Steven Nadler in Humanities:

Bento de Spinoza was a young merchant in Amsterdam, one of many Sephardic Jews in that city involved in overseas trade in the early 1650s. The specialty of his family’s firm, which he and his brother Gabriel had been running since their father’s death in 1654, was importing dried fruit. Bento (or Baruch, as he would have been called in Hebrew in the Portuguese community’s synagogue—the names both mean “blessed”) was, at this time and to all appearances, an upstanding member of the Talmud Torah congregation. His communal tax payments and contributions to the community’s charitable funds may have been especially low by early 1656, but this could have been a reflection only of the poor condition of his business.

Or it may have been a sign that something else was amiss.

More here.

“Cut down one of these giants”, said Roosevelt’s double, “and you cannot take its place. Nature was its architect, and we owe it to ourselves and our children’s children to preserve them . . . . We should see to it that no man for speculative purposes or for mere temporary use destroys the groves of great trees. Where the individual and associations cannot preserve them, then the State, and if necessary the nation, should step in and see to their preservation. We should keep the trees as we should keep great stretches of wilderness, as a heritage for our children’s children to preserve them for use, and for the sake of the nation hereafter.” At the time I thought these sentiments entirely benign, even vote-worthy. But at that time, of course, I had not read Christine Bold’s exposé of the twenty-sixth President and his cronies, whom she dubs the Frontier Club. According to Bold, Roosevelt’s principles were far from altruistic; they were suspect, even sinister, having been inspired by the distasteful science of eugenics. Thus the trees become, in the words of one of their defenders, “a failing and dying race”, but one that must be preserved on account of its nobility.

more from Clive Sinclair at the TLS here.

Consider this first difference, which is well illustrated by the starting point of Pinker’s article: He says that modern philosophers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant were in fact cognitive neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists and social psychologists who just didn’t have the right theories yet: “They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were evolutionary psychologists, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms. And they were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together”. If this is so, then why is it that most contemporary neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists and evolutionary biologists do not read a single line by these authors (apart from some erudite pop scientists who take the time to Google some quotations from Descartes for their new bestseller), whereas philosophers do? Does Pinker seriously think that philosophers and humanities scholars still read Kant or Hobbes because they have not been informed that new results in science are available? Are they just dumb idiots who read Hobbes instead of von Neumann and Morgenstern because they did not update their reading list on game theory? The mere suggestion is ludicrous.

more from Gloria Origgi at The Berlin Review of Books here.

A few words further, however, must be said about Moretti’s body of work. First of all, it is important to recognize that he is, in the most literal sense, inimitable. His experiments are, as he often self-effacingly confesses, one-offs, little tinkered-together bits of one and another theory soldered onto the apparatus of one or another non-traditional tool: maps, graphs, trees, network theory. What they are meant to do is fit a particular problem—understanding the plot structure of Hamlet, retracing the development of the market for novels in 18th century England, determining the importance of clues in accounting for Arthur Conan Doyle’s success—and each problem, once identified, requires an original contraption. This bespoke process makes it very difficult merely to paraphrase Moretti’s arguments; the point is as much in observing the gradual concatenation of insights and rejected hypotheses as it is in the finished product, for the ways his experiments take shape are far more illuminating in their singularity than they could be in consistency. What is consistent, though, from experiment to experiment, and book to book, is Moretti’s dedication to breaking a new path, his insistence that current methods are not adequate. Moretti is thus right to connect, in the first passage quoted above, the question of how one reads to the question of how much one reads. Close reading is slow reading, and slow reading can never be very much reading, even if one is very devoted (and very gifted with grants or teaching exemptions).

more from Andrew Seal at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Michael J. Totten in City Journal:

Before it became the poster child for urban disaster areas in the mid-1970s, Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East. With its French Mandate architecture, its world-class cuisine, its fashionable and liberated women, its multitude of churches on the Christian side of town, and its thousand-year-old ties to France, it fit the part. Then civil war broke out in 1975 and tore city and country to pieces. More than 100,000 people were killed during a period when Lebanon’s population was under 4 million. The war sucked in powers from the Middle East and beyond—the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel, Iran, France, the Soviet Union, the United States—but no country inflicted more damage than Syria, ruled by the Assad family’s Arab Socialist Baath Party. Today, the shoe is on the other foot. Syria, not Lebanon, is suffering the horrors of civil war. With Syria’s Bashar al-Assad possibly on his way out—or at least too busy to export mayhem to his neighbors—will Beirut have the chance to regain its lost glory?

…In fact, much of the city may be doing that. In the name of postwar progress, many of Beirut’s most beautiful buildings and even entire streets are being demolished and replaced with high-rises. Some of the towers, like those along the city’s new waterfront, are outstanding architecturally; others are generic blocks, little more than vertical placeholders, that are replacing some of the most charming urban vistas in the Middle East.

…Beirut sometimes looks like what you’d get if you put Paris, Miami, and Baghdad into a blender and pressed PUREE. Gleaming glass skyscrapers rise above French-style villas adjacent to bullet-pocked walls and mortar-shattered towers. Hip entrepreneurs set up luxury boutiques next to crumbling modern-day ruins. A Ferrari showroom sits across the street from a parking lot that was recently a rubble field. Beirut’s fabulous cuisine never went away; neither did its high-end shopping districts, cafés, nightclubs, and bars. But English has eclipsed French as the second-most-spoken language. None of the new construction looks even the slightest bit French.

More here.

Stoning

They say under these womens’ chador walk children and restaurants
They say all the skin and passages are moonlight and marble . . .
They do their mock laughter
if the chador is blown away they would take the ‘disaster’ to be stoned
onto the gravediggers of justice

Meaning, if there were no boundaries
no desire should be tempted to advance?
But if someone was left under the stones . . .

ranslation: Abol Froushan

From Nature:

In the war against infection, medicine needs a hero. Meet the bioengineered bacterium that can hunt down pathogens and destroy them with a powerful one–two punch. Synthetic biologist Matthew Chang at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has armed Escherichia coli bacteria with a ‘seek and kill’ system that targets cells of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an invasive bacterium that causes pneumonia and other illnesses¹. In preliminary tests with infected mice, the modified bacterium left a trail of dead P. aeruginosa in its wake. Chang and his team had previously developed an E. coli that could brew up an antibacterial peptide called pyocin, and then explode to release its deadly cargo whenever it detected a chemical signal emitted by its prey². Now the bioengineered vigilante is back — and it is tougher than ever. The researchers inserted genes into E. coli to make a killing peptide called microcin S (MccS). This is smaller than pyocin, so the E. coli can secrete it, rather than delivering the payload in a single suicidal burst. That means that fewer of the modified bacteria are required to treat an infection. The team then loaded the engineered bacterium with genes to make a nuclease called DNase I. This efficiently slices through the protective biofilm that envelops P. aeruginosa colonies by breaking down the nucleic acids that help to hold the biofilm together. The researchers programmed their E. coli so that it cunningly keeps its powder dry until it is close to its mark. It can detect a P. aeruginosa messenger molecule used for a process called quorum sensing, by which the invader assesses its own population density. Each E. coli generates a protein that latches on to a quorum-sensing molecule, forming a complex that activates its weapons systems. That complex also controls E. coli’s movement, so that the bacterium swims towards higher concentrations of a quorum-sensing molecule — a process called chemotaxis. As it homes in on its quarry, the E. coli ramps up its ammunition production. “That’s the real gem of this work,” says William Bentley, a synthetic biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “I think it’s really innovative.” Some of these tactics have been used individually in other bioengineered bacteria, but “putting it all together is totally new”, says Bentley. The assassin is unveiled this week in ACS Synthetic Biology¹. Chang fed his microscopic mercenaries to mice infected with P. aeruginosa, then collected faecal samples a few hours later. He found that the animals had fewer pathogens than those given ordinary E. coli. and appeared to suffer no ill effects from the treatment. “It’s quite promising,” says Chang.

But can such engineered bacteria ever be used in humans? “I believe so,” says Chang. Most conventional antibiotic treatments kill bacteria indiscriminately, taking out both pathogenic microbes and beneficial bacteria in the gut, for example. By contrast, Chang’s E. coli offers the possibility of a surgical strike. Chang also suggests that the bacterium could be given to people at high risk of pathogenic infection. The E. coli would lie dormant in the gut, and activate only once its enemy makes an appearance. “Of course there are regulatory hurdles: these are genetically modified organisms,” says Chang. “But eventually, if we can demonstrate that it is safe and effective, I really envision that this could be used in humans.” Bentley and his collaborators have used a similar approach to make bacteria that seek out cancer cells, and deliver a burst of chemicals when they arrive².

More here.

Vladimir V. Putin in the New York Times:

Recent events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization.

More here.

A plane that struck the Trade Center carried one of the Web's geniuses, who may have been the day's first casualty.

Molly Knight Raskin in Salon:

Despite the fact that the markets were no longer betting on Akamai, company executives chose Las Vegas for their 2001 sales kickoff. To mark the official launch of EdgeSuite, they flew several dozen employees and advisors out to Sin City for a few days at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino.

As VP of sales, John Sconyers said that, despite the market downturn, the mood was celebratory. Akamai had a new service, and with it the promise of new customers. They were in Vegas, and for a time, they felt like big winners. “We were just pinching ourselves,” Sconyers recalled. “It was an unbelievable experience.”

Employees, customers and members of the company’s board were put up in swank suites and handed substantial wads of cash to gamble. Ironically, it was the only time Dwight Gibbs of the Motley Fool recalled any sort of dispute with founder Danny Lewin, who insisted that Gibbs, a member of the company’s customer advisory board, stay in an upscale suite. “I said I didn’t like the optics . . . Danny would hear none of it,” Gibbs explained. “It was a mild kerfuffle, and eventually Danny won. I should have given in immediately. It would have saved us both a lot of time.”

The featured event of the sales kickoff was a speech by Lewin, the mathematical genius who had created a set of algorithms to foster a faster, better Internet, who announced the official launch of EdgeSuite with much fanfare. Notwithstanding the reality of the plunging markets, he was ebullient and optimistic. “Isn’t EdgeSuite a crappy name?” he asked, pausing for a laugh. “Luckily, we use it to our advantage. Microsoft also told me EdgeSuite was a crappy name, but they said we also have a crappy name so [they] respect companies with crappy names. So we should keep it even though it sucks.”

More here.

Cade Metz in Wired:

Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to anew breed of software that spans this sea of servers, the entire data center operates like a single system, one giant computer that runs any application the company throws at it.

A Google application like Gmail doesn’t run on a particular server or even a select group of servers. It runs on the data center, grabbing computing power from any machine than can spare it. Google calls this “warehouse-scale computing,” and for some, it’s an idea so large, they have trouble wrapping their heads around it.

Solomon Hykes isn’t one of them. He aims for something even bigger. With a new open-source software project known as Docker, he wants to build a computer the size of the internet.

More here.

June 9 The mountains look dramatic and incisive today. No sun, but a high ceiling, almost windless. I climbed in the Opal Hills, so-called, to the basin under the top ridge. Snow occasionally to my knees in drifts, otherwise gone. Saw some old black bear tracks on the path—hind foot the size of one of my hands. Very still today, woods quite empty, panorama on top, the lake green and white. I’m enjoying being alone, although thinking about New York literary politics, and the Kennedys, of course. Saw the tracks of a coyote and heard a short bark. Rubbed shoulders with some Maligne mosquitoes. Am glad to know I can climb to the places I climbed 16 years ago, when I was 19. My reactions are quieter and smudgier, though, and the park is developing like Yellowstone. If a person has just been married, like me, he kicks himself if his new wife isn’t constantly in the front of his mind, when, as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be natural for her to be. The symbiosis comes with time. As it is, I think of how pretty Marion was in the three dresses she wore during the weekend of my sister’s wedding.

more from Edward Hoagland in The American Scholar here.

I once met F.R. Leavis – or almost. It was in October 1977, in a house in Bulstrode Gardens in Cambridge. I had arrived with a group of fellow students for an introductory meeting with our medieval supervisor, Mrs Helena Shire, a formidable Scottish lady of confident views and startling formality. As she ushered us into her sitting room we realised that it already had an occupant. A small, gaunt, elderly man in a jacket and open-necked shirt stood in the French window. I think I remember a look of something like panic on his face as the gaggle of 19-year-olds approached. After a brief hesitation he turned and exited rapidly through the glass doors into the garden. I watched as he walked away from the house, squeezed through a gap in the fence into the next-door garden and disappeared. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Mrs Shire said, ‘do you know who that was?’ She paused, more for dramatic effect than in any expectation of an answer. ‘That,’ she said, ‘was F.R. Leavis.’ She lingered on the two initials. No one said anything, but it was obvious that the name was meaningless to most of us. It was another example of someone who was famous in Cambridge but otherwise unknown. He was evidently Mrs Shire’s next-door neighbour.

more from John Mullan at the LRB here.

Indeed, Lawrence would never have imagined that a foreign power might invade an Arab country with so little knowledge of it. His own affection for the Arabs went so far that he committed treason in an attempt to save them. In 1917, France and Britain desperately wanted to take Aqaba from the Turks; the port would assure them dominance of the northern Arabian coastline, as well as easier supply lines to Egypt. Faisal, the leader of the Arab revolt tenuously allied with the British, needed Aqaba as a launching point for the Arab rebellion in Syria. Lawrence thought the invasion would be a Gallipoli-like disaster—and foresaw a still darker outcome for this adventure. Once Aqaba was conquered, he predicted, the Allied forces would block the Arabs from moving northward on their march to create a greater Arab nation, a maneuver that would establish France and Britain as the dominant military forces in the Middle East. Lawrence had read the Sykes-Picot accord; when both the Arabs and the French made claim to Syria, there was no question who would win. “So long as that treaty stood,” Anderson writes, “British betrayal of the Arab cause in deference to its French ally was virtually preordained.” Lawrence advised Faisal to avoid Aqaba entirely, and find an alternative path into Syria to lead his uprising. More astoundingly, he told Faisal the details of Sykes-Picot, thereby committing “a consummate act of treason.”

more from Suzy Hansen at Bookforum here.

The Self-playing Instrument of Water
.
It is the story of the falling rain
To turn into a leaf and fall again

It is the secret of a summer shower
To steal the light and hide it in a flower

And every flower a tiny tributary
That from the ground flows green and momentary

Is one of water’s wishes and this tale
Hangs in a seed head smaller than my thumbnail

If only I a passerby could pass
As clear as water through a plume of grass

To find the sunlight hidden at the tip
Turning to seed a kind of lifting raindrip

Then I might know like water how to balance
The weight of hope against the light of patience

Water which is so raw so earthy-strong
And lurks in cast iron tanks and leaks along

Drawn under gravity towards my tongue
To cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

Which is the story of the falling rain
That rises to the light and falls again
.

by Alice Oswald
Poetry International, 2013

From NPR:

Lots of us play with our food. But for photographer Christopher Boffoli, it's become a full-time career. Boffoli rose to fame a couple of years ago. You may have seen some of his photographs — amusing dioramas featuring miniature plastic figurines in dramatic settings crafted from food — when they went viral back in 2011. More than 200 such images — at least half of which, Boffoli says, have not been previously published — are collected in a new book, Big Appetites. Boffoli's scenarios, and especially his captions, evoke New Yorker cartoons — many are dark and humorous. “I love the idea of taking something whimsical that people expect to be fun and turning on the fulcrum of their expectations to something more disturbing,” Boffoli tells The Salt.

More here.

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

Tom Junod in Esquire:

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did — who jumped — appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

More here.

In 2011, Darshan Thoogudeep, a Kannadiga actor commonly known by his first name, starred as Raja, an auto-rickshaw driver, in a Kannada film titled Sarathi. The film was released on 30 September, the death anniversary of Shankar Nagarkatte (better known as Shankar Nag), a legendary figure in Kannada cinema who acted in over 80 films and directed ten (along with two television serials, including Malgudi Days, adapted from RK Narayan’s work). Darshan’s film, which even included an animated dance-sequence featuring Nag, was widely viewed as a tribute to the late star, who, in 1980, had also essayed the role of an autorickshaw driver in the film Auto Raja, directed by Vijay. Auto Raja was an inter-class love story, with Nag playing an urban working-class auto driver and the leading actress Gayathri the daughter of a wealthy estate owner, and Nag’s love interest. According to the critic MK Raghavendra, the film attempted to “build a community around the urban working class”, represented by Bangalore’s autorickshaw drivers. It was a super-hit, making Nag a rage with auto-rickshaw drivers across Bangalore.

more from Sharanya at Caravan here.

Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster was released last Friday. Each of Wong’s previous masterpieces has evoked a kind of romantic longing. Chungking Express, for example, opens with a woman in a blond wig and a trench coat walking through the stalls of Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong. It’s a place where you can buy electronics and food, and it is crowded at night. The woman takes an elevator up to what looks like it might be a tailor shop, though it’s too dark to tell. We follow her down a hallway, and abruptly she turns and looks directly into the camera, the way a beautiful woman would turn to look at a man who was following her too closely. She walks a bit further, into a room with a man in an undershirt sitting on a top bunk, and the title screen comes up. Then, over scenes of white clouds against the blue sky, behind silhouettes of industrial equipment, a young man says in voiceover, “Every day we brush past so many people. People we may never meet or people who may become close friends. I’m a cop, number 223. My name’s He Qiwu.” Now he is chasing someone through Chungking. He brushes past a mannequin wearing a blond wig like the woman’s.

more from Amie Barrodale at Harper’s here.