E Journal414

Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis 3
Eyes on the Stars 19

Conceptual Illustrations That Unveil Hidden Worlds by Andrea Ucini 22
The Drift Called the Infinite: Emily Dickinson on Making Sense of Loss 30
At the Ashmolean 34
Portraits of Chinese Rockstars Imagined as Monumental Temples 39
The Artist’s Closet 47
The Danish Devastation of England 62
How to Live with Death 65
I am the fifth dimension! 70
Surreal Editorial Illustrations by Simon Prades 77
The Nose of the Master 83
The World’s First Celestial Spectator Sport 91
Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila
Good Communist Homes 98

New Smoke-Based Photographs by Ken Hermann 105
Syria: Stories from the Barrel of a Cannon 110
Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws 114
Researchers make improbable discovery of deep-sea coral reefs in "hostile" Pacific Ocean depths 123
Materials for raising the temperature of the quantized anomalous Hall and magnetoelectric effects 128
Show Me a Sign, Baby! Preverbal Kids and Sign Language 131
A Possible Keats 136
Topological Quantum Chemistry, the band theory of solids is now complete 149
The Microbiome 153
Scientists embark on expedition to submerged continent Zealandia 156
New Split-View Trash Sculptures by Bordalo II Combine Wood and Colorful Plastics 163
The Greatest Person then Living 169
Artist Dan Lam’s Drippy Blob-Like Sculptures Develop Sparkly Color-Changing Surfaces 174
A New View of Grenada’s Revolution 182
Where have all the megasharks gone? 189
Slug-Inspired Glue Patches Beating Hearts 191
Testosterone and bad judgments 194
Heavier Rainfall Will Increase Water Pollution in the Future 199
2
Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 414 september 2017
Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis
Michael Greenberg
AUGUST 17, 2017 ISSUE
Rob Abruzzese/Brooklyn Eagle
A view from 7 DeKalb Avenue, an apartment tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Eighty percent of its 250
apartments are subsidized units, for which there were 87,754 applications when it opened.
1.
New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of
large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the
health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is what aid
groups would characterize as a “complex emergency”: man-made and shaped by a combination of forces that
have led to a large-scale “displacement of populations” from their homes. What makes the crisis especially
startling is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made
tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration.
The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom. There are at least 61,000 people whose shelter is
provided, on any given day, by New York’s Department of Homeless Services. The 661 buildings in the
municipal shelter system are filled to capacity nightly, and Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced plans to
open ninety new sites, many of which are already being ferociously resisted by neighborhood residents. A
3
packed meeting in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about a proposed shelter for 104 men over the age of fifty that I
attended this winter quickly devolved into a cacophony of ire. “You dump your garbage on us because you
think we’re garbage!” shouted a black woman to a city official. The official seemed stunned, and police
watched anxiously as the meeting broke up.
The revulsion against the homeless seemed linked to a deep suspicion of “the powers that be, whoever they
may be,” as one attendee put it. There were already several shelters in the area. The de Blasio administration’s
argument that the homeless should be placed in the neighborhoods they come from so they can renew
connections and have a better chance of getting back on their feet only compounded the insult. Were the local
residents “connected” to the homeless—those on the lowest social rung? When the city changed eligibility for
the shelter to men sixty-two and older, residents opposing it were not assuaged: a neighborhood association
filed a lawsuit that blocked the shelter from opening for nearly two months, until it was dismissed by a judge
in late May.
The case is indicative of what New York faces as it tries to cope with its housing emergency. Last year more
than 127,000 different men, women, and children slept in the shelters. And in 2015, though the city managed
to move 38,000 people from shelters to more permanent housing, the number of homeless increased. The
administration’s most optimistic forecast sees no significant decrease in homelessness over the next five
years; the aim is merely to keep it from growing.
New York is the only city in the United States to have taken on the legal obligation of providing a bed for
anybody who asks for one and has nowhere else to sleep. This came about after advocates for the homeless
argued, in a series of lawsuits in the 1970s, that shelter was a fundamental right, not just a social service. To
establish this they pointed to an article in the New York State Constitution that implies public responsibility
for “the aid, care and support of the needy.” The legal battle culminated in an enforceable consent decree to
shelter the homeless—the Callahan decree—that Mayor Ed Koch’s administration voluntarily signed in 1981.
Three years later Koch said of the signing, “We made a mistake, and I am the first one to say it.” No one at
the time imagined the future extent of homelessness and the enormous municipal effort that would be required
to deal with it.
The Callahan decree is the reason that the vast majority of New York’s homeless are out of sight, more of a
news story than a daily reality that might jolt us into a pressing awareness of the human suffering the crisis
entails. The number of identifiably homeless who live on the street—in train tunnels, under expressways, in
basements and crawl spaces, and on tenement roofs—is fairly stable. No one claims to know how many of
them there actually are, but for years a variety of estimates have put the number at about 3,000 to 4,400 in
winter and 5,000 to 7,000 during the summer.
In fact, 75 percent of New York’s homeless are families with children, and at least a third of the adults in
these families have jobs. The bank teller, the maintenance worker, the delivery person, the nanny, the deli
man, the security guard—any number of people we cross paths with every day—may be living, unbeknownst
to us, in a shelter. A full-time postal worker I know lives with her two daughters in a shelter because, after
losing her apartment of fourteen years, she has been unable to find housing she can afford.
Every day city employees struggle to provide emergency quarters for those they have no space for in shelters,
cramming parents and their children into hotel rooms in every borough. In February 2016, when the number
of homeless hotel dwellers reached 2,600—and a mother and two of her children were murdered in a Staten
Island hotel where they had been placed by the city—Mayor de Blasio vowed to reduce the practice; despite
his best efforts, by December the number had swollen to 7,500. There have been predictable “scandals” about
the Department of Homeless Services scrambling at the last minute to put up a few dozen families for the
night in expensive Manhattan hotels. But the vast majority are clustered in the outer reaches of the outer
4
boroughs, where rundown cinderblock motels along expressways and elevated railroad tracks supplement city
shelters. The ninety new shelters de Blasio plans to open are meant to ease the need for these measures, but
there is no guarantee they will. One might reasonably imagine what New York would be like without the
Callahan decree, and nearly 70,000 men, women, and children wandering the streets with no place to stay.
And these are only the officially counted homeless. Many others don’t show up in the statistics: people living
temporarily with relatives or friends or fleeing the city altogether, not because they failed to pay rent or
violated the terms of their leases, but because their landlords found a way to wrest their apartments from the
rules of “rent stabilization” and take advantage of their soaring market value. The doubling and tripling up of
evicted families has led in some neighborhoods to “severe overcrowding,” defined as more than 1.5 occupants
per room. Citywide, the number of severely overcrowded households increased by 18 percent from 2014 to
2015. Often the situation becomes untenable after a while and the “couch surfers” move to municipal shelters.
2.
The system of rent stabilization is another development peculiar to New York, with its history of
overpopulated slums, tenant activism, and crusaders for social reform. No other American city provides legal
protection to tenants at anywhere near New York’s level. Housing shortages after World Wars I and II,
protests (and sometimes riots) against price gouging and substandard conditions, and a huge voting bloc of
renters with shared interests have led, over the past hundred years, to an evolving series of state-enforced
regulations.
In 1969 rent stabilization was established by the state legislature, covering older buildings, for the most part,
with six or more units and a history of tenant leases. Though legislators have tinkered with the laws almost
annually ever since—weakening protection during some periods, strengthening them in others—the basic
system remains intact today: landlords can increase rents for stabilized apartments only at or below a rate set
by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, all of whose members are appointed by the mayor. In recent years
increases have ranged from 3.75 to 4.5 percent for one-year leases. In 2015 and 2016, the Rent Guidelines
Board froze rents to provide relief for tenants. Tenants in these apartments are also guaranteed the right to
renew their leases.
Currently almost half of the rental apartments in New York City are stabilized—about 990,000 units, with 2.6
million people living in them.1 Three quarters of these units were built before 1947. They are found in late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century tenements, pre-war towers, and U-shaped apartment blocks, and they
are among the city’s most precious resources, as critical to its well-being, I would argue, as its transit system
and public parks. In view of this extraordinary level of regulation, it may seem surprising that New York
faces a crisis in affordable housing. But rent-stabilized apartments are disappearing at an alarming rate: since
2007, at least 172,000 apartments have been deregulated. To give an example of how quickly affordable
housing can vanish, between 2007 and 2014, 25 percent of the rent-stabilized apartments on the Upper West
Side of Manhattan were deregulated.
5
Eli Duke
A block in Bedford-Stuyvesant, May 2011
A major reason for this is that once the monthly rent of an apartment exceeds $2,700, the owner may charge a
new tenant whatever the market will bear—which, because of the exceptional pressures on New York real
estate, may be thousands of dollars more. Not long ago a rent-stabilized building would sell for ten or at most
twelve times its rent roll—the amount of money, before expenses, that it generates in a year. Today, it sells
for perhaps thirty or forty times that amount, or ten times what the rent roll would be after regulated tenants
have been dislodged. The clearing out of rent-stabilized tenants has become such a common real estate
practice that it is added to a building’s value even before the fact. Landlords have found enough loopholes in
tenant protection laws to make widespread displacement a viable financial strategy. A building in Crown
Heights with one hundred stabilized units and a rent roll of $1.2 million might now fetch $40 million or
more—and every tenant must be forced out for the investment to be recouped.
The buyers at these prices are, more often than not, private equity funds that manage pools of investors’
money: a typical participant in the Central Brooklyn market describes itself as an asset investment firm that
specializes in the “repositioning” of multifamily buildings. The aggressive entry of hypercapitalized investors
into the working- and lower-middle-class real estate market has struck Central Brooklyn—and the South
Bronx, and East Harlem, and Washington Heights, and practically every New York neighborhood with a
concentration of rent-stabilized buildings—like a thunderclap in the span of just a few years. They are a new
type of owner in the outer boroughs, ones who can afford patient, relentless eviction proceedings and tenant
buyouts in a way that most previous owners, who were often individual slumlords working with a different set
of profit margins, could not.
6
The supply of higher-paying renters driving the new real estate market appears to be strong, if not exactly
inexhaustible. New York has become one of a handful of big cities (London and Hong Kong are among the
others) preferred by a global financial elite—not just the super-rich buyers of $50 or $75 million
condominiums in the heart of Manhattan, but the “ordinary” rich as well, from places like China, Germany,
Brazil, India, Russia, and the wealthy suburbs of the United States itself. Relatively crime-free Brooklyn has
acquired the luster of an international brand. The well-off don’t comprise the entire new real estate market by
any means, but there are enough of them to keep pushing up prices and to put pressure on New Yorkers of
moderate means.
The effect has been catastrophic. A woman I know—call her S—who lived on Schenectady Avenue in Crown
Heights for twenty-three years and raised her eighteen-year-old daughter there told me she was recently
presented with a new lease in which the rent went from $1,017 to $2,109 per month. The hike was perfectly
legal. Over the years, the landlord had not passed on the annual increases granted by the Rent Guidelines
Board and was thus able to add all of them to the lease at once. Realtors call this “gentrification insurance”;
the Rent Guidelines Board calls it “preferential rent.” Tenants in at least 250,000 rent-stabilized apartments
pay preferential rents, which gives an idea of how many New Yorkers are in immediate danger of losing their
homes as a result of drastic increases when their leases come up for renewal. When real estate companies
began to market Crown Heights as a “newly discovered,” desirable urban frontier, S’s landlord levied the
accumulated increase without warning. Shortly after, he sold the building.
S’s daughter, who was studying to become a dental hygienist, took on extra hours at a retail clothing chain
where she worked. But they still missed rent payments, and late fees were piling up, adding to the burden. S
seemed locked in a nightmare when I saw her one morning begging for a fare at the Utica Avenue subway
station so she could get to her job as a home nursing aide in Manhattan. She had become impoverished
overnight, paying close to 70 percent of her income in rent, and saw no recourse other than to accept her new
landlord’s offer of $45,000 to move out and sign away any lingering legal claim she might have to renew her
lease at the stabilized rate.
“I put up with these streets when you had to be half-crazy to go out to the bodega for a quart of milk after
dark,” said S. “I got rid of a rat infestation four years ago myself.” She and other tenants once pooled money
to install a new hot water heater when the old one broke down. “We watched over this street, we cleaned it
up. Why should we have to leave?” S and her daughter were shuttling between various relatives and friends—
paying for a couch here, a spare bed there—when I lost touch with them.
Forty-five thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money when it was offered, and it did alleviate some of S’s
immediate financial worries, but in New York’s housing market it wasn’t nearly enough to replace what she
and her daughter had lost. They were unlikely to find a comparable home they could continue to afford after
money from the buyout ran out: most vacant rent-stabilized apartments become more expensive as landlords
act to push them toward deregulation.
From the point of view of S’s landlord, the buyout was a sound investment that would pay itself back in
increased rent in little more than a year, while adding substantially to the value of the building should the new
owners decide to sell it. With the apartment empty, they were able to add a 20 percent vacancy bonus to the
next lease, bringing the rent to $2,528. According to S, who stayed in touch with her former neighbors in the
building, a renovation that involved throwing up a sheetrock wall to create a second bedroom, replacing a few
kitchen cabinets and appliances, and installing a wine refridgerator and a stacked washer/dryer comfortably
pushed the rent over the deregulation limit of $2,700; the law permits landlords to add to the rent 2.5 percent
of the cost of “major capital improvements.” There is no effective oversight of the amount landlords claim to
have spent on improvements, while there is every incentive to inflate the costs.
7
The conversion of a one-bedroom apartment to a cramped two-bedroom allowed the landlord to lease to a
group of three young roommates who split the new monthly rent of $4,300. These new tenants are the
supposed “gentrifiers” of Brooklyn: they may be Web designers, fund-raisers, editorial assistants, fashion
industry aspirants, musicians with a couple of floating bartender gigs, line chefs, elementary school teachers,
film or TV crew workers, or online journalists—people with the kinds of jobs that New York abundantly
generates. Priced out of the borough’s more expensive neighborhoods—like Williamsburg, DUMBO, Fort
Greene, and Park Slope (not to mention Manhattan)—they are beckoned by rental agencies that specialize in
introducing young, single renters to the deeper territories of Brooklyn.
When a landlord embarks on a campaign to “unlock value” in his building, it becomes a consuming
psychological torment for renters. “Landlord harassment is practically all anyone I know talks about,” a
beleaguered tenant named Nefertiti Macaulay told me. “When it comes, it’s like a bomb’s gone off in your
living room.” After an equity firm bought her building and began pressuring tenants to leave, Nefertiti tried,
with mixed results, to organize a rent strike. Amiable and proper, with a tattoo on her shoulder of the famous
bust of the Egyptian queen who bears her name, Nefertiti has lived her entire life in Brooklyn. After her
experience with her landlord she became a housing advocate and currently works as a community liaison for
Diana Richardson, who represents Crown Heights in the New York State Assembly. She told me of a seventy-
one-year-old man and his ninety-year-old mother who have lived in the same apartment in another building
for forty years. “The new owner wants to give them $60,000 to move, and they think they have to take it
because the landlord says so. They’re more than likely to end up at the mercy of the [Department of Homeless
Services], at an annual cost to the city of $43,000 per person. I see it happen all the time.”
One of the tactics owners employ is to hold rent checks without cashing them and then sue tenants for
nonpayment. Delores, who has lived on Eastern Parkway for twenty-five years, found herself embroiled in
this scheme. Between 2013 and 2015 her building was flipped twice. “We don’t even know who the owners
are. When we call, no one answers. And when they do answer, they’re very disrespectful. They tell us they’re
going to relocate us to East New York. Where in East New York? It’s like we’re bad inventory they want to
off-load to some warehouse so we’re not in the way anymore.”
Some landlords bring tenants to court for putting up bookshelves (which may violate the letter of a lease that
prohibits renters from drilling into walls) or for having a roommate or, in one case I know of, a pet canary.
“Most people here don’t believe in the courts because they’re used to it working against them,” said Nefertiti.
“That’s what landlords count on.” Many renters are unaware of the laws protecting them and have little
knowledge of how New York’s intricate housing bureaucracy works, so they are easily intimidated by
determined owners. A court date is also a missed day at work. Landlords don’t expect to win all of these
skirmishes, but the barrage of lawsuits helps set the stage for a buyout: financially and emotionally ground
down, the tenant agrees to relinquish his rights and depart.
An artist I know in South Williamsburg took flight after her landlord paid a homeless man to sleep outside her
door, defecate in the hallway, invite friends in for drug-fueled parties, and taunt her as she entered and left the
building. In East New York a mother tells of a landlord who, after claiming to smell gas in the hallway,
gained entry to her apartment and then locked her out. In January, a couple with a three-month-old baby in
Bushwick complained to the city because they had no heat. In response, the landlord threatened to alert the
Administration for Children’s Services that they were living with a baby in an unheated apartment. Fearful of
losing their child, they left, leaving the owner with what he wanted: a vacant unit.
8
Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Councilman Robert Cornegy taking questions during a town hall meeting in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, March 9, 2017. At the meeting, Michael Greenberg writes, ‘the mayor told his worried
audience not to “think the city is all-powerful.”’
What might be a welcome development under different circumstances—the sale of a neglected building and
its renovation under a new owner—today provokes immediate panic. Any effort at “improvement,” many
tenants suspect, is probably the first salvo in what will be a protracted assault on their homes. A group called
the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, with the help of the Ford Foundation and the
Mertz Gilmore Foundation, has assembled a Displacement Alert Map that identifies residential properties
where tenants are vulnerable to harassment and illegal evictions. Using public data, it assigns risk scores to
buildings with rent-stabilized units that have sold for more than the average price in the neighborhood and
whose owners have applied for work permits from the city’s Department of Buildings. Of 96,400 properties
on the map, 24,766 had the highest risk of displacement. The map gives tenants of these buildings, and their
advocates, a way to keep track of landlords’ plans and to prepare, if necessary, an early defense against
eviction.
Costa lives in Central Brooklyn, in the type of pre-war building you might find in any part of New York. His
place consists of a small misshapen living room, clearly carved from a larger apartment, with a makeshift
kitchen wedged against a wall. The bedroom is just big enough for a mattress. He has been living there since
he was discharged from the Marines sixteen years ago.
9
In 2014, a management company purchased the building and set out to get rid of as many rent-stabilized
tenants as possible. Over the course of a year, they were able to push out about a third. “They offered me
$50,000,” said Costa, “a sum they could make up in rent in two years. I told them I needed half a million.”
The new owners began renovating the vacant apartments. According to Costa, they didn’t obtain work permits
but photocopied old ones and taped them to the doors. “They worked at all hours, especially at night, on
weekends, on holidays, around the clock, dust everywhere, a hell of rubble, you couldn’t sleep or hardly
breathe. The workers cursed at us, as if they’d been instructed to treat us like crap.”
Costa and other residents obtained an order to stop construction. After a brief pause, however, it started again.
Apartments were flooded. A neighbor’s ceiling collapsed; another’s wall caved in. Costa recorded some of the
illegal work on his cell phone. A few days later, an employee of the management company showed up with
police, who arrested Costa for threatening behavior: the crew foreman claimed he had brandished the phone in
anger. Costa was taken, in handcuffs, to Kings County Hospital, where he was dressed in a gown and held
“for psychiatric evaluation.” He had never been arrested or treated for a psychiatric condition and was
released after twelve hours with a “deferred diagnosis.” In February 2016, less than two years after they
bought the building, the owners sold it for almost twice what they had paid.
As astonishing as Costa’s experience was, even more shattering was that of the tenants of a building on New
York Avenue, whose owners sent construction crews into occupied apartments, claiming they had come to fix
structural problems. They ripped out walls, shut off water, and then abruptly ceased work, leaving occupants
with piles of dust and debris. One woman had to be freed by the Fire Department after workers nailed her
front door shut from the outside with plywood.
Stories like these move through the city like an underground stream. I repeat them not because they are
extraordinary, but because they are a fact of life for thousands of New Yorkers. For the most part they go
unnoticed. The displaced slink away, crouched into their private misfortune, seeking whatever solution they
can find. Many experience displacement as a personal failure; they dissolve to the fringes of the city, forced to
travel two or three hours to earn a minimum wage, or out of the city altogether, to depressed regions of Long
Island, New Jersey, or upstate New York. If they have roots in the Caribbean, as some residents of Central
Brooklyn do, they may try to start again there. Or they may join the growing number of people who are
officially homeless, dependent on the city for shelter.
3.
Mayor de Blasio is keenly aware of the pressures bearing down on what, as a candidate in 2013, he called
“the other New York”—that vast sector of the city’s population that lost considerable economic ground
during the twelve-year mayoralty of his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. De Blasio has tried to blunt the
hardships, but he also concedes that the forces responsible for the city’s housing emergency are beyond his
control. At a town hall meeting I attended at a Bedford-Stuyvesant elementary school on March 9, the mayor
told his worried audience not to “think the city is all-powerful. This is about something called money.” He
urged renters to think twice before succumbing to landlords offering to buy them out of their stabilized leases,
while tacitly acknowledging that thirty or forty or even fifty thousand dollars for someone accustomed to
living week-to-week may be difficult to turn down. People had to figure out for themselves whether their
leases and the rights that went with them should be put up for sale. “Sometimes, it’s a personal choice,” he
said, with resignation.
The core of de Blasio’s housing plan, announced in 2014, is to “build or preserve” 200,000 affordable rental
units throughout the five boroughs by 2024. The preservation part of the plan aims to keep 120,000 units that
are already affordable from passing into the unregulated market. Often the administration’s efforts involve
10
buildings that landlords allowed to fall into decrepitude and then forfeited, on account of unpaid taxes in the
1970s and 1980s. The city arranged financing for builders to renovate them and either keep existing tenants
or, if the properties had become uninhabitable, give affordable leases to new ones. These arrangements
usually last for twenty to thirty years—the time it takes the builders to repay their loans—at which point the
affordability requirement expires, and they have the right to assume full control over the properties. The de
Blasio administration has been stepping in, negotiating an extension with these owners to keep their buildings
affordable.
A typical example is the sixty-three “senior apartments” at Monsignor Alexius Jarka Hall on Bedford Avenue
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The residence, owned by a nonprofit organization called the People’s Firehouse,
recently received $19 million from the city to fix the roof and remain affordable for another thirty-five years.
The city has struck hundreds of such deals, and while they are of critical importance, they do not add to the
pool of affordable housing or protect tenants in the vast number of rent-stabilized buildings for which the
government has no negotiating leverage to ease the threat of eviction. 2
The “build” part of de Blasio’s build-or-preserve housing plan gives private developers tax breaks to include a
total of 80,000 affordable rental units in newly constructed market-rate buildings. The tax break, known by its
legislative code number, 421-a, dates back to 1971, when the city’s economy was collapsing and its white
working- and middle-class population was fleeing to nearby suburbs or to the Sunbelt, after rising energy
costs encouraged the migration of jobs from the Northeast. At that time the challenge was not to create
affordable housing but to keep bankrupt landlords from abandoning properties to scavengers and squatters.
Today, the tax break’s main purpose is to encourage large developers to build. Under 421-a, owners are
exempt from paying the increase in property taxes that would normally result from new construction: if a
building worth $200 million is erected on a lot valued at $10 million, the owner will not be taxed for the $200
million enhancement. In exchange, developers must set aside 20–30 percent of the units at below-market rates
for tenants who are chosen by city officials in an income-based lottery. The apartments remain affordable for
the duration of the tax exemption period, which in April was extended from twenty-five to thirty-five years.
De Blasio defends the program as the fastest and most practical way to provide a significant number of
apartments for people in need. “My plan offers volume,” he said at the town hall meeting in March. “And in
housing, volume matters.” Eighty percent of the volume, however, consists of high-cost market-rate rentals,
far more of them than would have been built without the enticement of 421-a. Measured purely by volume,
there is no housing shortage in New York—the upper end of the market is glutted with apartments, partly
because tax exemptions and rezoning laws have made construction so attractive to developers. In a ten-block
area of Downtown Brooklyn, nineteen residential towers with nearly seven thousand rental units are either
under construction or have recently been completed. If we include the area immediately around Downtown
Brooklyn, a total of 15,200 apartments have been built or had their plans approved since 2011, almost all of
them with 421-a exemptions.
As more and more apartments have come onto the market, landlords have had to offer “sweeteners” to attract
tenants. Posing as a prospective renter, I recently toured one of these buildings and was offered two months’
free rent on a two-year lease for a $5,400-per-month apartment. The lease came with a complimentary health
club membership, concierge service, and common areas that included a sun deck and party rooms that tenants
were “invited to share,” but the apartment itself was a narrow cookie-cutter two-bedroom. Turnover is high.
“With so much to choose from at $5,000 there’s really no reason for tenants to stick around,” a broker told
me.
11
DNAinfo.com/Dartunorro Clark
East Harlem residents protesting the city’s rezoning plan for the neighborhood during a community forum,
November 2016. When the plan came to a vote the following June, Michael Greenberg reports, a local
protester called it ‘ethnic cleansing.’
The 421-a exemptions cost New York $1.4 billion in uncollected property tax in 2016, and de Blasio’s
housing plan is now expected to cost at least $10 billion in exemptions by 2024. The city appears to be getting
relatively little affordable housing for the money. In 2016 it managed to squeeze 6,844 new affordable units
out of developers, as construction projects that had broken ground in 2014 were completed—a numerical
victory, but only 35 percent of those apartments were for households making less than $40,000, the income
level that is being most relentlessly pressured with eviction from older, “undervalued,” rent-stabilized
buildings. Citywide, de Blasio’s program provides far more affordable units for households making $63,000
to $143,000. (The government deems housing affordable when a household spends no more than 30 percent
of its income on rent.)
Yet the program appears to redefine what low and moderate income means. At 382 Lefferts Avenue in
Brooklyn, for example, new subsidized one-bedroom apartments rented for $2,047 in May 2015, $400 more
than the neighborhood average. According to the most recent data, the median annual household income in
Brooklyn is $44,850; to be eligible for a one-bedroom at 382 Lefferts Avenue a tenant would have to earn at
least $82,000 a year.
At 7 Dekalb Avenue, a gleaming zinc-skinned centerpiece of the residential skyscrapers that are rapidly rising
in Downtown Brooklyn, three quarters of the subsidized units are for individuals earning at least $57,000 (for
studio apartments) and families making up to $142,000 (for two-bedroom apartments). The poor aren’t
12
forgotten, but the de Blasio plan appears to convey the belief that in the growing, privatized, global supercity
that New York has become, families of four with incomes as high as $150,000 are in danger of being priced
out without some form of assistance.
At the town hall meeting, the mayor, trying to explain why he hasn’t set aside more units for those near the
poverty line, said, “There are swamps of people who make less than $40,000 a year. People who make
$50,000 need help, too.” To a renter in the audience anxious about her future, he admitted, with a touch of
sadness, that his housing policy “may not help you personally. New York may not be exactly the same city
you’ve known.” But he claimed that he was doing all that was realistically within his power “to protect the
character of New York.”
Much has been made of how difficult it is to win the lottery for one of these affordable apartments: between
2013 and 2015, 2.9 million applicants entered the lottery for 4,174 units, a 700 to 1 ratio. The number
suggests a stampede for subsidized housing across the eligible income bands. But when the pool of applicants
is looked at more closely, a revealing disparity emerges. To give an example, at 535 Carlton Avenue in the
Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood that has experienced a dramatic increase in property
values in recent years, 92,743 households entered the lottery for 297 affordable apartments. But only 2,203—
less than 3 percent of the applicants—applied for the 148 units (almost half the total) that had been set aside
for households earning six figures. (The monthly rent for these units ranged from $2,680 to $3,716, depending
on their size.)
By contrast, nearly 67,000 households—more than 70 percent of the applicants—vied for ninety units for
tenants with incomes of between $21,566 and $38,100. 3 So few applied for the more expensive apartments
because New Yorkers at that income level have enough options at similar prices in the unregulated rental
market. What they lack are homes they can afford to buy, a very different problem. In a rush to rack up
“affordable” units and get to the 80,000 he promised, de Blasio appears to have stocked the program with
housing for upper-middle-income tenants who don’t need it. It costs more to subsidize the poor because they
can pay so little themselves; the logical fiscal alternative is to subsidize those who can pay more.
In any event, developers are likely to prefer—and insist upon—filling their mandatory affordable units with
tenants in the higher income bands. Benjamin Dulchin, executive director of the Association for
Neighborhood and Housing Development, worries that the city isn’t tough enough with developers. “It’s all in
the details, how the city applies its considerable power to shape the market,” he told me. “If a developer says,
‘I don’t like your affordable allotment, I’m not going to build right now,’ the city should tell him, ‘Fine, then
wait two or three years,’ instead of caving and giving away too much of the public interest.”
De Blasio’s plan is predicated on the rezoning of fifteen neighborhoods to allow for higher residential density,
as urbanists call it. This means the construction of large apartment buildings designed to attract much
wealthier tenants than have previously lived in those neighborhoods.
In April 2016, East New York in Central Brooklyn, one of the poorest districts in the city, became the first to
be rezoned under de Blasio’s plan. Two years earlier, investment groups, having learned of the impending
change, began buying up older, rent-stabilized buildings and engaging in the familiar pattern of “unlocking”
value through tenant harassment and eviction. Prices shot up. Short-term speculators flipped buildings for an
average return of 125 percent, the highest appreciation in all of New York in 2016.
The city has promised to spend $257 million on schools, parks, street repair, high-speed Internet service, and
other improvements in a neighborhood whose residents have spent decades pleading for basic services.
Subway stations will be renovated, buses will run more frequently, and police on foot patrol will give the
13
streets a protected, reassuring air. As has happened during the early stages of gentrification in other Brooklyn
neighborhoods, East New York will be more racially integrated—for a time.
If all goes to plan, three thousand new affordable apartments will be created in East New York by 2024. It is
possible, however, that just as many older stabilized units will be lost to predatory investors, putting the city
in the impossible position of promoting affordable housing with one hand and working against it with the
other. Five Central Brooklyn neighborhoods suffered a net loss of 5,496 rent-stabilized apartments between
2008 and 2015, even after newly constructed affordable units were counted. 4 When I posed this conundrum to
an official in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, he said, “Gentrification is going to
happen anyway. At least this puts us in the game.” I wondered if this were true for East New York: without
the city’s invitation to developers and the influx of new residents that it will bring, the neighborhood’s manic
transformation—and the displacement that goes with it—seems unlikely to occur anytime soon.
Fear of displacement has reached such a pitch in New York that for many the very idea of rezoning has
become synonymous with eviction. In June, when Community Board 11 in East Harlem held a meeting to
vote on the city’s proposed rezoning of a ninety-six-block swath between 104th and 132nd Streets that would
allow for residential towers as high as thirty-five stories, more than one hundred protesters showed up, and a
violent shoving match erupted. One East Harlem resident called the rezoning plan “ethnic cleansing.” Another
compared it to “a Trojan horse” that would “come out at night to do us in.” Still another called it “a criminal
act against our people.”
Rejected outright by protesters was the possibility that residents and their representatives could negotiate an
agreement with the city that would provide more affordable units and stricter protection for rent-stabilized
tenants. The level of distrust toward the city was remarkable, but not surprising. The de Blasio administration
would do well to examine its disconcerting decision to rezone mainly in poor neighborhoods where
displacement is most acute.
The hard fact is that behind the wildfire of new construction, new restaurants, retail outlets, bars, music halls,
cafés, tech and media start-ups, and nearly full employment, real poverty in New York is on the rise. Wages
have gone up, but housing costs have made many people poorer. The median rent-to-income ratio shows that
New York tenants (excluding those living in public housing projects and other financially assisted buildings)
spent 65.2 percent of their total income on rent in 2016, up almost six points from the already alarmingly high
figure of 59.7 percent in 2015. The median can be a misleading measurement, but in this case it provides a
telling portrait of the city’s evolving predicament. By comparison, nationwide, in 2015, Americans earning
the country’s median annual income of $55,589 could expect to spend no more than 30 percent on rent.
The de Blasio administration’s current policy seems to acknowledge, and to some extent concede, that the
economy of New York leaves little room for the poor. The public housing projects, built with federal money
between the mid-1930s and late 1960s, are quickly becoming the last relatively secure refuge for lower-
income families in New York. They consist of 176,066 low-income apartments with 400,000 “authorized
residents” (leaseholders and members of their immediate family), a mere 4.7 percent of the city’s population.
(When “off-lease” residents are counted, some estimates put the number at 600,000.) The average family
income in the projects is $24,366, and the average monthly rent is $509. There are currently 255,143 families
on the waiting list, and the vacancy rate is close to zero percent. With the steady, seemingly inexorable
decline in the number of older rent-stabilized apartments, it is possible to foresee a future in which the public
housing projects and municipal shelters are home to New York’s only remaining poor.
14
4.
Obviously the situation calls for reform. Most crucial would be to eliminate the point—currently $2,700 per
month—at which rent-stabilized apartments revert to market rates. History shows that as long as landlords
have a path to the unregulated market, they’ll find a way to reach it. A 3 percent increase, say, from the Rent
Guidelines Board would raise a rent of $2,700 per month to $2,781, still a manageable amount for a family of
three with an income of $100,000, precisely the group that many of de Blasio’s new affordable units are
aimed at. But most rent-stabilized tenants pay much less than that: of the 990,000 regulated apartments,
471,694 have rents of $1,000–$1,499; an additional 120,076 rent for $800–$999. The vast majority of these
cheaper apartments are in New York’s poorest neighborhoods where incomes are well below the city’s
average. If rent-stabilized apartments were required to stay in the system, no matter their cost, the outsize
financial reward that landlords now reap for driving poorer tenants out of their homes would disappear.
Michael Moran/OTTO
Boston Road Supportive Housing for low-income tenants in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx, a
collaboration between the architect Alexander Gorlin and the nonprofit organization Breaking Ground, which
provides housing for the homeless
But no such reform will occur as long as legislators in Albany control the city’s housing laws. From 2000 to
2016, New York City developers contributed $83 million to state assembly and senate campaigns, more than
any other economic group. Much of that money went to upstate and Long Island candidates with no regulated
housing in their districts. In exchange, these legislators, risking not a single vote among their own
constituents, block pro-tenant bills from reaching the floor; on the rare occasion that one does make it to the
floor—such as a 2010 bill requiring landlords to justify rent increases for apartments that are about to be
deregulated—they band together to ensure its defeat.
15
The chair of the Senate Housing Committee, Catharine Young, is a Republican who represents a district near
Lake Erie that is closer to Cleveland than to New York City. Young regularly sponsors pro-landlord bills, and
in one case she introduced a bill involving a single building—Independence Plaza North in Manhattan—that
would have vacated a court decision in favor of 3,500 tenants.5 (Young’s bill passed the Senate but died in the
Assembly.) Two thirds of New Yorkers are renters. Urgently needed is some kind of referendum that would
give the city control over its housing laws.
But New York’s crisis begs for a more definitive solution. In November, Los Angeles voters passed a half-
cent sales tax increase to fund the most ambitious mass transit expansion in that city’s history. In essence,
Angelenos collectively agreed to pay for a vast, decades-long project to solve their most intractable urban
issue: gridlock traffic and the pollution it causes. Shouldn’t New Yorkers be given the chance to vote on a
similar measure to fund affordable housing? What New York desperately needs is newly constructed
buildings entirely devoted to households with incomes of $35,000 to $80,000, something a half-cent sales tax
would abundantly provide.
There’s no doubt that this proposal would encounter a great deal of resistance. Some might argue, for
instance, that a special transit tax to repair the subway system is more equitable because it would directly
benefit every New Yorker, not just those in need of affordable housing. But the MTA has access to large
amounts of capital through fare hikes and the issuance of municipal bonds. In addition, a commuter sales tax
of 0.375 percent that helps fund the subway already exists. A majority of New Yorkers, I believe, recognize
the importance of the housing emergency.
The city can expect no help from the federal government, which largely stopped building affordable public
housing during the Nixon administration more than forty years ago. Ben Carson, President Trump’s secretary
of housing and urban development, has expressed strong opposition to housing assistance for the poor, and
the modest amount of federal money still directed to it will likely be cut even further when the Republican-
controlled Congress resumes budget talks later this year.
The New York City Housing Authority, the government agency in charge of the city’s public housing, has a
$17 billion deficit, the amount needed to repair and maintain its 2,462 buildings, some of which are more than
seventy years old. In 2015, de Blasio implemented an effective program to address the deficit, but Trump’s
proposed budget cuts, if approved, would, in the words of a senior housing policy analyst, “set [it] back by
fifteen years.” Rarely has local funding been more imperative.
Imaginative low-cost housing is one of the most exciting branches of contemporary architectural design.
There is no reason why New York cannot participate, and even be a leader, in this movement, instead of
surrendering its skyline to a monotony of tinted-glass-clad towers with a handful of lower-cost units thrown in
as a necessary concession to the city. One need look no further than at the ranks of luxury high-rises on the
Williamsburg waterfront or in Downtown Brooklyn, or at the self-replicating piles clustered around the
Queensboro Bridge in Long Island City, to understand the new “blight of dullness,” to borrow Jane Jacobs’s
famous phrase, that is overtaking New York.
The city already has a few architectural examples of innovative housing to draw from, such as the felicitous
gray, blue, yellow, and red apartment building on Boston Road in the Bronx, with 154 units that the firm
Breaking Ground was able to construct for $47 million6; and the spectacular Via Verde, also in the Bronx,
with its pleasantly leaf-filled 6,000-square-foot courtyard, solar panels, and roofs planted with garden plots
and fruit trees. Both are for low-income tenants and were built on city-owned land, which made their
construction less expensive.
16
With a sales tax devoted to housing, affordable buildings needn’t be confined to land the city already owns;
enough money would be available to purchase lots all over the five boroughs, not just in poorer districts. The
buildings could be woven into the fabric of the city, rather than clumped together in self-enclosed enclaves
that promote a kind of psychological as well as physical segregation. New affordable housing would no
longer be contingent on giving tax exemptions to the builders of private, market-rate projects: luxury
developers would be free to charge whatever the market will bear for all of their units, not just 70 or 80
percent of them, and the city, in turn, could collect from these developers the billions in property taxes that it
now forfeits under 421-a. Housing built with money from a special tax fund would be 100 percent affordable.
Over time homelessness would decrease—especially among low-wage working families—as would the
amount (currently about $1.6 billion per year) that the city spends on homeless services.
I have focused mainly on Brooklyn, partly because its 306,374 rent-stabilized apartments are the most in any
borough, but also because Brooklyn is emblematic of New York’s housing emergency, with the
hyperinvestment its real estate has been attracting since 2011, when the credit freeze brought on by the 2008
financial crisis began to thaw. These past six years have seen an extraordinary amount of displacement, and
the majority of the displaced have been African-American. Seven of Central Brooklyn’s most vulnerable
neighborhoods have a combined population of 940,000, 82 percent of which was black in 2010. It is the
largest concentration of African-Americans (and Afro-Caribbeans) in the United States.7
In his revelatory book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated
America (2017), Richard Rothstein shows the extent to which explicit federal policy restricted blacks from
buying homes, effectively barring them from the surest path of entering the middle class, paying for higher
education for their children, and accumulating wealth. The policy lasted from 1934, when the Federal
Housing Authority (FHA) was established, until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968. By then, the
damage had been done: working-class whites in government-subsidized suburban subdivisions, with
guaranteed mortgages from the FHA, were benefiting from the increased value of their homes, while blacks
were consigned to live as renters in depopulated cities, without equity in homes and often without jobs.
Rothstein documents how mortgage covenants and deeds imposed by the FHA not only prohibited developers
from selling to blacks, but prohibited buyers from reselling to them. “Incompatible groups,” the FHA manual
said, could not be financed. The policy structured the economies of America’s major municipalities in ways
that are still felt today: now that New York (and a select number of other cities) has become desirable to live
in again, families that in the twentieth century had been kept poor in places like Brooklyn and Harlem are
being pushed out of their homes. We speak nowadays with contrition of redlining, the mid-twentieth-century
practice by banks of starving black neighborhoods of mortgages, home improvement loans, and investment of
almost any sort. We may soon look with equal shame on what might come to be known as bluelining: the
transfiguration of those same neighborhoods with a deluge of investment aimed at a wealthier class.
Under de Blasio some positive emergency measures have been proposed. In February the mayor announced
that the city would guarantee legal representation for tenants who are facing eviction and earn less that
$50,000 per year, roughly 90 percent of whom appear in housing court without an attorney. Landlords tend to
drop spurious cases when there’s counsel on the other side, and the number of illegal evictions has already
begun to fall.
This will give immediate help to people in the direst circumstances. Still, neither the city nor the state has yet
to commit fully to the protection of New York’s renters where they need it most: in their existing affordable
apartments. Under de Blasio’s plan, well intentioned though it may be, the housing crisis is almost certain to
worsen. To what extent should a renter who fulfills the terms of his lease be shielded from the vagaries of real
estate markets with their speculative booms and busts? More broadly, what kind of city do New Yorkers want
to live in? What responsibility, if any, do we bear to make sure that our most besieged citizens are not pushed
17
out by our current urban prosperity? These are critical questions that New York, and other cities profiting
from a surge of private real estate capital, must answer.
1. 1
This does not include the 176,066 low-income apartments—“the projects”—managed by the New York
City Housing Authority or the 45,312 Mitchell-Lama units for people of moderate and middle income. ↩
2. 2
The highly publicized agreement that the de Blasio administration signed with the owners of Stuyvesant
Town and Peter Cooper Village in 2015, to keep five thousand apartments rent-stabilized for the next
twenty years, was unusual in almost every respect. They are the only regulated units left in a development
with 11,232 apartments that had been built, in the mid-1940s, with an enormous amount of public financial
assistance. The fraught history of Stuyvesant Town reveals a great deal about the interdependent
relationship between the city and big developers. See Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison, and Michael
R. Glass, Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods (NYUPress, 2016);
and Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest
Real Estate Deal Ever Made (Dutton, 2013). ↩
3. 3
I am indebted to Norman Oder’s impeccably researched report “The Real Math of an Affordable Housing
Lottery: Huge Disconnect Between Need and Allotment,” City Limits, April 19, 2017. ↩
4. 4
The five neighborhoods are Bedford- Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, and
East Flatbush. ↩
5. 5
For more on the subject of real estate money and the state legislature see “The Inside Story of How 421a
Developers Sway Albany,” an excellent investigative piece by Will Parker of The Real Deal and Cezary
Podkul and Dereck Kravitz of ProPublica, The Real Deal, December 30, 2016. ↩
6. 6
See Martin Filler, “A Higher Form of High-Rise,” NYR Daily, October 4, 2016. ↩
7. 7
The neighborhoods are Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, Canarsie, East Flatbush, Prospect Lefferts, East New York,
and Fort Greene. ↩
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/08/17/tenants-under-siege-inside-new-york-city-housing-crisis/
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Eyes on the Stars: Astronaut Ronald McNair, Who Perished in the Challenger Disaster, Remembered by His
Brother in an Affectionate Animated Short Film
“When he went out in space and he looked out at the world, he saw no lines of demarcation. It was a world of
peace, he said.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Shortly after noon on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off on its tenth mission. Seventy-
three seconds later, off the coast of Florida, it combusted into a ball of fire and smoke on national television,
imprinting generations with the shock of the tragedy. All crew members — five men and two women,
including the first-ever non-government civilian to travel into the cosmos, a schoolteacher named Christa
McAuliffe — perished. Among them was 35-year-old astronaut Ronald McNair (October 21, 1950–January
28, 1986) — a promising young physicist, a skilled saxophonist, and the second black person to fly into
space. (On another Challenger mission three years earlier, Sally Ride had become the first American woman
in orbit.)
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Ronald McNair
In this wonderful animated short film from StoryCorps, the text of which is included alongside other moving
and deeply humane stories in the marvelous book Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work (public library)
edited by StoryCorps founder Dave Isay, McNair’s brother Carl and his friend Vernon Skipper remember
young Ronald’s defiant spirit of curiosity.
Folded into this affectionate account is a larger piece of civil rights history, a counterpoint to cultural
stereotypes about race, law enforcement and even librarians, and a meditation on the elemental impulse for
curiosity that animates all scientists and propels all science. Above all, the story emanates a clarion call to
never forget — never forget our history, however difficult it may be to own up to, never forget our heroes,
however tragic their fate, and never forget the power of storytelling as a caring keeper of our collective
memory.
Carl McNair: We knew from an early age that my brother Ron was different. When he was nine years old,
Ron decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library — which was, of course, a public library,
but not so public for black folks, when you’re talking about 1959 in segregated South Carolina.
So as he was walking through the library, all these folks were staring at him, because it was white folk only,
and they were looking at him and saying, you know, “Who is this Negro?” [Laughter.]
He found some books, and he politely positioned himself in line to check out. Well, this old librarian says,
“This library is not for coloreds.” He said, “I would like to check out these books.” She says, “Young man, if
you don’t leave this library right now, I’m going to call the police!” He just propped himself up on the counter
and sat there and said, “I’ll wait.”
20
So she called the police and subsequently called my mother. The police came down, two burly guys, and say,
“Well, where’s the disturbance?” She pointed to the nine-year-old boy sitting up on the counter. One of the
policemen says, “Ma’am, what’s the problem?”
So my mother, in the meanwhile, she comes down there, and she’s praying the whole way: “Lordy, Jesus,
please don’t let them put my child in jail!” My mother asked the librarian, “What’s the problem?” The
librarian said, “He wanted to check out the books. You know that your son shouldn’t be down here.”
The police officer said, “Why don’t you just give the kid the books?” And my mother said, “He’ll take good
care of them.” Reluctantly, the librarian gave Ron the books, and my mother said, “What do you say?” He
said, “Thank you, ma’am.” [Laughs.]
Ron did exceptionally well at school, and he was very good in science and math. During his junior year in
high school, his chemistry professor told him about a summer institute for math and science, so he went three
hundred miles or so from home to participate in this program. He met a professor there who said, “The
highest academic level you can go is PhD, and young man, I think you should shoot for it.” And Ron says,
“That sounds like a pretty good idea, sir. I’ll get a PhD.” And he went on to get a PhD from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Then, when NASA was looking for astronauts, here he was with a PhD in physics.
Ron went on a space flight in February of 1984. When he went out in space and he looked out at the world, he
saw no lines of demarcation. It was a world of peace, he said. And two years later, he took his last flight on
the space shuttle Challenger.
You know, as youngsters, a show came on TV called Star Trek. Now, Star Trek showed the future, where
there were black folk and white folk — all kinds of folk — working together. I looked at it as science fiction
— that wasn’t going to happen, really. But Ronald saw it as science possibility.
He was always someone who didn’t accept societal norms as being his norm. That was for other people. In
Ron’s own words, he was the kind of person who “hung it over the edge.” He’d go as far as he could, then go
one step beyond that.
Ron was a country boy from segregated, small-town South Carolina. Who would dream that he could become
an astronaut? But it was his time. And he got to be aboard his own starship Enterprise.
Callings is a tremendously nourishing read in its entirety, featuring stories by and about inspiring humans
from walks of life as varied as firefighters, NBA referees, funeral directors, and librarians. Complement this
particular thread with Primo Levi on how space exploration unites humanity and the wonderful Blast Off, a
vintage children’s book that envisioned a black female astronauts decades before one flew into space.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/06/ronald-mcnair-storycorps-
callings/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=e5ab79fdbf-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-e5ab79fdbf-
234059117&mc_cid=e5ab79fdbf&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
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Conceptual Illustrations That Unveil Hidden Worlds by Andrea Ucini
by Kate Sierzputowski on July 24, 2017
Self-taught Italian illustrator Andrea Ucini draws scenes which reveal hidden plot lines, adding a conceptual
twist to his minimalistic imagery. Within Ucini’s illustrations one can sneak a peek behind the veil of a
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shadow or streetlamp, uncovering another world or just a curious rodent. In addition to working as an
illustrator, Ucini also composes music and plays several instruments, a pastime that he sites as a strong
influence for his illustrations which have been included in Wired, Scientific America, Entrepreneur Magazine,
and more. You can view more of the Denmark-based illustrator’s work on his Instagram, Behance, and Anna
Goodson Illustration Agency where he is currently represented.
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27
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/07/conceptual-illustrations-by-andrea-
ucini/?mc_cid=a41c6124fe&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
29
The Drift Called the Infinite: Emily Dickinson on Making Sense of Loss
Reflections on silence and eternity from the poet laureate of death.
BY MARIA POPOVA
“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where
memories are created,” poet Meghan O’Rourke wrote in her stirring memoir of losing her mother. More than
a century earlier, another poet with a rare gift for philosophical prose reflected on mortality in the wake of her
own mother’s death.
Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) was about to turn fifty-two when her mother, after
whom she was named, died. A stroke had left her paralyzed and almost entirely disabled eight years earlier.
Despite her lifelong infirm health, her disinterest in the life of the mind, and the surges of unhappiness in the
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Dickinson home, Emily Norcross Dickinson had been attentive and affectionate to her daughter, igniting the
poet’s little-known but ardent passion for botany and prompting her to write that “home is a holy thing.”
Emily
Dickinson, daguerreotype, circa 1847. (Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, gift of Millicent
Todd Bingham, 1956)
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Although a contemplation of mortality haunts nearly all of Dickinson’s 1775 surviving poems in varying
degrees of directness, her mother’s death forced a confrontation with mortality of a wholly different order —
loss as an acute immediacy rather than a symbolic and speculative abstraction.
In a letter to her cousins penned shortly after her mother’s death in November of 1882 and found in The
Letters of Emily Dickinson(public library), the poet writes:
Mother’s dying almost stunned my spirit… She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind,
and is now part of the drift called “the infinite.”
We don’t know where she is, though so many tell us.
Even as a child, Emily had come to doubt the immortality so resolutely promised by the Calvinist dogma of
her elders. “Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me,” she wrote in her twenties to Susan Gilbert — her first
great love and lifelong closest friend. Dickinson went on to reject the prescriptive traditional religion of her
era, never joined a church, and adopted a view of spirituality kindred to astronomer Maria Mitchell’s. It is
with this mindset that she adds in the letter to her cousins:
I believe we shall in some manner be cherished by our Maker — that the One who gave us this remarkable
earth has the power still farther to surprise that which He has caused. Beyond that all is silence…
Writing less than four years before her own untimely death, she ends the letter with these words:
I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea… Thank you for remembering me.
Remembrance — mighty word.
In another letter from the following spring, penned after receiving news of a friend’s death, Dickinson stills
her swirling sorrow the best way she knew how — in a poem:
Each that we lose takes part of us;

A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.
She adds a sobering reflection on the shock each of us experiences the first time we lose a loved one:
Till the first friend dies, we think ecstasy impersonal, but then discover that he was the cup from which we
drank it, itself as yet unknown.
Complement with a collection of moving consolation letters by great artists, writers, and scientists ranging
from Lincoln to Einstein to Turing, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud shaped our
relationship to mortality, Seneca on the key to resilience in the face of loss, and this unusual Danish picture-
book about death, then revisit Cynthia Nixon’s beautiful reading of Dickinson’s “While I was fearing it, it
came” and Dickinson’s forgotten herbarium — an elegy for time and mortality at the intersection of poetry
and science.
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Emily Norcross Dickinson, daguerreotype, circa 1847 (Monson Free Library)
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/07/20/emily-dickinson-mother-
death/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=e5ab79fdbf-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-e5ab79fdbf-
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33
At the Ashmolean
Charles Hope
A study for ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ (c.1509)
Within a generation of Raphael’s death in 1520 it was widely recognised that his career, along with those of
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, marked a turning point in the development of painting in Italy and, by
implication, in the rest of Europe. As Pierre-Jean Mariette remarked in 1729, in the so-called Recueil Crozat,
a lavish collection of reproductions of famous European paintings, this was ‘the time in which, as everyone
knows, the fine arts emerged from their tombs’. And in 1745 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville
defended his decision to exclude all early painters from his Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, a work
soon translated into English and German, by pointing out that ‘Domenico Ghirlandaio and Pietro Perugino …
have no merit other than having been the masters of Raphael and of Michelangelo.’ Such attitudes dominated
the collection and display of paintings throughout most of Europe from the early part of the 16th century until
the French Revolution. The works of the so-called primitives were not highly valued and were displayed, if at
all, mainly as historical curiosities.
Although Raphael was younger than Leonardo and Michelangelo and his career was shorter, he was by far the
most influential of the three, especially from the end of the 16th century. Leonardo left few paintings, and the
most famous of them, the Last Supper in Milan, soon deteriorated, while Michelangelo was considered too
wilful, eccentric and limited in his range to provide a suitable model for young artists. By contrast, large
numbers of works by Raphael were readily accessible in Rome, the city in Europe that attracted the largest
number of visiting artists and patrons. There they could see how he had painted historical narratives,
mythologies, portraits, altarpieces and smaller devotional pictures. Such works set a standard for later artists,
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one that was all the more authoritative in that Raphael’s figure style seemed to be based on the most
prestigious model, the art of classical antiquity. That Raphael himself largely invented this interpretation of
ancient art, on the basis of a few statues, most of them very damaged, seems to have been generally
overlooked. Because his art came to be seen as perfect, no one seems to have thought it could be in any way
idiosyncratic.
A drawing of a woman with children (c.1512)
35
When taste inevitably changed, as it did in the early decades of the 19th century, Raphael came to be
esteemed more for his works from the period before his arrival in Rome, including those in which he was still
working in an idiom close to Perugino. The somewhat sentimental piety of many of these pictures gave them
an obvious appeal, whereas enthusiasm for the later works was more muted. But as taste changed again
Raphael’s status became less secure. We distrust the notion of perfection in art because it inevitably excludes
so much, and certainly don’t associate it with the expression of strong but conventional religious feeling or
with the supposed assimilation of the principles of classical art. We also generally place a high premium on
the personal involvement of the artist in every stage of the work, and the fact that Raphael increasingly
employed assistants to realise his ideas, especially in his later years, has made this aspect of his work seem
problematic. That Leonardo and Michelangelo were, or are thought to have been, driven and difficult is
central to their modern appeal. By contrast, bestselling novels have never been written about Raphael, and the
idea seems somehow incongruous.
Raphael, then, is more admired than loved, and everyone knows that visitors in their thousands visit the
Vatican to see Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel rather than those of Raphael in the Stanze. But
from the 17th century to the 19th the balance was different. It is unlikely that the works of either artist will
ever again achieve the authority they once possessed, but visitors to the current exhibition in Oxford (until 3
September) now have a rare opportunity not so much to understand why Raphael was once so influential but
to appreciate his extraordinary gifts. The Ashmolean, thanks to the enthusiasm of Thomas Lawrence,
possesses the largest and most representative collection of drawings by Raphael. These have been
supplemented by important loans from other British and foreign collections to create an exhibition which is
unlikely to be matched in Britain for several decades, not least because drawings can only be displayed on
rare occasions and in carefully controlled lighting.
Drawings were always central to Raphael’s activity because he was trained in an environment in which there
was, and always had been, a sharp distinction between the conception and execution of paintings. For both the
main types of picture produced in Italy before his time – panel paintings, especially the earlier ones with gold
backgrounds, and frescoes – it was necessary for the artist to establish the final design in detail before the
application of any pigment. This placed a high premium on the skill of disegno, a term that covers both the
activity of drawing and the wider notion of design. Later, as painters and others began to write in a limited
way about what artists did, disegno was seen as the common feature of the different visual arts, and it was
widely but not universally believed that whereas the conception of a work of art, in which drawings played an
essential role, was an intellectual activity, the realisation was a purely manual process.
Whether and, if so, to what extent Raphael shared these ideas is impossible to say. But given his background
it was inevitable that drawing played a fundamental role in the way that he worked. What can be seen very
clearly in the exhibition is how he used drawing, and his technical mastery of the medium changed very
dramatically in the twenty years or so of his career. In his earliest drawings he evidently shared the then
standard idea that corrections should be kept to a minimum, and that if the artist was not satisfied he should
start again, often elsewhere on the page. Equally conventional was his limited use of live models for the main
elements of a figure pose, and the adoption of poses and physiognomic features strongly reminiscent of those
favoured by his teacher Perugino. But a famous supposed self-portrait, the first exhibit in this show, already
shows surprising assurance.
36
A study for the head of an apostle (possible St Thomas) in the ‘Transfiguration’ (c.1519)
Raphael’s style and his approach to drawing was transformed by his period in Florence, from 1504 to 1508,
when he had direct experience of the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo. From the latter he seems to have
discovered the expressive potential of the heroic male nude, and from the former he learned the advantages of
making extensive changes in drawings, especially pen sketches, enabling him to create compositions in which
37
every element was precisely calculated to contribute to the overall effect. The results can be seen particularly
well in a series of drawings of the Madonna and Child, sometimes with the infant St John, made in the
preparation of some of his best-known pictures, in which the children are endowed with an agility and poise
quite incongruous for their supposed age but perhaps justifiable on the grounds of their divine status.
It was in Rome, where Raphael arrived in 1508, that he applied the lessons of Florence on a much larger
scale, in complicated compositions involving many adults interreacting, such as what is today his most
famous work, the so-called School of Athens. The surviving drawings for his Roman frescoes show the
enormous pains he took to organise his figures and develop their poses in an elaborate choreography, in which
gestures and especially hands and glances served to relate the figures in complicated ways. Particularly
revealing about Raphael’s working method and his ideals is a remarkable group of drawings for an
engraving, The Massacre of the Innocents, in which all the protagonists interact in strangely balletic poses.
The result is entirely artificial and seems wilfully eccentric, but at the time must have appeared an astonishing
display of virtuosity.
One of the great strengths of the exhibition is the way it illustrates Raphael’s increasing mastery of and
obvious pleasure in the medium of drawing during his years in Rome. This comes across most strongly in his
works in red and black chalk, which have survived much better than those in the more fragile medium of
metalpoint and those in pen, in which the original black ink has inevitably turned brown, creating a less
incisive effect, very different from the original. There is a particularly marvellous black chalk drawing of a
woman seen from the back, holding small children, done with apparent spontaneity and extraordinary control,
in which her movement, the modelling of her shoulder and the contrasting texture of her dress are evoked
with complete authority and extreme economy. Here, as in many of the later drawings, there is a more
extensive use of a live model, although Raphael never seems to have accorded to life drawing the importance
it acquired in artistic practice in Italy and elsewhere from the later 16th century. No drawing of the 15th
century is remotely comparable to this, and it entirely negates the common idea of Raphael as an artist of
laboured self-conscious perfectionism. The same could be said of a famous group of late drawings for his last
major work, the Transfiguration in the Vatican. The altarpiece itself, in which the balance of the colours has
irretrievably changed over the centuries, now seems excessively contrived, but the drawings for individual
heads, which served as full-sized cartoons for the picture, are livelier and more vivid than the painted
versions. This loss in quality between the drawing and the painting is characteristic of almost all Raphael’s
later output, in which the contribution of assistants is often a factor.
Whether he himself would have recognised or have been troubled by this is impossible to say, since we can
only speculate about his intentions as an artist, on the basis of what has survived. The direct experience of the
artist’s hand and thought that drawings can give us seems to have had much less appeal to non-artists before
the 20th century than it does today. Working drawings, which make up almost all the exhibition in Oxford,
were usually preserved by those who made them and then acquired by other artists or bequeathed to them, and
the few collectors of drawings seem to have favoured very highly finished ones, of the kind that
Michelangelo, for example, gave away to a few favoured friends.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/charles-hope/at-the-ashmolean
38
Portraits of Chinese Rockstars Imagined as Monumental Temples
by Christopher Jobson on January 18, 2016
39
Chinese artist DU Kun has long harbored a reverence for music and rockstars. A musician himself, the
Beijing-based painter is awed by the creation of music, aspects of fame, and the intangible aura of being a
revered rockstar, something he tries to capture is these temple-like portraits of famous Chinese recording
artists titled “Revels of the Rock Gods”.
Each oil painting depicts the face of a musician as if it were a temple built in devotion to a god and borrows
elements from Buddhist and Confucian architecture. Eyes are depicted as windows, tree branches or
waterfalls as flowing hair, and the surface of skin as ornate wood facades gilded with gold.
Kun is currently exhibiting the “Revels of the Rock Gods” series as part of his first solo show in Japan
at Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo through February 13, 2016. You can explore close-up details plus an archive
of Kun’s work on his website. (via Hi-Fructose)
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/portraits-of-chinese-rockstars-imagined-as-monumental-temples/
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The Artist’s Closet
Liana Finck
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“Sara Berman’s Closet” is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through

September 5.
www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/21/the-artists-closet
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The Danish Devastation of England
Today's selection -- from CNUT the Great by Timothy Bolton. From the demise of the Roman Empire to the
triumph of William the Conqueror in 1066 CE, the British Isles were the scene of repeated looting and
invasion from the Scandinavians. In fact, the English, or Anglo-Saxons, were themselves invaders who had
arrived in the fifth century from parts of Saxony, Frisia and Jutland, and seized control over the crumbling
remains of post-Roman Britain. The greatest of these invaders were Swen Forkbeard and his son Cnut the
Great, who ruled until 1035 CE and was simultaneously king of Denmark, England and Norway, known as
the Anglo-Scandinavian or North Sea Empire:
"Scandinavian ships and their raiding parties were all too familiar to the inhabitants of England who must
have watched Swen and Cnut's fleet appear on the horizon and draw up their longships on the beach at
Sandwich. ...
North Sea Empire of Cnut the Great, c.1030
"It is important to note that Swen and Cnut's arrival in 1013 came at the end of some thirty-five years of
devastating Scandinavian raids on English territory. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is normally a rather dry
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account, reading like a sparse bulletin of events, condensing even the most emotive of acts into a few blank
words, but here it descends slowly into a deeply impassioned narrative describing the violence of the invaders
and the collapse of a society. These events left substantial scars on the memories of the English, and a century
later John of Worcester, presumably working from oral accounts, would describe harrowing scenes of
violence and the systematic murder of every man the warbands encountered. Confronted with this tide of
destruction many of the English seem to have despaired, and turned towards prayer and public appeals to God
to rid them of the raiders.
Swein arrives in England in an illustration from the Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund (1434-44).
"The invaders came first in 981, striking Southampton, and this force was followed, until 1001, by numerous
small raiding armies that struck at coastal sites or headed inland on raiding campaigns. In 991 a larger raiding
party arrived and remained in England until 1005, closely followed by another in 1006-7. Then in 1009 a
'great army' headed by the warlord Thorkell the Tall arrived at Sandwich and appears to have received
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reinforcements in August of the same year from another immense fleet, apparently under the control of
Thorkell's brother and close associate. This force seized the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury and pillaged the
southern coastline, before making a winter camp on the River Thames and seizing provisions from the
surrounding Essex countryside. From that site they struck into Oxfordshire and East Anglia in 1010, burning
Thetford and Cambridge, before returning to Oxfordshire and proceeding to lay waste the counties of
Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, and burning the town of Northampton. At the peak of this
orgy of carnage, they took the archbishop of Canterbury prisoner along with many inhabitants of the town.
The archbishop was imprisoned for several months, and then executed on 19 April 1012; the other captives
were presumably sold into slavery. ...
"Æthelred 'the Unready' had been king of the English since 978, and was a descendant of the West Saxon line
of Alfred the Great who had reconquered the various kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England after the viking raids
of the ninth century. Despite the unfortunate byname that history gave to him, Æthelred appears to have been
a strong and effective ruler, and more ill-counselled (as the Anglo-Saxon unræd means) than not up to the
task. However, he was powerless in the face of such large and mobile forces, and had to resort to paying the
bulk of the invaders off and hiring the remaining crews of forty-five ships under Thorkell the Tall to stay on
as mercenaries in his service. Within months the weaknesses of this arrangement were tested and found
wanting, as early in 1013 Swen and Cnut's vast fleet appeared, and the English, broken, beaten and at the end
of their tether, capitulated to Swen's seizure of power. ...
"It is crucial to note that Swen's arrival in 1013 was quite different from that of the other Scandinavian
raiders, including several earlier attacks in which he appears to have played a part. Here his aim was conquest
not raiding. He sought to seize control at the level of central and local government and permanently rule the
country, rather than just raise wealth through pillage and ransoms. ... From the English perspective, Swen's
Christianity must have set him apart from many previous viking raiders, and may have made him a more
palatable figure to accept as an overlord."
author: Timothy Bolton
title: Cnut the Great
publisher: Yale University Press
date: Copyright 2017 by Timothy Bolton
pages: 53-58
All delanceyplace profits are donated to charity and support children’s literacy projects.
https://delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3384&utm_source=CNUT+The+Great+53-
58&utm_campaign=7%2F24%2F17&utm_medium=email
64
How to Live with Death
Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud reframed our mortality as an organizing principle of
human life.
BY MARIA POPOVA
Our lifelong struggle to learn how to live is inseparable from two facts only: that of our mortality and that of
our dread of it, dread with an edge of denial. Half a millennium ago — a swath of time strewn with the lives
and deaths of everyone who came before us — Montaigne captured this paradox in his magnificent
meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the
same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Centuries later, John Updike — a mind
closer to our own time but now swept by mortality to the same nonexistence as Montaigne — echoed the
sentiment when he wrote: “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead, so
why… be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”
How to live with what lies behind that perennial “why” is what British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips examines
in Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories (public library) — a rather unusual and insightful
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reflection on mortality, suffering, and the redemptions of living through the dual lens of the lives of two
cultural titans who have shaped the modern understanding of life from very different but, as Phillips
demonstrates, powerfully complementary angles: Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud.
Phillips, a keen observer of our inner contradictions, writes:
For Freud, as for Darwin, there is not just the right amount of suffering in any conventionally moral sense of
right: for who could ever condone suffering? But there is a necessary amount. Our instincts, at once the
source of our suffering and of our satisfaction, ensure the survival of the species and the death of the
individual.
The amount of suffering in the world is not something added on; it is integral to the world, of a piece with our
life in nature. This is one of the things that Freud and Darwin take for granted. But it is one thing not to
believe in redemption — in saving graces, or supernatural solutions — and quite another not to believe in
justice. So the question that haunts their writing is: how does one take justice seriously if one takes nature
seriously?
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Illustration from Cry, Heart, But Never Break, a remarkable Danish illustrated meditation on love and loss
Darwin, to be sure, had his own profound confrontation with suffering in his beloved daughter Annie’s
death just as he was beginning to tell the story of life itself. After two generational revolutions of the cycle of
life, Freud made our relationship to death a centerpiece of understanding our trials of living. With an eye to
these parallel legacies, Phillips writes:
If death was at once final and unavoidable, it was also a kind of positive or negative ideal; it was either what
we most desired, or what, for the time being, had to be avoided at all costs. For both Darwin and Freud, in
other words, death was an organizing principle; as though people were the animals that were haunted by their
own and other people’s absences… Modern lives, unconsoled by religious belief, could be consumed by the
experience of loss.
So what else could a life be now but a grief-stricken project, a desperate attempt to make grief itself somehow
redemptive, a source of secular wisdom? Now that all modern therapies are forms of bereavement
counselling, it is important that we don’t lose our sense of the larger history of our grief. It was not life after
death that Darwin and Freud speculated about, but life with death: its personal and trans-generational history.
[…]
Redemption — being saved from something or other — has been such an addictive idea because there must
always be a question, somewhere in our minds, about what we might gain from descriptions and experiences
of loss. And the fact of our own death, of course, is always going to be a paradoxical kind of loss (at once
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ours and not ours). But the enigma of loss — looked at from the individual’s and, as it were, from nature’s
point of view — was what haunted Darwin and Freud. As though we can’t stop speaking the language of
regret; as though our lives are tailed by disappointment and grief, and this in itself is a mystery. After all,
nothing else in nature seems quite so grief-stricken, or impressed by its own dismay.
Art from Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch, an uncommonly tender illustrated meditation on life
and death
Well before twentieth-century physics illuminated the impartiality of the universe, Darwin and Freud planted
the seed for rendering the notion of suffering — that supreme species of disappointment at the collision
between human desires and reality — irrelevant against the vast backdrop of nature, inherently indifferent to
our hopes and fears. Phillips writes:
Darwin and Freud showed us the ways in which it was misleading to think of nature as being on our side. Not
because nature was base or sinful, but because nature didn’t take sides, only we did. Nature, in this new
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version, was neither for us nor against us, because nature (unlike God, or the gods) was not that kind of thing.
Some of us may flourish, but there was nothing now that could promise, or underwrite, or predict, a
successful life. Indeed, what it was that made a life good, what it was about our lives that we should value,
had become bewildering. The traditional aims of survival and happiness, redescribed by Darwin and Freud,
were now to be pursued in a natural setting. And nature seemed to have laws but not intentions, or a sense of
responsibility; it seemed to go its own unruly, sometimes discernibly law-bound, way despite us (if nature
was gendered as a mother, she was difficult to entrust ourselves to; and if we could love a mother like this,
what kind of creatures were we?). And though we were evidently simply pails of nature — nature through and
through — what nature seemed to be like could be quite at odds with what or who we thought we were like.
Half a century after Loren Eiseley’s exquisite meditation on what it means for nature to be “natural,” Phillips
adds:
Nature, apparently organized but not designed, did not have what we could call a mind of its own, something
akin to human intelligence. Nor does nature have a project for us; it cannot tell us what to do, only we can. It
doesn’t bear us in mind because it doesn’t have a mind… And what we called our minds were natural
products, of a piece with our bodies. So we couldn’t try to be more or less natural — closer to nature, or
keeping our distance from it — because we were of nature.
[…]
If, once, we could think of ourselves as (sinful) animals aspiring to be more God-like, now we can wonder
what, as animals without sin (though more than capable of doing harm), we might aspire to.
Complement Darwin’s Worms with Meghan O’Rourke on learning to live with death, Seneca on the key to
resilience in the face of loss, and this unusual Danish picture-book about love and grief, then revisit Phillips
on how to break free from self-criticism, why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in love, and how to live
with being too much for ourselves.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/07/10/adam-phillips-darwins-worms-life-
death/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=4ff1216c09-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-4ff1216c09-
234059117&mc_cid=4ff1216c09&mc_eid=d1c16ac662
69
I am the fifth dimension!
Bee Wilson
 BUYGef! The Strange Tale of an Extra Special Talking Mongoose by Christopher Josiffe
Strange Attractor, 404 pp, £15.99, April, ISBN 978 1 907222 48 1
‘He does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence –
or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators
that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have
their food rejected. Slowly and patiently, the Irvings found a repertoire of things that Gef would consent to
eat. Before they went to bed at night, they would set out tidbits of bananas and oranges, chocolate and
biscuits, sausage and bacon – ‘he always leaves the fat part.’ In the morning, the mongoose chatted to them
through the wainscotting in his clear high-pitched voice about which of the items he had eaten.
For several years in the 1930s the case of this Manx mongoose – who was said to speak in a range of foreign
languages including ‘Hindustani’, as well as singing, whistling, coughing ‘in a human manner’, swearing,
dancing and attending political meetings – was discussed across Britain. As a fantastical beast, he was a
contemporary of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, who was first supposedly photographed in 1933, although
his fame was shorter-lived. Sometimes he called himself an ‘earthbound spirit’ and sometimes a ‘marsh
mongoose’. When he first arrived at the Irving house in 1931, he was said to be a malevolent presence, a kind
of ‘man-weasel’ who frightened the family with satanic laughter. Over the months, however, the Irvings
warmed to some of Gef’s ways, and he became a pet of sorts, who amused the family with his gossip and
jokes. He was less eager to share these witticisms with outsiders who came to the house to check him out. He
didn’t like to speak to people who doubted him and punished them with silence and insults or threatened to
blast them away with a shotgun.
From 1932 onwards, numerous ‘psychic investigators’ came to Doarlish Cashen, the Irving house, to meet the
remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of
the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert
was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with powers of speech. Lambert
was the co-author, with the famous paranormal investigator Harry Price, of a book on Gef, The Haunting of
Cashen’s Gap, which was sceptical about some of the Irvings’ account but didn’t rule out the possibility that
Gef was real. Price, who made a media career out of ‘investigating’ haunted houses, poltergeists and suchlike,
prided himself on separating the ‘bunk’ from the ‘debunk’, as he put it. Yet he and his colleague didn’t
conclude that Gef’s existence was pure bunkum. The pair had serious grounds for doubt: a sample of ‘fur’
given them by the Irvings which the mongoose had supposedly cut off himself with scissors was shown under
the microscope to be dog hair, and that was just one instance among several. But Lambert and Price’s main
regret seems to have been that Gef hadn’t spoken to them directly, which would have lent their book greater
weight and silenced the sceptics. The court, for its part, took the view that Lambert’s investigation of Gef
wasn’t a sign of madness, and awarded him damages of £7500.
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The story of Gef, in Christopher Josiffe’s meticulous telling, is both brilliantly silly and irreducibly
mysterious. After seven years of research into the legend of the talking mongoose, Josiffe, a librarian at
Senate House, is still not entirely clear about the nature of the hoax or who in the family was hoaxing whom.
In any case, he leaves open the possibility that Gef lived and talked and ate lean bacon exactly as the Irvings
claimed he did. This may sound whimsical, but it’s an effective device for taking us back to a prewar Britain
in which paranormal occurrences were widely believed, and somehow assimilated – by some, at least – into
the texture of everyday life. However hilarious Gef’s story, the Irving family, as Josiffe tells it, kept straight-
faced. The parents in particular grumbled about Gef, as one might about a difficult and cheeky pet dog who
messed up one’s house, and presented themselves as people who, far from having made Gef up, were annoyed
by the publicity he attracted and from which they never profited. James Irving seems to have wanted to prove
both that Gef existed and that he himself was completely sane. Perhaps his view of his own sanity was warped
by living on the Isle of Man, a place which rejoices in eccentricity. In their interviews with outsiders, the
Irvings walked a fine line between insisting on the magic of Gef – ‘I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth
wonder of the world!’ he was said to have told them – and downplaying any suggestion that their visitor was
anything other than flesh and blood and fur.
The possibility of Gef’s existence was first reported in the Manchester Daily Dispatch in January 1932. A
reporter claimed he had visited the Irving household to investigate the ‘animal story’ that had been the talk of
the island for several months. On arrival at the farmhouse, he heard ‘a voice which I should never have
imagined could issue from a human throat’. The Irvings told him that it was an animal, something like a stoat,
weasel or ferret, except that it spoke and sang songs and on occasion offered betting tips. The reporter
admitted that this was perplexing but insisted that the Irvings seemed like ‘sane, honest and responsible folk
and not likely to indulge in a difficult, long-drawn-out and unprofitable joke to make themselves the talk of
the world’. Irving told the reporter that he had tried and failed to catch this talking animal, whom he called
‘Jack’ (‘Gef’ came later). He insisted to the reporter that nothing that had happened in his home was
‘supernatural’ – there were ‘no spooks here’.
Irving knew that ‘the Dalby Spook’ was the name given to Gef in the wider community of the Isle of Man,
Dalby being the nearest settlement to the Irvings’ farmhouse. The next reporter to investigate the spook was
from the Isle of Man Examiner, in February 1932. The Examiner recorded:
Uncanny Happenings at Farmstead
Remarkable Story of Existence of Phenomenal Creature
Conversed with and Seen by Members Of Family
Is it an Animal with Powers of Speech?
He acknowledged that a talking animal sounded outlandish, and might ‘leave the reader unconvinced’. This
‘Dalby Sensation’ was ‘vouched for by people whose sanity brooks no question’. He meant James Irving
himself, a 58-year-old sheep farmer, supported by ‘the corroborative evidence of his wife and his bright 13-
year-old daughter’. Irving told the reporter that they had first heard strange noises on Sunday, 13 September
1931. At first, they believed it was a mouse, until the sounds changed to ‘peculiar animal noises such as the
blowing of a stoat or ferret, the spit[ting] of a cat and the barking of a dog’. Finally, in October, James and his
daughter Voirrey caught their first glimpse of the yellowish animal resembling a weasel, with a ratlike body,
‘a long bushy tail’ and a human voice. This talking animal would remain a presence – of some description –
in the Irving family house for the next ten years.
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Gef had many astonishing characteristics, in the Irvings’ telling. He had three light-yellow fingers on each
doll-sized hand, which were ‘very hard and cold to the touch’. Voirrey remembered how hard his hands felt
when she touched them. He held hands with the girl’s parents too but always warned them that if they made
any move to grab him, he would ‘take their finger off’. Though violent, Gef could also be dextrous, but his
greatest talents were linguistic. When the Irvings first became aware of him, he made noises like a baby
‘beginning to talk’ so James and Voirrey decided to ‘test’ him with some nursery rhymes. To their professed
amazement, the rhymes were repeated back ‘in a clear voice’ along with pieces of gossip from outside the
house and private details of the Irvings’ life together. He had a very high-pitched voice with a slight Manx
twang and tended to speak in the local dialect (‘sacret’ instead of ‘secret’ and ‘sleech’ instead of ‘sneak’).
Over time, he became more and more advanced in the things he could say, as Josiffe recounts. He knew a
little Hebrew and Gaelic; in June 1932 he spoke a sentence in Russian, and two years later recited two verses
in Spanish. This was followed by a ‘long complimentary sentence’ in Flemish, although when asked what
language it was, he told Irving it was German. ‘Poor Gef,’ Irving observed, ‘is not infallible.’ Gef’s much
vaunted fluency in Hindi was also questionable. Gef claimed to be of Indian origin and told Irving that he had
once lived with two ‘Hindoos’ but his vocabulary seemed to be limited to a handful of words such as ‘Yogi’,
‘nabob’ and ‘maharajah’ that would have been familiar to any British person in the 1930s. If he really came
from India, it was strange he knew so much English and Manx and so little Hindi.
At the time Gef’s existence came to light, James Irving was on the second chapter of his life. He had married
Margaret Ann Heavyside, a dressmaker, in Liverpool in 1897. They had two children, Elsie and Gilbert, and
lived a relatively affluent, respectable life near Wavertree Botanic Gardens. Irving made a goodish living
(around £600 a year: according to Josiffe, £55,000 in today’s money) as a piano and organ seller for the
Dominion Piano Company. But during the First World War his business collapsed, and in 1916 he decided to
make a new start as a farmer, spending £310 of his savings on Doarlish Cashen, a dilapidated farmhouse on
the Isle of Man, which at the time he bought it consisted of 45 acres of mostly gorse and shrub with just a few
hens, geese and sheep. The two older Irving children left home (Elsie back to Liverpool and Gilbert to
London), and in 1918 Voirrey was born. Thrown together in their lonely house on an island where they would
always be treated as outsiders, they were an isolated family unit. Photographs taken from the time of Gef’s
arrival show them to be a handsome and well-groomed family, rather theatrical-looking for farmers. James
Irving stands very upright, wearing a trilby and a self-satisfied smile. Margaret Irving wears a choker and a
bias-cut dress, very stylish, presumably of her own making. Voirrey, on the cusp of womanhood, has strong
eyebrows and her hair is cut in a smooth bob. She is startlingly photogenic but looks uncomfortable, as if she
didn’t want to be photographed. Her parents said that she hated visitors – something she had in common with
Gef, who would straightforwardly tell them to get lost – ‘Clear to the divil. We don’t want you here.’
Whatever was really going on with Gef, his arrival in the Irving family was part of the odd psychodrama of
this close triad of father, mother and daughter. When Lambert visited the house, he found it ‘unnatural for a
young person’ to be living alone with much older parents. Lambert and Price describe her as a clever, gloomy
person who carried ‘something of her mother’s strange look in her greenish-brown eyes, which, rarely fully
open, seem to observe the world with a penetrating yet half-concealed disdain’. She didn’t have friends and
unlike other farm girls in the area she didn’t go out. She was known to be a skilled ventriloquist and many
assumed that she was the key to Gef. Years later, a Dalby resident who had been at school with her recalled
that she was brilliant at throwing her voice and putting on animal noises; she herself had heard Voirrey
throwing her voice up a field and ‘shouting like a cat’. Someone who heard Gef speak on two occasions in
1932, when Voirrey was 14, described the voice as being like that of a girl of 15 or 16. Voirrey was known to
be a fearless rabbit catcher – just like Gef; and many of Gef’s views were strikingly close to Voirrey’s. When
her older sister Elsie came to visit, Gef behaved like a jealous sibling, saying he didn’t want her in the house.
In summing up the evidence for and against Gef, Lambert and Price listed some of the ways in which Gef
resembled Voirrey:
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Gef likes biscuits, cakes and sweets – so do young girls. Gef is interested in motorcars and aeroplanes – so is
Voirrey. Gef roams around the countryside, watching parties of workmen and attending various local
gatherings consonant with what we know of Voirrey. Gef’s humour, Gef’s wisecracks, Gef’s tantrums, Gef’s
affections – all have the quality of raw adolescence.
The reporter from the Manchester Daily Dispatch was one of the first to suggest that Gef was Voirrey. When
he visited the farm, he heard a ‘weasel-voice’ talking to Mrs Irving ‘while the little girl sat motionless in a
chair at the table’. Voirrey had her fingers to her lips. The reporter became persuaded that Voirrey was
suffering from some kind of dual personality and was ‘unconsciously playing a clever, ventriloquial, practical
joke’. He was convinced that James Irving himself genuinely believed in Gef because he ‘indignantly
repudiates suggestions that his daughter … has been playing tricks on him and on others’.
On the other hand, had Voirrey been the only one in the family to pretend to hear a mongoose speak, why
would Margaret – her mother – have claimed to have held hands with the creature and touched the top of his
head? Gef is said to have referred to Margaret as a ‘witch-woman’ and often showed a preference for her,
wishing her ‘night night’ and paying her various compliments. ‘He brought me a rabbit for my birthday,’ she
told one investigator. A different view was that Gef was invented by Margaret and Voirrey together in an
effort to persuade Irving to sell up and move back to the mainland. But Gef often taunted the family about his
presence in the household and how it would make it impossible for them to sell the house and move
somewhere better. If Margaret had wanted to create a poltergeist to scare her husband out of the house, surely
she would have invented one who bullied the family into leaving rather than to stay? Gef sometimes
threatened to kill all their poultry but at other times he seemed to be very jealous of anyone who got too close
to the family. ‘This is my house and it suits me,’ he apparently said.
Gef’s complex personality suggests that he was the product of three minds working more or less together.
Whether or not he was originally Voirrey’s creation, it’s clear that her father had a strong hand in his
manufacture. He was the main source of all the information released to the outside world, and he was the one
who kept a complete written record of Gef’s sayings and doings, a document of two hundred pages, which,
Price said, ‘rivals the Arabian Nights in the fantastic impossibilities’ it contained. When visitors came to the
house to try to catch sight of Gef, it was Irving who took them on the tour, pointing out the hole in the ceiling
through which the mongoose observed them. Witnesses described being taken on walks during which the
Irvings maintained Gef was present. On these occasions Voirrey would hang back behind the group and
appear to make noises, while her father sprang ahead, signalling various hedges from which he claimed Gef
was speaking, and helpfully translating the words for the visitors, in case they hadn’t caught what Gef said.
Why did the Irvings do all this? It wasn’t money, at least not in a straightforward way. Price and Lambert sent
him a cheque for £10 when they published their book and he wrote back to say that he hoped the book had
been a bestseller and that he might ‘expect a little more of what may be vulgarly known as the “Bunce”’. In
fact, the book sold fewer than four hundred copies and Irving got no more out of it. But in general, he didn’t
seek to profit from Gef, partly because he was aware that turning his mongoose companion into a money-
spinner would only lend support to the doubters. As Price put it, if people thought Irving was making money,
‘the bottom would fall out of the story.’
Another psychical investigator concluded that Gef was a projection of James Irving’s mind, that Irving was an
intelligent man who had, in Josiffe’s words, ‘been starved of mental stimuli up there in Doarlish Cashen, with
no radio, no telephone and few books to distract from his bleak existence’. Gef was a huge and all-consuming
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project for the family. Irving produced sketches for investigators as well as very blurry photographs of a very
indistinct animal with two-tone fur sitting on top of a hedge, a ‘snap’ taken by Voirrey, because, Irving
reported, Gef had always ‘fought shy of my eye, why, I do not know’. Gef and Irving had extraordinary
conversations about the nature of existence, and when Irving asked Gef where he would go when he died, he
first replied, ‘I never die,’ and then said: ‘To Hell. To the Land of Mist.’ Thanks to Gef, Irving could cease to
see himself as a frustrated and impoverished late middle-aged sheep farmer and become a quasi-Eastern
mystic who held in his hands the secrets of life and death, good and evil. ‘Are you an evil spirit?’ he asked
Gef, who replied: ‘I am not evil. I could be if I liked.’
Questions remain as to whether there was some kind of real mongoose-like animal on the loose near Doarlish
Cashen. James Irving died aged 72 in 1945. It had been three years since Gef last appeared to the family. He
had gone quiet ever since Voirrey left home in 1939 to work as a wartime machinist for the engineering firm
Dowty’s. Those who believed that Gef was Voirrey’s creation wouldn’t have been surprised that he showed
up less often when she wasn’t there. But in February 1947, two years after Irving’s death, the Isle of Man
Examiner reported that an animal which may have been Gef had been dramatically captured and killed. Mr
Leslie Graham, a retired army lieutenant who bought the farmhouse after Margaret Irving sold up, was putting
away his motorcycle one night when he was startled by an animal with gleaming eyes. It had a weasel-like
appearance but it was bigger than a weasel, more like a polecat. Graham set a snare for it and in the morning
found it trapped and ferocious. ‘It snarled and spat and clawed more venomously than anything I have ever
seen.’ Graham clubbed it to death with a stick. The corpse was three feet long with black and yellow mottled
fur. This was proof that some kind of unusual animal did once live near the Irving house but the question of
whether it spoke was still undecided. ‘At any rate, he did not talk to me,’ Graham reported: the only squeaks
he ever heard while living in the house were from rats behind the panelling.
The animal may have been real enough, but Gef’s extraordinary accomplishments were perceptible only to
the Irvings. What’s far from clear is how much of the Irvings’ manufacture of Gef’s personality was
conscious, and how much the subliminal actings-out of a weirdly claustrophobic family unit. If Voirrey
initially used Gef’s foul-mouthed rantings as a form of rebellion against her parents, her father in turn could
use the animal to express the way he felt about a difficult daughter who was no longer a child. Or, to put it
differently, for James Irving, Gef was a medium through which to act out his complicated Freudian feelings
for Voirrey, his beautiful youngest child towards whom, witnesses said, he was deeply over-protective. When
Gef first appeared in 1931, he threatened to attack Voirrey; and when he popped up in Voirrey’s bedroom at
night the parents moved her into their own bedroom to keep her safe from the beast, at which he taunted them:
‘I’ll follow her, wherever you move her!’ Yet over time, Gef’s relationship with Voirrey changed, and he
became her protector, promising to attack anyone who so much as spoke to her. In this respect, Gef was very
like Irving himself, who went apoplectic with rage when Price asked to take Voirrey out for a drive to verify
her version of events. ‘If Harry Price wanted a girl,’ Irving said, ‘he should look for one elsewhere.’
As for Voirrey herself, the signs are that she tired of the whole business. After her father died, she moved
away from the island and thereafter refused all approaches from people who wanted to talk about Gef. In 1996
the filmmaker Brian Catling found her, aged 78, living in a village outside Cheltenham and wrote to her about
the Gef affair but she replied that under no circumstances would she speak to him because she had left ‘all
that behind me’. The only time she granted an interview was to a journalist called Walter McGraw to whom
she said in 1970 that Gef was ‘very detrimental’ to her life since the other children on the island called her a
‘spook’. She insisted that there was no hoax and commented, cryptically, that if she and her mother had had
their way they ‘never would have told anybody about’ the existence of Gef. It was only because her father
was so ‘wrapped up in it’ that he ‘had to tell people about it’. Was this a tacit admission that Voirrey making
the Gef voice was a sort of household joke which should never have been spoken of outside the house?
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The really surprising thing is that so many people outside the family seem to have wanted the talking
mongoose to be real. Or maybe it isn’t so surprising; many people even now seem to want proof of the
strangeness of life in monster form. As recently as the 1990s, Puerto Ricans were preoccupied by the
chupacabra, a goat-sucking monster with spikes down its back. More to the point, the idea of a talking
mongoose had a special appeal for the many spiritualists and experts in occult magic who flourished in prewar
Britain. An erudite Egyptian occultist called Rollo Ahmed, author of I Rise: The Life Story of a Negro (1937),
travelled to Doarlish Cashen with sticks of incense and performed yoga poses in an effort to get Gef to
manifest, which Gef stubbornly refused to do, blaming Ahmed himself for his non-appearance, saying, in
Ahmed’s words, that the occultist ‘had disobeyed the Mongoose’s instruction that there was to be “no Hindu
magic, no sitting cross-legged on the floor”’.
Another determined and intelligent Gef-hunter was Nandor Fodor. In 1937, five years after the story first
surfaced, Fodor, a research officer for the International Institute for Psychical Research, came to stay with the
Irvings for seven days in the hope of observing Gef at first hand. He had first become interested in Gef in
1935, and was increasingly determined to meet the mongoose for himself, even though Irving assured him it
was unlikely he would get the chance to converse with Gef, who was more ‘surly’ than he had once been.
Fodor persevered. He wrote to Mrs Irving assuring her that he would pay £5 for a week’s board and required
nothing in return but some vegetables boiled in water for ten minutes (he was a vegetarian). He also wrote to
Gef telling him that he was ‘the cleverest thing far and wide’ and promising to bring him chocolate and
biscuits.
Fodor’s visit would be a bitter disappointment. One night while at the farmhouse, Fodor had stones thrown at
him. Another time, the kitchen door banged twice, which the Irvings in great excitement attributed to Gef
(‘Mr Irving said that in twenty years that door had never banged from draft’). It wasn’t much to go on. In
seven days, Gef didn’t manifest once. Yet Fodor’s main conclusion from the visit was still that ‘Gef DOES
EXIST.’ Fodor saw the case as a true mystery, since ‘all the probabilities are against it but all the evidence is
for it.’
Instead of making Fodor suspicious of Irving, Gef’s failure to materialise made him primarily disappointed
with Gef himself, to whom he wrote another letter:
Dear Gef,
I am very disappointed that you did not speak to me during the whole week which I spent here. I came from a
long way and took a lot of trouble in collecting all your clever sayings … I believe you to be a very good and
generous mongoose. I brought you chocolates and biscuits and I would have been happy if you had done
something for me.
By the 1950s, Fodor changed his mind about Gef, coming to argue that the animal was simply an alter ego for
James Irving : ‘a man who failed in life and whose passions were too strong to bear this failure with
resignation’. But back in the 1930s, Fodor, like many others, was only too happy to enter into Irving’s
delusion.
One of the most enthusiastic of Gef’s followers was Charles Morrison, a businessman and an old friend of
Irving’s who was interviewed by Lambert and Price in 1937. Morrison said he believed in Gef for the simple
reason that he had heard Gef speaking in the farmhouse many times with his own two ears. Unusually, Gef
was rather fond of Morrison, addressing him as ‘Charlie, Charlie, chuck, chuck, chuck’ or ‘Charlie, my old
sport!’ Lambert asked how he could be sure it wasn’t Voirrey or Irving speaking? Morrison saw Lambert’s
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point but argued that the voice was ‘coming from a hole in the porch … when we were in the kitchen’.
Morrison was so persuaded by Irving’s version that he went to Regent’s Park zoo to speak to animal breeders
about the possibility of a mongoose interbreeding with a stoat or a weasel. The breeder explained that such
interbreeding was very unlikely but not impossible. Morrison inferred from this that Gef must be ‘some
extraordinary animal which has developed the power of speech by some extraordinary process’. It was
obvious to Morrison that his old friend was a respectable and honest fellow and ‘an honest man couldn’t
“manufacture” these strange incidents day by day’.
The main thing Morrison wanted to impress on Lambert and Price was that neither he nor Irving was remotely
mad, let alone a hoaxer. On the contrary, he insisted, he couldn’t stand any kind of charlatan:
I am no ‘crank’ – I am a businessman … I have a most loathsome aversion against ‘clap-trap’, so-called

‘spiritualism’ … Extraordinary things do happen and they have got to be solved … One thing certain about
this matter I repeat. It is no fake. I have knocked about the world both here and in America and I regard
myself as a man of the world and have seen and gone thro’ a whole lot and I am not to be kidded too easily.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/bee-wilson/i-am-the-fifth-dimension
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Surreal Editorial Illustrations by Simon Prades
by Christopher Jobson on May 12, 2015
Illustrator and graphic designer Simon Prades (previously) delights in the surreal and dreamlike, where
silhouettes of faces open portals to other places and strange visual metaphors for difficult subjects are brought
vividly to life. Prades works primarily with non-digital mediums like pen and ink, using Photoshop to cleanup
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and occasionally animate his work for the web. The German illustrator currently freelances for some of the
biggest publications around including the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and elsewhere.
Shown here is a selection of work from the last two years, but you can explore a bit more on Behance.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/05/surreal-editorial-illustrations-by-simon-prades/
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The Nose of the Master
Michael Gorra
National Portrait Gallery, London
John Singer Sargent: Henry James, 1913
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For Henry James’s seventieth birthday in 1913 a group of his admirers commissioned John Singer Sargent to
paint him; and Sargent’s own birthday gift was to waive his fee. The novelist sat some ten times in the artist’s
London studio, and the painter always asked him to bring some friends along—“animated, sympathetic,
beautiful, talkative friends,” as James put it, whose conversation would break the “gloom in my countenance
by their prattle.” That was Sargent’s usual practice, and the evidence of its success sits this summer at the
entrance to “Henry James and American Painting,” a compact but wonderfully heterogeneous show at the
Morgan Library.
The portrait presents James full-faced and with his baldness fringed by gray. His head tilts just a bit to the
right, his eyes are slightly hooded, and his expression looks shrewdly confident and skeptical; judging us far
more than we would dare judge him. He’s wearing his usual winged collar and a bowtie, and seeing it here—
its regular home is London’s National Portrait Gallery—I was struck by the fullness of his lips and the warm
tones with which Sargent has painted his face. In 1914 the painting went on display at the Royal Academy
and was slashed with a hatchet by a suffragette, not because she had anything against either James or
Sargent per se, but simply because it looked like a picture of masculine prominence. It was expertly patched
and to my untrained eye the damage isn’t visible; but a picture taken at the time shows a gash at the temple
and another across the mouth.
Brooklyn Museum
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Frank Duveneck: Villa Castellani, 1887
The Century Association, New York Cit John La Farge: Henry James, 1862
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The Morgan’s exhibit includes a comprehensive selection of Jamesian portraits along with other paintings of
and by his friends. His brother William had planned to become a painter before deciding in 1861 to take up
science instead, and worked for almost two years in the Newport studio of William Morris Hunt. But in the
end it was Henry who spent the most time in artists’ rooms, and got the most from it. He too had gone to
Hunt, and put in his hours with charcoal and ink, though where William and his fellow pupil John La Farge
drew from life, Henry merely copied plaster casts. Still, it was enough to give him a taste for the painter’s
world, the portrait painter’s in particular. It was a sociable existence, its easy chat mixed with the purposeful
work of the hands, and the solitary writer was drawn to it as he would later be to the drawing room or the
dinner party. One consequence was the frequency with which he used the studio as a setting for his fiction,
whether in the early Roderick Hudson (1875) or a tale from his maturity like “The Real Thing.” And another
was that he himself was often painted or drawn or photographed.
ADVERTISING
He liked sitting, and the exhibition includes a round dozen of his many portraits; more probably than have
ever been gathered in one place before. In one, a marvelous 1911 charcoal head by Cecilia Beaux, the
novelist’s eyes are fierce, his baldness emphasized and egg-like. It’s matched by Abbott Handerson Thayer’s
elaborately stippled 1881 crayon drawing, a three-quarters view that suggests the strength of James’s nose.
And that nose figures as well in the earliest image of him here, a profile in oil that La Farge made in 1862.
James was just nineteen, and his hair looks a burnt red; he seems pensive and unhappy—uncertain too—and
the background has a touch of storm in it.
The show’s other La Farge was new to me, a half-length portrait of William James from 1859, a palette in one
hand and the other extended beyond the frame, and with the canvas as a whole dominated by the white
sleeves of his shirt. It’s again in profile, and taken together these images mark the two as brothers: the nose
and the lips match, and so does the tilt of the head. But William is active not contemplative, he’s doing
something; and looking at them together it seems that La Farge got at not only their similarity, but also the
essential difference between them. Maybe that’s an overstatement—maybe I’m projecting what I know about
that difference onto these pictures of teenagers. On a different day La Farge could well have done them
differently, capturing William’s youthful irresolution and Henry’s sense of purpose of instead. Only he didn’t,
and it’s a shame these two portraits normally hang separately, William at the National Portrait Gallery in
Washington, and Henry at the Century Association.
The exhibit’s pair of Whistlers is more familiar. So are its other Sargents, though there are some real treasures
among them, including the Royal Academy’s 1899 An Interior in Venice, where the stiff luxury of its setting
is undercut by the looseness of his brush. The freshest thing about this show is a set of paintings connected
with some of James’s friends and experiences in Italy. The Villa Castellani sits at the top of a Florentine hill
on the south side of the Arno, a structure with a “long, rather blank-looking” front that forms one side of a
“little grassy, empty, rural piazza.” The words come from The Portrait of a Lady, and they describe the
building in which the novel’s Gilbert Osmond keeps an apartment. The grass is gone now, but James’s
account is otherwise exact to the place: an easy walk from the city’s center, for all that his characters
complain about the climb, and with each turn of the road offering a new view, the olive-shrouded hills, the
Duomo too large for human conception. The villa dates from the fifteenth century, and by James’s day was
divided into flats “mainly occupied by foreigners of random race long resident in Florence.” One of them was
a family friend named Francis Boott, a widower who lived on the proceeds of a Lowell textile mill along with
his carefully-educated daughter, Elizabeth.
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Cincinnati Art Museum
Frank Duveneck: Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, 1888
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As individuals the Bootts had almost nothing in common with The Portrait’s Gilbert and Pansy
Osmond. Nevertheless James drew on their situation—their closeness, their expatriation—in
imagining his characters; and he also returned to them, as Colm Tóibín writes in the catalogue to
this exhibit, in developing the Ververs of The Golden Bowl. Boott wrote music and Lizzie painted,
and in 1879 she began to study with a good-natured but rough-mannered artist from Cincinnati
named Frank Duveneck. James had already written admiringly of his work and he had a reputation
as a skilled teacher; Lizzie fell in love with him, and over her father’s objections they married.
Duveneck had just completed a full-length portrait of her when in 1888 she caught pneumonia and
died. She stands against a gray wash of a background, all in brown—gloves and muff, dress and
hat—and so impressively corseted that one can almost hear the whalebone creak. She had worn
the same dress for their wedding, but her eyes here are steady and searching and sad; she’d just
had a baby and her expression made me think, irresponsibly, about post-partum depression. The
canvas is highly finished, indeed polished; but then so was Elizabeth Boott, and this painting’s
honesty and pain seem unforgettable.
Royal Academy of Arts, London
John Singer Sargent: An Interior In Venice (The Curtis Family), 1898
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Dwight Primiano/Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
John Singer Sargent: Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, 1885
The show’s catalogue includes three highly suggestive essays by its co-curators. Tóibín’s is the most intensely
biographical, slipping with practiced ease between James’s work and life, and tracing in that work the ghostly
presence of the painters and sculptors he knew. Marc Simpson, formerly of Williamstown’s Clark Institute,
writes exceptionally well about James as an art critic, noting both his puffery—he often reviewed his
friends—and his blind spots. James wrote interestingly about the early Winslow Homer, admiring his skill
while dismissing his subjects as “suggestive of a dish of rural doughnuts and pie.” But the list of American
painters he ignored is a long one, Thomas Eakins among them. The Morgan’s own Declan Kiely details the
library’s holdings of James’s manuscripts and letters, and the piece seems at first an outlier, though the
exhibition does include several vitrines of his papers. But Kiely predicates the essay on James’s own
ambivalence about such archival survivals, letters in particular; the result is sharp and alive and includes a
glimpse of some still-unpublished correspondence with the expatriate American doctor William Baldwin. He
was based in Florence, and his patients included everyone from Queen Victoria to Mark Twain, as well as
James himself—who would have hated the idea of our looking over the doctor’s shoulder at the details of his
health and diet.
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James explored such invasions of privacy in stories like “The Aspern Papers” and “The Abasement of the
Northmores,” and he tried to forestall posterity, knowing he would fail, by burning great piles of his own
papers in 1909 and again in 1915. Among them, presumably, were the letters he’d gotten from Sargent, with
whom in Simpson’s words he had an “apparently abundant correspondence.” They first met in 1884 and a few
years later James encouraged the painter to settle in London, writing him up for the magazines and
introducing him to other painters. They were guests at the same tables and depicted the same world; indeed
some critics complained about their resemblance, as though they merely illustrated each other. The one
surviving letter between them shows that they used first names—and yet James burned his files and Sargent
simply didn’t save things. In writing to others the novelist rarely refers to Sargent the person as opposed to the
painter, and we have never known, and never will, very much about their long friendship.
One portrait here that James mentioned as “very sure and charming” is that of a writer with whom both he and
Sargent were friends—or a double portrait rather, an 1885 oil, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife. Fanny
Stevenson lounges at one edge of the canvas, wrapped in a shawl—a few splashes of yellow and red—and
with her feet bare. Meanwhile the writer paces, pulling at his mustache, his long body impossibly thin, and
with the dimly Jamesian recess of a doorway swinging open between them. Sargent’s surface is rougher than
in his society portraits, and some critics at the time thought it awkward. So it is, deliberately, and Stevenson
loved it. He stands off-center, and looks out at us, looking too as if he’s about to leave the room, the frame. As
the past, or other people, are apt to when you try to pin them down.
“Henry James and American Painting” is at The Morgan Library & Museumthrough September 10. The
accompanying book by the same title is published by The Morgan Library & Museum with The Pennsylvania
State University Press.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/22/the-nose-of-the-master-henry-james/
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The World’s First Celestial Spectator Sport: Astronomer Maria Mitchell’s Stunning Account of the 1869
Total Solar Eclipse
“All nature rejoiced, and … we rejoiced with Nature.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
Trumpeted by the press as “the great eclipse of the nineteenth century,” the total solar eclipse of August 7,
1869 was the world’s first astronomical event marketed as popular entertainment — not merely a pinnacle of
excitement for the scientific community, but a celestial spectator sport for laypeople. Smoked, stained, or
vanished glass sold faster than any other item in American stores that summer. Small towns on the eclipse
path, which stretched from Alaska to the mid-Atlantic coast, experienced an unprecedented surge of tourism.
Newspapers offered extensive coverage of the event in the weeks leading up to it, crowned by front-page
headlines the morning after the eclipse.
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But by far the most exquisite and original piece about the cosmic marvel came two months later from the
inimitable Maria Mitchell(August 1, 1818–June 28, 1889) — America’s first female astronomer, who paved
the way for women in science and became the first woman hired by the United States federal government for
a “specialized nondomestic skill” in her capacity as “computer of Venus” — a one-woman GPS guiding
sailors around the world.
Total solar eclipse of 1869. Photograph by Benjamin Peirce, Harvard University.
Writing in the October issue of Hours at Home, Scribner’s first magazine, Mitchell reported on the eclipse
expedition she had led to Burlington, Iowa. (Nearly a decade later, she would draw on this experience and a
subsequent one in her tips on how to watch a solar eclipse.) Fusing rigorous insight into the science of
eclipses with a poetic account of this uncommonly transcendent encounter with the universe, Mitchell ends
her anonymous essay with a clever rhetorical twist that throws a grenade into society’s most foundational
assumptions about science, gender, and human nature.
She begins by framing the enormity of the fanfare surrounding the event, summoning the throngs “ticketed to
totality”:
Every known astronomer received courteous invitations into the shadow. Every astronomer, professional or
amateur, prepared to go. The observatories must have been left undirected; the mathematical chairs of the
colleges must have been empty, and, judging from the crowded condition of hotels within the darkness,
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Saratoga and Newport must have felt the different set of the travelling current… In the halls of the hotels we
saw meetings between friends long separated, and heard joyous exclamations as grayhaired men met and
shook hands and laughed, that neither could recognize in the middle-aged other the youth whom he had left,
and whom he had since known only through scientific journals.
Leading a team of six young scientists, Mitchell arrived at Burlington Collegiate Institute on August 4, “too
late to attempt any work that day,” and was engulfed in inclement weather for the next two days, glooming
from cloudy to “rainy, rainy all day.” When the third day broke with “as beautiful as morning could be,” they
began setting up their instruments. Writing deliberately in the masculine, she describes the technical setup:
In preparing for an observation of time, the astronomer gives himself every possible facility. He ascertains to
a tenth of a second the condition of his chronometer, not only how fast or how slow it is, but how much that
fastness or that slowness varies from hour to hour. He notes exactly the second and part of a second when the
expected event should arrive; and a short time before that he places himself at the telescope.
Diagram of a total solar eclipse (Atlas of Astronomy, 1869)
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Mitchell then pivots smoothly from this matter-of-factly reportage to a lyrical account of the pinnacle of the
experience — the sight of the corona and its attendant otherworldly light:
There were some seconds of breathless suspense, and then the inky blackness appeared on the
burning limb of the sun. All honor to my assistant, whose uniform count on and on, with
unwavering voice, steadied my nerves! That for which we had travelled fifteen hundred miles had
really come. We watched the movement of the moon’s black disk across the less black spots on
the sun’s disk, and we looked for the peculiarities which other observers of partial eclipses had
known. The colored glasses of our telescope were several, arranged on a circular plate, so that w
could slip a green one before the eye, change it for a red one or a yellow one, or, if we wished to
look with the eye unprotected, a vacant space could be found in the circumference. In the course
of the hour, from the beginning of the eclipse to total phase, this was readily done. I fancied that
an orange hue suited my eye best, and kept that in place intending to slip it aside and receive the
full light when the darkness came on. As the moon moved on, the crescent sun became a
narrower and narrower golden curve of light, and as it seemed to break up into brilliant lines and
points, we knew that the total phase was only a few seconds off.
Maria Mitchell
Light clouds had for some time seemed to drift toward the sun; the Mississippi assumed a leaden hue; a sickly
green spread over the landscape; Venus shone brightly on one side of the sun, Mercury on the other; Arcturus
was gleaming overhead, Saturn was rising in the east; the neighboring cattle began to low; the birds uttered a
painful cry; fireflies twinkled in the foliage, and when the last ray of light was extinguished, a wave of sound
came up from the villages below, the mingling of the subdued voices of the multitude.
Instantly the corona burst forth, a glory indeed! It encircled the sun with a soft light, and it sent off streamers
for millions of miles into space!
[…]
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On looking through the glass, two rosy prominences were seen on the right of the sun’s disk, perhaps one-
twentieth of the diameter of the moon, having the shape of the half-blown morning-glory. I found myself
continually likening almost all these appearances to flowers, possibly from the exquisite delicacy of the tints.
They were not wholly rosy, but of an invariegated pink and white, with a mingling of violet.
orona of the total solar eclipse of 1869, as seen through a four-inch telescope. Lithograph by J. Bien and J. F.
Gedney.
Here, in a supreme testament to the subjectivity of individual human consciousness — the sole tool we have
for probing the objective truths of the universe — Mithcell reminds us that no two perceptual experiences of
the same phenomenon are alike. (My blue is never your blue.) A century and a half before modern
neuroscience coined the notion of the “qualia” that shape our experience of the world, she writes:
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Any correct observation of color is, however, impossible. Beside the different perception of the eye, in its
normal state, the retina cannot instantly lose the effect of the colored glass. I had just left an orange glass, and
was quite insensible to that color; while one of our party who had been using a green glass declares the
protuberances to be orange-red.
In a parallel sentiment, with an eye to the representatives of various disciplines observing the eclipse —
photography, spectrography, astronomy — she offers a reflection on the nature of knowledge itself:
No one person can give an account of this eclipse, but the speciality of each is the bit of mosaic which he
contributes to the whole.
“Four Views of the Solar Eclipse, August 1869″ by John Adams Whipple
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Mitchell, who around that very time had written in her diary that “every formula which expresses a law of
nature is a hymn of praise to God,” returns to the aesthetic and almost numinous enchantment of this scientific
phenomenon:
As I ran my glance along the limb of the moon I saw another protuberance much larger than the former ones,
very nearly at the vertex, increasing rapidly. It seemed to be brought into light as the moon moved on; and
yet, billowy in shape and mottled in color, it appeared to have, or possibly it had, a motion within itself. Next
there leapt out on the left of the moon two more flower-shaped and flower-tinted creations. Twice, as I was
looking at these, a flickering light caught my eye, as if from the moon’s centre; another strangely shaped
figure rushed out as if from behind the moon, and instantly the sun came forth. All nature rejoiced, and much
as we needed more time, we rejoiced with Nature, and felt that we loved the light… The darkness was neither
that of twilight nor of moonlight.
Now here is the ingenious twist: The attentive reader would notice that, throughout her account of the
phenomenon, Mitchell is deliberately using the gender-neutral “we” to refer to her team of scientists and
doesn’t once use gender pronouns in her first-person narrative. A century and a half before Ursula K. Le Guin
so brilliantly unsexed the universal pronoun, Mitchell’s choice inclines her reader to the assumption, standard
in her era and still lamentably common in ours, that “scientist” defaults to maleness (even though the word
itself had been coined for woman thirty-five years earlier). Against that backdrop of implicit assumption,
Mitchell draws on a Wordsworth verse and concludes her anonymous essay with a dramatic revelation
surprising, perhaps even shocking, to her reader:
[The English astronomer Charles] Piazzi Smyth says: “The effect of a total eclipse on the minds of men is so
overpowering, that if they have never seen it before they forget their appointed tasks, and will look around
during the few seconds of obscuration to witness the scene.” Other astronomers have said the same. My
assistants, a party of young students, would not have turned from the narrow line of observation assigned to
them if the earth had quaked beneath them. They would have said
— “by the storms of circumstance unshaken

And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,
Duty exists.”
Was it because they were women?
In 1869, what a way to turn the magazine page into a drum onto which to play such a zinging rimshot sting.
Complement with Mitchell on science, spirituality, and the conquest of truth, the art of knowing what to do
with your life, and her advice on how to watch a solar eclipse, then revisit poet Adrienne Rich’s tribute to
astronomy’s unsung heroines and the story of the remarkable women who revolutionized astronomy long
before they could vote.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/07/13/maria-mitchell-1869-total-solar-
eclipse/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=4ff1216c09-
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Good Communist Homes
Sheila Fitzpatrick
 BUYThe House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine

Princeton, 1096 pp, £29.95, August, ISBN 978 0 691 17694 9
Yuri Slezkine, a master stylist as well as a first-class historian, is the least predictable of scholars. Still, it
comes as a surprise to find that the book he has now produced, after long gestation, is a Soviet War and
Peace. True, Slezkine says he is writing history, whereas Tolstoy’s War and Peace is generally treated, if
somewhat gingerly, as a novel; and Slezkine’s subject is not so much war and peace as that curious state
between the two that existed in the Soviet Union from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Second World
War. The correspondences even so are notable. The two books are much the same length and offer the same
practical difficulties of reading (the Penguin edition of War and Peace once fell apart in my hands when I
tried to read it at the beach; The House of Government is so thick I had to put it on a flat surface to read it).
The time span of the two books is much the same (fifteen years for Tolstoy, twenty or so for Slezkine), as is
the intention to show how a society survived a cataclysmic event (the Napoleonic invasion for Tolstoy, the
Bolshevik Revolution for Slezkine). Tolstoy had a philosophical point to make about history being the
outcome, not of the decisions of a few great men, but of the chaotic actions of multitudes. Slezkine’s
historical-philosophical point is that Bolshevism, and the Marxism from which it sprang, should be
understood as millenarian religious movements.
To be sure, there are differences. Slezkine is fond of many of his (Old Bolshevik) characters, but when he
writes about Bolshevism as an intellectual and political system there is a tinge of distaste, perhaps even
contempt, that is alien to Tolstoy but reminiscent of another Russian epic predecessor on the boundary
between history, literature and sarcastic polemic, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Then there is the
difference, perhaps less important than it may at first seem, that Tolstoy’s work, despite its research base and
the 160 historical figures among its characters, has made-up characters too and passes as fiction, whereas all
Slezkine’s characters are real people who lived in the elite House of Government in Moscow in the 1930s.
Slezkine doesn’t make up characters or dialogue, but then he scarcely needs to, given that the letters, diaries
and memoirs his characters produced in such profusion show them to be self-inventors of a high order. The
salient difference is perhaps not so much that Tolstoy’s characters are fictional as that, as a writer of fiction,
Tolstoy can present them in the round, whereas Slezkine, as an intellectual historian, is restricted to their self-
representations.
The House of Government begins with the disclaimer, a typical Slezkine inversion of a cliché, that ‘this is a
work of history. Any resemblance to fictional characters, dead or alive, is entirely coincidental.’ Leaving
aside the question of whether this is accurate, given his characters’ devotion to literature and their tendency to
see life through its lens, it is a deceptively simple statement of disciplinary allegiance and genre that is
quickly undercut in the introduction that follows. There are three strains in his work, Slezkine writes. One is
‘analytical’: that is, his argument that Bolshevism is a millenarian religion. Another is literary: at each stage
of his story, in tandem with his historical account, he runs a summary of the literary works that ‘sought to
interpret and mythologise’ events. But the most important strain, listed first, is the epic. Slezkine’s
introduction makes only the modest claim that the book ‘is a family saga involving numerous named and
unnamed residents of the House of Government … readers are urged to think of them as characters in an
epic.’ But the publisher’s blurb more straightforwardly – and, I think, accurately – characterises the book as
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an ‘epic story … in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate and
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago’.
As befits an epic, Slezkine’s mode of narration is expansive. The first third of the book, before the House of
Government even makes its appearance, offers a history of the Russian revolutionary movement, with a side
excursion into Marx; a sixty-page overview of religion in human history, with special reference to
millenarianism; and historical and literary accounts of 1917, the New Economic Policy of the 1920s,
including the factional struggles in the party following Lenin’s death, and the ‘great turn’ of the late 1920s
(Stalinist industrialisation, collectivisation and famine). There are several lengthy digressions on such topics
as constructivism and utopian architectural visions. Slezkine lets his characters speak for themselves, both in
long quotations from diaries, letters and autobiographies, and in extensive paraphrases. He affords equivalent
space to literary works, most frequently Mayakovsky’s and Babel’s writing for the early years and Platonov’s
and Leonov’s for the later ones.
There are endnotes referencing secondary works, particularly those of intellectual historians who share
Slezkine’s eschatological view of Bolshevism. The endnotes are no doubt to remind us that the book is, inter
alia, a work of scholarly history, but I think they would have been better left out. This is partly for the
parochial reason that, as a social historian in the field, I was somewhat irritated by his choices, and partly
because, as a reader, I was less interested in the book as a work of scholarship (impressive though it is in its
breadth of research and reference) than as a work of literature. References to secondary sources suggest that
this is an ordinary academic work which, according to the conventions, ought to ‘position itself in the
scholarship’. It isn’t, any more than The Gulag Archipelago was.
The overall framework of the book is structured according to the stages of a millenarian movement. ‘Early in
the book,’ Slezkine explains,
the Bolsheviks are identified as millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse. In subsequent chapters,
consecutive episodes in the Bolshevik family saga are related to stages in the history of a failed prophecy,
from an apparent fulfilment to the great disappointment to a series of postponements to the desperate offer of
a last sacrifice. They managed to take over Rome long before their faith could become an inherited habit, but
they never figured out how to transform their certainty into a habit that their children or subordinates could
inherit.
‘Anticipation’ is the title of the section on the revolutionaries in exile and underground in Russia before 1917,
followed by ‘Fulfilment’ with the October Revolution, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘The Reign of the Saints’
for the struggles to survive and fulfil the prophecy (incorporating ‘The Great Disappointment’, as it becomes
ever more clear that what the revolution had brought into being was not heaven on earth), and ‘The Last
Judgment’, winding up the drama with the destruction in the Great Purges of many of the erstwhile
revolutionaries.
Slezkine suggests in passing that the early 20th-century Russian intelligentsia – symbolists and Christian
mystics as well as revolutionaries – was in the grip of a millenarian and apocalyptic mood. But the main
genesis of Bolshevik millenarianism, in Slezkine’s account, was Marxism. Marx’s early preoccupations,
Slezkine argues, were the emancipation (resurrection) of Germany and the reformation of the Jews; and ‘the
entire edifice of Marxist theory … was built on these foundations.’ Marx, ‘like Jesus and unlike Mazzini or
Mickiewicz, succeeded in translating a tribal prophecy into a language of universalism’. Not being an expert
on the early Marx, I will leave it to others to take up the gauntlet on this one, but I winced when, much later in
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the book, Hitler is thrown into the mix as a fellow millenarian with ‘the same enemy – but whereas the
Bolsheviks thought of it as a class, the Nazis thought of it as a tribe’.
Interpretations of Bolshevism as a religion, of which there have been many over the years, generally leave me
cold, but Slezkine’s argument is more interesting. I have always tended to dismiss the Bolsheviks’ predictions
of imminent total transformation on the grounds that nobody could be so silly as to believe such a thing,
except fleetingly in the madness of the revolutionary moment, but Slezkine has persuaded me to take it
seriously – up to a point. I still privately believe that, for all the Bolsheviks who thought like Platonov
characters, there were others of a practical cast of mind who didn’t. Lenin I can more or less accept as a
millenarian, at least until October, after which responsibility sobered him up. But not even Slezkine could
convince me that Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, also an Old Bolshevik, was ever anything of the kind.
While that may restrict the applicability of Slezkine’s thesis, it doesn’t refute it. Slezkine himself notes that
the most passionate exponents of Bolshevik millenarianism tended to be male.
You may by now be wondering when I am going tell you what the House of Government was and who lived
there. Take it as my homage to Slezkine, a past master at stringing out anticipation. His narrative for the first
407 pages is dotted with stories and quotations from Old Bolsheviks who, the reader must presume, are likely
to show up later as residents of the House of Government. This is so, by and large (even if Nikolai Bukharin,
who makes many appearances in the story, did not actually live in the House), but it is also part of Slezkine’s
art to avoid locking himself in with strict definitions. The reader, he warns at the beginning, should think of
the persons who appear in his narrative not just as characters in an epic but also as similar to people
encountered in their own lives, who may or may not be familiar and may or may not turn out to be important.
‘No family or individual is indispensable to the story,’ however. ‘Only the House of Government is.’
The building, renamed ‘the House on the Embankment’ in Yuri Trifonov’s autobiographical novel of the
1970s, was a grey constructivist/neoclassical elephant designed by Boris Iofan and built on Swamp Square on
the Moscow River diagonally across from the Kremlin. (Slezkine likes to translate his Russian names into
English: Swamp Square is his rendition of Bolotnaya ploshchad; the House of Government’s cinema Udarnik
becomes Shock Worker.) Luxurious and modern by the standards of the time, and intended primarily, as the
name suggests, to house senior government (including party, military and security) officials, the House
consisted of 507 apartments ranging in size from one to seven rooms (three to five rooms was the norm), with
facilities including a kindergarten, a shop, a club and a theatre.
In an earlier iteration, Slezkine’s book was conceived as a biography of the building, and traces of this
remain, usually in the form of deadpan lists of objects, one of his standard techniques for dealing with non-
narrative archival material. Incoming residents had to sign an inventory of 54 items including ‘ceilings, walls,
wallpapers, tiled floors (in the kitchen, bathroom and toilet), parquet floors (in the rest of the apartment),
closets, windows, hinges, lampshades, doors (French and regular), locks (two kinds), doorknobs (three kinds),
nickel-plated doorstops, an electric doorbell, enamel bathtub with overflow drain and nickel-plated plug,
nickel-plated shower’ and so on. Sometimes the lists are of abstract nouns, such as the Housekeeping
Department’s priorities of ‘centralisation, symmetry, transparency, cleanliness, accountability and
surveillance’, or even verbs: Slezkine reminds us of the practical demands on a building whose residents, as
human beings, ‘ate, drank, slept, procreated, grew hair, produced waste, got sick, and needed heating and
lighting, among other things’.
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Once the story gets under way, the human beings come into focus. Tenants began moving into the House of
Government in 1931, and by the mid-1930s they numbered 2655. Of the 700 leaseholders (heads of
household), a high proportion were Old Bolsheviks (people whose connection with the party predated the
revolution), mainly intellectuals born in the 1880s and 1890s currently holding high office; among the
intellectuals, ‘by far the largest group’ were Jews. The rest of the residents were wives (an even higher
percentage of whom were Jewish), children, wards, in-laws, maids and an array of other relatives and non-
relatives who made up the often unconventional households. An appendix lists the 66 ‘leaseholders’ who,
along with some of their dependants, are most prominent in Slezkine’s story. They include the journalist
Mikhail Koltsov, who covered the Spanish Civil War and became a character in For Whom the Bell Tolls; the
secret policeman Sergei Mironov, whose frivolous, clothes-loving wife wrote memoirs that serve as a foil to
the high-mindedness of everyone else; the cultural official Alexander Arosev, a close friend of the head of the
government, Vyacheslav Molotov; Aron Solts, the party’s morality expert; Valentin Trifonov, a Civil War
military hero; Karl Radek, sometime oppositionist who for some years returned to favour with Stalin as an
international specialist; and the trade minister Israel Veitser, married to the high-profile director of the
Moscow Children’s Theatre, Natalia Sats. Elena Stasova – b. 1873, one of the oldest of Old Bolsheviks – is a
rare woman among the overwhelmingly male leaseholders. Even Sats is listed only as a dependant of her
husband. But most of the wives worked, if generally in less exalted jobs (usually in the cultural sphere) than
their husbands.
The extraordinarily detailed information on the households and the complexity of their domestic relations is
one of the remarkable and unique aspects of this book. Nobody knew what a good communist home ought to
be like, Slezkine remarks, but on the basis of House of Government data it looks strikingly non-nuclear.
Partnerships shifted, not always rancorously, so that an ex-wife plus children might be living down the hall
from the new wife plus children, with the husband dividing his time between the flats. Arosev shuttled
between three apartments: he lived in the House of Government with two daughters by a first marriage, their
governess and a maid; his new wife and their young child lived next door; and his first wife and another
daughter lived in a different building. Sometimes, an old wife and a new one lived in the same apartment, as
in the case of Bukharin’s third wife (Anna Larina) and his first, who was an invalid, together with his aged
father and Anna and Bukharin’s small son; Bukharin himself continued to live in the small apartment in the
Kremlin he had swapped with Stalin after Stalin’s wife’s death. Valentin Trifonov lived in an apartment with
his wife and their two children, Yury and Tatania, along with his mother-in-law (an old revolutionary to
whom he had once been married) and Undik, the young man she had adopted as an orphan during the Volga
famine of 1921.
Many families in the building included an adopted child – sometimes strays like Undik, sometimes children
taken in after the arrest or death of their parents, who might be relatives or just friends. Registered tenants in
Mikhail Koltsov’s apartment included his old wife, Elizaveta, and his new German partner, Maria Osten,
along with a young German boy whom Mikhail and Maria had adopted. The two essential components in the
everyday life of a House of Government apartment were a babushka (often of ‘bad’ social origin and/or a
believing Christian or Jew) and a maid, running the household between them while the parents were out at
work. The babushka was not necessarily an actual grandmother, but might be another elderly female relative.
The maids came from the countryside: as Slezkine points out, high Soviet officials might, by virtue of their
status, be insulated from the collectivisation struggle, but ‘almost every child raised in the House of
Government was raised by one of its casualties.’
The Great Purges hit the House of Government with particular fury. The NKVD usually came for people at
night, and many households experienced repeat visits, first for the husband and then, sometime later, weeks or
months, for the wife. The apartments were sealed, and the remaining family moved elsewhere in the building,
often sharing with another family in the same situation before finally being evicted. They came for Inna
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Gaister’s mother on her 12th birthday: ‘Mother kept walking through the rooms with me following behind her
in my nightshirt. And Natasha [the nanny] followed after me with Valiushka [the youngest daughter] in her
arms. We just kept walking like that in single file around the apartment.’ Arosev (and wife), Koltsov (and
Maria Osten), Larina (and Bukharin), Trifonov (and wife), Radek, Mironov, Veitser and Sats were all arrested
in the Great Purges; the men and some of the women were shot or died in the Gulag, but Gaister’s wife,
Larina, and Sats survived, returning to Moscow in the 1950s. Platon Kerzhentsev, fired as head of the
Committee on the Arts, wrote desperate denunciations as he awaited arrest – but the Black Maria passed him
by and he died of heart failure a few years later. In similar circumstances, Solts had a breakdown, while
another jurist, Yakov Brandenburgsky, appears to have feigned madness and sat out the terror in a psychiatric
hospital.
‘Last night NKVD agents came and took Mommy away,’ 12-year-old Yuri Trifonov wrote in his diary for 3
April 1938. (Slezkine’s American translation of Mama as ‘Mommy’ is jarring, at least to my ears.) ‘They
woke us up. Mommy was very brave. They took her away in the morning. Today I did not go to school.’
Yuri’s father had been arrested earlier. ‘Now it’s only Tania [his younger sister] and me with Grandma, Ania
[a friend of his parents, living with them since her husband was arrested] and Undik.’ Some House of
Government children were shunned by family and friends and had trouble at school; others found support at
school from friends and teachers. Babushki and occasionally maids stepped in to care for the children after
their parents’ arrests, but many ended up in orphanages in distant provinces.
The orphanage experience, as later recounted by the children, was not necessarily negative: nine-year-old
Volodia Lande, sent to an orphanage in Penza in 1937 after the arrest of both his parents, received warmth
and kindness from his teachers, quickly made friends, and eventually went to military college and became a
naval officer. Surprisingly, the upheaval of 1937-38 seems not to have permanently thrown the House of
Government children out of the circle of Soviet privilege. ‘Most of the children of government officials,
including “family members of the traitors to the motherland”, graduated from prestigious colleges and
(re)joined the postwar Soviet cultural and professional elite.’
The children of the House of Government are very important in Slezkine’s story. In the first place, he is
deeply interested in their attitude (he treats it as a singular Weltanschauung rather than as a spectrum of
positions) to their parents and the Soviet way of life. Their childhoods were blissfully happy (or remembered
as such), as Soviet childhoods were meant to be. The children ‘admired their fathers, respected their seniors,
loved their country, and looked forward to improving themselves for the sake of socialism and to building
socialism as a means of self-improvement’. They loved school and loved their friends, as well as venerating
the idea of friendship. Like their parents, they were passionate readers and admirers of the Russian classics,
Pushkin usually coming at the top of the list, as well as the ‘Treasures of World Literature’: Dickens, Balzac,
Cervantes etc, whose volumes were to be found on the shelves of their fathers’ studies. They were also
attached to Jack London and Jules Verne; they were romantics who embraced the real-life sagas of polar
explorers with the same fervour as the fictional adventures of Verne’s Children of Captain Grant.
You might think that the sudden arrest of their parents as ‘enemies of the people’ would have significantly
changed these attitudes, but apparently not. Most of the children believed in their parents’ innocence, and
perhaps that of their friends’ parents, while at the same time accepting the Soviet premise that enemies were
everywhere and needed to be unmasked. When one House of Government child, Andrei Sverdlov, went to
work for the NKVD and participated in the interrogation of some of his former playmates, most of his
contemporaries ‘considered him a traitor but did not question the cause he was serving. They did not feel that
they had to choose between their loyalty to the party and their loyalty to their friends, family and themselves.’
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The Second World War marks the end of Slezkine’s saga. The House of Government, cast into turmoil by the
Great Purges, was essentially emptied after bombing damage and with the approach of German troops in the
autumn of 1941. Remaining residents were called up into the army or evacuated east. A significant proportion
of the children died on active service. Those who survived tended to come back to Moscow but not to the
House of Government, which was back in operation after the war with a largely new set of residents. Some of
the mothers arrested during the Great Purges returned from the Gulag in the 1950s, but they were changed
people, shadows of their former selves, and their adult children often found it difficult to relate to them.
The Great Terror ‘spelled the end of most Old Bolshevik families and homes; it did not bring about the end of
faith,’ Slezkine says. But something did, since seventy odd pages later he writes that by the Brezhnev period
the children still ‘venerated the memory’ of their dead fathers ‘but no longer shared their faith’. The cause of
this loss of faith is not very clearly spelled out. It wasn’t the war, since as Slezkine tells us, ‘the coming of the
war … justified all the previous sacrifices, both voluntary and involuntary, and offered the children of the
original revolutionaries the opportunity to prove, through one more sacrifice, that their childhoods had been
happy, that their fathers had been pure, that their country was their family, and that life was, indeed, beautiful,
even in death.’ Nor, presumably, was it the Thaw of the mid-1950s, which ‘heartened and briefly rejuvenated’
the former House of Government children. Perhaps it was the long disillusioning years of Brezhnev’s
‘stagnation’, in which some of the House of Government children became dissidents and some of the Jewish
ones emigrated. Most of those remaining in the Soviet Union ‘welcomed Gorbachev’s Perestroika’, but it was
too late: some time in the postwar decades, ‘utopia’ had ‘evaporated … without anyone quite noticing’. ‘By
the time the Soviet state collapsed, no one seemed to take the original prophecy seriously any more.’
‘Why did Bolshevism die after one generation?’ Slezkine asks. Why was its fate ‘so different from that of
Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and countless other millenarian faiths? Most “churches” are vast rhetorical
and institutional structures built on broken promises. Why was Bolshevism unable to live with its own
failure?’ His answer is that the Bolsheviks, unlike other millenarian sects, failed to bring the family under its
control. ‘One of the central features of Bolshevism as a life-structuring web of institutions was that Soviets
were made in school and at work, not at home … The Bolshevik family was subjected to much less pastoral
guidance and communal surveillance than most of its Christian counterparts.’
Perhaps so. (But what about Pavlik Morozov, the heroic child of Soviet myth who denounced his own father?)
One could also question Slezkine’s premise. The émigré sociologist Nicholas Timasheff in his book The
Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (1946) noted with approval a process of
routinisation in the Soviet Union. A few years earlier, Trotsky had observed the same process, which he
called ‘The Great Betrayal’. From this perspective, the Soviet (Stalinist) system that emerged in the mid-
1930s looks very like one of those ‘vast rhetorical and institutional structures built on broken promises’ that
follow the utopian moment in the millenarian success stories of Christianity and Mormonism.
Slezkine isn’t writing a success story, however. His saga is in the tragic mode, and tragedies, in his
interpretation, are about failures and their inevitability. It wasn’t an inability to achieve ‘routinisation’ that
constitutes Bolshevism’s real failure in his narrative, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Slezkine’s short discussion of this is interesting if perfunctory. Marxism didn’t take permanent root because
its economic determinism was sterile. The House of Government children inherited their parents’ literary
tastes but not their interest in Marxist theory, being ‘entirely innocent of economics, and only indirectly
acquainted with Marxism-Leninism through speeches, quotations, and history-book summaries’. It also failed
because Russia was Russia. Bolshevism’s international orientation was unappealing, and the multinational
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structure of the Soviet state proved its undoing. ‘Stalin may have sounded like a Russian national prophet, but
his Russian never sounded native … Because the House of Government had never become the Russian
national home, late Soviet Communism became homeless – and, eventually, a ghost.’
Success and failure are a matter of opinion, and Slezkine’s interpretations should give Soviet historians plenty
to argue about. But this may be beside the point. Bolshevik millenarianism and Soviet ideocracy must fail in
Slezkine’s story, both for dramatic reasons and because of his intuitive conviction that they did. As for the
issue of genre, the best summation probably comes from Tolstoy who, explaining that War and Peace was
‘not a novel, still less an epic poem, still less a historical chronicle’, stated simply that it was ‘what the author
wanted and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed’.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good-communist-homes
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New Smoke-Based Photographs by Ken Hermann Capture Colorful Bursts Rising From an Industrial
Corridor by Kate Sierzputowski on July 20, 2017
Smoke, the simply titled project photographed by Ken Hermann (previously) and art directed by Gem
Fletcher, observes colorful clouds of the title’s subject matter as they disperse through industrial
environments, each gaseous mass originating from a ladder at the center of the photograph. The works follow
Hermann’s previous series Explosion 2.0, a group of explosive portraits which focused more on the fiery
burst at the center of the frame rather than the smoke created by each. With this series the puffs of yellow,
blue, orange, and pink clouds are closely documented, each work’s composition completely tied to the way in
which the wind decided to turn. You can see more of the Denmark-based artist’s work on his
Instagram @kenhermann and Fletcher’s at @gemfletcher.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/07/smoke-based-photographs-by-ken-
hermann/?mc_cid=a41c6124fe&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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Syria: Stories from the Barrel of a Cannon
Robyn Creswell
Mohamed Omran/Saqi Books
Mohamad Omran: Eyes, 2013; from Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, edited by Malu Halasa,
Zaher Omareen, and Nawara Mahfoud, and published by Saqi Books
In the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, animals illustrate human virtues and vices: foxes are sly; ants are
industrious; asses are often fools. The short fiction of the Syrian writer Osama Alomar uses animals that are
also recognizable types (his ants tend to be hard workers too), but the effect isn’t usually charming or
edifying. Instead of a comedy of manners, his non-human characters are, like their human models, stuck in a
nightmare of dictatorship and social paranoia. Human folly and injustice go all the way down: “A flower
planted on the edge of the veranda looked spitefully at another flower inside the house. She asked her
companion, ‘Why should that worthless plant be welcomed inside while we are left out under the burning sun
to die of thirst?’ ‘She must have known an important flower!’ her friend replied.”
If animals and plants think and act like people, the reverse is also true: human society is governed by the law
of the jungle. In Alomar’s tales, the norm of social behavior isn’t justice or civility, but eat or be eaten.
Politics is Darwinism in disguise and the only true law is universal inequity. The strongest stories give the lie
to the didacticism of older fables, since it isn’t clear that humans (or animals) can learn from their mistakes.
As Kafka is reported to have said, “To believe in progress is to believe that there has not yet been any.”
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Such grim premises give Alomar’s fiction a vaguely theological flavor. Many stories mention hell as a
synonym for reality—that is, a state of never-ending punishment for unknown crimes. His cast of characters is
a troop of the damned: pitiable civil servants, interrogators, wife beaters, dictators, child abusers, puffed-up
literary men. And the world they inhabit is as grotesque as the visions of Bosch. The most prominent features
of Alomar’s landscapes are volcanoes, heaps of garbage, quicksand, and barbed wire, elements that reappear
in story after story. This isn’t a realistic depiction of Syria, but the war has made it into a frighteningly
prophetic one.
Alomar was already well known in Syria when he left the country in 2008 to join family in the United States.
Since then he has mostly worked as a cabbie in Chicago while two collections of short stories have been
published in English. (They were selected by their able translator, C.J. Collins, who writes that he
collaborated closely with Alomar on the English versions, doing most of them “in the front seat of [Alomar’s]
taxi in a Chicago suburb heavy with the ache of immigration.”) Many of these stories were written before the
war, but even those written afterward make no explicit reference to the fighting—or indeed to Syria at all.
Alomar’s allegories and aphoristic pieces are set in no particular time or place; his characters have no names
and there are no historical references. And yet, it’s impossible to imagine these works as written by anyone
but a Syrian.
In her preface to his first collection in English, Fullblood Arabian, the writer and translator Lydia Davis
suggests that Alomar is working in the venerable tradition of the “very short story” (in Arabic, al-qissa al-
qasira jiddan), although his texts could just as easily be called prose poems: most are no more than a
paragraph or two; some are as short as one sentence while others stretch out to two or at most three pages.
Davis’s thumbnail history of the very short story extends from the animal tales of the
Sanskrit Panchatantra (translated into Arabic in the eighth century as Kalila wa Dimna) up through the
modern works of Kafka, Bernhard, and the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders. In the Arabic tradition, one finds
antecedents in the medieval akhbar, typically concise reports or anecdotes, often humorous, that form the
backbone of biographical and historical literature. A more recent precursor is the work of Khalil Gibran,
though Alomar’s infernal scenery is a cruel inversion of Gibran’s idyllic landscape of mountains, vineyards,
and shepherds.
In Alomar’s stories, as in the older fables (and Disney cartoons), animals can speak and every object is apt to
express an opinion. Wall clocks, buckets of water, flags, and lighthouses come alive and noisily assert
themselves. Alomar’s fables spring from a moralizing impulse—in his lesser texts, he gives in to it—but they
also resist that impulse in interesting ways. A favorite trick is to begin the story from a human perspective and
then shift to that of an animal or object, who offers a commentary on the action. In one story, a farmer milks
the cow while his wife nurses their baby. We switch abruptly to the cow’s point of view. “Why doesn’t this
intruder leave me alone and be content to milk his female!?” the cow thinks to herself. “I want my children to
get their fill of my milk. I never saw a man milk his female even once. Is it simply because we’re cows? What
kind of slavery is this!” In another story, a musical concert ends, the audience claps, and then we get the
hands’ take. Why are we being violently beaten against each other, they wonder. Then, seeing members of the
orchestra bow, one hand exclaims, “‘Why are they bowing?’ Trying not to show its pain, the other hand
replied, ‘They respect violence!’”
These sudden shifts of position—from human to animal, oppressor to victim—reveal the artifice or
impermanence of a state of affairs we take for granted. “I lay on the riverbank enjoying the gentle breezes,”
Alomar begins one story. “A few meters from me, a feather, blown violently in every direction, was cursing
the storm.” Or again, “The elevator that was going up to the top floor looked at his colleague who was going
down to the lowest and called to him disdainfully, ‘You descender!’ But after a while the roles were reversed
and so were the names.”
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Sulafa Hijazi/Saqi Books/The British Museum
Sulafa Hijazi: Untitled, 2012; from Syria Speaks
Rather than reassure with universal certainties, Alomar’s fables turn the world into a changeable series of
perspectives. Judgment depends on one’s place in the hierarchy—whether you’re up or down makes all the
difference—and there’s no place from which to survey the whole. Alomar began writing in this radically
perspectival way before the Syrian war started, but his technique seems especially well suited to the realities
of a country once famed as a mosaic but which now lies in fragments.
Most readers who encounter Alomar in translation will think of Kafka, whose fables of bureaucratic absurdity
have made him an honorary Syrian. And several of Alomar’s parables are unmistakably Kafkaesque. In one, a
man wakes from a nap to find himself, inexplicably, in a narrow tunnel with walls made of iron (shades of
“Metamorphosis” and also “The Burrow”). After a long struggle, he crawls out of the passage and into the
light. When he turns to look at what he’s escaped from, he sees “the barrel of a cannon being raised upward in
preparation for firing.”
This kind of coup de grâce, when a story goes from bad to very bad, is another specialty of Alomar’s—it is
even the source of his blackest comedy. Again and again in his stories, a promised rescue or moment of
respite turns out to be the trapdoor to a deeper circle of hell (the afterlife will be very much like the present, in
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other words, only worse). Animals and objects don’t provide relief from human cruelty, but rather a
refinement or exaggeration, as in “Kicks”:
The two interrogators had left their prisoner curled in a corner of the room, bleeding profusely and shaking in
terror. Soon the corner itself administered a kick that sent him tumbling across the room. In this way the four
corners went on kicking him back and forth until the roof collapsed on him and finished the job.
Or again, in “Bone Separation,” a story that resonates in the present all too strongly:
The prison guard brought in an enormous pile of bones and said to the prisoner haughtily, “If you can separate
the animal bones from the human ones we will set you free immediately.” He went away with a sadistic
laugh. The prisoner spent years trying in vain to separate out the bones. Eventually he fell dead over the pile,
and his own bones, little by little, were lost among the others.
Alomar has other influences closer to home than Kafka. No doubt the most important is Zakaria Tamer, a
native of Damascus now living in London whose surreal allegories are among the most celebrated works of
modern Arabic literature. Tamer’s best-known story, “Tigers on the Tenth Day” (the title piece of an English-
language collection), is an obvious touchstone for Alomar, an allegory about the reversibility of human and
bestial behaviors as well as the debasement of political life in Syria.
The story tells of a tiger removed from his jungle home and put in a cage. A human trainer promises his
students that the tiger will quickly be brought to heel: “Watch what will occur between the one who possesses
food and the one who does not, and learn.” To eat, the proud tiger soon learns to humiliate himself, mewling
like a cat, braying like a donkey, applauding meaningless speeches, and finally eating grass (and liking it).
The last line of the story reads, “On the tenth day the trainer, the pupils, the tiger and the cage disappeared:
the tiger became a citizen and the cage a city.”
The Assad regime has applied the tiger trainer’s lesson to the Syrian populace. Laying siege to his own cities,
Assad has starved his citizenry into submission—or forced them to leave the country. But Alomar’s stories,
like Tamer’s, take their distance from this savagery. While full of violence, his fictions are not reports from
the frontline. It may be this distance—the abstraction required by allegory—that paradoxically makes them
feel so immediate.
One of Alomar’s stories, “The Boot,” can be read as a sly parable of his approach to writing. Only about a
hundred words long, it describes a young man who grows up “enjoying the blessings and the paradises of his
country.” But one day he decides to travel. As the plane takes off, he is granted his first view of home from
above (one of Alomar’s characteristic shifts of perspective). Looking down from the airplane window, the
traveler is caught by surprise: “The layout of his country from the air took the shape of an army boot.”
Alomar’s fiction works in just this way, taking its distance from things in order to see their truth. While often
whimsical on the surface, in aggregate his stories offer a uniquely haunting account of the conflict they never
name.
Osama Alomar’s The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories and Fullblood Arabian are published by New
Directions. Syria Speaks is published by Saqi Books.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/15/syria-stories-from-the-barrel-of-a-cannon-osama-alomar/
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Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological
Flaws That Keep the Talented from Achieving Greatness
“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but
also to construct.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother
in a beautiful letter about talking vs. doing and the human pursuit of greatness. “The great doesn’t happen
through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.” But what stands between
the impulse for greatness and the doing of the “little things” out of which success is woven?
That’s what neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal(May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934) addresses
in his 1897 book Advice for a Young Investigator (public library) — the science counterpart to Rilke’s Letters
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to a Young Poet and Anna Deavere Smith’s Letters to a Young Artist, predating one by nearly a decade and
the other by more than a century.
Although Cajal’s counsel is aimed at young scientists, it is replete with wisdom that applies as much to
science as it does to any other intellectually and creatively ambitious endeavor — nowhere more so than in
one of the pieces in the volume, titled “Diseases of the Will,” presenting a taxonomy of the “ethical
weaknesses and intellectual poverty” that keep even the most gifted young people from ascending to
greatness.
Self-portrait by Cajal at his library in his thirties, from Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y
Cajal
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It should be noted that Cajal addresses his advice to young men, on the presumption that scientists are male
— proof that even the most visionary geniuses are still products of their time and place, and can’t fully escape
the limitations and biases of their respective era, or as Virginia Woolf memorably put it in Orlando, “It is
probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it.” (Lest we forget, although the word
“scientist” had been coined for a woman half a century earlier, women were not yet able to vote and were
decades away from being admitted into European universities, so scientists in the strict academic sense were
indeed exclusively male in Cajal’s culture.) Still, when stripped of its genderedness, his advice remains
immensely psychologically insightful, offering a timeless corrective for the pitfalls that keep talent and drive
from manifesting into greatness, not only in science but in any field.
One of Cajal’s revolutionary histological drawings
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Considering the all too pervasive paradox of creative people “who are wonderfully talented and full of energy
and initiative [but] who never produce any original work and almost never write anything,” Cajal divides
them into six classes according to the “diseases of the will” afflicting them — contemplators, bibliophiles and
polyglots, megalomaniacs, instrument addicts, misfits, and theorists.
He examines the superficiality driving the “particularly morbid variety” of the first type:
[Contemplators] love the study of nature but only for its aesthetic qualities — the sublime spectacles, the
beautiful forms, the splendid colors, and the graceful structures.
With an eye to his own chosen field of histology, which he revolutionized by using beauty to illuminate the
workings of the brain, Cajal notes that a contemplator will master the finest artistic techniques “without ever
feeling the slightest temptation to apply them to a new problem, or to the solution of a hotly contested issue.”
He adds:
[Contemplators] are as likable for their juvenile enthusiasm and piquant and winning speech as they are
ineffective in making any real scientific progress.
More than a century before Tom Wolfe’s admonition against the rise of the pseudo-intellectual, Cajal treats
with special disdain the bibliophiles and polyglots — those who use erudition not as a tool of furthering
humanity’s enlightenment but as a personal intellectual ornament of pretension and vanity. He diagnoses this
particular “disease of the will”:
The symptoms of this disease include encyclopedic tendencies; the mastery of numerous languages, some
totally useless; exclusive subscription to highly specialized journals; the acquisition of all the latest books to
appear in the bookseller’s showcases; assiduous reading of everything that is important to know, especially
when it interests very few; unconquerable laziness where writing is concerned; and an aversion to the seminar
and laboratory.
In a passage that calls to mind Portlandia’s irrepressibly hilarious “Did You Read It?” sketch, he writes:
Naturally, our bookworm lives in and for his library, which is monumental and overflowing. There he
receives his following, charming them with pleasant, sparkling, and varied conversation — usually begun
with a question something like: “Have you read So-and-so’s book? (An American, German, Russian, or
Scandinavian name is inserted here.) Are you acquainted with Such-and-such’s surprising theory?” And
without listening to the reply, the erudite one expounds with warm eloquence some wild and audacious
proposal with no basis in reality and endurable only in the context of a chat about spiritual matters.
Cajal examines the central snag of these vain pseudo-scholars:
Discussing everything — squandering and misusing their keen intellects — these indolent men of science
ignore a very simple and very human fact… They seem only vaguely aware at best of the well-known
platitude that erudition has very little value when it does not reflect the preparation and results of sustained
personal achievement. All of the bibliophile’s fondest hopes are concentrated on projecting an image of
genius infused with culture. He never stops to think that only the most inspired effort can liberate the scholar
from oblivion and injustice.
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Three decades before John Cowper Powys’s incisive dichotomy between being educated and being cultured,
Cajal is careful to affirm the indisputable value of learnedness put to fertile use — something categorically
different from erudition as a personal conceit:
No one would deny the fact that he who knows and acts is the one who counts, not he who knows and falls
asleep. We render a tribute of respect to those who add original work to a library, and withhold it from those
who carry a library around in their head. If one is to become a mere phonograph, it is hardly worth the effort
of complicating cerebral organization with study and reflection. Our neurons must be used for more
substantial things. Not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to
construct.
[…]
The eloquent fount of erudition may undoubtedly receive enthusiastic plaudits throughout life in the warm
intimacy of social gatherings, but he waits in vain for acclamation from the great theater of the world. The
wise man’s public lives far away, or does not yet exist; it reads instead of listens; it is so austere and correct
that recognition with gratitude and respect is only extended to new facts that are placed in circulation on the
cultural market.
Next come the megalomaniacs, who may be talented and motivated, but are bedeviled by a deadly
overconfidence that ultimately renders them careless and unrigorous in their work. Cajal writes:
People with this type of failure are characterized by noble and winning traits. They study a great deal, but love
personal activities as well. They worship action and have mastered the techniques needed for their research.
They are filled with sincere patriotism and long for the personal and national fame that comes with admirable
conquests.
Yet their eagerness is rendered sterile by a fatal flaw. While they are confirmed gradualists in theory, they
turn out to rely on luck in practice. As if believing in miracles, they want to start their careers with an
extraordinary achievement. Perhaps they recall that Hertz, Mayer, Schwann, Roentgen, and Curie began their
scientific careers with a great discovery, and aspire to jump from foot soldier to general in their first battle.
They end up spending their lives planning and plotting, constructing and correcting, always submerged in
feverish activity, always revising, hatching the great embryonic work—the outstanding, sweeping
contribution. And, as the years go, by expectation fades, rivals whisper, and friends stretch their imaginations
to justify the great man’s silence. Meanwhile, important monographs are raining down abroad on the subjects
they have so painstakingly explored, fondled, and worn to a thread.
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Self-portrait by Cajal at his laboratory in his thirties, from Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón
y Cajal
Cajal reflects on the only remedy for the megalomaniac’s main stumbling block:
All of this happens because when they started out these men did not follow with humility and modesty a law
of nature that is the essence of good sense: Tackle small problems first, so that if success smiles and strength
increases one may then undertake the great feats of investigation.
He considers a special class of megalomaniac — the serial ideator who always fails to reach the stage of
execution and whose rampant dreaming chronically falls short of doing. (This type, it occurs to me, has an
analog in love — the serial besotter, who thrives on the thrill of infatuation, but crumbles as soon as the
fantasy the beloved becomes a real relationship teeming with imperfection and the often toilsome work of
love.) Cajal writes:
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The dreamers who are reminiscent of the conversationalists of old might be seen as a variety of
megalomaniac. They are easily distinguished by their effervescence and by a profusion of ideas and plans of
attack. Their optimistic eyes see everything through rose-colored glasses. They are confident that, once
accepted, fruits of their initiative will open broad horizons in science, and yield invaluable practical results as
well. There is only one minor drawback, which is deplorable — none of their undertakings are ever
completed. All come to an untimely end, sometimes through lack of resources, and sometimes through lack of
a proper environment, but usually because there were not enough able assistants to carry out the great work,
or because certain organizations or governments were not sufficiently civilized and enlightened to encourage
and fund it.
The truth is that dreamers do not work hard enough; they lack perseverance.
He turns to the instrument addicts next — a class particularly prominent in our present culture of techno-
fetishism. In a sentiment that applies with astonishing precision to today’s legions of failed serial
entrepreneurs — the foundering founders who have fetishized the glitzy sleekness of an invention, be it a
gadget or an app, over its core conceptual value proposition — Cajal writes:
This rather unimportant variety of ineffectualist can be recognized immediately by a sort of fetishistic worship
of research instruments. They are as fascinated by the gleam of metal as the lark is with its own reflection in a
mirror.
[…]
Cold-hearted instrument addicts cannot make themselves useful. They suffer from an almost incurable
disease, especially when it is associated (as it commonly is) with a distinctive moral condition that is rarely
admitted — a selfish and disagreeable obsession with preventing others from working because they
personally do not know how, or don’t want, to work.
Next, Cajal turns to the misfit — though I suspect the word could have been translated better, for he doesn’t
mean the visionary nonconformist who propels society forward but the person who has ended up in a vocation
or environment ill-fitted to their inherent talents, thwarting them from reaching their potential. He writes:
Instead of being abnormal, misfits are simply unfortunate individuals who have had work unsuited to their
natural aptitudes imposed on them by adverse circumstances. When everything is said and done, however,
these failures still fall in the category of abulics because they lack the energy to change their course, and in
the end fail to reconcile calling and profession.
It appears to us that misfits are hopelessly ill. On the other hand, this certainly does not apply to the young
men whose course has been swayed by family pressure or the tyrannies of their social environment, and who
thus find themselves bound to a line of work by force. With their minds still flexible, they would do well to
change course as soon as favorable winds blow. Even those toiling in a branch of science they do not enjoy —
living as if banished from the beloved country of their ideals — can redeem themselves and work
productively. They must generate the determination to reach for lofty goals, to seek an agreeable line of work
— which suits their talents — that they can do well and to which they can devote a great deal of energy. Is
there any branch of science that lacks at least one delightful oasis where one’s intellect can find useful
employment and complete satisfaction?
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Cajal’s drawing of the medial geniculate nucleus in the thalamus of the cat, from Beautiful Brain: The
Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Next come the theorists. Marked by “a certain flaunting of intellectual superiority that is only pardoned in the
savant renowned for a long series of true discoveries,” the theorist becomes so besotted with her ideas and
hypotheses that she shirks from testing them against reality and instead continually narrows her lens to only
factor in what supports her theories. Cajal writes:
There are highly cultivated, wonderfully endowed minds whose wills suffer from a particular form of
lethargy, which is all the more serious because it is not apparent to them and is usually not thought of as being
particularly important. Its undeniable symptoms include a facility for exposition, a creative and restless
imagination, an aversion to the laboratory, and an indomitable dislike for concrete science and seemingly
unimportant data. They claim to view things on a grand scale; they live in the clouds. They prefer the book to
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the monograph, brilliant and audacious hypotheses to classic but sound concepts. When faced with a difficult
problem, they feel an irresistible urge to formulate a theory rather than to question nature. As soon as they
happen to notice a slight, half-hidden, analogy between two phenomena, or succeed in fitting some new data
or other into the framework of a general theory –whether true or false — they dance for joy and genuinely
believe that they are the most admirable of reformers. The method is legitimate in principle, but they abuse it
by falling into the pit of viewing things from a single perspective. The essential thing for them is the beauty of
the concept. It matters very little whether the concept itself is based on thin air, so long as it is beautiful and
ingenious, well-thought-out and symmetrical.
Exclaiming that “so many apparently immutable doctrines have fallen,” Cajal summarizes this particular
pitfall rather bluntly:
Basically, the theorist is a lazy person masquerading as a diligent one. He unconsciously obeys the law of
minimum effort because it is easier to fashion a theory than to discover a phenomenon.
Cajal takes care to note that while hypotheses have their use “as inspiration during the planning stage of an
investigation, and for stimulating new fields of investigation,” the theorist’s mistake is a blind attachment to
her theories not as a means to truth but as an end of intellectual labor:
One must distinguish between working hypotheses … and scientific theories. The hypothesis is an
interpretative questioning of nature. It is an integral part of the investigation because it forms the initial phase,
the virtually required antecedent. But to speculate continuously — to theorize just for its own sake, without
arriving at an objective analysis of phenomena — is to lose oneself in a kind of philosophical idealism
without a solid foundation, to turn one’s back on reality.
Let us emphasize again this obvious conclusion: a scholar’s positive contribution is measured by the sum of
the original data that he contributes. Hypotheses come and go but data remain. Theories desert us, while data
defend us. They are our true resources, our real estate, and our best pedigree. In the eternal shifting of things,
only they will save us from the ravages of time and from the forgetfulness or injustice of men. To risk
everything on the success of one idea is to forget that every fifteen or twenty years theories are replaced or
revised. So many apparently conclusive theories in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology have collapsed
in the last few decades! On the other hand, the well-established facts of anatomy and physiology and of
chemistry and geology, and the laws and equations of astronomy and physics remain — immutable and
defying criticism.
Advice for a Young Investigator is a marvelous read in its totality, exploring such aspects of science and
success as the art of concentration, the most common mistakes beginners make, the optimal social and
cultural conditions for discovery, and how to avoid the perilous trap of prestige. Complement it with physicist
and writer Alan Lightman on the shared psychology of creative breakthrough in art and science, philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer on the crucial difference between genius and talent, and astrophysicist and writer Janna
Levin on the animating force of great scientists.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/03/17/diseases-of-the-will-cajal-advice-for-a-young-
investigator/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=4ff1216c09-
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Researchers make improbable discovery of deep-sea coral reefs in "hostile" Pacific Ocean depths
Scientists ask how it's possible that certain coral reefs are thriving in this location
What are these deep-sea reefs doing in the Pacific Ocean? Scientists are finding out.
Credit and Larger Version
July 14, 2017
Scientists had long believed that the waters of the Central and Northeast Pacific Ocean were inhospitable to
certain species of deep-sea corals, but a marine biologist's discovery of an odd chain of reefs suggests there
are mysteries about the development and durability of coral colonies yet to be uncovered.
Scientist Amy Baco-Taylor of Florida State University (FSU), in collaboration with researchers from Texas
A&M University, found the reefs during an autonomous underwater vehicle survey of the seamounts of the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
In a paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports, Baco-Taylor and her team document the reefs.
They also discuss possible explanations for the reefs' appearance in areas considered hostile to large
communities of scleractinia -- small, stony corals that settle on the seabed and grow bony skeletons to protect
their soft bodies.
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"I've been exploring the deep sea around the Hawaiian Archipelago since 1998, and have seen enough to
know that the presence of the reefs at these depths was definitely unexpected," Baco-Taylor said.
These areas were considered impossibly hostile to large communities of scleractinian corals.
Credit: Amy Baco-Taylor
Some ocean areas, such as the North Atlantic and South Pacific, are particularly fertile habitats for deep-sea
scleractinian reefs, but a combination of factors led scientists to believe that finding these coral colonies was
exceedingly unlikely in the deep waters of the North Pacific.
The North Pacific's low level of aragonite, an essential mineral in the formation of scleractinian skeletal
structures, makes it difficult for the coral polyps to develop their rugged skeletons.
In addition, North Pacific carbonate dissolution rates, a measure of the pace at which carbonate substances
such as coral skeletons dissolve, exceed those of the more amenable North Atlantic by a factor of two.
In other words, said Baco-Taylor, the reefs simply should not exist in the North Pacific.
"Even if the corals could overcome low aragonite saturation and build up robust skeletons, there are areas on
the reefs that are just exposed skeleton, and those should be dissolving," Baco-Taylor said. "We shouldn't be
finding an accumulation of reefs."
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The researchers suggest potential reasons for the improbable success of these hardy reefs. Among them,
higher concentrations of chlorophyll in the areas of reef growth suggest that an abundance of food may
provide the excess energy needed for calcification in waters with low aragonite saturation.
Marine scientist Amy Baco-Taylor next to a submersible in which she has conducted research.
Credit: Florida State University
But that doesn't tell the whole story.
It doesn't explain "the unusual depths of the reefs, or why, moving to the northwest along the seamounts, they
get shallower," Baco-Taylor said. "There's still a mystery as to why these reefs are here."
The unexpected discovery of the reefs has prompted some scientists to reconsider the effects of ocean
acidification on vulnerable coral colonies. At a time when stories about the wholesale demise of reefs around
the world are sparking alarm, these findings may offer a glimmer of hope.
"These results show that the effects of ocean acidification on deep-water corals may not be as severe as
predicted," said David Garrison, a program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean
Sciences, which funded the research. "What accounts for the resilience of these corals on seamounts in the
Pacific, however, remains to be determined."
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Ropes from fishing gear entangled on the Southeast Hancock Seamount, where the research was done.
Credit: Amy Baco-Taylor
The reefs occur primarily outside the protected Papahanamoukuakea Marine National Monument, which
means they exist in areas where destructive trawling is permitted and active.
Researcher Nicole Morgan of FSU, also a co-author of the paper, said that locating the survivalist reefs is
crucial because it gives scientists a chance to preserve them.
"We want to know where these habitats are so that we can protect them," Morgan said. "We don't want
important fisheries to collapse, which often happens when reefs disappear."
The discovery of the puzzling reefs shows that there are still gaps in scientists' understanding of the deep sea.
The success of hypothesis-driven exploration, like the kind that produced these findings, demonstrates the
importance of continuing to strike out into the unknown, said Baco-Taylor.
"These results highlight the importance of doing research in unexplored areas, or 'exploration science,' as we
like to call it," said Brendan Roark of Texas A&M University, project co-principal investigator with Baco-
Taylor.
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If there are additional similar reefs sprinkled across the Northwestern Hawaiian seamounts, Baco-Taylor
wants to find them. Further study of these reefs could reveal important information about how they might
endure in a time of climbing carbon dioxide levels and increasing ocean acidification.
"If more of these reefs are there, that would run counter to what ocean acidification and carbonate chemistry
dictate," Baco-Taylor said.
"It leaves us with some big questions: Is there something we're not understanding? How is the existence of
these reefs possible?"
-NSF-
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=242467&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
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Materials for raising the temperature of the quantized anomalous Hall and magnetoelectric effects
DIPC July 13, 2017
Figure 1. A
sample of natural tetradymite. Tetradymite is an uncommon bismuth, tellurium sulfosalt and here it appears as
microcrystals in a quartz matrix. Tetradymite gives its name to the structure discussed in this work.
Topological insulators are electronic materials that have a bulk band gap like an ordinary insulator but have
conducting states on their edge or surface. The conducting surface is not what makes topological insulators
unique, but the fact that it is protected due to the combination of spin-orbit interactions and time-reversal
symmetry.
Researchers are chasing efficient ways to break this time-reversal symmetry without using an external
magnetic field, though. Actually, what they are trying to achieve is the realization of the quantum anomalous
Hall effect, a quantized version of the anomalous Hall effect, and the topological magnetoelectric effect. But,
what are these effects and why are they interesting?
Imagine that we have a conductor or a semiconductor through which a current is flowing. Then we apply a
strong transverse magnetic field. As a result, we can measure a potential difference at right angles to both the
current and the field caused by the deflection of charge carriers by the field. This effect was described by
Edwin Hall in 1879 and is the classical Hall effect. It introduces a coefficient which is a constant
characteristic of the material. A quantum mechanical version of the Hall effect can be found at very low
temperatures, in this the Hall coefficient is quantized. In the anomalous version of the quantum Hall effect,
the anomaly is that a finite Hall voltage is present even in the absence of an external magnetic field.
The quantum anomalous hall state is characterized by a dissipationless edge mode carrying electrons of only
one spin direction. This unique effect represents a promising platform for the creation of next-generation low
power consumption electronic devices as well as for incarnation of novel phenomena like Majorana fermions.
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On the other hand, if the insulator film is thick enough as to eliminate the finite-size effect, the quantized
topological magnetoelectric effect will appear. This means that an electric field would induce a topological
contribution to the magnetization with a quantized universal coefficient of proportionality. This effect can
open the door to magnetic monopoles.
Exciting, isn’t it? Unfortunately, being realized very recently, these effects are only accessible at extremely
low temperatures (2 K) and the lack of appropriate materials that would enable the temperature increase is a
most severe challenge. New ideas are badly needed.
Now, a work 1 lead by researchers from DIPC, CFM and UPV/EHU propose a novel material platform with
an unique combination of properties making it perfectly suitable for the realization of both effects at elevated
temperatures. Using first-principles calculations, the team develops a new, simple and efficient method to
incorporate magnetism in topological insulator surfaces that avoids dopant distribution and metallization
problems, and suggests and discusses different specific systems.
Figure 2. Atomic structure of MnBi2Te4/Bi2Te3. Blue spheres represent Te, grey ones
Bi and red ones Mn. Gold arrows indicate the Mn 3d moments, pointing out of the surface plane.
Thus, using ab initio band structure calculations, the researchers propose a magnetic extension of topological
insulator surfaces—a novel approach for the time reversal symmetry breaking. The key idea behind it is the
use of topological and magnetic insulators of the allied crystal structure and similar atomic composition, such
that the surface features of the former are naturally extended upon the deposition of the latter. In this case, the
topological surface state does not meet any significant interfacial potential and largely penetrates into the
magnetically-extended part, getting gigantically split once the ferromagnetic state with an out-of-plane
magnetization onsets there.
The researchers study systems consisting of tetradymite-type nonmagnetic semiconductor films (Bi2Te3,
Sb2Te3, and others) of different thicknesses, sandwiched between two septuplelayer-thick films of a
tetradymite-family magnetic insulator like MnBi2Te4.
The approach relies on the use of the stoichiometric magnetic compounds thus ruling out possible disorder-
related effects. Such a combination of properties renders the magnetically-extended topological insulator
surface to be a unique system, perfectly suitable for the eventual experimental observation of the topological
magnetoelectric effect at topological insulator surfaces without a magnetic field, as well as for the realization
of the quantum anomalous Hall state significantly beyond temperatures reached to date.
Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance.
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References
1. M M Otrokov, T V Menshchikova, M G Vergniory, I P Rusinov, A Yu Vyazovskaya, Yu M

Koroteev, G Bihlmayer, A Ernst, P M Echenique, A Arnau and E V Chulkov (2017) Highly-ordered
wide bandgap materials for quantized anomalous Hall and magnetoelectric effects 2D Mater. 4 –
025082 doi: 10.1088/2053-1583/aa6bec ↩
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/2017/07/13/materials-raising-temperature-quantized-anomalous-hall-
magnetoelectric-
effects/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28
Mapping+Ignorance%29
130
Show Me a Sign, Baby! Preverbal Kids and Sign Language
By Carly Okyle on August 1, 2017 Leave a Comment
Thinkstock/iStock
Cheryl White’s baby was fussy. She was colicky, and the long crying jags left both of them frustrated and
stressed. If only Rachel could tell her what was wrong, White thought. Then her father-in-law, early
childhood expert Burton White, gave her Joseph Garcia’s Sign With Your Baby (Northlight, 1999). White felt
some trepidation. Would Rachel want to replace words with signs? Would this delay her speech?
She started teaching sign language to Rachel after her first birthday and was won over immediately. “I’d
introduced milk, more, and eat, and within a couple of weeks she was signing back to me in the right
context,” she says. White began signing with her second baby, Matthew, when he was two months old.
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Sheryl White teaching sign language to a receptive young student.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl White
Distinct from American Sign Language (ASL) and other sign languages, baby sign language typically features
simplified gestures and is used with hearing children to help improve preverbal communication. Libraries are
getting involved in teaching it, offering classes to parents who want to communicate with their preverbal
children. Both library staff and parents give these programs high praise. While it’s a relatively nascent field of
study, anecdotal and scientific evidence shows that baby sign language can have long-term benefits.
Advocates also note that communication is a core aspect of social emotional development, and boosting it
with sign language can only benefit young ones.
White has been teaching baby sign language classes to parents since 1999. Early on, “I spent a lot of time
selling the idea—giving anecdotes, talking about the benefits,” she says. “Now, because it’s [more]
understood and popular, I spend less time building belief and spend more time hands-on modeling and
interacting with the babies.” These days, she teaches in libraries around Massachusetts, including the Boston
Public Library, the Hopkinton Public Library (HPL), and the Wellesley Free Library. Her four-week sessions
are open to a maximum of 12 families.
Kelly Rosofsky’s daughter Leigh was two and a half months old when they began attending library classes
near Newton, MA. “I loved it from the first class,” says Rosofsky, whose daughter’s skills “exploded” at 11
months. Now 16 months old, Leigh knows 12 signs, including milk, more, hat, ball, and dog.
Leigh uses the sign for book when she wants a story. “As we’re reading, she’ll back up to something and sign
‘ball’ because there’s a circle on the page, or ‘baby’ because there’s a carriage.” It’s good for caregivers, too.
Adds Rosofsky, “She really likes to show us and practice those skills.” Plus, “It’s the first time that you have
insight into what [your child] is thinking about.”
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TEACHING TIPS
Kaelker-Boor, Stylinsky, and White all designed their own programs. Stylinsky suggests learning how to
create a syllabus and to make time for questions and answers at classes. White advises caregivers to let babies
decide how much they are in the mood to learn. Kaelker-Boor’s tip: Keep the program short—30 minutes or
less—and allow for playtime afterward. From Kofron’s vantage point as library staff, it’s important to get the
word out and find a passionate teacher in the community—and to let new moms know that it’s OK to miss a
class or two and come back.
RESOURCES
♦ Using American Sign Language in Storytime
♦ Dr. Joseph Garcia: Baby Sign Language
♦ Knack Baby Sign Language: A Step-by-Step Guide to Communicating with Your Little One by Suzie
Chafin and Johnston Grindstaff
♦ babysignlanguage.com
♦ babies-and-sign-language.com
RESEARCH AND THE LIBRARY CONNECTION
Baby sign classes align with the broad mission of libraries, says Denise Kofron, youth services librarian at
HPL: “To encourage literacy in children and to make the library a community space with offerings from birth
to grandparenthood.” Furthermore, “they introduce children at a very young age to the library and what we
can offer,” she says. “We’re interested [in] studies showing that it helps with literacy, and we want them to
come back, pick up books, and read.”
The benefits can extend into childhood. “When the child begins to get familiar with signing, they are better
able to associate signs with their spoken word meaning, therefore allowing them to better develop language,”
writes Tiffany M. Alt in “The Effectiveness of Using Sign Language to Enhance the Development of Early
Language in Infants with Normal Hearing,” published in West Virginia University’s Speech Pathology and
Audiology Capstone Anthology. A 2007 study that Alt cites found that children who used sign language as
babies had higher scores on IQ tests when they were eight years old. In addition, Alt writes, “the use of the
fingers to make certain signs and shapes on the hands helps improve the child’s hand-eye coordination.”
Some researchers caution that infant sign language studies have methodological weaknesses. But educators on
the ground witness benefits—and a high demand. Debbie Stylinsky teaches baby sign language at the
Twinsburg (OH) Public Library and the Brooklyn Branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library in northeast
Ohio. Her two eight-week sessions are so popular that she started classes for babies and kids up through 12th
grade. Also an ASL interpreter, Stylinsky became interested when “I was teaching my grandchildren how to
sign basic things. We noticed that the whining almost stopped and the frustration level was gone,” she says.
“My grandson’s first sentence was ‘eat more please’ before he was two.” Teaching since 2009, Stylinsky’s
curriculum is based on Garcia’s work and her own experience.
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White leads a group baby sign language session.

Photo courtesy of Sheryl White
At the Rose Garden Library in San Jose, CA, Michelle Kaelker-Boor volunteers to teach baby sign language
twice a month. Launched in September 2013, her program was initially based on videos; as it has evolved,
Kaelker-Boor has added songs and a story pertaining to a weekly theme. Her classes average between 30 and
40 people. While many are infants up to three-year-olds, grandparents and older siblings often participate.
When her daughter was eight months old, Kaelker-Boor began learning ASL as a hobby—and asked her
library’s storytime leader if he would consider incorporating baby sign language. He was interested—but
didn’t know the language. “I [had been] in the business world as a corporate trainer,” says Kaelker-Boor. “I
thought, ‘I was a trainer for adults, so I might be able to translate that to children.’ ” Her daughter is now five,
and Kaelker-Boor still teaches as a way to “pay it forward” to her community.
Kelly Rosofsky’s daughter

Leigh signs the word flower.
Photo courtesy of Kelly Rosofsky
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BEYOND BABIES
This method of communicating may have benefits beyond babyhood. “Seeing Language: The Effect of Sign
Language on Vocabulary Development in Young Hearing Children,” a study by Marilyn Daniels, tracked a
class for two years, from pre-K to the end of kindergarten. “The results indicate that the statistically
significant vocabulary gains made in their prekindergarten year sustain throughout their kindergarten year and
remain with them,” according to the abstract.
At library storytimes and events, “a lot of times in groups of moms and kids, it can get loud,” says Kaelker-
Boor. “If your kid can’t hear well, they can watch you to see signs.” With older kids, “you can sign to
teenagers to say ‘I love you’ without embarrassing them,” she suggests. “Even when kids are older and verbal
and have words they can use, they can get so overwhelmed by emotions that they can’t get the words out. I’ve
found that signing breaks up that mode to start a conversation.”
“I’d love to make it bigger and do more in the future,” says Kaelker-Boor. “I don’t see it going away as a
fad.”
What’s not to like? There appear to be no drawbacks to teaching sign language to babies, or even older kids.
Librarians, parents, and teachers agree that it’s a fun, helpful way to bond with children.
Carly Okyle teaches creative writing and journalism for the Adapt Community Network in New York and has
written for Time.com, Entrepreneur.com, and YourTango.com.
http://www.slj.com/2017/08/standards/early-learning/show-me-a-sign-baby-preverbal-kids-and-sign-
language/
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A Possible Keats
Fleur Jaeggy
Chris
Buckland Wright
Woodcut by John Buckland Wright from The Collected Sonnets of John Keats, 1930
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In 1803, the guillotine was a common children’s toy. Children also had toy cannons that fired real gunpowder,
and puzzles depicting the great battles of England. They went around chanting, “Victory or death!” Do
childhood games influence character? We have to assume that they do, but let’s set aside such heartbreaking
speculations for a moment. War—it’s not even a proper game—leaves influenza in its wake, and cadavers. Do
childhood games typically leave cadavers behind in the nursery? Massacres in those little fairy-dust minds?
Hoist the banners of victory across the table from the marzipan mountain to the pudding! It’s perhaps a
dreadful thought, but we’ve seen clear evidence that both children and adults have a taste for imitation.
Certainly, such questions should be explored, and yet let us allow that there is a purely metaphysical
difference between a toy guillotine and war. Children are metaphysical creatures, a gift they lose too early,
sometimes at the very moment they learn to talk.
John Keats (1795-1821) was seven years old and in school at Enfield. He was seized by the spirit of the time,
by a peculiar compulsion, an impetuous fury—before writing poetry. Any pretext seemed to him a good one
for picking a fight with a friend, any pretext to fight.
Fighting was to John Keats like eating or drinking. He sought out aggressive boys, cruel boys, but their
company, as he was already inclined to poetry, must have provided some comic and burlesque treats. For
mere brutality—without humor, make-believe, or whimsy—didn’t interest him. Which might lead a person to
extrapolate that boys aren’t truly brutal. Yes, they are, but they have rules and an aesthetic. Keats was a child
of action. He’d punched a yard monitor more than twice his size, and he was considered a strong boy, lively
and argumentative. When he was brawling, his friend Clarke reports, Keats resembled Edmund Kean at
theatrical heights of exasperation. His friends predicted a brilliant future for him in the military. Yet when his
temper defused, he’d grow extremely calm, and his sweetness shone—with the same intensity as his rage had.
The scent of angels. His earliest brushes with melancholy were suddenly disrupted by outbursts of nervous
laughter. Moods, vague and tentative, didn’t settle over him so much as hurry past like old breezes.
A year before leaving Enfield—the Georgian-style school building would later be converted into a train
station and then ultimately be demolished—John Keats discovered Books. Books were the spoils left by the
Incas, by Captain Cook’s voyages, Robinson Crusoe. He went to battle in Lemprière’s dictionary of classical
myth, among the reproductions of ancient sculptures and marbles, the annals of Greek fable, in the arms of
goddesses. He walked through the gardens, a book in hand. During recreation breaks, he read Elizabethan
translations of Ovid. Scholars have made a habit of pointing out that the poet didn’t know Greek. So
what? Even Lord Byron insinuated that Keats hadn’t done anything more than set Lemprière to verse. In the
same way that the translation errors from Greek don’t at all invalidate Hölderlin’s Der Archipelagus, Keats’s
own transposed Greek perhaps allowed him to tear up the fields of Albion with the shards of classical ruins.
He revealed to no one that he was an orphan. The tutors were glued to his side. He forgot his birthday and
decided to study medicine. He learned how to leech, pull teeth, and suture. He observed cadavers on the
dissection table that had been purchased off the resurrection men for three or four guinea each. The naked
bodies were delivered in sacks.
Keats took notes and in the margins sketched skulls, fruit, and flowers. He felt alone. The “blue devils” settled
along with him into the damp room. He frequented the Mathew family, his cousins, Ann and Caroline, who
had a righteous horror of the frivolities of youth. They picked out piano arias from Don Giovanni and the
young men danced the quadrille. It’s said that John Keats’s very first passion was for a stranger he’d seen for
half an hour. He was waiting for her to smile at him but she never did. John Spurgin wanted to make a
Swedenborgian of him. Keats’s friend Charles Cowden Clarke procured his books. Clarke was a massively
tall man with bushy hair; eight years older than Keats, he had a great interest in cricket, about which he wrote
a handbook. He would also write about Chaucer and Shakespeare. Keats played cricket too.
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His appearance was transformed in a single afternoon in 1813 at a lecture about Spenser. Seeming suddenly
both large and potent, he emerged from his diminutive stature while reciting the verses that had struck him.
He devoured books, he copied, translated sections, he became the scribe and secretary to his mind. He
informed his friends at Guy’s Hospital that poetry was “the only thing worth the attention of superior minds.”
And it would become his sole ambition. He dressed like a poet, collar turned up and tied with a black ribbon.
For a short time he grew a mustache. When exam day arrived, everyone was sure that he wouldn’t pass, what
with those poetic airs. He did earn his diploma and would be able to work as an apothecary. But he chose to
leave medicine. He was only twenty years old when he saw his own poem, “To Solitude,” published in
the Examiner.
Chris Buckland Wright
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Woodcut portrait of Keats by John Buckland Wright from The Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1931
It was impossible for his talent not to draw the attention of many people. Leigh Hunt, imprisoned for having
libeled the king, protected Keats as long as Keats let him. John Hamilton Reynolds thought of him as a
brother. Joseph Severn perceived ecstasy in his face and about his features—but then, Severn was a painter.
He observed that his head was too small for his broad shoulders, observed the intensity of his gaze that blazed
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like a flame when crossed but when calm glittered like a lake at dusk, and noted a cold lethargy. They visited
museums together. He saw Brown, Dilke, Bailey, Hazlitt. Things were lukewarm with Shelley. Benjamin
Haydon showed him the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. Keats didn’t have the money to travel the world
but made a long walking tour of Scotland. He wore a sack on his back filled with old clothes and new socks,
pens, paper, ink, Cary’s translation of the Divine Comedy, and a draft of Isabella. His traveling companion
was the clerk and writer Charles Armitage Brown, a practical and energetic man. Keats returned home ragged
and feverish, his jacket torn and his shoes missing, but he had scaled a mountain, the Ben Nevis. He was poor,
according to W. B. Yeats, and couldn’t build a Gothic castle as Beckford had, which inclined him instead
toward the pleasures of the imagination. Yeats also said that Keats was malnourished, of weak health, and had
no family. But aren’t all poets the heralds of Heaven?
Painting of John Keats by Joseph Severn, 1819
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According to Haydon, he was the only one who knew him—with the sole exception of Wordsworth, who’d
predicted great acclaim for him based on his looks.
According to the testimony of friends, Keats was of small stature, though rather muscular, with a broad chest
and broad shoulders (almost too broad); his legs were underdeveloped in proportion to his torso. He gave off
the impression of strength. His chestnut hair was abundant and fine. He parted it with a ruler and it fell across
his face in heavy silken curls. He had a high, rather sloped, forehead. His nose was beautiful but his mouth—
they were specific on this point—was big and not intellectual. His lower lip was pronounced, giving him a
combative aspect, which diminished his elegance a bit, yet served, they were quick to add, to animate his
physiognomy. His face was oval and there was something feminine about his wide forehead and pointy chin.
Despite his disproportionate mouth, Keats, they’d concede, was handsome. Sometimes he had the look in his
eyes of a Delphic priestess on the hunt for visions.
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He was brilliant socially, loved wordplay, and his eruptions of laughter were noisy and extended. People
found him irresistibly funny when he did impressions. If he didn’t like the conversation, he’d retreat to a
window corner and look out into the void. His friends respected that corner as if it were his by law.
If a face, as Johann Gottfried Herder says, is nothing more than a Spiegelkammer of the spirit, then we should
be a little frightened of Keats’s variety of expressions. Even doubt insinuates itself. When Keats wrote, “I
thought a lot about Poetry,” we can’t see in that a mirror reflection of Keats. The mirror is empty,
uninhabited. The idea has no facial features and could look like anything, but theologically it’s more
beautiful empty. Keats is unable to contemplate himself. His gift is not knowing how to reconcile himself.
The identity of a person who is in the room with him presses in and cancels his own out in a flash. When
Keats speaks, he’s not sure that he’s the one talking. When he dreamed of bobbing in the turbine in Canto V
of Dante’s Inferno, it was one of the great joys of his life.
Joseph Severn’s portrait is described by some as a lie drawn from truth: friends found it too effeminate, the
trembling mouth, and yet the eyes were right, even radiant. The painting’s three-quarter view makes the eyes
seem even bigger, more remarkable. His focus rests above the earth yet not in the sky—fixed on a murky
horizon. His pupils are slightly enlarged, trained perpendicularly on the suspended thought. Even his gaze is
indolent, sensual, consciously engrossed, and like a veil shifting across his brow, there is a flash of charming
zealotry. He looks like a girl, and if we think of him as a girl, the femininity of his features evaporates and he
seems stubborn and volatile, the constant surveyor of his own visions.
One day in Haydon’s study, Keats recited “Hymn to Pan.” Wordsworth was there; he kept his left hand
tucked into his waistcoat. “With reverence” was the way he’d inscribed a book of his poems for Keats and he
was truly reverent about poetry. Wordsworth’s wife was once heard to say, “Mr. Wordsworth is never
interrupted.” Keats dared open his mouth anyway. He recited his verse in that singsong way of his while
pacing up and down the room. In the space between his voice and the paintings on the wall there was a plastic
silence. “A very pretty piece of paganism,” said Wordsworth, his left hand still tucked into his waistcoat.
Haydon was distressed by Wordsworth’s utter tactlessness and angered by his use of the word “paganism.”
And yet we read in Meister Eckhart that through their virtue, the pagan masters had ascended higher even
than Saint Paul, and that experience was what had brought them as high as the apostles had come through
grace.
There were women Keats didn’t dislike. Miss Cox, an Anglo-Indian heiress, had a theatrical Asian beauty and
was therefore despised by the Reynolds sisters. She kept him awake one night the way a Mozart piece might.
“I speak of the thing as a passtime and an amuzement than which I can feel none deeper than a conversation
with an imperial woman the very ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of whose Lips is to me a Banquet.”
Isabella Jones was a few years older than Keats and had read “Endymion.” They met when she was staying
with an elderly Irish relative in the village of Bo Peep near Hastings. Biographers have questions about her—
the two took walks, took tea together in the garden, and played whist late into the night—was this a summer
fling or an initiation? The prevailing view is that it was an initiation.
What took the form of a young woman who’d moved in nearby was almost a matter of sorcery. For some
time, Keats didn’t want anyone to utter her name. Her mere existence was secret. Fanny Brawne was
descended from knights, monks, and lawyers. Her mother had married for love against her parents’ wishes—
like Keats’s own mother who’d married the stable boy at the Swan and Hoop Inn. Fanny acquired Beau
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Brummell as a cousin when her mother’s sister married. From her paternal ancestors who’d performed at the
Garrick, Fanny inherited a proclivity for the theater. Grandfather Brawne had supported the liberation of
women. It was said about Fanny that she wasn’t very beautiful, but undoubtedly elegant. Her nostrils were too
thin, her face too long, the nose aquiline, and her pallor chronic. Her cheeks were never rosy, not even after a
six-mile walk.
The history of female beauty is almost always told in the negative. Even the Brontë sisters were talked about
as plain, as was Emily Dickinson. Spiritual sex appeal does not seem to generate chivalry. Fanny was the
same height as Keats, just over five feet tall. His nickname for her was “Millimant.” From the moment she
met him, Fanny was taken with his conversation. Generally, she found men to be fools. Was compelled to
describe herself as “not timid or modest in the least.” She conversed in French with the émigrés at the
Hampstead “colony.” She danced with officers at the St. John’s Wood barracks. She had an eighteenth-
century way about her, her hair curled in the style of the court of Charles II. Fanny had a “fire in her heart.”
Her mother made inquiries about Keats with the neighbors. They were engaged. Keats signed his letters to her
with the emblem of a Greek lyre with four broken strings and the motto: Qui me néglige me désole. Walking
on the heath, Keats came across a being with a strange light in its eyes, a rumpled archangel—he recognized
Coleridge. They walked together and spoke of nightingales and dreams.
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“That drop of blood is my death-warrant. I must die,” pronounced Keats calmly on the third of February 1820.
He seemed intoxicated. His future was not predicted by a Sibyl, but by the medical student himself, the poet
whose verses describe beauty flooded by a mortal estuary. With the intensity he’d once applied to his
anatomy studies, he scrutinized the blood on his handkerchief. He felt like he was suffocating and only
managed to fall asleep after hours of despotic insomnia. On the third day he was well enough to receive
visitors and read news of George III’s death. Doctor Rodd came to see him. His lungs were not compromised
but the doctor recommended mental rest. They determined that the hemorrhage was simply the body trying to
fight off the recent bout of cholera that his brother George had suffered. They soothed him with currant jellies
and compotes, some of which dripped onto a Ben Jonson first edition. This extreme diet provoked strong
palpitations. Doctor Bree, a specialist, was summoned. They could find no ailments in his lungs or other
organic causes. Keats’s illness “is in his head,” they concluded. For a day, he was tormented by Fanny’s
specter, which appeared to him dressed as a shepherdess and then in a ball gown. She was a joyful
simulacrum dancing and giggling in the void.
The morning of June 22, he had light bleeding. In the afternoon he went to the Hunts for tea. They talked
about an Italian tenor. There was a lady there who was particularly interested in bel canto and was amazed
that the young gentleman was the author of “Endymion.” The bleeding got worse over the course of the
evening. He spends the twenty-third laid out in a room, far from Fanny, staring at flowers on a table. Speech
is difficult. He indicates the verses he favors in a volume of Spenser he wants to give to Fanny. The doctor
Darling prescribes a trip to Italy. Keats’s hands are like those of an old man, veins swollen; his features,
Severn reports, have taken on the same cast his brother Tom’s did when he was dying of consumption. The
evanescent hand furiously traced an oblique line over the first copy of his book. In a preface, the publisher
apologized for the unfinished “Hyperion.” It is the first of July. There is a metal taste in his mouth. “If I die,”
he tells Brown, “you must ruin Lockhart.” For he was the one who’d written an insulting article about Keats
that touted gossip and personal details. Unsigned—yet Keats applied his sleuthing talents and located an
inside source to identify that enemy of literature.
Keats considered going just anywhere in order to die alone. Then he wanted Brown to go with him. But he
was to leave for Rome with Severn. On the twentieth of August he started coughing blood again. His friends
began to say their farewells. Fare wells to dying people are often awkward. Haydon started off the ceremony.
By way of comfort, he began to speak about life after death—the last thing that Keats wanted to hear.
Angered, Keats answered that if he didn’t get better right away he’d rather kill himself. John Hamilton
Reynolds was unable to take his hand. He wrote to John Taylor that he was happy about Keats’s departure,
that he should be running from Leigh Hunt’s vain and cruel company. As for Fanny, Keats only benefited
from the absence of the poor thing—to whom he was so incomprehensibly bound. Fanny wrote in her diary:
“Mr. Keats leaves Hampstead.” Keats gave her the Severn miniature, a copy of Dante, a copy of Spenser, and
his Shakespeare folio. They exchanged locks of hair and rings. Fanny sewed a silk lining into his traveling hat
and also gave him a journal and a knife. Woodhouse also took a lock of his hair. He wanted to be Keats’s
Boswell. The Maria Crowther set sail. It was a small two-rigger and when the sea got rough it disappeared
beneath the waves.
It had one cabin intended for six people. There was the Captain, a good man; Lady Pidgeon, plump and
pleasant; and Mistress Cotterell who was gracious though in an advanced state of consumption. But then there
was a typhoid epidemic in London, the ship was quarantined, and it was October 31 by the time that ended
and Keats was twenty-five years old. When Mistress Cotterell disembarked in Naples she asked, a little too
loudly, after the moribund youth. They arrived in Rome on the fifteenth of November. Doctor Clark was
waiting for them. His bedside manner had been acclaimed by the King of Belgium and Queen Victoria. He
was a Scot. While attending Keats, he had only minor concerns about what was afflicting the heart and lungs
and said that the more serious trouble was in his stomach. Mental exertions were the source of the trouble.
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The doctor recommended fresh air and moderate exercise. He had Keats throw all his medicines to the dogs.
He suggested horseback riding and rented a horse for him at six pounds sterling a month. The landlady, Anna
Angeletti, asked five pounds sterling in rent. Keats desired a piano and so that was rented as well. Doctor
Clark lent him several pieces of music, throwing in a Haydn sonata as well. The food was fetid. On one
occasion, Keats threw it out the window after tasting it. Shortly thereafter he was brought an excellent meal.
He started reading Alfieri’s Tragedie but had to stop after the first few pages—not being able to contain his
emotions. He wrote a last letter to Brown, attempting an awkward bow and a grand farewell. On the tenth of
December after vomiting blood, he asked Severn for laudanum. The attacks over the next week were violent.
He suffered from hunger. Clark rationed his food severely because of the ruined state of Keats’s digestive
apparatus; one anchovy on toast a day. Keats begged for more food. He couldn’t sleep. He suspected that
someone back in London had poisoned him. The servants didn’t dare come into his room because they feared
he was contagious. On Christmas Day, Severn perceived in his friend’s desperation that Keats was “dying in
horror.” As a good Christian, Severn tried to convince Keats that there was redemption in pain. Keats dictated
a list of books that he wanted to read: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy
Dying, and Madame Dacier’s translation of Plato. Three letters arrived that day. The letter from Fanny
remained unopened.
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Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Drawing by Joseph Severn of John Keats on his death-bed in Rome, 1821
At the end of December the landlady reported Keats’s illness to the police. Severn didn’t go out to sketch
ruins but stayed at Keats’s side instead. Keats was overcome by sleep and Severn drew a portrait of Keats’s
head on his pillow, eyes closed, face hollowed, a few curls glued to his forehead with cold sweat. Then
transcribed Keats’s words, his last testimony. Severn was in the presence of a great poet. He may have been
already thinking that one day he would be buried beside him. He’d been to visit the Protestant cemetery near
the Pyramid of Cestius, its grounds were glazed over with violets and it seemed that Keats liked the spot. He
said he would feel the flowers grow over him. Severn knew that violets were Keats’s favorite flower. He
plucked for him a just budded rose, a winter rose. Keats received it darkly and said “I hope to no longer be
alive in spring.” He wanted what he called in his last letter a “posthumous existence” to come to an end.
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Inscribed on his gravestone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” His words are set into the stone as
if on a mirror, touching everything and not touched by anything—strange asymmetry.
Stretched out on his bed, he gazed up at the rose pattern in the blue ceiling tiles. His eyes grew glassy. He
spoke for hours in a lucid delirium. He never lost his faculties. He prepared Severn for his death. He
wondered whether he’d ever seen anyone die before. He worried about the complications that might come up.
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He consoled Severn and told him that it wouldn’t last long and that he wouldn’t have convulsions. He longed
for death with frightening urgency. On the twenty-third of February he worried about his friend Severn’s
breathing, how it pressed on him like ice. He tried again to reassure him: “It will be easy.” Dusk entered the
room. From when Keats said that he was about to die, seven hours passed. His breath stopped. Death
animated him in the last moment. After the autopsy, Clark said that he couldn’t understand how Keats had
survived so long. Fanny’s last letters, never read by anyone, were sealed in his coffin. After the funeral
service, the police took possession of the apartment on Piazza Spagna. They stripped the walls and floor and
burned all of the furniture.
From These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, which will be published
by New Directions tomorrow.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/24/a-possible-keats/
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Topological Quantum Chemistry, the band theory of solids is now complete
DIPC July 20, 2017
This work is on the cover of Nature magazine. As the

editor puts it: “[…] a new and complete theory for calculating the topological properties of the electronic band
structures of materials. […] As a result, they complete the theory of electronic band structure […] The theory
should greatly simplify the search for further materials with exotic properties and also shed light on the
underlying physics of existing topological materials.” Cover illustration by JVG.Extended and refined by
Bloch and others during the 1930s, Bloch’s theory, known as the band theory of solids, accounts very well for
the conducting behaviour of materials. When atoms are joined together into a crystal, each of the individual
quantum states of the atoms joins with the corresponding states in other (identical) atoms in the crystal to
form the various energy bands within the material. The electrons in the atoms then fill up the available states
within each band. Topological behaviour arises from the global properties of the band electrons in something
called momentum space, a mathematical concept.
But this is a physicist’s point of view, one that considers the crystal as a whole. A chemist, on the other hand,
would have a much more local approach where hybridization, ionic chemical bonding and finite-range
interactions are paramount. Chemistry, therefore, operates in a real-space (rather than momentum space)
description, where atoms and electronic orbitals sit in periodic arrangements.
In any case, and despite the apparent success that the field of new materials has had in predicting some
topological insulators, conventional band theory is ill-suited to a natural treatment of topological insulators.
One need only look at the paucity of known topological insulators (less than 400 materials out of 200,000
existent in crystal structure databases!) to see the failings of the theory.
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Now, a team of researchers from Princeton University, UPV/EHU, Max Planck Institute and DIPC present 1 a
new and complete understanding of the structure of bands in a material and links its topological features to the
chemical orbitals at the Fermi level. It is, therefore, a revolutionary theory of Topological Quantum
Chemistry, a description of the universal global properties of all possible band structures and materials.
The evolution of a theory
In 1928, just two years after the formulation of quantum mechanics, the German physicist Arnold
Sommerfeld modified the classical free-electron model by treating the electrons according to quantum
mechanics. But the new theory still contained the unrealistic assumption that the electrons do not interact with
the charged lattice ions except to collide with them. As before, Sommerfeld also considered the electrons to
be little charged particles of matter.
Beginning in the same year, Felix Bloch, an assistant to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, began to make more
realistic assumptions in an attempt to formulate a more complete quantum mechanics of electrical
conductivity. First, because he wanted to assign a definite momentum and energy to each of the electrons, but
not a definite position or a time interval, he chose the wave side of the wave-particle duality. He assumed that
the electrons behave, not like particles, but like infinitely extended de Broglie waves. As a result, Bloch did
not treat electrons inside metals as a “gas” of particles, but rather as periodic waves extending throughout the
periodic crystal lattice. This, it later turned out, helped to explain how electricity can begin to flow in a wire
the instant a wire is plugged into a wall socket. If the electrons are viewed as balls of matter, it would take a
small amount of time for the current to begin flowing at the rate specified by Ohm’s law.
Bloch made a second assumption. He assumed that the positive metal ions, which are arranged in an infinite,
periodic array (that is, in a perfect crystal), each exerts an attractive electric force on the negative electrons.
This attractive force formed in visual terms a potential energy that looked like a type of “potential well.” The
wells of neighbouring ions then overlapped so that together they formed a periodic arrangement that gave the
electron waves a very bumpy ride down the wire.
Bloch then solved the Schrödinger equation for the energies that these types of de Broglie waves (wave
functions) could possess while moving in this type of periodic potential. He discovered that the allowed
energies of the electrons in the material are joined together into bands of quantum states, just as there are
certain quantum stationary states within each atom in which the electrons are allowed to exist. Between the
bands, as between the quantum states, there is a range of energies in which electrons are forbidden to exist.
The bands in the material are actually created by the joining together of the quantum states of the individual
atoms. In fact, if there are a total of N identical atoms in the material, then there are N quantum states within
each band. According to a rule in quantum mechanics (the Pauli exclusion principle), only two electrons are
allowed to occupy any one quantum energy state of a single atom, and this is allowed only because the two
electrons spin on their axes in opposite directions.
Time to incorporate topological insulators
But crystal symmetries place strong constraints on the allowed connections of bands. This is where some
crystallographic concepts become handy. In the theory of X-ray diffraction the concept of reciprocal lattice is
fundamental, with diffraction patterns being much more related to reciprocal lattices than to real-space ones,
even though the former can be defined from the latter. A cell in the reciprocal lattice is called a Brillouin
zone, after Léon Brillouin who introduced the concept in 1930.
In this work the researchers first compiled all the possible ways energy bands in a solid can be connected
throughout the Brillouin zone to obtain all realizable band structures in all non-magnetic space-groups. Group
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theory itself places constraints – “compatibility relations” – on how this can be done. Each solution to these
compatibility relations gives groups of bands with different connectivities, corresponding to different
physically-realizable phases of matter (trivial or topological). The scientists solve all compatibility relations
for all 230 space groups by mapping connectivity in band theory to the graph-theoretic problem of
constructing multipartite graphs.
Then the researchers developed the tools to compute how the real-space orbitals in a material determine the
symmetry character of the electronic bands. Given only the Wyckoff positions and the orbital symmetry (s, p,
d) of the elements/orbitals in a material, they derive the symmetry character of all energy bands at all points in
the Brillouin zone. To do this general, they extend the notion of band representation(all bands linked to
localized orbitals respecting the crystal symmetry), to the physically relevant case of materials with spin-orbit
coupling and/or time-reversal symmetry, and identify a set of elementary band representations (EBR).
How the theory applies to graphene with spin-orbit coupling. We begin by inputting the orbitals and lattice
positions relevant near the Fermi level. Following the first arrow, we then induce an EBR (see the main text)
from these orbitals, which subduces to little group representations at the high symmetry points, shown here as
nodes in a graph. Standard k·p theory allows us to deduce the symmetry and degeneracy of energy bands in a
small neighborhood near these points – the different coloured edges emanating from these nodes. The graph
theory mapping allows us to solve the compatibility relations along these lines in two topologically distinct
ways. On the left, we obtain a graph with one connected component, indicating that in this phase graphene is
a symmetry-protected semimetal. In contrast, the graph on the right has two disconnected components,
corresponding to the topological phase of graphene.
These elementary band representations allow to easily identify candidate semimetallic materials: If the
number of electrons is a fraction of the number of connected bands forming an elementary band
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representation, then the system is a symmetry-enforced semimetal. If, however, the number of connected
bands is smaller than the total number of bands in the elementary band representation, then the disconnected
bands are topological.
Thus, the researchers were able to classify all topological crystalline insulators. And they show how powerful
the method is by predicting hundreds of new topological insulators and semimetals. All these data are now
available on the Bilbao Crystallographic Server.
This blend of chemistry and physics is what finally completes the band theory of solids.
Author: César Tomé López is a science writer and the editor of Mapping Ignorance.
References
1. Barry Bradlyn,, L. Elcoro, Jennifer Cano, M. G. Vergniory, Zhijun Wang, C. Felser, M. I. Aroyo,
and B. Andrei Bernevig (2017) Topological Quantum Chemistry Nature doi: 10.1038/nature23268 ↩
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/2017/07/20/topological-quantum-chemistry-band-theory-solids-now-
complete/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%
28Mapping+Ignorance%29
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The Microbiome
Spores of Clostridium difficile
Today's encore selection -- from "Microbiomics: The Next Big Thing?" by Lisa J. Bain. It is estimated that
we each have 10 trillion of our own cells, accompanied by an even greater 100 trillion "good" bacterial cells.
These bacterial cells, along with assorted viruses, fungi and other microbes, collectively constitute what is
often referred to as the microbiome. Researchers now believe the microbiome is essential for the proper
functioning of the body -- and that antibiotics often deplete the microbiome, impairing body function and
causing maladies:
"Although it may sound weird, unappealing, even disgusting, fecal transplantation has piqued the interest of
gastroenterologists and infectious disease specialists around the world. Meanwhile, patients suffering from
severe diarrhea are demanding the procedure and the FDA has weighed in with restrictions on how this
'unapproved therapy' can be delivered.
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"Why all the excitement? Fecal transplantation is not new: Ben Eiseman, a surgeon at the University of
Colorado, described it more than 50 years ago to treat a life-threatening diarrheal disease caused by a
bacterium called pseudomonas enterocolitis. But until a few years ago, Eiseman's unconventional treatment
was largely dismissed by the medical community, at least in the United States (it has been much more widely
used in Australia). Then, in 2010, The New York Times ran a story about a doctor in Minnesota using fecal
transplantation to successfully treat a patient with a severe infection caused by a bacterium called Clostridium
difficile, or 'C. diff.' And this year, a randomized controlled trial of the treatment was stopped early when an
interim review of the data showed not only that it worked, but that it was far superior to the standard treatment
with powerful antibiotics. Fecal transplantation, also known as fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) or
bacteriotherapy, had arrived.
"The acceptance of FMT for the treatment of diarrheal disease caused by C. diff exemplifies a paradigm shift
in how many diseases are viewed, as well as a translational application of the science of microbiomics -- a
rapidly expanding research field that Science magazine dubbed 'The Germ Theory of Everything.'
Microbiomics researchers have shown that the human body is home to an entire ecosystem of bacteria,
viruses, fungi, and other microbes, and that these bugs play important roles in keeping us healthy and
regulating all sorts of physiologic processes. When the gut microbiota (the population of microbes) is
disrupted, for example by overuse of antibiotics, the consequences can be lethal, as is the case with C. diff. It
infects as many as 3 million people worldwide each year and in recent years these infections have become
less and less responsive to antibiotic treatment. In the U.S. alone, medical costs to treat C. diff infections
exceed $1 billion per year, and some 14,000 Americans die from the infections.
"Following on the heels of the massive Human Genome Project, which identified about 22,000 protein-coding
genes in humans, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) in 2007 to
map the collective genomes of the human microbiota. HMP researchers at nearly 80 institutions, including
[the University of Pennsylvania], analyzed tissue from 242 healthy individuals, sampling 15 body sites in men
and 18 in women. The findings made the genome project look modest in comparison: the human gut
microbiome alone is home to 100 trillion bacteria -- ten times the number of cells in the human body -- with
somewhere around 8 million protein-coding genes, 360 times as many as in the human genome.
"The same gene sequencing technology that fueled the genome project also made mapping the microbiome
possible. 'You literally can get more than a hundred billion bases of sequence information from a single
instrument run these days,' says Frederic Bushman, Ph.D., professor of microbiology. 'It's astounding. We're
analyzing a dataset of over a trillion bases of sequence information. When I was a student, it would be a few
days' work to get a few reads of a hundred bases each. Today, I have a little machine in my lab that will do a
hundred thousand sequence reads of about 250 bases each in a day.' One of the changes the new technology
has brought about in Bushman's research is the makeup of his laboratory personnel: 'We now have four
programmers in the lab and lots of collaborating statisticians to work with that kind of data. That's all new in
the last ten years.'
"Indeed, gene sequencing has brought about a transformation in the entire field of microbiology, as it has in
many other areas of biomedical research. David Artis, Ph.D., associate professor of microbiology, says that
when he completed his training in immunology back in the mid-'90s, he was advised not to be concerned
about the microbiota or what was then referred to as the commensal bacteria (bacteria that live harmoniously
with the host) that colonized the intestine. 'We were told, "don't worry about it -- it's too complicated, you
can't culture the bugs, and you can't phenotype what they are." What has been an incredible journey for us has
been the rapidity with which we've been able to engage and interrogate the role of the microbiome in the last
decade or so.' "
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author: Lisa J. Bain
title: Microbiomics:The Next Big Thing?"
publisher: Penn Medicine
date: Spring 2014
pages: 9-10
https://delanceyplace.com/view-
archives.php?p=3382&utm_source=Encore+%22Microbiomics%3A+The+Next+Big+Thing%3F%22&utm_c
ampaign=7%2F20%2F17&utm_medium=email
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Scientists embark on expedition to submerged continent Zealandia
Oceanographic research cruise will hold answers about plate tectonics, past climate
Descent to Zealandia: A view from the deck of the scientific drillship JOIDES Resolution.
Credit and Larger Version
July 18, 2017
Note: Video from IODP Expedition 371 will be available post-expedition.
Surrounding New Zealand is a mass of Earth's crust about half the size of Australia, the continent Zealandia.
What makes Zealandia different from other continents is that more than 90 percent of it is submerged.
Increasingly detailed seafloor maps have attracted attention to Zealandia. Now scientists are asking: What
secrets does it hold?
To find out, 30 researchers will set sail July 27 on a two-month ocean drilling expedition to search for clues to
Zealandia's history.
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Participants in International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 371, sponsored by the National
Science Foundation (NSF) and its international partners in IODP, will sail from Townsville, Australia, aboard
the JOIDES Resolution, one of the world's most sophisticated scientific drillships.
Zealandia, about half the size of Australia, surrounds New Zealand.
Credit: IODP
IODP is an international research collaboration that coordinates seagoing expeditions to study the history of
Earth recorded in sediments and rocks beneath the ocean floor.
Expedition 371 scientists will join more than 20 crew members in drilling at six Tasman Sea sites at water
depths ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 meters.
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At each site, the scientists will drill from 300 to 800 meters into the seafloor to collect cores -- complete
samples of sediments deposited over millions of years. The cores hold fossil evidence the scientists will use to
assemble a detailed record of Zealandia's past.
"If you go way back, about 100 million years ago, Antarctica, Australia and Zealandia were all one
continent," said expedition co-chief scientist Gerald Dickens, a geoscientist at Rice University. "Around 85
million years ago, Zealandia split off on its own, and for a time, the seafloor between it and Australia was
spreading on either side of an ocean ridge that separated the two."
The scientific drillship JOIDES Resolution, which will ferry more than 30 scientists to Zealandia.
Credit: IODP
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The relative movements of Zealandia and Australia are due to plate tectonics, the constant movement of
interlocking sections of Earth's surface.
Some 25 tectonic plates fit together like puzzle pieces to form Earth's crust. The plates are in constant motion.
They can crash together to form mountain ranges or slide past one another in earthquake zones.
Oceanic plates form on either side of ocean ridges and slide beneath lighter, more buoyant continental plates
in a process known as subduction.
A detailed map of IODP Expedition 371 to Zealandia.
Credit: IODP
Expedition 371 will examine such a shift, which occurred about 50 million years ago in the direction of the
enormous Pacific Plate northeast of Zealandia.
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"Some 50 million years ago, a massive shift in plate movement happened in the Pacific Ocean," said Jamie
Allan, a program director in NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences, which supports IODP. "It resulted in the
diving of the Pacific Plate under New Zealand, the uplift of New Zealand above the waterline, and the
development of a new arc of volcanoes. This IODP expedition will look at the timing and causes of these
changes as well as at related changes in ocean circulation patterns and ultimately Earth's climate."
A researcher on a previous IODP expedition labels pieces of core collected while at sea.
Credit: IODP
In the expedition's scientific prospectus, researchers refer to this shift as "the most profound subduction
initiation event and global plate-motion change" in the past 80 million years.
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"We're looking at the best place in the world to understand how plate subduction initiates," said Dickens.
"This expedition will answer a lot of questions about Zealandia."
Instrumentation is readied for installation during a previous expedition.
Credit: Dick Peterse, ScienceMedia.nl
Prior to the shift, Australia and New Zealand were spreading apart. After the shift, the area that separated
them was under compression for millions of years.
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Then, in the final stage, the Pacific Plate dove beneath Zealandia, forming a new subduction zone.
"What we want to understand is why and when the various stages from extension to relaxation occurred,"
Dickens said. "The cores will help tell us that. They'll be analyzed for sediment composition, microfossil
components, mineral and water chemistry, and physical properties."
He said the research may also answer questions about the way Earth's climate has evolved in the last 60
million years.
Zealandia has been left out of many climate models, Dickens said. That could be one explanation for the
difficulty scientists have had in developing accurate models of the greenhouse climates of around 50 million
years ago.
"When the community does climate modeling for the Eocene Epoch [56 to 33.9 million years ago], this is the
area that causes consternation, and we're not sure why," said Dickens. "It may be because we had continents
that were much shallower than we thought. Or we could have the continents right but at the wrong latitude.
The cores will help us figure that out."
Answers to Zealandia's mysteries may soon be revealed.
-NSF-
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=242506&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
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New Split-View Trash Sculptures by Bordalo II Combine Wood and Colorful Plastics Into Gigantic
Animals
by Kate Sierzputowski on July 21, 2017
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Bordalo II (previously) has created a series of bisected animals, colorful plastics forming one half of the
creature while a combination of wood and metal created a muted mirror on the other side. In one piece the
Portuguese artist created a turtle with legs that extend to the ground, appearing to crawl along the side of a a
low wall in Moncton, Canada. Other works are more monumental, such as a rabbit that extends two stories
in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, and a raccoon that seems to dangle head first from a building in Pittsburgh.
The globally-placed installations are the newest evolution of his series Trash Animals, large public works that
address the impact our carelessly tossed waste has on the environment around us. You can observe his process
for collecting plastic and other waste, as well as follow more of his recent work, on Instagram.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/07/new-split-view-trash-sculptures-by-bordalo-
ii/?mc_cid=a41c6124fe&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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The Greatest Person then Living
Andrew Bacevich
 BUYThe General v. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by H.W.
Brands
Anchor, 438 pp, £21.00, November 2016, ISBN 978 0 385 54057 5
H.W. Brands is a well-known and prolific historian of an old-fashioned sort. With no axe to grind and no
agenda to advance, he is all about telling stories, which he does exceedingly well. In The General v. the
President he recounts a remarkable episode in American history: the clash between President Harry S.
Truman and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur that culminated with MacArthur being sacked in April
1951. US history is replete with examples of military officers losing their jobs, usually for incompetence,
sometimes for dishonesty or moral turpitude. Only once, however, has a president fired his senior field
commander during wartime for blatant insubordination. As a chapter in the history of US civil-military
relations, the Truman-MacArthur controversy is seemingly sui generis, but to treat it as such, as Brands does,
is to miss its larger significance. Ending in what appeared to be a decisive affirmation of civilian control, it
revealed the challenges inherent in reconciling democratic practice with the exercise of militarised global
leadership: challenges that persist – in different form – in the presidency of Donald Trump.
War on the Korean peninsula, formally divided by the Allies into two states in 1945, erupted unexpectedly in
June 1950 when North Korean forces attacked across the 38th Parallel, providing the setting for the
confrontation between Truman and MacArthur. Brands focuses on their personalities, but the larger context
complicated matters and ratcheted up the stakes. For Americans these were unsettled and unsettling times.
Victory in World War Two had almost immediately given way to an ominous Cold War, with freedom itself
seemingly beset by an insidious form of totalitarianism. Expectations that the UN, created with great fanfare
in 1945, would pave the way for world peace were already falling victim to East-West divisions. The US
monopoly in nuclear weapons, the ultimate guarantor of American security, had ended after just four years,
when the Soviet Union successfully tested a weapon in August 1949. A month or so later China ‘fell’ to
communism. At home, the Second Red Scare, commonly known as McCarthyism, fuelled partisanship and
sowed paranoia, especially among left liberals or progressives who were vulnerable to the charge of fellow-
travelling. The Korean War compounded these issues.
Truman responded to North Korean aggression with alacrity. Promising to assist South Korea’s overmatched
army, he secured authorisation from the UN Security Council to ‘repel the armed attack’ and designated
MacArthur, a hero of both world wars, to command the coalition assembled to do so.
The appointment met with widespread approval. In a Gallup poll, Americans had dubbed MacArthur the
‘greatest person then living’. Asked ‘to name the greatest figure in world history’, they had ranked him fifth,
after Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jesus Christ and Washington. Endorsing his appointment, the New York
Times described MacArthur as ‘a superb strategist and an inspired leader; a man of infinite patience and quiet
stability under adverse pressure; a man equally capable of bold and decisive action’. All in all, ‘fate could not
have chosen a man better qualified.’
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By this time, though nominally subordinate, MacArthur had become Truman’s near equal and aspired to
succeed him. The two had never met. Having spent the previous several years presiding over the rehabilitation
of occupied Japan, the five-star general was accustomed to exercising quasi-sovereign authority. ‘In moments
of reflection,’ Brands writes, ‘he asked himself if any other great country had ever owed more to one man. He
could not think of an instance.’ He conducted himself accordingly. High-ranking US civilian and military
officials wishing to converse with MacArthur went to Tokyo: he didn’t deign to travel to Washington. Indeed,
he hadn’t set foot in the US since 1937.
The 70-year-old general willingly added a war on the Korean peninsula to his portfolio of responsibilities.
That he intended to exercise considerable latitude in its conduct was evident from the outset. Sitting in Tokyo,
he made decisions – to bomb the north and send US troops to the south – which he expected the authorities in
Washington to ratify. With enemy forces occupying Seoul, South Korea’s government in flight, and its army
crumbling, they had little choice but to comply. In a matter of days, MacArthur had put himself in the driver’s
seat.
The Battle of Inchon cemented his authority. To turn the tide, MacArthur proposed a daring amphibious
assault on the port of Inchon far behind North Korean lines. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman’s
principal military advisers, had their doubts. With characteristic bombast, MacArthur pressed his case. ‘The
prestige of the Western world hangs in the balance,’ he insisted:
Oriental millions are watching the outcome … here in Asia is where the communist conspirators have elected
to make their play for global conquest. The test is not in Berlin or Vienna, in London, Paris or Washington. It
is here and now [in Korea] … I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or
we will die.
MacArthur got his way. Launched on 15 September 1950, the Inchon operation succeeded brilliantly. Within
days, the North Korean forces were falling back in disarray. On 29 September, under MacArthur’s approving
eye, the government was reinstated in Seoul. Had MacArthur chosen this ‘mission accomplished’ moment to
retire, he might still enjoy his standing among history’s greats.
Instead, with MacArthur’s agreement, Truman revised the plan. Rather than restoring South Korean territorial
integrity, the aim now was to unite the peninsula under a single anti-communist regime. So troops under
MacArthur’s command (now including British and Commonwealth contingents) crossed the 38th Parallel and
advanced northward. Facing only token resistance, they pressed on towards Pyongyang and the Yalu River
bordering China. At this hopeful juncture, Truman decided that a tête-à-tête with his field commander might
be in order. Suspecting that the president merely wanted a share in the glory, MacArthur agreed, but only on
condition that they met on Wake Island, two thousand miles from Tokyo and nearly seven thousand miles
from Washington.
During his brief encounter with the president, which took place on the morning of 15 October, MacArthur
committed two errors for which he would pay dearly. First, he affirmed Truman’s existing view of him as an
arrogant prick. Adding to a previous record of slights and insults, MacArthur abruptly announced that he
would not be staying for lunch after the official proceedings; Truman could hang around on Wake, but he was
needed back in Tokyo. Second, in response to a question about the likelihood of Chinese intervention as UN
forces approached the Yalu, he told Truman that it just wasn’t going to happen. The war was as good as won:
‘formal resistance will end throughout North and South Korea by Thanksgiving.’ US troops would be home
(or back to Japan), he claimed, in time for Christmas, and if China foolishly did enter the war, ‘there would be
the greatest slaughter.’
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This proved to be a monumental misjudgment. In fact, Chinese ‘volunteers’ had already begun to cross the
Yalu. By late October, US troops were taking Chinese prisoners. Intent on conducting one final offensive that
would, in his words, ‘destroy all resisting armed forces in Korea and bring that country into a united and free
nation’, MacArthur ignored the likely implications. Events made a mockery of his pretensions. A massive
Chinese counter-offensive, launched on 25 November, sent UN forces streaming back across the 38th
Parallel. With Seoul once more in enemy hands and the Chinese showing no signs of stopping, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff contemplated evacuating the peninsula altogether. Preventing Korea from triggering a global
cataclysm became the overriding US policy objective.
As this point, MacArthur came unglued. Chinese intervention required direct retaliation, he insisted. The
adverse turn of events on the battlefield, he told journalists, stemmed directly from the fact that he had
laboured under constraints ‘without precedent in military history’. Unless he was provided with
reinforcements and given a free hand to wage war as he saw fit, defeat was all but inevitable. (At Wake
Island, MacArthur had remarked that ‘no commander in the history of war ever had more complete and
adequate support from all agencies in Washington than I have.’) At more or less the same time, a clumsy
remark Truman made at a press conference which seemed to suggest that the use of nuclear weapons was a
matter for field commanders to determine, triggered a brief panic. Attlee rushed across the Atlantic to find out
if the president had taken leave of his senses. He had not; he had merely misspoken.
His book’s hyperbolic subtitle notwithstanding, Brands offers no evidence to suggest that events in Korea in
late 1950 brought the US to the brink of nuclear war. Whatever he means when he writes that ‘the knife-edge
that Truman had been walking suddenly terminated above an abyss,’ the fact is that the American nuclear
arsenal remained in the US under lock and key. Still, Truman was in a fix. He had initially characterised
Korea as a mere ‘police action’. Now things had got dangerously out of hand. His misjudgments and
MacArthur’s recklessness had led to a longer and more costly war than he (or the American people) had
bargained for. The geopolitical imperative was to prevent further escalation as a first step towards terminating
hostilities. But Truman’s field commander, absolving himself of responsibility for the downward spiral of
events, was publicly insisting on the need to go all out to win, regardless of the cost.
By January 1951, MacArthur’s days in command were numbered. Even members of the Joint Chiefs, whose
habitual attitude to MacArthur was deferential to the point of being supine, realised he had to go. For them,
the core issue was not civilian control in itself. After all, they had bitterly opposed Truman on a host of issues
from military budgets and defence reorganisation to the control of nuclear weapons and racial desegregation.
What the chiefs cared about was their own status and prerogatives. A field commander challenging
Washington’s primacy in the conduct of war effectively threatened their own standing at the top of the
military hierarchy.
Further provocations from MacArthur brought things to a head. In a letter to the Republican leader of the
House of Representatives, dated 20 March 1951 and immediately made public, he reiterated the case for
escalation – ‘meeting force with maximum counter-force as we have never failed to do in the past’. In Korea,
the fate of the planet was being decided: Asia, after all, was where the ‘communist conspirators’ had chosen
to make their bid ‘for global conquest’. To see Europe as the decisive theatre of the Cold War was to get
things backwards: ‘lose the war to communism in Asia and the fall of Europe is inevitable,’ MacArthur wrote.
Nothing should take precedence over winning the fight now underway. ‘There is no substitute for victory.’
The general was implicitly arrogating to himself the functions of commander-in-chief. This was the final
straw. On 11 April, MacArthur learned via a radio broadcast that he had been fired.
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The public’s response to Truman’s decision was largely negative and pretty much doomed his chances of
winning another term as president. As for MacArthur, he flew home to a hero’s welcome bordering on the
hysterical. ‘The millions of Americans cheering and shouting for MacArthur,’ Brands writes, ‘wanted the
general to lead them, like a modern Moses, out of the wilderness of uncertainty’ that was the Cold War. For
the moment, MacArthur’s prospects for succeeding the man who had fired him looked very bright indeed. But
as Moses found when he led the Israelites towards the Promised Land, MacArthur discovered that gratitude
could be ephemeral. The cheering that greeted his return proved short-lived.
Invited to speak before Congress, he turned in a bravura performance. But during subsequent hearings
convened to inquire into the conduct of the Korean War, he fared less well. Testimony by other respected
senior officers undercut his own. The JCS chairman Omar Bradley delivered the decisive blow. A five-star
general himself, Bradley warned that directly attacking China, as MacArthur had proposed, would land the
US in ‘the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy’.
When he had finished in Washington, MacArthur set out on a cross-country tour to test the waters for a
presidential run. By the time his tour ended, however, enthusiasm for elevating him to the White House had
run its course. Distance – MacArthur as warlord and master of the Orient – had contributed to his mystique.
When Americans got a closer look, many disliked what they saw, especially as MacArthur’s speeches took on
an overtly partisan tone. ‘The shriller the general’s message grew,’ Brands writes, ‘the less attractive he
seemed.’ He lacked a common touch and appeared to have little feeling for the bread-and-butter issues that
most Americans cared about. In his farewell speech to Congress, MacArthur struck the pose of an ‘old
soldier’ wanting nothing more than to ‘fade away’ after a life of service to his country. Within a year of his
return from Tokyo, he had pretty much got his wish.
Truman had won out. In his conclusion, Brands pays brief tribute to the president. ‘Castigated as an appeaser
and howled into retirement,’ he paid a heavy political price for firing MacArthur. On the other hand, by
reining in the runaway general, he ‘had sustained the hope that humanity might survive the nuclear age’. End
of story. The judgment strikes me as way too comforting. The sacking of MacArthur – if anything, overdue –
deflected a direct assault on the principle of civilian control. But rather than establishing norms to which
civilian and military leaders would subsequently adhere, it encouraged unprincipled behaviour on all sides, as
subsequent events soon demonstrated.
In 1953, Americans did install a general in the White House: Eisenhower. Ike succeeded in ending the Korean
War, but he struggled throughout his two terms to impose his will on the armed services. His famous warning
about the menace posed by the military-industrial complex was tantamount to an admission of failure.
Things did not improve under his successors. The Vietnam War was a study in civil-military dysfunction,
chronicled in an important book called Dereliction of Duty (1997) by a young army officer named H.R.
McMaster. The story McMaster tells is one of mistrust, calculated dishonesty and mutual manipulation ending
in a mindless debacle. Since then the civil-military balance in Washington has shifted according to which
party is in power and the political savvy or lack thereof displayed by senior officers. Given the right
circumstances, a particular general may wield clout approaching MacArthur’s before he self-destructed. This
was the case with Colin Powell in the wake of Operation Desert Storm, and with David Petraeus when the
Iraq Surge of 2007-08 seemed, briefly, to represent a historic triumph. At other times, imperious civilians
keep generals on a short leash, preferring compliance to professional advice. This was the case on both
occasions when Donald Rumsfeld ruled the Pentagon.
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Ever since the Truman-MacArthur controversy of 1950-51, Americans have clung to the belief that safety and
security require the US to maintain a position of global military pre-eminence. While the Cold War lasted, US
policymakers preferred to hold American military power in abeyance. Since the end of the Cold War, and
especially since 9/11, they have put America’s armed might to work. The result is a nation that today finds
itself more or less permanently at war. At no time during the sixty-plus years since MacArthur’s downfall
have existing civil-military arrangements worked as advertised. That is to say, never has the interaction of
military and civilian leaders, conducted in an atmosphere of honesty and mutual respect, privileging the
national interest rather than personal ambition and institutional agendas, yielded consistently enlightened
policies. This remains one of the dirty little secrets the American elite is reluctant to own up to. In that
respect, the clash between Truman and MacArthur represents not the resolution of a problem but a harbinger
of problems to come.
Today that problem has undergone a new twist. Trump has by and large handed the national security
apparatus over to the generals. Now wearing three stars but still an active-duty army officer, McMaster
occupies the post of national security adviser. Career military officers, active and retired, fill numerous
positions on the National Security Council staff. The defence secretary is a former four-star general. So, too,
is the secretary of homeland security. Truman, I imagine, wouldn’t have approved; it’s possible MacArthur
would feel vindicated. The rest of us watch with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/andrew-bacevich/the-greatest-person-then-living
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Artist Dan Lam’s Drippy Blob-Like Sculptures Develop Sparkly Color-Changing Surfaces
by Christopher Jobson on July 18, 2017
Dallas-based artist Dan Lam organizes her gloopy sculptural works into three categories that perfectly capture
the form factor of her general aesthetic: Squishes, Drips, and of course Blobs. The pieces appear to ooze from
where they rest, growing stalactite-like appendages that drip from the edges of shelves. The pieces are made
primarily from polyurethane foam and acrylic paint and are often adorned with spiky appendages. Some of
her latest works have begun to incorporate layers of crystals and color-changing thermal paints that further
bring the alien works to life.
“My work has always elicited pretty raw reactions from people, my favorite being the desire to touch the
object, to make sense of it with another sense because just seeing it doesn’t satiate the curiosity,” Lam shares
with Blackbook Gallery. “I like the tension that is created in that moment.”
Lam most recently had works on view with Black Book Gallery and Guy Hepner. You can see more of her
behind-the-scenes process and studio experiments on Instagram.
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http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2017/07/blobby-glitter-sculptures-dan-
lam/?mc_cid=a41c6124fe&mc_eid=2d0f5d931f
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A New View of Grenada’s Revolution
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Alex Webb/Magnum Images
Grenadians watching the arrival of US helicopters, St. George, Grenada, 1983
In May 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines to Tripoli and Tunis to battle “Barbary pirates”
who were menacing American merchants off the coast of North Africa, thereby launching the young United
States’ first overseas military venture. Over the two centuries since, the list of foreign countries invaded by
US forces has grown to include some 70 nations (not including the “first nations” on what became US
territory itself). Some of these have become metonyms for their eras—Vietnam, Iraq. Most, though, dwell in
Americans’ minds only as flickering features of news cycles from the past. One such is the small Caribbean
nation of Grenada: an island that few Americans knew about before October 1983, when TV screens filled,
for some days that fall, with images of paratroopers dropping between tropical palms.
Grenada is located at the base of the Windward Antilles, about one hundred miles off the coast of Venezuela,
and is famed for its nutmeg. When Ronald Reagan ordered the 82nd Airborne there, he said the choppers
bellowing over its beaches had come to safeguard several hundred American medical students from the civil
unrest that had gripped the island after the apparent implosion, a few days before, of its government. Before
1983, Grenada was best known to West Indians for producing, along with its famous spice, the great calypso
singer Mighty Sparrow. Afterward, it was known for the traumas left by this sad episode of the cold war
whose legacy, for our current political era, is the subject of a welcome new documentary film, The House on
Coco Road, directed by Damani Baker.
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Reagan’s invasion, of course, had more to do with geopolitics than med students. Grenada had until that
month been led by a charismatic and capable socialist, Maurice Bishop, whose admiration for Castro’s
Cuba—and his acceptance of Cuba’s help to build a new airport for his island—bothered the US government.
Reagan claimed that Bishop’s new airport—a project also backed by countries like Britain and Canada, and
whose completion would enable jets carrying needed cargo and tourists to land there—was in fact meant to
turn this tranquil island into “a Cuban-Soviet colony” and “a major military bastion to export terror and
undermine democracy.” US soldiers had rehearsed the invasion for months on the US-Navy-held island of
Vieques. Their actual landing there was quickly and roundly condemned at the UN as illegal, but Reagan was
determined to maintain the Caribbean basin as an “American lake.” Sabotaging Grenada’s experiment at
socialism, which had begun when Bishop’s party seized power in 1979, was an example he needed to make.
Array
A clip from The House on Coco Road, 2016
Invading Grenada worked out pretty well for the Gipper: Reagan won reelection in a landslide a year later,
and would eventually see himself charitably recalled as a victor of the Cold War itself. But in the Caribbean,
the one-sided battle in which US bombs killed dozens of innocents, and buried a political experiment that had
inspired people across the region, is remembered rather differently.
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In his film, Baker examines Grenada’s revolution through a highly personal perspective. Baker’s mother,
Fannie Haughton, was an activist and educator in California who came of political age in the late 1960s amid
the heady rise of the Black Panthers and the birth of university programs in Black Studies. She was a close
confidante and comrade of Angela Davis, who also became, by the early 1980s, a mother concerned about
rising crime in Oakland. After a trip to Grenada, Haughton impulsively decided to move her young family
from the Bay Area to Bishop’s island. When they landed there her son Damani was ten years old. Thirty-four
years later, Baker has made an absorbing film that’s framed as a record of his quest to understand, as an adult,
what happened in Grenada—both in the life of his family and in the broader light of history.
Baker builds his story with grainy home movies of island life, and interviews with his mother and her friends
(including Maurice Bishop’s winning mum). Their stories are supplemented by archival and news footage,
and by Baker’s own narration as he visits sites in Grenada where Bishop’s New Jewel Party thrived. In 1983
Reagan’s bombs arrived to kill, among others, twenty-one patients in a nearby mental hospital. Baker and his
sister took shelter under a bed for three days, until his mom got them off the island on a military plane that
Reagan had sent to rescue those benighted med students in flip-flops.
This is the film’s climax. But to explain it, The House on Coco Road—which takes its title from Baker’s
mother’s childhood home in Louisiana—reaches into the past. Baker recounts how his mother’s parents,
seeking a safe place in which to raise black kids, fled southern racism for California in the 1950s. His
ambition is to connect what happened in Grenada to the saga of African-American struggles for freedom
reaching back to the toil of his sharecropper forebears in Dixie and forward to the Black Lives Matter
movement today. This expansive approach has its hazards, and makes his film as much a personal tribute to
the women who raised him as a historical narrative. But Baker’s intimate approach certainly lends human
force to his rendering of Grenada’s revolution and its catastrophic end.
We see Ronald Reagan building a rhetorical case against the island and then proclaiming, after invading, “We
got there just in time.” His words are jarring alongside footage of nothing more threatening than smiling
people in the sun, a “popular education brigade” teaching peasants to read, and black women hailing Bishop’s
declaration that henceforth in Grenada “equal pay for equal work” would be law. Reagan’s mien is also
strikingly juxtaposed with that of an afro-ed Angela Davis, who is shown smiling in gap-toothed exultation as
she visits Grenada in 1982. But among all of Baker’s revelatory footage, it is perhaps that of the Grenada
revolution’s leader that most impresses.
Sally Davis, Ann Bishop, Alimenta Bishop, and New Jewel movement leader Maurice Bishop, Grenada, 1982
Tall and striking, with an excellent beard, Bishop was an eloquent barrister who favored guayabera shirts and
exuded the confidence of his London education. With his patient smile and light-brown skin, he was Fidel
Castro with humility and Bob Marley without dreadlocks, as loved by Grenada’s peasants as by the academics
and activists who crowded to his speeches in New York. His New Jewel movement (its name was an
acronym: the New Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation) was born in 1974. Its aim was to
fight the corrupted regime of the man who’d become the island’s first president, after the longtime British
colony won its independence.
Eric Gairy was a petty despot who quashed dissent with a secret-police force whose slain victims included
Maurice Bishop’s father. The younger Bishop’s party was at first forcibly repressed by Gairy’s police, then
defeated at the ballot box in a dubious election, before its members took more drastic steps. One morning in
1979, while Gairy was away at the UN, Grenadans awoke to a smooth low voice on their radios: “Brothers
and Sisters, this is Maurice Bishop.” That dawn, a few dozen New Jewel men had peacefully seized control of
the island’s army barracks and its main radio station. “The dictator Gairy is gone,” Bishop intoned. “This
revolution is for work, for food, for decent housing and health.”
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Kathy Sloane/Array
Angela Davis at Carnival Jouvert, Grenada, 1982
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And that—food, housing, health—is what his revolution fought for. A drowsy old sugar island whose slaves’
descendants were now mostly farmers and fisher-folk became vibrant with people crowding revolutionary
rallies to dance and chant slogans that sounded like reggae songs and were affixed to brightly colored signs
around the island: “Forward Ever, Backward Never”; “It takes a revolution, to make a solution”; “Not a
second, without the people.” Their language may have been perfectly suited for V.S. Naipaul to ridicule, in an
incisive but typically ungenerous appraisal of the “revo’s” shtick. But its aims meant rather more to the legion
admirers of his movement, from the West Indies and beyond, who came to celebrate and support it. An early
review of Baker’s film, recently quoted by Ava DuVernay (whose distribution company, Array Now, picked
up Baker’s film) on Twitter, described Grenada in this period as “a functioning paradise for and by black
people.” One of those black people was Damani Baker’s mother. And her personal backstory, which we learn
as the film progresses, becomes important to how she—and her son’s film—narrates the Grenada revolution’s
end.
The basic facts of what happened in Grenada, in the fateful weeks before the US invasion, are clear enough.
That fall, the party’s central committee was struggling under the weight of all the projects their revolution had
taken on, and debating how best to tackle them. Some of its members proposed that responsibility for the
party’s leadership be split between Bishop and his erstwhile deputy, Bernard Coard. Bishop at first agreed.
But then he went on a long-planned trip to Eastern Europe and, upon returning, informed his comrades that he
no longer felt that power-sharing was in their revolution’s interest. They replied, with the help of the party’s
security forces, by placing him under house arrest and announcing that Bernard Coard was now in charge.
Coard, though a devoted party man, was as uncharismatic as Bishop was loved; his wife, Phyllis Coard,
although a prominent New Jewel minister, was also unpopular (perhaps mostly because she was Jamaican). A
rumor spread that the Coards were planning to kill Bishop. Thousands took to the streets. Hundreds marched
on Bishop’s house and succeeded in springing him loose, and bringing him to the island’s old colonial fort
that overlooked St. George’s Bay. But soon soldiers arrived—the army had deposed Coard and declared itself
in charge. Someone gave an order, or didn’t. Either way, Bishop and eight loyal colleagues were lined up
against a wall and shot by men who until a few days before had been under his command. Their bodies were
never found.
This chaotic, violent finale has always been somewhat mysterious. In Grenada and on nearby islands, pedants
and scholars have long been occupied with arguing over and apportioning blame for what happened. (These
debates also occupied a more purely expository documentary about Grenada’s New Jewel years by the
Trinidadian filmmaker Bruce Paddington, called Forward Ever: The Killing of a Revolution.) Baker, for his
part, doesn’t get into these arguments. To him, the basic reason for what happened is clear. And it’s to be
found not in Grenada but in 1969 in Los Angeles, where Angela Davis was fired by then-governor Reagan
because of her membership in the Communist Party.
UCLA was also roiled that year by the killing on campus of two young members of the Black Panther Party
by rival activists. It later emerged that these murders, which threw the Panthers’ local chapters into turmoil,
were at least partly precipitated by COINTELPRO—the FBI’s illegal program to infiltrate and destabilize
subversive groups. Agents had fostered conflict between the Panthers and their rivals by sending fake letters
between them. And Baker, when it comes time to explain Grenada’s tragedy, essentially points to this
example. He spent happy months as a boy playing in the yards of both Bishop and the Coards; he’d known
both as fast friends of his mother. “Why,” he asks, “were two friends who’d built the revolution together now
fighting?” He answers that question with a definition: “‘Destabilization’: to cause a government to be
incapable of function. Done successfully, it can happen without a trace.”
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Kuling Yurman/Array
Damani Baker, director of The House on Coco Road, interviewing Alimenta Bishop, the mother of New
Jewel movement leader Maurice Bishop, Grenada, 1999
The moment reveals how Baker’s intimacy with his story may hinder its recounting. He’s the son of a woman
for whom the word “Grenada” means, above all, “a loss of friends, and the loss of a utopia.” As she reads a
fond letter sent to her from Phyllis Coard in prison (both of the Coards, along with sixteen other people, were
convicted of Bishop’s killing), it seems the possibility of actual discord between her friends is unthinkable.
One understands this, emotionally—and knows, too, that Fannie Haughton is a woman with deep knowledge
of the US government’s capacity for harming those it deems threats. It’s also no doubt true that the US
executed an avid propaganda campaign against Bishop’s government, in the Caribbean and beyond, and that
US agents sought and likely found other ways to unsettle its leadership. But neither of those truths mean that
Grenada’s revolution wasn’t also beset by genuine internal tensions.
Naipaul had a point when he wrote that “the Revolution was a revolution of words”: painting slogans for “the
people” is much easier than actually running their economy—especially when you’ve nationalized important
industries like the nutmeg trade, as Bishop’s government did, with a plan for growth comprised largely of
“making the new man and woman.” The revolution had to work out how to thrive, as its heady hero phase
began to wane, and debates over how to do so weren’t simple. “The leadership had to rock back,” is how
Selwyn Strachan, Bishop’s Minister of Mobilization and Labor at the time, recently explained it to me in
Grenada. “To prioritize, analyze, and rationalize.” It was through those discussions that the party’s central
committee reached a decision to divide the prime minister’s duties with the aim, as Strachan put it, “of
marrying Maurice and Bernard’s respective strengths, and leaving their weaknesses behind.”
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Strachan should know. He was a party stalwart as close to its leaders as anyone: when Bishop returned from
his trip in October 1983, it was Strachan who went to pick up his friend at the airport, and whom Bishop first
informed of his reservations about the power-sharing agreement. Strachan was later convicted for his putative
part in Bishop’s ensuing death, and spent twenty-six years in prison. He’s now a dignified man with a salt-
and-pepper beard who was only released, after years of appeals, in 2009 (Bernard Coard was released the
same year). In 2015, I sat on a porch near the troublesome tarmac that’s now named the Maurice Bishop
International Airport, as he reflected on the missteps and triumphs of a small group of people who—surely
facing huge pressure, not least from a superpower waiting to swoop in as soon as things went wrong—made
errors and had disagreements of a sort quite understandable among people of good will. And Strachan was
never more animated than when he insisted that—despite the pain of his friends’ deaths and despite his own
decades in jail—he had no regrets: “The Revolution is the greatest thing that ever happened to this country.”
His eyes flashed as he recounted how he and his colleagues raised the island’s literacy rate to 99 percent, and
he argued that support for the revolution on his island has never waned. “A black revolution, in the West
Indies. It was earth-shattering.”
The House on Coco Road concurs with this sentiment, and so did the theater in Brooklyn full of rapt and
cheering Grenadans with whom I saw this affecting film. It’s also the sort of movie that you may leave,
especially at this polarized moment, wishing that its director, rather than preaching to a choir, had tried a bit
harder to prove his case to strangers and render this complex story with greater nuance.
But what’s inarguable is the mendacity behind Ronald Reagan’s treatment of this island’s people. And in that
there are warnings for us all as a new performer-turned-president stalks the White House, perhaps hoping for
a war that might boost his own agenda and image—and as he looks, frighteningly, at foes far more formidable
than little Grenada.
The House on Coco Road, directed by Damani Baker, is playing in select theatersand streaming on Netflix.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/26/a-new-view-of-grenadas-revolution/
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Where have all the megasharks gone?
Rocío Pérez Benavente July 17, 2017
We’ve known for decades there was a time when mammoths, saber-tooth cats, and other big mammals
walked the Earth like it was no big deal. We also know that at some point of the Ice Age, a mass extinction
made them disappear, leaving their fossils and their descendants as the only proof of their existence.
Now, we also know that something similar happened in the oceans, once populated by large and very diverse
species of marine mammals and turtles, sharks, and sea birds. According to a new study by researchers at the
University of Zurich, around a third of the marine megafauna that populated our oceans disappeared about
two to three million years ago.
The paper has been published recently in Nature Ecology&Evolution. Based on a new analysis of the fossil
record, researchers established a previously unnoticed extinction event during the Pliocene (5,3 to 2,6 millions
of years ago). This was the beginning of a period of great climate and sea-level oscillations, and during this
time, extinction rates were three times higher than during the rest of the Cenozoic (the whole era that englobes
the Pliocene).
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According to the results, 36% of the Pliocene genera didn’t survive to the next period, the Pleistocene. Not all
kinds of animals suffered the same impact: sea mammals were the most affected since 55% of their diversity
were lost. Alongside with them, 43% of marine turtles, 35% of sea birds and 9% of sharks disappeared too.
On the other hand, new forms of life developed in the next period. Animals like polar bears, some petrels, and
some penguins didn’t exist until after the Pliocene was over. However, researchers estimate that the loss was
greater than the gain and that those diversity levels have not been reached again since then.
To study the consequences of this loss, scientists made groups of species that were not always directly related
but shared some characteristics and played the same role in their ecosystems. They called these groups
functional entities. They found that seven of these functional entities were completely lost in coastal waters
during the Pliocene.
Although it may not seem much (just seven functional entities and a third of the total number of species), the
impact of this loss led to an important series of global changes: 17% of the diversity in sea ecosystems
disappeared and 21% changed somehow. Some of the predators disappeared (although new ones emerged),
and sea level oscillations reduced the space available for these ecosystems.
Although it is not clear what caused this sea mass extinction, researchers explain that those reductions of sea
habitats and sudden climate changes could be the main cause, and that, the same way it happened with out of
sea fauna, big warm-blooded animals were the most vulnerable to those factors.
https://mappingignorance.org/2017/07/17/where-have-all-the-megasharks-
gone/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+%28M
apping+Ignorance%29
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Slug-Inspired Glue Patches Beating Hearts
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | July 27, 2017 02:15pm ET
A new surgical adhesive molded into the shape of the slug that inspired it. The adhesive is made up of
polymers linked by two types of chemical bonds.
Credit: Courtesy of Jianyu Li, Adam D. Celiz and David J. Mooney
A new glue inspired by slug slime can mend a broken heart.
The adhesive, described today (July 27) in a new study in the journal Science, sticks to wet surfaces,
including the surface of a beating heart. It isn't toxic to cells, which gives it an advantage over many surgical
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glues. It's not available in operating rooms just yet — its developers say that could take years — but it could
potentially be approved much more quickly for applications such as closing skin wounds.
The slug-inspired glue is "very stretchy and very tough," said Jianyu Li, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard
University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the lead author of the study. Li and his
colleagues applied the adhesive to a blood-soaked, beating pig heart and found that it worked better than any
other surgical glue on the market.
Inspired by nature
The inspiration for the glue came from Arion subfuscus, a large and slimy species of slug found in North
America and western Europe. These slugs excrete a sticky, yellow-orange slime that adheres well to wet
surfaces. [7 Cool Technologies Inspired by Nature]
That characteristic intrigued Li and his colleagues, and they set to work making an artificial version of the
slime. The key, Li told Live Science, is that the slime is made up of long, straight chains of molecules called
polymers, which are also bound to each other — a phenomenon called cross-linking. Cross-linking makes
materials strong, but the slug slime has the added advantage of having two types of cross-link bonds. Some
were covalent bonds, which means they hold molecules together by sharing electrons. Others were ionic
bonds, meaning one molecule hands over its electrons to another. These "hybridized" cross-links make
the slug mucus both tough and stretchy, Li said.
The team mimicked this structure using artificial polymers layered onto what they called a "dissipative
matrix." The polymers provide the sticking power, Li explained, while the dissipative-matrix layer acts like a
shock absorber: It can stretch and deform without rupturing.
Patching wounds
To test the glue, the researchers applied it to pig skin, cartilage, arteries, liver tissue and hearts — including
hearts that were inflated with water or air and covered in blood. The material proved extremely stretchable,
expanding 14 times its original length without ever breaking loose from the liver tissue. When used to patch a
hole in a pig heart, the adhesive maintained its seal even when it was stretched to twice its original length tens
of thousands of times, at pressures exceeding normal human blood pressure.
The researchers even applied the adhesive to the beating heart of a real pig and found that the adhesion to the
dancing, bloody surface was about eight times as strong as the adhesion of any commercially available
surgical glue.
192
A pig's heart patched with a new adhesive inspired by slug slime. The adhesive is both tough and flexible, and
can adhere to wet, moving tissue, like heart muscle.
Credit: Courtesy of Jianyu Li, Adam D. Celiz and David J. Mooney
The glue was also tested in a living rat: The researchers simulated an emergency surgery by slicing the rats'
liver tissue and then patching the wound with either the glue or a standard blood-staunching product called
Surgiflo. They found that the new adhesive was as good at stopping the blood flow as the standard glue; the
rats treated with the new glue experienced no additional hemorrhaging up to two weeks after the surgery. The
Surgiflo-treated rats, however, sometimes suffered from tissue death and scar tissue, the researchers reported.
The rats treated with the slime-inspired glue did not experience these side effects.
Whether the new glue makes it to the operating room depends on much more extensive clinical testing, Li
said, but the adhesive could make its debut as a new method of dressing external wounds on a shorter timeline
than that.
"We have a company working on trying to push our material to clinical applications, and we have a patent
pending," Li said.
Originally published on Live Science.
https://www.livescience.com/59959-slug-slime-glue-patches-pig-hearts.html
193
Testosterone and bad judgments
José Ramón Alonso July 24, 2017
Testosterone is the primary male sex hormone and, in men, it plays a key role in the development of male
reproductive tissues such as the testis and prostate, as well as promoting secondary sexual characteristics such
as increased muscle and bone mass, and the growth of body hair. Testosterone increases in heterosexual men
after having had a brief conversation with a woman or watching a sexually explicit movie. It plays a major
role in different behaviors and higher levels of testosterone are linked to extramarital sex, risk-taking during
financial decisions, aggression and criminality.
Recently there has been a huge increase in the number of people who are taking testosterone supplements. In
the United States from 2001 through 2011, androgen use among men 40 years or older increased more than 3-
fold, from 0.81% in 2001 to 2.91% in 2011. The increase was seen in all age groups. Common diagnoses in
the year prior to testosterone therapy initiation were hypogonadism (50.58%), fatigue (34.49%), erectile
dysfunction (31.88%), and psychosexual dysfunction (11.75%) 1. This upward trend has not stopped and in
the last four years, the number of prescriptions for this hormone has gone from 1.3 million to 2.3 million.
Hypogonadism or low-T is a real disorder which manifests itself in fatigue and a drop in sexual desire and is
more common with age but among all new androgen users (2001-2011), one-in-four had not had their
testosterone level measured in the prior 12 months, and it is unclear how many of those tested showed
abnormal levels of testosterone. Apparently many men and their physicians are interpreting what is a normal
process of maturity as a pathological disorder and a recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine has
found that half of those men who are taking testosterone do not have a hormone deficit but simply they feel
tired and look for something that elevates their mood and sexual desire 2.
194
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Common side effects from testosterone medication include acne, swelling, and breast enlargement in males.
Serious side effects may include liver toxicity, heart disease, and behavioral changes: one of them is that those
men taking testosterone supplements make more impulsive and often taking wrong decisions. The time we
associate with risky and often irrational decisions is youth. Over the years, our judgment is more rational and
our decisions become more prudent and realistic. That process fits well with testosterone levels: total
testosterone levels drop by around 1.6% each year and bioavailable testosterone levels decrease by 2% to 3%
each year. 3 Therefore, it is important to value the patient as a whole and not just testosterone numbers: serum
testosterone levels of 220 ng / dL in a 45-year-old patient have a very different interpretation if the patient is
75 years old 4.
Men tend to have more confidence in our decisions and value our intelligence more positively than women.
That hubris may be tied to testosterone levels and Gideon Nave, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of
Pennsylvania, and Amos Nadler of Western University in Ontario have seen that people with elevated levels
of testosterone have more difficulty seeing faults in their own reasoning 5.
The key brain area appears to be the orbitofrontal cortex. This region of the brain, located just behind our
eyes, is responsible for such things as self-assessment, decision-making and impulse control. People with high
testosterone levels show less activity in the orbitofrontal cortex 6, which explains why people with high
testosterone production, have less self-control, are easily convinced that they are right, are much less critical
of their actions and their intelligence and, in general, are delighted with themselves and have a much better
self-image than any objective analysis gives.
In a classic study conducted at the University of Wisconsin, students were asked to rate their confidence on
each question on a score scale (1 was to answer practically at random and 5 to be very sure that they were
answering correctly). Both men and women scored very high when they answered correctly but have different
behavior in the wrong questions. Women tended to acknowledge their doubts, their lack of confidence in the
accuracy of the answers, but in the case of men it was not the case, most marked “certain” or “very certain”
although they were wrong and showed as much confidence in their poor responses as in the good ones. Men
are also more likely to overestimate how well they’ll perform compared to their peers. No one likes to think
we are average. But compared to women, men tend to think that we are much better than average.
Testosterone affects women as well. Most testosterone researchers study men, for obvious reasons, but Dr.
Nicholas Wright, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham in Britain, and his team focus on women.
They asked women to perform a challenging perceptual task: detecting where a fuzzy pattern had appeared on
a busy computer screen. When women took oral testosterone, they were more likely to ignore the input of
others, compared with women in the placebo condition. Amped up on testosterone, they relied more heavily
on their own judgment, even when they were wrong. Testosterone causally disrupted collaborative decision-
making in a perceptual decision task, markedly reducing performance benefit individuals accrued from
collaboration while leaving individual decision-making ability unaffected. This effect emerged because
testosterone engendered more egocentric choices, manifest in an overweighting of one’s own relative to
others’ judgments during joint decision-making.
Testosterone also plays a role in the financial market. Gideon Nave works at the Wharton School, the business
school of the University of Pennsylvania, and uses a medley of quantitative and experimental methods from
the fields of Computational Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Game Theory and Machine Learning for
reverse-engineering the decision-making process in humans. In a previous study with 243 volunteers, the
research team had half applied a gel with testosterone and the other a placebo gel and showed that men with
testosterone treatment did not show changes in their mood but in their ability to analyze and judge. They
196
were, on average, 35% more likely to make an intuitive mistake in a tricky question. They also made the
wrong decision faster than men with normal levels of testosterone and took more time to give a correct
answer. A team of neuroeconomists, led by Dr. Nadler, along with Paul J. Zak at Claremont Graduate
University, gave 140 male traders either testosterone gel or a placebo. Twenty-four hours later, the traders
came back into the lab and participated in an asset trading simulation. The results were disturbing. Men with
boosted testosterone significantly overpriced assets compared with men who got the placebo, and they were
slower to incorporate data about falling values into their trading decisions. They became outwardly riskier
within their trade patterns, chancing potentially unsuccessful transactions and not appearing to consider
implications of failure. The subjects who received dosages of testosterone were instead observed to behave
with a heightened sense of optimism, gambling on stocks and trades with a newfound, but unfounded, belief
that they were ‘sure things’. In other words, they created a trading bubble that was slow to pop. Maybe we
should control testosterone-increasing events for our economy’s sake!
These results should be taken with caution. Most studies are done in college students, in their early 20s and it
is not certain that an increase in testosterone affects the judgment in the same way in older people. On the
other hand, they are obviously mean values and it does not imply that all men make bad decisions because of
testosterone or that all men make worse decisions than women. Being able to make decisions is a good thing
and feel confident encourages to decide and to act, the problem is that if the path leads to an overconfidence
and testosterone can incite in that process.
Ironically, testosterone can make someone feel bold enough to lead a group but at the same time reduces his
ability to lead well. Perhaps primitive societies, where prestige was achieved in hunting or in war but was
exercised later, in maturity or old age, managed to combine the best of both worlds. So the problem is that the
ads for testosterone treatments that say they will make you feel like when you were twenty years old do not
tell you the second part: you will become as brainless as you were then.
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References
1. Baillargeon J, Urban RJ, Ottenbacher KJ, Pierson KS, Goodwin JS (2013) Trends in Androgen
Prescribing in the United States, 2001 to 2011. JAMA Intern Med 173(15): 1465-1466. ↩
2. Huston T (2017) Men Can Be So Hormonal. The New York Times June 24. ↩
3. Akturk HK, Nippoldt TB (2016) Low testosterone in men should be a sign rather than a number to
increase: a teachable moment. JAMA Intern Med 176 (12): 1743-1744. ↩
4. Loughlin KR (2017) Implications and Interpretations of Differences in Age-Adjusted Testosterone

Levels. JAMA Intern Med 177(5): 744. doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2017.0574 ↩
5. Nave G, Nadler A, Zava D, Camerer C (2017) Single dose testosterone impairs cognitive reflection
in men. Psychol Sci (in press). ↩
6. Mehta PH, Beer J (2009) Neural Mechanisms of the Testosterone–Aggression Relation: The Role of
Orbitofrontal Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22(10): 2357–2368. ↩
written by
José Ramón Alonso
José R. Alonso has a PhD in Neurobiology and is professor of Cell Biology at the University of Salamanca.
He has been researcher and visiting professor at the University of Frankfurt/Main and the University of Kiel,
in Germany, and the University of California, Davis and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in the
United States. He has authored more than 145 articles in peer-reviewed journals and written 20 books
including university textbooks and popular science for both adults and children.
 Website:http://jralonso.es/
 Twitter:@jralonso3
https://mappingignorance.org/2017/07/24/testosterone-bad-
judgments/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MappingIgnorance+
%28Mapping+Ignorance%29
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Heavier Rainfall Will Increase Water Pollution in the Future
Researchers anticipate harmful nitrogen outputs to increase as a result of precipitation changes.
Phytoplankton bloom off the U.S. Atlantic coast in August 2015, thanks to nutrient runoff.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSHUA STEVENS, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY
By Casey Smith
PUBLISHED JULY 27, 2017
If climate change continues to progress, increased precipitation could mean detrimental outcomes for water
quality in the United States, a major new study warns.
An intensifying water cycle can substantially overload waterways with excess nitrogen runoff—which could
near 20 percent by 2100—and increase the likelihood of events that severely impair water quality, according
to a new study published by Science.
When rainfall washes nitrogen and phosphorus from human activities like agriculture and fossil fuel
combustion into rivers and lakes, those waterways are overloaded with nutrients, and a phenomenon called
"eutrophication” occurs.
This can be dangerous for both people and animals. Toxic algal blooms can develop, as well as harmful low-
oxygen dead zones known as hypoxia, which can cause negative impacts on human health, aquatic
ecosystems, and the economy. Notable dead zones include those in the Gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay,
and around Florida.
In the new study, researchers predict how climate change might increase eutrophication and threats to water
resources by using projections from 21 different climate models, each of which was run for three climate
scenarios and two different time periods (near future, 2031-2060, and far-future, 2071-2100).
Previous models have consistently estimated that nitrogen loading will increase under all three scenarios and
for both time periods. But under a far-future “business-as-usual” scenario, meaning a situation in which
current warming rates continue into the future, the projected increase in nitrogen loading within the
continental United States is highest.
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Under these conditions, the study states that changes in the climate would alter precipitation patterns in the
U.S. and increase nutrient pollution by one-fifth by the end of the century, with the strongest impacts
occurring in the Corn Belt and in the Northeast.
Although some argue that the business-as-usual isn’t likely, Anna Michalak, a researcher at the Carnegie
Institution for Science and co-author of the study, says it’s not as unrealistic as it might seem.
“If we look at the trajectory we’re currently on, it looks very much like the business-as-usual scenario,”
Michalak says. “I would love for that to be unrealistic and for that pathway to be wrong, but it’s not
unrealistic to think that unless we start getting much more serious about mitigating and managing climate
change, this is the path we are essentially on.”
By increasing efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow down the progression of climate change, these
situations could avoided, however.
CLEANING UP THE MESS?
An increase in precipitation is an expected outcome of climate change, and other scientists have recently
reported that a warming atmosphere will hold more water and produce much heavier rains over the course of
the century.
"Future climate projections are showing an overall drying of the U.S. Southwest and a wetting in the rest of
the country, with some seasonal differences," says Andreas Prein, a scientist at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research.
More rainfall from extreme events is expected in the future climate, Prein added, meaning that extreme
precipitation is expected to increase, even in some regions that show a drying trend on average.
Still, preventing the resulting increases in excess nitrogen runoff is a major task. Researchers report that a
one-third reduction in overall nitrogen input such as fertilizer use would be necessary, and management in the
affected regions alone will not be enough.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency currently recommends reducing nitrogen input in the Mississippi
Atchafalaya River Basin by 20 percent relative to 1980-1996 levels to mitigate the negative effects of
nitrogen that flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
However, with the estimated changes in precipitation, a 62 percent reduction in nitrogen input would be
required to achieve a similar objective.
This could be a problem for communities across the country in the future where it’s critical to start thinking
about updating their infrastructure to deal with a future uptick in extreme storms.
“In developing water quality management strategies, we need to be accounting for the fact that precipitation is
going to change and that water quality is not only a local issue,” Michalak says. “We need to take a step back
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and realize that what we see in our backyards in terms of water quality is human action locally, regionally,
and globally.”
GLOBAL IMPACT
Although the researchers’ model is specific to the U.S., other heavily affected areas were also identified in the
study, including India, China, and Southeast Asia. Because these regions are fast developing with continually
growing populations, they have higher risk for large increases in nitrogen pollution due to increased
precipitation.
Michalak said large population centers around the world are already displaying evidence of hypoxic dead
zones and harmful algae blooms.
It’s a global issue, she said, and by using the new analysis of the U.S., researchers are opening a window to
look at other parts of the world where high precipitation is expected to increase even more, and where
nitrogen application is high.
“Water serves a lot of purposes, and even if you don’t live near the water, it does affect you, the things you
eat and the way you live,” Michalak says. “It’s very, very crucial to understand that water sustainability is not
just about having enough water, but it’s also about whether that water can be used by people and animals in
safe, healthy ways.”
Follow Casey Smith on Twitter.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/water-quality-hypoxia-environment-rain-
precipitation-climate-change/
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Tenants Under Siege: Inside New York City’s Housing Crisis 3

Eyes on the Stars 19

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Each that we lose takes part of us;

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Cincinnati Art Museum

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