¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ehrlich was a Polish Jew born in 1882, and an avid socialist (as were many European Jews at the time). He was a member of the Bund (the Jewish labour party) and ran against Zionist Yitshak Schipper in the Warsaw Kehilla.

On October 4, 1939 he was arrested by the NKVD (the Sovyet secret police) and subjected to interrogation for 10 months. On August 2, 1940 he was brought before a tribunal and accused of spying for the Nazis. He denied the charges, but the tribunal sentenced him to death. While he awaited execution, the sentence was commuted to 10 years in gulag. He wasn't released until a year later as part of the Sikorski-Mayski agreement between the Sovyet Union and Poland.

Upon his release he was asked to join the newly-formed Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which he formed with Viktor Alter under Stalin's blessing. The JAC was chaired by Solomon Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow Jewish Theater.

On December 4, 1941, just 10 months after the JAC's formation, Ehrlich and Alter were arrested in Kuybyshev by the NKVD. No reason was given for their arrest. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, both prominent social activists, petitioned Stalin to release Ehrlich and Alter, but were ignored.

On February 23, 1943 following the Sovyet victory in Stalingrad, Sovyet ambassador Maxim Litvinov wrote to William Green to tell him that Ehrlich and Alter had been executed on Stalin's orders.

Despite this, the JAC was fiercely pro-Sovyet. They led campaigns to fund the Red Army, and broadcast statements about the lack of antisemitism in the CCCP. In July 1943, Mikhoels and Itsik Feffer led the largest American pro-Sovyet rally in history, where over 40,000 people listened to him praise Stalin's efforts against the Nazis.

In January 1948, Mikhoels was killed by the MGB (the other Sovyet secret police) in a staged car accident.

Sovyet persecution of Jewish anti-fascists continued until 1952, when most of the prominent members of the JAC were arrested and executed. 7 months later in August, at least 13 prominent Jewish poets, including Feffer, were rounded up, brought to the basement of Lubyanka prison, and executed as part of Stalin's "Great Purge".

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life…

Celebrating the eleventy-first birth anniversary (jayanti) of Aruna Asaf Ali (1909 - 1996) - Queen of the Indian Independence Revolution.

These bottles were created and used as unguentaria (otherwise known as balsamaria) which are ancient vessels that were typically filled with scented oils, cosmetic powders, balms, or ointments. Unguentaria could be crafted from ceramic, glass, or stone, and they came in various shapes and sizes, but dove-shaped vessels made of glass were especially popular during the second half of the 1st century CE, when they were produced and distributed throughout the Roman Empire.

Above: a dove-shaped unguentarium with residue from the original contents still visible inside

Each bottle was crafted from blown-glass that was carefully modeled into the shape of a bird; the inner cavity was then filled with perfume or cosmetic powder, and the tip of the tail was reheated and compressed, effectively sealing the vessel.

Above: dove-shaped vessels that were opened and emptied long ago, c.50-100 CE

As this article explains:

The vessels were produced with glass blowing pipes by so-called "free blowing," and are for this reason extremely thin-walled, with body thicknesses significantly below 0.1 cm.

After the containers had been filled, the tail feathers were sealed airtight by reheating to protect the contents from moisture. Parts of the containers, such as the head or tail feathers, had to be broken off in order to access the contents of the vessels, which means that they were disposable packaging.

Above: vessels with the tips of their tails broken off

Most of these bottles were made from clear or pale blue Roman glass, but some were crafted with a dark blue, green, purple, or yellow appearance instead:

As cheap, mass-produced goods, the packaging consisted mainly of the conventional thin-walled and transparent Roman glass with an unintentional light blue colouring. Specimens made of intentionally coloured transparent glass (e.g. dark blue, dark green, violet or yellow) are less common. This may also have to do with the fact that the pink or white contents could be visually better distinguished and marketed if the vessels were made of the conventional Roman glass, which offered more transparency to the beholder than the intentionally coloured glass.

Above: a sealed unguentarium that likely contains scented oils and cosmetic residue, from Rovesenda, Italy, c.50 CE

Research suggests that many of these bottles were filled with powder, including pink substances that have been described as "blush" or "rouge," while others were filled with liquid.

Above: more dove-shaped unguentaria from the Roman Empire

Vessels with this design (which is also known as Isings form 11) have been unearthed at Roman-era sites located throughout Europe:

Evidence shows that these glass containers were widely marketed in the Roman Empire. The main areas of distribution are the central and northern Italian regions of Campania et Latium, Venetia et Histria, and Transpadana, along with the northwestern provinces of Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, Germania inferior and Germania superior [in what is now Italy, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands].

There is also evidence from the Balkan and Danube region in the provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia, and also from the eastern Mediterranean in the provinces of Achaea, Creta et Cyrenae and Macedonia. The distribution in the western Mediterranean seems to be limited to Hispania Tarraconensis.

Above: the severed heads of two bird-shaped unguentaria

Sources & More Info:

Glassware and Glassworking in Thessaloniki: 1st Century BC-6th Century AD: Bird-Shaped Inguentaria (Isings Form 11)

The Austrian Archaeological Institute: New Finds of Bird-Shaped Glass Vessels with Residues of their Former Content

The British Museum: Roman Perfume Bottle in the Shape of a Bird

Società Friulana di Archeologia: Glass Doves and Globes from Thessaloniki: North Italian Imports or Local Products?

Analytical Chemistry for Archaeology and Cultural Heritage: Compositional Analysis of Greco-Roman Unguentaria Residues

"should not be allowed to leave"

holy shit can you try to sound any more ominous

And I just think that's neat.

The audience were startled at first; they hadn’t expected this, not at a scholarly conference where one could expect theories, analyses, conclusions - words, words, words. Then people started applauding. For me, the sight of a sanitary napkin and a Tampax was a necessary precondition for understanding what we are talking about: not the generally known fact that women wait in long lines for food or that they don’t have washing machines - one could read about that in Time or Newsweek - but that besides all the hardship of living in Eastern Europe, if they can’t find gauze or absorbent cotton, they have to wash bloody cloth pads every month, again and again, as their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers did hundreds of years ago. For them, communism has changed nothing in that regard.

Slavenka Drakulić, Croatian writer, journalist and Index contributor, whose work covered topics from war in the former Yugoslavia to a novel on Frida Kahlo, has died aged 76. Born in Rijeka in 1949, she began her career as a journalist in the 1970s, going on to contribute to publications such as Index, The Nation, The Guardian and Dagens Nyhete, alongside publishing a number of fiction and non-fiction books.

When Index first published an essay by Drakulić in 1993 she had left Croatia for Sweden following a hit piece that described her and four other prominent female Croatian writers as “witches” and “traitors”. In her response entitled Close-up of death, she wrote angrily about what she called the “book keeping” of death since 1945 which had changed nothing for the tens of thousands of people under siege in Sarajevo during the Balkans war.

“Generations have learned about concentration camps at school, about factories of death; generations whose parents swear that it could never happen again – at least not in Europe – precisely because of the living memory of the recent past. They are fighting this war. What, then, has all that documentation changed? And what is being changed now, by the conscious, precise bookkeeping of death that is happening in our lives, in our living rooms, while we watch transmissions of the dying in Sarajevo?”

In a speech called Who’s afraid of Europe?, reprinted in Index in 2001, she warned of rising nationalism across the continent, asking “what exactly constitutes Europe? Where does it begin and end?”. Twenty years later she wrote again for Index. Emotional baggage explores the few items a refugee decides to pack before fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Drakulić’s 2003 novel They Would Never Hurt a Fly explored the personalities of accused war criminals as they went on trial for their actions during the breaking up of Yugoslavia.  Commenting on the trial of former president Slobodan Milošević, the novel asks yet again how seemingly ordinary people become perpetrators of atrocities.

Drakulić’s final book Zašto nisam naučila kuhati (Why I Never Learned to Cook) released shortly before her death, is a collection of essays discussing her relationship with food through a series of personal vignettes.

Eurozine is deeply saddened by the news of the death of Slavenka Drakulić, a member of the Eurozine Advisory Board and regular contributor. We have lost a European intellectual in the true sense.

By the time Drakulić first entered Eurozine’s orbit in 2000 with her keynote speech at the 14th European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Vienna, she had already published the series of books for which she was well-known througout Europe and the USA: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Café Europa, and Balkan Express.

A prominent writer and feminist intellectual in Croatia, Drakulić had been forced to leave the country in 1992 after being denounced as an enemy of the state by supporters of the Tuđman regime. From then on she divided her time between Stockholm and Vienna, taking it upon herself to explain to a western audience what had become of the former Yugoslavia.

Her speech, which was read out by Swedish publisher Arne Ruth after health problems prevented her from attending, was titled ‘Who’s afraid of Europe’. Occasioned by the new coalition between Wolfgang Schüssel’s Austrian People Party and Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party, Drakulić asked why the far right was gaining ground across the continent.

Her answer: ‘Europe is afraid of itself!’ The far-right was successfully exploiting people’s fear of identity loss, she argued, and liberal Europeans needed to offer something positive. That something was the chance of multiple identities and at the same time belonging.

In 2004 she published They Would Never Hurt a Fly, about war criminals on trial in The Hague. In it, she returned to Arendt’s famous point about the ‘banality of evil’.

‘Ordinary people could not do what these monsters did. We are ordinary people, therefore we cannot commit such crimes. But once you get closer to the real people who committed those crimes, you see that the syllogism doesn’t really work.’

An excerpt from the book was published in Eurozine and Transit magazine. Titled ‘Triumph of evil’, it described the trial of Radislav Krstić the first war criminal sentenced for genocide by the ICTY.

But it was testimony to Drakulić’s sanity as a writer that that she was capable of more lighthearted topics too. In 2007 she returned to a Eurozine conference to give a speech on … toilet paper. During communism, the scarcity of this basic commodity stood for the regime’s failure to meet citizens’ essential needs. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure whether she and her fellow eastern Europeans had not been longing for just another false paradise.