Thursdays are always long; here are some links to make this one go more quickly. Maybe.
Moby-Dick as a warning that we have failed to heed:
Nearly two centuries ago, Melville showed us how easy it is to welcome as our own the touches of others, their equivalent colors, customs and beliefs; their journeys, their transitions. And to remember those who, unwelcomed, suffered. How much could have been avoided, and embraced, had we heeded.
Melville feverishly scribbled a diagnosis, prognosis and prescription for the human condition. We are all Ishmael the ingénue and Starbuck the pragmatist and Ahab the maniac, stuck on a ship driven by winds we cannot predict, helmed by a mind not fully comprehensible, whose compulsions we don’t control. The world is an elusive whale; we might choose coexistence or destruction. And though we do not decide the outcome, the hands on those oars are ours; each stroke invites consequences. And lest we overlook the obvious: The men went equipped to do harm in their quest for — oil. If we are all Ishmael and Starbuck and Ahab, caught in our collective addiction, the whales exemplify a counterculture, a way of living weightlessly, of not draining the world that floats them.
(Also: an online reading of all of Melville’s masterpiece.)
Australian aborigines may have used beeswax stencils to create the astonishingly crisp artwork they produced.
An interesting argument for the “radically inclusive” nature of free jazz as developed by Ornette Coleman. I’m not wholly convinced I will enjoy it as much as other forms of jazz, which perhaps ask less of me; but it’s worth reading, if you like jazz at all. As you should.
Bruno Latour on the pandemic:
Covid has given us a model of contamination. It has shown how quickly something can become global just by going from one mouth to another. That’s an incredible demonstration of network theory. I’ve been trying to persuade sociologists of this for 40 years. I’m sorry to have been so right. It shows that we must not think of the personal and the collective as two distinct levels. The big climate questions can make individuals feel small and impotent. But the virus gives us a lesson. If you spread from one mouth to another, you can viralise the world very fast. That knowledge can re-empower us.
Good podcast interview by Ezra Klein of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Notice the discussion of the "neighbor strategy."
Here's a story about a guy who went into a silent retreat in mid-March, entirely cut off from the outside world, and just came out, 75 days later, to a fairly different world. Amazing.
Cool piece about using DNA to piece together fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A lot of interesting stuff in here, just consider this: Prof. Mizrahi further explains,
Since late antiquity, there has been almost complete uniformity of the biblical text. A Torah scroll in a synagogue in Kiev would be virtually identical to one in Sydney, down to the letter. By contrast, in Qumran we find in the very same cave different versions of the same book. But, in each case, one must ask: Is the textual 'pluriformity,' as we call it, yet another peculiar characteristic of the sectarian group whose writings were found in the Qumran caves? Or does it reflect a broader feature, shared by the rest of Jewish society of the period? The ancient DNA proves that two copies of Jeremiah, textually different from each other, were brought from outside the Judean Desert. This fact suggests that the concept of scriptural authority -- emanating from the perception of biblical texts as a record of the Divine Word -- was different in this period from that which dominated after the destruction of the Second Temple. In the formative age of classical Judaism and nascent Christianity, the polemic between Jewish sects and movements was focused on the 'correct' interpretation of the text, not its wording or exact linguistic form.
And this piece about using radiocarbon dating to help pinpoint the construction time of some of the oldest bits of the Temple Mount.
I missed this review when it came out last year—and I didn’t realize the volume, collecting her notes (or “fragments”) for the book she long thought about writing on Marx and politics, had finally been published.
Nice piece about Wallace Stegner, a great writer of the American West. It doesn’t deny the limits of Stegner’s vision, but it reminds us of his value at the same time.
How did the Caribbean get populated by humans? This study suggests something of how.