Eliyahu Freedman in Aljazeera:

“Jaffa will be a Jewish city …  Allowing Arabs to return to Jaffa would not be righteousness but stupidity,” David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in June 1948.

Israel’s first prime minister, who arrived in Palestine at Jaffa port in 1910, was writing after right-wing Irgun forces razed Jaffa in April and expelled nearly 70,000 Palestinian residents.

After the bombs stopped, looting began: Ben-Gurion was one of the strongest supporters of the expropriation of Palestinian property. Months later, thousands of Arabic books lay on the streets, “badly damaged during the war … wind, rain and sun”, according to Adam Raz, historian and author of The Looting of Arab Property in the 1948 War.

More here.

LA Johnson in NPR:

A group of small children sits cross-legged with their teacher, Steve Mejía-Menendez, on a round carpet. He’s a pre-K teacher at Lee Montessori Public Charter School’s campus in Southeast Washington, D.C., and although I’m here to meet him, I almost don’t spot him because he’s eye level with his students.

Mr. Steve, as he’s known here, is talking a few students through a geometry lesson when another student approaches to ask an unrelated question. This kind of distraction happens all the time in classrooms around the United States. Mr. Steve doesn’t lose focus. He uses American Sign Language to say “wait” — palms facing up, fingers wiggling — and the child waits quietly. When the lesson arrives at a natural stopping point, the student is invited to ask his question, and Mr. Steve silently responds by nodding his head along with his fist, which is sign language for “yes.”

Blink, and you could miss the whole interaction.

This isn’t a school for students with hearing disabilities, but Mr. Steve uses ASL as part of a broader approach to minimize noise in the classroom. And it’s noticeably quiet. No one is talking louder than what’s often referred to in Montessori schools as “the hum.”

More here.

Shannon Hall in Nature:

There is a mental-health crisis in science — at all career stages and across the world. Graduate students are being harassed and discriminated against, paid meagre wages, bullied, overworked and sometimes sexually assaulted. It doesn’t get much better for early-career researchers struggling to land long-term employment. And established senior researchers face immense pressure to win grants, publish in high-profile journals and maintain their reputations in highly competitive fields.

Scientists have raised concerns for years about the impacts of all these pressures on mental health. But a series of studies in the past few years are now providing hard data. And the findings show that the situation is dire.

More here.

Kate Strasdin at The Paris Review:

There was no immediate indication of who might have created this amazing dress diary, as I called it—of who had spent so much time carefully arranging the pieces of wool, silk, cotton, and lace into a document of lives in cloth. While there was much I was uncertain of, however, one thing I knew for sure from the careful handwriting that arched over each piece of cloth: this was the work of one woman. I just didn’t know who she was.

In the months that followed, I began to try and unravel some of the stories that might be contained in the album’s pages. Rather than detail its contents digitally, I had a sense that, to be authentic, I needed to write everything down in longhand. I bought a leather-bound book of handmade paper and a black ink pen and started at the beginning, transcribing each tiny caption. I wrote down names, dates, fabrics, colors, and patterns, trying to see who might emerge, looking out for clues about who the author could have been. I counted more than two thousand pieces of fabric: some patterned, others plain; some large and others much smaller. There were pieces paired with longer captions, and others that bore simply a year or nothing at all.

more here.

The reverse side also has a reverse side.
……………………….. —Japanese Proverb

The Reverse Side

It’s why when we speak a truth
some of us instantly feel foolish
as if a deck inside us has been shuffled
and there it is—the opposite
of what we said.

And perhaps why when we fall in love
we’re already falling out of it.

It’s why the terrified and the simple
latch on to one story,
just one version of the great mystery.

Image & afterimage, oh even
the open-minded yearn for a fiction
to rein things in—
the snapshot, the line of a frame.

How do we not go crazy,
we who have found ourselves compelled
to live with the circle, the ellipses, the word
noy yet written.

by Stephen Dunn
from Different Hours
W.W. Norton and Company, 2000

Thomas Nagel at the New Statesman:

Austin died in 1960, at the age of 48, and Krishnan sees this as the end of ordinary language philosophy. Metaphysical ambition – though still in the form of conceptual analysis – was exemplified by Strawson, who examined the basic structure of the human world, including our concept of persons, in Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (1959). Questions about the relation between mind and body had not been put to rest by Ryle; they remain wide open to this day. And moral and political theory flourished from the 1970s.

Krishnan concludes by asking what, in the ordinary language tradition, is still living, and what is dead. What is dead, he says, is the project of “dissolving philosophical problems by the simple device of showing them to arise from the misuse of language” as well as the “paranoid preoccupation with the avoidance of nonsense, as defined according to strictures that disallowed far too much that patently did make sense”. Also lost is the distrust of “depth” as a philosophical virtue – no longer dismissed as an excuse for obscurity.

What survives, according to Krishnan, is a set of standards and a style of inquiry that is of permanent value.

more here.

Michael Milburn in The Hedgehog Review:

For many viewers, the highlight of Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War is the reading of a poignant letter from a Union soldier to his wife a week before he is killed in the First Battle of Bull Run. “Sarah, my love for you is deathless,” Major Sullivan Ballou writes from his unit’s camp in Washington, DC. “It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains to the battlefield.” Concluding the series’ premiere episode in September 1990, the letter became the equivalent of a viral phenomenon in that pre-social media age: “Within minutes of the first night’s broadcast,” Burns said a year later, “the phone began ringing off the hook with calls from across the country, eager to find out about Sullivan Ballou….The calls would not stop all week—and they continue.” The letter still resonates today—Senator Chuck Schumer read an excerpt at Donald Trump’s inauguration—and in multiple articles turned up by a Google search, the word that recurs most frequently to praise it is “eloquent.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

More here.

Henry M. J. Tonks in Public Books:

The 1970s and 1980s are usually seen as the transformative era of recent American political history. And if the 1970s saw a “great shift” in US politics—with defeat in Vietnam, oil crises, industries in decline, and liberalism unraveling—then Americans woke up in 1981 to the bright morning of a new free-market consensus. The 1990s, by contrast, are typically construed as an historical ellipsis between that era of sanguine prosperity and the upheaval of the 2000s. The ’90s were a moment of tranquility. Cold War won, business booming, history at an end.

Nothing could be further from the truth. New scholarship indicates that the end of the Cold War did not so much settle history’s debates as it did undermine the structuring framework of American politics.

More here.

The Bell

We always praise what’s praisable
with imperfection
understood in the overtones.

When we say we’re free
we mean more or less –
always too much less, probably.

When we say our country’s great
we mean – as others have said about theirs –
such as it is, based on us.

Us – each of whom
by all he himself has chosen
stands not as tall as he’d like to stand.

Governing men have lied,
so have I, so have you, lied,
among many other things.

Our greed and fraud are broadcast.
Jefferson thinks it’ll all work out;
John Adams has doubts.

The iron tongue of that bell
will ring and bong and clang and sing
a complicated song.

It’s physical tone shall sound pure,
like the communication of angels;
but we’ll know (won’t we?)

what’s going on, who’s pulling
together on the rope underneath:
a man, a woman:  both,

among other things, Americans.

by R.P.Dickey
—thanks to Nils Peterson

James Wood in The New Yorker:

“Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America.” Perhaps you need to be a slight stranger to this country to formulate American ubiquity in this way—as comic tautology, as wry Q.E.D. Quite often, in the last twenty years, I’ve found myself driving along some strip development in Massachusetts or New York State, or Indiana or Nevada for that matter, and as the repetitive commercial furniture passes by—the Hampton Inn, the kindergarten pink-and-orange of Dunkin’ Donuts, Chick-fil-A’s chirpy red rooster—I’m suddenly seized by panic, because for a second I don’t know where I am. The placeless wallpaper keeps unfurling. And then Martin Amis’s sentence from his great early book of journalism, “The Moronic Inferno” (1986), appears in my mind, as both balm and further terror: well, wherever exactly I am, I’m certainly “in America.” So at least I laugh.

One definition of literary value might be the number of any given writer’s phrases or images that appear unbidden in the mind as you are just going about your day. For me, Amisian jokes and tags have for a long time made up part of the useful poetry of existence. When I’m bored or otherwise unhappy about reviewing another book, those wicked lines about the book reviewer Richard Tull, from Amis’s novel “The Information” (1995), swing into view: “He was very good at book reviewing. When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed.” Whenever I see a photograph of Saul Bellow, I recall, with a smile, Amis’s description of the American novelist as looking “like an omniscient tortoise.” Encountering smokers in contemporary novels or movies, I think often of John Self, the narrator of Amis’s novel “Money” (1984): “ ‘Yeah,’ I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Scientific American:

Imagine a physicist observing a quantum system whose behavior is akin to a coin toss: it could come up heads or tails. They perform the quantum coin toss and see heads. Could they be certain that their result was an objective, absolute and indisputable fact about the world? If the coin was simply the kind we see in our everyday experience, then the outcome of the toss would be the same for everyone: heads all around! But as with most things in quantum physics, the result of a quantum coin toss would be a much more complicated “It depends.” There are theoretically plausible scenarios in which another observer might find that the result of our physicist’s coin toss was tails.

At the heart of this bizarreness is what’s called the measurement problem. Standard quantum mechanics accounts for what happens when you measure a quantum system: essentially, the measurement causes the system’s multiple possible states to randomly “collapse” into one definite state. But this accounting doesn’t define what constitutes a measurement—hence, the measurement problem.

More here.

Michael Prodger at Literary Review:

Contemporary accounts suggest that Elsheimer was an attractive personality but ‘very solitary and contemplative’: walking through the streets, ‘he would be so caught up in thought that he would not say anything to anyone unless they spoke to him first’. He was also a perfectionist and an achingly slow worker, traits which led to his imprisonment for debt, since he could not bring himself to churn out works to satisfy his ready market. Incarceration did not spur greater productivity but exacerbated his pre-existing depression.

Elsheimer, as one of his circle put it, ‘grasped Nature’s spirit and essence’. His paintings, says Bell, are products of the shift in the natural sciences to greater objectivity. Elsheimer moved in a circle that contained the collector and papal botanist Johannes Faber and the Accademia dei Lincei, a group of empiricists with Galileo at its heart. He was familiar with current intellectual enquiries, put his eye to one of the first telescopes and was an expert in herbal medicine.

more here.