Cathleen Schine reviews Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, in the New York Review of Books:

Julian Barnes was married for thirty years to a woman he loved, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Levels of Life is an examination of the void she left behind when she died in 2008. The book is short, crisp, measured, and deeply felt. Not a grief memoir so much as a grief meditation, it is divided into three improbable parts: an appealing discussion of ballooning; a touching short story about the fictional romance of a real English adventurer named Fred Burnaby and the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt; and a thoughtful consideration of grief. In The Sense of an Ending, his novel that won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, Barnes’s celebrated literary playfulness and skill sometimes came off almost as affectation. The artifice in the new book, in contrast, is essential. Levels of Life is a far stranger and more original work.

It is, not surprisingly, a marvel of flickering Barnesian leitmotifs, none of them subtle, all of them subtly and unexpectedly intertwined. Barnes’s language is even more disciplined than usual. He has managed to tenderly expose the grief of mourning in all its naked, writhing confusion, without exposing himself, something of a miracle of restraint.

More here.

The Hitch died two years ago today and we miss him. I am reposting Morgan's remembrance which was published here soon after Christopher Hitchens died:

by Morgan Meis

At the moment, I'm angry with Christopher Hitchens. Not because he died. A man dies. And angry is not really the correct word, nor the correct emotion. I'm frustrated with Christopher Hitchens, troubled by him, moved by him, enamored of him and then repelled at the attraction.

The first time I met Christopher Hitchens was at a Harper's Magazine Christmas party just before the start of the Iraq War. Bloomberg had recently banned smoking in New York City and the intellectuals were pissed. In those days, Harper's parties happened down in the basement at Pravda. It was all very arch. Smoking ban be damned. Lewis Lapham and his band of merry lit boys were going to light up the smokes anyway. Hitch had a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But you've seen him like that a thousand times, in person, in pictures, on TV. I stood in line to speak with him. The line was moving smoothly until a woman in a red dress half a size too small for all her stuff gummed up the works. You could hear the collective groan all along the line as she stepped up to the Hitch. This was going to take a while.

I gave him a copy of a review a friend and I had written about his recently published book, Letters to a Young Contrarian. The book is not very good, a fact he readily acknowledged. Really, my friend and I wrote the review to attack him for his abandonment of the Left. He didn't care that we felt abandoned. Speaking with him, I came to understand that he really didn’t care. All the same, he appreciated the review, which was pretty smart. Hitch appreciated smart. Always.

More here.

Luke Muehlhauser at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute:

Luke Muehlhauser: Though you’re best known for your work in theoretical computer science, you’ve also produced some pretty interesting philosophical work, e.g. in Quantum Computing Since Democritus, “Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity,” and “The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.” You also taught a fall 2011 MIT class on Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science.

Why are you so interested in philosophy? And what is the social value of philosophy, from your perspective?

Scott Aaronson: I’ve always been reflexively drawn to the biggest, most general questions that it seemed possible to ask. You know, like are we living in a computer simulation? if not, could we upload our consciousnesses into one? are there discrete “pixels” of spacetime? why does it seem impossible to change the past? could there be different laws of physics where 2+2 equaled 5? are there objective facts about morality? what does it mean to be rational? is there an explanation for why I’m alive right now, rather than some other time? What are explanations, anyway? In fact, what really perplexes me is when I meet a smart, inquisitive person—let’s say a mathematician or scientist—who claims NOT to be obsessed with these huge issues! I suspect many MIRI readers might feel drawn to such questions the same way I am, in which case there’s no need to belabor the point.

From my perspective, then, the best way to frame the question is not: “why be interested in philosophy?” Rather it’s: “why be interested in anything else?”

But I think the latter question has an excellent answer. A crucial thing humans learned, starting around Galileo’s time, is that even if you’re interested in the biggest questions, usually the only way to make progress on them is to pick off smaller subquestions: ideally, subquestions that you can attack using math, empirical observation, or both.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process and represent a “tyranny” that must be broken, according to a Nobel prize winner who has declared a boycott on the publications.

Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.

Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.

The prestige of appearing in the major journals has led the Chinese Academy of Sciences to pay successful authors the equivalent of $30,000 (£18,000). Some researchers made half of their income through such “bribes”, Schekman said in an interview.

Writing in the Guardian, Schekman raises serious concerns over the journals' practices and calls on others in the scientific community to take action.

“I have published in the big brands, including papers that won me a Nobel prize. But no longer,” he writes. “Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals.”

More here.

Reading List

Later on, after the dishwasher is filled,
dog walked, mail posted, magazines sorted,
bed/some semblance of sense/a few calls made:

………………………….doctor, chimney guy, Blue Cross Blue Shield

I’ll free up a spare moment to add
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt to the list
of books read I’ve kept these past few years
a satisfying snap for every entry
like biting down on a marrow bone like

………………………….breaking a seized nut with an offset wrench.

I will resist the urge to record my
college textbooks, titles long forgotten
save for orphaned words such as Issues and
Contemporary. I won’t include those
T.V. Guides with their Byzantine layout
and Lilliput font or the stack of Hardy
adventures wolfed down like salty snacks.

………………………….Christ the Readers Digests’ alone would

require their own special section,
back issues from 1961
moldering swollen during those sultry
Tennessee summers, a sage piece by
Art Linkletter or Laughter Is The Best
Medicine to while away the still
afternoon’s, relieved only by the bleat
of the front porch swing and the X-ray buzz
of cicadas.

………………………….Maybe the laundry and the fallen leaves

won’t mind if I take five minutes to add
Franklin E. Meyer’s Me and Caleb and
The Borrowers, by Mary Norton
reminding me, how could I forget? of
E.B. White, Mark Twain and Marvel Comics
not to mention countless cereal
boxes, album jackets and the liner
notes concealed within. But reading the dogs
face, a forlorn sphinx haunting an empty
bowl, I think I’d best add her name first

………………………….hoping to avoid a bloody awful

savaging when she writes her memoirs.
.

by Dave Hardin
from Scrum, December 2013

From Smithsonian:

U.K.-based product designer Susana Soares has created a simple, elegant way of harnessing bees to screen for a number of diseases, including cancers, like tumors of the lung and ovaries. Her glass apparatus, called “Bee’s,” features a large chamber and a smaller connected chamber housed within it. After training the bees to associate a specific chemical odor with a food reward, such as sugar, the insects are released into the diagnostic device through an opening. Patients would simply blow into the smaller compartment and wait to see if a swarm gathers toward something alarming in the person’s breath.

The project, part of her master’s thesis at London’s Royal College of Art, began in 2007 when Soares came across research on bees and their phenomenal olfactory abilities. After talking to researchers in the field, she learned that certain diseases, such as lung cancer, noticeably alter the composition of bodily fluids, producing odorous compounds that show up in urine and sometimes blood. Some investigators have even been experimenting with various sensory methods to home in on these “biomarkers.” In Philadelphia, for instance, scientists have trained mice to identify the scent of lung cancer. Trained dogs have also been used to sniff out ovarian cancer. Others have focused on replicating these animal abilities in electronic nose devices that are calibrated to pick up these biomarkers undetectable to human noses.

More here.

Lucy Beresford in The Telegraph:

All the main characters, in their own way, want to put a stop to pain, and Bhutto presents a subtle exploration of what constitutes belonging and how it contributes to peace of mind. The melancholy threaded through the prose reveals her deep understanding of loss (Bhutto’s memoir Songs of Blood and Sword charts some of her famous family’s recent bloody history). As well as a window to Pakistan’s present-day difficulties, and a critique of the devastation wrought by war and fundamentalism, Bhutto’s novel is also an affectionate portrait of her homeland. In the scenes set in markets and bazaars, we glimpse a world so vividly realised that you can almost smell the rich lambs’ hoof curry the community looks forward to eating. The book also offers an under-reported view of ordinary Pakistani women as strong and assertive. As well as defiant Samarra, it is Mina – written off by the men as mad – who in her grief has the strength to stand up to the trigger-happy Taliban.

Above all, what The Shadow of the Crescent Moon captures so well is not just the trauma of war, but also the conflicts of contemporary Pakistanis, torn between remaining faithful to the legacy of previous generations, and their own dreams of choosing their own destiny.

More here.

Julian Barnes in The Guardian:

On 13 June 1963, the American novelist John Williams wrote from the University of Denver, where he was a professor of English, to his agent Marie Rodell. She had just read his third novel, Stoner, and while clearly admiring it, was also warning him not to get his hopes up. Williams replied: “I suspect that I agree with you about the commercial possibilities; but I also suspect that the novel may surprise us in this respect. Oh, I have no illusions that it will be a 'bestseller' or anything like that; but if it is handled right (there's always that out) – that is, if it is not treated as just another 'academic novel' by the publisher, as Butcher's Crossing [his second novel] was treated as a “western”, it might have a respectable sale. The only thing I'm sure of is that it's a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one.”

…Stoner was published in 1965, and – as is usually the case – it steered a mid‑course between the novelist's fears and his hopes. It was respectably reviewed; it had a reasonable sale; it did not become a bestseller; it went out of print. In 1972, Augustus, Williams's “Roman” novel, won half the National Book Award for fiction (the other half going to John Barth's Chimera). It was his largest moment of public success, yet he did not even attend the ceremony; perhaps he was rightly suspicious, as the laudatum pronounced in his absence was strangely disparaging. When he died, two decades later, without publishing any more fiction, the New York Times obituarist treated him as much as a poet and “educator” as a novelist. But still to come was that factor – identified by Williams in his letter – that novelists often write about, that they fear, but also place their trust in: time. And time has vindicated him way beyond his own modest hope. Fifty years after Williams wrote to his agent, Stoner became a bestseller. A quite unexpected bestseller. A bestseller across Europe. A bestseller publishers themselves could not quite understand. A bestseller of the purest kind – one caused almost entirely by word-of-mouth among readers.

More here. (Note: Read it, loved it, gave it to many friends who loved it. It is the male version of Madame Bovary. Do read it.)

John Paul Rollert reviews Jack Russell Weinstein's Adam Smith's Pluralism: Rationality, Education and the Moral Sentiments, in the LA Review of Books:

FRETTING, PERHAPS, for the fate of his own work, Jorge Luis Borges described the tendency of time to denude and adulterate a careful architecture of ideas. “There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless,” he said. “A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or proper noun — in the history of philosophy.”

This is not the destiny of marginal minds, but the lot of first-rate philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, and Rawls. The Categorical Imperative, Dasein, and Veil of Ignorance are all bywords for a broader vision, one that many of us feel we should know something about but which few of us will ever bother to investigate in any detail.

There are worse fates. Consider Adam Smith. His philosophy — indeed, the fact he was a philosopher — has been obscured by the “invisible hand.” That phrase occurs just three times in his entire corpus and only once in his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations. Nevertheless, it has become a symbol for the “caricaturish libertarian” whose philosophy (if we may call it that) has supplanted the “holistic picture of human agency” Smith spent his adult life describing.

Or so says Jack Russell Weinstein in a remarkable new book, Adam Smith’s Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments. The title is most telling for what it omits. Smith is best known as the founding father of modern economics. More than two centuries after his death, he is still celebrated for establishing a “free-market paradigm,” as Alan Greenspan put it in a 2005 lecture in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, Smith’s birthplace, that “remains applicable to this day.”

Of course, it wasn’t long before the former Fed chair had to acknowledge that the applicability of that paradigm was a bit more limited. In the fall of 2008, with the financial crisis in full bloom, the dean of deregulation famously confessed to the House Oversight Committee that there was a “flaw” in the “ideology” he presumed to share with Smith. The belief that “free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies” and that attempts to regulate them were unnecessary because they had never “meaningfully worked” warranted an amendment. Free markets, Greenspan conceded occasionally needed fixing.

More here.

Katherine Rowland interviews Daniel Bergner in Guernica:

Guernica: In the book, you reference a quote by the British gynecologist William Acton, who wrote in the Victorian era: “The majority of women, happily for society, are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.” The message there being that women’s sexuality, if unleashed, could upend civilization. Times have changed, but your book suggests that elements of that logic persist.

Daniel Bergner: If we cast back to Victorian times as they’re encapsulated in that Acton quotation, we see this really severe denial of women’s desire, and that denial is mixed in with a level of fear. That carries forward to our society. Women’s sexuality surrounds us, but right beneath that there’s this other standard for women’s desire that’s still informed by uneasiness. It’s linked, ultimately, to the comfort that we all get—men and society as a whole—from this idea that women are somehow less desiring than men. We can still lean on women a little bit to keep society stable. The dichotomy that’s set up is that men are animals and anarchic in their lust and women are civilized and civilizing in their sexuality.

Guernica: This assumption that women’s sexuality exerts a civilizing force seems to even carry over into the efforts to develop a female Viagra. You write about researchers concerned that the pills they’re developing might be too powerful.

Daniel Bergner: To be clear, the FDA isn’t going to talk to me and say, “We’re going to consider rejecting a drug because it had too strong an effect and would create a generation of nymphomaniacs.” But it was the drug companies themselves that were worried that if the effects were too strong, the FDA might reject them on those grounds. Was I surprised that those conversations were happening inside the drug companies? Yes, I was staggered.

More here.

Jonathan Bate at The New Statesman:

What about Swift? Gulliver’s Travels can be read in many different ways: as local satire (on particular political circumstances and scientific fashions), as parody of the kind of pseudo-realistic travel narrative represented by Crusoe, as mockery of utopian visions, as the misanthropic ravings of a furious old man. Three hundred years on, scholars and students still debate whether or not Swift the narrator is directing his irony against Gulliver or the talking horses known as Houyhnhnms (all you need to do is whinny). Or both. The fact the name Gulliver contains the word “gull” – someone who is easily deceived – is a starting point.

We cannot begin to give decent answers to the questions raised by Gulliver’s Travels without a sense of its place in Jonathan Swift’s long and complicated life, which lasted from 1667 (probably) to 1745 (by which time he had already written his own epitaph, the magnificently self-knowing and wittily self-deprecatory Verses on the Death of Dr Swift). The Harvard professor Leo Damrosch’s new biography is to be warmly welcomed. Up until now, the serious student of Swift has had to rely on Irvin Ehrenpreis’s three-volume epic treatment, completed half a century ago. As Damrosch shows in a crisp and exemplary prologue, Ehrenpreis, for all his command of minutiae, was unnecessarily dismissive of certain items of contemporary gossip about Swift and over-confident in his psychoanalytic interpretations.

more here.