Nadia Drake in No Place Like Home:

Forty years ago, Earth beamed its first postcard to the stars.

The message left our home planet on a warm and sticky mid-November day in Puerto Rico. It has been flying through the galaxy at the speed of light ever since, and in about 25,000 years will arrive at a cluster filled with more than 300,000 stars.

Unlike the radio signals that had been leaking from Earth since the late 1930s, this postcard was the first deliberate transmission to an alien civilization. Written in a way meant to be decipherable by extraterrestrial beings, the message contained some key information about the species that had sent it.

“It was a message that would actually inform anyone who did receive it that we existed, and tell them a little bit about what we were like,” says my dad Frank, who had the responsibility of constructing and sending what’s now known as the Arecibo Message. “And it was also a message to ourselves in that it showed what an intelligent civilization can do to contact other civilizations.”

He had just one month to write Earth’s first radio greeting to the stars.

It was 1974, and the Arecibo Observatory’s giant radio telescope had just gotten a major upgrade. Beamed into space by the Observatory’s powerful, one million-watt transmitter, the message would cap a ceremony marking the completion of the improvements (you can listen to it being sent, below). But it was a secret – only the ceremony’s organizers knew ahead of time what would happen, and they envisioned a transmission lasting about 3 minutes.

More here.

Dara Mohammadi in The Guardian:

“Let’s be clear,” says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.” The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. “The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.”

If toxins did build up in a way your body couldn’t excrete, he says, you’d likely be dead or in need of serious medical intervention. “The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak,” he says. “There is no known way – certainly not through detox treatments – to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.”

Much of the sales patter revolves around “toxins”: poisonous substances that you ingest or inhale. But it’s not clear exactly what these toxins are. If they were named they could be measured before and after treatment to test effectiveness. Yet, much like floaters in your eye, try to focus on these toxins and they scamper from view. In 2009, a network of scientists assembled by the UK charity Sense about Science contacted the manufacturers of 15 products sold in pharmacies and supermarkets that claimed to detoxify. The products ranged from dietary supplements to smoothies and shampoos. When the scientists asked for evidence behind the claims, not one of the manufacturers could define what they meant by detoxification, let alone name the toxins.

Read the rest here.

Daniel Finn in the New Left Review:

It seems clear that the Eurozone crisis has been stabilized, for the time being, on terms dictated by Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin. The price that has been paid to preserve the single currency and sustain a dysfunctional banking system hardly needs recounting here: from Athens to Dublin, mass unemployment remains a crippling burden. Yet, to paraphrase Tolstoy, all bail-out countries are unhappy in different ways. Greece has witnessed the stormiest opposition, with the emergence of Syriza as a potential, if fragile, counter-hegemonic force. In Spain, years of street protest have begun to leave their mark on the political system, and there is a gathering storm over Catalan independence. Rolling strikes in Portugal have seen public-sector wage and pension cuts blocked by the constitutional court. In Ireland, however, where the economy has been bled dry to reimburse the bad loans of British, French and German banks, resistance has been muted. Cabinet ministers have boasted of their ability to impose ‘remarkable’ cuts in public spending without provoking social unrest. For their part, European officials have repeatedly held Ireland up as an example of good citizenship to its unruly counterparts on the Eurozone periphery, much to the delight of local media outlets.

But if mass protests have been comparatively few in Ireland, it is not for lack of spirited polemical broadsides against its ruling elites by native writers. Pre-eminent here, in terms of impact and visibility, has been Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, the country’s leading public intellectual. Published in the immediate wake of the crash, O’Toole’s Ship of Fools (2009) was a coruscating attack on the crony culture and bubble economy fostered by Ireland’s political leaders, soon followed by Enough Is Enough (2010), another onslaught on the myths of the Republic, which proposed a comprehensive reform programme with fifty action points. Is there any writer in another EU—or OECD—country who has produced such a comprehensive indictment of the ruling establishment’s record, in such damning detail and in such sparkling prose? O’Toole’s latest works form part of a cycle dating back to the 1980s that testifies to his formidable range as a social commentator. In seeking to explain the ‘Irish exception’, it may thus be helpful to explore O’Toole’s writing in more depth: what distinguishes the critical character of his work, what causal explanation does it offer of his country’s predicament, and what light can it shed on Ireland’s post-crisis trajectory?

More here.

Andrew Gallix in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Do you agree that much of your back catalogue can now be read as a preemptive commentary on Memory Theatre, as though the latter had been written in the stars all along (which would be in keeping with the book’s uncanny astrological theme)?

SC: Sure. Why not? Look, what I really learned from Paul De Man years and years ago was that writers are structurally self-deceived about what they do, what they write and the intentions that might or might not lie behind their writing. Namely, to write is to be blind to one’s insight, if such insight exists. I understand this structurally: namely, that writing is an adventure in self-deception. I simply do not know what I am doing and you — as a reader, and a very good reader, moreover — can tell me what I am doing much more accurately than I can. Therefore, I should be interviewing you. In fact, let’s consider that we have reversed roles.

3:AM: The late Michel Haar, who haunts the book, is said to have been fascinated by the “poetic dimension” of Nietzsche’s style, which he saw as “that which might escape philosophy” — a fascination you also share. In Very Little . . . Almost Nothing (1997), you argued that “Writing outside philosophy means ceasing to be fascinated with the circular figure of the Book, the en-cyclo-paedia of philosophical science, itself dominated by the figures of unity and totality, which would attempt to master death and complete meaning by letting nothing fall outside of its closure”. Did you need to exorcise your fascination with this totalising tradition — by dramatising its failure — in order to write “outside philosophy”?

SC: Wow, thanks for reminding me of that passage from Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, which was written in 1992 or 93, as I recall, right towards the beginning of what became that odd book. I have two contradictory reactions to your question: on the one hand, many of the authors I have been obsessed with over the years have endeavoured to take a step outside philosophy, by which is usually meant the circle and circuit of Hegel’s system or Heidegger’s understanding of history as the history of being. I respect and love that gesture, that can be found in Bataille, Levinas, Blanchot and others. But, on the other hand, what I learned from Derrida very early on — my master’s thesis was on the question of whether we could overcome metaphysics — is that the step outside philosophy always falls back within the orbit of that which it tries to exceed. Not to philosophize is still to philosophize. Similarly, any text or philosophy that simply asserts the value of metaphysics is internally dislocated against itself, undermining its own founding gesture. This leave us writing on the margin between the inside and the ouside of philosophy, which is where I’d like to place Memory Theatre. Also note that although Michel Haar existed and was real, as it were, he didn’t say much or anything that I say that he said. He is a kind of vehicle that I try and drive and steer.

More here.

Francisco Goldman in the New Yorker (photo by Alejandro Acosta/Reuters):

In mid November, three caravans converged on Mexico City, led by family members of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School whose abduction, in late September, has led to nationwide protests. One caravan was coming directly from Guerrero State, where the students disappeared, another from the state of Chiapas, and another from the city of Atenco, in Mexico State, the site of the most notorious act of violent government repression committed by Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s current President, in 2006, when he was governor there. The plan was for the caravans to come together and for the travellers to lead a giant march on November 20th.

The kidnapping is now known to have been carried about by the municipal police of Iguala, Guerrero, on orders from the city’s mayor. According to the government, the police handed the students over to a local narco gang, which murdered them and burned their remains in the Cocula municipal dump. This scenario is still awaiting forensic confirmation, and the families of the missing students, and many others, do not accept it. “They were taken alive, we want them back alive!’ remains one of the most common chants at the marches. “It was the state!” and “Peña Out!” are also staple slogans.

As the caravans approached Mexico City, President Peña Nieto, along with members and supporters of his PRI government, began issuing statements and warnings that seemed to signal an aggressive new strategy to counter the protests. On November seventeenth, Beatriz Pagés Rebollar, the country’s Secretary of Culture, published an editorial on the PRI’s official website. “The chain of protests and acts of vandalism—perfectly well orchestrated—replicated in various parts of the country, demonstrate that the disappearances and probable extermination of the 43 normal-school students were part of a strategic trap aimed at Mexico,” she wrote. “All these activists and propagandists have the same modus operandi.” Pagés included opposition media on her list of these activists and propagandists, accusing them of fraudulently confusing Mexicans into believing that the students’ disappearance “was a crime of state, as if the Mexican government gave the order to exterminate them.”

Two days later, Carlos Alazraki, a veteran PRI insider and an advertising executive who has worked on the election campaigns of several of the party’s Presidential candidates, published an editorial entitled “Open Letter to All Normal Mexicans (Like You)” in the newspaper La Razón. “46 days ago, two bands, students and Iguala narcos, got into a brawl,” he wrote. “There are varying versions of what happened. . . . That one [band] were guerrillas, the other narcos. One or the other wanted to run the whole region.” Since the start of the “narco war,” in 2006, equating victims’ criminality with that of narcos has been a routine pro-government strategy.

More here.

Zoe Williams in The Guardian:

I initially interpreted the new atmosphere around mothering especially as just a new kind of patriarchy: even if a topic were far from the point of consensus, we should all pretend to agree, in order not to make the ladies anxious. And while I remain assured that there is a lot of casual sexism underpinning all this, I have concluded that the driving impetus is political: adverse conditions that are related to poverty are recast as parenting failures. For instance, mothers in the bottom quintile go back to work soonest, presumably because they cannot afford to take their full entitlement of maternity leave. This makes breastfeeding for the “recommended” amount of time impossible: it also renders unrealistic the ideal childcare for the pre-toddler – one-to-one, round-the-clock care from the primary care-giver.

The modern conversation about parenting turns the healthy baby, and healthy child, into the proof of the parents’ excellent life choices. By turning it into a matter of the self, predominantly the maternal self, to create the successful or unsuccessful child, we let society completely off the hook. There is no broad responsibility to create a healthy environment for children (because mothers who were concerned would live in some other environment), and no social imperative to look after children who were born in ill-health or some other misfortune (because mothers who behaved responsibly would have prevented this outcome). We all know that is ridiculous: we all know that the business is riven with good and bad fortune. I’ve never encountered any parent who seriously thinks they can prevent every negative event with extra vigilance, nor any parent who isn’t moved to empathise with another’s misfortune, rather than judge what he or she may have done or eaten. The top-down, ersatz scientification isn’t really fooling anyone.

More here.

Caroline Weber in The New York Times:

This year marks the bicentennial of the death of Josephine Bonaparte, but Napoleon’s empress has been having a moment for some time now. In the past two decades, she has starred in at least 20 new biographies, six museum exhibitions and six novels. Three editions of her correspondence have also appeared during this time, as have many more studies (of Napoleon and other Bonapartes) in which she features. The latest addition to this corpus is “Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte,” by Kate Williams, a biographer of Queen Victoria and Emma Hamilton. Beyond her appreciation for “flawed, vulnerable, engaging, powerful” women, Williams does not seem to have a compelling reason to tell this story. In the absence of new material or a new approach, she offers a breathless paean to the woman who, while “no great beauty,” could with “one twitch of her skirt . . . enthrall the man who terrorized Europe.”

Born in 1763 to a clan of blue-blooded French colonists on Martinique, Marie-Josèphe de Tascher de La Pagerie grew up “in a paradise of pleasure,” where she “splashed in the sea like a dolphin” and “sucked on sugarcane plucked from the fields.” In 1779, her family shipped her off to Paris to marry the self-styled Vicomte Alexandre de Beauharnais, a “languidly aggressive” blackguard by whom she had two children before separating from him in 1785. (Fond of alliteration, clichés and mixed metaphors, Williams indulges in all three when noting that “hotheaded Alexandre also had to eat humble pie.”)

More here.

Earthwish

—after ‘Irisch’ by Paul Celan

Grant me the wayleave
across the draw-bridge to your sleep,
the by-your-leave
to wend the wild meanders of your dreams,
the privilege, now I’m fit, to split the turf
along your breast’s incline
come dawn.

by Paula Cunningham
from Heimlich's Manoeuvre
Smith/Doorstop, Sheffield, 2013,

~~~~

Irisch

Grant me the right of way
over the cornstair to your sleep,
right of way
over the path of sleep,
the right to cut turf
on the shelf of the heart,
come morning.

by Paul Celan

Chris Powers in The Guardian:

Certain locations belong to certain writers. Kafka stalks the streets of Prague; Fitzrovia pubs call Julian MacLaren-Ross to mind; Dublin, to the understandable frustration of its other writers, is Joyce. When I lived in the flat expanses of the American midwest I would drive through mile after mile of cornfields, a landscape that always made me think of Sherwood Anderson and his collection Winesburg, Ohio. Even as Anderson's once-great reputation plummeted, the book, published in 1919, continued to exert a pronounced effect on the American short story throughout the 20th century. His prose carries flavours of Whitman and Twain, and the distinctive, comma-rejecting rhythm of Gertrude Stein. Above them you detect those he influenced: the Hemingway of In Our Time, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver among many others. Sometimes he writes very badly, but when he writes well his discursive style envelops you completely, without fanfare.

Winesburg, Ohio is a story cycle set in a small town in the 1890s. Each story concentrates on a different “grotesque” who inhabits the town, people whose lives have become distorted through an inability to communicate. For Anderson these “grotesques” are not monsters to be feared, but creatures to be pitied and loved. Many of them feel compelled to explain themselves in some way to a young man called George Willard, the closest thing the book has to a hero. George matures over the course of the collection, and in the final story leaves Winesburg behind. The effect of the book is to cumulatively produce an atmosphere of uncomfortable but compelling intimacy. Throughout, hands appear as symbols of the desirability and difficulty of human contact, and it was hands that Edward Wilson Jr used to precisely describe the feeling of reading it: “We are at once disturbed and soothed by the feeling of hands thrust down among the deepest bowels of life – hands delicate but still pitiless in their exploration.”

More here.

Mariana Alessandri in the New York Times:

I had just arrived home from my summer vacation — a week in a Minnesota cabin whose brochure warned “no crabbiness allowed” — when I came upon a study that declared New York the “unhappiest city in America.” I doubt many people were surprised by the results — New Yorkers, both in lore and reality, can be hard to please, and famously outspoken about their grievances — but as a born-and-raised New Yorker, and as a philosopher, I was suspicious of how the study defined happiness.

The survey in question, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asked how “satisfied” Americans were with their lives — very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But the National Bureau of Economic Research used the data to conclude things about their “happiness.” Some might not have minded that the terms satisfaction and happiness were used interchangeably, but I did. The study was titled “Unhappy Cities,” and the headlines that followed it came out swinging against New Yorkers.

I was certain that a person (even a New Yorker) could be both dissatisfied and happy at once, and that the act of complaining was not in fact evidence of unhappiness, but something that could in its own way lead to greater happiness.

At times like this I appreciate philosophers’ respect for words, and a number of them have argued to keep happiness separate from satisfaction.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

Over the last few days, as the United States has stepped up its bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria, it has been hard to escape another reality: the US is still looking for a coherent strategy against the Islamic State. Along with its relentless drive across the deserts of Syria and Iraq, and its continued massacre of civilians and members of endangered minorities, ISIS can now also claim its first victim in Washington with thesacking of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. His departure—prompted in part by divisions with the White House over Syria policy—highlights the deep problems of an air offensive against ISIS that has alienated Arab states and other allies in NATO, even as it has failed to bring tangible results.

The crisis ISIS has created for the West and the Arab world cannot be effectively addressed until there is a broader understanding of what ISIS wants. The first thing we need to recognize is that ISIS is not waging a war against the West. In view of the staggering growth in the number of ISIS’s international recruits—there are now estimated to be some 18,000 foreign fighters from 90 countries—the growing possibility that some who have joined the group may return home to carry out acts of terrorism must be taken seriously. There is also a risk that others who never went to Syria, like the shooter in the Canadian parliament in October, will be inspired by ISIS to carry out such attacks.

In contrast to al-Qaeda, however, ISIS has not made the US and its allies its main target. Where al-Qaeda directed its anger at the “distant enemy,” the United States, ISIS wants to destroy the near enemy, the Arab regimes, first. This is above all a war within Islam: a conflict of Sunni against Shia, but also a war by Sunni extremists against more moderate Muslims—between those who think the Muslim world should be dominated by a single strand of Wahhabism and its extremist offshoot Salafism and those who support a pluralistic vision of Muslim society.

More here.

Laura Sims at Poetry Magazine:

In John Berryman’s “Dream Song 29,” Henry suffers terrible guilt and self-doubt upon having contemplated—and possibly committed—murder. Like Oedipus who had already slept with his mother, killed his father, and blinded himself, Henry, “Ghastly, / with open eyes, … attends, blind.” Even blindness cannot keep him from “attend[ing]” the specter of murder, and “the bells say: too late.” But Henry, unlike Oedipus, is quickly given a reprieve—or so it seems—when, in the final stanza, the poem takes a nearly comical turn: “But never did Henry, as he thought he did, / end anyone and hacks her body up.” So, to our relief, and ostensibly to Henry’s, we learn that he never did the deed.

But this relief is more provisional than one would think. The only reason Henry “knows” he didn’t murder anyone is because “he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing”; he knows due to external evidence, due to the lack of missing persons, not because he knows himself. He lingers on the act of “reckon[ing], in the dawn, them up,” and then repeats, in the final line, “Nobody is ever missing,” as if to reassure himself.

more here.

Twelve Tweets from Michael Hendrick (via Ed Yong):

More here.

Rachel Holmes at The New Statesman:

In 1936, Vita Sackville-West published a biography of Joan of Arc. Clad in armour and boys’ breeches, brave, zealous, uncompromising, St Joan was a figure in whom she invested much of herself. “One wonders what her feelings were, when for the first time she surveyed her cropped head and moved her legs unencumbered by her red skirt,” Vita mused. But she knew very well, having experienced these same sensations. And her friend and sometime lover Virginia Woolf had already depicted them in Orlando (1928), a fictionalised biography of Vita’s life.

Energetic and confident, the heir to the Sackville dynasty always felt comfortable in her own skin. Being Vita wasn’t the problem – patriarchy was. Her assessment of Joan of Arc’s first dilemma mirrored her own: “The practical inconvenience of belonging to the wrong sex must be faced and overcome.” Vita was young when she discovered that what she loved most could never belong to her. The law of male entail excluded her from inheriting her home, the great Kentish house of Knole, where she was born in 1892. “Knole is denied to me for ever, through a ‘technical fault over which we have no control’,” she wrote.

more here.

Michael Lindgren in the Washington Post:

This beautiful, devastating little book is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever encountered, and if you grew up in a small town in the 1980s feeling even remotely marginal, it’s specifically engineered to break your heart.

“Our Secret Life in the Movies” has an extraordinary structure: Co-authors Michael McGriff and J.M. Tyree have assembled a list of 39 obscure art-house films as the starting point for a collection of brief, jagged improvisations on their respective youths. The result is a double-barreled bildungsroman of gothic, middle-American squalor and ruin. This sounds, in the abstract, pretentious and forced, but the result is flickeringly poetic. “I was just another latchkey kid with divorced parents,” one of the narrators mourns. “This was Reagan’s America, and I was a few too many dimensions in over my head.”

The relation between the vignettes they’ve written and the movies they’ve chosen, which range from classics by Tarkovsky and Kurosawa to oddities by Jens Lien and David Gordon Green, remains mercifully elliptical. Ingeniously, the movie-list concept serves as an organizing principle, but the true topics of the book’s evocative fragments are loneliness, anomie and desolation. As the dreamlike snapshots slip by — riddled with references to Dungeons & Dragons, the Dead Kennedys, methamphetamine, cheap cars, desperate sex, Jesus cults, neo-fascist skinheads, all the bizarre forgotten detritus of those strange times — the prose gradually accumulates a mesmerizing glow. “Before it was a sad place to get laid or get your teeth kicked out,” begins one sequence, “I spent my time at the combo bowling alley-roller rink.”

More here.

Astra Taylor at Bookforum:

The story of Anonymous’s emergence and transformation into one of the most intriguing and, arguably, potent leaderless political collaborations of our time has been told before in books such as Parmy Olson’s We Are Anonymous; in the 2012 documentary We Are Legion; and in a spate of glossy magazine articles. Coleman’s history complements, and frequently corrects, these popular accounts, but the book’s comprehensive detail and deep analysis set it apart. She covers the history of hacking and trolling, revealing the various tech-savvy and humor-loving milieus that spawned Anonymous. She traces the group’s political turn, from the battle with Scientology to actions like “Operation Payback,” which targeted PayPal and other financial institutions for cutting off WikiLeaks, and OpTunisia, which assisted antigovernment protesters during the Arab Spring. Coleman continues her tale as Anonymous fragments, tracking the evolution of spin-off cadres such as LulzSec and AntiSec and the rise and fall of well-known figures like Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond, and the double-crossing Hector Monsegur, aka “Sabu.”

Through it all, Coleman charts her own conceptual course, breaking with the standard narratives, particularly the click-baity cautionary tales about the dangers of Anonymous. Her book offers its share of warnings, but ones more nuanced, compelling, and empathetic than the typical hand-wringing about online mobs and the conundrum of virtual vigilante justice.

more here.

Matthieu Aikins in Rolling Stone:

Across the province, hundreds of thousands of people were taking part in the largest opium harvest in Afghanistan's history. With a record 224,000 hectares under cultivation this year, the country produced an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, or around 90 percent of the world's supply. The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow. The share of cocaine trafficking and production in Colombia's GDP peaked at six percent in the late 1980s; in Afghanistan today, according to U.N. estimates, the opium industry accounts for 15 percent of the economy, a figure that is set to rise as the West withdraws. “Whatever the term narco state means, if there is a country to which it applies, it is Afghanistan,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies illicit economies in conflict zones. “It is unprecedented in history.”

Even more shocking is the fact that the Afghan narcotics trade has gotten undeniably worse since the U.S.-led invasion: The country produces twice as much opium as it did in 2000. How did all those poppy fields flower under the nose of one of the biggest international military and development missions of our time? The answer lies partly in the deeply cynical bargains struck by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai in his bid to consolidate power, and partly in the way the U.S. military ignored the corruption of its allies in taking on the Taliban. It's the story of how, in pursuit of the War on Terror, we lost the War on Drugs in Afghanistan by allying with many of the same people who turned the country into the world's biggest source of heroin.

Read the rest here.

From NBC News:

Human ancestors may have begun evolving the knack for consuming alcohol about 10 million years ago, long before modern humans began brewing booze, researchers say. The ability to break down alcohol probably helped human ancestors make the most out of rotting, fermented fruit that fell onto the forest floor, the researchers said. Therefore, knowing when this ability developed could help researchers figure out when these human ancestors began moving to life on the ground, as opposed to mostly in trees. “A lot of aspects about the modern human condition — everything from back pain to ingesting too much salt, sugar and fat — goes back to our evolutionary history,” said lead study author Matthew Carrigan, a paleogeneticist at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida. “We wanted to understand more about the modern human condition with regards to ethanol [alcohol].”

To learn more about how human ancestors evolved the ability to break down alcohol, scientists focused on the genes that code for a group of digestive enzymes called the ADH4 family. ADH4 enzymes are found in the stomach, throat and tongue of primates, and are the first alcohol-metabolizing enzymes to encounter ethanol after it is imbibed. The researchers looked at the ADH4 genes from 28 different mammals, to investigate how closely related they were and find out when their ancestors diverged. In total, they explored nearly 70 million years of primate evolution. The scientists then used this knowledge to investigate how the ADH4 genes evolved over time and what the ADH4 genes of their ancestors might have been like. The results suggested there was a single genetic mutation 10 million years ago that endowed human ancestors with an enhanced ability to break down ethanol.

More here.