Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Salman Rushdie (Letters, Guardian, 16 December) helpfully clarifies that he approved of the assault on Afghanistan since he saw it as simple retribution rather than, as I incorrectly if charitably implied, an attempt at democracy-promotion. But my article was not about Rushdie's strenuous justifications of his government's fiascos. It did not propose a “moral equivalence” between what he calls “free” and “unfree” societies. Nor did it advance the preposterous argument that, as the estimable Perry Linkputs it, “if A is a citizen of country Y, he or she should shut up about country X.”

I actually wrote about the perennially ambiguous relationship between writers and power everywhere, and the unreasonably heavy burden of political obligations placed on fiction writers in non-western countries, particularly those – China, Pakistan, Iran – feared and disliked in the west. I tried to point out that writers in the west are not rated by their willingness to visibly denounce the violence and injustice perpetrated by powerful institutions and individuals in their “free societies”, or expected to address them explicitly and exclusively in their fiction.

Also, no figures of comparable influence in the non-west hold them to account, or point out the correct path to moral redemption and literary glory. Such are the imbalances of geopolitical power that it is hard even to imagine Mo Yan, or any writer in China for that matter, attacking Perry Link and Salman Rushdie for failing to be sufficiently critical of Barack Obama's routine executions using drones (which have killed many times more children than have died in random domestic massacres by crazed gunmen).

More here.

From City Journal:

Tom Wolfe is most identified with New York City, for good reason. He has lived and worked in Manhattan since the early 1960s, and New York dominates his writing the way London looms for Dickens. But Wolfe has never been afraid to venture from his home turf—this fall’s Back to Blood, an exploration of Miami, is a case in point—and his true literary second home is California. Over the course of his career, Wolfe has devoted more pages to the Golden State than to any setting other than Gotham. In his early years, from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, the ratio was almost one-to-one. More to the point, the core insights on which he built his career—the devolution of style to the masses, status as a replacement for social class, the “happiness explosion” in postwar America—all first came to him in California. Even books in which the state figures not at all are informed by Wolfe’s observations of the West. Without California, there would be no Wolfe as we know him—no Bonfire, no Right Stuff, no Radical Chic or Me Decade, none of the blockbuster titles or era-defining phrases that made him world-famous.

And without Wolfe, we would not understand California—or the California-ized modern world. At the time of his most frequent visits, the state was undergoing a profound change, one that affects it to this day and whose every aspect has been exported throughout the country and the globe. Both have become much more like California over the last 40 years, even as California has drifted away from its old self, and Wolfe has chronicled and explained it all.

More here.

From Edge:

I'll tell you the incident in New Guinea that had the biggest influence on my subsequent life. I was with a group of New Guineans doing a survey of birds on a mountain, and we were establishing camps at different elevations on the mountain to survey birds of different elevational ranges. We were moving from one camp up to another camp, and so I'd wanted to choose a new campsite. I found a gorgeous campsite. It was on a place where the ridge broadened out and flattened out. It was a steep drop-off, so I could stand at that edge and look out and see hawks and parrots flying. The broad area of the ridge meant that there was going to be good bird-watching walking around there. And it was beautiful, because my proposed campsite was underneath a gigantic tree, just a gorgeous tree. I was really happy with this campsite. I told the New Guineans, “Let's make camp here.” And greatly to my surprise, they were frightened out of their minds, and they said, “We're not going to sleep here. We'll sleep out in the open, rather than sleep in tents here.” I said, “What's the matter?” They said, “Look at that tree. It's dead.” Okay, so I looked up, and yes, this gigantic tree was dead, but it was solid as iron. And I told them, “All right. So maybe it's dead, but it's going to stand there for another 70 years, it's so huge and solid.” But no, they were just terrified, and they were not going to sleep under that dead tree. They actually did, rather than sleep under the dead tree, they went and slept 100 yards away.

We stayed at that campsite for a week and naturally, nothing happened. I thought that the New Guineans were just being paranoid. And then, this was early in my career, as I got more experienced in New Guinea, I realized, every night I sleep out in New Guinea forest. At some time during the night, I hear the sound of a tree crashing down. And, you see tree falls in New Guinea forest, and I started to do the numbers. Suppose the chances of a dead tree crashing down on you the particular night that you sleep under it is only one in 1,000. But suppose you're a New Guinean, who's going to sleep every night in the forest, or spend 100 nights a year sleeping out in the forest. In the course of 10 years, you will have spent a thousand nights in the forest, and if you camp under dead trees, and each dead tree has a one in 1,000 chance of falling on you and killing you, you're not going to die the first night, but in the course of 10 years, the odds are that you are going to die from sleeping under dead trees. If you're going to do something repeatedly that each time has a very low chance of bringing disaster. But if you're going to do it repeatedly, it will eventually catch up with you. That incident affected me more than anything else, because I realized that in life, we encounter risks that each time the risk is very slight. But if you're going to do it repeatedly, it will catch up with you. And ever since then, I'm now very cautious about how I stand in the shower, how I walk on sidewalks, how I go up and down stairs, how I take left turns in my car.

More here.

Haunts

Don't be afraid, old son, it's only me,
though not as I've appeared before,
on the battlements of your signature,
or margin of a book you can't throw out,
or darkened shop front where your face
first shocks itself into a mask of mine,
but here, alive, one Christmas long ago
when you were three, upstairs, asleep,
and haunting me because I conjured you
the way that child you were would cry out
waking in the dark, and when you spoke
in no child's voice but out of radio silence,
the hall clock ticking like a radar blip.
a bottle breaking faintly blocks away,
you said, as I say now, Don't be afraid.

by Michael Donaghy
from Conjure
Picador, 2000

Christopher Lydon in Transom.org:

Basic starting point: imagine in an interview you’re on a flight (90-minutes or so) to Chicago… You fasten your seatbelt and, to your amazement, find you’re sitting next to this person you’ve been wanting to interview…Magic Johnson, or Jane Austen or Paul Revere. Your mind is jumping to the moment when you can call home and say: you’ll never believe who I just talked with, heart to heart, no kidding.

Try these on the person in the next seat on the flight….

10. You have a definition of victory before you say hello. You’ve got an idea of what you’d like to phone home.

9. But: You’re ready for something entirely different. Jane Austen wants to talk about God, Paul Revere about sex… Somebody says: I know this isn’t what you’re interested in, but… and you know you’re launched.

8. The assignment is essentially about getting people to laugh, or cry. Or gasp. The novelist Alexander Theroux once told a prison writing class I was teaching that Buddy Hackett had it right about comedians and writers: the job is to go out there on stage, bang a nail into the wall, and then pull it out with your backside. I think with pleasure about interviewing Harold Evans about his book The American Century and intuiting from the book that the key moment was Harry Hopkins’ arrival in London with the Lend-Lease promise in 1940, or ’41. Harold Evans was 13 at the time, scared that his country (starting with mum and dad) was going down. I asked him just to talk about Harry Hopkins and sure enough he got to the moment when Hopkins recited from the Book of Ruth to Churchill and his Cabinet: “Whither thou goest, I will go… to the end.” And dear Mr. Evans cried like a baby. Bingo! He said Hopkins made Churchill cry, too.

More here.

The latest issue of Dissent looks at The New Feminsim. You can find Sarah Leonard's introduction here. Michael Walzer on gender and Spheres of Justice:

A feminist friend asked me to write a piece addressed to this question: How would my work have been different if I had engaged with and learned from the feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s? I have tried to respond, in a more personal style than I usually adopt, but with what I hope is a familiar anxiety.

Before I begin, I need to claim an earlier education. In 1953, I dated and later married a woman who was a bolshevik feminist, who wouldn’t let me open a door for her, or help her on with her coat, or pay for her movie tickets, or do any of the things that boys were supposed to do for girls in those benighted days. And we had two daughters who were egalitarian, and argumentative about it, from their first conscious moment. I wanted them to grow up in a society where they could do…whatever they wanted to do. So long before I ever read a feminist tract, I was committed to August Bebel’s proposition that there couldn’t be a just society without “equality of the sexes.”

But that bit of political correctness didn’t necessarily make for what you might call intelligence about gender. If I had been intelligent in that way, what would I have written differently? The book to focus on is Spheres of Justice, which I wrote in the early 1980s. Spheresdeals with the distribution of social goods and bads, the benefits and burdens of our common life, and it includes a discussion of the conventional roles and rewards of men and women. The book provoked a lot of arguments, many of them critical, and for me the most interesting criticism came from feminist writers.

The most important of those writers was the late Susan Moller Okin, a leading member of the remarkable first generation of academic women writing political theory in the United States, which includes Carol Pateman, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amy Gutmann, Nancy Rosenblum, and Iris Marion Young (who, like Okin, died too young). Okin was a student at Harvard and wrote her dissertation with me; in 1979, she turned it into her first book, Women in Western Political Thought. Her second book, Justice, Gender, and the Family, came out in 1989. I wrote a blurb calling it “a brilliantly argued and highly persuasive critique of current theories.” One of those current theories was mine. I want now to ask what I might have learned from Okin’s critique had she written it and had I read it before writing Spheres.

Philip Pilkington in Naked Capitalism:

After reading it [the New York Times article] I initially made my way over to Eurostat to look at the data and see if the facts led to a different narrative of Latvia’s experience with austerity.

Then I realised that this was an entirely pointless endeavour. Much better, I thought, to analyse the article itself rather than the statistics – which, if the reader cares to look into without blinkers will how the information presented by the Times is actually inconsistent with the happy face it attempts to put on Latvia’s exercise. In what follows then I include only details which are found in the original NYT article. We’ll look not at Latvia’s plight but the Times’ narrative to see how coherent it is on its own terms and, most importantly, what it attempts to convey.

The article begins with a story about a man who faced the austerity bravely. Because his newborn son required surgery he bought a tractor and began hauling wood to make ends meet. Quite the imagery, of course. Rugged, sturdy – very Baltic.

This is the theme throughout. Latvia is seen as a country that can endure the pain, whereas countries like Greece cannot. What the author means by this is that in Latvia people have largely accepted the cuts without protest while in Greece they have not. This is conveyed well by the image of the man hauling wood in order to ensure that his newborn child gets the surgery it needs.

What is so unusual about this piece and what strikes the informed reader straight away is that such endurance is seen as curative. As the headline says “used to hardship, Latvia accepts austerity, and pain eases”. The problem is that the piece doesn’t seem to ever substantiate this claim. Sure, there’s the story of a man who fires his employees only to rehire them after the worst of the recession is over, but this is just a story. I’m sure there are similar stories in Ireland, Spain or Greece if an eager reporter were to look hard enough. But when it comes to statistics – you know, the way we generally measure the effects of economic policies – the proof is strangely lacking.

John Quiggin has a couple of interesting posts on the topic over at Crooked Timber (image from Wikipedia):

I’ll start with the central issue of macroeconomics, unemployment. It’s the central issue because macroeconomics begins with Keynes’ claim that a market economy can stay for substantial periods, in a situation of high unemployment and excess supply in all markets. If this claim is false, as argued by both classical and New Classical economists, then there is no need for a separate field of macroeconomics – everything can and should be derived from (standard neoclassical) microeconomics.

The classical view is that unemployment arises from problems in labor markets and can only be addressed by fixing those problems. Within the classical camp, Real Business Cycle theory allows for cyclical unemployment to emerge as an voluntary response to technology shocks and changes in preferences for leisure – hence Krugman’s snarky but accurate quip that, according to RBC, the Great Depression should be called the Great Vacation. More generally, on the classical view, long-term unemployment has to be explained by labour market distortions such as minimum wages, unions, restrictions on hiring and firing, and so on.

The RBC school mostly treated the Great Depression as an exceptional case, to be dealt with later, and they have been no better on the Great Recession. While some have tried, it’s obviously silly to explain the current recession as the product of technology shocks in the ordinary sense of the term. If you treat the financial sector meltdown as a technology shock,RBC amounts to little more than the observation that opium makes you sleepy because of its dormitive quality. Since financial sector booms and busts are clearly driven by the the general business cycle, you get the theory that the business cycle is caused by … the business cycle.

Looking at the broader classical view, there are two big problems. First, over the past twenty or thirty years unions have got weaker nearly everywhere, minumum wages have generally fallen in real terms, or at least relative to average wages, and labour markets have been ‘reformed’ to become more flexible. So, you would expect low and falling unemployment. The low rate of US unemployment in the 1990s and (to a lesser extent) 2000s was indeed taken as a vindication of this prediction. So, sharp increases in unemployment are the opposite of what was expected. The even bigger problem is that, since 2008, unemployment has risen sharply in many different countries, with very different institutions. Many of these countries have reacted by cutting social protections (here’s Latvia, for example)[1] but unemployment has remained high.

Underlying academic debates about the adequacy of totalitarianism as a theoretical category, Tismaneanu suggests, is a question about evil in politics. Rightly, he does not ask which of the two totalitarian experiments was more evil – an approach that easily degenerates into an inconclusive and at times morally repugnant wrangle about numbers. There is a crucial difference, which he acknowledges at several points in The Devil in History, between dying as a result of exclusion from society and being killed as part of a campaign of terror and being marked out for death in a campaign of unconditional extermination – as Jews were by Nazis and their local collaborators in many European countries and German-occupied Soviet Russia. Numerical comparisons pass over this vital moral distinction. While the stigma of being a former person extended throughout families, it was possible to be readmitted into society by undergoing “re-education”, becoming an informer, and generally collaborating with the regime. When Stalin engineered an artificial famine which condemned millions to starvation and consigned peoples such as the Tatars and Kalmyks to deportation and death, he did not aim at their complete annihilation.

more from John Gray at the TLS here.

The discovery of the Higgs is more than a profound vindication of advanced mathematics and its application in theoretical physics. It is also a surprising engineering and political achievement. No single nation is prepared to invest in a project as technically difficult and high-risk as the Large Hadron Collider. The machine itself is 27 kilometres in circumference and is constructed from 9,300 superconducting electromagnets operating at -271.3°C. There is no known place in the universe that cold outside laboratories on earth; in the 13.75 billion years since the Big Bang occurred, the universe is still roughly 1° warmer than the LHC. This makes it by far the largest refrigerator in the world; it contains almost 120 tonnes of liquid helium. Buried inside the magnets are two beam pipes, which, at ultra-high vacuum, contain circulating beams of protons travelling at 99.9999991 per cent the speed of light, circumnavigating the ring 11,245 times every second. Up to 600 million protons are brought into collision every second, and in each of these tiny explosions, the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang are re-created.

more from Brian Cox at The New Statesman here.

For Rainer Maria Rilke the year 1903 did not begin auspiciously. He and his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, were living in Paris, where the poet had come in order to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin. The Rilkes were not exactly dazzled by the City of Light. In a letter to his friend the artist Otto Modersohn, dated New Year’s Eve 1902, the poet spoke of Paris as a “difficult, difficult, anxious city” whose beauty could not compensate “for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the gardens, people and things.” A few lines later he compares the French capital to those cities “of which the Bible tells that the wrath of God rose up behind them to overwhelm them and to shatter them.” As one may gather, Rilke did not tend toward understatement, particularly when speaking of his physical and emotional health. In Paris he suffered a more or less serious nervous collapse, which no doubt clouded his view of the city.

more from John Banville at the NYRB here.

From Scientific American:

Narcissism has long gotten a bad rap. Its unseemly reputation dates back at least to ancient Greek mythology, in which the handsome hunter Narcissus (who undoubtedly would be gloating over his present-day fame) discovered his own reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it. Narcissus was so transfixed by his image that he died staring at it. In 1914 Sigmund Freud likened narcissism to a sexual perversion in which romantic attraction is directed exclusively to the self. Contemporary views are hardly more flattering. Enter the words “narcissists are” into Google, and the four most popular words completing the phrase are “stupid, “evil,” “bullies” and “selfish.”

In 2008 psychologist Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and her colleagues found that narcissism scores have been climbing among American college students in the U.S. for the past few decades. Although the data are controversial, these scholars argue that we are living in an increasingly narcissistic culture. Some of the opprobrium heaped on narcissists is surely deserved. Yet research paints a more nuanced picture. Although narcissists can be difficult and at times insufferable, they can also make effective leaders and performers. Moreover, because virtually all of us share at least a few narcissistic traits, we may be able to learn something about ourselves from understanding them.

More here.

Machines

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

by Michael Donaghy
from Shibboleth, 1998
Oxford University Press

Over at Jacobin, Seth Ackerman proposes this era's version of the Meidner Plan or John Roemer's A Future for Socialism, in Jacobin:

If a deterministic story about free markets generating optimal prices, leading to maximum output was no longer viable, then the failure of planned economies could hardly be attributed to the absence of those features. As Communist systems were collapsing in Eastern Europe, economists who had lost faith in the neoclassical narrative began to argue that an alternative explanation was needed. The most prominent theorist in this group was Joseph Stiglitz, who had become famous for his work on the economics of information. His arguments dovetailed with those of other dissenters from the neoclassical approach, like the eminent Hungarian scholar of planned economies, János Kornai, and evolutionary economists like Peter Murrell.

They all pointed to a number of characteristics, largely ignored by the neoclassical school, that better accounted for the ability of market economies to avoid the problems plaguing centrally planned systems. The aspects they emphasized were disparate, but they all tended to arise from a single, rather simple fact:in market systems firms are autonomous.

That means that within the limits of the law, a firm may enter a market; choose its products and production methods; interact with other firms and individuals; and must close down if it cannot get by on its own resources. As a textbook on central planning put it, in market systems the presumption is “that an activity may be undertaken unless it is expressly prohibited,” whereas in planned systems “the prevailing presumption in most areas of economic life is that an activity may not be undertaken unless permission has been obtained from the appropriate authority.” The neoclassical fixation with ensuring that firms exercised this autonomy in a laissez-faire environment – that restrictions on voluntary exchange be minimized or eliminated — was essentially beside the point.

Jackson Lears reviews Ray Monk's Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer in the LRB:

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of the Manhattan Project and hence ‘father of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer remembered the words from Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ It was his own idiosyncratic translation, and it became his most famous remark. The next day, though, his mood was anything but sombre as he jumped out of a jeep at Los Alamos base camp. His friend and fellow physicist Isidor Rabi said: ‘I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car … his walk was like High Noon … this kind of strut. He had done it.’ His colleague Enrico Fermi ‘seemed shrunken and aged, made of old parchment’ by comparison. Yet his euphoria passed, and he sank into second thoughts, despondent about the calamitous consequences awaiting the Japanese. He walked the corridors mournfully, muttering: ‘I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.’ Racial condescension aside, he meant what he said, and during the days following the test his secretary said he looked as though he were thinking: ‘Oh God, what have we done!’

He was a brilliant physicist, a charismatic leader and a skilful administrator; he was also a deeply reflective and troubled man, sensitive enough to question the conventional wisdom of the powerful even as he struggled to maintain his influence among them. Monk ably captures all these dimensions, in part through sheer accretion of detail. But he does have a central theme, expressed in his title, Inside the Centre. Whatever else Oppenheimer wanted, he always longed to be at the centre of every important theoretical debate and policy discussion he could manage to enter; a child of wealthy and assimilated German Jews on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he was the quintessential outsider as insider – yet never quite the insider he aimed to be, in part due to his own contrarian instincts. Committed to Enlightenment ideals of open inquiry, he submitted to regimes of suspicion and secrecy though without ever giving up his own doubts.

Emily Brennan interviews Katherine Boo in Guernica:

Guernica: After reporting on issues of poverty in the United States for so long, what drew you to write about India?

Katherine Boo: I met my husband, who is from India, in 2001. When I first started going to India, I’d be at these dinner tables where people, claiming a posture of great authority, talked about what was going on in these historically poor communities. They always seemed to fall into two schools of thought: everything had changed with the country’s increasing prosperity, or nothing had changed in the lives of low-income people. I wasn’t a subscriber to either. In fact, I was familiar with these arguments from my experience of writing about the poor in the United States. Most of the people who do the talking about what it’s like for the very poor don’t spend much time with them. That circumstance transcends borders.

It was my husband, who had watched my reporting and fact-checking process, the way I use official documents and taped interviews to be quite precise, who first said to me, “Well, this might be something you can do in India.” And at first, I thought, “I can’t do it. I’m not Indian. If I did write anything, I would just be some stupid white woman writing a stupid thing.” But there were people around me who were saying, “If you do it well, then who you are becomes less important.” My husband and these others were interested in issues of social equality and fairness in India and thought it would be valuable to know what it was like for low-income people there, know it with a little more depth. There was plenty of reporting going on in India, but specifically what I do—follow people over long periods of time—there wasn’t much of that in India. (There are some people in the United States who do it, and do it very well, but there are not a lot of them here, either.) In my kind of work, you don’t parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glimpse. It’s the kind of work in which you ask, what is my understanding of how the world works, and where can I go to see these questions get worked out in individuals’ lives?

Somebody in Boots was Algren’s big chance, but when he stepped into the ring he swung and he missed. It was released in March 1935, and a year later it had sold only 762 copies. Algren hadn’t found a straight job, and after his publishing failure it seemed he wouldn’t be able to make it as a writer. He had nowhere to go, and no idea what to do next, and so resigned himself to nothingness. In the apartment of a girlfriend whose name has been forgotten, Algren removed the gas line from the back of a stove, placed it in his mouth, and breathed methane. The girlfriend discovered Algren nearly but not quite dead, and handed him over to Larry Lipton and Richard Wright, who looked after him for months. Eventually they had him committed to a hospital, which discharged him to his parents’ apartment. He spent the remainder of his life denying his suicide attempt. Seven years passed between the publication of Algren’s first book and his second, and during those years he grew into himself and became the stubborn, hilarious, fiercely loyal, brilliant, pugnacious, and fickle person he would be until his death.

more from Colin Asher at The Believer here.

Sacks’s weekend drug experimentation escalated: a cocktail of amphetamine, LSD, and cannabis let him see true indigo, a color unknown in nature, while morning-glory seeds gave him the conviction that a visitor, in actuality a psychoanalyst colleague of Sacks’s physician parents, was in fact only a replica of the woman he knew. In London, after extracting morphine from the drug cabinet in his parents’ home office and injecting it, he enjoyed a spectacular hallucination of the Battle of Agincourt on the sleeve of his dressing gown, remaining immersed in the vision for more than twelve hours; the span of time lost sufficiently alarmed Sacks that he gave up opiates altogether. In New York, he suffered acute delirium tremens after the sudden cessation of a serious chloral hydrate habit, experiencing intense hallucinations and fending off panic only by writing a clear, almost clinical account of what he saw. It was during this period that Sacks’s vocation as a writer would emerge, and the theme of writing as refuge and remedy will return in Hallucinations as a refrain.

more from Jenny Davidson at Bookforum here.