Oxford University Press's Blog, page 213

Plant lore: gorse

In the long history of this blog, I have rarely touched on the origin of plant names, but there have been posts on mistletoe (December 20, 2006) and ivy (January 11, 2017). Some time ago, a letter came with a question about the etymology of gorse, and I expect to devote some space to this plant name and its two synonyms.

The word gorse has been known since the Old English period and once sounded as gors and gorst. No book I have consulted explains why two variants existed. At first blush, gors-t looks like a few other words with excrescent (that is, parasitic, additional) t after adverbial s, as in whil-s–t, among-s-t, amid-s-t, and the substandard analogical across-t. But gorse is not an adverb, and the development must have gone in the opposite direction: for some reason, t was lost after s, so that the word’s etymology should account for the longer form. With few exceptions, all the sources concentrate on the root and try to explain only gor-. Yet the original division is not immediately clear: for example, frost is, from a historical point of view, fros-t (its root is the same as in freeze), while blast is bla-st (here the root is blow). I’ll mention still another interpretation of –st later.

Our earliest etymological dictionaries of English vacillate between nonsensical conjectures (for instance, from gross(e) “dull, corpulent, rude, fat, thick” and even from gore or garbage) and silence. Thus, even Noah Webster, who usually cast his net widely and managed to find some Persian or Hebrew look-alike, had nothing to say. Since gorse is a prickly plant, Charles Richardson, the author of a most useful dictionary spoiled by embarrassingly inadequate etymologies, viewed (though indeed tentatively) gorst as the past participle of Old Engl. iersan “to be angry” (to be sure, being pricked will make you irate). He was a faithful follower of Horne Tooke, who derived as many words as he could from past participles. Yet Tooke did not include gorse in his monumental book The Diversions of Purley! Richardson turned out to be more royalist (Tookian) than the king.

Gorse in its full glory. Image credit: Broom Flower Nature by DeNeric. CC0 via Pixabay.

Early enough, grass was suggested as the etymon of gorse. The word for “grass” often occurs with the vowel and r transposed (this phonetic leapfrog is called metathesis). For instance, in English dialects, both gers and gris occur. Old Frisian also had gers and gras, while in Middle Dutch, gars, gers, and gors have been recorded. It seems rather unlikely that gorse, a shrub, was called simply “grass.” Also, final t cannot be ignored. Yet this idea persisted for a long time. I’ll quote part of the etymology of gorse from the second edition of The Century Dictionary: “as no cognates are known, the word is probably a native formation, perhaps originally *grōst, literally ‘growth’ (undergrowth?), with noun-formative –st.” I have only expanded one abbreviation. An asterisk is the sign denoting an unrecorded, reconstructed form.

The crucial phrase in the above passage is no cognates are known. Indeed, Walter W. Skeat, in the first edition of his English etymological dictionary, cited no related forms in or outside English. He only noted that gorse is not “grass.” He also rejected Wedgwood’s idea that gorse is a borrowing from Welsh. It should be remembered that Hensleigh Wedgwood was the most prominent etymologist of the pre-Skeat era. Four editions of his dictionary appeared, and a revised American version was started (unfortunately, the project died almost in its cradle). At one time, Wedgwood expected to secure the position of the etymologist of what eventually became the OED. He was a resourceful but unreliable word historian. In the 1850s, he thought that gorse was related to Engl. forest. This was a blind shot. Wedgwood realized it, and in his dictionary cited only Welsh gores ~ gorest “waste, open.” I don’t know Welsh, but my experience shows that Wedgwood’s forms are always correct. Somewhat unexpectedly, Charles Mackay, who was as devoted to Irish Gaelic etymons as Tooke was to past participles, skipped gorse in his book.

After the publication of Skeat’s dictionary, Wedgwood brought out a “pamphlet” titled Contested Etymologies. It contains many reasonable suggestions, but Wedgwood is practically forgotten, and only those who study sound-imitating words use his work, because Wedgwood paid great (excessively great) attention to onomatopoeia. As regards gorse, he cited a few convincing analogs in defense of his derivation, but did not explain why Old English should have borrowed a Celtic name for a widespread plant.

Barley: stickly-prickly, as Kipling might have called it. Image credit: Barley by Craig Nagy. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The deadlock was broken when James A. H. Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, suggested that gorse did have a cognate, namely, German Gerste “barley.” Murray was an incredibly well-read man. Yet it is hard to tell how many sources he used in every given case. In the mid-1830s, Konrad Schwenck published a German etymological dictionary (still earlier he published a similar Latin dictionary), and in the entry Gerste we find Engl. gorse as a cognate. Someone at Oxford may perhaps tell us whether Murray had access to Schwenck’s dictionary, but, as far as I can judge, this comparison was not noticed, and Gerste appeared sporadically in dictionaries in connection with gorse only after the publication of the letter G in the OED.

Sitting on the fence and wondering where the word gorse came from. Image credit: Fjord is opening up by Bambi Corro. Public Domain via Unsplash.

One wonders whether the names of gorse and barley can be related. Indeed they can or rather they may. Plants often get their names from their appearance or function. The older such a name, the harder it is to decipher its meaning. If gorse and Gerste share the feature “prickly,” Schwenck and Murray’s comparison has potential, but specialists are far from being unanimous on this point. However, it should be remembered that specialists are not oracles but rather befuddled human beings. Their verdicts do not always have a solid foundation. Some people believe that gorse and Gerste are related, while others stay on the fence. Since modern dictionaries try to be fully reliable (better safe than sorry), their silence does not necessarily mean disagreement. Friedrich Kluge, the author of the first truly modern German etymological dictionary, never mentioned gorse in the entry Gerste, but his immediate successors added it. The latest editor returned to the original version. Skeat in the concise edition of his dictionary traced gorse to the ancient (Indo–European) root of Gerste, without citing this German word, and thus tacitly, but perhaps reluctantly, joined Murray.

This is a porcupine, the very embodiment of an Indo-European root. Image credit: Natural Animal Porcupine by analogicus. CC0 via Pixabay.

The root in question is supposed to mean “stand on end, bristle,” with reference to the plant’s awn, or beard; related is Latin hordeum “barley.” Quite recently, two etymological dictionaries of Proto-Germanic have been published. In one (by Guus Kroonen, 2013), the Latin, Greek, and Armenian cognates of Gerste appear, but gorse does not. In the other (by V. V. Levitsky, 2016), gorse is present. It will be fair to conclude that the etymology of gorse is in limbo, and this is where we will leave it until next week.

Featured image credit: Gorse here heather there by The Legend Kay. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

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It’s time to raise the retirement age again

Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin and both correctly agree on an important fact for national retirement policy: People live longer than they used to.

In his Executive Order on Strengthening Retirement Security in America, President Donald Trump instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to “examine the life expectancy and distribution tables” which govern mandatory retirement distributions. Under current law, a retiree must begin to receive her pension, IRA or 401(k) distributions no later than her “required beginning date.” For most people, this date occurs between their seventieth and seventy-first birthdays. Once such mandatory distributions have begun, they must be paid over the person’s remaining life. Because the average American is living longer than before, the executive order states, the Treasury tables (based on earlier, shorter life expectancies) may force “retirees to make excessively large withdrawals from their accounts.”

President Putin’s recognition of the pension implications of longer life expectancies has taken the controversial form of proposed later retirement ages to receive the Russian equivalent of Social Security payments. Under current law, Russian women start government pensions at age 55 while men commence such pensions at age 60. Putin proposes that the retirement age of Russian men be delayed in stages to 65 while the retirement age for women will be set in stages at 60—three years earlier than Putin’s original proposal to establish 63 as the female retirement age in Russia.

Both the Trump and Putin proposals reflect the fact that, on average, people live longer than they did when current retirement ages were established. Pension policy must confront these greater longevities.

Averages, of course, are just that, averages. Within the overall trend towards longer life expectancies, there are exceptions. In the United States, average life expectancies have actually decreased slightly in the last two years. Russian life expectancies are considerably lower than those in other industrialized nations.

Nevertheless, on balance, in both countries, and throughout the industrialized world, people live longer than they did when current retirement ages were established in 1983. Longer lives mean longer retirement payouts. This strains the finances of public and private pension plans. The French pension system, for example, confronts this same phenomenon of extended pension payouts.

This is not an unprecedented problem. In 1983, after intense partisan wrangling, President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill negotiated a compromise to bolster the finances of the federal Social Security system. One important part of that compromise was the decision to raise gradually the Social Security normal retirement age from 65 to 67. Thirty-five years later, a similar increase may be appropriate to bolster the finances of the Social Security System. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, using numbers from the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that moving the Social Security normal retirement age from 67 to 70 by 2035 would save $120 billion.

A rejoinder is that it is easy for white collar workers who love their jobs (e.g., law professors like me) to propose delaying retirement ages. For blue collar employees whose jobs are more physically taxing, delayed retirement looks less attractive.

It’s a fair criticism. The problem is that a system with varied normal retirement ages based on occupation would in practice be unworkable. For example, some think of manufacturing as a classic, physically -taxing blue collar job but much manufacturing today involves the operation of computerized equipment. In a system with different retirement ages for different occupations, how would the system distinguish between the manufacturing employee whose work is physically strenuous and the manufacturing worker whose high-tech environment is not? What would be the retirement age of a line-worker who is promoted to a management position?

The age adjustments proposed by President Trump are politically (relatively) easy since these adjustments will enable retirees with relatively large retirement accounts to withdraw their funds more slowly if they want. The kind of Social Security reform adopted in the U.S. in 1983 and now proposed by President Putin is politically tougher to enact since, even when phased-in, delaying pensions can disappoint the expectations of those affected.

But, at the end of the day, the solvency of public pension systems will require bi-partisan cooperation in the spirit of the Reagan-O’Neill compromise of 1983. Along with additional tax revenues, delaying the age of retirement to reflect longer life expectancies should be a component of that cooperation.

The two presidents are correct: we are living longer and pension policy must adjust to the reality of expanded longevity.

Featured image credit:  Photo by rawpixel via Unsplash.

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How well do you know William Godwin? [quiz]

In October, William Godwin (1756–1836) was featured as our Philosopher of the Month. He was a leading political philosopher and public intellectual during the crisis in British politics in the 1790s and achieved fame with the publication of his treatise “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.” The social theories on liberty and individualism that he espoused in the book would later exert a profound influence on generations of thinkers, writers, and poets.

You may have read his work, but how much do you really know about William Godwin and his famous literary family of writers? Test your knowledge with our quiz below.

 

Featured image credit: London Parliament England Ben by derwiki. CC0 via Pixabay .

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What is “toxic” about anger?

The Oxford Word of the Year is a word or expression chosen to reflect the passing year in language. Every year, the Oxford Dictionaries team debates over a selection of candidates for Word of the Year, choosing the one that best captures the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year. The 2018 Oxford Word of the Year is: toxic.

It is the sheer scope of the word’s application that has made toxic the stand-out choice for the Oxford Word of the Year. Here, psychology professor Ephrem Fernandez reflects on what makes anger a toxic emotion.

What is anger?

In essence, anger is a subjective feeling tied to perceived wrongdoing and a tendency to counter or redress that wrongdoing in ways that may range from resistance to retaliation (Fernandez, 2013). Like sadness and fear, the feeling of anger can take the form of emotion, mood, or temperament (Fernandez & Kerns, 2008).

What wrongdoings usually elicit anger?

Many psychological tests of anger present a list of anger-provoking scenarios. Some of the items on these inventories pertain to idiosyncratic reactions to highly specific situations. In general, our research shows that most wrongdoings can be broadly classified according to the following types: (i) insults or affronts, (ii) insensitivity or indifference, (iii) deception and betrayal, (iv) abandonment and rejection, (v) breach of agreement or promise, (vi) ingratitude, (vii) exploitation, (viii) ineptitude, and (ix) assault. As can be seen, most of the elicitors are psychological rather than physical. Whatever the elicitor, it is important to keep in mind that anger arises from a subjective perception of being wronged, one that is of course open to different interpretations.

What is the difference between the experience and expression of anger?

A common saying is that the good or the bad is not in anger per se, but in “what you do with it.” In other words, it is not the experience of anger but its expression that determines whether it is appropriate or not. After all, in the psychoevolutionary perspective, anger (like any affective quality) has evolved to serve a function. That function, in the case of anger, is to mobilize the individual to counter or redress a wrongdoing, just as fear would serve to mobilize the individual to escape or avoid, and sadness might demobilize the individual to the point of yielding or giving up.

So, should we direct our attention to the expression of anger more so than the experience of anger? Not so fast! There is abundant research showing that anger itself has deleterious effects on one’s health. Foremost among these is the effect on cardiovascular function. One striking observation in this regard is that a one-point increase in externalized anger or internalized anger is associated with a 12% increase in the risk of hypertension (Everson et al., 1998).

But anger is virtually unavoidable in human relations, and to eradicate it as we go about eradicating smallpox and other pathogens would be unrealistic in the world as we know it. Therefore, it makes more sense to direct our efforts to the expression of anger.

What makes anger dysfunctional?

The typical answer uttered in response to this question is “violence” or “aggression.” However, clinical anecdotes are replete with people who do not get aggressive or violent, yet harbor anger that impairs their relationships in work, family, and social settings. As Averill (1983) astutely pointed out, anger can occur without aggression and vice versa. Anger may be expressed along a variety of dimensions (Fernandez, 2008): it may be reflected or deflected, internalized or externalized, physical or verbal, resistance or retaliation, controlled or uncontrolled, and restorative or punitive. Elevations on particular dimensions can be plotted to form configurations that reflect such diagnoses as intermittent explosive disorder or passive aggressive personality.

Of course, any psychometric scores or profiles of anger should not be divorced from the particular context in which the anger occurs. A diagnosis of Intermittent Explosive Disorder, for example, hinges on the extent to which the aggressive outburst is out of proportion to the provoking event. As with other so-called “mental disorders,” broader sociocultural contextualization is also crucial when reaching conclusions about what is a disorder and what is not. However, one provocative question that arises is whether a whole sociocultural standard for the expression of anger could be dysfunctional—a matter for further debate.

One lesson that emerges in the search for what is wrong with anger is that it is not just the (culturally unsanctioned) blatantly aggressive anger that is maladaptive. Anger that is expressed in covert and indirect ways has also been the object of much interest, dating back to the famous Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory (BDHI; Buss & Durkee, 1957). For there is much in anger that is not manifest but masked, not obvious but insidious, and such anger may also have considerable destructive potential to others, not to mention the long-term ill effects exerted on the person who harbors such anger.

How is dysfunctional anger treated?

With regard to “anger management” as it is popularly called, the cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) remains dominant and supported by empirical evidence. Typically, this emphasizes techniques to help the client de-arouse and reappraise. This approach can be greatly enhanced by additional cognitive and behavioral strategies as well as emotionally-evocative techniques as espoused in emotion-focused therapy. The product of such enhancements is an even more integrative program such as Cognitive Behavioral Affective Therapy (CBAT).

Feature image credit: “For Dear Life” photo by Mitch Lensink. Public domain via Unsplash.

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What Matthew Shepard’s interment taught us about religion

On 26 October 2018, twenty years after two men in Wyoming brutally murdered gay college student Matthew Shepard, the Washington National Cathedral hosted a service to inter Shepard’s ashes in a permanent memorial. More than four thousand people attended the service that was co-led by the Reverend Gene Robinson, the first openly-gay elected bishop of the Episcopal Church. Robinson announced to the assembled crowd that Shepard had “come back to church.” During the service, Shepard’s father declared, “Matt loved the church.” Here, as in 1998 when Shepard died, Shepard’s veneration was connected to religion, to the image of him as gay and Christian.

When Shepard died in 1998 numerous conservative religious and political leaders portrayed gays as godless sinners. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, during the worst of the American AIDS epidemic, popular pastors like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell described AIDS as God’s punishment for the sin of homosexuality. AIDS activists insisted that most heterosexuals did not care that gay and bisexual men were dying by the thousands because many saw homosexuality as sinful. And yet when news circulated about Matthew Shepard’s murder in 1998, thousands of heterosexuals publicly expressed their outrage over his death. Although he was one of numerous anti-gay murders in the 1990s, and even though he had been unknown to the public before he died, heterosexual politicians, celebrities, and average citizens rallied to memorialize him. President Bill Clinton issued a statement about Shepard from the White House. Members of Congress joined five thousand Americans on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to honor him. More than sixty additional memorial services, marches, and vigils took place throughout the country. Never before had an anti-gay murder mattered so greatly to the nation.

Several factors help explain why Americans cared so deeply about Shepard’s death. Shepard was white, middle-class, and gender conforming. He resembled the few images of gay men and lesbians in popular culture in 1998, like Ellen DeGeneres, who had come out as gay one year earlier, and the characters on Will & Grace, which premiered a few weeks before Shepard died. Shepard was also young. He was twenty-one but wore orthodontic braces and stood five feet two inches tall. His youthful image made him seem like a non-sexual gay adolescent rather than the stereotype of hypersexual gay men.

Shepard’s widespread acceptance was also connected to religion. Shepard was a practicing Protestant who had been baptized and had served as an acolyte. The public learned that Shepard had joined only two clubs when he started college: one for LGBT students and another for Episcopalians. At the time of his murder, well-funded conservative Christian groups actively promoted ex-gay ministries where pastors insisted homosexuality could be eradicated through proper Christian devotion, an idea explored in the 2018 film Boy Erased. In 1998, Shepard countered the idea that Christianity and homosexuality were incompatible and epitomized how one could be both gay and Christian. To many heterosexual Christians, Shepard, as a white practicing Protestant, became a safe, relatable gay citizen.

Not everyone, though, accepted Shepard as a legitimate Christian. Outside his funeral, the Revered Fred Phelps and congregants from his Westboro Baptist Church screamed that Shepard was in Hell. Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church had previously picketed the funerals of several gay men who had died from AIDS complications. But their notoriety was directly connected to Shepard’s popularity. As they shouted anti-gay epithets, a group of Shepard supporters linked arms and formed a line in front of them. Then they sang “Amazing Grace” loud enough to drown out the anti-gay screaming. The standoff became a media flashpoint as a visible line emerged between those who supported gays and those who persecuted them. For many Americans, the Westboro Baptist Church’s protest against the young, and Christian, Matthew Shepard seemed like an abhorrent display of hate, a history of religious homophobia gone too far.

With Shepard’s ashes interred at the Washington National Cathedral, we might ask what his enshrined memorial should mean for us twenty years after his death. For one, his placement in the Cathedral should remind us that LGBTQ+ politics and religion are not always in opposition, and that many progressive religious leaders have fought for LGBTQ+ equality for decades. Second, his memorial should draw our attention to those who are most frequently targeted for violence in the present day, such as transgender women and queer people of color. Two decades after his death, we should be doing everything we can to make sure the LGBTQ+ Americans who, unlike Shepard, are not white, gender conforming, or Christian, matter as equally to the nation as those who do. That should be Shepard’s legacy.

Featured Image Credit: “National Cathedral (Washington DC)” by Shubert Ciencia. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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On animal sight and behaviour

have spent the last fifty years studying the eyes and vision of animals, including man.  During that time there have been many discoveries and ideas from vision research that have intrigued me, most of these are known to other scientists, but not more widely.  Yet everyone who can see is interested, at some level, with the extraordinary processes involved in imaging the world around us, and in translating those images into perceptions and actions. For many, but not all, animals, vision is the most important sense for guiding action, and this is achieved in many different ways by animals at different levels of evolutionary complexity, from molluscs to man.

Eyes, as we know them, came into being in the Cambrian era, which began 540 million years ago. Before the Cambrian there were animals, mostly small, and some would have had eyes like those of present-day flatworms: no more than a handful of receptors in a shallow cup. When the Cambrian explosion occurred, caused ultimately by climatic changes, animals got bigger, faster and, crucially, they stared to prey upon each other. To be a predator you need eyes, and the better they resolve the further away you can see prey. Similarly, as a prey animal the better your eyes are the easier it is to spot danger and take evasive action. A visual arms race developed, which resulted in most of the kinds of eyes that are found in modern animals. At the same time the major animal phyla came into existence, or at least became recognisable in the forms of the animals we know today.

Most people’s understanding of eyes is that they come in two varieties: camera-type eyes like ours, with a single lens-system focussing light onto a concave retina, and compound eyes with many lenses distributed over a convex surface. Since about 1890 scientific understanding about the number of types of eye, using different optical systems to produce images, has risen slowly, and now stands at between eight and ten, depending who you ask. Many of the systems have parallels in optical technology, but not all. For example, the mirror system of lobster eyes was unknown before its discovery in 1975, but it has now been adopted for use in X-ray optical systems. The laws of physics are the same for biology and technology, but the materials employed to produce structures that refract and reflect are very different.

Identifying others is a feat that we are very good at, but it does involve a great deal of brain-power;  attempts to achieve identification using the computational power of artificial intelligence have had only limited success.  Some of the ways that animals with small brains manage to identify others are extraordinary. Jumping spiders use unique scanning eye movements to establish whether the object they have just detected has a pattern of legs that signify it is another jumping spider (to be mated or avoided) rather than an insect (to be eaten). Fiddler crabs use the timing pattern of their claw waving, rather than physical appearance, to demonstrate which species they are facing. Mantis shrimps again use scanning eye movements coupled with an elaborate colour and polarisation vision system to determine whether another mantis shrimp has the appropriate distinguishing ‘badges’ on its body. All these animals avoid the “difficult” problem of pattern recognition by using specific features that code species identity.

If you watch the movements of other people’s eyes, you will find that they fall into two categories: very quick movements (saccades) that shift the direction of view, and slower movements that compensate for movements of the head or the surroundings, and so keep the image on the retina stationary (fixations). Steady gaze is essential to avoid motion blur (the eye is like a camera with a slow shutter speed), and it turns out that this ‘saccade and fixate’ eye movement strategy is common to almost all animals with good eyesight, from cuttlefish and insects to humans. One of the strange features of our eye movements is that we are scarcely aware of them. Every time we make a saccade the images shifts dramatically across our retinas, and yet we don’t see this; rather, we see a stable world which our gaze roams freely across, but without the abrupt disconnections that occur to the images themselves. This raises many interesting questions about the way our brains “edit” the information from the eyes before it reaches conscious perception. Although it has been known for many years that different regions of the brain deal with different aspects of the image, such as form, distance, motion and colour, there is no single brain area that holds an image of the world as we think we see it.  This and other enigmatic features of vision continue to puzzle both philosophers and scientists.

Featured image credit: “Bee” by image4you. CC0 via P ixabay .

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Detroit music [quiz]

Detroit is known as the birthplace of Motown Records, but there’s more to the musical history of the city than just that, due to the key role of the public schools in music training, the impact on music of the auto companies and the media, and the huge variety of ethnic music-making across Detroit’s 139 square miles. Test your knowledge of this unique city’s music history with our quiz.

 

Featured image credit: A 1960s RECORD SHOP. LIVERPOOL UK by Ronald Saunders. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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A lesson in allegorical storytelling [podcast]

National Novel Writing Month challenges writers from all over the world to complete a 50,000-word novel within the month of November. To help guide our readers who have taken on the challenge, we reached out to three-time National Jewish Book Award winner Howard Schwartz.

The podcast below recounts the story of “The Lost Princess,” a fairytale by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav that has all the expected elements: a king, a lost princess, a quest, three giants, and an enchanted palace. Howard offers a deeper reading of the story, and his analysis demonstrates the power of allegories as literary devices.

We usually assume that the folktales and fairy tales we encounter have come down to us anonymously. Sometimes we can’t even trace them to a specific country or time period. Of course, there are exceptions, such as the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. While his stories read as traditional folk and fairy tales, they are original, not retellings of stories he had heard in his youth.

The Jewish storyteller Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810), perhaps the greatest of them all, told stories that he himself made up. Rabbi Nachman came from an exceptionally distinguished family. He was the great-grandson of Israel ben Eliezer, a Ukrainian peasant who came to be known as the Baal Shem Tov (Master of God’s Name). The Baal Shem Tov sometimes told stories, especially parables, but not folk or fairy tales like his great-grandson.

Rabbi Nachman modeled himself after his great-grandfather, gathered loyal followers from a young age, taught the mysteries of the Torah, and became known as a Rebbe, a Hasidic leader. But in the last four years of his life he declared, “I tried to bring you back to God through my talks and Torah teachings, but they haven’t worked. So now I must tell you stories. People say stories help you fall asleep, but I say that telling stories wakes people up.”

In 1806, he told his first tale, “The Lost Princess.” This story certainly has all the earmarks of a traditional fairy tales: there is a king, a lost princess, a quest, three giants, and an enchanted palace. One day the king, whose daughter is his favorite, becomes angry with her and says, “Go the Devil,” and the next day she is gone. The distraught king sends his trusted minister to search for her, and the quest lasts several generations. Finally the minister learns that she is living in a palace of pearls on a golden mountain, and he undertakes a quest to find her there.

For those unfamiliar with the role of allegory in Jewish stories, this story reads like a conventional fairy tale.

For those unfamiliar with the role of allegory in Jewish stories, this story reads like a conventional fairy tale. But Rabbi Nachman’s followers were certain that there must be a secret meaning to this story, and they eventually figured it out. Important clues can be found in the opening sentence of the story:

“There once was a king who had six sons and one daughter.”

First of all, every Hasid knew that in any tale about a king, that king surely refers to God. Then there are the six sons and one daughter. In Judaism there are six days of the week and the seventh day is the Sabbath. The Sabbath is identified with the Sabbath Queen. So, by implication, this story about the lost princess may also be about the Sabbath Queen, who is said to be present during the Sabbath. This mysterious being is also linked with a kabbalistic figure known as the Shekhinah, who is understood to be the feminine aspect of God in some mystical texts, and in others as the Bride of God. In the Zohar, the primary text of Jewish mysticism, there is a key myth that portrays the anger of God’s Bride because God failed to prevent the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. As a result, she separates herself from God, going into exile with her children, the Children of Israel, and makes it clear that she won’t return to God until the Temple, her home in this world, is restored.

Rabbi Nachman’s remarkable scribe, Rabbi Nathan of Nemerov, explained this link between the lost princess and the Shekhinah:

This story is about every man in every time, for the entire story occurs to every man individually, for everyone of Israel must occupy himself with this tikkun, namely to raise up the Shekhinah from her exile, to raise her up from the dust, and to liberate the Holy Kingdom from among the idolaters, and the Other Side (Sitre Achra) among whom she has been caught. Thus one finds that everyone in Israel is occupied with the search for the king’s daughter, to take her back to her father, for Israel as a whole has the character of the minister who searches for her.

If “The Lost Princess” is read this way, it can be understood as a fairy tale retelling of this kabbalistic myth, where the king represents God and the lost princess is God’s Bride, who has been lost to Him. Thus Rabbi Nachman’s mysterious stories were a secret template for his followers to draw on in order to repair the rent in heaven and on earth. They were inspired by the teachings of a 16th century Rabbi, Isaac Luria, who proposed such a method of tikkun (repairing the world). Thus Rabbi Nachman’s stories, unique as they are, are in a direct line with the kabbalistic explanation for the fallen state of the world. And they also postulate an optimistic statement of hope that heaven and earth eventually can be repaired by the efforts of pious men.

Featured image credit: Castle Fairy Tales Nature by _Jasmin_. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Place of the Year 2018 nominee spotlight: International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest single structure humans have ever put into space. The spacecraft is in orbit 240 miles above Earth, and is both a home and a science laboratory for astronauts and cosmonauts. The station took 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble, beginning in November 1998 when the first piece of the Station was launched by a Russian rocket.  It includes laboratory modules from the United States, Japan, and Europe. As of January 2018, 230 people from 18 different countries had visited the International Space Station. The ISS includes contributions from 15 nations, with NASA of the United States, Roscosmos of Russia, and the European Space Agency contributing most of the funding. Other partners of the space station include the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The ISS has created the opportunity for people to maintain an ongoing presence in space, conducting research that couldn’t be done elsewhere. 

2018 has been an exciting year for the International Space Station. At the end of August, a tiny hole was found in a Soyuz spacecraft while it was docked at the ISS, leading to a small drop in cabin pressure. Initially thought to be the result of a micrometeoroid strike, Russian cosmonauts came to the shocking conclusion that it may have been deliberately drilled from the inside of the craft, leading to suggestions of sabotage—either by the team who built the spacecraft on the ground, or by one of the astronauts who were on the ISS at the time. The investigation into this incident is ongoing, and Russia convened a State Commission to look into the incident. The location and shape of the hole suggests a drilling mishap, leading to the conclusion that the hole was probably caused on the ground, by the company that builds the Soyuz capsules. However, for a brief period of time in September, speculation ran rampant that someone on the ISS may be trying to sabotage the Russian cosmonauts. 

Russia launched another investigation in October, this time into the failed launch of another Soyuz spacecraft. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, explained that their investigation pointed the blame to a bent pin, which prevented one of the side boosters from cleanly falling away. This resulted in its decompression, and the loss of control over the rocket.

On November 1, The Russian space agency announced that they intend on launching three astronauts to the International Space Station on December 3, an indication that it believes their Soyuz spacecraft is safe for travel. The astronauts for the December launch are Oleg Kononenko of Russia, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency. On November 16, Russia sent a care package to astronauts aboard the ISS in a cargo shipment dubbed Progress 71, launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The Progress’ Soyuz FG booster is loaded with 5,654 pounds of propellant, air, water and supplies. 

GIF by Nicole Piendel for Oxford University Press.

In the private space sector, SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, was named as the No. 1 company on the 2018 CNBC Disruptor 50 list. SpaceX delivers supplies to ISS. With an estimated $28 billion, it is one of the most valuable private companies in the world. In February the company launched the world’s most powerful rocket since NASA’s Saturn V. In early November at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, SpaceX engineers prepared to launch a Falcon 9 rocket. They are working to boost a Qatrai communications satellite into orbit on November 19. 

All this is happening in the shadow of President Trump’s proposal in June to create a new branch of the US military called the United States Space Force. He explained that, “We must have American dominance in space.” How this could affect the spirit of international cooperation and scientific research on ISS is unknown.

The International Space Station turns 20 this year, and in its time has hosted upwards of 1,500 experiments. We know about the nature and formation of other planets’ moons from spacecraft exploration, such as Voyager and Galileo. Watch below to see David A. Rothery, author Moons: A Very Short Introduction, give his top 10 things you should know about moons. 

Learn more about space and those who explore it with these titles: The First Men in the Moon, Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon, Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, Mass: The quest to understand matter from Greek atoms to quantum fields, Gravity: A Very Short Introduction, and Cosmology: A Very Short Introduction

Place of the Year 2018 Shortlist

Featured image credit: “satellite-iss” by Free-Photos. CC0 via Pixabay.

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International law regarding use of force

Through the power of precedent, international incidents involving the use of force help to clarify the meaning and interpretation of jus ad bellum, the corpus of rules arising from international custom and the United Nations Charter that govern the use of force. UN Charter Article 2(4) forbids states from using force in their international relations. Exceptions to this prohibition are acts taken in self-defence under UN Charter Article 51 or under the auspices of a UN Security Council authorization to use force under Article 42. States can also consent that another state use force in its territory, for example to combat rebel or terrorist actors. In certain cases, state practice gives rise to new interpretations of existing rules or novel exceptions emerge. Through the study of precedents scholars often consider whether or not there has been a shift in the legal landscape. To give but a few illustrations, commentators have questioned if States take measures of self-defence under Article 51 to protect nationals abroad (a justification that has been invoked at various moments, for instance by Russia in the context of the crisis in Georgia in 2008), if a right to humanitarian intervention has emerged (a discussion triggered by the Kosovo crisis in 1999), or if self-defence under Article 51 can be invoked against non-state actors (a topical debate in the post 9/11 era). Consequently, depending on the precedent’s facts and the arguments invoked by the main protagonists different legal issues can be triggered.

When analysing legal precedents scholars generally follow the same outline. They begin by laying out the context within which the incident involving the use of force took place. They then provide an assessment of the legal positions invoked by the main protagonists within the framework of the laws governing the use of force, and in particular the regime of the United Nations Charter. After which they conclude by providing an overview of the legal issues triggered by the precedent and the extent to which the incident affected the legal landscape of the jus ad bellum. Despite this standard procedure, legal academics never treat the legal framework governing the use of force in the same manner. This is not simply due to the variety of precedents in terms of facts, actors, and legal arguments. Each analyst’s approach is personal and unique, and inevitably discusses and analyses precedents in an original manner. Two scholars may apply themselves to the same case study and reach different conclusions on its precedential value and its impact on the legal landscape, particularly if they apply different methodologies. Law may constitute an objective set of rules but its interpretation and application lie in the eyes of the beholder.

This phenomenon reveals the elasticity of the legal framework governing the use of force. To clarify elasticity does not mean that the law can be expanded or manipulated at will. A rubber band can be stretched into many shapes and return to its original form once the forces that distorted it are removed. Stretch a rubber band too far, however, and it will snap. Very often, throughout various incidents involving the use of force, the core rules governing the jus ad bellum are stretched into different shapes by each precedent’s main protagonists as well as by the authors analysing it but never in a manner that causes the framework to break down.

To clarify elasticity does not mean that the law can be expanded or manipulated at will.

An obvious illustration is the debate on whether or not self-defence can be invoked against non-state actors. UN Charter Article 51 provides that self-defence can be invoked only in response to an armed attack against a UN member state. Because Charter Article 2(4) prohibits the use of force in international relations, the author of an armed attack is traditionally understood as another state and not a non-state actor such as a terrorist group. The implication of this state-centric reading is that states cannot invoke the use of force in self-defence against non-state actors unless the actions of the group can be attributed to a state under the law of state responsibility. If a state is the victim of a terrorist act by a group that is in the territory of another state it can protect itself by entering into cooperation with the territorial state – which could lead to intervention by invitation or with the consent of the territorial state – or by referring the matter to the UN Security Council – which could eventually trigger an authorization to use force under UN Charter Article 42. Today the question of a shift in the legal landscape dominates the debate. Precedents that have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the context of the bombings against ISIL/Da’esh appear to challenge the above-described interpretation of Article 51 and the applicability of the right to self-defence. The debate amongst legal scholars rages on as they reach different conclusions through their study of precedents. Just as states tug at Article 51 in one direction or another, scholars’ interpretations of the rule pull it into different directions as well.

Since the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945, in spite of the different forces that have pulled at the regime the rules governing the use of force appear to maintain their original shape, with little deformation. The exceptions to the prohibition of the use of force may shift over time as the law adjusts to the context of international politics but the prohibition remains in place. A rule may eventually be tugged in one direction, but never too far from its original conception. Fundamentally this elasticity is a practical illustration of how law, while indeed limited by the reality of international relations, strives to maintain international peace in service of the best interests of all concerned.

Featured image credit: Rubber bands in different colors by Bill Ebbesen. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia commons.

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