Christopher Turner at Cabinet Magazine:

To the untrained eye, Kinetography looks esoteric and occult, but to the few who can read it the complex strips of hieroglyphs allow them to recreate dances much as their original choreographers imagined them. Dance notation was invented in seventeenth-century France to score court dances and classical ballet, but it recorded only formal footsteps and by Laban’s time it was largely forgotten. Laban’s dream was to create a “universally applicable” notation that could capture the frenzy and nuance of modern dance, and he developed a system of 1,421 abstract symbols to record the dancer’s every movement in space, as well as the energy level and timing with which they were made. He hoped that his code would elevate dance to its rightful place in the hierarchy of arts, “alongside literature and music,” and that one day everyone would be able to read it fluently.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

One of the most intriguing moments in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s magisterial Tristes Tropiques of 1955 arrives when the anthropologist is playing with a group of Nambikwara children deep in Brazil’s interior. All of a sudden:

… a girl who had been struck by one of her playmates took refuge by my side and, with a very mysterious air, began to whisper something into my ear. As I did not understand and was obliged to ask her to repeat it several times, her enemy realized what was going on and, obviously very angry, also came over to confide what seemed to be a solemn secret. After some hesitation and questioning, the meaning of the incident became clear. Out of revenge, the first little girl had come to tell me the name of her enemy, and the latter, on becoming aware of this, had retaliated by confiding to me the other’s name… After which, having created a certain atmosphere of complicity, I had little difficulty in getting them to tell me the names of the adults.

But why, now, should the Nambikwara, who otherwise seem to be perfectly at ease with this anthropologist in their midst, seek to keep their “real” names secret? Why should a person not have a single all-purpose name for others to learn upon making their acquaintance? Is it not the essential purpose of names to enable us to refer to things and people correctly?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone who has thought carefully about all the ingredients of a good story, from plot and conflict to characters and relationships. This will be a useful conversation for anyone who tells stories, reads books, or watches movies. Maybe you’ll be inspired to finally write that novel.

More here.

Blake Smith in Foreign Policy:

For nearly half a century, Lévy has been one of the most visible public intellectuals in France and a master at manipulating philosophical and political controversy. With his good looks and outsized ego, Lévy is a compelling performer. He is also an irresistible target for critics from the left, right, and center. The inaccuracies and incoherencies of his voluminous body of work have been exposed in a number of unflattering biographies, of which the best is Philippe Cohen’s 2005 book BHL. The media’s tendency to thus refer to Lévy by his initials, BHL, suggests that he is, like LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), an iconic national brand—and perhaps nothing more than a label. Since the earliest days of Lévy’s career, rivals have denounced him as a cynical, vacuous pseudo-philosopher who puts intellectual culture in the service of self-aggrandizing spectacle.

More here.

From 1843 Magazine:

Efficient folk have come up with a range of productivity techniques. Benjamin Franklin was an early advocate of the modern to-do list. Each morning America’s Founding Father jotted down tasks and asked himself: “What good shall I do this day?” Office grunts take a less virtuous approach to planning. Some practise the Pomodoro technique, a strategy of slicing your day into 25-minute chunks of intense focus with five-minute breaks in between. Many people use a task-management app as a “second brain”, storing their thoughts in the cloud for safekeeping. Productivity tools can also have the opposite effect. You may spend so long managing your time that you never get to the work itself. “Yak shaving” is a term for tasks that lead on to further tasks which distract you from your original goal. If you want to become a time-management master, don’t go anywhere near a yak with a razor.

Le blurring
The mixing of work and personal life (noun)
Even the French are losing their work-life balance

The French view workaholism as an unfortunate Anglo-Saxon invention. They are proud of their 35-hour work-week and all-of-August holidays. (As one French saying goes: “They live to work, we work to live”.) Despite this, French workers are more productive than British ones, on average. Now these traditions are under threat. The French are suffering from le blurring – a slipping of the once-sacred work-life boundary. The shift started with smartphones. Suddenly your boss could contact you when you were at home stirring your soup, or even on holiday. Workers “remain attached by a kind of electronic leash, like a dog,” one French politician moaned.

More here.

Zaria Gorvett in BBC:

He Jiankui seemed nervous. At the time, he was an obscure researcher working at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. But he had been working on a top-secret project for the last two years – and he was about to take to the podium at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing to announce the results. There was a general buzz of excitement in the air. The audience looked on anxiously. People started filming on their phones. Jiankui had made the first genetically modified babies in the history of humankind. After 3.7 billion years of continuous, undisturbed evolution by natural selection, a life form had taken its innate biology into its own hands. The result was twin baby girls who were born with altered copies of a gene known as CCR5, which the scientist hoped would make them immune to HIV.

But things were not as they seemed.

…It turns out that the babies involved, Lulu and Nana, have not been gifted with neatly edited genes after all. Not only are they not necessarily immune to HIV, they have been accidentally endowed with versions of CCR5 that are entirely made up – they likely do not exist in any other human genome on the planet. And yet, such changes are heritable – they might be passed on to their children, and children’s children, and so on. In fact, there have been no shortage of surprises in the field. From the rabbits altered to be leaner that inexplicably ended up with much longer tongues to the cattle tweaked to lack horns that were unintentionally endowed with a long stretch of bacterial DNA in their genomes (including some genes that confer antibiotic resistance, no less) – its past is riddled with errors and misunderstandings.

More here.

This is Not a Small Voice

This is not a small voice
you hear this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river
mouths.

This is not a small love
you hear this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet
with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the
water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history
where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the
alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron
and lace.
This is a love initialed Black
Genius.

This is nor a small voice
you hear.

By Sonia Sanchez
from Wounded in the House of a Friend
Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1995

Blair McClendon at n+1:

DMX CLOSES OUT HIS SONG “Look Thru My Eyes” with the words “Feel the pain, feel the joy / Of a man, who was never a boy.” This, in two lines, is his entire career, as well as his autobiography. DMX’s music was intoxicating and horrifying. He barks after those closing lines, and somehow the bark, which showed up a lot, never felt like a gimmick. It could be vicious, it could be wounded, but it was never false. That kind of thing is hard to pull off in a genre built on presenting fiction as fact.

I don’t mean that as an insult. I love when rappers lie to me. To hear them tell it they’re all killers, dons, money long, pushing something foreign they’re going to put up in a twelve-car garage. I don’t think anybody should have a garage that big, but it sounds good. If a rapper has real charisma they’ll have you repeating the lies and undermining your own station in life.

more here.

Munro Price at Literary Review:

This 5 May will mark the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death on St Helena. The occasion will no doubt be marked, as was the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo six years ago, by a flood of new books about the emperor, adding yet more to the estimated 200,000 already written. Given this saturation, one wonders if there is anything left to say. This fascinating book proves that there is. It does so by focusing on a crucial yet neglected aspect of Napoleon’s rule: his bitter, decade-long confrontation with Pope Pius VII. This marked an important step both in the emperor’s decline and fall, and in the evolution of the Catholic Church.

It is a dramatic story. Napoleon came to power determined to heal the most gaping wound left by the French Revolution, its schism with the Church, which for almost ten years had fuelled persecutions, peasant risings and civil war across large areas of France. As a partner in this task, he was lucky enough to find Barnaba Chiaramonti, recently elected as Pope Pius VII. The result of this collaboration was a remarkable achievement, the Concordat of 1801, which settled the respective limits of ecclesiastical and civil power in post-revolutionary France and outlived Napoleon by almost a century.

more here.

Ursula Kenny in The Guardian:

Catherine Menon was born in Perth, Western Australia, where her British mother and Malaysian father met. She lectures in robotics and has a PhD in pure mathematics as well as an MA in creative writing. Fragile Monsters, her first novel, is set in rural Malaysia and unpicks a family’s story from 1920 to the present day. At its centre are Mary, “sharp tongued and ferocious”, and her visiting granddaughter, Durga, who tussle over the demons and dark memories that distort their past and warp the present. Hilary Mantel has described Menon’s writing as “supple, artful, skilful storytelling” and she has won awards for her short stories. She is married to a fellow mathematician and lives in north London.

Why did you want to write about Malaysia?
The idea came from the stories my father used to tell me about when he was young – appropriately sanitised. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I even realised that Kuala Lipis [where his family lived] was the head of Japanese activities in Pahang [state]. During the second world war it was very much under Japanese control. It was at the centre of things like food rationing; the children’s education was wildly interrupted and when it was resumed it was all in Japanese. So all sorts of upheavals that I really only came to understand when I started researching.

More here.

Ling Xin in the MIT Technology Review:

A massive landslide—the worst in decades—struck Du Fangming’s home in south China’s Hunan province on July 6. “My house collapsed. My goats were swept away by the mud,” he told Chinese media outlets shortly after the catastrophe. Fortunately, though, he was safe—one of 33 villagers who had been evacuated thanks to early warnings enabled by advanced positioning technologies that can provide more accurate readings than ever before.

Powered by China’s newly completed global navigation satellite system, BeiDou (“the Big Dipper”), and its ground-based stations, position sensors can detect subtle changes in the land’s surface in landslide-prone regions across China. Movement over a few meters can be spotted in real time, while post-processing accuracy can reach the millimeter level.

That means a shift in the dirt about the size of the tip of a sharp pencil can be spotted from more than 21,000 kilometers above. Twelve days before the landslide, Du’s village received an orange alert citing data anomalies, which pointed to accelerating surface sliding following days of heavy rain.

More here.

Tom Zoellner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the view of most historians, the original sin of Rwanda came from the colonial policy of making artificial ethnic distinctions through a caste-like system. Belgian administrators deemed those who were taller and herded cattle, the Tutsis, to be smarter than the Hutu, who were generally shorter and raised crops. So one group got all the privileges of helping the Belgians extract coffee and animal hides and were treated as sub-royals, while their countrymen were deemed slow and stupid. The story was fixed; the Goods and Bads had been preselected, and the inevitable resentments would explode in the 1994 genocide.

Today Rwanda is held up as a shining example of African progress, with a kitchen-clean capital, a booming economy, and a firm lid on internal violence. But in her explosive and devastatingly convincing new book, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, Michela Wrong contends that this is a result of the original sin coming home to roost once more. Western journalists and governments have selected their good guy in dictator Paul Kagame while ignoring his appalling human rights abuses, targeted assassinations, exported violence, and offenses against the rule of law that would be condemned anyplace else.

More here.

My Body Holds Stones

My body
holds
stones
of a tragic
Indian warrior
descending
into sunset
at trail’s end
swallowed by
two centuries.
I’m still trying
to unknot
his silhouette.

My body
holds
stones
of Indian women
surrounded
by wolves
roaring
at their feet,
x’s on
their eyes,
while sand gathers
freely
over their
lost earring.
Voices echo—
I am my sister—
in a canyon
while thunder sleeps

My body
holds
a stone monument
to large small pox blankets.
Jagged winds wail
the color yellow
on the prairies
that lay themselves down
in the dying rays of the sun.

Read more »

Abdelfattah Kilito in The Baffler:

WHAT IS THE POINT of reading the ancients? They are not of our world. They are peacefully asleep and do not want us to wake them. Let the dead bury their dead. We may hesitate a moment in our judgement and suppose that there are, perhaps, benefits and advantages to be gained from their company. Yet we immediately turn our faces away from them, admitting: we ought to read them, but we don’t. The matter remains a mysterious aspiration.

The strange thing is that despite not reading them, we behave as though we have read them and lay claim to the knowledge of their production. Personally, I have not read the Iliad, but I know the gist of it—and by the way, who reads Don Quixote? Most know about it only through the drawings of Gustave Doré or by way of a paragraph in the pages of a school textbook. This applies just as well to the majority of works designated as “classic.” What does this designation mean? Italo Calvino presented fourteen definitions of it, opening with the statement that the classic book is one which the reader says they re-read and never says they are currently reading.

It is commonly understood that every literature has a particular temporal sequence and a unique nomenclature for its stages. As a simple example, the French researcher in the literature of the Middle Ages is designated a “médiéviste.” (Paul Zumthor^[1] is among the distinguished researchers in this field). Is it possible to apply this description to a researcher interested in Arabic texts in their particular era, regardless of whether the researcher is Arab or non-Arab? This seems to me quite farfetched, since the term “Middle Ages” does not align with Arab history, nor does it agree with what we know of the development of Arabic literature. Every literature has its own periodization, hierarchy, classic texts, and even classical age. According to the French, as it is known, the classical age par excellence is the seventeenth century.

More here.