Weekly Reads, Poetry and Art for 06 February 2015

This week, we’ve got takes on Al Qaeda, the vaccine debate, guaranteed incomes, the poetry of Walt Whitman, a painting by Renoir, and more. Enjoy.

Weekly Reads

Clint Watts | Al Qaeda’s Coming Decline | – “If al Qaeda were a corporation today, it would be roughly equivalent to Microsoft: A big name but an aging brand, one now strikingly out of touch with the 18–35-year-old-demographic. The group made its way back into the headlines this past January, after its affiliate—al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP—took credit for a deadly attack on the Paris offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. “ Foreign Affairs

Schools May Solve The Anti-Vaccine Parenting Deadlock – – “Last month, however, one private Montessori school in Traverse City, Michigan—The Children’s House, which serves infants through children in the eighth grade—changed the power dynamic.  As one parent there described it, the school wrested control from a vocal minority of people in their community who don’t believe in vaccinating their children and gave the majority who do their voice back.  By revising its admissions policy and refusing to accept new students whose parents opt them out for personal beliefs, The Children’s House illustrates how schools are becoming ground zero for the anti-vaccine dispute. It also serves as an example of how educators—not state legislators or health officials— may be the ones who ultimately resolve the public controversy over immunization requirements.” The Atlantic

The Town Where Everyone Got Free Money | – “Between 1974 and 1979, the Canadian government tested the idea of a basic income guarantee (BIG) across an entire town, giving people enough money to survive in a way that no other place in North America has before or since. For those four years—until the project was cancelled and its findings packed away—the town’s poorest residents were given monthly checks that supplemented what modest earnings they had and rewarded them for working more. And for that time, it seemed that the effects of poverty began to melt away. Doctor and hospital visits declined, mental health appeared to improve, and more teenagers completed high school. “ Motherboard

Let’s Talk About Sex—in English Class – – “Yet, these books, despite their fantastical elements, represent reality. Among their lessons: Sex can be an expression of love or violence, and relationships that don’t feel awful can be profoundly unhealthy. How can the ugliest of acts feel like love to an outcast who has internalized society’s disdain? Why does a man with land and money revel in his power by assaulting those who have none? Even a story about unrequited passion or a couple that sacrifices everything to stay together will resonate in the lives of students. Running away from the tough questions does an injustice to the material; failing to use them to make meaningful connections to the students’ lives does an injustice to the students. English class is where teenagers get to talk about the human condition. Students may have emotional reactions to characters experiencing heartbreak, trauma, or a loss of innocence. There are no perfect formulas for addressing them, but they should be addressed.” The Atlantic

For Preventing Disease, Data Are the New Drugs – Issue 21: Information – – “We’re well on our way to a future where massive data processing will power not just medical research, but nearly every aspect of society. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a data scholar at the University of Oxford’s Oxford Internet Institute, says we are in the midst of a fundamental shift from a culture in which we make inferences about the world based on a small amount of information to one in which sweeping new insights are gleaned by steadily accumulating a virtually limitless amount of data on everything.” Nautilus

How the produce aisle looks to a migrant farmworker | – “He says the tricky part is to remove the strawberry’s stem and leaves without damaging the berries. And each piece of fruit must be inspected to make sure it’s not too green. But he’s picked berries in Washington state for many seasons and mastered it. He got to the point where he could pick with two hands at once, gathering more than 50 pounds of berries an hour. Fast work means earning a bit above the hourly minimum wage — $7.16 when he worked in Washington.” Public Radio International

Sentence of the Week

“Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas,’ and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were — and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age

Poem of the Week

Among the Multitude by Walt Whitman
Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.
Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.

Art of the Week

This week’s art piece is another housed at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876)  by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Nicholas Pioch describes the painting’s description of the lively people of Paris: “Renoir delighted in `the people’s Paris’, of which the Moulin de la Galette near the top of Montmartre was a characteristic place of entertainment, and his picture of the Sunday afternoon dance in its acacia-shaded courtyard is one of his happiest compositions. In still-rural Montmartre, the Moulin, called `de la Galette’ from the pancake which was its speciality, had a local clientèle, especially of working girls and their young men together with a sprinkling of artists who, as Renoir did, enjoyed the spectacle and also found unprofessional models. The dapple of light is an Impressionist feature but Renoir after his bout of plein-air landscape at Argenteuil seems especially to have welcomed the opportunity to make human beings, and especially women, the main components of picture.”