identity and makes him a model for his son, Addis (Caleb Eberhardt), who wants nothing more than to be a soldier, just like his dad. There is love in this story about the search for identity, but it’s a love surrounded by grief: Saul pines for a female officer who died in the service, and he’s the kind of guy who’s enthralled by the erotics of absence.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

The Bones of My Father

1
There are no dry bones
here in this valley. The skull
of my father grins
at the Mississippi moon
from the bottom
of the Tallahatchie,
the bones of my father
are buried in the mud
of these creeks and brooks that twist
and flow their secrets to the sea.
but the wind sings to me
here the sun speaks to me
of the dry bones of my father.

2
There are no dry bones
in the northern valleys, in the Harlem alleys
young / black / men with knees bent
nod on the stoops of the tenements
and dream
of the dry bones of my father.

And young white longhairs who flee
their homes, and bend their minds
and sing their songs of brotherhood
and no more wars are searching for
my father’s bones.

3
There are no dry bones here.
We hide from the sun.
No more do we take the long straight strides.
Our steps have been shaped by the cages
that kept us. We glide sideways
like crabs across the sand.
We perch on green lilies, we search
beneath white rocks…
THERE ARE NO DRY BONES HERE

The skull of my father
grins at the Mississippi moon
from the bottom
of the Tallahatchie.

by Etheridge Knight
from The Essential Etheridge Knight
University of Pittsburg Press, 1986