A Bit More Detail

• Charlie Stross at Antipope shares an essay he recently presented on artificial intelligence and its challenges for us.


• P. Kerim Friedman writes at {anthro}dendum about the birth of the tea ceremony in the Taiwan of the 1970s.


• Anthropology net reports on a cave painting nearly 44 thousand years old in Indonesia depicting a hunting story.


• Architectuul looks at some temporary community gardens in London.


• Bad Astronomy reports on the weird history of asteroid Ryugu.


• The Buzz talks about the most popular titles borrowed from the Toronto Public Library in 2019.


• Caitlin Kelly talks at the Broadside Blog about her particular love of radio.


• Centauri Dreams talks about the role of amateur astronomers in searching for exoplanets, starting with LHS 1140 b.


• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber looks at what is behind the rhetoric of "virtue signalling".


• Dangerous Minds shares concert performance from Nirvana filmed the night before the release of Nevermind.


• Bruce Dorminey notes new evidence that, even before the Chixculub impact, the late Cretaceous Earth was staggering under environmental pressures.


• Myron Strong at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about how people of African descent in the US deal with the legacies of slavery in higher education.


• Far Outliers reports on the plans in 1945 for an invasion of Japan by the US.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing gathers together a collection of the author's best writings there.


• Gizmodo notes the immensity of the supermassive black hole, some 40 billion solar masses, at the heart of galaxy Holm 15A 700 million light-years away.


• Russell Arben Fox at In Media Res writes about the issue of how Wichita is to organize its civic politics.


• io9 argues that the 2010s were a decade where the culture of the spoiler became key.


• The Island Review points readers to the podcast Mother's Blood, Sister's Songs, an exploration of the links between Ireland and Iceland.


• Joe. My. God. reports on the claim of the lawyer of the killer of a mob boss that the QAnon conspiracy inspired his actions. This strikes me as terribly dangerous.


• JSTOR Daily looks at a study examining scholarly retractions.


• Language Hat shares an amusing cartoon illustrating the relationships of the dialects of Arabic.


• Language Log lists ten top new words in the Japanese language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the dissipation of American diplomacy by Trump.


• The LRB Blog looks at the many problems in Sparta, Greece, with accommodating refugees, for everyone concerned.


• Marginal Revolution links to a paper suggesting the decline of the one-child policy in China has diminished child trafficking, among other crimes.


• Sean Marshall, looking at transit in Brampton, argues that transit users need more protection from road traffic.


• Russell Darnley shares excerpts from essays he wrote about the involvement of Australia in the Vietnam War.


• Peter Watts talks about his recent visit to a con in Sofia, Bulgaria, and about the apocalypse, here.


• The NYR Daily looks at the corporatization of the funeral industry, here.


• Diane Duane writes, from her own personal history with Star Trek, about how one can be a writer who ends up writing for a media franchise.


• Jim Belshaw at Personal Reflections considers the job of tasting, and rating, different cuts of lamb.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at a nondescript observatory in the Mojave desert of California that maps the asteroids of the solar system.


• Roads and Kingdoms interviews Eduardo Chavarin about, among other things, Tijuana.


• Drew Rowsome loves the SpongeBob musical.


• Peter Rukavina announces that Charlottetown has its first public fast charger for electric vehicles.


• The Russian Demographics Blog considers the impact of space medicine, here.


• The Signal reports on how the Library of Congress is making its internet archives more readily available, here.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel considers how the incredibly isolated galaxy MCG+01-02-015 will decay almost to nothing over almost uncountable eons.


• Strange Company reports on the trial and execution of Christopher Slaughterford for murder. Was there even a crime?


• Strange Maps shares a Coudenhove-Kalergi map imagining the division of the world into five superstates.


• Understanding Society considers entertainment as a valuable thing, here.


• Denis Colombi at Une heure de peine announces his new book, Où va l'argent des pauvres?


• John Scalzi at Whatever looks at how some mailed bread triggered a security alert, here.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the massive amount of remittances sent to Tajikistan by migrant workers, here.


• Arnold Zwicky notes a bizarre no-penguins sign for sale on Amazon.

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares Johannes Kroeger's image of the median Earth.


• The Crux considers when human societies began to accumulate large numbers of aged people. Would there have been octogenarians in any Stone Age cultures, for instance?


• The Dragon's Tales considers Russia's strategy in Southeast Asia.


• Alexandra Samuel at JSTOR Daily notes that one way to fight against fake news is for people to broaden their friends networks beyond their ideological sympathizers.


• Language Log, noting a television clip from Algeria in which a person defend their native dialect versus standard Arabic, compares the language situation in the Arab world to that of China.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen explains how the Tervuren Central African museum in Brussels has not been decolonized.


• The Planetary Society Blog explores the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why, in current physics, the multiverse must exist.


• Strange Company explores the strange disappearance, in the Arizona desert in 1952, of a young couple. Their plane was found and in perfect condition, but what happened to them?


• Strange Maps reports on the tragic migration of six Californian raptors, only one of which managed to make it to its destination.


• Towleroad reports on the appearance of actor and singer Ben Platt on The Ellen Show, talking about his career and coming out.


• Window on Eurasia notes the apparently widespread mutual dislike of Chechens and Muscovites.


• Arnold Zwicky considers the French Impressionist artists Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Suzanne Valadon, with images of their art.

• Centauri Dreams celebrates the arrival, and successful data collection, of New Horizons at Ultima Thule, as does Joe. My. God., as does
  Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog. Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explained, before the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule, why that Kuiper Belt object was so important for planetary science.


• In advance of the New Year's, Charlie Stross at Antipope asked his readers to let him know what good came in 2018.


• Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber makes the argument that, in the event of a Brexit bitterly resented by many Labour supporters, the odds that they will support a post-Brexit redistributionist program that would aid predominantly pro-Brexit voters are low.


• Bruce Dorminey notes that many Earth-like worlds might be made uninhabitable over eons by the steady warming of their stars, perhaps dooming any hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations on these planets.


• Far Outliers looks at the patterns of early Meiji Japan relations with Korea, noting an 1873 invasion scare.


• L.M. Sacasas writes at The Frailest Thing, inspired by the skepticism of Jacques Ellul, about a book published in 1968 containing predictions about the technological world of 2018. Motives matter.


• Imageo looks at the evidence from probes and confirms that, yes, it does in fact snow (water) on Mars.


• The Island Review interviews author Adam Nicolson about his family's ownership of the Hebridean Shiant Isles. What do they mean for him, as an author and as someone experience with the sea?


• JSTOR Daily looks at the long history of the human relationship with leather, as a pliable material for clothing of all kinds.


• Language Hat considers the possibility that the New Year's greeting "bistraynte", used in Lebanon and by Christians in neighbouring countries, might come from the Latin "strenae".


• Language Log notes the pressure being applied against the use of Cantonese as a medium of instruction in Hong Kong.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at the many reasons why a considerable number of Latinos support Donald Trump.


• Bernard Porter at the LRB Blog comes up with an explanation as to Corbyn's refusal to oppose Brexit.


• Marginal Revolution notes the many problems involved with the formation of supply chains in Africa, including sheer distance.


• The NYR Daily has a much-needed reevaluation of the Jonestown horror as not simply a mass suicide.


• Author Peter Watts writes about a recent trip to Tel Aviv.


• At Out There, Corey Powell writes about how planetary scientists over the decades have approached their discipline, expecting to be surprised.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel shared some top images collected by Hubble in 2018.


• Strange Company looks at the strange 1953 death of young Roman woman Wilma Montesi. How did she die, leaving her body to be found on a beach?


• Window on Eurasia notes how Circassian refugees in Syria are asking for the same expedited status that Ukrainian refugees have received.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell takes an extended look at the politics of 4G and Huawei and the United Kingdom and transatlantic relations over the past decade.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look, in language and cartoons, at "Jesus fuck".

• Centauri Dreams notes the lack of evidence for heat plumes around the Europan crater of Pwyll.


• Patrick Nunn at The Crux writes about the new evidence for the millennias-long records preserved remarkably well in oral history.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of a two-year cycle in gamma ray output in blazar PG 1553+113.


• Bruce Dorminey notes a proposal from French astronomer Antoine Labeyrie to create a low-cost hypertelescope in nearby space.


• Gizmodo interviews experts on the possibility of whether people who are now cryogenically frozen will be revived. (The consensus is not encouraging for current cryonicists.)


• JSTOR Daily notes how, looking back at old records, we can identify many veterans of the US Civil War suffering from the sorts of psychological issues we know now that military veterans suffer from.


• Language Hat notes the beauty of two stars' Arabic names, Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi, beta and alpha Librae.


• The LRB Blog takes a look at the encounters of Anthony Burgess with the Russian language.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution is surprised that Canada has allowed China to add deep-sea sensors to its deep-sea observatories in the Pacific, in a geopolitically-concerned American way.


• Tim Parks at the NYR Daily talks about the importance of translation, as a career that needs to be supported while also needing critiques.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at two shows on young people coming out, the web series It's Complicated and the documentary Room to Grow.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that the evidence of the existence of a potential Planet Nine in our solar system is not necessarily that strong.


• Strange Maps shares a map of Europe in 1920, one oriented towards Americans, warning of famine across a broad swathe of the continent including in countries now no longer around.


• Window on Eurasia notes that, in multiethnic Dagestan, Russian has displaced other local languages as a language of interethnic communication.


• Arnold Zwicky announces the creation, at his blog via the sharing of a Liz Climo cartoon, of a new category at his blog relating to pandas.

• blogTO notes the 1970s, when Yonge around Queen was under reconstruction.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her writing life in New York City.


• The Crux considers: Neandertal or Neanderthal?


• Dangerous Minds notes the new Laibach app.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at evaporating hot Jupiter HD 209458b.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russia's planned reduction of its crew on the International Space Station.


• Joe. My. God. notes the reactions of the Trump camp to Hillary's alt-right speech.


• Language Hat links to a paper examining the transition from classical to modern Arabic.


• Marginal Revolution considers the economics of durable art.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at post-Soviet patterns of migration and examines the ethnic composition of Georgia circa 1926.


• Une heure de peine reports on a new French series on sociology in comic book format.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the legal question of a head transplant.


• Window on Eurasia notes the violent rivalries of the two Donbas republics and looks at a refugee-prompted restricted movement zone on Russia's frontier with Norway.

On October 11, 2014, according to Islamic State-affiliated Twitter accounts a woman going by the name Ahlam al-Nasr was married in the courthouse of Raqqa, Syria, to Abu Usama al-Gharib, a Vienna-born jihadi close to the movement’s leadership. ISIS social media rarely make marriage announcements, but al-Nasr and al-Gharib are a jihadi power couple. Al-Gharib is a veteran propagandist, initially for Al Qaeda and now for ISIS. His bride is a burgeoning literary celebrity, better known as “the Poetess of the Islamic State.” Her first book of verse, “The Blaze of Truth,” was published online last summer and quickly circulated among militant networks. Sung recitations of her work, performed a cappella, in accordance with ISIS’s prohibition on instrumental music, are easy to find on YouTube. “The Blaze of Truth” consists of a hundred and seven poems in Arabic—elegies to mujahideen, laments for prisoners, victory odes, and short poems that were originally tweets. Almost all the poems are written in monorhyme—one rhyme for what is sometimes many dozens of lines of verse—and classical Arabic metres.

Little is known about Ahlam al-Nasr, but it seems that she comes from Damascus and is now in her early twenties. Her mother, a former law professor, has written that al-Nasr “was born with a dictionary in her mouth.” She began writing poems in her teens, often in support of Palestine. When, in the spring of 2011, protests in Syria broke out against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, al-Nasr took the side of the demonstrators. Several poems suggest that she witnessed the regime’s crackdown at first hand and may have been radicalized by what she saw:

[. . .]

ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other Islamist movements produce a huge amount of verse. The vast majority of it circulates online, in a clandestine network of social-media accounts, mirror sites, and proxies, which appear and disappear with bewildering speed, thanks to surveillance and hacking. On militant Web sites, poetry-discussion forums feature couplets on current events, competitions among duelling poets, who try to outdo one another in virtuosic feats, and downloadable collections with scholarly accoutrements. (“The Blaze of Truth” includes footnotes that explain tricky syntax and unusual rhyme schemes.)

Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. This culture finds expression in a number of forms, including anthems and documentary videos, but poetry is its heart. And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.

“Al-shi‘r diwan al-‘arab,” runs an ancient maxim: “Poetry is the record of the Arabs”—an archive of historical experience and the epitome of their literature. The authority of verse has no rival in Arabic culture. The earliest poems were composed by desert nomads in the centuries before the revelation of the Koran. The poems are in monorhyme and one of sixteen canonical metres, making them easy to memorize. The poets were tribal spokesmen, celebrating the virtues of their kin, cursing their enemies, recalling lost loves, and lamenting the dead, especially those killed in battle. The Koran has harsh words for these pre-Islamic troubadours. “Only those who have strayed follow the poets,” the Surah of the Poets reads. “Do you not see that they wander lost in every valley, and say what they do not do?” But the poets could not be written off so easily, and Muhammad often found it useful to co-opt them. A number of tribal poets converted and became his companions, praising him in life and elegizing him after his death.

In some ways, reading all this Arabic literature in English has been like listening in on a foreign-language recording when one understands the words’ meanings, but not the allusions, nor the jokes, nor the underlying rhythms.

Some of this woodenness can be blamed on inadequate translations. But some of it falls to our historical blind spots. What makes a literature untranslatable is not the failure to find equivalents of any particular words. The endless listicles of “untranslatable” words – like backpfeifengesicht (German for “a face badly in need of a fist”) and bakku-span (Japanese for “a girl beautiful only from behind”) – may not have single-word equivalents, but they come with easily understandable translations.

Rhythm and rhyme can be more difficult to recreate, but what’s really hard to convey is the fullness of a literary tradition. Why did the original readers judge this work great? Did they look for the same things we value in English, or was it something completely different?

Also, literature builds on literature. You can hardly appreciate Wicked without a passing knowledge of Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, and Moby-Dick is a lot thinner without access to a bit of Shakespeare and the Bible.

Novels take a position in a landscape of genres, motifs and other books. Just so, Youssef Rakha’s Sultan’s Seal, translated by Paul Starkey, is hard to understand if the reader lacks any relationship to classical Arabic letters.

The signs of the erosion of Arab identity are visible across the region. In Iraq, sectarianism is on the rise. The Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish communities are divided, with fault lines drawn in blood. The idea of being Iraqi is outdated, and the idea of being part of the Arab nation is even more distant.

Ever since the American invasion of Iraq, political divisions have been aggravated, and this has been deepened by political elites who have been using systematic state violence to stoke up sectarianism in order to cling to power. There has been a systemic elimination of Sunni community leaders from power by an overtly sectarian Iraqi government. The deliberate policy of "sectarianising" the security apparatus of the state has not only stoked sectarianism, it has caused the Sunni community as well as the Kurdish community to identify themselves in terms of their sect, rather than as Iraqi or Arab.

In Egypt, the inward-looking policy of de-Arabizing that started with President Sadat has reached its apex. The clearest symptom of this is the national sentiment towards Palestinians as well as Syrians. Egypt’s stance has dramatically shifted against Gaza, especially Hamas, who are now being blamed for the terrorist attacks in Sinai, with the military regime using these attacks to tighten the blockade of the strip and increase domestic support.

In terms of attitudes towards Syria, the majority have dramatically shifted their support to Assad, as the mania of “fighting terrorism” sweeps the nation. There is very little sympathy for the Syrian people’s suffering even though Assad has been on a rampage for the better part of three years.

[. . .]

Domestically, there is a large segment of Egyptian society that is not seen as Egyptian, but they are seen instead as agents of external powers, and most importantly, as foreign elements who identify themselves with a sect, namely the Muslim Brotherhood. Members of the Brotherhood are seen as placing their identity of belonging to the Brotherhood above their identity as Egyptians. In essence, Egypt is developing its own version of sectarianism. In this context, the divide is not religious or linguistic, it is secular/Islamist.

In Syria, the game of sectarianism has reached its apex. The revolt can now easily be characterised as a revolt by the Sunni majority against an openly sectarian regime. This, of course, ignores the more complex dynamic in Syria, with the critical role played by the Sunni urban middle class in their support for the regime. However, it is very difficult to ignore the fact that the Assad regime has mastered the sectarian game; gaining the support of the minorities as their protector against the Sunni onslaught, which threatens the very existence of some of these minorities, especially the Alawites. In effect, the struggle is turning into an existential struggle for these sects as they are no longer being identified as Syrian or Arab.

• James Bow celebrates his fourth published novel.


• blogTO celebrates WiFi in Bay station and shares old pictures of the Junction.


• Speed River Journal's Van Waffle examines the question of what caused new pollution in Lake Erie.


• Spacing Toronto examines again the controversy over a billboard apparently unauthorized at Bathuest and Davenport.


• Torontoist links to a project mapping specific songs to specific places on the map of Toronto, observes after Cheri DiNovo turmoil in the post-election Ontario NDP, and notes Dr. Barnardo's Home Children as well as the complex life of possibly-lesbian Mazo de la Roche.


• Transit Toronto's James Bow approves of Steve Munro's post suggesting that underfunding and neglect will soon cause serious harm to the TTC and its riders.

There has never been a Disney musical so widely translated (or “localized,” in industry-speak) as “Frozen.” There has also never been a Disney musical so loaded with American vernacular speech. Princess Anna may have spent her childhood in a remote Scandinavian citadel, but she talks like a teen-ager from suburban New Jersey. Singing about her sister’s impending coronation ceremony, she says, “Don’t know if I’m elated or gassy, but I’m somewhere in that zone,” and confesses to a need to “stuff some chocolate in my face” at the prospect of meeting a handsome stranger at the party. Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine were more demure in their longings, and sang in a register of English more readily amenable to translation.

One of the forty-one languages in which you can watch “Frozen” is Modern Standard Arabic. This is a departure from precedent. Earlier Disney films (from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to “Pocahontas” to “Tangled”) were dubbed into Egyptian Arabic, the dialect with the largest number of speakers in the region, based in a country with a venerable history of film production. Generations of Arabs grew up watching Egyptian movies, and the Disney musicals capitalized on their familiarity with this particular dialect.

Modern Standard Arabic is very similar to Classical Arabic, the centuries-old lingua franca of the medieval Islamic world. Today, it is the language of officialdom, high culture, books, newscasts, and political sermonizing. Most television shows, films, and advertisements are in colloquial Arabic, and the past several years have seen further incursions of the dialects into areas traditionally reserved for the literary language.

Ironically, though, children’s literature has remained deeply resistant to the trend toward vernacularization. “If we read to them in dialect, when are they supposed to learn real Arabic?” is the answer I usually get when I ask other parents about this state of affairs. As a scholar of Classical Arabic and a native speaker of Lebanese Arabic, I have always felt this to be a false choice. Setting aside the fraught question of what constitutes real Arabic, there is surely something to be said for introducing children to literature that speaks to them.

It’s tricky to describe the quality of a literary text in a formal language to a speaker of American English or any other language that does not contain the same range of linguistic variety as diglossic language families like Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. One way to put it is that Modern Standard Arabic is even less similar to regional Arabic dialects than the English of the King James Bible is to the patter of an ESPN sportscaster.

The Arabic lyrics to “Let It Go” are as forbidding as Elsa’s ice palace. The Egyptian singer Nesma Mahgoub, in the song’s chorus, sings, “Discharge thy secret! I shall not bear the torment!” and “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” From one song to the next, there isn’t a declensional ending dropped or an antique expression avoided, whether it is sung by a dancing snowman or a choir of forest trolls. The Arabic of “Frozen” is frozen in time, as “localized” to contemporary Middle Eastern youth culture as Latin quatrains in French rap.