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.