Harry T Dyer in LiveScience:

Speakers recently flew in from around (or perhaps, across?) the earth for a three-day event held in Birmingham: the UK’s first ever public Flat Earth Convention. It was well attended, and wasn’t just three days of speeches and YouTube clips (though, granted, there was a lot of this). There was also a lot of team-building, networking, debating, workshops – and scientific experiments. Yes, flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts. The weekend in no small part revolved around discussing and debating science, with lots of time spent running, planning, and reporting on the latest set of flat earth experiments and models. Indeed, as one presenter noted early on, flat earthers try to “look for multiple, verifiable evidence” and advised attendees to “always do your own research and accept you might be wrong”.

While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don’t trust is scientists, and the established relationships between “power” and “knowledge”. This relationship between power and knowledge has long been theorised by sociologists. By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers.

Let me begin by stating quickly that I’m not really interested in discussing if the earth if flat or not (for the record, I’m happily a “globe earther”) – and I’m not seeking to mock or denigrate this community. What’s important here is not necessarily whether they believe the earth is flat or not, but instead what their resurgence and public conventions tell us about science and knowledge in the 21st century. Multiple competing models were suggested throughout the weekend, including “classic” flat earth, domes, ice walls, diamonds, puddles with multiple worlds inside, and even the earth as the inside of a giant cosmic egg. The level of discussion however often did not revolve around the models on offer, but on broader issues of attitudes towards existing structures of knowledge, and the institutions that supported and presented these models.

More here.

Michael J. Barany in the LA Review of Books:

If calculus has turned you off, left you behind, shoed you away, or beaten you down, Steven Strogatz — a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University — wants to help. (If you and calculus are on friendly terms, you will find much to learn and enjoy here, but you are not the target audience.) Strogatz is a specialist in the mathematics of chaotic interacting systems, the topic of his first crossover book, Sync (Hyperion, 2003). He followed with a mix of memoir and differential equations in The Calculus of Friendship (Princeton, 2009) and a New York Times series that grew into an exuberant mathematical primer, The Joy of X(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). His latest, Infinite Powers, aims to explain the fundamental ideas of calculus, some of its history, and a few of its applications. Even those with no need or desire to do calculus, Strogatz contends, should be able to appreciate it.

When modern calculus debuted in the late 17th century, only a handful of people could claim to understand it well. In the 18th century, scientists and philosophers came to see it as both a powerful tool for reasoning and a way of marking the bounds of rational inquiry: a rational scientific question was, by definition, one that could be addressed with calculus. In the 19th century, it became the foundation of science and engineering education. We now live in a scientific and technological age made by those who learned, with great effort, to see the world through calculus-tinted glasses.

So it is no wonder that people like Strogatz, highly trained to see calculus all around them, can conjure wonder and excitement at the wages of calculus in the world.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the NYT:

Using an IBM quantum computer, they managed to undo the aging of a single, simulated elementary particle by one millionth of a second. But it was a Pyrrhic victory at best, requiring manipulations so unlikely to occur naturally that it only reinforced the notion that we are helplessly trapped in the flow of time.

Most of us already sense that the atoms of a scrambled egg can’t be unscrambled back inside a pristine shell. Now it seems that, under general conditions, even a single particle probably can’t go backward without help and careful tinkering.

“We demonstrate that time-reversing even ONE quantum particle is an unsurmountable task for nature alone,” Valerii M. Vinokur, of Argonne National Laboratory, said in an email message; he is one of the five aspiring time lords led by Gordey B. Lesovik of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

On paper, the basic laws of physics are reversible; they work mathematically whether time is running forward or backward. But if time is just another dimension of space-time, as Einstein said, it’s a strange one-way dimension. In the real world we can climb out of the subway and turn left or right, but we don’t have the choice of going forward or back in time. We are always headed toward the future.

We seem to be at the mercy of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder and complexity only increase in a closed system such as, say, the universe. Thus, the atoms in an egg never unscramble themselves, in part because there are countless more ways for them to be thoroughly scrambled than successfully reassembled.

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Corey Robin in The New Yorker:

A sinking economy and rising fascism led the bookish teen-ager to communism. Hobsbawm began organizing against the Nazis and struggling through Marx. (When he was seventeen, he ruefully noted that he hadn’t read enough Marx; by this time, Evans observes, he had consumed the first volume of “Capital,” “The Poverty of Philosophy,” “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” and “The Civil War in France.”) Once the Nazis came to power, he moved to Britain. After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Cambridge and securing a teaching position at Birkbeck College, he came to lead a charmed life in London, where he attended parties hosted by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan that featured A. J. Ayer, Robin Blackburn, and Liza Minnelli.

But “Interesting Times” has a second, unintended meaning. Hobsbawm was obsessed with boredom; his experience of it appears at least twenty-seven times in Evans’s biography. Were it not for Marx, Hobsbawm tells us, in a book of essays, he never would “have developed any special interest in history.” The subject was too dull. The British writer Adam Phillips describes boredom as “that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins.” More than a wish for excitement, boredom contains a longing for narrative, for engagement that warrants attention to the world.

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David A. Bell in Dissent:

I always regret that my father, Daniel Bell, who would have turned 100 on May 10, did not write memoirs. In the early 1990s, I spent a long time trying to persuade him to do so. He was then in his early seventies and had just retired, very much against his will, from his professorship at Harvard (they still had mandatory retirement for academics in those days!). For over a decade, books about the “New York Intellectuals” had been appearing at a steady clip, and they usually devoted considerable attention to him: his early years in the socialist movement and at the City College of New York; his career as a prolific intellectual journalist; his development into one of the great modern sociologists. Most of the authors treated him quite favorably. Some had done extensive interviews with him.

Nonetheless, every time a new book arrived at his house in Cambridge, he would call me, fulminating about the inevitable misrepresentations and mistakes. Sometimes he would go so far as to send long letters on the subject to the unfortunate author, typed on his old Smith Corona electric, with shaky, handwritten corrections. If the book had treated him unfairly, as some did, the letter would turn distinctly dyspeptic. “You should write memoirs,” I would tell him on the phone. Get your own story out. Make sure future historians have your side of it. He was particularly annoyed when the authors called him a “neoconservative,” as journalists had done since Peter Steinfels had published The Neoconservatives in 1979. My father insisted that he remained a man of the left, a “socialist in economics,” a “Menshevik.” Don’t tell this to me, I would say. I know it already. Write it.

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A. K. M. Skarpelis at Public Books:

Empires are strange creatures. Obsessed with their own end-time, they enlist the help of the katechon—a form of political sovereignty that “delays or maintains the end of time”—to postpone the inevitable, and stretch out time before the end. The obsessive fear of decline and an active engagement with trying to delay the end of empire is something that links contemporary right-wing movements to Himmler’s, Spengler’s, and Friedrich Ratzel’s temporal understandings of the basis for the National Socialist empire. The difference between then and now is that Hitler’s “solution” to the racial diversity he diagnosed as one of the core problems contributing to the cyclicity of empires and their inevitable decline was the murder of those the National Socialist regime deemed to be barbarians.

Still, “barbarians” continue to appear at the gates of American civilization in the guise of immigrants and refugees, and Bannon’s Aeneas is Abraham Lincoln, looming over a fireplace in the well-appointed Washington, DC, townhouse serving as headquarters for The Movement.

more here.

Paul Morton at The LARB:

SAUL STEINBERG CALLED HIMSELF “a writer who draws.” Harold Rosenberg called him “a writer in pictures.” Critics compared him to Klee and Picasso, but reviews were just as likely to namedrop Joyce and Stendhal. He was friends with Nabokov as well as Saul Bellow, Primo Levi, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, John Hollander, Charles Simic, and Ian Frazier. Ulysseswas his favorite novel. Nabokov’s essay on Gogol was his guidebook.

The tendency to think of Steinberg as a literary figure comes as much from his self-definition as it does from his identity as a New Yorker illustrator. His drawings would sometimes take up two-page spreads. Others would be wrapped by the text of a short story or a slice-of-life sketch. In this way they became another story to be read, one composed in an immigrant’s visual patois. (Steinberg grew up in Romania and studied in Italy before coming to the United States during World War II.)

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Wlliam Dalrymple at The Guardian:

Stories of human journeys into the Underworld are as old as literature itself. But few of them are happy tales. Old Babylonian cuneiform tablets recording the Epic of Gilgamesh were first incised around 1800BC. These tell of the Sumerian hero Enkidu who reappeared from a long imprisonment underground in the Netherworld, during which he had to sail through storms of hailstones that struck him like “hammers”, and surfed waves that attacked his boat like “butting turtles”. Gilgamesh questions him: “Did you see my little stillborn children who never knew existence?” “I saw them,” answers Enkidu.

Similar journeys end as darkly for Orpheus, Hercules and Aeneas as they do for their direct counterparts in Finnish, Inuit, Aztec, Mayan and Hindu mythology. In Greek mythology tales of haunting journeys down the rivers of the dead are sufficiently common that they have their own collective noun: katabasis. But for every Theseus who enters the labyrinthine darkness of the Underland to triumph against the Minotaur there are many more Eurydices who never return. Such fears, Robert Macfarlane points out, are embedded deep in our language where “height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’.”

more here.

Ordinance Upon Arrival

Welcome to you
who have managed to get here.
It’s been a terrible trip;
you should be happy you have survived it.
Statistics prove that not many do.
You would like a bath, a hot meal,
a good night’s sleep. Some of you
need medical attention.
None of this is available.
These things have always been
in short supply; now
they are impossible to obtain.

This is not
a temporary situation.
Our condolences on your disappointment.
It is not our responsibility
everything you have heard about this place
is false. It is not our fault
you have been deceived,
ruined your health getting here.
For reasons beyond our control
there is no vehicle out.
.
by Naomi Lazard
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Kate Wagner in Baffler:

THE SIMULTANEOUS RELEASE of the final season of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame has wrought upon this earth the swarm of a particular breed of internet person, one who responds to critics of any corporate franchise or brand with this insipid image: The original image comes from a webcomic posted on Facebook by Adam Ellis in 2016. Like many reaction images, it has its ebbs and flows of popularity, but in our recent pop cultural climate, it has seen an impressive resurgence. Let me be clear: this meme and its underlying ideology suck.

There are unlimited problems with the “Let People Enjoy Things” (henceforth abbreviated to LPET) approach to art and culture, first and foremost among them the fact that franchises in question (GoT and Marvel Comics) are multi-billion-dollar corporate entities engineered to entertain in the same way Doritos are made so that you can’t eat just one. These are some of the most profitable media empires in history, and they will plainly not be harmed by a Twitter user posting about why they personally don’t like them.

More here.

Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian:

At the centre of Natalie Haynes’s absorbing, fiercely feminist new novel A Thousand Ships, about the women caught up in the Trojan war, is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. Here, the goddess invoked at the start of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has something to say about the story that is being told under her guidance:

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say … But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men.

“One man’s anger at the behaviour of another” is a way of summing up the plot of the Iliad: the wrath of Achilles, directed at the Greek commander-in-chief, Agamemnon. The quarrel between the two men, who are ostensibly on the same side, is about the apportioning of loot – predictably enough, a captured woman, Briseis – and the stakes are so high because Achilles is by far the better fighter. When Agamemnon insists on pulling rank and taking Briseis, Achilles withdraws from the conflict, and the Greek invaders of Troy are pushed to the verge of defeat. Eventually, after the death of his beloved companion Patroclus, Achilles enters the battle, and the poem culminates in his slaughtering of Hector, Troy’s greatest warrior.

Haynes’s book is emphatically not this: it is, as Calliope’s intervention explains, the story of the shadowy women on the edges of Homer’s poem, who nonetheless – in Briseis’s case, in Helen of Troy’s case – drive the plot. A Thousand Ships is one of a trio of recent novels by women that, to a greater or lesser degree, rewrite the Homeric epics from the point of view of female characters. Madeline Miller’s beguiling Circe has the witch from the Odysseyat its centre, while Pat Barker’s remarkable The Silence of the Girls retells the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis. Towards the end of Barker’s novel, Briseis ponders how the war will be remembered. “What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp.”

More here.

Jennifer A. Fray at The Point:

Stepping inside the Notre Dame is a bit like stepping outside of ordinary time and space. The immense verticality of the entire structure, illuminated from outside through light refracted in the colors of the stained glass, isn’t accidental in its immediate effects on our consciousness. We are meant to experience our own smallness relative to its vastness; we are meant to be drawn upwards towards the light pouring in from all sides, and to recognize it as symbolic of an external revelation that illuminates and transfigures our minds and hearts. Her rose windows are meant to be occasions to contemplate the mysteries of human life—birth, love, sex, death—and the nature of eternity. As we enter, we are meant to feel deep in our hearts a yearning for that which is greater than ourselves; if we do not experience this awe and wonder, or stop to contemplate the depths of these mysteries, we have missed something of the structure’s essential intent.

more here.

Peter Singer and Michael Plant in Project Syndicate:

Just a little more than 24 hours after the fire that seriously damaged Notre-Dame de Paris, donations to rebuild the 850-year-old cathedral had passed €1 billion ($1.1 billion). Most of the money is coming from some of France’s wealthiest people. Untec, the national union representing construction economists in France, has indicated that the cost of the reconstruction is likely to be between €300 and €600 million, far less than the amount raised.

France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protesters have already raised the obvious question: “What about the poor?” If the rich can so easily give hundreds of millions to restore a building, they could just as easily have spent that money elsewhere in better ways. They could have spent €1 billion to save lives. So let’s confront the awkward question: How many lives is restoring Notre Dame worth?

Many will say that such a comparison is impossible. But if no comparison can be made, then we cannot know what is best to do. If the answer we propose seems simplistic, it can at least serve as a starting point from which to develop a better one.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

You can find the news about Pakistan’s war on women buried deep inside the metro pages of Urdu newspapers. I stumbled upon it a few years ago. I noticed that I could pick up my newspaper and almost every day find news about a murdered woman. I thought maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe Karachi is a huge city, these things happen. But it went on and on. It became so routine that I could pick up the paper, open the exact same pages, just like you can bet that you’ll find a crossword or letters to the editor, and it was always there.

Names changed, localities changed, the relationship between the murdered and her murderer changed and of course there were minor variations on how she was killed and where the body was found, but it was always there: single column, one and a half inches. Often the woman wasn’t even named: she was someone’s sister or mother of four, or the girl who ran away with her lover or the girl who refused to marry a suitor. Sometimes the news made it to the front page of the metro section but for that the murder had to be particularly gruesome, or the killer had killed himself after killing the woman, or the victim was very young, or the murderer killed the children along with the mother. That last one usually ends up on the front page if it’s a slow news day.

More here.

Robert Macfarlane at the TLS:

Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age, 110,000 years ago. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the temperature in the clouds at a moment of snowfall early in the Holocene. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1815, Laki in 1783, Mount St Helens in 1482 and Kuwae in 1453. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans, and it remembers the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and it tells – tells us that we live on a fickle planet, capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals.

Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue.

more here.

Louise Perry in Quillette:

Nusrat Jahan Rafi was a young woman who attended a madrassa in the rural town of Feni in Bangladesh. In late March of this year, she attended the local police station to report a crime. Nusrat alleged that the headmaster at her madrassa had called her into his office several days before and sexually assaulted her. After the assault, Nusrat told her family what had happened and decided to make a report to the police, no doubt trusting that they would treat her with some decency. The officer who took her statement did no such thing. He videotaped it on his camera phone and can be heard on the footage telling her that the assault was “not a big deal.” The headmaster was arrested, but someone within the police leaked the fact that Nusrat had made allegations against him and the footage of her statement ended up on social media. She was soon receiving threats from students at the madrassa as well as other people in the community. Influential local politicians expressed their support for the headmaster and crowds gathered in the streets of Feni demanding his release. Defiant, Nusrat insisted on going into the madrassa to sit her exams, but while there she was tricked into going up onto the roof of the building with a fellow female student. She was then set upon by a group of people who tried to persuade her to withdraw her allegations. When she refused, they doused her with kerosene and set her alight. Some of the men arrested have since told police that the attack had been planned and ordered by the headmaster from prison. Nusrat survived long enough to describe what had happened, but died in hospital on 10th April. She was 19.

More here.

Happy Marriage

My life, like a sandbar,
has been taken over by a monster of a man
who wants my body under his control
so that, if he wishes, he can spit in my face,
……. slap me on the cheek,
pinch my rear;
so that, if he wishes, he can rob me of the clothes,
and take my naked beauty in his grip;
So that, if he wishes. he can chain my feet,
if he wishes, with no qualms whatsoever,
……. whip me,
chop off my hands, my fingers,
sprinkle salt in the open wound,
throw ground-up black pepper in my eyes,
with a dagger can slash my thigh,
can string me up and hang me.

His goal: to control my heart
so that I would love him;
in my lonely house at night
sleepless, full of anxiety,
clutching at the window grille,
……..I would wait for him and sob;
tears rolling down, I would bake homemade bread,
would drink, as if they were ambrosia,
the filthy liquids of his polygynous body
so that, loving him, I would melt like wax,
not turning my eyes toward any other man.
I would give proof of my chastity all my life.

So that, loving him,
on some moonlit night
I would commit suicide
……. in a fit of ecstasy.
.

by Taslima Nasrin
from Poetry 180
random house 2003

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