Ross Andersen in The Atlantic:

Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.

More here.

Judith Levine in Boston Review:

After “the,” “and,” and “fuckin’,” the most frequently used word in the Netflix series Dead to Me must be “sorry.”

The protagonists of the show, Judy Hale and Jen Harding, have plenty for which to be sorry. First Judy (Linda Cardellini) kills Jen’s husband with her 1966 Mustang in a hit-and-run accident. Then Jen (Christina Applegate) bludgeons Judy’s ex-fiancé with a wooden bird and leaves him to bleed to death in her backyard pool.

Their victims, it must be said, sort of had it coming. Ted Harding was a peach of a dad but a rotter of a husband: he rejected his wife after a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction and cheated on her with a waitress named Bambi, who is about as old as her namesake. Steve Wood, Judy’s fiancé (who survives until the end of the first season), has no redeeming qualities aside from bedroom-blue eyes and a big cock. He is, among other things, a liar, an egotist, an abuser, a Mafia collaborator, and a preposterous home decorator. He is also the reason Judy left the scene of the accident after hitting Jen’s husband.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

When​ Jacques Carbonnel went to Algeria to do his army service in 1956, his wife, Jeanne, asked him not to hide anything from her. ‘You want me to tell you everything,’ he wrote to her soon after arriving. ‘It’s ugly and you are too pretty. We arrest suspects, we release some, we kill some – it’s the dead runaways you see in the newspapers, phoney runaways! We push some out of helicopters above their villages. Criminal, inexcusable. The military solution doesn’t work here.’ Three days later, after returning from a two-day operation, he explained the method the army used to make suspected rebels talk: ‘We fill them up with water. We put a pipe in their mouths, in the anus, and we open the tap.’

Carbonnel was one of 1.5 million conscripts – appelés – who were sent to Algeria to defeat a nationalist uprising: an entire generation of young men in their early twenties. (The population of France in 1954 was 43.3 million.) But they were not at war, at least not officially. Algeria had been conquered in 1830 and administered as an integral part of France since 1848, when it was divided into three départements. More than a million European settlers lived there as French citizens. In Algeria the French were chez eux: according to a popular saying, the Mediterranean separated France from Algeria just as the Seine in Paris divided the Left Bank from the Right. When the rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale launched their war of independence in November 1954, France referred to them as hors-la-loi, outlaws rather than combatants. By the time Algeria won its independence in July 1962, hundreds of thousands of Algerians, and roughly 24,000 French soldiers, were dead. Algeria was liberated after more than a century of colonial domination, and France woke up to find itself stripped of its most prized imperial possession.

More here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

On Boxing Day 1962 it began to snow and didn’t stop for the next 10 weeks. In effect, Britain had entered its own little ice age. There were drifts 23ft high on the Kent-Sussex border, while Stonehenge was buried so deeply that it was almost invisible when viewed from the sky. Icebergs entered the River Medway and, inland, icicles hung from the trees. The upper middle classes dug out their skis, while everyone else experimented with bits of corrugated iron strapped to their feet. A milkman died at the wheel of his float in Essex while indoor laundry froze before it could dry, so that next week’s vests and pants stood rigidly to attention before the kitchen fire. Someone had calculated that the last time it had been this cold was 1814, the year before Napoleon met his Waterloo.

more here.

David Boaz in The Huffington Post:

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Lewis Lapham in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Released in the two-hundredth-anniversary year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Paddy Chayefsky’s script for the 1976 film Network finds the outraged television news anchor Howard Beale urging his viewers to rise up in revolutionary protest against a world in which “there is no America, no democracy,” only the vast and inhumane “dominion of dollars.” Beale names the twentieth century’s colossal capitalist cash machine as the equivalent of the eighteenth-century British Empire dominating a world in which the man or woman who would be free must stand and say, “I’m a human being, goddamn it. My life has value.” The home viewers have been slow in getting to their feet, but as this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly goes to the printer two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, they’re up from their chairs and out in the streets, mad as hell, insisting that their lives—black, white, and brown; young, old, and yet to be born; male, female, transgender, or none of the above—matter. The long-delayed uprising was provoked by the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, unarmed black man, age forty-six, arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in a Minneapolis convenience store. A passerby took note of the incident with a cell-phone camera that sees Floyd in handcuffs lying facedown on the pavement. A police officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck holds the position for eight minutes and forty-six seconds; Floyd struggles to breathe until he loses all trace of a pulse.

The video is horrifying because the officer’s face lacks all trace of human feeling or expression. He seems neither to know nor care to know what he’s doing, which is violence being processed into mindless bureaucratic routine. He might as well be stamping an envelope or closing a box in an Amazon warehouse. Survivors of the Holocaust mention similarly empty faces of the Sonderkommando loading Jews into an oven. The video’s appearance on Facebook prompted the gathering of an angry crowd at the Minneapolis Cup Foods, smashing its windows, setting fire to nearby buildings and automobiles. By nightfall the video had gone viral, and within a matter of hours, revolutionary protests were springing up everywhere in the country, angry syllables of the great word democracy issuing from ten thousand pens, tongues, television screens, and social-media portals.

More here.

There Are Birds Here

—for Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here,
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between fences
and buildings. No.

The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,

I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make out of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about,
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
their neighborhood is not like
a war zone.

I am trying to say
the neighborhood is as tattered
and feathered as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying

how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be
in your birdless city.

by Jamaal May
from The Book of Exit Strategies
Alice James Books, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvnjdBNUFio&list=PLBHxLhKiPKxAuP99mqHQImX6Tn3MTUG39&index=3&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose

Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker:

In an equation-dense paper that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters a year after Weryk’s discovery, Loeb and a Harvard postdoc named Shmuel Bialy proposed that ‘Oumuamua’s “non-gravitational acceleration” was most economically explained by assuming that the object was manufactured. It might be the alien equivalent of an abandoned car, “floating in interstellar space” as “debris.” Or it might be “a fully operational probe” that had been dispatched to our solar system to reconnoitre. The second possibility, Loeb and Bialy suggested, was the more likely, since if the object was just a piece of alien junk, drifting through the galaxy, the odds of our having come across it would be absurdly low. “In contemplating the possibility of an artificial origin, we should keep in mind what Sherlock Holmes said: ‘when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’ ” Loeb wrote in a blog post for Scientific American.

more here.

Oliver Balch at Literary Review:

Everywhere rare metals are mined – be it the Democratic Republic of Congo (where conditions in the mines are ‘straight out of the Middle Ages’), Kazakhstan or Vietnam – pollution and environmental destruction follow. Safety standards aside, it’s hugely inefficient. Know how much lutetium you’ll get from extracting, crushing and refining 1,200 tonnes of rock? One solitary kilogram.

That translates not only into countless mountains being hollowed out but also into colossal amounts of energy being used. Assuming (correctly) that most of this energy comes from fossil fuels, then green tech’s promise of a low-carbon future seems misplaced at best (or, as Pitron prefers, a straightforward ‘ruse’). Never short on stats and facts, The Rare Metals War includes a reference to a US study that suggests that electric vehicles are three to four times as energy-intensive as conventional cars.

more here.

Matthew Janney in The Guardian:

Years ago, Maria Stepanova visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to do research for a book she would end up working on for 30 years. After telling him of her plan, the museum adviser replied: “Ah. One of those books where the author travels around the world in search of his or her roots – there are plenty of those now.” “Yes,” replied Stepanova. “And now there will be one more.”

In Memory of Memory is an astounding collision of personal and cultural history, and Stepanova’s first full-length book published in English, translated by Sasha Dugdale. It is a remarkable work from a writer who has won Russia’s most prestigious honours (including the Big Book award for In Memory of Memory, the NOS literary prize, the Andrei Bely prize and a Joseph Brodsky fellowship); a writer who will likely be spoken about in the same breath as Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk and Belarus’s Svetlana Alexievich in years to come. But 2021 is the year of Stepanova: in addition to In Memory of Memory, her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, and a collection of essays and poems titled The Voice Over, will also be published in English this year. “I feel a bit funny about it,” she jokes, from her dacha outside Moscow. “Isn’t it a bit of an overkill?”

More here.

Jonathan O’Callaghan in Quanta:

Identical twins have nothing on black holes. Twins may grow from the same genetic blueprints, but they can differ in a thousand ways — from temperament to hairstyle. Black holes, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, can have just three characteristics — mass, spin and charge. If those values are the same for any two black holes, it is impossible to discern one twin from the other. Black holes, they say, have no hair.

“In classical general relativity, they would be exactly identical,” said Paul Chesler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. “You can’t tell the difference.”

Yet scientists have begun to wonder if the “no-hair theorem” is strictly true. In 2012, a mathematician named Stefanos Aretakis — then at the University of Cambridge and now at the University of Toronto — suggested that some black holes might have instabilities on their event horizons. These instabilities would effectively give some regions of a black hole’s horizon a stronger gravitational pull than others. That would make otherwise identical black holes distinguishable.

More here.

Manvir Singh in Aeon:

When the anthropologist Irven DeVore suggested in 1962 to then-graduate student Richard Lee that they study hunter-gatherers, neither expected to transform the modern understanding of human nature. A baboon expert, DeVore mostly wanted to expand his research to human groups. Lee was searching for a dissertation project. Being interested in human evolution, they decided not to study peoples in the Americas or Australia, as was the norm in hunter-gatherer studies. Instead, they looked for a site that was, in Lee’s words, ‘close to the actual faunal and floral environment occupied by early man’. So, they headed to Africa – specifically, to the Kalahari.

Twice as big as California and, in places, three times as dry, the Kalahari is a red, scorched scar that yawns across Botswana and Namibia. It’s a brutal place. For nine months a year, the sun tortures the earth. There are no clouds and, with the exception of great scraggly baobabs, no tall trees that provide shade. When in 2013 the travel writer Andrew Evans visited Tau Pan, a settlement in the eastern Kalahari, he said it looked like ‘the deadest part of our planet’.

But appearances can be deceiving.

More here.

Jim Kozubek in Nautilus:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with how life could, at the same time, be so malleable. One day, while meditating on a leaf, the poet had what you might call a proto-evolutionary thought: Plants were never created “and then locked into the given form” but have instead been given, he later wrote, a “felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.” A rediscovery of principles of genetic inheritance in the early 20th century showed that organisms could not learn or acquire heritable traits by interacting with their environment, but they did not yet explain how life could undergo such shapeshifting tricks—the plasticity that fascinated Goethe.

A polymathic and pioneering British biologist proposed such a mechanism for how organisms could adapt to their environment, upending the early field of evolutionary biology. For this, Conrad Hal Waddington became recognized as the last Renaissance biologist. This largely had to do with his idea of an “epigenetic landscape”—a metaphor he coined in 1940 to illustrate a theory for how organisms might regulate which of their genes get expressed in response to environmental cues or pressures, leading them down different developmental pathways. It turned out he was onto something: Just a few years after coining the term, it was found that methyl groups—a small molecule made of carbon and hydrogen—could attach to DNA, or to the proteins that house it, and alter gene expression. Changing how a gene is expressed can have drastic consequences: Every cell in our body has the same genes but looks and functions differently only due to the epigenetics that controls when and how genes get turned on. In 2002, one development biologist wondered whether Waddington’s provocative “ideas are relevant tools for understanding the biological problems of today.”

More here.

Kootai, the Beautiful Rag-picker

There are some women in life who inspire you.
They need not always be the successful women,
Those who belong to high society or status, or
Those who have risen to the top rank in their career.

Success can never be measured by achievements alone,
Success is like an intoxication,
The more you have – the more you want,
It is like an opium that you cannot get rid of.

Some years back, I began to take notice of a woman,
Who walked around the premises of my residence,
Picking up rags, papers, sticks from the ground, and
Putting them into a large sack that she carried.

At first, I suspected her as a petty thief.
Then I realized, that she was just a scavenger,
I began to watch her from my window every morning.
There was something about her that was unique and charming.

One day, I just beckoned to her from my window
And asked her name and as to what she was doing.
She said her name was Kootai- named after a Goddess.
And then, addressing me as ‘Amma’ she flashed a beautiful smile.

Read more »

From Delancy Place:

Today’s selection — from Zora and Langston by Yuval Taylor. Zora Neale Hurston started out her career as an anthropologist recording black folklore with the encouragement of Franz Boas, but her real passion was hybrid — a genre that fused fiction and folk, which symbolized “every aspect of daily life”:

“Zora had begun studying anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia in the fall of 1925, which involved a momentous shift of perspective. All her life Zora had been immersed in black folkways and had never even thought of separating her identity from those of the folk. She used to tell this story: when a policeman stopped her from crossing on a red light, she told him that since she saw all the white people crossing on green, she thought the red light was for colored folks. Here, as she often did, she was taking a common black folktale and applying it to herself. Zora defined folklore as ‘the arts of the people before they find out that there is any such thing as art, and they make it out of whatever they find at hand’; as a corollary, the folklore that Zora had always drawn on was suddenly art to her: it had changed its nature.

“Therefore, now that she was embarking on a course of studying the folk, she could no longer be one of them. As she would write at the beginning of Mules and Men, ‘From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.’ Suddenly African American culture was a thing to research rather than to roll around in and play with.

“In this new endeavor she could not have asked for a better guide than Franz Boas, whom she idolized, calling him ‘the greatest anthropologist alive’ and ‘the king of kings.’ She even convinced Bruce Nugent, who hated schools, to attend Boas’s classes. Boas was sixty-seven at the time and had been at Columbia since 1899. He was without a doubt America’s preeminent anthropologist, almost singlehandedly responsible for debunking scientific racism, defining cultural relativism, and establishing folklore as a subject worthy of scientific study. He unflaggingly encouraged Zora’s work, and urged her to become a professional anthropologist herself; undoubtedly he recognized that Zora could well become America’s foremost authority on black folkways.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)