David Ludwig and Mark Friedman in the NYT (image by Sarah Illenberger):

FOR most of the last century, our understanding of the cause of obesity has been based on immutable physical law. Specifically, it’s the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. When it comes to body weight, this means that calorie intake minus calorie expenditure equals calories stored. Surrounded by tempting foods, we overeat, consuming more calories than we can burn off, and the excess is deposited as fat. The simple solution is to exert willpower and eat less.

The problem is that this advice doesn’t work, at least not for most people over the long term. In other words, your New Year’s resolution to lose weight probably won’t last through the spring, let alone affect how you look in a swimsuit in July. More of us than ever are obese, despite an incessant focus on calorie balance by the government, nutrition organizations and the food industry.

But what if we’ve confused cause and effect? What if it’s not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat?

The more calories we lock away in fat tissue, the fewer there are circulating in the bloodstream to satisfy the body’s requirements. If we look at it this way, it’s a distribution problem: We have an abundance of calories, but they’re in the wrong place. As a result, the body needs to increase its intake. We get hungrier because we’re getting fatter.

It’s like edema, a common medical condition in which fluid leaks from blood vessels into surrounding tissues. No matter how much water they drink, people with edema may experience unquenchable thirst because the fluid doesn’t stay in the blood, where it’s needed.

More here.

Teeth
—for cousin Gedion, who drove us to Massawa
.

Two sisters ride down with us.
It is liberation day in Massawa.

The older sister is the color of injera; her teeth are big
& stuck out.
The younger sister is a cinnamon stick.

Their almond eyes are the same.
Ink black hair falls beautiful down both their backs.

I see that you love one of them & change my mind
many times about who I think it is.

Months later, I will show their photographs to my father
who will laugh & say he knows.

“It is this one,” he will say, surely, pointing
to the woman whose teeth stay, tame, in her mouth.

But what man would choose a woman
whose mouth looks stronger than his hands?

Know, Cousin, I pray there is love
between you & the older one
whose teeth might be bullets of ivory;

I imagine from this mouth:
kites,
rain,
ax equal to lace, the yellow & lick
of a jar filled with
the sweet of stinging bees.
.

by Aracelis Girmay

Adam Ziegfeld in The Washington Post's The Monkey Cage:

First, as of the most recent counting, almost 70 percent of Indians did not vote for the BJP. Commentators such as Max Fisher at Vox claim that the BJP “dramatically … swept the vote.” In fact, the BJP won about 31 percent of the vote, a new high for the party. Although this is the first national election in which the BJP has ever won more votes than any other party, less than a third of Indians voted for it. The BJP’s legislative majority is largely a function of India’s single-member district (SMD) electoral system, the same system used in American, British, and Canadian legislative elections. In an SMD system, votes rarely translate proportionally into seats. This system rewards parties that are the largest in each electoral district. The BJP’s vote is patchily distributed across India, which works to its advantage. In a number of states where it is disproportionately strong, the BJP was, in district after district, the largest party, even if not always by a very large margin. For example, in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP won about 42 percent of the vote. However, it is likely to win 71 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats (almost 90 percent) because the remaining 58 percent of the vote was split across a number of different parties.

Meanwhile, in states where the BJP won few seats, it did quite poorly. Thus, relatively few of the BJP’s votes were wasted—that is, cast in electoral districts where the party ultimately failed to win a legislative seat. As a result, the party won a legislative majority on a fairly small vote share. Previously, no party had won a legislative majority with less than 40 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Congress suffered an ignominious defeat in part because its vote was fairly evenly distributed across the country. Coming in second or third place across many electoral districts brings no electoral reward. In this election, Congress looks a lot like the Liberal Democrats in Britain—a party that typically wins respectable vote shares in lots of districts but fails to win many seats.

More here.

Gary Gutting interviews Philip Kitcher in the NYT's The Stone:

G.G.: So you reject all religious doctrines, but you also say that you “resist the claim that religion is noxious rubbish to be buried as deeply, as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.” Why is that?

P.K.: The past decade has seen some trenchant attacks on religion, and I agree with many points made by people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. (Dennett seems to me clearly the most sophisticated of the “new atheists”; much as I admire Dawkins’s work in evolutionary biology and in enhancing the public understanding of science, he is more often off-target in his diatribes against religion.) But these atheists have been rightly criticized for treating all religions as if they were collections of doctrines, to be understood in quite literal ways, and for not attending to episodes in which the world’s religions have sometimes sustained the unfortunate and campaigned for the downtrodden. The “soft atheism” I defend considers religion more extensively, sympathizes with the idea that secularists can learn from religious practices and recommends sometimes making common cause with religious movements for social justice.

G.G.: So on your view, Dawkins and company don’t refute all forms of religion, just unsophisticated literal assertions of religious claims.

P.K.: Yes, I think there’s a version of religion, “refined religion,” that is untouched by the new atheists’ criticisms, and that even survives my argument that religious doctrines are incredible. Refined religion sees the fundamental religious attitude not as belief in a doctrine but as a commitment to promoting the most enduring values. That commitment is typically embedded in social movements — the faithful come together to engage in rites, to explore ideas and ideals with one another and to work cooperatively for ameliorating the conditions of human life.

More here.

Wendy Pearlman in Guernica (Image by Tammam Azzam):

Statistics tell us that violence in Syria has left at least 150,000 dead, 9 million forced from their homes, and 9.3 million in need of humanitarian aid. But by the time numbers are published they are already out of date. In the West, the Syrian conflict connotes sectarian war, humanitarian crisis, Islamic extremism, and chemical weapons. It is easy to forget that, for many, this nightmare began with a dream.

I have interviewed more than 150 Syrian refugees, and they describe the start of protests in the spring of 2011 as their break through a barrier of fear. They raised their voices against a system that denied them voice. Though initial demands were only for reform, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad responded ferociously.

On my first trip to Jordan in 2012, I met displaced Syrians who had endured bombardment and buried loved ones, yet still retained a glimmer of optimism. A grandmother in the Zaatari refugee camp, then just rows of tents in the desert, expected to return to Syria any day. Insisting that I visit her there, she explained how to catch the bus from the Damascus airport to her village and carefully dictated her Syrian landline number.

When I returned in 2013, her village no longer existed. The Zaatari camp had quadrupled to become the fourth-largest city in Jordan, though one surrounded by a barbed-wire fence through which refugees were forbidden to exit. In Jordan, and then Turkey, I found that refugees’ descriptions of Syria frequently ended with the single verb “rah,” meaning to be gone and finished. A father from Homs traced a mental map of his old neighborhood, from the alley shortcuts he took in elementary school to the hospital where his daughter was born. “Rah,” he said, shaking his head. Nothing remained but rubble.

More here.

Michaele L. Ferguson reviews Melissa Gira Grant's Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work in the Boston Review (image by Vittorio Sciosia):

To Grant, the empowered sex worker is just as fantastic as the victimized whore. She argues that we need to dispel fantasies of prostitution altogether, to resist seeing sex workers as either wholly exploited or wholly empowered by the work they do. Sex workers, as workers in any field, like certain things about their jobs and dislike other things. Sex workers should have, with everyone else, the ability to voice a complicated and ambivalent relationship to their labors. “There must,” Grant writes, “be room for them to identify, publicly and collectively, what they wish to change about how they are treated as workers without being told that the only solution is for them to exit the industry.” They must be able to talk about their working conditions honestly and openly, without having to fit their experiences into someone else’s fantasy of prostitution, and without fearing police surveillance and incarceration in response.

But even Grant is not immune to the pull of fantasy. She makes potent arguments against victimization and control, but her demands on behalf of professionalism leave a false sense that sex work, because it is just another job, is unassailable. Pertinent avenues of criticism are foreclosed. In Grant’s imagination, we don’t ask what is actually good for women, we don’t ask why women predominate in sex work, and we don’t ask about which desires empower and which create harmful expectations that reinforce women’s vulnerability.

Grant urges us to “see off-the-clock sex workers as whole, as people who aren’t just here to fuck.” Sex workers have lives, lovers, families, desires, needs. Their work—much of which involves marketing, building Web sites, scheduling, communicating with clients, and managing money—is not reducible to sex. And not all those who perform sex work do so full-time, or even more than once or twice. Many have complicated work histories including both sex work and other forms of wage labor. If we can view sex workers as whole people, then we can also appreciate the agency exercised in their work.

Sex workers operate in a broader, structural context where “the labor market, the privatization of education and healthcare, and debt” help to explain why someone might find sex work an attractive option. Grant poignantly suggests that “vital information” about how to do sex work be made widely available so that anyone can access it, “should they ever be in the situation of explicitly trading sex for something they need.”

In other words, prostitution is not the result of a moral crisis but of a money crisis.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

In A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth writes with affection of a placid India's first general election in 1951, and the egalitarian spirit it momentarily bestowed on an electorate deeply riven by class and caste: “the great washed and unwashed public, sceptical and gullible”, but all “endowed with universal adult suffrage”. India's 16th general election this month, held against a background of economic jolts and titanic corruption scandals, and tainted by the nastiest campaign yet, announces a new turbulent phase for the country – arguably, the most sinister since its independence from British rule in 1947. Back then, it would have been inconceivable that a figure such as Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister of Gujarat accused, along with his closest aides, of complicity in crimes ranging from an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002 to extrajudicial killings, and barred from entering the US, may occupy India's highest political office.

Modi is a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founder's belief that Nazi Germany had manifested “race pride at its highest” by purging the Jews is by no means unexceptional among the votaries of Hindutva, or “Hinduness”. In 1948, a former member of the RSS murdered Gandhi for being too soft on Muslims. The outfit, traditionally dominated by upper-caste Hindus, has led many vicious assaults on minorities. A notorious executioner of dozens of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 crowed that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman and extracted her foetus. Modi himself described the relief camps housing tens of thousands of displaced Muslims as “child-breeding centres”. Such rhetoric has helped Modi sweep one election after another in Gujarat.

More here.

Mohsin Hamid in The New York Times:

Writing fiction is, in many ways, like a religion. It is a daily practice, a way of life, a set of rituals, an orientation toward the universe. It is a communion with the intangible, a bridge between the finite and infinite. There’s a reason religions use stories to communicate, and it’s the same reason religions persecute storytellers: Stories are powerful. They are how we make sense of what cannot be known. So imagine a situation in which you were paid to pray, and in which a few of the devout were given huge payouts for their devotion. This does happen. It corrupts religions. And it corrupts writers too. In the words of the poet Jalaluddin Rumi: “If you want money more than anything, / you’ll be bought and sold. / If you have a greed for food, / you’ll be a loaf of bread. / This is a subtle truth: / whatever you love, you are.”

It’s a radical thought, but I wonder whether in some way we professional fiction writers might be better off if, like poets of old, we were to make nothing from our writing and had to earn our living elsewhere. Radical or not, it’s how most writers actually live today, working their day jobs, and writing — unpaid, alone, with passion — at night.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

No one is quite sure just what a Schwenkfelder is these days, including many of those who call themselves Schwenkfelders. The number of these people is so very small, and gets smaller the more you investigate. It all began with the spiritual awakening of Silesian nobleman Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig in 1518 or maybe 1519. (How many American stories begin with a spiritual awakening.) Schwenckfeld had gotten fired up by the teachings of Martin Luther and was inspired to take Luther’s ideas further. The complicated theology of Caspar Schwenckfeld — described in Schwenckfeld’s Concept of the New Man as “a skillful blending of Johannine mysticism and Pauline Anthropology, modified by the sifting process of fifteen hundred years of Christian theology” — boiled down to this: That people could communicate directly with God, that true spirituality didn’t need all the machinery of hierarchies and priests and sacraments, that church was not a place but a community. Schwenckfeld wanted a theological system that would appeal to all Christians — he dreamed of a day when the warring factions of Europe would become brothers and worship as one. Schwenckfeld sent books and letters to Luther with the details of his discoveries, certain that the theologian would be interested. Schwenckfeld called it the “Middle Way.” There are several references to Caspar Schwenckfeld in the private letters of Martin Luther, in which Luther calls Schwenckfeld a simpleton and a maniac, and his Middle Way the “spue” of the devil. How frustrating it must have been for poor Martin Luther to see his proposals taken to such extremes. In time, Luther’s view of Schwenckfeld would be shared by the Silesian authorities. They would label the hard-of-hearing and gentle Schwenckfeld a heretic and eventually force him into a polite, voluntary exile. It is well known that Schwenckfeld prayed for Martin Luther every day, for all the days of his life.

more here.

Ian Sansom at The Guardian:

Kafka's The Trial; Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk; Kundera's The Joke; Bohumil Hrabal's Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age; Josef Škvorecký's Lieutenant Boruvka novels: one might be forgiven for thinking that all Czech literature is somehow synonymous with absurdism, dark humour and the erotic sublime. But this is too simplistic. Do Austen, Dickens and Larkin represent Eng lit? “I don't like it when people make generalisations about nations or ethnicities,” writes the novelist Ivan Klíma in his new memoir, which covers his life from early childhood in Prague to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, “claiming that Germans are disciplined, Czechs have a sense of humour, the English are tight-laced, the Russians are drunkards, Jews are businessmen and Gypsies are thieves”. Just as there is more to English literature than marriage plots, social panoramas and patiently lowered horizons, there is more to Czech literature than long jokes and the aesthetics of the forlorn. There is, for example, the work of Klíma.

With his once-fashionable shaggy Beatles haircut and his ever-serious and scholarly mien, Klíma looks well meaning and yet utterly out of touch – like a university professor. Yet Philip Roth once described Klíma as “my principal reality instructor”.

more here.

Kevin Boyle at The New York Times:

Over the past century, Congress has passed only a handful of truly transformative pieces of legislation. The Social Security Act comes to mind, as do the G.I. Bill, the Marshall Plan, the laws that created a mammoth military and laid down a web of highways, and the reforms that reopened the nation to immigration. Visionary laws — each and every one — meant to achieve policy aims of striking originality.

Then there’s the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its provisions were simple enough: The key sections outlawed the segregation of public spaces and prohibited employers and federal agencies from discriminating on the basis of race, sex or national origin. But the act’s significance extended far beyond its particulars, its purpose defined as much by morality as policy. Drafted in the midst of a crisis created by the courage of children, pushed through the Senate past the defenders of an indefensible social order, it marked one of those extraordinary moments when the promise and practice of equality align and democracy is affirmed.

more here.

Acquainted With The Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

by Robert Frost
from The Poetry of Robert Frost
Henry Holt & Co. LLC, 1964

H. Allen Orr reviews Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, in the NYRB:

Wade’s main claim is that human races likely differ in social behavior for genetic reasons as a result of recent evolution. These slight differences in behavior may, in turn, explain why different sorts of social institutions appear among different peoples:

Institutions are not just sets of arbitrary rules. Rather, they grow out of instinctual social behaviors, such as the propensity to trust others, to follow rules and punish those who don’t, to engage in reciprocity and trade, or to take up arms against neighboring groups. Because these behaviors vary slightly from one society to the next as the result of evolutionary pressures, so too may the institutions that depend on them.

Evolutionary biology might therefore have something to say about why some peoples live in modern states and others in tribal societies, and why some nations are wealthy while others remain mired in poverty.

The science in A Troublesome Inheritance is mostly inspired by the genomics revolution of the last decade or so. (A genome is the full complement of DNA, the hereditary material, that an individual carries.) This revolution has been, to a considerable extent, a technological and economic one. The high-tech approaches needed to “sequence” a person’s genome—to decipher the three billion units ofDNA that make up a human genome—is now sufficiently automated and inexpensive that geneticists have sequenced the genomes of thousands of people from around the world. In the course of this work, results have emerged that throw light on racial differences. Geneticists, Wade says, have been reluctant to talk openly about these results, which are sometimes politically sensitive. He takes up this task here.

A Troublesome Inheritance cleaves neatly into two parts. The first is a review of what recent studies of the genome reveal about our evolution, including the emergence of racial differences. The second part considers the part that genetic differences among races may play in behavior and in the social institutions embraced by various races. These two parts fare very differently.

More here.

First, Siddharth Varadarajan over at his website (image from Xinhua):

Mr Modi’s remarkable election campaign may have been fuelled by unprecedented sums of money and magnified by the logic of the first-past-the-post system — which converted a 12 percentage point difference in vote share with the Congress into a 600 per cent difference in seats – but it has helped him banish, for all intents and purposes, the lingering shadows of a darker past.

Troubling questions about his record that were met earlier with menacing silence or anger, but never answers, can no longer be asked. With the absolute majority Mr Modi has now delivered for the BJP, a new ledger of accounts has been opened. Any audit of his record will henceforth be on his own terms.

Narendra Damodar Modi asked the electorate for 272+ seats and they have given it to him. He asked voters for a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ – an India free of the Congress – and they have handed it to him. So reviled was the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government and so terrible its record of governance that the party has justifiably suffered the worst defeat in its 129-year history.

The ‘Modi Wave’ left nearly 60 per cent of the electorate cold and failed to make a major dent in those states where regional parties still enjoy a high degree of credibility with voters like Tamil Nadu, Odisha and West Bengal but it has wrecked the Congress everywhere.

More here. Vijay Prashad in The BRICS Post:

For the first time since 1984 a single party will have a majority in the Indian parliament. That year, the Congress Party led by Rajiv Gandhi secured 414 seats (out of the 533 seats in the Lok Sabha, the parliament). Mr. Gandhi’s mother, Indira, had been assassinated not long before the election, and the Congress won decisively on a massive sympathy wave. It did not matter to the electorate that the Congress had engineered an anti-Sikh pogrom that resulted in the death of 3000 Sikhs in two days. The 1984 election was the Congress’ largest victory yet.

In the 1984 election, the Hindu Right’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won only 2 seats. This year, the tide has turned. The BJP is projected to win a large majority, not near 414 but as decisive. It did not stop the Indian voters that the BJP leader, Narendra Modi, is accused of having a hand in an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002. The Congress, led by Mr. Gandhi’s son, Rahul, has posted its lowest ever total. It will limp into second place.

India will now have a powerful Hindu Right government with a very weak opposition. It is the worst of all worlds.

To come to power, the BJP wiped out several major political parties across northern India – the major parties of Uttar Pradesh (BSP, SP) and of western India (including the NCP). It also decimated the Congress. How did the BJP manage this feat?

More here. Also see Google's India election results map here.

George Scialabba at Boston Review:

Vivian Gornick’s review of The Americanization of Narcissism is written with her usual cogency, verve, and elegance. But I think she and the book’s author, Elizabeth Lunbeck, are mistaken about the motivation and import of Christopher Lasch’s views on the “underlying character structure” of late twentieth-century America.

Lasch was fundamentally a critic of mass society. He located the pivot of modern psychic development in the rise of mass production, with its concomitant deskilling of workers, destruction of economic independence, change in relations of authority from personal to abstract, and professionalization of education, management, mental health, social welfare, etc. The result of those epochal changes was a drastic change in the socialization of children. Individuation largely consists of the gradual reduction in scale of infantile fantasies of omnipotence and helplessness, accompanied by the child's modest but growing sense of mastery, continually measured against its human and material surroundings. Formerly, the presence of potent but fallible individuals, economically self-sufficient, with final legal and moral authority over their children's upbringing, provided one kind of template for the growing child's psychic development.

more here.

Edward White at Paris Review:

After that first meeting Van Vechten’s interest in Stein swiftly morphed into an obsession. Back in New York he set himself the task of hauling her from obscurity and into the mainstream. Van Vechten’s encounter with this “cubist of letters,” as she was described in a New York Times article he wrote about her, came at a perfect moment for both of them. In the early months of 1913, many Americans got their first glimpse of artists such as Kandinsky, Matisse, Picasso, and Duchamp when the Armory Show exhibition of modern art hit New York with incendiary force. Stein’s links to these European radicals—“freaks,” as at least one American newspaper labeled them—generated much curiosity about her. Van Vechten, for his part, was at the beginning of his journey as a Manhattan tastemaker, loudly extolling the virtues of African-American theater, ragtime, and modern dancers such as Isadora Duncan. In Stein he found the perfect cause to champion: a unique artist whose mercurial work pulsated with the spirit of the age, but also one whose public image he could shape and bind himself to.

Early in February 1914, Van Vechten urged his friend and New York Times colleague Donald Evans to publish the manuscript of Tender Buttons through his new publishing house, the Claire Marie Press.

more here.