Cashing In on Céline’s Anti-Semitism 3

Japan Shocked Russia and Europe 7

H. Auden on the Political Power of Art 10

Going into Space Crushes the Delicate Nerves in Your Eyeballs 16

Scientists figure out how to make muscles from scratch 18

Rare Hybrid Bird Discovered in the Amazon in a First 23

This artificial muscle costs 10 cents to make. And it’s as strong as an elephant. 26

Family unification (1) 29

For americans, government is a danger; for chinese, the solution 33

Will the Court Kill the Gerrymander? 36

Art in a Time of Terror 42

Scientists create functioning kidney tissue 48

Memories of Mississippi 51

Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship 65

‘The Biggest Taboo’: An Interview with Qiu Zhijie 69

The Novelist’s Complicity 75

Fred Bass, Maestro of the Strand 78

Lauren Greenfield’s Gilt Edge 82

Dominica: After the Storm 90

Autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder share molecular traits, study finds 98

Consciousness: Where Are Words? 101

A Paper Memo Pad That Excavates Objects as It Gets Used 106

The Emperor Robeson 115

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Custom Hand-Knit Sweaters Blend Subjects into Urban Environments 124

Lebanon: About to Blow? 130

Breathe: A Stunning Black & White Timelapse of Thunderstorms Across the Central Plains 136

Molecular mechanisms of memory formation revelaed 137

The Horror, the Horror 140

Two Biologists Explore the Remote Rainforests of the Ecuadorian Andes to Document Fungi 147

New, forward-looking report outlines research path to sustainable cities 156

Paper-Cast Sculptures of Legs and Torsos Covered in Traditional Chinese Paintings by Peng Wei 160

To Be, or Not to Be 167

A Top Floor Sprinkler Leak Creates a 21-Story Tower of Icicles on a Chicago Fire Escape 174

How to scale up a pilot program 180

Astrophysicists settle cosmic debate on magnetism of planets and stars 184

Tatsuya Tanaka Continues Building Tiny Worlds in his Daily Miniature Calendar Photo Project 187

The Nonbinary Gender Trap 199

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Cashing In on Céline’s Anti-Semitism

Agnès Poirier

François Pages/Paris Match via Getty Images

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Meudon, France, 1957

On December 12, Antoine Gallimard, head of the illustrious French publishing house founded by his

grandfather Gaston in 1919, received a letter from the French prime minister’s office. It was signed by

Frédéric Potier, head of the prime minister’s “delegation in charge of fighting racism, anti-Semitism and anti-

LGBT hatred.” It was a polite but firm invitation to meet. In fact, the French government was summoning a

French publisher to ask the company to justify its decision to publish a certain book.

Such an occurrence is extremely rare. But the nature of the book in question, and its author’s identity, explain

the intense scrutiny. Gallimard proposed to publish this year a book edition of three virulently anti-Semitic

pamphlets by Louis-Ferdinand Céline that were written and published between 1937 and 1941, and that have

never since been reissued in France: Bagatelles pour un massacre, L’école des cadavres, and Les beaux draps.

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Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images

The front cover of Bagatelles pour un massacre, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1941

Alongside Marcel Proust, Céline is considered one of the greatest French novelists and stylists of the

twentieth century, notably for his 1932 masterpiece, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the

Night). He is also recognized as a vile anti-Semite, xenophobe, misogynist, misanthropist, and early pro-Nazi

who nourished the general defeatist spirit before and during the war and who, through his writings and

articles, infused into French society a deeply insidious anti-Semitism.

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A few days after the Normandy landings, knowing only too well that he would be either assassinated

by résistants or condemned to death for treason by a new Gaullist or communist government, he fled France

together with a thousand unrepentant French collaborators, one of whom was Marshal Pétain, the leader of the

collaborationist Vichy government. With the help of Nazi occupiers, these fugitives absconded to the

Sigmaringen Castle in the Swabian Alps of southern Germany. In March 1945, Céline and his wife, Lucette,

then found refuge in Denmark, where they stayed until 1951, when Céline was assured he could return to

France without fear for his life—although a French court had, in the meantime, condemned him in absentia as

a “national disgrace.” Having already served a spell in prison in Denmark at France’s behest, Céline was

allowed to return home, settling in leafy Meudon, just outside Paris.

After his own publisher, Robert Denoël, a well-known Nazi collaborator, was assassinated in Paris in

mysterious circumstances in December 1945 (to this day, his murder remains unsolved), Céline moved to

Éditions Gallimard, which continued to publish his work until his death in 1961. Céline left explicit

instructions that his three anti-Semitic pamphlets were not be reprinted—a wish that, until very recently, his

still-living widow had respected. Now, however, at the age of 105, Lucette seems to have had a change of

heart. A few months ago, she reached an agreement with Gallimard that it would reissue the works, using a

French-Canadian edition of the texts available in Quebec, where Céline’s writings have already fallen into

public domain. (In France, literary works enter the public domain seventy years after the author’s death; in

Canada, after only fifty.) After all, since the material was already available in French, why leave French

readers to buy it from a Canadian publisher when Gallimard and Céline’s widow could benefit from the sales

for another fifteen years?

Thus, on December 19, a week after receiving his official summons, Antoine Gallimard went to 55, rue Saint-

Dominique on the Left Bank in Paris to meet the head of the prime minister’s antiracism unit. From

Gallimard’s office, at 5, rue Sébastien-Bottin, it is but a brisk ten-minute walk through the

7th arrondissement, an elegant quarter comfortably sequestered from the bustle of the world. By a certain

historical irony, the delegation’s office stands right next to the former German Institute where, during the war,

Gerhard Heller, the young Sonderführer in charge of monitoring French literary publishing, regularly met

with Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the extreme-right author appointed by Gaston Gallimard to appease the Nazi

occupiers.

During their meeting, Potier told Gallimard that the first French reprint of Céline’s anti-Semitic pamphlets in

nearly eight decades should be done in the spirit of education, rather than in one of sensation; he proposed

that the original texts should be accompanied by in-depth exegesis, and put into context by interdisciplinary

scholars and historians. Potier had in mind, perhaps, the very scholarly “critical edition” of Mein Kampf that

enabled the recent reissue of Hitler’s work in Germany for the first time since the war.

Antoine Gallimard, accompanied by the Jewish writer and historian Pierre Assouline, who is writing a preface

to the new edition, politely refused. For them, Céline’s texts belong to literature and do not need more than a

literary critic’s preface and notes. In their eyes, the French-Canadian edition, which has notes by a Céline

expert named Régis Tettamanzi, is sufficient.

Although it is very unlikely that the French government will seek to ban the book, a growing chorus of

prominent voices—among them, historians, politicians, and Holocaust survivors—have already threatened

legal action against Gallimard. One of them, the well-known Nazi hunter and French lawyer Serge Klarsfeld,

deemed Gallimard’s project “unbearable.” Other voices, though, argue that it is better to reprint the work with

the addition of critical context than to let people access the plain texts online, where illicit versions are

available.

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Then, on January 4, Le Monde revealed that the Canadian publisher, Rémi Ferland, had openly supported

Marine Le Pen in the last year’s French presidential elections, with public postings on his Facebook page.

The Le Monde report also pointed out how this particular edition exhibited a worrying vagueness, even a

nonchalance, about the way its notes and commentary addressed Céline’s pathological anti-Semitism. Even

naming this collection of pamphlets “Écrits polémiques” (polemical writings), as the French-Canadian edition

does, is insidious, declared Le Monde. In France today, anti-Semitism is considered a crime, not simply an

opinion. When far-right writers, politicians, and comedians are convicted in French courts for incitement to

hatred and anti-Semitism, why should Gallimard be permitted to reissue anti-Semitic diatribes? For Serge

Klarsfeld, this is an untenable discrepancy.

Amid the heated debate, however, few voices have questioned Gallimard’s motive for publication. Why the

urgency, and without a more carefully prepared edition? It is hard to avoid the impression that the publisher

seems chiefly interested in making a quick profit. Considering the rise of anti-Semitism in the country and the

heightened tension between France’s large Muslim and Jewish communities, the wisdom of the French

publisher and its sense of responsibility seem questionable.

One explanation for Gallimard’s ambiguous conduct can be found in the firm’s history. During the war, some

publishers chose to close down rather than collaborate with the Nazi occupation, while others—like

Gallimard—decided to remain open and negotiate with the German authorities. Appointing an outspoken

fascist writer like Drieu La Rochelle to a crucial position at Gallimard pleased the Nazi overseers and created

a clever smokescreen—for the résistants, too, were operating from the offices of Gallimard. One was the

long-time editor of the literary journal La Nouvelle Revue Française, Jean Paulhan. The two writers’ tiny

offices stood next to each other. How could they cohabitate? Easily enough, it turned out: such was Paris

during the Occupation, a place of moral ambiguity, of cowardice, treason, and courage living side by side.

Drieu the collaborator and Paulhan the résistant coexisted without rancor, their love of literature cementing

their mutual respect. For four years, they published both rightist and leftist authors under the noses of the

Nazis. For them, as for Gaston Gallimard, one thing only counted above all else: the talent of the writer.

These were, however, extraordinary times. In a short essay published in London in 1945 entitled “Paris sous

l’occupation” (“Paris Under the Occupation”), Jean-Paul Sartre tried to explain it: “Everybody was going

about their day like sleepwalkers, carrying their fate over their shoulder like a sling bag, toothbrush and soap

in one’s pocket, just in case of an arrest. We all lived in transit, between two round-ups, two hostage-takings,

and two misunderstandings.” Today, though, Gallimard’s morally ambiguous attitude has no justification. Its

urge to re-issue the violently anti-Semitic prose that Céline himself did not want to reprint is questionable; its

decision to do so quickly and carelessly was even more dubious.

The storm has forced Gallimard to reconsider its plan to reprint the French-Canadian edition. On January 11,

the publisher made a surprise announcement, reversing its previous position and suspending publication of the

pamphlets. In a statement, Antoine Gallimard said the correct “methodological and memorial conditions” that

would enable Céline’s notorious work to be read “dispassionately” did not exist at present—a formulation that

appeared to concede that reprinting the French-Canadian edition would be inappropriate, while leaving the

door open for a more scholarly edition at a future date. Gallimard’s decision is welcome, but the habit of

ambiguity, it seems, dies hard.

HTTP://WWW.NYBOOKS.COM/DAILY/2018/01/12/CASHING-IN-ON-CELINES-ANTISEMITISM/

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Japan Shocked Russia and Europe

Today's selection -- from The 1929 Sino-Soviet War by Michael M. Walker. By the 1800s, the dominance of

Asia by European countries was complete, with Britain, France, the Netherlands and other European countries

having established colonies in Asia and with the British military's subjugation of China. This was

compounded by the humiliation of China after the European powers defeated the country in the Boxer

Rebellion of 1900 and then extracted heavy reparations. Russia in particular gained complete military

dominance of that part of China adjacent to Korea, which was then a colony of Japan. Japan, anxious

regarding Russia's buildup in the region and unable to bring a change through negotiation, stunned the world

by attacking Russia in February of 1904 and handily defeating the tsar's army. With over a half million

casualties, this war also gave evidence of the emerging brutality of mechanized war:

"When ... [Tsar Nicholas II] adopted an unyielding negotiations stance, Japan came to see war as the only

solution. ... The Japanese were as alarmed as the Chinese at the failure of the Russian army to leave the

Northeast. They concluded that because the Chinese military was impotent in the years after the Boxer

Uprising, the substantial Russian army and naval forces in the Northeast had to be directed at Japan. Where

St. Petersburg sought to delay negotiations over the Korea question as an effective tactic while expanding

Russian military might in response to perceived unreadiness, the Japanese increasingly saw them as examples

of Russian duplicity and even deceit.

"To the Meiji leaders in Tokyo, that Russia appeared bent on

dominating East Asia through force proved the wisdom of a war

policy. ... By 1904, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) had been

increased by six divisions to a total of thirteen, while the navy had

grown from a combined fleet built around four dated capital ships

to one possessing ten, with six modern, first-rate battleships, all of

which had entered service in the last seven years. When the tsar

failed to make meaningful concessions over Korea during close of

1903, Japan prepared for war. ... T

he Russians opted to delay negotiations with Japan once again,

convinced that time was on their side, while the Japanese

mobilized. When Tokyo's final offer, issued on 13 January, met

with an unfavorable response, war broke out in February 1904.

"[From the beginning] until the war's end after the Japanese victory

at Mukden in March 1905, the Japanese never lost the initiative on

the battlefield. ...

Battlefields in the Russo-Japanese War

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"Japanese assault on the entrenched Russian forces", 1904

"On 1 January 1905, Port Arthur fell to [Japanese General] Nogi's badly bloodied 3rd Army, while the

decisive land battle of the war at Mukden ended in defeat for Russia in March. [Russian General] Kuropatkin

was relived of command shortly afterward, and when the Russian Baltic fleet was destroyed in the battle of

the Tsushima Straits in late May, any hope of Russian victory disappeared. By mid-June, St. Petersburg

requested an armistice, but Tokyo declined to accept until peace negotiations began on 1 August under the

good offices of the United States [led by the Nobel Prize-winning efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt] at

the Portsmouth naval yard. The war was over, but at a terrible cost for both sides: the Japanese saw

approximately 60,000 killed in action with another 20,000 dying from disease and close to a quarter million

wounded, while the Russian casualties easily exceeded those totals."

author: Michael Walker

title: The 1929 Sino-Soviet War: The War Nobody Knew

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publisher: University Press of Kansas

date: Copyright 2017 by Michael Walker

pages: 29-31

https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3497&utm_source=The+1929+Sino-

Soviet+War&utm_campaign=1%2F02%2F17&utm_medium=email

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.H. Auden on the Political Power of Art and the Crucial Difference Between Party Issues and Revolutionary

Issues

“In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

To be a thinking, feeling, creative individual in a mass society too often unthinking and unfeeling in its

conformity is to find oneself again and again at odds with the system yet impelled to make out of those odds

alternative ends — to envision other landscapes of possibility, other answers, other questions yet unasked.

Because that is what artists do, a certain political undertone inheres in all art. Chinua Achebe knew this when

he observed in his fantastic forgotten conversation with James Baldwin: “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too

much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same

people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”

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What it means to be an artist inside but not trapped by the system and to labor at improving it from within is

what beloved poet W.H. Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973) examines in one of the thirty-four

splendid essays in his indispensable 1962 collection The Dyer’s Hand (public library), which also gave us

Auden on writing, originality, and how to be a good reader and what it really means to be a scholar.

Auden begins with a taxonomy of social formations:

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has

a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

A mob is active; it smashes, kills and sacrifices itself. The public is passive or, at most, curious. It neither

murders nor sacrifices itself; it looks on, or looks away, while the mob beats up a Negro or the police round

up Jews for the gas ovens.

The public is the least exclusive of clubs; anybody, rich or poor, educated or unlettered, nice or nasty, can join

it: it even tolerates a pseudo revolt against itself, that is, the formation within itself of clique publics.

Today, these clique-based pseudo revolts have reached a pinnacle in identity politics. Echoing Nobel laureate

Elias Canetti’s foundational insight into the power of crowds and the paradox of why we join them, Auden

adds:

In a crowd, passion like rage or terror is highly contagious; each member of a crowd excites all the others, so

that passion increases at a geometric rate. But among members of the Public, there is no contact. If two

members of the public meet and speak to each other, the function of their words is not to convey meaning or

arouse passion but to conceal by noise the silence and solitude of the void in which the Public exists.

Occasionally, the Public embodies itself in a crowd and so becomes visible — in the crowd, for example,

which collects to watch the wrecking gang demolish the old family mansion, fascinated by yet another proof

that physical force is the Prince of this world against whom no love of the heart shall prevail.

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Art by Ben Shahn from On Nonconformity

Nearly a century after Oscar Wilde proclaimed that “a true artist takes no notice whatever of the public” and

more than a century and half after Germaine de Staël’s bold assertion that “contemporary glory is submitted

to [the public’s] decision, for it is characterised by the enthusiasm of the multitude, [whereas] real merit is

independent of everything,” Auden considers how the emergence of the capital-P Public and its modern

ventriloquist, the mass media, has abraded the essence of true art:

Before the phenomenon of the Public appeared in society, there existed naïve art and sophisticated art which

were different from each other but only in the way that two brothers are different. The Athenian court may

smile at the mechanics’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe, but they recognize it as a play. Court poetry and Folk

poetry were bound by the common tie that both were made by hand and both were intended to last; the

crudest ballad was as custom-built as the most esoteric sonnet. The appearance of the Public and the mass

media which cater to it have destroyed naïve popular art. The sophisticated “highbrow” artist survives and can

still work as he did a thousand years ago, because his audience is too small to interest the mass media. But the

audience of the popular artist is the majority and this the mass media must steal from him if they are not to go

bankrupt. Consequently, aside from a few comedians, the only art today is “highbrow.” What the mass media

offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced

by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority

become cultural snobs.

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In consonance with Achebe, Auden suggests that because all genuine art arises from a rebellion against the

tyranny of conformity, all art is inescapably political. In an incisive dichotomy, he examines what “political”

really means:

There are two kinds of political issues, Party issues and Revolutionary issues. In a party issue, all parties are

agreed as to the nature and justice of the social goal to be reached, but differ in their policies for reaching it.

The existence of different parties is justified, firstly, because no party can offer irrefutable proof that its policy

is the only one which will achieve the commonly desired goal and, secondly, because no social goal can be

achieved without some sacrifice of individual or group interest and it is natural for each individual and social

group to seek a policy which will keep its sacrifice to a minimum, to hope that, if sacrifices must be made, it

would be more just if someone else made them. In a party issue, each party seeks to convince the members of

its society, primarily by appealing to their reason; it marshals facts and arguments to convince others that its

policy is more likely to achieve the desired goal than that of its opponents. On a party issue it is essential that

passions be kept at a low temperature: effective oratory requires, of course, some appeal to the emotions of

the audience, but in party politics orators should display the mock-passion of prosecuting and defending

attorneys, not really lose their tempers. Outside the Chamber, the rival deputies should be able to dine in each

other’s houses; fanatics have no place in party politics.

In a passage of astonishing prescience, he contrasts party issues with other — and far more consequential —

kind of political issues:

A revolutionary issue is one in which different groups within a society hold different views as to what is just.

When this is the case, argument and compromise are out of the question; each group is bound to regard the

other as wicked or mad or both. Every revolutionary issue is potentially a casus belli. On a revolutionary

issue, an orator cannot convince his audience by appealing to their reason; he may convert some of them by

awakening and appealing to their conscience, but his principal function, whether he represent the

revolutionary or the counterrevolutionary group, is to abuse its passion to the point where it will give all its

energies to achieving total victory for itself and total defeat for its opponents. When an issue is revolutionary,

fanatics are essential.

Writing three decades after W.E.B. Du Bois and Albert Einstein’s little-known correspondence about “the evil

of race prejudice in the world” and just after Dr. King’s timeless insistence that “injustice anywhere is a threat

to justice everywhere,” Auden adds:

Today, there is only one genuine world-wide revolutionary issue, racial equality.

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One of W.E.B. Du Bois’s pioneering modernist data visualizations of African American life.

Echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s conviction that it is the artist’s task to liberate the present from the past and

James Baldwin’s immortal assertion that “a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and

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he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,” Auden returns to the artist’s task as a force of

wakefulness for regime-tranquilized society:

Every artist feels himself at odds with modern civilization.

In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they

please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of

people, they remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the

managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.

The Dyer’s Hand is an abidingly rewarding read in its totality. Complement this particular portion with

Denise Levertov on the artist’s task to awaken society’s sleepers, Adrienne Rich on the political power of

poetry, Robert Penn Warren on art and democracy, and John F. Kennedy on the artist’s role as an antidote to

corruption, then revisit Auden on belief, doubt, and the most important principle in making art.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/01/11/auden-art-

politics/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=f0379ebb83-

EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-f0379ebb83-

234059117&mc_cid=f0379ebb83&mc_eid=d1c16ac662

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Going into Space Crushes the Delicate Nerves in Your Eyeballs

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | January 11, 2018 11:51am ET

Astronaut Ed White performed the first American spacewalk during the Gemini 4 mission on June 3, 1965.

Credit: NASA

Two delicate, bundled stalks of nerve tissue erupt forward from the brain, slip between gaps in the backs of

each eyeball, and attach themselves gently to the rear of each retina. These are the optic nerves, the

transmitters linking human beings to their powers of sight. And now researchers have shown that space travel

puts a powerful, dangerous squeeze on their fragile tips.

A study of 15 astronauts who had been on missions in orbital freefall for about six months found that the

tissues at the backs of their eyes — tissues that surround the heads of their optic nerves — tended to look

warped and swollen in the weeks after their return to Earth. This change could help explain why nearly half of

long-term space travelers develop significant vision problems, according to the study, published today (Jan.

11) in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology.

This isn't the first study to demonstrate that space travel changes the shape of the eye; a 2011 paper published

in the journal Ophthalmology showed that there were changes to the internal anatomies of astronauts' eyes.

But the new study is the first to show direct, damaging changes to the optic nerve. [Photos: The First Space

Tourists]

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An image from a dissection shows a human optic nerve from a side-view of the face.

Credit: Dr. John B. Selhorst/Wikimedia commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0

That's a big deal, because as NASA slowly (ever so slowly) works toward long-term crewed missions into

deep space, it needs to understand how those missions are likely to impact astronauts' health.

Many of the 15 astronauts in the study had pre-existing eye damage (likely from previous missions) before the

trips to space documented in this study. But images of their Bruch membrane openings — the gaps in the

back of the eye through which the optic nerve travels — showed those tissues moving deeper into the eye

after long-term missions and swelling significantly after the astronauts returned to Earth.

It's not clear exactly why this happens, but the researchers offered a guess: Perhaps the internal pressure in the

eye increases while the astronauts are up in space, and over time, the surrounding tissues get used to that new

pressure. Then, upon return to Earth's gravity, that pressure might quickly drain away. The rapid change could

irritate and deform the eye's internal tissues.

The researchers don't offer a solution to this problem, and it's not clear that it's a problem within NASA's

capacity to solve. But it's an issue the human spaceflight program will have to think about carefully as it asks

its workforce to endure longer and longer stints in outer space.

Originally published on Live Science.

https://www.livescience.com/61402-space-eye-damage-nerves.html

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Scientists figure out how to make muscles from scratch

MEGAN MOLTENI

Silicon Isn't Just for Computers. It Can Make a Pretty Good Kidney, Too

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In the latest issue of Nature Communications, researchers describe for the first time how to transform skin

cells into functional human skeletal muscle. Here, the lab-grown cells can be seen contracting under a

microscope.

FOR THE PAST several years, Nenad Bursac has been trying to make muscles from scratch.

A biological engineer at Duke, Bursac came close in 2015, when his lab became the first to grow functional

human skeletal muscle in culture. "Functional" being the operative word. Like the muscle fibers in, say, your

bicep, the tissues could contract and generate forces in response to things like electrical pulses and shots of

chemicals.

But to produce the tissue, the researchers had to isolate their starting materials from pea-sized globs of

muscle, which they sliced from human test subjects. The lab was, in effect, growing muscle from muscle. It

was a significant accomplishment, but also kind of a letdown: Biopsied cells don't proliferate well in the lab,

so producing a large, consistent supply is difficult. What's more, Bursac is interested in developing models of

muscular disorders (muscular dystrophies, for example). But for the 2015 study, his lab sampled healthy

tissues; sampling it from someone with a muscle-wasting disease, he says, would be unethical.

"In a lot of people with rare, congenital diseases, their muscles are already damaged, so you don't want to

biopsy on top of that and cause further damage," Bursac says. "The ideal scenario is to take a skin, blood, or

urine sample, use that to generate stem cells, and use that to generate functional muscles." In other words:

Reprogram skin or blood cells to act like undifferentiated stem cells.

Now, Bursac and his team have done exactly that. In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the

researchers describe for the first time how to transform skin cells into functioning human muscle. Their

method will make it easier than ever for researchers to study muscle and muscle-based therapies—and could

one day form a basis for stem cell and transplantation therapies.

Bursac's team used pluripotent stem cells derived from human skin cells, which they genetically programmed

to express large quantities of a protein called Pax-7. It can reprogram a single stem cell into what's known as a

myogenic progenitor cell—an intermediate cell that, under the right conditions, can eventually become a

mature, contracting muscle cell.

But cells are small. To make an individual muscle fiber, you need a lot of them. It takes Bursac's team about

five weeks to convert a single stem cell into about a thousand myogenic progenitors (after which, Bursac says,

it's fairly easy to scale to millions or even billions of cells). The researchers then load those progenitor cells

onto a cylindrical scaffold of gel made of fibrin, the same stuff that helps your blood clot. It gives the cells a

surface on which to align and complete their transformation into unified bundles of muscle fiber.

To verify that the fibers could function not just in culture but in live tissue, Bursac's team transplanted their

three-dimensional muscle bundles into adult mice. Through small, glass windows implanted in the mice's

backs, the researchers were able to watch their home-spun tissues not just survive but integrate with the

rodent's natural muscles. "The cells express a protein that flashes whenever calcium signalling is active in the

cell," Bursac says. "When the cells light up, we can see that the muscle is alive and active."

MORE MEDICINE

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MEGAN MOLTENI

A Patient Gets the New Transgender Surgery She Helped Invent

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21

SHARA TONN

Amazing Micrographs Show What Cells Really Look Like

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22

And also, Bursac hypothesizes, capable of self-repair. The lab-grown fibers also developed a special reservoir

of cells that muscles can draw on to regenerate after exercise or injury. The researchers' previous efforts to

produce muscle fibers from biopsied tissues had produced scant reserves of these cells; the new method, in

contrast, produces a rich supply.

The newly grown tissues aren't perfect. Bursac's homespun muscle fibers appear less mature than ones they've

produced from the biopsy technique, and generate less force than the real thing. Still, he's confident his lab

and others will be able to use the tissues to design new disease models—and perhaps, one day, gene- and

regenerative-therapies.

"Having a mature muscle culture system like this could make it a lot easier to study muscles and study

therapies," says University of Washington geneticist Jeffrey Chamberlain, who is working to develop gene

and cell therapies to correct and treat muscular dystrophies and was unaffiliated with the study. In the past,

researchers like him have had to work primarily with animal models. "So it'll advance the field by improving

basic testing, but there's also potential to use this in the future, for therapeutic stem cell transplantation."

All that, from a handful of skin cells. Who knew home grown muscles could hold so much promise?

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-figure-out-how-to-make-muscles-from-scratch/

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Rare Hybrid Bird Discovered in the Amazon in a First

By Samantha Mathewson, Live Science Contributor | January 9, 2018 06:50am ET

The golden-crowned manakin was first discovered in Brazil in 1957

Credit: Dysmorodrepanis/CC-BY 3.0

A rare, vivid green bird with radiant yellow head feathers is actually a unique hybrid species that lives in the

Amazon rainforest, researchers have found.

The small, golden-crowned manakin was first discovered in Brazil in 1957, but then it was not seen again

until its rediscovery 45 years later in 2002. A new study of the bird's origins shows that the golden-

crowned manakin is a cross between the snow-capped manakin and the opal-crowned manakin, representing

the first hybrid-bird species found to date, according to a statement from the University of Toronto.

"While hybrid plant species are very common, hybrid species among vertebrates are exceedingly rare," Jason

Weir, senior author of the study, said in the statement. [In Photos: Amazing Amazon Animal 'Selfies']

Advertisement

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Hybridization occurs when two species interbreed to produce a third. While the three related species of

manakins all have radiant yellow-green upper bodies with golden undersides, each has distinctively colored

feathers on their head.

The male golden-crowned manakin has evolved yellow feathers, likely as a way to attract potential female

mates.

Credit: University of Toronto Scarborough

Although hybridization among vertebrates in the wild is rare, it has been recorded in some animal

populations. For example, the red wolf of eastern North America is a possible hybrid between the coyote and

grey wolf, Live Science previously reported.

Even rarer, however, is when a hybrid species becomes reproductively isolated and forms a stable population

that no longer freely mixes with its parent species. This is what the golden-crowned manakin accomplished: It

established its own new species with unique characteristics in a remote area of the south-central Amazon

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Rainforest, the researchers said. This area is separated from the parent species' habitat by wide rivers that act

as natural barriers.

"Without geographic isolation, it's very likely this would never have happened because you don't see the

hybrids evolving as separate species in other areas where both parental species meet," Weir said. "This is

what makes the golden-crowned manakin such a novel animal."

The researchers collected feather samples and performed genetic tests that revealed that about 20 percent of

the golden-crowned manakin's genome came from the snowy-crowned manakin and about 80 percent came

from the opal-crowned manakin, according to the study.

Using a technique called coalescent modeling, the researchers were also able to determine that the golden-

crowned manakin emerged about 180,000 years ago, when the two parental species originally mated.

Furthermore, the researchers found that both parental species diverged from a common ancestor about

300,000 years ago.

"Most Amazon bird species diverged from their most recent relative around 1.5 [million] to 4 million years

ago, so these are all young birds by comparison," said Weir, who is an expert on the biodiversity of New

World birds.

Colorful keratin

While the snow-capped manakin has bright, snowy-white crown feathers, the opal-crowned manakin has

brilliant, iridescent crown feathers. Male birds use these highly reflective colors to attract female mates in the

dark interior of the rainforest. Hybrid and parent species generally have similar characteristics, but the golden-

crowned manakin somehow evolved with a distinctive golden head that doesn’t resemble the crown feathers

of either of its parents. [Real or Fake: 8 Bizarre Hybrid Animals]

To better understand why the golden-crowned manakins have such a strikingly different coloring, the

researchers examined the keratin structure of the crown feathers of all three of the bird species. Their analysis

showed that the two parent species have very different structural arrangements of keratin that create the

snowy-white and brilliant iridescent crown feathers.

As a result of hybridization, golden-crowned manakins have a mix of keratin structures from both parental

species. It is believed that the members of the species originally had duller white or grey feathers as a result of

their keratin structure and then later evolved yellow feathers to increase their visibility in the forest and attract

female mates, the researchers said.

Their findings were published Dec. 26 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article published on Live Science.

https://www.livescience.com/61374-first-hybrid-bird-amazon.html

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BY ELAINA ZACHOS 07 JANUARY 2018

This artificial muscle costs 10 cents to make. And it’s as strong as an elephant.

A team of young scientists hopes to use the device for prosthetics and industrial applications.

Two years ago, a team of scientists came together in a university basement. Many of them had never co-

authored papers before, and their research money came from start-up funds.

Turning to nature, the University of Colorado Boulder scientists set out to engineer a lifelike muscle that was

cheap, flexible, and strong. Their work, published in Science and Science Robotics on January 5, introduces

HASEL, a manmade device that creates movement and has the potential to heal itself.

"[The scientists] are helping create the future of flexible, more-humanlike robots that can be used to improve

people's lives and well-being," a university dean says in a statement.

MUSCLES OF THE FUTURE

In the past, prosthetic limbs and other robotic materials were made rigid by bulky pumps, valves, and tubes,

while some muscle alternatives were flexible but couldn't withstand electric pulses. (Read: "Twisting

Everyday Fibers Could Make 'Smart Clothes' a Reality")

But CU Boulder's Keplinger Research Group has created a versatile muscle that might be able to heal itself.

The mechanism is as flexible as an octopus, as strong as an elephant, and as fast as a hummingbird. With this

technology, the team is hoping to eventually engineer full-body robots that can gracefully mimic human

movement. (Read: "Human-Pig Hybrid Created in the Lab—Here Are the Facts")

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"We have basically taken the best of those two approaches and merged them into a new technology," says

senior author Christoph Keplinger, a mechanical engineering professor at CU Boulder.

The movement-creating device is called a "hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic" actuator. That's

a HASEL (pronounced "hey-zuhl") actuator or muscle, for short. The pump-free devices are pouches made of

the same inexpensive plastic that makes up potato chip bags and filled with an electrically insulated liquid,

similar to canola oil. The devices change shape when voltage is run through them, and the malleable oil gives

the mechanism the potential to self-heal.

"You can control it with only two wires," Science paper lead author Eric Acome says, referring to the wires

used to power the electrodes. "We don't need to have some sort of external equipment."

Researchers are designing artificial muscles that will more closely imitate human movement.

GROUPS OF THREE

The researches outline different applications of the muscle, which is thin, transparent, and flexible. One

design is a donut-shaped muscle with electrodes placed on either side of it. When the device is electrified, the

oil inside it moves, changing its shape to mimic gripping.

Another muscle design is made from stretchy, ionic conductors with a liquid pocket inside. When electricity

is applied to it, the muscle spasms, which can lift a gallon of water or flex a mechanised arm.

Another design, dubbed a Peano-HASEL actuator, is made of three small, rectangular pouches strung

together. The liquid-filled device contracts under a kick of voltage, much like a biological muscle. The

movement is so gentle it can grasp plump raspberries or raw eggs without crushing them.

Science Robotics lead author Nick Kellaris says one of these Peano-HASEL devices only costs 10 cents to

make. If the design is scaled up, Keplinger adds, producing them could cost less than a cent each.

PROSTHETICS TO PACKAGING

Unlike past designs, the oil inside HASEL muscles can withstand electricity. This gives the durable device the

potential to self-heal. The plastic casing can't self-repair tears yet, but Keplinger says creating a self-healing

encasement is one of the next steps for research.

The artificial muscles could slim down bulky metal robots and give them more human-like movements.

Because of the material's versatility, co-author Shane Mitchell says the muscle can be tailored for specific

applications, like prosthetics. (Read: "Revolution in Artificial Limbs Brings Feeling Back to Amputees")

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"You could imagine them as being laid out in a forearm, and then they could control the digits of an artificial

hand," Mitchell says.

HASEL could also help in creating artificial human tissue and organs. Scientists at CU Boulder are already

developing an artificial small intestine, which could help doctors-in-training and be used to test new medical

treatments. (Read: "Spinach Leaf Transformed Into Beating Human Heart Tissue")

Acome says that with its gripping abilities, the muscle could also be helpful in food handling and packaging.

The team is already working on new HASEL actuators that would work with five times lower voltage levels

than those outlined in the studies. The voltage published in the papers is similar to the low-current shock you

might get from static, and it's not dangerous to humans.

"We want to create robotics that are lifelike," Keplinger says.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/science/this-artificial-muscle-costs-10-cents-to-make-and-its-as-

strong-as-an-elephant.aspx

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Family unification (1)

Mario Reig January 10, 2018

Our core theory of fundamental physics, the Standard Model (SM), describes a vast range of phenomena

precisely and very accurately. In that sense it is close to Nature’s last word. It presents, however, some

shortcomings. For example, the SM contains three different forces and many independent fields. It is

attractive to imagine that a deeper unity underlies this observed multiplicity.

Thanks to the gauge principle, in Quantum Field Theory interactions are codified into symmetry groups,

under which our theory must be locally invariant. Our most fundamental theory, the SM, is based in the

symmetry SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1). The three independent groups encode three different interactions, i.e. the

strong, weak and electromagnetic forces. Additionally, when coming to fermions, it contains a plethora of

independent components: each family contains two quarks (with charges +2/3 and -1/3) that come in three

colors, one lepton with charge -1 and one neutral lepton called neutrino. Moreover, for some unknown reason,

in Nature this family structure is triplicated.

During the 70s, some physicists proposed 12 that the apparently independent forces are unified at high

energies in a unique interaction represented as a simple gauge group. Additionally, quantum corrections

explain why at low energies the strength of SM interactions are so different. These theories are usually known

as Grand Unified Theories, GUT.

Even more important than these nice features, one property of GUTs is that there exist connections between

quarks and leptons: they belong to the same multiplet of the gauge group. Phenomenologically this means that

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the unified interaction can convert a quark into a lepton and vice-versa. These transitions can mediate the

decay of protons (which in the SM are stable), making this process the smoking gun of GUTs. However, the

rate of proton decay is highly suppressed due to the breaking, at very high energies, of the initial symmetry

down to the SM.

Unfortunately, while unifying interactions is quite straightforward a unified description of all the elementary

fermions, a theory that in addition to forces also unifies families, is not an easy task. There are several

difficulties one must overcome in order to build a consistent theory of family unification. One of them is

related with the quantum consistency of the theory, i.e. one has to deal with gauge anomalies. These

anomalies are dangerous because they break gauge symmetry at the quantum level and also may spoil

renormalizability of the theory.

In addition to a simple group that contains the Standard Model, the gauge group of a family unification theory

must contain representations that are able to accommodate the family structure and its replication. This

constraints severely our possibilities, since unitary groups, SU(N), able to accommodate the SM chirality

usually lead to anomalies. Fortunately, there exist another possibility that consist on the orthogonal groups:

SO(N). This groups, except for N=6, are anomaly free and, strikingly, for some special values of N these

groups can reproduce chirality. Other interesting choice is the exceptional group E6, but its 27representation

contains only one family.

The anomaly free condition suggest that it is interesting to study the groups SO(4n+2) because, as we have

said, in addition to anomaly freedom they can also reproduce chirality. These groups have a chiral spinor

representation with dimension 22n. Other property that justifies this election is that, unlike tensor

representations, spinors decompose repetitively when breaking the symmetry group down to a smaller group.

Can this property of spinors explain the family repetition?

Inspired by these properties, in the 80s M. Gell-Mann, P. Ramond and R. Slansky 3, Y. Fujimoto 4 and,

independently, F. Wilczek and A. Zee 5proposed to use a unified theory based in SO(18) and its 256-

dimensional spinor representation. The reason for this choice is that SO(18) contains the smallest spinor able

to contain, at least, three left-handed families (one has to keep in mind that the SM weak interaction is left-

handed). However, this spinor turns out to be too large. This fact can be seen from the symmetry breaking to

SO(10):

Where each 16 is the spinor representation of SO(10) that when breaking the symmetry down to the SM it

splits as

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Since each 16-dimensional spinor of SO(10) contains one family, the 256 spinor contains 8 families and also

8 mirror families (families with the opposite chirality, this is right-handed). This proliferation of families is a

tough phenomenological problem: we only observe 3 families and, moreover, these families are left-handed.

In order to get rid of the extra families Gell-Mann, Ramond and Slansky conjectured that a new interaction

similar to the strong interaction of the SM is able to confine, presumably at the TeV scale, all the unseen

particles leaving at low energies only the SM families. This is known as the heavy color hypothesis.

Wilczek and Zee, showed that because of the large amount of families and mirror families the heavy color

interaction is not asymptotically free and, thus, one cannot achieve a confining regime at the TeV scale [5].

This means that in a SO(18) theory one should observe 8 families and 8 mirror families below the

electroweak scale, clearly against the experimental results.

A couple of years later, J. Bagger and S. Dimopoulos showed that a generalized Higgs mechanism cannot

give us, as a final result, three chiral families at low energies 6. Their result was, that by using a Higgs

mechanism, one should observe 4 families and 4 mirror families below the electroweak scale, making the

other families and mirror families very heavy. However this is clearly not the case of the SM.

The SO(18) theory, as a unified theory of forces and families, had a short life. Because of the discouraging

results by Wilczek and Zee and, independently by Bagger and Dimopoulos people stopped working on family

unification theories. And the dream of a Unified Theory of forces and matter faded away.

References

1. H. Georgi and S. Glashow, Phys.Rev.Lett. 32, 438 (1974). ↩

2. H. Fritzsch and P. Minkowski, Ann. Phys. 93, 193 (1975). ↩

3. M. Gell-Mann, P. Ramond, and R. Slansky, Conf. Proc. C790927, 315 (1979), 1306.4669. ↩

4. Y. Fujimoto, Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 26, No. 11 (1982) 3183-3194. ↩

5. F. Wilczek and A. Zee, Phys. Rev. D25, 553 (1982). ↩

6. J. Bagger and S. Dimopoulos, Nucl. Phys. B244, 247 (1984). ↩

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written by

Mario Reig

Mario Reig is a PhD candidate in theoretical physics at IFIC

Website:http://webific.ific.uv.es/web/en

Twitter:@mareig94

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/01/10/family-unification-

1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28Mappi

ng+Ignorance%29

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For americans, government is a danger; for chinese, the solution

The 12th National People's Congress held in 2013

Today's selection -- from Following the Leader by David M. Lampton. The fundamental belief in the purpose

of government is very different in China than America. "In America government is accountable to the people.

In China, the people are accountable to the government":

"China ... [has] a deeply engrained political culture characterized by leaders who are deeply anxious about

their grip on such a huge and diverse population and territory. As C.H. Tung, Hong Kong's first chief

executive in the postcolonial period, has remarked, ' "[Chinese] leaders, from their earliest days, are taught to

expect that dangers lurk around every corner. Be cautious!"'

"The basic wisdom about governing China has been voiced by Yao Yilin, one of China's most prominent (and

politically conservative) economic leaders: 'China was so big that it was very difficult for things to go

completely bad or go completely well, and hence leaders had to simply manage big problems as well as

possible and not go to extremes in either actions or analysis.' [Political scientist] Herbert Simon called this

'satisficing' -- less jargonistically, this is the search for 'good enough,' or chabuduo in Chinese.

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"It is striking how enduring the tasks of governing China have been over time, tasks that boil down to

achieving growth and maintaining social and political stability. Central to achieving stabilization has always

been 'feeding the people' (yang min); maintaining revenue flows to the central state; communicating policy

expectations effectively down the very deep hierarchies; monitoring the implementation of central directives

and having adequate internal intelligence to warn of pending instability locally or nationally; and securing

China's historically elastic boundaries from threats both near and far, often from non-Han peoples with

populations spilling across far-flung frontiers. In a 1979 meeting, Vice-Premier Li Xiannian (later president),

who presumably had the experiences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution fresh in his

mind, revealed his underlying worry by stating his minimalist governance objective: '[I] can't guarantee

results but I'll "guarantee no starvation."'

"Chinese citizens and leaders have persistently believed that the centralized state plays a decisive role in

achieving these objectives. For Americans, government is a danger; for Chinese, government ought to be the

solution. In January 2000, Vice-Premier Qian Qichen expressed the view that East Asian governments could

not achieve progress without strong government. Chinese political discourse revolves around what the

government can and should accomplish and how it can do so effectively. This is a far cry from American

beliefs on limiting government and enlarging the private and individual sectors. One senior PRC academic

explained in 1999, 'In America government is accountable to the people. In China, the people are accountable

to the government.'

"China scholar Lily Chen illustrates these concepts in a Chinese idiom:

'In the older Chinese governance tradition, officials, especially local governors, are called fumu guan, or

parent officials. Local governors in ancient China were called mushou, which means that they will guard the

mass or the herd of people for the emperor. This implies that these local officials have rights over their herd,

just as the parents, knowing and having the best interests over their children, have rights over their children,

including education, training, and discipline. This concept of fumu guan is somewhat inherited after 1949 ....

The antithesis of this concept, I think, is "taxpayer," a concept Chinese borrowed from the West, implying

that the mass, the people, have a right to know what the officials have done with their tax money, and

therefore implying a sense of democracy and representativeness of government officials.'

"Thinking on Chinese governance has always stressed the importance of political leadership. Leaders are not

weather vanes sensing popular will whose job is to understand what the people want and deliver it, though

some impulses in this direction are evident in today's China. Rather, the core task of political leadership is to

understand, define, and act upon society's enduring interests; when the populace does not understand its own

underlying interests, the leader is supposed to educate, persuade, and perhaps even change popular

inclinations. "

author: David M. Lampton

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title: Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping

publisher: University of California Press

date: Copyright 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

pages: 48-51

https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3502&utm_source=Following+the+Leader+48-

51&utm_campaign=1%2F09%2F18&utm_medium=email

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Will the Court Kill the Gerrymander?

Zachary Roth

National Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images

Paolo Uccello: St. George and the Dragon, circa 1470

On Tuesday, a panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map, ruling it an

unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. State Republicans had drawn district lines with such ruthlessness that

they had won ten out of thirteen seats in the 2016 election—77 percent—even though they got only 53

percent of the vote. GOP lawmakers, wrote Judge James Wynn Jr., had been “motivated by invidious partisan

intent.”

Republicans had openly admitted as much. “Nothing wrong with political gerrymandering,” declared one of

the lawmakers leading the process at a 2016 hearing. “It is not illegal.” The GOP is likely to appeal Tuesday’s

ruling to the Supreme Court on those grounds.

Whether courts are empowered to block partisan gerrymanders—as opposed to gerrymanders involving racial

discrimination, which just about everyone agrees are unconstitutional—is a question the justices considered in

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October when they heard Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to Wisconsin’s state assembly map. The fate of North

Carolina’s map likely hangs on how the court decides Gill. A ruling is expected before the end of June.

There’s much more at stake, too. An opinion in Gill that significantly reduces partisan gerrymandering could

radically reshape the redistricting process for this decade and the next, with major implications for the fight to

control both Congress and state legislatures. But it also could help fix America’s increasingly embattled

democracy.

Gill and the enormous gerrymander from which it emerged underscore how the justices’ failure to act when

they last had the chance, over a decade ago, has warped American electoral politics almost beyond

recognition. Essentially, it has allowed Republicans to turn the last three elections for Congress and many

statehouses into a strange simulacrum of competition, in which the parties compete vigorously for votes even

though GOP control has often been all but assured from the outset. At stake in Gill, ultimately, is the question

of whether election outcomes can be made once again to provide at least a rough reflection of the popular

will.

*

States must redraw their congressional and state legislative maps after every census, which takes place in the

first year of each decade. Before the 2010 mid-term elections, Republicans poured resources into the battle for

control of important state legislatures in order to gain power over the redistricting process that would follow.

They emerged with full control of state government in crucial redistricting battlegrounds like Florida, Texas,

Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Alabama.

Then, they set about rigging the maps. American political parties have been drawing district lines in their

favor at least since Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry’s famous 1812 map, which aimed to boost his

Democratic-Republican Party and included the notorious salamander-shaped district from which the term

“gerrymander” derives. But by 2011, Republican map-drawers had access to software exponentially more

sophisticated even than that used by states like Pennsylvania a decade earlier. This allowed them, with

unprecedented precision, to distribute Republican voters more efficiently than Democratic ones. They did so

by grouping Democratic voters together into a small number of ultra-safe districts with clear Democratic

majorities (it helped that Democrats already tend to cluster in cities), while creating a much larger number of

districts that leaned Republican—by less extreme margins than the Democratic ones, but still by enough that

the GOP was largely assured of winning them.

In the next election, in 2012, Democratic candidates for Congress won more votes than Republican

candidates in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin, yet in all those states the GOP came

away with more House seats. (In Pennsylvania, Republicans won thirteen out of eighteen seats with less than

49 percent of the vote.) Nationwide, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes in congressional races than

Republicans, but came away with thirty-three fewer seats. Stated bluntly, voters in 2012 wanted a Democratic

Congress but got a Republican one, with the result that President Barack Obama’s legislative agenda was

stymied for two more years of his presidency than it would have been in a system that accurately reflected

voters’ collective preferences. In the two elections since then, Republicans’ share of seats has again

significantly exceeded their share of votes in both congressional and state legislative races.

Now, with President Trump deeply unpopular, Democrats are expected to pick up seats in the mid-term

elections of November 2018. But thanks to the rigged map, analysts say, they’ll need to win about 55 percent

of the vote nationwide to carry a majority of House seats in Congress.

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Besides clearly thwarting the will of voters, the Republican gerrymander has reduced the number of

competitive districts, contributing to declining turnout as would-be voters come to feel, often with reason, that

their voices don’t matter. And there is evidence that it has contributed to the growing extremism of the

Republican congressional caucus by creating so many safe Republican seats, whose holders have more to fear

from a primary challenge than from the general election.

Bettmann/Getty Images

This manipulation has felt particularly threatening to the integrity of US democracy because it’s only one way

among several in which the right to meaningful political participation for ordinary Americans is being

undermined. Over the last decade, extreme gerrymandering has coincided with state-level voter suppression

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laws that have largely targeted minorities and marginalized groups; with the evisceration of campaign-finance

laws, giving outsized influence in elections to corporations and the super-wealthy; with the violation of

longstanding congressional norms, which saw, for example, the Senate fail to vote on Merrick Garland’s

Supreme Court nomination; and even with the growing significance of the Electoral College, which twice in

the last five presidential elections has handed the White House to the candidate who lost the popular vote.

Together, these trends have threatened to create a sense that America’s democratic system is dangerously

unable to fulfill its prime function of translating the preferences of voters into political and policy outcomes.

The cartoon by Gilbert Stuart that coined the term “gerrymander,” showing Massachusetts’s electoral district

in 1812; Stuart’s friend called it a ‘Gerry-mander,’ a cross between a salamander and Massachusetts Governor

Elbridge Gerry, who approved rearranging district lines for political advantage

Back in 2004, the Supreme Court heard Vieth v. Jubelirer, a challenge to Pennsylvania’s congressional map,

through which Republicans had essentially guaranteed themselves at least 60 percent of congressional seats

for the next decade, even if Democratic candidates got more votes statewide. The map rendered the will of

Pennsylvania’s voters irrelevant.

The court’s four liberal justices voted to strike the map down as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

The four conservatives voted to uphold it, saying that finding a legal standard to determine when a partisan

gerrymander goes too far is impossible. Justice Anthony Kennedy was the swing vote, and in the end, he did

what he often does: he sided with the conservatives while seeming to throw the liberals a bone. Kennedy said

it might still be possible to come up with a legal standard for partisan gerrymandering in a future case. But he

rejected the standard used by the plaintiffs in Vieth as arbitrary, and so upheld Pennsylvania’s map.

Since then, legal scholars, political scientists, and statisticians have been developing a standard for identifying

unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders that will satisfy Kennedy. Gill uses a standard that, gerrymandering

opponents hope, may finally convince Kennedy to vote in their favor: the efficiency gap. Developed by

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at the University of Chicago who was among those representing

the Gill plaintiffs, and the political scientist Eric McGhee, the efficiency gap compares each party’s number

of “wasted” votes—that is, votes that went to a losing candidate, or that went to a winner but weren’t needed

for victory. The larger the gap between the two parties’ total number of wasted votes, the greater the

advantage the map gives one party.

Wisconsin Republicans drew their most recent maps during a snow storm in February 2011. They did so not

in the state capitol building in Madison, but across the street in the conference room of a friendly law firm—

the better to invoke attorney-client privilege and shield the process from public scrutiny. The result was

roughly comparable to the Pennsylvania congressional map that Justice Kennedy had reluctantly approved in

2004. Even though Democratic candidates for the Wisconsin assembly got more votes than Republicans

statewide, the GOP wound up with five out of eight House seats in the 2012 election.

“There is close to a zero percent chance that the current plan’s efficiency gap will ever favor the Democrats

during the remainder of the decade,” said Stephanopoulos and McGhee of the Wisconsin assembly map, in a

calculation cited by a federal district court.

During oral arguments, the Supreme Court’s four most conservative members did not sound convinced.

Justice Neil Gorsuch likened the formula for the efficiency gap to his steak rub: “I like some turmeric, I like a

few other little ingredients, but I’m not going to tell you how much of each.” Chief Justice John Roberts

dismissed it as “sociological gobbledygook.” And, famously concerned about the court’s reputation, the chief

justice fretted that intervening in a case with such clear partisan implications would be seen by “the intelligent

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man on the street” as an effort to help one party at the expense of the other, causing “very serious harm to the

status and integrity of the decisions of this court.” (Why, despite the court’s conservative, Republican-

appointed majority, this hypothetical intelligent man would be likelier to see partisan bias in a ruling to

intervene, benefiting Democrats, than in a ruling not to, benefiting the GOP, was left unexplained. Maybe the

man wasn’t as intelligent as Roberts thought.)

But Kennedy sounded much more open to the challengers’ view. While asking nothing at all of the plaintiff’s

lawyer, he grilled Wisconsin’s solicitor general with tough questions that hinted he may see extreme

gerrymandering as a violation of a voter’s right to freedom of association found in the First Amendment, of

which he is famously protective.

Another development could also augur well for gerrymandering opponents. In December, the

justices unexpectedly announced they would hear a second redistricting case, this one a challenge to a single

congressional district drawn by Maryland Democrats. Why the court agreed to hear the Maryland case, which

raises similar issues to Gill, isn’t yet clear. But several court-watchers, noting Roberts’s concerns about the

court being seen as partisan, have offered a plausible theory: there may already be five votes for the plaintiffs

in Gill, and the chief justice is more likely to join the majority in a decision that hurts Republicans if he

knows the court has a chance to demonstrate its nonpartisanship by also striking down a district in Maryland

that was drawn by, and favors, Democrats.

*

A result along those lines could have almost immediate repercussions. It would boost the plaintiffs not only in

the North Carolina case, but also likely in a challenge to Texas’s maps. But the real impact of a Supreme

Court ruling would be felt when the next redistricting cycle begins, after the 2020 census. A clear statement

by the court against partisan gerrymandering would empower lower courts to strike down the most egregious

maps, and would probably also convince lawmakers and their map-drawers to act with more caution.

Even leaving Gill aside, there are signs that the upcoming redistricting cycle may not repeat the worst

excesses of the previous one. For one thing, Democrats won’t be caught sleeping again. They’ve already

launched an aggressive effort, led by former attorney general Eric Holder, to win control of the major

redistricting battlegrounds in 2020, which would mean that fewer states than last time are likely to be under

the one-party rule that ruthless gerrymandering requires. Holder’s group also plans to support efforts to have

independent commissions take over the redistricting process.

In fact, in a supreme irony, Republicans may be about to experience the downside of extreme

gerrymandering. In order to most efficiently distribute their voters, they created a large number of districts

with slightly more Republicans than Democrats, while creating very few ultra-safe Republican districts, since

doing so would have wasted Republican votes.

That strategy made sense for most election years. But now, the expected Democratic wave in this year’s

midterms could put in play all those weakly-leaning Republican districts. Some experts predict a “wave

election,” in which Democrats could gain as many as seventy-five seats. The Republican gerrymander of

earlier in the decade could end up making a Democratic resurgence even more powerful than it would

otherwise have been.

Still, the GOP may attempt to politicize the upcoming census itself, on whose data redistricting relies. The

administration is now looking to add to the survey a question about citizenship, which civil-rights advocates

fear could chill response rates from non-citizens. Among other troubling results, that could lead to

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redistricting plans that reduce the power of minority communities and boost that of white ones. And for the

Census Bureau’s top operational post, President Trump is reportedly considering Thomas Brunell, a

Republican defender of gerrymandering who wrote a book entitled Redistricting and Representation: Why

Competitive Elections are Bad for America.

Gill may lead to a fairer, more democratic redistricting process. But with Republicans doing all they can to

maintain a hold on power as America’s demographics rapidly change, it’s unlikely to be the end of the story.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/11/will-the-court-kill-the-gerrymander/

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Art in a Time of Terror

J. Hoberman

Tony Oursler/Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Tony Oursler: Nine Eleven (still), 2001

Full disclosure: My personal experience of “Age of Terror: Art since

9/11,” the recently-opened exhibition at London’s Imperial War

Museum, was informed by the fact that, not thirty-six hours before, a

stretch of the Lower Manhattan bike path that, a few blocks from where

the World Trade Center stood, is part of my daily routine was the site of

a truck attack that killed eight people and injured eleven others. I was

out of the country when it occurred, as I had been on September 11, and

was overwhelmed with the same desire to see my neighborhood. So, I

spent a good half-hour with the video piece installed at the exhibition

entrance: Tony Oursler’s Nine Eleven.

As unpretentious as a home movie (which, in a sense, it is), Nine

Eleven induced a weird sort of nostalgia. Oursler began filming after the

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tower was hit, but what I found equally compelling was the material that

followed. Nine Eleven recalled to mind much that I had forgotten about

the immediate aftermath of September 11 in what had been the World

Trade Center’s immediate vicinity—the hand-captioned posted pictures

of the missing, the twisted wreckage of the building façade (so

emblematic that it should have remained a memorial like the bombed-

out church in central Berlin), the pile of rubble that smoldered for

weeks, the fact that Oursler was only one of many who were taking

pictures at Ground Zero.

rayson Perry/Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Photo by Stephen Brayne

Grayson Perry: Dolls at Dungeness September 11th 2001, 2001; click to enlarge

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The IWM show, which is the largest of contemporary art in the

museum’s history, is divided into four sections (titled “9/11,” “State

Control,” “Weapons,” and “Home”). Among the exhibits are a fair

number of common, albeit modified, objects: a breakfront stocked with

mirrored hand grenades, a series of mock Dresden figurines undergoing

various types of body search, and an Afghan rug featuring a drone (of

three such “war rugs” commissioned by European artists). The busiest,

least disturbing of these artifacts is the ceramicist Grayson Perry’s gold,

reflective urn embellished with bombers, burning buildings, baby dolls,

and obscenities.

1.

“Age of Terror” is also filled with pieces designed to be experienced

over time. These include some confrontational, but otherwise

unremarkable, video installations concerning torture and drone pilots by

Coco Fusco and Omar Fast, and the truly remarkable Bomb Iraq, a

homemade video game apparently created in the mid-1990s that the

mixed-media artist Cory Arcangel discovered on a used computer

purchased in a thrift store.

Much of Oursler’s Nine Eleven, however, is powerfully mundane. More

evocative than the presence of the army in the streets in the days after

September 11 were the religious fanatics and Good Samaritans who

arrived from all over America, as well as the merchandizers and the nuts

who gave the scene the teeming quality of a medieval marketplace. This

aftermath is the subject of the show. One goes from Nine Eleven to

Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 9/12 Frontpage—a full wall of the following

day’s newspaper coverage from across the globe. A particularly resonant

video piece documentes the performance artist Fabian Knecht’s

peregrinations through Lower Manhattan dressed in an ash-covered suit,

attracting so little notice that he might have been invisible. (Going from

Lower Manhattan to midtown in the days after the attack was truly

entering another world, a journey that required one to show a passport

on return.)

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Omer Fast

Omer Fast: 5000 Feet is the Best, 2011

For the most part, “Age of Terror” is sobering, serious stuff. Still, the

British press does not seem to have been especially impressed. More

than one review has criticized the show and even its premise as trite or

banal. Some have argued that art is simply unequal to the magnitude of

the event. But isn’t that a given? Who can forget Karlheinz

Stockhausen’s shocking observation, six days after the Twin Towers

fell, that the attack was “the greatest work of art imaginable for the

whole cosmos”?

Steven Spielberg tried hard to represent the cataclysm in the opening

scenes of his War of the Worlds, a movie he described as, in some sense,

a documentary. But artists cannot recreate September 11, only respond

to it. Gerhard Richter and Sabine Moritz were together on a New York-

bound plane when the towers went down and felt compelled to make

paintings addressing the event, not unlike the Post-It notes that, as

shown in Oursler’s video, spontaneously appeared in public spaces

throughout Manhattan in the days following the attack, expressing grief

or declaring solidarity. (A similar thing happened, on a smaller scale, on

the morning after Trump’s election.)

The most blatant, as well as the blandest, bid for an “Age of Terror

icon” is Ai Weiwei’s white marble Surveillance Camera with Plinth.

The piece is brutal but not melodramatic. Like the show’s various war

rugs or Arcangel’s found computer game or Knecht’s performance

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piece, Ai’s mini-monument recognizes the fact of ordinary terror, terror

as routine.

Given that the exhibition’s strongest pieces evoke a regime of terror

(rather than the Age), I was surprised that there was nothing here by

Laura Poitras, whose 2016 Whitney show, “Astro Noise,” was devoted

to what might be called the post-September 11 global village. But I was

gratified to see that “Age of Terror” ends with a section largely devoted

to artists born in present-day war zones: Lida Abdul (Afghanistan),

Khaled Abdul Wahed (Syria), Hanaa Malallah (Iraq), Jamal Penjweny,

and Walid Siti (both Iraqi Kurdistan). Their modest pieces featuring

deranged maps, photographs or models of wrecked homes, and other

exercises in extreme dislocation give testimony to the way they—dare

we say, “we?”—live now, a bomb or a bike path from oblivion.

Jitish Kallat/Photo by Thelma Garcia/Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris-Brussels

Jitish Kallat: Circadian Rhyme 1, 2011

“Age of Terror: Art since 9/11” is on view at the Imperial War

Museum through May 28, 2018.

January 9, 2018, 3:39 pm

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Courtesy The Park Gallery & Roger Fawcett-Tang

Hanaa Malallah: My Country Map, 2008

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/09/art-in-a-time-of-terror/

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Scientists create functioning kidney tissue

February 9, 2018

Source:

University of Manchester

Summary:

Scientists have successfully produced human kidney tissue within a living organism which is able to

produce urine, a first for medical science. The study signifies a significant milestone in the

development of treatment for kidney disease.

FULL STORY

Kidney glomeruli -- constituent microscopic parts of the organ- were generated from human embryonic stem

cells grown in plastic laboratory culture dishes.

Credit: Image courtesy of University of Manchester

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Scientists have successfully produced human kidney tissue within a living organism which is able to produce

urine, a first for medical science.

The study led by Professors Sue Kimber and Adrian Woolf from The University of Manchester, signifies a

significant milestone in the development of treatment for kidney disease.

The Medical Research Council and Kidney Research UK funded project is published in the journal Stem Cell

Reports.

Kidney glomeruli -- constituent microscopic parts of the organ- were generated from human embryonic stem

cells grown in plastic laboratory culture dishes containing a nutrient broth known as culture medium,

containing molecules to promote kidney development.

They were combined with a gel like substance, which acted as natural connective tissue -- and then injected as

a tiny clump under the skin of mice.

After three months, an examination of the tissue revealed that nephrons: the microscopic structural and

functional units of the kidney -- had formed.

The new structures contained most of the constituent parts present in human nephrons -- including proximal

tubules, distal tubules, Bowman's capsule and Loop of Henle.

Tiny human blood vessels -- known as capillaries- had developed inside the mice which nourished the new

kidney structures.

However, the mini-kidneys lack a large artery, and without that the organ's function will only be a fraction of

normal.

So, the researchers are working with surgeons to put in an artery that will bring more blood the new kidney.

To test the functionality of the new structures, the team used Dextran -- a fluorescent protein which stains the

urine-like substance produced when nephrons filter the blood, called glomerular filtrate.

The Dextran was tracked and detected in the new structures' tubules, demonstrating that filtrate was indeed

being produced and excreted as urine.

"We have proved beyond any doubt these structures function as kidney cells by filtering blood and producing

urine -- though we can't yet say what percentage of function exists," said Professor Kimber.

"What is particularly exciting is that the structures are made of human cells which developed an excellent

capillary blood supply, becoming linked to the vasculature of the mouse.

"Though this structure was formed from several hundred glomeruli, and humans have about a million in their

kidneys -- this is clearly a major advance.

"It constitutes a proof of principle- but much work is yet to be done."

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The University of Manchester's School of Biological Sciences and Manchester Regenerative Medicine

Network (MaRM) as well as Kidneys for life have also supported the work.

Professor Woolf, who is also Consultant in Paediatric Nephrology at Royal Manchester Children's Hospital,

Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, said: "Worldwide, two million people are being treated with

dialysis or transplantation for kidney failure, and sadly another two million die each year, unable to access

these treatments.

So we are tremendously excited by this discovery -- we feel it is a big research milestone which may one day

help patients.

"However, there is much more to learn: Building on our generation of kidney filtration units we must now

turn to developing an exit route for the urine and a way to deliver this technology to diseased kidneys

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Manchester. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Ioannis Bantounas, Parisa Ranjzad, Faris Tengku, Edina Silajdžić, Duncan Forster, Marie-Claude Asselin,

Philip Lewis, Rachel Lennon, Antonius Plagge, Qi Wang, Adrian S. Woolf, Susan J. Kimber. Generation of

Functioning Nephrons by Implanting Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Kidney Progenitors. Stem Cell

Reports, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.stemcr.2018.01.008

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180209112402.htm

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Memories of Mississippi

Danny Lyon

Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Danny Lyon outside a movement headquarters in Albany, Georgia, 1962

It was the summer of 1962. I had just finished my third year at the University of Chicago. My 650cc Triumph

motorcycle was damaged, leaving me grounded and bored. One of my classmates, Linda Pearlstein, had been

arrested in civil rights demonstrations in Cairo, Illinois. With contacts from Linda, I put my 35 mm Nikon F

reflex into an old army bag, asked my sister-in-law to drive me to Route 66 at the city’s edge, stuck out my

thumb, and hitchhiked south. I thought I was just going on an adventure.

As the sun set, I stepped into a pay phone booth in East St. Louis and called a number I had received from

Linda. I told whoever picked up the phone that I would reach Cairo that night by bus. Cairo is at the

confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers. It was the free town that Huck and Jim were headed to but

floated by in the night. It was Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters when he engineered the capture of Fort

Donaldson.

That night, as the bus door swung open at the Greyhound stop in Cairo, a large black man stood on the other

side. I was a bit afraid, until from behind him stepped a shorter, white woman. Charles Neblett and Selyn

McCollum had both been Freedom Riders, and both worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC). The next morning, in a small black church, I listened to a speech by a local high school

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student and movement leader, Charles Kohn. In the corner sat John Lewis, whom I recognized as a leader of

the Freedom Rides. I had been in few churches before, but never in a black church. A New Yorker, the son of

a physician and Jewish immigrants, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a black hospital. The trip I

was now on would profoundly change my knowledge, my feelings, my prejudices, and my view of everything

American.

After the service, the small group marched to a segregated swimming pool that sported a “Private Pool,

Members Only” sign. Among the pictures I made outside the pool was one of three of the demonstrators

kneeling and praying. Perhaps it was the light. Maybe it was the white thugs grinning and cursing at us from

the pool door. It struck me as a sublimely beautiful moment: the grace of the three, the two men kneeling at

each side, the child in the middle.

Danny Lyon

John Lewis, left, on a SNCC poster, 1963; photo by Danny Lyon

In a few days, with advice and contacts from John, I went on to Nashville, Tennessee, then to the SNCC

headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, only to be told by the woman who opened the door that “everybody” was

down in Albany. Rather than take a segregated seat on the Atlanta-Albany bus, with whites sitting in front,

blacks in the rear, I stood. The only other person standing was a nattily dressed black man who suggested I

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not try to reach the colored half of town at night. That turned out to be Wyatt Tee Walker, one of Dr. King’s

lieutenants. It was a hot and humid night, with bugs flying in the bright lights of the Albany Greyhound

station. An overweight policeman stood in front of me as I stepped off the bus.

“That’s nigger town. That’s the white side. Where you going?”

I spent the night at the white YMCA. In the morning, I walked unmolested into the black side of town and

proudly had my photograph taken in front of the local SNCC office, a barbershop with a “Don’t Buy

Downtown” sign out in front.

I had done it. Deep in the South I had reached one of the towns central to an uprising that would sweep away

legal segregation, bring the vote to black people in the thirteen states that had made up the Confederacy, and

overthrow the system of racial oppression called Jim Crow that had been re-imposed in those states after the

Civil War. Over my shoulder was a Nikon F reflex. “You got a camera,” James Forman—then SNCC’s

executive secretary—said to me when we met at the Freedom House. “Go inside the courthouse. Down at the

back they have a big water cooler for whites and next to it a little bowl for Negroes. Go in there and take a

picture of that.”

Forman is one of the under-recognized major heroes of the Southern civil rights movement. He would protect

me, promote me, and in the coming years become like a father to me. The corridor of the courthouse was

dark, and the fountains were way in the back and hard to see. My heart was pounding as I leaned against the

wall to make a time exposure, terrified that someone would appear.

Danny

Lyon/Magnum Photos

Police in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1963

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Danny Lyon/The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

SNCC brochure, 1963

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After that first night, I stayed in the colored part of town and would venture downtown during the day to make

photographs. One was of two SNCC workers being arrested at a drugstore lunch counter. One white from the

north, the other a black former gang leader whom SNCC had brought into the movement, they were getting

arrested so I could photograph them. That made it easy for me to be standing ready by the police cars and

make pictures as they were carried out.

That afternoon at the Freedom House, I met a pretty young white woman and we ended up at a downtown bar,

where she proceeded to get drunk and loudly announce that she was married to a black man back home in

South Carolina. I found this an unnerving conversation as everyone in the bar could hear her and had begun to

stare at us. As we stepped into the street, a few police officers emerged from squad cars to arrest us both. I

made a fuss as they confiscated my Nikon before locking me in a cell for the night. Through the bars and

across the hall, I could see Dr. King in his cell on the black side of the jail. A day or two after I was released, I

had the nerve to return to the jail and take pictures of the exterior. A group of policemen soon surrounded me.

“Who are you?” I’m not sure what I said, but I remember what they said. “You’re shaking now, boy. You’re

going to be shaking a lot harder when we’re done with you.”

I left town the next morning, heading north and back to school. My pictures and text were published in the

University of Chicago student paper, the Maroon. Others were used for fundraising by SNCC. A month later,

in September 1962, I made my second trip south. Forman had gone to Harry Belafonte for a $300 check so

that I could reach the Mississippi Delta and photograph Bob Moses, who lived in Cleveland at the house of

Amzie Moore, a World War II veteran and gas station owner who had invited Moses and SNCC to

Mississippi to organize voter registration. Because it was dangerous for blacks to be seen together with whites

in cars, or anywhere else, in Mississippi, the office kept white workers out. I was probably one of the first

whites to reach SNCC workers in the Delta. It was September and the cotton was in full bloom. I joined

Charlie Cobb and Frank Smith and stayed with them in a small house in Ruleville. The wall over my bed was

perforated with shotgun holes. Frank had me wear a straw hat because it made me look more “like a cracker.”

The field workers took me to a plantation to photograph folks picking cotton.

Then I made one walk downtown too many. As I passed the small cinderblock Cleveland police station, an

officer stepped out from the parking lot and pulled me inside. I sat across from the chief as he politely

explained to me that “in order to engage in the practice of photography” in Cleveland I needed to post a

$1,000 bond. He opened a book of ordinances and pointed to the line. Outside in the parking lot, the

policeman who had pulled me in was waiting. Clearly agitated, he explained with deep emotion that “we

don’t mix the races down here.” He was sweating and rocking back and forth. Bizarre as it sounds, Frank

Smith had told me that if I got into trouble I should just say I was black. This was apparently a common

SNCC ruse, but it escaped me that I was supposed to say that it was a black woman who numbered among my

recent ancestors. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “my grandfather was colored.” The policeman went completely

crazy, reached for the gun on his belt, and said he would kill me right there on the spot. I thought he meant it.

I backed into the street and walked rapidly in the hot sun towards the Freedom House, praying that a car

would pass by and pick me up. Within a block, some kids who recognized me from the Freedom House

stopped their car, and I yanked open the back door and jumped inside. I left town as soon as I could and

headed to Oxford, where James Meredith was trying to enroll as the first black student at Ole Miss (the

University of Mississippi).

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Danny Lyon/The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

SNCC brochure for Mississippi Summer; photo by Danny Lyon; click to enlarge

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In Mississippi, violence and the threat of violence were everywhere. In February 1963, Moses would survive

an assassination attempt that badly wounded Jimmy Travis, a twenty-one-year-old SNCC worker from

Jackson. In March, I drove south with another student, Bill Zimmerman, and we stayed overnight in SNCC’s

office in Greenwood, Mississippi. It was firebombed the next day.

On June 9, 1963, six movement people were pulled off a bus in Winona, three of whom—Fannie Lou Hamer

and June Johnson of SNCC and Annell Ponder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—

were taken into the back room of the police station, tied to a bench, and whipped by the police. They were

returning from a workshop on voter registration. Three days later, in Jackson, the NAACP leader Medgar

Evers was assassinated as he stepped out of his car in front of his home.

That same month, I finished school in Chicago and, at Forman’s urging, flew to Atlanta to become SNCC’s

first—and, at that point, only—staff photographer. I was paid $35 a week and given a Southern Airlines credit

card, the first and only credit card I would have for many years. SNCC had been formed eighteen months

before my visit to Albany. Its first paid staff member was Jane Stembridge, a gay, white Southern woman. By

the time I joined, it had sixty staff members, mostly Southern black former students, but also Northern blacks

(Moses was a math teacher from New York City, and Forman was an air force veteran who had been

president of the student body at Roosevelt University in Chicago), and a handful of whites, many of whom

were Jewish.

Casey Hayden, a stunningly beautiful SNCC worker from Texas, later wrote that “we were the beloved

community, harassed and happy, just like we’d died and gone to heaven and it was integrated there. We

simply dropped race.” She was waiting for my bus when it reached Atlanta. “You can stay at my place,” she

said. When we had met the summer before, John Lewis had been a staff member who had requested ten

dollars to go to Cairo as a field worker. Now he was SNCC’s chairman. I got an apartment with John and Sam

Shirah, a white boy who had led the Postman’s march through Alabama. That group of ten black and white

SNCC and CORE workers ended up in the Alabama penitentiary. Sam’s ancestors had fought for the

Confederacy, and he was from the same Alabama town where John’s had been enslaved and where John

himself grew up. Dottie Zellner, who would befriend me in the Atlanta office, said it was the “cross-

pollination” that made SNCC so effective. That a black and a white from Troy, Alabama, and a Jew from

New York would live together was typical.

That summer, with my credit card and Forman’s leadership, I would visit every major SNCC project and be

present at almost every major confrontation. The writer and civil rights historian Taylor Branch called it the

“firestorm.” More than 14,000 people, mostly black and young, were arrested in protests across the South. It

was the high water mark of the movement. At the Atlanta office, I set up a darkroom in a closet and shared an

office with Dottie Zellner and Julian Bond, whom Forman had hired because Bond’s résumé said

“journalism.” Together, we turned out posters, pamphlets, and flyers using my pictures.

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Danny Lyon/The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Cover of The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, with photographs by Danny Lyon and a

text by Lorraine Hansberry, Simon & Schuster, 1964

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On my first day at the office, I saw a young black man struggling at a typewriter. Dottie Zellner pulled me

aside and said: “Don’t help. It’s important he learns how to type.” She also said that “Mississippi belongs to

Bob,” by which she meant that while Forman oversaw SNCC projects in Georgia Alabama, Maryland, and

Arkansas, Moses did what he wanted in Mississippi. In a letter he wrote in 1961 from the county jail in

Magnolia, Bob called it “the heart of the iceberg.”

Every six months, SNCC would have a “conference” at which powerful leaders would appear, including Ella

Baker, the SCLC leader who had helped found SNCC. One was held in Washington, D.C., soon after the

murder of John F. Kennedy. There was also a black nationalist meeting going on nearby, and after one

session, a small group of SNCC people, including Courtland Cox, John Lewis, and me, went over to see what

they had to say. On a long table at the entrance were pamphlets and literature. To my dismay, as we were

about to enter, a person at the door nodded toward me and said, “He can’t come in.” I gestured to the table

and the photographs on the covers, saying, “I took some of those,” and as I turned to leave John followed me

out of the room. The other SNCC people walked in.

That winter in Atlanta, Sam Shirah and I went to a New Year’s party in an apartment—really, just a group of

movement people sitting on the floor drinking cokes and beer and eating chips. Ruby Doris Smith, a veteran

who had served a hundred days in prison with SNCC, was holding court, and at one point I distinctly heard

her say, “I can’t believe we still have them on the staff.” I had been photographing the golden age of the

movement, a time when it was nonviolent, integrated, idealistic, and successful. What I heard Ruby say sent a

chill through me. It was the writing on the wall. My mother had also clipped a New York Times interview

with Bayard Rustin, who had organized the March on Washington, in which he said that whites should work

in the white community.

On the night before the 1963 March on Washington, I had slept on the floor of John Lewis’s hotel room.

When I walked down to the lobby that morning, Malcolm X was standing there, a very tall, red-headed man

surrounded by reporters. Fifty years later, I filmed John at a recreation of the march, and he showed me the

star embedded on the steps where Dr. King had stood to make his “I have a dream” speech. In his speech

about the march, Malcolm had said, “They told those Negroes what time to hit town, how to come, where to

stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t

make; and then told them to get out town by sundown”—which had some truth in it, as John’s speech was too

radical for the coalition behind the march. Just hours before he gave it, he, Forman, and Courtland Cox

censored it in a bathroom under the steps of the Memorial. I seem to have been the only photographer among

the thousands there who took a picture of John as he spoke. To be honest, I didn’t bother to listen to King.

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The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Verso of the Mississippi Summer brochure, listing the SNCC staff of 1963; click to enlarge

When the summer project of 1964 started, bringing a thousand mostly white Northern college students into Mississippi, I didn’t particularly want to go. For one thing, there were now many other people photographing the movement. For another, I thought voter registration was a bore. I

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found direct action, sit-ins, and marches, all of which often led to arrests, more exciting to photograph. Then, on June 21, a week before the project

Danny Lyon

Stamp in memory of James Cheney, Micky Schwerner, and Andy Goodman, designed by Danny Lyon and his

class at CUNY, 1990s

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started, two workers and a summer volunteer were spotted changing a flat tire outside of Philadelphia,

Mississippi, and taken to jail while the sheriff gathered the Klan to plan their murder. James Chaney was a

black Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) worker from Meridian. He died, along with his best friend, a

professional organizer with CORE from New York City named Mickey Schwerner, and Andy Goodman, a

Queens College student and summer volunteer who had been in the South two days. A black Southerner and

two Jewish boys from New York were lynched for trying to register African Americans to vote in a state that

had lost the Civil War—but won back the power over their former slaves twenty years later by denying the

right to vote through terror.

I had made the pamphlet that had been distributed throughout the North to bring volunteers to the South. So I

got on a plane and returned to Mississippi, knowing it was no longer the grassroots movement I had witnessed

two years earlier. That November, there was a SNCC conference in Waveland, Mississippi. By then, I had left

SNCC and rented a place in Treme, in New Orleans. Sam Shirah and I got on my motorcycle to see if we

could meet any girls in Waveland. I went through the conference room photographing the SNCC workers I

knew, knowing I would probably never see them again.

In 1966, in a late-night meeting after many of the voters had left, Stokely Carmichael was elected to replace

John Lewis as SNCC’s chairman. John was stunned, arguing that Carmichael wasn’t even from the South.

“I’m from Alabama,” John would say, after the fact. “I don’t have to tell people I am black.” Later that year,

speaking from a stage during a march with Dr. King, Carmichael first used the term “black power.” The

crowd loved it.

At a 1967 meeting, as Dottie and Bob Zellner sat outside, the remaining staff debated expelling the last two

white staff members. Both had been in SNCC for five years. James Forman, who had been replaced by Ruby

Doris Smith as executive secretary, came out of the meeting to tell the couple the news, saying later that it

was the hardest thing he ever had to do. One of the boys I photographed at Waveland was Ralph Featherstone.

By 1970, when SNCC was virtually non-existent, Featherstone, like many SNCC veterans, had become a

Black Panther. A bomb later went off in his car and killed him.

Although I was a paid staff member, I always saw my work with SNCC as journalism. After 1964, I thought

my part was to see what was happening in America, to see what the press didn’t see, and show it to the world.

When John was knocked unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, I watched it on television. (By

then, I was a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club.) In the march that followed, a Detroit

housewife, Viola Liuzzo, was shot to death by the Klan as she ferried marchers to the Birmingham airport. A

white woman was murdered for being in a car with African-American men.

As these events were unfolding, there was no question in my mind that protest against the war in Vietnam was

eclipsing the Southern civil rights movement. The same newspapers that had been running stories about Sam

and the marchers when they were jailed began to run more prominent articles about Vietnam. Many

movement people became part of the growing antiwar movement—among them Diane Nash, John Lewis,

Julian Bond, and Dr. King himself. My student friend Bill Zimmerman, who had become politicized on our

early trip to Mississippi, would help create Medical Aid for Indochina (MAI), which raised money for

medical supplies for North Vietnam.

On October 21, 1967, I was knocked unconscious on the steps of the Pentagon by a club-wielding military

policeman. Hidden inside my clothes was my Nikon F reflex. Inside jail, I used it to photograph Norman

Mailer, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for Armies of the Night, which gave an account of that day when

100,000 people marched and 700 were arrested. I was number four. When Dr. King was assassinated, my

Nikons and I were inside the Texas prison system, where I was working on my book Conversations with the

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Dead. It was April 4, 1968. “Why now?” I thought. “The movement is dormant. No one cares about Dr. King

anymore.” How wrong I was. That night furious African-American protesters burned downtown Cairo. It

never recovered.

Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos

Bob Moses at a SNCC conference, Waveland, Mississippi, November 1964

I was also wrong about never seeing any of my SNCC friends again. In 1989, I attended the Trinity College

SNCC conference in Hartford, Connecticut. I walked in and there they all were. It was as if a fantasy world I

had once lived in had come alive, and all my heroes and heroines were real people, sitting there in front of

me. Mike Thelwell, a SNCC worker and former Black Panther, a poet, novelist, and teacher at Amherst,

apologized for the expulsion of the whites from SNCC. Bob and Dottie Zellner were sitting there. “We had no

cards to play,” said Mike. Dottie Zellner will be eighty years old this year. Bob Zellner is still an activist in

North Carolina. Julian, Carmichael, Forman, and so many others are gone. Ruby Doris Smith died of cancer

at the age of twenty-five. Sam Shirah was shot and killed long ago. They are, all of them, among the bravest

and best of all Americans.

That day in Washington when John showed me the star where Dr. King had stood, I listed to Al Sharpton, the

keynote speaker at the 2013 march, as his voice boomed out through the public address system.

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“And when they ask us for our voter ID, take out a photo of Medgar Evers. Take out a photo of Goodman,

Cheney, and Schwerner. Take out a photo of Viola Liuzzo.

“They gave their lives so we could vote. Look at this photo. It gives you the ID of who we are.”

Danny Lyon’s Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement is available from Twin Palms Publishers.

More information about his years as SNCC’s staff photographer, including his 2016 conversation with

Congressman John Lewis at the Whitney Museum, can be found on his website, bleakbeauty.com.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/10/memories-of-mississippi/

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Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

Morris Dickstein

Private Collection/Photo by Christie's Images/Bridgeman Images

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Abandonment (The Two Friends), 1895

Out of the more than ninety novels that make up the so-called Human Comedy of Honoré de Balzac, only a

handful are still widely read or assigned in schools, at least in the Anglo-American world: Père

Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, perhaps Cousin Bette, the late novel from which I first learned to

read French by dutifully looking up every other word. Yet Balzac was arguably the creator of the modern

social novel, “the first and foremost member of his craft” and “the master of us all,” according to Henry

James, who wrote about him again and again. His influence was pivotal for writers as varied as James,

Flaubert, Zola, Dostoyevsky, and Dreiser, all of whom imitated yet rebelled against him. To his successors he

was a rough-hewn genius with an immense appetite for life. “What a man he would have been had he known

how to write,” said Flaubert. “But that was the only thing he lacked. After all, an artist would never have

accomplished so much nor had such breadth.” They were awed by the scope and sheer abundance of his work,

as well as his mastery of scenic detail. So were many social historians and radical writers, beginning with

Marx and Engels. Marx lauded his “profound grasp of real conditions,” despite his self-proclaimed Catholic

and monarchist views, while Engels felt he had written almost a complete history of French society from 1816

to 1848, novels from which Engels said he’d learned more than from any economist. For twentieth-century

critics like Georg Lukács and Erich Auerbach, his work, with its intricate linkage between characters and their

milieu, formed the very template of literary realism.

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Balzac did not at first set out to write a portrait of his age. Always fluent and prolific, in the 1820s he churned

out pulp and Gothic novels under pseudonyms before trying his hand as a printer and businessman. But

inspired in part by the historical novels of Walter Scott, he became what he called the “secretary” of French

society, the observer who cataloged its complex formations. In his 1842 preface to La Comédie humaine, the

ambitious framework he now conceived for his work, he said he wanted to write “the history which so many

historians have neglected, that of Moeurs [manners, morals].” On the model of a zoologist classifying animal

life, he had become, as he saw it, a “painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the drama of private life, an

archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloger of professions, a registrar of good and evil.” On this huge, multi-

paneled canvas, which ultimately would include more than two thousand characters, many of them

reappearing in book after book, he had hoped to “detect the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures,

passions, and incidents.”

While complete sets of Balzac’s work in English translation were once common, few contemporary readers

have sought out many of his lesser-known books. Graham Robb concludes his prodigious 1994 biography of

Balzac with the terse suggestion that “unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” The Memoirs

of Two Young Wives, first published in 1842, is not exactly a masterpiece, but it’s a singular work, one of

Balzac’s Scenes of Private Life, full of arresting detail yet cutting against the grain of his received image as a

social realist. James himself wrote a long preface to a 1902 translation, but the novel soon dropped without a

trace from the English-speaking world. It’s a gem of a book, occasionally florid and schematic yet engrossing,

and this new translation by Jordan Stump makes for precisely the kind of rediscovery that Robb invited.

It’s not hard to see why the book has attracted little notice even in its own time. A novel like Père Goriot is a

symphonic work with settings ranging from a faded pension to the great houses of Paris, with a broad

spectrum of characters from naive to diabolical, a stark family drama with echoes of King Lear, and at its

heart a coming-of-age story that exposes the whole fabric of a vicious, amoral society. The Memoirs of Two

Young Wives, with only two main characters, is a small-scale chamber work, one of the last French epistolary

novels, a mode that belongs more to the previous century than to the 1840s. It too is a coming-of-age story,

but instead of the young man from the provinces who trades his innocence for vaulting ambition and lays

siege to French society, it’s made up of the letters exchanged between two young women who leave a

Carmelite convent before taking their vows, confronting the limited choices available to them in the wider

world. Both spring from the minor aristocracy, their convent life the consequence of their social position, not

any religious vocation. Despite the rights granted to women under Napoleon’s more egalitarian civil code,

still in force after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, their inheritances were to be diverted to foster the

fortunes of their brothers, the eldest sons who would carry the family title. In the convent they have developed

a deep bond, a “secret inner life” that would be played out in their letters. At one level the novel would be a

bold exploration of female friendship, surprising from so masculine a writer as Balzac, the titanic figure we

know from Rodin’s sculpted image. The letters make up a rich tapestry of private life and feeling for women

barred from playing any public role. They tell a story of the opposite paths the two of them take in love and

marriage, mapping more intimate ground than the social novels for which Balzac has been most appreciated.

That intimacy, with its direct access to the inner life behind the social mask, is a hallmark of the epistolary

novels on which Balzac modeled this work, especially Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), the

longest English novel, perhaps the first psychological novel, and its French offshoot, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), two celebrated works centered on women, both of them among

Balzac’s most cherished books. Falling in love with her tutor, an exiled, impoverished Spanish nobleman, one

of Balzac’s protagonists, Louise, like Rousseau’s Julie, actually reenacts some of the medieval Heloise story,

her forbidden romance with the philosopher and rising churchman Peter Abelard. Meanwhile, her bosom

friend Renée quickly makes a marriage of convenience to the frail son of Provençal gentry, twenty years her

elder. Both women embark on discreet missions of redemption, lending their strength to the damaged men

they marry. The Spaniard Felipe, heir to a dukedom but deemed an enemy by Spain’s Bourbon king, has

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ceded to a younger brother both his title and the woman he loved. Repeatedly described as physically ugly,

“an old young man,” he can’t imagine attracting another woman until he falls for the witty, vivacious, and

passionate Louise. Renée’s husband Louis is even more needy, for he’s returned a broken man from Russian

captivity in Napoleon’s wars. With support from her friend Louise, she deftly manages both his family life

and his advancement to a title and a parliamentary position.

All this backstory is sketched in only briefly since the men in the book are dim figures, rarely heard from

directly, seen almost entirely through the lens of the confiding women. Socially, these women take care to

recede into the shadows, especially Renée, who is eager to maintain the appearance of a proper wife and

mother. But the letters, free of any third-person narration, highlight their inner strength, their depth of feeling,

and their starkly conflicting views of love and marriage. Louise is very much the romantic heroine,

determined to live out a grand passion with the men she loves. Felipe himself is a figure out of romance, not

only a Spaniard, hence broodingly grave and hot-blooded, but “the last Abencerrage,” descended from the

fiery Moors who conquered parts of Spain from North Africa until they were expelled or Christianized toward

the end of the fifteenth century. (Their legend had only recently been popularized on the stage and in an 1826

tale by Chateaubriand.) Louise’s second great love, even more intense and possessive, involves another

romantic figure, barely realized, a stereotypical poet. With him she leaves Paris for a bucolic love nest, not far

from the city, that excludes society altogether.

Renée, on the other hand, in her own deep provincial life, blends in effortlessly with both nature and society.

Pragmatically, she accepts marriage to a man she does not love, a marriage of companionship, social

ambition, and common interest. “My life may never be great, but it will be tranquil, smooth, and untroubled,”

or so she imagines. She takes care to create a beautiful landscape, directs her passion toward motherhood and

her busy mind to advancing her weakened husband’s position. When children do come, Balzac’s physical

evocation of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare make up some of the most astonishing pages

in the book, written completely from a woman’s point of view. (Balzac saw himself as an androgynous figure

with a “woman’s heart.”) Renée lives in her body, in her maternal feeling, while leading from behind. Her

approach to marriage is thoroughly rational—though far too “calculating,” in the view of her friend—but her

tormenting anxieties about the children, especially when one of them falls ill, parallel the anxiety Louise has

about her lovers. The pangs of jealousy threaten Louise’s romantic dream and drive her to a theatrical, almost

operatic denouement anticipated from the very first page of the novel.

By the end it has long been clear that the book is less about two women and their stories than a trenchant

dialogue about love and marriage by a writer who never hesitated to weave direct commentary and social

argument into his story, contrasting these women not by their style or their voices, as Rousseau himself urged

(and as a modern writer surely would), but by their clashing ideas. This makes The Memoirs of Two Young

Wives as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two

women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship. Louise first emerges as a “blithe and worldly

girl” in glittering society, witty and sardonic, something of a Jane Austen heroine. As they privately chronicle

their hopes and experiences to each other, they highlight the differences between the city and the country,

Paris and the provinces, society and domesticity. Once Renée settles quickly on marriage while Louise falls in

love with her exiled tutor, their letters turn into a clash between imagination and reason, headlong passion and

sober calculation. As Renée invests all in creating a family, Louise pursues an ideal vision of romance, an

insufficient word for the kind of “boundless” transcendence she seeks in love. Her marriage is a conflagration,

burningly sexual but also beyond the sexual. She longs for a completely transfiguring intimacy of souls,

something that would suffer no aging or abatement, no descent into the routine or the familiar, no intrusion

from workaday social relations or child-rearing. Hers is a version of the cult of romantic love, the Tristan

myth explored by Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World, a consummation beyond the body that

can only be ratified by death, seen as a final perfection, beyond loss or change.

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Renée, on the other hand, has “embraced Devotion as a shipwrecked sailor desperately clings to the mast.” To

her Louise has been “depraving the institution of marriage,” living out the “voluptuous excesses that the law

unwittingly allows,” trying “to be both the wife and the mistress.” She warns her friend that “an immense,

boundless happiness will destroy you in the end.” For Renée, such “devouring” passion—or passion in

general—must inevitably decline; permanence in marriage rests instead on a “deep, serene mutual

familiarity.” She briskly chooses duty over desire, the bond of friendship, companionship over heedless love,

yet her call to “devotion” exposes an underlying desperation. One fascinating feature of the book is the

reversals that occur as these two women—by now less women than counters in a philosophical debate—live

each other’s lives vicariously: Louise, otherwise content, cries out in the end for never having had children

while Renée unexpectedly laments having missed out on love, being reduced to routine. This is only one of

the many doubling effects that gives the novel a classical sense of symmetry.

Baudelaire, in some startlingly incisive remarks about Balzac’s work not long after his death, pointed to

another feature of this duality. “It often surprises me that Balzac’s greatest claim to fame is to pass as an

observer; it always seemed to me that his principal merit lay in being a visionary, a passionate visionary. All

of his characters are endowed with that life force by which he himself was animated. All of his tales are as

vibrantly colorful as dreams.” This is why his characters, like those of Dickens, seem so exaggerated, not

simply specimens of social types but, as Baudelaire says, the palpable result of Balzac’s own visionary

intensity. All of them are “more fiercely alive, more active and cunning in their struggles, more patient in

their misfortunes, more gluttonous in their pleasures, more angelic in their devotions, than any real-world

comedy might reveal to us…. Every soul is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with willpower. Indeed, this is

Balzac himself.” James, in his introduction, made a similar point about Balzac the historian or reporter and

Balzac the “originator,” with “his unequalled power of putting people on their feet, planting them before us in

their habit as they lived,” but doing so “with the inner vision all the while wide-awake.” By the “secret of an

insistence,” says James in his inimitable late style, Balzac “warms his facts into life.” Both Baudelaire and

James see Balzac’s apparent flaws, his heated exaggerations, as secret strengths.

It is not hard to take the argument at the heart of The Memoirs of Two Young Wives as a representation of

these two sides of Balzac’s creative mind, as dramatized in the friction between Louise the visionary, drawn

to peak experience, uncompromising and intense in her demands upon life, and Renée the realist, strictly

practical, with her iron sense of limits. Together, these two qualities were the source of what commentators

have sharply noted: Balzac’s visceral presence in his work. As one of his best biographers, V.S. Pritchett, put

it, “Balzac is always felt as a sanguine presence in his writing, breathless with knowledge, fantasy, and things

seen.” Describing his “ubiquity” as a novelist, he adds, “There is a spry, pungent, and pervasive sense that in

any scene he was there, and in the flesh.” In the range of his empathy, in the busily peopled world he creates,

with characters recurring like real people from book to book, Balzac can be compared not only to Dickens but

to Shakespeare. Even as spare a novel as The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, with its weighty themes but

limited cast, helps explain just how he did it, for its inner drama could well be a reflection of his own divided

self.

Morris Dickstein’s introduction to Honoré de Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is published

by New York Review Books.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/09/balzacs-novel-of-female-friendship/

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‘The Biggest Taboo’: An Interview with Qiu Zhijie

Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

Qiu Zhijie in his studio, 2018

One of China’s most influential artists is forty-eight-year-old Qiu Zhijie. A native of southern China’s Fujian

province, Qiu studied art in the eastern city of Hangzhou before moving to Beijing in 1994 to pursue a career

as a contemporary artist. At the time, contemporary art was illegal in China and artists often lived in villages

on the outskirts of town, held underground exhibitions, and were patronized almost exclusively by foreigners.

Qiu quickly made a name for himself as one of China’s leading artists, creating one of the most famous

images of that era: a picture of himself from the waist up, shirtless, against a white wall with an enormous red

character, 不, or “No,” painting across his face and torso. Another was a video of him copying a classic piece

of calligraphy, the fourth-century Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion, one thousand

times until it became illegible. More recently, he has embarked on major conceptual art projects, such as an

exploration of the suicides that take place at a major bridge that for decades was a symbol of Communist self-

reliance, and dozens of enormous idea mapsthat juxtapose mythology, politics, and social critique.

I got to know Qiu in 1999 when I wrote about the controversy surrounding an influential exhibition called

“Post-Sense, Sensibility, Alien Bodies & Delusion.” Held in the basement of an apartment block, it was a

backlash against the political pop art of that era, purposefully creating art that couldn’t be sold or collected: a

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human cadaver encased in a block of ice, for instance, or dead animals nailed to the wall. Disgusted, the

authorities closed the show the day it opened—a response reminiscent of the one that greeted the

Guggenheim’s current major retrospective of Chinese art, with authorities forcing the museum to remove live

animals from several exhibits.

Qiu’s work features prominently in the Guggenheim show. He was the only artist commissioned to make an

original work, one of his idea maps; his Orchid Pavilion calligraphy is also on display.

Unlike prototypical dissident-artists such as Ai Weiwei, who have shunned China’s art establishment and

work mainly abroad, Qiu is now firmly part of the Chinese art establishment. He teaches at the Central

Academy of Fine Arts, the most influential art school in China, as head of the Department of Experimental

Art, and curated the Chinese pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale. Last month, I met Qiu at his studio in the

eastern suburbs of Beijing, where we talked about the challenges of maintaining artistic integrity inside the

system, censorship, how he lectures on Communist Party ideology, and the Party’s transformation to a party

of nationalism.

Ian Johnson: What do you think of the new Guggenheim show?

Qiu Zhijie: I think it’s somewhat too late. It should have been ten years ago. Their [the curators’] goal was to

catch the 1990s. They wanted to change the image of Chinese painting away from political pop and the “big-

face school” [painters such as Fang Lijun, who became internationally famous for making paintings of round,

bald-headed people, often looking bored]. This is a great idea but the dates are off. The cutoff for the show

was supposed to be 2008, but most of the art is from the 1990s. For some of the artists, you’re seeing their

first piece of work, but many have done much better work since then.

But weren’t the 1990s very important to Chinese art?

Yes, but I think the most important year was 2001, when Beijing won the Olympic bid. That’s why I made it

so big on my map in the show. But the curators thought that other things were more important, like post-1989,

or Tiananmen, or Beijing holding the Olympics in 2008; I guess that’s why it ended in 2008. But it wasn’t

holding the Olympics [that mattered]; it was winning the bid.

Why?

Because holding the Olympics was just the routine work of carrying out something. But winning it, in 2001,

was important. That was when Chinese contemporary art went from being underground to something

accepted by the government. At the same time, China joined the World Trade Organization. And September

11 happened. So, to me, 2001 was the most important year—more so than 1989.

They knew they were holding the Olympics and so they needed to tell the world that China is open and

peaceful, and we needed contemporary art as a business card to show the world how open we were [italics

indicate English in the original]. That year, Li Lanqing went to the Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof art show. In

2002, the ministry of culture sent us to attend the Sao Paolo Bienal. And in 2003, they had the first Chinese

pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It all happened so fast.

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And now you’re an instructor in the country’s leading art school. What’s that like?

Some of it is probably typical for administrators around the world. Once, a student wanted to commit suicide.

I had to deal with that. One bought dope and was arrested by the police. I had to deal with that. And last

Monday, I had to hold a class in political theory. It was called “The Dean’s Political Thought Class.”

[Laughs.]

I lectured on the 19th Party Congress [the major Communist Party meeting in October that ensconced Xi

Jinping as leader for another five years]. I lectured on cultural self-confidence and the promotion of science!

[Laughing.] I gave a great lecture! I said I’m the kind of artist that Xi Jinping would really like. I’ve got

cultural self-confidence [one of Xi’s requirements of Chinese artists]. Every day, I practice calligraphy and

paint with ink wash. Every day, I carry out social investigation—like my project on the suicides at the

Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. So I care about ordinary people! And he says we should do great works for a

great era, so I do big works of art! [Laughing even harder.]

Have you read the three-hour work report that he delivered at the Party Congress in October?

I saw it. It was remarkable. But more remarkable was that [the ninety-one-year-old former Party secretary]

Jiang [Zemin] could sit there for three hours without drinking water, without going to the bathroom. When he

got up to leave, someone wanted to help him but he didn’t want the help. He wanted to walk himself!

What about things you can’t teach? Reports have circulated that Chinese universities should suppress foreign

ideas. What about sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989?

We discuss June 4. Because if you don’t discuss it, they’ll use VPNs and go see it themselves anyway. That’s

how I see it, anyway.

Where were you on that day back in 1989?

I was in Hangzhou. I was one of the students’ leaders. I was nineteen years old, a freshman. I was at the

Zhejiang Fine Arts Academy. Back then, people said we were used by the Voice of America and foreign

media. We didn’t feel like that. We felt we were patriotic.

We don’t talk about June 4 too much. But if there’s a question I answer it. I think June 4 is the biggest taboo

area, the most sensitive, the only thing you’re really not supposed to discuss.

What about the Cultural Revolution?

Absolutely, yes [it can be discussed]. In class, I discuss trends of socialist thinking. We discuss things like

Maoist leftists like [deposed leader] Bo Xilai. You can talk about that. Things like Taiwanese independence

or Hong Kong independence, these aren’t problems.

Are there limits to being tizhinei—inside the system?

Of course, there are limits being tizhinei but there are things you can accomplish. Like our current plan to

bring together artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists for long-term cooperation. If you’re an independent artist,

you won’t really be able to accomplish this. But if you’re with Central Academy of Fine Arts then you can

form a team with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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But there’s a price. The price isn’t that you’re limited [in what you can do], but “bureaucratism.” It consumes

your time, delays you, with so many of these meetings that I loathe. For example, for our project on

entrepreneurs and scientists, we held a big meeting. I wanted to put up some ads in the subway to bring in the

public—it’s a great topic and the room could have been full. But this is against some rules of how you can

spend public money. There are all these strange rules.

Some people describe artists inside the system as being zhao an [a term from ancient China that refers to a

feudal lord offering rebels an amnesty and a chance to join his army].

Yes, they say that of us. In order not to be accused of this, in an interview you have to curse the Party. Should

I curse the Communist Party? Then I guess I would become as famous as Ai Weiwei and win prizes abroad.

I’d move to New York with my wife and children.

Ian Johnson

A detail from People Who Claimed to be Messiah Crowding History (2015), by Qiu Zhijie

But what about young people? They’ll just continue to learn oil painting or sketching from plaster figures

[old-fashioned styles that Qiu has supplanted in his classes with more contemporary methods]. If you really

want to change China, you have give young people a chance to see new things. From one’s own advantage,

it’s okay. I can give an interview to The New York Review of Books or CNN (laughing) and curse the Party.

Sure, why not?

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So I think this term zhaoan, it’s not fair. They’re just telling an old story, that Mao was a terrible old dictator

and here’s a fighter for democracy. But things aren’t really like that. This government has deep ties to Wall

Street. It’s not a traditional dictatorship. It’s a new type. It’s now much more complicated. All these things are

mixed in together.

The map you made for the Guggenheim shows all sorts of ideas and strands of China moving along a giant

river. Some of the ideas are sensitive, like the Great Leap Forward, Mao, and the Cultural Revolution, leftists

like Bo Xilai and even Ai Weiwei. Can you show a piece like this inside China?

Yes, I’m planning a show of it and others in China in 2018. I have things that are more political than that. It

shows all these strands in China: public intellectuals, Confucians, Daoists, Buddhists, the Party, democracy,

the Cultural Revolution, the Long March, Maoist thought… They’re all moving toward this Roman-style

Coliseum. And they are all fighting in the Coliseum. I plan to show this, too.

But you don’t know where the line is. It doesn’t matter if it’s shown in Paris or New York, the state security

watches it. They know what I’m painting.

Do you think it’s because contemporary art doesn’t influence ordinary people? So they don’t care—if a few

people watch it, it doesn’t matter.

I think they do want to control it. The thing is, the government doesn’t have a unified will. Maybe Xi would

see this and think, “Who cares,” but the Public Security Bureau looks at it and thinks, “No.” Or Xi would see

it and get angry. You don’t know.

You really don’t feel that things are harsher or tighter now?

It’s like this: because the anticorruption crackdown was so harsh, officials don’t dare act or do anything.

Everyone speaks in formulaic language, and reads the Party’s documents. That kind of atmosphere isn’t good.

Actual measures are few, but you do feel a kind of authoritarianism that’s worse than before. For example,

say a leader is coming to visit, then everyone is nervous for a few days. And if this big leader wants to eat a

meal, then everyone is running around, checking security, figuring out what will he want to eat, and so on. In

the past, it wasn’t so nervous. You can feel a nervousness.

Wasn’t it more relaxed, say, ten years ago?

In terms of exhibitions, I feel it was about the same as now. Ten years ago, I took some students to Tibet to do

a survey. We called the resulting show “Why Go to Tibet?” It was about why so many Han Chinese were

traveling to Tibet and painting Tibetan people. So, back then, someone came by and said not to use the title.

So I changed it to “Why Go There?” and that was it. It’s not like after the big meeting on culture [in 2014] or

the 19th Party Congress that the thought control has tightened. But I do think that the overall atmosphere of

being afraid to make a mistake, that’s very pronounced.

It seems like the government views contemporary art as a resource to help foster creativity—hence these

projects to bring together scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists. Isn’t this instrumentalizing art?

Well, it’s better than the police coming and closing down your exhibition.

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But it is part of the country’s plans for China’s future. In a way, it’s remarkable when you think of how

contemporary art is viewed by politicians in other countries.

The Party’s goal is China’s future. So the 19th Party Congress document talked about the happiness of

Chinese people. Or the revival of the people. It didn’t say anything about realizing Communism. So it’s

become a kind of party of nationalism that happens still to be called the Communist Party of China.

It’s even embraced traditional culture. What do you think about that? You practice calligraphy, but you’re

also an advocate of contemporary art.

The problem is what we mean by tradition. How do you explain tradition? Qin Shihuangdi [the brutal first

emperor of China] is part of Chinese tradition. So is [the Daoist philosopher] Zhuangzi. It will take a lot of

effort to figure this out. What are we trying to promote? This is what China still doesn’t know.

This interview, part of Ian Johnson’s continuing NYR Daily series, “Talking About China,” was supported by

a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/06/the-biggest-taboo-an-interview-with-qiu-zhijie/

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The Novelist’s Complicity

Zia Haider Rahman

Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway,

and Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, 2013

“In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me a word of advice that I’ve been turning over in

my mind ever since.” Thus begins F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a novel that many regard as one of

the finest literary works of the twentieth century. It’s certainly one of the most popular. The words are uttered

by Nick Carraway, the narrator, through whom the entire story is told. His father’s advice is to refrain from

judging people because not everyone has had the advantages he has had. But what of those who had all the

same advantages and then some, the people who make up Carraway’s milieu in the novel? Carraway proceeds

to condemn them, though perhaps pulling his punches when it comes to the eponymous hero.

No effort at putting Fitzgerald’s novel on screen has ever been entirely successful, certainly not in terms of

fidelity to his vision. The medium of film has a major obstacle to overcome if it is to provide a faithful

rendering of a first-person novel, such as the The Great Gatsby: in general, film cameras show everything in

the third person, not from the vantage point of a particular character but from a stance separated from any

consciousness. If our reading experience of a first-person novel is substantially conditioned by the particular

perspective of the character telling the story—when is it not?—then recreating that reading experience

through the third person of film is impossible.

There are often other impediments. Time and causation are dealt with differently, flexibly, in novels. Take

Fitzgerald’s novel. There’s some doubt about how Jay Gatsby made his money; in the end, Carraway can

really only report half-heard hearsay and rumors of historical shady dealings. How could such antecedents be

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brought into a film narrative while retaining the quality of doubt as to what precisely happened? That doubt or

vagueness is, after all, essential in giving us permission to regard Gatsby sympathetically.

What I’m getting at with all this detail is that there’s a basic difference between fiction grounded in the

interiority of characters, on the one hand, and film and TV, on the other. Novels do interiority and the drama

of the mind infinitely better than TV and film do.

The imminent death of the novel has been announced every year for as long as I can remember. (This doesn’t

mean that the novel won’t die; it means that successive soothsayers haven’t been very good at soothsaying.)

In 2009, the American novelist Philip Roth predicted that within twenty-five years the readership of novels

would amount to a cult. “I think people will always be reading them,” he said in an interview, “but it will be a

small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.”

Roth’s prognosis has some data behind it. While the publishing industry might be thriving, buoyed up by

cookbooks, self-help manuals and all manner of non-fiction, fiction sales have fallen by 23 percent over the

past five years. In most industries, this would raise alarm bells.

Good evidence-based research explaining why fiction sales have fallen so much seems to be lacking, but this

hasn’t stopped speculation. The attention spans of readers, it’s said, is now trained for tweets, Facebook posts,

and information in bitesize morsels. Roth suggested as much in his interview. “To read a novel requires a

certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading,” he said. “If you read a novel in more than two

weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness,

is hard to come by.”

Reading now, also, has strong competition from screens. This is a new golden age of television, we’re told,

and I agree. With The Wire, The Sopranos, Madmen, Breaking Bad, the reboot of Battlestar Galactica (think

“Shakespeare in Space”), and many, many other shows, there has been a steady supply of riveting dramas,

with rich characterization, moral depth, and tumultuous plot lines. The boxed set and the binge-watching of

viewers have freed up writers from the constraints of the weekly serial, whose intervening seven days ensured

that scarcely more than a cliffhanger of the plot survived in the memory. Now TV writers can craft and

develop character over time, something novels do. Binge-watching offers space, also, to introduce subordinate

plot lines and ideas. Just like novels.

Television today appears to be capable of delivering many of the rewards novels might offer. There’s some

research suggesting that reading fiction improves our capacity to empathize with others whose lives are very

different from our own. Even on this score, television can claim some success. Who would deny that The

Sopranos has inculcated in viewers a strange empathy for the New Jersey mobster or that Breaking Bad has

inspired warmth toward a drug-dealing chemistry teacher?

And if television can reach a wider audience than novels ever did, isn’t the goal of broadening empathy better

served by those superbly well-written TV dramas?

Television might offer strong competition and attention spans might be sagging, but there may be deeper

cultural trends that have led to the decline of novels. In a paper published in 2014 in the

journal Administrative Science Quarterly, researchers found that winning a famous literary prize seems to be

followed by a steep fall in the quality ratings of a book on the online book review site Goodreads, a limb of

the Amazon behemoth. This happened after Julian Barnes won the 2011 Booker Prize for his novel The Sense

of an Ending. The researchers speculate that what might be happening is that winning a famous prize draws in

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a great many readers who would otherwise not consider the book, many of whom have no other reason for

expecting to like the book. Some of these readers might not even be habitual readers of fiction.

Amazon and Goodreads ratings, and numerous online book-reviewing sites, have all contributed to and

reflected the democratization of the arbitration of literary taste. But such democratization is not intrinsically a

good thing. The arbitration of scientific evidence is not conducted under the auspices of universal suffrage; it

is scientists who adjudicate on the risks of climate change, for instance, not elected politicians, and that’s

exactly how it should be. The democratization of reading tastes has gone hand in hand with the demise of the

critic, and with that, the idea of reading a novel because certain people with discernibly good judgment think

that the book is worth reading. A writer—I think it was the novelist Claire Messud, but don’t quote me—

suggested that the literary critic should aspire to be able to say of a novel that “this is a great book even

though I didn’t like it.” The implication is that there is much more to what makes a book great and worth

reading than merely one’s visceral reaction of liking it or not. Great works allow us to gather around the

campfire and discuss things of importance—not least of all, our diverse subjectivities. This idea might smack

of snobbery, but it’s useful to reflect that the idea retains influence in other areas of art, such as painting and

sculpture—notably, areas that don’t rely on an economics involving a large number of buyers of the same

product.

The question, however, remains: Should the demise of the literary novel trouble us? I think the answer is

“yes,” but not nearly as much as some literary novelists would have you think.

Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels, and taking with them many excellent

writers. And by and large, it’s delivering the same rewards to its audience. But what about novels that exploit

the opportunities that are available only to the form of the novel, such as novels that explore interiority, or

rely on the novel’s versatile treatment of time and causation? Who will speak for such novels?

If I seem reluctant to sound the alarm for the demise of the literary novel, even as a novelist myself, it is

because modern fiction, particularly English-language fiction, has moved in the direction of the televisual,

anyway. Much so-called literary fiction is evidently written with an eye to an option for film or TV

adaptation. The response to the challenges from television and other media has been to become more like the

offerings of those media. In some ways, this is understandable behavior on the part of each novelist. For all

but a tiny few, it’s nearly impossible to make anything even approaching a living from writing literary fiction.

But the effect of this in aggregate is to leave much of modern fiction looking like an inferior version of TV. If

novelists are relinquishing the very things that are exclusively the province of the novel, then they are

complicit in the demise of the novel. If they don’t want to save the novel, why should anyone else?

This essay first appeared as a broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s “A Point of View.”

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/05/the-novelists-complicity/

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Fred Bass, Maestro of the Strand

Tom Vanderbilt

Strand Bookstore

Max Ferguson: Strand Book Store, 2009; click to expand

The news this week of the death, at age eighty-nine, of Fred Bass, the legendary bookseller who made the

Strand into the cultural landmark it is, put me in mind of an afternoon I spent with him more than a decade

ago. I had gone to the Strand to learn something about the store’s highly-trafficked used-book buying counter,

and the people who worked there. It was a place with which I had a more than passing familiarity. Like any

number of young literary-minded New Yorkers with more ambition than money (or storage space), I had long

made the trek to 12th Street and Broadway, my satchel laden with review copies. There was something

ignoble in this, not to mention back-breaking—friends who worked at music magazines had simply to phone

someone to come over and buy their review CDs (when those were still a thing).

It was, though, an authentic part of a hoary, if not frequently discussed, literary tradition. “A great deal goes

on behind the scene in the literary world,” the jaded, infinitely corruptible journalist Étienne Lousteau tells

Lucien Chardon, the aspiring poet from the provinces, in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. One of those things, he

notes, is the “low trade” in selling publisher’s review copies, which Lousteau has taken to its most perverted

end: reviewing books without actually reading them so he can make more money selling them with uncut

pages. A century later, George Orwell, in his essay “In Defence of the Novel,” passingly refers to “the hack

reviewer, who has a wife and a family and has got to earn his guinea, not to mention the half-crown per vol

which he gets by selling his review copies.” More recently, in Bound to Last, the writer Sean Manning

remembers his time working at the bookstore, and the “depressing” prospect of buying books with “publicity

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notices still sharply creased and tucked inside the front covers.” He despaired of “all the hours those authors

had toiled, all their months and years of sacrifice, just for some reviewer to hawk it back to the Strand for two

or three lousy bucks.”

The small dispatch I filed from that day at the Strand was, by one of those endless vicissitudes of Grub Street

that any hack will recognize, not published by the magazine that had first expressed interest. It was not

intended as a profile of Bass; rather, a small glance at this discreet place of transaction, where the higher

calling of literature was brought down to its bare market essentials—and which, for me, had great drama, and

sometimes the urgency of a payday loan window. But I remember sensing in Bass, beyond a slightly gruff

exterior edged with a shrewdness gained from a lifetime in the trade, a man of great passion, a man who knew

the innumerable and shifting currents of the book trade the way an old sailor knows the mutable sea. He was a

character who could have come from a book.

*

The used-book buying counter at the Strand is roughly ten feet long by four feet wide. The wood surface is

scratched and grooved with the traffic of decades of books, resined by the moist palms of generations of

expectant sellers. On one side a decaying sign somewhat announces, in red letters, “SELL YOUR BOOKS

HERE.” Below that a laser-printed sign announces, much more clearly, “SELL YOUR BOOKS HERE.”

There can be few book-minded New Yorkers who have not approached this counter at some point in their

lives. Like some Ellis Island of the migrating volume, it stands like a rocky promontory, ready to receive the

teeming literary tide. (Had it an Emma Lazarus, she might be moved to write: “Do Not Give Us Your Dog-

Eared, Your Broken-Spined, Your Ex-Library w/Markings.”) Those would-be sellers can be sorted into

several broad categories: impecunious editorial assistants, for whom a Friday lunchtime sale at the Strand

may ensure that night’s revelry; the square-footage-minded apartment dweller who frantically heaves

cartonfuls of books into the store—while their Volvo 240 sits hazard-blinking outside—to make way for a

Jennifer convertible or a new baby’s crib back home; the disheveled street scavengers for whom a

curbside What to Expect When You’re Expecting may be a meal ticket.

On a recent, typically busy Saturday at the Strand, a steady stream of sellers approached “Neil W.,” as he was

name-tagged. Neil W. is compact and solid, has a stern face, a razor-backed thatch of short, gray hair, and like

most buyers at the Strand wears a flannel shirt. A Strand veteran of more than thirty years, he has a booming

voice with a gravel edge—put him on Parris Island and he’d have a platoonful of grunts doing one-armed

push-ups in the rain. A twentysomething man with hipster dark glasses and an army jacket strained toward the

desk with several Gristedes bags (paper) heaving with books. Neil W. began sifting through the books, which

seemed to be mostly Oxford World’s Classics paperbacks. “Are these all paperbacks, sir?” he asked. The man

nodded. “This stuff isn’t worth anything,” he soon announced. “I’m sorry, sir. No used paperback fiction.”

The man, a bit stunned at the prospect of having to return home with the bags, rather meekly mumbled, “No

used paperback fiction?” He seemed paralyzed with indecision, and after a few minutes, Neil W. barked:

“Let’s move it, Sir!” He scrambled to collect his books as the next seller approached the counter.

For many years, I, too, have joined this procession, standing before clerks who seemed to me either

munificent benefactors or intimidating magistrates, handing over books and wondering what strange science

lay behind the price offered to me. (In moments of codependent-no-more anger, I have gone to other stores,

and, disheartened by the result, always returned tome-in-hand to the Strand.) I have also been struck by the

terse interactions going on near me, which often seem to revolve around the Strand’s buyer having to impart

to the aspirant seller an unpleasant, philosophically daunting bit of news: that what they are attempting to

sell has no value. Not everyone takes this well. As one local blogger notes in a florid, lengthy rant: “The

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process is baffling. The Buyer’s brusque. And by the end you’re thrilled to be out of there with whatever

they’ve paid for the books… If I ever take the time to map New York’s circles of hell the Strand and the

Buyer will be pretty far down. Lower than ticket-happy transit cops and Penny Crone, The Strand’s Buyer is a

creature apart.”

Strand Bookstore

Fred Bass

Piqued by this vehemence and vitriol, I went down one afternoon to talk to Fred Bass, the Strand’s seventy-

five-year-old-owner and, on most weekdays, still its resident book-buyer, peering over spectacles at stacks

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filled with Russian Folk Tales or The Da Vinci Code. “The first thing I tell people is: Books must be in good

condition. They must be quality books that people still want. And they say, ‘What do you mean, how do I

know?’ I can’t answer that.” Certain types of books—chess, for example—Bass will always take, while

certain others he will almost certainly not. “You take things like biographies of has-been statesmen—like

Gore, Humphrey, McGovern. That stuff’s not going to sell.” While bar codes and computers have helped give

a shape to the Strand’s overwhelming inventory, a good deal of buying still proceeds by “feel,” as Bass

described it. “You really can’t check every book. It’s too time-consuming.” Certain books are almost a

conditioned reflex. “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I must get five copies of that a day. We’re still

selling ten or fifteen copies a week—my price is down to $3.95. Often, I put them on the dollar table because

we have too many.” He scanned a backpackful of books a young woman has deposited on the counter.

“Fifteen dollars,” he said. “Okay,” she said.

Bass has endured high drama on his seemingly prosaic watch. “I was doing the review copies on the main

floor when a guy came in with quite a stack of books. Some other gentlemen who I didn’t know was standing

on the side, looking at him and literally glaring at him. When I bought the books, this other guy came over

and grabbed one of the books and said, ‘You son-of-a-bitch. I just sent this down to you by messenger this

morning, and you couldn’t wait to sell it down here. I’ll see that you’ll never get a book from Random House

again.’ The reviewer looked at him calmly, and said, ‘I guess Random House won’t get any more of my

reviews.’” And then, there are the eccentrics. “One guy always used to say, ‘You know you’re paying me too

much. I can’t take your money.’ He was nice guy, but a little crazy.”

When I asked Bass about Neil W., the imposing Saturday buyer, Bass said: “He’s got a rough edge about him.

We try and soften it up. I’ve worked next to him where he said things in a very polite way and people get

insulted. He’s said nothing wrong, it’s just the tone of his voice.” Whether this is inherent or the result of

dealing with legions of people convinced that their Book of the Month Club editions must be valuable

because they paid good money for them is an open question. “He’s tough,” Bass said. “He’s got people lined

up and sellers start arguing with him. He doesn’t have the time, he cuts them off.” Bass, who possesses the air

of a scholar, admits he, too, can get testy. “Every now and again I even lose it. Somebody comes in, the books

are torn. They’re dirty. They don’t have covers on them. And I say, ‘Are you really trying to sell this?’ You

just kind of wonder what goes through people’s minds.”

A few days later, I returned to the Strand. Bass waved a beige set of galley proofs at me. “This was in a batch

yesterday,” he said. I recognized them as being of my own book. From mere seller, I had gone to sold.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/04/fred-bass-maestro-of-the-strand/

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Lauren Greenfield’s Gilt Edge

Alissa Quart

Lauren Greenfield

Christina, twenty-one, a Walmart pharmacy technician, on the way to her wedding in a coach drawn by six

miniature white ponies, Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida, 2013

A blonde, hugely buxom woman is pictured standing in her home, the largest in the United States. Her maid is

in the corner of the frame and one of her eight children is in the maid’s arms, his face covered in neon-orange

Cheetos crumbs. In another image, underdressed dancers gyrate while a lottery winner “makes it rain” at a

strip club, dollar bills flying. In Moscow, a Latvian model/trophy wife stands in front of her home’s giant

library, composed entirely of her self-published fashion photography books. An American child beauty queen

wears a smog-thick layer of make-up and a saloon-style boa and headdress. Her tongue rolls between her

teeth salaciously.

These photos by Lauren Greenfield, who has been documenting American exorbitance for decades, are part of

“Generation Wealth,” an exhibition of some 200 images at New York City’s International Center of

Photography through January 7. (A feature-length Amazon-supported documentary by Greenfield on the same

topic, not included in the show, opens at Sundance later this month.) Greenfield’s subjects are not only

America’s wealthiest, but also the striving wannabes who go into hock so they can mimic their social

superiors with pricey cars and weddings they can’t afford. As Greenfield has saidin an interview, her work

depicts “bling” as “the new American dream.”

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Greenfield’s raw material, materialism, is candy-colored and stimulating. It is also almost uniformly

depressing. She shows us the self-starved bodies of the affluent young, among their parents’ magma-flow of

possessions. We see their marmoreal homes, their beauty regimes, and their fathers’ younger, heliotropic

second wives. The overall affect of the exhibition’s packed two floors and the accompanying book, a dense

gold brick with some 650 images that was so big it actually took up too much space in my home, is nihilism.

At times, it even feels gleefully so.

Lauren Greenfield

llona at home with her daughter Michelle, Moscow, Russia, 2012

Greenfield and other photographers focused on documenting America’s rich form a counterpart to the many

now shooting in Detroit or America’s Methlands, in full, gritty, and lambent detail. On either side of this

divide, photographers seeking to represent our steep income gradient face potential pitfalls. On the one hand,

photographers who find an inadvertent beauty in abandoned lots, mortgage-collapsed suburban dwellings, or

the homeless run the risk of creating “ruin porn.” On the other side, photographers of the wealthy may be

guilty of making what could be called “bling porn”—when grossly gilded worlds are turned into art that is

itself grossly gilded. In other words, bling porn happens when artists make luxury objects out of the luxurious

lives and objects they ostensibly seek to critique.

Bling pornographers may assume a censorious attitude toward their decadent subjects and their displays of

branded goods, but their glossy prints can themselves become decadent products for art buyers’ consumption.

Earlier examples of this are Jessica Craig-Martin’s party snaps, cropped to remove faces, or Tina Barney’s

Nantucket-palette images of families and preppy kitchens. (An exception to this problem is the work of

Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg; in Rich and Poor (1985), his quiet black-and-white portraits are not

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trying to be exciting.) At times, Greenfield’s work, too, approaches bling porn not just because her works are

sold for profit to the wealthy, but also because of the high gloss and lush colors of her images: the lifestyles of

grotesque celebrities like Tyra Banks, Brett Ratner, and Donatella Versace are portrayed with a vibrancy that

can seem to foster the dream of a 90,000-square-foot home (which was the plotline of her 2012

film The Queen of Versailles) rather than satirize it.

Lauren Greenfield

Jackie and friends with Versace handbags at the Versace store, Beverly Hills, California, 2007

There are two critiques of Greenfield’s work that tend to circulate. One is that the work can be perilously

close to becoming a gaudy display of the allure of privilege, including Greenfield’s own, which has given her

access to the world of the wealthy. The other is that, as the New York Times review had it, Greenfield is

guilty of “preferring easy satire if not outright mockery” to a more complex portrayal. Leafing through the

book does sometimes put one in the uncomfortable position of consuming consumption, being shoehorned

into the bling-porn point of view. Take that Latvian-born model in Moscow wearing a sweater that reads,

“I’m a luxury,” like a dead-eyed animatronic Odalisque, Westworld by way of Riga. These and other images

like it are undeniably gross, yet also as seductive as a fashion shoot.

But the risk of bling porn is worth taking to bear witness to our new Gilded Age. The recently-passed tax bill

is only the most recent example of how income inequality has been written into the law of the land. Our

president and first lady routinely celebrate their own excess in photographs, as does Treasury Secretary Steve

Mnuchin and his rapacious wife, who famously posed with sheets of cash. America’s three wealthiest

billionaires now possess as much wealth as the entire bottom half of US households. Since the Great

Recession of 2008-2009, more than 85 percent of income gains have gone to the top one percent. The

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lifestyles of the rich and famous are amply celebrated in the real-estate sections of newspaper, in glamour

magazines, and on reality television, giving their cues to the amateur snappers on social media, like Rich Kids

of Instagram or Private School Snapchats.

Lauren Greenfield

Xue Qiwen, forty-three, in her apartment, decorated with Versace furniture, Shanghai, China, 2005

“Bling porn” thus captures our moment. Its paradoxes, however, are as old as portraiture. As John Berger

wrote some forty years ago in Ways of Seeing, even the Old Masters’ paintings were coated in the tempuras

and oils of ideology, including the worship of Mammon. Oil painting celebrated a new kind of wealth, wrote

Berger, wealth that was all about buying-power. Painting “itself had to be able to demonstrate the desirability

of what money could buy,” Berger wrote. “And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its

tangibility, in how it will reward the touch, the hand, of the owner.”

Like those floor-to-ceiling nineteenth-century portraits of robber barons, some of Greenfield’s images are

supersized in strikingly large prints, echoing her quarry’s inflated tastes. The exhibition includes many

smaller prints, video consoles, a short documentary (whose scalding commentary by the artist is bizarrely

accompanied by a light-hearted, reality TV-style soundtrack), and extensive commentary written by some of

the subjects (one, dressed in princess garb, regrets that, back in history, one had to be born a princess).

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Lauren Greenfield

Crenshaw High School girls, who were selected by a magazine to receive “Oscar treatment” for prom, riding

in a limo with their dates, Culver City, California, 2001

Some of the best pictures show how far the aspirations and tastes of the one percent have trickled down,

infecting not only the middle class but working people of all types. They, too, want to live the American

fairytale more than the American dream—like the service worker who scrimped and saved in order to afford a

Disney wedding where she was transported in a glass carriage, replete with footmen in powdered wigs.

The twisted fairytale has been a mainstay of Greenfield’s projects since the 1990s. Her first book, Fast

Forward (1997), includes photographs from the opulent private high school that Greenfield herself attended in

Santa Monica, with its parking lot full of BMWs, or teenagers getting nose jobs to match their friends.

Greenfield’s second book, Girl Culture (2002), extended and concentrated her look at youth and

commercialization, focusing on girls in particular. I first encountered this work when I was also documenting

the startling excesses of mall-rat teenagers and bar mitzvah parties replete with sexy adult “party starters”

paid to dance breast-to-nose with thirteen-year-old boys for my first book, Branded (2004). The coming-of-

age party became a process of what I dubbed “self-branding” in the late 1990s, by which adolescents

internalized the external ad campaigns aimed at them. Greenfield’s images of teen girls suggest that her

subjects experience themselves as much by consuming products as they do being consumed by men who see

them as mini-beauty queens or strippers. Greenfield was the grand interpreter of this transformation of youth,

although I related more to other photographers of the period working in this field—for example, the Dutch

photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who appeared to have greater sympathy for her body-crazed adolescent

subjects.

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Lauren Greenfield

Celebrity plastic surgeon Dr. Frank Ryan preparing a Botox injection for Shannon Tweed, a former Playboy

Playmate and wife of Gene Simmons, the lead singer of Kiss, Beverly Hills, California, 2000

Greenfield’s photography of young celebrities was sometimes premonitory, like her snap of a youthful Kim

Kardashian. Her early images of aging women overdosed on cosmetic surgery feel similarly prophetic, as

procedures overall have increased 115 percent since 2000. The women pictured are by no means, all “ladies

who lunch.” One of Greenfield’s most disturbing recent “surgery” portraits shows a woman bus driver who

underwent multiple procedures on her small salary. In these photos—for example, in a striking close-up of

lips being injected with collagen, there is a shockingly toxic picture of gender oppression plus money.

The world Greenfield documents feels hermetically-sealed and suffocating. Only a few portraits even suggest

there could be something beyond all this decadence and moral decay. Among them is an Icelandic fisherman-

turned-banker who returned to fishing cod and a happier life.

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Lauren Greenfield

Lindsey, eighteen, at a Fourth of July party three days after getting a nose job, Calabasas, California, 1993

The weakest works in “Generation Wealth” are photographs of Wall Street titans and of China’s new rich.

One feels Greenfield included these images because they jibe with her theme, not because there is anything

else particularly astute or striking about them. There is a similar vacancy in some of Greenfield’s shocking

images of the super-rich: Who really cares about these people? They never had souls. It’s the working-class

Disney “princess” who could still be “saved” that seems more poignant.

At its best, Greenfield’s work provides a shocking, rigorous, and needed visual language for society’s worst

excesses. A decade ago, to visit this world might have seemed like cultural anthropology. It might even have

been an optional exercise. Today, in the age of Donald, Melania, and the Mnuchins, it is a necessary, even

captivating, task—if, at times, a repulsive one.

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Lauren Greenfield

Mijanou, eighteen, voted Best Physique at Beverly Hills High School, skipping class with friends on Senior

Beach Day, Santa Monica, California, 1993

This essay was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

“Laura Greenfield: Generation Wealth” opened at the Annenberg Space for Photography and is now on view

at the International Center for Photography in New York City through January 7. The book by the same title

is published by Phaidon.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/02/lauren-greenfields-gilt-edge/

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Dominica: After the Storm

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro and Lennox Honychurch

Marica Honychurch

Trees stripped by Hurricane Maria in the interior of Dominica, October, 2017

Lennox Honychurch wrote the book on Dominica. Born on this small, mountainous island in the Windward

Antilles in 1952, he first published The Dominica Story in 1975. An updated version of the book remains the

standard history of a country that few Americans could distinguish from the Dominican Republic until

recently, when Hurricane Maria blasted its peaks with 160-mile-per-hour winds and images on the news

showed a once-lush land that then resembled the surface of the moon.

Located between the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, Dominica was named for the day of the

week—a Sunday—when Columbus first glimpsed its steep sides. The island— which is just under 300 square

miles, about the size of New York City—remained unsettled by Europeans for much longer than its

neighbors; it remains home today to a proud community of indigenous people whom the Spanish dubbed

“Carib” but who call themselves Kalinago. The island passed back and forth between French and English

control many times before it became, in 1763, the British colony it would remain until winning independence

in 1978.

Honychurch’s roots there go back generations, and his devotion to Dominica has made him work to restore its

colonial-era forts and to write several more books. His most recent is a study of how Dominica’s “maroons,”

or runaway slaves, once thrived in the still-untamed woods of what the local tourist board now touts as “the

Nature Island of the Caribbean.”

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On the afternoon of September 18, as Hurricane Maria bore down, Honychurch was in his home by the

island’s north shore. The next day, after the storm had moved on and was raging toward Puerto Rico, I tried to

reach him on his cellphone. My call went straight to voicemail. Dominica’s power grid was wrecked, and its

few cell towers were snapped in half: the only way to communicate with anyone there, for weeks after the

storm, was via email or Skype with those who had access to government computers in the island’s little

capital, Roseau. From friends there, I soon learned that Honychurch was all right. He’d built his house—

unlike most homes on an island where nine in ten abodes saw severe damage—using traditional hurricane

defenses; it had stood firm. But it wasn’t until seven weeks after the storm that I finally reached him—with

the help of a temporary cell-tower, Honychurch explained, that the phone company has erected near his

village.

“We had what you’d call a ‘mixed preparedness’,” he sighed, explaining that many of his neighbors hadn’t

absorbed Maria’s full danger until the storm hit. “On the US cable TV stations, where many people here get

their news, ‘making landfall’ means hitting Florida or Puerto Rico; they don’t focus much on the littler islands

that Atlantic hurricanes hit first.” Honychurch told me his story of experiencing the worst storm ever to strike

his island. He described the steep uphill battle that Dominica is still facing three months later, after the most

damaging Caribbean hurricane season on record. Even to begin a rebuilding process will take years, and in the

meantime, the world’s spotlight moves on. (Our conversation has been condensed.)

—Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: I wonder if you could describe for me the day Maria hit, the buildup to the storm, and

your experience of it. Were people in Dominica ready, in any way, for what hit them?

Lennox Honychurch: Most people weren’t, no. Right up until Maria’s outer bands began to hit, many people

here hadn’t realized the enormity of her approach. There was still talk on local radio, that afternoon of

September 18, of Maria moving more to the south, toward Martinique. But by 8:00 or so that evening, as it

got really bad, it became clear to all that this was indeed a Category 5 hurricane, hitting us full force, and that

it was going to go diagonally across the whole island.

We’ve had bad hurricanes before. Hurricane David, in 1979, was a landmark in the twentieth-century history

of Dominica. But it’s amazing how time wipes away memory. As Maria landed, many people went to so-

called hurricane shelters—village schools and churches, mostly. But many of those buildings were built in the

last couple decades with big flat roofs; they weren’t up to a storm like this. Their roofs came right off, and

people were exposed.

You, though, were okay in your house, but what was that night like there? And what is it about your place,

which I know you modeled on older French homes in the Antilles, that allowed it to stand firm?

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Marica Honychurch

A kitchen in Roseau Valley, Dominica, September, 2017; click to enlarge

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I’m on headland facing north, and that night it was like being on the bow of a ship—the winds surging and

waves crashing against the cliffs’ bottoms, rain pouring down. Gusts chopping up the trees like spinach. But I

built my place to withstand storms and based it on the old houses the French learned to build on Martinique in

the eighteenth century—they’d had a number of experiences there, by then, that taught them they had to be

ready to withstand these storms that arrived, in the days before satellites and televisions, with no warning—

when you had to be able to close up in ten, fifteen minutes. Their houses had heavy shutters. Mine has those,

and a steep-pitched roof with rafters that are close together and have “hurricane ties” at either end. It’s built of

actual boards rather than sheets of plywood. The galvanized [steel] on the roof is screwed in, not nailed. The

houses here that weathered Maria were the old ones, or done in that style. It’s the houses built since the 1970s

and 1980s, these places made from just nailing together plywood and particle board—including many homes

of the upper classes, not just the poor—that got destroyed.

When you opened your door, the morning after, what did you see?

Well, it was just after first light at 6 AM that I opened my door—to a completely new vista. I had been

surrounded by coastal forest, but that was completely gone—I was looking across to houses, though now

demolished, that I knew were there but that I had never seen from my place before. The landscape was

completely transformed, returned to how it would have looked 200 years ago, when the island’s coasts were

all planted with sugarcane. You could see for miles. Except for the ground, of course, was covered not with

sugar but with branches. My neighbors, beginning very early that morning, began to arrive. I was one of the

few people on the island who didn’t lose water or power. My concrete cisterns were full; the solar panels

bolted to the roof held. And so those first few days, especially, my community service was just to be available

for people coming for showers and for water; for ice and electric current.

You live in the north of the island, the other end of the island from Roseau. But I know that most of your

family, your mother and sister, live in the south, up in the hills over the capital. But you had no way, in the

aftermath of the storm, to reach them, right—no one did, since all phones were out, and I presume the roads

were, too? There are, of course, only a few major roads in Dominica, whether you’re circling the coast or

crossing the interior.

Yes, that’s right. And I was keen to head south right away, to see my mother. She was about to turn ninety-

two—Maria hit on September 18 and my mum’s birthday was September 21. So I wanted to get there for that;

also just to ensure that my mum, and my sister and my sister’s kids, with whom she lives, were okay. And

there was no way of communicating with them but to go. But many of the roads, as you say, were washed out;

those that weren’t were impassable. So I considered walking—it would have been some thirty-two miles on

foot. But I met a man by my place, a couple days after the storm, who had just done sixteen miles, and he had

started at 6 AM. So I realized there was no way I could walk across the island in one day—over tree trunks

and through rivers, but also, now, dodging the electric poles and cables that were twisted and spun all over the

place. So I waited until the road was partially open, a few days later. And I drove a way into the interior, as

far as I could go, but I had to walk the rest, about ten miles.

I was very glad, as I did so, that other people had walked before. Because the roads were unrecognizable. It

was thanks to those footsteps in the mud, their cutlass marks through branches, that I found my way. My mum

and my sister and her kids, thankfully, were okay. They’d lost water and power. But they were okay. And that

walk through the interior, seeing the devastation to the forest, was astonishing.

The trees, nearly all of them, were snapped off halfway up their trunks. But what was even more striking was

how they’d been stripped, by the branches tearing through the forest and ripping off the bark, the orchids,

everything. That, and the parrots—those that hadn’t died. They looked, on these stripped rainforest trees, like

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specks of emerald green. And you could just tell they didn’t know what had hit them. They were in a state of

shock. In the weeks since, there’s been real concern about one of our native species here—the Imperial Parrot,

which you find only in Dominica and which is on our national flag. Even before the hurricane, they were

extremely rare, and the National Forestry folks haven’t reported seeing any since. Other parrots have come

from the mountains to the coasts, whose flora are greening faster than our forests. In the trees by me now, we

have red-necked parrots that we never had before—usually they live on the mountain.

Marica Honychurch

Albert Joseph, Loubiere, Dominica, 2017

Birds, of course, weren’t the island’s only traumatized inhabitants. Tell me about your encounters with people

as you traversed the island that first time after the storm, and since.

Among the most striking experiences was passing through the Kalinago territory—the area where the

indigenous Kalinago people live, on the Atlantic coast. It’s a part of the island that’s totally exposed to the

elements, and the devastation there was awful. I talked with many people whose houses were just spread

around like matchsticks. Since the island is so mountainous, most people live around its edges by the coast.

But that also meant that all of our rivers—we have a saying here: “Dominica has a river for every day of the

year”—did as much damage as the wind in many spots. The rivers brought down boulders, and huge trunks of

trees like battering rams coming down flooded ravines. It was as though the island had vomited everything

out onto its coastal villages.

People here are extremely resilient, and look after each other—in rural districts especially, we like to talk of

“koudmen”: the spirit of helping hands. Living on this rough, rugged island, Dominicans are accustomed to

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nature’s fury, even if it isn’t a full-fledged hurricane. They have a remarkable capacity to just pick up, and

piece together what they can—to go from having a three-room house to picking up the pieces and sheltering

their families in one room instead. We’re also fortunate here, as damaging as the rivers were during the storm,

to have them. In the Leeward Islands—Antigua, Barbuda—they don’t have such water; accessing fresh water,

in those places, is really a chore. After Maria, our rivers may have been running murky, but at least people

could wash their clothes. And they had access, too, to our springs. All over the island, I saw people putting

plastic gutters from ruined homes down into springs to get fresh water—using bits of ruined houses to drink.

I know that many people, too, have just left. We’ve been hearing about that in many places—about how climate change, and awful storms made worse on a warming planet, are increasingly a driver of migration. What has that looked like, in recent weeks, in Dominica?

Marica Honychurch

West Bridge, Roseau, Dominica, October, 2017

In the immediate aftermath, the ferry was providing a free service to Martinique and Guadeloupe, so many

people took advantage of that. Many people have gone to Antigua, where Dominicans have long gone to look

for work. And Antigua must be having a hell of a time—they’ve also got everyone from their sister-island,

Barbuda, which was completely razed by Hurricane Irma. From my house on the north coast, I saw so many

little fishing boats passing the point here, just crowded with people, leaving for the French islands or

wherever else.

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Thirty-eight years ago, Dominica’s population was the highest it’s ever been. The day before Hurricane

David, in August 1979, our population was 85,000. After David, the next census, the population was 15,000

less, at 70,000. Before Hurricane Maria, we were down to about 68,000. And now, people have just been

going in droves. We may be down, goodness knows, to maybe 45,000. But plenty of other people, of course,

can’t leave. And many of our elderly, people in their eighties and nineties, have been dying recent weeks—

expiring of a kind of broken heart, I think, from the shock of it all. The number of deaths has not been fully

quantified. A couple of weeks ago, they were saying, “Twenty-four dead, thirty-four missing.” But with so

many people living in forests and on isolated farms, you just don’t know. A lot of people were swept away.

The situation in rural areas is one thing, but a lot of the international coverage of what was happening in

Dominica, especially right after the storm, focused on Roseau—this more urban area, where people depend

more on shops than their own land or neighbors to eat. And Roseau isn’t even a city by world standards; it’s

just a town, really, of 20,000 people. What was the situation there?

Well, as you say Roseau may not be a big city, but it is home to about a third of Dominica’s population. And

there’s been a lot of chaos. The port was so damaged, as ships began to arrive with goods and aid, all these

containers were being piled hither and yon. Finding what was in what, and what was meant for whom, and

getting goods into shops, caused a great deal of dismay. Many of the shops were raided by hungry or thieving

people. Many shopkeepers found it virtually impossible to open again, and some, especially Chinese or others

not from Dominica, have just left. The picture with aid has, of course, been very difficult.

In Dominica, as in many other Caribbean islands, we call ourselves independent—we won independence from

Britain in 1978—but on occasions like this, you really see how extremely dependent we still are on the

goodwill and assistance of wealthy countries. And these countries’ focus, with all the damage done by

hurricanes elsewhere, has been elsewhere, too. The US, after Maria, had Puerto Rico to deal with. The British

had a ship in the region, but they had to deal with the British Virgin Islands. The French were already on the

ground dealing with St. Martin and St. Barthélemy, after Irma, and helped Martinique and Guadeloupe

prepare and deal with Maria, with the full force of the French government. No one has really focused on

Dominica. Which was so different from when Hurricane David hit us in 1979. That time, the US came right

away, the army and their engineers; the French; the British, of course. They each had an encampment here.

But not this time.

Eventually, some aid arrived—but you’ve said that a lot of the rebuilding has been more at the grassroots; it’s

been about local organizations and efforts, sometimes partnering with people abroad.

Yes, eventually, contingents from those various nations came to help. So did foreign aid workers from Unicef,

UNESCO, the World Health Organization. But certainly, a lot of the work has been left to us. In my district,

many children aren’t back in school. Hospitals and clinics that aren’t yet connected to power or running water

are still doing what they do—delivering babies, tending to the sick and old, carrying on in hugely trying

circumstances. I’ve been focused, personally, on distributing water filters to such clinics, and to individuals,

too. An organization on [the island of] Grenada sent up a container full of these “Lifesaver” purifiers—they’re

like jerry cans with filters, to help make river-water potable—that I went and picked up by the port, and have

been distributing daily from the back of my pickup, along with packets of seeds the Grenadans also sent, to

help our farmers who grow vegetables. Many people are doing things of this nature, with the help of family

from overseas sending down supplies.

But the situation remains desperate. We need building materials, steel, and wood to put roofs on our schools.

Of course, the utility companies are also going to have to make a huge reinvestment—they’ve lost so much in

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terms of cables and poles—and they’ll need help. Our basic infrastructure is shot. Which is why, now, our

prime minister [Roosevelt Skerrit]’s job has become to seek assistance.

Right after the storm, Skerrit went to the UN and gave an eloquent speech in which he implored the richer

countries, those whose carbon outputs have fed climate change, to help those countries most vulnerable to

global warming’s effects.

Yes, and that’s a conversation about which we’re keenly aware. “To deny climate change,” as the prime

minister put it, “is to deny a truth we’ve just lived.” Where his demands for help with readying islands like

Dominica for storms will go, we’ll see—that’s a question for the long term. For now, the political situation is

about seeking funding—it’s about going not just to the UN, but to Washington D.C., to various embassies and

high commissions, trying to gain help. Getting the millions required for rehabilitation, one senses, won’t be

easy. In 2017, there are problems around the globe that dwarf ours here. But we’ve got to make our voices

heard.

Hurricanes are not new in the Caribbean. Here in Dominica, as I’ve been saying on local radio, we’ve had to

deal with them many times in our history. The challenges, on our warming planet, have changed; the strength

of this storm was exceptional. But we’ll rebuild this time, too. We’ve got no choice.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/28/dominica-after-the-storm/

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Autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder share molecular traits, study finds

University of California - Los Angeles

Summary:

Most medical conditions are largely defined by their physical symptoms. Psychiatric illnesses,

however, are largely defined by a person's behavior. A new study challenges that distinction,

identifying many shared -- and distinct -- patterns of gene expression in the brains of people with

autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The data hint at potential targets that may one day lead to

new treatment approaches.

FULL STORY

Brain activity concept (stock illustration).

Credit: © James Steidl / Fotolia

Most medical disorders have well-defined physical characteristics seen in tissues, organs and bodily fluids.

Psychiatric disorders, in contrast, are not defined by such pathology, but rather by behavior.

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A UCLA-led study, appearing Feb. 9 in Science, has found that autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

share some physical characteristics at the molecular level, specifically, patterns of gene expression in the

brain. Researchers also pinpointed important differences in these disorders' gene expression.

"These findings provide a molecular, pathological signature of these disorders, which is a large step forward,"

said senior author Daniel Geschwind, a distinguished professor of neurology, psychiatry and human genetics

and director of the UCLA Center for Autism Research and Treatment. "The major challenge now is to

understand how these changes arose."

Researchers know that certain variations in genetic material put people at risk for psychiatric disorders, but

DNA alone doesn't tell the whole story. Every cell in the body contains the same DNA; RNA molecules, on

the other hand, play a role in gene expression in different parts of the body, by "reading" the instructions

contained within DNA.

Geschwind and the study's lead author, Michael Gandal, reasoned that taking a close look at the RNA in

human brain tissue would provide a molecular profile of these psychiatric disorders. Gandal is an assistant

professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA.

Researchers analyzed the RNA in 700 tissue samples from the brains of deceased subjects who had autism,

schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder or alcohol abuse disorder, comparing them to

samples from brains without psychiatric disorders.

The molecular pathology showed significant overlap between distinct disorders, such as autism and

schizophrenia, but also specificity, with major depression showing molecular changes not seen in the other

disorders.

"We show that these molecular changes in the brain are connected to underlying genetic causes, but we don't

yet understand the mechanisms by which these genetic factors would lead to these changes," Geschwind said.

"So, although now we have some understanding of causes, and this new work shows the consequences, we

now have to understand the mechanisms by which this comes about, so as to develop the ability to change

these outcomes."

In addition to Geschwind and Gandal, the study's authors are Jillian Haney, Neelroop Parikshak, Virpi Leppa,

Gokul Ramaswami, Chris Hartl and Steve Horvath, all of UCLA; Andrew Schork, Vivek Appadurai, Alfonso

Buil and Thomas Werge, all of the Institute of Biological Psychiatry, Mental Health Services Copenhagen in

Denmark; Chunyu Liu of the University of Illinois at Chicago; Kevin White of the University of Chicago; the

CommonMind Consortium; the PsychENCODE Consortium; and the iPSYCH-BROAD Working Group.

The study was supported with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Simons Foundation

Autism Research Initiative and the Stephen R. Mallory schizophrenia research award at UCLA.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of California - Los Angeles. Original written by Leigh Hopper. Note:

Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Michael J. Gandal, Jillian R. Haney, Neelroop N. Parikshak, Virpi Leppa, Gokul Ramaswami, Chris Hartl,

Andrew J. Schork, Vivek Appadurai, Alfonso Buil, Thomas M. Werge, Chunyu Liu, Kevin P. White,

CommonMind Consortium, PsychENCODE Consortium, iPSYCH-BROAD Working Group, Steve Horvath,

Daniel H. Geschwind. Shared molecular neuropathology across major psychiatric disorders parallels

polygenic overlap. Science, 2018; 359 (6376): 693-697 DOI: 10.1126/science.aad6469

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208141346.htm

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Consciousness: Where Are Words?

Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks

Diana Ong/Bridgeman Images

Diana Ong: Brain child, 2008

Words, words, words. With the advent of the stream of consciousness in twentieth-century literature, it has

come to seem that the self is very much a thing made of words, a verbal construction forever narrating itself

and reconstituting itself in language. In line with the dominant, internalist view of consciousness, it is

assumed that this all takes place in the brain—specifically, two parts known as Wernicke’s area and Broca’s

area in the left hemisphere. So, direct perception of sights and sounds in the world outside the body are very

quickly ordered and colored by language inside our heads. “Once a thing is conceived in the mind,” wrote the

poet Horace in the first century BC, “the words to express it soon present themselves.” And we call this

thinking. All our experience can be reshuffled, interconnected, dissected, evoked, or willfully altered in

language, and these thoughts are then stored in our brains.

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—Tim Parks

This is the fourteenth in a series of fifteen conversations on consciousness between Riccardo Manzotti and

Tim Parks.

Tim Parks: Riccardo, you have been presenting quite a different theory of consciousness, which suggests that

there is nothing “stored” in the brain. No images, no sounds, and, I assume, no words. As you see it, the brain

is a powerful enabler that allows experience to happen, but this experience is actually one with the objects we

see, hear, smell, and touch, outside our bodies, or again, one with the body itself in those cases where it is the

body that is experienced. And we are this experience, not something separate from it. You have explained

dreams, hallucinations, and non-verbal thoughts as more complex and delayed forms of perception, always

insisting that each experience is identical to something outside the brain, something whose existence is

relative to our body. But how can that possibly be the case for language? When I am thinking silently to

myself, where can the language possibly be, if not inside my head?

Riccardo Manzotti: Imagine you’re lying in bed planning to furnish a house you’ll soon be moving to in a

distant town. What do you do? You start thinking about different items of furniture to figure out if they will

go together in the space there. This would normally be explained by saying that you are imagining mental

objects—representations in your head—and arranging them together in a mental space, another mental

representation, again in your head. But in our previous conversation, we reached the conclusion that there are

no “mental” objects—no thoughts, that is—separate from real objects. Simply, there is no need to introduce

this new entity, thought, between body and object.

When we say we are thinking, what we are actually doing is rearranging causal relations with past events,

objects that we have encountered before, to see what happens when we combine them. We don’t need a

mental sofa to put next to a mental armchair. We allow the sofas and armchairs encountered in our past to

exert an effect in the present, in various combinations. Like a controlled dream.

Parks: But we were talking about words, Riccardo, not sofas and armchairs! Last time we talked about

thinking things directly; this time we’re considering thinking in language, which is surely different.

Manzotti: Not at all. Words are really not so different from sofas and armchairs. They are external objects that

do things in the world and, like other objects, they produce effects in our brains and thus eventually, through

us, in the world. The only real difference is that, when it comes to what we call thinking, words are an awful

lot easier to juggle around and rearrange than bits of furniture.

Parks: External objects you say. But what kind of object is a word? Is it a sound? Is it a visual sign? What

about when it is neither spoken nor written, but simply thought in the head?

Manzotti: Exactly as with the furniture, what we have is a rearrangement of our causal relations with past

events—in this case, words initially heard in the external world. If we take things slowly and simply observe

what happens as we learn to speak and think, you’ll see that, once again, there’s no need to posit the entity

you call “a thought in the head.”

Parks: Go on, then.

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Manzotti: A mother repeats words to a baby. That’s how it starts for most of us. So, we have sounds, which

are physical objects. The sounds are repeated, frequently, insistently, in reference to things, actions, emotions,

to the point where they become labels that are perceived together with facts in the world. As soon as you have

the fact, the sound/word is present; as soon as you hear the sound/word, the fact is present. And when you

make the right sound, the food arrives.

Parks: I suppose you could say the same thing happens with certain movements that a parent teaches a child.

Pointing, waving, clapping, or even using tools: spoons, forks.

Manzotti: Indeed. But it’s important that the sounds/words don’t just come singly; they come in patterns,

building up more and more complex objects, phrases, sentences. And many of the sounds don’t relate to an

object/experience, but to the other sounds in the pattern. I mean words like, “and,” “but,” “as,” “because.”

Then the patterns can be rearranged. Hear the beginning of the pattern and the rest follows automatically.

Parks: Surely not altogether automatically, or we would simply be forever repeating the same things?

Manzotti: True. Let’s say there are powerful automatisms, rules if you like, that govern this constant

rearrangement of words we experience. The further you proceed in a sentence, the more your options close

down. However, we’re not trying to offer a linguist’s description of language function here, simply to

establish how and where language is experienced. It is a patterning of real, physical, external objects, and

these are one with our experience. They are our experience.

Parks: But some words refer to imaginary entities, or abstract entities. Are they external objects?

Manzotti: All sounds/words are physical objects in the same way. But you’re right, once we get used to the

idea that a sound refers to an object, we can start inventing sounds/words for imaginary or notional objects—

angels, dark matter, whatever—and then use other sound/words to put them in relation to the

experience/objects we are familiar with.

Parks: But how did we arrive at an imaginary or notional object, something that doesn’t perhaps exist, if

you’re saying there is nothing to experience but real external objects?

Manzotti: What is an angel but a juggling of past experience: beautiful body, plus wings, as in a dream? What

is dark matter if not a piece needed to complete a puzzle, a theory, made up of endless complex objects in the

world? Sometimes, the imaginary object is a reshuffling of real objects and thus it is real in its own way;

sometimes, it is nothing. Both these very different notional entities can be traced back to direct experience.

Parks: In other words, you’re saying that we don’t so much think in a language—English, Italian, whatever—

but constantly rearrange our experiences, our world, of which the language we speak is a part. It’s world-ish!

Manzotti: Yes. Think of people who are born stone-deaf. Are they going to be thinking in sound/words? If

they’ve never heard words, how can they be hearing them in their thinking? They can’t. In fact, if you ask

such people about this—in writing, of course—they tell you they think in signs. They’ve learned their

language visually, so they think words visually. Those are the external objects they are dealing with.

Interestingly, some people born deaf say they think in images with captions.

Parks: Which brings us to the written word.

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Manzotti: Right. At a certain point, the child who has learned to speak is invited to look at signs on paper or

on screen, and relate them to the sound/words he or she knows. This introduces yet another object into the

mix: the written word. Written words now prompt sounds and thus the child’s relations with object

experiences. Words also facilitate the rearrangement of these experiences in all kinds of extended forms. We

go back and forth so frequently between these different kinds of objects that we have put in strict relation to

each other—sound, sign, referent—that as the world acts on our brains in what we call experience, so the

sounds that we relate to each object/experience are also active in our brains. And we call this silent thinking.

Parks: To sum up, words and language amount to a kind of behavior—like learning a series of movements, or

a dance, with infinite variations.

Manzotti: Correct, and just as you can’t find a pirouette stored in a dancer’s brain, so you wouldn’t have

found “To be or not to be” stored in Shakespeare’s. At the end of our last conversation, I quoted E.M.

Forster’s remark, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” This is exactly right. Language is a

performance. We launch into it, we have a direction and we set off. But until we have said or written the

thing, until we’ve performed it, we don’t know how it will turn out.

Parks: So, nothing is stored in the head.

Manzotti: All the objects we encounter, the objects we call experience, continue to be active in our bodies and

brains, continue to be our experience. It is the nature of our fantastically complex brains that they allow these

encounters to go on, and to go on going on. The encounters are not “stored” and are certainly not static. They

are continuing to happen. They are us.

Parks: But there must be some order. Isn’t this a recipe for chaos?

Manzotti: Words are one way we try to impose a rather crude order on a fantastically complex, nuanced

experience. Language makes categories—for example, in the area of colors, where we name only a small

number of the vast range of colors we see. In 1858, the British statesman William Gladstone, commenting on

Homer’s references to color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, suggested that our experience was limited and

determined by linguistic conventions. But in 1898, the ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers’s study of the inhabitants of

Murray Island (between New Guinea and Australia), people who had no names for colors as basic as green

and blue, conclusively demonstrated that human beings see all shades of colors even when they don’t have

words for them. In 1969, the anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established that color names do not

change the colors one sees, and later studies have confirmed this.

Parks: So, by segmenting infinitely nuanced experience into a limited number of words, language allows us to

impose a little order, though presumably at the risk of leaving a lot of experience out of the system.

Manzotti: It’s like a net we’ve made and throw over the world. It catches some fish and lets others slip

through the links. But it doesn’t create fish, or stop them from existing. And we’re always tampering with our

net to have it capture new fish, or exclude certain fish we want to pretend don’t exist. Sometimes, the net

captures fragments of the net itself (for the net itself is an object), and it gets tangled and snarled. In short, it’s

as if we’d built a world with Lego bricks that corresponds very crudely to the world as a whole, and we keep

adjusting it to fine-tune the correspondence.

Parks: And just as there is no inner “cinema screen” in the brain on which visual images are seen, so there is

no inner auditorium in which the voice resounds.

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Manzotti: It is all echo and learned behavior. Our words are the words of our mother tongue, not other

languages (or not until we’ve been exposed to them for a long time). There is some interesting overlap here

with the work of Julian Jaynes, a Princeton-based psychologist who in the late 1970s claimed that

consciousness is not concocted inside the brain but is a learned process based on language. As Jaynes saw it,

we talk to ourselves and hallucinate our own voices. His hunch was that, in the past, people have often

mistaken this hallucinated voice for external sources, thus inventing gods, angels, demons, and the like.

Parks: Whereas you, I presume, would see all supposedly internal voices as simply a collection of past voices

still rumbling on thanks to the brain’s capacity to allow immediate perception to continue.

Manzotti: Yes. In the 1950s, when the neuroscientist Wilfred Penfield used electrical charges to stimulate the

cortex of his patients, they reported hearing the voices of people they knew. Since then, other scientists have

consistently obtained similar results. As we said when we discussed dreams, all perception involves both

immediate experience and, as it were, buffered experience, perception that remains in the background and

comes to the fore, if at all, only when immediate attention to the here-and-now is not required.

Parks: But in that regard, words are rather different from, say, my visual memory of an exciting soccer game,

in that I keep performing language pretty much all the time, and when I want. If it’s a hallucination, it’s an

extremely controlled hallucination.

Manzotti: Yes, because we train ourselves assiduously and from the earliest age to give structure to the world

in this way. Learning languages, even dead languages like Latin and Greek, has always been considered good

for one’s education, because it promotes this organization of experience. Society demands language of us and

promotes it most determinedly. In those very rare cases where a child is abandoned in nature, yet survives (so-

called feral children, or wolf children), without having gone through the language-learning process, they are

not, alas, like Kipling’s Mowgli, smart, bright kids. Unused to the constant manipulation of experience that

language allows, they are cognitively impaired. Language, as Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted, is a game.

Constantly playing this game, we learn how to organize those objects we call words and, eventually, with

them, the world.

Parks: As always, you have systematically eliminated any entities that might intervene between the world and

the body, all representations and so-called mental phenomena. As you see it, all experience is made up of

external objects and the rearranging of external objects. But what I want to ask now is the crunch question:

Who is doing that rearranging, who is focusing on this part of the landscape or that, who is choosing this word

rather than that?

Manzotti: Where and what is the self you mean? Who says I? Who pulls the levers? A soul, a ghost in the

machine? We’ll tackle this in our next, and last, conversation. But let me leave you with that all-too-famous

quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson as he crossed a bare field in winter twilight:

I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through

me; I am part or parcel of God.

But instead of the Universal Being, God, perhaps we could just say the world: “I am a part of the world, that

part relative to my body.”

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/12/27/consciousness-where-are-words/

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A Paper Memo Pad That Excavates Objects as It Gets Used

JANUARY 15, 2018

JOHNNY STRATEGY

Leave it to the stationery-loving Japanese to come up with a new way to enjoy writing notes. The Omoshiro

Block (loosely translated as ‘fun block’) utilizes laser-cutting technology to create what is, at first, just a

seemingly normal square cube of paper note cards. But as the note cards get used, an object begins to appear.

And you’ll have to exhaust the entire deck of cards to fully excavate the hidden object.

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Produced by Japanese company Triad, whose main line of business is producing architectural models,

the Omoshiro Blocks feature various notable architectural sites in Japan like Kyoto’s Kiyomizudera Temple,

Tokyo’s Asakusa Temple and Tokyo Tower. The blocks are composed of over 100 sheets of paper and each

sheet is different from the next in the same way that individual moments stack up together to form a memory.

But despite the declining cost of laser-cutting technology, the Omoshiro Blocks are still quite expensive and

range from around 4000 yen to 10,000 yen, depending on their size. Getting your hands on one will also be

tricky for the time being as they’re currently only available at the Tokyu Hands Osaka location. But you can

keep up with updates from the company by following them on Instagram. (Syndicated from Spoon &

Tamago)

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/omoshiro-block-a-paper-memo-pad-that-excavates-objects-as-it-gets-

used/?mc_cid=7bb900ddf6&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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The Emperor Robeson

Simon Callow

Beinecke Library, Yale

University/Van Vechten Trust

Paul Robeson as Othello, 1944; photograph by Carl Van Vechten

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FEBRUARY 8, 2018 ISSUE

Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary

by Gerald Horne

Pluto, 250 pp., $18.00 (paper)

No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson

by Jeff Sparrow

Scribe, 292 pp., $19.95 (paper)

When I was growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, Paul Robeson was much in evidence, on records,

on the radio, on television. His name was haloed with the sort of respect accorded to few performers. The

astonishing voice that, like the Mississippi in the most famous number in his repertory, just kept rolling along,

seemed to carry within it an inherent sense of truth. There was no artifice; there were no vocal tricks; nothing

came between the listener and the song. It commanded effortless attention; perfectly focused, it came from a

very deep place, not just in the larynx, but in the experience of what it is to be human. In this, Robeson

resembled the English contralto Kathleen Ferrier: both seemed less trained musicians than natural

phenomena.

The spirituals Robeson had been instrumental in discovering for a wider audience were not simply communal

songs of love and life and death but the urgent cries of a captive people yearning for a better, a juster life.

These songs, rooted in the past, expressed a present reality in the lives of twentieth-century American black

people, citizens of the most powerful nation on earth but oppressed and routinely humiliated on a daily basis.

When Robeson sang the refrain of “Go Down Moses”—“Let my people go!”—it had nothing to do with

consolation or comfort: it was an urgent demand. And in the Britain in which I grew up, he was deeply

admired for it. For us, he was the noble representative, the beau idéal, of his race: physically magnificent,

finely spoken, fiercely intelligent, charismatic but not at all threatening.

At some point in the 1960s, he faded from our view. Disgusted with America’s failure to address his

passionate demands for his people, he had gone to Moscow, endorsing the Soviet regime. Meanwhile, a new

generation of black militants, fierce demagogues, had become prominent, and suddenly Robeson seemed very

old-fashioned. There were no more television reruns of his most famous movies, Sanders of the River (1935)

and The Proud Valley (1940); his music was rarely heard. When news of his death came in 1976, there was

surprise that he was still alive. And now, it is hard to find anyone under fifty who has the slightest idea who

he is, or what he was, which is astonishing—as a singer, of course, and, especially in Proud Valley, as an

actor, his work is of the highest order. But his significance as an emblematic figure is even greater, crucial to

an understanding of the American twentieth century.

Robeson was born in the last years of the nineteenth century, to a father who had been a slave and at the time

of the Civil War had fled to the North, to the town of Princeton, New Jersey, eventually putting himself

through college and becoming a Presbyterian minister. He drummed his own fierce determination and

rigorous work ethic into his children, especially Paul, who was a model pupil. Studious, athletic, artistically

gifted, he was an all-around sportsman, sang in the school choir, and played Othello at the age of sixteen. At

Rutgers University, despite vicious opposition from aggressive white teammates, he became an outstanding

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football player; he graduated with distinction. He then studied law, first at NYU and then Columbia. On

graduation, he was marked out for great things, tipped as a possible future governor of New Jersey, but he

gave up the law almost immediately after a stenographer refused to take dictation “from a nigger.” Instead he

threw himself into the vibrant artistic life of Harlem at the height of its Renaissance, appearing in plays by

Eugene O’Neill, giving concerts of African-American music, and occasionally playing professional football;

he was spoken of by Walter Camp as the greatest end ever.

His fame spread with startling speed; within a couple of years, he was lionized on both sides of the Atlantic.

From an early age, he was perceived as almost literally iconic. His stupendous physique seemed to demand

heroic embodiment, and he was frequently photographed and sculpted, as often as not naked; the frontispiece

of the first of many books about him—Paul Robeson: Negro (1930), by his wife, Eslanda (Essie)—shows

Jacob Epstein’s famous bust of him. He was the black star everyone had been waiting for, the acceptable face

of negritude.

His appearances in England were especially warmly received: he was seen onstage in The Emperor

Jones, Show Boat, and, most daringly, as Othello. His singing voice was extensively broadcast by the BBC,

and he made films; by 1938 he was one of the most popular film stars in Britain. Swanning around in the most

elegant circles, hobnobbing on equal terms with painters, poets, philosophers, and politicians, he felt

exhilarated by England’s apparent lack of racial prejudice. He bought himself a splendid house, threw parties

at which one simply had to be seen, and engaged in a series of liaisons with English women under his wife’s

nose.

He had not completely given in to the adoration, though. All the while, he was being quietly radicalized. He

consorted with left-wing thinkers and young firebrands, like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, bent on

overthrowing colonial rule. Touring Europe, drawing crowds of tens of thousands to his concerts, he was

stirred by his audiences’ response to his music, and became interested in theirs. He was, he said, a folk singer,

not an art singer; folk music, he declared, was universal, the living proof of the community of mankind. He

absorbed his audience’s songs into his repertory, whenever possible in the original language; enrolling in the

philology department of the School of Oriental and African Languages at London University, he began a

study of African languages.

His increasing awareness of left-wing ideology showed in his choice of work—in London he played the

leading role in Stevedore, a play that directly addressed racism—but also inexorably led him to Moscow in

1934. Russia grasped him to its collective bosom; audiences went mad for him, Sergei Eisenstein wanted to

make a film with him as Jean-Christophe, emperor of Haiti. He was overwhelmed, declaring that for the first

time in his life he felt himself to be “not a Negro but a human being”; he placed his young son in a Russian

school. Fired by a sense of the coming battle to be fought, he went to Spain, then in the throes of the civil war.

He sang for the Republican forces and was received rapturously, as he was wherever he went, except in

Hitler’s Germany, through which he passed rapidly and uncomfortably, narrowly avoiding confrontation with

Nazi storm troopers. In his speeches, he increasingly framed the struggle for racial equality as a war on

fascism. In the run-up to World War II, Robeson became less of an artist, more of a moral force; less an

American, more a world figure.

But when Hitler invaded Poland and the war in Europe was finally engaged, he returned to America, pledging

to support the fight for democratic freedom. He saw American participation in the war as a tremendous

opportunity to reshape the whole of American life and, above all, to transform the position of black people

within the nation. His fame and influence rose to extraordinary heights, and after America joined the war, his

endorsement of its ally the Soviet Union proved very useful.

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In 1943, he reprised his Othello on Broadway, the first time an amorously involved black man and white

woman had ever been shown on stage there; to this day the production holds the record for the longest run of

any nonmusical Shakespeare play on Broadway, and it toured the land to strictly nonsegregated audiences.

The following year, Robeson’s forty-sixth birthday was marked with a grand gala, attended by over 12,000

people; 4,000 had to be turned away. The playwright Marc Connelly spoke, describing Robeson as the

representative of “a highly desirable tomorrow which, by some lucky accident, we are privileged to appreciate

today.” He was the man of the future; America was going to change.

Or so it seemed for a brief moment. The dream was almost immediately shattered when black GIs returning

from the war were subjected to terrifying outbursts of violence from white racists determined to make it clear

that nothing had changed. After a murderous attack on four African-Americans in Georgia, an incandescent

Robeson, at the head of a march of three thousand delegates, had a meeting with the president, Harry S.

Truman, in the course of which he demanded “an American crusade against lynching.” Truman coolly

observed that the time was not right. Robeson warned him that the temper of the black population was

dangerously eruptive. Truman, taking this as a threat, stood up; the meeting was over. Asked by a journalist

outside the White House whether it wouldn’t be finer when confronted with racist brutality to turn the other

cheek, Robeson replied, “If a lyncher hit me on one cheek, I’d tear his head off before he hit me on the other

one.” The chips were down.

From that moment on, the government moved to discredit Robeson at every turn; it blocked his employment

prospects, after which he turned to foreign touring, not hesitating to state his views whenever he could. At the

Soviet-backed World Peace Council, he spoke against the belligerence of the United States, describing it as

fascist; these remarks caused outrage at home, as did his later comments at the Paris Peace Congress, at which

he said: “We in America do not forget that it was on the backs of the white workers from Europe and on the

backs of millions of blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We

reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone.” These comments provoked denunciations

from all sides—not least from the black press and his former comrades-in-arms in the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People, anxious not to undo the steady progress they felt they had been

making. Robeson’s universal approbation turned overnight into nearly universal condemnation.

When he spoke in public in America, the meetings were often broken up by protesters armed with rocks,

stones, and knives, chanting “We’re Hitler’s boys” and “God bless Hitler.” At a meeting in Peekskill, New

York, Robeson narrowly escaped with his life. He now found himself subpoenaed to appear before the House

Un-American Activities Committee, where, refusing to state whether he was a member of the Communist

Party, he turned the tables on the interrogator who questioned why he had not stayed in the Soviet Union.

“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country,” replied Robeson. “I am going to

stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it.”

Before long, his passport was confiscated (a move, astonishingly, supported by the American Civil Liberties

Union). Robeson was now effectively imprisoned in his own country, where he found it virtually impossible

to earn a living because of FBI threats to theaters that might have hired him. But he could not be silenced:

from time to time he would go into a studio and broadcast talks and concerts that were relayed live to vast

crowds across the ocean. Through all of this, he kept up his criticism of the government’s racial policies, but

also, despite mounting evidence of the Terror in Russia under Stalin and the brutal suppression of the

Hungarian uprising in 1956, stubbornly maintained his unqualified admiration of the Soviet Union and what

he insisted was its essentially benevolent character.

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James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection/Beinecke Library, Yale University

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A photograph of Paul Robeson inscribed to Carl Van Vechten, circa 1930; from Gather Out of Star-Dust: A

Harlem Renaissance Album, Melissa Barton’s catalog of a recent exhibition at the Beinecke Library at Yale.

It is published by the library and distributed by Yale University Press.

His passport was finally restored to him in 1958, and he sped away. He based himself in England, where he

sang in St. Paul’s Cathedral and in the Royal Festival Hall; he played Othello for one last season at the

Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. He returned to Moscow, where ecstatic crowds filled

stadiums to welcome him back. He made his way to Australia and New Zealand. But something was

imploding within him. Back in Moscow, en route for the US, where he planned to speak in favor of the

fledgling civil rights movement, he was found with slashed wrists on the floor of the bathroom of his hotel

room. From there he went to London, where he received heavy sedation and massive doses of

electroconvulsive therapy before being transferred to a somewhat less draconian hospital in East Germany. At

last, in 1963, he came back to America and lived out the remaining thirteen years of his life as a private

citizen with very occasional public interventions; there were manic interludes and depressions, but mostly he

was just very quiet. When he died in 1976, most of the obituaries—even in the African-American press—

expressed a respectful incomprehension.

It is an altogether extraordinary life, the stuff of epic. It has not lacked for scholars: most notably the radical

historian Martin Duberman’s masterful and all-encompassing five-hundred-page life (1989). Robeson’s son,

Paul Jr., offered his personal perceptions of the great man’s first forty years in An Artist’s Journey (2001), the

first volume of The Undiscovered Paul Robeson, carrying the story through to its bitter end, five years later,

in a second volume, The Quest for Freedom, passionate and contentious. More recently, there has been Jordan

Goodman’s politically radical A Watched Man. And now—coincidentally or not—at a time of accelerating

racial unrest in America, there are two new books about him, as different from each other as chalk from

cheese.

Gerald Horne’s Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary is baffling. It is written with great sincerity and

passion, but its constant reiteration of certain words and phrases—we learn on page after page that Robeson

was, indeed, a revolutionary—hardly constitutes an argument, while the simple presentation of a narrative

eludes the author completely. Horne seems unable to present a clear picture of Robeson’s personality or the

world in which he lived; it is a chronological free-for-all, as we giddily lurch from decade to decade,

backtracking or suddenly leaping forward. Often sentences make no sense whatever: “Though Robeson’s tie

to Moscow is often derided,” says Horne, “this is one-sided—akin to judging a boxing match while only

focusing on one of the fighters—since it elides the point that (by far) African-Americans in their quest for

global aid to combat Jim Crow were attracted to Japan.”

The author’s analyses of world affairs and his assessments of history’s leading players are, to put it gently,

crude; this, for example, is Winston Churchill: “the pudgy, cigar-chomping, alcohol-guzzling Tory.” And he

takes certain, shall we say, contentious things as self-evident—notably the essential goodness of the USSR.

When Robeson first saw Stalin in Moscow, Horne reports, he was struck by the dictator’s “wonderful sense of

kindliness…here was one who was wise and good,” and duly held up his son Pauli to see this paragon of

benevolence. Horne has nothing to say about Robeson’s comment, apparently finding no fault with it.

Elsewhere, Horne makes desperately strained attempts to force every action of Robeson’s into a political

mold: of the actor’s heroic assault on the role of Othello in London—a part of immense technical and

emotional challenges for any actor, let alone an untrained and relatively inexperienced one—he tells us:

“Robeson’s groping as an actor in his attempt to grasp the lineaments of Othello was of a piece with his

groping as a black man seeking to grasp the lineaments of capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy.” No,

it wasn’t: it’s just a very hard part. Horne has evidently read a great deal and had access to some remarkable

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material, but it is often impossible to fathom from the book what is really happening at any one moment or

what was going on in Robeson’s mind.

Horne cites any number of searing details, but lacking articulate analysis, his account is numbing and

bewildering in equal measure, like being addressed from a dysfunctional megaphone. His rousing conclusion,

bringing his obsession with Robeson’s linguistic gifts to a climax, is simply stupefying:

This multi-lingual descendant of enslaved Africans, whose dedicated study of languages was designed in part

to illustrate the essential unity of humankind, continues to symbolize the still reigning slogan of the current

century: “workers of the world, unite!”

I’m sorry to break it to Mr. Horne, but he doesn’t. And it isn’t.

Jeff Sparrow’s No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson is the polar opposite of Horne’s book, a work

not of assertion but of investigation. It takes nothing at all for granted. The author, an Australian left-wing

commentator, is very present in the book: it’s his journey (and thus our journey) as much as it is Robeson’s.

He goes to see for himself a world that is, he admits, far from his own experience. The result is arresting,

illuminating, and ultimately upsetting.

Sparrow’s starting point is a curiously moving newsreel, readily available on YouTube, showing Robeson in

his early sixties visiting workers on the building site of the Sydney Opera House and spontaneously singing

for them as they sit utterly rapt; here, he discovered the plight of the Australian aborigines, ardently pledging

himself to their cause decades before it became fashionable. It is this sense of Robeson’s universalism that

Sparrow seeks to investigate. It takes him back to Robeson’s birth, and then goes back further—into the

history of Robeson’s father, the Reverend William, born into slavery, and further still into the history, or

rather the experience, of slavery itself.

What, Sparrow wants to know, was slavery actually like? He goes to North Carolina and talks first to the very

nice and decent descendants of slave owners who slowly, uncomfortably, reveal the reality of slavery for their

families. One of their young servant girls was savagely whipped for “being slow.” “They might have been

cultured and intelligent people,” says Sparrow, “they might have cared for their children and showed kindness

to their neighbours, but they’d ordered a young slave girl thrashed to the bone because she dropped a dish.”

As it might be in a novel, this small detail of daily and routine brutality, endlessly repeated as part of a way of

life only 150 years ago, is somehow more chilling than a description of greater atrocities.

Likewise, Sparrow notes what it was that Robeson’s father, a former slave with no education whatsoever, had

to do to get first a BA, then an MA, and finally a degree in theology: it “meant mastering Ancient Greek,

Latin, Hebrew, geometry, chemistry, trigonometry, mineralogy, political economy, and the myriad other

components of a nineteenth-century classical education.” William Robeson, as a slave, would have had no

formal education at all. This fierce—heroic—work ethic the Reverend Robeson passed on to his son. He

never spoke about his experience of slavery. But the lesson was clear: the only way out of poverty and

humiliation was hard, hard work—working harder than any white man would have to, to achieve a

comparable result.

And then, as another of Sparrow’s interviewees, a distant relative of Robeson, tells him, when a black man

has finally achieved something, a certain circumspection is necessary. As Robeson himself wrote with bitter

anger in Here I Stand, his 1958 autobiography:

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Even when demonstrating that he is really an equal…[c]limb up if you can—but don’t act “uppity.” Always

show that you are grateful. (Even if what you have gained has been wrested from unwilling powers, be sure to

be grateful lest “they” take it all away.)

Sparrow deploys this contrapuntal effect—this dialogue between past and present—brilliantly. He talks to the

elegant British black actor Hugh Quarshie, a recent Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company, about the

challenges of the role, and specifically about what it might have felt like for Robeson to play the part,

painfully conscious as he must have been that he was “the only black face in the room.” Sometimes, says the

Oxford-educated Quarshie, he finds himself talking to some patron of the arts, expatiating on “Mozart and

Buñuel, and then suddenly I wonder if what they are actually seeing are thick lips and a bone through my

nose.”

Sparrow never lets the reader forget how other, how fundamentally alien, black people have been made to feel

in American society, and how recently unspeakable brutality and contempt were the norm. At the turn of the

twentieth century, in 1901, for example, when Robeson was three years old, President Theodore Roosevelt

had lunch at the White House with Booker T. Washington, the great educator and former slave, eliciting this

comment from the South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman: “The action of President Roosevelt in

entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their

place again.” This was the world into which Robeson was born.

Wherever Robeson went, Sparrow goes too: to Harlem to get a sense of its all-too-brief Renaissance; to

London to see the four-storied mansion in Hampsted, in which at the crest of Robeson’s first wave of

popularity he and his wife lived with five liveried servants; to Spain to see, as Sparrow’s chapter heading has

it, “what Fascism was.” Going there in 1937 was a fearless, almost reckless, thing for Robeson and his wife to

do, but he had to do it. He had to endorse what he felt was essentially the same fight he was fighting, the fight

for human dignity and freedom. The night before a big battle, he addressed the soldiers, and then he sang,

sang himself hoarse, as the volunteers shouted out their requests; when he sang “I Feel Like a Motherless

Child,” the grizzled commander of the unit, reported the radical journalist Charlotte Haldane, turned beetroot

red with the effort of fighting down the tears.

Sparrow shows how this admittedly splendid actor, this marvelous singer, this charismatic speaker, had

somehow evolved into something more: he had for many people become the embodiment of the global

longing for a better world, a juster dispensation. In the radically polarized pre-war world, this passionate

commitment led him, inevitably, to Moscow, where he felt that his visionary ideas had the best chance of

becoming reality. Sparrow takes us to the National Hotel, opposite Red Square, where Robeson told

Eisenstein, “Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity. You cannot imagine what that

means to me as a Negro,” and sees with his own eyes why Robeson might have felt that, in the Moscow of

1935, he was in the promised land.

Sparrow interviews a young black Russian TV personality now living in Moscow who has a more

complicated story than Robeson’s to tell. Her grandmother, she tells him, was a white woman who had

married a black man and come to Russia because they could scarcely hope to live together in America. “It

didn’t work out as we hoped,” she said, “but the idea, the idea was right.”

He pursues Robeson’s commitment to that elusive idea. Robeson, it is clear, knew that his dream was just

that: that the reality was otherwise. But he had to maintain his faith, otherwise what else was there? The

pressure on him from all sides, the expectation that he would somehow find a path through all these

contradictions, may have led to his attempted suicide in the Sovietsky Hotel in 1961: Sparrow surmises that it

may have directly stemmed from the desperate requests from Robeson’s Russian friends to help them get out

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of the nightmarish world they found themselves in. “I am unworthy, I am unworthy,” Robeson gasped, over

and over again, to the maid who discovered him with slashed wrists on the bathroom floor. Sparrow

convincingly suggests that his descent into bipolarity and the subsequent attempts to kill himself (“in 1965

there were more half-hearted suicide attempts,” he reports laconically) were part of the anguish of his having

failed to square his vision with reality.

In an epilogue that must have been painful for Sparrow—a man of the left—to write, he acknowledges that

Robeson’s endorsement of Stalin and Stalin’s successors, his refusal to acknowledge what had been done in

Stalin’s name, is the tragedy of his life. And it is a tragedy for us, too, because Robeson had an almost unique

combination of gifts that enabled him to articulate his cause in a way that spoke to all people. “Every artist,

every scientist must decide NOW where he stands,” he had said when he returned from Spain. “He has no

alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.”

As Sparrow describes it, it is a pitiful spectacle: this heroic figure, striving for dignity for all of his fellow

human beings, robbed of his own, somehow baffled and cheated by the world. Sparrow quotes a trade

unionist who having met him said: “[Robeson] stands like a giant, yet makes you feel, without stooping to

you, that you too are a giant and hold the power of making history in your hands as well.” To which Sparrow

soberly adds: “The disintegration of the movements for which Paul had been such an icon had left behind a

profound void from which we were yet to recover. We did not feel ourselves giants; we did not feel capable of

making history.” History, he says, has become meaningless. “And a figure such as Paul became almost

incomprehensible.” On the contrary. Sparrow has made perfect and haunting sense of him.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/emperor-paul-robeson/

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Custom Hand-Knit Sweaters Blend Subjects into Urban Environments

JANUARY 12, 2018

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

Over the last four years, photographer Joseph Ford (previously) has collaborated with friend and knitter Nina

Dodd to create a project that blends models into their environments rather than having them stand out. Each

subject wears a custom hand-knit sweater by Dodd that transforms their torso, partially camouflaging their

body into a highly textured wall, striped running track, or for one pooch—the leaves of dense shrub.

The series, Knitted Camouflage, also features a collaboration with French street artist Monsieur Chat who

painted one of his trademark cats on the wall of a derelict factory for the photographer. You can take a peek

behind the scenes of Ford’s photographic projects on his Facebook and Instagram.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/hand-knit-sweaters-blend-subjects-into-urban-

environments/?mc_cid=7bb900ddf6&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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Lebanon: About to Blow?

Janine di Giovanni

FEBRUARY 8, 2018 ISSUE

Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos

Syrian children from Homs in Tripoli, Lebanon, October 2013

Lebanon is a tiny country, with a population of around six million; it could fit neatly between Philadelphia

and Danbury, Connecticut. It has survived many crises over the past several decades: a brutal civil war from

1975 to 1990 that left 100,000 dead, a string of political assassinations since 2004 whose perpetrators have

gone unpunished, and occupations by Israel and Syria. But Lebanon’s resilience is fraying. Its infrastructure is

badly damaged and unemployment is high. It is also struggling to accommodate a large refugee population—

500,000 Palestinians, many descended from those who fled the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and nearly 1.5 million

Syrians, a majority of them Sunni Muslims.

Most of the Syrian refugees I met in Lebanon do not want to be there—or in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, or Egypt.

They are fleeing intense fighting, ethnic cleansing, starvation, chemical attacks, and Russian air strikes that

devastated Aleppo and other rebel-held areas. It is clear that they are not welcome in Lebanon, where they are

increasingly seen as disrupting the country’s delicate sectarian balance among Shia Muslims, Druze, and

Christians and as vulnerable to Islamist radicalization.

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Lebanon’s most recent crisis was the sudden resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri on November 4 during

a visit to Saudi Arabia. His announcement, in which he explained that he was afraid for his life, surprised

even his closest advisers and rattled the country. He has since returned to Lebanon and has suspended his

resignation. Hariri’s father, Rafik, a former prime minister and a prominent Sunni businessman, was

assassinated in 2005, along with twenty-two others, when explosives hidden in a van were detonated as his

motorcade drove near the St. Georges Hotel in Beirut. After a painful inquiry, the UN determined that the

assassination was likely committed by members of Hezbollah with Syrian planning and logistical support.

Hezbollah is the Shia political party and militant organization funded by Iran and Syria. Hariri’s death was

followed by a series of sectarian murders of other anti-Syrian politicians, compounding the long-standing

frustration with Lebanon’s failure to bring his killers to justice.

Hezbollah, which backed President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian war, has attained so much power in

Lebanon that it is considered a state within a state. It holds sway in parliament and is able to infiltrate

Lebanese military intelligence. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the regional Sunni giant emboldened by the Trump

administration’s seal of approval, has a stake in keeping Sunnis prominent in the Lebanese government.

These rising tensions are part of a much larger conflict. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the regional Shia giant, are

fighting proxy wars for influence in the Middle East. The bloodiest battlefield so far has been Syria. In

Yemen, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are fighting against forces loyal to the government of President

Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, which is supported by Saudi Arabian air strikes. The conflict has created a

catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which, according to the UN, a child dies every ten minutes. In early

November, a missile was fired by Yemen’s armed Houthi group toward Riyadh and intercepted en route by

the Saudis. A second balistic missile fired by the Houthis later that month was also brought down. This was

clearly a message from Iran; the Yemenis are not likely to possess such sophisticated military hardware.

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, claims to be working toward a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, but the

two nations continue to jostle for regional supremacy. Hariri’s sudden fall from power and the rising sectarian

tension in Lebanon have created fear that the country will be the next battleground of the Saudi-Iranian proxy

war. In the middle of this uncertainty are Syrian refugees.

The experience of refugees in Lebanon is an extended waiting game. The government has made clear that it

wants to prevent their integration into Lebanese society in order to ensure that they won’t stay, as the

Palestinians have. Lebanon barely tolerates the Palestinians; it certainly does not embrace them. The

miserable refugee complex of Sabra and Shatila—a sprawling place of desperation and hopelessness—is a

testament to that.

The Ouiza refugee settlement outside Sidon, where Syrian refugees are dumped, is next to a Palestinian

refugee camp called Ain al-Hilweh—Arabic for “sweet water spring.” In August, clashes at the Palestinian

camp between police and Sunni Islamists left two dead, and in April, seven people were killed. I spoke to

three men from the Syrian city of Hama whose stories were familiar—their lack of work, adequate housing,

and medical care, their trauma of escaping a burning country, but also their profound sense of indignity in

exile. In Ouiza, they spin out their days in boredom and confusion. Ismail, at thirty, is the oldest of the group

and tells me that when he does work as a laborer in the nearby town of Sidon, he can earn about 50,000

Lebanese pounds (approximately $30) in two days—only enough to cover the cost of a doctor’s visit for his

kids, who often get sick. The last time he went to pick up a prescription, a group of Lebanese men taunted

him with “Nique ta mère”—Fuck your mother—and threw stones at him.

When I visited in October, it was olive season. Many of the children were out picking olives or selling tissues

on the streets. The teenage boys weren’t in school; they lumbered through their days, increasingly bored and

agitated. “There’s a lot of neglect with these kids,” explains Kevin Charbel, an Irish aid worker from the

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Belgian aid organization Soutien Belge. “It’s not that their parents don’t love them, it’s just that they have no

idea how to raise them in these circumstances.” Baha, another of the three men from Hama whom I spoke to,

told me he was twenty when he got to Lebanon. His education was interrupted: he feels that his life has

simply halted. It’s a miserable predicament, he says, to have the sense of waiting for something to happen.

“I’ve spent six years here, doing nothing. When I was twenty, I thought I had a future. These six years, I’ve

become twenty years older.” Some days, he says, he’d rather die in his country than be humiliated here every

single day.

Many Lebanese fear that the settlements are, or will become, hotbeds of radicalism. Sheikh al-Rafei, the

leader of the Salafist community in Lebanon, warned that refugees suffering from a sense of dislocation and

social humiliation could easily be preyed upon by radical recruiters. This is the technique used by zealous

preachers in the isolated banlieues of France, and it wouldn’t be hard to replicate in Lebanon. Syrian refugees

live in open “settlements,” which are often simply abandoned buildings on the outskirts of towns, or even

unheated garages. Anyone can just drive in.

There is special concern about children who have grown up in refugee settlements and do not remember the

old life in Homs, Aleppo, or Hama. “Many of these kids don’t know what Syria is or where they come from,”

says Jassen, a twenty-seven-year-old refugee from Raqqa whom I met in Tripoli. “They don’t know the flag,

or the country.” During a visit to an outdoor “shift school,” I saw Syrian preschoolers being taught to draw a

Syrian flag. Khalil el Helou, a retired Lebanese general, told me that he feared these children could be easily

recruited. “Imagine a young Syrian, eight years old. If he lives like this for ten more years, imagine him at

eighteen. If they are not contained in Lebanon,” he added, “they will be more dangerous on the streets of

Manhattan.”

Patricia Khoder, a journalist with L’Orient Le Jour, a Beirut daily, has expressed other reasons for Lebanese

antipathy to refugees. “Look—we had thirty years of Syrian occupation,” she said, referring to the Syrian

troops that were sent to protect Christians during the civil war but overstayed their welcome by decades. At

one point, President Hafez al-Assad even sent his son, Bashar, to oversee the Syrian forces in Lebanon. The

Syrians did not leave until after Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005. Khoder likens the current refugee crisis

to an imaginary scenario in postwar France. If 20 million German refugees had descended on Paris in the

aftermath of the Nazi occupation, she tells me, “I don’t think the French would have accepted that. How can

we?”

Last summer, a video went viral of a group of Lebanese men, since detained, who physically and verbally

assaulted a Syrian refugee called Uklah from Deir-al-Zour in eastern Syria, demanding that he renounce his

country and ISIS. The BBC reported a “voice note” that was widely shared on WhatsApp calling on Lebanese

to “beat Syrians.” These events are not uncommon. They illustrate a recent rise in crimes and hate speech

directed at refugees, who have become scapegoats for a variety of Lebanese grievances. A Lebanese

businessman named Alan Bey compared them to Mexican-Americans: “They work hard and do the work the

Lebanese don’t want to do, but they get blamed for everything.”

Much of the hatred has been stirred up by the conniving foreign minister, Gebran Bassil, who in October

famously said, “Yes, we are racist Lebanese,” adding, “and at the same time, we are open to the world, and no

one has the right to lecture us about being humanitarian.” This was a jab at European countries that have

taken a fraction of the refugees that Lebanon has.

Bassil is forty-seven and the son-in-law of President Michel Aoun, a former Lebanese army general. He is the

leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, also known as the Aounist Party, the largest Christian party and the

second largest in Lebanon’s parliament. An engineer by training, he became foreign minister in 2014, and has

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his eye on the Lebanese election next May. His strategy is not sophisticated: “Bassil is trying to radicalize

Lebanese people,” says Ziad el Sayegh, a senior adviser to the Ministry of State for Displaced Persons. “It’s

simple. Raise fear in Lebanese society, polarize votes.” Many Lebanese find Bassil and his rhetoric odious.

One political analyst refers to him as “Im-Bassile.” But like Nigel Farage, who played a large part in

encouraging pro-Brexit sentiment, there are many who listen to him. “Bassil started very early on trying to

gain political traction by creating a panic about the refugees,” says Nadim Shehadi, who is Lebanese, from the

Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

One night in Beirut I attended a gala in support of freedom of the press and whistleblowers. The annual event is hosted by a Maronite Christian journalist, Dr. May Chidiac, who lost a leg and an arm in a car bomb after criticizing the Syrian regime in 2005. The assassination attempt on Chidiac came after Rafik Hariri’s murder, along with a string of others. No one took responsibility, but Chidiac has openly blamed Hezbollah.

Ali Hashisho/Reuters

Palestinian women at the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp near Sidon, Lebanon, August 2017

It was the Lebanese version of the Oscars—red carpets, women in long ball gowns, waiters in black tie

serving iced Johnny Walker Red and champagne cocktails, and Beirut’s shiniest politicians, diplomats,

businessmen, actors, and crooners. Models lounged on white leather sofas. A troupe of dancers did a routine

from Grease and drove a pink Cadillac convertible onto the stage. It was a long way from the Ouiza

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settlement. A Lebanese socialite who asked me not to use her name told me, “We can’t handle the refugee

situation, we can’t cope.” Her shrill tone echoed not only Bassil but also his father-in-law, President Aoun,

who gave an identical quote to a group of foreign diplomats: “We can’t cope.”

Bassil’s xenophobia has been apparent for years; as energy minister, he blamed power cuts in Lebanon on

refugees and foreigners. Now he demands that the Syrians go home—immediately. “Syrian citizens have only

one route, which is the route that leads them to their homeland,” he said on a recent trip to the Bekaa Valley.

Then billboards started going up in Beirut that said: “We will not become a minority in our own villages and

cities. Let’s gather in a mass rally to demand the departure of the Syrians.”

Some refugees are already being forced home. Last summer in Arsal, a border town, a repatriation deal

brokered by Hezbollah and the armed Syrian opposition forces initiated two separate deportations of

thousands of refugees back to Syria. Some were combatants, but many were civilians—wives and children.

The UN was not present to witness the exodus. Such deportations violate international law and set a

dangerous precedent for dealing with a complicated crisis. They leave the Syrian men who return vulnerable

to conscription into Assad’s army. Mireille Girard, the head of the UN Refugee Agency in Lebanon, said:

“There is a fear in Lebanon that the longer refugees stay, the less they may want to go back.“ She added that

although they want to go home, they will do so only when “they feel confident and safe. Return is about

trust.”

There is real anxiety about Hezbollah’s domination in Lebanon, and about Iran’s not very subtle aim of

expanding Shia power from Tehran to Beirut. The Saudis, meanwhile, are seeking to prop up their own Sunni

fighters in Syria, stretching the proxy war over the border into Lebanon. And Syrian refugees are caught in

the middle. The conflict is especially apparent in cities like Arsal and Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city

and a northern coastal Sunni stronghold with strong links to the towns of Hama and Homs in Syria.

In Tripoli, Islamic militants who oppose President Assad are fighting both Assad’s supporters (in the form of

Alawite armed groups) and the Lebanese government. Armed conflict has swept across parts of Tripoli such

as the Alawite Jabal Mohsen area and the Sunni Bab al-Tabbaneh district, with Sunni refugees finding

themselves in the midst of the violence. Residents of both neighborhoods fight on opposite sides in Syria, and

then come home and continue the conflict. “We are just waiting for an order from Saudi Arabia to open up the

next battle,” a local commander told a German reporter in 2015. “We have to protect our Sunni community

here.”

Attempts have been made to foster “cultural unity”—multifaith cafés, theatrical collaborations, academic

studies. But at the Taqwa Mosque, which has been a recruiting ground for young Lebanese Sunnis to go fight

in Syria, Sheikh Salem al-Rafei told me that the situation was “very critical. Worse than ever.” When Sheikh

Rafei, who survived an assassination attempt allegedly by Hezbollah in 2013, gave a sermon to a crowd

consisting largely of Syrian refugees, he encouraged them to no longer tolerate their marginalization. He cited

their lack of status in Lebanese society, their lack of a future, the humiliations they face every day, and the

deepening sectarian divisions in Lebanon. This was a week before Prime Minister Hariri resigned in Saudi

Arabia. During the bloody battle for the border town of Al-Qusayr in 2013, when Hezbollah sent fighters to

aid Assad’s army, Sheikh Rafei sent his own men. “It was a religious duty to fight in Syria,” he said. About

thirty fighters from Tripoli alone died fighting in Al-Qusayr. As a devout Salafist, he is determined that

Sunnis will not lose in the sectarian conflict.

At the heart of the issue is the absence of an official policy or long-term strategy for what to do with the

refugees. When the Syrian civil war began in 2011, Lebanon and other “front-line” states (Turkey, Jordan)

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maintained an “open-door policy.” Nadim Shehadi, from the Fletcher School, recalled that in 2012 Prime

Minister Najib Mikati and his advisers called donors and UN Agencies asking for help in dealing with 50,000

refugees. He was told that the agencies were already overstretched and was asked to “present a plan.” Mikati

did not do so because refugees were crossing the border in very high numbers and it was impossible to predict

how many more would come. “Mikati was right,” says Shehadi in retrospect. “Had he made a plan, mindful

of 200,000 refugees, his plan would have collapsed once the number had grown to one million refugees. The

entire system would have collapsed. Now there are 1.5 million.”

Khalil el Helou, a retired Lebanese general whose family came from Syria in 1970 and who now advises the

government, has suggested one sort of official policy. He recommends that Lebanon contain and police

refugee settlements, preferably with an international force, to prohibit jihadist recruiters from entering. He is

not sure who would fund this policy, and acknowledges that the international community has already done a

poor job of providing enough humanitarian aid in Syria. But we have to act soon, he says. “If we don’t, we are

creating a new generation of terrorists who will strike at Beirut—or New York.”

The Syrian war will eventually end—painfully, and without the result the United States government wants to

see: the end of the Assad regime. As for the refugees, no one seems to have any idea what to do with them.

“Sometimes there simply is no solution,” Nadim Shehadi admits. “We’ll do the same thing we do with the

Palestinian issue, that is, turn a blind eye. But the future is very alarming. If one percent of the refugees

radicalize and decide to take up arms to fight, that is 25,000 radicalized people. Only one percent is in fact a

lot.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/lebanon-about-to-blow/

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Breathe: A Stunning Black & White Timelapse of Thunderstorms Across the Central Plains

JANUARY 11, 2018

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

Phoenix-based filmmaker, photographer, and storm chaser Mike Olbinski captures approaching storms around

his desert home using high definition video, often posting his works to his Vimeo in 4K. Breathe, one of his

latest short films, is the first ever work posted in 8K and features a selection of storms shot in 2017 in either

the American central plains or southwest. Watch the video above in high resolution to witness the

magnificence of each rolling stormcell gather and disperse throughout a variety of open landscapes.

You can follow along with Olbinski’s storm chasing adventures on his blog, and see more of his timelapse

videos and photography on his website.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/breathe-a-stunning-black-white-timelapse-of-thunderstorms-across-

the-central-plains/?mc_cid=7bb900ddf6&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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Molecular mechanisms of memory formation revelaed

Neuroscientists discover a cellular pathway that encodes memories by strengthening specific synapses

Source:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Neuroscientists have uncovered a cellular pathway that allows specific synapses to become stronger

during memory formation. The findings provide the first glimpse of the molecular mechanism by

which long term memories are encoded in a region of the hippocampus called CA3.

FULL STORY

This image shows neurons in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, which is important for memory encoding

and retrieval. Nuclei of the CA3 neurons are labeled in green and their dendrites in red, and the smaller specks

of green above represent axons projecting to the CA3 neurons from the dentate gyrus.

Credit: Lin Lab

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MIT neuroscientists have uncovered a cellular pathway that allows specific synapses to become stronger

during memory formation. The findings provide the first glimpse of the molecular mechanism by which long-

term memories are encoded in a region of the hippocampus called CA3.

The researchers found that a protein called Npas4, previously identified as a master controller of gene

expression triggered by neuronal activity, controls the strength of connections between neurons in the CA3

and those in another part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus. Without Npas4, long-term memories

cannot form.

"Our study identifies an experience-dependent synaptic mechanism for memory encoding in CA3, and

provides the first evidence for a molecular pathway that selectively controls it," says Yingxi Lin, an associate

professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Lin is the senior author of the study, which appears in the Feb. 8 issue of Neuron. The paper's lead author is

McGovern Institute research scientist Feng-Ju (Eddie) Weng.

Synaptic strength

Neuroscientists have long known that the brain encodes memories by altering the strength of synapses, or

connections between neurons. This requires interactions of many proteins found in both presynaptic neurons,

which send information about an event, and postsynaptic neurons, which receive the information.

Neurons in the CA3 region play a critical role in the formation of contextual memories, which are memories

that link an event with the location where it took place, or with other contextual information such as timing or

emotions. These neurons receive synaptic inputs from three different pathways, and scientists have

hypothesized that one of these inputs, from the dentate gyrus, is critical for encoding new contextual

memories. However, the mechanism of how this information is encoded was not known.

In a study published in 2011, Lin and colleagues found that Npas4, a gene that is turned on immediately

following new experiences, appears to act as a master controller of the program of gene expression required

for long-term memory formation. They also found that Npas4 is most active in the CA3 region of the

hippocampus during learning. This activity was already known to be required for fast contextual learning,

such is required during a type of task known as contextual fear conditioning. During the conditioning, mice

receive a mild electric shock when they enter and explore a specific chamber. Within minutes, the mice learn

to fear the chamber, and the next time they enter it, they freeze.

When the researchers knocked out the Npas4 gene, they found that mice could not remember the fearful

event. They also found the same effect when they knocked out the gene just in the CA3 region of the

hippocampus. Knocking it out in other parts of the hippocampus, however, had no effect on memory.

In the new study, the researchers explored in further detail how Npas4 exerts its effects. Lin's lab had

previously developed a method that makes it possible to fluorescently label CA3 neurons that are activated

during this fear conditioning. Using the same fear conditioning process, the researchers showed that during

learning, certain synaptic inputs to CA3 neurons are strengthened, but not others. Furthermore, this

strengthening requires Npas4.

The inputs that are selectively strengthened come from another part of the hippocampus called the dentate

gyrus. These signals convey information about the location where the fearful experience took place.

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Without Npas4, synapses coming from the dentate gyrus to CA3 failed to strengthen, and the mice could not

form memories of the event. Further experiments revealed that this strengthening is required specifically for

memory encoding, not for retrieving memories already formed. The researchers also found that Npas4 loss

did not affect synaptic inputs that CA3 neurons receive from other sources.

Synapse maintenance

The researchers also identified one of the genes that Npas4 controls to exert this effect on synapse strength.

This gene, known as plk2, is involved in shrinking postsynaptic structures. Npas4 turns on plk2, thereby

reducing synapse size and strength. This suggests that Npas4 itself does not strengthen synapses, but

maintains synapses in a state that allows them to be strengthened when necessary. Without Npas4, synapses

become too strong and therefore cannot be induced to encode memories by further strengthening them.

"When you take out Npas4, the synaptic strength is almost saturated," Lin says. "And then when learning

takes place, although the memory-encoding cells can be fluorescently labeled, you no longer see the

strengthening of those connections."

In future work, Lin hopes to study how the circuit connecting the dentate gyrus to CA3 interacts with other

pathways required for memory retrieval. "Somehow there's some crosstalk between different pathways so that

once the information is stored, it can be retrieved by the other inputs," she says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the James H. Ferry Fund, and a Swedish Brain

Foundation Research Fellowship.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by Anne Trafton. Note:

Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. Feng-Ju Weng, Rodrigo I. Garcia, Stefano Lutzu, Karina Alviña, Yuxiang Zhang, Margaret Dushko, Taeyun

Ku, Khaled Zemoura, David Rich, Dario Garcia-Dominguez, Matthew Hung, Tushar D. Yelhekar, Andreas

Toft Sørensen, Weifeng Xu, Kwanghun Chung, Pablo E. Castillo, Yingxi Lin. Npas4 Is a Critical Regulator

of Learning-Induced Plasticity at Mossy Fiber-CA3 Synapses during Contextual Memory Formation. Neuron,

2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2018.01.026

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208120925.htm

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The Horror, the Horror

Gary Saul Morson

The Essential Fictions

by Isaac Babel, edited and translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur

Northwestern University Press, 404 pp., $21.95 (paper)

Red Cavalry

by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

London: Pushkin Press, 219 pp., $18.00 (paper)

Odessa Stories

by Isaac Babel, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk

London: Pushkin Press, 221 pp., $18.00 (paper)

A photograph of Isaac Babel taken by the NKVD after his arrest, circa 1939

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On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved the sentences of 346 prominent people, including the dramaturge

Vsevolod Meyerhold, the former NKVD (secret police) chief Nikolai Yezhov, and the writer Isaac Babel. All

were shot. Babel had been arrested on May 15, 1939, in the middle of the night, and, the story goes, he

remarked to an NKVD officer: “So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?”

Grim wit was Babel’s trademark. He is best known for a cycle of short stories entitled Red Cavalry, a

fictionalized account of his experiences as a Bolshevik war correspondent with a Cossack regiment during the

Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920. Lionel Trilling, who introduced Babel to the English-speaking world,

recognized these stories as the masterpiece of Soviet literature.1 Some of Babel’s other stories, especially his

Odessa tales, also impressed Trilling and have remained favorites. They offer a tragicomic portrait of

Odessa’s large Jewish community, with its rabbis, sensitive schoolboys, and, improbably, a Jewish gangster

whose adventures combine epic heroism with a trickster’s ingenuity.

How did a young man “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,” as he describes himself in one

story, wind up in a regiment of Cossacks, known for their extreme brutality, violent masculinity, and hatred of

Jews? Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1894, Babel, who received a traditional Jewish education,

was steeped in the polyglot, multicultural communities of Odessa, where he acquired fluency in Hebrew,

Yiddish, and French, as well as Russian. In one story, he describes how Odessa Jews were obsessed with

turning their sons into great violinists, like Mischa Elman or Jascha Heifetz; but Babel, who concealed copies

of Turgenev on his music stand, preferred the traditional Russian view of literature as the most important

thing in the world.

Influenced by Maupassant, he wrote his first stories in French, but as he recalls in his autobiographical tale

“My First Honorarium,” he was inhibited by his belief that “it was pointless to write worse than Lev Tolstoy.”

With Tolstoy, he told an interviewer, “the electric charge went from the earth, through the hands, straight to

the paper, with no insulation, quite mercilessly stripping off any and all outer layers with a sense of

truth…both transparent and beautiful.” But it was not Tolstoy’s incomparable realism and transparent style

that Babel would cultivate. It was his ability to strip away all life’s accidents and reveal its “essence.”

In his tale “Childhood. At Grandmother’s,” the young Babel learns to see everything around him—streets,

shop windows, stones—“in a special way…and I was quite certain that I could see in them what was most

important, mysterious, what we grown-ups call the essence of things.” He discovered in his grandfather a man

who “was ruled by an inextinguishable search for knowledge and for life.” His grandmother told him not to

trust anyone, but to acquire all human knowledge: “You must know everything,” she demanded, and with

these words she shaped “my destiny, and her solemn covenant presses firmly—and forevermore—upon my

weak little shoulders.” That destiny, as he conceived it, was to become “the [Russian] literary Messiah,

awaited in vain for so long.”

To see into the essence of things requires experience. In one autobiographical tale, a proofreader rebukes

Babel for not knowing the natural world: “And you dare to write! A person who doesn’t live in nature, as a

stone or an animal lives in nature, will never write two worthwhile lines in his entire life.” But it was human

beings, in all their beauty and loathsomeness, he most wanted to know. In 1915, he moved to St. Petersburg

and wrote some stories that impressed Maxim Gorky, who published Babel’s work in his newspaper New

Life, until the Bolsheviks shut it down. As Babel recalled, Gorky advised him to go into the world and acquire

real experience. Over the next few years, Babel served as a soldier on the Romanian front and may even have

worked for the nascent Cheka (secret police) before becoming a war correspondent.

There could hardly have been a more grotesque pairing than a sensitive Jewish intellectual with a brutal

Cossack regiment. For Trilling, this contrast constitutes the central theme of Red Cavalry, and it is certainly

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important. But something else is going on. The author approaches the world as an anthropologist, a

disinterested spectator recording the odd customs of Cossacks, Jews, Poles, priests, Hasidic rebbes, camp

whores, and every sort of perpetrator or victim of extreme violence. Observing his own reactions as if they

were someone else’s, or placing himself in dangerous situations in order to monitor his own emotions, he

treats himself as just another specimen of the human condition. In his story “My First Goose,” he wonders at

his own taste for violence and its intimate link with sexuality. He has to know everything.

But what is the morality of looking at human suffering from outside, as a scientist examines specimens? That,

too, is a theme of these stories and of Babel’s work in general. In her memoir Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda

Mandelstam describes Babel as a risk-taker, willing to do anything, however dangerous or morally

questionable, to learn about unexpected situations and strange people. Babel listened with more intensity than

anyone she had ever met, while everything about him “gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity—the

way he held his head, his mouth, his chin, and particularly his eyes…. Babel’s main driving force was the

unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinized life and people.”

Babel even seemed to enjoy risk itself. During the great purges, he had an affair with the NKVD chief

Yezhov’s wife. Instead of living in apartment buildings for writers, he chose a house where foreigners stayed.

“Who in his right mind would have lived in the same house as foreigners?” Mandelstam asked, since any

contact with foreigners was a likely death sentence. She also reports that Babel spent a lot of time with

“militiamen,” a euphemism for NKVD agents. Mandelstam’s husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, asked

Babel why he was so drawn to such company: “Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store

where the merchandise was death?” Babel replied: “I just like to have a whiff and see what it smells like.”

One might suppose that Yezhov had Babel arrested for sleeping with his wife, but in fact he was arrested after

Yezhov fell, apparently because it was routine to incarcerate anyone associated with an enemy of the people.

Under interrogation, which almost always involved torture, Babel implicated other cultural figures—not as

spies, but for the views they actually held, which no one but a totalitarian would find objectionable. Sergei

Eisenstein, according to Babel, had remarked that under current conditions gifted individuals could not fully

realize their talents, while the writer Ilya Ehrenburg complained that “the continuing wave of arrests forced all

Soviet citizens to break off any relations with foreigners.” As was not uncommon, Babel’s confession was

bloodstained.

The narrator of Red Cavalry—the war correspondent Vasily Lyutov, the pseudonym Babel himself had used

among the Cossacks—observes everyone anthropologically, even his fellow Jews, as if they were a strange

tribe. In the opening story, “Crossing the Zbruch,” he is quartered with a poor Jewish family, consisting of a

pregnant woman, a man with a covered head asleep against the wall, and two “scraggy necked Jews” who hop

about “monkey-fashion.” As if he were disgusted by contact with Jews, Lyutov describes finding in the room

assigned to him “turned-out wardrobes…scraps of women’s fur coats on the floor, human excrement, and

shards of the hidden dishware Jews use once a year—at Easter.”

These Jews take their revenge on him for his imperious treatment of them. He discovers to his horror that the

man with the covered head, next to whom he has been sleeping, is a corpse with a cut throat. The woman

explains that her father begged the Poles to kill him outside, so his daughter wouldn’t see him die, “‘but they

did as they saw fit. He met his end in this room and was thinking of me. And now I should wish to know,’

said the woman with sudden and terrible violence, ‘I wish to know where in the whole world you could find

another father like my father?’”

Red Cavalry draws on a diary Babel kept in which he expresses horror at the violence committed by Reds,

Poles, and partisans alike.2 Everyone kills Jews, and he asks himself, “Can it be that ours is the century in

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which they perish?” Like Lyutov, the war correspondent in the stories, Babel clings to a belief in revolution as

more than senseless killing, but encounters everywhere “the ineradicable cruelty of human beings.” Several

stories are narrations by Bolshevik soldiers who nonchalantly describe their hideous, needless brutality as a

fight against “treason” and “counter-revolution.” Babel entertains the thought that “this isn’t a Marxist

revolution, it’s a Cossack rebellion,” which at least leaves open the possibility that a true Marxist revolution is

taking place elsewhere, but he soon surrenders even this consolation. “Our way of bringing freedom—

horrible.” The Bolshevik soldiers resemble their enemies. “The hatred is the same, the Cossacks just the same,

the cruelty the same, it’s nonsense to think one army is different from another…. There’s no salvation.”

Sovphoto/UIG/Getty Images

Isaac Babel with his grandson, date unknown

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In one story, Lyutov encounters an old Jew, Gedali, who questions whether paradise can be achieved by

random killing and a war on religion. “The Revolution—we will say yes to it, but are we to say no to the

Sabbath?” asks Gedali. Poles beat Jews and the Revolution beats Poles, which makes sense, but then why

does the Revolution practice violence on Jews as well? The narrator, pretending to be an unshakable

Bolshevik, replies that the revolution “cannot do without shooting,…because she is the Revolution.” If so,

Gedali asks, how is one to tell revolution from counterrevolution? “I want an International of kind people,”

Gedali declares, “I would like every soul to be registered and given first-category rations. There, soul, please

eat and enjoy life’s pleasures.” As the story closes, “Gedali, founder of an impossible International, has gone

to the synagogue to pray.”

The cycle’s core story, “The Life and Adventures of Matthew Pavlichenko,” questions the anthropological

impulse itself. What is the morality of treating living people experimentally, whether to understand human

nature, as the narrator wishes, or to test sociological theories, as suggested by the phrase “the Soviet

experiment”? Babel based the tale not only on a real officer, Apanasenko, described in his diary as especially

brutal, but also on his own impulse to take brutality as a key to human nature. “Must penetrate the soul of the

fighting man, I’m penetrating, it’s all horrible, wild beasts with principles,” he notes in the diary.

The fictional Pavlichenko, who narrates the story, practices cruelty not only out of revenge or revolutionary

principle but, like Babel himself, out of a desire to “penetrate the soul.” Before the Revolution, Pavlichenko’s

master, Nikitinsky, exploited him and slept with his wife, but now the tables are turned. As a Red general,

Pavlichenko returns to the estate, terrifies Nikitinsky, and claims to be delivering a letter written by Lenin to

Nikitinsky personally. I took out a blank page, Pavlichenko explains, and pretended to read, “though I can’t

read to save my life. ‘In the name of the people and the establishment of a bright future, I order Pavlichenko,

Matvei Rodionych, to deprive certain people of life according to his discretion…. That’s Lenin’s letter for

you.’”

Since this is apparently a revenge story, we expect Pavlichenko to shoot his former master, but learn that the

general has more on his mind than settling scores. Like Babel, he regards himself as a sort of social scientist

who, with disinterested curiosity, seeks to learn the essential truth about life. In the most chilling passage

of Red Cavalry, Pavlichenko, groping for words, experiments on his victim. Instead of shooting him,

I trampled my master Nikitinsky. I trampled on him for an hour or more than an hour, and in that time I got to

know life in full. Shooting—I’ll put it this way—only gets rid of a person,…shooting won’t get at the soul, to

where it is in a person and how it shows itself. But, some of the times, I don’t spare myself, some of the times,

I trample an enemy for more than an hour, seeing as I wish to get to know life, this life we live.

Time and again, Pavlichenko does not spare himself. The quest for knowledge demands no less.

Untold horror results when knowledge is more important than people, and still more when one imagines that

life’s essence is to be found in extreme situations. Babel here enters a debate running through Russian

literature about whether true life resides in extreme situations, as Dostoevsky’s characters tend to assume, or

in the most ordinary ones, as Tolstoy and Chekhov believed. Babel and Lyutov are drawn to extremes, but

repeatedly discover the value of the ordinary.

In “The Death of Dolgushov,” Lyutov’s coachman Grishchuk, seeing people torn apart, asks: “Why do

women bother?… What’s the point of matchmaking and marriages and kin dancing at weddings” and all that

effort to raise children? “Makes me laugh…why women bother.” What women do every day, that’s what

matters, and what violent men—those “wild beasts with principles”—do destroys the results of all their

prosaic work. Lyutov and Grishchuk encounter an injured soldier with his insides hanging out and his

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heartbeats visible, who begs Lyutov to shoot him so the Poles won’t be able “to play their nasty tricks” on

him. Lyutov can’t do it, and his refusal horrifies his friend Afonka Bida, who rightly detects cruelty in such

“compassion.” “Your kind with your glasses feel sorry for our brother like a cat’s sorry for a mouse,” Bida

fumes. As Lyutov despairs at losing Bida as a friend, Grishchuk, who understands prosaic goodness, comforts

him. As the story ends, he “took a shriveled apple from under his driver’s seat. ‘Eat,’ he said to me. ‘Please,

eat…’”

In both the diary and the stories, the author treats the wanton destruction of beehives as symbolic of war on

everyday life and its prosaic values. “Total destruction…. The orchard, apiary, destruction of the hives,

terrible, bees buzzing despairingly, the men blow up the hives with gunpowder…a wild orgy…I feel sick

about it all,” he writes in the diary, and one Red Cavalry story begins: “I mourn for the bees…. We defiled

untold hives…. There are no more bees in Volhynia.” Bees matter to the artist Pan Apolek, who scandalizes

churchmen by painting Jesus and Mary with the faces of local sinners, as if to show that the sacred resides not

in mythic distance but right before one’s eyes. He tells a story about how gnats plaguing Jesus on the cross

asked a bee to sting him, but the bee refused since Jesus is a fellow carpenter. Soldiers kill bees, but Jesus is

their brother.

Babel strove for concision. It is said that he rewrote one story twenty-two times to make it as brief and

powerful as possible. For Babel, the right word, le mot juste, was often the word omitted. Unsurprisingly, his

output was small, and he produced less and less as Stalinist rule tightened. This silence, and the reasons for it,

became the target of his own mordant irony in his speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. The Party

and the government, he explained, “have given us everything, depriving us of only one privilege—that of

writing badly.” Of course, without that right, it is impossible to write anything worthwhile at all. So fearful

am I of disappointing readers, he concludes, I have become the master of a new genre: the genre of silence.

This comment resonated over the years since so much Russian literature was written for the drawer, appearing

only decades later, or, like Babel’s last work, was seized by the NKVD and never reappeared.

Babel’s prose depends on his silences, on what he does not say. Like his contemporaries the Russian

Formalists, he wanted to shock readers out of cliché and routine perceptions, and so he cultivated a style

demanding interpretations he did not provide. When convention or common sense suggests one word, he

provides another, slightly but significantly different. The test of a good translator is whether she preserves the

strangeness. When Babel writes “invisible voices,” does the translator supply (as Walter Morison does)

“mysterious voices”? Without realizing it, most translators betray Babel’s style by interpreting his words.

The new translations by Boris Dralyuk and Val Vinokur, like Morison’s classic one, provide a readable text

that captures much of what makes Babel’s stories great, but they often explain—that is, explain away—

Babel’s oddities. In the story “Pan Apolek,” Babel begins a sentence: “V Novograd-Volynske, v naspekh

smyatom gorode, sredi skruchennykh razvalin,” which, as literally as possible, means: “In Novograd-

Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city, amid the crooked ruins….” Vinokur gives us “In Novograd-Volynsk,

among the twisted ruins of that swiftly crushed town,” while Dralyuk offers “In Novograd-Volynsk, among

the gnarled ruins of that hastily crushed city.” And Morison: “In Novograd-Volynsk, among the ruins of a

town swiftly brought to confusion….”

These are all interpretations, almost paraphrases. Babel describes the city as “crumpled” (smyatyi), the way

one crumples a piece of paper before throwing it away. The ruins are not twisted or gnarled or brought to

confusion, but crooked: the word skruchennyi, as my colleague Nina Gourianova reminds me, is the one used

in Samuil Marshak’s famous translation of the English nursery rhyme about a crooked man in a crooked

house. Babel’s strange lexicon, and the peculiar image of a town resembling a crumpled letter, disappear. And

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the translators omit the double use of the word “in” (“In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city”), so

the sentence’s rhythm changes.

Dralyuk makes a principle of explaining. His introduction offers as an example of his method a passage where

Babel describes old letters as istlevshikh (rotten, decaying). Dralyuk alters this to “letters worn thin”: “If one

takes a moment to imagine what Babel’s narrator imagines…one can conjure the fragile letters before one’s

eyes, feel their texture; they have been ‘worn thin’ by friction and sweat.” But Babel does not describe them

as worn thin, and the Red Cavalry stories constantly offer images of rot, decay, and moldering.

Translation is the theme of Babel’s story “Guy de Maupassant.” A woman loves Maupassant passionately, but

her renditions remain “tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian.” The narrator

helps: “I spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation,” he explains (Vinokur). “A phrase

is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The

lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You must turn it once, but not twice.” Too often, Morison turns

it twice, and Dralyuk not at all. Vinokur gets the right effect most often.

“Guy de Maupassant” contains Babel’s most quoted line about style: “No iron can enter the heart as icily as a

period placed in time.” (“Nikakoe zhelezo ne mozhet voiti v chelovecheskoe serdtse tak ledenyashche, kak

tochka, postavlennaya vovremya.”) It is especially sad when translators get the timing of this very sentence

wrong. They drag it out, which is like giving a joke a wordy punch line. In Morison’s version, “No iron can

stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place,” while Vinokur renders: “Nothing of iron

can breach the human heart with the chill of a period placed just in time.” “Stab” and “breach” are

interpretations; “with force” does not mean “icily”; the right place is not the right time; and the word “just” is

only implied. For both translators, Babel’s fourteen words needlessly expand to eighteen. The period arrives,

like a bungled witticism, a bit late.

Translators, like the rest of us, cling to words, thoughts, and images that are all too hopelessly familiar. That

is why Babel crafted a style to shock readers into seeing the strangeness before their eyes. He gave his words

a terrifying twist that lodges them in the heart and mind. Those given, as he was, to romanticize violence and

seek truth in extreme situations would do well to attend to his invisible voices and resonant silences.

1. 1

Trilling’s introduction to Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, translated by Walter Morison (Criterion,

1955). ↩

2. 2

Isaac Babel, 1920 Diary, edited by Carol J. Avins and translated by H.T. Willetts (Yale University Press,

1995). ↩

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/isaac-babel-horror-the-horror/

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Two Biologists Explore the Remote Rainforests of the Ecuadorian Andes to Document Fungi

JANUARY 8, 2018

CHRISTOPHER JOBSON

All photos © Danny Newman

Biologists estimate that 3.2 million species of fungi may exist on Earth, and of that only around 120,000 are

known to science which leaves potentially millions organisms of left to discover, photograph, and document

before it’s too late. The majority of undescribed species live in the tropics where mycologists Danny Newman

and Roo Vandegrift have traveled extensively to document fungi in regions threatened by climate change and

development.

In 2014, the pair traveled to Reserva Los Cedros, one of the last unlogged watersheds on the western slope of

the Andes, where they took all of the photos seen here. The reserve has since been declared open for mining

by the Ecuadorian government and the habitat that spawned these unusual mushrooms is slated for

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destruction. “The identification and description of rare or endemic species from the reserve will help

demonstrate the value of these habitats and the importance of their conservation,” shares Newman about the

project.

As part of a January residency at the University of Oregon, Newman is now working to sequence the DNA of

350 fungi samples found at Reserva Los Cedros and is seeking support from the public to help fund the

project at cost. You can see more photos from their discoveries in Ecuador on Mushroom Observer. Also, do

yourself a favor and check out the caterpillar at 0:50 in the video below.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/ecuadorian-fungi/?mc_cid=7bb900ddf6&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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New, forward-looking report outlines research path to sustainable cities

NSF advisory committee assesses ongoing transformation of our increasingly urban planet

Sustainable cities report by NSF's Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education.

Find related stories on NSF's Environmental Research and Education (ERE) programs at this link.

In 1950, fewer than one-third of the world's people lived in cities. Today more than half do. By 2050, urban

areas will be home to some two-thirds of Earth's human population.

"This scale and pace of urbanization has never been seen in human history," states a new report, Sustainable

Urban Systems: Articulating a Long-Term Convergence Research Agenda.

The document was authored by members of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee for

Environmental Research and Education's (AC-ERE) Sustainable Urban Systems Subcommittee, chaired by

bioproducts and biosystems engineer and public affairs professor Anu Ramaswami of the Humphrey School

of Public Affairs and the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Sciences at the University of Minnesota.

It serves as a guide for the direction research on cities might take today and in the future.

We live on an urban planet, according to the AC-ERE report, one where cities, although occupying only 3 to

4 percent of Earth's land surface, are affecting human and environmental well-being on scales from the local

to the global.

The goal of sustainable urban systems

How will we reach the goal of sustainable urban systems? "The AC-ERE report is an excellent foundation for

new scientific collaborations on how cities function, how they grow, and how they can be managed

sustainably for decades to come," says Earth and environment scientist Tony Janetos of Boston University,

and chair of the AC-ERE.

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To develop the next generation of sustainable urban systems research, states the report, "a much broader and

longer-term research agenda is needed."

Adds Leah Nichols, chair of NSF's Working Group on Environmental Research and Education, "Current and

past NSF investments have created a strong foundation for the research agenda outlined in the report.

Programs such as Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems; Smart and Connected

Communities; and Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability have supported interdisciplinary

projects with far-reaching results."

The time is now

Changing urban areas "present a historic opportunity to improve human and environmental well-being, locally

and globally," states the AC-ERE report.

"Researchers, industry leaders and policymakers are recognizing a time-sensitive opportunity to develop a

new convergence science of sustainable urban systems that's multi-scale, trans-disciplinary, and advances

science-policy-community partnerships to identify pathways toward a more sustainable urban future."

Cities: double-edged swords

Few challenges are more compelling than how to make cities sustainable, say AC-ERE members.

In the U.S., urban areas are home to some 80 percent of the country's human population and generate 85

percent of the Gross Domestic Product, making them critical for local and national prosperity, security and

well-being, the report states.

While cities and their suburbs are engines of innovation, they also face issues such as aging and inadequate

infrastructure; human health risks from pollution, poor diets and sedentary lifestyles; vulnerability to disasters

and extreme events, such as hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria and California's recent wildfires; and

inequities in economic opportunity.

'Transboundary flows' from cities

Complicating the picture, what happens in a city doesn't stay in a city.

Transboundary flows of people, natural resources, and goods and services, as well as waste and pollution,

move from place to place via networks of trade, infrastructure and information. The effects extend well

beyond urban boundaries, states the AC-ERE report.

Energy use in cities contributes to more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Water supply to

just 50 percent of the world's largest urban areas draws on watersheds covering a large part of Earth's land

surface: 41 percent.

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Regional air pollution from cities is a factor in more than 6.5 million premature deaths each year worldwide.

Water stress and weather extremes, such as heat, cold and floods, affect human lives and economies in cities

from Bangkok to New York, Phoenix to Chicago. And the regions around them.

No city is an island.

Advancing next-generation sustainable urban systems science

Scientists need new data, methods and theories that assess the interactions among people, technology,

infrastructure and natural systems to understand how cities function and change, according to the AC-ERE

report.

Next-generation urban systems science requires that researchers study urban areas in ways that connect

homes, businesses and communities to impacts on regional and global scales, the report's authors believe.

Scientists need to look for commonalities across metropolitan areas that would help cities learn from each

other, states the document. And researchers need to work with community members, city managers, local

government officials, and industry representatives to produce knowledge that's practical and useful.

Specific questions the report cites: How will innovation and new technologies, such as self-driving electric

vehicles, transform cities? How do we make cities more secure, disaster-resilient and healthy?

Our collective future depends on finding answers. We need to know, say the members of the AC-ERE, how to

handle life on a planet that's becoming more and more urbanized. Whether we're ready or not, the challenge is

here.

-NSF-

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=244179&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

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Paper-Cast Sculptures of Legs and Torsos Covered in Traditional Chinese Paintings by Peng Wei

JANUARY 10, 2018

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

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Beijing-based artist Peng Wei places traditional Chinese painting on rice paper to create contemporary

sculptures of human legs, shoes, and torsos. These paper-cast works display scenes of the natural and

domestic, including lush gardens, animals, and interiors of Chinese homes. Peng has been troubled by the

adoption of Western styles of clothing by Chinese women. By painting classical Chinese motifs on Western

shoes and other fashion-related items, Peng aims to deny the decline of China’s cultural heritage to rapid

globalization.

Peg was born in Chengdu in 1974 and graduated from the Eastern art department of Nankai University with a

BA in Literature and an MA in Philosophy. Her works have been collected by the National Art Museum of

China, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Guangdong Art

Museum, and many more international collections. You can see more of Peng’s paintings and sculptures

on Artsy. (via Lustik)

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To Be, or Not to Be

Masha Gessen

Igor Stomakhin

Masha Gessen at her apartment in Moscow in the early 1990s, when she was in her mid-twenties

This essay was delivered in a slightly different form as the Robert B. Silvers Lecture at the New York Public

Library on December 18, 2017.

1.

Fetus

The topic of my talk was determined by today’s date. Thirty-nine years ago my parents took a package of

documents to an office in Moscow. This was our application for an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union. More

than two years would pass before the visa was granted, but from that day on I have felt a sense of

precariousness wherever I have been, along with a sense of opportunity. They are a pair.

I have emigrated again as an adult. I was even named a “great immigrant” in 2016, which I took to be an

affirmation of my skill, attained through practice—though this was hardly what the honor was meant to

convey. I have also raised kids of my own. If anything, with every new step I have taken, I have marveled

more at the courage it would have required for my parents to step into the abyss. I remember seeing them in

the kitchen, poring over a copy of an atlas of the world. For them, America was an outline on a page, a web of

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thin purplish lines. They’d read a few American books, had seen a handful of Hollywood movies. A friend

was fond of asking them, jokingly, whether they could really be sure that the West even existed.

Truthfully, they couldn’t know. They did know that if they left the Soviet Union, they would never be able to

return (like many things we accept as rare certainties, this one turned out to be wrong). They would have to

make a home elsewhere. I think that worked for them: as Jews, they never felt at home in the Soviet Union—

and when home is not where you are born, nothing is predetermined. Anything can be. So my parents always

maintained that they viewed their leap into the unknown as an adventure.

I wasn’t so sure. After all, no one had asked me.

2.

Vulnerable

As a thirteen-year-old, I found myself in a clearing in a wood outside of Moscow, at a secret—one might say

underground, though it was out in the open—gathering of Jewish cultural activists. People went up in front of

the crowd, one, two, or several at a time, with guitars and without, and sang from a limited repertoire of

Hebrew and Yiddish songs. That is, they sang the same three or four songs over and over. The tunes scraped

something inside of me, making an organ I didn’t know I had—located just above the breastbone—tingle with

a sense of belonging. I was surrounded by strangers, sitting, as we were, on logs laid across the grass, and I

remember their faces to this day. I looked at them and thought, This is who I am. The “this” in this was

“Jewish.” From my perch thirty-seven years later, I’d add “in a secular cultural community” and “in the

Soviet Union,” but back then space was too small to require elaboration. Everything about it seemed self-

evident—once I knew what I was, I would just be it. In fact, the people in front of me, singing those songs,

were trying to figure out how to be Jewish in a country that had erased Jewishness. Now I’d like to think that

it was watching people learning to inhabit an identity that made me tingle.

Some months later, we left the Soviet Union.

In autobiographical books written by exiles, the moment of emigration is often addressed in the first few

pages—regardless of where it fell in a writer’s life. I went to Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory to look for

the relevant quote in its familiar place. This took a while because the phrase was actually on page 250 out of

310. Here it is: “The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have

missed for worlds.”

This is an often-quoted phrase in a book full of quotable sentences. The cultural critic and my late friend

Svetlana Boym analyzed Nabokov’s application of the word “syncope,” which has three distinct uses: in

linguistics it’s the shortening of a word by omission of a sound or syllable from its middle; in music it is a

change of rhythm and shift of accent when a normally weak beat is stressed; and in medicine it is a brief loss

of consciousness. “Syncope,” wrote Svetlana, “is the opposite of symbol and synthesis.”

Suketu Mehta, in his Maximum City, wrote:

Each person’s life is dominated by a central event, which shapes and distorts everything that comes after it

and, in retrospect, everything that came before. For me, it was going to live in America at the age of fourteen.

It’s a difficult age at which to change countries. You haven’t quite finished growing up where you were and

you’re never well in your skin in the one you’re moving to.

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Mehta didn’t let me down: this assertion appears in the very first pages of his magnificent book; also, he

moved to America at the same age that I did. And while I think he might be wrong about everyone, I am

certain he is right about émigrés: the break colors everything that came before and after.

Svetlana Boym had a private theory: an émigré’s life continues in the land left behind. It’s a parallel story. In

an unpublished piece, she tried to imagine the parallel lives her Soviet/Russian/Jewish left-behind self was

leading. Toward the end of her life, this retracing and reimagining became something of an obsession. She

also had a theory about me: that I had gone back to reclaim a life that had been interrupted. In any case, there

are many stories to be told about a single life.

3.

Diversity

On Valentine’s Day in 1982—I was fifteen—I went to a gay dance at Yale. This was a great time for gay

dances. It was no longer terrifying to be queer on campus, but gay life was still half-hidden in a way that was

thrilling. I do not remember, in fact, dancing, and I don’t even remember catching anyone’s eye. In other

words, I’m pretty sure that no one noticed me. Strangely, that wasn’t crushing. Because what I do remember

is standing somewhere dark, leaning against something, and feeling like I was surrounded by community. I

remember thinking, This is who I could be.

What the syncope of emigration had meant for me was the difference between discovering who I was—the

experience I had in the woods outside of Moscow—and discovering who I could be—the experience I had at

that dance. It was a moment of choice and, thanks to the “break in my destiny,” I was aware of it.

4.

Entitlement

In this sense my personal narrative splits from that of the American gay and lesbian movement. The latter was

based on choicelessness. A choice may have to be defended—certainly, one has to be prepared to defend

one’s right to make a choice—while arguing that you were born this way appeals to people’s sympathy or at

least a sense of decency. It also serves to quell one’s own doubts and to foreclose future options. We are,

mostly, comfortable with less choice—much as I would have felt safer if my parents had not set out on their

great emigration adventure.

After I left Moscow, one of my grandmothers was compelled to hide the fact of our emigration—we had

committed an act of treason that could have threatened those left behind. So in the little town where she lived

and where I had spent summers as a child, she continued to update my friends on the life I wasn’t leading. In

that Soviet life, I applied to colleges and failed to get in. In the end, I settled for some mediocre-sounding

technical route.

I was hurt by the predictability of the story my grandmother chose for me. In the United States, I was living

an imaginative and risky life—I dropped out of high school, ran away from home, lived in the East Village,

worked as a bicycle messenger, dropped out of college, worked in the gay press, became the editor of a

magazine at twenty-one, got arrested at ACT UP protests, experimented sexually and romantically, behaved

abhorrently, was a good friend, or tried to be—but in the mirror held up by my grandmother, it wasn’t just my

location that was different: it was the presence of choice in my life.

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After ten years in this country, I went back to Moscow as a journalist, on assignment. I felt so unexpectedly

comfortable in a country that I had expected to feel foreign—as though my body relaxed into a space that had

stayed open for it—that I also felt resentful about not having had a choice in leaving. I kept going back and

eventually stayed, refashioning myself as a Russian-language journalist. I pretended that this was the life I

would have had if I had never left, but deep inside I believed that my grandmother had been right: there was

some parallel me, toiling miserably on some dead-end engineering task. This made me a double impostor in

the life I was living.

I’m not sure when I made the choice to stay in Russia, but I remember hearing the statement come out of my

mouth, surprising me, as it sometimes happens when a decision makes itself known. I had been living there a

year, and I was talking to a close friend, an American graduate student who had also been there a year and

was now going back. “I think I’m going to stay,” I said. “Of course you are,” he responded, as though it

weren’t a choice at all.

Around the same time, I was interviewed by a young Russian journalist: having chosen to return to Russia

made me exotic enough to be written about. He asked me which I liked better: being a Russian in America or

an American in Russia. I was furious—I believed myself to be a Russian in Russia and an American in

America. It took me many years to come around to liking being an outsider wherever I go.

I remet my two grandmothers, whom I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager, and started interviewing them. This

project became a book about the choices they had made. The one who disapproved of our emigration had

become a censor, which, she told me, was a moral choice. She had been educated to be a history teacher, but

by the time she had completed her studies she was convinced that becoming a history teacher in the Soviet

Union would require her to lie to children every day. Censoring, on the other hand, seemed to her a job that

could have been done by a robot: any other person would have crossed out the same lines or confiscated the

same mail (her first job was as a censor of printed material in incoming international mail), whereas every

history teacher uses a different kind of charm and persuasion to distort children’s understanding of the past.

My other grandmother I knew as a rebel and a dissident, someone who never compromised. But as I

interviewed her I learned that when she was offered a job with the secret police (as a translator), she had

agreed to take it. This was during Stalin’s so-called anti-cosmopolitan campaign, when Jews were purged

from all kinds of Soviet institutions. She could not get a job to save her life, or, more to the point, her toddler

son’s life. It had been no choice at all, she told me: she had to feed her child. She never started the job

because she failed the medical exam.

The central figure in the book, however, was her father, who was killed in Majdanek. I had always known that

he had participated in the rebellion in the Bialystok Ghetto. But then I also found out that he had served in the

Judenrat (Jewish council) before choosing to help the rebels.

As I studied the archives—a remarkable number of documents from the Bialystok Ghetto have been

preserved—I realized that my great-grandfather had been one of the de facto leaders of the Judenrat. He had

been responsible for food deliveries to and garbage removal from the ghetto, and I saw strong evidence that

he took part in putting together the lists of names for extermination. I also found a memoir written by a

member of the resistance in which she recalled my great-grandfather’s efforts to stop the resistance. Later he

apparently changed his position and started helping the resistance to smuggle weapons into the ghetto. Before

the war, he had been an elected official, a member of both the city council and the Jewish council, so it was

clear to me that he had seen his duties in the Judenrat as the logical outgrowth of his elected service. I could

see the trajectory of my great-grandfather’s choices.

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My grandmother didn’t want me to publish the part about the Judenrat, and we had a protracted battle over

whose story it was to tell—hers or mine, or both of ours. In the end, she had only one demand: that I omit a

quote from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. This is the infamous quote in which Arendt says that the

Holocaust would not have been possible without the help of the Jewish councils.

I saw it as a story of impossible, anguished choices that he nonetheless insisted on making. Totalitarian

regimes aim to make choice impossible, and this was what interested me at the time. I was awed by the gap

between my capacity for judgment and the unbearably limited options faced by my grandparents. I fixated on

the ideas of “impossible choice” and of having “no choice.” But what interests me now is that I think

resistance can take the shape of insisting on making a choice, even when the choice is framed as one between

unacceptable options.

5.

Science-Based

Back in the United States, my parents’ adventure came to a halt, eleven years after we landed in America. My

mother died of cancer in the summer of 1992. Another eleven years later, I returned for a yearlong

fellowship—to be a Russian in America for a year. During that year I took a test that showed I had the genetic

mutation that had caused the cancer that killed my mother and her aunt before that. I was “born this way”—

born to develop cancer of the breasts or ovaries, or both. The genetic counselors and doctors asked me what I

wanted to do. It was a choice, framed as one between “aggressive monitoring”—for the first signs of cancer,

which the doctors were certain would appear—and preventive surgery.

I ended up writing, first, a series of articles and then a book on making choices in the age of genetic testing. I

talked to people who had faced far more drastic choices than the one before me. These people had chosen to

live without such essential organs as the stomach or pancreas, whereas all the doctors were suggesting to me

was the removal of breasts and ovaries. I chose to remove my breasts and reconstruct them. I was choosing

my breast size and my fate!

The doctors, incidentally, didn’t think this was the right choice: they advocated for the removal of the ovaries

rather than, or more importantly than, the breasts. I found more compelling evidence in favor of keeping the

ovaries for a while, but two and a half years ago I had those removed as well. Around that time, my doctor

was strongly suggesting I really no longer had a choice.

6.

Transgender

Two decades after moving back to Russia, I left again. It was one of those impossible choices that don’t feel

like much of a choice: I was one of many people pushed out of the country during the crackdown that

followed the protests of 2011–2012. Some were given the choice between emigrating or going to prison. My

options were emigrating or seeing social services go after my kids, on the grounds that I am queer.

What had happened to the life my discontinuous self was leading back in America while I was in Russia? My

writing life had been proceeding apace, more or less—I was publishing in the United States while living in

Russia. Socially, who was I? Who were my people? Where did I belong? I had lost some friends and gained

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others. Some friends had become couples, split up, recoupled, had children. I had coupled and recoupled and

had children too.

Also, some of the women I had known had become men. That’s not the way most transgender people phrase

it; the default language is one of choicelessness: people say they have always been men or women and now

their authentic selves are emerging. This is the same “born this way” approach that the gay and lesbian

movement had put to such good political use in the time that I’d been gone: it had gotten queer people access

to such institutions as the military and marriage.

The standard story goes something like this: as a child I always felt like a boy, or never felt like a girl, and

then I tried to be a lesbian, but the issue wasn’t sexual orientation—it was gender, specifically, “true gender,”

which could now be claimed through transitioning. I found myself feeling resentful at hearing these stories. I

too had always felt like a boy! It had taken some work for me to enjoy being a woman (whatever that

means)—I’d succeeded, I had learned how to be one. But still: here I was, faced with the possibility that in the

parallel life that my left-behind self was leading in the United States while I was in Russia, I would have

transitioned. True gender (whatever that means) didn’t have much to do with it, but choice did. Somehow, I’d

missed the fact that it was there.

I had written an entire book on making choices that had to do with removing the parts of the body that would

appear to have made me female: the breasts, the ovaries, the uterus. And I had not questioned the assumptions

that after a mastectomy one considers one’s options for reconstruction, and after a radical hysterectomy one

considers whether to receive hormone “replacement” in the form of estrogen. Indeed, I had had reconstruction

and was taking estrogen. I had failed, miserably, at seeing my choices, made as they were under some duress,

as an opportunity for adventure. I had failed to think about inhabiting a different body the way one would

think about inhabiting a different country. How do I invent the person I am now?

I quit estrogen and started testosterone. I had some trouble with the evidence part of the science, because, as I

have found, all published papers on the use of testosterone in people who start out as women fall into one of

two categories: articles that aim to show that people taking testosterone will experience all of the

masculinizing changes that they wish for, and ones that aim to show that women will have none of the

masculinizing changes that they fear. I am taking a low dose, and I have no idea how it’s going to affect me.

My voice has become lower. My body is changing.

But then again, bodies change all the time. In her book The Argonauts Maggie Nelson quotes her partner, the

artist Harry Dodge, as saying that he is not going anywhere—not transitioning but being himself. I recognize

the sentiment, though I’d probably say the opposite: for thirty-nine years, ever since my parents took those

documents to the visa office, I have felt so precarious that I lay no claim to someone I “really am.” That

someone is a sequence of choices, and the question is: Will my next choice be conscious, and will my ability

to make it be unfettered?

7.

Evidence-Based

It took little effort to organize the notes I jotted down for this talk around the seven words that the Trump

administration was reported to have banned the Centers for Disease Control from using. All seven words—

from “fetus” to “evidence-based”—are words that reflect on our understanding of choice.

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Choice is a great burden. The call to invent one’s life, and to do it continuously, can sound unendurable.

Totalitarian regimes aim to stamp out the possibility of choice, but what aspiring autocrats do is promise to

relieve one of the need to choose. This is the promise of “Make America Great Again”—it conjures the allure

of an imaginary past in which one was free not to choose.

I’ve been surprised, in the last year, that the resurgence of interest in some of the classic books on

totalitarianism has not brought back Erich Fromm’s wonderful Escape from Freedom (though Fromm, who

was a psychoanalyst and social psychologist, has been rediscovered by many people in the mental health

profession because he introduced the idea of “malignant narcissism”). In the introduction, Fromm apologizes

for what he perceives as sloppiness, which he says stems from the need to write the book in a hurry: he felt

that the world was on the verge of catastrophe. He was writing this in 1940.

In the book, Fromm proposes that there are two kinds of freedom: “freedom from,” which we all want—we

all want our parents to stop telling us what to do—and “freedom to,” which can be difficult or even

unbearable. This is the freedom to invent one’s future, the freedom to choose. Fromm suggests that at certain

times in human history the burden of “freedom to” becomes too painful for a critical mass of people to bear,

and they take the opportunity to cede their agency—whether it’s to Martin Luther, Adolf Hitler, or Donald

Trump.

No wonder Trump appears to be obsessed with people who embody choice. Immigrants are his most

frightening imaginary enemy, the ones who need to be “extremely vetted,” blocked out with a wall, whose

crimes need to be reported to a special hotline and whose families need to be kept out of this country. It puts

me in mind of the “aggressive monitoring” for the cancer that’s sure to come. Transgender people have been

another target of Trump’s apparently spontaneous lashing out—witness the transgender ban in the military,

the rescinding of protections for transgender students, and now the ban on the very word “transgender.”

But in speaking about immigrants we tend to privilege choicelessness much as we do when we are speaking

about queer people or transgender people. We focus on the distinction between refugees and “economic

migrants,” without asking why the fear of hunger and destitution qualifies as a lesser reason for migration

than the fear of imprisonment or death by gunshot wound—and then only if that wound is inflicted for

political or religious reasons. But even more than that, why do we assume that the more restricted a person’s

choices have been, the more qualified they are to enter a country that proclaims freedom of personal choice to

be one of its ideals?

Immigrants make a choice. The valor is not in remaining at risk for catching a bullet but in making the choice

to avoid it. In the Soviet Union, most dissidents believed that if one were faced with the impossible choice

between leaving the country and going to prison, one ought to choose exile. Less dramatically, the valor is in

being able to experience your move less as an escape and more as an adventure. It is in serving as living

reminders of the choicefulness of life—something that immigrants and most trans people do, whether their

personal narratives are ones of choice or not.

I wish I could finish on a hopeful note, by saying something like: If only we insist on making choices, we will

succeed in keeping darkness at bay. I’m not convinced that that’s the case. But I do think that making choices

and, more important, imagining other, better choices, will give us the best chance possible of coming out of

the darkness better than we were when we went in. It’s a bit like emigrating that way: the choice to leave

rarely feels free, but choices we make about inhabiting new landscapes (or changed bodies) demand an

imagination.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/to-be-or-not-to-be/

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A Top Floor Sprinkler Leak Creates a 21-Story Tower of Icicles on a Chicago Fire Escape

CHRISTOPHER JOBSON

All photos © Andrew Hickey.

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Late last week, a bitter cold snap that swept across the U.S. brought temporary chaos to Chicago’s south loop

when a sprinkler system failed atop a 21-story hotel and storage facility. Water cascaded down a fire escape

and quickly froze into a tower of ice. Street art photographer Andrew Hickey stopped by and captured some

shots of the amazing sight before it was cleared up a few hours later.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/fire-escape-ice-tower-

chicago/?mc_cid=7bb900ddf6&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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How to scale up a pilot program

José Luis Ferreira January 17, 2018

Economics needs theory, lab experiments, historical data and field evidence. Pilot programs and randomized

controlled trials are particularly credible from the point of view of internal validity. However, the results of

these “proof-of-concept” studies do not necessarily extend beyond the context in which they where

implemented or scale up if they are generalized.

Photo: Arvind

Eyunni | Pratham

Banerjee et al. (2017) 1 study six main challenges in drawing conclusions for localized random controlled

trials: market equilibrium effects, spillovers, political reactions, context dependence, randomization or site-

selection bias, and piloting bias. Then, they document the overcoming of some of these challenges using an

example of a successful intervention that started by a nongovernment organization in a few slums, and was

developed to a policy implemented at scale by state governments in India. Here we present a summary of their

work using selected paragraphs from the article.

The challenges

1. Market Equilibrium Effects

The first challenge should already be familiar to economists. A small-scale implementation may have only

partial equilibrium consequences, whereas a large-scale one may affect the general equilibrium. As a result,

the outcomes of a small-scale program may under or over estimate the outcomes of generalizing it. For

example, granting a scholarship to a small group of students may have a big effect on the group, but a

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generalization of the scholarships will increase the educational attainment across the entire population, thus

decreasing the overall return to education (Heckman et al., 1998 2).

As another illustration, consider the low impact of microcredits on beneficiaries according to randomized

control trials (Barnejee et al., 2105 3 review this literature). However, the sudden collapse of microcredit in

Andhra Pradesh, India, due to political and not economic reasons, caused a large negative effect on the

communities where it was used. Although the mechanism is not fully understood, it seems that the

microcredit has a multiplier effect where it is implemented, something that would not have been captured in

the micro data.

2. Spillover Effects

Many treatments have spillovers on neighboring units, which implies that those units are not ideal control

groups. Some spillovers are related to the technology. For example, intestinal worms are contagious, so if a

child is dewormed, this will affect her neighbor. Other channels of spillover are informational: when a new

technology is introduced (like a long-lasting insecticide-treated bed-net), the first people who are exposed to it

may not take it up or use it properly.

3. Political Reactions

Political reactions, including either resistance to or support for a program, may vary as programs scale up.

Corrupt officials may be more likely to become interested in stealing from programs once they reach a certain

size (Deaton 2010 4).

4. Context Dependence

Evaluations are typically conducted in a few (carefully chosen) locations, with specific organizations. Would

results extend in a different setting (even within the same country)? Would the results depend on some

observed or unobserved characteristics of the location where the intervention was carried out?

5. Randomization or Site-Selection Bias

Organizations or individuals who agree to participate in an early experiment may be different from the rest of

the population. This may be because the willing partners are particularly competent and motivated, because

those who are more likely to benefit are also more likely to be treated, or because the organization, knowing it

will be evaluated, chooses a location or a subgroup where effects are particularly large.

6. Piloting Bias/Implementation Challenges

A large-scale program will inevitably be run by a large-scale bureaucracy. The intense monitoring that is

possible in a pilot may no longer be feasible when that happens, or may require a special effort.

A Successful Scale-up: Teaching at the Right Level

Pratham, an Indian nongovernmental organization, designed a deceptively simple approach, which has come

to be called “teaching at the right level”. The basic idea is to group children, for some period of the day or

part of the school year, not according to their age, but according to what they know.

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From Bombay Slums to 33 Million Children

The partnership between researchers and Pratham started with a “proof of concept” randomized controlled

trial of Pratham’s Balsakhi Program in the cities of Vadodara and Mumbai, conducted in 2001–2004

(Banerjee et al. 2007 5). Their learning levels increased by 0.28 standard deviations.

Pratham next took this approach from the relatively prosperous urban centers in West India into rural areas,

where they were forced to rely largely on volunteers rather than paid teachers. To facilitate this change, the

pedagogy became more structured and more formal, with an emphasis on frequent testing. A new randomized

evaluation was therefore launched to test the volunteer-based model in the much more challenging context of

rural North India.

The results were very positive, bur also revealed new challenges: Volunteers’ enthusiasm decreased, classes

ended prematurely, and only 12% of eligible students were treated, leaving behind students from the bottom

end disproportionately.

A First Attempt to Scale-Up with Government

Starting in 2008, Pratham and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab embarked on a series of new

evaluations to test Pratham’s approach when integrated with the government school system.

Different implementations were conducted to determine the causes of success or failure. In the interventions

that provided the program with material or material plus training they found no effect. When volunteers were

added to the program, they caused a positive impact in Bihar, but not in Uttarakhand, the two states where the

study was conducted. At first glance, it seemed that the failure of schools to utilize the volunteers as intended

(they were made part of the school team) might be the reason why the Uttarakhand intervention did not work.

However, a careful analysis showed that the reason was not the distinction between volunteers and

government schoolteachers, but between personnel that incorporated the targeted teaching aspect and those

who did not. In other interventions, where the program was implemented by schoolteachers during summer

camps, it provided positive results. Why don’t they do so during regular school day?

Getting Teachers to Take the Intervention Seriously

First, all efforts were made to emphasize that the program was fully supported and implemented by the

government, rather than an external entity. Second, the program was implemented during a dedicated hour

during the school day. This change sent a signal that the intervention was government-mandated, broke the

status quo inertia of routinely following the curriculum, and made it easier to observe compliance. Third,

during the extra hour children were reassigned and physically moved to classrooms based on levels. This

removed teacher discretion on whether to group children by achievement.

This new version of the program was evaluated in the school year 2012–2013 in 400 schools, out of which

200 received the program. This time the results were positive.

Still, in areas where this was difficult to implement because the teaching culture is very weak, Pratham, with

the permission of the district administration, developed the in-school “Learning Camps” model using

volunteers.

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It took five randomized control trials and several years to traverse the distance from a concept to a policy that

actually could be successful on a large scale, benefiting millions of children.

References

1. Banerjee, A.; Banerji, R.; Berry, J.; Duflo, E.; Kannan, H.; Mukerji, S.; Shotland, M., and Walton,

M. 2017. From Proof of Concept to Scalable Policies: Challenges and Solutions, with an

Application. Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(4), 73–102. ↩

2. Heckman, J. J.; Lochner, L., and Taber, C. 1998. Explaining Rising Wage Inequality: Explorations

with a Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Labor Earnings with Heterogeneous Agents. Review

of Economic Dynamics 1, 1–58. ↩

3. Banerjee, A.; Karlan, D.; and Zinman, J. 2015. Six Randomized Evaluations of Microcredit:

Introduction and Further Steps. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7(1), 1–21. ↩

4. Deaton, A. 2010. Instruments, Randomization, and Learning about Development. Journal of

Economic Literature 48(2), 424–55. ↩

5. Banerjee, A.; Cole, S.; Duflo, E., and Linden, L. 2007. Remedying Education: Evidence from Two

Randomized Experiments in India. Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(3), 1235–64. ↩

written by

José Luis Ferreira

José Luis Ferreira is an Associate Professor at the Economics Department in Universidad Carlos III de

Madrid. He studied Economics at the University of the Basque Country and obtained his PhD at Northwestern

University. He has worked also at the University of Pennsylvania, ITAM and Chapman University. His main

research interests are Game Theory, Experimental Economics and Economic Methodology. His publications

include articles in the Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, BE Journal of

Theoretical Economics, Economics and Philosophy, and Analysis. He is a member of ARP-Sociedad para el

Avance del Pensamiento Crítico (Society for the advancement of critical thinking).

Website:http://todoloqueseaverdad.blogspot.com.es/ Twitter:@jl_ferr

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/01/17/scale-pilot-

program/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%2

8Mapping+Ignorance%29

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Astrophysicists settle cosmic debate on magnetism of planets and stars

Laser experiments verify 'turbulent dynamo' theory of how cosmic magnetic fields are created

Source:

University of Chicago

Summary:

Using one of the world's most powerful laser facilities, a team of scientists experimentally confirmed

a long-held theory for cosmic magnetic field generation: the turbulent dynamo. By creating a hot

turbulent plasma the size of a penny, that lasts a few billionths of a second, the researchers recorded

how the turbulent motions can amplify a weak magnetic field to the strengths of those observed in

our sun, distant stars, and galaxies.

FULL STORY

This is a 3-D radiation magneto-hydrodynamic FLASH simulation of the experiment, performed on the Mira

supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. The values demonstrate strong amplification of the seed

magnetic fields by turbulent dynamo.

Credit: Petros Tzeferacos/University of Chicago

The universe is highly magnetic, with everything from stars to planets to galaxies producing their own

magnetic fields. Astrophysicists have long puzzled over these surprisingly strong and long-lived fields, with

theories and simulations seeking a mechanism that explains their generation.

Using one of the world's most powerful laser facilities, a team led by University of Chicago scientists

experimentally confirmed one of the most popular theories for cosmic magnetic field generation: the turbulent

dynamo. By creating a hot turbulent plasma the size of a penny, that lasts a few billionths of a second, the

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researchers recorded how the turbulent motions can amplify a weak magnetic field to the strengths of those

observed in our sun, distant stars, and galaxies.

The paper, published this week in Nature Communications, is the first laboratory demonstration of a theory,

explaining the magnetic field of numerous cosmic bodies, debated by physicists for nearly a century. Using

the FLASH physics simulation code, developed by the Flash Center for Computational Science at UChicago,

the researchers designed an experiment conducted at the OMEGA Laser Facility in Rochester, NY to recreate

turbulent dynamo conditions.

Confirming decades of numerical simulations, the experiment revealed that turbulent plasma could

dramatically boost a weak magnetic field up to the magnitude observed by astronomers in stars and galaxies.

"We now know for sure that turbulent dynamo exists, and that it's one of the mechanisms that can actually

explain magnetization of the universe," said Petros Tzeferacos, research assistant professor of astronomy and

astrophysics and associate director of the Flash Center. "This is something that we hoped we knew, but now

we do."

A mechanical dynamo produces an electric current by rotating coils through a magnetic field. In astrophysics,

dynamo theory proposes the reverse: the motion of electrically-conducting fluid creates and maintains a

magnetic field. In the early 20th century, physicist Joseph Larmor proposed that such a mechanism could

explain the magnetism of the Earth and Sun, inspiring decades of scientific debate and inquiry.

While numerical simulations demonstrated that turbulent plasma can generate magnetic fields at the scale of

those observed in stars, planets, and galaxies, creating a turbulent dynamo in the laboratory was far more

difficult. Confirming the theory requires producing plasma at extremely high temperature and volatility to

produce the sufficient turbulence to fold, stretch and amplify the magnetic field.

To design an experiment that creates those conditions, Tzeferacos and colleagues at UChicago and the

University of Oxford ran hundreds of two- and three-dimensional simulations with FLASH on the Mira

supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. The final setup involved blasting two penny-sized pieces of

foil with powerful lasers, propelling two jets of plasma through grids and into collision with each other,

creating turbulent fluid motion.

"People have dreamed of doing this experiment with lasers for a long time, but it really took the ingenuity of

this team to make this happen," said Donald Lamb, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor

Emeritus in Astronomy & Astrophysics and director of the Flash Center. "This is a huge breakthrough."

The team also used FLASH simulations to develop two independent methods for measuring the magnetic

field produced by the plasma: proton radiography, the subject of a recent paper from the FLASH group, and

polarized light, based on how astronomers measure the magnetic fields of distant objects. Both measurements

tracked the growth in mere nanoseconds of the magnetic field from its weak initial state to over 100 kiloGauss

-- stronger than a high-resolution MRI scanner and a million times stronger than the magnetic field of the

Earth.

"This work opens up the opportunity to verify experimentally ideas and concepts about the origin of magnetic

fields in the universe that have been proposed and studied theoretically over the better part of a century," said

Fausto Cattaneo, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and a co-author of

the paper.

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Now that a turbulent dynamo can be created in a laboratory, scientists can explore deeper questions about its

function: how quickly does the magnetic field increase in strength? How strong can the field get? How does

the magnetic field alter the turbulence that amplified it?

"It's one thing to have well-developed theories, but it's another thing to really demonstrate it in a controlled

laboratory setting where you can make all these kinds of measurements about what's going on," Lamb said.

"Now that we can do it, we can poke it and probe it."

Story Source:

Materials

provided by University of Chicago. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

1. P. Tzeferacos, A. Rigby, A. F. A. Bott, A. R. Bell, R. Bingham, A. Casner, F. Cattaneo, E. M. Churazov, J.

Emig, F. Fiuza, C. B. Forest, J. Foster, C. Graziani, J. Katz, M. Koenig, C.-K. Li, J. Meinecke, R. Petrasso,

H.-S. Park, B. A. Remington, J. S. Ross, D. Ryu, D. Ryutov, T. G. White, B. Reville, F. Miniati, A. A.

Schekochihin, D. Q. Lamb, D. H. Froula, G. Gregori. Laboratory evidence of dynamo amplification of

magnetic fields in a turbulent plasma. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-02953-

2

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180209131436.htm

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Tatsuya Tanaka Continues Building Tiny Worlds in his Daily Miniature Calendar Photo Project

DECEMBER 20, 2017

LAURA STAUGAITIS

Since April 2011, art director and photographer Tatsuya Tanaka’s imagination has built a magnificent number

of miniature worlds (previously here and here). Through the artist’s clever lens, everyday activities like

construction work, walking the dog, getting a parking ticket, and plowing through a blizzard become delight-

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inducing scenarios. Tanaka also plays with pop culture references, building staple skyscrapers for Godzilla to

prowl.

You can see more from Tanaka’s ongoing Miniature Calendar project on Instagram, where he shares his

creations each and every day. With over two thousand scenes and counting, he has garnered an impressive

followership of a million people. In August, Tanaka also released a book of his work, Small Wonders – Life

Portrait in Miniature. (via Tu Recepcja)

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/12/tatsuya-tanaka-miniature-

calendar/?mc_cid=42bc20b803&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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The Nonbinary Gender Trap

Robin Dembroff

Musée Picasso, Paris/Bridgeman Images/Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso: Maya with a Doll, 1938

As California residents rang in 2018, they joined residents of Oregon and Washington, D.C., in having the

option to revise their legal genders from either “male” or “female” to “nonbinary.” California’s enactment of

the Gender Recognition Act, which was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown last October and starts to

take effect later this year, is but one more sign of a slow but steady sea-change. Washington State has

followed suit, and similar third-gender options are under consideration in New York and Vermont. Under

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California’s new law, legal gender is dramatically reframed. No longer is it based on which sex (male/female)

one was assigned as birth. Instead, legal gender will be based on what California lawmakers deem

“fundamentally personal”: gender identity.

A person’s gender identification encompasses identification with certain physical features as well as gender

expressions, gender norms, and gendered language. This means that, regardless of one’s physical

characteristics, a Californian who does not identify as a man or a woman may change their legal gender to

“nonbinary.” The motivation for this shift is clear: according to California Senator Scott Wiener,

the nonbinary option means that “transgender and non-binary people will now be able to identify themselves

as they are, not as who society tells them they should be.” (California’s law goes further than other states’

measures, permitting citizens to opt for nonbinary on their birth certificates, as well as other official

documents like driving licenses.)

California legislators, and progressive lawmakers in other states, may be acting from the best of motives, but

this swath of new legislation rests on a dangerous mistake. I say this as a nonbinary person, one who identifies

as genderqueer and uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them. I’m also a philosophy professor and

spend much of my time thinking about the ways in which gender categories are constructed and enforced. For

me, adding “nonbinary” to the list of legal gender options does not address the core problem: any legal system

that requires a person to record their gender perpetuates government control over our bodies and identities.

Even as it was signed into law, the Gender Recognition Act was condemned by the right as opposing nature,

science, and even God. Conservative groups argued that legal gender should reflect the supposed fact that

nature designates everyone as a “biological male” or “biological female.” The California Family

Council dubbed the Act the “Change Your Gender Bill” and derided it as replacing “a physical description of

reality” with “a description of feelings and self-identification.” According to such groups, the government

should uphold an ideology that determines gender on the basis of whether, at birth, you have a penis or a

vagina. Many on the left, by contrast, have hailed the Act as championing trans rights and progressive ideals.

Despite their apparent disagreement, both conservatives and liberals share a fundamental

assumption. Conservatives insist that the state should record what genitals I have. Liberals insist the state

should instead record my self-identity. But both assume that the state should be concerned with my gender,

whatever they understand that to be. In so doing, each side—whether tacitly or intentionally—endorses the

use of legal gender to reinforce its own preferred gender ideology. To fail to see this appointment of the state

as final arbiter is naïve and dangerous.

Senator Wiener’s comments in support of the Act also betray a widespread illusion that our gender identities

exist independently of legal frameworks. He seems to believe that the state’s work is merely to reflect the

genders of individuals. But the legal institutions we navigate every day do not simply reflect gender. Laws

entrench the language, concepts, rights, and obligations constructing gender categories. The society that

Senator Wiener believes “tells us who we should be” cannot be divorced from the institutions that structure

that society: laws, as much as persons around us, set up the gender categories we do or do not identify with.

I grant to progressive lawmakers that it is better to have a third, nonbinary option than to limit constituents to

“male” and “female.” It is an achievement to resist a near-universal legal practice of marking (and policing)

bodies according to a binary classification of reproductive features. The best solution, though, would be

eliminating all gender markers on state-issued identification. Americans should not have to resign themselves

to a choice between two legally classified genders based on genitals and three legally classified self-identities.

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The new law forces Californians to identify within a ternary range of options even though lawmakers

apparently recognize that the scope of gender identities outside of male and female is vast and effectively

unlimited. The Act states: “Nonbinary is an umbrella term for people with gender identities that fall

somewhere outside of the traditional conceptions of strictly either female or male… such as agender,

genderqueer, gender fluid, Two Spirit, bigender, pangender, gender nonconforming, or gender variant.” In

other words, California now lumps all identities other than “male” and “female” under the “nonbinary” label.

This reduces alternative gender identities to “not a woman or a man.” Far from escaping the gender binary,

this and any similar law will continue to define every gender identity with reference to the binary. It

perpetuates the common prejudice that binary identities are somehow more legitimate than the multitudes of

other identities. Rather than deconstruct gender binarism, lawmakers have, in effect, shored it up.

Admittedly, the current legal system encodes gender so deeply that there is no immediate route to gender-

neutral jurisprudence. The only viable options presently available to lawmakers might be three legal genders

or two. But we must begin to think beyond this dichotomy. There is no good reason why our bodies or our

gender identities should be recorded by the state. These designations have been used to police heterosexual

marriage (until 2015), gender segregation in voting (until 1920), and females’ ineligibility to serve in the

military (until 1948); they were also used to maintain females’ exclusion from universities (including my

own, Yale, until 1969). History suggests that federal and state governments have encoded biological sex in the

service of institutional sexism. Legal gender has, by and large, allowed the clean and easy exclusion of

females from positions of social and political power.

I say “by and large” because these designations have also been used at times to correct sexism. Consider Title

IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. It is perhaps

best known for requiring schools and universities to fund women’s sports, a measure that revolutionized

women’s participation in athletics in the United States. Legal gender was part of enforcing Title IX: without

the law’s ability to track male and female students, it might have been more difficult to ensure that females

had equal access to education programs. Title IX is but one example of the ways in which legal gender has

been used to secure certain rights for women in the United States.

But now Title IX faces problems. It was built on assumptions that did not take into account the complexity

that intersex, trans, and nonbinary students introduce to education systems. The new landscape creates

questions that Title IX is inadequate to answer: Can a school legally discriminate against nonbinary persons?

Has a school sports league violated Title IX by forcing a transgender boy to wrestle against girls?

Perhaps these questions have clearer answers if legal sex is replaced by legal gender identity. But then, new

worries arise. Consider, in this regard, California’s Gender Recognition Act. This Act unfortunately

transgresses its own tenets by violating citizens’ rights to privacy. The legislation states in one breath that

gender identity is “fundamentally personal” and that there ought to be “state-issued identification documents”

that reflect gender identity.

Gender identities are complex and deeply individual. There is no single way to articulate the basis for gender

identity, and not all citizens have stable and clearly defined identities. Any legal categorization of gender

identity, which necessarily requires external criteria of identity (such as attesting to it “under pain of

perjury”), is sure to be reductive and inadequate. I do not want one of my most personal understandings of

myself recorded and fixed on my driver’s license any more than I would like my genitalia recorded on it.

I applaud California lawmakers for identifying and seeking to correct the negative impact that legal gender

markers have on trans and nonbinary lives. But their solution takes us sideways, and other lawmakers would

do well to carefully consider the costs. California’s solution fails to address the fundamental problem with any

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legal gender system: there is no defensible basis for legally recording people’s gender identity or sex, and we

should not perpetuate the state’s assumed right to define citizens’ gender identities. The way forward is the

way out.

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/30/the-nonbinary-gender-trap/