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[Vesper 28,796]

Weekend shoulder of pork

Serves 6
Prep: 10 minutes. Cook: 4 hours

Shoulder of pork does great things given time in the oven — crackling and tender pullable meat, joy.

Ingredients

• 2 tsp fennel seeds
• 2kg shoulder of pork, bone out
• Olive oil
• 6 jacket potatoes
• 6 onions
• 6 bay leaves
• 2 eating apples
• 160g watercress
• Red wine vinegar
• Mustard, to serve

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 220C fan/gas 9. Bash the fennel seeds in a pestle and mortar until fine. Sit the pork in a large roasting tray and randomly score the skin all over, rub with olive oil, the fennel, sea salt and black pepper, then roast for 1 hour. Halve the potatoes, and peel and halve the onions.

2. Remove the tray from the oven and baste the pork with the tray juices, then remove it to a plate for a moment. Add the potatoes and onions to the tray and carefully toss with the bay leaves, 2 tablespoons of red wine vinegar and a pinch of salt and pepper, then sit the pork on top.

3. Return the tray to the oven, reduce the temperature to 160C fan/gas 4 and roast for 3 hours, basting the pork and tossing the veg halfway, also adding a splash of water occasionally to prevent it from drying out, if needed.

4. Matchstick the apples, toss with the watercress, a little extra virgin olive oil, a swig of red wine vinegar and seasoning. Shred the pork and onions to your liking, then serve everything with the potatoes and a dollop of your favourite mustard on the side.

[Vesper 28,796]

Gnarly lamb Madras traybake

Serves 8
Prep: 9 minutes. Cook: 5 hours

Get this in the oven in no time, then sit back and enjoy the cooking aromas — perfect food to share.

Ingredients

• 1 x 2kg lamb shoulder, bone in
• 1 x 180g jar of Madras curry paste
• 250g yellow split peas
• 4 red onions
• 1 potato
• 4 tomatoes
• 6cm piece of ginger
• 1 bulb of garlic
• Half a bunch of coriander (15g)
• 12 cloves
• Olive oil

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170C fan/gas 5, and boil the kettle.

2. Lightly score the skin side of the lamb all over in a criss-cross fashion, then season with sea salt and black pepper and rub with half of the curry paste.

3. Place the yellow split peas in your largest high-sided roasting tray, then peel, halve and add the onions and potato. Halve the tomatoes, peel and chop the ginger, break up the garlic bulb and roughly chop the coriander (stalks and all), then add everything to the tray, along with the remaining curry paste.

4. Stir in 1.2 litres of boiling kettle water, then sit the lamb on top, scatter over the cloves, tightly cover the tray with oiled tin foil and carefully transfer to the oven to roast for 4½ hours, or until the lamb is super-tender and melt-in-your-mouth — there’s no need to check it, just let the oven do its thing.

5. Remove the foil, baste the lamb well with the juices from the tray, and cook for a final 30 minutes, or until golden and gnarly.

6. Pull off chunks of meat and divide between serving plates, discarding any bones. Break up the potato, squeeze out the soft garlic and stir both through the split peas and veg, then plate up, along with some of the tasty juices.

[Vesper 28,796]

Roasted Med veg and feta traybake

Serves 4
Prep: 5 minutes. Cook: 30 minutes

Hero-ing those genius bags of mixed roasted veg from the freezer saves big on the prep time here.

Ingredients

• 300g couscous
• 1 x 400g tin of chickpeas
• 700g frozen chargrilled Mediterranean veg
• 1 heaped tbsp harissa paste
• 200g block of feta cheese
• 1 lemon
• 1 heaped tsp dried oregano
• Olive oil

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 200C fan/gas 7. Tip the couscous into a 25cm x 35cm roasting tray, then mix in the chickpeas, juice and all.

2. Toss the frozen veg with the harissa and a pinch of sea salt and black pepper, then layer on top of the couscous and chickpeas.

3. Quarter the feta and arrange on top, then halve the lemon, place half in the middle, and squeeze the other half over everything. Sprinkle over the oregano and drizzle with 2 tablespoons of olive oil.

4. Roast for 30 minutes, or until everything’s beautifully golden. Fork up the couscous, use tongs to squeeze over the jammy roasted lemon and serve. Delicious with a seasonal salad on the side.

Easy swaps
If you can’t get hold of frozen chargrilled Mediterranean veg, simply chop your favourite seasonal veg into 2cm chunks instead.

[Vesper 28,796]

Golden miso salmon

Serves 4
23 minutes

Going hard and fast with the grill adds an extra dimension of flavour, creating a satisfying meal.

Ingredients

• 500g asparagus
• 320g sugar snap peas
• Olive oil
• 1 tbsp dark miso
• 2 tbsp low-salt soy sauce
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• 2 limes
• 4 x 130g salmon fillets, skin on, scaled, pin-boned
• 1 tbsp sesame seeds
• 1 carrot
• 2 spring onions
• 4 radishes
• 4 sprigs of fresh mint

Method

1. Preheat the grill to high. Snap the woody ends off the asparagus and place it in a 25cm x 35cm roasting tray with the sugar snap peas, then drizzle with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and shake to coat.

2. Mix the miso, soy and sesame oil in a shallow bowl, then finely grate in the zest of 1 lime and squeeze in the juice to make a marinade. Slice the salmon fillets in half lengthways, toss in the marinade, then drape over the veg in the tray, drizzling over the excess marinade. Scatter over the sesame seeds.

3. Grill for 12 minutes, or until the greens are blistered and the salmon is golden and just cooked through.

4. To make a quick pickle, peel and matchstick the carrot, trim and finely chop the spring onions, finely slice the radishes, pick and roughly chop the mint leaves, then dress it all with lime juice, sea salt and black pepper.

5. Scatter the pickle over the salmon in the tray, and serve. Delicious with noodles or fluffy rice on the side.

[Vesper 28,796]

Summery salmon traybake

Serves 4
20 minutes

Knowing something so colourful and beautiful can be on the table in just 20 minutes is joyful.

Ingredients

• 1 x 567g tin of peeled new potatoes
• Olive oil
• 4 x 150g salmon fillets, skin on, pin-boned
• 400g ripe cherry tomatoes, on the vine
• 100g black olives, pitted
• 1 heaped tbsp baby capers in brine
• Half a bunch of oregano (10g)
• 1 lemon
• 4 slices of prosciutto
• 4 heaped tsp pesto

Method

1. Preheat the grill to high. Drain the potatoes, place in a 25cm x 35cm roasting tray, toss with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, then place on the hob over a medium heat for 5 minutes, or until the potatoes begin to get golden.

2. In a bowl, mix the salmon, vine tomatoes, olives and capers with the oregano leaves, 1½ tablespoons of oil and half the lemon juice. Pull out the salmon fillets and wrap in the prosciutto, then pour the contents of the bowl into the tray and sit the salmon on top, skin side down.

3. Grill for 10 minutes, or until golden and the salmon is just cooked through.

4. Dollop over the pesto and serve with lemon wedges, for squeezing over.

Easy swaps
Green beans, runner beans, asparagus and sprouting broccoli would all be delicious here. Tinned potatoes are brilliant for quick cooking, but you could also swap in shop-bought potato gnocchi.

[Vesper 28,796]

Christopher Columbus was Spanish and Jewish, documentary reveals

Fifteenth century explorer’s true origins revealed after DNA analysis from samples buried in Seville Cathedral

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/13/christopher-columbus-was-spanish-and-jewish-documentary-reveals

A view of the mausoleum of Christopher Columbus in the cathedral of Seville, Spain. A documentary has revealed the explorer was Jewish and from Spain. Photograph: Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters

The centuries-old mystery over Christopher Columbus’s nationality has been revealed by scientists in a Spanish TV documentary after using DNA analysis.

The 15th explorer was Jewish and from Spain, according to Columbus DNA: His True Origin, a programme broadcast on national broadcaster RTVE on Saturday to mark Spain celebrating its national day and commemorating Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

Researchers led by forensic expert Miguel Lorente tested tiny samples of remains buried in Seville Cathedral, long marked by authorities there as the last resting place of Columbus, although there had been rival claims. The team compared them with those of known relatives and descendants.

Countries have long argued over the origins and the final resting place of the divisive figure who led Spanish-funded expeditions from the 1490s onward, opening the way for the European conquest of the Americas.

Many historians have questioned the traditional theory that Columbus was from Genoa in north-west Italy. Other theories ranged from him being a Spanish Jew, Greek, Basque or Portuguese.

Lorente, briefing reporters on the research on Thursday, had confirmed previous theories that the remains in Seville belonged to the explorer.

He said: “Today it has been possible to verify it with new technologies, so that the previous partial theory that the remains of Seville belong to Christopher Columbus has been definitively confirmed.”

Research on the nationality had been complicated by a number of factors including the large amount of data but “the outcome is almost absolutely reliable,” Lorente added.

Columbus died aged 55 in the northwest Spanish city of Valladolid in 1506 but wished to be buried on the island of Hispaniola that is today shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

His remains were taken there in 1542, then moved to Cuba in 1795 and then, it had been long thought in Spain, to Seville in 1898.

In 1877, workers found a lead casket buried behind the altar in a cathedral in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, containing a collection of bone fragments the country says belong to Columbus.

Lorente said both claims could be true as both sets of bones were incomplete.

 

Read more:

 

 

DNA study confirms Christopher Columbus’s remains are entombed in Seville

 

[Vesper 28,796]

Stars behaving absurdly

For centuries, the only way in which to illuminate the mysteries of black holes was through the power of mathematics

https://aeon.co/essays/mathematics-is-the-only-way-we-have-of-peering-into-a-black-hole

A 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blasting from the M87 galaxy’s 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, September 2024. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STSCI

As celestial entities go, black holes are, paradoxically, both commonplace and extraordinary. They could be seen as commonplace due to their general ubiquity. Astrophysicists now believe that giant black holes – each with the mass of millions or billions of suns – inhabit the centres of practically every large galaxy, where they exert a powerful influence over star formation and other processes. There are more than 200 billion such galaxies, according to estimates, each thought to harbour about 100 million stellar- or star-sized black holes. Adding that up, we’re talking about something on the order of 10¹⁹ – or 10 billion billion – black holes. And far into the future, when the Universe is three times its current age (or about 40 billion years old), black holes will be all that’s left. That prediction was made in an analysis by the astrophysicists Fred C Adams and Gregory Laughlin in 1997 who concluded that, in the distant future, ‘the only stellarlike objects remaining [will be] black holes of widely disparate masses.’

 

The Event Horizon Telescope provided the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. Courtesy Wikipedia

On the other hand, black holes are also extraordinary. They’re the densest known objects in the Universe. The Sun, for instance, would be a black hole if all its matter were squeezed into a radius of less than 3 kilometres, rather than its actual radius of about 700,000 kilometres – a hypothetical compacting that would make our host star more than 10 quadrillion times denser than it is right now. Because matter in a black hole is, by definition, compressed into a relatively tiny space, its gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape its indomitable grip. And that is why such an object is called ‘black’. Light cannot get out from the interior of a black hole, which means there is no possible way to look inside.

In view of the ineluctable opacity of black holes, one might wonder how we’ve managed to learn anything about them – especially when it comes to insights regarding their interior structure. While it’s certainly true that vital clues have been obtained from observational data, empirically obtained information has become available only in recent decades. However, for a period of about 200 years prior to that, all we had to rely on were physical theories and mathematics, and that’s the story we are telling here. From the late 18th century to the present day, mathematicians have tackled questions about these enigmatic objects that are beyond the range of any telescope yet devised – questions limited only by the reach of human imagination.

The very concept of black holes was invented through mathematics by the visionary, if little-known, scientist John Michell in 1783 (though he did not call them black holes at the time). In 1750, this low-profile rector of a small English village (Thornhill, 20 miles south of Leeds) demonstrated that the force between two magnetised objects drops off with the square of the distance between them – which was about three decades before the French scientist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb established that same fact. And in 1755, Michell proposed that earthquakes generate waves that propagate through the earth, ‘thereby helping establish the field of seismology’, according to the American Physical Society. Michell was the first to use statistical methods to demonstrate that stars often group together in binary pairs or in larger assemblages. He also conceived of a device for measuring the strength of gravity between two objects, which was used in a renowned experiment by Henry Cavendish in 1798, five years after Michell’s death.

 

Mitchell’s November 1783 letter to Cavendish and published in Philosophical Transactions, as ‘On the means of discovering the distance, magnitude, &c. of the fixed stars, in consequence of the diminution of the velocity of their light, in case such a diminution should be found to take place in any of them, and such other data should be procured from observations, as would be farther necessary for that purpose.’ By the Rev. John Michell, B.D. F.R.S. Courtesy the Royal Society, London

Michell was ahead of his time on all these fronts, but the ideas he conveyed in a 1783 letter to Cavendish – published a year later in the journal Philosophical Transactions – were more than a century ahead of the curve. Michell was originally motivated to devise a technique for determining the mass of a star. He subscribed to a theory, first advanced by Isaac Newton, that light consisted of a stream of particles known as corpuscles. He surmised that the gravitational pull of a star would slow the motion of these light particles. And if the star was big enough – ‘more than 500 times the diameter of the Sun’, he calculated – ‘all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity.’ The gravitational field in such a case would be so strong that it would overcome the escape velocity of light itself, Michell proposed.

Their escape velocities are, indeed, greater than the speed of light

Any light produced by a star would be trapped inside, making the star invisible, but there still might be a way to detect its presence, he suggested: ‘If any other luminous bodies should happen to revolve about them, we might still perhaps from the motions of these revolving bodies infer the existence of the central ones with some degree of probability.’

In his remarkably discerning presentation, Michell got many things right about what we now call black holes. Their escape velocities are, indeed, greater than the speed of light, and the presence of many black holes has been deduced by scrutinising the motions of the luminous bodies that fall under their gravitational spell.

Through no fault of his own, however, Michell got many of the particulars wrong. We now know that the crucial determinant as to whether a star is destined to become a black hole depends on its density, not its diameter. Moreover, it was not until 1905 that Albert Einstein postulated the notion – supported by experiments both before and since – that light travels at a constant velocity and cannot be slowed down by the influence of gravity (as Michell and other 18th-century scholars had supposed). Optical experiments carried out by Thomas Young in 1801 bolstered the proposition that light had wave-like properties – evidence that led to the eventual downfall of Newton’s corpuscular theory of light.

Few scientists of Michell’s era were able to comprehend his arguments about dark, invisible stars, and his ideas consequently attracted little notice. To gain a detailed understanding of the curious objects that Michell conjured up, an entirely new way of thinking about matter, gravity, light and energy was required. That is just what Einstein provided on 25 November 1915 when he supplanted Newton’s then 230-year-old law of universal gravitation with the introduction of his own brainchild – the general theory of relativity.

Einstein offered a novel description of gravity that was, at its heart, geometrical. Gravity, he said, was not an attractive force exerted between two or more massive objects, as Newton had maintained centuries earlier. Instead, the phenomenon arose from the fact that a massive object curves the space and time around it. In this theory, space and time meld together to form the concept of ‘spacetime’ – and the curvature of spacetime, in turn, relates directly to its shape or geometry. According to Einstein’s view, it is the curvature of spacetime induced by a massive object like the Sun that holds other objects – such as the planets in the solar system – in its gravitational sway. This notion was summed up decades later by the physicist John Wheeler in his oft-cited statement: curved spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.

It took Einstein 10 long years to arrive at this result – during which, by his own admission, he worked harder than ever before in his life. And the outcome of this pursuit – which characterised gravity as a geometric effect – was somewhat ironic, given that Einstein had previously not held mathematics in high regard, nor had he devoted much effort to that subject area as a student. He knew little about geometry when he set out to formulate his general theory, and he had not even heard about the geometry of curved spaces invented in 1854 by the mathematician Bernhard Riemann, upon which his theory ultimately was based.

Einstein’s contribution here can be encapsulated within a single mathematical equation that might appear to be quite simple: G_ij = T_ij. The curvature of spacetime on the left side of this expression is equal to the distribution of matter and energy on the right. However, the letters G and T represent complex mathematical constructs known as tensors, which are 4-by-4 arrays of numbers and functions. What looks like a single equation above is, in fact, 10 linked ‘field’ equations. Each one of these equations would be difficult to solve on its own and, to make things harder, all 10 of them have to be solved simultaneously.

As the radius goes to zero, the pressure and density would approach infinity

Einstein did not know whether an exact solution to his field equations could ever be obtained. And when he used his equations to address a longstanding problem regarding Mercury’s anomalous orbit around the Sun, he sought and eventually found only approximate solutions.

Fortunately, Einstein’s paper of 25 November 1915 made its way into the hands of the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, who was then a 42-year-old soldier in the German army, assigned to the Russian front during the First Word War. Schwarzschild somehow found time during breaks in the military action not only to read Einstein’s paper but also to pursue his own ideas, which culminated in the first exact solution to the field equations of general relativity. The solution in question – which Schwarzschild sent to Einstein in a letter dated 22 December and published a month later – described the geometry of spacetime around a spherical, non-rotating star. Based on his determination of the geometry, Schwarzschild was able to work out the precise mechanics of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun, providing a mathematical description that had proven elusive until that time.

Karl Schwarzschild, early 20th C. Courtesy the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

In February, Schwarzschild published a second paper in which he explored, again mathematically, the interior of such a star. Using an argument reminiscent of the approach Michell had pursued some 130 years earlier – though propped up this time by the framework of Einstein’s new gravitational theory – Schwarzschild showed that, if enough mass were packed into a small enough radius, any light produced by the star would be stuck inside. This radius, known as the Schwarzschild radius, marks the boundary of what we now call the event horizon – the point of no return, or actually the surface of no return surrounding a black hole, beyond which any light or particles cannot get out.

Of perhaps even greater interest was what Schwarzschild found at the centre of his hypothetical sphere-like star. As the radius goes to zero, the pressure and density would approach infinity. Such a point would be called a singularity – a place where the laws of general relativity would break down and its predictions would go haywire. Schwarzschild, in other words, had identified some of a black hole’s key features back when the theory of general relativity was just a few months old.

Einstein, the author of that theory, doubted that the objects that sprung from Schwarzschild’s equations could actually exist. ‘If this result were real, it would be a true disaster,’ Einstein commented, reflecting his sense that the appearance of singularities would have a pathological effect on his newly unveiled theory.

Schwarzschild considered his solution an important theoretical contribution, but he too was unsure of the physical reality of the objects that his calculations gave rise to – objects that would be called black holes 50 years later. One of his qualms was that he couldn’t think of a viable mechanism for how such things could be formed, nor did he believe that the predicted infinite pressures could ever be realised. Schwarzschild, sadly, was unable to carry this work further, as he died a few months later, in May 1916, from a disease he contracted during the war.

Although mathematical analyses, drawing on Einstein’s theory, had raised the possibility of black holes, the concept remained an abstraction until persuasive arguments could be made as to how objects of this sort might actually materialise in the real world.

Some of the earliest inklings that black holes might be real came in 1930 when a 19-year-old Indian student, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, travelled by ship from Madras to Southampton. Chandrasekhar was headed for the University of Cambridge, where he would pursue graduate studies in astrophysics. It was a long journey to England and, to pass the time, his thoughts turned – as many a young man’s mind might – to white dwarfs, a kind of star he’d become interested in after reading a book on the subject by Arthur Eddington, who was then a professor at Cambridge, as well as one of the world’s most esteemed astronomers. A white dwarf is the dense core of a star (roughly the size of the Sun) that is no longer ‘shining’, having exhausted its nuclear fuel and expelled almost all of its outer layer. Chandrasekhar wanted to know how big (or massive) a white dwarf could be without collapsing uncontrollably to a singularity of infinite density. He determined during this voyage that such a gravitational instability would occur in a white dwarf of 1.44 solar masses – a threshold that’s now called the Chandrasekhar limit.

Attendees of the Astrophysical Conference on Novae and White Dwarfs in Paris, 1939. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is back row, second from right, Arthur Eddington front row, second from right. Courtesy the AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

He presented this result at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, but his findings were challenged by Eddington, who declared that Chandrasekhar’s ideas – based, as they were, solely on mathematics – bore no relation to the physical world. There ought to be a law of nature, Eddington said, ‘to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way’. Any claims to the contrary, he added, were tantamount to ‘stellar buffoonery’.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his wife Lalitha at the McDonald Observatory in 1939. Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Chandrasekhar was ultimately vindicated. He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for this and related work on stellar evolution – the same year that he published a 672-page book, The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. History, meanwhile, has proven Eddington wrong on this point: it turns out that our laws of nature do permit stars to behave in ‘such an absurd way’. And much of that was demonstrated by the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues in the late 1930s.

Oppenheimer generalised Chandrasekhar’s results on mass limits to stars other than white dwarfs – specifically to neutron stars, the cores of collapsed stars that are so dense, their electrons and protons get crushed together to form neutrons. (A tiny chunk of a neutron star, the size of a sugar cube, would weigh a billion tons.) Working with George Volkoff, Oppenheimer showed that a neutron star of more than about three solar masses will inexorably collapse into a black hole.

Einstein’s arguments were eventually refuted, and he never wrote another paper on black holes

And he went further still. In a separate paper in September 1939 with his then-graduate student Hartland Snyder, Oppenheimer filled in a key part of the picture that Chandrasekhar had not addressed, supplying a step-by-step mathematical account of the process whereby a star implodes to form a black hole. The mathematician Demetrios Christodoulou regarded this achievement as ‘very significant, being the first work on relativistic gravitational collapse’. By showing how a black hole can be formed, guided by Einstein’s equations, Oppenheimer and Snyder brought the product of Schwarzschild’s wartime musings much closer to plausibility.

Ironically, one month later, in October 1939, Einstein published a paper in The Annals of Mathematics in which he claimed to have set forth ‘a clear understanding as to why the “Schwarzschild singularities” do not exist in physical reality’ – essentially challenging a prediction that was borne of his own equations. Einstein’s arguments were eventually refuted, and he never wrote another paper on black holes.

Oppenheimer did not undertake any additional work on the subject either – despite the important contributions he’d already made. By 1942, he had other weighty matters on his mind, as he was asked to join the Manhattan Project that year. In 1943, he was named director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the atomic bomb was being developed, and that work – for obvious reasons – overshadowed his prior theorising about black holes.

Another momentous breakthrough on the mathematics front came in 1963 when Roy Kerr, a New Zealander then based at the University of Texas, addressed a major shortcoming of the Schwarzschild solution: it applied only to spherical black holes that are stationary – a problem, given that every star and planet ever observed rotates to some extent. And rotating objects are not perfectly round; they have bulges at the centre. Kerr’s colleague at Texas, Alan Thompson, warned Kerr not to waste his time and effort on spinning black holes, because a new paper by the physicist Ezra Newman and two co-authors had just concluded that no solutions could be found for them.

Upon identifying a flaw in the paper by Newman et al, Kerr forged ahead. However, in order to make progress, he had to adopt two simplifying assumptions: first, that the black holes are rotating at a constant rate so that nothing in this scenario changes in time and, second, that even though the black holes were not perfect spheres, they were still symmetrical around a vertical axis – in the same way that an upright cylinder is nonspherical yet symmetrical around its vertical axis. With these assumptions, he soon hit upon a solution to the Einstein equations that applied to rotating black holes – or Kerr black holes, as they were soon called.

Kerr’s paper, which was published in July 1963, was just a page-and-a-half long, but it was considered a huge advance because he had furnished the best mathematical representation yet of a physically realistic black hole.

Chandrasekhar praised the accomplishment, saying that Kerr’s description applied flawlessly to ‘untold numbers of massive black holes that populate the Universe’.

In the fall of 1963, the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose came as a visiting professor to the University of Texas, where he engaged in many conversations with Kerr. One thing Penrose wondered about was whether the singularities that arose in Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes would also arise in objects that lacked those same symmetries. His answer came in his 1965 singularity theorem – and in other theorems that followed (some carried out with Stephen Hawking) – which earned Penrose a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. To explore this question, he developed new mathematical tools from geometry and the related subject of topology (the study and classification of the general, as opposed to exact, shape of objects). In 1965, Penrose proved that the event horizon of a Schwarzschild and Kerr black hole is something called a closed trapped surface – a surface whose curvature is so intense that even outward-pointing light beams get wrapped around and forced inward. Once a closed trapped surface is formed, he demonstrated, the collapse to a singularity is inevitable, regardless of symmetry considerations.

When Penrose gave a talk at Princeton about his theorem shortly after his January 1965 paper came out, the physicist Robert Dicke told him he’d ‘shown [that] general relativity is wrong’. There was no problem with the theory, Penrose countered, ‘[b]ut you do have to have singularities’ – which was a point that many physicists, including Einstein, had been hesitant to accept.

A complementary piece of this puzzle came in a 1979 theorem (published in 1983) by the mathematicians Richard Schoen and Shing-Tung Yau. Although Penrose had proved that a closed trapped surface will evolve (or devolve) to an object with a central singularity, he did not say how a closed trapped surface could be created in the first place. Schoen and Yau spelled out the precise conditions: when the matter density of a given region is twice that of a neutron star, a trapped surface will form, and that object will collapse directly to a black hole.

Their work, now referred to as the black hole existence proof, came out at a time when the existence of black holes was still open to debate. But by then, the evidence was starting to build. In the 1970s, astronomers proposed that a bright X-ray source called Cygnus X-1 was a stellar-sized black hole, and that the galaxy M87 harboured a supermassive black hole with the mass of billions of suns. And by the 1990s, a case was starting to be made that a supermassive black hole resided at the centre of practically every large galaxy.

Mathematicians still have a big role to play in unravelling the elusive properties of black holes

The case for the physical reality of black holes was dramatically strengthened on 14 September 2015, when detectors from the LIGO Observatory in Louisiana and Washington state intercepted gravitational waves for the first time in history – the product, scientists asserted, of the violent collision of two black holes, each with the mass of about 30 suns, which took place about 1.3 billion light-years from Earth (and hence about 1.3 billion years ago). Gravitational waves from roughly 100 other collisions and mergers – involving black holes and their ultra-dense kin, neutron stars – have since been detected.

In 2019, a global network of radio telescopes that collectively comprise the Event Horizon Telescope captured an image of the outer edge of an enormous black hole (with the mass of billions of suns) lying in the centre of the M87 galaxy. In 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope obtained an image of the ‘supermassive’ black hole in the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, with the mass of 4 million suns.

In view of this and other compelling evidence, the existence of black holes is no longer a matter of dispute among astrophysicists. But that should not be taken to mean that our understanding of these objects is complete. Nothing could be further from the truth. And mathematicians still have a big role to play in unravelling the elusive properties of black holes.

To cite a recent example, in 2022, the mathematicians Elena Giorgi, Sergiu Klainerman, and Jérémie Szeftel proved that slowly rotating Kerr black holes are stable, meaning that if you perturb a Kerr black hole in a gentle way, by giving it a little ‘bump’, it will settle down and behave in just the way the Kerr solution prescribed. In 2023, Marcus Khuri and Jordan Rainone proved that an infinite family of black holes, configured in a variety of elaborate shapes, are mathematically possible in higher-dimensional spaces that extend beyond the three familiar dimensions. While such exotic entities are by no means certain to exist, there is nothing in mathematics that rules them out.

Meanwhile, there are several open problems concerning black holes that have kept mathematicians busy for more than half a century. One is the cosmic censorship conjecture, first posed by Penrose in 1969, which holds (in one of its various forms) that singularities must be concealed behind an event horizon. Or, to put it more starkly, there are no ‘naked’ singularities. The second problem relates to the no-hair theorem (or actually conjecture), which posits that black holes can be fully characterised by their mass, spin and charge. Restating that in slightly different terms, there is no way to distinguish between two black holes that have the same mass, spin and charge. Special cases have been solved for both of these enduring problems, but there are no complete solutions for either of them.

Scientists still have deeply profound questions about black holes. And though technology has finally enabled us to glimpse the tumultuous exteriors of these objects, mathematics is often all we have to illuminate those places that our instruments cannot penetrate – including the shadowy realm, deep inside a black hole, that is otherwise obscured by an event horizon.

This essay was adapted from The Gravity of Math: How Geometry Rules the Universe (Basic Books, 2024) by Steve Nadis and Shing-Tung Yau.

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The tentacles of language are always on the move

An evolutionary biologist explains how human language can shift as slowly or rapidly as organisms adapting to life on Earth

https://psyche.co/ideas/the-tentacles-of-language-are-always-on-the-move

 

As an evolutionary biologist, I see the history of species in my own body. In my spinal cord, I see half a billion years of evolution, starting with the flexible cord of a tiny proto-fish in the ancient Cambrian period; I see the steps backwards from my brain to the mere subtle thickening of the nerve cord at the front end of that same proto-fish.

In contrast with evolutionary biology, I have little formal training in linguistics beyond two classes in artificial intelligence approaches to language at the University of Vienna. The classes predated ChatGPT by decades and were held in a building that once housed a late-medieval monastery, which seems fitting in retrospect; the computer science of two decades ago feels akin to the Middle Ages.

Evolution is more like human language than computer science. It produces major changes in the lineages of animals and plants over hundreds of millions of years, and then occasionally goes into sprint mode, such as in the great African Rift lakes, where a rainbow of new species has evolved in only hundreds of thousands of years. The grand developments of human languages, likewise, can seem impossibly slow – and then suddenly race ahead. The early Indo-European and major language groups of modern Europe and South Asia saw slow, grand developments, yet they too can shift in a lifetime or less. I’m exhibit number one. My exceedingly international biography, with time spent living in Austria, the UK, Germany, the US, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, helped me see such shifts, and gives me more food for linguistic thought than a more stationary human language-user would ever see.

I’ll start with German, the official language of Austria, where I grew up. German in Austria is by no means a ‘pure’ Germanic language, but rather a mix of German, south-Slavic vocabulary and, especially in the Viennese dialect, Yiddish, the German dialect of the Jewish diaspora that emerged in the later Middle Ages.

Knowing a language provides the speaker with insights a native speaker might miss because their language production will be too automatic

Yiddish is an especially interesting input into the body of Viennese German: the language developed as a Germanic tongue more than 1,000 years ago as displacements of the Jewish people split it into eastern and western branches. The eastern branch of the Yiddish language developed in relative isolation from the rest of the Germanic languages. Then, in the 19th century, the pogroms in eastern Europe led many speakers of eastern Yiddish back to central Europe, where their vocabulary entered Viennese German. At a heavy metal concert, when my teenage self remarked at the kieberer (a Yiddish word loaned into Viennese for ‘police’, versus the ‘polizei’ of straight-up German), I was invoking a millennium of European language mixing.

I grew up speaking German, but it wasn’t quite my ‘mother tongue’. My mother is a (now retired) high-school English teacher, and her love always lay more with Shakespeare’s language than with Schiller’s. I enjoyed reading in English from a young age, and we spent a semester in England when I was seven years old. While I have an accent in my pronunciation of spoken English, it never felt like a foreign language to me. This turned out to be a good starting point for writing scientific manuscripts and popular science articles. Knowing a language in depth (while not being exposed to it in the critical period of language acquisition at the beginning of life) provides the speaker and writer with insights an actual native speaker might miss because their language production will be too automatic. While I am certainly not putting myself near the pantheon of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov – both literary greats in a language of which they were not native speakers – I am almost sure they profited from the distance I mention above.

A few years ago, I decided to move to the Philippines. There are a number of pleasant aspects to life in this archipelago of 7,000-plus tropical islands and, for the fish biologist, there is no better place to stick your head underwater. Fish biodiversity is stunningly high around the coral reefs of the Philippines and, after a decade of diving the islands’ waters, I still find fish species new to me.

I spent a lot of time underwater, but not all. Love struck, and with it came the unique chance to learn one of the many Filipino languages from a native speaker up close.

My spouse grew up with Bisayan, the main language spoken in the central and southern Philippines. At its core, Bisayan is an Austronesian language, related to Indonesian and the languages of the Pacific Islands. However, centuries of Spanish colonial rule added a rich Romance language vocabulary – in unusual ways. Nouns were imported without adapting the Spanish grammar for creating plurals or adding articles. The Bisayan word for table is lamesa – the Spanish mesa, fused to la, the Spanish feminine definite article. Hence, ‘The table is high’ in Bisayan is ‘Taas ang lamesa’ – a sentence with the Austronesian article ang followed by the Romance article la, which was swallowed by the Spanish noun when it became a Bisayan word.

The ATM machines often give the language options as ‘English’ and ‘Taglish’

Conversely, there is still a Spanish creole language in the Philippines, Chavacano, which is spoken in the south of the island of Mindanao. This is a language akin to 19th-century Spanish, with a grammar different from modern Castilian Spanish, but nevertheless a Romance language. Separating Chavacano and Bisayan is a lengthy ferry ride and a day of travel over mountains and through areas not particularly safe for the outsider due to the decades-long religious-political strife for Muslim independence. The broken-up geography and politics of the Philippines has certainly contributed to the country’s great diversity in languages.

Since the Philippines were a US territory from 1898 to 1946, the English language gained a strong foothold in the country, extending US culture and soft power. The Filipinos, pragmatic people in action and word, liberally mix English into Tagalog (the national language of the Philippines) and Bisayan. The ATM machines often give the language options as ‘English’ and ‘Taglish’, the crossover idiom of English and Tagalog, instead of offering to show the menu in pure Tagalog.

English is the second official language of the Philippines, alongside Tagalog. As the language of the economically and politically powerful Americans, it has gained an especially strong following among the upper-middle and upper classes of the country. Well-off friends of mine speak to their children exclusively in English. If you listen to an interview with a celebrity actress in the capital Manila, you will hear agitated chatter in Tagalog, interspersed with phrases and half-sentences in English. I assume it’s the details of the history of a region that make communities of speakers either open to foreign influences, or dogmatic and insular when it comes to modifying their native language, such as the French-speaking Canadians, who strive to keep English out, even with legal means.

Just as Austrian German is distinct from German, Philippine English is a separate dialect, on a par with Australian, South African or American English. I would argue that due to its constant contact with a wide variety of Austronesian languages (there are hundreds more in addition to Tagalog and Bisayan), it’s more derived than these variants of English. In several cases, somewhat unusual uses of verbs were turned into nouns, creating newly coined words, proper neologisms. For example, while a ‘holdup’ is, comprehensible to any native speaker of English, a robbery, in Philippine English, a ‘holdupper’ became a term for a robber.

My favourite term in Philippine English is ‘double dead’. If your cow dies from pneumonia (dead once) and you don’t want to waste the meat, you just slaughter it anyway (dead twice), and cut it into steaks. The practice happens among the poor country folk who can’t afford to waste the effort they put into raising such a big animal. The term is honest and descriptive. It couldn’t be any clearer that the animal’s life is over; it’s dead not only once but twice. This is in stark contrast to many more recently coined terms in standard or American English: an ‘unsheltered person’ does nothing to paint a picture of a man with psychiatric problems, poor hygiene and no cash left in his pockets who was abandoned by his family and society. The term obfuscates, while ‘double dead’ vividly describes.

If one of the three languages lacks a trick available in another, he adds it

During the first three years of my son’s life, Austrian German from the southward movement of ancient Germanic tribes and borrowed Yiddish from the East converged with Bisayan, including the adoption of American and Spanish vocabulary in his mind.

At age three, he is comfortable in German, and somewhat less in Bisayan and English. If one of the three languages lacks a trick available in another, he adds it. He assigns new grammatical constructs to languages that don’t have them. Bisayan doesn’t have grammatical genders like German; there is only one gender-neutral article. This doesn’t deter our son: he made the Bisayan worm (das ulod) neutral, in an interesting contrast with the German worm (der Wurm, masculine). Once you start learning to speak German, you feel the urgent need to add gendered articles to words!

And Bisayan also received some Anglo-Saxon tenses from him: hilak, the Bisayan word for ‘crying’, became hilak-ing. There is no such verb form in Bisayan, to my knowledge. But just like with the German gendered articles, anyone who had got the taste for using the English ‘ing’ form in communicating will want to use it in any language they speak.

The scholarly literature on bilingualism is home to an agitated discussion of the benefits or harms of bringing up a child with two or more languages. Ideological divisions run deep in this literature. In my experience, children are extremely keen to express themselves, by whatever means possible, and they will handle more than one language quite naturally. To come back to our son, he knows, at age three, which set of grandparents to speak to in which language. The development of languages, with their mixing and reshuffling over the course of centuries, almost certainly builds on the dynamics of multilingual families.

 

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Tequila isn’t just for summer – try these cocktails for Halloween

Mix tequila with black currant or pear to capture the flavors of the season

https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/tequila-cocktails-halloween/

Everyone is getting into the Halloween mood, and we’ve already seen some fun and attractive Halloween cocktails that can make your spooky party go with a bang. But one cocktail ingredient you might overlook for this season is tequila. Whilst it is most often associated with refreshing summer drinks with lots of citrus, this spirit can also find a place in your autumnal cocktails if you mix it with ingredients like black currant or pear, both of which work with the fruity flavors of tequila but fit with the fall feeling.

These cocktails from Tres Agaves Organic Tequila will give you some inspiration, and there’s also a recipe for a beloved Bloody Mary that’s perfect for batching ahead of time, making it an easy drink to please a crown.

Very Superstitious

Ingredients:

• 2 oz Tres Agaves Organic 100% de Agave Blanco Tequila
• 1 oz black currant juice
• 0.5 oz Campari
• 0.5 oz spicy ginger syrup
• 0.5 oz lime juice
• Egg white

Method:

Related

• Whiskey cocktails to capture the fall vibes
• High-end Halloween cocktails from renowned bar Death & Co
• Pumpkin season is here, so try this Pumpkin Spice Espresso Martini recipe

Shake all ingredients hard, without ice. Add ice and shake until chilled. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass decorated with a chicken feather and garnish with a maraschino cherry.

The Grave Digger

Tres Agaves

Ingredients:

• 1.5oz Tres Agaves Organic 100% de Agave Reposado Tequila
• 0.5oz Mezcal
• 0.75oz Fino Sherry
• 0.5oz Pear Liqueur

Method:

Stir ingredients in mixing glass and strain over a large ice cube. Garnish.

Organic Bloody Maria

Tres Agaves

Ingredients:

• 4 oz Tres Agaves Organic Bloody Mary Mix
• 2 oz Tres Agaves Organic 100% de Agave Blanco Tequila
• Lemon Wedge (Garnish)
• Try it spicy by adding 1 Jalapeño or Serrano Pepper, or 2 Dashes Mexican Hot Sauce

Method:

Build with ice. Add a squeeze of fresh lemon & your favorite garnish. Taste for balance and serve.
Spicy style: Slice pepper lengthwise. Remove seeds. Muddle in Shaker. Add ice, Bloody Mary Mix, Tequila and hot sauce.

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10 fantastic single malt Scotch whiskies to warm you this fall

These Scotch whisky brands have some wonderful single malts

https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/best-single-malt-scotch-whisky/

When the calendar turns to autumn, if your first thought is to crack open a bottle of bourbon or rye, you’re missing out on one of the best fall whisk(e)y options. Single malt Scotch whisky is a great choice for autumnal drinking. There’s something for everyone, from peat-smoked expressions to soft, honey, and heather-centered bottles.

For those new to this type of whisky (only the U.S. and Ireland use the “e” in whiskey), single malt Scotch whisky (like bourbon) has a few rules and regulations. First, it must be made in Scotland (this seems fairly straightforward). It also must be distilled at a single distillery using pot still distillation. It must also be made from barley (hence single malt), matured in oak barrels for at least three years. There are a few more rules, but those are the most important for all Scotch whisky brands.

The best single malt Scotch whiskies to warm you up this fall

 

The main reason single malt Scotch whisky is a great choice for fall drinking is the fact that there are so many nuanced, complex bottles available. Whether you choose an expression from the Highlands, Lowlands, Speyside, Campbeltown, or Islay, there’s a bottle available to fit every palate. The key is finding them.

Related

• Highland Park Whisky launched a new product design inspired by its archipelago home
• Johnnie Walker is releasing the perfect blended whisky for Après Ski
• Loch Lomond is launching a new series of single malt whiskies with a 16-year-old

Fear not; we won’t make you spend an afternoon slowly meandering around your local liquor store with a confused look on your face in hopes that someone will help you. We did the work for you. Below, you’ll find the best single malt Scotch whiskies to warm you up this fall. We found a mix of great whiskies to keep you feeling cozy inside and out, through autumn and well into the holiday season.

 

Laphroaig 10

If you want to take a deep dive into everything that the sheep-filled island of Islay has to offer, you’ll grab a bottle of Laphroaig 10. The famed distillery’s flagship bottle gets its flavor from peat-smoked barley. Matured for at least 10 years in oak casks, it’s known for its bold kick of peaty smoke, as well as ocean brine, vanilla, caramel, and oak. It’s a complex, smoky sipper you’ll go back to again and again.

 

 

Ardbeg An Oa

Another classic Islay distillery, Ardbeg is well known for its smoky, peaty, sweet, balanced expressions. One of its best, most warming bottles is Ardbeg an Oa. Named for the Mull of Oa along the Kildaton Coast, this non-chill filtered single malt whisky is a vatted whisky made up of expressions aged in Pedro Ximenez, ex-bourbon, and virgin charred oak barrels. The result is a complex sipper with notes of dark chocolate, toffee, dried cherries, baking spices, and robust campfire smoke.

 

 

Aberlour A’Bunadh

When it comes to sherry matured or finished single malt Scotch whiskies, there are few as popular and well made as Aberlour A’Bunadh. The name translates to ‘the original’ from Gaelic. This sherry-matured whisky is bottled as a potent cask strength (although the alcohol content varies by batch). It’s known for its flavors of dried cherries, raisins, ginger, candied orange peels, dark chocolate, vanilla, and oaky wood.

 

 

Talisker Storm

With a name like Talisker Storm, you must have a pretty good idea that you’re in for a whisky swirling with flavors when you crack open one of these bottles. First released in 2013, this no-age-statement single malt Scotch whisky is known for its nose of caramel apples, oak, campfire smoke, and vanilla and a palate of oak, vanilla, peppery spice, dried fruits, and robust smoke. It’s a nice mix of sweetness, spice, and smoke.

 

 

Highland Park 18

Also known as Highland Park 18 Viking Pride, this popular expression is aged for at least eighteen years in a combination of first-fill sherry season European and American oak barrels. The result is a memorable whisky that begins with a nose of dried cherries, vanilla, oaky wood, and campfire smoke. Drinking it reveals a symphony of dark chocolate, sweet honey, candied orange peels, salted caramel, and gentle, rich smoke.

 

 

Aberfeldy 12

If you’re a fan of Dewar’s blended whiskies, you’ve enjoyed your fair share of Aberfeldy. This is because it’s the base for some of that brand’s most popular expressions. But it’s so great, it belongs on its own. Especially Aberfeldy 12. Known for its nose of sherry, raisins, honey, and vanilla. Drinking it brings forth notes of chocolate fudge, toasted vanilla beans, dried fruits, candied orange peels, oak, and light smoke at the very end.

 

 

Lagavulin 16

While some distilleries opt for a ten-year-old or a twelve-year-old as its flagship expression, Lagavulin decided a sixteen-year expression was a better choice. Matured for a minimum of sixteen years in oak casks, this award-winning sipper is known for its nose of iodine, peat smoke, oak, and vanilla and a palate of salted caramel, oak, vanilla, dried fruits, and bold peat smoke. There’s a reason it’s one of the most popular Islay single malts.

 

 

The GlenDronach 12

When it comes to sherried single malt Scotch whiskies, it’s tough to beat the appeal of GlenDronach 12. Also known as “The Original,” it’s aged for at least twelve years in a mixture of Spanish Pedro Ximenez and oloroso sherry casks. This creates a sweet, rich, highly complex sipping whisky. It all begins with a nose of ginger candy, vanilla, and orchard fruits before melding into a palate of oak, sweet sherry, dried cherries, vanilla, and cream.

 

 

Glenmorangie Nectar D’Or

If you want to go basic, you can grab a bottle of Glenmorangie The Original. This 10-year-old expression might be the best gateway bottle of Scotch available today. If you’re trying to up your fall sipping game, you’ll opt for Glenmorangie Nectar D’Or. This indulgent, dessert-like single malt whisky loaded with flavors of toffee, almond cookies, oak, and spices gets its flavor from being matured in a combination of ex-bourbon casks and Sauternes wine barrels.

 

Craigellachie 13

Often referred to as the “Bad boy of Speyside,” Craigellachie spent a long time as mostly a nameless whisky used in Dewar’s blend. In the last decade, it’s gained in popularity. Its 13-year-old expression is a great choice for a cool fall night. First matured in ex-bourbon and ex-sherry barrels before having half the batch finished in first-fill sherry casks, and the other half in first-fill bourbon barrels, it’s known for its bold, rich flavor profile featuring notes of caramel, toasted marshmallows, dried cherries, oak, and spices.

Bottom line

 

If you’ve never tried single malt Scotch whisky before, now is the time to get on the proverbial, whisky-soaked bandwagon. Single malt Scotch whisky is more than just a drink for fancy, bearded, tweed jacket-wearing gentlemen. It’s a warming, complex drink for everyone. Especially during the chilly autumn months.

Edited October 18 by Vesper

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Loch Lomond is launching a new series of single malt whiskies with a 16-year-old

https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/loch-lomond-wayypoint/

Loch Lomond is a rising name in the world of Scotch whisky. This is made more evident with the news of its new collection of whiskies that were crafted to pay tribute to the distillery’s home along the body of water called Loch Lomond and its history in the Trossachs (an area of wooded glens near the loch).

The Waypoint Series was created for a specific ‘Waypoint’ in the National Park. The first age-statement single malt whisky is a 16-year-old expression.

Loch Lomond Waypoint 16-Year-Old

 

The first expression, made to pay tribute to the Falls of Falloch, was matured for sixteen years in ex-bourbon barrels before being finished for twelve months in ex-cognac barrels. The result is a complex, memorable whisky that begins with a nose of candied orange peels, honey, and oak. The palate is a mix of caramel apples, honey, oak, and toffee. The finish is warming, sweet, and filled with citrus flavors.

Related

• Indian whisky brand Royal Tiger is releasing two new single malt whiskies
• Monkey 47 is releasing a new gin called Distiller’s Cut Edition 14
• Benromach is releasing an un-peated single malt Scotch with the perfect name

“There are so many layers to this whisky. There is depth in every drop, with each one bringing a different dimension to the collective character,” Michael Henry, Master Distiller at Loch Lomond Whiskies, said in a press release.

Where can I buy it?

 

This 46.2% ABV non-chill-filtered 16-year-old expression isn’t available everywhere. It’s available exclusively through The Whisky Shop on Loch Lomond’s website for a suggested retail price of $82 before being rolled out to select retailers worldwide. If this looks like a whisky you’d like to add to your collection, look out for its eventual US release.

Buy Now

Edited October 18 by Vesper

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Greek man convicted of causing disturbance by entering neighbors’ properties to smell their shoes

https://apnews.com/article/greece-court-smelling-shoes-conviction-thessaloniki-ec071292e0c413f7adc4b848642e1f5c

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — A judge in northern Greece on Thursday imposed a suspended one-month prison sentence on a man convicted of disturbing his neighbors by repeatedly sneaking into their properties to smell their shoes.

The 28-year-old Greek man told the Thessaloniki court that he was unable to explain his behavior, which, he said, had caused him great embarrassment.

He stressed that he had no intention of breaking the law or harming anybody, and neighbors testified that he never displayed any sign of aggression during his nocturnal visits.

The man was arrested before dawn on Oct. 8 in the small town of Sindos, about 15 kilometers (9 miles) west of Thessaloniki. Police had been called after a neighbor found the defendant in his front yard sniffing his family’s shoes, which had been left outdoors to air.

The court heard that there had been at least three similar incidents in the past six months, despite neighbors having asked the defendant’s family to get him to stop.

The man was ordered to attend therapy sessions.

[Vesper 28,796]

Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back

Our stories help us make sense of a chaotic world, but they can be harmful and restrictive. There’s a liberating alternative

https://psyche.co/ideas/your-life-is-not-a-story-why-narrative-thinking-holds-you-back

Narratives are everywhere, and the need to construct and share them is almost inescapable. ‘A man is always a teller of tales,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel Nausea (1938), ‘he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.’

We rely on narratives because they help us understand the world. They make life more meaningful. According to Sartre, to turn the most banal series of events into an adventure, you simply ‘begin to recount it’. However, telling a story is not just a powerful creative act. Some philosophers think that narratives are fundamental to our experiences. Alasdair MacIntyre believes we can understand our actions and those of others only as part of a narrative life. And Peter Goldie argues that our very lives ‘have narrative structure’ – it is only by grappling with this structure that we can understand our emotions and those of others. This suggests that narratives play central, possibly fundamental, roles in our lives. But as Sartre warns in Nausea: ‘everything changes when you tell about life.’

In some cases, narratives can hold us back by limiting our thinking. In other cases, they may diminish our ability to live freely. They also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical, and difficult to change, reducing the real complexity of life. They can even become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to live our lives as if we were ‘telling a story’. The question is: what other options do we have?

Narratives work by organising our experiences by connecting them into sequences, which give our lives meaning. The ability to form these sequences is something we learn very young. As the educator Carol Fox found during research in the 1990s, stories begin shaping us from childhood. Fox found that reading to children at home gives them tacit knowledge of linguistic and narrative structures, which they incorporate into their own spoken stories. Her research showed that children as young as three used stories to experiment with language as they made sense of the world. The older we get, the more we keep playing – and the more we keep relying on narratives.

Random events can be reframed as being part of some grand plan

As adults, we adopt different roles, including friend, lover, employee, parent, carer and more. The way we understand these roles is often framed in terms of expected behaviour. For example, we have a narrative grasp of what a ‘friend’ is, and we judge ourselves and others by how well they fit that narrative – sometimes favourably, sometimes less so.

So, why is this a problem? One issue is complexity. Seeing yourself as the main character in a story can overly simplify the fullness of life. Think of the way in which people talk about their ‘journey’ through life. Through this narrative, certain events become more significant while others are overlooked, and random events can be reframed as being part of some grand plan. Yet viewing our lives in such a narrow way hinders our ability to understand the complex behaviour of others and ourselves. For example, a child that accepts the narrative of being ‘naughty’ may incorrectly frame their behaviour as bad, rather than as an expression of their unmet needs. Stories can change us by locking us into ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.

In the 1970s, a recognition of this limitation gave rise to narrative therapy. Rather than seeing people as illogical or overly emotional, this new form of psychotherapy focused on the role of narratives in a person’s life. As the therapist Martin Payne explains in his book Narrative Therapy (2000), the approach allows ‘richer, combined narratives to emerge from disparate descriptions of experience’. A new narrative can be incredibly powerful for someone who is unaware of how their established stories are obscuring other ways of understanding their life.

The stories that might need changing are not only grand, but also minor, such as the ‘scripts’ that we rely on throughout our lives. These scripts can become habitual patterns of thinking, influencing our interpretations of family members, friends or colleagues. As narrative therapy shows, we can also get these scripts wrong, and may need help altering them.

Though narrative therapy can be effective, it is unable to help people understand what creates and shapes their narratives. It merely helps them to choose between different narratives or construct new stories about themselves and the world. Swapping one ‘script’ for another doesn’t help someone see the full range of possibilities that lie in front of them, including what it might mean to reject a narrative altogether.

The narrative he follows gives him a limited understanding of himself

The possibility of rejecting a narrative can be found in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) where he describes a café waiter. According to Sartre, the waiter has adopted a particular narrative that shapes his identity and governs how he ought to behave. Being wedded to a narrative view of the self can lead to living in what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’ – that is, living without being aware of one’s responsibility or in control of one’s own destiny:

All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.

In other words, he is playing the role of a waiter in a similar manner to an actor on stage who follows a script. As a result of embodying the waiter-narrative, he lives inauthentically because he can only act in a way that fits with the role. The narrative he follows gives him a limited understanding of himself, determining his actions and preventing him from taking ownership of his life. But what would happen if the waiter rejected that narrative identity? For Sartre, this would be a step towards true selfhood, or an authentic existence – what he called ‘being’ – rather than merely playing a role.

So, what does it mean to reject a narrative? Living in a non-narrative way means rejecting a particular identity, and instead seeing life and meaning as a set of open choices. For the waiter, rejecting his narrative identity would mean acting in a way that reflects his choices and sense of self, not just the story he tells about himself.

To understand what is involved in rejecting a narrative, it is important to remember that narratives do not exist outside of people’s minds. The stories we tell ourselves are not out there in the world. They are tools that mediate our relationships with the world. Though they relate to facts, and real events, they are not factual. In fact, they are neither true nor false. Instead, stories help us make sense of things. So, if we rejected the power of narratives to sequence events in our lives, how else would we organise our thoughts about the world?

Think of the ways that perspectives organise experiences differently. By ‘perspective’ I mean something more complex than ‘point of view’. I’m referring to the way we engage with the world from a particular position or orientation that draws our attention to aspects of experience, like how our visual ‘perspective’ allows bright colours to show up more easily than dull ones. Perspectives are shaped by our place in the world, our beliefs, values and what we think matters. As the philosopher Elisabeth Camp explains, a perspective ‘helps us to do things with the thoughts we have: to make quick judgments based on what’s most important, to grasp intuitive connections, and to respond emotionally, among other things.’ Through perspective some features of our experiences ‘stick out in our minds while others fade into the background.’

Poetry captures a way of seeing and feeling, not just a sequence of events

Perspectives, then, determine the narratives we adopt. In other words, our core beliefs and values shape the way we see things and what we take to be important in our experiences. It is our perspectives that generate our narratives. Perspective also explains why our narratives can differ so radically from those of other people, even when we experience the same events. But once we understand these perspectives, we can see how flexible our narratives can truly become. Perspectives, it turns out, don’t have a linear, ordered structure. We can’t think of them in terms of sequences of events, like stories. In some ways, perspectives are better represented by the non-linearity of poetry.

Poems, particularly lyric poems, are inherently perspectival; they unify words, images, thoughts and feelings to express value. Poetry captures a way of seeing and feeling, not just a sequence of events.

Think of ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird ’ (1917) by the American poet Wallace Stevens. Each stanza focuses on a different way of looking at a blackbird and its relationship to the self:

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

In Stevens’s poem, he brings experiences together without explaining how they are related – they are connected only by his perspective. Likewise, understanding ourselves in a non-linear way means seeing how we relate to a complex and chaotic world in the present moment. Within that moment, we find significance without needing an ordered pattern.

And so, instead of just changing our narratives, we should learn to understand the perspectives that shape them. When we focus on our own stories, we live life as we already know it, but by loosening the grip that stories hold over our lives – by focusing on the perspectives of ourselves and others – we can begin opening ourselves up to other possibilities. We can adopt new orientations, find significance in new places, and even move toward the exciting unpredictability of shared perspectives.

As Sartre warned, everything changes when you tell a story. Narratives limit our potential. Though we are complex beings, living in a chaotic universe, our stories create the illusion that our lives are ordered, logical and complete.

We might never fully escape the narratives that surround us, but we can learn to change the perspectives behind them. And so, we are never bound by stories, only by our ability to understand how our beliefs and values shape the way we perceive and engage with the world. We don’t need better narratives; we need to expand and refine our perspectives.

 

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Great value wines you might not have heard of

Under-the-radar grapes from traditional regions give you a flavour of a grand vin for a lot less money, says our wine critic

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/food-drink/article/best-budget-wines-good-value-supermarket-9bhjxs080

With heavy duty increases already heading our way in February next year, and rumours of yet another duty hike in this month’s budget, smart cost-conscious drinkers need to track down unsung, undervalued wines right now. A good place to start is with the lesser grapes and wines from traditional regions that give you some of the flavour of a grand vin for a lot less money.

Climate change has brought with it warmer, riper harvests, so grapes such as Burgundy’s lean, mouth-puckeringly acidic bourgogne aligoté, once only made drinkable by being sweetened with cassis in a kir, now makes a happy solo swig. Sylvain Pataille produces wonderful old vine biodynamic bourgogne aligoté grown on Marsannay’s limestone soil (see best buys) that really does give you some of the mineral richness of meursault. If it’s reds you want, cooler sites in the Rhône are worth plundering. A decade ago higher, cooler vineyards surrounding Mont Ventoux wouldn’t ripen, but that’s not been an issue in the extraordinary run of recent sunny, tip-top Rhône vintages. Check out the concrete tank-aged, soft, plump, velvety 2022 Ventoux from Rémy Ferbras (Waitrose, £9.99).

Further south, clairette is an under-the-radar, dwindling but still important white Rhône and Languedoc grape that in the right squeaky-clean, low-yielding, oxidation-preventing hands turns into a star. Best known for its role in sparkling Clairette de Die, besides popping up in about a third of white Châteauneuf du Pape blends, clairette is rarely found solo. All the more reason to scoop up Gérard Bertrand’s delicious night-harvested, bold orchard-fruited 2023 Clairette du Languedoc Adissan with its fine creamy finish (Majestic, £14.99).

• Budget bottles! Great wines under £6

Further afield, Austria’s zweigelt grape is making waves for its aromatic, dark, tangy, full-bodied reds. Even Aldi sells a zweigelt blend, the vibrant, ripe, spicy, sweet black and red cherry-stashed 2023 Specially Selected Australian Zweigelt-Shiraz, £9.99, from southeastern Australia. We can also expect to see lots more of the similarly dark-hearted and deeply coloured saperavi grape from Georgia on our shop shelves (see the Bedoba best buy). The Wine Society, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, is strong on the wilder shores of wine. Its soft, floral, lemony 2022 Pinot Blanc from the Czech Republic’s Thaya winery is worth a punt (thewinesociety.com, £11.95). It is just 11.5 per cent alcohol and has an appealing saline, fish pie-friendly finish.

 

From left: Lentsch Zweigelt; Grecanico Dorato Mandrarossa; Generation Series Bourgogne Aligoté; Bedoba Saperavi

Under-the-radar wines

2021 Lentsch Zweigelt, Austria
13 per cent, Waitrose, £8.99 down from £9.99
Little known but brilliant beetroot and cherry-licked Austrian bursting with zweigelt’s crunchy, dark-hearted fruit.

2023 Grecanico Dorato Mandrarossa, Sicily
12.5 per cent, nywines.co.uk, £13.95
Transport the garganega grape south and it turns into a lively, citrussy stone fruit gem with a fine honeysuckle finish.

2022 Generation Series Bourgogne Aligoté, France
13.5 per cent, thewinesociety.com, £18
Sylvain Pataille’s meursault taste-alike is crammed with complex, golden, nutty, tangy, minerally oomph.

2021 Bedoba Saperavi, Georgia
13.5 per cent, cambridgewine.com, £19
Inky, exotically spiced Georgian, made from the indigenous saperavi grape — it’s a silky, sweet black-chocolate charmer.

From left: Vista Castelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo; Pierre Jaurant Cahors Malbec; Villa Maria Private Bin Riesling; Domaine de Pellehaut Chardonnay

Supermarket star buys

2022 Vista Castelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, Italy
12.5 per cent, Tesco, £5.50
The best vintage for almost a decade from the Citra co-op of this juicy, sweetly fruited red berry gem.

2022 Pierre Jaurant Cahors Malbec, France
13 per cent, Aldi, £7.19
Malbec’s first home was Cahors and this elegant, leafy, herby, big food winter warmer gets my thumbs-up.

2023 Villa Maria Private Bin Riesling, New Zealand
11.5 per cent, Waitrose, £8.99 down from £10.99
Mouthwatering Marlborough riesling with oodles of racy, spritzy, mandarine zip and tangy acidity.

2023 Domaine de Pellehaut Chardonnay, France
12 per cent, Booths, £10.50
Straw-gold, lively, yeasty, new mown hay-scented Gascon white from a tried and trusted producer.

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The fermented crescent

Ancient Mesopotamians had a profound love of beer: a beverage they found celebratory, intoxicating and strangely erotic

https://aeon.co/essays/mesopotamians-found-beer-celebratory-intoxicating-and-erotic

Depiction of a banquet in shell and lapis lazuli, 2550-2450 BCE, your, Iraq. Courtesy the Penn Museum

Hamoukar, Syria. 20 May 2010. We are midway through what will be the last excavation season at the site for some time. The following spring will see the outbreak of a long and brutal civil war. Today, though, the archaeologist Salam Al Kuntar, balanced on tiptoe at the bottom of a tomb, has just uncovered a little green stone. It is a cylinder seal, an ancient administrative device. We roll the tiny seal in clay – just as its former owner once would have – to reveal an impression of the intricate scene carved into its surface. It may not be the finest seal ever seen, but the tableau is eye-catching: a stick-figure man and woman are having sex, the man standing behind the woman, who bends over to drink from a jug on the ground. And is that a straw emerging from the mouth of the jug?

This is not the only erotic drinking scene that has survived from ancient Mesopotamia. And many of the others quite clearly feature a straw. Indeed, the drinkers of ancient Mesopotamia often drank via straw – though not always, shall we say, in this particular position. Hundreds of cylinder seals feature banquet scenes, and many show drinkers seated around a shared vessel, sipping beer through long straws. Banquets were a key part of the social calendar in Mesopotamia, and beer was an essential element. But people also drank beer at home, on the job, in the tavern, in the temple, pretty much everywhere.

Ancient clay plaque depicting an erotic drinking scene, 2000-1500 BCE, Tello (Girsu), Iraq. Courtesy the Louvre, Paris

Perhaps you have encountered the notion that beer was ‘invented’ in Mesopotamia. That is a hypothesis at best. Our knowledge about the early days of beer in Mesopotamia – about the prehistory of beer in the region – is scant. And, as the global search for earlier and earlier traces of alcoholic beverages gains steam, there is at least one key takeaway: beer was invented (or discovered) many times in many different places. Moreover, many of the earliest beverages were hybrids, drawing their fermentable sugars from a mix of fruits, grains, honey and other sources.

As I recount in my new book In the Land of Ninkasi, Mesopotamia was the world’s first great beer culture: an ancient society that was thoroughly steeped in beer, where beer was not a novelty but an everyday necessity and a fundamental cultural touchstone. The famous ‘land between the rivers’ was also the land of Ninkasi, goddess of beer. When Ninkasi poured out the finished beer, ready to drink – a Sumerian song tells us – it was like ‘the onrush of the Tigris and the Euphrates’.

It is in the centuries just before 3000 BCE, the late Uruk period, that the beer scene in ancient Mesopotamia begins to come into focus. Unheard-of numbers of people were living together in the world’s first cities. Inequality was on the rise. Decision-making power had been handed over to the world’s first states, the first centralised governing regimes (or, if you buy one recent theory, a more democratic system of councils and popular assemblies). In the midst of all this, somebody (or more likely, somebodies, plural) also pioneered the world’s first writing system and, along with it, the first bureaucracies and red tape. And what were those trailblazing bureaucrats writing about? Beer! The late Uruk period has given us both the earliest physical traces of beer in Mesopotamia, preserved as organic residues within ceramic vessels, and the first written evidence for beer in world history.

 

A cylinder seal impression depicting beer-drinking through straws, 2600-2350 BCE, Khafajeh, Iraq. Courtesy ISAC Museum/University of Chicago

Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets, densely packed with cuneiform characters, testify to more than three millennia of history in Mesopotamia. And thousands of those tablets testify to more than three millennia of beer. They allow us to peer into the minds and mouths of our beer-drinking forebears – what kind of beverages they preferred, how these beverages were made, what they meant to people. Thanks to more than a century of archaeological excavation, we can also bring these documentary sources into conversation with other remains – architecture, ceramics, stone tools, cylinder seals, carbonised seeds – that allow us to look beyond what was put down in writing. We can, for example, take a virtual tour through the spaces where beer was brewed, reconstruct the brewer’s toolkit (and use replica vessels to brew some beer ourselves), or sneak a peek at exclusive elite banquets through the eyes of ancient artists.

Once the beer has done its work, the goddess’s ploy bears fruit

Given the time that separates us from them, it is a wonder that so much has survived. But there is one thing about studying people who lived thousands of years ago and spoke languages long-dead: one must get comfortable with uncertainty. I say that we face up to this issue head-on and try to achieve an honest assessment of what we know about beer in ancient Mesopotamia, how we know it and what we do not know for certain. To give you a sense of where things currently stand, I offer here a series of snapshots. Each begins with a brief vignette, a bit of historical fiction to set the scene.

First stop, the abzu, domain of the god Enki, deep down below the earth’s surface in the underground freshwaters. The aftermath of a drinking party. A beer-befuddled Enki – in most other situations, a wise trickster – has just regained his wits. Frantic, he turns to his minister Isimud: ‘Where am I? Where did she go? Where’s all my stuff?’ The panic rising, he begins to enumerate the missing items, all the so-called arts of civilisation, his most prized possessions. ‘Where are the noble sceptre, the staff and crook, the noble dress, shepherdship, kingship? Where are the craft of the carpenter, coppersmith, scribe, leatherworker, and builder? Where are wisdom, attentiveness, respect, awe, and reverent silence?’ The list goes on. In every case, the answer from Isimud remains the same: ‘You gave them to Inana.’

This (paraphrased) episode from a classic piece of Sumerian literature – the tale of Inana and Enki – establishes one point of connection between beers past and present. In ancient Mesopotamia, the beverage known as kaš in Sumerian and šikaru in Akkadian (pronounced ‘kash’ and ‘shi-ka-roo’) was not just liquid bread, a nutritious and filling foodstuff. It was a beverage that did things to people. In this case, the goddess Inana exploits the inebriating effects of beer. She dons her most beguiling outfit – topped off with a special crown – and gives the ensemble a once-over to make sure that it will have the desired effect. The gist of her appraisal: ‘My genitals are absolutely amazing!’ Satisfied, Inana heads off to visit Enki at home, where she plans to ‘speak coaxingly’ to him. He welcomes her, and they sit down together to drink. Once the beer has done its work, a competition ensues and Inana’s ploy bears fruit. A drunken Enki hands over many of his coveted powers, and Inana boards the Boat of Heaven to make a rapid getaway.

So drinking beer could lead to inebriation. That’s hardly an earth-shattering statement. But not all specialists agree about the alcohol content of Mesopotamian beer. Some think the beer would have been only mildly alcoholic. The logic here varies, but one could point to the fact that children were sometimes given beer, not just on the sly but direct from the hands of temple administrators. How do we know? Because they made sure to provide careful documentation. In one case, children like Andurre, Ebina, Ili-ešdar, Baran-kagal, Bilzum, Il-zima and Ergu-kaka each received 10 litres of beer per month. Can we assume that the beer in question was low in alcohol content? I’m sceptical. Sure, doling out beer (of any sort) to minors might be frowned upon today and might very well land one on the wrong side of the law. But world history offers up an abundance of counterexamples.

I’m even more sceptical about any suggestion that we can generalise further and assume that all beer in ancient Mesopotamia was low in alcohol content. Why, for example, would the drinkers who populate Mesopotamian literature – drinkers like Enkidu, soul mate of Gilgamesh, who guzzles seven goblets and begins to sing – experience effects consistent with a higher level of alcohol consumption, such as feelings of freedom, elation, lightness, energy, satisfaction, wellbeing, conviviality? And why, in the written record, would drinking be associated with impaired judgment, interpersonal friction and (perhaps, in one case) impotence? It’s clear that at least some of their beer was plenty potent. In the Mesopotamian worldview, beer was not just a generic foodstuff. It was a beverage that did things to those who drank it, that could impact them physically, mentally, emotionally. We cannot accurately assess the role of beer in ancient Mesopotamia without acknowledging its inebriating potential.

The Mesopotamian tavern was a commercial space where one could purchase beer, food and possibly sex

The year is 650 BCE. Ashurbanipal is king. We are in the city of Nineveh, capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire, at a small tavern near the river. We have managed to stake out a spot at a corner table, ideal for people-watching. We raise our mugs of beer (or could it be date wine?) for a taste but then freeze. All eyes have suddenly shifted to the front door, left open to catch any hint of a breeze. What are those two guys outside up to? One has just dipped his fingers into a small jug and then smeared something across the doorframe. They both enter and head straight for the stairway that leads to the roof. A few minutes later, we hear some muffled chanting and then clear and firm (in Akkadian, not English): ‘Ishtar, Nanay, Gazbaya help me in this matter!’ When the chanting picks up again, we turn back to our beers but cannot help a few more furtive glances back at the stairway. What is happening?

If we could have followed those two men en route to the tavern, we would probably be even more confused. They had taken a winding route through the city, one of them stopping periodically to collect dirt from the ground and place it in a pouch on his belt. Their last stop was the river, where they had collected water in a jug and mixed in the contents of the pouch and a few dribbles of oil. It is that mixture that ended up smeared onto the doorframe of the tavern. This whole strange trip across the city of Nineveh was part of an elaborate ritual procedure. The cuneiform tablet that spells it out stipulates the collection of 18 different kinds of dust: dust from a god’s house, from a city gate, from a sandstorm, from the door of a tailor, a maltster, an innkeeper, a gardener, a carpenter, and many more. And all that dust-gathering was just one among the many steps in this ritual – all for the sake of guaranteeing profit for the tavern.

A Sumerian beer cup, 2700-2600 BCE. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

This was a namburbi ritual, an effort to counteract the effects of a negative omen. The Mesopotamian world was full of signs, messages from the gods imprinted in the flight of birds, the bark of a dog, the folds of a sheep’s entrails. Ritual specialists could read these signs – for example, signs predicting financial ruin for a tavern – and recommend preemptive measures. In Mesopotamia, the tavern was a commercial space, a privately owned business where one could purchase beer and food (and possibly sex, if one desired). By the Neo-Assyrian period, one could also purchase date wine at many taverns. Confusingly, this newly popular beverage was also called šikaru or ‘beer’ in Akkadian. Taverns were often run by female tavern-keepers, most famously Shiduri, a wise tavern-keeper at the edge of the world in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Taverns were places of celebration, inebriation, fornication and sometimes criminal collaboration. The Code of Hammurabi demands that a tavern-keeper report and arrest any criminals gathered in her establishment. Taverns also had a special ritual potency. Certain remedies, for example, required the patient to visit a tavern and touch the brewing vessel or its wooden stand.

Kushim pulls the wooden door tight and heads off down the street, surprisingly busy for this hour of the day. A friend peeks out from a doorway and tries to stop him for a chat, but there is no time. Kushim rushes on with a quick wave, catching a glimpse of the slow-moving Euphrates River between buildings on the right. Up ahead, a white temple glitters in the early morning sun, high above the city of Uruk. Kushim turns his attention to the colourful structures that cluster atop another height to the right. He is headed in that direction, on his way to work. When he reaches the brewery, Kushim heads straight to a side room, off the main courtyard, and breaks the mud seal locking the door. Grabbing two small clay tablets from a shelf inside, he scans down the columns of figures and breathes a sigh of relief. No need to worry. Everything checks out. The supplies of malted barley delivered last week match up perfectly with the batches of beer that he sent out yesterday.

These tablets are some of the earliest written documents in world history, dating to about 3000 BCE. We may not know exactly where they were produced or who this ‘Kushim’ was. But we do know that someone was carefully recording deliveries of beer and the ingredients used to produce particular types of beer. Quite a few of the so-called archaic texts revolve around the production and distribution of beer. And beer remained a matter of official, administrative concern over the ensuing three millennia of Mesopotamian history.

The room is nearly silent, except for a gurgling: ‘dubul dabal, dubul dabal’ – the sound of beer brewing

Beer appears on thousands of cuneiform tablets. We learn, for example, about different types of beer. At one point: golden, dark, sweet dark, reddish brown, and strained beer. Not long after: ordinary, good, and very good – or possibly ordinary, strong, and very strong beer. Then a bit later, some beers of less certain translation: maybe sweet, red, date-sweetened, and bittersweet varieties. Often the two key brewing ingredients were malted barley, like many of our beers today, and the enigmatic bappir – possibly a dry, crumbly fermentation starter. Some beers also featured unmalted barley, emmer wheat, date syrup and/or aromatics. Exactly which aromatics is up for debate, but hops, so crucial today, were not in the mix.

Beer was brewed at home, in neighbourhood taverns, and in breweries managed by palace and temple authorities. In some cases, we know the names of the brewers – for example, homebrewers Tarām-Kūbi and Lamassī (both women), tavern-keepers Magurre and Ishunnatu (both women), and palace brewers Qišti-Marduk and Ḫuzālu (both men). Others remain anonymous but left traces of their brewing activities in the archaeological record: for example, in a temple brewery excavated at the site of modern-day Tell al-Hiba, Iraq, in what was the ancient city of Lagash.

We are walking down a narrow alleyway, mudbrick walls rising to either side. On the right, we pass an inconspicuous doorway, a side entrance that leads into the Bagara, the main temple of Ningirsu, patron god of the city of Lagash. A wisp of smoke escapes from another doorway to the left. We ease open the wooden door and are hit with a blast of malty aroma. Avoiding the smoke that pours out of a room to the right, we step into another room on the left, pulling the door shut behind us. The room is dimly lit and nearly silent, except for a faint gurgling: ‘dubul dabal, dubul dabal, dubul dabal.’

That is the sound of beer – at least according to one piece of Sumerian literature. It is the sound of two brewing vessels speaking with one another. The one with a hole in its base sits above the other, and they make a ‘dubul dabal’ sound, Sumerian onomatopoeia for the sound of a liquid dripping from the upper to the lower. These two brewing vessels, well attested in the written record, were not actually uncovered by archaeologists within the room that we visited in the building next to the Bagara temple at Lagash. But we have good reason to suspect that this building was a brewery. What is more difficult is pinning down exactly what took place in each room, exactly how beer was brewed.

The most detailed account of the brewing process appears in the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’, goddess of beer. But this lyric portrait of Ninkasi at work in the brewery is hardly a set of instructions for brewing beer. It is preserved only on three known tablets, in each case followed immediately by another song, perhaps a sort of drinking song written to celebrate the opening of a new tavern. What makes the hymn so useful for students of Mesopotamian beer is that it seems to depict Ninkasi brewing up a batch of beer, step by step, from start to finish. But how much weight should we really place on this one song? Is it really a useful guide to exactly how beer was actually brewed in Mesopotamia? Imagine that you are an archaeologist of the future. You are trying to recreate the beers of the mid-20th century CE, and all you have to go on are these lines from a contemporary drinking song known as ‘Beer, Beer, Beer’: ‘A barrel of malt, a bushel of hops, you stir it around with a stick…’ The ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’ has more to offer than that, but it is still more song – maybe even legit drinking song – than recipe.

Cuneiform tablet recounting the ‘Hymn to Ninkasi’. CDLI/Louvre Musuem, Paris

So, what exactly does this song from the distant past offer us? In one sense, it offers the possibility of establishing a direct channel of communication between brewers past and present, of establishing a sense of shared tradition across a span of nearly 4,000 years. But there is also a persistent danger of inadvertently flattening the past into the present, of missing some of what made their world different from our own. Ultimately, it’s all about translation. What exactly is Ninkasi up to – if we follow the classic but now dated translation by Miguel Civil – when she mixes the bappir (a key brewing ingredient) with sweet aromatics and bakes it in a big oven, when she waters the malt and then soaks it in a jar, when she spreads out the cooked mash on reed mats, when she holds the sweetwort in her hands? Can we assume that she’s basically just doing some version of what brewers still do today, if in a less scientific or less sophisticated fashion?

I think not. More specifically, I think we need to be careful to avoid two seductive ‘traps’ that have hindered interpretation of this challenging Sumerian text. The terminological trap tempts us to translate the text using terminology drawn from the European brewing tradition. I suspect a square-pegs-round-holes situation, a modern brewing lexicon that does not match up well with past reality. The minimalist trap, on the other hand, entices us into assuming that ancient brewers relied on a simple, straightforward set of steps: just the basics. To the contrary, since the Mesopotamian brewing tradition probably stretched back deep into the prehistoric past, we should expect sophistication, creativity, complexity and diversity.

The beers provided our audiences with a unique sort of visceral, embodied connection to the ancient past

14 August 2013, 5:55pm. Pat Conway, co-owner of Great Lakes Brewing Company, and I are huddled in an office off the main dining room at his Cleveland brewpub. The first tasting event for our Sumerian Beer Project kicks off in five minutes. But we have just realised – we forgot to name the beers. After some quick brainstorming, we settle on a tribute to the famous adventuring duo, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Fast-forward 45 minutes. Pat has waxed lyrical about our collaborative brewing effort. I have given a lecture about ancient Mesopotamia. The brewers have explained our brewing process. The guests have had a taste of our two beers, Gilgamash and Enkibru, served up in tasting glasses. But now the moment of truth. A large ceramic vessel waits at the front of the room, straws emerging from its mouth. Will anyone be willing to try sipping some Enkibru Sumerian-style? We had our doubts, but the audience did not. The answer was a resounding ‘Yes!’

 

Photo supplied by the author

This event set the pattern for others to follow. We served our guests two beers. Enkibru was brewed using authentic ingredients, equipment and brewing methods. It was tart, uncarbonated, milky-looking and intriguingly herbal. Gilgamash, brewed using the same ingredients but modern equipment and a commercial yeast, was more familiar, something like a Belgian saison. These beers were the result of a multi-year collaboration between Great Lakes Brewing Co and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (at the time, the Oriental Institute) at the University of Chicago. I signed on as a graduate student and never looked back. This was my entry point into the world of Mesopotamian beer.

Did we manage to produce an exact replica of any beers from the distant past? Definitely not. We had to rely heavily on educated guesswork. But we did provide our audiences with a unique sort of visceral, embodied connection to the ancient past. If you would like to have a taste of Gilgamash too, my book includes a brew-it-yourself recipe to try at home. If you give it a go, I suggest a ceramic jug and some long straws. And with the first sip – or any time you find yourself in need of a toast – I propose that you borrow a line from our ancient Mesopotamian drinking song and call on Ninkasi, goddess of beer. ‘May Ninkasi live together with you!’ Or give it a try in Sumerian: ‘Ninkasi zada ḫumu’udanti!’

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Sichuan Chilli Oil Smashed Cucumber Salad & Soy-Cured Egg

This is just one of the best things ever. The textures and tastes set you up for a perfect meal. Normally, smashed cucumbers are served simply as a side to just nibble on while you’re waiting for noodles or dumplings to come out. I think this treatment takes the cucumbers to more of a comprehensive dish. This is so refreshing. I’m so hyped on this salad, and I know this will be a staple for you and your family or friends, or maybe your lover.

Serves

6

Ingredients

For the soy sauce eggs

6 eggs

½ cup of water

1 cup of soy sauce

¾ cup of mirin

For the cucumber salad

2 English cucumbers, cut into 2-inch strips

Salt

½ red onion, sliced as thinly as possible

½ bunch of coriander, chopped

½ bunch of spring onions, chopped

2 tbsp of toasted sesame seeds

For the black vinegar chilli crisp dressing

¼ cup of chilli crisp

2 tbsp of black vinegar

2 tbsp of soy sauce

3 tbsp of toasted sesame seeds

Zest & juice of 1 lime

2 garlic cloves, grated

1 small knob of ginger, grated

2 tbsp of rapeseed oil

Method

Step 1

First, we’re going to make the soy sauce eggs. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Lower each egg into the pot and set your timer for 6 minutes. Transfer the eggs to an ice bath until they get cold, then peel them. To marinate the eggs, place a Ziploc bag in a small bowl. Fill it with the water, soy sauce and mirin. Add the eggs and squeeze the air out of the bag to ensure the eggs are covered in the soy sauce mixture. Seal the bag closed and store in the refrigerator. Ideally wait 24 hours, but they can be used after 6 hours.

Step 2

When you are ready to make your salad, prepare to smash your cucumbers. Lay them on a cutting board and smash them with the bottom of a pot. Transfer them to a strainer set over a bowl, generously salt them, and place them in the fridge for 30 minutes. Salting them draws out a lot of the moisture in the cucumbers. Press them with paper towels to remove all the moisture you can.

Step 3

In a large bowl, mix the onions.

Step 4

Make the black vinegar chilli crisp dressing. In a small bowl, mix up the chilli crisp, black vinegar, soy sauce, sesame seeds, lime zest and juice, garlic, ginger and rapeseed oil.

Step 5

Carefully remove your beautiful little soy eggs from their salty bath. Break them gently with your hands. Do it artfully, we are trying to make art here.

Step 6

When you’re ready to serve, get a large platter out. First put down your smashed cucumber. Toss with the dressing. Top it with the broken-up soy eggs. Add the onion and coriander, and top with the sesame seeds.

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Pork Katsu Sando

As classic as it gets, pure and simple. Brine your pork chops; you’ll thank me later. Or don’t, but still make this sando. It’ll still slap if you don’t brine, but holy cow, if you brine, you’ll win, and winning is what it’s all about. For some reason, these eat better than any other sandwich. They seem smaller and more perfect in every way, like most things in Japan. Very thoughtful and no fluff, only 100% execution. I love you, Japan. Thank you for always leading the way with restraint.

Serves

2

Ingredients

Two 6oz boneless pork chops, from the shoulder end

1 cup of all-purpose flour

3 eggs, whisked

1 cup of panko breadcrumbs

Oil, for frying

Salt

Four 1-inch-thick slices milk bread or brioche

2 tbsp of Kewpie mayonnaise

1 piece of pickled daikon

¼ head green cabbage, sliced as thinly as possible

For The Brine

1 tbsp of sugar

2 tbsp of salt

4 cups of water

For the katsu sauce

1 cup of ketchup

¼ cup of soy sauce

¼ cup of HP Sauce

1 heaping tbsp of prepared horseradish

1 cup of tonkatsu sauce

Method

Step 1

Let’s start by making your brine. In a large bowl, dissolve your sugar and salt in the water. Add the pork chops to the bowl, making sure they’re completely submerged. Place in the fridge for 2 hours to brine. Then, rinse them off and pat them dry with paper towels.

Step 2

Next, make your katsu sauce. In a medium bowl, stir together the ketchup, soy sauce, HP Sauce, horseradish and tonkatsu sauce. Transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate until ready to use.

Step 3

Prepare your pork katsu. Set up three shallow bowls for your breading station: one with the flour, one with the whisked eggs, and one with the panko. Dip each pork chop first in the flour, then the eggs, then the panko. Make sure each pork chop is completely coated. The best method is to have one wet hand and one dry hand. Alternatively, you can use a fork to pick up the pork and move it around.

Step 4

Line a plate with paper towels. Heat 4 inches of oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat until it reaches 180°C. Gently place the pork chops in the hot oil and fry until golden brown, about 6 minutes total. Then transfer them to the paper towel-lined plate to drain. Season both sides with salt. While the katsu is still hot, brush both sides with your katsu sauce.

Step 5

Spread your mayo on your bread, place your daikon, then your sauced katsu. Top with a big pile of sliced cabbage and your remaining slice of bread. Repeat with the other sandwich.

[Vesper 28,796]

Crispy Lamb Pho

This recipe is for an old friend and was inspired by a memory of one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. Danny Bowien used to have a burrito spot called Mission Cantina on the Lower East Side, and some days they would serve pho. Because why not? The lamb pho really hit me hard because it was two things that I love but had never really had together. The deep lamb pho broth and the crispy lamb ribs blew my mind. I hope you enjoy my version inspired by Danny’s genius.

Serves

4

Ingredients

For The Soup

2 large yellow onions, cut in half

1 8-inch piece ginger, cut in half

1.4kg of marrow bones

1 bone-in lamb shoulder (take out of the fridge 2½ hours before starting recipe)

2 racks of bone-in lamb ribs (take out of the fridge 2½ hours before starting recipe)

15 cups of water

½ cup of fish sauce

2 tbsp of sugar

1 tbsp of salt, plus more as needed

½ tsp of MSG

4 garlic cloves, halved

1 cinnamon stick, broken in half

1 tbsp of coriander seeds

2 star anise pods

3 or 4 cloves

½ cup of mala spice (I like Fly By Jing)

450g of dried pho noodles

Garnishes

Shiso leaves

Coriander

White onion, sliced

Spring onions, sliced

2 limes, quartered

Handful of bean sprouts

Bird’s eye chillies

Thai basil

Method

Step 1

Let’s make pho. First, let’s char our onions and ginger in a cast-iron pan over medium-high heat. You want them to get caramelised to give our broth a deep flavour. Set aside.

Step 2

In a large pot, place the marrowbones, lamb shoulder and lamb ribs, and cover the goods with cold water. Bring to a boil for 5 minutes to blanch, and then drain and quickly wash off all the bones, shoulder and ribs.

Step 3

Place everything back into the pot and add your 15 cups of water, fish sauce, rock sugar, salt, MSG and garlic cloves. Bring to a boil and then immediately reduce it to a simmer. Skim the scum and add your charred onions, charred ginger, cinnamon, coriander, star anise and cloves. Keep simmering the pho broth, removing the scum from the surface of the water until the liquid is clear and no more scum rises to the surface. There will be a lot of it – the lamb ribs are very fatty.

Step 4

After about 2½ hours (when you can almost pinch through the ribs), take them and the lamb shoulder out. Let them cool on a wire rack and move to the fridge. Let the broth continue to simmer for another 4 hours. Keep adding water if too much is cooking off. In the end we should have about 6 litres of delicious broth. Strain after 4 hours.

Step 5

Preheat your oven to grill on high. When you are ready to serve, slice your lamb shoulder meat and ribs into 1-inch-thick pieces, then cover all your lamb in the mala spice and season with salt. Grill until they are nice and crispy (5-10 minutes).

Step 6

To serve, boil the noodles according to the package instructions. Divide among four bowls. Put the lamb shoulder and ribs on top. Bring the broth to a rolling boil and ladle it over all that deliciousness in your bowls. Set up your garnishes on a large plate and serve.