Zeina G. Halabi at Eurozine:

This dialectical reconstruction of exile is one of the most revealing portraits of Darwish. Invoking his poetry’s prophetic iconography, it evokes displacement, absence, and the privilege of representation, about who speaks for the wandering people and how. It asks the question of how exile is framed temporally, probing the conceptions of time at work in this experience. Palestine is thus revealed across three successive temporalities: historically embedded in Biblical tradition and collective memory; a signifier in the present of displacement and loss; and projected into the future by the spectral figure of the exiled poet-prophet. The scene is thus about the intertwinement of the lyrical and the political, the personal and the collective, and the spectral and messianic; all set the parameters of the intellectual-prophet.

This is where the enmeshment of the poet-prophet, Palestine, and manifold temporalities turn into a metanarrative. We watch Bitton representing Darwish; he represents the Palestinians in 1997 from the vantage point of today’s coups, revolutions, and civil wars, all of which have had an effect on the conception of the ‘prophetic intellectual’.

more here.

Joseph Horowitz at the LARB:

STEPHEN JOHNSON’S BOOK How Shostakovich Changed My Mind (2019) begins with an unforgettable story. In 2006, Johnson traveled to St. Petersburg to meet an aged clarinetist named Viktor Kozlov. Kozlov was a member of the Leningrad orchestra that somehow performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 on August 9, 1942. The city was under Nazi siege. Hundreds of thousands had died. The survivors were starving. Only 15 members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra remained alive. They were joined by dozens of additional instrumentalists, mainly from military bands, brought in under armed convoy. Special rations were procured. The players were so weak that the initial rehearsals lasted only 15 to 20 minutes. The 75-minute symphony, composed in wartime, mirrored the fraught moment. Kozlov remembered:

There was a lot of applause, people standing. One woman even gave the conductor flowers — imagine, there was nothing in the city! And yet this one woman found flowers somewhere. It was wonderful! The music touched people because it reflected the Siege. […] People were thrilled and astounded that such music was played, even during the Siege of Leningrad!

more here.

Deborah Copaken in The Atlantic:

By the time of her arrival at Harvard the following fall––now Liz instead of Lizzie––she was instantly college famous. Within weeks on campus, everyone knew who Liz Wurtzel was. How could you not? Particularly after the popped-cherry party she threw midyear. Or rather, our mutual friend Donal Logue threw the party, and Liz commandeered it. “So the story is we threw a huge party sophomore year in Adams House,” said Donal earlier today, when we spoke to commiserate over her death. “Liz, a freshman at the time, showed up and announced she had just lost her virginity and it was now officially the ‘Elizabeth Wurtzel lost her virginity party.’ At first, I was surprised. She seemed so wild. When I got to know her and understood her Ramaz background, her high-school life, it made sense.”

Now Donal and everyone else who knew Liz, or has encountered her work since, are trying to make sense of the idea that she’s gone. Elizabeth Wurtzel died on January 7, 2020, at the age of 52, of complications from breast cancer. When I spoke with Roberta Feldman Brzezinski, her college roommate and friend ever since, she remembered Liz as “brilliant, acerbic, volatile, and fiercely loyal. In her last years, she became a fountain of life wisdom. Why do you care how people behave? You are the star of your own drama, and everyone else is just a bit player. In her case, that was epically true.”

…Wurtzel’s 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation, forever changed the literary landscape. It redefined not only what women were allowed to write about, but when they were allowed to write about it: their messy, early decades in medias res. Mental illness was no longer something to be hidden or shameful. It was a topic like any other, to be brought out into the light. Liz was suddenly the It Girl in New York, throwing epic, unforgettable parties in her loft. Suddenly, in the same way that she’d once drawn courage from my teenage writing, I now drew courage from her literary descriptions of early adulthood. “You should write about your war-photography years,” she urged me during one of her parties. And so I did. From then on, whenever anyone wanted to criticize women memoirists for oversharing; or dismiss personal writing as lesser or not literary; or shame us for describing, in intimate detail, the joys and miseries of human love, in all of its messy glory, we’d get lumped in together or collectively shamed as examples of what not to do. As the years wore on, we sometimes even found ourselves “oversharing” on the same stage.

More here. (Note: For my niece, Alia Raza, who sat many hours by Liz’s side as she lay dying, and mourned and grieved her friend in a thousand silent ways. RIP Liz)

William Foster in Nature:

The fear of getting lost and being unable to find our way home is woven into the stories we hear as children: it can haunt us for years. Humanity’s navigational skills are poor and increasingly rarely used, leaving us to view feats of animal navigation with a mixture of envy and admiration. How do Atlantic salmon find their way back to the streams where they were born, after up to three years at sea? How do Arctic terns find their breeding sites in the far north after excursions of more than 70,000 kilometres to the Antarctic? Desert Navigator is the story of how a tiny ant (Cataglyphis spp.) became the ideal model organism for the study of animal navigation. It begins 50 years ago in a vast Saharan salt pan, where a lone, shiny black ant caught the eye of neuroethologist Rüdiger Wehner as it scuttled across the sand. Eventually, it discovered the corpse of a large fly, gripped it firmly in its mandibles, and then performed the manoeuvre that launched Wehner’s field of research.

The ant set off in a straight line, crossing more than 100 metres of the barren ground to disappear into an inconspicuous hole — the entrance to its underground colony. The only plausible explanation is that the ant knew all along exactly where it was in relation to its home nest. But how does Cataglyphis manage this, with a minute brain and no mobile phone?

Wehner unspools the answer over the book’s seven chapters, describing the astonishing subtlety, intricacy and diversity of the techniques used both by the ants in finding their way home and by researchers in discovering how they do it. The ants plot their compass direction using patterns of polarized light and gradients of colour and light intensity in the sky, along with the position of the Sun, backed up by cues from Earth’s magnetic field and the wind direction. They know where they are by counting the steps they have taken and keeping track of the direction they were following at the time. They can memorize panoramic ‘snapshots’ of landmarks, such as boulders, around their goals. Somehow, their brains integrate all this information so that their foraging journeys can be optimally organized.

More here.

A Door like a Wound

The door first appeared in my backyard,
white sentinel among anemone sheets

unfurling on clotheslines. The next morning
I found it laying on the back row of the bus,

its glass knob rotating back and forth, back, forth.
Over the weeks I saw it roosted in the hair of toddlers,

stuck in the teeth of a laughing waitress, once
in a stroller where a baby was supposed to be.

Then one morning I woke up, found it embedded
in my palm. I tweezed the knob, pushed the door open.

Inside: a small room, bay windows, garrulous daylight,
a pair of boy’s shoes, a clarinet laid across a wooden chair,

and my mother’s voice, as if from a phone off its cradle,
singing some lost, some low-sweet tune…

I went to the bathroom, turned on the faucet,
held my hand under the water as if cleaning a wound.

Now when I press my ear to where the door used to be
I hear a knock-knock, knock-knock against my skin,

and sometimes, like old bones creaking, the whine of a hinge.

by Todd Dillard
from Empty Mirror

Daniel Callcut in Prospect:

Perhaps nothing is so distrusted, in an age that prizes authenticity, as the attempt to act in a politically neutral fashion. The recent general election has brought accusations of BBC news bias to a new level of intensity. The organisation’s claims to balanced coverage, under attack from left and right, represent one more pillar of the traditional liberal order under threat of disintegration. Does anyone really believe in the idea of media impartiality anymore? Isn’t this just one more centrist idea that is collapsing not just practically but philosophically too?

The worry about impartiality being a moribund idea doesn’t just face broadcasters. It confronts everyone from teachers to judges. What do you do if the stereotypically teenage complaint, everyone is biased, is deemed to have been right all along? I think of my experience of teaching philosophy in the United States and I think it contains some useful answers. What I shall suggest is that, even if true neutrality is ultimately impossible, it is a terrible overreaction to give up on the aspiration to balance.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Wilfrid Sellars described the task of philosophy as explaining how things, in the broadest sense of term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term. (Substitute “exploring” for “explaining” and you’d have a good mission statement for the Mindscape podcast.) Few modern thinkers have pursued this goal more energetically, creatively, and entertainingly than Daniel Dennett. One of the most respected philosophers of our time, Dennett’s work has ranged over topics such as consciousness, artificial intelligence, metaphysics, free will, evolutionary biology, epistemology, and naturalism, always with an eye on our best scientific understanding of the phenomenon in question. His thinking in these areas is exceptionally lucid, and he has the rare ability to express his ideas in ways that non-specialists can find accessible and compelling. We talked about all of them, in a wide-ranging and wonderfully enjoyable conversation.

More here.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

On January 3, the United States assassinated Qassem Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, while he was leaving Baghdad International Airport in a car with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia. All the occupants of the car were killed.

The next day, at a special press briefing, an unnamed senior US State Department official said that Suleimani had been, for 20 years, “the major architect” of Iran’s terrorist attacks and had “killed 608 Americans in Iraq alone.” He added that Suleimani and Muhandis had been designated as terrorists by the United Nations, and that “both of these guys are the real deal in terms of bad guys.”

In 2003, US intelligence about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction was completely wrong. Those errors led to the invasion of Iraq, which cleared the way for the involvement of Iran and Suleimani in the country. But let’s assume that this time the facts are as the US administration says they are. Was the double assassination ethically defensible?

More here.

John Plotz, Pu Wang, and Cixin Lui at Public Books:

JP: Can you talk about how that subculture existed? Was it connected by magazines, or was there an online culture—or was it books that you read in translation or books by other Chinese writers? What was the material connection that made you a fandom?

CL: I started my fascination with science fiction while I was a primary school student. That was still in the final years of the Cultural Revolution. There was no cultural landscape of media as we know it today. There was not even the concept of science fiction yet in China. Back then, what I read was translated science fiction from the ’50s, the period of the early People’s Republic. The early socialist period was a relatively open era, culturally. At that time, a lot of Western science fiction works were translated into Chinese.

Those first science fiction books I read belonged to my father. During the Cultural Revolution, those books were no longer considered politically orthodox enough. My father just put them underneath the bed. So, as a young boy, I sneaked under the bed and started to read those words. Among those authors were H. G. Wells and Soviet science fiction writers.

more here.

Nell Zink at n+1:

THE PLOT OF The Brothers Karamazov defies summarization. As its unmotivated twists mounted, I was reminded of Dwight Garner’s complaint, in a review of Nicotine in The New York Times, that plot for me is “there when she needs it, like a small fleet of dependable Vespas, to shuttle her characters around.” Only now did I perceive the indelible early influence of the master. Mislaid closes with a courtroom scene whose origins I had always insisted lay in Viennese operetta, but it’s obvious to me now that I borrowed the idea from Dostoyevsky. I never even heard of an operetta with a courtroom scene.

The plot: the aforementioned contemplator bludgeons the evil dad and hangs himself, pinning the crime on the ne’er-do-well eldest Karamazov brother. The truth—that a contemplator could plan something that complicated—is known only to the middle brother, and it stresses him so severely, to the point of hearing voices, that no one in court believes a word he says.

more here.

Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review:

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.

more here.

Wendy Moore in The Guardian:

The history of medicine abounds with oddball characters and bizarre events. Yet few figures are quite as eccentric as the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and few episodes reach the levels of absurdity displayed in his demonstrations of “hysterical” women being hypnotised in Paris in the late 19th century. Charcot had begun so promisingly. Early in his career he made groundbreaking discoveries in multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, thereby earning himself the epithet “father of neurology”. But he became fixated on “hysteria”, a catch-all diagnosis that Victorian doctors applied to unconventional behaviour that defied medical explanation. For more than a decade Charcot hypnotised scores of patients, mostly women, at the Salpêtrière asylum in his quest to show their condition had a biological cause rooted in the brain. According to his twisted logic, if patients reproduced their strange antics and seizures under hypnosis this proved their illness was real not feigned and was therefore a physical not a mental disorder. Crowds of eminent doctors and scientists, the vast majority male, packed the hospital to watch Charcot induce his patients to adopt ridiculous poses and act out ludicrous scenes.

His star patient, Blanche Wittmann, known as “queen of the hysterics”, had been sexually abused as a teenager. Under hypnosis she was persuaded to cower in fear of an imaginary snake, lead her troops into battle as a pretend general and remove her clothes. It is a wonder Charcot’s spectators did not march him to the cells after these performances rather than his unfortunate victims. Yet paradoxically all this time he was surrounded by an epidemic of manic behaviour that filled psychiatric institutions and was truly caused by brain disease – neurosyphilis. While he, the founder of neurology, was obsessed with proving that mental illness was caused by lesions in the brain, patients with neurosyphilis were left to the forerunners of modern psychiatry.

In this absorbing and scholarly book, Allan Ropper and Brian Burrell home in on Charcot’s strange shows as the seminal moment when psychiatry and neurology split and began their journeys along separate but intertwining paths towards a partial convergence today.

More here.

Helen Sullivan in The New York Times:

Mr. Serhal grew up in Lebanon but studied wildlife management at Oklahoma State University, graduating in 1982, at the height of the Lebanese civil war. His plan was to return and establish a hunting farm in Lebanon. But he abandoned it when, while using binoculars for the first time, he watched as a bobwhite quail hen — a game bird — ushered her chicks from bush to bush. “That gave me the shock of my life,” he said. His binoculars revealed a different way of viewing nature: “When you go to the field as a hunter with a gun, you don’t see the bird. The minute you flush it, you shoot.”

Watching the bobwhite mother protect her chicks, he thought: “I am a criminal.”

In 1990, Mr. Serhal completed a stint at the Brooklyn Zoo and, with Lebanon’s 15-year civil war ended, returned home. In 1996, he helped establish the Shouf Biosphere Reserve, Lebanon’s first national park. But after a few years, he felt the Shouf wasn’t working as well as it should. The American model, of land designated and protected by the government, had angered people in the surrounding villages, who had been free to use the area for as long as anyone could remember, to graze livestock and pick wild herbs. Mr. Serhal thought that, instead, hima might be accepted as a traditional concept; it also would include communities and municipalities in the design of the conservation areas. Hima wouldn’t be just about protecting nature, Mr. Serhal said; it would be “nature plus people.” When S.P.N.L. helped a community design a local hima, the group suggested additional conservation methods, like banning hunting. The first hima was established in southern Lebanon in 2004. Today there are 25; they have been given legal status by the government and cover more land than Lebanon’s national parks. Five of the designated hima are also what BirdLife calls “Important Bird Areas,” of which there are 15 in the country. Last year, Mr. Serhal was awarded Japan’s Midori Prize for Biodiversity, among the world’s most prestigious awards for conservation work.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith at his own website:

There are two very different essays I’ve been meaning to write, both of which equally merit the title of the present one.

The one would address the special meaning of ‘existence’ as distinct from ‘being’ in the Heideggerian tradition, and would ask whether that special meaning applies to trees. Heidegger had dismissed even animals as merely being rather than existing, to the extent that they are ‘poor-in-world’ and therefore do not have that special and rare power human beings supposedly have of standing outside of being, ex-isting as Heidegger the etymologist emphasises, and beholding being rather than simply being whisked along by it as everything else is. A fortiori, it is usually assumed, the world of plants must be even poorer, and thus trees are taken as exemplary instances of being without existing.

Looking at the hanging branches of Louisiana oaks though, as I am at present, reaching down to the bayou in search of something they want, I wonder if this is true, and it seems to me, at least fleetingly, that I can imagine what it is like to be a tree, that there is something it is like, and that it is weltreich indeed. If it is difficult to grasp this, this may only be because we are limited in our sympathy by the radical difference of time scale that separates their experience from ours. I am fairly certain that if this difference were removed, we would see that trees too have projects, and experience feelings of accomplishment, defeat, joy, pensiveness, and wistfulness.

But that’s not what I’m writing about here.

More here.

Abraham Loeb in Scientific American:

At a recent group meeting, my postdoc raised a question: “Should we make our theoretical model more complex so that our explanation of the data will not appear too trivial?” I was surprised by this suggestion and felt obligated to explain why. “Simplicity is a virtue,” I said, “not a deficiency. Excessive mathematical gymnastics is used to show off in branches of theoretical physics that have scarce experimental data. But as physicists, we should seek the simplest explanation for our data. This is the lifeblood of physics and the appropriate measure of success.”

For decades, it was believed that our simple model of the early universe, characterized by a small number of parameters, was naive and the result of scarce data. By the turn of the 21st century, we had collected enough to verify that the universe indeed started from the simplest possible initial state, being nearly homogeneous and isotropic with small fluctuations that developed into the complex structures we find in it today. This simple cosmological model, which has existed for a century, is the foundation for modern cosmology.

More here.

John Krzyzaniak in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Early Friday morning, Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, was killed on the drive back from the international airport in Baghdad, Iraq, in a US drone strike authorized by President Trump.

Soleimani has been at the helm of the elite Quds Force since 1998, and it’s difficult to overstate his importance. In the Atlantic, Andrew Exum, former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy, wrote that “from a military and diplomatic perspective, Soleimani was Iran’s David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and Brett McGurk all rolled into one”—referring to two former US military generals and a former special presidential envoy.

Some had speculated that Soleimani, given his popularity in Iran, might one day run for president. But that would have arguably been a demotion; as leader of the Quds Force, Soleimani reported directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader, commanded more than 10,000 troops, and essentially set Iran’s Middle East policy. Indeed, after the assassination, US Sen. Chris Murphy referred to Soleimani as the “second most powerful person in Iran.” In the Senator’s estimation, then, Soleimani ranked in power above the Iranian president, the speaker of the parliament, the head of the judiciary, and even the chief of staff of the armed forces in Iran.

More here.

Leanne Ogasawara in the Dublin Review of Books:

The story of Don Quixote never gets old. First published (Book One, that is) in 1605, Cervantes’s novel continually makes the list of the greatest books of all time, being the second most translated after the Bible. In 2002, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters asked a hundred authors across the world to name their choice for “best novel” of all time: Cervantes won in a landslide. Considered by many people to be “the first modern novel”, it is a story of a man’s search for truth. It is also hilariously funny. I was not surprised to learn that it is one of the most requested books by the inmates at Guantánamo.

As if reading the Quixote is not enough, there is also a long list of works that have been created over the centuries in direct homage to it. Most famous are Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, both being intentional retellings of the story. But there are also more indirect, but still consciously influenced, works, like Kafka’s story “The Truth about Sancho Panz”a and GK Chesterton’s The Return of Don Quixote, not to mention pretty much everything Milan Kundera ever wrote. There is Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. My own favorite is Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, about a priest in a small town in La Mancha, who claims he is a descendant of the famous knight errant, never mind that all his friends remind him that Don Quixote was a fictional character. Beyond literature, we have Massenet’s opera Don Quichotte and Petipa’s ballet Don Quixote, as well as Telemann’s marvellous Don Quixote Suite.

Salman Rushdie’ s new novel, Quichotte, is only the latest in the four-hundred-year-long history of Quixote spin-offs.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOiTd83tD4

Marguerite Duras in The Paris Review:

My mother had green eyes. Black hair. Her name was Marie Augustine Adeline Legrand. She was born a peasant, daughter of farmers, near Dunkirk. She had one sister and seven brothers. She went to teachers college, on a scholarship, and she taught in Dunkirk. The day after an inspection, the inspector who had visited her class asked for her hand in marriage. Love at first sight. They got married and left for Indochina. Between 1900 and 1903. A sort of commitment, adventure, a sort of desire, too, not for fortune but for success. They left like heroes, pioneers, they visited the schools in oxcarts, they brought everything, quills, paper, ink. They had succumbed to the posters of the era urging, as if they were soldiers: “Enlist.”

She was beautiful, my mother, she was very charming. Many men wanted her over the years, but as far as I know, nothing ever happened outside of her marriages. She was brilliant, and had an incredible way with words. I remember her being fought over at parties. She was one of a kind, very funny, often laughing, wholeheartedly. She was not coquettish, all she did was wash herself, she was always extremely clean. She had a sewing machine but she didn’t know what to have it make. I, too, until I was fourteen or fifteen, dressed like her, in sack dresses. When I started to become interested in men, I picked out my outfits more carefully. Then my mother had me sew incredible dresses, with frills, that made me look like a lampshade. I wore it all.

More here.