Our own Azra Raza at The Science Network:

R.B. Moreno in The Millions:

Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January’s “Labyrinth,” which accompanied a curious photograph. But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bolaño’s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, “Gomez Palacio,” his posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which “Gomez Palacio” appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: “I was glad the doctor was running late,” she wrote later in reviewing Last Evenings on Earth, “so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.”

Francisco Goldman, who likened “The Great Bolaño” to Borges in a profile for The New York Review of Books, dates the ex-Chilean’s rise to 1999, the year The Savage Detectives won a coveted Venezuelan prize for the best Spanish-language novel. “The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the relationship of life to literature, were the constant themes of Bolaño’s writings,” reads Goldman’s summary of his subject’s legacy, which at the time spanned ten novels and three story collections. (Bolaño’s drive to finish his 900-page masterwork, 2666, a far-flung novel involving the murders of women in the Sonora desert, is thought to have exacerbated his liver condition.) “It’s as if Bolaño is satirizing the routine self-pity of exile,” adds Goldman, in turning to one of his short fictions (“Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva”). “Yet the story’s mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely grief leaves you an intuitive sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal truthfulness.”

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi in Crooked Timber:

Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, inter alia, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel ready to start throwing stuff at a wider audience, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems, makes the case that democracy will on average do the job a lot better than the other two ways, and then looks at different forms of collective information processing on the Internet as experiments that democracies can learn from. A html version is under the fold; the PDF version is here. Your feedback would very much be appreciated – we would like to build other structures on top of this foundation, and hence, really, really want criticisms and argument from diverse points of view (especially because such argument is exactly what we see as the strength of democratic arrangements).

Cognitive Democracy

Henry Farrell (George Washington University) and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi (Carnegie-Mellon/The Santa Fe Institute)

In this essay, we outline a cognitive approach to democracy. Specifically, we argue that democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly diverse perspectives to come together in order collectively to solve problems. Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy. Furthermore, democracy can, by experimenting, take advantage of novel forms of collective cognition that are facilitated by new media.

Amartya Sen in the NYT:

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Europe’s current malaise is the replacement of democratic commitments by financial dictates — from leaders of the European Union and the European Central Bank, and indirectly from credit-rating agencies, whose judgments have been notoriously unsound. Participatory public discussion — the “government by discussion” expounded by democratic theorists like John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot — could have identified appropriate reforms over a reasonable span of time, without threatening the foundations of Europe’s system of social justice. In contrast, drastic cuts in public services with very little general discussion of their necessity, efficacy or balance have been revolting to a large section of the European population and have played into the hands of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.

Europe cannot revive itself without addressing two areas of political legitimacy. First, Europe cannot hand itself over to the unilateral views — or good intentions — of experts without public reasoning and informed consent of its citizens. Given the transparent disdain for the public, it is no surprise that in election after election the public has shown its dissatisfaction by voting out incumbents.

From The Telegraph:

From The Daily Beast:

A Knocker

There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities

it's easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down their foreheads

my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick

I strike the board
it answer me
yes–yes
no–no

for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens

I thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralists dry poem
yes–yes
no–no

Layla Al-Zubaidi in the LRB:

In a hit YouTube show called Top Goon, wooden puppets act out the parts of Bashar and his father. The director relocated his operation to Lebanon after a march last July led to the detention of many of his friends. In August, the political cartoonist Ali Farzat was kidnapped and dumped by a roadside, his hand broken, after he published a cartoon depicting Bashar hitching a ride out of town. Dissent is met with brute force, no matter what form it takes, and masks and puppets are a reasonable precaution. In the final episode of Top Goon the puppeteers show (part of) their faces. His eyes just visible behind a Syrian flag, one of them pops up from behind the stage to tell the Bashar puppet his time is up. Bashar won’t go down easily: ‘I’m president of this republic! I’ll annihilate you! Infiltrator! Scum! Al-Qaida!’ The puppeteer isn’t bothered. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘I can make you do whatever I want. I can make you dance.’ He makes the president do a few pirouettes. Then he unscrews his head.

In downtown Damascus I passed the usual bustling alleys filled with shops and cafés, busy as ever. The window of a loyalist restaurant displayed a cartoon. A big devil, carrying a hat emblazoned with the UN flag, was blowing a horn labelled SECTARIAN SCHISM. Little devils sliced chunks out of a map of Syria, their knives marked with the corporate logos of al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and the BBC.

I got into a cab. When the driver asked why I’d come to Syria I said I was writing about Syrian culture – I was careful not to say ‘revolutionary’ culture. He gave me a look in the mirror that seemed to say he thought I’d come from outer space. I asked him to drop me off by the central bank, where a huge portrait of Bashar, eyes tinted ice-blue, covered the monumental façade.

‘You want culture?’ the driver asked and pointed at a stage being set up in the square in front of the bank, in preparation for a visit by Kofi Annan’s international observers. Giggling teenagers in scout uniform were taking up position. Kiosks were draped with Syrian flags and posters of the ruling family surrounded the stage. ‘That’s our culture. Setting up a theatre to show the world that millions support our president.’

Emily Cooke in The New Inquiry:

By all accounts, Susan Sontag found being alone intolerable. In Sigrid Nunez’s 2011 memoir, Sempre Susan, Sontag didn’t even want to drink her morning coffee or read the newspaper without someone else around. When she was alone and unoccupied by books, she tells Nunez, her “mind went blank” like “static on the screen when a channel stops broadcasting.” Without others to respond to her ideas, or a book to provoke them, the ideas vanished. Sontag herself substantiates Nunez’s impression in the second volume of her journals, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. The tension visible here between the demands (and solace) of relationships and the appeal (and terror) of solitude may be a basic human circumstance. But women, in modern history, feel the tension with special acuteness, we who are assumed to be talented at interaction and rudderless when alone. It is striking that even Sontag, the most authoritative and singular of public figures — the most masculine of women intellectuals — also found the conflict vexing. The first volume of the journals charted her heady, headlong ascent into sexual and intellectual self-knowledge. This second volume, even as it spans the period of her most important work, shows her running up against her own limits. For Sontag, one of the most troubling of these was her difficulty being alone.

Solitude is a problem for writers generally, who spend so much time alone rehearsing a form of ideal communication. And men —as a practical matter — are often worse at being alone than women. But for male writers, however often an appearance of self-sufficiency can be stripped away to reveal a hidden structure of support, there is a writerly tradition of solitude that has existed at least since Romanticism: Rousseau’s “my habits are those of solitude and not of men,” or Shelley’s “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” A man who chooses to be alone assumes the glamour of his forebears. A woman’s aloneness makes us suspicious: Even today it carries connotations of reluctance and abandonment, on the one hand, and selfishness and disobedience, on the other. Kate Bolick, writer of a much-discussed piece in The Atlantic about the “rise of single women,” became something of a spectacle for suggesting that she was happy, at 39, being unmarried and on her own. Albeit strangely titillated, many readers rallied to believe her. The rest called her deluded.

Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:

Is China poised to become the world’s next superpower? This question is increasingly asked as China’s economic growth surges ahead at more than 8% a year, while the developed world remains mired in recession or near-recession. China is already the world’s second largest economy, and will be the largest in 2017. And its military spending is racing ahead of its GDP growth.

The question is reasonable enough if we don’t give it an American twist. To the American mind, there can be only one superpower, so China’s rise will automatically be at the expense of the United States. Indeed, for many in the US, China represents an existential challenge.

CommentsThis is way over the top. In fact, the existence of a single superpower is highly abnormal, and was brought about only by the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The normal situation is one of coexistence, sometimes peaceful sometimes warlike, between several great powers.

CommentsFor example, Great Britain, whose place the US is often said to have taken, was never a “superpower” in the American sense. Despite its far-flung empire and naval supremacy, nineteenth-century Britain could never have won a war against France, Germany, or Russia without allies. Britain was, rather, a world power – one of many historical empires distinguished from lesser powers by the geographic scope of their influence and interests.

CommentsThe sensible question, then, is not whether China will replace the US, but whether it will start to acquire some of the attributes of a world power, particularly a sense of responsibility for global order.

Edward Shorter in Scientific American:

Major depression was created in 1980 by DSM-III editor Robert Spitzer as an effort to bridge disagreements between psychoanalysts, when they ruled the roost in the American Psychiatric Association, and the rest of the profession, which was becoming increasingly oriented towards biology. As a political construct, major depression included the two forms of depressive illness that previously had been considered as different from each other as measles and tuberculosis: melancholic illness and nonmelancholia. Melancholia, a grave form of depression involving slowed thought and movement, a complete joylessness in life and lack of hope for the future, had always been considered a separate illness. By 1980 the term melancholia had gone out of style and had been replaced by endogenous depression.

The other form of depressive illness that psychiatry had always recognized as separate was an ill-defined aggregation of symptoms of mood, anxiety, fatigue, somatic complaints – and a tendency to obsess about it all – that had been called on occasion neurasthenia, neurotic depression, reactive depression and other terms indicating real illness but not melancholic disease.

So the first artifact the DSM series created was lumping these two forms of depressive illness together. In fact, they are so disparate that the depression term itself should be abandoned.

More here. [Thanks to Louise Gordon.]

Amitava Kumar in The Daily Beast:

He will be graduating this Sunday from Trinity College in Connecticut. He is not a very good student. His GPA is only 2.7. Once he was even threatened with expulsion because he had been quarrelling with his wife and had missed classes. He surprised me a few days ago by saying that he wanted to give a speech at his graduation ceremony. Would I read the draft he had written?

There was a further surprise. In what he had sent me, there was mention of his incarceration, in a federal prison in upstate New York, a few months after the events of 9/11. He was suspected of being a terrorist. I had known of this, but I had also found him taciturn and secretive; I was surprised that he was prepared to stand in his blue and gold robes at graduation and read aloud about having been put behind bars.

I will call him Khalid Farooq. He is 34 years old, and grew up in Abbotabad in Pakistan. He arrived in the U.S. on Sept. 5, 2001. Over the year that I have now known him, Khalid had mentioned his arrests—the first only a few days after the September attacks—but the details I was now reading were new to me.

More here.

Ben Yagoda in the New York Times:

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None is correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.

If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:

I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and after “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.

The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.

More here.

Hilary Mantel in The Guardian:

As a small child I remember being told by a solemn nun that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand. In the nun's eyes, it was the kind of deformity that Protestants were prone to; it was for Anne's sake, as everyone knew, that Henry VIII had broken away from Rome and plunged his entire nation into the darkness of apostasy. If it weren't for this depraved woman, England would be as holy as Ireland, and we'd all eat fish on Friday and come from families of 12.

Anne Boleyn wasn't exactly a Protestant, but she was a reformer, an evangelical; and the sixth finger, which no one saw in her lifetime, was a fragment of black propaganda directed at her daughter, Elizabeth I. In Elizabeth's reign it was the duty of beleaguered papists to demonstrate that the queen's mother had been physically and spiritually deformed. Hence, not just the extra finger but the “wen” on her throat, which supposedly she hid with jewellery: hence the deformed foetus to which she was said to have given birth. There is no evidence that this monster baby ever existed, yet some modern historians and novelists insist on prolonging its poor life, attracted to the most lurid version of events they can devise.

Anne Boleyn is one of the most controversial women in English history; we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation. She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.

More here.

Lhendup G. Bhutia in Open:

In the film Vicky Donor, Annu Kapoor plays Dr Baldev Chaddha, a fertility specialist whose sperm bank in New Delhi is close to shutting down because the quality of his donors’ samples is just too poor to impregnate patients. That’s when Vicky Arora, played by Ayushmann Khurrana, comes in. A good-for-nothing lad who lives off his mother’s beauty parlour, his sperm samples rejuvenate Dr Chaddha’s flagging business. Vicky discovers that the quick buck assured by his virility beats the tedium of managing his uncle’s garment store: every single shot of semen fetches him a wad of Rs 500 notes. And this is how Vicky Arora becomes Vicky Donor and starts wanking for a living.

For all the earnest talk of the film’s intention to cast light on an industry cloaked in secrecy and ridden with stigma, its portrayal of the sperm donation business is but a caricature. The industry does exist, but there are no wads of cash being dispensed, donors don’t hang out at Costa Coffee outlets, and they certainly don’t earn enough to buy cars. Indian donors are mostly outstation students living in cramped hostel rooms, sweating to pay their bills and embarrassed by their need to encash what everyone else flushes down the drain. For some donors, it may be pocket money, but for most it’s the room rent or phone bill. And turning donor entails putting their pride at risk. Every commercial ejaculator must pass a strict selection test. Only the best are signed on. The rejects return home unpaid and dejected.

More here.

Fresno sits about two thirds of the way down California’s huge Central Valley, which runs almost the entire length of the state, bounded to the west by the coastal ranges and to the east by the Sierra Nevada mountains. This is the most fertile farmland in the United States. The central and nothern parts get plenty of rain, but the southern part, called the San Joaquin Valley, is dry and subject to droughts, though with a few nice months of green in fall and spring. It could not have looked very promising when Fresno first appeared as a small outpost along the San Joaquin River; the expansion of the California Pacific Railroad to Fresno in the 1870s helped, however. And soon enough it became clear that despite the difficulty of the land, the connection to the farming infrastructure being set up to the north, including the railroad, made settling there worthwhile. Dutch and German farmers built irrigation ditches to make the land farmable. They were soon followed by immigrants from Mexico, Armenia, China, and Japan.

more from Michael Thomsen at n+1 here.

June Gruber in Greater Good:

Clearly, happiness is popular. But is happiness always good? Can feeling too good ever be bad? Researchers are just starting to seriously explore these questions, with good reason: By recognizing the potential pitfalls of happiness, we enable ourselves to understand it more deeply and we learn to better promote healthier and more balanced lives. Along with my colleagues Iris Mauss and Maya Tamir, I have reviewed the emerging scientific research on the dark side of happiness, and we have conducted our own research on the topic. These studies have revealed four ways that happiness might be bad for us.

1. Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe.

Happiness, it turns out, has a cost when experienced too intensely. For instance, we often are told that happiness can open up our minds to foster more creative thinking and help us tackle problems or puzzles. This is the case when we experience moderate levels of happiness. But according to Mark Alan Davis’s 2008 meta-analysis of the relationship between mood and creativity, when people experience intense and perhaps overwhelming amounts of happiness, they no longer experience the same creativity boost. And in extreme cases like mania, people lose the ability to tap into and channel their inner creative resources. What’s more, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found that too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—makes people inflexible in the face of new challenges.

More here.