Year: 2013

You can destroy homes, but you can’t destroy the spirit that lives on. #Syria pic.twitter.com/U1sJl0ZI5f

— AlAwa (@HebaAlAwa) September 27, 2013

Shaj Mathew considers the work of renowned Syrian poet Adunis and its connection to the nation’s ongoing bloodbath:

Although Adunis, who has lived in exile in Paris since the 1980s, may not be inclined to opine further on this conflict, his oeuvre contains a rich array of political poetry for those dissatisfied with his current silence. In particular, his 1963 poem “The Homeland,” translated into English by M.M. Badawi in the 1971 Journal of Arabic Literature, seems particularly apposite today. Throughout the poem, Adunis variously describes his homeland as a father, a stone, a house, a child, faces, and the streets: “all of these are my homeland, not Damascus,” Adunis writes.

At its core, “The Homeland” is a lament for Syrians and an acknowledgement of their sufferings, one that sadly still rings true some fifty years after its initial publication. “To the father who died, green as a cloud/ With a sail on his face, I bow,” Adunis writes. These lines, with their wonderful simile, “green as a cloud,” capture the wartime fates of so many who died too young, with so much potential lost, the direction of their lives halted. An acidly sarcastic parenthetical aside—“(in our land we all pray and clean shoes)”—briefly interrupts the poem’s elegiac tone and warns against orientalist stereotypes. But Adunis waxes melancholic again in the poem’s final lines as he attempts to preserve the “dust” of a former home, his memories of hardship.

Meanwhile, a new wave of raw, vulnerable poetry is pouring out of the warn-torn nation:

Rather than relying on metaphors and allegorical images, these new poems rely on literal, visceral descriptions, with a newfound emphasis on a united Syrian identity instead of religious symbols. For instance, a poem she translated by Najat Abdul Samad, called “When I am overcome by weakness”, reads:

“I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy / they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood. / Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration… / I bandage it with the outcry: ‘Death and not humiliation.’”

Another by Youssef Bou Yihea titled “I am a Syrian”, declares: “My sect is the scent of my homeland, the soil after the rain, and my Syria is my only religion.”

“A lot of poetry and beautiful lyrics are rising up from the ashes in Syria,” says expatriate Syrian writer Ghias al-Jundi, who is responsible for PEN International’s research on attacks against free expression in the Middle East. “There is a cultural side to the revolution, and it’s brilliant.”

Alex Ross laments the dismal representation of female conductors in the world of concert music:

The problem is not that there is any lack of female conductors—the journalist and blogger Jessica Duchen has drawn up a list of nearly a hundred of them—but that there is “one heck of a glass ceiling regarding where they work,” as Duchen says. …

In 2008, in a column about [female conductor Marin] Alsop, I wrote, “The problem isn’t that misogyny runs rampant in the music world; it’s that the classical business is temperamentally resistant to novelty, whether in the form of female conductors, American conductors, younger conductors, new music, post-1900 concert dress, or concert-hall color schemes that aren’t corporate beige.” I was naïve about the degree to which male-chauvinist attitudes persist. Shortly before Alsop’s Last Night appearance, the young Russian-born conductor Vasily Petrenko, who leads the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the Oslo Philharmonic, declared that orchestras “react better” to male conductors and that “a sweet girl on the podium can make one’s thoughts drift towards something else.”

Ross translates an interview with conductor Yuri Temirkanov, music director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic:

Q.: In your opinion, could a woman conduct?

A.: In my view, no.

Q.: Why not?!

A.: I don’t know if it’s God’s will, or nature’s, that women give birth and men do not. That’s something that no one takes offense at. But if you say that a women can’t conduct, then everyone’s offended. As Marx said, in response to the question “What’s your favorite virtue in a woman?”—“Weakness.” And this is correct. The important thing is, a woman should be beautiful, likable, attractive. Musicians will look at her and be distracted from the music!

Q.: Why? There are women in the orchestra; people indifferent to a women’s charms. Besides, how many times would you be enraptured by appearances? After all, it’s something you tire of, and switch to the heart of the question. Statistically, of course, there are women conductors.

A.: Yes, they do exist.

Q.: Nevertheless, you maintain that these are less than women, or less than conductors.

A.: No, simply that in my opinion, it’s counter to nature.

Q.: And what is it in the conductor’s profession that runs counter to a woman’s nature? That’s counter to the essence of the conductor’s profession?

A.: The essence of the conductor’s profession is strength. The essence of a woman is weakness.

(Video: A 2007 interview with Marin Alsop, the first female conductor of a major American orchestra)

The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) has released a new report that indicates the ocean’s “role as Earth’s ‘buffer’ is seriously compromised”:

A “deadly trio” of warming, deoxygenation and increased acidification combined, the report found, are posing an even greater threat to the oceans than they would alone.

While the carbon absorbed from the atmosphere promotes increased warming and acidification, pollution from sewage and fertilizer is creating algae blooms that decrease the oceans’ levels of oxygen. The report found that overfishing, too, threatens marine life.

The acidification, specifically, is “unprecedented in the Earth’s known history,” says the report, which found that the oceans are more acidic now than they’ve been for the past 300 million years. And carbon is being released into the ocean at a rate 10 times more quickly than the last time there was a major collapse of ocean species, 55 million years ago. As a result, the authors write, they have reason to believe that “the next mass extinction may have already begun.”

“It’s a lot to process,” sighs Lex Berko:

While we already knew some elements of this report—that oceans are acidic, that temperatures are rising, that dead zones are becoming more common—the power of IPSO’s research is that it shows to what degree acidity, warming, and deoxygenation are effecting the ocean. Its bleak conclusions mirror those from the IPCC report of last week. If this indeed represents the current condition of our oceans, then we need to recalibrate our perspectives and realize that “the future of humanity and the future of the ocean are intertwined.”

Lisa Hix highlights a key part of the violent history of guns in the American Old West:

“The gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which is a very well-known event, was something that had social, political, cultural ramifications,” [museum curator Jeffrey] Richardson says. “You had two sides. One was Northern Republicans; one was Southern Democrats. They had conflicting mining interest, and there was a love triangle. All of these things led up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The actual shootout, which lasted 30 seconds, was ostensibly over gun control: The Earp faction, which was representing law and order, asked the cowboys to disarm as they were making their way into town at Tombstone. Well, the cowboys did not do so, and that ostensibly led to the fight.”

That’s right, the West had gun control. In the early days, the West was largely populated with rowdy young men working as miners or cowboys. But as more families flooded into the West, people started to be concerned about safety. Starting in the 1880s, many Westerners towns started to post gun-control ordinances that required anyone coming into town to check their guns at the local law-enforcement office or the hotel. “As they became civilized and people brought their wives and families out, they didn’t want a lot of gunplay,” [True West editor Bob Boze] Bell says.

In Back to Normal, psychologist Enrico Gnaulati considers the over-diagnosis of conditions like ADHD, biopolar disorder, and autism spectrum disorders. Amanda Schaffer finds some of his arguments “compelling” but sees in Gnaulati “a tendency to reach beyond the evidence”:

In particular, he resurrects an old evolutionary claim, popularized in the 1990s. The idea is that “A.D.H.D. traits such as distractibility, impulsivity and aggressiveness,” which today can be maladaptive, helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. “Restlessness, constant visual scanning, and being amped up for quick and aggressive action happen to be attributes of fine hunters,” Gnaulati writes. “If Ritalin had been around 150,000 years ago and taken in mass quantities, our survival as a species might have been uncertain.”

Well, maybe. Speculating about what life might have been like for our ancestors, what traits aided their survival and whether the genetic underpinnings of those traits remain in tact today is a dicey proposition.

Gnaulati does cite one study of Kenyan men, some of whom have a particular genetic variant associated with A.D.H.D. Among the men who were nomadic, having this variant was linked to being “more physically nourished.” Among the men who were recently settled, the reverse was true, which Gnaulati interprets to mean: “A.D.H.D. actuality gives you a leg up under nomadic conditions when you have to forage and hunt but acts as a hindrance when you have to slow down and plow the soil.” The gene variant in question, however, is only weakly linked to A.D.H.D. In fact, most people with this variant do not have the disorder, according to Joel Nigg of Oregon Health and Science University. That makes it tough to generalize about A.D.H.D. based on these men.

Also, as far as common sense goes, doesn’t hunting actually require patience, planning and self-control? Would you trust the survival of the species to an A.D.H.D. kid armed with a spear?

Fisher flags a new study that ranks America “eighth in the world for the wellbeing of the elderly.” Why America scores so high:

[E]ducation and employment opportunities for elderly Americans are some of the best in the world. Actually, second-best, behind only Norway. As the report explains, “Older people value their capacity to work” because they “wish to maintain social contacts and self-worth” as well as remain self-sufficient. In most countries, people start getting locked out of the labor market once they get older. The United States is unusual in that the elderly face less age discrimination and have an easier time getting the education and skills to remain competent members of the workforce. That’s not just good because it means they can work if they want to, but because it allows them to be active and self-sufficient, which go a long way toward promoting health and happiness.

Paradoxically, this may also partly be a product of the United States’s relatively weak social safety net; the report finds that elderly in the United States have “the lowest levels of dependency on public transfers” of wealth in the world.