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The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Apple allege former partners planted AirTags near them to keep track of their whereabouts.
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In the third century BCE, Archimedes posed a riddle about herding cattle that, he claimed, only a truly wise person could solve. His problem ultimately boiled down to an equation that involves the difference between two squared terms, which can be written as x2 – dy2 = 1. Here, d is an integer — a positive or negative counting number — and Archimedes was looking for solutions where both x and y...
The world is crafting a plan to save nature. Will Indigenous people get a say?
For some Indigenous Maasai tribes in Kenya, birdwatching is not so much a leisure activity as it is a survival tactic. The sight of an oxpecker, a gray and white bird with vivid yellow eyes, often indicates that dangerous water buffalos roam nearby. Meanwhile, the brown flash of a honeyguide bird might be the ticket to a calorie-dense meal — these birds can literally guide humans to honey.
The honeyguides and oxpeckers of the world illustrate a key tenet of Indigenous knowledge, according to Kimaren ole Riamit, a member of the Maasai community in Kenya. “Nature takes care of us when we take care of it,” said ole Riamit, who has on several occasions followed honeyguides to beehives.
Lessons like this are essential as the world faces a crisis of wildlife extinction and climate change. Yet Indigenous knowledge and those who wield it are often an afterthought in major efforts to protect nature, from the Paris Agreement to a big UN treaty on biodiversity loss.
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Courtesy of Kimaren ole Riamit
Ole Riamit, the executive director of a nonprofit called Indigenous Livelihoods Enhancement Partners, is among the Indigenous leaders pushing to elevate voices like his in these initiatives. He sees himself as a bridge between the Maasai world — an Indigenous world, rooted in nature — and the Western approach to conservation, which has a history of subjugating tribes in Kenya, the US, and elsewhere.
He told Vox about growing up in a Maasai community and how the lessons he learned can make wildlife conservation stronger and more equitable. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was it like growing up in a Maasai community, and what does your Maasai identity mean to you?
I grew up as a cattle boy, as a herds boy. But I was one of the very few who had the privilege of going to boarding school outside of the community, about 100 kilometers away.
Every time I had a break at school, I was herding cattle. I learned which pasture is healthy; which one is poisonous; which one helps cows produce more milk; which one is medicinal. So one of my identities is being connected to the landscape — the savanna pasture land of East Africa.
I learned about the different trees and species. I learned which roots are good for food, which fruit is healthy, and when they flower and when they fruit. One of my very strong identities is the Indigenous identity, as people of the land and people of the cattle.
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Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images
When I think of these landscapes, I think, perhaps naively, of the iconic animals like giraffes and elephants and lions that live there. Did you have a relationship with these animals growing up?
Yes, and I continue to have a relationship with them. I grew up with elephants, buffaloes, lions, cheetahs, and leopards.
I have a brother who lost an eye because he had an encounter with a leopard, which came to steal the goats at night. I was chased by an elephant — I walked right into it in the forest. But I’m here to tell the story. I have a brother whose knee is dislocated because a hyena came into the sheep pen and tried to steal a goat. You are trained to be tough, to withstand pain, to protect the community and the livestock at whatever cost.
You need to ask the question: Why is there wildlife here and not in other communities? We have 42 ethnic groups in the country. But the highest density of wildlife is found in these pastoral areas, particularly in Maasailand. For us, it’s difficult to separate culture from nature. Nature is reflected in our culture through rites of passage — through naming ceremonies, circumcision ceremonies, graduation ceremonies when you go from a junior to a senior warrior.
There are also animals that reflect clans. You have a clan of the baboon, a clan of the elephant, and a clan of the rhino. How would you kill your clans-mate, the wildlife? There are also taboos and rules about interacting with nature that make sure we use it sustainably.
What are some of those taboos?
One of them is that if you have a lactating cow — a cow that gives milk — it’s taboo to eat game meat, to eat wildlife. You cannot pride yourself on eating game meat. The girls will run away from you. You’re not a respected warrior. Why go kill an antelope when you have an animal in the shed?
The same goes for harvesting natural products like herbal trees and medicinal plants. If the active ingredient of an herbal plant is in its roots, you are not allowed to harvest the taproot — the root that goes all the way down. You get the lateral root. And you can’t keep taking roots from one plant until it dies; you move on to the next one.
If the active ingredient is in the bark of the tree, you don’t cut a ring out of the bark, because that would suffocate the tree. You create a vertical slit, and you don’t leave it naked — you cover it with soil.
The abundance of wildlife speaks to the efficiency of these rules.
How did you learn all of this?
The landscape itself is a library of knowledge. As a young boy or girl, when you’re helping your mother fetch water or taking care of the sick, you are told what each plant is for, which ones are poisonous, and what they’re called. When this plant flowers, the rain is around the corner. Indigenous weather forecasting is associated with the behavior of plants and animals. You are in school every day, every moment.
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Edwin Remsberg / VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
You have a brother who was injured by a leopard. Does that kind of encounter create tension with wildlife?
Yes. When a lion, for example, becomes problematic and develops a taste for cattle meat instead of wild buffalo or eland, the community can organize to kill it. But it’s not a reason to kill all of the lions. When you’re attacked, you try to protect yourself with your traditional spear. You don’t surrender yourself as a snack to the lion. But in general, wild animals have learned to respect our space, and we have learned to respect their space.
Have you had any experiences that demonstrate how dependent we are on wildlife and ecosystems?
You learn that nature communicates. We learned that the honeyguide bird guides us to honey. They actually make a sound to tell you that they’ve seen a hive. If you know how to respond and follow them, they will take you to it.
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Brown Bear/Windmill Books/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The bird will look for humans in the landscape close to where the honey is, and then it comes and chirps. Over the years, Indigenous communities have learned the language and how to respond.
When you try to harvest the hive, the bees try to finish the honey. They overfeed and become engorged, so they can’t fly. Then the honeyguide feeds on the overfed bees, which can’t sting.
You’re working now to bring Indigenous knowledge to the fight against climate change and wildlife extinction. What are some examples of that knowledge?
I am privileged to belong to two worlds. I belong to the Indigenous world but I also received a formal Western education.
One lesson from the Indigenous community is that you take from nature only what you need. You don’t overstock your fridge just to throw food in the dustbin.
Another lesson is that nature takes care of us when we take care of it. We have a forest in our community that gives water to the only river that crosses the Maasai Mara [National Reserve]. Our elders set the forest aside because it’s a lifeline — of the people, of wildlife, of the livestock.
The modern conservation movement is rooted in Western ways of knowing. When did you decide you wanted to be a part of that?
I grew up in a thriving landscape, rich in biodiversity, and I was always connected to the land. When I was going to school as a young boy, I’d cross this stream every morning and arrive dripping wet. Water was always abundant.
Then I started noticing things change. I saw that some birds were no more, such as the oxpecker. I can’t remember the last time I heard of a honeyguide. This river that used to flood has been reduced to a stream that a toddler can cross, barely wetting his feet. I saw that the landscape is almost crying.
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Sergio Pitamitz / VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
I started questioning what is happening and became aware of climate change. Even the community itself started noticing and saying dry months have stolen water from wet months, and they are not giving the water back. The Indigenous knowledge systems of weather forecasting became disrupted, and our livelihoods are ordered around the weather.
A lot of us feel so disconnected from nature, and we are — we get our food from a grocery store, our homes are air-conditioned, and so on. It’s clear that your lives are much more directly dependent on the land.
One message we take to the world is that climate change is not a theoretical debate for us. We are on the front lines of the negative impacts of climate change. We see the water disappear.
One of the characteristics of the savannas and the rangelands of pastoral communities is that water is scarce. But if you add climate change to that scarcity, you have a severe situation.
We just recently had a drought in Kenya. We went for three or four months without rain. Many people’s herds collapsed and died, and building a herd is an intergenerational affair.
So for us, climate change is so real.
You went to grad school in Canada. What was it like to learn about wildlife issues or climate change from textbooks and Western professors?
It was strange. It felt distant and alien. One of the things that I struggled with is that every study must begin with a theoretical framework. You must think from where somebody else started thinking, and continue from there. But I’m used to observing, I’m used to experiencing things firsthand.
I also questioned how conservation was enacted. First came “fortress” conservation, where Indigenous people were pushed out of the land [in the name of protecting wildlife]. The assumption then was that people hate wildlife and are destructive to wildlife.
As we struggled with fortress conservation, a new model emerged called community-based conservation. Community-based conservation is what Indigenous communities have been doing for eons. Wildlife is there because communities are living there with it.
Then when you introduce a so-called investor into these conservation efforts, who might build a tourist lodge and has instruments of power — privileged knowledge of the market and privileged connections to state organizations. The investor ends up being the conservator, not the community. So while community-based conservation is suddenly a big movement toward appreciating what communities have done and continue to do, a lot of work is still needed to create mutually respectful partnerships.
How was Indigenous knowledge perceived when you were learning about conservation?
Indigenous knowledge was perceived as inferior knowledge. It was perceived as nonrigorous knowledge because it’s nonscientific — because it’s not documented. Never mind that scientific books are written by interviewing and researching in the field and getting knowledge from these communities, and so on. And when those books are written, this knowledge is privatized.
While Kenya is certainly progressing, the institution in charge of Indigenous knowledge is the national museums. There’s an idea that this knowledge should be preserved in the archives. It’s not active knowledge. It’s something to be gazed at, to be frozen in time.
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Yang Zheng/VCG via Getty Images
When you look at the major efforts to protect nature today — I’m thinking about the UN Paris Agreement or the new global effort to protect 30 percent of all land and water by 2030 — what role do Indigenous communities play in shaping these initiatives?
When you look at the Convention on Biological Diversity or the Sustainable Development Goals or the Paris Agreement, Indigenous people have managed to put placeholders in these decisions. For example, there’s recognition [in these initiatives] that Indigenous knowledge should inform climate change adaptation and mitigation. We have put in a placeholder that says Indigenous knowledge is grounded in collective land tenure.
But these placeholders are just text that speaks to these issues. They mean nothing if they’re not cascading down and translated into action.
So, these international climate and biodiversity treaties mention Indigenous people and land tenure — meaning, the right to land — but that’s not the same as action on the ground.
Exactly. Sometimes I call this “death by recognition.” The reality of the matter is that Indigenous people are not saying, “Write about us on paper.” They’re saying, “Address our human rights, give Indigenous knowledge space in planning and development, and allow us to sit at the decision-making table.”
They are saying, “Put resources in our hands because we are aware of the issue; we understand where it hurts. We can direct these resources to strategic actions now.”
Right now there is a lot of money flowing into climate initiatives and into biodiversity efforts as well. Is that making its way into Indigenous communities?
One of the challenges for Indigenous people is access to resources. Most of the resources come indirectly — it’s a very layered process and each layer takes a chunk of those resources. Very little arrives in the hands of our communities.
And much of the money comes by way of small grants. Why small? There is this notion that Indigenous people have no capacity to manage big grants. How would they grow to manage big grants if they can’t flex their muscles to manage big grants like everybody else?
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Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images
Funds for climate change also often target specific landscapes like the Amazon or Congo Basin. These are not the only landscapes sequestering carbon. What about savanna woodlands? Savanna woodlands here sequester the most carbon.
What would you do with endless resources for conservation?
For pastoral communities, a big issue is access to water, which determines whether cattle can use a certain pasture. So I would strengthen the community’s access to water.
When you look at the issue of drought and dying herds, one way to help is by securing land tenure. It’s a technical process that requires cartographers and maps and other kinds of resources. Land tenure affects how Indigenous communities adapt to climate change and use the land.
We have learned that the State only understands the language of paper — it doesn’t communicate by spoken words, orally. Maybe we have talked too much about our Indigenous knowledge without documenting it. So we should document this knowledge and practices that are relevant to conservation, relevant to sustainable use, and relevant to climate resilience.
What would it mean to you to bridge the gap between the Indigenous and Western worlds? What is your vision for conservation?
I recognize the constraints of a crowded planet that needs to feed its growing population. But I also think we can develop integrated visions for how we relate to nature. The world will be a better place if multiple knowledge systems speak to each other, if they inform each other. We need space for mutual respect, for hearing each other out without prejudice, for not privileging some knowledge systems over others.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As big of an institution it is, you’d think the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) would take immediate action against someone who has consistently brought shame on their school. For not the first time, a law professor from UPenn has come under fire for sharing her racist and xenophobic ideology. Amy Wax, who formerly made headlines for writing racist editorials and citing Wikipedia as a scholarly source to claim Black students are more likely to fail in law school, has made headlines again—this time for her anti-Asian rhetoric.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half,” Wax said in a 2017 interview with Loury, according to The Washington Post.
In conversation with Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show, the same venue where she infamously spoke against Black people, Wax claimed that not only was “less Asian immigration” better for the U.S., but also that “fewer Asians” in the country would be great. Meaning she wasn’t only against more Asians coming to the U.S., she also had a problem with those already here. Her reason? She says they’re more likely to vote for Democrats.
In this episode, which aired on Dec. 20, Wax discussed U.S. immigration and shared her ideology that immigrants do not share the same values of the Western world and are thus a threat—an idea she also shared in a recent speech.
“But as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration. There needs to be more focus on people who are already here, and especially the core (and neglected) ‘legacy’ population, and a push to return to traditional concepts and institutions and Charles Murray’s ‘American Creed.’”
She continued:
“I confess I find Asian support for these policies mystifying, as I fail to see how they are in Asians’ interest. We can speculate (and, yes, generalize) about Asians’ desire to please the elite, single-minded focus on self-advancement, conformity and obsequiousness, lack of deep post-Enlightenment conviction, timidity toward centralized authority (however unreasoned), indifference to liberty, lack of thoughtful and audacious individualism, and excessive tolerance for bossy, mindless social engineering, etc.”
Additionally, she claimed that the U.S. should also be concerned about how both South Asians and other members of the AAPI community impact American culture.
“It’s just harder to assimilate those people or to have confidence that our way of life will continue if we bring a lot of people in who are not familiar with it. These are not original ideas on the [political] right,” Wax told Loury. “This might result in a shift in the racial profile of people who come in. Obviously, we’ll have fewer people from Africa. We’ll have fewer people of some parts of Asia, and it’ll be more white—not that many white people want to come to the United States.”
“[We] have to distinguish mass-immigration, which we’re getting from the Hispanics, south of the border, which I think poses different questions and challenges from the Asian elites that we’re getting,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that the influx of Asian elites is unproblematic. I actually think it’s problematic. …I think it’s because there’s this…danger of the dominance of an Asian elite in this country, and what does that mean? What is that going to mean to change the culture?
But her rant didn’t end there. She even targeted immigrants who stand up and speak against racism in America, piggybacking on the racist ideology that if you don’t like what’s happening in the country you should leave.
Her comments come as no surprise as she has consistently made comments against POC individuals and voiced her views on the country’s need to favor white over non-white people in the immigration system. But this time they went viral because even Loury’s audience had an issue with them.
"Let us be candid: Europe and the First World, to which the United States belongs, remains mostly white for now. And the Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of non-white people," she said at the inaugural National Conservatism conference 2019, according to Vox. "Embracing cultural distance nationalism means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites."
Not to mention, she has gotten away with such comments for numerous years— despite facing backlash. What’s different this time is that both students and faculty alike are calling for Wax to face consequences.
University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, who insisted she was not a racist despite praising the superiority of "European" culture, now argues that the US needs "fewer Asians" and we need to be asking "how many" Asians are too many. pic.twitter.com/WaPCMGglAC
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) January 2, 2022
Due to Wax’s comments, Penn Law School Dean Theodore Ruger not only issued a statement but reminded individuals that the professor was no longer allowed to teach required courses but only instruct electives at the school.
In his statement issued on Monday Ruger called Wax’s comments “anti-intellectual,” “racist,” and “white supremacist.”
"Like all racist generalizations, Wax's recent comments inflict harm by perpetuating stereotypes and placing differential burdens on Asian students, faculty, and staff to carry the weight of this vitriol and bias," he said.
"As we have previously emphasized, Wax's views are diametrically opposed to the policies and ethos of this institution," Ruger added. "They serve as a persistent and tangible reminder that racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not theoretical abstractions but are real and insidious beliefs in this country and in our building. This reality sharpens and deepens our commitment to support our community as we continue to work to advance equity and inclusion."
IMHO she should be completely removed from the university especially given the depth of her comments and the university’s claim that they are opposing their values. I mean this isn’t the first time the dean had to acknowledge her commentary and the harm it causes. After her comments on Black students, he had to issue a statement then as well denouncing the false claims of their lack of success. That is also when she was banned from teaching core classes at the university— despite this, her commentary continues so clearly it has no impact on her.
According to ABC News, students have expressed anxiety and worry on campus after hearing her comments.
Outside of the school social media backlash has also been strong. Even Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump chimed in.“It helps explain the situation this country finds itself in that an Ivy League university allows the morally and intellectually bankrupt racist #AmyWax teach the next generation of American lawyers. There should be consequences for this kind of hateful rhetoric @pennlaw,” she tweeted.
I understand tenure is in place, but something more substantial should be done. Any ideas on how Penn Law can handle this? Clearly, they are ill-equipped, as Wax continues to spread her hateful rhetoric online and on TV.
Click here to see the petition students have crafted in efforts to impact Wax’s tenure status.
Documents show that the antivirus company Avast has been selling its users' internet browsing data, through a subsidiary named Jumpshot, to clients that include Pepsi, Google, and Microsoft, reports Motherboard. The report is the result of a joint investigation between the VICE News site and PC Mag.
“An Avast antivirus subsidiary sells 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site,'” and clients of that data broker firm, Jumpstart, have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey,” Joseph Cox at Vice/Motherboard.
“An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies,” the joint investigation with VICE Motherboard and PCMag found.
Excerpt:
The documents, from a subsidiary of the antivirus giant Avast called Jumpshot, shine new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of peoples' internet browsing histories. They show that the Avast antivirus program installed on a person's computer collects data, and that Jumpshot repackages it into various different products that are then sold to many of the largest companies in the world. Some past, present, and potential clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Condé Nast, Intuit, and many others. Some clients paid millions of dollars for products that include a so-called "All Clicks Feed," which can track user behavior, clicks, and movement across websites in highly precise detail.
Avast claims to have more than 435 million active users per month, and Jumpshot says it has data from 100 million devices. Avast collects data from users that opt-in and then provides that to Jumpshot, but multiple Avast users told Motherboard they were not aware Avast sold browsing data, raising questions about how informed that consent is.
The data obtained by Motherboard and PCMag includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies' LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites. It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymized user visited YouPorn and PornHub, and in some cases what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched.
Read more:
Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data [Joseph Cox / VICE, via techmeme]
New: leaked documents, data, contracts show how hugely popular antivirus Avast now harvests internet browsing data and sells it for millions of dollars. Clients included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft. Documents show a product called "All Clicks Feed"https://t.co/i5s2lX8FJL
— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) January 27, 2020
Before selling the data Jumpshot/Avast removes personal info like names. But multiple experts believe you could identify people inside it. The data itself is also highly sensitive, being able to see specific porn videos and searches people looked at https://t.co/i5s2lX8FJL pic.twitter.com/DCLEP0qbXB
— Joseph Cox (@josephfcox) January 27, 2020
It was nice knowing you, Avast!
You can kiss your enterprise customerbase good bye! https://t.co/goI9bbkpc6
— Catalin Cimpanu (@campuscodi) January 27, 2020
SCOOP: Leaked documents show that the world's largest companies, including Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, Bain, Altria, etc. are spending millions tracking your every click around the internet: https://t.co/kXGegjaSPp
— Jason Koebler (@jason_koebler) January 27, 2020
Our privacy laws need a desperate update: such data collection should itself be illegal. https://t.co/H549nCisRy
— Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) January 27, 2020
Companies LOVE to pretend that "anonymizing" your data somehow means users can't be identified or their data abused. These duo reports do a lovely job highlighting how that's nonsense:https://t.co/dEG5EwPVjx pic.twitter.com/605IElYGu3
— Karl Bode (@KarlBode) January 27, 2020
Been using free antivirus software? Your very, *very* detailed browsing history has been put on the market – and lots of companies have been eagerly buying it.
If you’re not paying (and sometimes when you are), you’re the product, not the customer. https://t.co/NVceWrAoNV
— James Ball (@jamesrbuk) January 27, 2020
This is another reason why quitting these services is futile. Their power is so far beyond our standard ways of dealing with companies. https://t.co/5Rv8BhYSeL
— SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN
(@sivavaid) January 27, 2020
The antivirus business doesn't make much money anymore, so software like Avast is selling your browsing data instead. Don't use third-party antiviruses, people.
https://t.co/X9YUUuch97
— Owen Williams
(@ow) January 27, 2020
An antivirus company sells the ultimate in user behavior data: 'Every search. Every click. Every buy. On every site.'
Its buyers? Google, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi and a whole lot more.https://t.co/EAlrJ0zmgM
— ᴅᴇʀᴇᴋ ᴍᴇᴀᴅ (@derektmead) January 27, 2020
Doing wither instead of infect will upset the infect fans as much as doing infect would upset its foes.
On Zendikar, the Allies are basically the humanoids that have banded together. It would be tricky giving them a visual clue. If Allies showed up on another world, we could possibly do that. Note that it’s hard to give a singular cohesive look if the creatures make up too many cards as it could make the set look too monotonous.
The girls, ages 10 and 11, were held captive for years and remember nothing of their Yazidi heritage. They miss the ISIS woman who looked after them and tell rescuers they want to return to her.
(Image credit: Jane Arraf/NPR)
Is that something people actually want?
Only if you choose haste, it gets a +1/+1 counter from another source and then changes control. That’s not going to happen a lot,
NPR's Kelly McEvers discusses the announcement that 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities have been indicted by a grand jury with Ana Kasparian, co-host and producer for the online news network The Young Turks. and John Phillips political commentator for CNN and a columnist for the Orange County Register.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I have always been a daf yomi skeptic. Although I am a Talmudist and spend hours each day on Talmud scholarship, I find the rate of a “page a day” far too fast to achieve any substantive understanding. The relentless pace forces the reader to move on before mastering any given passage. When one has to cover two or more pages to make up for the inevitable missed day or days, comprehension becomes increasingly futile. Complex and difficult Talmudic reasoning is translated by virtually all daf yomi instructors, but not adequately explained, as most sessions are compacted to 45 minutes or so. This is not to minimize the salutary ritual aspects of daf yomi such as connecting the Jewish world in a shared endeavor, cultivating a commitment to Jewish tradition, and engaging in the mitzvah of Torah study for its own sake; I just don’t think one retains much Talmud content.
Ilana Kurshan’s delightful new book, If All the Seas Were Ink has now proven me wrong. This memoir recounts 7 ½ years of Kurshan’s life from 2004 to 2011, ages 27-35, as she studied daf yomi in Jerusalem. Kurshan tells of her failed first marriage and divorce; of the ensuing depression, self-doubt, loss of confidence, and despair; of her efforts to pick up the pieces of her life and to begin dating again; and of fresh love, remarriage, and birth of three children. The course of daily Talmud study structures the book, as Kurshan integrates this personal narrative with the traditions she encounters on the Talmud’s thousands of pages. The book is thus a “bibliomemoir,” a term coined by Joyce Carol Oates for a genre of literature combining engagement with a specific book or corpus of books with autobiography, or more exactly a “talmudomemoir.” The ritual “page a day” forces Kurshan to keep going in tough times, centers her in good times, and informs her religious and emotional struggle to lead a life of piety and study.
The titles of the book’s chapters correspond to the tractates of the Talmud she studied over the seven-year cycle: Yoma (Day of Atonement), Sukkah, Beitzah (Festival Laws), Rosh Hashanah … Ketubot (Marriage Contracts) ... Gittin (Divorces) etc. This structuring device evokes Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, with its chapters named after the elements and the corresponding autobiographical connections to chemical experiments. Yet the primary template is the great Church Father Augustine’s Confessions, with the story of a lost and fallen protagonist recounted by the saved and redeemed narrator ultimately converging in the redemptive experience. Where Augustine interweaves biblical verses into his account of his professional, emotional, and philosophical-religious quests and applies them to the events of his life, Kurshan carries out a similar project with Talmudic passages. For both, authentic living is realized in study such that texts and books pervade and shape their experience. Yet the solutions to their respective journeys could not be more different: Augustine finds truth and meaning in Paul and Christianity, where Kurshan finds wholeness in love, marriage, and building a Jewish home. Salvation, for Augustine, entails celibacy, poverty, and abandonment of all this worldly pursuits; for Kurshan salvation requires marriage, children, and the mundane routines of raising a family. This contrast encapsulates a core difference between rabbinic Judaism and certain types of Christianity: the rejection of the body and of this world as opposed to the embrace of both.
The most enjoyable feature of the book is the brilliant and creative integration of the daily Talmudic folio Kurshan studies with experiences of her life. Kurshan draws a connection between the Talmudic discussion of the terumat ha-deshen, the first ritual activity each morning in the Temple, where the priests cleared away the previous night’s ashes from the altar, to emptying the dishwasher upon waking up, “a ritual that links the day that has passed to the day that is dawning.” Studying the laws of hezek re’iyah, “the damage of seeing,” which apply to constructing dwellings that look into the domain of a neighbor, Kurshan reflects on the difficulties of growing up as child of a rabbi in a house next to synagogue, constantly on public display. When her daughter’s lost stuffed elephant is replaced by another and then miraculously found, the child experiences confusion as to which is the “real” beloved elephant. Kurshan invokes the Talmudic deliberation over which animal is holy when a lamb designated as the Passover sacrifice is lost, replaced, and then found.
Upon learning she is pregnant with twins, and experiencing apprehension at the possible complications, she discusses the Talmud’s anxiety over “pairs,” apparently a curious relic of Mesopotamian superstition about even numbered sets of objects. Interrogated by an overly aggressive airlines agent about her motives for returning to Israel and plans in the holy land, she opines that his relentless questioning violates the Talmud’s warning against delving into “what is in front of you and what is behind you,” in traditional context referring to the times prior to creation and of the messiah. Every occasion, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary, recalls a Talmudic tradition. I have always considered assertions that the Talmud is an encyclopedic work covering every facet of human life, or that the Talmud’s “contours are a reflection of life itself” to be exaggerated. But Kurshan’s book goes a long way to making that case.
These innovative applications of particular Talmudic passages are accompanied by hundreds of discussions of general traditions about marriage, divorce, childbirth, the Sabbath, holidays, prayer, and other elements of Jewish life and history. Kurshan confesses that, having flirted with vegetarianism for years, she became a full-fledged vegetarian after studying the Talmudic tractates that detail the laws of slaughtering animals and decapitating birds for sacrifices. She recalls studying the laws about how to hang a person while visiting the Tower of London in England, and the laws of questioning witnesses while visiting the Palais de Justice in Paris. In this respect the book is much more than a personal account of one woman’s encounter with the Talmud but serves as a wonderful general introduction to the Talmud and a valuable resource for Jewish literacy and education.
Kurshan is not only a student of Talmud but a student of texts and books in general. She received an undergraduate degree in English literature from Harvard, and worked as a book editor, literary agent, and translator in New York and Jerusalem. Her knowledge of English literature and poetry is remarkable, and she seamlessly weaves quotations from these texts into her book to complement passages from Bible and Talmud. Kurshan quotes not only from such famous authors as Shakespeare, Dickenson, Hawthorne, Blake, Coleridge, Whitman, and Woolf, but from Wallace Stevens, Alexander McCall Smith, Wendy Cope, Colleen McCullough, Jack Gilbert, Kenneth Koch, and dozens of others. (I had never heard of many of the authors she quotes; feeling rather stupid is one downside of reading this book.)
Wrestling with taking the plunge into marriage, Kurshan invokes Eliza Griswold’s poem “Tigers,” which describes two lovers on a precipice with tigers threatening from above and below, and William Blake’s “The Tyger,” explaining that she “chose Griswold’s pluck over Blake’s terror.” When she has last minute jitters her fiancée calms her nerves by quoting an apt passage of Talmud; he then responds to her anxiety expressed through an allusion to a line from William Matthew’s “Misgivings,” by quoting from the continuation of the poem—at this point the reader knows Kurshan has met her true soulmate.
Kurshan reads voraciously and constantly, governed by a horror of bitul zeman, idle time, the rabbinic concept of never wasting time that could be spent productively on study. She reads in elevators, in line at the supermarket and post office, in doctors’ offices, and when walking down the street—to the point where she developed a reputation in Jerusalem “as the woman who reads and walks.” When forced to swim for exercise after a broken foot precludes jogging, she is frustrated at the wasted time in the pool, so she covers poems with plastic wrap and leaves them at the end of the lane to sneak peeks before swimming the next length. “This was how I memorized all of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s ‘Eros Turannos,’” she mentions in passing. Were I not confident of her virtuous character, I would think she means to shame the rest of us slackers.
Apart from the framing narrative arc of divorce and misery to remarriage and bliss, not much happens. The book is about mundane, quotidian life: buying groceries, cooking dinner, feeding infants, watering plants, cleaning the apartment. These ordinary pursuits serve the larger goal of a life dedicated to study and observance. Kurshan fills her days with prayer, organizing worship services, attending lectures, celebrating the festivals, Talmud study, Bible classes, reading, and still more study. She works tirelessly to integrate the holy and the profane, such as preparing Talmud themed dishes, including Resh LaQuiche, named for the Talmudic sage Resh Lakish. Here and there the book addresses larger theological or cultural issues, such as the existence of God, the efficacy of prayer, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Israel-Diaspora relations. These are dealt with in a perfunctory manner, almost as if fulfilling an obligation—how can a book about seven years in Jerusalem not mention Arabs? Kurshan has few novel insights in any case, though admittedly these are difficult issues.
Perhaps one exception is gender, as the anomaly of a woman attending daf yomi classes provokes questions from the typical audience of religious males, and Kurshan’s involvement in egalitarian minyanim and Torah-reading stands out against the religious landscape of Jerusalem. In some ways, however, the minor importance of these larger questions is precisely the lesson of the book: the observant Jewish life or study takes place very much in the trenches, in the everyday struggles, and does not require answers to larger theological and philosophical problems.
If all the Seas were Ink has a heartwarming tenor. “It did not seem possible that such supreme joy could be my rightful lot” she marvels at her newfound love. Coming from just about anyone else, I would find such sentiment trite. Kurshan’s purity and goodness make it feel innocently honest. For those not enamored by the seven year commitment to daf yomi, Kurshan’s memoir may be the next best thing.
Irene Harrington, a happy child
If you’ve been following this blog for at least two years, you probably know about the plight of Irene Harrington, a daughter of Father Matthew Harrington and his wife Anna. Father Matthew was the priest at St. John the Theologian Orthodox Mission in Starhill. When his wife Anna became pregnant with their fourth child, they discovered early on that Baby Irene would have severe birth defects, and that both the pregnancy and the delivery would be life-threatening for Anna. But they told the doctors in no uncertain terms that terminating the pregnancy was not an option, and would not be discussed. This is what it means to be deeply and authentically pro-life.
As a clergy family in a mission parish, and with Matushka Anna (as Orthodox priest wives are called) having to quit her job to go on full bed rest due to the high-risk pregnancy, the Harringtons had very little money. A friend of their started a GoFundMe to help defer the costs of caring for Irene. People all over the country, including more than a few readers of this blog, responded with extraordinary generosity.
The Harringtons moved back to their home state of Washington last fall. Irene has been receiving medical care there. Tonight, the Harringtons posted this update on Irene’s condition to the GoFundMe site:
We are sorry for the long lapse in updates but we have been waiting to complete some major appointments so we can more accurately update our wonderful supporters. Irene has been busy growing and really has benefitted in many ways since our move. She has her own corner in the living room where we keep a medium sized mirror at ground level. This has really improved her ability to use both sides of her body as the mirror allows her to see and activate her right side. She also loves to look at things in the mirror including any new treasures or fashion items she has found. She is getting good practice at wearing her glasses but continues to have vision difficulties and limitations. We have started having home visits from an occupational therapist and will start having appointments with speech, physical, and vision therapist as well.
Since our last update, Irene has had serval major appointments including MRI and 3D CT scans. Having the current scans have allowed her team to see how to proceed in treating Irene’s condition. Some of the issues that were shared so far include the discovery of what is actually inside the growth that covers her right eye area. It appears that it is a type of teratoma that includes tooth, bone, tissue, as well as part of her pituitary gland and another gland that belongs in the brain. Her right eye never developed but instead behind that growth is a very large cyst which is taking up a lot of space. Up to this point, the cyst has been beneficial and allowed the eye socket to grow without the aid of surgical spacers. However, that time may be coming to an end and the cyst will likely need to be removed. This will prove difficult. There are many irregularities with her her brain formation and skull. In addition to her MRI, a 3D CT scan showed us the severity of her spinal scoliosis. It’s a complicated case. Although her spine curvature continues to worsen as she grows the Pediatric Orthopedic surgeon would like to allow her more time before any surgical intervention. However, because of the severity, surgery is the only possibility to help correct her spine. We’re just buying a little more time before we begin that process. She will see a pulmonologist regularly to ensure that lung function will not be impacted on her affected side as she continues to grow. The good news is that the MRI gave a more detailed view to reveal that she has no tethering of the spine. Now we wait. Specialists and Surgeons continue to meet about her case with the new information to decide how to proceed. It was really upsetting to see the scans. It’s hard to see how deformed and different things look on the inside. It is a stark reminder that she is truly miraculous and she continues to be as she grows and develops physically and cognitively.We wish we knew more about how things will progress and it is always hard to hear about how difficult and complicated Irene’s situation is. The specialists continue to say her case is “unique”. We are reminded, how blessed we are to have her in our lives. She is a light of love and laughter and is constantly reminding us of the tender mercies that God has showered upon us. She is full of God’s grace. Irene will often come running through the house to our table at dinner time when she hears the Lord’s prayer, crossing herself and bowing making it very difficult to keep a straight face. She loves it when dad lays on the floor so she can climb over him, a brief moment of attention to dad, as she tags along closely with mom at all times. Anna’s health is wonderful. She has had good reports from her doctor and is busy continuing to pour her energy and time into all of Irene’s needs, coordinating her therapy, and all of her medical visits. We will continue to update you as we get new information. As for now, please know how much we love you and appreciate your prayers for our little family.
If you are so moved, please give what you can to help this little girl and her family, who continue to be an incredible witness to life.
While I don’t usually write on pop culture topics or movies, I am making one of my rare exceptions with this post. I saw the first available screening of Wonder Woman last night, and I was very impressed. Patty Jenkins has directed a wonderful adaptation of the heroine’s origin story, and she and her cast and crew deserve the very positive reviews they have been receiving. The movie lives up to the high expectations that have been created for it, and it makes its mark as one of the better movies in this genre. Wonder Woman is the fourth installment in the current DC Comics movie universe, and it serves as an important link between last year’s Batman v. Superman and this fall’s Justice League, but it stands by itself and doesn’t require viewers to have seen anything else before seeing it.
The movie is in many respects a straightforward origin and adventure story: it tells us where Diana came from, how she chose to enter the world, and what she did in her first attempt to save it. Because it is the first Wonder Woman movie, it doesn’t have to bother with reimagining an extremely familiar character, and it is freed of the burdens associated with the numerous “reboots” that accompany some other superhero characters. This movie assumes that the audience doesn’t necessarily know Diana’s backstory and can dwell on it at some length, and that allows both comic fans and casual viewers to get to know the character and enjoy the ride. The portrayal of Themyscira–Diana’s home island–is well-executed, and Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright do fine work in their respective roles as Diana’s mother and aunt/instructor. Setting the story in 1918 and taking Diana onto the battlefields of WWI are unusual choices, but they raise the stakes and pay off later in the film.
Spoilers follow, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know them.
The movie begins with episodes from Diana’s childhood and adolescence, and we see how she acquires the military training that she will later use to such great effect later in the story. Then she encounters Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), an American spy working for British intelligence, who has crashed in the sea off the coast of Themyscira. She rescues him, but only just in time to watch as a German landing party pursues him onto the shores of her island. A pitched battle follows between the Germans and the native Amazons, which only makes Trevor’s arrival seem even more suspicious. Following Trevor’s interrogation and his description of the war raging in the outside world, Diana becomes convinced that she has to aid him in returning to Europe to find a way to bring an end to the war. The rest of the plot unfolds in a fairly straightforward way as Diana and Trevor assemble their team and carry out their mission.
During the film, Diana moves from being an extremely naive and idealistic outsider to the world of men to one who is quickly disillusioned by the corruption and horror she encounters in WWI-era Europe. As a complete stranger to the world she encounters, Diana serves as both critic of the folly and stupidity she witnesses in the military leadership of the time and as a stand-in for a modern audience. As viewers of Batman v. Superman will recall, her disillusionment is so great that she ends up withdrawing from the world for a century after the events shown in this film. While she triumphs over Ares in the final battle, she nonetheless recoils from what she called “the century of horrors.” Wonder Woman ends with a coda that emphasizes Diana’s renewed willingness to fight for a better world, but we happen to know that this a fairly recent development following the events in BvS.
David Thewlis’ Ares is outstanding, and the revelation in the final act that he has been the villain all along is well-done and manages to come as something of a surprise. Almost until the end the audience is made to think that Erich Ludendorff is the embodiment of Ares, and it is only after Diana kills him with relative ease that we realize that he can’t possibly be the real villain. The oddity of Ludendorff’s ahistorical, untimely demise (the real Ludendorff lived until the late 1930s) is a glitch in the script, but that’s a minor problem with a mostly satisfying story. Making Ares the “peace at any cost” British official rather than the very obvious German general was a smart choice, and one that takes seriously Ares’ capacity for duplicity.
The relationship between Gal Gadot’s Diana and Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor is handled very well, and the two have real chemistry on screen. Theirs is a love story that is ultimately fated not to end well, but because of that relationship Diana gains an important insight into the human condition that proves critical in her clash with Ares. Because Ares is committed to an unremittingly bleak and dark view of human nature, Diana’s appreciation for the nobler qualities of men helps her to reject his attempts to recruit her to his side and finally enables her to defeat him.
Wonder Woman has many similarities with recent DC movies that many critics will inevitably bash by way of praising it, so it is worth noting a few of them here. The structure of the story is almost identical with Man of Steel in recounting the origins and first trials of their respective characters, but more specifically there is a moment when Ares tries to recruit Diana to support him that is the same as Zod’s attempt to get Kal on board with his plans. The response from each one is exactly the same: “I can’t be part of that.” In both cases, they are asked to choose between siding with their own kind against humanity, and both refuse to do it. The final battle with Ares is more than a little reminiscent of the fight with Doomsday at the end of Batman v. Superman, and the scene of an anguished Diana in the gassed village is eerily similar to the scene of Superman in the destroyed Capitol hearing room.
Finally, Wonder Woman is distinguished by the fact that it is the only female superhero movie to date that is likely to be both a critical and financial success. That is a credit to Jenkins’ work as director and to the studio’s decision to commit to a standalone Wonder Woman movie very early in the new DC movie franchise. That paves the way for more movies like this one, and if they are half as good as this one was that will be a good result.
