Dan Hancox at Poetry Magazine:

Grime music is catharsis delivered from a vertiginous height. Born and bred in London’s inner city housing projects in the early 2000’s, among a Black youth subculture that drew more on Jamaican reggae than American rap, grime was a product of confinement. London’s social housing tower blocks, in which many of grime’s pioneers grew up, became synonymous with the genre’s grittiness and hyperlocal roots, but they were also essential to the music’s distribution. Grime was first popularized by pirate radio stations broadcast from illegal transmitters and squatted “studios” erected on the rooftops of 20- and 30-story buildings. Up there, elevated from their impoverished upbringings, grime’s founders found space to breathe. What they created was unapologetically strange and uncompromising: music built from beats too irregular to dance to, rapping too fast to be intelligible on the radio, lyrics full of niche slang and swear words, and songs not geared around hooks and choruses. Moreover, all of this was produced by artists unwilling to play with a British music industry focused on developing homegrown guitar bands and importing rap and R&B from the United States.

more here.

Sudhir Hazareesingh at the TLS:

A crisis of this magnitude almost invariably reveals wider dysfunctions, and so it has been with Macron’s debacle with the gilets jaunes. The President seemed oblivious to the plight of the provinces, and unable to show any personal empathy with the lives of ordinary citizens. Visiting all corners of the territory and making an emotional connection with the people are key functions of the French republican monarch. De Gaulle managed this with his systematic tournées across small towns and villages: by the end of his first term, he had visited every metropolitan département. The very incarnation of this esprit de proximité was Jacques Chirac, who genuinely delighted in his encounters with the public, especially when they afforded opportunities to sample tasty local victuals. Macron, in contrast, has failed to cultivate these organic (and gastronomical) ties with the citizenry. He has also communicated very patchily, with long periods of Olympian silence combined with clumsy off-the-cuff interventions – as when he grumbled about his compatriots’ “Gaulois tendency to resist change”, or when he told an unemployed man that he could find a job by “just crossing the street”. In his December 10 speech, he expressed his sorrow for having “hurt” the French people by “some of his words”, and for seeming “indifferent” to their everyday concerns. This is one of the areas where his combination of intellectual superiority and political inexperience – he never held elected office before becoming President – have come back to haunt him.

more here.

Han Zhang at The New Yorker:

In 724 A.D., the twenty-three-year-old poet Li Bai got on a boat and set out from his home region of Shu, today’s Sichuan province, in search of Daoist learnings and a political career. He wasn’t headed anywhere in particular. Instead, he began a life of roaming—hiking up mountains to Daoist sites, meeting men of letters all over the country, and leaving behind hundreds of poems about his travels, his solitude, his friends, the moon, and the pleasures of drinking wine. In the centuries since, Li’s verse, by turns playful and profound, has made him China’s most beloved poet.

In “The Banished Immortal,” a biography of Li, the novelist Ha Jin narrates the poet’s unusual life with erudition and empathy. Jin, a National Book Award-winning writer, is most known for his fiction, which is largely set in China during the Cultural Revolution and in Chinese immigrant communities in the U.S. One might easily take “The Banished Immortal,” his first work of nonfiction, as a departure from his previous work.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

During a six-month period in 1889, nearly 900,000 people descended upon the sprawling Universal Exposition in Paris, the fourth world’s fair to be held in the city, this one constructed in the shadows of the new Eiffel Tower. For the average Parisian strolling down the Esplanade des Invalides, the sight of a Tunisian palace, an Algerian bazaar, or a Cambodian pagoda would have meant pure enchantment, and nobody was more enchanted than Claude Debussy. Inside a replica of a Javanese village, the 26-year-old composer encountered the ensemble of bronze metallophones, gongs, and other instruments known as a gamelan, the musicians in the pavilion joined by a male singer and four young female dancers. For an artist recoiling from the rigid orthodoxy of the conservatory, the music’s bright, sensuous timbres, its feeling of spaciousness, and its vaguely pentatonic scales offered Debussy a path toward something new, even if he struggled to make sense of what he heard in the context of western harmony and counterpoint.

more here.

Jennifer Byrne in Nature:

From where I work at the University of Sydney, you cannot see the ocean. However, in Australia, the ocean is part of our national consciousness. This is perhaps why I think of the research literature as an ocean, linking researchers in disparate yet ultimately connected fields. Just as there is growing alarm about our rising, polluted oceans, scientists are increasingly talking about the swelling research literature and its contamination by incorrect research results.

Most of the talk centres on unconscious bias and ill-informed sloppiness; conversations about intentional deception are more difficult. Unlike most faulty research practices, fraud actively evades detection. It is also overlooked because the scientific community has been unwilling to have frank and open discussions about it.

In 2015, I discovered several papers had been written about a gene that I and my colleagues first reported in 1998. All were by different authors based in China, but contained shared and strange irregularities. They also used highly similar language and figures. I think the papers came from third parties working for profit, fuelled by the pressure on authors to meet unrealistic publication expectations. (Such operations have been identified by investigative journalists.) I also think that, with most of the protein-coding and non-protein-coding genes in the human genome currently understudied, such third parties are targeting less-well-known human genes to produce low-value and possibly fraudulent papers.

How could such manuscripts slip through peer review?

More here.

From History:

Frederick Douglass, the most influential black man in 19th-century America, wrote 1,200 pages of autobiography, one of the most impressive performances of memoir in the nation’s history. The three texts included Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (published in 1845); his long-form masterpiece My Bondage and My Freedom, (1855); and finally, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised in 1892). During his lifetime, they launched him to national prominence; since then, they have become essential texts of U.S. history.

In them, Douglass tells his extraordinary personal story—of the slave who endured and witnessed untold acts of brutality, then audaciously willed his own freedom. He describes the young slave who mastered the master’s language, and who saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation. And then he captures the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as no one else ever did in America. But as in so many autobiographies, there is also much Douglass holds back, details that don’t fit his carefully constructed narrative. He says little, for instance, of his complex family relationships—including his second marriage to a white woman—or his important female friends. Nor does he ever really reveal his true feelings about his improbable odyssey from a fugitive slave and radical outsider, a black man who gained fame for eloquently trumpeting the nation’s harshest truths, to a political insider warmly welcomed by Abraham Lincoln in the White House.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

A Question from Borges

In my republic what remains is soil,
but on all the roads in Buenos Aires
I am invisible. Borges sends me a note
I read it and hide it in my pocket.
On my way to the train station,
the university empties behind me.

Every Latin American story
should end in crucifixion.
How much courage would it take
for a foreigner to die in the pampas?
I have nothing left to abandon.

Words are wealthy, I think to myself
as my wife breaks pan de agua over the table.
She has been speaking in short sentences
since our argument on Quincey—
we don’t fear life but
it also arrives suddenly.

My commute carries my grief
through a city that eludes me.
I have resided in these ruins
disguising my own skeleton. But
these ruins crumbled here
from another continent.
Read more »

Wes Siler in Outside:

On Monday, a trail runner in Colorado was attacked by a mountain lion. While fighting to defend his life, the man managed to kill the lion. This is how he did that.

The reports I read this morning were almost unbelievable. I’d heard of people fighting off mountain lions and surviving attacks, but the idea of someone managing to kill the apex predator with their bare hands? I was skeptical. But here was the official report from Colorado Parks and Wildlife:

“The victim of the attack described hearing something behind him on the trail and was attacked by a mountain lion as he turned around to investigate. The lion lunged at the runner, biting his face and wrist. He was able to fight and break free from the lion, killing the lion in self-defense. The runner sustained serious, but non-life threatening injuries as a result of the attack.”

“We’ve had a few false reports here of animal attacks there didn’t turn out to be factual,” Rebecca Ferrell, a public information officer for CPW, told me. “In this case, everything that the runner told us was completely credible. The injuries he sustained, as well as the injuries we found on the body of the mountain lion, corresponded with his story. We have zero reason to believe that anything he told us was false.”

More here.  [Thanks to Dave Munger.]

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Researchers in Belgium found that people with depression had consistently low levels of bacteria known as Coprococcus and Dialister whether they took antidepressants or not.

If the preliminary finding stands up to further scrutiny, it could pave the way for new treatments for mental health disorders based on probiotics that boost levels of “good” bacteria in the intestines.

Jeroen Raes of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology and the Catholic University of Leuven drew on medical tests and GP records to look for links between depression, quality of life and microbes lurking in the faeces of more than 1,000 people enrolled in the Flemish Gut Flora Project.

He found that two kinds of bugs, namely Faecalibacterium and Coprococcus, were both more common in people who claimed to enjoy a high mental quality of life. Meanwhile, those with depression had lower than average levels of Coprococcus and Dialister.

More here.

Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Policy:

During the Cold War, the tensions that defined the world were ideological and geopolitical. As a result, the superstar experts of that era were those with special expertise in those areas. And policymakers who could combine an understanding of both, such as Kissinger, George Kennan, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, ascended to the top of the heap, winning the admiration of both politicians and the public. Once the Cold War ended, however, geopolitical and ideological issues faded in significance, overshadowed by the rapidly expanding global market as formerly socialist countries joined the Western free trade system. All of a sudden, the most valuable intellectual training and practical experience became economics, which was seen as the secret sauce that could make and unmake nations. In 1999, after the Asian crisis abated, Time magazine ran a cover story with a photograph of Summers, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, economics has enjoyed a kind of intellectual hegemony.

More here.

Victor Lavalle at Bookforum:

As Zachary Lazar put it in his New York Times review: “It helps that James . . . is a virtuoso at depicting violence, particularly at the beginning of this book, where we witness scene after scene of astonishing sadism, as young men and boys are impelled by savagery toward savagery of their own.” Later he writes, “The novel’s great strength is the way it conveys the degradation of Kingston’s slums.” Lazar’s praise, the elements of the novel he highlighted, would be echoed again and again in each review I read, and I can’t say he’s wrong. James ismasterful with violence and sadism, and Kingston’s slums are vividly portrayed.

But after a while I wondered about a vital aspect of the novel that I rarely saw mentioned, let alone praised, in these reviews: the sex. More specifically, the gay sex. There’s a fair bit of it in the novel; two characters—Weeper and John-John K—are gangsters who have sex with men, and James writes about both their violence and their sexuality. But only one of these things was mentioned regularly by reviewers.

more here.

Francine Prose at Lapham’s Quarterly:

If, as one sometimes hears, people can be divided into two groups—those who run away from violence and danger and those who run toward it—something similar could be said about ones who, like Brassaï and Caravaggio, see themselves as nocturnal beings, as opposed to those who see themselves as creatures of daylight, or even identify with that loaded appellation morning person. Some, like Sancho Panza, wish only to go to bed at twilight and to sleep undisturbed—escaping the real and imagined terrors that they perhaps sense lurk in the dark. Others, like Don Quixote, feel the compulsion to stay awake for at least part of the night, to maintain a vigil.

Still others feel that, like the vampires and werewolves a daylight lover may fear, they only really come alive when the lights go out. The thieves and murderers who ply their trade through the pages of this issue can do so only under cover of darkness, and so, as Juvenal and Italo Calvinoremind us, more crimes are committed during those blackened hours. Night is said to be Satan’s favorite time; one only has to read John C. Norris’ 1871 account of the nocturnal terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan to be mostly convinced of this.

more here.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce at The New Statesman:

You don’t turn to Thorn’s memoirs (this is her second; she is also a New Statesman columnist) for rock ’n’ roll name-dropping, but for someone who can – to quote her quoting Updike – “give the mundane its beautiful due”. My brother-in-law says of being a fan of the band: “The only difference between them and us was that we were listening to Everything but the Girl, while they were in Everything but the Girl.” The past is another planet and the diary twinkles with the arcane poetry of lost brand names – Aqua Manda, Green Shield Stamps.

Though it does turn out that Thorn was a bit more rock ’n’ roll than you might have thought. There’s a lot of underage drinking (“Southern Comfort, gin and orange. LOVELY!”) and sexual danger: “Creep asked me to dance again but I said no – found out he is a policeman. Yikes!” She was 13 when she wrote that, but the boys, she says, were “always older”.

more here.

Immanuel Kant

The philosophy of white blood cells:
this is self,
this is non-self.
The starry sky of non-self,
perfectly mirrored
deep inside.
Immanuel Kant,
perfectly mirrored
deep inside.

And he knows nothing about it,
he is only afraid of drafts.
And he knows nothing about it,
though this is the critique
of pure reason.

Deep inside.

by Miroslav Holub
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996
Translation from Czech by Dana Habova and David Young

Sara Miller Llana in The Christian Science Monitor:

Last fall it was voted America’s best-loved book. This winter it made it to Broadway, grossing more at the box office in its first full week than any other play in history. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” became a classic the moment it was published in 1960 – a tale of racial injustice set in Depression-era Alabama told through the eyes of 6-year-old Scout. It garnered the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and its movie adaptation won three Oscars in 1963. That it has smashed theater records and risen to the top of a PBS nationwide popularity poll of American literature nearly 60 years later speaks to the lasting power of the narrative of a little girl making sense of racism and hypocrisy around her, as her father Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.

But its endurance is not just its clear-eyed depiction of a moment in time in the American South. It is the book’s evolution itself, from a groundbreaking text in its time to one today that raises complex questions about how the story is told – who tells it and, notably for some, who doesn’t. As “To Kill a Mockingbird” gets adapted for the stage, giving more voice to the black characters that were secondary or silent in the original novel, and gets re-examined in classrooms across North America, some are asking if a time comes when a book should be retired despite the impression it made on generations of students and the nostalgia many still feel about the work. That discussion gives it even more staying power.

More here.

Emily Lordi in The New Yorker:

“I don’t want to make somebody else,” Toni Morrison’s character Sula declares, when urged to get married and have kids, “I want to make myself.” Morrison herself might have understood this to be a false dichotomy—she was a single mother of two by the time she published “Sula,” her second novel, in 1973—but, in her fiction, she split the individualist impulse to make an artful life and the domestic drive to make a home between two characters: Sula and her best friend, Nel. The tensions between these two desires animate the body of fiction and nonfiction about the private lives of women and mothers. It’s a canon that has been dominated by the accounts of white, straight writers, but it now includes Michelle Obama’s blockbuster memoir, “Becoming.”

What Obama brings to this genre is, first, a powerful sense of self, which precedes and exceeds her domestic relationships—the book’s three sections are titled “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us,” “Becoming More”—and, second, a conviction that the roles of wife and mother are themselves undefined. She makes and remakes her relationship to both throughout her adult life. In this, she draws on the literature of black women’s self-making that “Sula” represents. The modern matron saint of that tradition is Zora Neale Hurston, who, in a 1928 essay, describes “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”: a prismatic, mutable experience of being a loner, a spectacle, an ordinary woman, a goddess (“the eternal feminine with its string of beads”). Lucille Clifton shares Hurston’s sense of the need to invent oneself in a world without reliable mirrors or maps; as she writes in a poem, from 1992, “i had no model. / born in babylon / both nonwhite and woman / what did I see to be except myself? / i made it up…” Like these writers, Obama exposes the particular pressures and thrills of black women’s self-creation. But she also details the rather more modest creation of a stable domestic life. By bringing motherhood, marriage, and self-making together in “Becoming,” she combines the possibilities that Sula and Nel represent.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

Claire Mullen in Literary Hub:

In Diego Rivera’s La creación, Nahui Olin sits among a gathering of figures that represent “the fable,” draped in gold and blue. She appears as the figure of Erotic Poetry, fitting for what she was known for at the time: her erotic writing and sexual freedom.

Olin—a painter, poet, and artists’ model—was known throughout the 1920s and 30s for her intense beauty; huge green eyes, golden hair, and an all-engulfing stare. But her image has been practically erased from the lore of that post-revolutionary time. Her piercing eyes aren’t recognizable unless one is familiar with her face, and the myth that surrounds it: of a woman who reveled in her own beauty, who painted portraits of herself with her many lovers, and who was eventually shunned by society and died, decades later, in the house that she grew up in, alone. Now, a new generation is revalorizing her story.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

A young evolutionary biologist, Barrett had come to Nebraska’s Sand Hills with a grand plan. He would build large outdoor enclosures in areas with light or dark soil, and fill them with captured mice. Over time, he would see how these rodents adapted to the different landscapes—a deliberate, real-world test of natural selection, on a scale that biologists rarely attempt.

But first, he had to find the right spots: flat terrain with the right color soil, an abundance of mice, and a willing owner. The last of these was proving especially elusive, Barrett bemoaned. Local farmers weren’t keen on giving up valuable agricultural land to some random out-of-towner. After knocking on door after door, he had come up empty.

More here.