In April of 1932, an unlikely literary débutante published her first book. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was a matron of sixty-five, neat and tiny—about four feet eleven—who was known as Bessie to her husband, Almanzo, and as Mama Bess to her daughter, Rose. The family lived at Rocky Ridge, a farm in the Ozarks, near Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder raised chickens and tended an apple orchard. She also enjoyed meetings of her embroidery circle, and of the Justamere Club, a study group that she helped found. Readers of The Missouri Ruralist knew her as Mrs. A. J. Wilder, the author of a biweekly column. Her sensible opinions on housekeeping, marriage, husbandry, country life, and, more rarely, on politics and patriotism were expressed in a plain style, with an occasional ecstatic flourish inspired by her love for “the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” A work ethic inherited from her Puritan forebears, which exalted labor and self-improvement not merely for their material rewards but as moral values, was, she believed, the key to happiness. Mrs. Wilder, however, wasn’t entirely happy with her part-time career, or with her obscurity. In 1930, she sat down with a supply of sharpened pencils—she didn’t type—to write something more ambitious: an autobiography.

more from Judith Thurman at The New Yorker here.

This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival. Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. (I suppose the nearest regional equivalent would be the Mexican Day of the Dead.) The clement weather allows the wearing of the lighter yukata, or summer kimono, and the staging of the Bon Odori dance, in which all can join, to the soft rhythm of taiko drums. For the rest of the time, the yagura, or wooden scaffold, is the center of a sort of fairground, in which stalls and raffles compete for custom with the sellers of sake and Japanese beer and with an amazing teriyaki buffet.

more from Slate here.

(h/t Jason Wilson)

The Next Superpower

On the much-publicised full moon
festive youths and families gorge

on overpriced moon-cakes
to celebrate mid-autumn. How

very poetic. Not all that far away
the plants’ wastes flow

to choke the Yangtze. I can’t
appreciate the taste of the cakes,

their severe sweetness. The Chinese
cherish the stuff. This, they say,

is a beloved tradition. I can’t
remember ever loving anything

resembling one. You can’t finish
yours, and stroll onto the balcony

Read more »

Diane Ackerman in Orion Magazine:

AT DAWN, the world rises out of darkness, slowly, sense-grain by grain, as if from sleep. Life becomes visible once again. “When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can’t think anymore,” Claude Monet once lamented. “More light!” Goethe begged from his deathbed. Dawn is the wellspring of more light, the origin of our first to last days as we roll in space, over 6.684 billion of us in one global petri dish, shot through with sunlight, in our cells, in our minds, in our myriad metaphors of rebirth, in all the extensions to our senses that we create to enlighten our days and navigate our nights.

Thanks to electricity, night doesn’t last as long now, nor is it as dark as it used to be, so it’s hard to imagine the terror of our ancestors waiting for daybreak. On starless nights, one can feel like a loose array of limbs and purpose, and seem smaller, limited to what one can touch. In the dark, it’s hard to tell friend from foe. Night-roaming predators may stalk us. Reminded of all our delectable frailties, we become vulnerable as prey. What courage it must have taken our ancestors to lie down in darkness and become helpless, invisible, and delusional for eight hours. Graceful animals stole through the forest shadows by night, but few people were awake to see them burst forth, in twilight or moonlight, forbidding, distorted, maybe even ghoulish or magical. Small wonder we personalized the night with demons. Eventually, people were willing to sacrifice anything—wealth, power, even children—to ransom the sun, immense with life, a one-eyed god who fed their crops, led their travels, chased the demons from their dark, rekindled their lives.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Ivan Klima grew up knowing exactly what freedom was. Freedom was the opposite of his childhood. In 1941, when Klima was 10, his father was sent on the first Nazi transport to Terezin, the “fortress ghetto” north of Prague, and the family followed. Klima remained in Terezin for the duration of the war. He had, he says, not been aware that his parents were Jewish until Hitler came to power. “Anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child,” he once wrote, “who has been completely dependent on an external power which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him – probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education. That life can be snapped like a piece of string – that was my daily lesson as a child.” There were other lessons, too, though; lessons in survival, lessons in escape. Klima had only one book with him in Terezin, The Pickwick Papers . He read it over and over, and transported himself daily to the world of Sam Weller and Nathaniel Winkle. Freedom was established in his mind as storytelling.

He started to write while in the camp, aware that any page he finished could be his last, and found that the trick of escape worked even better. He wrote plays and made his own puppets to perform in them, and then stories about the girls he fancied, daydreams about his first loves. The sense of liberation he found in these made-up sentences never left him. “I have always pursued inner freedom,” Klima tells me now, at his home in Prague. “I have never been censored.”

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 10¹³ dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (10¹⁵) dollars.

The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The important point here is not that high finance is catching up with the sciences; it’s that the numbers we encounter everywhere in daily life are growing steadily larger. Computer technology is another area of rapid numeric inflation. Data storage capacity has gone from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and the latest disk drives hold a terabyte (10¹² bytes). In the world of supercomputers, the current state of the art is called petascale computing (10¹⁵ operations per second), and there is talk of a coming transition to exascale (10¹⁸). After that, we can await the arrival of zettascale (10²¹) and yottascale (10²⁴) machines—and then we run out of prefixes!

More here.

In More Intelligent Life Magazine, Brian Cathcart looks at the issue:

One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver “Stamford Bridge”, the name of Chelsea’s stadium, but he delivered them instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. They missed the game.

Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.

Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.

The other is more subtle. Everybody involved in these stories has consciously handed over responsibility for knowing geography to a machine. With the sat-nav on board, they believed that they did not need to know about north or south, Spain or England, leafy Surrey or gridlocked Islington. That was the machine’s job. Like an insurance company with its call centre or a local council with its bin collections, they confidently outsourced the job of knowing this stuff, or of finding it out, to that little computer on the dashboard.

David Zax in Smithsonian.com:

Certain pursuits were not in an astronomer’s job description, says Dava Sobel, author of the bestselling historical memoir Galileo’s Daughter (1999). “You didn’t talk about what the planets were made of,” she says. “It was a foregone conclusion that they were made of the fifth essence, celestial material that never changed.” Astronomers might make astrological predictions, but they weren’t expected to discover anything new.

So when Galileo, then 45 years old, turned his telescope to the heavens in the fall of 1609, it was a small act of dissent. He saw that the Milky Way was in fact “a congeries of innumberable stars,” more even than his tired hand could draw. He saw the pockmarked surface of the moon, which, far from being perfectly spherical, was in fact “full of cavities and prominences, being not unlike the face of the Earth.” Soon he would note that Jupiter had four moons of its own and that Venus had moonlike phases, sometimes waxing to a disk, sometimes waning to a crescent. He later saw imperfections in the sun. Each discovery drew Aristotle’s system further into question and lent ever more support to the dangerously revolutionary view that Galileo had privately come to hold—set out just a half-century earlier by a Polish astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus—that the Earth traveled around the sun.

“I give infinite thanks to God,” Galileo wrote to powerful Florentine statesman Belisario Vinta in January of 1610, “who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things.”

Over at Reset Dialogues on Civilization, Marco Cesario makes the case:

What is the meaning nowadays of teaching about the Islamic religious phenomenon rather than the Islamic religion as such? The International Institute of Religious Thought in Paris (IIIT) attempted to answer this difficult question during a study day attended by intellections and experts on Islam. Speakers included Mohammed Mestiri (director of the IIIT), Mustafa Cherif, a philosopher and the director of the Masters in Islamic Studies at Barcelona University, Stéphane Lation Professor at Fribourg University and Charles Saint-Prot, Director of the Institute of Geopolitical Studies in Paris.

The debate showed that nowadays Islam should no longer be considered a spiritual subject or an organisation of worship of the divine, but rather a phenomenon. This new and ambitious paradigm also involves the Humanities; philosophy, sociology, history, epistemology and anthropology. Islam is above all a reality, a phenomenon that extends over time and space through a diversity of eras and societies. All too often the historical, anthropological and the generally scientific perspective has opposed the religious, theological or spiritual. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, on the contrary they should cooperate in the multi-disciplinary character to allow Islam to move forwards in the 3rd millennium.

Only if one considers Islam as a religious phenomenon and not a collection of irrefutable dogmas, and only if its analysis is accompanied by the scientific discipline of the Humanities, will communities be allowed to improve and integrate with modernity without trauma.

Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

This is probably going to make me sound, yet again, like a Neanderthal shouting from the back of the classroom, and might even destroy my career and end a few friendships and scandalize my children and cast shame upon my ancestors—but I have something to confess. After years of deceiving myself and others (felonious head nods in grad seminars, forced cocktail-party chuckles), I have decided it’s time to stop living a literary-critical lie. There is no easy way to say this, so here it is. I hate Thomas Pynchon.

I should not, probably, hate Thomas Pynchon. He is an indisputably, uniquely gifted genius who shares artistic DNA with almost all my favorite writers (Joyce, Barthelme, DeLillo, et al). Basic demographics and taste-algorithms suggest, in fact, that I should be a full-fledged Pynchon groupie, the kind of guy who names all his hamsters Slothrop and slaps W.A.S.T.E. stickers on the windows of his local post office. But I can’t help it. My distaste is visceral, involuntary, and preconscious—a spasm of my aesthetic immune system. While I fully appreciate Pynchon in the abstract, as a literary-historical juggernaut—a necessary bridge from, say, Nabokov (with whom he studied at Cornell) to David Foster Wallace—sitting down with one of his actual books makes my eyebrows start to smolder. I find him tedious, shallow, monotonous, flippant, self-satisfied, and screamingly unfunny. I hate his aesthetic from floor to ceiling: the relentless patter of his Borscht Belt gags, his parodically overstuffed plots, his ham-fisted verbs (scowling, growling, glaring, leering, lurching) and adjectives (lurid, louche, lecherous), the tumbling micro-rhythms of his sentences, the galloping macro-rhythms of his larger narratives. I hate the discount paranoia he slathers over everything with an industrial-size trowel. I hate the cardboard cutouts he tries to pass off as human characters, and I hate—maybe most of all—his characters’ stupid names. (I even hate his name, which makes him sound like some kind of 29th-century sci-fi lobster.) I hate the fake song lyrics he invents for his characters to sing and the fake restaurants (Man of La Muncha) he invents for them to eat at and the stupid acronyms he invents for them to pledge their lives to.

This confession comes courtesy of Pynchon’s newest novel, Inherent Vice, a manically incoherent pseudo-noir hippie-mystery that should fit in nicely with the author’s recent series of quirky late-career non-masterpieces (Mason & Dixon, Against the Day).

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Equating fundamentalism with terrorism is loose thinking, but the biggest drawback is the loss of historical memory that making the parallel entails. Much of the state terror in the past century was secular, not religious. Lenin and Mao were avowed disciples of an Enlightenment ideology. Some will object that they misapplied this. And yet it is a feature of the fundamentalist mindset to posit a pristine faith, innocent of complicity in any crime its practitioners have ever committed, and capable – if only it is implemented in its pure, unsullied form – of eradicating practically any evil. This is pretty much what is asserted by those who claim that the solution to the world’s problems is mass conversion to “Enlightenment values”. If Garton Ash is reluctant to talk of Enlightenment fundamentalism, this may be in part because it suggests that we are at risk of drifting into an intractable conflict. Yet clearly the danger of clashing fundamentalisms is real. In this respect, the facts are subversive, and the vagaries of the present discourse should not stand in the way of recognising the facts.

more from John Gray on Timothy Garton Ash’s new book of essays at The New Statesman here.

The masterpieces of Minoan art are not what they seem. The vivid frescoes that once decorated the walls of the prehistoric palace at Knossos in Crete are now the main attraction of the Archaeological Museum in the modern city of Heraklion, a few miles from the site of Knossos. Dating from the early or mid-second millennium BC, they are some of the most famous icons of ancient European culture, reproduced on countless postcards and posters, T-shirts and refrigerator magnets: the magnificent young “prince” with his floral crown, walking through a field of lilies; the five blue dolphins patrolling their underwater world between minnows and sea urchins; the three “ladies in blue” (a favorite Minoan color) with their curling black hair, low-cut dresses, and gesticulating hands, as if they have been caught in mid-conversation. The prehistoric world they evoke seems in some ways distant and strange—yet, at the same time, reassuringly recognizable and almost modern. The truth is that these famous icons are largely modern. As any sharp-eyed visitor to the Heraklion museum can spot, what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches.

more from Mary Beard at the NYRB here.

It’s the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England – he was avoiding the city because of the plague – when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane observation led Newton to devise the concept of universal gravitation, which explained everything from the falling apple to the orbit of the moon. There is something appealing about such narratives. They reduce the scientific process to a sudden epiphany: There is no sweat or toil, just a new idea, produced by a genius. Everybody knows that things fall – it took Newton to explain why. Unfortunately, the story of the apple is almost certainly false; Voltaire probably made it up. Even if Newton started thinking about gravity in 1666, it took him years of painstaking work before he understood it. He filled entire vellum notebooks with his scribbles and spent weeks recording the exact movements of a pendulum. (It made, on average, 1,512 ticks per hour.) The discovery of gravity, in other words, wasn’t a flash of insight – it required decades of effort, which is one of the reasons Newton didn’t publish his theory until 1687, in the “Principia.”

more from Jonah Lehrer at the Boston Globe here.

From Scientific American:

Breathing in the hormone oxytocin has been shown in recent years to trigger all kinds of feel-good emotions in people, such as trust, empathy and generosity. Now scientists find it might have a dark side: Snorting oxytocin might also incite envy and gloating. Past studies have shown that oxytocin plays a wide role in social bonding in mammals—between mates, for instance, or mother and child—and recent work suggested the hormone was linked with pro-social behavior in people, such as altruism. Still, neuroscientist Simone Shamay-Tsoory in University of Haifa in Israel and her colleagues noted that oxytocin was found to raise aggression in rodents, suggesting the hormone might play a wider role in social emotions in humans. The researchers decided to investigate envy and gloating—feelings related to the tendency to compare oneself with others—to see if oxytocin ramped up these emotions or dialed them down.

The researchers gave 56 volunteers either oxytocin or a placebo and paid them to take part in a game of chance with another participant which, unknown to them, was a computer. They were shown three doors on a video screen, either red, blue or yellow, and told that behind each door was a different sum of money they could keep after the game.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Neither music historians nor hard-core metal fans will gasp to learn that the band Staind, with songs like “Painful” and “Mudshovel,” tends to go far more negative in its lyrics than did the heavyweight of soul, Luther Vandross, whose many hits included “The Closer I Get to You.” Or that Slayer (“Raining Blood”) paints darker word pictures than Faith Evans (“I’ll Be Missing You”).

Yet who knew that Slayer was about 30 percent more negative than Mr. Vandross — and that such calculations might say something about the mood of the country? In a new paper, a pair of statisticians at the University of Vermont argue that linguistic analysis — not just of song lyrics but of blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being. “We argue that you can use this data as a kind of remote sensor of well-being,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a co-author of the new paper, with Christopher M. Danforth; both are in the department of mathematics and statistics.

More here.