From Harvard Magazine:

“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever does,” says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining mathematically the phenomena of everyday life: practicing the old-fashioned method of scientific inquiry called natural philosophy, where one wonders about everything.

Mahadevan, who grew up in India, tells a traditional story about Krishna where mud becomes metaphor. “In Hindu mythology, Krishna is divine,” he begins. “However, because there was a prophecy that he would overthrow an evil king, his origins when he was a baby were hidden from almost everybody. So when Krishna was born, his mother surreptitiously sent him away to be brought up by a foster mother who didn’t know who he was. As in all mythologies, there were premonitions [of greatness], but growing up with his foster mother, he would go out like all children and play in the mud. One day he started to eat the mud, putting it in his mouth. And his [foster] mother, from afar, said, ‘Don’t do it.’” Krishna kept eating the mud. “Again [she] said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and yet he continued. So she came up to him, and when she opened his mouth to take out the mud, she looked—and she saw the universe.

“Without ever claiming all the grandeur that the story actually suggests,” says Mahadevan, “you just have to look and you will find interesting things everywhere.”

More here.

Memory, a Small Bird
Susie Patlove

Memory is a small bird
……..flying with bones so light
its tiny feathered form blurs
……..and I have only a scene
dimly lit, of a woman’s legs
……..dark-stockinged, wordless
and while everything there
……..is shaped by angular light
her legs are soft, cylindrical
……..sinking into her black shoes
and who am I to believe
……..that such a thing occured
or whatever I saw in 1948
……..had much to do
with what my mother said to
……..the woman in stockings
or if I, the baby, crawling
……..on our kitchen floor, knew
for the first time that words
……..could order the bright emptiness
that what was uttered
……..by one woman to another
described their minds
……..and I could then translate
all shapes and every color
……..into sounds flying, birdlike
between the one who was everything
……..and a stranger, whose legs
would come down through decades
……..an odd vision asserting itself
until it arrives here on this page
……..mysterious, flapping its wings

…

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in the New York Times Book Review:

When the Banana Company arrives in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it brings with it first modernity and then doom. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez writes, the company “changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” It imported “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town; it unleashed a “wave of bullets” on striking workers in the plaza. When the Banana Company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.”

If Macondo is meant to represent Latin America, it is fitting that “the Banana Company” plays so central a role in its development and decline. For much of the 20th century, the American banana company United Fruit dominated portions of almost a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere. It was, Peter Chapman writes in “Bananas,” his breezy but insightful history of the company, “more powerful than many nation states … a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.” United Fruit essentially invented not only “the concept and reality of the banana republic,” but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern banana. “If it weren’t for United Fruit,” he observes, “the banana would never have emerged from the dark, then arrived in such quantities as to bring prices that made it available to all.”

Today, “the banana is the world’s fourth major food, after rice, wheat and milk.” But when a Brooklyn-born twentysomething named Minor Keith planted a few banana cuttings next to a railroad track in Costa Rica in the early 1870s, it was virtually unknown outside its native environs…

More here.

Christopher Hitchens, Shashi Tharoor, Dan Savage, and some other guy, on Bill Maher:

Russell Greenberg reviews No Way Home: The Decline of the World’s Great Animal Migrations by David S. Wilcove, in American Scientist:

Conservation biology focuses largely on developing solutions to the human-caused extinction crisis gripping the world’s biota. Somewhat diminished amid the valiant efforts to save threatened species and populations is the complementary goal of maintaining the grandeur of certain natural phenomena, including ones that capture the imagination by virtue of the sheer abundance of organisms involved. A prime example, which David S. Wilcove describes eloquently in No Way Home, is animal migration—the back-and-forth journeys of flocks, herds, pods and schools of animals across plains and seas, and sometimes even hemispheres. These grand migrations have evolved over millions of years to allow animals to take advantage of seasonal flushes of food. Yet the patterns of movement are indeed dynamic and can change noticeably over a fairly short period of time.

No Way Home explores the current precarious state of migration, raising a fundamental question for conservationists: How satisfying will it be to save all of the migratory species from extinction if the flow of migration nevertheless slows to a trickle? Migration is indeed declining. In some cases the changes have been abrupt and obvious, but more often they have taken place so slowly as to be barely perceptible until eventually it becomes obvious that a particular migration is an unrecognizable ghost of the phenomenon it once was.

More here.

Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka, via Amitava Kumar:

Far away from the glittering salons of Bombay and Delhi, away from its obsessions with booming malls and plummeting stocks, a good man waits in jail. He’s been in for nine months. But it is unlikely that the story of Dr Binayak Sen would have caught your attention. He’s been written about in bits. Some channels have covered him. But even though he is a mesmeric character — intense, articulate, idealistic, a man of privilege who seeks nothing for himself — and his imprisonment is a scandal that should shame any civilised society, for the most part, news of him here has been overwhelmed by hotter media preoccupations. Lead India competitions. And polls on who should be awarded Indian of the Year. Shah Rukh, Manmohan, or Vijay Mallya? Men like Dr Binayak can wait their turn in jail.

The story of Binayak Sen is the story of the dangerously thin ice India’s democratic rights skim on. The story of every dangerous schism in India today: State versus people. Urban versus rural. Unbridled development versus human need. Blind law versus natural justice. It is the story of an India unraveling at the seams. The story of unjust things that happen — unreported — to thousands of innocent people, the story of unjust things waiting to happen to you and me, if we ever step off the rails of shining India to investigate what’s happening in the rest of the country. Most of all, it is the story of what can be done to ordinary individuals when the State dons the garb of being under siege.

But, first the facts of the story…

More here.  [Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Richard John Neuhaus reviews Liberty of Conscience by Martha Nussbaum, in the New York Sun:

Martha Nussbaum straddles several disciplines, holding appointments in the philosophy department, the law school, and the divinity school at the University of Chicago. In her new book, “Liberty of Conscience” (Basic Books, 406 pages, $27.50), she reminds us that she also straddles cultural and religious traditions, having ancestors who came over on the Mayflower and having converted from liberal Episcopalianism to liberal Judaism of the Reform persuasion. Thus does she embody, so to speak, the diversity that she champions in this spirited work of advocacy.

Almost every word of the book’s title raises interesting questions. Is “liberty” the same thing as religious “free exercise”? Does the “free exercise” of religion mean “religious equality”? Are “conscience” and “religion” interchangeable terms? And is her account of “America’s tradition” consistent with the legal history and lived experience of our country? These are all questions very much worth debating, and on all of them Ms. Nussbaum has strong opinions that she advances with an air of great self-confidence, and at length. One wonders if the book really needs to be all of 400 pages. But then, she is covering a truly enormous territory.

More here.

Read this poem aloud.  The rhytmn of it is spectacular.

Poet to Blacksmith
Seamus Heaney

–Eoghan Rua O Suilliabhdin’s (1748-84) instructions to
Seamus MacGerailt, translated from the Irish

Seamus, make me a side-arm to take on the earth,
A suitable tool for digging and grubbing the ground,
Lightsome and pleasant to lean on or cut with or lift,
Tastily finished and trim and right for the hand.

No trace of the hammer to show on the sheen of the blade,
The thing to have purchase and spring and be fit for the strain,
The shaft to be socketed in dead true and dead straight,
And I’ll work with the gang till I drop and never complain.

The plate and the edge of it not to be wrinkly or crooked–
I see it well shaped from the anvil and sharp from the file,
The grain of the wood and the line of the shaft nicely fitted,
And best thing of all, the ring of it, sweet as a bell.

..

Yonatan Mendel in the LRB:

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren’t making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel’s leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month – December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and eight ministers in the Palestinian government.

Also in the Economist:

The United Nations has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato (see article). It hopes that greater awareness of the merits of potatoes will contribute to the achievement of its Millennium Development Goals, by helping to alleviate poverty, improve food security and promote economic development. It is always the international year of this or month of that. But the potato’s unusual history (see article) means it is well worth celebrating by readers of The Economist—because the potato is intertwined with economic development, trade liberalisation and globalisation.

Unlikely though it seems, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the industrial revolution in England in the 19th century. It provided a cheap source of calories and was easy to cultivate, so it liberated workers from the land. Potatoes became popular in the north of England, as people there specialised in livestock farming and domestic industry, while farmers in the south (where the soil was more suitable) concentrated on wheat production. By a happy accident, this concentrated industrial activity in the regions where coal was readily available, and a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its “historically revolutionary role”.

In the Economist:

Irma Stern was born in South Africa, but studied under the German Expressionists. Her adult life was spent travelling widely, particularly within Africa, and her sense of being of the continent and yet outside it pervades all her work.

When she died in 1966, Stern was indisputably the grande dame of South African painting. But her reputation stagnated from then on, and it is only since two Sterns from Jack and Helene Kahn’s collection sold in an auction at Sotheby’s in Cape Town last February for £256,000 ($507,000) and £469,000 that her work has begun to gain significant international renown. The two star lots of Bonhams first South African sale in London last May were also both Sterns.

In Bonhams’s upcoming South African auction on January 31st, 32 of her works will go under the hammer, including a rich-red portrait of the timid but passionate-looking wife of a rich Indian merchant from the Cape. Dirty and unframed, the picture has lain for a generation in the attic of its British owner who did not know what it was. Bonhams estimates the painting will sell for £80,000-120,000.

Most white artists of Stern’s generation, Modigliani and Picasso included, painted Africans as objects—exotic, long-limbed and indistinguishable from each other. Stern, herself an outsider, both because of her Jewish heritage and her lifelong reputation for being rude, crotchety and mean, portrayed Africans as individuals. In an era that has begun to regard even Gauguin as a neo-colonialist, Stern had a fresh and prescient eye on another culture.

Nicholson Baker reviews John Broughton Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the NYRB:

When, last year, some computer scientists at the University of Minnesota studied millions of Wikipedia edits, they found that most of the good ones—those whose words persisted intact through many later viewings—were made by a tiny percentage of contributors. Enormous numbers of users have added the occasional enriching morsel to Wikipedia—and without this bystander’s knowledge the encyclopedia would have gone nowhere—but relatively few users know how to frame their contribution in a form that lasts.[*]

So how do you become one of Wikipedia’s upper crust—one of the several thousand whose words will live on for a little while, before later verbal fumarolings erode what you wrote? It’s not easy. You have to have a cool head, so that you don’t get drawn into soul-destroying disputes, and you need some practical writing ability, and a quick eye, and a knack for synthesis. And you need lots of free time—time to master the odd conventions and the unfamiliar vocabulary (words like “smerge,” “POV warrior,” “forum shopping,” “hatnote,” “meat puppet,” “fancruft,” and “transclusion”), and time to read through guidelines and policy pages and essays and the endless records of old skirmishes—and time to have been gently but firmly, or perhaps rather sharply, reminded by other editors how you should behave. There’s a long apprenticeship of trial and error.

At least, that’s how it used to be. Now there’s a quicker path to proficiency: John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, part of the Missing Manual series, overseen by The New York Times’s cheery electronics expert, David Pogue.

Mark Leonard in Prospect (UK):

We are used to China’s growing influence on the world economy—but could it also reshape our ideas about politics and power? This story of China’s intellectual awakening is less well documented. We closely follow the twists and turns in America’s intellectual life, but how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker? Inside China—in party forums, but also in universities, in semi-independent think tanks, in journals and on the internet—debate rages about the direction of the country: “new left” economists argue with the “new right” about inequality; political theorists argue about the relative importance of elections and the rule of law; and in the foreign policy realm, China’s neocons argue with liberal internationalists about grand strategy. Chinese thinkers are trying to reconcile competing goals, exploring how they can enjoy the benefits of global markets while protecting China from the creative destruction they could unleash in its political and economic system. Some others are trying to challenge the flat world of US globalisation with a “walled world” Chinese version.

Paradoxically, the power of the Chinese intellectual is amplified by China’s repressive political system, where there are no opposition parties, no independent trade unions, no public disagreements between politicians and a media that exists to underpin social control rather than promote political accountability. Intellectual debate in this world can become a surrogate for politics—if only because it is more personal, aggressive and emotive than anything that formal politics can muster.

From The New York Review of Books:

A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win by Shelby Steele.

In A Bound Man, Steele attempts to apply to the election his notions about the uses of “black victimization” and “white guilt” that he worked out in The Content of Our Character. “You must never ever concede that only black responsibility can truly lift blacks into parity with whites,” because to do so would be to give up control over white guilt. In politics, blacks wear either the mask of the challenger or that of the bargainer. The purpose of these masks is to enable blacks to gain things from the white majority by “manipulating their need for racial innocence.” Because whites are “stigmatized with past racism,” blacks have a monopoly over racial innocence and believe, as only the oppressed can, that this is their greatest power in America.

It could be said that Obama’s way has been prepared not by Colin Powell, dutifully holding up the vial at the UN, but by Nelson Mandela, who emerged from his prison not bitter, calling for reconciliation. It is possible that the emerging youth vote is an anti–”War on Terror” vote, not just an anti–Iraq war vote. Mandela was also the one figure on the world stage who persuaded us that he was exactly what he seemed to be. The anti-apartheid movement was one of the few things happening on campuses in the 1980s. Since then white students in their thousands have taken Black Studies classes, reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, bringing Derrida to bear in their term papers on the hip-hop artist Nas’s debut album, Illmatic, even as black student enrollment nationwide has been falling. Shelby Steele ridicules institutions obsessed with diversity, but they, like Obama, are right to be inspired by the civil rights movement. The youth vote that gave him such a margin of victory in South Carolina, and kept his campaign going on Super Tuesday, missed the Sixties. Here is their chance.

More here.

From Lensculture.com:

For moments or hours every day, urban dwellers often find themselves temporarily trapped in enclosed spaces, bathed in artificial light, surrounded by garish colors, and mired in a sluggish state of pause. This can happen in a subway station,  a waiting room, an indoor shopping mall, an airport lounge… While the people may be physically present, their minds and spirits are often elsewhere.

The blurred portraits of anonymous strangers made by Russian photographer Alexei Vassiliev capture this phenomenon with surprising, emotional force. Some of his subjects look as if they are nervously fluttering inside a hovering mirage. Others appear serene and glowingly transcendent. His photographs convey a sense of physical confinement and spiritual wandering. These strangers (identified only by an arcane numbering system) are unaware of the scrutiny of the camera. They are lost in a limbo of introspection — not aloof, but quietly caged, temporarily suspended, slowed, restricted, waiting, existential.

More here.

At Video Nation:

Over at the SSRC, Chapter 1 of Alex de Waal’s AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis – Yet:

This book argues that African governments ,civil society organizations and international institutions have proved remarkably effective at managing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a way that minimizes political threats. In doing so, they have adopted a model of response to AIDS that focuses on process rather than outcome – chiefly the smooth and coordinated functioning of their own institutions,but also adherence to certain principles, some of which are based on evidence,and some on faith.These process indicators, such as  UNAIDS’s ‘three ones’, are rigorously assessed . Encouragingly for democrats, this process emphasizes human rights and the participation of civil society leaders,and it has thereby ensured that democracy in African is not threatened by the epidemic and may even be strengthened. With a few important exceptions where different intersecting stresses come together,AIDS is unlikely to cause socio-political crisis.

Over at Reset DOC, Mitchell Cohen, Andrew Arato, Ernesto Ferrero, Mohamed Salmawy and Daniele Castellani Perelli debate the boycott the Book Fair in Turin for asking Israel to be its guest of honour. Cohen:

This campaign is wrong-headed, often slanderous, and betrays the best ideals of the left and democracy.

I say this, indeed I would insist on this, as an American leftist who has in fact opposed many Israeli policies, especially the settlements, for decades. When these anti-Israeli campaigners hiss at “the Zionists,” they remind me of American neo-conservatives hissing at “leftists.” The hiss itself should tell you that there is something wrong. And note the fact that attempts in Britain to boycott Israeli universities were thwarted because they contravened anti-discrimination laws. From a political point of view, the efforts were also ridiculous. Israeli universities have been major bastions of dovish sentiment. Israel’s 60th anniversary should be celebrated and Israeli-Palestinian peace should be sought at the same time.

Arato:

This was not the right time to make Israel the guest of honor at a book fair, unless Israeli Jewish and Arab writers were put into the center of attention. With that said, the boycott is stupid. Why boycott precisely the writers who are critical of government policies? Yes, let us support the Israel’s right to exist. But a state is a people, a territory and a coercive organization. There is no question about the identity of the coercive organization, and we should accept it as such. But should we all accept every Jew (by the very uncertain standards of the Law of Return and subsequent interpretations) to be part of the people of Israel, wherever they live, whatever their religion, when people born in the present borders (1948, 1967, 2008) cannot be because of their ethnicity or religion?

Bernard Avishai over at Jewcy:

[Obama] He asked if we can hope to move peace forward or secure Israel if we cannot look for solutions that are “non-military or non-belligerent.” He said he admires the debate in Israel, he said, where views of the Palestinians are often “more nuanced” than in the US. “I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community,” Obama lamented, “that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, that you’re anti-Israel. And that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel.”

YOU’D THINK OBAMA’S stance would be welcomed in Israel, and by the peace camp especially, but even the liberal Haaretz can’t hide its anxiety. The paper’s Washington correspondent, Shmuel Rosner, is exercised by Obama’s insinuation that he would, of all things, find it difficult to work with Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, whom most of the paper’s columnists otherwise revile. It could be interpreted “as meddling in Israel’s internal politics,” Rosner wrote, immediately adding (and as if to add to the incoherence of his misgivings) that Bill Clinton had problems with Netanyahu, too, while Israelis have themselves meddled in American electoral politics.

But this reflects a more general disquiet, which is not simply about a suspect foreign policy team, or the allegedly tortured relations between African-Americans and Jewish Americans. For most Israelis, even liberal Israelis, things have always boiled down to a single question which their politicians and diplomats have posed since Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state over the objections of his Secretary of State, George Marshall. Is this American a friend of Israel?