Michael Marshall in The Guardian:

In early February 1814, an elephant walked across the surface of the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge in London. The stunt was performed during the frost fair, when temperatures were so cold that for four days the top layers of the river froze solid. Londoners promptly held a festival, complete with what we might now call pop-up shops and a lot of unlicensed alcohol.

Nobody could have known it at the time, but this was the last of the Thames frost fairs. They had taken place every few decades, at wildly irregular intervals, for several centuries. One of the most celebrated fairs took place during the Great Frost of 1683-84 and saw the birth of Chipperfield’s Circus. But the river in central London has not frozen over since 1814.

The frost fairs are perhaps the most emblematic consequences of the “little ice age”, a period of chilly weather that lasted for several centuries. But while Londoners partied on the ice, other communities faced crop failures and other threats. The story of the little ice age is one of societies forced to adapt to changing conditions or perish.

It’s also a long-standing mystery. Why did the climate cool and why did it stay that way for centuries?

More here.

Ram Manikkalingam in the Sunday Times:

Sri Lanka is at a political deadlock. Protesters want the President and parliamentarians to go home. Parliament wants the President to go home. And the President wants the protesters to go home. But no one is going home. Meanwhile, we cannot change the President without changing the prime minister. We cannot change the prime minister because no party leader wants to be saddled with the economic crisis. And we cannot manage the economic crisis because there is no new prime minister. How do we get out of this triple deadlock?

It is very hard for the protesters to shift tack, because there are many tens of thousands. It is difficult for parliament to move, because at least 113, out of the 225 members, must agree. But it is easier for the President to change course because he can take a decision and implement it on his own. So what can he do that meets the concerns of the protesters?

The President can declare that he is ready to get rid of the executive presidency. He can commit to initiating a process of constitutional change within parliament to do that. He can also commit not to serve out his term, but to quit as soon as the amendment is passed.

More here.

 Priyanka Mattoo at The New Yorker:

A few years ago, the musician Ali Sethi was driving through Punjab, behind a jingle truck—the long-haul trucks known in his native Pakistan for their filigreed paint designs—when he spotted a phrase in florid Punjabi calligraphy on its back. “Agg lavaan teriya majbooriya nu,” it said—a call to “set fire to your compulsions.” It’s not uncommon to glimpse bits of verse, or dire warnings—against straying eyes or losing yourself in the big world out there—among the fluorescent parrots and tropical fruit schemes of jingle trucks. But Sethi couldn’t stop thinking about that phrase.

It inspired the first line of “Pasoori,” the thirty-seven-year-old’s latest single, a joyous, dance-fuelled hit that has drawn more than a hundred million views on YouTube since its release three months ago and is playing on the radio everywhere, from the United Arab Emirates to Canada. The song is stealthily subversive: a traditional raga—the classical Indian framework for musical improvisation—has been laid over an infectious beat that sounds South Asian, Middle Eastern, and, improbably, reggaetón, all at once.

more here.

Claudia Fitzherbert at Literary Review:

In 1974, at the age of eighty-four, Jean Rhys was asked in a television interview whether she would prefer to write or be happy were she to live her life over again. ‘Oh, happiness!’ she replied without missing a beat.

Rhys had been channelling unhappiness since the publication of her first volume of short stories in 1927. The four novels she published before the war chart journeys that go from bad to worse for heroines who end up alone in dreary hotel rooms. Ford Madox Ford, her much older mentor and unfaithful lover, said she had a ‘terrific – an almost lurid! – passion for stating the case of the underdog’ as well as a ‘singular instinct for form’. The novels are spare, witty and completely unsentimental. Her protagonists sometimes dwell on who they were or might have been if their looks hadn’t faded or their lovers had been kinder or their babies hadn’t died. Their creator never falters in her acknowledgement that they are who they’ve become.

more here.

Customs

The second farthest place that I have been
from anything that you will ever know is
in love. Like this, I mean. Like how when
condors fledge, they leap from icy cliffs then
fly. They ask: Destination? Purpose? I say, Yes,
I wish to have one. Let’s say “South.” Ushuaia,
the land of lagooned mountains, turquoise in
the snow. Let’s say I have a backup answer, but
we will never hear it because I’ll go and I’ll be
gone, like how you went, too—became a time
lapse of the clouds over El Chaltén: just some slow
recording on my phone. That was supposed to be
the time of my life. That was supposed to be when
we got closer. What even is the word explore? Flamingoes
in their craning lines, pink perforations in the sky and salt. Ñandu.
Receding glaciers. Perhaps we should just accept climate change
as a liberation of the water. We’re its savior, returning it to
its rightful salten home. And who was Magellan,
anyway? There are penguins with his name, but
only in colonial tongues, and I call them that. And
you sent me here to learn what a disaster the world is—
has always been because of men like me. See it
all, you said; and I signed on without considering
the finest print: sure to witness disaster. We’ll be
fighting over love and water in our lifetimes.
We’ll squander them like years, but
faster. And even when we have
none left, we’ll still believe
we have the answers.

by Benjamin Faro
from The Echo Theo Review 2/11/22

Kelly Grovier in BBC:

In 1805, a little-known English artist and amateur painting instructor did what no woman before her ever had: publish a book on the subject of colour theory. Though frustratingly few details of the life and career of Mary Gartside have survived, her unprecedented volume An Essay on Light and Shade, on Colours, and on Composition in General reveals evidence of extraordinary creative genius. Modestly introduced by its obscure author as little more than a guidebook to “the ladies I have been called upon to instruct in painting”, Gartside’s study is accompanied by a series of strikingly abstract images unlike any produced previously by a writer or artist of any gender.

At first glance, you could easily mistake Gartside’s eight watercolour “blots” for magnified floralscapes that anticipate the outsized stamens and pistils that the US artist Georgia O’Keeffe would begin exploding out of all proportion more than 100 years later. But look again at these lucent surges of almost petals, whose vibrancy of colour is unshackled to tangible shape, and any certainty you may have had about what it is that these images portray or what they mean begins to break down. Neither fragrant blossoms plucked from the real world nor imaginary blooms unfolding in the mind, Gartside’s abstract blots burst beyond the borders of themselves a full century before non-figurative painting established itself on the better-known canvases of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

More here.

Cressida Leyshon in The New Yorker:

This week’s story, “The Face in the Mirror,” is about a man named Anders who wakes one morning and discovers that his skin is no longer white. He’s now a dark man. Why did this scenario first come to you?

I spent most of the nineteen-seventies and most of the nineteen-nineties in America. I lived in liberal enclaves, attended prestigious schools, had a well-paying job. Then, after 9/11, I experienced a profound sense of loss. I was constantly stopped at immigration, held for hours at the airport, once pulled off a flight that was already on the tarmac. I had become an object of suspicion, even fear. I had lost something. And, over the years, I began to realize that I had lost my partial whiteness. Not that I had been white before: I am brown-skinned, with a Muslim name. But I had been able to partake in many of the benefits of whiteness. And I had been complicit in that system. Losing this forced me to consider things afresh. And over the next couple of decades that experience was the grain of debris in my mind’s oyster that this work began to accrue around.

More here.

Jesse Nathan in McSweeney’s:

JESSE NATHAN: What is your relationship to improvisation, in writing your poems? I’m interested in the extent to which they are (or seem) premeditated, versus “writing on nerve” as Frank O’Hara said. I imagine some chemistry of both. What does that mixture look like, for you? Do you do some kind of research before you write? Often your poems have a feeling of fingertip knowledge, as if it’s flowing right off the top of your head…

ROBERT PINSKY: For me, it is all improvisation . . . and hard work. The very word “preparation” freezes me. But let me quote a master. In his 1965 Paris Review interview, Dizzy Gillespie says a few things I have kept in mind all through my writing life. About improvisation he says:

It takes complete concentration. Of course, some nights you’re just complacent. You do some new things, but… you see, there’s thousands of ways to play on any chord. You have to figure it out in a split second and play it at the same time. It’s not instinct. It’s hard!

Not instinct but spontaneous. Immediate but difficult. Those seeming paradoxes, that make great sense to me in poetry, also apply to sports: ten people are running down the court, each person and both teams trying to anticipate what happens next—the person with the ball is hearing all the rhythms at once, and makes a no-look, behind-the-back pass at the right moment without thinking, about it, exactly. It’s more a matter of having thought about it many times before, less and less consciously over time: the decisive moment of action based on experience.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in Quillette:

The fact that wings are not always a good thing is demonstrated by those animals whose ancestors used to have wings but who have given them up.

Worker ants don’t have wings. They walk everywhere. Well, perhaps “run” is a better word. The ancestors of ants were winged wasps, so modern ants have lost their wings over evolutionary time. But we don’t have to go back that far. Nowhere near. The worker ant’s immediate parents, her mother and her father, both had wings. Every worker ant is a sterile female fully equipped with the genes of a queen, and would sprout wings if reared differently, as queens are. The potential for wings is, so to speak, coiled up in the genes of all ants, but in workers it doesn’t burst forth.

There must be something wrong with having wings, otherwise worker ants would realise their undoubted genetic ability to grow them. The pluses and minuses for and against wings must be pretty finely balanced if a female sometimes grows them and sometimes doesn’t.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: You’ve just written an interesting and—ironically—viral piece about the way in which our digital institutions have made everything in American life uniquely stupid over the last ten years, and why you’re not very optimistic about that changing. Tell us the basic premise of the piece. Why is everything uniquely stupid?

Jonathan Haidt: The piece is the culmination of my eight-year struggle to understand what the hell happened. I’ve been a professor since 1995. I love being a professor, I love universities. I just felt like this is the greatest job on Earth. I got a glimpse, as a philosophy major, of Plato’s Academy—sitting under the olive trees talking about ideas. And then all of a sudden, from out of nowhere in 2014, things got weird. They got aggressive and they got frightening. This game has been going on for thousands of years, in which one person serves something, the other person hits it back—around 2014, intimidation came in. There was a new element, which was that if you say something, people won’t argue why you’re wrong, they’ll slam you as a bad person. On the left, they’ll call you a racist; on the right, they’ll call you a traitor. But something changed on campus.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

Europe is geographically much closer to Africa than America. Northern Africa has been part of the Eurasian culture since Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, over two millennia ago.

But the colonization of America by Europeans began just before the 1500s1, while they colonized Africa mostly after 1870, during a period of about 40 years called the Scramble for Africa that saw Europe’s colonization of Africa go from about 10% of its territory to about 90%. For 350 years, Europeans didn’t conquer the continent next door, crossing the Atlantic instead. Why?

More here.

When All the Others Were Away at Mass

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

by Seamus Heaney
from Clearances in Memorium, 1911-1984
Faber and Faber, 1987

Joanna Cresswell in Lensculture:

There is a particular collage in Indian photographer Devashish Gaur’s project This Is The Closest We Will Get that stands out in its cut-and-paste simplicity. Entitled Me and Dad, it’s a portrait, black and white, cropped at the shoulders, but most importantly, it depicts two men instead of one. The sitter of the original photograph—an archival one that’s been collaged over—wears a checkered suit and his hair is neatly swept to the side. It feels formal, perhaps a little dated even. Meanwhile, slices of a second face, arranged over this sitter, belong to his son—the photographer, Gaur himself. And their features, the contours and outlines of their faces, do seem to blend quite remarkably. Father and boy, artist and sitter, portrait and self-portrait, entwined.

Blending new images, archival pictures and digital re-workings, This Is The Closest We Will Get began in 2019, after Gaur discovered photographs of his grandfather during the renovation of his family home. His grandfather had died before he was born, and yet his family had always told him how alike they were in habits and interests, so these pictures fascinated him. How strange it was, he says, to resemble someone he’d never known. Thus the project in the first instance was a visual depiction and recollection of memories and conversations about his grandfather.

More here.

Gabrielle Blair in Vice:

As a mother of six and a Mormon, I have a good understanding of arguments surrounding abortion, religious and otherwise. When I hear men discussing women’s reproductive rights, I’m often left with the thought that they have zero interest in stopping abortion. If you want to prevent abortion, you need to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Men seem unable (or unwilling) to admit that they cause 100% of them. I realize that’s a bold statement. You’re likely thinking, “Wait. It takes two to tango!” While I fully agree with you in the case of intentional pregnancies, I argue that all unwanted pregnancies are caused by the irresponsible ejaculations of men. All of them.

Don’t believe me?

Let’s start with this: A woman’s egg is only fertile for about two days each month. Yes, there are exceptions, because nature. But one egg which is fertile two days each month is the baseline. And those fertile eggs are produced for a limited number of years. This means, on average, women are fertile for about 24 days per year. But men are fertile 365 days a year. In fact, if you’re a man who ejaculates multiple times a day, you could cause multiple pregnancies daily. In theory, a man could cause 1000+ unwanted pregnancies in just one year. While it’s true that sperm gets crappier as men age, it doesn’t have a fertility expiration date; men can cause unwanted pregnancies from puberty until death. So, starting with basic fertility stats and the calendar, it’s easy to see that men are the issue here.

More here.

Anthony Cummins at The Guardian:

Sam Knight is a prizewinning British New Yorker journalist whose features and profiles fizz with doggedly chased-down detail distilled into compelling narrative, whether he’s writing about Ronnie O’Sullivan, the £8bn-a-year sandwich industry or preparations for the death of the Queen (“Operation London Bridge”). The Premonitions Bureau, his first book, showcases the gifts that make him so endlessly readable. A richly researched feat of compression, it tells a tantalising tale of the unlikely interplay between the press, psychiatry and the paranormal in Britain during the late 1960s.

Knight’s central character (so fluently does he tell his outlandish story, it’s hard not to think of it as a novel) is John Barker, a Cambridge-educated psychiatrist whose interest in clairvoyance led him to pitch the Evening Standard late in 1966 with the idea of a “Premonitions Bureau”, by which readers would come forward with portents of catastrophe, such as that year’s deadly landslide at Aberfan.

more here.