The Ant

The ant moves on tiny Sephardic feet.
The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.
The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Often bears are piled up close to each other.
In their world it's just one hump after another.
It's like looking at piles of many melons.

You and I have spent so many hours working.
We have paid dearly for the life we have.
It's alright if we do nothing tonight.

I am so much in love with mournful music
That I don't bother to look for violinists.
The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

I love to see the fiddlers tuning up their old fiddles,
And the the singer urging the low note to come.
I saw her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

You and I have worked hard for the life we have.
But we love to remember the way the soul leaps
Over and over into the lonely heavens.

by Robert Bly

From Himal Southasian:

Right from the time of Independence, Pakistan has been troubled. The country’s psyche has been scarred since it emerged from the turmoil and bloodletting of Partition. Further trauma was in store when, in 1971, the eastern wing broke away, calling into question the very basis – ostensibly, religion – on which Pakistan was established. Today, the evolution of a composite Pakistani nationalism is being stringently challenged by a spectrum of sub-nationalisms. Still, one must not give in to the temptation to make too much of even this litany of woes and challenges – many of the other countries in Southasia, as in the rest of the world, live with such tensions. Perhaps Pakistan only reflects the problems more clearly.

Our cover image for this issue, taken by photojournalist Muhammad Danial Shah, presents a detail from the National Monument in Islamabad. The very design of the monument, inaugurated in 2007, is one that fervently seeks to forge a composite Pakistani nationalism, with four main petals and three smaller petals representing the extant four provinces and three territories (see pic). But bas relief in marble can only do so much to develop a unitary identity as a sum of the parts. Local and regional aspirations will have to be recognised in a ‘nations within nations’ formula – and the question is how successful Pakistan will be, given that the country is still a work in progress? There is no one answer, and the articles in this issue reflect the possibility of a multi-faceted formula. While some would claim that Pakistan is a failed state, others would say that it is stable enough to stand alone, the result of six decades of cohabitation. The hope is that Pakistan overcomes its existential angst before too long, because Pakistani stability and self-confidence would do wonders to the idea of Southasia.

More here.

From Nature:

After a decade-long struggle, researchers have determined the structure of an enzyme that repairs damage wreaked by the Sun on DNA and has an important role in preventing skin cancer. Ultraviolet light from the Sun can cause DNA damage by fusing together two of the nucleotide bases that sit side by side on a DNA strand. This forms a bulky lesion that distorts the DNA helix, making it impossible for most of the enzymes involved in DNA replication to read past the altered site correctly.

In 1999, researchers reported that one enzyme, DNA polymerase η ('eta'), a member of a family of proteins that copes with DNA damage, is able to bypass this error. The enzyme is mutated in some patients with a condition called xeroderma pigmentosum, which causes extreme sensitivity to sunlight. For such patients, the briefest exposure to the Sun can be enough to cause skin cancer. This week, two research groups report in Nature^1,2 that they have at last determined precisely how DNA polymerase η manages this feat. The teams have captured a molecular snapshot of the enzyme — both from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and from humans — as it reads damaged DNA and produces a pristine, unmutated copy. “These two papers represent a major step forward in understanding the basic mechanisms responsible for skin cancer,” says Thomas Kunkel, a biochemist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, who was not affiliated with either study.

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

The current and future problems of the beleaguered nation of Afghanistan may go well beyond war, the Taliban, Al Quaida, US occupation, poverty and heroin trafficking. The land locked nation of rough and rugged terrain is apparently the repository of vast mineral wealth, including large quantities of lithium, an essential component of many electronic gadgets. But like an uninformed (and unstable) nouveau riche individual, a poor, backward, politically fractious, war torn country may find its sudden wealth to be a burdensom and even a lethal liability. Prosperity is as much about managing one's assets as it is about owning them. The savvy rich get richer when blessed with goodies and the poor often become bewildered, murderous and vulnerable when in possession of sudden new riches.

More here.

Martin Gardner in The New Criterion:

The title of Amir Alexander’s new book (his second) and the beautiful unidentified landscape painting on its jacket, refer to an early dawn duel on a deserted street in Paris. On May 30, 1892. Éveraste Galois, a brilliant young mathematician who pioneered the study of groups, a branch of abstract algebra, was killed in a ridiculous pistol duel over a woman. The duel was so little newsworthy that to this day no one knows for sure who shot Galois in the stomach and left him to die. He was twenty. As soon as Galois was buried, a legend formed about him. He became a martyr unjustly scorned by the French establishment, a scorn that contributed to his poverty and early death. This myth found its strongest expression in a flawed chapter on Galois in Eric Temple Bell’s bestseller Men of Mathematics.

But as Alexander, a science historian who lives in Los Angeles, makes clear, Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd, suffering from what today would be called a “personality disorder.” His anger was paranoid and unremitting. He insulted friends. His ardent Republicanism, with its hatred of the king, sent him twice to prison. He railed against the French establishment, even though it published many of his papers. “If any person was ultimately to blame for the short and tragic life of this brilliant young mathematician,” Alexander writes, “it was inescapably himself.”

More here.

Mohamad Bazzi in Foreign Affairs:

For many Shiite Muslims, whose religion was born of rebellion, last year's popular uprising in Iran was just the latest in a centuries-long struggle against injustice and tyranny. Now, as the clerical regime consolidates its grip on power a year after the tainted reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran remains torn by what seems to be a hopeless conflict between Islam and democracy. But the 2009 unrest and violent crackdown in Iran were actually battles in a larger war that has been raging for centuries within Shiism — a war over who should rule the faithful, and how. There is a more moderate, democratic vision of Shiism — one that has been stifled ever since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution — that could ultimately resolve the current conflict.

Shiite clerics have long debated their role in politics. The “quietist” school — rooted in the sect's tradition of seeking to avoid confrontation with powerful rulers — argues against direct engagement in political matters. The more activist school emphasizes the martyrdom of Shiism's founding figure, Imam Hussein, who advocated rebellion and confrontation. But even within the activist school, there is a debate over the extent of clerical power.

More here.

Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Everybody agrees that scientific research is indispensable to the nation's health, prosperity, and security. In the many discussions of the value of research, however, one rarely hears any mention of how much publication of the results is best. Indeed, for all the regrets one hears in these hard times of research suffering from financing problems, we shouldn't forget the fact that the last few decades have seen astounding growth in the sheer output of research findings and conclusions. Just consider the raw increase in the number of journals. Using Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of “refereed academic/scholarly” publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main cause: the growth in the number of researchers.

Many people regard this upsurge as a sign of health. They emphasize the remarkable discoveries and breakthroughs of scientific research over the years; they note that in the Times Higher Education's ranking of research universities around the world, campuses in the United States fill six of the top 10 spots. More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise.

If only that were true.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further.

Der Zeit interviews the Swiss oboist, composer and conductor Heinz Holliger on Schumann's labyrinthine imagination, in Sign and Sight:

Die Zeit: Herr Holliger, you reference Robert Schumann in all your compositions. You conduct Schumann and you have devoted huge amount of your time to his life and his work. You don't seem to be able to tear yourself away from this composer.

Heinz Holliger: I readily admit that it is a little obsessive.

How did your passion for Schumann begin?

I was 14 or 15 years old, when I heard the Violin Sonata No. 2 and the Trio in G Minor at a concert in Berlin. These are considered difficult late works which turn most people off Schumann. It was just the opposite for me. It was like being set on fire.

And the flame has never gone out?

On the contrary. It burnss more intensely as I get older.

What is it that keeps it burning?

You never reach a dead end with Schumann and his analytical observations. New doors are always opening up. One door opens onto the next and there is another one behind that, and another and another. In his work, speculative thinking collides head on with a vast, labyrinthine imagination. Schumann was an extremely erudite man. He translated Sophocles at 17. He had considerable literary talents and he was probably one the greatest writers among the composers, up there with Berlioz and Debussy. This makes him an encyclopaedic character. A cosmic figure without limits. The same applies to his music. Although Beethoven was a great role model for him, he never wanted to realise linear trains of thought in his compositions. He was not interested in going from A to B. He starts with a primal cell of a motif, he sets spiralling movements in motion, which exponentiate to create vast edifices. I admire his associative thinking process, his ability to draw out ever new circles of speculation. Schumann's music is all about dislocation. The bar line is a coffin for him. He almost always shifts the emphasis of the weightier notes. He syncopates the primary accents or overlays various layers of time. What emerges is a sort of delirious time. You no longer feel the passing of time.

Dushko Petrovich's fun talk delivered at The Armory Show’s Open Forum series on March 6th, 2010, in n+1:

Post-minimalist

Decades ago, Richard Serra borrowed an expensive Brancusi book from an artist I know. He kept it too long, ignoring several requests to return it. When he finally brought it back, almost a year later, he casually mentioned he “got forty ideas” off the Romanian.

Post-Brooklynist

A friend had gotten fed up with the annual rent increases. He decided to tell his landlord off and move further into Bushwick. It was really satisfying. He hired an agent and they eventually found an acceptable place: about the same rent, three stops further out. When he went in to sign the lease, he encountered the same landlord behind a different desk.

Post-racist

Gagosian has hired a lot of black security guards.

David Runciman reviews Hitchens' Hitch-22 in the LRB and says something very insightful:

Peter and Christopher were brought together on a platform in 2008 to debate the latter’s book against God (God Is Not Great), and discovered that neither of them had the stomach for the vituperation and mutual hostility their audience had been anticipating. A few days earlier, Christopher had cooked Peter supper in Washington, ‘a domesticated action so unexpected that I still haven’t got over it … If he is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage of his life, then what else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just makes him a little sad. What he is sad about is Christopher’s inability to see that his militant atheism is just an extension of his earlier Trotskyism. Christopher, Peter thinks, is still hankering for a world in which evil is vanquished and all the mistakes of the past can be eradicated. What he can’t see is that this wishful thinking is precisely the kind of self-delusion that he takes to be characteristic of religion. That’s because it is a kind of religion. In his yearning for certainty, Christopher is merely replicating the intolerance and taste for indoctrination that he professes to despise among the priesthood.

This idea that the new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The blustering, obscene, insatiable, limitlessly restless author of Hitch-22 doesn’t come across as much of a priest manqué, not even a whisky priest. What he most resembles, to an almost uncanny degree, is a particular kind of political romantic, as described by Carl Schmitt in his 1919 book Political Romanticism. Schmitt was ostensibly writing about German romanticism at the turn of the 19th century (the intellectual movement that flourished between Rousseau and Hegel) but his real targets were the revolutionary romantics of his own time, including two of Hitchens’s Trotskyite heroes, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For Schmitt, political romantics are driven not by the quest for pseudo-religious certainty, but by the search for excitement, for the romance of what he calls ‘the occasion’. They want something, anything, to happen, so that they can feel themselves to be at the heart of things. As a result, political romantics often lead complicated double lives, moving between different versions of themselves, experimenting with alternative personae. ‘Reversing one’s position between several realities and playing them off against one another belongs to the nature of the romantic situation,’ Schmitt writes. Political romantics are ostensibly self-sufficient yet also have a desperate need for human comradeship. ‘In every romantic we can find examples of anarchistic self-confidence as well as an excessive need for sociability. He is just as easily moved by altruistic feelings, by pity and sympathy, as by presumptuous snobbery.’ Romantics loathe abuses of power, but invariably end up worshipping power itself, sometimes indiscriminately: ‘The caliph of Baghdad is no less romantic than the patriarch of Jerusalem. Here everything can be substituted for everything else.’ Above all, in place of God they substitute themselves. ‘As long as the romantic believed he was himself the transcendental ego, he did not have to be troubled by the question of the true cause: he was himself the creator of the world in which he lived.’

Gardening Space

There wasn't anything here
when we moved in;
there wasn't any here, yet.
But the neighborhood grew quickly,
an ever-accelerating expansion.
Streetlights flicked on.

We waited impatiently
for the compost of matter to decay
to a substrate for life.
In the meantime, we said Howdy!
to the next-door galaxies over the back fence,
their barbeque grills glowing in the bare dark yards,
the kids arm-wrestling, flexing their muscles
in the neophyte friendships
of gravitational pull.

As the background temperature rose
in minuscule increments,
we planted seeds with each small thaw.
They dwindled and died a billion times.
Through the radiation monsoons,
each drop of energy filling a riddle
of expanding rings, we planted again and again,
scattering starry grains
into barren orbital furrows,
strings marking the seed lines.

It was springtime everywhere at once.
Glowing blooms swelled and unfurled,
vapors emanating to fill hollow voids
with being. Moons hovered like irascible insects
over coalescing worlds.

Sometimes we thought summer would never end,
that the heat would last forever.
We never asked where does it come from.
Where does it go?

We sit on the porch,
shucking green planets from
the opening pods of night,
talking about harvests
and the date of the first
hard frost.

by F.J. Bergman
from Astropoetica,
Summer 2009

From Harvard Magazine:

Harvard may have the lowest dropout rate of any college. Though years off are common, currently around 98 percent of those who matriculate at Harvard College receive their bachelor’s degrees within six years, according to the Registrar’s Office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Several celebrated Harvard dropouts have done quite nicely sans diploma. These include R. Buckminster Fuller ’17, Robert Lowell ’37, Bonnie Raitt ’72, Bill Gates ’77, and Matt Damon ’92 in the last century alone. But what of those who do not become famous? What becomes of those who leave Harvard voluntarily and, despite multiple invitations, never return? (The College routinely contacts those who have left to ask if they wish to complete their degrees.) We chose an era known for its radical sensibility and tracked down three members of a College class (1969) that might represent its high-water mark, to catch up with them and see if they had any regrets about the path not taken. Here are their stories.

Joanne Ricca: Adventurous Caregiver

When Joanne Ricca was a high-school junior in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the American Field Service chose her as an exchange student to live in a Swedish town the following school year (1964-65). Students at her high school circulated a petition protesting Ricca’s selection. “They thought I was un-American,” she explains. “I was a beatnik, a rebel, very outspoken—I liked to stir things up. My entire junior year I wore the same thing to high school every day—a green corduroy jumper, with a black turtleneck under it in winter—because I thought people made too much of clothes. For me it was sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I was a bad girl.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Gut microbes deserve a lot of credit: They not only help digest our food, produce some nutrients, detoxify harmful substances, and protect us from pathogens—they are also important for the development of the immune system. Disturbances in the gut microbiota have been linked to allergies as well as disorders of the digestive and immune systems. Although intestinal organisms' impact on the digestive system's functioning is generally accepted, how they influence pathologies elsewhere in the body has remained a mystery. New research has begun to address this enigma. Diane Mathis, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues have found that one species of naturally occurring gut bacteria can set off arthritis in mice, in part by manipulating cells of the immune system. Their study appears in the June 25 issue of the journal Immunity.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, incurable disease characterized primarily by painful joint inflammation. Although its precise cause is unknown, RA is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system mistakes the body's own substances and cells for foreign invaders and releases friendly fire on them. To study how gut microbes affect the development of RA, the researchers made use of a specific strain of mice that naturally develop severe inflammatory arthritis. They raised the mice under germ-free conditions and found that the animals developed RA significantly more slowly than the controls that were naturally colonized with diverse, nonpathogenic microorganisms. What's more, the colonized mice produced a much greater level of an immunoregulatory protein known as IL-17. This molecule is produced by immune cells and promotes inflammation. Blocking IL-17 function in the mice prevented disease progression, demonstrating the important role of IL-17 in arthritis.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

The glare from the glass case prevents us from seeing it clearly, but the object in the photo above is a lady's hat made out of twigs and spiderwebs. It was made in the early 20th century by a San tribesmember in southern Africa, and is currently on display in the Africa Room of the British Museum. This room appears not to attract very many visitors, for reasons I'll get to soon, but I wanted to dwell on this curious hat for a moment still.

Whether or not it meets the formal criteria for qualification as such, this hat is something very close to a cargo-cult object: a reproduction by members of a technologically simple culture, from naturally available materials, of an artefact associated with a dominant, technologically advanced culture. The first cargo cults were identified by western anthropologists in New Guinea, when, shortly after the end of World War II and the disappearance of the goods that the Japanese and American troops had brought into the region, the tribespeople attempted to summon them back by building non-functioning simulations of airports.

The British Museum's labelling tells us that we are supposed to admire the spiderweb hat, in more or less the same way we are supposed to praise the plaques made by casters in the brass foundries of the highly complex early modern Kingdom of Benin. The general message of the Africa Room –which is in fact the Africa Basement– is that, first of all, there is a cohesive, unitary, and stable thing called 'Africa', and, second of all, that everything that comes out of Africa, whether made of brass or of spiderwebs, is equally and perfectly good.

This lesson is one that is very different from what we are taught in the other halls of the museum, where the labels carefully and conscientiously spell out for us the different stages in the rise and decline of classical Assyrian, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilizations. In this respect, the well-meaning 'Africa is good' message in fact perpetuates the myth of stagnation that Eric Wolf sought to dispel in his masterful book, Europe and the People without History of 1982.

More here.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Snaking around the outer wall of the courthouse in Mbaiki, Central African Republic, is a long line of citizens, all in human form and waiting to face judgment. It’s easy to imagine them as the usual mix of drunks, reckless drivers, and check-bouncers in the dock of a small American town. But here most are witches, and they are facing criminal punishment for hexing their enemies or assuming the shape of animals.

By some estimates, about 40 percent of the cases in the Central African court system are witchcraft prosecutions. (Drug offenses in the U.S., by contrast, account for just 12 percent of arrests.) In Mbaiki—where Pygmies, who are known for bewitching each other, make up about a tenth of the population—witchcraft prosecutions exceed 50 percent of the case load, meaning that most alleged criminals there are suspected of doing things that Westerners generally regard as impossible.

I went to the front of the witch line and asked Abdulaye Bobro, the chief judge, what the punishment was for casting spells.

More here.