Adrian Ghenie. Self Portrait #3. 2010.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.

Our friend Mark Blyth's new book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea is to be released soon. Henry Farrell has a review over at Washington Monthly.

On January 25, the British statistics office announced that the United Kingdom’s economy had shrunk by 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. After enduring two recessions in the last four years, Britain is now well on its way into a third. The pain has been compounded by a succession of austerity budgets, in which Britain’s Conservative-led government has tried to hack away at spending. Repeated rounds of cuts have battered the British economy. However, Britain’s chief economic policymaker, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, wants still more pain. He is pushing the government to identify £10 billion more in cuts this year.

This makes no economic sense. Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has pleaded for Britain to start focusing on growth rather than fiscal virtue, claiming that “we’ve never been passionate about austerity.” It doesn’t make any political sense, either. Voters like vague proposals for “reducing government waste” in the abstract, but hate cuts to programs that they care about. Why do so many members of the political elite disagree with Blanchard in their visceral passion for austerity? Why do they keep on pushing for pain when it threatens economic ruin and hurts their election chances?

Mark Blyth’s new book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, gives us some important clues. Many books have been published in the last few years explaining why some economic ideas (the efficient markets hypothesis; the Black-Scholes option pricing model) are dangerous. Blyth, a professor of international political economy at Brown University (and a friend of mine), explains why a blind fixation on austerity is one of these terrible ideas. However, his book does two additional things that other books in this genre do not. First, it asks why bad economic ideas, like austerity, have such powerful consequences. Economists themselves do not think that ideas are powerful, and their models usually assume that people are motivated by straightforward self-interest rather than complicated notions. Second, it asks why these ideas keep on coming back. Every time governments have experimented with austerity, it has led to disaster, and yet a couple of decades later, their successors try again, with equally dismal consequences.

Tim Adams in The Observer:

What will you remember of the people you love? Many of us have had that thought from time to time, but no one I know has ever had to give it the attention that Sonali Deraniyagala has given it.

Versions of that question took hold in her head in the days after Christmas 2004, and they have never left. She had spent that Christmas with her family on holiday from their home in London at a nature reserve, Yala, in the south of her native Sri Lanka. On Boxing Day she looked out of her hotel room window and noticed that the sea was behaving a bit oddly. Just that. It had come further up the beach than before. What she was seeing was in fact the first sign of the wave – she didn't yet know the word tsunami, few of us did – that would in the minutes that followed sweep away all of the life she knew. She would be carried on that unfathomable water for nearly two miles inland, survive only by clinging to the branch of a tree, and it would claim the lives of her husband, Steve Lissenburgh, then 40, her two young sons, Vikram, seven, and Nikhil (or Malli as he was known, “little brother”), five, and those of her parents, who were staying in the room next door. And after the water had gone, the questions of remembering, and the related ones, of how to go on living, flooded in, inundated her.

I first knew Sonali not as the bearer of all those terrible facts, the asker of those questions, but as a fabulous smile. About 10 years ago, as was then compulsory in north London, my wife Lisa joined a little book group of four with her close friend Sarah. Sonali, whose son Vikram was a best friend of Sarah's son Noah, was one of the four. I remember Lisa coming back from the first meeting and saying how she had met this great woman, a lecturer in economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, super clever and sharply funny, and who never stopped laughing. In the weeks and months that followed, that latter observation seemed to me literally true. I'd usually make myself scarce on book-club nights at our house, pausing just to say extended hellos as wine bottles were clattering in the kitchen and that week's offering – Brick Lane orAusterlitz – was cracked open for wayward discussion. And there was Sonali, smiling as if she would never stop.

Robin West in The Boston Review:

Radical is more than just a memoir studded with encomia to brilliant instructors. It is also an argument for her thesis that truly excellent teaching is not only necessary but may even be sufficient for students’ academic success. Once Rhee’s book turns to more contentious matters and her opponents take flesh and blood form, it becomes a manifesto for her approach to school reform. Readers are invited to take sides, and we should. Whether her agenda should be followed depends in part on the strength of her argument in its favor, and not only on her personal story, the tales of superstar teachers, or on the results she may or may not have achieved as a public official for a brief time.

Read as a defense of the claim that we should not only put students first, but that doing so requires a steady focus on ensuring excellent teaching and little else, the book disappoints. The argument for an aggressive anti-union program that will require firing teachers and closing schools and potentially result in losses for union-backed Democratic politicians will almost assuredly not satisfy Rhee’s critics, both in the teachers’ unions and more generally.

The fault for this does not lie solely with the critics’ self interest, as Rhee has protested in multiple interviews. It is not only the wrath of tenured mediocre teachers that is feeding the backlash against her reforms. It is also, I suspect, a far more justifiable sense that those reforms may not be so radical or so effectively put students first. Even for those who accept Rhee’s premise—that access to good teaching is paramount and that a recalcitrant educational bureaucracy stands in its way—there is too much that is missing from her prescription and not nearly enough engagement with that prescription’s costs.

Donald Morse on Kurt Vonnegut's Literary Remains, in the LA Review of Books:

KURT VONNEGUT (1922-2007) stands in the long line of Emersonian American writers — those who, in Emerson’s words, “utter our painful secret,” or as Vonnegut put it in Timequake: “many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone’.” The latter reassurance echoes and reechoes throughout his novels because of Vonnegut’s core belief, articulated in an interview, that “the great American disease is loneliness.” Hence his emphasis on the need for community (Timequake) and his on-going experiments with constructing artificial extended families (Slapstick). In addition, Vonnegut shares with Thoreau a sense of being but a “sojourner” — to which he adds the ethical imperative that we must “help one another get through whatever this is.” And like Mark Twain, he responds to his country’s shortcomings, failures, and pretensions with satire, while engaging and absorbing the common and the vulgar.

At the time of his death, Vonnegut was acclaimed as one of the United States’s most important twentieth-century writers — one who may also be seen as the representative post-World War II American writer both because of his subject matter and his innovative techniques. The five years since his death have seen a series of both good and unfortunate posthumous publications bearing his name, along with editions of his letters and interviews and a major full-scale biography. The compilation of interviews Tom McCartan selected from the last 35 years of Vonnegut’s life, Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2011), nicely supplements William Rodney Allen’s earlier and much larger compendium, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut(1988), while Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him (Da Capo Press, 2009) records Loree Rackstraw and Vonnegut’s enduring friendship begun during his stay at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1960s. Rackstraw, an astute literary critic, also proves one of Vonnegut’s most competent readers.

Owen Hatherley reviews Jonathan Meades Museum without Walls, in the LRB:

Jonathan Meades, for the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment, has finally published a book on the subject. A volume did appear in 1988 – English Extremists, written with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Cook, celebrating the postmodern architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilson Gough – but since then his medium has been television. Meades has never been a fully paid-up architectural correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped destroy Ian Nairn, the pugnacious, melancholic writer and broadcaster who is his most obvious precursor. It’s telling that this book doesn’t appear courtesy of the Architectural Association or any of the other publishers you might have expected to show an interest, but as part of a ‘crowdsourced’ endeavour with dozens of benefactors chipping in to pay for publication.

Clancy Martin in Harper:

In 1994, when my eldest daughter was born, “Ferber-izing” (after Dr. Richard Ferber, a pediatrician who specializes in child sleep disorders) was all the rage. The idea was that very small children, indeed newborn babies, should learn to sleep in their own beds: they’d cry themselves to sleep for a few nights, so the theory went, and then they’d get used to it. I learned from Diamond that this practice was common in Germany for many years:

The magic words for German parents were that children should acquire Selbstständigkeit (meaning, approximately, “self-reliance”) and Ordnungsliebe (literally, “love of order,” including self-control and complying with the wishes of others) as quickly as possible. German parents considered American children spoiled, because American parents attended too quickly to a child’s crying.

My wife and I tried this once. I remember the night. She asked me to leave the house — I couldn’t take the screaming. When I came back, an hour later, our daughter was asleep in bed next to her, her infant mouth still attached to her mother’s breast. She “co-slept” with us — despite the strong moral disapproval of many of our friends, who thought we were coddling her and interfering with her independence — for years afterward.

When my next daughter was born, Ferberizing was still around, and my second wife, too, thought that our new baby would learn independence from crying herself to sleep. Then she changed her mind and decided that both of our daughters (a second quickly followed the first) would be allowed to sleep in bed with us for as long as they liked. All three of my daughters are what Diamond calls WEIRD children: children of a Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic society. Here, according to Diamond, is how they’re probably being raised:

We follow the rabbit-antelope pattern: the mother or someone else occasionally picks up and holds the infant in order to feed or play with it, but does not carry the infant constantly; the infant spends much or most of the time during the day in a crib or playpen; and at night the infant sleeps by itself, usually in a separate room from the parents.

Ha! I wish. During the first two years of my daughters’ lives, it was an open question whether or not the girls could walk. In fact, my eldest never crawled at all, because she had developed the more efficient practice of sitting and yelling until she was picked up and carried to wherever she wanted to go. Both of my younger daughters, now ages six and eight, still regularly demand to be carried when they are tired of walking. A friend of mine, a tattoo artist, often has his girls with him in his studio all day long, surrounded by the instruments of his craft — precisely the sorts of “dangerous tools” Diamond believes only the children of hunter-gatherer societies are exposed to. The same problem extends to Diamond’s overgeneralizations about how Western parents discipline and educate their children. He has done a fascinating job of studying how hunter-gatherer societies raise their children, but he doesn’t seem to have spent enough time observing how contemporary Westerners actually raise their children. It’s probably true that most of us wish our children would spend hours “playing with their plastic ready-made store-bought toys,” but the fact is that they don’t. They unwrap the damn things at Christmas, and within an hour they’re having more fun jumping on the bubble wrap than flying the $50 remote-control helicopter.

What I’m suggesting is that the difference between “their kids and our kids” is much smaller than Diamond argues, or perhaps that we would like to pretend. Even violent disciplinarians like my stepfather — the exception, not the rule, in our society — are found among hunter-gatherers: Diamond tells the frightening story of a mother who beats her child until, still unsatisfied by her tears, she rubs her face with stinging nettles. I do see one key difference between how we parent in the West and in the societies Diamond describes: We WEIRD parents of WEIRD children worry far more about whether or not we’re parenting properly. We lie about how we parent or don’t parent; we’re hypocrites and judge other parents for not doing what we ourselves don’t do (or for doing what we ourselves also do). We spend millions of dollars on books, toys, manuals, tutors, and videos for our own and our children’s entertainment and education, and still we are freaked out about whether or not we are doing it properly. First “helicoptering” is necessary in the terrifying contemporary world, then it’s morally blameworthy; first laissez-faire parenting is the new way, then it’s for irresponsible slackers. We parent with “love and logic,” or whatever the latest bestseller prescribes. “The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time,” Diamond writes, “are worth considering seriously.” But we don’t have to consider them; most of us are already practicing them. From the time they’re newborns, your kids are pretty clear about their needs, about what serves their flourishing and what interferes with it — and most of us, whether we admit it or not, get with the program quickly enough, just as I and both my wives did in the face of the popular moral conviction that the Ferber method was how all good parents would teach their newborns to sleep alone.

You new parents: your child-rearing instincts are the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary programming. The one way you’ll mess it up is by overthinking it.

More here.

Ruchira Gupta in The Telegraph:

India is on the brink of a paradigm shift in its legal framework to deal with human trafficking based on the Justice Verma Committee recommendations set up after the December 16 rape in Delhi. Through the current Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance, 2013 and the proposed changes to the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill and the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, 1956, India has finally broadened the definition of trafficking to include all forms of enslavement — from servitude to prostitution. These amendments will bring India on a par with the UN Protocol to End Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. The trafficking definition legally explains exploitation, the exploiter and the exploited for the first time in India’s Independent history. Exploitation is defined as forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude, the forced removal of organs and prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation.

…These recommendations pave the way for our country to create a contemporary, democratic society where women and girls can live lives free of male violence. It addresses both the urgency of the crisis in India, where 17 women are raped “officially” everyday, and hopefully sets the stage for legislation that will recognise that any society that claims to defend principles of legal, political, economic and social equality for women and girls must reject the idea that women and children, mostly girls, are commodities that can be bought, sold and sexually exploited by men. To do otherwise is to allow that a separate class of female human beings, especially women and girls who are economically and caste-wise marginalised, is excluded from measures being set in place for women’s security. As well as from the universal protection of human dignity enshrined in our Constitution and the body of international human rights instruments developed during the past 60 years.

More here. (Note: Dear friend Ruchira Gupta is the founder president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, a grassroots movement to end sex trafficking.)

From Orion Magazine:

Ice is a seed.

Balls of ice sowed seeds of life on Earth. That’s what comets are, just clumps of ice holding interstellar rocks and dust. But in that dust are amino acids and nucleotides that build living things. Many scientists think that this might be one way life began on Earth, 4 billion years ago, when the spinning arms of the galaxy cast comets over the planet, comets and comets and comets, protolife smacking onto the broken lava plains, until basins gathered the meltwater into oceans, and the oceans nurtured onrushing life. Ice sows ice, too. The first grains gleamed in white sunshine, throwing back the sun’s heat and cooling their own small shadows. More ice formed in the cool places, and the shine of it cooled a larger shadow, until the reflectivity of the growing ice sheets cooled the whole planet, finally draped in dazzling layers of ice. Now the glaciers that remain in mountain valleys give life to rivers—the Ganges, the Fraser, the Colorado—as meltwater slides down blue rills and finally cuts a channel through gravel and till.

A seed is a book.

In hot winds at the end of summer, mountain mahogany seeds unfurl. Each pod sprouts a few white feathers, loosely coiled. A feather-seed lofts over the ridge and drifts onto dirt. After a hard rain, the seed swells and uncoils, augering its hard head into the soil. There it plants all the instructions for making a mountain mahogany sapling, laid out in the language of DNA. A seed is a conveyance system for information. It is words taken wing—words written in the language of adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, ancient instructions clasped between hard covers, everything needed to carry a story to a new place where it can take root. Long before writers figured it out, seed-bearing plants had found a way to convey to the next generation wisdom accumulated over millions of years. A samara is wisdom with ailerons. A dryas seed is a set of instructions with hair as wild as Einstein’s. A dandelion seed is an epic on a parachute. A sandbur seed is a poem stuck to a sock. An elm seed is a prayer book: This way is life. This way is rootedness.

More here. (Note: Do take a few minutes to watch the stunning video)

From Yale News:

The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse.

Scientists have long known that the young and old brains are very different. Adolescent brains are more malleable or plastic, which allows them to learn languages more quickly than adults and speeds recovery from brain injuries. The comparative rigidity of the adult brain results in part from the function of a single gene that slows the rapid change in synaptic connections between neurons. By monitoring the synapses in living mice over weeks and months, Yale researchers have identified the key genetic switch for brain maturation a study released March 6 in the journal Neuron. The Nogo Receptor 1 gene is required to suppress high levels of plasticity in the adolescent brain and create the relatively quiescent levels of plasticity in adulthood. In mice without this gene, juvenile levels of brain plasticity persist throughout adulthood. When researchers blocked the function of this gene in old mice, they reset the old brain to adolescent levels of plasticity. “These are the molecules the brain needs for the transition from adolescence to adulthood,” said Dr. Stephen Strittmatter. Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology, Professor of Neurobiology and senior author of the paper. “It suggests we can turn back the clock in the adult brain and recover from trauma the way kids recover.”

More here.

Now, The Undivided Past suggests, the only solidarity that is acceptable is solidarity with humankind: nothing less will do because anything more partial risks dividing us, and division means fisticuffs or worse. Yet is there not something ultimately quietist about writing off many of the conceptual vehicles that have previously allowed people to mobilise? Not all conflict, after all, is bad and justice sometimes may even require it. Behind Cannadine’s story of identities that need to be shrugged off is the interesting intellectual question of when we all got so hung up on this business of identity and started seeing it as something limiting rather than liberating. Nazism and fascism took the shine off nationalism for many European liberals. “Identity” began to be used in the contemporary sense sometime in the 1950s but it acquired a harder and more negative edge during the culture wars on British and American campuses. In an earlier book, Ornamentalism (2001), Cannadine criticised Edward Saïd’s influential account of Orientalism by claiming that in the British empire divisions of class trumped race. In The Undivided Past he seeks to do away with such categories completely, trumping them by an appeal to our common humanity.

more from Mark Mazower at the FT here.

When Whitey Bulger was arrested in Santa Monica late on the afternoon of June 22, 2011, it brought to an end one of the longest, and strangest, manhunts in U.S. history. Nearly 82, Bulger had spent 15 years hiding in plain sight in an apartment complex near the Pacific with longtime girlfriend Cathy Greig. In that time, he had literally reinvented himself: from a ruthless murderer and extortionist, who for more than a quarter century ruled South Boston, or Southie, to a grandfatherly figure, white-haired, bearded and nondescript. “We were looking for a gangster, and that was part of the problem,” explains former Boston police detective Charles Fleming in Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy’s “Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice,” a definitive account of Bulger’s life and the city that helped create him. “He wasn’t a gangster anymore.”

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

We are used to thinking of life based upon the distinctive properties of carbon and water. It does not have to be like that, according to astrobiologists. Life probably requires solvents, and a way for complex molecules to be built up: a prerequisite for self-replication that is one of life’s essential features. However, out on Titan (a moon of Saturn) there is liquid methane in which life could arise and whole new biochemical pathways could be imagined. A National Research Council report concludes: “If life is an intrinsic property of chemical reactivity, life should exist on Titan.” ut why stop there? On Triton (a moon of Neptune), where temperatures are so low that gases liquefy, a metabolism based on strange silica compounds and liquid nitrogen has been posited. Or again, astrobiologists have proposed life in the clouds surrounding Venus, and based on sulfuric acid. Why not life around red dwarfs if one tweaks the elements in a different fashion?

more from Richard Fortey at the NY Times here.