NBC News Tom Brokaw reported live from the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, as the Cold War symbol came tumbling down. He returns to Germany three decades later to reflect on how the world has changed since and the challenges Europe now faces.
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Tashka and Laura Yawanawá|TED Salon: We the Future
Tashka and Laura Yawanawá lead the Yawanawá people in Acre, Brazil — a tribe that stewards almost 500,000 acres of Amazon rainforest. As footage of the Amazon burning shocks the world’s consciousness, Tashka and Laura call for us to transform this moment into an opportunity to support indigenous people who have the experience, knowledge and tools needed to protect the land.
This talk was presented at “We the Future,” a special event in partnership with the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER Tashka and Laura Yawanawá · Leaders of the YawanawáChief Tashka Yawanawá and Laura Yawanawá represent the critical perspective often missed in the discussions about the future of indigenous people in Brazil: that of the indigenous people themselves.TAKE ACTION
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
“You have got a boy mixed of most kindly elements, as perhaps Shakespeare might say. His rapidly and clearly working mind has not in the least spoiled his character,” a school principal wrote at the end of the nineteenth century to the mother of a lanky quiet teenager who would grow up to be the great English astronomer Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (December 28, 1882–November 22, 1944) and who would catapult Albert Einstein into celebrity by confirming his relativity theory in his historic eclipse expedition of May 29, 1919.
The centennial of that landmark event, which revolutionized science and united a war-torn humanity under one sky of cosmic truth, was the subject of the third Universe in Verse — the charitable celebration of science through poetry I host each spring at Pioneer Works — and as has been our annual tradition, we had the great honor of an original poem for the occasion by one of the great storytellers of our time: Neil Gaiman.
Arthur Eddington
Born into a family descended from the first Quakers and stretching back four generations of farmers, Stanley — as his mother and sister always called him — learned the multiplication table before he could read and tasked himself with counting the letters of the Bible. By the age of ten, this unusual child who was and would remain very much his own person had observed most of the sky with a 3-inch telescope his headmaster had loaned him.
At twenty, after winning a series of mathematics competitions and scholarships, Eddington entered Trinity College, where he was immediately immersed in the cult of Newton. His peers would later remember him as extremely quiet and reserved, exuding formidable powers of concentration. (Later in life, his awkwardness and aloofness would make some of his students perceive him as arrogant.) In 1904, while Einstein was finalizing his special relativity, the 22-year-old Eddington became the first second-year Trinity student to rise to the top of the undergraduate student body in mathematics — a position known as Senior Wrangler and regarded at the time as “the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain.”
Two of Eddington’s photographs from his historic eclipse observation, proving Einstein right and Newton wrong.
At Trinity, Eddington met Charles Trimble. A classmate who also came from a working-class background, this pensive-looking youth with gentle features and neatly combed black hair soon became his most intimate friend. Eddington was an avid cyclist and usually rode alone, but he began going on long rides with Charles, talking about mathematics and literature. Only in Charles’s company, he deviated from his Quaker discipline and took the occasional cheerful drink, smoked the occasional cigarette, went to the theater and the newborn cinema.
Charles eventually took a mathematics post and spiraled into mental illness. Eddington never married, never had another intimate bond. He lived out his days with his sister, Winifred, who also never married. I picture him Turing-like — in his genius, in his misapprehended awkwardness, in his loneliness and heartbreak.
That invisible private side to the public genius is what Gaiman takes up with empathic perceptiveness and great tenderness in his poem, celebrating what he calls these “twin suns” of Eddington’s life and, through the diffraction that is all great art, celebrating the twin suns of the public self and the private self, of genius and loneliness, of intellectual heroism and emotional heartbreak, that shine in varying degrees on every human life.
IN TRANSIT (for Arthur Eddington)
by Neil Gaiman
1.
To find the many in the one
he sweated under foreign skies
to see the stars behind the sun.
So space and time were now undone
reality was undisguised.
We found the many in the one.
There is no photograph, not one,
that shows the mind behind the eyes.
He saw the stars behind the sun.
Not with a sword, or knife, or gun,
a simple picture severed ties.
He found the many in the one.
Light bends around us. So we run,
as gravity reclassifies
the stars we saw behind the sun.
To see the world beyond the skies,
to know the mind behind the eyes,
To find the many in the one
he showed us stars behind the sun.
2.
Unfucked, or anyway retiring,
in the awkward sense. Retirement will never be an option.
The gruff gentleman with the cap who understands
what the numbers mean
remembers a bicycle ride when he was younger.
The smoke of the cigarettes he does not smoke kicks at his lungs
mixing with the buzz of the booze he doesn’t ever drink
a convivial pint after the ride into the country gave him such a thirst.
And afterwards they lay on their back in the stubble
staring up at the stars. Together. All the stars
Countable as the words in a Bible,
countable as the hairs on his friend’s head,
all accountable, and that is why they never truly touched.
The shadow of prison or disgrace perhaps moving between them
like the shadow of an eclipse.
And, in another life, at another time,
to see the stars behind the sun,
he takes his photographs
fighting the cloud cover. Becoming
the thing that happened in Principe.
when he proved that the German was right,
that light had weight,
half a year after the Armistice.
A populariser, but not courting popularity.
Somewhen a boy is counting stars.
Somewhen a man is photographing light.
Somewhen his finger strokes the stubble on another’s cheek,
and for a moment everything is relative.
Complement with Gaiman’s superb original poems from the first two years of The Universe in Verse — “The Mushroom Hunters” (2017), a subversive celebration of the history of women in science, which won the Rhysling Award for Best Long Poem; and “After Silence” (2018), a tribute to the life and legacy of Rachel Carson — then revisit the touching, improbable story of how Eddington confirmed relativity.
For more wonder and beauty from The Universe in Verse, savor astrophysicist Janna Levin reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman, and “Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich, Regina Spektor reading “Theories of Everything” by the astronomer, poet, and tragic genius Rebecca Elson, Amanda Palmer reading “Hubble Photographs” by Adrienne Rich, and astronomer Natalie Batalha reading “Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: People take control of property that they do not own and do not have title to (not entitled to have), which causes abuse to others.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) Truth is entitled to use Itself properly and lovingly. OR: Truth is the President.
2) There is only Infinite Mind, That I AM, Knowing Being, in every conceivable expression — revealing the limitless entitlement to empowerment, that restores the always already Real rightful ownership, upon its True Recognition.
3) Truth is the Only Allness of Mind, this Infinitude of Consciousness AWARENESS Being Fully Authorized, Fully Augmented Principled Increase of Formative Empowerment, this Supra-Structured, Fully Morphe'(D) Right of Possessory Usefulness is the Fundamental Essence, The Only Cosmic Intended Identity, that Work’s towards the Benefit of All Concerned.
4) Truth self-evidently powers the totality of fulfilling presence with ease.
All Translators are welcome to join this group. See Weekly Groups page/tab.
Trinfinity Academy is now free.
Image by Stephanie Keith, © All Rights Reserved.
Published June 19, 2013 (onbeing.org)
Gender is a covenant I have broken: a covenant with others and a covenant with myself.
“Did anyone ever teach you to be true to yourself?” a therapist once asked me. I had come to her in the midst of what I call my gender crisis — the physical, mental, and emotional breakdown I experienced after 40-plus years of living as the male I knew I wasn’t. I had just told her about my shame about hiding for decades my lifelong sense that I was female. Having failed to keep faith with my own gender identity, how could I now break my covenant with my wife, my children, and all who knew me as a man?
Gender is a covenant, a promise that the maleness or femaleness we present in public represents both our genitalia and our gender identity, our private sense of whether we are male or female. People who visibly fail to keep this covenant, those we call “transgender,” are subject to severe penalties: exile from family and friends, loss of employment, and verbal and physical abuse.
Every week, one or two transgender Americans are killed, in a hate crime, for breaking the covenant of gender.
Most of us are literally born into the covenant of gender, when those who deliver us from our mothers’ wombs examine our genitals and proclaim, “It’s a boy!” or, “It’s a girl!” My body entered me into the covenant as male, and, for 45 years, that is the way I presented myself to the world. But though my gender presentation matched my genitalia, I was still breaking the gender covenant, because the maleness I presented to others didn’t reflect my own sense of who I was.
Transsexuality — the mismatch between physical sex and gender identity — causes many kinds of suffering; for me, one of the worst was the guilt and shame I felt about pretending to be a man. Those feelings drove me to confess to my college sweetheart, the woman I later married, that I was transgender when we were sophomores in college. She offered me a private version of the gender covenant: As long as I lived as a man, she would love and stay with me, even though she knew my gender identity was female. That was the first gender covenant I could keep, for it meant that at least in one relationship, I could meet the expectation of others without betraying my sense of self.
For the next two decades, I kept this covenant: to be true to my wife, and, later, to our children, by living as a man. I wrote and published poetry, gave divrei Torah and served on the board of our local nondenominational synagogue, completed a doctorate, and finally landed a tenure-track job at the Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, where I taught, and still teach, writing and American literature. In short, I became what we call “a successful man,” which in my case referred to the lines on my C.V. but not to my success at living, loving, writing, and teaching as a man. If I had really been that man, I could have lived happily ever after within the terms of the gender covenant. Instead, I became steadily more miserable; by my early 40s, it literally, physically, and emotionally made me sick to live as a man.
Most people — the vast majority whose physical sex matches their gender identities — don’t realize that “covenant” applies to gender until they see someone like me breaking it. Then, they tend to be angry. Some people have told me that my gender transition is pathologically selfish; having lived as a male for 45 years, why couldn’t I keep living as a man for the sake of my wife and children? Others have become angry at my now-ex-wife for not staying with me through and despite my transition.
The moral value of a covenant can be measured by how we respond when it is broken. When the Israelites at Sinai broke their brand-new covenant with God (constructing the golden calf), the responses — Moses’ passionate pleas for divine presence and God’s forgiveness and revelation of the thirteen attributes of mercy — resulted in a greater understanding and a deeper mutual relationship between God and Israel. When the covenant of gender is broken, the responses — blaming, shaming, victim-villain narratives — tend to mirror rather than to expand the narrow binary terms of the gender covenant.
My experience with breaking this covenant has taught me to strive not just for a more embracing, nonbinary conception of gender, but for a more embracing, nonbinary moral language — a language that acknowledges suffering, and the need for growth and forgiveness, on all sides. My transition has not only been from an inauthentic life as a man to an authentic life as a woman. It has also been from a gender covenant based upon physical sex and social convention to a new gender covenant in which gender doesn’t mean being male or female, but being true to others by becoming our truest selves.
Reprinted with permission from the journal Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas May 2013, as part of a larger conversation on rethinking covenants.
Joy Ladin is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at the Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University in New York. Her memoir is called Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders. She’s also the author of nine collections of poetry and most recently published the book The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.
Image by Sharon McCutcheon/Unsplash.
Published December 11, 2014 (onbeing.org)
By Joy Ladin
Somewhere between male and female
The soul gets lost
Where are you calls the mother of the soul
But the soul never had a mother
Get back here this instant the father demands
But somewhere between male and female
The soul failed to be fathered
Male and female
Split at the seams
Leaving the soul naked
Criss-crossed with scars
Male scars and female scars
Breast scars and testicle scars
Scars like doors
And scars like fingers
Fingers point at the naked soul
Doors slam in its face
No
The soul is still alone
It is is only dreaming
It’s been discovered
In the space between male and female
Where no one will ever find it
Reprinted from Transmigration by Joy Ladin. Copyright © 2009 by Joy Ladin. Used with the permission of the publisher, The Sheep Meadow Press.
Joy Ladin is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at the Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University in New York. Her memoir is called Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders. She’s also the author of nine collections of poetry and most recently published the book The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.
Illustration by Francesco Izzo.
When John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, schizophrenic, and paranoid delusional, was asked how he could believe that space aliens had recruited him to save the world, he gave a simple response. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
Nash is hardly the only so-called mad genius in history. Suicide victims like painters Vincent Van Gogh and Mark Rothko, novelists Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, and poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath all offer prime examples. Even ignoring those great creators who did not kill themselves in a fit of deep depression, it remains easy to list persons who endured well-documented psychopathology, including the composer Robert Schumann, the poet Emily Dickinson, and Nash. Creative geniuses who have succumbed to alcoholism or other addictions are also legion.
Instances such as these have led many to suppose that creativity and psychopathology are intimately related. Indeed, the notion that creative genius might have some touch of madness goes back to Plato and Aristotle. But some recent psychologists argue that the whole idea is a pure hoax. After all, it is certainly no problem to come up with the names of creative geniuses who seem to have displayed no signs or symptoms of mental illness.
The most important process underlying strokes of creative genius is the tendency to pay attention to things that normally should be ignored or filtered out.
Opponents of the mad genius idea can also point to two solid facts. First, the number of creative geniuses in the entire history of human civilization is very large. Thus, even if these people were actually less prone to psychopathology than the average person, the number with mental illness could still be extremely large. Second, the permanent inhabitants of mental asylums do not usually produce creative masterworks. The closest exception that anyone might imagine is the notorious Marquis de Sade. Even in his case, his greatest (or rather most sadistic) works were written while he was imprisoned as a criminal rather than institutionalized as a lunatic.
So should we believe that creative genius is connected with madness or not? Modern empirical research suggests that we should because it has pinpointed the connection between madness and creativity clearly. The most important process underlying strokes of creative genius is cognitive disinhibition—the tendency to pay attention to things that normally should be ignored or filtered out by attention because they appear irrelevant.1
When Alexander Fleming noticed that a blue mold was killing off the bacteria culture in his petri dish, he could have just tossed the latter into the autoclave like any of his colleagues might have done. Instead, Fleming won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of penicillin, the antibacterial agent derived from the mold Penicillium notatum. Many people have gone for a walk in the woods and returned with annoying burrs attached to their clothing, but only George de Mestral decided to investigate further with a microscope, and thereby discover the basis for Velcro.
Cognitive disinhibition proves no less beneficial in the arts than in the sciences. Artistic geniuses will often report how the germ for a major creative project came from hearing a tiny piece of casual conversation or seeing a unique but otherwise trivial event during a daily walk. For example, Henry James reported in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton that the germ of the story came from an allusion made by a woman sitting beside him at Christmas Eve dinner.
Exceptional intelligence alone yields useful but unoriginal and unsurprising ideas.
But cognitive disinhibition has a dark side: It is positively associated with psychopathology. For example, schizophrenics find themselves bombarded with hallucinations and delusions that they would be much better off filtering out.2 So why don’t the two groups become the same group? According to Harvard University psychologist Shelly Carson, the creative geniuses enjoy the asset of superior general intelligence. This intelligence introduces the necessary cognitive control that enables the person to separate the wheat from the chaff. Bizarre fantasies are divorced from realistic possibilities.
According to this conception, high intelligence is essential to creative genius, but only insofar as it collaborates with cognitive disinhibition. Exceptional intelligence alone yields useful but unoriginal and unsurprising ideas. Marilyn vos Savant made it into the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s highest recorded IQ, and yet has not managed to find a cure for cancer or even build a better mousetrap.
Some domains of creativity put far more emphasis on usefulness than on originality and surprise. In such cases, the vulnerability shared between genius and madness becomes much less critical. For example, psychopathology can be negatively correlated with creative genius in the hard sciences.3 The interesting exception are the scientific revolutionaries who go against the prevailing paradigms.4 For them, the relation is almost as positive as found for artists and writers.
But many geniuses do walk the line between the normal and the abnormal. For them, the barrage of impulses and ideas they perceive is a fount of creativity. As Nash said after an extended period of delusional thinking, his return to a more rational phase was “not entirely a matter of joy.” To explain why, he gave another simple reply. “Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.”
Dean Keith Simonton is a distinguished professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Davis.
References
1. Carson, S.H. Cognitive disinhibition, creativity, and psychopathology. In Simonton, D.K. (Ed.), The Wiley Handbook of Genius Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, United Kingdom (2014).
2. Eysenck, H. J. Genius: The Natural History of Creativity Cambridge University Press (1995).
3. Simonton, D.K. The mad (creative) genius: What do we know after a century of historiometric research? In Kaufman, J.C. (Ed.), Creativity and Mental Illness Cambridge University Press (2014).
4. Ko, Y., & Kim, J. Scientific geniuses’ psychopathology as a moderator in the relation between creative contribution types and eminence. Creativity Research Journal 20, 251- 261 (2008).
5. Damian, R.I., & Simonton, D.K. Diversifying experiences in the development of genius and their impact on creative cognition. In Simonton, D.K. (Ed.), The Wiley Handbook of Genius Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, United Kingdom (2014).
6. Damian, R.I., & Simonton, D.K. Psychopathology, adversity, and creativity: Diversifying experiences in the development of eminent African-Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2014). Retrieved from doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000011
This article was originally published on March 9, 2017, by Nautilus, and is republished here with permission.
Rob Wile Sep 17, 2013, 5:47 AM (businessinsider.com)
Whom do you put in charge of your country after you’ve overthrown a king?
We now know the answer of course — just call the new leader “president” and make him accountable to two other branches of government.
But for a faction at the Constitutional Convention — the triumph of which, we celebrate this week — the answer was not so simple.
For Delegate Edmund Randolph of Virgina, the country had not gone through eight years of war only to reconstruct the British system at home.
A single executive would amount to “the foetus of monarchy,” he said, according to James Madison’s notes on the debate. “The fixt genius of the people of America required a different form of Government.”
Randolph believed that in general, pluralities were superior to a single decision-maker; a lone “Magistrate,” as he referred to the position, would struggle to gain the necessary confidence to properly govern.
Plus, nominees to the position would inevitably come from more populous areas, giving rural areas short shrift.
A three-person executive, Randolph concluded, would be optimal. Per Madison:
“He could not see why the great requisites for the Executive department, vigor, despatch & responsibility could not be found in three men, as well as in one man. The Executive ought to be independent. It ought therefore in order to support its independence to consist of more than one.”
Delegate Roger Sherman of Connecticut was more agnostic on the number of men (and, unfortunately, it was going to be men) to serve in the executive, but that was only because he conceived of the position as more of an administrator — a kind of modern-day city manager, only with the entire country as his jurisdiction.
The office, he explained, should be limited to carrying out the will of the people as expressed in the legislature, which could add or reduce the number of people holding executive office at will:
“As [legislators] were the best judges of the business which ought to be done by the Executive department, and consequently of the number necessary from time to time for doing it, he wished the number might not be fixed, but that the legislature should be at liberty to appoint one or more as experience might dictate.”
If these arguments don’t seem convincing now, they weren’t then either.
Randolph and Sherman lost the vote on the question 7-3. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts probably wins for most colorful counter-argument:
“Mr. Gerry was at a loss to discover the policy of three members for the Executive. It wd. be extremely inconvenient in many instances, particularly in military matters, whether relating to the militia, an army, or a navy. It would be a general with three heads.”
Can’t have that.
Historians agree that the unanimous election of General George Washington to the presidency of the Convention helped nudge the executive in the direction of a single office holder.
It also helped reinforce that the executive would be referred to as “the President.”
But how would you address him to his face, now that the war was over?
John Adams, Washington’s vice president (this question now came after ratification), had some unusual ideas for this. He wrote to a friend:
“A royal or at least a princely title will be found indispensably necessary to maintain the reputation, authority, and dignity of the President. His Highness, or, if you will, His Most Benign Highness, is the correct title that will comport with his constitutional prerogatives and support his state in the minds of our own people or foreigners.”
Eventually he convinced a Senate committee to propose, “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.”
That didn’t get very far either.
Here’s what happened next, according to Gordon S. Wood:
“When Jefferson learned of Adams’s obsession with titles and the Senate’s action, he could only shake his head and recall Benjamin Franklin’s now famous characterization of Adams as someone who means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, and sometimes and in some things, absolutely out-of-his senses.”
But somehow Washington, perhaps out of deference to his friend and sidekick, seconded Adams’ argument, Wood writes:
“Washington himself had initially favored for a title “His High Mightiness, the President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties.”
Eventually, though, Washington was talked down, and established the convention we still know today:
“When the President heard the criticism that such titles smacked of monarchy, he changed his mind and was relieved when the House of Representatives under Madison’s leadership succeeded in fixing the simple title of “Mr. President.”
Still, an uncomfortably close call.