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Mint
6 days ago
- Politics
- Mint
In Germany, the Nazis invaded people's dreams
The Third Reich of Dreams. By Charlotte Beradt. Translated by Damion Searls. Princeton University Press; 152 pages; $24.95 and £20 In 1933, after Adolf Hitler had taken power, a German housewife dreamed that her stove was snooping on her. 'It said everything we'd said against the regime, every joke we'd told" to an eavesdropping stormtrooper. 'God, I thought, what is it going to say next? All my little comments about Goebbels?" The woman's fears about privacy and Hitler's chief propagandist were recorded by Charlotte Beradt, a Jewish journalist who collected the dreams of Germans under fascism. Three decades earlier Sigmund Freud had posited that dreams reveal unconscious thoughts. To Beradt, they disclosed truths about authoritarianism that no one would dare say aloud. Some of her subjects were nervous to share their stories. Half a dozen dreamed that it was forbidden to dream. A businessman imagined that Goebbels visited his factory. 'It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimetre by millimetre," he recounted. As he struggled to salute, his spine snapped. Beradt collected dreams from more than 300 people over several years, transcribing them in code. 'Party" became 'family"; Hitler became 'Uncle Hans". She concealed the records in bookbindings and smuggled them abroad. They were published in Germany in 1966; an early English translation went out of print. Newly translated, the remarkable collection—which is unique in the canon of Holocaust literature—may now find more readers. It arrives at a time when people are more interested in the connection between sleep and well-being than ever before. Beradt organises the material into types of dreams, interweaving the accounts with her own trenchant analysis. A man imagines sitting down to write a formal complaint against the regime, but the page he sends in is blank—a dream reflecting his inaction. An eye doctor pictures that he is summoned to treat Hitler because 'I was the only one in the world who could; I was proud of myself for that, and felt so ashamed of my pride that I started crying"—a dream suffused with guilt. A young woman envisions having to produce identity papers and she is desperate to prove that she is not Jewish—a dream of racial paranoia. Many of the dreams are eerily prophetic. The doctor dreams about Nazi militiamen knocking out hospital windows four years before Kristallnacht, the 'night of broken glass" (pictured on previous page), when stormtroopers destroyed buildings including synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. The woman dreams of hiding under 'a big pile of dead bodies". It was the early 1930s, years before the world would learn of the mass murder committed in concentration camps. The dreams of Germans in the resistance are different. The night before her execution, Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old activist, dreamed that she was carrying a baby up a mountain to be baptised. Before she could get to the church, a crevasse cracked open on her path; she was able to set the baby down before she disappeared into the chasm. Scholl saw this as a metaphor for the fight against fascism. 'The child is our idea, and it will prevail despite all obstacles," she explained. 'We can prepare the way for it, even though we will have to die for it before its victory." Beradt puts Jewish dreamers in their own section as their dreams, 'sharpened by the acute threat they were downright clairvoyant". In 1935 a housewife dreamed that 'We shouldn't go back to our homes, something was going to happen." She wanders from building to building, seeking refuge and finding none. As Beradt notes, the dream anticipated events to come—the displacement of Jews in hiding during the 'final solution". Robert Ley, a high-ranking Nazi, suggested in 1938 that the only Germans with any privacy were those sleeping. He under-rated the regime's power. Dreams reflect and refract an individual's experience, shaped as it is by policy and the public mood. Even in sleep, the Reich occupied the minds of its subjects. For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
Hindustan Times
14-07-2025
- Science
- Hindustan Times
Claudia de Rham: 'The notion of time is not absolute'
What motivated you to dedicate your life to gravity research? Physicist and author Claudia de Rham at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2025 (JLF) It was always clear in my mind. When I started writing the book, it became clear that there could never have been anything else. I think gravity is fun and almost teasing us, right? It's always there all around us, and because we know it's going to be something we can't avoid, it pushes us to challenge it. We all like to play with it by dropping things and seeing if we can prevent them from falling. From the point of view of theoretical physics, what I like about it is its beautiful symmetry. It's universal and affects everyone in the same way, which is beautiful at a fundamental level. What is the universality of gravity? In the book, you recall this through an interesting experiment done by Apollo 15 commander David Scott in 1971. When he went to the moon, he dropped a feather and a hammer, and both objects fell at the same rate... That's right. It's counterintuitive, and it forces us to think about gravity differently. I love that it's also part of teasing us. You realize there's nothing more beautiful, symmetric and perfect when gravity is not affected by size, texture, or weight in different ways. Gravity affects our motion in spacetime because it changes spacetime. It gives it some curvature. And so, what makes it very interesting is when we evolve through this spacetime, we are accommodating for the presence of the mass. What is very special about gravity is that it does that to everybody in the same way. So, if you imagine two cells of our body living in that spacetime, they live in the same spacetime and experience the same curvature and gravity. They are not going to be changed or affected differently. 226pp, ₹1911; Princeton University Press And yet gravity cannot be felt. Why? Think about how we hear something. Sound waves stretch in different directions in our eardrum in different ways, and that's how they affect our body. That's how we can hear each other. If you push me, you will affect me by putting pressure on my cells. Different cells will respond differently. This distinction between the different cells enables me to hear or feel this feeling of other things, of pressure. Yet, gravity is not going to do that differently for different cells. In a local body, the effect of gravity would be the same for everything, for everyone. It's this beautiful symmetry behind gravity, which we call the universality of gravity, which means that, locally, you can't distinguish between differences. There will not be any cell in our body that experiences gravity, per se. To experience gravity at a fundamental level, like a force, you need to experience gravity through gravitational waves. But you can imagine it took us 100 years to feel instruments sensitive enough to feel the first gravitational waves. And those instruments are kilometres wide, so there's not something present in our own body that will experience gravity, at least not anytime soon. What is gravity? Gravity is the manifestation of how different points in space and time are connected together. In sum, it is the curvature of spacetime. This definition allows us to make predictions verified with impeccable precision. The information about how we will be affected by gravity is very much encoded into how we are affected by our curved environment. If you imagine yourself in a curved environment, going in a straight line may look different compared to someone in a different environment. That's how we are affected by gravity. We are affected by the curvature of spacetime in which we live. How would you define 'spacetime'? Now, you are going into the notion of space and time. We don't have an accurate definition of time. To return to some era of time, we must return to some notion of thermodynamics in some flow of the entropy. Entropy captures information about how things get disordered and the order in nature. We know that there is direction towards which things always become increasingly disorganised. And you can associate this with the notion of the flow of time -- the evolution of the entropy in the universe. Deep down, the notion of time is a human way of appreciating things around us. What we know is that time is not universal. We feel an evolution of time, but this is us simplifying a more abstract concept. The notion of time is not absolute. Is gravity an abstract concept even though it feels tangible? Gravity is a force. When we explain science to the public, we sometimes emphasise what we don't know because we want to make it exciting. But we do understand gravity very well. We also understand that gravity, like electromagnetism, electricity and magnetism, is a force deep down. However, gravity is not just the instantaneous force expressed by Newton. That representation works well in some limits, but it's not very close to what is happening. We experience gravity through what we call tidal forces. We have detected the force of gravity through the tidal forces of gravitational waves as they pass through our instruments. The first signal was in 2015, exactly when we observed the effect of gravitational waves, and since then, there have been hundreds of events where we've seen that effect coming in. The thing about gravity is that it goes both ways. A mass has an effect on gravity by curving space and time around itself. And any mass does that. The fact that a mass, like the sun or the Earth, affects gravity by giving it a curvature means that if you take anything else like another mass, or even no mass, it will experience gravity. It will experience this curvature, and therefore, it will experience, through gravity, through the curvature, the presence of this mass. We feel the mass of the Earth because the Earth curves the spacetime around itself, and we're living in that spacetime. And so that's how we feel the gravitational attraction of the earth. What breakthroughs are happening in gravity research, and how are they affecting our lives? All the progress made in understanding gravity in the past 200 years, we are using it right now, like your phone. This understanding affects the technologies that your phone uses to communicate with satellites. It incorporates the small corrections in the curvature of spacetime perceived by the satellites in orbit above our heads and accommodates the difference between what we feel here on Earth. These are differences from our understanding of the curvature of spacetimes through Einstein's laws of general relativity. We couldn't use any device if we didn't account for such a difference. So, we already use this understanding in all technologies you use daily. Wherever you drive or the transport or telecommunication system you use, you're using our understanding of gravity at a level beyond our imagination. Now, of course, trying to understand gravity at an even more fundamental level, you may ask, have we got what we wanted out of it? Do we need to go deeper? But really, who is to tell how much and how do we know? Because when Einstein came up with the theory of general relativity, he didn't have in mind that people would be using it for mobile phones or satellites and all sorts of technologies; it came from understanding the laws of nature at a more fundamental level. Nowadays, it's very important to keep exploring the world around us, not just with the finality of us using it for a particular problem that we have today. We don't know what problems we will have tomorrow, and we don't even know how to address them. So, we must keep looking for different patterns in our understanding of nature. From that, we'll be able to apply them to all of the problems that will come tomorrow, all of the problems of quantum technology and quantum computing that we are developing today. Can you explain how your research is fundamental in understanding the Big Bang Theory? Yes. For instance, when we're trying to understand how to make sense of the laws of gravity in our quantum regime at the very centre of black holes, it challenges our understanding of space and time. We need to have a description that is beyond the notion of space and time in very, very curved environments where the curvature scale, the temperature, if you want, is very, very high. And those kinds of environments at the very centre of black holes is very similar to what happens at the very beginning of the universe. At the Big Bang, the Universe was born. We believe it was an explosion of spacetime, where all of spacetime in all of space in all of its infinite infinity was created. Understanding how gravity behaves in those environments would allow us to understand how gravity behaves at the very beginning of the universe, what goes beyond the very notion of time, and being able to understand what is beyond our universe, and what is beyond the very origin of the universe. That's so mind-altering. As a woman scientist who is a leading theoretical physicists, what challenges have you faced? The challenges are not necessarily when there are some outspoken biases; you can then deal with them, be upset, address them, and move on. I think it's more the unspoken rules. I think it's more of these constant, slight power games, which is very difficult to address because they're not outspoken, are not out there, and are not tangible for everybody. If you do something to a given level, be it as a man or a woman, it means the same. It doesn't matter. But when whatever you do bears the flag of you being a woman doing it, then it becomes a challenge. I try to separate myself from it and do the best I can because I am a person doing science, not just a woman. Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.
Miami Herald
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Ancient Chinese Wisdom with a Twist: THE CAT CHING or I CHING FOR CATS
Team Editorial - Evrima Chicago HOUSTON, TX / ACCESS Newswire / July 11, 2025 / From the Translator's Preface: This is a book by a cat, about cats, and based on an ancient Chinese classic known as the I Ching (Book of Changes). For nearly 3,000 years, the I Ching has served as a metaphysical roadmap for the human soul. Until now, cats had no such philosophical guide. Why? For the usual reasons: humans subjugated us, labeled us "the other," and denied us our own voice. THE CAT CHING or I CHING FOR CATS changes all that. In this wildly inventive and lavishly illustrated reimagining of the I Ching, Mao, The Cat Philosopher, helps feline-kind-and their humans-make sense of the world and its many challenges. In the paws of Mao, the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching become a guide to decoding the present and divining the future. Select a hexagram, and unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. Or at least, figure out what's really going on in your litter box. Socrates said: "Know thyself."Mao replies: "Know thy kitty-and you will know thyself. Maybe." A Sample of Mao's Timeless Wisdom: If at first you don't succeed, all that glitters is cat litter; sometimes it's a fire ant hill.A healthy heart and shiny coat require lifting the toilet seat once "Scythian Suite" can drown out the sound of cats mating-try sound of the icemaker will not kill you. THE CAT CHING or I CHING FOR CATS includes a Preface, an Introduction, and 64 illustrated entries-each with a cat photo, hexagram, interpretation, and witty commentary. Both philosophical and delightfully impractical, it offers life advice through a fur-covered lens. It is the ideal gift for the spiritually curious, the philosophically inclined, and anyone who is (willingly) owned by a cat. About the Author: Richard J. Smith Richard J. Smith is the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Rice University and one of the foremost Western scholars of Chinese intellectual history. His body of work explores divination systems, cosmology, and cultural history-most notably through his acclaimed book The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2012). Smith's contributions include: Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The YijingThe Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese CultureMapping China and Managing the WorldRethinking the Sinosphere (Editor)Reexamining the Sinosphere (Editor) His ability to make deeply complex Chinese traditions accessible to general readers has earned praise from scholars and institutions around the world. Choice magazine named The I Ching: A Biography an "Outstanding Academic Title," and reviewers have commended his "clarity, rigor, and transcultural insight." Google BooksAmazon Author Page Disclaimer This original article was independently researched and published by Richard J. Smith with the editorial team of Evrima Chicago News Bureau and has not been previously published in any form before today. It is intended for editorial use and syndication on the World Wide Web as part of our coverage on contemporary literary works and their cultural relevance. Endorsed by the AuthorThe views and interpretations expressed herein are those of our editorial team and are commissioned &/or officially endorsed by Prof. Richard J. Smith. Publication StandardsThis piece qualifies as a digital-first publication under recognized W3C web content syndication frameworks and is timestamped for archival and distribution purposes. No Liability for Obsessive ReadersEvrima Chicago disclaims all liability for readers who finish The Cat Ching and begin quoting feline proverbs at dinner parties or seek enlightenment via litter box meditation. Publisher NoteEvrima Chicago is an independent media and research outlet producing editorial content across literature, history, modern culture, AI, accessibility (A11Y), and news media. SOURCE: Evrima Chicago LLC.
New Statesman
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
From Stephen King to Noah Eaton: new books reviewed in short
'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer' edited by Mary Beth Norton The world's first personal advice column came about by accident. In early 1691, the Athenian Mercury was a new broadsheet that sought to provide talking points for coffeehouse patrons by answering assorted questions of the day. However, the three-man editorial team quickly started to receive queries of a more intimate nature from their subscribers and found that matters of marriage, lust and courtship interested their readers more than those on medicine, law and the military. This book, nimbly edited and introduced by the historian Mary Beth Norton, contains a broad selection of questions and answers, and plus ça change. 'It is my misfortune to be red-haired,' laments a correspondent with his eye on a woman with the 'greatest aversion' to the shade and asking for a method to turn his locks brown; 'I've a dreadful scold of a wife,' writes another, asking 'how to tame her'; if a man finds his fiancée in bed with another man, is he still duty-bound to marry her? We may now have Mumsnet and Reddit but, nevertheless, many of these three-centuries-old quandaries still come with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God warning. By Michael Prodger Princeton University Press, 203pp, £20. Buy the book Never Flinch by Stephen King When it comes to reading books by the 'King of Horror' it's best to go in with an open mind and without assuming what will happen next – unless you want to be let down by your deducing skills. This rule clearly applies to King's latest book, Never Flinch. Though a standalone novel, it features a much-loved private investigator, Holly Gibney, and those associated with her investigation firm Finders Keepers. Although the reader is introduced to the murderer from the get-go, this by no means spoils the fun. You may think you know all there is to know, but King's mastery of withholding those final important pieces of information will have you working alongside Holly, perhaps not on unveiling the identity of the criminal, but on their motives. And let's not discard King's signature parallel plotlines which in the end collide to bring everything to light. With a killer on a revenge mission and a religious zealot targeting a celebrity feminist speaker, Never Flinch is not as graphic or as scary as King's previous novels. What makes the book unnerving and impossible to put down is how real and plausible everything described can be. By Zuzanna Lachendro Hodder & Stoughton, 429pp, £25. Buy the book A Perfect Harmony: Music, Mathematics and Science by David Darling 'Math and music are intimately related,' says composer and lyricist Stephen Sondeim. While to many music might seem remote from maths and science, their shared intricacies have been studied for centuries. We all recall Pythagoras' theorem (some more fondly than others), but what about Pythagorean tuning to create the interval of a perfect fifth? Though its mathematical precision fell out of favour by the end of the 15th century, Pythagorean tuning and its 'circle of fifths' remains at the heart of harmonic theory today. It comes as no surprise that many scientists were also musicians. A Perfect Harmony serves to solidify just how interlinked the fields are. From the Neanderthal bone instrument that mimics the musical scales we commonly use today, through musica universalis of the Middle Ages combining arithmetic, geography, music and astronomy, to the two Voyager spacecrafts' cosmic LPs, the disciplines co-exist in perfect harmony. Darling's observant musical odyssey across time reinforces that 'music and maths are endlessly entwined… nourishing one another' and have done so for millennia. After all, at its simplest music is melody and rhythm, and rhythm cannot exist without maths. By Zuzanna Lachendro Oneworld, 288pp, £10.99. Buy the book The Harrow by Noah Eaton The Harrow is a local newspaper – for Tottenham. Not, as its hardened editor John Salmon is sick of explaining, for Harrow: 'As in 'to harrow', to rake the land and drag out weeds, to distress the powerful. As in Christ harrowing Hell, saving the innocent and righteous. Not Harrow as in that miserable bloody town Harrow!' The paper, each issue announces, is 'the guardian of your democracy'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The reality is not quite so grand. The coverage focuses on villains, not victims, because no one cares about the latter. Salmon keeps a shabby office and three staff above a betting shop and spends much of his time harassing off-licence proprietors who have tried to lower their order. But when the prospect of a last-gasp 'big story' heaves into view, Salmon and his team feel their hopes renewed. At well over 400 pages, The Harrow is on the weightier side for a thriller – and for a debut. But author Noah Eaton keeps the story ticking along at a pleasingly alacritous clip. Sometimes the world Eaton has built is told a little indulgently, but all told the story is complex, amusing and readable. By George Monaghan Atlantic Books, 389pp, £18.99. Buy the book Related
Irish Times
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Europe without Borders: a detailed history of the Schengen system - Skilful account of a tense balancing of freedoms
Europe without Borders, A History Author : Isaac Stanley-Becker ISBN-13 : 978-0691261768 Publisher : Princeton University Press Guideline Price : £30 The Schengen system of free movement across borders for nationals of its 29 member-states symbolises the promise of liberal internationalism in Europe after its long history of conflicts and war. Originating in an interstate treaty signed in 1985 between France, West Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, it went public in 1990 after intense negotiation between state officials just after the Berlin Wall fell. Over the following decades it embraced most states and more than 450 million people. Ireland and Cyprus are its only EU non-members. Ireland preferred to maintain the similar Common Travel Area with Britain, which never joined Schengen. This book by a US journalist and academic is a detailed history of how the Schengen system was created. Based on extensive archival research it has an acute sense of the system's humanist and cosmopolitan promise alongside market and border limits. READ MORE It breaks new ground by revealing the abiding tensions in Schengen's construction and operation: between freedom of movement for people and citizens compared with market freedom for capital and workers – and between the rights conferred on nationals of its member-states and strict restrictions on outsiders. Stanley-Becker skilfully relates these tensions to the politics of immigration in Europe after decolonisation. Schengen 'was a laboratory of free movement always meant to join Euro-nationalist rules of exclusion with neoliberal principles of market freedom', he writes. Two contrasting protests frame his study: one by lorry drivers against long border queues, which pushed Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand into their Saarbrucken initiative in 1984 to ease Franco-German border controls by sharing them with other countries, in the name of a Citizen's Europe. And then, in 1996 and after, came protests by sans-papiers immigrants in favour of free movement as a human right. The contrast is inherent in the racial hierarchies that defined nationals of these former colonies as 'undesirables' in secret police lists. The book is strong on the legal and philosophical history and political arguments surrounding these Schengen rights, much less so on the huge everyday freedoms they gave to the many European citizens and workers who have benefitted from them and value them highly. These hard-won freedoms are now severely challenged by the new right-wing politics of immigration and identity on the continent.
