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Science and archeology journalist, Andrew Lawler, has made a name for himself writing unique and compelling books on somewhat unconventional subjects. His first book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, explored the cultural history of the domesticated chicken and how it spread across the globe. — Read the rest
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Photograph of Harriet Clark by Joshua Conover; photograph of Ishion Hutchinson by Neil Watson.
We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson.
The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo.
Harriet Clark’s slanting, beautiful story “Descent,” which appeared in our Summer 2022 issue (no. 240), is narrated by a young girl caught between her mother—imprisoned for her part in a botched robbery intended to finance revolutionary struggle—and her grandmother, whose grief encompasses a cruel resentment. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clark is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is at work on her first novel. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:
In “Descent,” Harriet Clark deftly tells an enclosing story about the wish for resurrection. An eight-year-old girl, “a great stayer,” knows departure as a fact of life. She and her grandfather simulate disappearance and recovery in a game they play with her in the trunk of the car. A silence is kept in honor of a felled deer. Strange cats attack the old man. Clark somehow manages to give us each character’s interiority: “if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared.” Clark ends where she began, with a conundrum, this time inflected with the grandmother’s harsh language: “To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home.”
The Susannah Hunnewell Prize, which honors a writer for an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous calendar year, was established in 2023 in memory of Hunnewell, who joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s tenure. She remained associated with the magazine for thirty years, serving as its Paris editor and later as its publisher from 2015 until her death in 2019. She also conducted some of the most beloved interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Harry Mathews, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and Emmanuel Carrère.
The prize’s first winner, Ishion Hutchinson, published his essay “Women Sweeping”—a moving illumination of the artistry that infused his grandmother’s work and life, by way of Édouard Vuillard’s painting of his own mother sweeping—in our Spring 2022 issue (no. 239). Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons, and a forthcoming collection of essays. He is the recipient of the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Mona Simpson writes:
She was the house, Henry James said of his mother. And so it was with Vuillard’s mother and Ishion Hutchinson’s grandmother, a “short and solid-built” baker. Sounds of “jubilation” hiss from the kitchen as the narrator witnesses the honor and pleasure of his grandmother making a home. “The interior does not simply belong to her, it is her,” Hutchinson writes of Vuillard’s mother. For a disenfranchised people, owning a house was, and still is, the ultimate achievement. By herself, Hutchinson’s grandmother earned what Mr. Biswas strived for in Naipaul’s novel: “legally owned property.” How? “Through baking.”
This question and answer form a refrain, as the narrator watches her measure flour and sugar with empty Betty and Carnation cans and eats the bits (“bun bun”Harr) left on the tin baking pans after black cake and coconut drops are removed to sell. There’s something quietly radical in Hutchinson’s association of his Jamaican grandmother with Madame Vuillard, and in his valorization of what is traditionally women’s work. The narrator was able to go to the good school on the island; Vuillard attended the same school as Marcel Proust. How? We are not told. But at the end of the essay, Hutchinson reveals his grandmother’s guarded secret, her vulnerability, her shame, and her wish, along with her pride.
Tickets are still available for the Revel, which will take place on April 4 at Cipriani 42nd Street. We hope you’ll join us to celebrate Clark and Hutchinson, as well as the inimitable Vivian Gornick, who will receive the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. We’ll also be marking the seventieth anniversary of the Review, which was founded in Paris in 1953. Since then, the magazine has evolved the contemporary canon, publishing a spirited mix of emerging and established voices. That exhilarating encounter between different styles and generations also reliably makes the Revel an excellent party, and all proceeds help sustain the magazine. We’d love to see you there.
Part three of a three-part series aims to discuss the topic of advancing accessibility within scholarly communication with the focus of digital accessibility.
The post Guest Post — Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing: Recommendations for Digital Accessibility Best Practices appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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Part two of a three-part series aims to discuss the topic of advancing accessibility within scholarly communication with the focus of digital accessibility.
The post Guest Post — Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing: Building Support appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Part one of a three-part series aims to discuss the topic of advancing accessibility within scholarly communication with the focus of digital accessibility.
The post Guest Post — Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing: Fostering Empathy appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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French startup Bibak (formerly known as La Consigne GreenGo) has amassed $6.4 million (€6 million) in an equity funding round and debt. The company wants to put an end to single-use plastic food packaging and replace those with reusable food containers.
Founders Future, MAIF Impact, Seed One, Notus Technologies SWEN Capital Partners’ Blue Ocean fund as well as several business angels are participating in the startup’s funding round. The startup closed this round in November 2022.
The fact that Bibak is a French company is a competitive advantage as regulation recently changed. Since January 1st, 2023, restaurants have had to use reusable food containers for people who eat there.
“It changes the scale of the business and the reuse industry,” co-founder and CEO Yasmine Dahmane told me.
And yet, Bibak has been around for a quite a while. The startup began in 2018 with French corporate catering service companies like Sodexo, Compass and Elior. The company now also targets the event industry as well as fast-food chains like Burger King.
But Bibak doesn’t want to do it all. While many restaurants are buying professional dishwashers, the startup believes that most food containers won’t be cleaned in restaurants. Instead, a third-party company will come and exchange your piles of dirty dishes, plastic boxes and cutlery with clean ones.
Instead of trying to do it all, Bibak is focusing on the area where it can bring more value — that’s the tech and platform part of this flourishing industry.
“We let professional washing and logistics companies do their job. It’s a much more solid model because we can bring in industrial washing companies,” Dahmane said.
So what does Bibak bring to the table then? First, Bibak gives some visibility through data. Customers can use the platform to see their inventory in real time, count how many food containers are missing, create a deposit system and see the environmental impact of reusable containers.
Second, Bibak helps you when it comes to collecting used food containers. The startup can send you smart return kiosks and create a deposit system that works for your specific restaurant. It can be a gamified system with rewards or a straightforward deposit system.
Third, Bibak also is a fintech company in a way. The company can manage the cashback and reward system for you.
The good news is that Bibak becomes more and more efficient as it scales. “We want to provide a cost per wash that is as low as possible,” Dahmane said.
The company targets big clients at first as it thinks smaller restaurants will follow course once these big chains are on board. Overall, more than 1.5 million of single-use packaging items have been avoided. Bibak competes with another French startup called Pyxo.
People working for Société Générale, Engie, Hermès, Danone or Vinci are already using Bibak food containers. And on the weekend, when people go to Roland Garros or We Love Green, they are interacting with Bibak as well when they order a drink. Soon, you may also receive a Bibak container when you order food online.
Bibak is building the software stack to manage reusable food containers at scale by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Every other week we’re inviting one of the Design Milk team to share five personal favorites – an opportunity for each of us to reveal the sort of designs we use and appreciate in our own lives from a more personal perspective. Editor-in-Chief Caroline Williamson returns this week for our Take 5 series.
I admit, I’ve long been on the miniature loving train. How can you not fall for teeny tiny objects made with such detail? So when this landed in my inbox, I had to share! British miniature artist Nadia Michaux created the world’s smallest sub – 12x smaller than a regular Subway® Footlong – at just 2.2cm (less than 1 inch). The design is a clay replica of the new Footlong Teriyaki Steak Sub that’s been added to the sandwich chain’s new Japanese-inspired menu. She even nailed the exact colors by mixing clay colors, firing them, and then making necessary adjustments to get it right – a laborious task. Bottom line, it fascinates me.
Louis Vuitton® recently released their 2nd collaboration with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and to celebrate they launched several exhibitions to pay homage to her and her iconic dots. Each immersive, and most definitely Instagrammable, exhibition had a different look, including Harrod’s in London donning colorful dots both inside and out and complete with a human-looking Kusama robot, while the Tokyo pop-up was a yellow-dotted dream with a larger-than-life Kusama sculpture in the middle. Wish I could visit them in person!
For some reason, I’ve been really gravitating towards home furnishings in the color lavender lately. If you look around, you’ll notice lavender goods popping up more and I’m loving it… except when it’s paired with other pastels and the palette all of a sudden looks like Easter. Instead, my eyes lean towards more dramatic pairings, like these two tables in lavender and electric red. It’s shocking but delightful!
I’ve had a life-long obsession with Polaroid and I love when they release anything new – cameras or film. And when they launch a collection with one of my favorite musicians of all time, I’m sold. Available in packs of 10, the David Bowie Edition film features 10 unique frame designs that reference his iconic album art and imagery, allowing you to make your own art alongside Bowie’s (even though we have to accept the fact that none us will ever be that cool).
I’ve been intrigued by this piece by Elias Sime, part of a recently opened exhibition titled Tightrope: Behind the Processor. Sime uses recycled electronic components – keyboards, circuits, wires, and various other e-waste – that he braids and layers together to form abstract art, like this massive piece that spans 99-5/8″ x 157-1/2″. From far away, it almost looks like a landscape, like the view looking down while flying on a plane, but closeup, you see all the intricate braiding and weaving of the different components.
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Guest post by Meghan Garrity
January 30, 2023 marks 100 years since the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.
This population exchange was not the first such agreement, but it was the first compulsory exchange. Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion and Muslim Greek nationals did not have the option to remain. Further, Greek and Muslim refugees who had fled the Ottoman Empire and Greece, respectively, were not allowed to return to their homes. Only small populations in Istanbul and Western Thrace were exempted from the treaty.
The population exchange between Greece and Turkey is an example of the broader phenomenon of mass expulsion—a government policy to systematically remove an ethnic group without individual legal review and with no recognition of the right to return. Far from an isolated incident, the Lausanne Convention was one of 19 population “transfers” or “exchanges” throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. These expulsions occurred with the stroke of a pen, but mass expulsions also occur at the point of a sword. Governments use violence to force out “undesirable” groups by destroying their homes, appropriating their assets and income, and in some cases, killing members of the group to encourage others to flee.
Although mass expulsion is rare, it is recurring. Between 1900–2020, governments expelled over 30 million citizens and non-citizens in 139 different episodes around the world.
Far from a historical phenomenon, over the last 50 years governments have continued to implement expulsion policies at an average rate of 1.56 per year. In just the last two decades (from 2000–2020) there were 24 expulsion events, including Eritreans from Ethiopia (1998–99); Rohingya from Myanmar (2012–13; 2016–18); and Afghans from Pakistan (2016).
What explains this recurrence? In the early decades of the twentieth century, particularly after World War I, minority groups were seen as dangerous Trojan horses that sowed instability and brought insecurity. The “Great Powers” and international institutions like the League of Nations, promoted expulsion as a necessary policy to “unmix” antagonistic populations. It was believed that only by reuniting groups with their co-ethnics and establishing homogenous nation-states—however fanciful that idea was in practice—could international peace and security be achieved.
Therefore, in post-conflict environments mass expulsion was often considered a viable policy, typically disguised in the more benign-sounding language of population “transfer” or “exchange.” The 1923 Lausanne Convention was part of one such post-conflict peace agreement that ended the war between Greece and Turkey and redrew the borders of the soon-to-be Turkish Republic.
Notable figures such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Herbert Hoover openly promoted and lobbied for mass expulsion. In 1942, in the midst of World War II, Czechoslovakia President-in-exile Edvard Beneš wrote in Foreign Affairs, “It will be necessary after this war to carry out a transfer of populations on a very much larger scale than after the last war. This must be done in as humane a manner as possible, internationally organized and internationally financed.” After the war, the Allied Powers carried out Beneš’ wish. The 1945 Potsdam Agreement authorized the “orderly and humane” expulsion of between nine and 12 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
But international norms and law slowly began to shift. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights included the right of nationals to return to their country of origin. The next year the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibited “individual or mass forcible transfers.” Protection for refugees soon followed with the 1951 Refugee Convention explicitly stating, “No contracting state shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee.” Subsequent regional human rights treaties bolstered legal frameworks against the expulsion of both nationals and non-nationals, including the European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 4 (1963), American Convention on Human Rights (1969), African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981), and more recently the Arab Charter on Human Rights (2004). In 1998 the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court included “deportation or forcible transfer of populations” as Crimes Against Humanity.
Yet despite these legal advancements, mass expulsion persists. Although laws against expulsion are in place, there is minimal, if any, regional or international enforcement. In the face of myriad atrocities and human rights abuses, cases of mass expulsion are not prioritized. The limited international justice resources are dedicated to accountability for more heinous atrocities like genocide. Unfortunately, multiple rounds of mass expulsion may eventually escalate to more serious violence as in the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar: expelled in 1978, 1991–92, 2012–13, and 2016–18. Only this latest episode has been referred to the International Court of Justice amidst accusations of genocide.
Governments also hesitate to call out others for implementing expulsion policies because they too have expelled. In 1983 Nigeria expelled over two million West African migrants without any serious criticism from its regional neighbors. Affected countries like Ghana, Niger, and Chad had previously expelled populations from their territories, and thus refrained from condemning Nigeria.
Furthermore, while mass expulsion has continued over time, the nature of the person targeted has changed. In the first half of the twentieth century, mass expulsions almost exclusively targeted citizens. Since 1950, only 12 incidents of citizen-only expulsions have occurred, which at first glance seems to indicate the customary international law against expelling citizens has diffused around the world. But, on the contrary, expelling states have simply modified their strategy by removing citizens simultaneously with non-citizens—foreign nationals, resident aliens, and/or refugees. When non-citizens are the main target of expulsion, these decisions are often considered “immigration policies” under the sovereign jurisdiction of the state. However, international law also guarantees the protection of non-nationals from mass expulsion and requires certain rules to be followed, including non-discrimination and individual legal review. The en masse removal of groups based on identity characteristics is illegal.
Mass expulsion, in whatever form it takes, has gross humanitarian consequences for those affected. In the chaos families are separated, homes and livelihoods are left behind, and in some cases, lives are lost. Importantly, research shows these policies do not bring the positive outcomes their advocates proclaim, and expelling states often suffer economically and politically in their aftermath.
The anniversary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention is a moment to reflect on the tragedy of the Greek-Turkish “population exchange.” More policy attention is needed to prevent and punish mass expulsion.
Meghan Garrity is a postdoctoral fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
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