Cassatt’s biographer, Nancy Mowll Mathews, attributes the artist’s affinity for printmaking to her impatience with academic drawing. That’s a shrewd observation; Cassatt used printmaking to keep the image in play, to evade the demand for finish. In the exhibition, there are several opportunities to see two or three versions of the same image and study how Cassatt revised a composition as she worked through her thoughts about it. And any single image can also disclose the restless exploratory nature of Cassatt’s immersion in her subject matter. The earliest of her prints at the NYPL is a costume study after Paul Gavarni from around 1878. In its first state, there is a rather conventional figure against a nearly blank ground; in the second, the ground has been filled in with dark mottling, and details have dropped out of the figure. In the third, the figure has become a vaporous near-absence amid a nocturnal space. All three versions were still in Degas’s studio at his death.

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

From Nature:

If a salamander loses its leg, it can grow a new one. Humans and other mammals are not so fortunate, but we can regenerate the tips of our digits, as long as enough of the nail remains. This was first shown some 40 years ago; today researchers finally reveal why it is that nails are necessary. Working with mice, researchers led by Mayumi Ito at New York University have identified a population of stem cells lying beneath the base of the nail that can orchestrate the restoration of a partially amputated digit. However, the cells can do so only if sufficient nail epithelium — the tissue that lies immediately below the nail — remains. The results are published on Nature's website today¹.

The process is limited compared with the regenerative powers of amphibians, but the two share many features, from the molecules that are involved to the fact that nerves are necessary. “I was amazed by the similarities,” says Ito. “It suggests that we partly retain the regeneration mechanisms that operate in amphibians.” By labelling groups of nail cells so that all the daughter cells they produced were blue, Ito, together with Makoto Takeo and others, showed that the nail base contains a small population of self-renewing stem cells, which sustain the nail’s continuous growth. This ongoing growth depends on signals carried by the Wnt family of proteins — if this signalling pathway is disrupted, mouse nails cannot form.

More here.

From Columbia.edu

Sze has won acclaim for her minutely detailed, accumulative installations, in which everyday items such as coffee cups, plastic bottles and electrical fans become vital objects that defy the boundaries between the throwaway and the precious, the mundane and the monumental. Sze has always been known for work that challenges viewers to experience space in unexpected ways, and her installation at the U.S. Pavilion at the Biennale promises to do the same on a grand scale. Sze has created a sequence of constructed environments that will activate the Pavilion’s architecture and extend beyond the building and into the courtyard, blurring the perceptual boundaries between the site’s interior and exterior.

Sarah Sze was born in Boston in 1969. She received a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. She has received critical acclaim for her public commissions and site-specific installations, including recent commissions for the New York City High Line, the Cartier Foundation, the Carnegie International and the São Paolo Biennial. A MacArthur Fellow and Louis Comfort Tiffany Award winner, she has challenged architectures and captivated viewers with her large-scale constructions that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings, burrow into the ground and stretch across museums. Solo museum projects include at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Institute of Contemporary Art, London. An exhibition of Sze’s drawings, Infinite Line was on view at the Asia Society in New York last year.

More here.

My Father Built England

‘Show me your hands.’ It was the only question
The foreman asked. They were your references
And your scholarship. That is why my father used
Piss to harden his schoolboy hands, as was custom
When blisters set fire to the skin, an ancient trick
Shown to him by a Meath man who died beneath
A truck, sober in Kilburn. In 1939, England needed
A solid Paddy full of gristle, to be counted on,
Semi-British for the duration. You supply your own
Sweat and wellies but could pick a white virgin
Shovel from the Gaffer and return it sharp, shined
By gravel. Only once was he broken, when black
Winds blew down the scaffolding; its tubular legs
Dancing across the unfinished airstrip. As he lay
Dead, a Geordie Tea-Boy nursed him well.
Wet Time was a bloody nightmare; always under
The Landlady’s feet and once he was thrown
Out of digs in a row about Rex’s favourite chair.
It was 1942 before he could pin fifty pounds to
The inside of his overcoat and take himself home.
Then, while German bombs fell on England,
My father built Ireland for Hogan and Son.

by Ron Carey
from Southward Journal
April 2013

Mathieu von Rohr in Spiegel:

[T]he mood hanging over the country is depressed. France is in the midst of the biggest crisis of the Fifth Republic. It feels as if the French model had reached an end stage, not just in terms of the economy, but also in politics and society. A country that long dismissed its problems is going through a painful process of adjustment to reality and, as was the case last week, can now expect to be issued warnings by the European Commission and prompted to implement reforms.

France's plight was initially apparent in the economy, which has been stagnating for five years, because French state capitalism no longer works. But the crisis reaches deeper than that. At issue is a political class that more than three quarters of the population considers corrupt, and a president who, this early in his term, is already more unpopular than any of his predecessors. At issue is a society that is more irreconcilably divided into left and right than in almost any other part of Europe. And, finally, at issue is the identity crisis of a historically dominant nation that struggles with the fact that its neighbor, Germany, now sets the tone on the continent.

The French economy has been in gradual decline for years, without any president or administration having done anything decisive about it. But now, ignoring the problems is no longer an option. The economy hasn't grown in five years and will even contract slightly this year. A record 3.26 million Frenchmen are unemployed, youth unemployment is at 26.5 percent, consumer purchasing power has declined, and consumption, which drives the French economy, is beginning to slow down, as well.

There is a more positive side of the story, which sometimes pales in the face of all the bad news. France is the world's fifth-largest economy, and interest rates for government bonds have been at historic lows for months. The country is far from being on the verge of bankruptcy and cannot be compared with Italy or Spain, and certainly not with Greece. Nevertheless, France is ailing. And looking weak is something the French themselves hate more than anything else.

Margaret Wertheim in Aeon:

Theoretical physics is beset by a paradox that remains as mysterious today as it was a century ago: at the subatomic level things are simultaneously particles and waves. Like the duck-rabbit illusion first described in 1899 by the Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, subatomic reality appears to us as two different categories of being.

But there is another paradox in play. Physics itself is riven by the competing frameworks of quantum theory and general relativity, whose differing descriptions of our world eerily mirror the wave-particle tension. When it comes to the very big and the extremely small, physical reality appears to be not one thing, but two. Where quantum theory describes the subatomic realm as a domain of individual quanta, all jitterbug and jumps, general relativity depicts happenings on the cosmological scale as a stately waltz of smooth flowing space-time. General relativity is like Strauss — deep, dignified and graceful. Quantum theory, like jazz, is disconnected, syncopated, and dazzlingly modern.

Physicists are deeply aware of the schizophrenic nature of their science and long to find a synthesis, or unification. Such is the goal of a so-called ‘theory of everything’. However, to non-physicists, these competing lines of thought, and the paradoxes they entrain, can seem not just bewildering but absurd. In my experience as a science writer, no other scientific discipline elicits such contradictory responses.

An editorial in Scientific American:

“We will get woolly mammoths back.” So vowed environmentalist Stewart Brand at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February in laying out his vision for reviving extinct species. The mammoth isn't the only vanished creature Brand and other proponents of “de-extinction” want to resurrect. The passenger pigeon, Caribbean monk seal and great auk are among the other candidates—all species that blinked out at least in part because of Homo sapiens. “Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years,” Brand asserted. “We have the ability now—and maybe the moral obligation—to repair some of the damage.”

Just a few years ago such de-extinction was the purview of science fiction. Now it is so near at hand that in March, Brand's Long Now Foundation, along with TED and the National Geographic Society, convened an entire conference on the topic. Indeed, thanks to recent advances in cloning and the sequencing of ancient DNA, among other feats of biotechnology, researchers may soon be able to re-create any number of species once thought to be gone for good.

That does not mean that they should, however. The idea of bringing back extinct species holds obvious gee-whiz appeal and a respite from a steady stream of grim news. Yet with limited intellectual bandwidth and financial resources to go around, de-extinction threatens to divert attention from the modern biodiversity crisis.

Attraction and repulsion combined to create a sick fascination for Shillong’s street food when I was growing up in that city in the 1980s and 90s. Brightly-coloured ice lollies, whose flavour diminished as their oranges and yellows drained into one’s mouth, were sold out of ice-boxes slung around the necks of their itinerant vendors, and were nicknamed ‘nala-pani’ or drain water. The dubious provenance of the water that went into them made them something of a delicious taboo. It is impossible to separate the lure of aloo-muri from the unwashed hands of their makers The channa-wallahs, who rang little bells to attract customers to their none-too-clean but delectable wares, were itinerant too, unlike the aloo-muri men who always occupied strategic spots outside schools; they did their best business in the late afternoon when bored and hungry children poured out of classrooms. It is impossible to separate the lure of aloo-muri from the unwashed hands of their makers, the weathered, rusting tins that hold powdered masalas, the grated white papaya standing open to the elements, and the muddy looking tamarind water. This mix of puffed rice and boiled potatoes is Shillong’s signature street food; its overpowering spiciness, so strong that it actually kills all taste, and so remote from the milder and earthier flavours of the food native to the city, is a combination of the forbidden, the grubby and the exotic.

more from Anjum Hasan at Granta here.

Today, Taksim Square is Istanbul’s chestnut tree. I’ve been living in Istanbul for sixty years, and I cannot imagine that there is a single inhabitant of this city who does not have at least one memory connected to Taksim Square. In the nineteen-thirties, the old artillery barracks, which the government now wants to convert into a shopping mall, contained a small football stadium that hosted official matches. The famous club Taksim Gazino, which was the center of Istanbul night life in the nineteen-forties and fifties, stood on a corner of Gezi Park. Later, buildings were demolished, trees were cut down, new trees were planted, and a row of shops and Istanbul’s most famous art gallery were set up along one side of the park. In the nineteen-sixties, I used to dream of becoming a painter and displaying my work at this gallery. In the seventies, the square was home to enthusiastic celebrations of Labor Day, led by leftist trade unions and N.G.O.s; for a time, I took part in these gatherings. (In 1977, forty-two people were killed in an outburst of provoked violence and the chaos that followed.) In my youth, I watched with curiosity and pleasure as all manner of political parties—right wing and left wing, nationalists, conservatives, socialists, and social democrats—held rallies in Taksim.

more from Orhan Pamuk at The New Yorker here.

From Five Books:

Tell me why you started with the sayings of the Buddha.

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear.

Is there a specific saying that you particularly like?

There are two big ideas that I found especially useful when I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. One is an idea common to most great intellectual traditions. The quote is: ‘All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.’ It’s not unique to Buddha, but it is one of the earliest statements of that idea, that we need to focus on changing our thoughts, rather than making the world conform to our wishes.

The other big idea is that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. Buddha uses this metaphor: ‘My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant.’

More here.

Santiago Zabala and Creston Davis in Al Jazeera:

At a recent Google Zeitgeist conference, Stephen Hawking boldly pronounced that “philosophy is dead”.

It is dead, he thinks, because philosophy is passé. Hawking believes philosophy is like a guy who shows up at a cocktail party just after the guests have left. Why would one of the most intelligent humans alive say such a provocative thing? His reasons are obvious: “Philosophers,” Hawking says, “have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”

According to Hawking, the conversation about the truth of the world rests in the hands of elite physics professors funded by multinational corporations and national governments. Should we believe this pronouncement just because it comes from an eminence such as Hawking? Could it be that some categorical mistake has been committed by the likes of Hawking who, in our opinion, mistakes philosophy for theology?

The debate over the death of philosophy begun by Hawking not only rests on wrong premises, but also searches for an inadequate solution. First, philosophy is still taught in universities, and second, philosophers continue to write books that disagree on the meaning of our existential relation with the world. We submit that a more precise question needs to be addressed: Which philosophy is dead?

More here.

From Phys.org:

Most of the matter in the universe may be made out of particles that possess an unusual, donut-shaped electromagnetic field called an anapole.

This proposal, which endows dark matter particles with a rare form of electromagnetism, has been strengthened by a detailed analysis performed by a pair of theoretical physicists at Vanderbilt University: Professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho. An article about the research was published online last month by the journal Physics Letters B.

“There are a great many different theories about the nature of dark matter. What I like about this theory is its simplicity, uniqueness and the fact that it can be tested,” said Scherrer.

In the article, titled “Anapole Dark Matter,” the physicists propose that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up 85 percent of the all the matter in the universe, may be made out of a type of basic particle called the Majorana fermion. The particle's existence was predicted in the 1930's but has stubbornly resisted detection.

A number of physicists have suggested that dark matter is made from Majorana particles, but Scherrer and Ho have performed detailed calculations that demonstrate that these particles are uniquely suited to possess a rare, donut-shaped type of electromagnetic field called an anapole. This field gives them properties that differ from those of particles that possess the more common fields possessing two poles (north and south, positive and negative) and explains why they are so difficult to detect.

More here.

From New Statesman:

Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra focuses on the ten years from 1977, when the pianist Liberace met Scott Thorson, who became his lover as well as chauffeuring him onstage in a cream Rolls-Royce for his Las Vegas performances. How best to explain Liberace? As a child in the 1970s, I was struck by his similarity to the most decadent item in our larder, the Mr Kipling French Fancy. It was even jazzier than the Viscount biscuit (imagine: a biscuit in a wrapper!) but it also made me slightly sick. That’s Liberace: imagine a French Fancy at a grand piano, decked out in jewellery that would make the average hip-hop performer look frugal, and you’re in the right ballroom. I mean, ballpark. No sooner have the posters come down for Side Effects, which Soderbergh announced would mark his farewell to cinema, than this new movie is upon us. To the casual observer, the director may seem like the child who has difficulty starting his sponsored silence (“I’m not talking from . . . now! No – from now”). However, Behind the Candelabra was made for television. Soderbergh had hoped to make it for cinema, only to be told by studio executives that it was too gay. Instead, he shot it for HBO, the pioneering US cable network responsible for almost every great TV series of the past 15 years. For Hollywood to reject something starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, the project would have to be as gay as a white, fox-fur coat with a 16-foot train, or a hunk in a diamante posing pouch, or a rhinestoneencrusted queen being pleasured in the back room of a Los Angeles porn shop. Behind the Candelabra features all these and more.

…The movie’s richness lies in its performances. Damon negotiates skilfully Scott’s descent from bliss to frazzled insecurity. Rob Lowe has a succulent cameo as a plastic surgeon whose rigid, feline pout reveals that he has been getting high on his own supply. Douglas, meanwhile, conveys sublimely a creosoted smarm that is rarely unsympathetic. He has captured the preening, liquid voice (he pronounces Scott’s name “Scaaaaart”) and he convinces us that Liberace’s declarations of intimacy were no less sincere for being reproduced verbatim onstage in front of thousands or in a hot tub with his latest squeeze.

More here. (Note: Brilliant performance by Michalel Douglas…see the film if you can.)

From Nature:

In the push to match medical therapies to the genetic underpinnings of disease, lung-cancer treatments have been at the frontier. But the 1.6 million people diagnosed with this cancer every year will take scant comfort in knowing that of the past 20 late-stage trials of drugs to treat it, only two yielded positive results. And in only one of those 20 were patients chosen systematically by screening for biomarkers such as relevant blood proteins or DNA sequences.

Now, an ambitious project aims to improve those success rates and speed new treatments to market by matching companies with the patients whose tumours are most genetically relevant to the therapies they are trying to develop. The project is slated to launch next year and, if successful, could be expanded to other cancers. The project was spearheaded by the Friends of Cancer Research, a think tank and advocacy group in Washington DC, and has won the support of the US National Cancer Institute and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The idea is to streamline the drug-approval process by bringing pharmaceutical companies together to test multiple experimental drugs in late-stage clinical trials under a single, ‘master’ protocol. “The drive is to make the whole process of personalized medicine more efficient,” says Eric Rubin, vice-president of oncology clinical research at Merck, a pharmaceutical firm based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey.

More here.

Over at Princeton University Press:

The arguments found here have been gestating for a long time, as I wrote about peasants, class conflict, resistance, development projects, and marginal peoples in the hills of Southeast Asia. Again and again over three decades, I found myself having said something in a seminar discussion or having written something and then catching myself thinking, “Now, that sounds like what an anarchist would argue.” In geometry, two points make a line; but when the third, fourth, and fifth points all fall on the same line, then the coincidence is hard to ignore. Struck by that coincidence, I decided it was time to read the anarchist classics and the histories of anarchist movements. To that end, I taught a large undergraduate lecture course on anarchism in an effort to educate myself and perhaps work out my relationship to anarchism. The result, having sat on the back burner for the better part of twenty years after the course ended, is assembled here.

My interest in the anarchist critique of the state was born of disillusionment and dashed hopes in revolutionary change. This was a common enough experience for those who came to political consciousness in the 1960s in North America. For me and many others, the 1960s were the high tide of what one might call a romance with peasant wars of national liberation. I was, for a time, fully swept up in this moment of utopian possibilities. I followed with some awe and, in retrospect, a great deal of naiveté the referendum for independence in Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea, the pan-African initiatives of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, the early elections in Indonesia, the independence and first elections in Burma, where I had spent a year, and, of course, the land reforms in revolutionary China and nationwide elections in India.

The disillusionment was propelled by two processes: historical inquiry and current events. It dawned on me, as it should have earlier, that virtually every major successful revolution ended by creating a state more powerful than the one it overthrew, a state that in turn was able to extract more resources from and exercise more control over the very populations it was designed to serve.

Pranab Bardhan reviews some recent books on development in The Boston Review:

The classical economists, from William Petty and Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, were all development economists. They offered general theories of markets and growth and wrote about a particular developing country (typically Britain) going through a process of industrial transformation.

Then, for more than a century, development shifted from the economic and intellectual core to the periphery. Debates about development focused on controversies over Soviet industrialization and on the need for protectionist policies to defend infant industries in places—such as the United States, Germany, Eastern Europe, Australia, and India—trying to “catch up” with England.

After the Second World War, as a large number of countries became independent (or “liberated,” as in China), development economics blossomed but remained at the intellectual margins of the economics discipline. Underdevelopment was conventionally understood as the product of market and institutional failures. In the prevailing paradigm, such failures were regarded as exotic exceptions or as the remediable results of bad policies instituted by new governments.

The challenges of persistent poverty and underdevelopment eventually undercut this intellectual marginalization. In the last three decades of the 20th century, economists recognized that standard market-equilibrium models—with their smoothly functioning invisible hands—break down in the context of information failures and dysfunctional institutions in all economies. So economists started paying more attention to rumblings from the periphery. As Joseph Stiglitz put the problem in a 1989 essay:

A study of less developed countries is to economics what the study of pathology is to medicine; by understanding what happens when things do not work well, we gain insight into how they work when they do function as designed. The difference is that in economics, pathology is the rule: less than a quarter of mankind lives in the developed economies.

In the past decade, development economics has grown to extraordinary prominence, not just in academia but also in the public arena. This new development economics has moved in two strikingly different directions. The first focuses on micro-level policy interventions. It uses the tools of field experiments and randomized controlled trials (RCT) to evaluate focused strategies for alleviating persistent poverty. The second trend focuses on macro institutions: the structures of democracy, autocracy, centralized and diffused power, and legal protections of property and contracts that organize politics and markets. Drawing ideas from the burgeoning field of institutional economics, this second stream of work has addressed grand, old historical questions such as why some countries have succeeded in the march to prosperity while others have languished.

BEFORE THE FAMOUS BOOK, there was the essay, the thing Agee and Evans were sent to Alabama for in the first place. It never got published. Agee wrote it at least twenty thousand words longer than Fortune wanted; he turned it in late; the rubric under which it was supposed to run was done away with by editorial higher-ups, etc., etc. Anyone who’s written for magazines will recognize the thousand mystifying in-house obstacles that doom so many pieces. The very manuscript of this was considered lost, until Agee’s middle child and younger daughter, Andrea, found it a decade ago, and The Baffler excerpted it last year. Now, at the age of seventy-seven, it exists in full, published by Melville House with the title Cotton Tenants. It’s a very different creature from the book. More restrained. More disciplined, overall—perhaps it’s more correct to say, more confident. Cotton Tenants knows its form: the long, weird, quasi-essayistic, documentary-infused magazine piece, a form older than the novel, despite a heritable instinct in critics to continually be calling it New. Agee was pushing the form—that’s partly what makes it exciting to see and read this new book. He was pushing Luce, too, seeing what he could smuggle into Fortune, stylistically, in a Trojan-horse kind of way. Later, writing for himself and Evans, he was willing to go further.

more from John Jeremiah Sullivan at Bookforum here.

The discovery and publication of Savage Coast is significant, not only because, as Rukeyser’s large body of work on Spain attests, the Spanish Civil War was an essential part of her poetic and political development, but also because it also provides us with new perspectives on the literature of the period. Written long before Orwell’s or Hemingway’s major texts on the Spanish Civil War—at one point she editorializes, “Hemingway doesn’t know beans about Spain”—Savage Coast is only one of a handful of novels by foreign women on the subject and gives us a more complex understanding of how women positioned themselves within historical and cultural processes, offering a unique view of the political, artistic, and intellectual networks that shaped early twentieth-century global solidarities. Rukeyser’s work on Spain likewise offers new methods for exploring the relationship between political radicalism and textual experimentation, as she grapples with issues of documentation and aesthetics, attempting to harness what Virginia Woolf called “granite and rainbow,” within a single text. Savage Coast is both a journalistic account of the first days of the Civil War as well as a fragmented and “visionary” lyric about the formation of Rukeyser’s own political, sexual, and artistic subjectivity inside its history. Her writings, then, give us new forms and vocabulary to work with: they change how we will read other works, seek out and represent suppressed histories; they “open out of the future,” to use Derrida’s phrase.

more from Rowena Kennedy-Epstein at Paris Review here.