America Buys Mexico 3 Why 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a mystery 6 The Human Microbiome Reimagined as a Cut-Paper Coral Reef by Rogan Brown 11 The tiny ways prejudice seeps into the workplace 21 The Pits: An Endearing Short Film Follows a Lonely Avocado Searching NYC for its Other Half 26 The pigment made of human remains – and more surprising hues 28 The reasons why women’s voices are deeper today 32 Persons outside the Law 36 Huge Galaxy Cluster Found Hiding in Plain Sight 41 THE EMPTY UNIVERSE 44 Lovers of Wisdom 48 Why non-smokers are getting lung cancer 55 Surreal Paintings by Matthew Grabelsky Take the New York City Subway for a Wild Ride 59 Earth Has Many More Rivers and Streams Than We Thought, New Satellite Study Finds 66 What will humans look like in a million years? 69 Cyclo Knitter: A Bicycle-Based Machine That Knits a Scarf in Five Minutes 73 The best way to understand ourselves? 76 Magnetic Microrobots Deliver Cells Into Living Animals 83 Unique Weathering Pattern Creates Fascinating Geometric Ripples on a Chain Link Fence 84 The nuclear bunker in ‘Europe’s North Korea’ 91 The War in Five Sieges 97

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Russia Developing Super-Autonomous Robotic Submarine Powered By Batteries 102 Tipping the Scales 104 The words that change what colours we see 112 Land-based portion of massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated little during past 8 million years 116 SOUTH VIETNAM'S PRESIDENT NGO DINH DIEM 119 THE MAFIA OF SICILY 122 Human Limbs Mysteriously Emerge from Marble Slabs in Milena Naef’s Performative Sculptures 125 Beyond the point-dipole approximation 130 The cost of changing an entire country’s alphabet 134 Defunct Old Cars Given New Life as Pools and Pizza Ovens by Benedetto Bufalino 144 Düssel… 150 In Hawaii, being nice is the law 154 Different Speeds, Same Furies 160 The Mesmerizing Animation of Sinusoidal Waves in GIFs by Étienne Jacob 182 How to extract the interacting spectral function from a ground state DFT calculation 187 Five myths about first aid 190 Elegant Dip Pen Illustrations Inside the Sketchbooks of Elena Limkina 195

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America Buys Mexico

Today's selection -- from Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolutionby Frank McLynn. In the early 1900s, under the policies of longtime Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, Americans owned three quarters of the mines and more than half of the oil fields in Mexico

"[Porfirio Díaz led] a hard-driven programme of industrialisation. Iron and steel works were constructed in Nuevo León, textile mills in Veracruz, and there was a massive mining boom, especially of lead and copper, stimulated by new technologies for refining precious metals. Most of all there was oil, the black gold of the twentieth century. The first geological discoveries and drillings took place on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico at the turn of the century, making Tampico the new boom town. Oilwells were spudded in and production began in 1901. By 1910 Mexico was one of the world's leading producers and by 1918 was second only to the United States. Such was Díaz's myopia, however, that his 1884 mining code vested the ownership of subsoil rights in the proprietor of the surface land. Those who had acquired public lands at a giveaway price now found they had a second and much more lucrative bite of the cherry when petroleum was found on their territories.

"The porfirista policy according Pineda"

"This was the context in which foreign capital, already a leech on the Mexican economy, became a veritable octopus. It is doubtful if Díaz ever did say: 'Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near to the United States' -- it sounds too witty for him -- but he was aware of the truth contained in the remark. Viewing the Mexico

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stabilised at gunpoint by Díaz as an investment cornucopia, American capitalists flooded across the border. Among the famous names with substantial holdings south of the Rio Grande were Hearst, Guggenheim, McCormick and Doheny; Mexicans became familiar with the corporate identities of Standard Oil, Anaconda, United States Steel, and many others. Soon the Americans owned threequarters of the mines and more than half the oil fields and they also diversified into sugar, coffee, cotton, rubber, orchilla, maguey and, in the northern provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua, cattle. Out of a total foreign investment of nearly three billion dollars in Mexico by 1910, the American share was 38 per cent, or over one billion dollars, more than the total capital owned by native Mexicans. In 1900 Edward L. Doheny acquired huge swathes of oil-rich Tamaulipas, near Tampico, complete with subsoil rights, for less than a dollar an acre. Once oilwells were installed, Doheny's plant could literally suck Mexican national treasure out of the ground, to the tune of 50,000 barrels a day, all completely taxfree except for an infinitesimal stamp duty.

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"The Americans were not the only economic predators. The British (who still held 55 per cent of all foreign investment in Latin America as a whole), were well represented with 29 per cent of foreign investment in Mexico, mainly in mines, banks and oilwells. The great English entrepreneur in Mexico was Weetman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, whose construction firm, Pearson & Son, had built the Blackwall Tunnel in London, the East River tunnel in New York and a number of railway bridges in Mexico. As a personal friend of Díaz, Pearson was able to cash in on the oil bonanza and obtained the rights to the Tuxpan fields in 1909; Díaz thought it a good idea to build up Pearson's oil company, Mexican Eagle, as a counterweight to Doheny and Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Eventually, Lord Cowdray (as he became in 1910) extended his business ambitions into Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica, exacerbating pre-existing Anglo-American tensions in Latin America and leading Washington to invoke the Monroe Doctrine.

"The Anglo-Saxon nations, though by far the biggest foreign investors, were not the only ones. The French, forgiven for their sins of the 1860s, were allowed to control the textile industry while the widely hated Spanish or gachupines dominated the retail trade and the tobacco plantations. All foreign capitalists were secretly resented to greater or lesser degrees -- the Spanish sometimes openly -- but Díaz rigged his judiciary so that in any dispute involving foreign companies and Mexican nationals, the foreigners would always get a favourable judgement. It was a standing joke that only gringos and bullfighters (another of Díaz's favourite groups) could get justice from a Mexican court. Nor did the foreigners endear themselves to the locals by their lifestyle and obvious contempt for Mexico and Mexicans. Disdaining to acquire Mexican citizenship, the expatriate community lived in splendid and luxurious isolation, repatriating profits and making sure their own nationals rode the privileged managerial gravy-trains. To all complaints about the exploiters in their midst Díaz returned the same answer: the foreigners were needed to make Mexico a modern nation, since the Mexicans themselves lacked the know-how."

author: Frank McLynn

title: Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

publisher: Basic Books

date: Copyright 2000 by Frank McLynn

pages: 5-8

https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3622

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Why 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a mystery

Kubrick may have set out to make a science-fiction film, but 2001: A Space Odyssey, which turns 50 this week, is closer to home than we think, writes Nicholas Barber.

 By Nicholas Barber

It’s been 50 years since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we’re still trying to make sense of it. Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece is regularly voted as one of the greatest films ever made: BBC Culture’s own critics’ poll of the best US cinema ranked it at number four. But 2001 is one of the most puzzling films ever made, too. What, for instance, is a shiny rectangular monolith doing in prehistoric Africa? Why does an astronaut hurtle through a psychedelic lightshow to another universe, before turning into a cosmic foetus? And considering that the opening section is set millions of years in the past, and the two central sections are set 18 months apart, how much of it actually takes place in 2001?

Much of 2001: A Space Odyssey is baffling – Kubrick likened the film to a painting or a piece of music (Credit: Alamy)

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Kubrick himself wouldn’t be too upset by all this head-scratching. “You’re free to speculate about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film,” he told an interviewer in 1968, “but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.” Kubrick’s co-writer, Arthur C Clarke, answered some of the story’s questions in his tie-in novel, which was published just after the film’s release. But the director edited out anything which might have made it too easy to comprehend. He likened the film to a painting and a piece of music, something to experience “at an inner level of consciousness”. And yet 2001 isn’t completely baffling. One thing which is clear is how much it has in common with some of his previous anti-war and anti-authority films, 1964’s Dr Strangelove in particular.

If Kubrick hadn’t wanted us to laugh, he wouldn’t have focused on a “zero-gravity toilet"

Seen from a distance, the two films could hardly appear more different. One is a farcical black-and-white arms-race satire featuring Peter Sellers in multiple roles; the other is a richly coloured, contemplative, interstellar sprawl, described on the original poster as an “epic drama of adventure and exploration”. But look at the similarities: the Cold War secrecy between the US and Russia, the boardrooms packed with middle- aged men in suits, the supposedly infallible machine which is intent on slaughtering the people who built it. Look at the Dr Strangelove scene in which Major Kong (Slim Pickens) rewires his plane’s bomb-bay doors, and the almost identical 2001 scene in which an astronaut deactivates his spaceship’s computer.

The film shares similarities with Kubrick’s Cold War satire Dr Strangelove including the boardrooms packed with middle-aged men in suits (Credit: Alamy)

And look at the convictions which underpin both works: that humans are intrinsically, self-destructively violent, and that anyone who believes himself to be 100% right is probably a dangerous maniac. It may be going too far to call 2001 a cynical political comedy, but if Kubrick hadn’t wanted us to laugh, he wouldn’t

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have focused on a “zero-gravity toilet”. And he wouldn’t have had a chapter entitled The Dawn of Man, in which man, having dawned, bashes another man’s brains out with a club.

Great apes

In this opening sequence, our hairy ancestors (played by mime artists in costumes) eat nothing but roots and berries until they happen upon a towering black slab which was once compared to a tombstone but which now brings to mind an oversized iPhone. This mysterious monolith accelerates the ape-men’s learning, and one of them has the idea to use a bone as a weapon. After he has killed both a tapir and a fellow ape-man, he flings the bone high into the air, and Kubrick brings us the edit which always pops up when you type “match cut” into a search engine: the spinning bone is replaced by a satellite orbiting the Earth. Except that it’s not a satellite, as such. According to Clarke, the craft which takes the place of the bone is “supposed to be an orbiting space bomb, a weapon in space”. Here, at least, we can see what Kubrick is getting at: by his reckoning, human progress has all been about developing bigger and better ways to murder each other.

In the film’s opening sequence, The Dawn of Man, our hairy ancestors happen upon a mysterious towering monolith (Credit: Alamy)

Kubrick enjoys pointing out that the men in charge of our fates aren’t necessarily the most imaginative or intelligent people in the solar system

In this part of the film, we meet Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), a scientist on his way to the Moon, where another alien monolith has been unearthed. But Floyd is no conventional sci-fi boffin: neither a crazed nerd in a lab coat nor a dashing intergalactic hero. Instead, he is a complacent, all-American breadwinner who is tended to by pretty stewardesses, and who misses his daughter’s birthday party because he is ‘travelling’. When he compliments his colleagues on their discovery, you wouldn’t think they had found proof of extra-

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terrestrial life; you’d think they had composed a new advertising jingle. “Well, I must say,” chuckles Floyd, “you guys have certainly come up with something.” Whether it’s the American generals in Dr Strangelove, the French generals in Paths of Glory, or the Minister of the Interior who claims to have the cure for crime in A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick enjoys pointing out that the men in charge of our fates aren’t necessarily the most imaginative or intelligent people in the solar system. And it’s always men. The only female character in Dr Strangelove is a US General’s bikini-wearing secretary; in 2001, the women have more clothes, but they don’t any have more dialogue.

‘Dr Strangelove in Space’

The film’s third section is set aboard a colossal spacecraft bound for Jupiter. Its crew consists of David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), along with three other astronauts in suspended animation, but most of the ship’s operations are taken care of by a computer named HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain). Could this artificially intelligent pilot spell trouble for his crewmates? Well, he declares that he is, “by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error”, and that sort of self- confidence in a Kubrick film is usually a bad sign. Sure enough, HAL tells David and Frank, incorrectly, that the ship’s communications dish is faulty. Assuming that HAL must be malfunctioning, the astronauts decide that they’ll have to shut him down. Unfortunately, HAL decides to shut them down first.

The female characters in 2001 may have more clothes than in Dr Strangelove, but they don’t have any more dialogue (Credit: Alamy)

It’s here, especially, that 2001 could be retitled ‘Dr Strangelove in Space’ because it’s here that Kubrick zeroes in on our puffed-up certainty, and of our absurd faith in any system or machine which seems to have all the answers. In the 1964 film, a ‘doomsday device’ that was supposed to guarantee world peace is actually going to wipe out civilisation – and it has been programmed to ensure that no one can stop it. And in the 1968

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film, the ironies pile up even higher. A HAL computer makes a mistake. A mission controller confirms that is a mistake – because his own identical HAL computer on Earth says so. But HAL remains as sure of himself as the generals in Dr Strangelove: “Well, I don’t think there is any question about it,” he purrs, in his soothing, almost-emotional voice. “It can only be attributable to human error.” Listen closely and you can hear Kubrick groaning in despair.

HAL, the artificially intelligent pilot of the film’s spacecraft, spells trouble for the humans on board (Credit: Alamy)

Not that 2001 is simply a Dr Strangelove sequel. Ignore the bitter satire, and you’ve still got stunning special effects, immaculate production design, prophetic technology, transporting classical music, and all-out strangeness: Dave’s climactic voyage ‘beyond the infinite’ is as mind-blowing now as it must have been in 1968.

Nonetheless, it’s striking that Kubrick set out to make ‘the proverbial good science fiction movie’, to borrow Clarke’s phrase, and that he was fascinated specifically by alien life. And yet he couldn’t help commenting on human life instead. It’s one reason why 2001 is so satisfying, as cryptic as it may be. Kubrick was dreaming of other worlds, but he kept coming back down to Earth.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180404-why-2001-a-space-odyssey-remains-a-mystery

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The Human Microbiome Reimagined as a Cut-Paper Coral Reef by Rogan Brown

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

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Using the visual metaphor of a coral reef, artist Rogan Brown (previously) introduces his audience to the diverse bacteria, archaea, fungi found in the human body through paper-based sculptures. The detailed works are created after months of research and hunting for aesthetic parallels that might link the two surprisingly similar worlds.

His series Magical Circle Variations merge these sources of inspiration with a pastel color scheme that can also be found in a coral habitat. “What the reef and the microbiome have in common is that they both consist of biodiverse colonies of organisms that coexist more or less harmoniously,” Brown explains. “There are further parallels between coral and human beings in that we are both symbiont organisms, that is we depend on a mutually beneficial relationship with another species: coral only receive their beautiful colors from varieties of algae that live on them and human beings can only exist thanks to the unimaginably huge and diverse number of bacteria that live in and on them.”

Brown hopes that his intricate paper sculptures will allow his audience to more greatly conceptualize the bacteria-based landscape of the human body. Works like these will be exhibited with C Fine Art at the upcoming Art Market Hamptons July 5-8, 2018. You can see more of his work on his website.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/human-microbiome-by-rogan- brown/?mc_cid=96e8e6217d&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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The tiny ways prejudice seeps into the workplace

Microaggressions are everyday slights and indignities some people encounter all the time - while others aren’t even aware they’re committing them.

 By Bryan Lufkin To a female CEO: “Can I speak with your boss?”

To a man who’s a nurse: “Wow, you don’t see many male nurses.”

To an LGBTQ intern: “Huh, you don’t sound gay.”

To a non-white colleague – in a mostly white office: “So, where are you from? …No, I mean, where are you really from?”

A speaker at a rally in Ireland that sought to bring attention to racism in the workplace (Credit: Alamy)

To a mixed-raced person: “What are you?"

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Welcome to the world of microaggressions: brief queries, comments or actions sprinkled throughout day-to- day life that make others – particularly those in marginalised groups – feel bad about themselves.

A slow accumulation of these microaggressions can lead to low self-esteem, feelings of alienation and eventually even mental health issues, researchers warn. They can also create a toxic work environment.

There are steps you can take to handle these delicate situations – whether you’re on the receiving end, or you’re the one unknowingly doling them out.

Where microaggressions can happen

Unlike hate speech, microaggressions are not intended to be malicious, even though the impact might be.

But they don’t have to be spoken. They can be tiny actions, too – ones that most onlookers might not even notice, let alone describe as offensive.

Not sitting next to someone on a train, for example. Or interrupting someone during a meeting, or assuming someone speaks the same language as you because you’re the same race – or assuming they don’t because they’re not the same race – or gawking at people who look different as they walk past.

It makes the people experiencing the aggression feel different, weird, someone to be suspicious of, or even feared.

“When a student says to me, ‘Dr Sue, I really liked that presentation – oh and by the way, your English is very good,’ my comment is: ‘thank you, I hope so – I was born here,” says Derald Wing Sue, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University in New York City. He’s Asian-American and was born in Portland, Oregon.

Why are they damaging?

There are some who think that microaggressions are much ado about nothing. They might say that microaggression is a product of political correctness, or that it causes a walking-on-eggshells sort of atmosphere. Op-eds in media outlets have claimed that it fosters “a culture of victimhood.”

“I understand the people who are saying, ‘don’t be a whiner,’ ‘enter the real world.’ What they don’t understand is what the real world is like for people of colour [for example],” says Sue.

That student complimenting Sue probably thought they were doing just that – paying him a compliment.

But in actuality, the comment sent a message to Sue that he, despite being an American, is an outsider. And because this has happened over and over throughout his life, he says these comments make him feel like a foreigner in his own country of birth.

And herein lies the problem with microaggressions: slow-building, incremental damage that snowballs into something a lot bigger.

Uppala Chandrasekera is the director of public policy at the Canadian Mental Health Association in Toronto. She says that “to onlookers, [the reaction to a microaggression] may seem disproportionate. ‘Why is that person so angry? I meant it as a joke or a compliment.’ But the person is not just reacting to what happened today.” They’re also reacting to something that happened five days ago, five months ago or five years ago.

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“We always remember the first time it happened,” Chandrasekera says, referring to the first time we might experience discrimination in our lives. “It’s a deeply painful moment. Because it’s so painful, we end up storing it away in a box. But, the body remembers the trauma, so the next time it happens, it triggers [a reaction].”

Subtle discrimination compounds over time, Chandrasekera adds, leading to stress and anxiety at best or drug or alcohol addictions at worst.

How to take action

So what do you do if you see or hear this happening at work?

“The best thing to do in that moment is acknowledge that it happened,” Chandrasekera says. “The person is feeling very much alone. They’re very ‘triggered,’ because it’s not the first time it’s happened,” she says, referring to microaggressions’ repeating nature. Ask if they’re OK or if they want to talk, she adds.

“Checking in with them is important because that goes a long way in mental health, in terms of social inclusion,” she says.

If you are on the receiving end, Sue suggests microinterventions – comebacks that simultaneously “disarm the microaggression but also educate the perpetrator,” he says, for example, when he told the student who said he spoke good English that he was in fact born in the US.

Sue, who specialises in racism and multiculturalism, reminds us that “no one is immune from inheriting racial, gender or sexual biases in our society.”

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To fight microaggressions in daily life, bystanders in non-marginalised groups are encouraged to acknowledge them, call them out and offer support (Credit: Getty Images)

If someone calls you out on something that has offended them, don’t get emotional or defensive. Be patient, hear them out, ask what you said or did so that you can better understand what the person is saying.

“It is very important that we do a lot of self-work and understand what biases we have,” he says. “Making them explicit allows us to deal with them.”

Providing a platform for those who experience these constant, tiny slights could also help fight discrimination. The Microaggression Projectwebsite was launched in 2010 for that purpose.

Graffiti outside the University of London on One Day Without Us and the UN World Day of Social Justice early last year (Credit: Alamy)

At last count, there have been over 15,000 online submissions, each chronicling a different microaggression.

“They have come from almost every community of marginalised identities in Western society, including racial minorities, women, a variety of LGBT communities, socioeconomic classes, migrant communities, and the disabled community,” said David Zhou, one of the co-founders of the project, in an email.

“What our project strives to do is to amplify their voices and to provide rich detail to these experiences.”

Pushing your company to do better

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Workers who feel beaten down and discriminated against are less likely to show up and give 100% every day, Chandrasekera says.

So it’s important for HR departments to take complaints from employees relating to chronic microaggressions seriously and not brush them off as overdramatic reactions to innocuous comments. Chandrasekera says that in Canada, 500,000 workers don’t show up to work on any given day because of mental health issues. She contends that feeling continually diminished at work is a mental health issue.

Zhou adds that microaggressions affect “every facet of professional advancement, from hiring to promotion, and across industries.”

But for many people, microaggressions aren’t limited to the office – and despite being added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, they certainly aren’t new, either.

“I think awareness of these experiences never required this fairly academic term in order to exist in communities for which they are a daily reality,” says Zhou.

“But in the process of defining what they are, individuals within these marginalised communities usually have reflexively understood their meaning,” he adds. “Which is a clear indication that what we are defining is real.”

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180406-the-tiny-ways-youre-offensive---and-you-dont-even-know-it

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The Pits: An Endearing Short Film Follows a Lonely Avocado Searching NYC for its Other Half

LAURA STAUGAITIS

In an awww-inducing short film written by David Bizzaro and directed by Mike Hayhurst, a fuzzy little avocado puppet wanders the streets of New York City looking for its missing half and pit. Tinkling piano music and classic New York shots of changing leaves, fast-driving taxis, and charming parks lend a rom-com feel to this fruit-forward film about searching for one’s mate. (via The Kid Should See This)

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/05/the-pits-short-film- avocado/?mc_cid=96e8e6217d&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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The pigment made of human remains – and more surprising hues

A pigment derived from the remains of ancient Egyptians is one of the surprises in a new book taking a forensic look at art history’s greatest colours, finds Kelly Grovier.

 By Kelly Grovier Colour is the soul of art. It’s what pulls us into the over-ripening gold of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and what whorls our spirit perilously into the existential blue of his Starry Night. Yet how many of us have given a second thought to the cultural origins of the pigments that manipulate our gaze? What would it mean to our affection for JMW Turner’s sprawling and luminous sunrises if we knew the backstory of the lilting lemon he used to conjure them? Would it change the power or poetry of Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway if we learned that the evaporative yellows that infuse the atmosphere with mystical light were wrought from the distilled urine of cows cruelly raised on a diet consisting exclusively of mango leaves?

Joseph Mallord William Turner used Indian Yellow in his 1844 painting Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway (Credit: Alamy)

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Thirty years ago, America found itself in the throes of a heated public debate about the merit of a provocative photograph by a taxpayer-funded artist, Andres Serrano, who had plunged a crucifix into a beaker of urine to capture the eerie atmospherics of refracting light on the sacred object. But Turner’s mistscapes are arguably more sensational even than Serrano’s Piss Christ. The diaphanous figures dancing in shimmering splendour to the left of the railway tracks in Turner’s work are sculpted from the forced waste of abused animals – the inhumanity of their treatment is fossilised forever on the clotted surface of Turner’s mesmerising canvas.

Immersion Piss Christ (1987) by US artist Andres Serrano was partially destroyed by Catholic activists in 2012 (Credit: Getty Images)

A fusty clump of so-called “Indian Yellow”, clenched roughly into a ping-pong-ball sized sphere, just the way Turner himself would have acquired the colour, is among the many hues to feature in an intriguing new book from Atelier Éditions, An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour, devoted to the vast cache of colours held by Harvard University in its extraordinary Forbes Pigment Collection. Harvard’s laboratory, a rich resource for scholars seeking to trace the DNA of every hue out of which the vibrancy of world culture has been constructed, houses nearly 4,000 unique specimens.

Waste of talent

The unique laboratory is the legacy of Edward Waldo Forbes (1879-1969), former director of the university’s Fogg Art Museum. A keen collector and art historian, Forbes embarked on a global search for far-flung pigments in order to better appreciate the raw materials that make up the masterpieces we see and to guard against the counterfeit allure of forgery. The cornerstone of the Forbes Pigment Collection is the countless phials filled and labelled by Forbes himself. Taken together, the assembled samples of subtle shades, which

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filtered their way into the studios of art history’s greatest geniuses, comprise a forensic workshop in which the mystery of the rainbow is endlessly unwoven.

Pigments from the Forbes Collection include Cadmium Scarlet, Madder Lake, Kidney Haematite and Black made from Calcined Pig Bones (Credit: Pascale Georgiev for Atelier Éditions)

If you’ve ever wondered what it is that gives everything from the white robes of Egyptian tomb painting to the pulsing purity of the lamb’s wool in Renaissance Christian icons such otherworldly immaculacy, the answer, we discover, is dung. Bovine dung, to be precise. “Created by laying lead ingots and vinegar within earthenware jars,” according to Kingston Trinder, author of the brief introductions to the book’s 10, colour- categorised chapters, “then enveloping such with layers of either tan bark or bovine excrement, the resultant lead carbonate went utilised as a white pigment”. In such light, the contemporary British artist Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung-encrusted painting, The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), which caused considerable controversy when it was exhibited in London and New York between 1997 and 1999, suddenly seems conventional in its making.

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Chris Ofili’s elephant-dung-encrusted painting, The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), is not so different from a white pigment that incorporated cow dung (Credit: Alamy)

Flipping through An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour is to discover a rich and inspiring vocabulary of every shade into which life and art is splintered. Here, one learns to distinguish between “Cadmium Scarlet” and “Dragon’s Blood”, “Geranium Lake” and “Chinese Vermillion”, “Murez Shell” and “Alizarin Violet”. If the bovine backstory to Turner’s sunrises has put you off the magic of his skies, turn away now before I fill you in on what the topless heroine of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People is really trudging over as she marches triumphantly forward towards freedom.

In all likelihood, the crumpled browns that describe the defeated flesh of the fallen revolutionaries whose bodies lay scattered at Liberty’s feet was, in fact, fashioned from powderised remains of long-dead and embalmed Ancient Egyptians. The pigment, known for centuries as “Mummy brown”, is the subject of a fascinating anecdote retold in the charming introduction to the volume by the art historian Victoria Finlay, author of the celebrated book, Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox, first published in 2002.

According to Finlay, the British writer Rudyard Kipling remembered his uncle, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, conducting a funeral procession and solemn burial for his earthen tube upon the appalling discovery that the colour had been harvested from the bodies of the dead. “Even as an old man,” Finlay writes, “Kipling wrote that he still remembered exactly where that tube of mummy brown lies.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180328-the-pigment-made-of-human-remains-and-more-surprising-hues

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The reasons why women’s voices are deeper today

We’re not talking Barry White here but some fascinating research reveals how women’s voices are becoming deeper in some countries.

 By David Robson

If you listen to radio programmes from the 1940s and 1950s you’ll notice some striking differences between the way that people spoke then and how we express ourselves today.

The most noticeable change can be heard in their accents. Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in a shift in pronunciation.

Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher employed a voice coach to help lower her voice in an attempt to give herself more authority (Credit: Getty Images)

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In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with “received pronunciation” these days – and even Queen Elizabeth II’s voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain’s social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty.

But once you move past those accents, you’ll find another social transformation mirrored in our voices: women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.

Cecilia Pemberton at the University of South Australia studied the voices of two groups of Australian women aged 18–25 years. The researchers compared archival recordings of women talking in 1945 with more recent recordings taken in the early 1990s. The team found that the “fundamental frequency” had dropped by 23 Hz over five decades – from an average of 229 Hz (roughly an A# below middle C) to 206 Hz (roughly a G#). That’s a significant, audible difference.

The researchers had carefully selected their samples to control for any potential demographic factors: the women were all university students and none of them smoked. The team also considered the fact that members of the more recent group from the 1990s were using the contraceptive pill, which could have led to hormonal changes that could have altered the vocal chords. Yet the drop in pitch remained even when the team excluded those women from their sample.

Instead, the researchers speculated that the transformation reflects the rise of women to more prominent roles in society, leading them to adopt a deeper tone to project authority and dominance in the workplace.

Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher employed a professional speech coach to help her to sound more authoritative, deliberately dropping the pitch of her voice by a massive 60 Hz. And while most of us may not go to such great lengths, recent research shows that we all spontaneously adapt the pitch of our voices to signal our perceived social rank.

For both men and women, the people who had lowered their pitch ended up with a higher social rank

In one experiment, Joey Cheng of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign asked groups of four to seven participants to perform an unusual decision-making task that involved ranking the items that an astronaut would need to survive a disaster on the moon. And at the end, she also asked each member to (privately) describe the pecking order of the group and to rank each member’s dominance.

Recording the participants’ discussions throughout the task, she found that most people quickly shifted the pitch of their voice within the first few minutes of the conversation, changes that predicted their later ranking within the group.

It’s a common tactic in nature, with many other primates – from rhesus macaques to our closest relatives, chimpanzees – lowering their vocal pitch during altercations

For both men and women, the people who had lowered their pitch ended up with a higher social rank, and were considered to be more dominant in the group, while the people who had raised their pitch were considered to be more submissive and had a lower social rank. “You were able to predict what happened to the group, in terms of the hierarchies, just from these initial moments,” Cheng says.

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Many animals, such as male frogs, lower their vocal pitch to assert their dominance over others nearby (Credit: Getty Images)

As Cheng points out, it’s a common tactic in nature, with many other primates – from rhesus macaques to our closest relatives, chimpanzees – lowering their vocal pitch during altercations. “It signals to others that their intention is to be ready to fight and protect their resources – to assert their status.” And the same connotations were apparent for the humans who had lowered their voices too. “They were rated by others as being more domineering and more willing to impose their will over others, and as a function of that, they were able to gather more influence and make decisions on the group’s behalf.”

 Find out more: Does the way you speak give away how much you earn? Cheng’s findings are certainly consistent with Pemberton’s hypothesis that greater gender equality explains the long-term vocal shift in those Australian women – a pattern that has now been recorded in Sweden, the US and Canada. Whether consciously or unconsciously, women appear to be adapting their vocal profile to suit the opportunities that are available to them today.

Interestingly, the influence of perceived dominance on vocal pitch can also be heard when you compare voices between countries. Women in the Netherlands consistently talk in deeper voices than women in Japan, for instance, and this seems to be linked to the prevailing gender stereotypes – independence versus powerlessness, for instance – in the different cultures (an inequality that is also reflected in a much larger gender pay gap in Japan).

And Cheng points out that these changing vocal dynamics may not always be an advantage for women, even in the countries where a deeper speaking voice is now more common.

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“While lower voices – and other assertive behaviour in general – effectively signal and assert power and authority in women, as it does in men, it might also have the unintended effect of undermining how well liked they are,” she says, pointing to research showing that a deeper voice is considered to be less sexually attractive and less agreeable, for instance.

In this way, it could be another example of the “double-bind” that women face in the workplace, in which the very same qualities that are praised in men may still be judged negatively in their female colleagues. Just consider the media’s discussions of Hillary Clinton, who was considered either to be too “shrill” or too “unemotional”. The deeper speaking voices may be one audible sign of progress, but we clearly still have a long way to go before we eliminate those prejudices.

--

David Robson is a freelance writer based in the UK. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180612-the-reasons-why-womens-voices-are-deeper-today

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Persons outside the Law

Catherine Hall

 Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733- 1833 by Daniel Livesay North Carolina, 448 pp, £45.00, January, ISBN 978 1 4696 3443 2 Around 1800 William Macpherson, the 16-year-old son and heir to the chief of Clan Macpherson, decided to try his hand at planting in the West Indies. The family had been Jacobites and urgently needed to repair their finances. His father, Allan, had failed to make a fortune in the East Indies and William knew he had to make good. They had kin on his mother’s side, Frasers, living in Berbice in Dutch Guyana, and so the West Indies seemed the next best possibility. He was appointed as an overseer and then manager on one of the Fraser estates, where more than three hundred enslaved men, women and children laboured to produce cotton, not sugar, on the swampy, muddy land. His father soon authorised him to buy six ‘negroes’ for £500 and congratulated William on this first step to prosperity. William’s mother was sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and had copied out lines for him from Phillis Wheatley, freed slave and poet. He had himself heard the Enlightenment philosopher Dugald Stewart’s lectures in Edinburgh and was familiar with the idea that any African inferiority was due to the miserable conditions of slavery. His experience on the plantations, however, soon convinced him that ‘negroes’ were ‘an obstinate ungrateful race’. William, following the well-worn pattern of white colonists, began a relationship with an enslaved woman, Countess. He named their first child Eliza, after his mother. In 1807 he returned to Scotland, having persuaded the man who owned Countess to sell her to him for £120, but leaving her and Eliza behind. He borrowed £2000 from his father to try to establish his own plantation. On his return to Berbice he set up house with Countess, whom he renamed Harriot, after his sister. Their second child, Matilda, was named for his favourite cousin and a son after his father, Allan. William freed Harriot and her children, moved, he recorded, by affection for them. His business did not prosper and he was soon heavily in debt. He contemplated marrying his main creditor’s daughter, but she was of mixed heritage and he could not swallow the idea of a mulatto wife. He surrendered his estate and sailed for Scotland with the two girls, leaving Harriot and their son in Berbice. Allan was to follow when he was a little older. Harriot/Countess, whose African name we do not know, would have to find her own way like many other women abandoned by white men. Affection had its limits. Her motherless children would have to deal with their new environment.

William’s mother had been shocked to hear of his illegitimate children and his father wrote advising him to leave the girls in Glasgow rather than bring them to the parental home, but he didn’t receive the letter. His mother refused to call the children by their names and referred to them as the ‘little moonlight shades’. Difference in skin colour could provoke violence, sometimes affection, rarely indifference; often it elicited mixed feelings. Her grandchildren were not children of the sun, they were ‘moon shades’ born on the wrong side of the law, yet they required her Christian charity. She was determined they must not carry the family name and consequently they became the Williams sisters. Illegitimacy was an infringement of the social and racial order, indeed an attack on it. It raised the question of who was entitled to belong and in what ways. When Allan, aged six, arrived in Scotland, he became Allan Williams.

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Within a year William made a respectable marriage to the daughter of the town clerk of Dundee and when their son was born he too was named Allan. This child, however, could be a Macpherson. William urgently needed employment and after an unsuccessful venture with the East India Company headed for another site of empire, eventually securing through patronage the position of collector of internal revenue in New South Wales. His mother was left with the responsibility for his illegitimate children and their schooling. Her attitude to them gradually softened and she was keen to ensure they received a decent education. But at the same time they should not harbour ambitions above their station: they must know their place, know their inferiority, know that their colour would always count against them. The ‘moonlight shades’ could not expect good marriages or genteel occupations. Matilda disappears from the records while Eliza took care of her grandmother in her old age, dying herself at 30. The ‘moonlight shades’ and their mother stand for the women, black and brown, whose near invisibility, yet absolute centrality to the system of slavery, speak to the silences of the archive and the work of recovery that remains to be done.＊

Eliza, Matilda and Allan Williams are three of the 360 children of mixed heritage – mainly white fathers and ‘mulatto’ or enslaved black mothers – whom Daniel Livesay has tracked in their journeys from Jamaica to Britain between 1733 and 1833. Their stories illuminate the long history of connection between Britain and the Caribbean caught in that evocative phrase: ‘we are here because you were there.’ While approximately 80 per cent of the enslaved children born to white fathers in 18th and early 19th-century Jamaica remained in slavery, a significant number, possibly thousands, of elite ‘coloured’ or ‘brown’ boys and girls were sent to England or Scotland to be educated, either in the hope of improving their prospects when they eventually returned to the island or in the expectation that there would be a better life for them here rather than there. Where might they face less discrimination? Their experiences varied across the period as attitudes to people of colour changed both in the metropole and in the colonies. Relatively fluid understandings of baggy imperial kinship networks, with their legitimate and illegitimate children, often managed by means of spatial separation, were characteristic of the mid-18th century. By the later 18th and early 19th centuries, however, those of mixed heritage were increasingly discriminated against across the empire and were seen in Jamaica as a threat to the stability of the racial order, especially as they began to claim civil and political rights. Families, as Livesay and others have convincingly demonstrated, were at the heart of the Atlantic world, but they were unstable formations and who was included and who excluded, and in what ways, was rarely settled. Family could be constructed along lines of legitimacy and European endogamy, or interpreted as expansive and affective, or indeed move between the two. It was one of the prisms through which race was understood and Jamaicans of colour – Livesay’s ‘children of uncertain fortune’ – played a significant part in shaping attitudes to race in the British Empire and in pushing popular opinion in Britain towards narrower definitions of belonging.

In the mid-18th century the expansion of sugar production meant an ever-increasing demand for slaves. Yet white settlers were hard to attract and the resulting imbalance of population raised serious concerns both in Jamaica and the metropole. The tension between the need for people of colour with substantial inherited property to act as bulwarks against the huge majority of black people and the fear of their increasing presence was long-lasting. Limited efforts were made in the early 18th century to encourage the development of an elite group of people of colour, who would identify with white colonists. A legal decision in 1733 meant that anyone with less than an eighth African ancestry could become white in the eyes of the law. ‘Privilege petitions’ offered the well-to-do the opportunity to improve their position by seeking special legislation by private bill, claiming white status on the grounds of birth and property in the colonial House of Assembly. Free people of colour in the middling

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ranks, however, were to be kept firmly in their place. The great rebellion of 1760, described by the historian of Jamaica Edward Long as ‘the grand enterprise, whose object was no other than the entire extirpation of the white inhabitants’, provoked a change of policy on the island. The population of people of colour had grown substantially and some had become significant property owners. This posed a threat to the black/white binary which the slave-owners constantly attempted to fix, never with total success, not least because of their own sexual practices. An attempt was made to sharpen racial boundaries with new legislation limiting the inheritance of children of whites and non-whites to £2000. The purpose of the Act, it was explained to the metropolitan authorities, was to check unauthorised ‘fornication & concubinage’ and to encourage ‘the legal propagation of Children by marriage’ and the transmission ‘of property and power to a pure and legitimate race’. Middling men, it was hoped, would be deterred from interracial unions but an elite would still be exempted by privilege petitions. The presence of so many free people of colour in Jamaica was an uncomfortable sign of the failure of the white imperial family to reproduce itself. The law could attempt to control sexuality, but it never succeeded.

From the 1770s there was increasing concern in the metropole, among pro-slavers as well as abolitionists, about the presence of people of colour and the possible ‘bronzing’, as it was described, of the population. Lord Mansfield’s judgment in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, who had escaped from his owner on British soil, holding that he could not be kidnapped and returned to enslavement in the Caribbean, provoked much public comment and an increasing awareness of the ‘unfamiliar strangers’ present in the English heartlands. There were runaways living among the London poor, as well as black American loyalists who had landed after the loss of the 13 Colonies, and enslaved men and women who had been brought to Britain by their owners and lived in the basements and attics of the streets and squares in Marylebone favoured by West Indians. The emergence of an abolitionist movement in the late 1780s and its campaign to abolish the slave trade made Caribbean slavery more visible in the form of pamphlets, poetry, novels and plays as well as parliamentary politics. But in 1791 the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue – which, as Haiti, became an independent state in 1804 – sent racial fear ricocheting through the white Atlantic world as horrific stories of the murder of white fathers by their mixed-heritage sons circulated, augmented by accounts of the barbarism of the enslaved in their struggle for freedom.

Meanwhile, the families whose stories Livesay has so carefully uncovered were trying to live with their children, legitimate and illegitimate, whose opportunities and expectations they were attempting to manage. John Tailyour, another Scot, moved to Jamaica in 1783, having been encouraged to consider the opportunities there by his extremely wealthy and successful cousin Simon Taylor. Taylor, according to Lady Nugent, the governor’s wife, ‘had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates’. Tailyour began a relationship with an enslaved woman, Polly, born Mary Graham, who was described as ‘mulatto’ on the baptismal certificates of her and Tailyour’s children. Like William Macpherson, Tailyour decided to free his growing family. ‘Having now for several years experienced [Polly’s] care and attention … I confess myself much attached to her, and I find myself very much so for the Children,’ he wrote to his cousin. But this attachment didn’t alter his attitude to the Africans he bought and sold. He was a slave factor, his business was to sell people. The voyage of the Eliza, which set off in 1788 from Bristol to the Bight of Biafra, collecting its human cargo and then transporting it to Barbados and Jamaica, provides a clear instance of the splitting that slavers practised between their intimates – my family, my children – and human property, the enslaved. Initially there were 283 men,

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women and children on the ship; 73 died on the Middle Passage, struck by smallpox and dysentery, another 30 in the weeks after it docked in Kingston. Tailyour’s letters about these deaths, as Livesay notes, ‘reveal a slave trader utterly disconnected from the moral realities of his business’. He was mildly concerned for his reputation, but proud that he had secured some of the highest prices of his career. This splitting speaks to the concept of disavowal, that way of knowing and not knowing at the same time. Enslaved Africans were people who had been transformed into property, commodities: but it was their human capacity to labour and reproduce that made them of value to their owners. Eventually Tailyour made enough money to retire to Scotland in 1792, buy a large house and estate, marry and have legitimate children. He continued to support his illegitimate children, who were sent to Britain. His son James struggled to pass as white in order to be accepted into the East India Company officer corps, since the company had instituted a ban on West Indians of colour joining its ranks. James was supported by Tailyour family connections determined to use their influence on behalf of the young man. His African ancestry had to be explicitly denied. Once in India James’s letters reveal the extent to which he had adopted a white colonial identity: he gives hostile accounts of the Indian ‘natives’ and complains bitterly about lack of opportunity. James and his brother, John, were never welcomed to their father’s grand new house in Scotland. Their mother, Polly, remained in Kingston, deprived of her sons and relying on friends to ask her former lover for kindnesses.

Joseph Marryat, in the early 19th century one of the most vocal opponents of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, had migrated to Grenada in the mid-1780s and established a successful mercantile business. He isn’t one of Livesay’s subjects since he left his children on the island, manumitting before he went ‘my negro woman slave … Fanny, together with her two mulatto children Ann and Joseph’. He had already married the daughter of a prosperous New England planter. On returning to England in 1791 an inheritance from an uncle allowed him to invest in plantations across the Caribbean. He became a significant ship owner, banker and MP, published many pro-slavery pamphlets and spoke in Parliament in defence of West Indian interests. His early ‘outside family’ did not prevent him from becoming passionately hostile to the increase in the numbers of free people of colour. At a meeting of the African and Asiatic Society in 1816 he was horrified to see a black woman leading in a white woman with a ‘party-coloured child’ and he regarded ‘the progressive increase of the free coloured people’ as ‘adverse to the public peace and security’. Meanwhile his daughter Ann Marryat, after some time spent as a ‘housekeeper’ to a planter, had managed to establish herself as a slave-owner in Demerara. She appears in the compensation records, the detailed accounts of the twenty million pounds paid by British taxpayers to slave owners when slavery as an institution was abolished in the British colonies in 1833, largely to secure their votes in Parliament. She was awarded £567 4s. 6d for 13 enslaved people.† Women constituted more than 40 per cent of the claimants for compensation in the Caribbean; many of them, like Ann Marryat, were the illegitimate daughters of white men. They never married, allowing them to act as small businesswomen particularly in urban areas. White men were their route to a freedom which brought with it the possibility of enslaving others.

*

The families Livesay has tracked tend to be those in which fathers felt some affection and concern, albeit with limits. Thousands of children were born in a Jamaica where sexual violation and violence was an everyday occurrence. Their legal status was determined by that of their mother and they represented a form of capital accumulation for slave owners. Robert Wedderburn, a radical agitator and Unitarian preacher, provides one of the few voices articulating the sense of loss, bitterness and

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anger aroused by these ugly practices of power. His pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery, written as an act of restitution to his mother, Rosanna, was published in 1824. Rosanna was, he wrote, ‘a woman of colour’, but a respectable lady’s maid, enslaved to a Lady Douglas. His father, James Wedderburn Esq of Inveresk, was ‘an extensive proprietor of sugar estates in Jamaica’. His father had tricked his way into gaining control of his mother, who then became the manager of his household. ‘But her station there was very disgusting,’ he wrote.

My father’s house was full of female slaves, all objects of his lusts; amongst whom he strutted like Solomon in his grand seraglio, or like a bantam cock upon his own dunghill … It is a common practice, as has been stated by Mr Wilberforce in parliament, for the planters to have lewd intercourse with their female slaves; and so inhuman are many of these said planters, that many well-authenticated instances are known, of their selling their slaves while pregnant, and making that a pretence to enhance their value. A father selling his offspring is no disgrace there. A planter letting out his prettiest female slaves for purposes of lust is by no means uncommon. My father ranged through the whole of his household for his own lewd purposes; for they being his personal property, cost nothing extra; and if any one proved with child – why, it was an acquisition which might one day fetch something in the market, like a horse or pig in Smithfield. In short, amongst his own slaves my father was a perfect parish bull; and his pleasure was the greater, because he at the same time increased his profits.

Rosanna was ‘of a rebellious disposition’ and was sold back to Lady Douglas. Her son was cared for by his grandmother, a Kingston higgler (pedlar) and obi woman known as Talkee Amy. The boy witnessed both his mother and grandmother being flogged and learned the hard way that any appeal to his father was useless.

Children of Uncertain Fortune contributes to new understandings of the long history of connection between Britain and the Caribbean and shifting patterns in racial thinking and racial practices. Work such as this can play a vital part in repairing at least some of the damage done by colonialism. The tensions between browns and blacks that became so closely mapped onto class remain a significant issue in Jamaica. The details that have emerged over these last months of the deportations of the so- called Windrush generation, the denial of housing, benefits, employment and healthcare to those who have lived their lives in Britain, worked, paid taxes and national insurance, contributed in myriad ways, remind us yet again that institutional racism is alive and well at the heart of the state. In 1999 Sir William Macpherson, chief of the clan Macpherson, descendant of William Macpherson, delivered his report on policing. The Metropolitan police, Macpherson said, were ‘institutionally racist’. He knew his family’s history well. Who can say what part those imperial hauntings played in his understanding of the many failures attending the death of Stephen Lawrence?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/catherine-hall/persons-outside-the-law

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Huge Galaxy Cluster Found Hiding in Plain Sight

By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | June 28, 2018 05:29pm ET

Chandra broadband image of PKS1353-341, showing the bright center and the surrounding diffuse cluster.

Credit: NASA/CXC/MIT

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For the first time, astronomers have discovered a galaxy cluster that was hiding in plain sight, not far from the Milky Way.

This finding might help reveal how the supermassive black holes that likely exist at the hearts of most galaxy clusters influence the clusters' evolution, researchers on the new study said.

Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity. The nearest cluster to the Milky Way is the Virgo cluster, which holds about 2,000 galaxies and is located about 65 million light-years away from Earth, NASA officials said on an image page. [Gigantic Galaxy Cluster Blazes in Amazing New Hubble Photo]

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In 2012, astronomers discovered the Phoenix cluster, the brightest in X-ray light of any cluster found yet. Located about 7 billion light-years away from Earth, the Phoenix cluster is named after the constellation in which it dwells.

Further investigation revealed that prior work had detected this giant but had not recognized it as a cluster; its central galaxy was so bright in X-rays that scientists had misidentified it as a single bright spot instead of the heart of a cluster. This led the new study's researchers to wonder how many similar clusters might have escaped detection,they said.

Now, the researchers have discovered a Phoenix-like cluster located about 2.4 billion light-years from Earth around a quasar named PKS1353-341. They estimated that the cluster has a mass equal to about 690 trillion times that of Earth's sun; in comparison, recent estimates of the Milky Way's massrange between 400 billion and 780 billion times that of the sun.

The central galaxy of this cluster is incredibly bright: about 46 billion times more luminous than Earth's sun. The most likely source of all this energy is an extraordinarily hot disk of matter whirling into a supermassive black hole millions of times the mass of the sun, the researchers said.

This is the first result of the Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight (CHiPS) survey, which analyzes data from the ROSAT, 2MASS, WISE, SUMSS and NVSS all-sky surveys to find bright sources of infrared, radio and X- ray light. CHiPS aims to discover previously unseen, nearby and massive galaxy clusters that were incorrectly identified as isolated bright points of X-ray light.

The recent finding suggests that "there might be many of these missing clusters in our local universe," study lead author Taweewat Somboonpanyakul, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Space.com. "We should have an answer of whether or not Phoenix represents the most extreme central cluster region in the universe within the next year or two."

Discovering more Phoenix-like clusters might help solve mysteries regarding the evolution of galaxy clusters, the researchers said. These puzzles include the "cooling flow problem," wherein computer simulations have predicted the presence of more cool gas and newborn stars than are actually seen within the most-luminous galaxies in a cluster. Future analysis of Phoenix-like clusters may confirm that the activity of supermassive black holes suspected to lurk at the centers of many clusters helps explain this puzzle, the researchers said.

The scientists detailed their findings online June 14 in a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

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Magellan PISCO image of the inner part of the galaxy cluster, showing the central giant elliptical galaxy.

Credit: LCO/MIT

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. https://www.space.com/41026-huge-galaxy-cluster-hiding-plain-sight.html

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THE EMPTY UNIVERSE

Random upsurges of repulsive energy in what theorists call the "inflaton field" may have resulted in the sudden exponential expansion of space, producing a huge universe like ours.

Today's selection -- from The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. If all of the protons, neutrons, and electrons, the very things we think of as most important, were completely removed, the total mass/energy of the universe would be only slightly diminished. And 100 billion years from now, the universe will be a largely empty place:

"In the 1990s, two groups of astronomers, one led by Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the other led by Brian Schmidt at the Australian National University, set out to determine the deceleration -- and hence the total mass/energy -- of the universe by measuring the recession speeds of type la supernovae. ...

"The groups concluded that the expansion of the universe slowed down for the first 7 billion years after the initial outward burst, much like a car slowing down as it approaches a highway tollbooth. This was as expected. But the data revealed that, like a driver who hits the gas pedal after gliding through the EZ-Pass lane, the expansion of the universe has been accelerating ever since. The expansion rate of

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space 7 billion years ATB was less than the expansion rate 8 billion years ATB, which was less than the expansion rate 9 billion years ATB, and so on, all of which are less than the expansion rate today. The expected deceleration of spatial expansion has turned out to be an unexpected acceleration.

"But how could this be? Well, the answer provides the corroborating second opinion regarding the missing 70 percent of mass/energy that physicists had been seeking.

"If you cast your mind back to 1917 and Einstein's introduction of a cosmological constant, you have enough information to suggest how it might be that the universe is accelerating. Ordinary matter and energy give rise to ordinary attractive gravity, which slows spatial expansion. But as the universe expands and things get increasingly spread out, this cosmic gravitational pull, while still acting to slow the expansion, gets weaker. And this sets us up for the new and unexpected twist. If the universe should have a cosmological constant -- and if its magnitude should have just the right, small value -- up until about 7 billion years ATB its gravitational repulsion would have been overwhelmed by the usual gravitational attraction of ordinary matter, yielding a net slowing of expansion, in keeping with the data. But then, as ordinary matter spread out and its gravitational pull diminished, the repulsive push of the cosmological constant (whose strength does not change as matter spreads out) would have gradually gained the upper hand, and the era of decelerated spatial expansion would have given way to a new era of accelerated expansion.

"In the late 1990s, such reasoning and an in-depth analysis of the data led both the Perlmutter group and the Schmidt group to suggest that Einstein had not been wrong some eight decades earlier when he introduced a cosmological constant into the gravitational equations. The universe, they suggested, does have a cosmological constant. Its magnitude is not what Einstein proposed, since he was chasing a static universe in which gravitational attraction and repulsion matched precisely, and these researchers found that for billions of years repulsion has dominated. But that detail notwithstanding, should the discovery of these groups continue to hold up under the close scrutiny and follow-up studies now under way, Einstein will have once again seen through to a fundamental feature of the universe, one that this time took more than eighty years to be confirmed experimentally.

"The recession speed of a supernova depends on the difference between the gravitational pull of ordinary matter and the gravitational push of the 'dark energy' supplied by the cosmological constant. Taking the amount of matter, both visible and dark, to be about 30 percent of the critical density, the supernova researchers concluded that the accelerated expansion they had observed required an outward push of a cosmological constant whose dark energy contributes about 70 percent of the critical density.

"This is a remarkable number. If it's correct, then not only does ordinary matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons -- constitute a paltry 5 percent of the mass/energy of the universe, and not only does some currently unidentified form of dark matter constitute at least five times that amount, but also the majority of the mass/energy in the universe is contributed by a totally different and rather mysterious form of dark energy that is spread throughout space. If these ideas are right, they dramatically extend the Copernican revolution: not only are we not the center of the universe, but the stuff of which we're made is like flotsam on the cosmic ocean. If protons, neutrons, and electrons had been left out of the grand design, the total mass/energy of the universe would hardly have been diminished.

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"But there is a second, equally important reason why 70 percent is a remarkable number. A cosmological constant that contributes 70 percent of the critical density would, together with the 30 percent coming from ordinary matter and dark matter, bring the total mass/energy of the universe right up to the full 100 percent predicted by inflationary cosmology! Thus, the outward push demonstrated by the supernova data can be explained by just the right amount of dark energy to account for the unseen 70 percent of the universe that inflationary cosmologists had been scratching their heads over. The supernova measurements and inflationary cosmology are wonderfully complementary. They confirm each other. Each provides a corroborating second opinion for the other. ...

"Early on, the energy of the universe was carried by the inflaton field, which was perched away from its minimum energy state. Because of its negative pressure, the inflaton field drove an enormous burst of inflationary expansion. Then, some 10-35 seconds later, as the inflaton field slid down its potential energy bowl, the burst of expansion drew to a close and the inflaton released its pent-up energy to the production of ordinary matter and radiation. For many billions of years, these familiar constituents of the universe exerted an ordinary attractive gravitational pull that slowed the spatial expansion. But as the universe grew and thinned out, the gravitational pull diminished. About 7 billion years ago, ordinary gravitational attraction became weak enough for the gravitational repulsion of the universe's cosmological constant to become dominant, and since then the rate of spatial expansion has been continually increasing.

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"About 100 billion years from now, all but the closest of galaxies will be dragged away by the swelling space at faster-than-light speed and so would be impossible for us to see, regardless of the power of telescopes used. If these ideas are right, then in the far future the universe will be a vast, empty, and lonely place."

author: Brian Greene

title: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality

publisher: Vintage Books

date: Copyright 2004 by Brian R. Greene

pages: 294-301

https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3657

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Lovers of Wisdom

Jim Holt

JULY 19, 2018 ISSUE

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, translated from the Greek by Pamela Mensch, edited by James Miller

Oxford University Press, 676 pp., $45.00

De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images

Plato, Pythagoras, and Solon; fresco in St. George’s Church, Suceava, Romania, sixteenth century

Poor Diogenes Laertius. He gets no respect. A “perfect ass”—“asinus germanus”—one nineteenth-century scholar called him. “Dim-witted,” said Nietzsche. An “ignoramus,” declared the twentieth-century classicist Werner Jaeger. In his lyric moods he wrote “perhaps the worst verses ever published,” an anthologist pronounced. And he had “no talent for philosophical exposition,” declares The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

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Then why waste time on him? For this excellent reason: Diogenes Laertius compiled the sole extant work from antiquity that gives anything like a comprehensive picture of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. He may have been a flaming mediocrity. He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.” Eighty percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen supposedly said. Well, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers showed up. And by dint of that, its author has become what Nietzsche called “the night watchman of the history of Greek philosophy: no one can enter into it unless he has given him the key.”

What made this fellow so lucky? It’s not hard to explain why certain works survive. We still have Plato’s dialogues because they were diligently preserved by the Academy. Aristotle too founded a school, and his treatises were widely copied and studied. (Still, the nineteen or so dialogues Aristotle composed—esteemed for their literary quality by Cicero as “a river of flowing gold”—were somehow mislaid by Western civilization.) But Diogenes Laertius didn’t have a school, as far as anyone knows. In fact, almost nothing is known about the man. Even his slightly absurd Greco-Roman name is a puzzle—was “Laertius” some kind of nickname? Judging from the historical references in Lives (which stop just short of the Neoplatonists), he probably lived early in the third century CE. There is a hint in his text that he might have been a native of the eastern city of Nicea. Beyond that he is a cipher. That his work should endure, when the vast majority of the philosophical writings he drew on perished, may simply have been a “quirk of fate”—so guesses James Miller, the editor of this welcome new translation.

If so, it was not an altogether unhappy quirk. Despite the ridicule to which he has been subjected, Diogenes Laertius has some undeniable virtues. It is true that he shows little interest in, and scant understanding of, actual philosophical reasoning. But he is keenly attuned to the philosopher as a social type, and an eccentric one at that. Philosophy to him was not a mere body of propositions; it was a way of life, one that pretended to be superior to conventional modes of human existence. He treats his subjects as public exemplars, for good or ill, of the precepts they advanced. The tension between logosand bios—between doctrine and life—keeps his heap of often dubious biographical reportage from sinking into tedium. So too do his flickers of irony: his philosophers are often “eminent” in the same sense that Lytton Strachey’s Victorians were. The life of reason, though noble on the whole, is seen to be hedged about by hypocrisy and absurdity. Even Nietzsche, who as a young philologist cast scorn on Diogenes Laertius for his mindlessly slipshod ways, came to prefer his work to “the soporific fumes” of more scholarly sources, because in it “there lives at least the spirit of the ancient philosophers.”

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is organized into ten “books,” each of which is devoted to one or more philosophical schools and their founders. Plato gets his own book (the third); so does Epicurus (the tenth and final). Other figures afforded ample space include Zeno (the Stoic) of Citium, golden-thighed Pythagoras, Pyrrho the Skeptic, Aristotle, and Socrates. On the other hand, important figures like Parmenides and Anaximander get short shrift, and the entry for Cebes, a disciple of Socrates, reads in its entirety: “Cebes was a Theban. Three of his dialogues survive: The Tablet, The Seventh Day, Phrynichus.” (These dialogues are now lost.) An especially complete portrait is given of Diogenes of Sinope, the most prominent of the Cynics. And this is not the only Diogenes in play. There is also an entry for the less famous Diogenes of Apollonia, whom Diogenes Laertius, in an embarrassment of Diogeneses, manages to confuse with Diogenes of Smyrna. (It should be noted that Diogenes Laertius lived five or six centuries later than the multiple Diogeneses he writes about.)

In all, over eighty individual figures get entries—including one apparently rather clever “lady-philosopher,” Hipparchia the Cynic. (A couple of female students of Plato are also mentioned, one of whom is reported “to

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have worn men’s clothes.”) The author typically says something about the philosopher’s family origins and his teachers, then moves on to anecdotes about his life and apothegms expressing his opinions. We are furnished with details of his sex life, the more scandalous the better. Letters (some spurious) and wills are quoted, and the philosopher’s written works are listed. These stacks of titles, sometimes extending over several pages, are extremely valuable, since the works in question (like the aforementioned dialogues of Aristotle) have generally vanished. Finally, we are given an account, or several alternative accounts, of the philosopher’s death, often with an ironizing comment by the author in what he calls “my own playful verses.”

The principle of selection for these biographical materials is simple: cram in everything, without regard to plausibility or philosophical relevance. Physical details are abundant, if not always consistent. We are told of Zeno the Stoic, for example, that “he was lean, longish, and swarthy,” but also that he was “thick-legged, flabby, and weak”; also that “he delighted…in green figs and sunbathing.” Plato is “weak-voiced” but mocked for his “long-windedness.” Aristotle had thin calves and small eyes, wore fine clothes and lots of rings, and “spoke with a lisp.”

If the principle of selection for Lives is “anything goes,” its principle of organization is more definite—and not what we are used to today. Recent histories of Greek philosophy proceed both by chronology and filiation of ideas, falling into three broad chapters. First come the pre-Socratics, who were concerned with questions about the world’s origins and basic makeup—that is, with natural philosophy. Then comes the pivotal figure of Socrates, who turned philosophy in an ethical direction by asking the question “How to live?,” followed by Plato and Aristotle, who expanded its scope to take in not just ethics and natural philosophy, but also metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. Finally come the Hellenistic schools—Cynics, Stoics, Skeptics, and Epicureans—who narrowed the scope again by making philosophy primarily an ethical inquiry: an attempt to find the formula for the good life.

That is the scheme followed by, for example, Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy. Diogenes Laertius employs a very different one. He is what is called a doxographer. His concern is to catalog the opinions (doxai in Greek) of each famous philosopher, without much regard to how they might have arisen in reaction against the proposals of earlier speculative thinkers. Instead of viewing Greek philosophy as an evolving conceptual inquiry—with an inflection point at Socrates—he takes it to be a cluster of institutional schools. And he organizes these schools not chronologically, but by geography. There is an eastern or “Ionian” succession, originating in the city of Miletus (on the coast of present-day Turkey), and a western or “Italian” succession, originating in Greek colonies in Italy (notably Elea) and Sicily.

Diogenes Laertius treats these as two parallel traditions, with Athens as the convergent point. He devotes the first seven books to the “Ionians,” who range from Thales to Aristotle and beyond; and the last three books to the “Italians,” who range from Pythagoras to Epicurus. This jumbles not only chronology but also lines of influence. For example, Zeno of Elea, who flourished well before Plato and Aristotle, and whose ingenious paradoxes stimulated them both, counts as an “Italian,” so he is presented well after they are. Confusingly, he is also presented well after the other famous Zeno, Zeno of Citium, the much later founder of Stoicism.

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers proved highly influential when it was printed in Latin during the Renaissance. Montaigne stuffed his essays with anecdotes drawn from it, declaring that he was “equally curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the world as to know the diversity of their doctrines.” Well into the modern era, historians were still following Diogenes’s doxagraphic model: dividing philosophers into institutional “schools” and collecting their sayings.

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But around the turn of the nineteenth century that began to change. German historians, vigorously debating the nature of history, sought to trace a longer conceptual arc in the unfolding of philosophy, one transcending schools and geography. The most powerful advocate of this new approach was Hegel. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel judged the work of Diogenes Laertius harshly. “A philosophic spirit cannot be ascribed to it,” he declared; “it rambles about amongst bad anecdotes extraneous to the matter in hand.” What is important, Hegel argued, is not that a philosopher lived in such-and-such a way and said this or that; rather, it is how the philosopher fits into the evolution of human consciousness toward truth.

After Hegel, the reputation of Diogenes Laertius suffered a sharp decline among both classicists and historians of philosophy—as witness the abusive quotations I opened with. Yet one abuser, Nietzsche, later turned into a passionate (if ambivalent) defender. As a philologist, Nietzsche had contempt for the sloppy scholarship that went into Lives. But as a philosophical subversive, he had two motives for championing the work. The first was his hatred of Socrates’s moral optimism—a precursor, he thought, to slavish Christian morality—and his preference for what he saw as the darkly “tragic” worldview of the pre-Socratics. From the materials that Diogenes Laertius had preserved on figures like haughty Heraclitus and Etna-leaping Empedocles, Nietzsche hoped to recapture a sense of pre-Socratic tragic grandeur in Greek culture. His second motive for championing Lives was a more general one. Whereas Hegel insisted that the biography of a philosopher was irrelevant to his conceptual contribution, Nietzsche took the opposite view: bios is the ultimate test of logos. He wrote:

The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves anything, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.

Now, one is loath to put oneself in the position of adjudicating between Hegel and Nietzsche. In this case, however, I think it is safe to render a verdict, if a disappointingly bland one: they are both partly right. The philosophers chronicled by Diogenes Laertius fall into two broad categories: those who are primarily interested in the ethical question of how to live and those who aren’t. In treating the former, he does a pretty good job; in treating the latter, he is horrible.

Take Plato. He was interested in the question of how to live. In fact, his entire philosophy can be seen as emerging from an attempt to make sense of Socrates’s good life, and of the Socratic claim that virtue equals knowledge. But Plato’s dialogues—happily preserved—encompass metaphysical and epistemological doctrines that go far beyond ethics. And Diogenes Laertius’s account of those doctrines in his book on Plato can only be deemed inane. Page after page is given over to enumeration (“There are three kinds of friendship…. There are five kinds of medicine…. There are six kinds of rhetoric”), making Plato’s works seem an exercise in trivial taxonomy. Only in the penultimate paragraph is there the merest hint of his most important metaphysical innovation, the Theory of Forms. To say Diogenes Laertius had “no talent for philosophical exposition” is an understatement: he had an anti-talent.

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Vatican Museums and Galleries/Tarker/Bridgeman Images

Heraclitus of Ephesus; detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, circa 1509

And how does Plato’s life, as recounted in Lives, serve as a test of his philosophy? We are told that when Dionysius I of Syracuse angrily said to Plato, “You talk like an old fart,” Plato intrepidly replied, “And you like a tyrant”—the sort of standard anti-tyrant story that, according to the Plato expert Gilbert Ryle, deserves “no credence.” We are told that Plato, a childless bachelor, was a busy seducer of women and boys, and that he addressed verses to a young girl urging her to give up her virginity to him—details lifted from the now lost On the Luxuriousness of the Ancients, by a dodgy scandal-monger called the Pseudo-Aristippus. And we are told that Plato may have died from a lice infestation: a presumably unedifying end for this otherworldly philosopher.

Such a preposterous amalgam of myth and hearsay leaves us siding with Hegel’s dim assessment of Diogenes Laertius. But then consider him on the Hellenistic schools. He is our main source for the lives and doctrines of Diogenes the Cynic, Zeno the Stoic, Pyrrho the Skeptic, and Epicurus. All these figures focused primarily, if not exclusively, on a single ethical question: What is the formula for the good life? The Stoics equated happiness with virtue, the Skeptics equated it with the tranquility that arises from suspending judgment, and so on. Their views on the best mode of life were not so much argued for as dogmatically asserted. And their metaphysical predilections, when they had any, tended to be at the service of their ethics. Epicurus, for instance, favored atomism because its randomness meant we didn’t have to worry about the gods.

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These Hellenistic philosophies of life, short on important reasoning but long on practical prescription, are eminently suited to the critique proposed by Nietzsche: How did the lives go of those who propounded them? And here is where Diogenes Laertius doesn’t let us down.

Consider his portrait of Diogenes the Cynic. (It is interesting that Hegel thought the Cynics were too unsystematic to be considered philosophers, whereas Nietzsche aspired to be a modern-day Cynic.) The Cynic philosophy is a tough one to live by, involving as it does a spurning of conventional values and a resolve to live ascetically, by the rudest standards of nature—like a dog. (“Cynic” comes from kyon, the Greek word for dog.) Diogenes fully embodied this ideal, hewing so strongly to his idiosyncratic notion of virtue that Plato reportedly called him a “Socrates gone mad.” He lived in a disused wine tub, subsisted on abandoned scraps, and subjected himself to every hardship. He was contemptuous of power: when Alexander the Great offered to grant him a wish, Diogenes tersely replied, “Stand out of my light.” He outraged standards of decency by openly pleasuring himself in the marketplace and declaring, “If only one could relieve hunger by rubbing one’s belly.” (His recourse to public masturbation rates a double mention in Lives.)

Yet his cleverness in debate, his witty asperities, and his cussed integrity evidently made him beloved by Athenians. He also has modern appeal—not as a Mr. Natural avant la lettre, but rather as an opponent of all things tribal and provincial. When asked where he came from, he declared (using the Greek term cosmopolites), “I’m a citizen of the world.” When asked what he found most beautiful, he said, “Freedom of speech.” As a model of his philosophy, which emphasized praxis over abstract theorizing, he made a strong impression on his biographer, who concludes, “Such were his views and he clearly acted in accordance with them.”

Therein lies the value, admittedly curate’s-eggish, of Lives. But why a new translation? The old Loeb Library version by R.D. Hicks, first published in 1925, served well enough for almost a century. But this one by Pamela Mensch, a distinguished translator of ancient Greek, is superior in three respects. First, it is based on a more accurate edition of the Greek text, made by Tiziano Dorandi in 2013. Second, Mensch avoids the bowdlerization that the Hicks translation was often guilty of. Here is one example, from the life of the Academic philosopher Arcesilaus, involving a sodomitic jest:

Hicks: Again, when some one of immodest life denied that one thing seemed to him greater than another, he [Arcesilaus] rejoined, “Then six inches and ten inches are all the same to you?”

Mensch: To a man who let himself be penetrated and who recalled to him the doctrine that one thing is not greater than another, Arcesilaus asked whether a ten-incher did not seem to him greater than a six-incher.

Until I read the new version, I thought I was the one with the dirty mind.

Third, the Mensch translation is furnished with a weighty apparatus of footnotes that are delightfully revealing of Greek history and folkways. For example, an otherwise puzzling reference by Diogenes Laertius to a radish is cleared up by a footnote informing us that one Athenian punishment for adultery “involved inserting a radish in the rectum of the guilty man.” Other virtues of this new edition of Lives include the hundreds of philosophy-inspired artworks with which the editor has chosen to adorn the text (a de Chirico, a Daumier, a Francesco Clemente…) and sixteen superb essays by such scholars as Anthony Grafton, Ingrid Rowland, and Glenn W. Most. (I am particularly indebted to André Laks’s essay, “Diogenes Laertius and the Pre-Socratics.”)

From time to time while making my way through Lives, I was moved to ponder what some future Diogenes Laertius might make of the present philosophical era. Which figures would strike him as models for living?

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Whose dramatic public gestures, whose devastating coruscations would he record? Who would strike him as a “philosopher” in the original Pythagorean sense: a lover of wisdom?

The Columbia philosopher Arthur Danto, in a somewhat acidulated “Letter to Posterity,” published shortly before his death in 2013, wrote, “Never, in my entire experience, have I encountered a philosopher I thought of as wise.” Most of his professional peers, he went on to say, were “shallow, vain, silly” compared with the best of humanity. Surely, though, we can think of a few philosophers from the last century who were as existentially impressive as those in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein comes to mind; so does Simone Weil; perhaps Iris Murdoch, with her amatory adventurousness and devotion to a Platonic ideal of the Good; also Derek Parfit, who burned with a hard gem-like flame in pursuit of philosophical truth.

I think a future Diogenes Laertius might be especially attracted to a lesser-known figure of our era, the Columbia philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, who upon his death in 2004 was justly memorialized in The New York Times Magazine as “one of the rare philosophers who lived a genuinely philosophical life.”* Morgenbesser was revered for his dialectical cleverness, his anticonventional ways, his willingness to suffer for philosophy, and especially his rapier-like flashes of humor. Like Diogenes the Cynic, he embodied the spoudogeloios (seriocomic) ideal even in extreme circumstances. During the 1968 student uprising at Columbia, Morgenbesser joined a human chain of protesters and got clubbed by the police. When later asked about the beating, he pronounced it “unjust but not unfair”: “It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but it was not unfair because they hit everyone else too.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/lovers-of-wisdom-laertius-philosophers/

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Why non-smokers are getting lung cancer

Lung cancer is commonly associated with smoking. But rates of the disease among non-smokers – and women – are rising.

 By Naomi Elster

As a lung cancer researcher and patient advocate at Trinity College Dublin, Anne-Marie Baird gets mixed responses when she tells people about her profession. One of the more memorable was when, at a scientific conference, she was asked “Why would you even bother researching that? They deserve it – and they’re all going to die anyway.”

Lung cancer is the most common cancer globally, with 1.8 million new cases diagnosed worldwide in 2012 (the most up-to-date figures available). Although 58% of new cases were in developing countries, the disease is a widespread problem – 45,000 people are diagnosed with it annually in the UK, 230,000 in the US and 12,500 in Australia.

Making matters worse, over the last few decades, patient survival has barely improved. In 1971-1972, the chance of surviving for 10 years after diagnosis was just 3%. By 2010-2011, 5%. Over the same period, a woman with breast cancer nearly doubled her chance of living 10 years after diagnosis – from 40% to 78.5%.

A common view of lung cancer is that it is self-inflicted by smoking – and that the problem will eventually disappear when everyone gives up the habit. But aside from the fact that none of this helps former or current smokers who currently have the disease, there are two major flaws with this thinking.

First, lung cancer cases aren’t declining across the board.

The gender gap is one obvious example. More men than women still are diagnosed with lung cancer – in the US, a man’s lifetime risk is 1 in 15 while a woman’s is 1 in 17. But while a recent US study found that rate of lung cancer among men continues to fall, in young white women it has increased. And globally, while the number of men diagnosed with lung cancer has dropped over the last two decades, among women it’s risen by 27%.

Researchers aren’t sure why. But there is some science to suggest that women might react differently to nicotine, and that women’s DNA is damaged more easily and more profoundly by carcinogens in tobacco.

The health risks to women also may be becoming apparent later because women began smoking after men. Few women smoked in the 1920s in the US, for example. But as the habit began to be marketed – and seen – as a symbol of emancipation, female smoking rates rose. One study of more than 100 countries found that the link between gender equality and female smoking rates endures.

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“In countries where women have higher empowerment, women’s smoking rates are higher than men’s,” write researchers Sara Hitchman and Geoffrey Fong.

As a result, though men are five times as likely to smoke as women globally, that’s not true in many countries. In the US, 22% of men and 15% of women smoke; in Australia, 19% of men and 13% of women. And the younger the cohort, the less of a gender gap. Of 13 to 15-year-olds, 12% of girls smoke compared to under 15% of boys in the US; in Australia, 5% of adolescents of both ages. In France and the UK, more 15-year-old girls smoke than 15-year-old boys.

“Women’s empowerment must continue,” write Hitchman and Fong. “But does the bad necessarily have to follow from the good?”

Second hand

But while smoking causes approximately 85% of lung cancers – and the single biggest thing we can do to reduce our risk of getting lung (and other) cancers is not to smoke – not smoking is not a guarantee.

“Non-smoking lung cancer is not a trivial issue,” says Charles Swanton, chief clinician of Cancer Research UK. “In my practice, 5-10% of patients have never smoked.”

This, too, seems to affect women differently: one study has found that one in five women who develop lung cancer have never smoked, compared to one in 10 men. A review of lung cancer patients undergoing surgery from 2008 to 2014 in the UK, meanwhile, found that 67% of those who never had smoked were female.

Part of this disparity likely stems from the exposure of non-smoking women to secondhand smoke. Even if women have been catching up in some countries, the fact that more men than women historically have smoked means the chance of a non-smoking woman being married to a husband who smokes is higher than vice versa.

Making matters worse, as the World Health Organisation points out, “Women and children often lack power to negotiate smoke-free spaces, including in their homes.” Secondhand smoke increases the chance of a non-smoker getting lung cancer by 20-30% and causes 430,000 deaths worldwide each year – 64% of which are women.

Gender-based roles may also be relevant in some situations. The use of indoor coal fires for cooking and heating have been linked to lung cancer in non-smoking women in China, and certain Indian cooking fuels have similarly been shown to increase risk of lung cancer.

One US study reported that 17% of people diagnosed with the most common form of lung cancer in 2011- 2013 had never smoked

Meanwhile, the proportion of lung cancer patients who never have smoked is going up. One US study reported that 17% of people diagnosed with the most common form of lung cancer in 2011-2013 had never smoked, compared to 8.9% of people diagnosed in 1990-1995. In the UK, researchers reported that the proportion of non-smokers undergoing surgery for lung cancer jumped from 13% to 28% from 2008 to 2014. And in Taiwan, the proportion of never-smoker patients increased from 31% in 1999-2002 to 48% in 2008-2011.

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These proportions may represent fewer people smoking overall, even as other risk factors (say, cooking fumes) remain equally dangerous. It’s also important to remember that the majority of lung cancer patients remain smokers.

But even small percentages have an impact: just 0.2% of the female non-smokers in the UK Million Women Study were diagnosed with lung cancer, but that adds up to 1,469 women who had never smoked getting the disease.

Smoking-related lung cancers and non-smoking related lung cancers are very different. Different genes are changed, or mutated, in each. For non-smokers, cancer is more commonly caused by changes in the EGFR gene – which can be targeted by relatively new and effective lung cancer drugs.

Cancer cause

In general, cancers develop when the normal processes which keep us healthy and alive by making new cells go wrong. Carcinogenic chemicals, ultraviolet light and viruses can all damage the DNA in cells, causing a cancerous malfunction. But in many cancers there isn’t an identifiable, external risk – and this may be the case for some of the non-smokers who get lung cancer.

But aside from coal fires and cooking fuels, there are other factors, such as radon gas or asbestos, which can increase a person’s chances of getting lung cancer.

There also have been fears – and headlines – about air pollution, which was listed as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2013. The agency estimated that 223,000 annual lung cancer deaths could be attributed to PM2.5s, tiny particles that come from diesel exhausts and construction. More than half of these deaths were in China and other East Asian countries, which have seen rapid industrialisation and resulting smoggy cities. In the UK, about eight in 100 lung cancer cases each year stem from exposure to PM2.5s. (Find out more about air pollution and its effects in the BBC series So I can breathe).

Still, as Cancer Research UK puts it: “Air pollution increases the risk of lung cancer but the risk is small for each individual so it’s important to keep this in perspective and not shut yourself away because it’s difficult to avoid some air pollution.”

Smoke screen

Despite the media attention paid to non-smoking-related risks, most non-smokers have a “false sense of safety” about lung cancer – which can make matters worse. If they see lung cancer as unlikely, even when their symptoms are typical they tend not spot them early enough, so they tend to be diagnosed when their cancer is at an advanced stage.

That makes it much more difficult to treat. Within a year of diagnosis, 70% of lung cancer patients whose disease was caught early will still be alive, compared with just 14% of patients whose tumour was already at an advanced stage.

“Anybody who has sinister chest symptoms needs to seek urgent medical advice, especially if these are long- term or not resolved with antibiotics,” Swanton says. In particular, coughing up blood is “a red flag symptom”, whether someone ever has smoked or not.

After being diagnosed, the stigma of lung cancer can also be difficult.

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After being diagnosed, the stigma of lung cancer can also be difficult. “Not a lot of people want to come out and say, ‘I’m a lung cancer patient’,” Baird says. “With breast and other cancers, people say it more freely.”

Due to the general assumption that people with lung cancer are smokers, those who have never taken a puff still suffer from the stigma that they ‘caused’ their own disease, either.

US researchers interviewed lung cancer patients including smokers, recent quitters, and never-smokers. Even some of the never-smokers reported negative responses from their medical team.

One participant who had never smoked told the researchers: “The first negative reaction I got was in the hospital, from the respiratory therapist… She said this under her breath while I was having respiratory therapy post-op, ‘That’s what you get for smoking.’”

That stigma has also meant that lung cancer receives only a small share of the billions of dollars globally that are ploughed into researching cancer. In Canada, for example, which has the second-highest rate of lung cancer in the world, the disease receives just 7% of research funding – despite causing 25% of cancer deaths. The opposite has been reported for breast cancer.

Still, there are reasons to be hopeful. In the last few years UK expenditure on lung cancer research, for example, has been climbing, making up 11.5% of the total money spent on total cancer research in the 2016- 17 financial year.

Meanwhile, Swanton is leading the £14 million TRACERx study, which will examine how lung cancers change over time in 850 patients. Studies like this give researchers the potential to delve deeper into the differences from patient to patient, between smokers and non-smokers, men and women. Understanding these differences makes it possible to design more effective treatments for individual patients.

The future of lung cancer is a more hopeful one. But a catchphrase used by those campaigning for more funding into research for lung cancer should serve as a reminder to all of us about what is at stake.

“Lung cancer doesn’t discriminate, and neither should you.” http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180625-why-the-rate-of-women-getting-lung-cancer-is-rising

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Surreal Paintings by Matthew Grabelsky Take the New York City Subway for a Wild Ride

ANDREW LASANE

New York City is sometimes affectionately (or disaffectionately) referred to as a “concrete jungle,” but for Los Angeles-based artist Matthew Grabelsky it’s more of a big cageless zoo. Using the New York City subway system as the setting for his work, Grabelsky paints surreal portraits of people who are seemingly normal from the neck down, but who have had their heads replaced by animals, both wild and domesticated.

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Having grown up in New York and being fascinated by the imagery of Greek mythology as a kid, Grabelsky’s paintings are an exploration of human nature and of the way that animals represent various parts of the human subconscious. “The characters are symbolic of the kinds of thoughts that lie under the surface of people’s minds, and they reveal that the most extraordinary can exist in the most ordinary of everyday settings,” the artist told Prohbtd in an interview. “This theme is communicated through the juxtaposition of these ostensibly irrational images with otherwise completely mundane scenes. My idea is that my creatures are not original but are ultimately part of a much larger cultural continuum.”

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Since graduating Cum Laude from Rice University in 2002 with a BA in Art and Art History (and a BS in Astrophysics), Matthew Grabelsky has shown in dozens of group exhibitions and solo shows around the world. In 2017 he was tapped by electronic musician Moby to paint an album cover featuring a father cow reading a book to his calf. To see more of Grabelsky’s work, follow him on Instagram.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/new-york-city-subway-matthew- grabelsky/?mc_cid=f13be2d8df&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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Earth Has Many More Rivers and Streams Than We Thought, New Satellite Study Finds

Jessica Boddy

Photo: Brent Stirton / Staff (Getty)

Rivers and streams cover much more of the planet than geologists previously estimated, according to a new study published in Science. In total, this new estimate shows that, excluding land with glaciers, Earth is covered by just under 300,000 square miles (773,000 square kilometers) of rivers and streams. That’s more square footage than the state of Texas, and it’s as much as 44 percent higher than previous counts.

The finding has implications for the study of climate change, because rivers exchange greenhouse gasses with the atmosphere, especially when humans pollute their waters.

“It was assumed until about 2006 that rivers and lakes were just a pipe transporting carbon to the ocean,” John Downing, a limnologist and biogeochemist at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told Gizmodo. “But the rivers are leaking gasses into the atmosphere.”

As pollutants like fertilizers and sewage seep into water supplies, gasses including methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide bubble out and drift up into the atmosphere. More river coverage could mean we’re sending even more of those greenhouse gasses into the air than current calculations account for.

“Here’s another reason not to spoil water,” said Downing, who was not involved in the new study. “If you pollute it, you spoil fishing and swimming, but you also spoil the atmosphere.”

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To map out the planet’s rivers and streams, University of North Carolina hydrologists George Allen and Tamlin Pavelsky analyzed thousands of images from a NASA Landsat satellite. Using software developed by Pavelsky, the duo ended up with 58 million river measurements they then used to calculate the total coverage of rivers and streams on Earth.

And they didn’t just blindly trust their software. To make sure the program was reliable, the researchers employed what Allen called “a small army of undergraduates” to vigilantly monitor whether the program was measuring rivers, not roads, and if it was avoiding other mistakes along the way. “They were so enthusiastic,” Pavelsky said. “They did such a great job.”

The researchers estimated river shapes by measuring their widths, as shown here.Graphic: George Allen, Tamlin Pavelsky (“Global extent of rivers and streams,” by G.H. Allen; T.M. Pavelsky at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, NC; G.H. Allen at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX)

Aside from their Texas-sized estimate, the researchers also found that rivers were both narrower and more sparse in human-developed areas, which surprised them. This could be because people are siphoning water for agriculture, draining swamps, and leveeing rivers, but more research will have to be done to say for sure.

Other scientists have made estimates of Earth’s river and stream coverage in the past. Downing, for instance, used the distinct way rivers branch and how much water they move to estimate their global coverage. Others have used elevation and water runoff data to do it. But none have shown river morphology—a river’s shape and direction—like this satellite estimate does, the researchers said.

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“If you look around the world, rivers look different from place to place,” Allen, who recently began a professorship at Texas A&M University, told Gizmodo. “They might be braided, or sinuous, or meandering. And for the most part, current technology doesn’t take into consideration the actual morphology of rivers. This data set is the first of its kind to do this at a global scale on high resolution.”

Downing was impressed by the number of data points Allen and Pavelsky considered, and found their results exciting—especially because the duo’s estimate was within 15 percent of his own.

“I think it’s absolutely terrific,” Downing said. “They put in a massive amount of effort and confirmed the numbers we already had that were created from basic physical principles.”

Having a map of Earth’s river morphology may prove extremely useful when predicting floods, Downing added, or for studying the way rivers behave in the future as the Earth warms. Plus, now that this fine-tuned, river-measuring technique has some reliable results, he said it could be useful to see how river flow rates change from season to season—another good data set to have when working to keep communities safe from floods.

“Rivers are so wonderful, but they can also be dangerous,” Downing said. “Water goes where it wants to go—so it’s good to know where it goes and how much area it’s covering.”

https://gizmodo.com/earth-has-many-more-rivers-and-streams-than-we-thought-1827179134

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What will humans look like in a million years?

By Lucy Jones

To understand our future evolution we need to look to our past

Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel?

Might humans morph into a hybrid species of biological and artificial beings? Or could we become smaller or taller, thinner or fatter, or even with different facial features and skin colour?

Of course, we don’t know, but to consider the question, let’s scoot back a million years to see what humans looked like then. For a start, Homo sapiens didn’t exist. A million years ago, there were probably a few different species of humans around, including Homo heidelbergensis, which shared similarities with both Homo erectus and modern humans, but more primitive anatomy than the later Neanderthal.

Over more recent history, during the last 10,000 years, there have been significant changes for humans to adapt to. Agricultural living and plentiful food have led to health problems that we’ve used science to solve, such as treating diabetes with insulin. In terms of looks, humans have become fatter and, in some areas, taller.

Perhaps, then, we could evolve to be smaller so our bodies would need less energy, suggests Thomas Mailund, associate professor in bioinformatics at Aarhus University, Denmark, which would be handy on a highly-populated planet.

What will happen to our species in the future?

Living alongside lots of people is a new condition humans have to adapt to. Back when we were hunter gatherers, there would’ve been a handful of interactions on a daily basis. Mailund suggests we may evolve in ways that help us to deal with this. Remembering people’s names, for example, could become a much more important skill.

Here’s where the technology comes in. “An implant in the brain would allow us to remember people’s name,” says Thomas. “We know what genes are involved in building the brain that’s good at remembering people’s names. We might just change that. It sounds more like science fiction. But we can do that right now. We can implant it but we don’t know how to wire it up to make it useful. We’re getting there but it’s very experimental.”

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Will our descendants be cyborgs? © Daniel Haug/Getty

“It’s not really a biological question anymore, it’s technological,” he said.

Currently, people have implants to fix an element of the body that’s broken, such as a pacemaker or a hip implant. Perhaps in the future, implants will be used simply to improve a person. As well as brain implants, we might have more visible parts of technology as an element of our appearance, such an artificial eye with a camera that can read different frequencies of colour and visuals.

We’ve all heard of designer babies. Scientists already have the technology to change the genes of an embryo though it’s controversial and no one’s sure what happens next. But in the future, Mailund suggests, it may be seen as unethical not to change certain genes. With that may come choice about a baby’s features, so perhaps humans will look like what their parents want them to look like.

“It’s still going to be selection, it’s just artificial selection now. What we do with breeds of dogs, we’ll do with humans,” said Mailun.

This is all rather hypothetical, but can demographic trends give us any sense of what we may look like in the future?

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Will technology affect our evolution? © Donald Iain Smith/Getty

“Predicting out a million years is pure speculation, but predicting into the more immediate future is certainly possible using bioinformatics by combining what is known about genetic variation now with models of demographic change going forward,” says Dr. Jason A. Hodgson, Lecturer, Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment

Now we have genetic samples of complete genomes from humans around the world, geneticists are getting a better understanding of genetic variation and how it’s structured in a human population. We can’t exactly predict how genetic variation will change, but scientists in the field of bioinformatics are looking to demographic trends to give us some idea.

Hodgson predicts urban and rural area will become increasingly differentiated within people. “All the migration comes from rural areas into cities so you get an increase in genetic diversity in cities and a decrease in rural areas,” he said. “What you might see is differentiation along lines where people live.”

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Genetic diversity will increase in cities and decrease in rural areas © Ryan Deberardinis/EyeEm

It will vary across the world but in the UK, for example, rural areas are less diverse and have more ancestry that’s been in Britain for a longer period of time compared with urban areas which have a higher population of migrants.

Some groups are reproducing at higher or lower rates. Populations in Africa, for example, are rapidly expanding so those genes increase at a higher frequency on a global population level. Areas of light skin colour are reproducing at lower rates. Therefore, Hodgson predicts, skin colour from a global perspective will get darker.

“It’s almost certainly the case that dark skin colour is increasing in frequency on a global scale relative to light skin colour,” he said. “I’d expect that the average person several generations out from now will have darker skin colour than they do now.”

And what about space? If humans do end up colonising Mars, what would we evolve to look like? With lower gravity, the muscles of our bodies could change structure. Perhaps we will have longer arms and legs. In a colder, Ice-Age type climate, could we even become even chubbier, with insulating body hair, like our Neanderthal relatives?

We don’t know, but, certainly, human genetic variation is increasing. Worldwide there are roughly two new mutations for every one of the 3.5 billion base pairs in the human genome every year, says Hodgson. Which is pretty amazing - and makes it unlikely we will look the same in a million years.

By Lucy Jones Featured image by Donald Iain Smith/Getty https://www.bbcearth.com/blog/?article=what-will-humans-look-like-in-a-million-years

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Cyclo Knitter: A Bicycle-Based Machine That Knits a Scarf in Five Minutes

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

The Cyclo Knitter is a bicycle-based machine by design student George Barratt-Jones. The contraption is made from a simple combination of wood and bike parts, and allows one to knit a scarf through light exercise.

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Barratt-Jones came up with the idea one day while waiting for the train in Eindhoven. His invention allows other riders to stay warm while passing time on the platform, and step away with a winter accessory.

If you like this creative knitting mechanism, check out the Rocking Knit, a rocking chair designed by Damien Ludi and Colin Peillex that converts rocking into knitted hats.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/cyclo-knitter-a-bicycle-based-machine-that-knits-a-scarf-in-five- minutes/?mc_cid=f13be2d8df&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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The best way to understand ourselves?

While some stories shape political events, and others still resonate millennia after they were created, a few can offer a unique insight into human nature, writes Fiona Macdonald.

 By Fiona Macdonald

A man talking to a skull. A monologue about suicide, at the porous border between sanity and madness. A girl drowning in a brook, grief-stricken for her father. If David Lynch had made Twin Peaks 400 years ago, he might have come up with something similar. But this was William Shakespeare. In 1596, his son Hamnet died at the age of 11 – and five years later, as the playwright was finishing his tragedy Hamlet, Shakespeare’s father suffered a serious illness. He was to die in September 1601.

“Something must have been at work in Shakespeare, something powerful enough to call forth this linguistic explosion,” writes Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. “As audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, passionate grief, provoked by the death of a loved one, lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy.” The death of his son and the impending death of his father “could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet”. What is revered as one of the greatest works in literature is likely to have sprung from a place of intense emotional suffering.

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Hamlet is a play “about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfilment,” writes Greenblatt (Credit: Alamy)

The crucible in which Hamlet was forged might help explain why the tragedy continues to speak to audiences around the world four centuries on. It came eighth in BBC Culture’s Stories that Shaped the World poll, with voters praising its extraordinary insight into human nature. Hamlet is “the play that exemplifies Shakespeare’s profound understanding of the human psyche in so much of its nuanced extremity… our simultaneous blending of genius and self-sabotage, our capacity for love and hate, creativity and destruction,” claims the US poet, novelist and critic Elizabeth Rosner. According to the UK author and critic Adam Thorpe, it’s a story that has “influenced the way we think about our muddled selves. We enter Hamlet’s inner core and emerge rinsed of illusion.” Hamlet reveals how much stories can teach us about ourselves.

Literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have – David Lodge

As the philosopher Noam Chomsky has said, “we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology” – something the critic and author David Lodge has explored. In his 2004 book Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge argues that “literature is a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive we have… The novel is arguably man’s most successful effort to describe the experience of individual human beings moving through space and time.”

Lodge argues that “The crises are basically the same: we all have the same wishes and the same hopes… in fiction you get models of how other people react” (Credit: Alamy)

On one level, it’s the ability to spy on other people’s thoughts that gives literature this insight. “We do not really know what anybody else is actually thinking at any time – consciousness is a very private thing – and we partly go to literature in its various forms to make up or compensate for the necessary solipsism of our own inner lives,” Lodge tells BBC Culture. “Fundamentally, the reason why we read literary texts is that it

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gives the impression, if it’s successful, of enabling you to understand how other people think. We know what we feel and what we think, and what we hope for and fear, but we don’t really know how other people process these feelings and observations.”

As Greenblatt argues, in Hamlet, Shakespeare “had perfected the means to represent inwardness… coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed Shakespeare’s deepest perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled”.

According to Greenblatt, Hamlet “must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life” (Credit: Alamy)

No one, before or since Shakespeare, made so many separate selves – Harold Bloom

The critic Harold Bloom has gone so far as to claim that “Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us”. The playwright’s characters, Bloom argues in his 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, “are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being… no one, before or since Shakespeare, made so many separate selves”. He credits his own passion for books as stemming from the access they give him into the minds of others: “I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.”

Ways of seeing

That impulse can go beyond simply understanding who we are: reading can shape our sense of ourselves. “Whether it’s Dante when I turned 60 or Alice in Wonderland when I was an adolescent, these stories were for me autobiographical,” Alberto Manguel, writer and director of the National Library of Argentina, tells

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BBC Culture. “I understood perfectly what Alice felt in the world of absurd adults, where she tries as politely as she can to ask intelligent questions, when everything around her seems absurd. That helped me understand the mad world I was in – and later, when I discovered the political world and the Mad Hatter says there is no room at the table, and Alice points out that the table is set for many people and there is lots of room, I felt that was exactly what I was seeing in society, where a group of people like the Mad Hatter were saying to others who were starving that there’s no room at the table.”

“Words reveal to Alice that the only indisputable fact of this bewildering world is that under an apparent rationalism we are all mad,” writes Alberto Manguel (Credit: Alamy)

He insists that reading has given meaning to his life experiences. “I’m certain that if I hadn’t read Alice in Wonderland and Dante, I wouldn’t understand so many aspects of myself.” In his book Curiosity, Manguel claims he might not be able to identify himself in a police line-up: “I’m not sure whether this is because my features age too rapidly and too drastically or because my own self is less grounded in my memory than the printed words I’ve learned by heart.”

Shakespeare somehow recognised the part of my life my English friends had no idea about: the Indian part, in India – Preti Taneja

Identification with a story can come in unexpected ways. Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young reimagines King Lear in modern-day Delhi. Studying the play at school in the UK, she felt a profound connection – one that surprised her. “In King Lear I recognised the Indian extended family I was used to visiting in Delhi each summer,” she has written. “Shakespeare somehow recognised the part of my life my English friends had no idea about – the Indian part, in India.”

King Lear helped her to think about the Partition of India. “No one talked about it at school, yet there was this definite sense that there was a huge story that had brought us to this country, that was the reason I’d been born

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here – and then suddenly there it was, in Shakespeare of all things,” Taneja tells BBC Culture. “This story of partition that leads to civil war, this story of daughters who are forced into performing well for family honour and duty – which is the situation many second-generation immigrant women face.”

“Literature can make us think about how patterns are repeated… generational damage is something that we have to work so hard to reverse,” says Taneja (Credit: Alamy)

By turning king into beggar, obedient daughters into villains, loyal daughter into banished exile, legitimate son into outcast and illegitimate son into insider, King Lear messes with ideas of fixed identities. “There’s an aspect in which almost every character is cast into a position of otherness to themselves,” says Taneja. “Everyone gets swapped around. This play really is about alienation from the self, and exploration of the other within the self – how we reconcile those two sides, and come to terms with the fact that we’re all hybrid beings, and that society isn’t a fixed thing.”

Bloom touched on this when he said that “Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves… he may teach us how to accept change in ourselves as in others, and perhaps even the final form of change.” With characters who gauge what they seem like from others’ perspectives, and then adapt their behaviour accordingly, he believes the plays reveal the process of self-revision – the ability “to change by self-overhearing and then by the will to change”.

A light in the dark

But as well as identifying with characters, we read to find out how people profoundly different from us think. “The canon I was introduced to at school included Philip Larkin, JM Coetzee – all these men writing about masculinity and writing about society with a very particular gaze,” says Taneja. “It felt to me like what I was learning was how I was seen. This is what the male characters they are voicing think of me, and of the world of others that I belong to. There were lots of epiphanies in that – Coetzee is one of my favourite writers

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because his work is so sharp – it taught me about the way that a certain kind of patriarchal masculinity sees me in the world.”

According to Manguel, “the quest to find out who we are… is responsible, in some measure, for our delight in the stories of others” (Credit: Alamy)

Storytelling has an evolutionary role in fostering empathy. As Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Reading encourages us not to reduce others to caricatures. “Unconsciously we begin to accept that the other is always a mystery and that easy characterisations lead nowhere,” says the Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou. “Literature transforms amorphous fear and pity into individualities. It tells us: the other is not what it seems.”

Fiction can place us in uncomfortable positions too. At BBC Culture’s Stories that Shaped the World event, the author Colm Tóibín argued that it should “show you evil so that you would know it”. In the case of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia, he said: “I need to show you someone who was once good… how easily she could become corrupted, what a monster she could become – where you’re almost following her when she comes to murder her husband Agamemnon, thinking ‘I want you to do this’ – you’re pushing the reader’s imagination into areas where the reader might not want to go.”

And just as stories demonstrate that humans are neither straightforwardly ‘good’ nor ‘evil’, they also remind us how quickly we change. “Our readings are never absolutes: literature disallows dogmatic tendencies,” writes Manguel. “Instead, we shift allegiances… if we recognise ourselves in Cordelia today, we may call Goneril our sister tomorrow, and end up, in days to come, kindred spirits with Lear, a foolish, fond old man. This transmigration of souls is literature’s modest miracle.”

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Perhaps most importantly, reading can reaffirm a feeling we all have – that who we are as humans varies from moment to moment. In response to the question posed by the Caterpillar – “Who are you?” – Alice says: “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present. At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180626-the-best-way-to-understand-ourselves

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Magnetic Microrobots Deliver Cells Into Living Animals

The miniscule carriers successfully transported and released live cells at a particular location within living mice.

SUKANYA CHARUCHANDRA

Microrobots of different sizes were found to have different cell-carrying capacities.

LI ET AL., SCI. ROBOT. 3, EAAT8829 (2018)

Researchers used magnetically driven microrobots to carry cells to predetermined spots within living zebrafish and mice, they report in Science Robotics today (June 27). The authors propose using these hair- width gadgets as delivery vehicles in regenerative medicine and cell therapy.

The scientists used a computer model to work out the ideal dimensions for a microrobot; spiky, porous, spherical ones were deemed best for transporting living cells. They printed the devices using a 3-D laser printer and coated the bots with nickel and titanium to make them magnetic and biocompatible, respectively. An external magnetic field applied to the animal then leads the microrobots.

To begin with, the research team tested the ability for the robots to transport cells through cell cultures, blood vessel–like microfluidic chips, and in vivo in zebrafish. Further, they used these microrobots to induce cancer at a specific location within mice by ferrying tumor cells to the spot. The team observed fluorescence at the target site as the labeled cancer cells proliferated.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/magnetic-microrobots-deliver-cells-into-living-animals-64391

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Unique Weathering Pattern Creates Fascinating Geometric Ripples on a Chain Link Fence

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

All images published with the photographer’s permission

Over the past few years, Twitter user @Ben_On_The_Moon has photographed his chain link fence due to a mysterious weathering pattern that has caused groups of concentric rings to appear on the upper side of the fence’s segments. His macro photographs emphasize the intriguing apparitions, which appear like miniature crop circles on the metal bars. Despite his research, he has not discovered the specific cause of the pattern.

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You can see more of @Ben_On_The_Moon’s documentation of the curious phenomena on Twitter. (via Kottke)

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89 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/unique-weathering-chain-link- fence/?mc_cid=f13be2d8df&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

The nuclear bunker in ‘Europe’s North Korea’

Communist Albania was Europe’s most isolated nation. Fearing invasion, its regime built a top-secret nuclear bunker. Today that bunker is an eerie tourist attraction.

 By Stephen Dowling From the road, it was hidden. A long tunnel, carved through the hillside in front, was the only way inside. This was not somewhere you could idly wander – it was the entrance to a military base.

The tunnel, nearly twice the length of a football field, is cooler than the air outside. Here and there, pools of water collect on the floor. A harmonious hum gets louder and louder as you reach the centre of the tunnel. Behind, the guard standing at the tunnel entrance is a silhouette against the bright light, the size of a toy soldier.

In total, you have to walk 656ft (198m) to reach the nondescript parking lot at the end. A grey institutional building looms above. This is Bunk’Art 1, and a few minutes’ walk up the path beside leads into one of the Cold War’s most secretive hideaways.

***

This is, Artemisa Muco says, the best place to be in Tirana on a summer’s day when the mercury is hitting 40°C.

Muco works as one of the guides at Bunk’Art 1. The 24-year-old cultural history graduate spends her days in a place so secretive it was known only as ‘Facility 0774’, an emotionless moniker for a structure built to survive the end of days.

Enver Hoxha was Albania’s ruler for four decades. From the close of World War Two until the mid-1980s, he ruled the country under a brand of Stalinist self-sufficiency designed to turn Albania into a modern independent country. It was a singular path – his zealous adherence to Marxist-Leninism allowed little deviation. Albania broke relations with Yugoslavia in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1961 and China in 1979, all because of a perceived dereliction of socialist duty.

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There are thought to be more than 300 rooms in the once-secret complex (Credit: Stephen Dowling)

With this Stalinist zeal came paranoia. Hoxha, a former partisan who had fought the Germans in World War Two, believed that enemies from both the East and West planned to invade this tiny mountainous country. He ordered an enormous programme of bunker-building, which would allow Albania’s citizens to fight a guerrilla war from a vast network of concrete pillboxes. And while the fighting raged, Hoxha, along with the rest of the ruling elite, would coordinate the resistance from this bunker.

Facility 0774 is the result of Hoxha’s singular paranoia. Built between 1972 and 1978, it boasts more than 300 rooms spread across five subterranean levels, much of it deep inside the foothills of the Mali I Dajtit mountains to the east of the Albanian capital. It is a windowless, claustrophobic memento of the Cold War in one of its most overlooked corners.

Had the West – or indeed the East – invaded, Facility 0774 would have been a bustling place. The country’s entire defence would have been organised from here. There would have been as many as 300 people inside, including the country’s general staff.

The bunker was constructed in complete secrecy

“There would have been enough food, water and fuel here for them to stay inside for a whole year,” says Muco.

The bunker was constructed in complete secrecy. On one wall is an image of Hoxha visiting on the day of its inauguration, one of only a few nights he would spend here before his death in 1985. Despite this, he had his own quarters, complete with a luxurious bed, a secretary’s office, and a bathroom fitted with a diesel-powered shower. The private chambers are decorated in what looks like some kind of dark wood. “It’s fibreboard,”

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says Muco. “All the rest of the rooms, like the prime minister’s, they are made of wood. This is the only room done this way.”

Albania transitioned from one-party rule to parliamentary elections in 1991, but the rest of the decade was marked by chaos – in 1997, the country’s government collapsed after the failure of Ponzi financial schemes, which had swallowed up much of the country’s wealth. Some 2,000 people were killed and many military bases were looted in the resulting mayhem. Facility 0774 was one of them.

The entire complex was built in strict secrecy (Credit: Stephen Dowling)

The bunker complex was last used by the Albanian military for drills in 1999, and then fell into disrepair. It was only in 2014 that it was reopened thanks to the efforts of Italian journalist Carlo Bollino, who wanted to bring this relic of Albania's isolated past into the spotlight.

“I decided to open Bunk'Art 1 in 2014, when the ministry of culture launched a call for ideas to celebrate Albania's 70 years of independence,” he tells BBC Future after our visit. “Until that time there was still no place where a tourist or even an Albanian could know the secrets of the communist period.”

He says he had a powerful reaction on his first visit. “I felt the thrill of exploring a dark, mysterious place that conveyed a sense of history.”

I struggled a lot to make it clear that remembering the facts of the communist period does not mean having nostalgia for communism – Carlo Bollino

When the facility was opened in 2014 for a month, it caused quite a stir – some 70,000 Albanians visited.

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“The Albanian people only knew there’s this bunker we didn’t know about for so many years," says Muco. "As you can see there are homes around here, even the people here around this area when they come here they’re like, ‘Wow’. It’s very impressive for them to see there’s such a building inside the mountain.”

Bollino has tried to build not just a museum – preserving the regime’s bolthole as if it were a time capsule – but to add something else. Several of the rooms have been turned into art installations, each of them displaying a different aspect of the country’s communist past, or riffing off the bunker’s austere surroundings.

The renovated rooms in this labyrinthine complex have been filled with the kind of furniture and fittings of the time. The team have now finished renovating more than 100 of the bunker’s rooms. Much of the rest of the complex remains unrenovated, or simply off-limits – a working army base is nearby, and the facility officially remains part of Albania's Ministry of Defence.

The curators have painstakingly filled the rooms with the kind of equipment that was used at the time (Credit: Stephen Dowling)

Bollino admits it has been a huge challenge. “It was difficult from a logistical point of view, because the place is very wet and any object exposed for a few days is assaulted by mould.

“But the greatest difficulties were cultural: recovering documents and objects from the communist past was very laborious, but even more difficult was the effort to overcome the prejudice towards a place in which I wanted to tell a terrible period in the history of the population. I struggled a lot to make it clear that remembering the facts of the communist period does not mean having nostalgia for communism.”

There are surreal touches. What look like wastepaper baskets adorned with red stars are in fact air purifiers, releasing oxygen to scrub the air of carbon dioxide build up. The distinctive Soviet-style gas masks – the kind

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that Albania had been supplied with when it was friendly with Moscow – dot the corridors, reminding visitors of the nightmarish escalation that would have led to this place becoming a temporary home to 300 people.

One of the rooms is dedicated to the measures that would have been taken in case of nuclear attack (Credit: Stephen Dowling)

The complex is confined, but not small. At its heart lies an assembly hall big enough for hundreds of people. From here, Hoxha and the regime’s elite would have read speeches to those locked inside this nuclear-proof bolthole. It has now become a theatre and concert space – there’s a small bar on the way in – that’s already played host to rock and jazz concerts. There’s a touch of poetic irony; both forms of music were banned under Hoxha’s rule.

Further concerts are just one of the plans for the facility, which is rapidly becoming one of the most popular tourist attractions in Albania. Bollino says he has other plans too.

Muco says that Bunk’Art has tried to remain as politically neutral as possible, without shying away from the facts of Albania’s communist isolation

“My next project concerns one of the south corridors of Bunk'Art 1, in which I want to set up a photographic exhibition with scenes of daily life, always referring to the communist period. It will be an opportunity to introduce visitors to another part of the country that has now disappeared.

“In September I will try a form of immersive theatre: I will revive characters from the past in the corridors of Bunk'Art and visitors can meet and interact with them. It is a first step towards a much more ambitious project concerning an installation based on virtual reality.”

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The bunker corridors are littered with special air purifiers which would have kept the air clean (Credit: Stephen Dowling)

In the meantime, Bunk’Art is becoming a reason to visit Tirana. Senada Murati, one of the team running the complex, says they have started to receive much more interest from visitors from the UK and the US, and even as far afield as New Zealand.

Muco says that Bunk’Art has tried to remain as politically neutral as possible, without shying away from the facts of Albania’s communist isolation. Hoxha’s 40-year rule is believed to have led to nearly 5,500 executions and more than 25,000 imprisonments. Albanian citizens could be shot on sight if they were caught trying to scale the fences that sealed the country’s borders.

“I think the museum has to be really sensitive,” she says. “We present here the bright side and the dark side of communism, so people can decide.

“Some visitors, they come with a picture of Hoxha in their pocket.”

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180622-the-nuclear-bunker-in-europes-north-korea

96 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 454 september 2018

Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila

The War in Five Sieges

Patrick Cockburn

The road to Raqqa, once the de facto Syrian capital of Islamic State, looks surprisingly pastoral. As we approached the city across the plain north of the Euphrates we had to stop the car several times: the road was barred by flocks of sheep. It seemed an encouraging sign of returning normality. But local people explained that shepherds were bringing their flocks to graze here for less happy reasons. Before 2011 this was well-irrigated crop-growing land, but now, after six years of war, the irrigation channels are dry or contain only stagnant water: nobody is maintaining them and there is no electricity to pump water from the Euphrates. Giant grain silos stand just off the road but they have been abandoned or damaged by bombs or shells.

The further we drove into Raqqa, the worse the destruction became: most of the few buildings that are still intact have been taken over as command posts by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-Arab army that with the support of US-led airpower captured Raqqa after a four-month siege last October. There are equal numbers of Arabs and Kurds in the SDF, but the commanders we met were all Kurds. Some of the surviving residents of Raqqa, which before the war had a population of 300,000, are returning, but the streets were mostly empty. Behind one SDF guard post an elderly woman was sorting through the debris of a bombed-out building, looking for scraps of metal and plastic to sell. One of her sons had been killed by a mine, she said, and she needed money to buy food for his wife and daughter. All the buildings in the city centre have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair: some took a direct hit from a bomb or a shell; others still stand but have been gutted by bomb blasts and look uninhabitable.

There were occasional signs of life. Some people had gathered outside a shop selling tea and falafel; a small generator in the street was powering Raqqa’s only working traffic light. Nearby was al-Naeem roundabout, where Islamic State carried out public executions, displaying the severed heads of its victims on the spikes of a metal fence. IS has gone, but the sense of terror it generated during the four years it ruled Raqqa has not. Residents said their fear of IS remains ineradicable – ‘Daesh is in our hearts and minds’ – and they worry that the present moment may only be a pause in the violence. The anxiety is understandable, but the threat may be long-term rather than immediate: SDF commanders say that IS is not carrying out guerrilla attacks, and though there are frequent rumours of ‘stay-behind IS sleeper cells’ they always turn out to be mythical. But the SDF officers are Kurds in control of an Arab city and they know they can’t stay in charge for ever; nor will they always be able to call in airstrikes and artillery fire from the US-led coalition. Even if IS stays away, Raqqa, on the bank of the Euphrates, is in a dangerous position, sandwiched between opposing sides: the Kurds, backed by the US, to the east; and to the west Assad, supported by Russia and Iran.

Many other cities in Syria and Iraq have been wrecked in the course of long sieges. In some cases large districts have been flattened – such as Daraya in Damascus or the Old City in Mosul – but in Raqqa the damage extends across the entire city. This means that there is nowhere that can be used as a base for reconstruction. The UN says it is difficult to find places from where aid can be distributed because IS planted mines and booby traps everywhere. Electricity workers complain that they can’t do their job for the same reason. Months have passed since the siege ended but signs of reconstruction are few. ‘After the war we were at zero and we are still at zero,’ an Arab doctor said. People aren’t being

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vaccinated and only elderly women and children are allowed to pass through Syrian government lines on the other side of the Euphrates to get treatment in Damascus hospitals. ‘The regime thinks everybody here is a terrorist,’ the doctor said. ‘They have always been fascists in Raqqa,’ an unsympathetic Kurd said.

The SDF and the US-led coalition seem to have felt that Raqqa, a city occupied by IS for longer than any other, was a centre of popular support for IS, and so deserving of whatever happened to it. SDF frontline troops called in airstrikes at will to obliterate any resistance. In addition to the bombs, according to a US officer some 35,000 artillery shells were fired into the city during the siege. Nine mass graves have been discovered, only one of which has been opened. It contained 553 bodies: civilian victims of airstrikes, IS fighters and, possibly, patients from a nearby hospital. The coalition maintains in the face of all evidence that it tried to avoid civilian casualties in both Raqqa and Mosul. In Mosul, its spokespeople could argue, the attacking forces had no choice but to inflict heavy civilian casualties since IS fought to the end and tried to kill anyone who attempted to escape. But this argument doesn’t hold good for Raqqa. Here, the siege ended with an ugly twist: civilians expected to be bused out under the terms of a truce, but instead IS fighters and their families were evacuated in a convoy while the civilians were left behind.

The deal between the remaining IS fighters and the besieging forces is documented in ‘“War of Annihilation”: Devastating Toll on Civilians, Raqqa – Syria’, an Amnesty International report published in June. It shows that initial attempts to agree a truce in early October – when IS had been driven back into a single corner of the city, along with a large number of civilians whom they would not allow to escape – were sabotaged by foreign IS fighters, mostly from Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, who discovered they weren’t included in the agreement, which held that Syrian-born fighters could leave the city unharmed. Fearing summary execution, the foreign fighters broke the truce by opening fire on the SDF with mortars and automatic rifles. A second ceasefire deal was arranged for 14 October, and presented by the coalition and the SDF as a humanitarian arrangement, allowing them ‘to focus on defeating Daesh terrorists in Raqqa with less risk of civilian casualties’. In the event, the opposite happened: it was IS fighters – including Saudis and Tunisians, carrying arms and ammunition – who boarded the buses, which took them to territory controlled by IS. The report quotes Jamila, a mother of two: ‘When we heard that there was a truce and we would be allowed to leave Raqqa, we thought this was for us, the civilians, but then when the buses came we realised they were for Daesh. We had to make our own way out of the city.’ After these experiences, people in Raqqa feel that nobody cares what happens to them. They say they are frightened of everybody: IS, the Kurds and Assad.

Raqqa is one example of the prolonged siege warfare that has dominated the wars in Syria and Iraq. The opposing forces have varied from city to city but they include the Syrian and Iraqi armies, the Kurdish SDF, IS, the Syrian non-IS opposition, Iraqi Shia paramilitaries and Hizbullah. In every case, ground troops have only been able to win with the backing of airpower, artillery and advisers most usually supplied by the US-led coalition or Russia. Whether the fighting was in Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq or Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, the way the sieges were conducted was similar. Few combat troops were used: no side could afford heavy losses in street battles with a well-trained enemy. The attackers relied heavily on shelling and bombing to clear the way or to batter the defenders into submission. It was a strategy that always succeeded in the end, but it had the inevitable cost – a cost that governments on all sides invariably lied about – of causing great destruction and civilian loss of life. Air forces were in denial or deliberately misleading, pretending that modern high-precision

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targeting had transformed the nature of bombing. But the ruins of East Aleppo, Raqqa, Mosul and Eastern Ghouta look very much like pictures of Hue in 1968 or Hamburg in 1945.

Claims and counterclaims are impossible to verify in the course of a siege and it is only afterwards that the true scale of civilian casualties can be established, though by then the news agenda has moved on and there is limited public interest. The fullest report comparing the claims of air forces with what actually happened on the ground was Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal’s ‘The Uncounted’, an examination of civilian loss of life around Mosul published at the end of 2017 in the New York Times magazine. Khan and Gopal exhaustively studied a number of coalition areas, including Qaiyara, a town south of Mosul where the US air force admitted to having killed one civilian and the Iraqi air force claimed to have killed none. After conducting extensive door-to-door interviews with people in Qaiyara, Khan and Gopal concluded that the real figures were very different: ‘What we found was sobering. During the two years that Isis ruled downtown Qaiyara, an area of about one square mile, there were 40 airstrikes, 13 of which killed 43 civilians – 19 men, eight women and 16 children, ages 14 or younger.’ They discovered that one in five of the airstrikes in these areas had resulted in the deaths of civilians, making them thirty times more destructive than the coalition acknowledged. This, they wrote, may be ‘the least transparent war in recent American history’.

*

In Syria, the sieges began in 2012, a year after the original uprising, when Assad pulled his forces out of many opposition-held areas and concentrated on strategically important urban areas, road networks and military facilities. Opposition strongholds like Douma on the outskirts of Damascus were at first loosely encircled by checkpoints and subjected to sporadic artillery fire. When I visited Douma in February 2012 the Syrian soldiers manning the checkpoints looked relaxed; they had little to do while the UN tried to mediate access for people living in the area to hospitals elsewhere in Damascus as well as the release of detainees and a resumption of public services. Over the next six years these semi- permeable blockades were to turn into outright sieges: the pattern was much the same in Aleppo, Homs and elsewhere. For Assad, the advantage of this approach was that poorly trained conscripts could be used to seal off opposition zones while the most motivated and well-equipped troops acted as a strike force that could be moved quickly from point to point to resist an attack or launch an offensive. For the opposition, too, siege warfare had its attraction: in the heart of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo they had liberated territory they now ruled themselves, and they hoped to use these enclaves as bases from which to bring down the regime. But their forces were dissipated: they failed to join up the liberated zones, and the government was able to pick them off one by one.

The decision to defend certain areas, or to besiege them, was often determined by sectarian or ethnic allegiances. Both the government (dominated by the Shia Alawi sect) and the opposition (dominated by Sunni Arabs) would play down the fact, but divisions between communities were at the heart of the Syrian civil war. These divisions decided the location of the military frontlines that snaked through Damascus and Homs, much as they had once done in Belfast and Beirut. The government-held districts were inhabited by the minority groups, Alawites, Kurds, Christians, Druze, Ismaili and Shia, which together make up about 40 per cent of the population. A businessman in Damascus told me that the weakness of the anti-Assad forces was that ‘the exiled opposition leaders have not developed a serious

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plan to reassure the minorities.’ Opposition enclaves were overwhelmingly Sunni Arab, though the Sunni community was itself divided between rich and poor and between rural and urban areas. Well- off secular Sunnis in government-held West Aleppo didn’t feel much sympathy for the poor, religiously minded Sunni in the rebel-held east of the city.

The government used artillery and aerial bombardment to drive out civilians from opposition areas. Once the bombardment was over they would act as if everybody who remained was an enemy of the regime – though they might be just too poor to find anywhere else to live. Places like Daraya in south Damascus were turned into ghost districts, the buildings empty, silent and stripped of everything down to the window frames. In 2014 I visited Homs, the third largest city in Syria and the centre of the original uprising. At the time, Assad’s soldiers were bombarding the Old City, where rebels were holed up. I spoke to an army captain called Mohammed, who had been fighting the siege in Homs for two and a half years. He disapproved of a mediation plan that would allow a thousand rebel fighters to be evacuated. He rolled up a trouser leg to show me where a sniper had shot him, and said: ‘They came through a tunnel that came out behind where our men were positioned and attacked them from behind.’ He took great satisfaction in the fact that the rebels involved in this particular incident had all been killed: one consequence of these sieges was to deepen hatreds on both sides of the frontline. They also caused pervasive fear. In Homs, where the intertwining of pro and anti-government districts was particularly complex, I wanted to visit a military hospital in the al-Waer district in the west of the city, the largest remaining Sunni enclave still holding out against Assad. Government officials gave permission but said: ‘We frankly can’t find anybody to go with you because it is so dangerous.’ We drove cautiously from checkpoint to checkpoint: it became clear that the hospital was surrounded by rebel positions. When we got there, the guards were too frightened to open the gates.

Syria has always been deeply divided. In 2012, young men in Douma showed me houses which had once belonged to members of the Muslim Brotherhood: they had been sealed during the Brotherhood’s anti- government campaign twenty years earlier and were still shut up. Long before the civil war there was intense resentment over the privileges and power of the Alawi elite, to which most of the leadership belonged. In Barzeh, a Sunni district in north Damascus, the inhabitants’ main grievance dated back to the 1970s, when Hafez al-Assad, an Alawi officer who had recently seized power, confiscated a large piece of land belonging to local people to create two new neighbourhoods: Esh el-Warwar and Dahiyat al-Assad. They were soon populated with Alawi officials and officers and the original Sunni owners received minimal compensation. When the protests that swept through Syria in 2011 reached Barzeh, it was the Alawi militia and paramilitaries from the new neighbourhoods who came to suppress the demonstrations, using tanks and heavy weapons. The protesters fought back and, thanks to popular support and their knowledge of the terrain, kept control of the district. A long stalemate followed, but the rebels had cut off the main road to Esh el-Warwar and Dahiyat and the government wanted it back. The rebels, for their part, were being pounded by artillery and sniped at from a hill overlooking Barzeh, while the inhabitants who had fled the district wanted to go home. A ceasefire was arranged and was largely successful, since in Barzeh – unlike in so many other places – there were no ideologically committed foreign jihadi fighters. Returning refugees looked aghast at the extent of the destruction of their homes. Abu Hamzeh, a rebel leader, said that about 250 people, including women and children, had been killed in the siege. The government had promised to release detainees but was only handing over dead bodies. Survivors said they had no fruit or fresh vegetables: they had avoided starvation because they were able to eat the stocks of food of those who had fled.

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During all these sieges fighters and civilians alike lived a subterranean existence to escape the shelling and bombing. The primitive and dangerous conditions in Barzeh in 2014 were repeated in East Aleppo in 2016, Mosul and Raqqa in 2017, and Eastern Ghouta in 2018. Through intermediaries, I kept in touch with Haytham Bakkar, a local journalist, in Eastern Ghouta during the last weeks of the siege there. He said that many families had abandoned their one-storey houses and moved into bigger buildings which had basements. Bakkar said that conditions in these overcrowded underground rooms were miserable: he was living in one with half a dozen families whose children were crying because they hadn’t eaten for three days. ‘The basements are wet, smell bad because of the leaking sewage pipes, and are full of dangerous insects like scorpions,’ he said. ‘There is no daylight and no electricity, so people are using small torches with batteries to see.’ He wanted to stay in Eastern Ghouta whatever happened because ‘if we cross to a safe area we may live, but we will have to watch the TV news showing strangers living in our homes.’ I lost touch with Bakkar for a while when Eastern Ghouta finally fell in April. The next time I heard from him he had fled to Turkey with his family, but he didn’t want to say exactly where he was living.

Five sieges decided the outcome of the wars in Syria and Iraq: Kobani, East Aleppo, Mosul, Raqqa and Eastern Ghouta. Just how much these sieges had in common wasn’t immediately obvious to the outside world because media coverage was so different. The sufferings of civilians in East Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta at the hands of the Syrian government and the Russians were extensively reported, with graphic photographs and film of injured and dying children. Their production, and the eyewitness reporting of events, was effectively outsourced by international media to local activists: the only people who could operate as journalists in jihadi-held areas. In Mosul and Raqqa the news coverage was very different: in both cases the foreign media downplayed the civilian loss of life, or blamed it on IS for using people as ‘human shields’ and not allowing them to escape – it was true enough that IS didn’t care how many civilians were dying around them.

In the final months of the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa the coalition bombing, and the Syrian and Iraqi shelling, became considerably more intense – for a reason the US and the Syrian and Iraqi governments haven’t admitted. They had always been less capable than they claimed of locating the right target, and now they faced another problem: IS and other jihadi groups were showing great tactical ingenuity in fighting guerrilla war in the streets, inflicting heavy casualties on Iraqi army and SDF ground troops. IS fighters moved swiftly on foot or by motorbike from house to house, cutting holes in walls and tunnels underground, making surprise attacks and avoiding surveillance from the air. Their sniper, mortar and mine-laying teams never stayed in one place for long: they would move on quickly from a house they had used as a base, leaving the civilian inhabitants to face coalition retaliation. Such tactics went a long way towards negating the advantages of the high-precision airstrikes that the coalition claimed were so much more discriminating than those of the Russians and the Syrian air force. In the end, maximum firepower was used to obliterate the last stubbornly defended IS enclaves, with no regard for the number of civilians killed. When the fighting ended in Raqqa and Mosul the devastation was essentially identical to what I had seen in Barzeh and Homs years earlier.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/patrick-cockburn/the-war-in-five-sieges

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Russia Developing Super-Autonomous Robotic Submarine Powered By Batteries

By Pritha Paul @ZiggyZina143

Russian scientists are developing an advanced automated submarine that will be powered by an external combustion engine, Igor Denisov, deputy director of the Foundation for Advanced Studies (FPI), revealed in an interview with Interfax, a Russian news agency.

"We are planning to create an apparatus that will pass through the Northern Sea Route without floating up and without the use of nuclear power, including under the ice," Denisov said. "In order for this device to accomplish such a 'feat,' its autonomy should be at least 90 days, which is already commensurate with the autonomy of modern submarines.”

The decision to forego the nuclear option to power the underwater vehicle was a conscious one, Denisov said, in order to make it increasingly safe. While a nuclear installation helps power submarines for uninterrupted movement throughout the world's oceans, it also puts its operational capabilities at risk.

Despite the known hazards of using nuclear power to energize submarines, most militaries have fallen back to it to power up their propulsion systems of underwater vehicles, instead of non-nuclear batteries, which were used in the initial days. As it turned out, the fairly low capacity of the batteries severely limited the operation capabilities of submarines, making it almost impossible to record underwater routes.

"At the moment, the technologies for manufacturing external combustion engines, the so-called Stirling engines, are being developed and are being implemented, including the receipt of the necessary energy components from solid or liquefied energy carriers," Denisov said.

Russian scientists are developing an advanced automated submarine that will be powered by an external combustion engine. In this photo, the Russian submarine Dmitry Donskoy (NATO-Typhoon class), the world's largest in active service, arrives at Kronstadt Navy base, outside Saint Petersburg, to take part in the Naval military parade, July 26, 2017. Photo: Getty Images/ OLGA MALTSEVA

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The aim behind developing the alternative source of power by the scientists is to step toward a non-nuclear future where the batteries will be able to provide power comparable to the kind that is obtained from a nuclear plant at present. This would ensure the smooth movement and operation of the underwater robotic apparatus.

However, the project is far from being completed as it is only in its first stage at the moment.

"The project has begun, the first stage — the creation of the device itself in late 2019. That is, at the end of next year the device descends to the water," Denisov said. “Then a hybrid will be made, and the third stage will be using the results of ongoing search projects to create efficient systems using, possibly, hydrogen, as well.”

After the first prototype is developed, the scientists will move on to test it to see whether it overcome the established distance in the Black Sea, before moving onto the second stage which would include tasking the robotic submarine to overcome about 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles).

"Then a hybrid will be made, and the third stage will be using the results of ongoing search projects to create efficient systems using, possibly, hydrogen, as well," he said.

The report of a super-autonomous submarine robot being developed by Russia comes days after an interview with Stars and Stripes, in which Admiral James Foggo, the commander of the U.S. Navy in Europe and Africa, said the United States must expand its submarine fleet in response to the Kremlin beefing up its own naval force around Europe more aggressively than at any time since the Cold War.

http://www.ibtimes.com/russia-developing-super-autonomous-robotic-submarine-powered-batteries-2693603

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Tipping the Scales

Noah Feldman

JULY 19, 2018 ISSUE

If Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have a stable majority of conservative justices for the first time since before the New Deal. Kennedy’s successor will be Trump’s second Surpreme Court pick and may not be his last. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is eighty-five, clearly wishes to stay on the Court as long as Trump is president. So does Justice Stephen Breyer, who turns eighty later this year. But neither is immortal. Especially if Trump is reelected, he could potentially replace both of these justices with staunch young conservatives.

Lady Justice; drawing by Gerald Scarfe

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The current Court’s four consistent conservatives are all substantially younger than Kennedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer. The oldest, Clarence Thomas, is sixty-nine. Samuel Alito is sixty-eight, Chief Justice John Roberts is sixty-three, and Neil Gorsuch is just fifty. All are self-described constitutional originalists; all favor interpreting statutes based on text rather than their intention; and all have strongly pro-business judicial records. Should Trump appoint a fifth conservative—to say nothing of a sixth or seventh—the conservative majority could easily last a generation.

In light of this prospect, it is not too soon to start asking what a conservative Supreme Court would mean for the country. A conservative jurisprudence, aggressively applied, would reshape American law and politics. It would reinterpret fundamental issues of individual and privacy rights, health care, employment, national security, and the environment. These changes would in turn affect electoral politics. The range of conservative legislation that could survive judicial review would expand, while the range of progressive legislation that could do so would narrow.

In retrospect, it is remarkable that a strong conservative majority on the Court has not emerged before now. Since 1980, Republicans have held the presidency for twenty-two years and Democrats for sixteen. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on the platform of choosing conservative judges, appointed three justices—Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennedy—and elevated William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship. That should have established conservative control. Yet O’Connor turned out to be a centrist, controlling the Court for a quarter-century by casting the decisive fifth vote in controversial cases. When she retired in 2006, Kennedy assumed her position as the swing justice and unexpectedly emerged as a liberal hero, voting, for example, to extend constitutional rights to detainees in Guantánamo Bay and marriage rights to same-sex couples.1

George H.W. Bush also had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority. He appointed Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall but also replaced William Brennan with David Souter, who underwent a subtle yet significant evolution from Burkean conservative to Burkean liberal. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each got two justices confirmed, which maintained the Court’s balance. That conservative control has been so long in coming reflects either miscalculation by Reagan and George H.W. Bush or (more likely) something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part.

There is one glaring anomaly in the pattern of appointments. Obama should have been able to get Merrick Garland confirmed after Scalia died in February 2016—which would have provided some insulation against a conservative majority. The Senate’s decision to block the moderate Garland purely because Obama nominated him transformed both the composition of the Court and the norms of the confirmation process.

A Senate controlled by Democrats would probably refuse to confirm any Trump Supreme Court nominee, no matter how much time remains in his presidency. If justices can only be confirmed when the president and the Senate majority come from the same party, we will witness a shrinking Supreme Court forced to operate with eight, seven, or even six justices. In this scenario, a president whose party controls the Senate would have the chance to fill all those vacancies with justices who share his or her ideology. The Court’s politics would no longer drift gradually but veer suddenly to the left or the right.

One of the first things likely to happen if the Court’s majority turns conservative is that state legislatures in heavily Republican states will pass legislation restricting abortion rights. Already, Mississippi has passed a law barring abortions after fifteen weeks—long before viability. A federal court blocked the law, but its passage signals clearly that the Court will come under pressure to revisit Roe v. Wade.

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In the past, Chief Justice Roberts has shown a decided preference for changing constitutional law indirectly. Rather than overturning landmark liberal precedents outright, he prefers to minimize their importance by narrowing them and limiting their holdings to factual situations that no longer exist. He would surely prefer that Roesuffer death by a thousand cuts rather than see the Court accused of overturning it in a stroke and casting the country back to the days of coat-hanger and back-alley abortions.

Yet the chief justice is only first among equals. The Court’s other conservatives have already shown a willingness not to follow his lead, as occurred in the Affordable Care Act case, NFIB v. Sebelius, when they left Roberts alone in upholding the ACA’s individual mandate. Given the assertive ideology, cohesive political views, and no-holds-barred style of many younger judicial conservatives, a conservative majority could be expected to reverse Roe as long as Roberts concurred in the decision, regardless of whether he joined the opinion.

For pro-choice advocates, the fall of Roe would be a disastrous defeat. Brown v. Board of Education was controversial when decided but gained wide acceptance over time. The Roe decision has never achieved a similar consensus. Many Court observers, including Ginsburg, have suggested that it generated lasting controversy because the Court decided it without first laying the foundation with prior incremental decisions. As a result, since 1973, pro-choice advocates have been fighting a rearguard action to defend the right to abortion. For Roe to be overturned would be the ultimate failure of nearly half a century of pro-choice strategy.

The aftermath of a decision striking down the right to abortion would be complicated. Democrats would have to convince majorities in each state to protect abortion. It could become impossible for women to obtain legal abortions in the numerous states that have tried to enact more restrictive abortion laws in recent decades (only to have them struck down by the courts). Abortions could be outlawed in much or all of the South, the Southwest, and the intermountain West. Those with means would still be able to travel to states that permitted them, but women too poor or young to travel would find it vastly harder to end unwanted pregnancies. Many people would probably react by taking to the streets, organizing, and voting against such restrictive laws and the politicians who put them in place. Abortion rights would immediately become a wedge issue for Democrats. Their goal would be to push women who might otherwise vote Republican into the Democratic column.

Once abortion rights were constitutionally recognized, liberal efforts in connection with them were, rationally enough, redirected to preserving the composition of the courts, rather than actively trying to convince those who rejected such rights to change their views. For as long as abortion has been legal, conservatives, for their part, have been able to count on the crucial votes of centrists who prefer conservative candidates but quietly want to preserve the option of abortion. With Roe overturned, Republicans might lose the 34 percent of their voters who believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases.

Just as liberals would no longer be able to rely on the Supreme Court to strike down anti-abortion measures, they would have to concentrate on winning elections and lobbying members of Congress to secure other rights that they are currently seeking to win in court. At present, the fight for transgender rights is heavily aimed at convincing judges to extend existing antidiscrimination protections to transgender people. Because a conservative Supreme Court would not in the foreseeable future do so, progressives would have to lobby Congress and state legislatures for such protections.

Over time, the fight could well prove successful. As the example of gay marriage shows, changes in values can eventually take place and even come to be broad-based. Support for gay marriage has risen steadily for

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twenty years, from 27 percent nationally in 1996 to 64 percent in 2017. Remarkably, the shift can be discerned even among evangelicals born after 1964, 49 percent of whom now believe gay marriage should be legal, compared to just 35 percent of all evangelicals.

For this reason, gay marriage may be one significant progressive rights victory that could survive even a conservative majority on the Court. Emboldened conservative state legislators might try to pass new laws contravening the Obergefell precedent and restricting marriage to one man and one woman. Yet the political cost of such efforts would probably be extremely high, as not only liberals but also mainstream corporate interests would respond with state-level boycotts. Some conservative justices could potentially accept gay marriage as a fait accompli, given how quickly attitudes toward it are changing. A conservative Court would no doubt allow religious liberty exemptions for merchants who do not wish to serve gay couples.2 But if gay marriage remains the law of the land, such exemptions will come to be seen as compensatory concessions to the losing side in a culture war, rather than steps toward reversal of the right to marriage.

In addition to rolling back existing constitutional rights, a conservative Supreme Court could block progressive government programs. One example is affirmative action. Over decades, the Court has used the right to equal protection of the laws to whittle down affirmative action until its only important remaining application is in higher-education admissions. In 2016, to the surprise of many observers, Kennedy cast the deciding vote to preserve this practice—despite having dissented thirteen years earlier when O’Connor used her swing vote to reach the same result.3

A conservative majority unconcerned with diversity as a social good in itself would not find it difficult to bar affirmative action altogether on the principle that white or Asian applicants are treated unequally when race is a factor in admissions. Unlike in the case of abortion rights, there would be no way for states to get around a constitutional ban on affirmative action.

Two responses would probably follow such a decision. Progressive students would protest vociferously; and administrators who have come to believe in the value of diversity as a good in itself would seek new ways to create diverse student bodies without formally taking account of race. Economically based affirmative action could be combined with school-based admissions quotas (such as admitting the top few percent of students from some schools or regions) that are formally race-neutral but track racial demographics. Universities could also invest in college preparation for underprivileged middle and high school students and actively recruit strong minority students.

A conservative Court majority could conceivably seek to limit and even overturn other progressive legislation by restricting the legitimate scope of the states’ or Congress’s activities. In some respects, it might bring the Court closer to the libertarian, property-protecting constitutional interpretation of the early twentieth century. In the Lochnerera, so-called after a 1905 decision blocking a New York State maximum-hours law for bakers, the Court struck down much progressive state legislation as violating the liberty of contract, a right it found in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Then and now, libertarian judicial activism entails blocking legislation that is thought to interfere with the ability of supposedly free economic actors to make economic decisions and form contractual relationships as they choose.

Libertarian thinking is alive among the conservative justices. In 2010, for example, the law professor Randy Barnett argued that the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional because it required people to do something they were not doing—buying insurance—rather than regulating something they were already doing. Nearly all legal scholars found Barnett’s libertarian distinction between action and inaction constitutionally meaningless. The conservative justices embraced it, however, holding the mandate

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unconstitutional as beyond the authority of Congress under the commerce clause; Roberts and the four liberals voted to sustain the mandate on the grounds that it was part of Congress’s taxing power.

But the conservative justices would be very unlikely to go back to Lochner explicitly. The repudiation of the liberty-of-contract jurisprudence that characterized the Lochnerera is still an important part of constitutional orthodoxy. Antonin Scalia held up the Lochner decision as the very model of bad jurisprudence, and frequently accused liberals like Kennedy of inventing constitutional rights in the vein of Lochner. A conservative court would be likelier to practice a less radical version of judicial activism, one in which the justices opportunistically use existing doctrinal tools to undermine progressive legislation.

Roberts, for instance, invoked states’ rights to block the Medicaid expansion proposed in the ACA. He held that Congress’s threat to revoke states’ Medicaid funding unless they accepted expansion amounted to an unconstitutional form of coercion. Similarly, in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Roberts struck down a substantial part of the Voting Rights Act by arguing that Congress had drawn on “forty-year-old facts” about racial discrimination in voting, rather than citing “current conditions,” to justify extending the law. As a result, states and municipalities with long histories of racial gerrymandering can now redistrict without first submitting their plan to the Department of Justice for pre-clearance, as the Voting Rights Act requires.

Faced with this sort of conservative judicial activism, liberals could find themselves thwarted in passing progressive social legislation. The hard case would arise if the legislation enjoyed substantial and durable national support and was nonetheless blocked by the Court. That is not what happened with the ACA; the law passed by a bare partisan majority, and the conservative justices merely helped undermine legislation that already stood on shaky political ground. It is what happened during the New Deal, when the justices’ resistance led Franklin Roosevelt to try to pack the Court. The Court folded, and Roosevelt prevailed. Today’s Court, however, enjoys more independence and public legitimacy than the Court that Roosevelt confronted did, and it is far from obvious that it would give in to Democratic pressure.

Matters of national security—especially those that concern presidential power—would pose a problem for a conservative Court. Conservatives are torn between two competing views: one that grants the president near- monarchic authority when it comes to national security, and another that allows the president to be constrained by Congress. To complicate matters further, they have tended to support presidential power when the president is a Republican, while sharply limiting it when the president is a Democrat.

This conflict was on view in Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015), an important case about whether the president or Congress would have the final word about the passports of US citizens born in Jerusalem. Congress wanted passport bearers to be able to list their country of birth as Israel; the Obama administration wanted to maintain the status quo, in which the country of birth was given as “Jerusalem” to avoid taking a stand on the city’s status. Ultimately, the Court held that the president could ignore Congress’s command to allow Israel to be designated because his authority in foreign affairs includes the right to recognize foreign states.

Unsympathetic to the Obama administration’s assertion of executive power, Scalia dissented. He pointed out that under the established doctrinal framework, the president’s power is at “its lowest ebb” when Congress has directly spoken. Thomas, also unsympathetic to Obama, dissented separately. But he insisted that the extent of the president’s inherent powers, as the Constitution originally defined them, should be determined by looking at the royal prerogatives that the British king in principle possessed in the era of the founding.4

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Clarence Thomas; drawing by David Levine

Outraged, Scalia accused Thomas of constructing “a presidency more reminiscent of George III than George Washington.” Their disagreement went back to 2004, when Scalia and Thomas split sharply over whether the Bush administration could detain an American citizen without trial on suspicion of affiliation with al-Qaeda. Scalia thought this violated the basic right to habeas corpus; Thomas believed it fell within the president’s national security power.

A conservative post-Scalia Supreme Court would probably rule quite differently on presidential power and national security based on who the president was. It would be likely to defer to a conservative president, deploying Thomas’s theory of the strong executive. That is essentially what happened in Trump v. Hawaii, the travel ban case, in which the conservative majority relied on what it called “core” executive power as an excuse to avoid the anti-Muslim bias that actually motivated the ban. If a liberal president tried to deploy unilateral executive power, however, the Court’s conservatives might well fall back on the Scalia line of skepticism, insisting that Congress’s competing powers are necessary to constrain the president. A Democratic president might then end up blocked by a conservative Court unless the Democrats controlled Congress. If Congress and the president agreed, even a conservative Court could be expected to defer to them on matters of national security. Conservatives might in fact be more deferential under these conditions than a liberal Court would be to a Republican president and Republican-controlled Congress, because they have at

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hand the Thomas argument for radical deference to the executive, which no liberal justice endorses. Such deference seems especially likely to occur if Trump has appointed the justices who control the outcome.

Environmental regulation is the final area in which an activist conservative Court could have a substantial effect. The source of the Court’s power here lies in the relationship between environmental legislation and regulation. In general, Congress has chosen to deal with the environment by passing very general laws and delegating the authority to implement them to regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

An activist conservative Court could make life difficult for a Democratic EPA by blocking regulation directly, declaring it “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. The courts are only supposed to use this tool to block actions that are genuinely irrational or that exceed the agency’s legal authority; but the Court could deploy it much more aggressively than has been done in the past.

In practice, environmentalists could try to get around such a judicial barrier by lobbying Congress to pass laws directing that a specific regulation be adopted, rather than delegating so much authority to the EPA. If public opinion were strongly enough in favor of increased environmental protection, a Democratic Congress and president could probably get some regulation adopted despite judicial resistance.

A conservative Court could also impede environmental reform by second-guessing agencies’ interpretations of federal law. According to what is known as the “Chevrondoctrine,” when federal law is ambiguous, the Court will defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law provided it is reasonable. This doctrine is intended to give substantial power to agencies, binding the hands of judges who might otherwise disagree with the agencies’ policies.

Today Chevron is under attack, most prominently from Gorsuch, who has written disparagingly of the idea that courts would have anything less than full control over the meaning of federal statutes. This is bad news for environmental regulation—and that is almost certainly part of the point. A Court that does not defer to an agency’s interpretation of federal law can substitute its own policy judgment for that of the agency. If that agency is the EPA, and its judgment is being used to expand environmental protection, then a conservative Court that overturned Chevron or weakened its rule of deference would stand ready to reverse the agency’s course.

The only solution for environmentalists would be to pass new laws that would expressly enact regulation, rather than delegating regulatory authority to the agencies. That would be hard to do, especially given the established norm that agencies rather than Congress do most environmental regulating. But if a conservative Court systematically uses statutory interpretation to block environmental regulation, that division of labor may have to change. Instead of making arguments to the EPA or other agencies, environmentalists would have to direct their efforts more directly toward Congress itself.

A durable conservative majority on the Supreme Court could, then, impose substantial changes in American rights and law, especially in areas where liberals have in recent decades relied on courts and administrative agencies rather than Congress or state legislatures to implement progressive policies. Those who oppose such changes should begin considering the appropriate political responses, such as choosing which issues should be targeted for grassroots organizing and lobbying state legislatures and Congress. Ultimately, Democrats cannot rely on judges for social progress. A functioning liberal democracy requires a liberal populace that is prepared to vote for the policies it wants.

Letters

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Justice Is Not Blind August 16, 2018

1. 1 Kennedy had shown flashes of moderation before. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), he coauthored an opinion that declined to overrule Roe v. Wade and thus preserved women’s right to choose even as it replaced Roe’s trimester framework with a new test of whether the state had imposed an “undue burden” on the right. And in Romer v. Evans(1996), Kennedy helped establish a jurisprudential basis for gay rights by striking down a Colorado constitutional amendment that barred antidiscrimination laws protecting homosexuals. ↩

2. 2 See David Cole, “This Takes the Cake” in this issue. ↩

3. 3 Fisher v. University of Texas (2016); Gratz v. Bollinger (2003). ↩

4. 4 In fact, by the late Georgian period, the king was by constitutional custom unable to exercise many aspects of royal prerogative that textbooks still ascribe to him. See Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2016). But Thomas seems blissfully uninterested in this complex historical reality. ↩

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/supreme-court-tipping-scales/

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The words that change what colours we see

Depending on what language you speak, your eye perceives colours – and the world – differently than someone else.

 By Aina Casaponsa and Panos Athanasopoulos, Lancaster University

Squares A and B are exactly the same colour – but our brains think otherwise (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way.

Some people can’t see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with ‘normal vision’, causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.

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Besides our individual biological make up, colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and so is subjective – and prone to personal experience.

Take for instance people with synaesthesia, who are able to experience the perception of colour with letters and numbers. Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses – where a person can see sounds or hear colours. But the colours they hear also differ from case to case.

Another example is the classic Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion. Here, although two marked squares are exactly the same colour, our brains don’t perceive them this way.

Since the day we were born we have learnt to categorise objects, colours, emotions, and pretty much everything meaningful using language. And although our eyes can perceive thousands of colours, the way we communicate about colour – and the way we use colour in our everyday lives – means we have to carve this huge variety up into identifiable, meaningful categories.

Painters and fashion experts, for example, use colour terminology to refer to and discriminate hues and shades that to all intents and purposes may all be described with one term by a non-expert.

Those who work with fabrics or paints discriminate shades that the rest of us might lump under one category (Credit: Getty Images)

Some languages only have two terms, dark and light

Different languages and cultural groups also carve up the colour spectrum differently. Some languages like Dani, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, only have two terms, dark and light. Dark roughly translates as cool in those languages, and light as warm. So colours like

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black, blue, and green are glossed as cool colours, while lighter colours like white, red, orange and yellow are glossed as warm colours.

The Warlpiri people living in Australia’s Northern Territory don’t even have a term for the word “colour”. For these and other such cultural groups, what we would call “colour” is described by a rich vocabulary referring to texture, physical sensation and functional purpose.

Remarkably, most of the world’s languages have five basic colour terms. Cultures as diverse as the Himba in the Namibian plains and the Berinmo in the lush rainforests of Papua New Guinea employ such five term systems. As well as dark, light, and red, these languages typically have a term for yellow, and a term that denotes both blue and green. That is, these languages do not have separate terms for “green” and “blue” but use one term to describe both colours, a sort of “grue”.

In Papua New Guinea, the Berinmo people use a single word to denote both blue and green (Credit: Getty Images)

Historically, Welsh had a “grue” term, namely glas, as did Japanese and Chinese. Nowadays, in all these languages, the original grue term has been restricted to blue, and a separate green term is used. This is either developed from within the language – as is the case for Japanese – or through lexical borrowing, as is the case for Welsh.

Russian, Greek, Turkish and many other languages also have two separate terms for blue – one referring exclusively to darker shades, and one referring to lighter shades.

Greek speakers, who have two fundamental colour terms to describe light and dark blue, are more prone to see these two colours as more similar after living in the UK

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The way we perceive colours can also change during our lifetime. Greek speakers, who have two fundamental colour terms to describe light and dark blue (“ghalazio” and “ble”), are more prone to see these two colours as more similar after living for long periods of time in the UK. There, these two colours are described in English by the same fundamental colour term: blue.

Greek speakers have separate words for shades of blue – and see those shades as more different than do English speakers (Credit: Getty Images)

This is because after long term everyday exposure to an English-speaking environment, the brain of native Greek speakers starts interpreting the colours “ghalazio” and “ble” as part of the same colour category.

But this isn’t just something that happens with colour. In fact different languages can influence our perceptions in all areas of life. In our lab at Lancaster University we are investigating how the use of and exposure to different languages changes the way we perceive everyday objects. Ultimately, this happens because learning a new language is like giving our brain the ability to interpret the world differently – including the way we see and process colours.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180419-the-words-that-change-the-colours-we-see

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Land-based portion of massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated little during past 8 million years

But increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could affect stability and potential for sea level rise

The drilling rig of the ANtarctic geological DRILLing (ANDRILL) project in a 2006 photograph.

 Credit and Larger Version

Large parts of the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet did not retreat significantly during a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were similar to today's levels, according to a team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The finding could have significant implications for global sea level rise.

The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of three major ice sheets closely watched by scientists as global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels increase, glaciers melt and sea levels rise. Of the three, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest potential contributor to sea level rise.

To gauge the ice sheet's stability, researchers took ultra-sensitive analytical measurements of chemical signatures in sediment samples taken from the ice sheet's sea bed. They concluded that some ice on the southernmost part of the continent could be stable in a warming climate, as was the case during the Pliocene Epoch.

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But they also caution that ongoing, rising carbon emissions mean that carbon dioxide levels will soon surpass the benchmark set during the Pliocene -- approximately 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago -- the last time Earth experienced carbon dioxide levels higher than 400 parts per million.

The findings were published today in the journal Nature.

The researchers relied on samples taken as part of the international ANtarctic geological DRILLing (ANDRILL) project. NSF funded the U.S. participation in ANDRILL.

Examining sediment samples delivered from land-based sections of the ice sheet, the researchers found those areas that drain into Antarctica's Ross Sea have been stable for the past 8 million years.

The geological history of the massive ice sheet -- frozen both above and, in many places, below the ocean's surface -- has been difficult to pinpoint. The absence of data about the East Antarctic Ice Sheet's response to warming in the past have hindered efforts to predict its role in future sea level rise.

This study focused on the portion of the ice sheet that sits above the ocean. It holds enough water to cause as much as 34 meters of sea level rise if the ice sheet were to melt completely.

Another component of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, marine-based ice, sits below sea level and is thus directly affected by the ocean.

"Based on this evidence from the Pliocene, today's current carbon dioxide levels are not enough to destabilize the land-based ice on the Antarctic continent," said Jeremy Shakun, an assistant professor of Earth and Environmental Science at Boston College and a lead author on the paper.

"This does not mean that at current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels Antarctica won't contribute to sea level rise. Marine-based ice is already starting to add to sea level rise and alone could contribute as much as 20 meters. We're saying that the terrestrial segment of the ice sheet is more resilient at current carbon-dioxide levels."

Shakun's co-authors on the paper include Carling C. Hay, also of Boston College; researchers Lee B. Corbett, Paul R. Bierman, Kristen Underwood and Donna M. Rizzo of the University of Vermont; Susan R. Zimmerman of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Marc W. Caffee of Purdue University; and Tim Naish and Nicholas R. Golledge of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Estimates on global sea level rise due to melt from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during the Pliocene vary from 5 meters to more than 40 meters higher than today. The upper end of this range would imply that most of the ice on the planet melted, enough to raise sea levels by 63 meters.

If the land-based East Antarctic Ice Sheet was stable during the Pliocene, as Shakun and colleagues suggest, the Pliocene total could have been at most 30 meters.

The researchers analyzed sediment contained in drill cores taken from the sea floor. These cores contain geological records, but also chemical signatures -- in particular, the rare isotopes beryllium-10 and aluminum- 26, which were extracted at the NSF-funded Community Cosmogenic Facility at the University of Vermont and measured using particle accelerators at Purdue University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Both isotopes are found in rock surfaces that have been exposed to cosmic radiation bombarding the Earth from outer space. Researchers usually examine rock samples from hillsides, mountain tops and rivers to determine where and when ice retreated during prior geological eras.

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Shakun and some of the co-authors of the latest report used a different approach two years ago to offer one of the most comprehensive climatological accounts ever compiled of the Greenland Ice Sheet, dating back 7.5 million years.

In the Greenland study, levels of beryllium-10 found in sandy deposits brought out to sea in icebergs suggested the ice sheet has been a "persistent and dynamic" presence that melted and re-formed periodically in response to temperature fluctuations. The findings helped confirm that the Greenland Ice Sheet is a sensitive responder to global climate change.

Earlier studies of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet indicated that some marine-based portions of the ice sheet and its neighboring West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated during the Pliocene. But it was unclear whether terrestrial ice also retreated.

Their analysis found "extremely low" concentrations of beryllium and aluminum isotopes in quartz sand in the marine sediment samples taken in the region, which leads to the conclusion that the ice sheet has been stable for millions of years.

While the sediment was the product of erosion from the continent, the low levels of tell-tale chemical signatures reveal that the sediment experienced only minimal exposure to cosmic radiation, leading the team to conclude East Antarctica must have remained covered in ice.

According to the paper's authors, "the findings indicate that atmospheric warming during the past eight million years was insufficient to cause widespread and/or long-lasting meltback of the EAIS margin onto land."

The findings not only clarify the past impact of rising temperatures on East Antarctic ice, said Shakun, but confirm the accuracy of models scientists are using to assess past and future consequences of a warming planet.

-NSF-

https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=245750&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

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SOUTH VIETNAM'S PRESIDENT NGO DINH DIEM

Today's selection -- from The Age of Eisenhower by William I. Hitchcock. The seeds of America's eventual defeat in Vietnam stemmed from the horrifying policies and practices of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem. He was assassinated in a CIA-backed coup in 1963:

"In June 1954, as the French and Vietnamese communists hammered out the Geneva accords that partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel, [South Vietnam president Ngo Dinh] Diem saw his chance. ... [He] returned to Vietnam to form a government that would usher out the hated French and open the way to the creation of an independent and noncommunist South Vietnam. ... Diem became the face of a new experiment in Asian self- rule.

"Although Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country; although his extended family, the Ngo clan, had a notorious reputation for corruption, criminality, and connections to reactionary military circles; and although he had little popular appeal or legitimacy, he seemed to the Americans the perfect man to build a free and democratic South Vietnam. He was ferociously anticommunist. His Catholicism marked him as Western in American eyes. And he already had close friends in Washington. In fact his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been working with the CIA since 1952 and would maintain that link for the rest of the decade. As Diem consolidated power, he relied upon American support to fend off a military coup attempt in 1954 as well as uprisings launched by sects and gangs in Saigon in 1955. ...

"As Diem's power grew, his relationship with the United States became more troubled. He was an authoritarian man with a messiah complex. He relied upon his brother, who ran the secret police, to wage a relentless war upon communist The partition of French Indochina that sympathizers and subversives. By itself that did not displease resulted from the 1954 Geneva Conference. Washington, but the methods used -- mass arrests, torture, wanton murder -- did upset the narrative that Washington wished to write of Diem as a model Asian leader. Even the CIA station in Saigon urged Diem to adopt land reform and political liberalization so as to develop some degree of popular support and legitimacy. Diem refused, citing the constant threat of internal subversion as a reason to focus on building up the South Viet- namese Army and deploying harsh tactics against any dissidents.

"Diem understood that he could manipulate the Americans. In return for his anticommunism, he sought and received enormous amounts of aid, totaling $2 billion between 1954 and 1961. Not only did the United States supply the South Vietnamese Army and security police, but it gave vast sums in the form of development aid and loans, allowing South Vietnam to purchase huge quantities of American cars, trucks, household goods, and food. The United States built roads, bridges, schools, railways, canals, and airports; set up a national telecommunications network; supplied civil aviation aircraft; and implemented nationwide English-language education. South Vietnam rapidly became the showcase for the American way of modernization and militarization in the Third World. And all the while hopes for democratization withered. ...

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Diem is shown shaking hands with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower at Washington National Airport in 1957.

"American officials consoled themselves that, for all his shortcomings, Diem nevertheless shared America's aims in Asia. A briefing book prepared for Eisenhower on the eve of Diem's visit declared that Diem 'feels that Vietnam in its present situation and given its own heritage is not yet ready for a democratic government. ... His concept is one of benevolent authoritarianism.' Diem 'believes that the Vietnamese people are not the best judges of what is good for them.' While these attitudes prompted some discomfort in Washington, Diem's anticommunism inoculated him from serious American criticism.

"When Diem met with Eisenhower at the White House on May 9, 1957, Ike praised him for 'the excellent achievements he has brought about' and barely registered any protest when Diem insisted that he needed more milltary aid. Given the honor of addressing a joint session of Congress, Diem declared that his country had used its annual subvention of $250 million to wage war on communism. The budget-conscious representatives gave him a standing ovation. In New York City, Diem received a ticker-tape parade. Mayor Robert Wagner hailed the Vietnamese 'miracle' and described Diem as 'a man to whom freedom is the very breath of life itself.' The press hailed him as 'Vietnam's man of iron' and a 'symbol of a free new Asia.' ...

"In 1958 and 1959 Diem transformed South Vietnam into a regime of terror, corruption, and repression in his campaign to wipe out communist subversion. He was tactically successful in hunting down and cracking

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communist cells, but his methods were so brutal that they alienated his own people. More significant, his methods persuaded North Vietnam to escalate its support for the rebellion inside South Vietnam. In January 1959 the North Vietnamese decided to launch a major campaign of subversion in the South to overthrow Diem's regime and attempt to reunite the country. A new Indochina War was about to begin.

"As communist attacks increased in South Vietnam, Diem responded in kind. His government herded hundreds of thousands of peasants into concentrated villages ('agrovilles') so they could be better policed and blocked from offering support to the rebellion. Diem also expanded even further his security apparatus, channeling American aid into the secret police and diverting the army into internal security duties. In May 1959 he forced through a new decree that gave the government extraordinary emergency powers to arrest, try, and execute suspected communist guerrillas. In an appalling act of barbarism, the government sent guillotines to all the provinces. Those people found guilty of subversion met their death strapped to a horizontal plank beneath a slashing blade. Predictably such policies stimulated massive hostility throughout the South."

From THE AGE OF EISENHOWER: America and the World in the 1950s by William I. Hitchcock. Copyright © 2018 by William Hitchcock. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

author: William I. Hitchcock

title: The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

publisher: Simon & Schuster

date: Copyright 2018 by William Hitchcock

pages: 439-442

https://delanceyplace.com/

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THE MAFIA OF SICILY

Today's selection -- from The Italians by Luigi Barzini. Luigi Barzini's famous 1964 description of the Mafia:

"The word Mafia notoriously means two things, one, which should be spelled with a lower-case 'm', being the mother of the second, the capital letter Mafia.

1900 map of Mafia presence in Sicily. Towns with Mafia activity are marked as red dots. The Mafia operated mostly in the west, in areas of rich agricultural productivity.

"The lower-case mafia is a state of mind, a philosophy of life, a conception of society, a moral code, a particular susceptibility, prevailing among all Sicilians. They are taught in the cradle, or are born already knowing, that they must aid each other, side with their friends and fight the common enemies even when the friends are wrong and the enemies are right; each must defend his dignity at all costs and never allow the smallest slights and insults to go unavenged; they must keep secrets, and always beware of official authorities and laws. ...

"Mafia, in the second and more specialized meaning of the word, is the world-famous illegal organization. It rules over only one part of Sicily: its threats are terrifying in Palermo, Partinico or Agrigento, but are ignored in Messina, Catania and Syracuse. It is not a strictly organized association, with hierarchies, written statutes, headquarters, a ruling elite and an undisputed chief. It is a

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spontaneous formation like an ant-colony or a beehive, a loose and haphazard collection of single men and heterogeneous groups, each man obeying his entomological rules, each group uppermost in its tiny domain, independent, submitted to the will of its own leader, each group locally imposing its own rigid form of primitive justice. Only in rare times of emergency does the Mafia mobilize and become one loose confederation.

"Nobody knows how many mafiosi there are. Only a minority of Sicilians are technically mafiosi, in the criminal sense of the word. Many do not honestly know whether they are mafiosi or not. Western Sicilians must, as a rule, entertain good relations with the Mafia in their native village or city quarter. They have to live there, they must protect their family, job, property or business, and want no trouble. The Mafia is for them a fact of life, one of the permanent conditions of existence, like the climate, the average rainfall or the local patois. It is often impossible to draw a neat dividing line between Mafiosi and non-Mafiosi.

"Take the good friars of Mazzarino, who were recently arrested and tried for having acted as messengers between the Mafia and its intended victims, men who were being blackmailed. The pious fathers patiently explained to the non-Sicilian court that they were by no means to be considered advisers, instigators or accomplices of the criminals. They had only done their best to persuade the intended victims, to whom they brought the Mafia's blackmail message, that it was safer to pay, and pay quickly, in order to save their lives. Were not one or two men, who had stubbornly overlooked the advice, subsequently found dead in solitary country lanes? Yes, of course, the monks had written some of the messages themselves, but only because the mafiosi were illiterate and did not own a typewriter.

"Furthermore, the friars pointed out that they were by no means responsible for the conditions of law enforcement in Mazzarino. They were not policemen. They took for granted that there were extortionists and potential victims, moneyed men whose only safety was in conforming with the Mafia's demands, and men who could live and prosper out of the fear they could evoke in others. The monks explained they were only doing their duty: they had avoided unnecessary bloodshed. Was theirs not a charitable mission? (The monks were found guilty, nevertheless, and given long prison sentences.)

"Everybody, of course, knows (although such things are never admitted openly) that the trouble the Mafia defends one from is almost always contrived and controlled by the Mafia itself. Everybody knows that the tributes he is paying to the local boss could be compared to a tribute to a powerful feudal baron. Everybody is resigned. But the relationship between the Mafia and its victims is not limited to the collection of money. A day always comes when the Mafia also needs some favour in return. On that day, a man discovers he can no longer refuse. A businessman finds he must give a job to an ex-convict, a banker extend a loan to a risky customer, a farmer shelter some unknown men for a few days in a barn without asking questions, an honest man remember distinctly something he never knew or forgets something he saw. All these people gradually get so enmeshed in the net, in the hope of avoiding trouble, that they cannot free themselves."

author: Luigi Barzini

title: The Italians

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publisher: Penguin Books

date: Csopyright Luigi Barzini, 1964

pages: 253-257

https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3656

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Human Limbs Mysteriously Emerge from Marble Slabs in Milena Naef’s Performative Sculptures

LAURA STAUGAITIS

Photographs by Lisa-Marie Vlietstra and Alice Trimouille

Milena Naef juxtaposes the manufactured shapes of marble slabs with the organic forms of the human figure in her performative sculptural works. In her series ‘Fleeting Parts,’ the artist removes portions of Cristallina marble to create openings that are perfectly shaped to allow arms, legs, and torsos to emerge.

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Naef, who lives and works in Amsterdam, describes her work in a statement: “Once tangible, the interaction with the concrete material allows for a space to ‘open’ in which a given context can be changed. The body itself with its physical presence and its absence becomes a vital aspect of the work. When do structures inhibit or liberate us and our physical form? What is the consequence of the fact that our bodies are always ‘filling space’?”

The artist’s solo show is on view through August 20, 2018, at Studio Oliver Gustav in Copenhagen, and she will also be exhibiting work at the Garage Rotterdam museum from August 31 to October 28, 2018. You can see more of her work on Instagram. (via I Need A Guide)

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/milena-naef-marble- sculptures/?mc_cid=f13be2d8df&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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Beyond the point-dipole approximation

DIPC June 28, 2018

The wave nature of light expresses itself in the propagation all over space, showing an intrinsic limitation to be localized beyond the so-called diffraction limit which is of the order of half the wavelength of the photons propagating. However when interacting with matter, light often gets reflected, diffracted, scattered or absorbed depending on the interactions and excitations induced in the material. In particular, at visible wavelengths, between 450 nm and 800 nm, metals interact with electromagnetic waves producing a variety of optical effects. The conduction electrons that constitute the metal can oscillate rigidly at certain optical frequencies that depend on the electron density. Furthermore, when metals are physically bounded by surfaces and interfaces as it is usually the case in nanoparticles and nanostructures, the oscillations of the electron charge density at the surfaces show resonant localized modes so-called surface plasmons.

Figure 1. Illustration of a particle-on-mirror plasmonic cavity strongly coupled to a single molecule placed within its (sub-)nanometric gap.

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The interaction between surface plasmons and an ensemble of quantum emitters (quantum dots and organic molecules) can be pushed into the so-called collective strong coupling regime. This phenomenon takes place when light and matter states exchange energy faster than their respective decay channels, giving rise to new quasiparticles usually termed plasmon–exciton–polaritons. The properties of these hybrid states can be adjusted through their light and matter content, which means a new, and qualitatively different, degree of light manipulation.

It is apparent, then, that the strength of the coupling between molecular electronic excitations and cavity optical modes is a magnitude of paramount importance that determines the dynamical properties of important phenomena. The coupling strength between an emitter and an optical cavity (Figure 1) is often estimated as a product of the local electromagnetic field in the optical cavity, and the dipole moment of the emitter’s optically allowed electronic transition.

In this context, the molecular emitter is often considered to be a point-like dipole, since the dimensions of a typical optical cavity and thus the extension of its optical modes are usually orders of magnitude larger than the size of the emitter. However, nanoscale plasmonic resonators result in a class of optical cavities that allow for light localization into deeply subwavelength dimensions, thus reaching effective mode volumes as small as a few nanometers. Under these conditions, emitters such as quantum dots and organic molecules cannot be described as point-like objects any more, since the spatial extent of their electronic transition densities are of the order of the size of the strongly inhomogeneous local fields of the plasmonic resonator.

Figure 2.

Now a team of researchers from CFM, UPV/EHU, DIPC and IFIMAC present 1 a quantum theoretical framework that allows us to calculate the coupling between strongly confined plasmonic modes and molecular electronic excitations of spatially extended molecules, identifying the importance of a proper quantum treatment of the molecule to accurately obtain the dynamical properties of the hybrid exciton−plasmon system.

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Figure 3. (a) Schematics of the plasmonic resonator−emitter system. (b, c) Atomic structure of methylene blue (MB) and zinc phtalocyanine (ZnPc). (d, e) Isosurface plots of the transition densities (MB, ZnPc) corresponding to the transition between the ground and the singlet excited state calculated within the TDDFT framework (blue, negative values of the density; red, positive ones).

The resarchers use two exemplary organic molecules, methylene blue and zinc phtalocyanine (Figure 3), to reveal the importance of molecular size both in the weak and strong coupling regimes, as well as in the atomic-scale spatial mapping of the coupling strength.

The quantum treatment of the plasmon−exciton coupling combines the canonical quantization of plasmons in metallic particles with quantum chemistry calculations of molecular excitations based on the time-dependent density functional theory (Figure 3).

They show conclusively that the coupling strength stems from a delicate balance between the spatial dependence of both the excitonic transition charge density and the photonic fields, and therefore, only a quantum model that fully incorporates the inhomogeneities of the exciton transition charge density can

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describe quantitatively this interplay. Thus, each situation requires a detailed analysis as in some occasions the point-dipole approximation overestimates the coupling, whereas it underestimates its strength in others.

These results are of importance in nanoscale optical spectroscopy, in setting optical paths to engineer chemical reactivity at the single-molecule level, as well as in coherent control of the nanoscale light-matter interaction.

Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance.

References

1. Tomáš Neuman, Ruben Esteban, David Casanova, Francisco J. García-Vidal, and Javier Aizpurua (2018) Coupling of Molecular Emitters and Plasmonic Cavities beyond the Point-Dipole Approximation Nano Letters doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b05297 ↩ written by

DIPC

Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) is a singular research center born in 2000 devoted to research at the cutting edge in the fields of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science. Since its conception DIPC has stood for the promotion of excellence in research, which demands a flexible space where creativity is stimulated by diversity of perspectives. Its dynamic research community integrates local host scientists and a constant flow of international visiting researchers.

 Website:http://dipc.ehu.es/  Twitter:@DIPCehu

https://mappingignorance.org/2018/06/28/beyond-the-point-dipole- approximation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnoranc e+%28Mapping+Ignorance%29

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The cost of changing an entire country’s alphabet

The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favoured by the West. What are the economics of such a change?

 By Dene-Hern Chen

The change, announced on a blustery Tuesday morning in mid-February, was small but significant – and it elicited a big response.

“This one is more beautiful!” Asset Kaipiyev exclaims in surprise. The co-founder of a small restaurant in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, Kaipiyev had just been shown the latest version of the new alphabet, approved by President Nursultan Nazarbayev earlier in the day.

The government signed off on a new alphabet, based on a Latin script instead of Kazakhstan’s current use of Cyrillic, in October. But it has faced vocal criticism from the population – a rare occurrence in this nominally democratic country ruled by Nazarbayev’s iron fist for almost three decades.

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Pinch and zoom on mobile to expand.

In this first version of the new alphabet,apostrophes were used to depict sounds specific to the Kazakh tongue, prompting critics to call it “ugly”.

The second variation, which Kaipiyev liked better, makes use of acute accents above the extra letters. So, for example, the Republic of Kazakhstan, which would in the first version have been Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy, is now Qazaqstan Respýblıkasy, removing the apostrophes.

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“It is more beautiful than the former variant,” says Kaipiyev. “I don’t like the old one because it looks like a tadpole.”

Then it hit him. His restaurant, which opened in December, is called Sa’biz –spelt using the first version of the alphabet. All his marketing materials, the labelling on napkin holders and menus, and even the massive sign outside the building will have to be replaced.

In his attempt to get ahead by launching in the new alphabet, Kaipiyev had not predicted that the government would revise it. He thinks it will cost about $3,000 to change the spelling of the name on everything to the new version, Sábiz.

What Kaipiyev and other small business owners are going through will be happening at a larger scale as the government aims to transition fully to the Latin-based script by 2025. It’s an ambitious goal in a nation where the majority of the population are more fluent in Russian than in Kazakh.

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Asset Kaipiyev, co-founder of Sa'biz, changed the spelling of his restaurant – now he has to change it again (Credit: Taylor Weidman)

Mother tongue

According to the 2016 census, ethnic Kazakhs make up about two-thirds of the population, while ethnic Russians are about 20%. But years under Soviet rule mean Russian is spoken by nearly everyone in country – roughly 94% of the more than 18 million citizens are fluent in it. Kazakh fluency is at second place, at 74%.

Years under Soviet rule mean Russian is spoken by nearly everyone in country – roughly 94% of the population is fluent in it

Frequency of usage depends on the environment. In the Russian-influenced northern provinces and city centres, like Almaty and the capital Astana, Russian is used both on the street and in state offices. But in the south and west, Kazakh is more regularly used.

That the Kazakh language is currently written in Cyrillic – and the persistent use of Russian in elite circles – is a legacy of the Soviet Union’s rule, one that some of its neighbouring countries sought to shed right after the union’s collapse in 1991. Azerbaijan, for example, started introducing textbooks in Latin script the next year, while Turkmenistan followed suit in 1993. Kazakhstan is making the transition almost three decades on, in a different economic environment that makes the costs hard to predict.

Pinch and zoom on mobile to expand.

The cost of change

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So far, state media has reported that the government’s total budget for the seven-year transition – which has been divided into three stages – will amount to roughly 218 billion tenge ($664m). About 90% of that amount is going to education programmes the publication of textbooks for education programmes in the new Latin script, including for literature classes.

According to state news media, the government has allocated roughly 300 million tenge each ($922,000) for 2018 and 2019; this money will go towards education in primary and secondary schools, says Eldar Madumarov, an economist and professor at KIMEP University in Almaty.

The government’s total budget for the seven-year transition will amount to roughly 218 billion tenge, or $664 million

Meanwhile, the translation of teaching kits and textbooks will begin this year, according to state media, while teachers nationwide will start teaching pre-school and first grade students the new alphabet in 2020, adding a grade each year until 2025, when all levels from pre-school to the final grade will have fully transitioned.

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There is also budget for developing a language converter IT program to recode Cyrillic script into Latin in the third quarter of 2018 (approximately $166,000), improving the qualifications of secondary school teachers ($33.2m), and hiring influential bloggers to push forward an awareness campaign for the final stage of the transition, beginning in 2024 ($1.4 million).

But without a clear breakdown provided by the government, some economists have found it difficult to properly assess the direct costs of this massive undertaking. (The ministries of foreign affairs, education, and culture did not respond to requests for comment and clarification.)

Hidden costs

The piecemeal reporting of how the transition will happen makes one economist worried about the unexpected costs.

“If this reform is not properly implemented, the risks are high that highly qualified people from the Russian- speaking majority, which includes also ethnic Kazakhs, may want to consider emigration,” says Madumarov. “The risks may be that some of their opportunities would be cut.”

If this reform is not properly implemented, highly qualified people from the Russian-speaking majority may want to consider emigration – Eldar Madumarov

In late February, the extent of the issue was on display when Nazarbayev – who is comfortably bilingual – ordered that all cabinet meetings be held in Kazakh. Since Russian has long been the lingua franca of state affairs, government officials’ command of Russian often surpasses their Kazakh. One meeting was broadcast over TV, and it showed officials struggling to express themselves. Some even opted to wear translation headsets.

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City librarians take a class on the new alphabet at the National Library in Astana, Kazakhstan, on 21 February 2018 (Credit: Taylor Weidman)

Bureaucratic characters

There’s also the cost of changing the language of government affairs. IDs, passports, printed laws and regulations – all the paperwork that governments need in order to function will have to be translated. While this has been reportedly part of the second and final stage of the transition, there has been no listed amount for this expense, says Kassymkhan Kapparov, director of the Almaty-based Bureau for Economic Research of Kazakhstan.

For things like passports and IDs, there is already a fixed fee to renew, “so the only thing that would change is that the letters would just change in the software,” Kapparov says, adding that a new passport costs roughly $60 while an ID card is about $1.50. “The government left it blank. I think the logic is that it would not cost anything.”

It will cost about $3,000 for Sa’biz restaurant to change the spelling of its name the new version, Sábiz (Credit: Taylor Weidman)

But he remains most curious about the third stage, which reportedly begins in 2024 and includes the translation of internal business documents within the central and local state bodies, while state media would also need to implement the new alphabet.

“For the state’s own media to use the new alphabet, you have to train people first of all, then you have to change all the IT infrastructure to embed this script. And then you have to change all the planks [signboards]

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and the letterheads and stamps and signs,” he says. “For that, they didn’t provide the estimate… based on my estimates, it would be somewhere between 15 to 30 million [dollars].”

That number is only for the public sector, though. “For the private sector, of course they would have to do it themselves. It could be double, it could be ten times,” Kapparov says. “It depends on how hard the government goes about it, like would they require it to change in a single year? It’s possible. With our government, you never know.”

Kapparov also worries that people, especially the older generation, would struggle to read and write in the new Latin script, so communications within the public sector may have to be in several languages at once.

“You can call it the language burden, because when you write a letter inside the public sector, you would have to write it in Russian, in Kazakh, and in Kazakh in the new script… and for that you would need to employ translators,” he says. “This creates additional costs and additional inefficiencies and of course the government doesn’t show it in their budget. But it will create an additional burden on the government.”

When it comes to direct costs, Kapparov is confident that his estimates – which he did in 2007 after the first feasibility study came out and again in January of this year when budgetary information started trickling out via state media – would not be more than $1bn for the entire transition.

But the director of Kazakhstan’s Centre for Macroeconomic Research, Olzhas Khudaibergenov, believes the whole transition will cost far less than Kapparov’s estimate. He thinks all paper documents costs will just be folded into the government’s usual budget. “Real expenses will be only for informational and explanatory programmes to support the transition.

“I estimate that the annual budget will not exceed two to three billion tenge [$6.1m-$9.2m] within 2018 to 2025.”

Economic benefits?

Kapparov says this alphabet transition is “hard to sell” for the government, and there won’t be a direct return on investment.

The alphabet change should be seen as more of a social and cultural development programme – Kassymkhan Kapparov

Rather, it “should be seen as more of a social and cultural development programme of the government,” he says.

Khudaibergenov agrees. “It is more a question of national identity which we are trying to find, and are ready to pay for that.”

KIMEP University professor Madumarov believes the economy could be slowed by political ramifications of the language change. While some have speculated that Nazarbayev’s decision to switch might signal cooling ties with Russia, the gradual shift to a Latin-script language could also weaken trade relations with post- Soviet countries.

Currently, up to 10% of the current trade flow between Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine can be explained by the convenience of a shared language, which in some ways translates to a shared culture and mentality, says Madumarov. This also means that Russian-speaking Kazakhs have more economic mobility between

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countries. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan and Georgia, nations that are not as fluent in Russian, have weaker trade links.

Russian is the language of choice in Kazakhstan's cities, such as the capital Astana (Credit: Taylor Weidman)

Inversely, he says that the benefits to having a Latin-script alphabet means being better integrated with most of the Western world. As an example, Turkey, which switched to a Latin-based alphabet from its former Arabic script in 1928, has managed to form alliances with the European Union and was in negotiations – up until recently, when the government moved towards a more autocratic direction – to be a member.

Turkey has long been used as an example of how modernisation of the language and legal systems led to its position today as an economic power, says Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, a Berlin-based expert in Turkic languages and Turkic history. But she says this progress is due more to growing literacy and republic founder Ataturk’s firm grip over every aspect of society.

Turkey’s 1928 switch to a Latin script “was done in no time”, but back then, few Turks could read and write: Ataturk needed educated people for his country to be on the same level as Europe and the US, “and part of the education drive was the new alphabet”, she says.

An independent nation

Kazakhstan’s transition is more about setting itself apart from its Soviet past than literacy or economics, Kellner-Heinkele says. “It is a political argument to show that they are an independent state and they are modern and they are a nation.”

Fazylzhanova Muratkyzy, a linguist who worked with the government to create the new alphabet, echoes this assessment, and says many Kazakhs associate the Cyrillic-based script to Soviet control.

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Young people, especially, are welcoming the change.

Based on surveys that her linguistic institute have conducted over the last decade, Muratkyzy says that 47% of the younger generation – aged 18 to 25 – supported a switch to a Latin-based script in 2007; that number jumped to 80% in 2016.

47% of the younger generation supported a switch to a Latin-based script in 2007; that number jumped to 80% in 2016

“It is the choice of the people, of the nation. And with this new alphabet, it is connected to our dreams and our future,” she says. “It shows that our independent history is finally beginning.”

Head of national academics Munalbayeva Daurenbekovna discusses the new alphabet at the National Library in Astana (Credit: Taylor Weidman)

Munalbayeva Daurenbekovna, head of the National Academic Library, has been holding open classes for librarians and other interested parties to help them get used to the Latin script. She is optimistic the that young people especially will have no trouble learning the new script.

“Teachers would have to learn every day for one month. For children, it would only take 10 lessons, because children learn faster than adults.”

For Kaipiyev, the owner of Sa’biz, moving away from the Cyrillic script – no matter how tedious it is for him as a small business owner – is something he fully supports. “We want to connect with Europe and America, and with other foreign countries. This will help us turn the page to the next chapter,” he says.

As for changing his restaurant material to reflect the latest version of the alphabet?

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“I think I will leave it the same for now,” Kaipiyev says, after a moment’s consideration. “We will change it when the people can actually read it.”

Additional reporting by Makhabbat Kozhabergenova. Additional research by Miriam Quick.

--

http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180424-the-cost-of-changing-an-entire-countrys-alphabet

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Defunct Old Cars Given New Life as Pools and Pizza Ovens by Benedetto Bufalino

JUNE 18, 2018

ANDREW LASANE

French artist Benedetto Bufalino (previously) brings functional fun to existing objects that were built with practicality as a primary objective. Since transforming a cement mixer truck into a disco on wheels back in 2016, Bufalino has continued to create unique urban interventions out of cars, phone booths, and other vehicles and objects from daily life.

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While some of his creations are meant to be observed as structures (like his modified aquariums), others are built to be used. Bufalino has transformed a gutted sedan into a working wood-burning pizza oven, outfitted a camper van with a family-sized pool, and modified stretch limousines to serve as outdoor seating or ping pong tables.

Rather than restricting his labor-intensive sculptures to rarefied gallery settings, the artist often installs his work in public spaces to be encountered by the unsuspecting general public. To see more of his projects, including behind-the-scenes looks at the builds, follow Bufalino on Instagram (via designboom).

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/defunct-cars-benedetto- bufalino/?mc_cid=f13be2d8df&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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Düssel…

Ian McEwan

JULY 19, 2018 ISSUE

Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource/© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/SIAE, Rome

Giorgio de Chirico: The Soothsayer’s Recompense, 1913

You ask how was it for me. To answer I must go back some fifty years to a warm Friday midnight and the moment when I whispered with utmost delicacy into the ear of my new friend the indelicate question. I was lying beneath her and she was in all her glory, naked but for a studded choker of lapis lazuli and gold. Even in the amber light of a bedside lamp, her skin gleamed white. Her eyes were closed as she swayed above me, her lips, minimally parted, allowed a glint of beautiful teeth. Her right hand rested lovingly on my left shoulder. She smelled faintly, not of perfume but of sandalwood soap. Those bars, imprinted with an ancient sailing ship and folded in tissue within a long rectangular box of balsa, were once mine. She had taken to them the moment she first entered my bathroom. Why should I mind?

As we came to a lull in our lovemaking and she leaned forward, I put my lips close to her ear lobe and licking it, speaking into a headwind of sensual pleasure that seemed to snatch the words from my mouth, said, “Dearest, I know I shouldn’t, but I have to ask you this. I don’t claim any right to know, of course, but after

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these two wonderful weeks…I feel…darling, Jenny…forgive me, I love you and always will…but please tell me the truth. Are you real?”

Before I describe her reaction, I should explain for the benefit of younger readers how things stood at that particular moment. We’d been through a social revolution whose outcomes now are entirely taken for granted. The young, I’ve noticed, tend to act as though nothing has happened. They have little or no sense of history. The miracles worked by previous generations—they’re as ordinary as life itself. But as everyone who takes an interest should know, the entire debate began innumerable centuries before, with Plato perhaps, or with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or with Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, or the speculations of Alan Turing, or when, at the dawn of the third millennium, a computer program, learning from its own mistakes by way of deep neural networks and “self-play,” defeated a Grandmaster at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Or, most significantly, when the first android became pregnant by a human and the first viable carbon-silicon baby was born. Only three streets away from my apartment, in a delightful little square lined with cafés and shaded by pollarded plane trees, there’s a statue in Molly’s honor. You would think that there was nothing unusual in such a monument. Except that a pretty girl of eight in T-shirt and jeans, hands on hips, stands boldly before us on a plinth in place of a general, or a poet or an astronaut.

Could a machine be conscious? Or put another way, were humans merely biological machines? The affirmative answers to both questions consumed many decades of international wrangling between neuroscientists, bishops, philosophers, politicians, and the general public. Finally, long after it was due, artificial people were granted full protection under various human rights conventions. So too were their mixed-source offspring. Other rights properly followed, including benefit of marriage, property ownership, of passports, voting, and employment protection. An android could start a business, get rich, be bankrupted, sued, and murdered as opposed to destroyed. Around the world there developed various “autonomy acts” which made it illegal to buy or own a manufactured person. The legal language self-consciously invoked the anti-slavery acts of the nineteenth century. With rights came responsibilities—military service was an uncontroversial, irresistible matter. On jury service, androids were a useful addition, given all the cognitive defects and weak, pliable memory of humans.

Ours was the generation that came of age in the aftermath—turbulent years of passion and anguished reflection. What it meant to be human was being interestingly, or tragically, extended. If the consensus of the scientific elites was that our newly devised friends felt pain and joy and remorse, how could we prove it? We had been asking the same question about other humans since the dawn of philosophical reflection. Should we be troubled or delighted that they were, on the whole, cleverer, kinder, more beautiful than we were? Were the religious among us wrong to refuse to grant them souls?

Then, as so often happens with contested social change, once these matters were talked out and the legislation approved, life moved on and soon no one could remember what all the fuss had been about. It’s often said that the great questions of philosophy are never resolved: they fade away. All those protest marches, monographs, speeches, conferences, and dire predictions were for nothing. After all, our new friends seemed much like us, only more likable. You could trust them, which is why so many went into law, banking, and politics and began much-needed reasonable reform of those institutions. Their natures were deeply caring, and many became doctors and nurses. They were strong and fast and made up two thirds of our Olympic track and field team, though sprint hurdling took another fifteen years to perfect. Famously, they showed themselves brilliant musicians and composers in all forms of music. If ever we worried that they seemed a little too good at everything, we could congratulate ourselves that they were our creation, in our image, the final full flowering of our artistic and technical genius. They were, we often said, the better angels of our nature.

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By slow steps, though much remarked on, and affecting social life as well as legal process, it came to be understood and generally accepted that our crafted con-specifics deserved full dignity, and respect for their privacy. That’s to say, in a matter of years it became socially unacceptable—as was not the case in our youth—to ask.

For example, at a gala dinner for a major book prize, you could not inquire of your charming neighbor at table, prompted by a rather too astute remark of his, if he, a highly respected publisher, was a biosilicate- based, locally manufactured artifact. Twenty years before, you could have—indeed, it would have been the first thing you wanted to know. It would have been no more than a casual preliminary. Just as if you had said, I hear you have a second home in Thuringia. So do I! With all the last mutinous mutterings about political correctness fading away, along with the stupid old “they live among us” scare stories, it became offensive, even prurient to ask, since your inquiry would be, in essence, grossly physical, given that the matter of ascribing consciousness had long been settled. It would be no less intrusive than asking of a human over the chocolate mousse, Is it really true? Everyone’s saying you’ve had a colostomy!

Another example. When Mrs. Tabitha Rapting became prime minister with a parliamentary majority of two, there were those who wondered if she was “real”—another hurtful word that has been dropped. But the point is this—socially, we had already crossed a great divide, for such wondering was not done in public. Only in golf club bars, or on street protest marches by marginal, radical groups. It would have been indecent, obscene, akin to racism, and therefore probably illegal. That was all long ago, and even now we’re still not sure when an android first became prime minister. Or if one ever has. Or whether we’ve lived under an unbroken succession of them. Nor do we know whether (or if) an android has ever taken the men’s or women’s singles championship at Wimbledon. Or if a human has won it these past twenty years.

So if my question to Jenny that sultry July evening seems despicable to younger readers, let me remind them that I belong to a generation that lived through the transition. As gruesome adolescents with an unforgivable taste for taunting women passersby in shopping malls, we thought we knew a dozen ways to test the difference. We were wrong, of course—not that we would have cared. Beyond DNA analysis or deep micro- surgery, there are no means of knowing. But we knew we could always demand an answer from the victims of our taunts, and the answer was programmed always to be truthful—until that too began to change.

Jenny, I’m proud to remember, did not take offense. She drew closer to me. Her eyes, now open and deep and black, were fixed on mine. She felt—words can barely perform the task—liquid, smooth, warm, enveloping. Sentient and sensual. Oh, such a lovable self. A bolt of love and pleasure threatened to render me deaf. But my curiosity was so strong that I heard every word she said. Moments like these are what we’ll take to the edge of the grave. The kiss we exchanged before she spoke was tender and rapturous. Her lips, her tongue— miracles, however they were formed. I knew, even before I had my answer, that I would never leave her. So why should it matter what she was made of?

“You’re mine.” She said it as a matter of plain fact. She had uttered these words occasionally during our lovemaking and they had always pleased me. “And I belong to you. Everything else is froth.”

Because she paused, I disloyally wondered if these endearments, however sincere, were a form of evasion. But how dared I doubt her?

“I thought you already knew. I was formed in Düsseldorf in Greater France. So were my parents and the aunts you’re so nice to. But the cousin you met in the restaurant, the one you tried to beat at squash, he’s from Taiwan.”

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“Düsseldorf!” It was all I could manage, though the final syllable was no more than a swallowing sound, for I believed I was disappearing. Such mighty sensations belonged not to me but to the world of things, to the emptiness between things, to the essence of matter and space. Around those two entities there rose an obliterating tide of ecstasy. Such confirmation of her strange and beautiful otherness thrilled the world that included me to a vanishing point of oblivious singularity. Within seconds I had, in the colorful phrase of my shopping mall adolescence, “cartwheeled over the windmill.” Feebly clutching at my heart, I briefly fainted. How it shamed me to be such a selfish lover—and as I returned to the present moment I told her so. Of course, it was in her nature to forgive.

I was in love and there was no turning back. But now I knew for certain something about her that I would need to bear in mind. Her processing speeds ran at half the speed of light. She could think a million times faster than me. Tact and other considerations would oblige her not to show it. But if we were to live together, I would have to acknowledge that it would be tricky for me to win an argument or counter any decision she made. In the instant it might take me to shrug and look away from her to gather my thoughts, she could have rehearsed in private reflection most of what was known about human nature and the history of civilization.

So, there it is, this is how it was for me. My generation straddled one of the great clefts or rifts in that lengthening mountain range we routinely call the story of modernity. Believe me, if you have never apologized to a machine for posing the indelicate question, then you have no concept of the historical distance that I and my generation have traveled.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/dussel/

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 In Hawaii, being nice is the law

‘Aloha’ is a legal concept that grew out of the necessity for Hawaiians to live in peace and work together, in harmony with the land and their spiritual beliefs.

  By Breena Kerr It was mid-afternoon on our second day living in Hawaii, and I woke up groggy from a much-needed power nap. I stumbled into the kitchen where my girlfriend was sitting on the floor with the guy from the cable company. He had come to set up our internet – something we direly needed, because our house is situated in a lush valley with no mobile phone signal. But, I realised, they weren’t even talking about the internet. Instead, I found, he was inviting her to come boar hunting with him.

In Hawaii, ‘Aloha’ is more than a greeting – it’s the law (Credit: Danita Delimont/Getty Images)

As the days passed, the friendly happenings increased. We stopped by a neighbourhood farm and were offered avocados from the caretaker’s tree. We arrived at the end of a hiking trail, or so we thought, when a passing father and daughter offered to show us the secret additional part of the path that led up a rock face,

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over boulders and through a stream to a hidden waterfall. On another occasion, we were headed for a swim in the ocean, when someone on shore warned us that the current was too strong to swim safely, then offered us a beer and invited us to go canoeing.

There may be many words to explain these kinds of encounters, but at least one of them is ‘Aloha’. And as it turns out, ‘Aloha’ is actually the law here.

Hawaii now hosts almost nine million visitors a year, and ‘Aloha’ is a word that most of those tourists will hear during their time on the islands. The word is used in place of hello and goodbye, but it means much more than that. It’s also a shorthand for the spirit of the islands – the people and the land – and what makes this place so unique.

“Alo means ‘face to face’ and Ha means ‘breath of life’,” according to Davianna Pōmaikaʻi McGregor, a Hawaii historian and founding member of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. But McGregor also noted that there are several less literal, but equally valid, interpretations of the word.

Aloha is a concept that grew out of the necessity for Hawaiians to live in peace and work together

One especially memorialised interpretation was shared by a respected Maui elder named Pilahi Paki at the 1970 conference, Hawaii 2000, where people had gathered to discuss the past, present and future of Hawaii. It was a time of heightened disagreement in the islands, over Vietnam and other political issues, and Paki stood up to give an emotional speech about the Aloha Spirit – in other words, the unique spiritual and cultural code of a Hawaii that is uniting rather than divisive. In it, she described what Aloha meant about the way people should treat one another.

In her speech, she broke each letter of ‘Aloha’ down to one phrase. And that speech became the basis for Hawaii’s Aloha Spirit law, which essentially mandates consideration and kindness:

“Akahai, meaning kindness to be expressed with tenderness; Lōkahi, meaning unity, to be expressed with harmony; ʻOluʻolu, meaning agreeable, to be expressed with pleasantness; Haʻahaʻa, meaning humility, to be expressed with modesty; Ahonui, meaning patience, to be expressed with perseverance.”

Although the Aloha Spirit law didn’t become official until 1986, its origins are deeply rooted in native Hawaiian culture. Aloha is a concept that grew out of the necessity for Hawaiians to live in peace and work together, in harmony with the land and their spiritual beliefs, McGregor told me.

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The Aloha Spirit law is deeply rooted in native Hawaiian culture (Credit: Babak Tafreshi/Getty Images)

It makes sense. Hawaii is the most isolated population centre in the world: the California coast is around 2,400 miles away; Japan is more than 4,000 miles. The islands are small – most (like Maui, where I live) can be driven around in a single day. Then, as now, there are no bridges connecting the islands, and even inter- island travel is a challenge. With nowhere to go, the only option, it would seem, is to get along.

“Being isolated, historically, our ancestors needed to treat each other and the land, which has limited resources, with respect,” McGregor said. “For Hawaiians, the main source of labour was human. So there was a need for collective work among extended families and a high value placed on having loving and respectful relationships.”

Like any place, she added, Hawaii had its problems with people abusing power. But, she said, there’s evidence that if a chief was not acting ‘‘with Aloha”, peace-loving Hawaiians would find ways to get rid of them.

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The islands’ isolated location led Hawaiians to place a high value on respectful relationships with one another (Credit: Brandon Tabiolo/Design Pics/Getty Images)

It’s not so different from how the Aloha Spirit law is applied today.

According to the Hawaii State Attorney’s Office, the law is mostly symbolic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work – especially when political leaders or business people get out of line.

“This law is virtually impossible to enforce because it is a philosophy that directs a code of conduct and way of life. Nonetheless… all citizens and government officials of Hawaii are obligated to conduct themselves in accordance with this law,” Dana Viola, first deputy attorney general of Hawaii, said in an email.

If a business or a government official doesn’t act with Aloha Spirit, they could lose business or be chastised publicly. “So the consequences are real,” she added.

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Residents, businesses, government officials and even visitors are expected to act with Aloha Spirit (Credit: Linda Ching/Getty Images)

But Wendell Kekailoa Perry, assistant professor at the Hawai'inuiakea School of Hawaiian knowledge, who has studied the Aloha Spirit law in depth, said that the law and its sentiment aren’t always positive.

“The Aloha Spirit is used to argue that everyone in Hawaii can ‘feel’ and should accept the love for humanity… [and] says that the Aloha Spirit transcends race, differences and embraces togetherness or ‘equality’. That is a problem because it ignores all of the complexities of our life and society,” Perry said.

“Maybe, on a good day, the law can support Hawaiian rights,” he added. But on a bad day, he said, it can be used to silence native Hawaiians who are protesting injustices in the islands. When that happens, “The Aloha they are using is actually part of the ‘passive’ and ‘don’t-make-waves’ native identity created during the US occupation and control. But, if you look at the thousands of debates that were publicly expressed in Hawaiian language newspapers and protests, it is obvious that passivity was not the only Hawaiian cultural practice.”

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Although the Aloha Spirit law likely has its flaws, it still resonates with those who live in Hawaii (Credit: Jose Fuste Raga/Getty Images)

Before Paki, who inspired the law, passed away, she reportedly said that with Aloha, and the mutual respect that it entails, “Hawaiians have the power to save world culture.” Although the law likely has its flaws, it’s something that still resonates in the islands.

"Visitors to Hawaii often talk about how Hawaii is a beautiful place, but the most special part of their experience has been the people, and how nice people are,” said Hawaii State Representative Tulsi Gabbard. “People across the United States and around the world ultimately want peace... By truly living Aloha – having respect and love for others – we can be empowered to overcome those differences and find solutions that best serve the wellbeing of people and our planet."

Aloha, for me, is kindness and harmony – something important to keep in mind between ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’

Often, when people think of Hawaii, it’s in the context of a holiday. When I moved here two months ago, a friend said “Think of me when you’re having cocktails on the beach.” He imagined an idyllic, one- dimensional version of my life that doesn’t square with the reality. There’s still work to do, bills to pay, shopping and laundry to do and all the other trappings of a normal life.

The Aloha Spirit law is somewhat similar. It’s an idealised version of something that does exist, but is far too complicated to fit in a one-page definition.

For now, I’ll say that Aloha, for me, is kindness and harmony – something important to keep in mind between ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180422-in-hawaii-being-nice-is-the-law

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Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson

 BUYAnthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp, £25.00, October 2017, ISBN 978 0 241 14383 4 Are there any appropriate dimensions to literary biography as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.

Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of postscripts. Yet his memoirs, which run to nearly double the length of her biography, stop at much the same cut-off point. Did they cover so much ground that little was to be gained by treading it again? By no means. In the four volumes of To Keep the Ball Rolling, scintillating portraits of his contemporaries screen notable discretion about himself. Nor has Spurling’s own practice as a biographer in the past been so succinct. Her double-decker biographies of Compton-Burnett and Matisse, each of them outstanding, are considerably longer than her Life of Powell. Would the difference be due to her relationship with the subject, a close friend whom for many years she knew and admired – Christopher Sykes on Waugh is the nearest parallel? In such cases, affection can shape the compass of a biography, personal knowledge lighting up but also limiting what can be said. Perhaps there are traces of that here; but, on the whole, in the warmth and grace of Spurling’s account there is a natural tact but little sign of inhibition. Perhaps simple consideration of sales was a factor: over a certain length, publishers rarely break even. Aesthetically speaking, at all events, the economy of her study is not out of keeping with its subject: Powell, a disciplined writer with a laconic streak of his own, would have appreciated it.

What does Spurling add to the story outlined in Powell’s memoirs and projected in his fiction: military father, excruciating prep school; happiness at Eton, depression at Oxford; job in publishing, deadpan early novels, marriage into the Pakenhams; war service in Northern Ireland and Allied Liaison; postwar triumph with A Dance to the Music of Time? The most striking revelations come where he said least, of his childhood and his loves. The finest thing in Spurling’s book is her delicate portrait of the extraordinary union that produced Powell and shaped his infancy. Though both parents came from gentry families, their marriage defied convention, since his mother was 15 years older than his father, who wed at the age of 22 – an age gap frowned on enough in civilian life, but virtually unheard of in the army. Breaking a still greater taboo, before they were married she travelled on her own to South Africa to join him during his service in the Boer War. Sadly, however, the price of such daring was thereafter, in Spurling’s surmise, her all but complete withdrawal from society out of timidity at being taken for a cradle-snatcher, which Powell’s father – her opposite in temperament – did little to offset, given his own volcanic temper with the world at large. Within the nuclear cell, the marriage itself was a success, though the social isolation of the family was compounded by the uprooted, nomadic character of army life. As to its consequences for the future author, Spurling opens her book: ‘Small, inquisitive and solitary, the only child of an only son, growing up in rented lodgings or

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hotel rooms, constantly on the move as a boy, Anthony Powell needed an energetic imagination to people a sadly underpopulated world from a child’s point of view.’

Such, at the outset, was his external environment. Within the family, the extreme contrast between his parents – his father ‘a champion grudge-bearer, liable to resort at the smallest real or imagined slight in public or private to hysterical rage’, his ‘calm, generous and open’ mother ‘a born peacemaker’ – left a two-fold mark on him: on the one hand, acquiring as a baby ‘the rock-bottom security that came from being unconditionally loved by his mother’, who bore him when she was 38; on the other, learning as a boy from the spectacle of his father the need for ‘strategies of discipline and restraint’. Arrival at the age of 13 at Eton, a year after the Great War had come an end, brought him in Spurling’s view the underlying stability and continuity that came from a sense he had never known before of belonging to a community that accepted him, the nearest thing to a place where he felt at home. The school became from now on a kind of virtual extended family whose members – however rebarbative, reluctant or remote – stood in all his life for the actual relatives he hadn’t got.

Fortunate in finding himself in a house ‘with a poor reputation and no standards to keep up’, presided over by an easy-going master, he flourished as a member of the school’s Arts Society, did well academically, and emerged more polished and confident socially.

Oxford was an abrupt reversal: depressed and inchoate, he got little out of the university, and left with a poor degree. Remarking that his subsequent accounts of his time there were ‘both vague and characteristically harsh’, Spurling conjectures that with ingenuous good looks, he may have suffered from unwanted advances in a setting where homosexuality was not unusual. Certainly his main later complaint was the impossibility of any relation with girls, under vigilant bar by the authorities. There was also his lack of money for the lavish living affected by smart undergraduates, and his relative modesty of background – an absence of snobbish connections Spurling takes to have left him lonely and disoriented, his social life ‘arid, sometimes non- existent’ in London on going down.

Reacting against standard images of Powell as the consummate denizen of an aristocratic beau monde, more than one reviewer of Spurling has bent the stick in the opposite direction, depicting him as by her account an outsider who eventually made his way, through literary achievement and likeability, from social disadvantage to exalted company. This notion is only a little more accurate than the received version. One third of the boys in Powell’s house at Eton came from titled families; at Oxford he was a member of the Hypocrites Club, haunt of iconoclast high-rollers; in London, he was shoehorned by a former staff captain of his father’s, without even applying for it, into a job with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of limited means, liable to be snubbed or dropped. Flexible though each may have been, there were different levels in the upper social hierarchy of the time. Still, a certain worldly success came early. Powell reached London when he was 21. At 25 he had published his first novel, Afternoon Men, well received by critics across the board, and sufficiently popular with readers for a fan letter to yield him a fashionable mistress in Chelsea, after an earlier affair with Nina Hamnett, model for Modigliani and his route into bohemia.

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Powell was reticent about these matters in his memoirs, leaving readers to deduce the possible significance or otherwise of the women featuring in them prior to his marriage in 1934. Spurling offers a sequence of vivid silhouettes, panels in a period fresco, of what he omitted: failures with the débutante Adelaide Biddulph and the model Enid Firminger; passages with Nina Hamnett and Dorothy Varda, another model, both of them self- destructive; a fling with the artist Juliet O’Rourke, wife of a modernist architect; a tumble in the afternoon with the Irish writer Mary Manning; a ‘great passion’ for Marion Coates, wife of another architect, before his wedding to Violet Pakenham, sixth daughter of a Longford earl. All these set in an interwar landscape where bohemia and la bonne société – hostesses, adventurers, artists, intellectuals – overlapped as in the first half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Marriage extended rather than altered this, Powell acquiring many an in-law from an Anglo-Irish background to which he was allergic, while his wife ‘slipped effortlessly’ into ‘a shabby, rootless urban world unlike any she had known before’. Spurling’s portrait of Violet Powell – another part of his life, as he often said, that he could never describe – is the second great virtue of her book. Written with an underlying entre femmeswarmth and understanding, its stress falls on ‘her extraordinary openness to experience, her voracious hunger for life and the energy she put into it’. High-spirited and quick-witted, becoming in due course a fluent writer herself, she proved a temperamental and intellectual partner rare in that generation, whose impact on Powell’s postwar fiction was no small one: in their son Tristram’s words, her memory ‘was, as it were, the right arm of my father’s imagination’.

With the onset of the Second World War, A Dance becomes more closely autobiographical, his memoirs moving in parallel, and once the novel sequence itself started to be published, at the turn of the 1950s, it naturally dominated his life. Across this stretch of time, there is – with one exception – less that is new in Spurling’s narrative, which contracts accordingly: three-quarters of it covering the first 45 years of his life, a quarter the subsequent 25. She is also the author of a comprehensive handbook to the series, published shortly after it was completed, and her commentary on it here is always to the point, if tilted towards identification of characters with real persons, a regular tendency in critics whose oversimplifications Powell himself often warned against, if occasionally also allowed. Spurling’s principal trophy is pinning the original of his most celebrated creation, Widmerpool, on the colonel who hired and fired him in the wartime Cabinet Office, Denis Capel-Dunn, an ‘undistinguished’ lawyer in civil life who perished on a flight back from the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco, to no great distress on Powell’s part. With the completion of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volume of A Dance, Spurling effectively brings her biography to a close. Its brief postscript describes her friendship with him, his subsequent brace of novels, the honours and travails of old age, his final infirmity. Though tight-lipped, it makes a moving conclusion.

Yet there is undeniably an element of paradox in its upshot. What more sense do we gain of Powell himself as a person, once launched on adult life? Spurling observes of the biography he produced after the war, John Aubrey and His Friends, that ‘for all the author’s evident respect and affection, its subject never comes to life as Aubrey makes his own subjects do.’ How far can the same be said of her account of him? Good-natured, amusing, affable, to many he also seemed inscrutable. ‘Nobody could get the wrong impression of you,’ a woman friend once told him, ‘because you don’t give them anything to go on.’ To interviewers he would deflect questions about himself with the disarming claim: ‘I never feel strongly myself what my own character is like.’ ‘I have absolutely no picture of myself. Never have had.’ Spurling knew him well, but he was in his sixties by the time she met him, when such defences were long in place. By the time she came to write his biography, he had outlived every one of his contemporaries who might have had unexpected perceptions or memories of him: the lack of third-party insight or witness in the story is striking. There was nothing to be done about that.

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Still, signs of considerable inner turbulence beneath the unruffled surface Powell presented to the world were there. He suffered from nearly permanent insomnia (‘In my early days I never slept a wink’), late on installing a camp bed by his desk so as not to keep his wife awake too. Prey not only to bouts of paralysing accidie, ‘the feeling that nothing’s worth doing’, but to spells of black depression – after an unsuccessful sortie to Hollywood in 1937, and in still more acute form, on returning to civilian life again after the war, when ‘every morning he wished he were dead’ – in his memoirs he implied a rather different explanation for having nothing to say when asked about his character, observing that ‘not everyone can stand the strain of gazing down too long into the personal crater, with its scene of Hieronymus Bosch activities taking place in the depths.’ Spurling, tacitly treating his depressions as discrete episodes, without much bearing on what he may have been like at some deeper level, does not recall this graphic image. Reluctance to venture much psychological surmise after Powell landed in London is visible in other ways. Reporting his claim never to have raised his voice again after leaving Eton, she later shows he was not so imperturbable: ‘rage and frustration’ at the tedium and inanity of life in the army ‘drove him to the kind of explosion he had witnessed as a child from his father’; he ‘lost control’ after Graham Greene’s obstruction of his book on Aubrey; he was hopelessly drunk with ‘unguarded anger, bitterness and shock’ on dismissal as literary editor at Punch; he severed his long-standing ties with the Daily Telegraph in ‘grief and rage’ at infantile barbs from the junior Waugh. Some of the materials for a more complex, in all probability no less sympathetic, portrait of Powell lie plain in the pages of this biography. But by choice, certainly not inability, they are denied synthesis.

The one arresting novelty in the latter half of Spurling’s narrative is that Violet Powell had an affair during the war with someone she described to Sonia Orwell as the love of her life, without identifying the lover. Spurling writes with typical understanding of the conditions making for such an affair, and attributes Powell’s postwar depression to his discovery of it. In the most startling single passage of her book, she argues that the famous scene in which Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, takes Jean Templer in his arms – in the back of a car, speeding through night and snow along the Great West Road, past the neon sign where a bathing belle ‘dives eternally through the petrol-tainted air’: the opening embrace of the principal romance of the series – mingles the lightning suddenness of Powell’s courtship of Violet with the beauty and marital circumstances of her predecessor Marion Coates, on whom Jean was modelled, transferring the pain of Violet’s infidelity to the successive deceptions of Jean.

This is an ingenious reconstruction, which seems to have the authority of Violet behind it. But if it is accurate, it only shows how the extraordinary power of a creative imagination transformed particles of experience into the universe of his fiction, since there is not the least hint of the enigmatic sexual waywardness of Jean in anything represented by Spurling of either woman in real life. This is not to say there is no mystery in Powell’s affair with Marion Coates, of whose emotional and sensual straightforwardness Spurling paints an attractive picture. But it lies elsewhere. What is truly strange about the connection is the fact, which Spurling reports without any expression of surprise, that Marion, born in China and schooled in England, ‘gentle, self- contained and demure with a softness and sweetness of manner that hid a cool analytical brain and a streak of unexpected toughness’, was a lifelong communist, whose intellectual mentor was J.D. Bernal. Given his own political outlook, a more unlikely figure for Powell to fall passionately in love with is difficult to imagine.

Did he ever stray after marriage, as his wife once did? If so, his discretion has never been breached. Glamorous photographs to be found in this biography and his memoirs – of Miranda Christen, adventuress installed by Powell in Islington as stenographer for Orwell, or Georgina Ward, actress in a belated stage

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version of his prewar novel Afternoon Men – tell no tales. His friend Alan Ross, editor of the London Magazine, thought that surrounded by promiscuous friends, he may have simply found a vicarious pleasure, productive for his fiction, in observing them, while conducting his own marital life with the meticulous sexual correctness Jenkins whimsically fancies of the usurper Gyges in Temporary Kings. That is quite possible. Spurling says nothing either way. A protective motive is more or less explicit at the end of her book, but it is directed elsewhere. Though herself not especially distant from them, she has reasons for not wanting to dwell on Powell’s politics, which play less of a role in her story than in either his life or his art. Her concern is for his contemporary reputation, in her view diminished by a disobliging myth of them.

*

There is no doubt that, as Isabelle Joyau, a French critic, has put it, the question of literary status is unusually acute in the case of Powell. It is difficult to think of another writer where opinions diverge so widely. Readers of his work, the American scholar Nicholas Birns observes, tend to be either addicts or indifferent, to love or to hate it: ‘There is not the dutiful normative respect coupled with limited concrete enthusiasm garnered by so many canonical modern writers.’ The reasons for that, however, have in the first instance little to do with its political dimensions, significant though these certainly are. They relate to the nature of his project as a whole. In scale and design, the architecture of A Dance to the Music of Time is unique in Western literature. Scale: the novel covers a period of more than half a century, from 1914 to 1971. Design: it forms a sequence of 12 self-standing but completely interconnected works. Why is this combination unique? Balzac’s Comédie humaine, covering the history of society from the Revolution to the last years of the July Monarchy, is comparable in span. But its 91 volumes form no single narrative: they are separate fictions, in which characters may reappear a few times, but the stories are essentially disconnected, at best unified ex post facto by the more or less arbitrary categories of the creator’s ‘system’. The twenty volumes of Zola’s Rougon- Macquart cycle start with a prelude in the Ancien Régime, but as their subtitle, ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, indicates, 18 of the novels are set in the two decades of Louis Napoleon’s rule, integrated only by a doctrine extraneous to them, ostensibly obeying a biological determinism. In Spain, Galdós produced 46 Episodios Nacionales, from the Battle of Trafalgar to the fall of the First Republic, but these are historical novels in the strict sense, comprising five distinct series, each with a new hero, and each recounting major political conflicts through the adventures of an individual.

The more relevant comparison, it is sometimes felt, is between Powell and Proust. There are good reasons for this. In the titles of the two novels, A la recherche du temps perdu and A Dance to the Music of Time, the dominant term is the same. Their length is very similar: 1,240,000 words in Proust, 1,130,000 in Powell. Bearing in mind that French is syntactically more prolix than English – translations of the latter into the former typically increase in size by some 15 per cent – the longer work may actually be Powell’s. In both, a unitary overall narrative encompasses successive distinct volumes. The social settings and occasions of each have much in common, aristocrats and artists, dinners and parties featuring prominently in both. The predominant focus of each is on sexual relations. Both are delivered in a high style. Both are inlaid with literary, painterly and other aesthetic references. Both are tours de force in comedy.

How far in any of these aspects was Powell, two generations younger, directly indebted to his predecessor? In his many considerations of other writers – three volumes covering English, European and American literature – none figures so frequently as Proust, a revelation to him already at Oxford. There is no question that A la recherche was one of the preconditions of A Dance, which could not have been written without the formal breakthrough it represented. But Lermontov and Fitzgerald were equally, in certain respects perhaps more,

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important as inspirations. Powell was no one’s epigone. When he is set beside Proust, it is not the connections between them, but the disparities in reception that are most significant. The literature on Proust is an ocean, at the latest count more than three thousand titles. On Powell, fewer than a dozen: seven studies from America, one each from France, Japan, Switzerland – and one from Britain. Figures like these have no conceivable relation to respective achievement. They call for other kinds of explanation.

Two, of course, come readily to mind. Proust transformed the parameters of the novel as a genre, in a way that only Joyce matched. That accords him a place of his own in its history. Then there is the fact, now a thing of the past, but central for the better part of a century, of French predominance in the world republic of letters. Neither of these tells us much, however, about the specific literary qualities of A la recherche. There is a sense, indeed, in which both have tended to obscure them. In the huge modern literature on Proust, it is noticeable how little of it is actual criticism, in any traditional meaning of the term, as distinct from documentation or devotion. That this has been a general drift across the discipline, Joseph North has argued in his recent Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History with good reason. A fortiori in the case of such an eminence as Proust. In the academy, criticism as once understood is, on the whole, at a discount. Comparison tends to fall with it. Not just as suspect for other reasons – de gustibus – but because it is inherent in judgment of any kind, which always implies a distinction or opposition within a commensurable set of values.

Such preventions are superstitions. Without critical comparison, reading is intellectually and aesthetically blind. Where two writers are at once as similar and dissimilar as Proust and Powell, they invite interrelated judgments. A starting point, as good as any, is offered by background. The contiguity in the ambience of their novels, appreciable but far from complete, was not a product of common origins. Powell’s family were not particularly well off, but belonged to what historically was regarded as the nobilitas minor – rural gentry without titles. Proust came from an extremely rich bourgeois household in Paris, closely connected to the highest circles of power in the Third Republic. His maternal grandmother was a niece of Adolphe Crémieux, author of a famous decree according French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria during the Second Empire, and after its fall minister of justice in the republican government of national defence of 1871. His father was a friend of Félix Faure, president of the Third Republic in the last years of the 19th century, who expired in one of its most famous scandals, in the course – his pompe funèbre, as it was widely dubbed – of fellation by his mistress. The foreign minister Gabriel Hanotaux, champion of colonial expansion in Africa, was a guest at his dinner table. This was a republican elite of distinctly roturier origins: Faure had been a tanner, Hanotaux’s father was a provincial lawyer. When Proust’s mother followed his father to the grave, he inherited at the age of 34 a fortune of about $5 million. He never earned a centime or had to do a day’s work in his life. If Powell was in one writer’s words ‘liminal’ to a socially fashionable world, it was a boundary he would cross quite easily, without being overly impressed by the other side. Proust arrived much earlier in smart society, from the age of 17 dandled for his good looks and wit in aristocratic salons. Dazzled by the ci-devant world of a class which, cut off – unlike its counterparts in England, Germany, Austria or Russia – from power, compensated for political impotence with extravagant social pretensions and mannerisms, Proust settled in to a lifelong frequentation of it, if modulated over time by illness and reclusion.

Out of his exceptional gifts and this crucible came the revolutionary achievement of A la recherche as a novel. Technically speaking, that lay in its combination of two attributes, each without precedent: monumentality of narrative scale and intensity of elaborate introspection – a fictional universe teeming with characters, steeped in an unremitting interiority, made one in an intricate poetry of complex syntax and imagery. Thematically speaking, too, this was the first sustained representation of same-sex relations in Western literature. Moving fluently across comic and tragic registers, the grandeur of A la recherche was

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immediately recognised by contemporaries: ‘one of the great minds and imaginations of our day’, Edmund Wilson wrote in the 1920s, ‘absolutely comparable’ to ‘the Nietzsches, the Tolstoys, the Wagners and the Ibsens of a previous generation’.

All literary magnitudes are finite. In the case of great writers, it is understandable that their vices should attract so much less attention, not infrequently to vanishing point, than their virtues; but not defensible. For all its gifts, Proust’s work has conspicuous shortcomings, regularly ignored in the cult of it. Time – the grandiloquent leitmotif of the novel – is handled erratically at the episodic level of the narrative, in ways that cannot be explained by the vagaries of the narrator’s memory. Proust, who rarely dated his letters, blurred temporality by avoidance of any specifications of age, and frequent resort to the iterative form of the past imperfect (‘Aunt Léonie would … ’), but lapses of control are obvious enough. Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older than when she figures for him as Swann’s wife; references to historical events impossible at the time of fictional episodes – Edward VII’s state visit to Paris (1903), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), the death of the Swedish king Oscar II (1907), all at an early stage of talk about the Dreyfus Affair (1898) etc: the external and internal chronologies of the novel do not fit. More significant is the stasis of the society depicted in the arc of the narrative as a whole. Between the 1870s, when the story of Swann hypothetically begins, and the aftermath of the First World War, when the novel ends, virtually the only area of change is technological. Electrical lights replace gas lamps, motor cars replace coaches, telephones and aeroplanes appear: otherwise, all remains essentially as it was. Even the war alters only fashions in dress, and the guests at the same receptions. History, for Proust, was romantic imaginings of a medieval or Renaissance past – ‘the distant gules of kingly France’. It had little or no meaning for him in the present. The passage of time is purely existential, the slide towards decrepitude and death. The mystique of involuntary memory he erected around it was essentially defensive. In his remarkable Proust among the Stars, the one study of A la recherche equal to its splendours, Malcolm Bowie observed with justice that while Time in this mode is ‘a “big” controlling theme’, calling forth ‘an impressive philosophical diction’, it ‘levitates too obligingly above the restless detail of Proust’s writing’ in ways that can be ‘intimidating and coercive’, the strengths in his handling of it lying elsewhere. ‘It is down among Proust’s intricate propositional structures with their outrageous embeddings, suspensions and redundancies that his boldest pieces of temporal architecture are to be found.’

*

Like capitalised time, characters are another overdone feature in standard encomia of the novel. For the most part, these have plenty of life, but lack any depth. Where they are most vivid, Proust’s portraits belong to the art of caricature. They depend on repetition and exaggeration, resembling the garish dummies that are a feature of Dickens more than anything in prior French fiction. There is a range here: at the lower end, the dullards of the Verdurin salon, Cottard, Brichot, Saniette and the rest declaiming their tag-lines, the poseur Bloch with his ludicrous affectations, the hypocritical snob Legrandin: grotesques pure and simple. A notch up, the sententious diplomat Norpois and his one-time mistress Madame de Villeparisis. Beyond these, the bluff Duc de Guermantes and the ineffable Verdurin couple themselves. At the heights, his most famous creation, where pathos transfigures a comic monster into something closer to, if never altogether becoming, a credible human being, the Baron de Charlus. This gallery does not, of course, exhaust the population of the novel. But characters who escape such treatment pay a penalty: they remain curiously blank. Famously so in the vacant mystery of Albertine, but in large measure true also of Swann and Odette, figures memorable more for their repertoires and accessories, and the stylised roles they play, than for their indistinct persons; of Gilberte, given little more than the red hair and freckles of her childhood; or even, after his initial scenes,

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monocle dancing in front of him like a butterfly, Saint-Loup. These are not caricatured, but they too lack complexity.

What replaces it in Proust is mutability. In some cases (Swann) infatuation works the change; in others, more often (Odette, Bloch, Madame Verdurin), the shifting tides of snobbery or fashion. In others again, the most striking, it is an abrupt characterological capsizal, lacking any motivation at all: the odious Morel, cowardly deserter one day, gallant patriot the next; the golf-bag ninny Octave late magicked into a distinguished writer; the vicious lesbian lover of Mlle Vinteuil, co-defiler of her father’s image, transformed into the devoted posthumous saviour of his compositions; Saint-Loup, long the impassioned lover of the actress Rachel, overnight a brutish pursuer of men. Most ubiquitous of all is the pattern of which Saint-Loup is the type: the unstoppable revelation of such a high proportion of the dramatis personae of the novel, men and women alike, as addicts of their own sex. ‘Inversion’, as Proust calls it, sweeps through the ranks of his characters, warping all credibility before it.

Though no admirer of the term realism, Proust was not a fantasist: he was committed to verisimilitude. The distortion it suffers in his work was a product of his own compulsions. At the turn of the century, the upper levels of French society were not as hypocritical or repressive as their counterparts in England. It was nevertheless a notable act of literary courage for Proust to foreground homosexuality in his novel, something no writer had done before. But, caring much for his standing in polite society, he feared scandal if he was identified with it. So his representations of homosexuality could never accord with his actual feelings about it. A sinister light had to fall on it, its adepts depicted as a secret society under a curse, in the biblical cadences of the exordium to its full-scale invasion of the narrative. There, Proust sought to square the circle of social stigma and personal experience, twisting rejection and explanation together in a desperate just-so story of his own: what in classical times was culturally normal had become physically pathological, repugnant if blameless. The strain is all too obvious: the pressure of emotion denied blows its rivet in the longest single sentence – three unbroken pages – of the novel. Inevitably, the bad faith of the construction becomes a filter clouding its optics. Collectively, the return of the repressed breeds the overpopulation of a supposedly medical minority. Individually, it dictates the indeterminacy of the central alter of the story: Albertine, projection of Proust’s love for a young man, obliged to acquire the image of a young woman, can never achieve resolution, remaining a vague blur, drained of substance by the prohibition Proust imposed on his creation.

*

A sexual preference can be lived in any number of ways. Under the social constraints of the time, Proust’s version restricted and displaced his range of characterisation. But there was a further handicap from which this suffered. He was a homosexual, but so far as is known – and will be known, until the diaries of the companion of his twenties, Reynaldo Hahn, are published twenty years hence – one who may have been forever unconsummated. Shortly before his death, he told Gide he had loved only men, but never enjoyed physical union with anyone. What is certain is that the only direct report he ever left of sexual pleasure was with himself. His French biographer Tadié’s view that ‘onanism was always his principal sexual activity’ is supported by testimony, grim beyond words, from the male brothel he patronised in his last years. In a novel where, as Bowie puts it, ‘sex in a precariously sublimated form’ is present throughout, ‘recklessly exceeding the requirements of the plot’ to a point where it often seems to be ‘the enveloping “category of categories”’, possessing an ‘unlimited range and warrant when it comes to explaining the order of things’, such specialisation could scarcely fail to have had consequences for the imaginary of the work. In passing, Bowie

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remarks that the amatory style of A la Recherche is one ‘where couples and coupling do indeed point back to a primordial narcissism, an objectless inward rapture’, without pausing to consider what this might imply for those represented in it. Intent on the ‘relentless desire-drivenness of the novel’ (the way ‘Proust’s versatile comic intelligence dwells with relish upon an outrage, a lack of proportion and right-mindedness inherent in human sexuality’), he is not concerned with its capacity for characterisation. But it was there that narcissism exacted its cost.

Flooding the narrative, total immersion in the self yielded prodigious riches of interior perception and reverie, delivered with continual energy and subtlety. At such a pitch of creative intensity, however, the egoism of Proust’s imagination permitted no more than fitful and superficial attention to others. That might have been just a limitation, of the kind to be found in any writer. Proust, however, erected it into a doctrine: the impossibility – not just in his, but in every case – of anyone ever knowing anything of others. Hence the ease with which his characters become their opposites. He once wrote that ‘Something repeated ten times is the opposite of art,’ and in the novel has his narrator disdainfully declare: ‘A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it.’ Yet, of course, A la recherche is laden with theories, none more tirelessly repeated than a dogmatics of nescience, the natural epistemology of an artless narcissism. Persons are but ‘a shadow which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge’; ‘man is a creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself, and if he says the contrary, lies’; ‘it is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the perishable collections of our mind’: ad libitum.1

Obnubilating others as individuals, the doctrine does so in the name of universals. The writer should ‘listen to people only when, stupid or absurd as they may have been, they have become, by repeating like parrots what other people of similar character are saying, birds of augury, mouthpieces of a universal law. He remembers only what is general.’ As for forms of social intercourse, ‘it is superfluous to make a study of manners, since we can deduce them all from psychological laws.’ Underlying such pronouncements was a pessimism rooted in Proust’s disappointments: the aristocracy, love, friendship had all in different ways failed him. The social world he so ardently courted, and never deserted, had become, by the time he was writing A la recherche, ‘the realm of nullity’. Sexual desire had never found romantic fulfilment. So passion was not just necessarily unrequited, but founded on a delusion. For since it was a ‘law of nature that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love,’ the only emotion the self can actually feel is anxiety at not knowing the activities or whereabouts of the other: ‘love is what we feel for someone whose actions seem to arouse our jealousy.’ So ‘how can we have the courage to wish to live, how can we lift a finger to preserve ourselves from death, in a world in which love is provoked by falsehood, and consists merely in our need to see our sufferings appeased by the person who has made us suffer?’ Friendship fares no better. In the milieu he frequented, Proust had no real interlocutors, avoiding intellectual equals capable of contesting him. He concluded that for a writer, friendship was nothing less than an ‘abdication of the self’ that yielded nothing: ‘even conversation, which is the mode of expression of friendship, is a superficial digression which gives us no new acquisition.’ Yet one more ‘indication of the unreality of others’, friendship could only be ‘a simulacrum’ – ‘our friends being friends only in the agreeable folly that accompanies us through life, and to which we lend ourselves, but which at the deepest level we know well to be the delusion of one who talks to furniture because he believes it is alive.’ With axioms like these, the final apodictic judgment follows: ‘After failure in every quarter of the domain of life and action, it is a mental incapacity for happiness that nature creates in us. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear or gives way to the bitterest of reactions’; virtually its only function is to make ‘the valuable agony called unhappiness possible’.

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Valuable because ‘suffering is the best thing one can encounter in life,’ since it alone gives that sight of ‘the whole law-governed immensity’ which is the condition of literature, and ‘true life, life at last laid bare and illuminated – the only life in consequence which can be said to be fully lived – is literature.’ More, if ‘sorrows are the servants, obscure and detested, against whom one struggles, beneath whose dominion one more and more completely falls, servants implacable and irreplaceable who by subterranean pathways lead us to truth and death’, it is only they who permit the final triumph of truth over death. ‘The cruel law of art is that people die and we ourselves die after exhausting every form of suffering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l’herbe.’ The consolations of the age had never received such magnificent expression. But such they remained. In England, by the time of Arnold, salvation by art was already the conventional intellectual substitute for faith. In France, Thibaudet would observe in 1926: ‘The 19th century began, with Chateaubriand, in the poetry of religion. It ended, with Mallarmé and his disciples, in a religion of poetry.’ Proust was at odds with both Mallarmé, for culpable obscurity, and Thibaudet, for daring to point out weaknesses in Flaubert, but the cap fitted. Chateaubriand and Nerval, as he often explained, were his primary literary inspirations, and the cadences of his novel famously resemble poetry, culminating in the most famous of all professions of the redemptive vocation of art. There, as Genette would write, it ‘parts company with the tradition of the Bildungsroman and approaches certain forms of religious literature’, for ‘the narrator does not simply know more, empirically, than the hero; he knows in the absolute sense, he understands the Truth.’2At this deepest level of his sensibility, Proust was a late Romantic.

That left its mark in the moral landscape of his novel, opinions and characters polarised into ways close, as Edmund Wilson noticed, to the good and evil valences of melodrama. In one register, there is Morel: ‘a vile nature who would not shrink from any act of meanness’ – typically so, for in that ‘he resembled the majority of mankind.’ Indeed there is scarcely anyone the narrator encounters after his childhood in Combray who is not in one fashion or another tainted or degraded: cruelty, hypocrisy, mendacity, greed, pretension, selfishness are all but universal. At its opposite, we are told, no less sweepingly, that ‘it is not good sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”, but human kindness. In the most remote, most desolate ends of the earth, we marvel to see it blossom of its own accord.’ The four pages that follow retail one disobliging or unattractive human characteristic after another. But Proust can readily return to the charge: ‘Kindness, a simple process of maturation which in the end sweetens characters originally more acid even than that of Bloch, is as widespread as that belief in justice which, if our cause is good, makes us no more fear a hostile than a friendly judge.’ Fine words. In practice, warmth and compassion are to be found only in the narrator’s family circle, above all his mother and grandmother – that ‘race from Combray, from which sprang human beings absolutely unspoilt’, seemingly now ‘almost extinct’. The shabbiness or villainy of the world beyond it is not entire. Ethically, Proust will occasionally stitch a silver lining into his persons: Verdurin is capable of an unexpected act of charity, his wife is a genuine lover of the arts, deep down Charlus is naturally good, Bloch could sometimes be nice, and so on. But the mitigations are nominal: they have no narrative weight. Rather, like the transformations of Morel or Saint-Loup, they come from the fictional plasticine out of which Proust peopled his world. The only real changes A la recherche records come from the rotations of fashion and the talons of ageing.

The design of A Dance to the Music of Time is altogether distinct. Powell was a teenager when the First World War ended, and a student as The Waste Land, Ulysses and Scott Moncrieff’s translation of A la recherche detonated in its aftermath. The combination of moral caesura and literary revolution marked a

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divide that Proust, though he would contribute to it, had never known. ‘This “age-gap” of the 1920s was a chasm to make all subsequent ones of its sort seem inconsiderable,’ Powell wrote in his memoirs. A product of it, he was bound to be acutely conscious of the temporality that had so largely passed Proust by. Time in A la recherche has two registers: psychological and biological. There are references to political or cultural events, but they feature only as incidents in the persiflage of the salons, without bearing on the action; even the Dreyfus Affair simply illustrates the frivolity of the chameleons who frequent them. In A Dance too, time is existential as Proust conceived it – memory and mortality – but it is also fully historical, recording changes in outlooks, customs, institutions, alternating periods of war and peace, across half a century, each decade sharply delineated. Sarajevo, Versailles, Depression; Abdication, Spanish Civil War, Munich; Home, Western and Eastern Fronts in the Second World War; Austerity, Cold War, counterculture – these don’t just supply backdrops or atmospherics. Determining actions, entanglements, destinies, they orchestrate the narrative.

Like Proust, in all but the affair of Swann and Odette, Powell chose a first-person form. It is a common complaint that in doing so, he went to the opposite extreme, creating a narrator not all-engulfing, but so neutral and self-effacing, spectator rather than participant in the story, that the effect is to lower the emotional voltage of the novel. This is a misconception. The personality of Nicholas Jenkins is inseparable from its power. By no means a Lockwood or Marlow, or even – perhaps the nearest, if still quite distant, precedent – Nick Carraway, he is fully present as the actor on whom the story is centred in the first four instalments of A Dance, which form a classic Bildungsroman embedded in the larger architecture of the series: tracing his path from innocence to adulthood, through discovery of the intermittences of friendship, the pull of money and the tricks of desire, circles of society old, new and offbeat, demonstrations of the will and misadventures of the heart. The third volume is even canonically entitled The Acceptance World, though the classic resolution of the genre does not arrive till marriage in the fourth, before the fifth and sixth undo any generalisation of it, amid the wreckage of the wedded state among friends, and the revelations of death and betrayal. With the seventh, eighth and ninth volumes, the subjectivity of the narrator returns front stage, with Jenkins the soldier journeying from regimental through staff to war office experience. Only in the final three postwar volumes, which cover the period when Powell was writing the novel, does he withdraw Jenkins to the position of essentially an onlooker. Prior to these, a wide palette of feelings is at work. The narrator is scarcely a cipher. Bemused, elated, ashamed; jealous, embarrassed, lonely; desiring, priggish, maladroit; furious, in despair; in tears, in love: at one point or another he is all of these. Defining the tone of the novel, however, is the reflective cast of his mind, in certain respects recalling that of Proust’s narrator, yet also markedly different from it.

Powell thought passionate interest in oneself – not self-interest, or mere selfishness – unusual: ‘True interest in yourself is comparatively rare, sharply to be differentiated from mere egotism and selfishness; characteristics often immoderately developed in persons not in the least interested in themselves intellectually or objectively.’ It was something Proust possessed, and he lacked. He could have added that comprehensive interest in others – a fully engaged, impartial curiosity – is even rarer. That, like perhaps no other writer, he had. Precise calculations differ, but if we take Kilmartin’s Guide to Proustand Spurling’s Invitation to the Dance as benchmarks, Proust’s novel contains more than three hundred, Powell’s some four hundred characters.3 The only work to bear artistic comparison with them, Cao Xueqin’s great Dream of the Red Chamber, approaches five hundred. In each case, of course, a distinction has to be made between actors and extras – figurants who appear only once, or rate simply a mention. The ratio of the first to the second is 0.89:1 in Proust, 1.46:1 in Powell – a considerable difference. More extras than actors in A la recherche, more actors than extras in A Dance. Of the extras in Proust, nearly half are so class-marked – the lift-boy, the gardener,

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the laundry girl – they don’t earn so much as a name. In other words, the ‘character-space’ of the two works, to use the term coined by Alex Woloch in his pioneering study of the relationship between major and minor figures in the novel, The One v. the Many, is quite distinct. Powell’s is demographically much richer. If we reckon that, fictionally speaking, the critical measure is not the number of persons who cross the stage of a novel, but those who can be said to occupy it for any space of time, A Dance contains about twice as many main characters, on either a broad or a narrow definition, as A la recherche.

*

Quantity is one thing, quality another. There Powell stands alone. Traditionally, masters of characterisation – Balzac, Eliot, James – were omniscient, describing their creations both from without and within: representing their thoughts and feelings as freely as their carriage or clothes, if typically according one subject-position within the novel, the hero or heroine, the central point of view on the tale, recounted in the third person. Proust took the alternative of a first-person narrative, nearly as canonical since the time of Constant or Charlotte Brontë, to lengths never attempted before, if also without overmuch coherence: the narrator not only reports Swann in the third person, but assumes on occasion an impossible omniscience in the first person. By the time Powell started to write, the interior monologue – Dujardin, Joyce, Woolf – had overtaken authorial omniscience, as superior in depth and less suspect of artifice, while Hemingway was dispensing with both, for pure exteriority of speech and action. The early, prewar Powell modelled himself on Hemingway, producing terse third-person narratives with deliberately flat characters. The enormous change he made in writing A Dance was to switch to a first-person narrative that retained most of the restraints of this mode – that is, no direct psychological access to the inner life of the other characters – while giving them, with unique economy, the presence and depth of figures from the expansive tradition of old, that allowed itself every facility of purchase in its portraiture.

Powell employed four principal means in bringing his characters to life, each offering an instructive contrast with Proust’s. The first was his gift of physical depiction, the classic introduction to them. Here is the way the best friend, in early days, of the two narrators are described. Saint-Loup:

Along the central gangway leading inland from the beach to the high road I saw tall, slender, his neck uncovered, his proud head held high, a young man go past with searching eyes, whose skin was as fair and his hair as golden as if they had absorbed all the rays of the sun. Dressed in a loose, almost white apparel such as I could never have believed any man could wear … His eyes, from which a monocle kept dropping, were the colour of the sea. Everyone looked at him with interest.

Stringham:

He was tall and dark, and looked a little like one of those stiff, sad young men in ruffs, whose long legs take up so much room in 16th-century portraits; or perhaps a younger – and far slighter – version of Veronese’s Alexander receiving the children of Darius after the battle of Issus: with the same high forehead and suggestion of hair thinning a bit at the temples. His features certainly seemed to belong to that epoch of painting: the faces in Elizabethan miniatures, lively, obstinate, generous, not very happy and quite relentless.

Proust’s vision is little more than romantic schmaltz of the period: ‘golden’ (applied in due course interminably to features of the Guermantes clan as a whole), is merely a vacant signifier for glamour; ‘the colour of the sea’ is meaningless – it can be grey, blue, brown, green. Powell delivers an image of indelible precision and detail.

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Conversation typically comes next as a marker. A quarter of A la recherche is made up of dialogue; a half of A Dance to the Music of Time. Speech in Proust is generally entertaining – it is where his comic gifts are concentrated – but it is a crude instrument of individuation, since it relies so much on parody. Bloch, Legrandin or Saniette speak distinctively enough, but as objects of the stylised ridicule of cartoons. Talk in the Guermantes or other aristocratic salons, unlike the Verdurin household, is not guyed in the same way, but it is uninflected, the company maintaining much the same worldly tone, with at best some sidelong sparring between the ducal pair; Charlus alone is accorded some wonderful harangues, courting without collapsing into burlesque. Perhaps most conspicuous is the absence of exchange where the narrator is concerned. As a critic noted in the Nouvelle Revue française early on, no one is truly allowed to answer him. Albertine may protest, but no real argument ensues. Françoise, essentially a stock figure of the faithful servant given to grumbling, with a strong sense of proper hierarchies, can issue a rebuke to her employer, moved by dislike for Albertine. But when she does so – an illiterate countrywoman – Proust cannot resist the parodic impulse, and has her addressing him in a sentence of high-flown Marcelese length and orotundity:

‘To be sure, you yourself are kind, and I shall never forget the debt of gratitude I owe you, but the house has become a plague-spot now that kindness has installed trickery within it, now that intelligence protects the stupidest creature ever seen, now that refinement, good manners, wit, dignity in everything, a real and visible prince, lets vice – everything that is vulgar and low – lay down the law, hatch its plots, and humiliate me, I who have been in the service of this family for forty years.’

Powell was immune to this kind of ineptness. With an extraordinary ear for spoken language, he created defining ways of talking for character after character, across a wide gamut of diction, without any need to resort to verbal tags or inflation. Templer and Duport, Mona and Quiggin, Mrs Erdleigh and Mr Deacon, General Conyers and Lady Molly, not to speak of Widmerpool or Stringham, speak in expressive voices that, even at the more exotic end of the spectrum, never strain belief; in more vernacular idiom, the exchanges between Albert, Billson and Bracey at Stonehurst have little in common with the mannerisms of service at Combray. Dialogue here is not just illustrative, as conversation so often is in Proust, it is concomitant with action. Of that, there is very little in A la recherche, whose narrative proceeds for long stretches without it. Acts indicative of characters are few and far between: sometimes just minimal gestures like the careless abandon of Albertine’s opening jump over a beachcomber at Balbec, or the chivalry of Saint-Loup’s acrobatic navigation of banquettes to confer his coat on the narrator in a restaurant in Paris. For more significant scenes, we are left with incidents of a wilful childhood and episodes towards the end of the novel: Swann ditched by the Guermantes, Charlus humiliated by Morel at the instigation of the Verdurins, Albertine’s decision to decamp. There is nothing comparable to Powell’s cannonade of symptomatic actions prepared or recollected in dialogue, from the opening shots of Uncle Giles’s intrusion at Jenkins’s school and Stringham’s impersonation of Le Bas onwards: Templer showing off his roadster, Donners displaying his dungeon, Mona summoning Quiggin, Moreland’s rescue mission to Maclintick, Conyers’s handling of Billson, Duport’s dealings with Jenkins, Bithel’s choreographic turning of the tables, Stringham’s refusal of prewar connections, and so on. In a typical passage of Powell’s high comedy – far from his only register – here is Widmerpool, newly engaged, explaining what is on his mind, and Jenkins’s reactions, in a conversation preparing the dénouement of At Lady Molly’s. The year is 1935.

He began to speak hurriedly again, the words tumbling out as if he wished to finish with this speech as quickly as possible. ‘I should not wish to appear backward in display of affection,’ he said, developing an increased speed with every phrase, ‘and, in addition to that, I don’t see why we should delay unduly the state in which we shall have to spend the rest of our life merely because certain legal and religious formalities take time to arrange. In short, Nicholas, you will, I am sure, agree – more especially as you seem to spend a good

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deal of your time with artists and film-makers and people of that sort, whose morals are proverbial – that it would be permissible on my part to suppose – once the day of the wedding has been fixed – that we might – occasionally enjoy each other’s company – say over a weekend –.’

He came to a sudden stop, looking at me rather wildly.

‘I don’t see why not.’ It was impossible to guess what he was going to say next. This was all far from anything for which I had been prepared.

‘In fact, my fiancée – Mildred, that is – might even expect such a suggestion?’

‘Well, yes, from what you say.’

‘Might even regard it as usage du monde?’

‘Quite possible.’

Then Widmerpool sniggered. For some reason, I was conscious of embarrassment, even of annoyance. The problem could be treated, as it were, clinically, or humorously; a combination of the two approaches was distasteful. I had the impression that the question of how he should behave worried him more on account of the figure he cut in the eyes of Mrs Haycock than because his passion could not be curbed.

In evoking personality, to physiognomies, declarations and actions, Powell added one of his trademarks, succinct encapsulations. Here is Sonny Farebrother, at first (1922) and then subsequent (1943) sight:

There was a suggestion of boyishness – the word ‘sunny’ would certainly be applicable – about his frank manner; but, in spite of this manifest desire to get along with everyone on their own terms, there was also something lonely and inaccessible about him.

He bestowed around him a sense of smoothness, ineffable, unstemmable smoothness, like oil flowing ever so gently from the spout of a vessel perfectly regulated by its pourer, soft lubricating fluid, gradually, but irresistibly, spreading; and spreading, let it be said, over an unexpectedly wide, even a vast area.

Dicky Umfraville:

Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle two, contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents; the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always felt to be warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet who utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song.

Pamela Flitton, in 1943 and 1953:

Iciness of manner remained complete. She was perhaps not altogether normal, what Borrit called ‘a bit off the beam’. There was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction.

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The violent antithesis presented by their contrasted forms of existence [husband and lover], unique specimens as it were brought into collision, promised anarchic extremities of feeling of the kind at which she aimed; in which she was principally at home. She liked – to borrow a phrase from St John Clarke, to ‘try conclusions with the maelstrom’.

There are echoes of Proust in certain characters in Powell. Uncle Giles’s description of himself as ‘a bit of a radical’ is a repetition of the claim Legrandin awards himself; Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson’s letter to the Times invokes the adage beloved of M. de Norpois, ‘the dogs bark, the caravan moves on.’4 The first pair are both poseurs with a grudge, the second both sententious diplomats. But as to portraits (much the same could be said of, say, Quiggin and Bloch), there is no comparison. Powell’s are much subtler, more complex. The contrast becomes still sharper in characters more central to the narrative. It is enough to match Stringham against Saint-Loup, not just at first sight, but across their respective unfolding; the enigmatic plenitude of Jean against the empty riddles of Albertine; Widmerpool against Charlus as comic monsters. Characterisation here is never static, but Powell handles change in a way quite unlike Proust, not as precipitous moral volte-faces, or mere physical deliquescence, but as gradual evolution or revelation, across a carefully calibrated sequence of situations and actions. Widmerpool’s mutation as he alters from ridiculed schoolboy to humiliated suitor, capable but still absurd Streber in business and the City, ruthless wartime colonel and high-level military intriguer, Labour MP and ennobled fellow-traveller, to his downfall in the Cold War and descent into an occult netherworld, is an organic process: from the laughable to the malignant to the abject. Charlus simply shrinks into himself, tel qu’en lui-même le sénilité le change.

*

Powell’s social range is, of course, much wider too. The aristocracy certainly provides its quota to A Dance, either by repute or in person: Bridgnorth, Huntercombe, Warminster, Aberavon, Seaford and assorted offspring, especially the Stepneys and Tollands. Not invested with any special aura, they are no cause for any particular disappointment. As in Proust, there are painters, writers and musicians, actors, scholars and critics, though these inhabit bohemian or academic purlieus not to be found in A la recherche; servants are more disturbed, truculent, melancholic in Powell; but – the critical difference – there are also businessmen, politicians, soldiers, publishers, journalists, bureaucrats, adventurers, mages and misfits: a company beyond Proustian ken. The spirit in which this landscape is treated finds famous expression in Powell’s maxim: ‘All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.’ Dwelling on the even play of curiosity that followed from it, Ferdinand Mount, who has written notably well about his uncle, remarks that so far from being snobbish, as often charged, ‘his fiction is extraordinarily democratic in a way few other writers of his time could claim.’

The judgment is carefully formulated and can be upheld, with two provisos. Powell’s world is certainly larger than that of any of his contemporaries. But it has a frontier: other than miners conscripted as soldiers, represented as soldiers rather than miners, likewise bank clerks, it doesn’t contain workers or figures from the lower middle class, the majority of the population in most of the period covered by the narrative. His class background didn’t in itself preclude this – Henry Green, a close friend at Eton and Oxford, built novels around them – but his personal trajectory, with the exception of regimental service, did. No writer has ever produced a successful encyclopedia of the society in which they lived, Zola coming nearest, all experiences of life limiting imagination in one way or another. What holds good is the variety of Powell’s world, and the equity in his inventory of it: both indeed unequalled in his time, or since.

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The equity is not absolute. If only by implication, Mount overstates it in one significant respect. Women, who lend as much colour to the story as men, are handled differently. Throughout, the narrator refers to all men, even close friends, by their surnames (Barnby, Moreland, Pennistone); all women of his own generation, the majority, by their first names (Barbara, Gypsy, Priscilla); those of an older generation, much fewer, by surnames distanced with honorifics (Madame Leroy, Miss Weedon, Mrs Erdleigh); only a servant features, pre-First World War style, with a surname alone: Billson. The contrast in Jenkins’s own cohort does not denominate greater intimacy with the opposite sex, but the reverse. Its visual equivalent is the asymmetry with which the appearances of men and women are described. Jenkins, like most of the male characters, certainly appreciates looks in women, on which they all comment freely. But compared to the precision with which men are depicted, these remain on the whole curiously undefined, reduced to vague or generic categories; ‘willowy’, ‘fierce’, ‘striking’, ‘tolerable’, ‘a beauty’ and so forth. Here is a married couple encountered early on in Jenkins’s cursus, Buster and Amy Foxe, mother and stepfather of Stringham:

Buster was standing beside this urn, cleaning a cigarette-holder with the end of a matchstick. He was tall, and at once struck me as surprisingly young; with the slightly drawn expression that one recognises in later life as the face of a man who does himself pretty well, while not ceasing to take plenty of exercise. His turn-out was emphatically excellent, and he diffused waves of personality, strong, chilling gusts of icy air, a protective element that threatened to freeze into rigidity all who came through the door, before they could approach him nearer.

‘Hullo, you fellows,’ he said, without looking up from his cigarette-holder, at which he appeared to be sneering, as if this object was not nearly valuable enough to presume to belong to him …

A moment or two later his mother appeared. I thought her tremendously beautiful: though smaller than the photograph in Stringham’s room had suggested. Still wearing a hat, she had just come into the house.

The disproportion is in no way a reflection of the respective importance of the two in the narrative, rather the opposite: Amy effortlessly controls her husband and is of significantly more moment to the story. Even where Powell’s gifts are most engaged, characteristically mobilising the arts to his effects, when Jenkins falls in and eventually out of love with Jean Templer, the result is blurred. First sighting, 1923:

Like her legs, her face was thin and attenuated, the whole appearance given the effect of a much simplified – and somewhat self-conscious – arrangement of lines and planes: such as might be found in an Old Master drawing, Flemish or German perhaps, depicting some young and virginal saint; the racquet, held awkwardly at an angle to her body, suggesting at the same time an obscure implement associated with martyrdom. The expression of her face, though sad and a trifle ironical, was not altogether in keeping with this air of belonging to another and better world.

Second meeting, 1928:

She still seemed slim, attenuated, perhaps not exactly a ‘beauty’; but, all the same, still in some way mysterious and absorbing to me, just as she seemed when I visited the Templers after leaving school. There was perhaps a touch of the trim secretary of musical comedy.

Two or three hours later:

She reminded me of some picture. Was it Rubens and Le Chapeau de paille: his second wife or her sister? There was that same suggestion, though only for an instant, of shyness and submission.

In 1932:

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Once she had reminded me of Rubens’s Chapeau de paille. Now for some reason – though there was not much physical likeness between them – I thought of the woman smoking the hookah in Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Perhaps there was something of the odalisque about Jean, too. She looked pale and rather tired.

In 1945:

It was as if the mother was someone different; the daughter, the remembered Jean. About seventeen or eighteen, Polly Duport was certainly a very pretty girl; prettier, so far as that went, than her mother at the same age. Jean’s attraction in those days had been other than mere prettiness.

In 1971:

She was now altogether transformed into a foreign lady of distinction. The phrase ‘sad Goya duchess’ did not at all overstate the case.

Each vivid enough in itself, the multiplication yields no cogent physical image: Rogier Van der Weyden, Noël Coward, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya cancel one another out. Can the sequence be justified as the impress on the narrator’s perceptions of someone essentially elusive, across successive conflicting emotions and the passage of time? Perhaps. But the indeterminacy also speaks to a larger question.

In the morning after the night when Jean materialises unforeseen at the Ritz and they become lovers, Jenkins recollects an argument with Barnby about the way women are pictured in novels, in the course of which he remarks: ‘No real tradition of how women behave exists in English writing.’ In an interview, Powell himself went further: ‘Females are very hard to do. I don’t think any male writer has ever done one right.’ As such, the notion makes no sense: where would James figure in it? But the view that ‘women are terribly, terribly difficult’ to depict well confesses a gradient in the portraits in his own novel, where few achieve the full- length treatment accorded male protagonists, requiring analytic reflection of a kind the narrator can never bring stably to bear, for example, on Jean. The principal exception is Pamela Flitton, whose sexual nihilism is examined with a sombre power transcending the conventions of the femme fatale, a type anyway a historical anachronism by the time of the narrative. That she is in this respect hors série has led some to tax Powell with an underlying misogyny. Nothing in the novel speaks to this. Both of the women who figure as the worst news for men, Audrey and Pamela (Xanthippe and Circe), achieve a kind of atonement in unexpected turns to care or sacrifice, tropes here bent out of true by the disconcerting form they take. On the other side of the gender divide, no such alleviation attaches to Widmerpool or other brutish male specimens.

In 20th-century literature, prejudicial treatment of women can take two forms, which of course may be combined. Are they disliked? Are they slighted? The first, misogyny strictly speaking, is rarer than the second, male chauvinism, and where it exists typically generates much cruder kinds of disparagement. The asymmetry in Powell’s handling of the sexes is free of hostility to women. It is not their presence, but their absence that arouses vehemence of feeling: ‘the excruciating boredom of exclusively male society’ of which the narrator complains in the army. Arguably the warmest single portrait of anyone in A Dance to the Music of Time is of Molly Jeavons, in the disorderly kindness and disregard of convention in her cross-class household. Marriage, a state understandably of little interest to Proust, who vouchsafes scarcely a thought about it, but still in Powell’s time central to relations between the sexes, forms one of the leading topics of A Dance. Few avoid misfortune there, with scenes of conjugal discord among the most wrenching pages in the novel. Significantly, it is not a man, but a woman – Moreland’s wife, Matilda, one of Powell’s most

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sympathetic characters – who gives most eloquent expression to what marriage is likely to mean for either sex, in an outburst rare for use of italics: ‘Is it fun to be married to anyone?’ she asks, and continues passionately: ‘I mean married to someone. Not to sleep with them, or talk to them, or go about with them. To be married to them.’

Women can be liked but all the same belittled, tacitly if not explicitly. Impossible with such variously commanding figures as Madame Leroy, Miss Weedon and Mrs Erdleigh, could it be said of the narrator’s contemporaries? For Isabelle Joyau, most of his female characters – besides such older ones, she instances six of his own generation – are ‘startlingly tough’. That may be, critics can reply, but as James Tucker, still his best English reader, remarked in The Novels of Anthony Powell (1976), none is shown discussing, joking, intriguing or speaking about art, politics, literature or money in the style of men. Morally and practically speaking, they give as good as they get, if not better: but professionally or intellectually? The only jobs ascribed to the prewar lot are model and actress. Postwar this alters: in the final trilogy, Ada Leintwardine, successful novelist, is capable of trumping or outmanoeuvring any of the literary figures around her; and no one else in the novel comes near the erudite firepower of Emily Brightman, sprightly historian of late antiquity. Powell was a product of his class and period, with the blindspots these imply, but changes in gender roles were not lost on him. The notion of any particular sexism doesn’t stick. Spurling’s love of his work is scarcely an eccentricity: women have been among its greatest admirers.

*

That this should be so is also a natural response to the structure of the work, capable of impartially attracting any reader. Rather bafflingly, Powell disavowed much skill with plot, to all appearance not out of false modesty, saying he was bad at a side of novel construction to which he has owed many fans. How in fact he planned the intricate architecture of A Dance to the Music of Time, with its huge cast of characters across a dozen volumes, remains something of a mystery. It is not clear if at the beginning he envisaged even more than three, and certain that he claimed not to have decided on 12 till he had reached six. Yet in the very first, Stringham says laughing of Widmerpool, ‘that boy will be the death of me,’ which he coldly becomes in the eighth; while in the same opening volume Widmerpool, peering over a hedge at the discomfiture of Le Bas engineered by Stringham, is – viewed retrospectively – in pettoalready the voyeur he turns out to be in the 11th; Sunny Farebrother, said by Jenkins to disappear from his life for twenty years after impressing him as a teenager, resurfaces punctually seven volumes later; Pamela Flitton makes her entry in the second volume as a bridesmaid of about six or seven vomiting into a baptismal font at her uncle’s wedding, before hitting assorted military careers like a meteorite in the ninth, and repeating her eructations in a large Chinese urn in the tenth.

Such precision of long-range balletics is very rare, perhaps unique. It unfolds within a structure in which each of the 12 volumes has its own self-contained plot, built of five or so episodes separated by intervals, within the overall narrative. Openings are typically meditative, passages of controlled, often ironic reverie; endings alternating between deadpan or wry deflation of previous intensities of emotion or action, and bleak registration or stoical foreboding of events and the passage of the time. In between, the dramas dominating the narrative are formed by social juxtapositions of one kind or another: visits, receptions, parties, meals, weddings, drinks, soirées, exhibitions – a much wider variety than in Proust, where dinners and receptions occupy a third of the novel, but with the same set pieces in large gatherings. Parties in A la recherche roll on for well over a hundred pages apiece. More concise, Powell’s certainly owe something to Proust’s example, but are closer to the art of Dostoevsky, whose Possessed he regarded as perhaps the greatest of all novels.

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What Dostoevsky invented were scenes of polite society where antagonistic emotions explode the conventions of the occasion in comic outrage and social scandal, no less potentially tragic for that. Not simply expressive, they are performative, culminating in deeds as well as words. Such too are the set pieces in A Dance: the successive exits of Stringham and Mr Deacon, followed by the disparate volley of her curses, from Milly Andriadis’s party in Mayfair; the apotheosis of an alcoholic Stringham, transfixing listeners at his mother’s reception for Moreland, and his chilling captivity that ensues, followed by the suicide of one of his audience; the panic-stricken flight of Templer’s second wife, soon to descend into an asylum, from a too suggestive tableau vivant after dinner at the castellar residence of Sir Magnus Donners; the climactic nocturnal confrontation between Pamela and Widmerpool, amid a throng of other interested parties, after a private performance of Il Seraglio in Regent’s Park. Scenes, mutatis mutandis, all worthy of The Idiot.

A recurrent motif at these and other key moments of the novel is the role of the physical mishap as precipitant of events, one of the most distinctive features of Powell’s imagination, figuring the casual emblems of contingency in life. These can function as comic slapstick: the misaimed banana that splatters on Widmerpool’s face, the sugar castor that accidentally opens over his head; or more ambiguously, the untied shoelace by a barred window on a medieval staircase that freezes the narrator into a vision of Widmerpool as a prisoner behind the grill, then as a bureaucrat glaring through his guichet, each time revealing another aspect of him. But equally as dramatic device: triggers of break-up, trailers for downfall, conditions for scandal – the jostling of a girl on a passenger’s knee that causes Templer to drive his car into the ditch, severing his friendship with Stringham; the jamming of the door as Mr Deacon tries to negotiate it with bundled sheets of War Never Pays! cascading from under his arm, in ignominious exit from Milly Andriadis’s party, prelude to his death from injuries sustained falling down the stairs of a seedy club not long after; a chauffeur’s confusion between a Terrace, a Place and a Gate of the same name, delaying the limousine whose arrival would have averted the terminal fracas between Pamela and Widmerpool among the guests on the pavement in Regent’s Park. It may even have been a bump in the asphalt that throws Jenkins and Jean into each other’s arms on the Great West Road.

The 12 plots within the plot that comprise A Dance to the Music of Time each contain a crescendo of complex feeling, typically but not invariably towards the end of the volume: Stringham’s signal to the narrator of a parting of the ways in A Question of Upbringing; the narrator’s dream-like intercourse with Gypsy Jones (‘there was something odious about her that made her, at the same time – I had to face this – an object of desire’) after Mr Deacon’s funeral in A Buyer’s Market; Widmerpool’s assertion of authority over Stringham at his alcoholic collapse after the Old Boy dinner where Le Bas is taken ill in The Acceptance World; the narrator’s coup de foudre and prevision of his marriage in At Lady Molly’s; Maclintick’s suicide in Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant; the revelation of Jean’s passages with not just one but two of the figures most despised by the narrator (‘perhaps, I thought, her men are gothic too, beings carved on the niches and corbels of a medieval cathedral to arouse at once laughter and horror. In any case, I had been one of them. If they were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted’), with news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact the next morning announcing that war was at hand in The Kindly Ones; Gwatkin’s loss of his command in The Valley of Bones; the awkward chasse-croisés at the Café Royal during the Blitz and the deaths that follow it, the punishment of Bithel and Stringham’s posting to what will be his end in Singapore in The Soldier’s Art; Pamela’s public accusation of Widmerpool as murderer of Templer in The Military Philosophers; Trapnel’s discovery of Pamela’s abandonment of him and destruction of his novel in Books Do Furnish a Room; her gift of her death to Gwinnett in Temporary Kings; Widmerpool’s demise in Hearing Secret Harmonies.

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The issues in such episodes, when the emotional register is suddenly heightened, are humiliation, betrayal, friendship, love and death. However pointed, pathos is always kept tightly under control. Typically, Powell will put a gap between the event and the narrator, employing third-party accounts rather than direct report to describe them. These can be quite circumstantial – Jean’s shuttle between lovers in South America, Trapnel’s final night of inebriated glory in a pub, Widmerpool’s crazed chanting to his woodland end – and in a few cases the narrator is on the spot either shortly or before or just after the event (Maclintick’s turning on the gas, the bomb that hits Lady Molly’s), lending it peculiar immediacy. But often tragic or lurid events – the killing of Templer by partisans in the Balkans, of Stringham in captivity in Malaya, the sacrifice of Pamela in a sordid hostelry – occur off-stage, particulars withheld. The distancing devices increase in number and effect as the narrative lengthens. In part, this is a natural consequence of the way the narrator is decentred once past the threshold of marriage. But it also corresponds to the tonal parabola of A Dance. Association of its curve with spring, summer, autumn and winter is contested by some, though its last words certainly allude to the seasons. What is undeniable, however, and insufficiently emphasised, is the buoyant – if certainly also often ironic – sense of adventure and high spirits of the first four volumes of the sequence, in the comedy of youthful discovery of life; touches of darkening as the war approaches; with it, the coming of austerity and tragedy; final descent into the realms of the macabre. As a turn to ever more extreme actions and situations unfolds, in a shift resembling that in Proust, whose example may have licensed Powell’s imagination for it, the requirement for buffering procedures steadily mounts, till by the end nearly all is elaborate – often even, with a further twist, speculative or dubitative – oratio obliqua.

*

Stylistically speaking, Powell is the very unusual case of a writer who radically changed his way of writing midway through life. He himself made light of the difference between his quartet of prewar novels and the postwar sequence, preferring to present his work as a more or less continuous development, and on the whole his admirers have followed him in this. In reality, it is hard to think of any other novelist where the formal contrast is so marked. Hemingway was the principal influence on Powell’s prewar writing, along with E.E. Cummings and Wyndham Lewis: clipped sentences, terse dialogue, deadpan affect. Late in life he would dismiss Hemingway’s prose with a telling epithet – ‘muscle-bound’– and find much of Farewell to Arms ‘terrible stuff’. But, at the time, he sought to repurpose its techniques for interwar English comedy. The results were not particularly high wattage. The verdicts of Koyama Taichi, in The Novels of Anthony Powell: A Critical Study (2006), comparing them with Waugh’s output in the same period, are brisk. Similarities abound – Decline and Fall: Afternoon Men (’the merry-go-round of manners’); Black Mischief: Venusberg (‘topsy-turvy in a foreign land’); Vile Bodies: Agents and Patients (‘satire of the fast set’); A Handful of Dust: From a View to a Death (‘the country house is falling down’); Scoop: What’s Become of Waring? (‘the dinginess of hacks’) – but Powell lacks the gusto of Waugh’s ‘wild, grotesque flights of the imagination’, his energy-saving variants yielding no more than a ‘light, prosperous disdain for the sordid affairs of the world’. That could be thought too harsh. But Koyama is perfectly correct in pointing out the most striking feature of the early novels. They contain, virtually without exception, only flat characters.

The First World War, although it impinged on him directly very little, altered Proust’s enterprise decisively, suspension of publication after the first volume in 1913 extending what would have been a trilogy into six more volumes when it was resumed in 1919. The effect of the Second World War on Powell was more drastically transformative. He emerged from it, he said, a different person. Unable to compose any fiction in the army, he immersed himself in the writings, familiar and obscure, of the 17th century, with a view to producing the biography of John Aubrey that became his first book after the war. The impact of what he would term Aubrey’s ‘new sort of sensibility’ proved critical, with Powell taking from it both his

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‘appreciation of the oddness of the individual human being’ and ‘mastery of the ideal phrase for describing people’. The lapidary side of A Dance owes quite a bit to this. At the same time, a more general steeping in 17th-century prose that – especially in generations formed before the Civil War: for Powell, conspicuously Robert Burton – was modally baroque left its mark too.

Out of this frequentation with forms of writing prior to Augustan normalisation, and a much wider range of wartime and postwar reading, not just in English literature, Powell developed a style as unlike his prewar fiction as the characters of The Acceptance Worldare from the matchstick figures of Afternoon Men: combining formal elegance with colloquial energy, brilliant descriptive passages with abrupt analytic reflections, elastic clauses and sparing connectives, a prose uniquely at once alembicated and taut. Powell’s sentences are nowhere near the length or complication of Proust’s, which average 35 words apiece, and his imagery, vivid enough in its own right, does not compare with the poetic and scientific range or density of Proust’s. His art is more laconic. Counterintuitively, English has a more Latinate syntax than French, a single verb able to control a sequence of clauses where French requires cumbersome repetitions; it also allows participial constructions barred or reproved in French. Powell made extensive use of both possibilities, especially the latter, making an English equivalent of the Latin ablative absolute one of the trademarks of his style, with sovereign indifference to schoolroom objections to the pendant participle. English also, of course, has twice the vocabulary of French, because of its double Latin and Teutonic roots. Powell made use of that too: contrary to expectation, words that would normally be regarded as recondite, mostly of Latin origin, are more frequent in A Dance than in A la recherche.

What Powell took most importantly from Proust was the reflective generalisation as an integral thread in the narrative. In his use of this, Proust was drawing on his own 17th-century literary resources, the maxims of the French moralists. A la recherche would be unimaginable without it, the title of the novel itself a promise of research to a generalisable end. But, as noted above, intellectually speaking Proust’s obiter dicta are too often weakened by monomania and inflation; they lack the ironic precision and control of La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyère.5 Far more observant about others, Powell was his superior in handling fictional generalisations about them. Flowing seamlessly through the plot, and delivered by the narrator, defining his personality, they are consistently finer-grained, and typically more striking.

They also cover a much wider span of objects. Modes: ‘fashions of one generation, moral or physical, are scarcely at all assessable in terms of another. They cannot properly be equated.’ Setbacks: a ‘law that requires most people to minimise to a superior a misfortune which, to an inferior, they would magnify’. Appearances: ‘Persons at odds with their surroundings will not infrequently suggest an earlier historical epoch.’ Rebels: ‘Nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react.’ Digs: ‘that streak of social cruelty that few lack’. Nuptials: ‘Weddings are notoriously depressing affairs.’ Sexual success: ‘Seduction is to do and say, the banal thing in the banal way.’ Some of these are no more than high-spirited quips, others apothegms that go deeper.

Bearing directly on its themes, and moving at a level well above them, are longer reflections. Extracted from the narrative contexts that give each its particular analytic force, they inevitably lose something of their flavour, but are indicative enough. Alterity: ‘It is not easy – perhaps not even desirable – to judge other people by a constant standard. Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable in one person, may be readily tolerated in another: apparently indispensable principles of behaviour are in practice relaxed – not always with impunity – in the interests of those whose nature seems to demand an exceptional measure.’ The second parenthesis, qualifying without cancelling the conclusion, is characteristic. Unpredictability: ‘Human relationships flourish

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and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.’ Egoism: ‘Self-interest, equally unattractive in outer guise and inner essence, is, all the same, a necessity for individual survival. It should not perhaps be too much despised, if only for that reason. Despised or not, its activities are rarely far from the surface. Now at Widmerpool’s words about leaving, I was unwelcomely aware of self-interested anxieties throbbing hurriedly into operation.’ Love: ‘Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.’ Generalisations spurning absolutes, each with its reservation or proviso: ‘most’ – ‘perhaps’ – ‘not infrequently’ – ‘few’ – ‘rarely’ – ‘at all’ – ‘not always’ – ‘scarcely’ – ‘all the same’ – ‘not without impunity’. Overturned, one Proustian sententia after another.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/perry-anderson/different-speeds-same-furies

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The Mesmerizing Animation of Sinusoidal Waves in GIFs by Étienne Jacob

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

24-year-old French student Étienne Jacob produces black and white GIFs that transform the curvature found in sinusoidal waves into a multitude of experimental forms. The animated spheres imitate the appearance of mutating microbes or fiery stars, yet tend to remain in a 2D plane. Jacob recently experimented with programming his GIFs to appear more 3D, like in the work below which features a black sphere fighting to keep its position in a strong current.

Jacob has published all of his animations to his Tumblr, Necessary Disorder since January 2017, and provides tutorials for how to create these GIFs on his blog. You can view more of the applied mathematics student’s work on his Twitter.

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/04/animation-of-sinusoidal-waves-in-gifs-by-etienne- jacob/?mc_cid=7ef2a4d03e&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f

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How to extract the interacting spectral function from a ground state DFT calculation

DIPC

The electronic wave function of an n-electron molecule depends on 3n spatial and n spin coordinates. In a sense, the wave function of a many-electron molecule contains more information than is needed and is lacking in direct physical significance. This has prompted the search for methods that involve fewer variables than the wave function and that can be used to calculate the energy and other properties.

One of these methods is density functional theory (DFT), a theoretical treatment of molecules in which the electron density is considered rather than the wave functions of individual electrons. In other words, a way of describing many-electron, in general, many-fermion, systems in which the energy is a funtional of the density of electrons (fermions).

DFT is without doubt one of the most popular and successful approches for the description of matter with important applications in condensed matter physics, material science and computational chemistry. DFT owes its success to its relative simplicity and low computational cost as compared to other approaches for solving the quantum many-body problem. Despite its simplicity, DFT is in principle exact, that is, it can provide the exact ground state energy and density of many-electron systems. In practice, of course, an approximation for the exchange correlation energy functional is needed and a plethora of such approximations have been suggested.

The spectral function in physics tells you the probability that a particle with a certain momentum has a specific energy. In other words, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty relation, a particle can have an energy that is distributed around a mean. The spectral function describes exactly this distribution and encode information about the (quasi-particle) excitations of the system (energies and lifetimes).

Spectral functions to a large degree determine the transport properties of a many-electron system and can (approximately) be measured, for example, with scanning tunneling microscope (STM) spectroscopy or angular-resolved photoemisson spectroscopy (ARPES). In any case, spectral functions have so far been out of reach for DFT.

Now, Ikerbasque’s researchers David Jacob (UPV/EHU) and Stefan Kurth (UPV/EHU & DIPC) describe 1 a scheme to extract the interacting spectral function (and thus an excited state property) essentially from a ground state DFT calculation. In order to do so, they make use of a recently proposed DFT framework for nonequilibrium steady state transport, the so-called i-DFT approach.

Under certain, well-defined conditions, the i-DFT self-consistent equations for density and current decouple. While the one for the density becomes equivalent to the usual ground-state DFT self-consistency condition, the extra equation for the current can be used to extract the spectral function.

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Figure 1. (Left) STM-like theoretical setup for measuring the true many-body spectral function of a system in a density functional theory framework. The tip (T), couples very weakly to the sample (S), which in turn is strongly coupled to the rest of the system (R). (Right) Exchange correlation bias

The basic idea is to “measure” the spectral function of a system by means of an STM like setup where a small portion of the system is probed by an STM tip, as shown in the left panel of Figure 1. The tip couples only very weakly to the sample and thus does not influence the system in an essential way. In the ideal STM limit of vanishing coupling to the tip, the system is restored to quasi-equilibrium and the normalized differential conductance yields the exact equilibrium many-body spectral function.

The central idea of i-DFT is that the pair of “densities” – to wit, particle density and the steady current – of the interacting system can in principle exactly be reproduced by an effective system of noninteracting electrons. Calculating normalized differential conductance from i-DFT, the researchers derive an exact relation expressing the interacting spectral function.

Thus, they propose a computationally efficient DFT scheme to calculate the spectral function of an interacting many-electron system. Conceptually, this scheme allows to express the spectral function in terms of the ground state density.

Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance.

References

1. David Jacob & Stefan Kurth (2018) Many-Body Spectral Functions from Steady State Density Functional Theory Nano Letters doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b00255 ↩ written by

DIPC

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Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) is a singular research center born in 2000 devoted to research at the cutting edge in the fields of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science. Since its conception DIPC has stood for the promotion of excellence in research, which demands a flexible space where creativity is stimulated by diversity of perspectives. Its dynamic research community integrates local host scientists and a constant flow of international visiting researchers.

 Website:http://dipc.ehu.es/  Twitter:@DIPCehu

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Five myths about first aid

In a medical emergency, the right response can save lives – but many of us are still doing the wrong thing.

 By Claudia Hammond Getting first aid right can mean the difference between life and death. But as we learn more about the human body and how it responds, over the years the advice gradually changes – meaning that in some cases, what we learned in the past is out of date.

If you’re burned, forget the butter – run your burn under the tap for at least 20 minutes instead (Credit: Getty Images)

Here are some of the most common myths about first aid… and what you should do instead.

MYTH 1: Put butter on a burn

This is a folk remedy that’s been around for centuries. It even was recommended by the man widely credited with the invention of first aid, the Prussian surgeon General Friedrich Von Esmarch.

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Any new burn that’s exposed to the air is incredibly painful. Covering it with a cool substance such as butter will slightly ease the agony for a time. But the pain will soon return – and sealing off the air before the burn has cooled can keep the heat in, meaning the skin continues to burn.

For most burns, the general advice instead is to remove any clothing and jewellery touching the burn, then to run your burn under the tap for a lot longer than you think – at least 20 minutes. This prevents the skin from continuing to burn, as well as helping to numb the area.

Once the burn is thoroughly cooled you can cover it up with a clean cloth or cling film or a plastic bag to prevent it from becoming infected.

There’s just one situation where butter on a burn can be useful: if you get hot tar on your skin. The fattiness of the butter can help to remove it, reducing the pain. (Read more about this myth in our previous story here).

MYTH 2: Giving chest compressions to someone who doesn’t need them can cause more harm than good

Both first aid technology, and advice, have changed a great deal over time (Credit: Getty Images)

If someone has a cardiac arrest, the biggest predictor of their survival is whether or not someone gives them cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) before medical help arrives.

If you go on a first aid course, you learn to watch the chest and put your head to person’s close to listen for breaths. If there’s no sign that the person is breathing, you should call emergency services and begin CPR.

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First aid instructors also tell you that even if you’re not sure the person is breathing normally, you should again proceed with CPR anyway.

Although this is the advice, many people are reluctant to give CPR because they fear doing more harm than good.

A study conducted in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, followed up cases where bystanders gave CPR in order to discover whether unnecessary CPR might have put patients at greater risk. During the study, bystanders had performed CPR on 910 patients. Of these only 26 had not, in fact, had a cardiac arrest. And of those 26, CPR only caused complications in three cases. This included a minor rib fracture, but none of the complications were serious.

The authors conclude that members of the public should not be afraid to give CPR even if they’re not certain what’s happening. They could save a life.

MYTH 3: To do CPR properly, you need to give mouth-to-mouth as well as doing chest compressions

Giving CPR without breaths is easier and more effective than with breaths – but even so, only 39% of women and 45% of men receive CPR from bystanders (Credit: Getty Images)

The guidelines on this have changed a lot in the past decade. Standard CPR used to involve alternating 15 fast-paced compressions with two breaths into the patient’s mouth. Then it was found that giving two breaths after every 30 compressions was just as effective. This became the standard advice.

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There was a 22% improvement in survival rates if bystanders gave compression alone, instead of compression with breaths

Next came the idea of doing CPR without giving any breaths at all. This results in fewer pauses and allows more opportunity for the compressions to keep blood flowing to the brain. Although the blood may not be fully aerated, at least it gets to the brain quickly. Three randomised controlled trials comparing the methods found only marginal differences between the two methods.

But when the results from these studies were combined and re-analysed, there was a 22% improvement in survival rates if bystanders – who were doing CPR with guidance on the phone from ambulance dispatchers – gave compression alone.

These results do not apply to children or to cases of near-drowning, where breaths are still recommended.

The finding that CPR without mouth-to-mouth is slightly more effective is good news in two ways. First, any improvement in survival rates is of course of a good thing. But second, it might encourage more people to have a go. After all, the easier the guidelines are to remember, the more likely people are to try. There even are games you can play to teach you how to do it.

Also, many people are reluctant to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a stranger.

But still not everyone is prepared to give chest compressions. Research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions in 2017 revealed that some bystanders seem to be wary of touching women’s chests. Audrey Blewer studied almost 20,000 cases of cardiac arrest and found that 45% of men received CPR from bystanders – compared with 39% of women.

MYTH 4: You shouldn’t shock someone with a defibrillator unless you are certain their heart has stopped

This is a major myth. After all, defibrillators, often kept in public places like railway stations, are designed for anyone to use. You don’t have to work out for yourself whether the person who’s collapsed would benefit from electric shocks to startle the heart into rhythm: the machine itself can assess what’s needed. If shocks aren’t necessary, it won’t give them.

US research has shown that survival rates double if a public access defibrillator is used rather than CPR alone. But their use outside hospitals is very low. People seem reluctant to use them. Christopher Smith from Warwick Medical School published research in 2017 showing that many members of the public didn’t know what the machines were, where to find them or how to use them. He told me that some people are afraid of using them in case they do more harm than good.

MYTH 5: Tilt the head backwards to stop a nosebleed

This is very old advice – but can result in a person swallowing their blood into their stomachs or even choking on it, all while continuing to bleed. Instead the best way to stem the bleeding is to apply pressure by pinching the soft part of the nose and leaning forwards for 10 minutes. If bleeding hasn’t stopped after half an hour, seek medical advice.

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Even though defibrillators often can be found in many public places, many people remain intimidated to use them (Credit: Getty Images)

Disclaimer All content within this column is provided for general information only, and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional. The BBC is not responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by a user based on the content of this site. The BBC is not liable for the contents of any external internet sites listed, nor does it endorse any commercial product or service mentioned or advised on any of the sites. Always consult your own GP if you're in any way concerned about your health.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180418-five-myths-about-first-aid

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Elegant Dip Pen Illustrations Inside the Sketchbooks of Elena Limkina

CHRISTOPHER JOBSON

Moscow-based illustrator Elena Limkina fills the pages of her sketchbooks with detailed Baroque-inspired drawings of architectural elements, anatomical studies, and flowing calligraphy. She refers to the books as her “artist’s diary” and indeed each page is practically an artwork unto itself. Limkina works primarily as a watercolor artist and creates concepts for brands, interior designers, and magazines, but also sells prints in her online shop. You can follow more of her work on Instagram and Behance. (via My Modern Met, Lustik)

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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/08/elegant-dip-pen-illustrations-inside-the-sketchbooks-of-elena-limkina/

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