Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books:

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.

Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.

You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring. Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort. “Don’t say that was delicious,” my husband warns, “you say everything’s delicious.” “But it was delicious.” It drives him crazy. All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

More here.

It is of some consequence, then, to discover that not everything Scott wrote were his own words, even though that is how they have always appeared in print. One of the passages famously noted for being an example of Scott’s innate facility with language and metaphor—and therefore “proof” of his superiority as a writer and noble soul—was in fact written by a far more accomplished wordsmith: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So how can it be that no one—not even Scott’s lauded editor, Leonard Huxley, or any of the scholars who have pored over Scott’s words in a hundred years—have noticed this glaring misappropriation? The fact that Scott was quoting Longfellow in the first place provides us with an insight into his literary life that is just as revealing as simply noting that it was overlooked. The passage that Scott quoted is itself illuminating.

more from Micki Myers at Paris Review here.

Not liking modernism and not wanting to be taken for poncy literary types were Amis-Larkin stances too, and proudly despising Beckett, in particular, is an Amis family tradition. (Kingsley to Larkin in 1985: ‘I think it’s all to do with Mandarin vs. Vernacular was it, as Cyril C put it? You know, art novel, Pickarso, European thought, bourgeois conscience, Tuscany, Beckett, we haven’t got a television set, lesson of the master and nothing happening.’) Yet Bradford’s discipleship is less wholehearted than it first seems. Throughout his narrative of the two men’s friendship it’s clear that he prefers Larkin’s closeted artiness to Amis’s knockabout style. Sometimes, as when he writes of the young Amis being viewed as ‘almost charismatic’, apparent bitchiness turns out to be a side effect of an awkward way with words. Elsewhere he seems as appalled as any taste-shaping puritan by Amis’s boozing and shagging. And after a while it’s hard not to feel for his subjects as he wrenches their every exchange into a pattern of one-way envy and obsession. When Larkin tells Monica that a letter from Amis ‘makes me laugh’, Bradford glosses: ‘No doubt it did but it stirred other feelings too.’ That these feelings, in this instance, weren’t mentioned only shows how deep they ran.

more from Christopher Tayler at the LRB here.

Roger Boylan reviews Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (edited by Michael Hoffman), in the Boston Review:

Reading Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters is like sitting across a café table from Roth himself after he’s had a few. He holds nothing back. He rages, jokes, pleads, and sobs. “Don’t be upset,” he says—imagination supplies a wagging forefinger—“if my letters are full of impatience and even irritations. It so happens I live and write in a continual state of confusion.”

No standard biography of Roth exists in English, but this collection of his letters, superbly translated and judiciously edited by long-time Roth advocate Michael Hofmann, provides a more intimate portrait than any biography could. Roth’s letters are a study in authorial candor: in vino veritas, at least in part, for some of them were composed while he was drunk, getting that way, or hungover—the grim trinity that dominated his life more and more until he died of it, plusweltschmerz, in Paris in 1939. He was just short of 45 and had come a long way to die so young. He left behind one masterpiece,The Radetzky March, in which, in a series of vivid set-pieces, he evokes the reality of life high and low during the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s long decline, a vast theme encapsulated in the Trotta family, who ascend to nobility and imperial favor from provincial origins on the obscure fringes of the realm.

Kenneth Rogoff in Project Syndicate:

As one year of sluggish growth spills into the next, there is growing debate about what to expect over the coming decades. Was the global financial crisis a harsh but transitory setback to advanced-country growth, or did it expose a deeper long-term malaise?

Recently, a few writers, including internet entrepreneur Peter Thiel and political activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, have espoused a fairly radical interpretation of the slowdown. In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they argue, these countries’ weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and innovation. As such, they are unlikely to see any sustained pickup in productivity growth without radical changes in innovation policy.

Economist Robert Gordon takes this idea even further. He argues that the period of rapid technological progress that followed the Industrial Revolution may prove to be a 250-year exception to the rule of stagnation in human history. Indeed, he suggests that today’s technological innovations pale in significance compared to earlier advances like electricity, running water, the internal combustion engine, and other breakthroughs that are now more than a century old.

I recently debated the technological stagnation thesis with Thiel and Kasparov at Oxford University, joined by encryption pioneer Mark Shuttleworth. Kasparov pointedly asked what products such as the iPhone 5 really add to our capabilities, and argued that most of the science underlying modern computing was settled by the seventies. Thiel maintained that efforts to combat the recession through loose monetary policy and hyper-aggressive fiscal stimulus treat the wrong disease, and therefore are potentially very harmful.

These are very interesting ideas, but the evidence still seems overwhelming that the drag on the global economy mainly reflects the aftermath of a deep systemic financial crisis, not a long-term secular innovation crisis.

Catherine Z. Elgin in The Philosophers' Magazine (image from Wikimedia commons):

Disagreement abounds. People disagree about everything from sports and politics to science and child rearing. When disagreements stem from the manifest ignorance, bias, or stupidity of one of the disputants, they are epistemologically benign. That someone who clearly does not know what he is talking about disagrees with you gives you no reason to rethink your position. But some disagreements are more worrisome. Equally intelligent, knowledgeable, thoughtful and open-minded people often disagree. Let us call such parties intellectual equals. Should disagreements among intellectual equals give us pause?

Epistemologists disagree. Conciliatory thinkers such as Hilary Kornblith hold that it should. If Fred recognises George as his intellectual equal, he has no basis for thinking that his opinion is better than George’s (or that George’s is better than his). So when they disagree, conciliationists maintain, both should suspend judgement. Advocates of resoluteness such as Thomas Kelly recommend holding fast. If intellectual equals who disagree are always required to suspend judgement, scepticism looms. Given the range of topics on which we disagree with our intellectual equals, we know very little. Resoluteness is permissible, they maintain, because everyone makes mistakes. It is open to Fred to think that where they disagree, George must be mistaken. He is then within his rights to dismiss George’s opinion. Unfortunately, George can think the same about Fred. Resoluteness fosters dogmatism; we are always entitled to dismiss the opinions of intellectual equals who disagree with us by assuming they have made a mistake. Neither scepticism nor dogmatism is an attractive option. A third alternative is that disagreement among intellectual equals provides some reason to rethink one’s position but does not require revising or repudiating it. In that case, parties could reasonably agree to disagree. The challenge is to make room for this position.

From Spiked:

One of the most striking aspects of the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, is the wild inaccuracy in much of the reporting. As Peter Preston in the Observer noted, it was not only the number of casualties that wavered, but also the name of the killer, the details of the death of the mother (whether it was at home or in front of her class), and, significantly, the type of weapon the killer used (at first, the weapons were identified as two 9mm pistols – later reports noted that it was a semi-automatic rifle). But confusion over the details was nothing compared with the ridiculous myths and stories propagated as facts in relation to more general issues surrounding the tragedy at Sandy Hook school. Here are some myths we should challenge.

1. School shootings are a regular occurrence in the United States

School shootings are incredibly rare and, statistically, children are safer at school than they are at home, and they are far more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else. According to Gary Kleck, a child is more likely to be struck by lightning at school than a bullet. To put it in perspective, the homicide rate at primary schools in the UK – that nation most favoured by gun-control activists – is slightly higher than that in the United States, lest anyone thinks that school violence is endemic to the US. The fact that we have all heard of school shootings does not mean that there is much danger at all of them occurring.

2. Gun controls would have prevented such killings

Former UK home secretary Jack Straw, speaking after the Connecticut killings, said there is no doubt that tighter gun control laws would make school shootings less likely. ‘The more you tighten the law, the more you reduce the risk’, he said, taking credit for the lack of school shootings in the UK since he brought in legislation after the Dunblane massacre of 1996. Taking credit for the lack of incredibly rare incidents is hubris indeed. Had he put forward legislation concerning fatal elephant attacks, would he similarly take credit for the fact that the UK has been free of elephant attacks since the 1990s?

More here.

Soffly Soffly Nesta Skank

boy Marley
armed & ganjaras
soffly soffly his spliff a mystrical cloud
thirsty as he pores into the book
of nolej of wrong & rise
ever so the drumthud & bass gong
move us to skank
while they having fun/k in Babylon
as one more of my peopleses
slumps into his mouthful of gurgling blood

for the pigses
who haven’t known the sun
but interstellar con & contraption
for their politishams
who haven’t known love
but the bleeding triggah of lies
that quiets the poor
for the slipperous slime
home in their shrunken hearts
we’ll be burning all illusion tonight
& banging munition all night
.

by Seitlhamo Motsapi
from earthstepper/the ocean is very shallow
Publisher: Deep South, South Africa

From MIT News:

Finding ways to diagnose cancer earlier could greatly improve the chances of survival for many patients. One way to do this is to look for specific proteins secreted by cancer cells, which circulate in the bloodstream. However, the quantity of these biomarkers is so low that detecting them has proven difficult. A new technology developed at MIT may help to make biomarker detection much easier. The researchers, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, have developed nanoparticles that can home to a tumor and interact with cancer proteins to produce thousands of biomarkers, which can then be easily detected in the patient’s urine.

Cancer cells produce many proteins not found in healthy cells. However, these proteins are often so diluted in the bloodstream that they are nearly impossible to identify. A recent study from Stanford University researchers found that even using the best existing biomarkers for ovarian cancer, and the best technology to detect them, an ovarian tumor would not be found until eight to 10 years after it formed. “The cell is making biomarkers, but it has limited production capacity,” Bhatia says. “That’s when we had this ‘aha’ moment: What if you could deliver something that could amplify that signal?” Serendipitously, Bhatia’s lab was already working on nanoparticles that could be put to use detecting cancer biomarkers. Originally intended as imaging agents for tumors, the particles interact with enzymes known as proteases, which cleave proteins into smaller fragments. Cancer cells often produce large quantities of proteases known as MMPs. These proteases help cancer cells escape their original locations and spread uncontrollably by cutting through proteins of the extracellular matrix, which normally holds cells in place. The researchers coated their nanoparticles with peptides (short protein fragments) targeted by several of the MMP proteases. The treated nanoparticles accumulate at tumor sites, making their way through the leaky blood vessels that typically surround tumors. There, the proteases cleave hundreds of peptides from the nanoparticles, releasing them into the bloodstream. The peptides rapidly accumulate in the kidneys and are excreted in the urine, where they can be detected using mass spectrometry.

More here.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is by common consent one of the masterpieces of political theory. Yet its greatness is hard to pinpoint. It lies partly, again by common consent, in the quality of its prose. Even readers horrified by Hobbes’s authoritarian arguments thrill to the manner of their expression. It is a prose as utterly individual as that of his contemporaries Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne and Milton – and as hard to categorise. Its darts and flashes, compressions and difficulties can call to mind the metaphysical poets, his other contemporaries. Yet metaphysical inspiration was one of Hobbes’s targets, bent as he was on the subjection of political argument to the realism of the scientific revolution, the area of thought where his prior interest lay. Anyway, the attraction of his prose can explain only so much. The impact of the work, especially on the Continent, was largely indebted to his Latin translation of it. The year of the English edition, 1651, also produced Milton’s Latin vindication of the execution of Charles I in 1649, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, another book whose literary properties dazzled readers shocked by its thesis. Hobbes was one of them. His own Latin deserved and commanded no such wonder.

more from Blair Worden at Literary Review here.

In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer. Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.

more from Austin L. Hughes at The New Atlantis here.

Joshua Foer in The New Yorker:

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

More here.

Scott Huler in Scientific American:

You want to see my next vehicle? I’m going to get a TruckIt, a tiny little recumbent-bicycle deal with an electric motor — it’s called a velomobile, if you want to know. It costs $5,500, recharges its battery with its own rooftop solar panels, can legally take you on the road, on the sidewalk,* and on greenway trails, and has a 30-mile-per-charge range. Then you can either rely on those solar panels or you can take the little battery out and plug it in. And though it’s designed to carry me and up to 800 pounds of payload (guitar, amp, and groupie?), I can retrofit a little jumpseat so I can just haul around the groupie if I need to. You can read all about it in this story by the News & Observer of Raleigh.

And hokey smokes, it’s made right here in the U.S.A., by Organic Transit, in a renovated furniture warehouse in downtown Durham, NC.

The thing — and the Elf, its more carlike little sister — is limited to 20 mph on pure electricity (to remain classified as a bicycle), but it can take you up and down hills with or without your pedaling. Every New Urbanist, transit focused downtown renovation should all but give these things away for free. If you live and work in a walkable downtown that lacks — as so many do — a grocery store, instead of needing a second car, all you’ve done is given purpose to your workout. “Going out for a ride, dear — got that grocery list?”

More here.

Isaac Chotiner in The New Rebublic:

Isaac Chotiner: Are you working on anything at the moment?

V.S. Naipaul: I am far too old [laughs].

IC: So no more?

VSN: When you are eighty, you don’t have much more to say. Do you know any writers of eighty?

IC: I’m thinking. No.

VSN: Exactly. How can one? If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he’s got nothing more, you know?

IC: You wrote a number of books after age sixty, though.

VSN: Yes, yes, I had to. There were things I had to say.

IC: Martin Amis said that, when he went back to read his early work, he found a certain energy in it that was absent in his later work, but he also said that, in terms of form, he thought his later work was stronger, at the sentence level.

VSN: Who said this?

More here.

From Nature:

The causes of infertility, which affects around 10% of couples, are often unknown, but may in some cases result from the body's inability to produce viable gametes — also known as sperm and egg cells. The first study of the development of such 'germ cells' from humans could help scientists to learn how to create them in the laboratory instead. Even though the reproductive age for humans is around 15–45 years old, the precursor cells that go on to produce human eggs or sperm are formed much earlier, when the fertilized egg grows into a tiny ball of cells in the mother’s womb. This ball of cells contains ‘pluripotent stem cells’ — blank slates that can be programmed into any type of cell in the body — and researchers are hoping to use these stem cells to treat various conditions, including infertility. But little is known about the early developmental stages of human gametes — owing to the sensitivity of working with human tissue — and most work in this area has been conducted using mice. In a Nature Cell Biology paper today¹, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, trace the development of early germ cells in human fetuses of between 6 to 20 weeks and analysed when genes were turned on or off.

The DNA within these early germ cells carries 'epigenetic modifications' — structural changes that do not affect the DNA sequence itself but do affect the way that genes are expressed. These changes may have accumulated during the parents’ lives, and need to be erased during the fetal stage. The study found two major events that wipe out, or reprogram, epigenetic modifications. Most of this reprogramming happened before 6 weeks, but the authors found a second event that completes the reprogramming after 6 weeks. “This is an important and fundamental paper for understanding human germ-line cells and finding the basic information about human germ-cell biology,” says reproductive biologist Evelyn Telfer of the University of Edinburgh, UK. “The researchers are clearly working in an uncharted area.”

More here.

Richard Friedman, M.D. in The New York Times:

In the wake of the terrible shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., national attention has turned again to the complex links between violence, mental illness and gun control. The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides. Arguing against stricter gun-control measures, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and a former F.B.I. agent, said, “What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ” Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, told The New York Times: “To reduce the risk of multivictim violence, we would be better advised to focus on early detection and treatment of mental illness.”

But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.

…Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

More here.

First, Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian:

The possibility of friction with either the authoritarian state or non-state actors (political and religious extremists) often makes for a degree of self-censorship. At the same time, the need for obliqueness can also make the literary imagination more resourceful.

Such is the case with Mo Yan's deeply interesting fiction. His writing, however, has hardly been mentioned, let alone assessed, by his most severe western critics; it is his political choices for which he stands condemned. They are indeed deplorable, but do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan's counterparts in the west to such harsh scrutiny?

In fact, we almost never judge British and American writers on their politics alone. It would seem absurd to us if the Somali, Yemeni or Pakistani victims of Barack Obama's drone assaults, miraculously empowered with a voice in the international arena, accused the US president's many literary fans of trying to put a human face on his unmanned killing machines; or if they denounced Ian McEwan, who once had tea with Laura Bush and Cherie Blair at 10 Downing Street, as a patsy for the Anglo-American nexus that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more.

Nevertheless, they would not be wrong to detect an unexamined assumption lurking in the western scorn for Mo Yan's proximity to the Chinese regime: that Anglo-American writers, naturally possessed of loftier virtue, stand along with their governments on the right side of history.

Rushdie responds, also in the Guardian:

Pankaj Mishra (Why Salman Rushdie should pause before condemning Mo Yan on censorship, Review, 15 December) makes a series of confused, dishonest and wrong-headed assertions. He misreads John Updike's “blue mailboxes” speech at the Pen congress of 1986. Updike was not talking selfishly about sending away his writing and receiving cheques in return. He was using the mailboxes as a metaphor of the easy, free exchange of ideas and information in an open society. One presumes Mishra is in favour of such a society.

He also misrepresents me. I have never made the claim that the Bush administration was resolved “to bring democracy through war in Afghanistan”. I did say that, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the reprisal attack against the al-Qaida-Taliban axis was justifiable, not to “bring democracy”, but to respond to an act of war. In Afghanistan a terrorist group had taken over the levers of a nation state and used that state as a base from which to attack the United States. For all I know, Mishra may feel that instead of fighting back, America should have apologized to al-Qaida for its foreign policy misdeeds and accepted that those killed in the Trade Centre towers deserved to die. I do not accuse him of that. Neither should he accuse me of what I did not say.

But Mishra has stranger fish to fry. Not content with attacking Nabokov, Bellow, Updike, Martin Amis and myself for “selective humanism”, he states: “Of course, violence and exploitation underpin all nation states, democratic or not.” This – what shall I call it? – this satanic view of human society as invariably founded upon evil is his reason for proposing the existence of a moral equivalence between powerful democracies and powerful tyrannies, and between writers' responses to living in free and unfree societies.

Mo Yan in the NYRB blog:

Getting into the People’s Liberation Army was hard, but not as hard as getting into college. So, starting in 1973, I sent in my application and took a physical exam at the commune every year, and every year I was rejected. But then, in February 1976, with the help of some important people, my persistence paid off—I received my enlistment notice. Soon after that, on a cold, snowy day, I walked some fifteen miles to the county town. There I put on an army uniform and climbed into the back of a military truck for the trip to Huang County, where I moved into the famous “Ding Family Compound” barracks and began basic training. (I would not revisit the site until the fall of 1999, after Huang County had evolved into the city of Longkou and Ding Family Compound had been converted into a museum. What had originally impressed me as the magnificent home of a wealthy landlord I now saw was little more than a squat building, proof that my horizons had broadened.)

After getting through basic training, I was sent, along with three other recruits, to a so-called Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Defense. People back home complimented me on my good luck of having been assigned to such a fine unit, but it actually turned out to be a major disappointment—it was only a radio-monitoring station that was about to be phased out.