Новости за 08.08.2016

The poet Nina Riggs, who died last month, recalls her mother’s death a year earlier. “The hair on my head is a patchy fuzz following months of chemo. I am one-breasted from a mastectomy last month, my T-shirt sagging off my body on that side like a sheet on a windless clothesline. ‘Damnit’, my mom had said when she was still coherent, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to die right when you’re in the middle of all this. It’s killing me’. One of her wry smiles”

“If Mesopotamia is the cradle of urban civilisation, Babylon is its firstborn child.” The recorded origins of Babylon go back more than four thousand years, but the great city of historical legend was built in the sixth century BC by the Assyrian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar II, using labour and treasure seized at the destruction of Jerusalem. Herodotus devotes ten pages of his Histories to Babylon, saying that “in addition to its enormous size it surpasses in splendour any city of the known world”

A French radio station commissioned the first known use of simultaneous interpretation to relay a speech given by Hitler at Nuremberg in 1934. A decade later the technique was first used on an institutional scale for the trial of Nazi war criminals, again in Nuremberg. The interpreters reported terrible strain both from the pressure of work and from the material they were asked to translate. One said that “after just four months in Nuremberg she felt ten years older”

For more than a century the Mashco Piro people of Peru have lived in isolation in the Madre de Dios rain forest. They were last disturbed when the 19C rubber baron Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald — Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo — tried to run a railway through their territory. So why now are they showing themselves on the river bank, and yet killing strangers who come near? Are they asking to be introduced to the outside world, or is that the very danger against which they are fighting? (Metered paywall)

Chester Arthur Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf, “may well have been the greatest blues singer of the 20th century”. He was “phenomenal” on stage: “His six-foot-six frame and intense glowering stare belied some very smooth moves, his finesse only enhanced his edginess. He seemed at any moment like he might actually turn into a wolf, letting the impulse give out in plaintive howls and prowls”. The Rolling Stones sat at his feet — “an act of humility in a band not especially known for that quality”

Profile of Jack Parsons, an “explosives aficionado” who worked at the rocketry research lab in Caltech, and helped the US Government to formulate stable solid rocket fuels in World War Two. His life changed when he encountered Alastair Crowley. He befriended “a young sci-fi writer named L. Ron Hubbard”, married a woman whom he “believed was sent to him to help him conceive the goddess Babalon in human form”, and was blown to pieces in 1952, possibly by his own hand

Discussion of Jeffrey Rosen’s biography of Louis Brandeis, “the Jewish Jefferson”, “the most farseeing constitutional philosopher of the 20th century”. Brandeis “railed against bankers” for their risk-taking in ways that anticipated the crash of 2008; he “predicted the ways in which technology would threaten privacy”. But he did not argue for a “larger national bureaucracy” as the solution. He “lived in a simpler time when it was still possible to imagine society governed on the local level”

Diamond pricing is an “arcane, rapacious art”. The per-carat price of diamonds rises exponentially with size. A top-color, best-cut white weighing a single carat runs about $30,000. A 100-carat stone of the same quality sold at Sotheby’s in New York last year for $22 million — $220,000 per carat. But a diamond weighing more than a thousand carats? “The stock market flailed around for a value. Clearly there was no easy way to fix a price, but everyone knew it would be a lot”

German recruits lose faith in Islamic State, return home, and tell what they have seen and done. “Nils D. spent a year serving the terrorist militia, performing guard duty and working as a cook. He discovered severed heads on the street and watched beheadings. He listened to the screams of people being tortured and looked on as they were hung from metal poles with their hands tied behind their backs. Today, Nils D. is being held in a German prison as a convicted terrorist”

King Sejong invented Korea’s Hangul alphabet “almost single-handedly” in the early 15th century; his successors spurned it in favour of continued use of Chinese characters; Hangul prevailed only 500 years later, as a symbol of modern Korean nationalism. Strictly, Hangul is “neither alphabet nor syllabary, but something of a chimera. Each written component stands for a single sound, but the components are compressed into blocks that correspond to individual syllables”