David Binder and Bruce Weber in NYT:

Christa Wolf, a leading writer from the former East Germany whose novels, stories and essays explored the weight of history on ordinary individuals, especially and controversially including her own struggles with the legacy of Nazism and life in a Communist society, died Thursday in Berlin. She was 82.

Her death was announced by the publishing house Suhrkamp, which did not disclose a cause.

Ms. Wolf, who grew up in Germany under the Nazis, led a philosophically angst-ridden life that played out in her work. In novels like “Divided Heaven,” “The Quest for Christa T.,” “Cassandra” and “A Model Childhood,” she wrote about characters, largely women, whose daily lives were deeply colored by the political systems that governed them.

trongly autobiographical and gravely moral, her books were widely read in both East and West Germany, and over the years she became respected as a kind of public conscience of a long-divided people. Still, she was criticized as being insufficiently outraged by the repressiveness of the East German regime, and her reputation was tainted by her opposition to the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, as East Germany was officially known, even as the Berlin Wall was coming down.

Another blow to her standing came in 1993, with the revelation that she briefly served as an informant for the East German secret police in the early 1960s.

She was difficult to categorize — a loyal dissident, a critic of the regime, but a believer in socialist ideals.

Stefan Auer in Eurozine:

Europe's better times were meant to be ahead of it. Not so long ago, “the European dream” was believed to have provided the best “vision of the future”; Europe was going to “run the twenty-first century”, having created “an entirely new species of human organization, the likes of which the world has never seen”. If the West – and most of the world – was American in the twentieth century, the twenty-first was going to be European. But not in any crude, old-fashioned, imperial, my-values-are-better-than-yours kind of way; rather in an open and open-ended reflexive, self-critical, you-are-as-good-as-or-better-than-me way. Europe was going to lead the world by example; do it gently. “Soft power Europe” would rule without anyone noticing but everyone benefiting. All these assumptions proved hubristic: Europe's turn of fortune is humbling, humiliating and, perhaps, irreversible.

What went wrong, and when? Europe's most audacious moment occurred some time between 1989 and 1991. That short period of time encapsulated both the demise of communism in central and eastern Europe – from Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1989 to the Soviet Union in 1991 – and the bold step forward on the path towards an “ever-closer union” in western Europe. Twenty years later, the significant failures of economic and political integration have forced Europeans to re-consider the underpinnings of their project.

Though it appeared in different shapes and sizes, and had numerous causes outside Europe (e.g. the US sub-prime crisis), the economic crisis of 2010-2011 has also manifested itself as a crisis of European democracy. The creation of a monetary union with a shared currency, the euro, is a project that, in many ways, arose out of the events of 1989-1990, in particular, the perceived need to anchor a reunified Germany more firmly within Europe. The common currency was always much more than a transnational medium of exchange. From its inception, it was intended to be the symbol of united Europe par excellence. Rather than achieving this, the eurozone crisis has reinforced latent suspicions, if not hostilities, between EU nations.

From House of Figs:

1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

More here.

Larry Jagan in Himal Southasian:

How much difference a year can make! The walls of closed society seem to be falling in Burma. But will the army remain silent? Change is in the air in Burma, according to many in Rangoon. Though how long until the winds shift remains an open question. ‘There’s definitely a Burmese Spring here,’ said a senior member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), on condition of anonymity. ‘But whether it’s only an illusion, a false dawn as we have had many times before, only time will tell.’ Nonetheless, many in the pro-democracy movement within Burma are optimistic, believing that the new president, Thein Sein, is serious about economic and political change. Critically, this is a process that seems to include Suu Kyi herself, though for the moment it is very unclear what role she may play.

Recent months have seen the continual unveiling of signs that the country’s new quasi-civilian government is trying to pursue a genuine transition to democracy of some sort. The release of more than 200 political prisoners, including the renowned comedian Zarganar, was one of the most recent, and most significant, signals that the new government is serious about political reform. According to a senior government minister on condition of anonymity, preparations are underway for the release of at least 200 more political detainees as well. Taken together, the movements made in the year since the new government was formed strike many as significant – though with caveats.

More here.

From Mail:

Doctors should brush up on their Shakespeare to help improve their understanding of how the mind can affect the body, according to an unusual study. Dr Kenneth Heaton said many doctors don't realise how many physical symptoms can be caused solely by psychological problems. But the Bard's works help illustrate this link because he had such an 'exceptional awareness of bodily sensations'.

The former gastroenterologist and expert on 16th-century literaturelooked for descriptions of sensory ailments in all 42 of Shakespeare's major works. He found dozens of examples when characters experienced psychosomatic symptoms – which was far more than in the writings of his contemporaries. For instance Hamlet is shown suffering from fatigue as a result of grief, crying out: 'How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!' Meanwhile, coldness is shown to be a symptom of shock, as when Juliet in Romeo and Juliet reveals: 'I have a faint cold fear that thrills through my veins.'

More here.

MAGIC CITY WAS A LARGE DANCE HALL on Paris’s Left Bank, used over the decades for purposes as diverse as transvestite balls in the roaring 1920s and the storage of Jewish property confiscated by the fascist French government in the 1940s. It was seized by the Nazis and lavishly refurbished as a radio studio run by the Gestapo during the Occupation, and it was where French television broadcasting set up shop during the 1950s. It was also the place where Mahatma Gandhi—on his way home from the Second Round Table Conference in London and en route to visit Romain Rolland in Geneva—made his only public appearance in Paris, on 5 December 1931, in the very same space where the celebrated Parisian drag queens Kymris and Monsieur Bertin once strutted their stuff. According to contemporary newspaper accounts of the event, it was a strange evening. Patrons were ushered to their seats by girls “bizarrely uniformed in bright red skirts, leather boots, and wide leather belts from which hung cutlasses”, according to the journalist Robert Gauthier’s report in Le Temps. Gauthier observed that the “atmosphere, part circus, part dancing hall, the overheated room, the massive columns of red marble, the flashes of magnesium from here and there, and the floodlights ready to be lit into action were not on the same level as this leader of men.” Further to the right, reporter Georges Suarez had a different take in L’Echo de Paris: “Mahatma Gandhi proves himself to be a great comic…. He appears crushed by his lamentable half-nakedness … but, if his sandals are those of Mohamed, his little bathing suit does not conjure up Napoleon’s coat at Wagram.”

more from Mira Kamdar at Caravan here.

Fiction rarely influences politics anymore, either because fewer people read it or because it has fewer things to say. Yet novels have affected America in large and unsubtle ways: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle shaped the contours of the national current no less profoundly than our periodic wars and bank panics. More recently, Ayn Rand’s tales of triumphant individualism, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, inspired a resilient strain of free-market fundamentalism that continues to color our economic life. A Russian immigrant who adored her adopted country, Rand strove to become American in all things, and in the process became an especially American sort of storyteller: the kind whose stories are a means to a social or political end. It’s an honored tradition in American writing, one that acquits fiction of its perennial charge of uselessness by making it practical, identifying problems and offering solutions—pragmatic books for the purpose of the country’s self-improvement. Few novels have sought to improve America as radically as Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Backward, 2000-1887, published in 1888. Bellamy, like Rand, used fiction to popularize a philosophy, and with comparable results: Looking Backward sold nearly half a million copies in its first decade and appeared in several languages around the world.

more from Ben Tarnoff at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

At the turning point of this second volume of Beckett’s letters, which is also the turning point of his professional life, the moment when, after so many years of ‘retyping … for rejection’, his best work is finally to be published with enthusiasm by editors determined to let the world know what they have discovered, the author’s partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, writes to Jérôme Lindon at Editions de Minuit to advise that Beckett does not wish his novel to be entered for the Prix des Critiques. It is 19 April 1951, Beckett is 45, the novel in question is Molloy. Suzanne explains:

What he dreads above all, in the very unlikely event of his receiving a prize, is the publicity which would then be directed, not only at his name and his work, but at the man himself. He judges, rightly or wrongly, that it is impossible for the prizewinner, without serious discourtesy, to refuse to go in for the posturings required by these occasions: warm words for his supporters, interviews, photos, etc etc. And as he feels wholly incapable of this sort of behaviour, he prefers not to expose himself to the risk of being forced into it by entering the competition.

Thus is born the celebrated myth of a writer concerned purely with his art, oblivious to commercial concerns and hence somehow superior to those writers who will gladly stand before a microphone, cheque in hand. It was a myth that would eventually play to Beckett’s advantage, both critical and commercial. But Suzanne’s letter – and it is impossible not to hear Beckett’s voice dictating it – makes no special claims.

more from Tim Parks at the LRB here.

This past January, at the St. Innocent Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, friends and relatives gathered to bid their last farewell to Marie Smith Jones, a beloved matriarch of her community. At 89 years old, she was the last fluent speaker of the Eyak language. In May 2007 a cavalry of the Janjaweed — the notorious Sudanese militia responsible for the ongoing genocide of the indigenous people of Darfur — made its way across the border into neighboring Chad. They were hunting for 1.5 tons of confiscated ivory, worth nearly $1.5 million, locked in a storeroom in Zakouma National Park. Around the same time, a wave of mysterious frog disappearances that had been confounding herpetologists worldwide spread to the US Pacific Northwest. It was soon discovered that Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a deadly fungus native to southern Africa, had found its way via such routes as the overseas trade in frog’s legs to Central America, South America, Australia, and now the United States. One year later, food riots broke out across the island nation of Haiti, leaving at least five people dead; as food prices soared, similar violence erupted in Mexico, Bangladesh, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia.

more from Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin at Seed here.

The one thing I least believe about race in America is that we can disregard it. I’m nowhere close to alone in this, but the person I encounter far more often than the racist—closeted or proud—is the one who believes race isn’t an active factor in her thinking, isn’t an influence on his interaction with the racial Other. Such blindness to race seems unlikely, but I suspect few of us entirely understand why it’s so improbable. I’m not certain either, but I’ve been given some idea. At a panel discussion in 2004, a professor of political philosophy, Caribbean-born with a doctorate from the University of Toronto, explains that he never understood why the question in America is so often a question of race. A scholar of Marxist thinking, he says in nearly every other industrialized nation on Earth, the first question is a question of class, and accordingly class is the first conflict. He says it wasn’t until he moved to the United States in the early ’70s—about the same time my father arrived—that he intellectually and viscerally understood that America is a place where class historically coincides with race. This, he says, is the heaviest legacy of slavery and segregation. To many immigrants, the professor and my father included, this conflation between success and skin color is a foreign one. In their native lands, where there exists a relative homogeneity in the racial makeup of the population or a pervasive mingling of races, the “minorities” of America are classed based on socioeconomic status derived from any number of factors, and race is rarely, if ever, principal in these.

more from Jaswinder Bolina at Poetry here.

On June 10, 1942, all the inhabitants of the Czech village of Lidice were killed by firing squad or sent to concentration camps. One hundred and ninety-two men were murdered on the spot, but it is estimated that the total number of men, women and children who were eventually killed exceeded 340. The buildings were then set on fire and the entire village bulldozed. The slaughter was a reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, who, six months earlier, had chaired the Wannsee Conference which had planned the “Final Solution to the Jewish question”. The atrocity sparked a worldwide furore. Artists and intellectuals wrote numerous poems, novels, essays and theatrical plays about the massacre, while the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu composed an orchestral work and the British filmmaker Humphrey Jennings made The Silent Village. Time and again, the dead inhabitants of Lidice were set before the eyes and ears of the world as exemplars of “human courage in adversity” and proof of the barbarity of Hitler’s war. Their deaths served many purposes, including exhortations that it was necessary for American citizens to become “fixed as steel in our determination to stop at nothing in this war”, as Edna St Vincent Millay put it in her preface to her 1942 poem “The Murder of Lidice”.

more from Joanna Bourke at the TLS here.

From PhysOrg:

Da Vinci wrote in his notebook that “all the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk.” In other words, if a tree’s branches were folded upward and squeezed together, the tree would look like one big trunk with the same thickness from top to bottom. To investigate why this rule may exist, physicist Christophe Eloy, from the University of Provence in France, designed trees with intricate branching patterns on a computer. “I designed the lightest tree structure to resist wind while still maintaining the strength of the trunk,” said Eloy.

Trees are fractal in nature, meaning that patterns created by the large structures, such as the main branches, repeat themselves in smaller structures, such as smaller branches. Eloy started with a fractal tree skeleton, in which smaller copies of the main branches are repeatedly added together to create the virtual tree. Each new branch takes after its “mother” branch, mimicking the fractal nature of real trees. At this stage, the model tree served merely as a framework for later determining the most effective branch thickness. Once the skeleton was completed, Eloy put it to the test in a virtual wind tunnel. After applying various wind forces needed to break the branches, Eloy determined the diameters for each branch that limited the chance of snapping. Accounting for every part from the smallest twig to the trunk, the simulation seemed to produce Leonardo's rule.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

On an empyreal spring evening in 1858, with the oleander in bloom upriver and early jasmine scenting the wind, the steersman for the Mississippi steamboat Pennsylvania, a bookish 22-year-old named Sam Clemens, guided the massive packet into the docks under the winking gaslights of New Orleans. As the Pennsylvania berthed, Clemens glanced to his side and recognized the adjacent craft, the John J. Roe. Perhaps recalling his many happy assignments steering the Roe, the young apprentice pilot leapt spontaneously onto the freighter’s deck. He was amiably shaking the hands of his former mates when he froze, transfixed by the sight of a slight figure in a white frock and braids: a girl not yet on the cusp of womanhood who would forever after haunt his dreams and shape his literature. Mark Twain’s description, written years later, of the girl as she emerged from the jumble of deckhands, leaves no doubt as to the spell she cast on him. “Now, out of their midst, floating upon my enchanted vision, came that slip of a girl of whom I have spoken…a frank and simple and winsome child who had never been away from home in her life before.” She had, the author continued, “brought with her to these distant regions the freshness and the fragrance of her own prairies.”

The winsome child’s name was Laura Wright. She was only 14, perhaps not quite, on that antebellum May evening, enjoying a river excursion in the care of her uncle, William C. Youngblood, who sometimes piloted the Roe. Her family hailed from Warsaw, Missouri, an inland hamlet some 200 miles west of St. Louis. She surely could never have imagined the import of that excursion. In this centenary year of Mark Twain’s death, it may seem that literary detectives have long since ransacked nearly every aspect of his life and works. Yet Laura Wright remains among the final enigmas associated with him. Only one faded photograph of her is known to exist.

More here.

Sam Harris in his blog:

Here is what Steven Pinker, my previous interview subject, recently wrote about him:

Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind, many of which have become textbook classics and part of the conventional wisdom. His work has reshaped social psychology, cognitive science, the study of reason and of happiness, and behavioral economics, a field that he and his collaborator Amos Tversky helped to launch. The appearance of Thinking, Fast and Slow is a major event.

Kahneman was kind enough to take time out of a very busy book tour to answer a few of my questions.

Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition. Do you have any advice about when people should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions?

When the stakes are high. We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: High-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action. If there is no time to reflect, then intuitively guided action may be better than freezing or paralysis, especially for the experienced decision maker. If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea. The effort invested in “getting it right” should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

Are there times when reasoning is suspect and we are wise to rely on our snap judgments?

As Gary Klein has emphasized (Sources of Power is one of my favorite books), true experts—those who have had sufficient practice to detect the regularities of their environment—may do better when they follow their intuition than when they engage in complex analysis. Tim Wilson and his collaborators have demonstrated that people who choose between two decorative objects do better by following their impulse than by protracted analysis of pros and cons. The critical test in that experiment is how much they will like the chosen object after living with it for a while. Affective forecasting based on current feelings appears to be more accurate than systematic analysis that eliminates those feelings.

More here.

From TV Tropes:

A straw man used to show that emotion is better than logic.

It starts by having characters who think “logically” try to solve a problem. And they can't. Either they can't find any answer, or they're caught in some kind of standoff, or they're even stuck in a Logic Bomb-type loop. Once this is established, someone who uses good old human emotion comes up with a solution that the logical thinker can't. This provides An Aesop that emotion is superior and that the logical thinker shouldn't trust logic so much.

This is, of course, a broken Aesop. Fiction often gets the concept of logic wrong in a number of ways.

The most common mistake is to assume that logic and emotion are somehow naturally opposed and that employing one means you can't have the other. Excluding emotion doesn't make your reasoning logical, however, and it certainly doesn't cause your answer to be automatically true. Likewise, an emotional response doesn't preclude logical thinking — although it may prevent you from thinking in the first place — and if an emotional plan is successful, that doesn't make logic somehow wrong.

Because the author is more concerned with setting up their strawman than in handling logic correctly, they will often misuse and distort the concept to create contrived examples where what they're calling “logic” doesn't work. Common situations include:

• The Straw Vulcan will only accept a guaranteed success. A plan that only has a chance of success is not “logical”, even if the chance is the highest possible. This is actually a well-known error in logic, called the Perfect Solution Fallacy.
• The story assumes a “logical” plan is one where every step makes the goal visibly closer, and accepting a short-term disadvantage for a long-term advantage is not “logical”. There's nothing inherently illogical in accepting a short-term set-back if it makes the long-term success more likely.
• The Straw Vulcan will be completely unable or unwilling to plan for unexpected and even illogical behavior from other parties.

More here.

Belén Fernández in Guernica:

Friedman’s writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized “First Law of Petropolitics”—which Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedom—does not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law. The tendency toward rampant reductionism has become such a Friedman trademark that one finds oneself wondering whether he is not intentionally parodying himself when he introduces “A Theory of Everything” to explain anti-American sentiment in the world and states his hope “that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine [the theory], turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter’s college tuition.”

In the case of Friedman’s musings on the Arab/Muslim world, the reduction process produces decontextualized and often patronizing or blatantly racist generalizations, such as that suicide bombing in Israel indicates a “collective madness” on the part of the Palestinians, whom Friedman has determined it is permissible to refer to collectively as “Ahmed.” Criticism of Israeli crimes is largely restricted to the issue of settlement-building; generalizations about the United States meanwhile often arrive in the form of observations along the lines of: “Is this a great country or what?” This does not mean, however, that the United States is not in perennial danger of descending into decisive non-greatness if it does not abide by Friedman’s diktats on oil dependence and other matters, such as the need to expand U.S. embassy libraries across the globe because “you’d be amazed at how many young people abroad had their first contact with America through an embassy library.”

More here.