How The Huffington Post Ate the Internet

Shapiro_interiorMichael Shapiro in Columbia Journalism Review:

Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up.

The invitation for the lunch came from Kenneth Lerer. He was 51 and casting about for something new, having recently left his position as executive vice president for communications at AOL. Lerer was a private man who was nonetheless comfortable in the presence of powerful people with whom he had earned a reputation for honing images in disrepair, most famously for the disgraced and subsequently rehabilitated junk bond trader Michael Milken. Lerer had made a good deal of money and a good many friends after having first made a name for himself in the quixotic 1974 New York senate campaign of Ramsey Clark (for which he was hired by the chairman of this magazine, Victor Navasky, who later recruited him for CJR’s Board of Overseers, which has no say in content). Lerer was splitting his time between New York and skiing at his vacation home in Utah when he came across a new book by a young sociologist, Duncan Watts. The book was called Six Degrees. Lerer was so taken by it that he took Watts to lunch.

He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. Lerer had a plan and he wanted Watts to help him. He had set himself an ambitious target. He wanted to take on the National Rifle Association.

He told Watts: “I know the answer to this is somewhere in these pages.”

No-Arms

PlatonovA short story by Andrey Platonov, in Caravan:

THERE WAS ONCE AN OLD PEASANT who lived in a village with his wife and their two children. He came to the end of his life and he died. Then it was his old woman’s turn to get ready to die—her time had come too. She called the children to her, her son and her daughter. The daughter was the elder, the son the younger.

She said to her son, “Obey your sister in everything, as you have obeyed me. Now she will be a mother to you.”

The mother gave a last sigh—she was sorry to be parting from her children forever—and then died.

After the death of their parents, the children lived as their mother had told them to live. The brother obeyed his sister, and the sister took care of her brother and loved him.

And so they lived on without their parents, perhaps many years, perhaps few. One day the sister said to her brother, “It’s hard for me to keep house on my own, and it’s time you were married. Marry—then there’ll be a mistress to look after the home.”

But the brother did not want to marry. “The home has a mistress already,” he said. “Why do we need a second mistress?”

“I’ll help her,” said his sister. “With two of us the work will be easier.”

The brother didn’t want to marry, but he didn’t dare disobey his elder sister. He respected her as if she were his mother.

The brother married and began to live happily with his wife. As for his sister, he loved and respected her just as before, obeying her in everything.

At first his wife seemed not to mind her sister-in-law. And the sister-in-law, for her part, did all she could to be obliging.

But soon the wife began to feel upset.

An Unquenchable Gaiety of Mind

BorgesGeorge Watson in The American Scholar:

By his last years Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was often seen as a skeptic. Michel Foucault began Les mots et les choses (1966, published in English as The Order of Things) by acclaiming him for having defied certainty and demolished every familiar landmark of knowledge, since everything “bears the stamp of our age and our geography.” Foucault cited something Borges claimed to have found once in an old Chinese encyclopedia, a hilarious taxonomy of animals using the following categories: those belonging to the emperor, those that are embalmed, those that are tame, sucking pigs, sirens, stray dogs, et cetera. That was impressively credulous of Foucault, since Borges (as I once heard him say) often made up his quotations: “One is allowed to change the past.” Among the literal minded, however, his reward was to be thought to have sounded the death knell of all human hopes to know the world or to understand our place in it.

Nearly 30 years ago I wrote down my recollections of Borges’s visits to Cambridge, mainly in 1984, which was coincidentally the year Foucault died. Perhaps I should have published them sooner, since they suggest an unquenchable gaiety of mind: Foucault’s mistake would undoubtedly have amused him. He might even have made a story of it. Though blind, Borges was not sad. His name and fame survive as the author of several dozen stories; he never wrote a novel, and cheerfully called himself lazy.

He was a traditionalist—the last Victorian—mindful, perhaps, that when Queen Victoria died he was already in his second year of life. In a 1979 BBC radio conversation with Graham Greene, John Updike, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Carlos Fuentes celebrating Borges’s 80th birthday, he cheerfully conceded it. “What is the matter with being an old-fashioned storyteller?” he asked, and he politely disdained an accolade from Robbe-Grillet calling him the enemy of realism and father of the nouveau roman. Realism, after all, never confined itself to reality: it embraces coincidence, for example, and foreboding. “You don’t think of life as being like a realistic novel, do you?” he asked. All lives are rich in fantasy, and to depict fantasy is to depict life.

Towards a New Manifesto

Tumblr_lts9dnWQFT1qe7zezTheodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Utopian:

Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

Adorno: Because people have to work so hard, there is a sense in which they spend their spare time obsessively repeating the rituals of the efforts that have been demanded of them. We must not be absolutely opposed to work.

Horkheimer: We ought to construct a kind of programme for a new form of practice. In the East people degenerate into beasts of burden. Coolies probably had to do less work than today’s workers in six or seven hours.

Adorno: ‘No herdsman and one herd.’ A kind of false classless society. Society finds itself on the way to what looks like the perfect classless society but is in reality the very opposite.

Venter says ‘synthetic life coming’

Dick Ahlstrom in the Irish Times:

ScreenHunter_07 Jul. 13 17.15The world may soon see the first examples of synthetic life, artificial organisms constructed in a laboratory. These will be unique organisms, not close copies of existing cells, said their creator Dr Craig Venter…

He and his laboratory in California were well on the way towards assembling a unique living organism, one unknown to exist anywhere else on the planet.

Two years ago he reported having built a living organism. “This was a proof of concept,” Dr Venter said. “It wasn’t identical to any existing cell but we wanted it to live.” For that reason it was modelled on another cell.

Things had progressed significantly however. His team are currently designing three different organisms, adding blocks of DNA that have been seen to be essential for sustaining life, he said. They do not know what design will produce a living organism so they decided to produce several.

Once designed these would then be built using DNA sequencing machines and the genetic package would then be popped into a hollowed out cell.

The work was made particularly difficult because geneticists still do not know the function of many of the genes seen in living organisms. “We don’t know all the first principles,” he said.

He had no doubt however that they would achive their goal. “I am hoping it will happen this year.”

More here.

Do apps that promote ethical behavior diminish our ability to make just decisions?

Evan Selinger and Thomas Seager in Slate:

ScreenHunter_06 Jul. 13 14.07Ethics apps do more than present users with relevant, sometimes hard-to-obtain information. Like a coach, they also directly influence our choices, motivating us to eat better, exercise more, budget our money, and get more out of our free time. Users don’t see these tools as threats to free will, self-esteem, or sustainable habits. Instead, they’re downloading increasing amounts of software containing a “good-behavior layer” that helps users avoid self-sabotaging decisions, like impulse buying and snacking. Capitalizing on three inter-related movements—nudging, the quantified self, and gamification—the good-behavior layer pinpoints our mental and emotional weaknesses and steers us away from temptations that compromise long-term success.

In many cases, good-behavior technology gets the job done by bolstering resolve withdigital willpower. By tweaking our responses with alluring and repulsive information, while also shielding us from distracting and demoralizing data, digital willpower helps us better control and redirect destructive urges. Apps like ToneCheck prevent us from sending off hotheaded emails, while GymPact inspires us to go the gym. Students are getting into the act, too, and developing apps to make their classmates more responsible, e.g., get to class on time and be less distracted. Arianna Huffington's project “GPS for the soul” promises to analyze a user’s stress levels and provide overwhelmed people with rebalancing stimuli, like “music, or poetry, or breathing exercises, or photos of a person or place you love.” We’re already willing to delegate self-control to technology—and future developments will likely give devices even more ethical decision-making power.

More here.

The Difference Between Running and ‘Running’ a Private Equity Firm

From NYMag:

RomneyDan Primack is all over the counter-narrative to the controversy surrounding today's Boston Globe story about how Mitt Romney, who claimed to have left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, was actually employed as Bain's CEO and sole shareholder until 2002.

Primack has the offering documents from a private equity fund Bain raised in 2000 that lists eighteen managers of the fund — the people who were making the direct decisions about what the firm invested in, and how much it invested. Romney's name isn't on it.

The distinction between what the Obama campaign is saying (that Romney lied about when he stopped running Bain Capital and therefore is responsible for decisions that led to the outsourcing of jobs post-1999) and the reality to be drawn from Primack's document stash (that Romney might have been “running” Bain Capital during that period, in a technical sense, but wasn't actively managing its investments) is a small but very important point that cuts to the heart of the way private equity firms are managed.

More here.

Spoiled Rotten: Why do kids rule the roost?

From The New Yorker:

ChildIn 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River. A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old. While Izquierdo was doing field work among the Matsigenka, she was also involved in an anthropological study closer to home. A colleague of hers, Elinor Ochs, had recruited thirty-two middle-class families for a study of life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Ochs had arranged to have the families filmed as they ate, fought, made up, and did the dishes.

Izquierdo and Ochs shared an interest in many ethnographic issues, including child rearing. How did parents in different cultures train young people to assume adult responsibilities? In the case of the Angelenos, they mostly didn’t. In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or a shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game. In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her. In a third episode captured on tape, a boy named Ben was supposed to leave the house with his parents. But he couldn’t get his feet into his sneakers, because the laces were tied. He handed one of the shoes to his father: “Untie it!” His father suggested that he ask nicely. “Can you untie it?” Ben replied. After more back-and-forth, his father untied Ben’s sneakers. Ben put them on, then asked his father to retie them. “You tie your shoes and let’s go,’’ his father finally exploded. Ben was unfazed. “I’m just asking,’’ he said.

More here.

Gene mutation defends against Alzheimer’s disease

From Nature:

AlzAlmost 30 million people live with Alzheimer’s disease worldwide, a staggering health-care burden that is expected to quadruple by 2050. Yet doctors can offer no effective treatment, and scientists have not been able definitively to pin down the underlying mechanism of the disease. Research published this week offers some hope on both counts, by showing that a lucky few people carry a genetic mutation that naturally prevents them from developing the condition1. The discovery not only confirms the principal suspect that is responsible for Alzheimer’s, it also suggests that the disease could be an extreme form of the cognitive decline seen in many older people. The mutation — the first ever found to protect against the disease — lies in a gene that produces amyloid-β precursor protein (APP), which has an unknown role in the brain and has long been suspected to be at the heart of Alzheimer’s.

APP was discovered 25 years ago in patients with rare, inherited forms of Alzheimer’s that strike in middle age2–5. In the brain, APP is broken down into a smaller molecule called amyloid-β. Visible clumps, or plaques, of amyloid-β found in the autopsied brains of patients are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, but scientists have long debated whether the plaques are a cause of the neuro­degenerative condition or a consequence of other biochemical changes associated with the disease. The latest finding supports other genetics studies blaming amyloid-β, and it makes the protein “the prime therapeutic target”, says Rudolph Tanzi, a neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a member of one of the four teams that discovered APP’s role in the 1980s.

More here.

Who is the equivalent of a feudal landlord in Pakistan’s urban areas? Who are the serfs?

Umair Javed in The Friday Times:

ScreenHunter_05 Jul. 13 13.02In the early 80s, when large-scale urbanization began to take place in India and Pakistan, sociologists and political scientists realized that traditional modes of social organization – groupings like biraderi and caste – took different shapes and forms in towns and cities. While there was a surge in populist politics during the 70s in India under Indira Gandhi, and Pakistan under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, subsequent periods saw the re-emergence and consolidation of patronage systems and traditional dhara politics in both countries.

What we now find ourselves with is an incomplete understanding of domestic politics. While mainstream discourse has always found it easy to develop a caricatured sketch of rural politics – tinted in large part by the urban bias and media's portrayal of landlord-tenant relationships – we have nothing of the sort for urban areas, except for Karachi where equally caricatured understandings of ethnicity and gang politics prevail. Who is the equivalent of a landlord in Lahore? Who are the serfs and the haris? Is voting an individual, autonomous phenomenon or is it still a bargaining chip in a vertical patron-client relationship? Unfortunately, in the absence of systematic research, the answers can only be gleaned through anecdotal evidence and casual observations.

More here.

Just Another Princess Movie

Picture-4-383x501Lili Loofbourow on Pixar's Brave, in The New Inquiry (warning: spoilers included):

I suppose most girls remember when they became aware of themselves as specifically female viewers. Growing up in the eighties, I watched movies about boys and girls with equal relish, empathizing with the protagonists and getting totally absorbed in story without my parts getting consciously in the way. When I realized the boys in my classes didn’t do the same thing — they refused to see themselves in female protagonists and found the prospect humiliating to contemplate — I felt I had overstepped my bounds. Feeling simultaneously embarrassed at being so profligate with my sympathy and spiteful towards those who weren’t, I started watching movies the way I was supposed to: as a girl, specifically.

Boy, was it bleak.

If you don’t get to be Indiana Jones and have to think about how he is with girls, if you have to wonder, while watching Treasure Island, whether any of the characters you loved would even talk to you, movies become kind of painful. You do find ways around it. For one thing, you start actively seeking out stories where people don’t rule you out quite so much. You look for “girl movies.” Barring some truly wonderful exceptions, you get used to eating the same three meals over and over, forever. Without thinking about it too hard I’ll approximate them as spunkiness, pathos, and transformation. Working Girl, He’s Just Not That Into You, Grease. Again, some of these are great. Most are derivative.

Given the sameness of the flavors on offer, you become a sort of expert at spotting slight variations. You watch not so much for the arc (that’s almost always disappointing) but for certain arresting moments. When you find these, you treasure them. You dissect their context away and relish them — sometimes for themselves, sometimes for the endings they didn’t have.

I don’t claim this is universal, but many female viewers I’ve had conversations with over the years have expressed similar, if not identical, practices. We have watered-down expectations when it comes to women in film. Most movies, even the great ones, we watch for their perfect middles. Sometimes we edit the films post post-production and pretend the end never happened at all.

The Idea Biz

Short but insightful post from Timothy Noah at The New Republic:

Idea BizToday’s New York Times op-ed page carries two separate citations from last week’s Aspen Ideas Festival, which probably means the thing has already paid for itself. The ideas cited are good ones, but the increasing dominance of corporate-sponsored idea-disseminators like the Aspen festival and the TED conferences (gently lampooned by my friend Nathan Heller in a recent New Yorker takeout) makes me wonder whether ideas upsetting to the moneyed classes will become harder to shoehorn into the national conversation. “Your blood will run in the streets” is not, I would guess, an idea that is welcome at such conclaves, even when meant metaphorically. I note with selfish interest that income inequality, a topic that has generated considerable interest of late, was not on the menu at Aspen, just as it wasn’t on the menu at the latest World Economic Forum.

Read the rest here.

Three Reasons the Euro Zone Deal Won’t Work

252px-Common_face_of_one_euro_coinMark Blyth and Stephen Kinsella in Harvard Business Review:

The latest Euro crisis summit was different from the 19 others that preceded it in one very important respect: The PR department of the EU played this one very well. Rather than hopes being raised only to be dashed, this time they were dashed before the summit only to be raised after it ended.

And yet hopes are now slowly deflating once again, even as the Eurogroup works out the final details.

The idea behind the latest maneuver is that recapitalizing European banks will reduce the correlation between the creditworthiness of a state's banking system and the creditworthiness of a State itself. If a state's banks are highly levered and filled with rapidly devaluing government debt (as they are in Europe), then the risks borne by the banks becomes risks to the state, and vice versa, as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Spain are learning. This occurred thanks to the flawed design of the Eurosystem. Being deprived of a currency printing press, Euro-bound states cannot credibly commit to bailing out their banks, so when their banks inevitably get themselves into trouble, this shows up in their sovereign's yield.

The creditor countries hence decided to allow the use of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to directly recapitalize the damaged balance sheets of Europe's banks, specifically the Spanish banks. And market participants were initially thrilled. Yields on sovereign bonds fell immediately following the deal's announcement. For example, the generic yield on Ireland's nine year sovereign bonds fell from 7.1 to 6.4% in one day, an unprecedented drop. Similar drops took place in Spain and Italy.

“Eating the Whole Thing”: Philosophy, Science, and Anxiety

Cropped-marcuse-image-smallestOver at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Michael Brent, Christine Smallwood, and Ajay Chaudhary talk to David Albert:

This is a supplemental episode of our podcast series. In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research, Michael, Christine, and I (Ajay) sit down with Professor David Albert of Columbia University to discuss quantum physics, the history of 20th and 21st century physics, the philosophy of science, and a host of related issues, including his recent – and sometimes heated – exchange with Lawrence Krauss. As this episode is so different from our others, and led primarily through Albert’s discussion of quantum physics, the Notations section will be a brief bibliography without time-stamps. We hope you enjoy!*

*- Michael and I will be recording a follow-up to this discussion shortly. To be posted soon!

(You can download here by right-clicking and “save as” or look us up on iTunes)

the elephant and the termite

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Yet the two writers actually have a good deal in common. Both collections include “special interest” essays. In Franzen’s case, two thirty-pagers on avian ecology in Europe and China – dense, serious pieces lacking the lovely descriptive touches he can bring to shorter offerings. In Lethem’s case, there is a lot about superheroes, including an essay that finds, in the Batman film The Dark Knight, echoes of “a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction, and cultivated grievance”. Fundamentally, the two share a belief in the healing power of fiction. “Love” is an important word in their critical vocabularies, as in: “What counts is what freedom you [as a writer] can taste, and what love you can offer, from inside the role you’ve been handed” (Lethem); “The curious thing about David [Foster Wallace]’s fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it” (Franzen). Both writers have a tendency to the Messianic. “Fiction is my religion”, Franzen tells us. He doesn’t think it can save the world, but “there is some reasonable chance . . . that it could save your soul”. Lethem, in his bold essay on James Wood, frames their respective relationships to literature with a religious metaphor: “About books I’m Quakerish, believing every creature eligible to commune face-to-face with the Light; he’s a high priest, handing down sacred mysteries”.

more from Claire Lowdon at the TLS here.

We’ll call it The New Jersey Novel.

570_Triborough_NJ

Though it is one of the most densely populated and lavishly polluted states in the nation, New Jersey is not home to a single place that deserves to be called a city. Camden, anyone? Or how about Trenton, Newark, Elizabeth, Hoboken, Paterson or Piscataway? Or that chancre sore by the sea, Atlantic City? New Jersey also lacks the regional peculiarities that have nourished novelists in other parts of America – the urban thrum of the Eastern seaboard and the industrial Midwest, the magnolia murk and tortured history of the South, the soul-exposing vastness of the big-sky West, the sun-dazed sprawl of southern California. Instead, New Jersey has suburbs like the one Peter Jernigan retreated to, it has shopping malls, office parks, a seashore, some serious slums, and a thruway that slices through the world’s juiciest petrochemical badlands. And, yes, the Garden State also has a few lovely bucolic pockets.

more from Bill Morris at The Millions here.

The banal swing-set. The bone-jarring seesaw.

Img018_final

In the summer of 2011, the New York Times published an article asking, “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” It cited recent studies in the US and Europe documenting how antiseptic safety-first playgrounds may actually stunt emotional and cognitive development and leave children not only decidedly bored and under-stimulated but with skewed abilities to manage real-world risk later in life. The research also suggested that claims (made by the manufacturers, who had lobbied for stricter safety standards in the first place) that injuries had decreased overall thanks to the new play equipment may have been incorrect, and that total injuries may have actually risen due to the illusory perception of a danger-free zone. Either way, researchers agreed that mastering challenges, negotiating risks, and overcoming fears were critical to healthy play. It was 1966 all over again. By the end of 2011, there were discernible signs that a backlash to the counter-revolution was emerging. In Battery Park City, the removal of a solitary, recently installed tire-swing (that emblem of 1960s urban play freedom) after a child bumped her head became something of a bellwether, inspiring widespread mockery of what was seen as a farcical overreaction by a handful of Tribeca uber-moms and the neighborhood’s grousing safety militias.

more from James Trainor at Cabinet here.

Thursday Poem

Los nadies: los hijos de nadie, los dueños de nada.
Los nadies : los ningunos, los ninguneados. —Eduardo Galeano

The Nobodies —excerpt

They rise from the dawn and dress.

They raise the bundles to their heads
And their shadows broaden—
Dark ghosts grounded to nothing.

They grin and grip their skirts.

They finger the gold and purple beads
Circling their necks, lift them
Absently to their teeth. They speak

A language of kicked stones.

And it’s not the future their eyes see,
But history. It stretches
Like a dry road uphill before them.

They climb it.

by Tracy K. Smith

from Duende
Graywolf Press, 2007)

D. H. Lawrence’s “Pomegranate”

From The Paris Review:

DhIf the authors of Genesis envisioned any one particular fruit dangling from that infamous tree in Eden, scholars argue it was likely the pomegranate. In the Greco-Roman tradition, those same ruby seeds cursed Persephone to an eternal half-life, consigned her to winter after winter with her abductor-husband, Hades, among the pomegranate groves of the dead. From Jerusalem to Athens to Rome, this is the fruit you get when love spoils into lust, when desire goes to seed. This is not a fruit you want to crack open.

Lawrence knows this mythology. His poem is, in fact, a highly compressed commentary on it. He take a tour of three cities—Syracuse, Venice, San Gervasio—and three of their pomegranate orchards. As Lawrence moves among these places, these pomegranates, he moves, too, among the fragments of lost—or soon to be lost—love. (As for his puzzling reference to the “viciousness of Greek women,” maybe he had a bad experience.) The fruits’ imperious grandeur—“barbed, barbed with crowns”—allures and inflames his memory, stoking his violent outcry until it bursts its confines. Literally. One of the wonders of this poem is that it is itself a pomegranate. Its prickly, defensive opening lines call to mind a barbed crown. That crown gives way to a tough rind and bitter pulp, the poem’s central section, with its various fruits and grievances. These, in turn, at long last yield seeds. By his fifth stanza Lawrence is railing about a “fissure,” and pretty soon “the end cracks open with the beginning,” and the poem reveals a prize too ravishing, too delicious, to be anything but the pomegranate’s bejeweled contents:

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken.
It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

More here.