Laurel Braitman in The California Sunday Magazine:

Dutch Harbor is a small town on a small island far out in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, nearly 1,200 miles from Anchorage at the edge of the Bering Sea. It’s the most productive fishing port in the United States. Every winter the tiny population swells with thousands of people who come to work in the fish processing plants, on the crab boats, or out on the big cod and pollack trawlers. But they’re not the only ones trying their fortunes in town or out on the boats.

People in town call them Dutch Harbor pigeons. The rest of us call them bald eagles. In a community of just over 4,700 permanent residents, there live an estimated 500 to 800 eagles. They stare judgily down from light posts, peer intently into people’s windows, eat foxes and seagulls while perched in the trees next to the high school, and sit on rooflines like living weather vanes. Down at the docks, they swarm every boat that comes into port like some sort of Hitchcockian nightmare, fighting for scraps of bait, elbowing one another for prime positions, crowding together on top of crab pots, and squawk-cheeping their opinions.

We’re used to seeing our national bird as a valiant hero in nature documentaries plucking salmon from pristine streams, on the back of every dollar bill in our wallets, or on pretty much every federal seal — from the NSA and the CIA to the office of the president. But in Dutch, especially in winter when it’s harder for them to catch fish, you can see eagles for what they really are: hardy, scrappy scavengers.

Turns out that when you live with a federal symbol up close and personal, day in and day out, it’s a little harder to think of them as majestic.

More here.

Arika Okrent in Mental Floss:

The BBC’s Matthew Anderson tweeted about a rule that “English speakers know, but don’t know we know.” It was a screen grab of a passage from Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence explaining that the reason “great green dragons” sounds better than “green great dragons” is that we unconsciously follow a rule that stipulates that the order of adjectives in English goes opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose. Size comes before color, so no “green great dragons.”

People reacted to the tweet with amazement, astonishment, and thousands of retweets. It can be shocking to realize that we are able to follow rules that no one ever taught us explicitly. But that’s what most of language is: Not the little things that textbooks tell us we’re getting wrong, but the solid ones we always get right. Non-native speakers, however, might get them wrong, and that gives us a good opportunity to get a peek at the rules we don’t otherwise notice.

1. WHY “MY BROTHER’S CAR” AND NOT “THE CAR OF MY BROTHER”

There are two main ways to express possession in English, one with possession marked on the possessor (my brother’s car) and one with an “of” phrase (the car of my brother). Teachers and usage guides don’t usually give rules telling you why “the car of my brother” sounds bad but “the door of my house” sounds fine, because no one thinks to say “the car of my brother” in the first place. But why not? After all, languages like Spanish and French use this kind of construction (el coche de mi hermano, la voiture de mon frère). Why does “my brother’s car” sound so much better than “the car of my brother,” but “my house’s door” sounds the same or worse than “the door of my house”?

More here.

Christopher Carroll at The NY Review of Books:

In 1942 the composer Ned Rorem, then nineteen, attended a panel at Northwestern University made up of various grandees from the world of music. One of them—a short, stocky bald man with a high-pitched voice and a face like an owl—was Virgil Thomson, a composer and the chief classical music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. The panel, as Rorem remembered it, began with an attempt to define music:

The others were falling back on Shakespeare’s “concord of sweet sounds” when Thomson shrieked: “Boy, was he wrong! You might as well call painting a juxtaposition of pretty colors, or poems a succession of lovely words. What is music? Why, it’s what we musicians do.”

The story captures some of what makes Thomson’s music writing at once so admirable and so maddening. At its best, his criticism was disarmingly direct and unpretentious. He could write with style, and had a knack for bringing the sound of music to life, as when he described the finale of the Brahms Third Symphony, “where the winds play sustained harmonic progressions which the violins caress with almost inaudible tendrils of sound, little wiggly figures that dart like silent goldfish around a rock.” He was a fierce advocate of styles of music that were dismissed as quaint and unimportant or ignored entirely, especially French music, such as the works of Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Satie, and new music by living American composers. Most of all he had a willingness to speak his mind even when it meant contradicting the press, the concert-going public, and the administrations who ran the orchestras.

more here.

Coco Fusco at Hyperallergic:

The presence of blackness in a Whitney Biennial invariably stirs controversy — it’s deemed to be unfit or not enough, or too much. The current Whitney Biennial is no exception — the art press has been awash this past week with reports of a protest staged in front of a painting of a disfigured Emmett Till lying in his casket and a letter penned by an artist who called for the work to be removed and destroyed. The painter is Dana Schutz, a white American. The author of the letter is Hannah Black, a black-identified biracial artist who hails from England and resides in Berlin. The protestors are a youthful coalition of artists and scholars of color. The curators being called on the carpet are both Asian American. Debates about the painting and the letter rage on social media, to the exclusion of discussion of the many works by black artists in the show, most notably Henry Taylor’s rendering of Philando Castile dying in his car after being shot by police. This multicultural melodrama took a rather perverse turn on March 23, when an unknown party hacked Schutz’s email address and committed identity theft by submitting an apologia under her name to the Huffington Post and a number of other publications; it was printed and then retracted. Up to now, none of Schutz’s detractors have addressed whether they think it’s fine to punish the artist by putting words in her mouth.

more here.

Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker:

I asked Schutz if she’d thought any more about the Emmett Till painting. “That one turned out,” she said, sounding surprised. She had put it in the Berlin show, where it caused no controversy. She found the image on her iPhone, and showed it to me. Based on a widely reproduced photograph of Till’s mutilated corpse in his coffin, the painting was dominated on one side by a mostly abstract, thickly painted head in shades of dark brown and black, and on the other side by his white dress shirt. Till’s mother had dressed him formally for his funeral, and she had insisted on leaving the casket open so that people could see what the killers had done to his face. “This is about a young boy, and it happened,” Schutz said. “It’s evidence of something that really happened. I wasn’t alive then, and it wasn’t taught in our history classes.” She was still uncertain about the painting. “I don’t know if it has the right emotionality,” she said. “I like it as a painting, but I might want to try it again.” All the Berlin pictures were sold (at prices ranging from ninety thousand dollars to four hundred thousand), but Schutz had kept two of them for herself: a painting of two men coping with oversized insects, and the Till painting, which was called “Open Casket.”

more here.

Robert Fulford in National Post:

Charles Darwin was confounded by an “odd state of mind” that he recognized in himself and many others.

Shyness.

Why did it exist? He could work out how lust, greed, love, etc. evolved as traits over many millennia. Each of them had a clear purpose in the creation and survival of humanity. But shyness? It was, so far as he could see, of no benefit to our species. And shyness could lead sometimes to blushing, another non-starter among human qualities. Darwin noted that it makes the blusher suffer and the beholder uncomfortable, “without being of the least service to either of them.”

Why?

The problem that Darwin never solved is the subject of a splendidly quirky book, Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (Yale University Press), by Joe Moran, who teaches cultural history in Liverpool. Moran searches tirelessly through history, literature, folklore and a little medicine without concluding why so many millions of us are shy. It remains as mysterious as it is pervasive. Some shy people suffer from feelings of inadequacy that they don’t care to acknowledge. Some may have secrets. When people say “I can’t stand cocktail parties,” that usually means they feel misplaced and self-conscious when talking to large groups of people whom they only half know. When they say “I have no small talk,” what they mean is that they’ve never mastered easygoing conversation. Moran doesn’t know why he’s often shy himself but realizes he’s a chronic case. Before he makes a phone call, he writes out what he wants to say. He keeps a notebook full of topics to raise when he finds himself at a loss for words, which apparently happens often. I’m also painfully shy on occasion and recognize Moran as a fellow sufferer, but I have never developed such an organized strategy.

From his perch in England, Moran observes that this is a national characteristic of the English.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Databases worldwide are rapidly swelling with the sequences of thousands of cancer genomes. Now, some scientists are advocating that researchers shift their focus back in time: to study the DNA of tumours in their adolescence, before they commit to being cancerous. At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in Washington DC, researchers gathered on 2 April to discuss the growing call to sequence the genomes of pre-cancerous lesions — abnormal growths that sometimes progress into full-blown cancers. The results could help researchers to determine which tumours warrant treatment and could aid the development of therapies to block cancers on the path to malignancy. It is a project that is now near the top of the cancer research wish list, says oncologist Elizabeth Jaffee of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “This is something that has really taken off throughout the cancer community,” she says.

The idea could be one of the next 'big science' projects for cancer. The idea is to borrow some tactics — such as coordination among scientists and sequencing centres — from The Cancer Genome Atlas, one of the first and biggest cancer genome efforts, which characterized the genomes of 33 cancers using samples from more than 11,000 people. But the new 'Pre-Cancer' Genome Atlas would also study cancers over time. It would ideally include multiple snapshots of the same tumour as it developed, in the hope that researchers will be able to determine what changes pushed it across a tipping point to become cancerous.

More here.

Before it was published, censors approved Ahmed Naji's subversive novel 'Using Life' – so how did he end up in jail for what he wrote?

Jonathan Guyer in Rolling Stone:

On a scorching Saturday morning in July, Ahmed Naji stood in the crowded cage of a Cairo courtroom. The 31-year-old author had been convicted six months earlier of "violating public morality" for publishing a piece of literature. In his novel, Using Life, an irreverent portrayal of youth culture on the cusp of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the protagonist performs cunnilingus, rolls hash joints and gulps from bottles of vodka. Censors had approved the book, which is also sometimes translated as The Use of Life, but when an excerpt appeared in Cairo's premier literary review, Akhbar Al-Adab, an absurd series of events eventually led Naji to prison. Though he was released in December thanks to a high-powered team of Egyptian lawyers and campaigns from international arts communities, he lives in fear that anything he says or writes could land him back in Egypt's most notorious prison. He described to Rolling Stone how self-censorship has entered into his considerations at the keyboard. "When you are writing, you are thinking… someone will read something or this could affect the case and so on," says Naji. "It's hard to move on and write."

Torn from the pages of Kafka, Naji's case sheds light on the risks of free speech in an authoritarian state. In Egypt, if a citizen experiences personal injury from an offensive piece of writing or television program, he or she can bring a case forward to the public prosecutor claiming the violation of public morals, a vague clause enshrined in the constitution and taken from the French legal system. There have only been few instances of such cases moving forward, but public prosecutors do often relish in the opportunity to serve as the moral police. "The accused disseminated written materials that exude sexual lust and fleeting pleasures, lending out his pen and his mind to violate the sanctity of public morals and good character," the prosecutor told a local news outlet last year. Naji's story shows literature's ambiguous power to agitate and the state of arts and letters in a country that experienced a widespread uprising just six years ago.

More here.