Thursday, December 4, 2014
Shell 'Art' Made 300,000 Years Before Humans Evolved
We will never know what was going on inside its maker's head, but the tidy, purposeful line (pictured above right) has opened a new window into the origins of our modern creative mind.
It was found etched into the shell of a fossilised freshwater clam, and is around half a million years old – making the line by far the oldest engraving ever found. The date also means it was made two to three hundred thousand years before our own species evolved, by a more ancient hominin, Homo erectus.
"It is a fascinating discovery," says Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. "The earliest abstract decoration in the world is really big news."
The shell was dug up in Trinil, Indonesia, in the 1890s by Dutch geologist Eugene Dubois, and was one of many fossil finds in the area, including bones of Homo erectus and several animals.
The shell collection sat in a museum in Leiden, the Netherlands, for over a century. Seven years ago, PhD student Stephen Munro, now at the Australian National University in Canberra, was in the country for a few days and stayed with archaeologist Josephine Joordens of the University of Leiden. She was re-exploring the Dubois collection at the time, and as Munro was also studying ancient molluscs, Joordens encouraged him to take a look. Pressed for time, he photographed each one before heading back to Australia.
"A week later I received an email," Joordens recalls. "He wrote that there was something strange on one of the shells and did I know what it was?"
by Catherine Brahic, New Scientist | Read more:
Image: uncredited
How Exxon Helped Make Iraqi Kurdistan
[ed. Spreading freedom throughout the Middle-East, one oil field at a time.]
In January 2011, Exxon hired one of the best connected men in Iraq: Ali Khedery, an American of Iraqi descent who had served in Baghdad as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and a senior adviser to three U.S. generals.
At a meeting with Exxon a few months later to analyze Iraq's future, Khedery laid out his thoughts.
Iraq under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was moving toward dictatorship and civil war, he said he told the session. "We will see a rise in violence and a total paralysis in Baghdad," he recalled saying. Iraq was likely to align itself more closely with Iran, which will "have an adverse impact on U.S. companies."
The gloomy scenario grabbed the attention of Exxon executives. Just two years earlier, they had signed a $25 billion deal with Iraq to develop West Qurna, one of the largest oil fields in the country.
"No one wanted to hear that they had negotiated a multi-billion dollar deal in a country which will soon implode," said Khedery, who has detailed to Reuters the meeting and subsequent events for the first time.
He suggested an alternative: Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq that was politically stable, far from the chaos in the south, and had, by some estimates, oil reserves of 45 billion barrels.
Less than a year later, Exxon signed a deal with Kurdistan. The story of how that happened explains much about the would-be nation's growing power.
In January 2011, Exxon hired one of the best connected men in Iraq: Ali Khedery, an American of Iraqi descent who had served in Baghdad as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and a senior adviser to three U.S. generals.
At a meeting with Exxon a few months later to analyze Iraq's future, Khedery laid out his thoughts.Iraq under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was moving toward dictatorship and civil war, he said he told the session. "We will see a rise in violence and a total paralysis in Baghdad," he recalled saying. Iraq was likely to align itself more closely with Iran, which will "have an adverse impact on U.S. companies."
The gloomy scenario grabbed the attention of Exxon executives. Just two years earlier, they had signed a $25 billion deal with Iraq to develop West Qurna, one of the largest oil fields in the country.
"No one wanted to hear that they had negotiated a multi-billion dollar deal in a country which will soon implode," said Khedery, who has detailed to Reuters the meeting and subsequent events for the first time.
He suggested an alternative: Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq that was politically stable, far from the chaos in the south, and had, by some estimates, oil reserves of 45 billion barrels.
Less than a year later, Exxon signed a deal with Kurdistan. The story of how that happened explains much about the would-be nation's growing power.
Interviews with key players in the secret 2011 negotiations - the talks involved not just Exxon but also fellow Western oil giant Royal Dutch Shell - show how Exxon's decision to invest infuriated both Washington and Baghdad, and helped propel Kurdistan closer to its long-held goal of independence.
Kurds like to say they are the world's largest ethnic group without a state. Numbering some 35 million, they inhabit a band that stretches from Syria across southern Turkey and northern Iraq and into Iran. Most follow Sunni Islam and speak their own distinct languages.
The Exxon deal fueled Kurdish self-belief. The presence of the biggest U.S. oil company has helped not just financially but also politically and even psychologically.
Kurds like to say they are the world's largest ethnic group without a state. Numbering some 35 million, they inhabit a band that stretches from Syria across southern Turkey and northern Iraq and into Iran. Most follow Sunni Islam and speak their own distinct languages.
The Exxon deal fueled Kurdish self-belief. The presence of the biggest U.S. oil company has helped not just financially but also politically and even psychologically.
by Dmitry Zhdannikov, Isabel Coles and Ned Parker, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Reuters/Brendan Smialowski
The Golden Quarter
We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like magic only half a century ago: cloned organs, stem-cell therapies to repair our very DNA. Even now, life expectancy in some rich countries is improving by five hours a day. A day! Surely immortality, or something very like it, is just around the corner.The notion that our 21st-century world is one of accelerating advances is so dominant that it seems churlish to challenge it. Almost every week we read about ‘new hopes’ for cancer sufferers, developments in the lab that might lead to new cures, talk of a new era of space tourism and super-jets that can fly round the world in a few hours. Yet a moment’s thought tells us that this vision of unparalleled innovation can’t be right, that many of these breathless reports of progress are in fact mere hype, speculation – even fantasy.
Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics. Space travel. Civil rights.
There is more. Feminism. Teenagers. The Green Revolution in agriculture. Decolonisation. Popular music. Mass aviation. The birth of the gay rights movement. Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles. High-speed trains. We put a man on the Moon, sent a probe to Mars, beat smallpox and discovered the double-spiral key of life. The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.
Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. The US economist Tyler Cowen, in his essay The Great Stagnation (2011), argues that, in the US at least, a technological plateau has been reached. Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox. As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’ (...)
But surely progress today is real? Well, take a look around. Look up and the airliners you see are basically updated versions of the ones flying in the 1960s – slightly quieter Tristars with better avionics. In 1971, a regular airliner took eight hours to fly from London to New York; it still does. And in 1971, there was one airliner that could do the trip in three hours. Now, Concorde is dead. Our cars are faster, safer and use less fuel than they did in 1971, but there has been no paradigm shift.
And yes, we are living longer, but this has disappointingly little to do with any recent breakthroughs. Since 1970, the US Federal Government has spent more than $100 billion in what President Richard Nixon dubbed the ‘War on Cancer’. Far more has been spent globally, with most wealthy nations boasting well-funded cancer‑research bodies. Despite these billions of investment, this war has been a spectacular failure. In the US, the death rates for all kinds of cancer dropped by only 5 per cent in the period 1950-2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Even if you strip out confounding variables such as age (more people are living long enough to get cancer) and better diagnosis, the blunt fact is that, with most kinds of cancer, your chances in 2014 are not much better than they were in 1974. In many cases, your treatment will be pretty much the same.
For the past 20 years, as a science writer, I have covered such extraordinary medical advances as gene therapy, cloned replacement organs, stem-cell therapy, life-extension technologies, the promised spin-offs from genomics and tailored medicine. None of these new treatments is yet routinely available. The paralyzed still cannot walk, the blind still cannot see. The human genome was decoded (one post-Golden Quarter triumph) nearly 15 years ago and we’re still waiting to see the benefits that, at the time, were confidently asserted to be ‘a decade away’. We still have no real idea how to treat chronic addiction or dementia. The recent history of psychiatric medicine is, according to one eminent British psychiatrist I spoke to, ‘the history of ever-better placebos’. And most recent advances in longevity have come about by the simple expedient of getting people to give up smoking, eat better, and take drugs to control blood pressure.
There has been no new Green Revolution. We still drive steel cars powered by burning petroleum spirit or, worse, diesel. There has been no new materials revolution since the Golden Quarter’s advances in plastics, semi-conductors, new alloys and composite materials. After the dizzying breakthroughs of the early- to mid-20th century, physics seems (Higgs boson aside) to have ground to a halt. String Theory is apparently our best hope of reconciling Albert Einstein with the Quantum world, but as yet, no one has any idea if it is even testable. And nobody has been to the Moon for 42 years.
Why has progress stopped? Why, for that matter, did it start when it did, in the dying embers of the Second World War?
by Michael Hanlon, Aeon | Read more:
Image: courtesy Dick Swanson/U.S. National Archives
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
Mansplanation Nation
There's something endearing about people who loudly proclaim their love of books. Forget the suspicions kicked up by trumpeting something as universal as “books” as one’s true love (also loves: baby animals, pizza, oxygen); forget the anachronism of loving physical objects in space and not some “long read” floating in the ether; forget the self-congratulatory tone that hints at a closetful of book-festival tote bags emblazoned with Shakespeare’s face. Proudly championing books still counts as a true act of courage, a way of raging against the dying of the page.
In embracing the book as an object, a concept, a signifier, and a religion, though, one often forgets the texts that answer to the name of “book” these days. A perusal of the best-seller lists of the past two decades indicates that the most popular books might more accurately be described as billionaire-themed smut, extended blast of own-horn tooting, Sociology 101 textbook with sexy one-word title, unfocused partisan rant, 250-page-long stand-up routine, text version of Muppets Most Wanted with self-serious humans where the Muppets should be, folksy Christian sci-fi/fantasy, pseudohistorical rambling by non-historian, and simpleton wisdom trussed up in overpriced yoga pants.
And if we narrow our focus to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times’ hardcover-nonfiction best-seller list in the twenty years since Bookforum was first published, we discover an increasingly shrill, two-decade-long cry for help from the American people. As I Want to Tell You by O. J. Simpson (1995) and The Royals by Kitty Kelley (1997) yield to Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore (2003) and Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward (2004), you can almost see the support beams of the American dream tumbling sideways, the illusions of endless peace and rapidly compounding prosperity crumbling along with it. The leisurely service-economy daydreams of the late ’90s left us plenty of time to spend Tuesdays with Morrie and muse about The Millionaire Next Door or get worked up about The Day Diana Died. But such luxe distractions gave way to The Age of Turbulence, as our smug belief in the good life was crushed under the weight of 9/11, the Great Recession, and several murky and seemingly endless wars. Suddenly the world looked Hot, Flat, and Crowded, with the aggressively nostalgic waging an all-out Assault on Reason. In such a Culture of Corruption, if you weren’t Going Rogue you inevitably found yourself Arguing with Idiots.
Tracking this borderline-hysterical parade of titles can feel like watching America lose its religion in slow motion. Except, of course, this also meant there was a boom industry in patiently teaching faith-shaken Americans precisely how to believe again. Since the new century began, the top spot on the best-seller list most years has been all but reserved for these morale-boosting bromides: Seemingly every politician, blowhard, and mouthpiece willing to instruct us on how to reclaim our threadbare security blanket of patriotism, cultural supremacy, and never-ending growth and prosperity has turned up in that prestigious limelight. If that list is any indication, we’re desperate for something to ease our fears—or to feed directly into those fears with the kind of angry rhetoric that plays so well on cable news. (...)
And while it’s impossible to argue that people aren’t purchasing books by Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney, it’s also difficult to imagine that people are actually reading these books from cover to cover. These are identity accessories more than books—the red-state equivalent of what a funky watch or rakishly arranged silk scarf might be in our notoriously shallow and decadent coastal metropolises. It also says something about the current state of liberal culture that the most popular blue-state authors—Franken, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert—are, accessory-wise, more like a bow tie that squirts water in your face. Solemn, poorly written tomes on everything that’s wrong with this country are on one side of the fence, ironic detachment, incredulity, and clown cars on the other. Or as Bill O’Reilly put it when he appeared on the Daily Show in 2004, “You’ve got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night, and they can vote.”
Bemoaning the stoned slackers of the world might not be a wise choice for the author responsible for what we might term the “Mansplanations of History for Stoned Slackers” series: Killing Lincoln (2011), Killing Kennedy (2012), Killing Jesus (2013), and Killing Patton (2014), every single one of which rested comfortably in the No. 1 spot for weeks at a time. In fact, over the past two decades, O’Reilly has been in the position with seven different books for forty-eight weeks total. How does he do it?
Here’s a clue: If mansplaining means “to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner,” then O’Reilly clearly sees America as a suggestible (though fortunately profligate) woman in desperate need of a seemingly limitless amount of remedial mansplanation. And to be fair, if the most popular nonfiction books are a reliable guide, Americans crave mansplaining the way starving rats crave half-eaten hamburgers. We’d like Beck—not an education professor—to mansplain the Common Core to us. We want Malcolm Gladwell—not a neuroscientist or a sociologist or psychologist—to mansplain everything from the laws of romantic attraction to epidemiology. And we want O’Reilly—not an actual historian—to mansplain Lincoln, Kennedy, Jesus, and all of the other great mansplaining icons of history. We want mansplainers mansplaining other mansplainers. We dig hot mansplainer-on-mansplainer action.
In embracing the book as an object, a concept, a signifier, and a religion, though, one often forgets the texts that answer to the name of “book” these days. A perusal of the best-seller lists of the past two decades indicates that the most popular books might more accurately be described as billionaire-themed smut, extended blast of own-horn tooting, Sociology 101 textbook with sexy one-word title, unfocused partisan rant, 250-page-long stand-up routine, text version of Muppets Most Wanted with self-serious humans where the Muppets should be, folksy Christian sci-fi/fantasy, pseudohistorical rambling by non-historian, and simpleton wisdom trussed up in overpriced yoga pants.And if we narrow our focus to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times’ hardcover-nonfiction best-seller list in the twenty years since Bookforum was first published, we discover an increasingly shrill, two-decade-long cry for help from the American people. As I Want to Tell You by O. J. Simpson (1995) and The Royals by Kitty Kelley (1997) yield to Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore (2003) and Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward (2004), you can almost see the support beams of the American dream tumbling sideways, the illusions of endless peace and rapidly compounding prosperity crumbling along with it. The leisurely service-economy daydreams of the late ’90s left us plenty of time to spend Tuesdays with Morrie and muse about The Millionaire Next Door or get worked up about The Day Diana Died. But such luxe distractions gave way to The Age of Turbulence, as our smug belief in the good life was crushed under the weight of 9/11, the Great Recession, and several murky and seemingly endless wars. Suddenly the world looked Hot, Flat, and Crowded, with the aggressively nostalgic waging an all-out Assault on Reason. In such a Culture of Corruption, if you weren’t Going Rogue you inevitably found yourself Arguing with Idiots.
Tracking this borderline-hysterical parade of titles can feel like watching America lose its religion in slow motion. Except, of course, this also meant there was a boom industry in patiently teaching faith-shaken Americans precisely how to believe again. Since the new century began, the top spot on the best-seller list most years has been all but reserved for these morale-boosting bromides: Seemingly every politician, blowhard, and mouthpiece willing to instruct us on how to reclaim our threadbare security blanket of patriotism, cultural supremacy, and never-ending growth and prosperity has turned up in that prestigious limelight. If that list is any indication, we’re desperate for something to ease our fears—or to feed directly into those fears with the kind of angry rhetoric that plays so well on cable news. (...)
And while it’s impossible to argue that people aren’t purchasing books by Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney, it’s also difficult to imagine that people are actually reading these books from cover to cover. These are identity accessories more than books—the red-state equivalent of what a funky watch or rakishly arranged silk scarf might be in our notoriously shallow and decadent coastal metropolises. It also says something about the current state of liberal culture that the most popular blue-state authors—Franken, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert—are, accessory-wise, more like a bow tie that squirts water in your face. Solemn, poorly written tomes on everything that’s wrong with this country are on one side of the fence, ironic detachment, incredulity, and clown cars on the other. Or as Bill O’Reilly put it when he appeared on the Daily Show in 2004, “You’ve got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night, and they can vote.”
Bemoaning the stoned slackers of the world might not be a wise choice for the author responsible for what we might term the “Mansplanations of History for Stoned Slackers” series: Killing Lincoln (2011), Killing Kennedy (2012), Killing Jesus (2013), and Killing Patton (2014), every single one of which rested comfortably in the No. 1 spot for weeks at a time. In fact, over the past two decades, O’Reilly has been in the position with seven different books for forty-eight weeks total. How does he do it?
Here’s a clue: If mansplaining means “to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner,” then O’Reilly clearly sees America as a suggestible (though fortunately profligate) woman in desperate need of a seemingly limitless amount of remedial mansplanation. And to be fair, if the most popular nonfiction books are a reliable guide, Americans crave mansplaining the way starving rats crave half-eaten hamburgers. We’d like Beck—not an education professor—to mansplain the Common Core to us. We want Malcolm Gladwell—not a neuroscientist or a sociologist or psychologist—to mansplain everything from the laws of romantic attraction to epidemiology. And we want O’Reilly—not an actual historian—to mansplain Lincoln, Kennedy, Jesus, and all of the other great mansplaining icons of history. We want mansplainers mansplaining other mansplainers. We dig hot mansplainer-on-mansplainer action.
by Heather Havrilesky, Bookforum | Read more:
Image: The Princess Bride with uncredited modifications
Winning the Breakup in the Age of Instagram
[ed. How does stuff get so complicated.]
“Brett was there,” I Gchatted my friend Holly after running into a man who’d broken my heart six months earlier. “We actually had a nice chat. He was a mess though. Like, unshowered, smelled weird, was carrying an iPad in the waistband of his pants because he had nowhere to put it.” She asked me what I’d been wearing. Lipstick and heels, I replied. I’d been waiting for my new boyfriend, who picked me up and briefly met Brett.
“Oh my God,” Holly replied. “That is the ultimate ex encounter? He’s nice but looks like a mess. You look awesome and are with a new guy. You won.”
“Winning the breakup” may be a petty concept, but everyone who exits relationships regularly (or maybe just exited one very memorably) knows exactly what it means. The winner is the ex whose career skyrockets after the split; whose new wife is a supermodel; who looks better; who dates better; who has bouncier hair. It’s getting over your ex before she gets over you and leading a demonstratively successful life without her — but doing so in ways that at least look casual, just for yourself, definitely not just to rub it in her face, because you’re so over her, remember? And therein lies the Catch-22 of winning the breakup: To care about winning, you are forced to care about not caring about someone. Asked about her weekend plans, my 26-year-old friend Sam once replied, “I’m assembling a team of hotties to torture my ex on Instagram.”
Dating actively is to be in a perpetual state of breakup. (Even in a best-case scenario, you are spared the breakup only once.) I’m 30, but already I feel like I’ve surpassed my lifetime limit for breakups — starting at age 18, hooking up in the dorms, I was already cohabitating with my significant others. In the past decade and change, I’ve had multiple multiyear relationships, which among my peers is a typical track record. For a time, social theorists believed my generation’s defining romantic feature was the hookup. But as hooking up rapidly expanded into a series of miniature marriages — and miniature divorces made more confounding by social-media omnipresence and cell-phone butt dials — I’ve come to think millennial romances are defined not by their casual beginnings but their disastrous ends. We aren’t the hookup generation; we’re the breakup generation. Today I find myself entering each subsequent relationship already anticipating its end — but is breakup dread a sign that the relationship is doomed, or does the dread actually cause the doom?
Inevitably, no two people ever can desire a breakup exactly equally. Which means at least one person comes out of it feeling like a loser — and as any résumé-padding overachiever knows, where there are losers there are also winners.
by Maureen O'Connor, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo: Islandpaps/Splash News
“Brett was there,” I Gchatted my friend Holly after running into a man who’d broken my heart six months earlier. “We actually had a nice chat. He was a mess though. Like, unshowered, smelled weird, was carrying an iPad in the waistband of his pants because he had nowhere to put it.” She asked me what I’d been wearing. Lipstick and heels, I replied. I’d been waiting for my new boyfriend, who picked me up and briefly met Brett.
“Oh my God,” Holly replied. “That is the ultimate ex encounter? He’s nice but looks like a mess. You look awesome and are with a new guy. You won.” “Winning the breakup” may be a petty concept, but everyone who exits relationships regularly (or maybe just exited one very memorably) knows exactly what it means. The winner is the ex whose career skyrockets after the split; whose new wife is a supermodel; who looks better; who dates better; who has bouncier hair. It’s getting over your ex before she gets over you and leading a demonstratively successful life without her — but doing so in ways that at least look casual, just for yourself, definitely not just to rub it in her face, because you’re so over her, remember? And therein lies the Catch-22 of winning the breakup: To care about winning, you are forced to care about not caring about someone. Asked about her weekend plans, my 26-year-old friend Sam once replied, “I’m assembling a team of hotties to torture my ex on Instagram.”
Dating actively is to be in a perpetual state of breakup. (Even in a best-case scenario, you are spared the breakup only once.) I’m 30, but already I feel like I’ve surpassed my lifetime limit for breakups — starting at age 18, hooking up in the dorms, I was already cohabitating with my significant others. In the past decade and change, I’ve had multiple multiyear relationships, which among my peers is a typical track record. For a time, social theorists believed my generation’s defining romantic feature was the hookup. But as hooking up rapidly expanded into a series of miniature marriages — and miniature divorces made more confounding by social-media omnipresence and cell-phone butt dials — I’ve come to think millennial romances are defined not by their casual beginnings but their disastrous ends. We aren’t the hookup generation; we’re the breakup generation. Today I find myself entering each subsequent relationship already anticipating its end — but is breakup dread a sign that the relationship is doomed, or does the dread actually cause the doom?
Inevitably, no two people ever can desire a breakup exactly equally. Which means at least one person comes out of it feeling like a loser — and as any résumé-padding overachiever knows, where there are losers there are also winners.
by Maureen O'Connor, NY Magazine | Read more:
Image: Photo: Islandpaps/Splash News
Mystery Humans
Updated genome sequences from two extinct relatives of modern humans suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.
The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a member of an archaic human group called the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting on ancient DNA at the Royal Society in London. The results suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet-unknown human ancestor from Asia.
“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.
The first published Neanderthal and Denisovan genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups bred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today. (...)
The Denisovan genome indicates that the population got around: Reich said at the meeting that as well as interbreeding with the ancestors of Oceanians, they also bred with Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans in China and other parts of East Asia. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.
The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a member of an archaic human group called the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting on ancient DNA at the Royal Society in London. The results suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet-unknown human ancestor from Asia.“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.
The first published Neanderthal and Denisovan genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups bred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today. (...)
The Denisovan genome indicates that the population got around: Reich said at the meeting that as well as interbreeding with the ancestors of Oceanians, they also bred with Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans in China and other parts of East Asia. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with yet another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago — one that is neither human nor Neanderthal.
by Ewen Callaway, Nature | Read more:
Image: Ria Novosti/SPL
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
How He and His Cronies Stole Russia
For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze the attempts at privatization, discuss the ebb and flow of political parties and the growth and decline of an independent media.
Mostly we agree that those reforms failed, and sometimes we blame ourselves for those failures: we gave the wrong advice, we sent naive Harvard economists who should have known better, we didn’t have a Marshall Plan. Sometimes we blame the Russians: the economists didn’t follow our advice, the public was apathetic, President Yeltsin was indecisive, then drunk, then ill. Sometimes we hope that reforms will return, as many believed they might during the short reign of President Dmitry Medvedev.
Whatever their conclusion, almost all of these analysts seek an explanation in the reform process itself, asking whether it was effective, or whether it was flawed, or whether it could have been designed differently. But what if it never mattered at all? What if it made no difference which mistakes were made, which privatization plans were sidetracked, which piece of advice was not followed? What if “reform” was never the most important story of the past twenty years in Russia at all?
Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy is not the first book to ask this question. (...) In her introduction, Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains:
That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we’ve long known for a long time, of course. In her book Sale of the Century (2000), Chrystia Freeland memorably describes the moment when she realized that the confusing regulations and contradictory laws that hog-tied Russian business in the 1990s were not a temporary problem that would soon be cleaned up by some competent administrator. On the contrary, they existed for a purpose: the Russian elite wanted everybody to operate in violation of one law or another, because that meant that everybody was liable at any time to arrest. The contradictory regulations were not a mistake, they were a form of control.
Dawisha takes Freeland’s realization one step further. She is arguing, in effect, that even before those nefarious rules were written, the system had already been rigged to favor particular people and interest groups. No “even playing field” was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by—or stolen from—the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.
Mostly we agree that those reforms failed, and sometimes we blame ourselves for those failures: we gave the wrong advice, we sent naive Harvard economists who should have known better, we didn’t have a Marshall Plan. Sometimes we blame the Russians: the economists didn’t follow our advice, the public was apathetic, President Yeltsin was indecisive, then drunk, then ill. Sometimes we hope that reforms will return, as many believed they might during the short reign of President Dmitry Medvedev.Whatever their conclusion, almost all of these analysts seek an explanation in the reform process itself, asking whether it was effective, or whether it was flawed, or whether it could have been designed differently. But what if it never mattered at all? What if it made no difference which mistakes were made, which privatization plans were sidetracked, which piece of advice was not followed? What if “reform” was never the most important story of the past twenty years in Russia at all?
Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy is not the first book to ask this question. (...) In her introduction, Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains:
Instead of seeing Russian politics as an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.In other words, the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism. Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.
That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we’ve long known for a long time, of course. In her book Sale of the Century (2000), Chrystia Freeland memorably describes the moment when she realized that the confusing regulations and contradictory laws that hog-tied Russian business in the 1990s were not a temporary problem that would soon be cleaned up by some competent administrator. On the contrary, they existed for a purpose: the Russian elite wanted everybody to operate in violation of one law or another, because that meant that everybody was liable at any time to arrest. The contradictory regulations were not a mistake, they were a form of control.
Dawisha takes Freeland’s realization one step further. She is arguing, in effect, that even before those nefarious rules were written, the system had already been rigged to favor particular people and interest groups. No “even playing field” was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by—or stolen from—the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.
by Anne Applebaum, NY Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Yuri Maltsev/Reuters
Why “BoJack Horseman” is Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen
[ed. This is indeed a very bizarre show. And funny.]
It’s hard to explain “BoJack Horseman.” It’s an animated show about a guy, who is also a horse, who is also a washed-up sitcom actor who makes poor personal and professional decisions. His ex-girlfriend and agent is a cat lady. Not a lady who has cats; a lady who is a cat. The editor who wants to publish his memoirs is a penguin. (Naturally, he works for Penguin.) In the title sequence, BoJack sleepwalks through various scenes of D-list celebrity with a dazed, absent look on his face; in one of the last moments, he sinks underwater without struggling, evoking “The Graduate’s” Benjamin Braddock on his horsey face.
“BoJack Horseman” is a show that tries for many things: raunchy comedy that engages with the disaffection of the bored and wealthy; the pathos of being old and forgotten in a culture that constantly rewards the new; and the bizarre, unremarked-upon reality of a Hollywood populated by animal-people and people-people. (Princess Carolyn, BoJack’s agent, energetically claws at a huge scratching post when she goes to the gym.)
It’s more weird than entertaining, at least at first. But sticking with the curiosity long enough reaps surprising rewards. BoJack’s story starts as an animated comedy about an asshole — in the vein of “Family Guy” — and turns into a time-jumping drama about an asshole in the process of painfully acknowledging that he is, well, an asshole — Ã la “Mad Men.” BoJack Horseman does the difficult work of transforming from something like Peter Griffin to something like Don Draper in 12 half-hour episodes. (...)
And most crucially: “BoJack Horseman” is a strange creation, one that could not have existed just five years ago, one that feels avant-garde even now. This wanton combining of genres, borrowing of styles, and moneyed experimentation with expensive celebrity guests would be nearly impossible to sell to any major network except maybe HBO (which did something like this with “Curb Your Enthusiasm”). All the more surprising considering that “BoJack Horseman” is not a program from a veteran showrunner of a beloved sitcom, like Larry David, or a wealthy scion of a Hollywood family, like any number of the Coppola kids’ projects. The show is instead the brainchild of a novice showrunner, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, and the distinctive visual style of production designer Lisa Hanawalt, also a newcomer to television. The show is a pastiche of styles that borrows from the dark, surreal comedy of Adult Swim shows and the family drama of “Bob’s Burgers” and “The Simpsons,” but it also has the demonstrated freedom to use two back-to-back episodes to tell the same story from different perspectives, as it does with “Say Anything” and “The Telescope.” It isn’t afraid to end things on, as it describes, “A Downer Ending,” as it does in the penultimate episode of the season. And it’s willing to tell the convoluted story of BoJack stealing the “D” from the Hollywood sign and then pinning it on his rival Mr. Peanutbutter and then starring in the film adaptation of the real event, but not playing himself, playing Mr. Peanutbutter, all while Mr. Peanutbutter is preparing to marry Diane, BoJack’s ghostwriter, whom they both are in love with. (It is more than a little confusing, and revels in its silly complexity.)
Zach Sharf at Indiewire made the case that “BoJack Horseman” is the most Netflix-friendly of the studio’s current originals, arguing that like Season 4 of “Arrested Development,” “BoJack Horseman” “has made the streaming service’s binge-watching platform vital to experiencing the show as a whole.” What strikes me about “BoJack Horseman” is that it’s a show that demonstrates not just what Netflix can do well, comedically, but also how much the mold for animated shows can be further broken. “BoJack Horseman” is so much weirder than I thought a show could get while still being fun and moving; I wouldn’t have known that if Netflix hadn’t thrown money at this particular (and likely quite expensive) project.
It’s hard to explain “BoJack Horseman.” It’s an animated show about a guy, who is also a horse, who is also a washed-up sitcom actor who makes poor personal and professional decisions. His ex-girlfriend and agent is a cat lady. Not a lady who has cats; a lady who is a cat. The editor who wants to publish his memoirs is a penguin. (Naturally, he works for Penguin.) In the title sequence, BoJack sleepwalks through various scenes of D-list celebrity with a dazed, absent look on his face; in one of the last moments, he sinks underwater without struggling, evoking “The Graduate’s” Benjamin Braddock on his horsey face.“BoJack Horseman” is a show that tries for many things: raunchy comedy that engages with the disaffection of the bored and wealthy; the pathos of being old and forgotten in a culture that constantly rewards the new; and the bizarre, unremarked-upon reality of a Hollywood populated by animal-people and people-people. (Princess Carolyn, BoJack’s agent, energetically claws at a huge scratching post when she goes to the gym.)
It’s more weird than entertaining, at least at first. But sticking with the curiosity long enough reaps surprising rewards. BoJack’s story starts as an animated comedy about an asshole — in the vein of “Family Guy” — and turns into a time-jumping drama about an asshole in the process of painfully acknowledging that he is, well, an asshole — Ã la “Mad Men.” BoJack Horseman does the difficult work of transforming from something like Peter Griffin to something like Don Draper in 12 half-hour episodes. (...)
And most crucially: “BoJack Horseman” is a strange creation, one that could not have existed just five years ago, one that feels avant-garde even now. This wanton combining of genres, borrowing of styles, and moneyed experimentation with expensive celebrity guests would be nearly impossible to sell to any major network except maybe HBO (which did something like this with “Curb Your Enthusiasm”). All the more surprising considering that “BoJack Horseman” is not a program from a veteran showrunner of a beloved sitcom, like Larry David, or a wealthy scion of a Hollywood family, like any number of the Coppola kids’ projects. The show is instead the brainchild of a novice showrunner, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, and the distinctive visual style of production designer Lisa Hanawalt, also a newcomer to television. The show is a pastiche of styles that borrows from the dark, surreal comedy of Adult Swim shows and the family drama of “Bob’s Burgers” and “The Simpsons,” but it also has the demonstrated freedom to use two back-to-back episodes to tell the same story from different perspectives, as it does with “Say Anything” and “The Telescope.” It isn’t afraid to end things on, as it describes, “A Downer Ending,” as it does in the penultimate episode of the season. And it’s willing to tell the convoluted story of BoJack stealing the “D” from the Hollywood sign and then pinning it on his rival Mr. Peanutbutter and then starring in the film adaptation of the real event, but not playing himself, playing Mr. Peanutbutter, all while Mr. Peanutbutter is preparing to marry Diane, BoJack’s ghostwriter, whom they both are in love with. (It is more than a little confusing, and revels in its silly complexity.)
Zach Sharf at Indiewire made the case that “BoJack Horseman” is the most Netflix-friendly of the studio’s current originals, arguing that like Season 4 of “Arrested Development,” “BoJack Horseman” “has made the streaming service’s binge-watching platform vital to experiencing the show as a whole.” What strikes me about “BoJack Horseman” is that it’s a show that demonstrates not just what Netflix can do well, comedically, but also how much the mold for animated shows can be further broken. “BoJack Horseman” is so much weirder than I thought a show could get while still being fun and moving; I wouldn’t have known that if Netflix hadn’t thrown money at this particular (and likely quite expensive) project.
by Sonia Saraiya, Salon | Read more:
Image: Netflix
Not Dead Yet: How Some Video Stores are Thriving in the Age of Netflix
[ed. Not so fast. See also: Nine years working at one of the last Indie video stores in America.]
That the number of video stores around the world is on the decline isn’t exactly breaking news. For the past decade, a range of options—DVD-by-mail, video on demand, standalone rental boxes, and online streaming among them—have posed major challenges to the viability of video stores, rendering the phrase itself an anachronism. But just because Blockbuster couldn’t keep its iconic blue awnings hanging doesn’t mean there aren’t some intrepid entrepreneurs (and diehard cinephiles) taking a cue from their digital counterparts and finding ways to not just survive in the age of Netflix, but thrive.
Hop the F train from Kim’s final location to Brooklyn and you’ll find Video Free Brooklyn, a tiny storefront touting the tagline that “Video stores didn’t die, they just had to evolve.” Originally opened in 2002, the space was taken over by the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber in 2012.
While the decision to purchase a video store at the height of streaming’s assault on the traditional rental industry seemed counterintuitive, Hillis calls it “a labor of love that, surprisingly, also made economic sense.” Part of that is location: Video Free Brooklyn resides on Smith Street, a main thoroughfare of the borough’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, which means steady walk-in traffic. And once people find it, they tend to come back. “The neighborhood tends to be more educated and media-savvy,” Hillis says, “which translates to more discerning tastes.”
Though the store measures just 375 square feet, basement storage allows Hillis—a noted film critic in his own right—to keep approximately 10,000 discs on hand. But rather than compete against the same wide-release films and television series that one can watch with the click of a button and an $8.99 streaming subscription, Hillis is curating a library of hard-to-find fare. “After the floodgates of the Internet opened, we’re now drowning in content and especially mediocrity,” Hillis says. “Video Free Brooklyn’s model is almost a no-brainer: My inventory is heavily curated, but so is my staff, all of whom work in the film industry and have extensive, nerdy knowledge about cinema. Coming into the shop is about nostalgia, the joy of discovery, and getting catered recommendations from passionate cinephiles. It’s a hangout, like the record store in High Fidelity.” (...)
Fisher admits that the convenience and on-demand nature of digital entertainment always will pose a challenge to physical retail outlets, but believes the issue goes beyond the idea of instant gratification. “There is room for all these things,” he says, “but it’s dangerous if people reach the mindset of, ‘If it’s not on Netflix it’s not worth watching.’ Because the selection is so small. It’s the same with cable television and on-demand services—even if you subscribe to all of these different avenues, you’re missing out.”
It’s not that streaming platforms aren’t being curated—it’s who’s doing the curating. “What’s passively happening, whether people realize it or not, is that corporations are deciding what we should watch,” adds Barr. “The thing that made VHS catch on in the ’80s was this great sense of emancipation; prior to that, the only way you were seeing a movie was just by going to a theater. With streaming we are regressing a little bit, because once again the sacrifice we are making in order to have the ease of streaming is that we are putting that decision-making process in the hands of Netflix, Amazon, or whatever service.” And more often than not, those decisions are financially motivated—which is fine for the company’s coffers, but can also lead to that all-too-familiar fatigue that comes with scrolling past endless straight-to-video schlock and movies you’ve already seen but keep getting recommendations for.
That the number of video stores around the world is on the decline isn’t exactly breaking news. For the past decade, a range of options—DVD-by-mail, video on demand, standalone rental boxes, and online streaming among them—have posed major challenges to the viability of video stores, rendering the phrase itself an anachronism. But just because Blockbuster couldn’t keep its iconic blue awnings hanging doesn’t mean there aren’t some intrepid entrepreneurs (and diehard cinephiles) taking a cue from their digital counterparts and finding ways to not just survive in the age of Netflix, but thrive.
Hop the F train from Kim’s final location to Brooklyn and you’ll find Video Free Brooklyn, a tiny storefront touting the tagline that “Video stores didn’t die, they just had to evolve.” Originally opened in 2002, the space was taken over by the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber in 2012.While the decision to purchase a video store at the height of streaming’s assault on the traditional rental industry seemed counterintuitive, Hillis calls it “a labor of love that, surprisingly, also made economic sense.” Part of that is location: Video Free Brooklyn resides on Smith Street, a main thoroughfare of the borough’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, which means steady walk-in traffic. And once people find it, they tend to come back. “The neighborhood tends to be more educated and media-savvy,” Hillis says, “which translates to more discerning tastes.”
Though the store measures just 375 square feet, basement storage allows Hillis—a noted film critic in his own right—to keep approximately 10,000 discs on hand. But rather than compete against the same wide-release films and television series that one can watch with the click of a button and an $8.99 streaming subscription, Hillis is curating a library of hard-to-find fare. “After the floodgates of the Internet opened, we’re now drowning in content and especially mediocrity,” Hillis says. “Video Free Brooklyn’s model is almost a no-brainer: My inventory is heavily curated, but so is my staff, all of whom work in the film industry and have extensive, nerdy knowledge about cinema. Coming into the shop is about nostalgia, the joy of discovery, and getting catered recommendations from passionate cinephiles. It’s a hangout, like the record store in High Fidelity.” (...)
Fisher admits that the convenience and on-demand nature of digital entertainment always will pose a challenge to physical retail outlets, but believes the issue goes beyond the idea of instant gratification. “There is room for all these things,” he says, “but it’s dangerous if people reach the mindset of, ‘If it’s not on Netflix it’s not worth watching.’ Because the selection is so small. It’s the same with cable television and on-demand services—even if you subscribe to all of these different avenues, you’re missing out.”
It’s not that streaming platforms aren’t being curated—it’s who’s doing the curating. “What’s passively happening, whether people realize it or not, is that corporations are deciding what we should watch,” adds Barr. “The thing that made VHS catch on in the ’80s was this great sense of emancipation; prior to that, the only way you were seeing a movie was just by going to a theater. With streaming we are regressing a little bit, because once again the sacrifice we are making in order to have the ease of streaming is that we are putting that decision-making process in the hands of Netflix, Amazon, or whatever service.” And more often than not, those decisions are financially motivated—which is fine for the company’s coffers, but can also lead to that all-too-familiar fatigue that comes with scrolling past endless straight-to-video schlock and movies you’ve already seen but keep getting recommendations for.
by Jennifer M. Wood, Wired | Read more:
Image: Scarecrow Video
Monday, December 1, 2014
Digital Cosmopolitans
The early 1980s weren’t especially kind to Paul Simon. He ushered in the second decade of his post–Simon & Garfunkel life with One Trick Pony, a forgettable companion album to a forgettable film starring his former musical partner, Art Garfunkel. When a 1981 reunion concert with Garfunkel brought 500,000 people to New York’s Central Park, and sold over two million albums in the United States, the two began touring together. But “creative differences” brought the arrangement to a premature end, and a planned Simon & Garfunkel album became a Simon solo release, Hearts and Bones, that was the lowest-charting of his career. With the breakup of his marriage to the actress Carrie Fisher, “I had a personal blow, a career setback and the combination of the two put me into a tailspin,” Simon told his biographer Marc Eliot.
During this dark period, Simon was mentoring a young Norwegian songwriter, Heidi Berg. Berg gave Simon a cassette of mbaqanga music featuring musicians from Soweto, then the most notorious blacks-only township in apartheid South Africa. While the identity of the album Simon heard is uncertain, it likely featured the Boyoyo Boys, a popular Sowetan band, and listening to the cassette in his car, Simon began writing new melody lines and lyrics on top of the sax, guitar, bass, and drums of their existing tracks.
“What I was consciously frustrated with was the system of sitting and writing a song and then going into the studio and trying to make a record of that song. And if I couldn’t find the right musicians or I couldn’t find the right way of making those tracks, then I had a good song and a kind of mediocre record,” Simon told Billboard magazine’s Timothy White. “I set out to make really good tracks, and then I thought, ‘I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write the song after the tracks are made.’”
In the hopes of working this new way, Simon appealed to his record company, Warner Bros., to set up a recording session with the Boyoyo Boys. In 1985, that was far from an easy task. Since 1961, the British Musicians Union had maintained a cultural boycott of South Africa, managed by the UN Center against Apartheid. The boycott was designed to prevent musicians from performing at South African venues like Sun City, a hotel and casino located in the nominally independent bantustan of Bophuthatswana, an easy drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. But the boycott covered all aspects of collaborations with South African musicians, and Simon was warned that he might face censure for working in South Africa.
When Simon turned to Warner Bros. for help, the company called Hilton Rosenthal. Then managing an independent record label in South Africa, Rosenthal had in the past worked with Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, the two musicians who became the heart of Juluku, a racially integrated band that electrified traditional Zulu music and brought it to a global audience. Rosenthal’s label had partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute Juluku’s records in the United States, so Warner executives knew he could help Simon navigate a relationship with South African musicians.
As a white South African who’d recorded a highly political, racially integrated band in apartheid Johannesburg, Rosenthal was aware of some of the difficulties Simon might face in recording with Sowetan musicians. He assured Simon that they would find a way to work together and sent him a pile of twenty South African records, both mbaqanga acts and choral groups including Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Then he arranged a meeting with his friend and producer Koloi Lebona, who set up a meeting with the black musicians’ union, to discuss whether members should record with Simon. (...)
The sessions that Rosenthal and Lebona organized led to Graceland, one of the most celebrated albums of the 1980s. It won Grammy awards in 1986 and 1987, topped many critics’ charts and regularly features on “top 100 albums of all time” lists. It also made a great deal of money for Simon and the musicians he worked with, selling over sixteen million copies. South African songwriters share credits and royalties with Simon on half of the album’s tracks, and Simon paid session musicians three times the US pay scale for studio musicians. Many involved with the project, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, drummer Isaac Mtshali, and guitarist Ray Phiri went on to successful international music careers.
At its best, Graceland sounds as if Simon is encountering forces too large for him to understand or control. He’s riding on top of them, offering free-form reflections on a world that’s vastly more complicated and colorful than the narrow places he and Art Garfunkel explored in their close harmonies. The days of miracle and wonder Simon conjures up in “The Boy in the Bubble” are an excellent metaphor for anyone confronting our strange, connected world.
Collaborations like Graceland don’t happen without the participation of two important types of people: xenophiles and bridge figures. Xenophiles, lovers of the unfamiliar, are people who find inspiration and creative energy in the vast diversity of the world. They move beyond an initial fascination with a cultural artifact to make lasting and meaningful connections with the people who produced the artifact. Xenophiles aren’t just samplers or bricoleurs who put scraps to new use; they take seriously both forks of Kwame Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitans: they recognize the value of other cultures, and they honor obligations to people outside their own tribe, particularly the people they are influenced and shaped by. Simon distinguishes himself from McLaren by engaging with South African musicians as people and by becoming an advocate and promoter of their music.
Unlike xenophiles, outsiders who seek inspiration from other cultures, bridge figures straddle the borders between cultures, figuratively keeping one foot in each world. Hilton Rosenthal was able to broker a working relationship between a white American songwriter and dozens of black South African musicians during some of the most violent and tense moments of the struggle against apartheid. As a bridge, Rosenthal was an interpreter between cultures and an individual both groups could trust and identify with, an internationally recognized record producer who was also a relentless promoter of South Africa’s cultural richness. Rosenthal, in turn, credits Koloi Lebona with building the key bridges between black musicians and the South African recording community. (...)
What happens when people encounter another culture for the first time? Will we find a bridge figure to help us navigate these encounters? How often do we embrace the unfamiliar as xenophiles, and how often do we recoil and “hunker down,” as Robert Putnam observes?
It’s a question as old as the Odyssey, where Odysseus’s encounters with people of other lands remind readers that his name, in Greek, means “he who causes pain or makes others angry.” For all the kindly Phaeacians who sail Odysseus back to Ithaca, there are Cyclopes who eat men and destroy ships. When we encounter new cultures, should we expect cooperation or conflict? The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart consider this ancient question through the lens of media. In their book Cosmopolitan Communications, they look at what happens when people encounter different cultures through television, film, the Internet, and other media.
by Ethan Zuckerman, Salon | Read more:
Image: Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell (Credit: AP/Luiz Ribeiro/Hachette Book Group)
During this dark period, Simon was mentoring a young Norwegian songwriter, Heidi Berg. Berg gave Simon a cassette of mbaqanga music featuring musicians from Soweto, then the most notorious blacks-only township in apartheid South Africa. While the identity of the album Simon heard is uncertain, it likely featured the Boyoyo Boys, a popular Sowetan band, and listening to the cassette in his car, Simon began writing new melody lines and lyrics on top of the sax, guitar, bass, and drums of their existing tracks.“What I was consciously frustrated with was the system of sitting and writing a song and then going into the studio and trying to make a record of that song. And if I couldn’t find the right musicians or I couldn’t find the right way of making those tracks, then I had a good song and a kind of mediocre record,” Simon told Billboard magazine’s Timothy White. “I set out to make really good tracks, and then I thought, ‘I have enough songwriting technique that I can reverse this process and write the song after the tracks are made.’”
In the hopes of working this new way, Simon appealed to his record company, Warner Bros., to set up a recording session with the Boyoyo Boys. In 1985, that was far from an easy task. Since 1961, the British Musicians Union had maintained a cultural boycott of South Africa, managed by the UN Center against Apartheid. The boycott was designed to prevent musicians from performing at South African venues like Sun City, a hotel and casino located in the nominally independent bantustan of Bophuthatswana, an easy drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. But the boycott covered all aspects of collaborations with South African musicians, and Simon was warned that he might face censure for working in South Africa.
When Simon turned to Warner Bros. for help, the company called Hilton Rosenthal. Then managing an independent record label in South Africa, Rosenthal had in the past worked with Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu, the two musicians who became the heart of Juluku, a racially integrated band that electrified traditional Zulu music and brought it to a global audience. Rosenthal’s label had partnered with Warner Bros. to distribute Juluku’s records in the United States, so Warner executives knew he could help Simon navigate a relationship with South African musicians.
As a white South African who’d recorded a highly political, racially integrated band in apartheid Johannesburg, Rosenthal was aware of some of the difficulties Simon might face in recording with Sowetan musicians. He assured Simon that they would find a way to work together and sent him a pile of twenty South African records, both mbaqanga acts and choral groups including Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Then he arranged a meeting with his friend and producer Koloi Lebona, who set up a meeting with the black musicians’ union, to discuss whether members should record with Simon. (...)
The sessions that Rosenthal and Lebona organized led to Graceland, one of the most celebrated albums of the 1980s. It won Grammy awards in 1986 and 1987, topped many critics’ charts and regularly features on “top 100 albums of all time” lists. It also made a great deal of money for Simon and the musicians he worked with, selling over sixteen million copies. South African songwriters share credits and royalties with Simon on half of the album’s tracks, and Simon paid session musicians three times the US pay scale for studio musicians. Many involved with the project, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, drummer Isaac Mtshali, and guitarist Ray Phiri went on to successful international music careers.
At its best, Graceland sounds as if Simon is encountering forces too large for him to understand or control. He’s riding on top of them, offering free-form reflections on a world that’s vastly more complicated and colorful than the narrow places he and Art Garfunkel explored in their close harmonies. The days of miracle and wonder Simon conjures up in “The Boy in the Bubble” are an excellent metaphor for anyone confronting our strange, connected world.
Collaborations like Graceland don’t happen without the participation of two important types of people: xenophiles and bridge figures. Xenophiles, lovers of the unfamiliar, are people who find inspiration and creative energy in the vast diversity of the world. They move beyond an initial fascination with a cultural artifact to make lasting and meaningful connections with the people who produced the artifact. Xenophiles aren’t just samplers or bricoleurs who put scraps to new use; they take seriously both forks of Kwame Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitans: they recognize the value of other cultures, and they honor obligations to people outside their own tribe, particularly the people they are influenced and shaped by. Simon distinguishes himself from McLaren by engaging with South African musicians as people and by becoming an advocate and promoter of their music.
Unlike xenophiles, outsiders who seek inspiration from other cultures, bridge figures straddle the borders between cultures, figuratively keeping one foot in each world. Hilton Rosenthal was able to broker a working relationship between a white American songwriter and dozens of black South African musicians during some of the most violent and tense moments of the struggle against apartheid. As a bridge, Rosenthal was an interpreter between cultures and an individual both groups could trust and identify with, an internationally recognized record producer who was also a relentless promoter of South Africa’s cultural richness. Rosenthal, in turn, credits Koloi Lebona with building the key bridges between black musicians and the South African recording community. (...)
What happens when people encounter another culture for the first time? Will we find a bridge figure to help us navigate these encounters? How often do we embrace the unfamiliar as xenophiles, and how often do we recoil and “hunker down,” as Robert Putnam observes?
It’s a question as old as the Odyssey, where Odysseus’s encounters with people of other lands remind readers that his name, in Greek, means “he who causes pain or makes others angry.” For all the kindly Phaeacians who sail Odysseus back to Ithaca, there are Cyclopes who eat men and destroy ships. When we encounter new cultures, should we expect cooperation or conflict? The political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart consider this ancient question through the lens of media. In their book Cosmopolitan Communications, they look at what happens when people encounter different cultures through television, film, the Internet, and other media.
by Ethan Zuckerman, Salon | Read more:
Image: Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell (Credit: AP/Luiz Ribeiro/Hachette Book Group)
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