Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jeff Weintraub explains.

Tina Rosenberg and David Bornstein relay the story of reliable transportation and maintenance, and how it can save lives:

Until 2008 [health assistant Tsepo] Kotelo could visit only three villages a week, because he had to reach them on foot, walking for miles and miles. But in February of that year, Kotelo got a motorcycle – the best vehicle for reaching rural villages in Africa, most of which are nowhere near a real road. Just as crucial, he was given the tools to keep the bike on the road: he received a helmet and protective clothing, he was taught to ride and trained to start each day with a quick check of the bike. His motorcycle is also tuned up monthly by a technician who comes to him.

Now, instead of spending his days walking to his job, he can do his job. Instead of visiting three villages each week, he visits 20. Where else can you find a low-tech investment in health care that increases patient coverage by nearly 600 percent? …

[Riders For Health] dramatizes the importance of paying attention to the scruffy and mundane parts of a system, especially delivery. Businesses understand this.  If Federal Express didn’t maintain its trucks, it would go bankrupt.  The same applies to social interventions.

My old friend Douglas Coupland has adapted his Predictions for the Next Decade for the NPR audience:

In the future, we'll try to live near a subway entrance. In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it's the only real estate that's going to hold its value, if not increase.

In the same way, you can never go backward to a slower computer. You can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness. Enjoy lettuce while you still can, anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it was they served in railway hotels back in the 1890s: jams, preserves, pickled everything.

In a roundup of some of the more disturbing prison statistics out there, Joe Windish quotes from Michelle Alexander's new book, The New Jim Crow:

There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

"Balm," by Virginia Woodward Cloud first appeared in 1902:

After the heat the dew,
    and the tender touch of twilight;
The unfolding of the few
    Calm stars.
After the heat the dew.

After the Sun the shade,
    and beatitude of shadow;
Dim aisles for memory made,
    And thought.
After the Sun the shade.

After all there is balm;
    from the wings of dark there is wafture
Of sleep, — night’s infinite psalm, —
    And dreams.
After all there is balm.

Simon Schama assesses taxidermy in British art over time:

While the bestiary has long been close to the heart of British modernism, its obsessions have generally been not horsey but sheepish and cow-eyed, with an ironic yen for exploring the weird connection between butchery, sacrifice and salvation enshrined in Christian iconography.

Damien Hirst’s “Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain” (2007), for example, with its bovine, arrow-pierced martyrdom, has all kinds of precedents, not just in the multiple piercings of Piero del Pollaiuolo’s 15th-century Sebastian but also in Rembrandt’s “Flayed Ox” of the 1650s, the latter a meaty martyrdom for the Calvinists, the carcase strung out on its wooden cross like an even more animal version of the younger Rembrandt’s Passion paintings with their tragically beastly torment and howling.

“There is a kind of tragedy about all those pieces,” Hirst has said of his bisected and formaldehyded animals, and, however laconic he comes across, almost all of his strongest work taps into that most forgotten but deepest strain in British culture – its ancient perfervid religiosity.

(Image from an old Hirst exhibition)

Eileen Reynolds reviews Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers, by Deborah Cadbury:

The story she tells is really about Quakers, and about one family’s continuous struggle to reconcile religious values—pacifism, austerity, sobriety—with the indulgent nature of their product and the ruthlessly competitive capitalism of the world in which they made their fortune.

John Cadbury, who founded a tea-and-coffee shop in Birmingham in 1824, practiced a brand of “Quaker capitalism” that valued hard work and “wealth creation for the benefit of the workers, the local community, and society at large,” rather than large profits only for the entrepreneurs themselves. Debt was seen as shameful, advertising as dishonest. His descendants came to create a thriving chocolate empire—but not without confronting challenges to their values.

John Scalzi contemplates all the things he doesn't have to think about today.

 Adam Kirsch reviews Robert Alter's translation of The Wisdom Books, "new renderings of the books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes—possibly the most challenging and perplexing works in all of Scripture":

[T]hey are also the Biblical books that speak most directly to the modern, skeptical, secular reader. If the Torah is revelation—an ostensibly factual account of God’s actions and commandments—the Wisdom Books are a kind of counter-revelation: an emphatically human expression of the impossibility of knowing God or believing in His justice.