Lee Siegel at The New York Times:

W. H. Auden said that a great book reads you. Eileen Simpson’s beautiful, recently reissued memoir of her doomed marriage to the poet John Berryman, “Poets in Their Youth” (1982), read me twice, just a few weeks ago and about 30 or so years before that, when I was in my early 20s. I might well have been two different people.

Back when I was green and carefree — to borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, who makes several appearances in the book — I was in awe of Simpson’s poets. Berryman numbered among his most intimate friends Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. I was convinced these figures were heroes of modern life.

“What the hell is happiness?” Simpson quotes Berryman saying to her “with a happy laugh” when they had been married just a short time. Then, she writes, he asks “more uneasily, ‘Should a poet seek it?’” I thought that was a question worth pondering.

more here.

Salt
.

Salt in a wound worth its weight in salt.
Kiss that picques like fleur de sel de bretagne.
Love preserved like lemon in salt.
Preserved lemon, reserved love.

Salt of you mixes with salt of me.
Fish baked in salt crust
Take a hammer to break it
Like they do in Livorno.
Non mi ricordo pui di niente
except the salt sea of Sardinia
where I swam everyday for summers in a row
and tasted salt of your forearm
on the beach in beckoning breeze.
.

by Carolyn Wells
from Alimentum, The Literature of Food

Marjorie Perloff at the Times Literary Supplement:

Aldous Huxley, who wrote one of the funniest pastiches, assumed, as did many of his Modernist contemporaries, that Poe’s French admirers praised his work largely because they had no ear for English and thus couldn’t hear what Harold Bloom, in a scathing indictment, calls “Poe’s palpable vulgarity”. But wrong as Bloom may be about “French Poe”, his essay “Inescapable Poe”, which was first published in the New York Review of Books as a review of the Library of America two-volumeCollected Edition of Poe’s poetry and prose, is perhaps the most vigorous version of the argument against the poetry that McGann’s book is designed to dispel, even though he unaccountably makes no reference to it. The authority of “French Poe”, Bloom declares, “vanishes utterly when confronted by what Poe actually wrote”. And he begins by citing four lines from “For Annie”: “Sadly I know I am shorn of my strength, / And no muscle I move / As I lie at full length – / But no matter! – I feel I am better at length”. Bloom concludes, “These dreadful lines are by no means unrepresentative of Poe’s verse”. Taken out of context and exhibited without comment, the lines may well seem weak, but as the argument unfolds, what really worries Bloom is less Poe’s diction or rhythm than the notion that his entire oeuvre is a “hymn to negativity”: “Poe, seeking to avoid Emersonianism, ends with only one fact, and it is more a wish than a fact: ‘I will to be the Abyss.’ This metaphysical despair . . . cannot be refuted, because it is myth, and Poe backed the myth with his life as well as his work”. Indeed, so murky is Poe’s vision that there were at least eleven nineteenth-century American poets (not counting Emily Dickinson and Whitman) who were better than Poe: in chronological order – Willian Cullen Bryant, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Jones Very, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Timrod and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. “Poe scrambles for twelfth place with Sidney Lanier”. This is an eccentric judgement and Bloom knows it, turning it slightly on its side at the end of his essay when he acknowledges that Poe, or at least the myth of Poe, is “central to the American canon”: Hart Crane, for example, places Poe squarely in “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge, where the descent into the “interborough fissures of the mind” of the subway symbolizes the loss of the Emersonian vision of Self-Reliance.

more here.

Caroline Moorehead at Literary Review:

Ravensbrück was never intended as a death camp. The only concentration camp built entirely for women, it was planned by Himmler as a place of labour and re-education for prostitutes, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and vagrants – all the 'undesirables' of the new Nazi Germany. But as Sarah Helm documents with meticulous thoroughness, such was the level of brutality that the women died, first in their tens, then in their hundreds and finally in their thousands. Of the 130,000 women estimated to have entered the camp during the six years of its existence, as many as half, and possibly three-quarters, did not survive. The French ethnologist Germaine Tillion, who was sent there in 1943, described it as a place of 'slow extermination'.

Ravensbrück took its name from a village fifty miles north of Berlin, which stood on the edge of a lake surrounded by forests and flat marshy land. Locals called it the 'little Siberian Mecklenburg' on account of the glacial winds coming from the Baltic. The first 867 women arrived on 15 May 1939. They were stripped, washed, checked for lice and handed blue and white striped dresses and jackets, socks, wooden clogs and a white headscarf. Each was given a number and a coloured triangle made of felt to be sewn onto their clothes: black for prostitute, beggar or petty criminal, green for habitual criminals, lilac for Jehovah's Witnesses.

more here.

Ben Jeffery at The Point:

The philosopher Georg Lukács once said that there was something nightmarish in the experience of an intellectual with no vision of the future. Underneath all of its obstructions and code, DeLillo’s writing seems to express the same thought. The future is a kind of narrative category, after all: the projected goal that gives the present its sense of order and purpose. It’s something we suffer without. For an individual, the inability to imagine life improving, or changing in any way other than badly, is a kind of death sentence. On the collective level, too, a society without any aspirations toward a better shared existence is condemned to the unchallenged perpetuation of injustice and misery, the ineradicable underside of all human history to date (and a horror that weighs “like a nightmare” on the living, as Marx so famously put it). DeLillo’s entire project has been based on a sense of disorientation that’s fundamentally political—the loss of a collective narrative, the transformation of a once-shared experience of America into something enigmatic and foreign. Part of Lukács’s point was that a society can’t suffer something like that without the damage making itself felt in everyday life, through all the sensations that DeLillo has spent his career so expertly evoking: confusion, anomie, anxiety, isolation, fear.

The obvious question is then: What would it be to overcome that? The most electrifying moments in Cosmopolis are gestures in the direction of an immense world order beyond the limits of ordinary perception.

more here.

Nigel Warburton in Five Books:

NW: Can you begin by saying something about the philosophy of information? When I studied philosophy there weren’t any courses on the philosophy of information so I’m not exactly sure what it is.

Ewen Calloway in Nature:

In a historic decision, the United Kingdom's House of Commons has voted to legalize a gene-therapy technique that could help women to avoid passing genetic defects onto their children. The vote, decided by 382 members of parliament casting in favour and 128 against, is expected to lead to the United Kingdom becoming the first country in the world to allow the transfer of DNA from diseased human eggs to healthy ones in the clinic.

This technique, known as mitochondrial replacement or three-person in vitro fertilization, aims to prevent women passing on harmful mutations in their mitochondria, the cell's energy-producing structures. An estimated 1 in 5,000 children are born with diseases caused by such mutations, which typically affect power-hungry tissues such as the brain, heart and muscles. All mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother, and some women carry harmful mitochondrial mutations without experiencing symptoms themselves. “It's great news for the patients with mitochondrial disease. It gives them real hopes and that's just fantastic,” says Doug Turnbull, a neurologist at Newcastle University, UK, who has led the effort to bring mitochondrial replacement to the clinic.

More here.

John G. Messerly in Salon:

Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists. As for what little religious belief remains among their colleagues, most professional philosophers regard it as a strange aberration among otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent.

Now nothing definitely follows about the truth of a belief from what the majority of philosophers or scientists think. But such facts might cause believers discomfort. There has been a dramatic change in the last few centuries in the proportion of believers among the highly educated in the Western world. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. This change occurred primarily because of the rise of modern science and a consensus among philosophers that arguments for the existence of gods, souls, afterlife and the like were unconvincing. Still, despite the view of professional philosophers and world-class scientists, religious beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?

More here.

Roy Scranton in the LA Review of Books:

EVERY TRUE WAR STORY is a story of trauma and recovery. A boy goes to war, his head full of romantic visions of glory, courage, and sacrifice, his heart yearning to achieve heroic deeds, but on the field of battle he finds only death and horror. He sees, suffers, and causes brutal and brutalizing violence. Such violence wounds the soldier’s very soul.

After the war the boy, now a veteran and a man, returns to the world of peace haunted by his experience, wracked by the central compulsion of trauma and atrocity: the struggle between the need to bear witness to his shattering encounter with violence, and the compulsion to repress it. The veteran tries to make sense of his memory but finds it all but impossible. Most people don’t want to hear the awful truths that war has taught him, the political powers that be want to cover up the shocking reality of war, and anybody who wasn’t there simply can’t understand what it was like.

The truth of war, the veteran comes to learn, is a truth beyond words, a truth that can only be known by having been there, an unspeakable truth he must bear for society.

So goes the myth of the trauma hero.

This myth informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history. It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. It shapes how we understand Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and World War II, and it affects whom we vote for. Like all myths, this story frames and filters our perceptions of reality through a set of recognizable and comforting conventions. It works to convince us that war is a special kind of experience that offers a special kind of truth, a truth that gives those who have been there a special kind of authority.

More here.

Paul Morley talks to Brian Eno in The Guardian (photo Harry Borden):

On talking: 1

“I heard a recording that had been made of me 35 years ago chatting with some friends and I thought the tape must have sped up because I sounded so fast. When ­others spoke, they were at a normal speed. It was me, I was speaking so fast. What I find both disappointing and reassuring is that I was saying exactly those things I will be saying today. I don't know what to make of that. A few different references, but the basic ideas haven't changed at all. No difference whatsoever! I suppose it's good to see I've been consistent as sometimes over the years it seems as though it's all been a bit incoherent, a bit of this, a bit of that, a while doing this, then one of those, followed by three of those. It seems all over the place when I'm doing it. Listening to me now talking then suggests there has been a pattern.”

On the intensity of ideas

“If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas. You expect to be engaged with ideas strongly whether you are for or against them. If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.”

On listening

“If you think of the mid- to late-50swhen all of this started to happen for me, the experience of listening to sound was so different from now. Stereo didn't exist. If you listened to music outside of church, apart from live music, which was very rare, it was through tiny speakers. It was a nice experience but a very small experience. So to go into a church, which is a specially designed and echoey space, and it has an organ, and my grandfather built the organ in the church where we went, suddenly to hear music and singing was amazing. It was like hearing someone's album on a tiny transistor radio and then you go and see them in a 60,000-seater. It's huge by comparison.

More here.

Richard A. Epstein over at the Hoover Institution (Image credit: Sanofi Pasteur):

The resurgence of measles is largely attributable to the confluence of two separate factors. On the one side there is a strong, if unacknowledged, effort on the part of some people to free ride off the vaccination of others. The self-interested calculations of many conscientious parents can run as follow: Of course, measles is a contagious disease, but it only spreads if there is a sufficiently large population of unvaccinated people in any given community. Taking any vaccine, including the measles vaccine, necessarily carries with it some risk of adverse outcomes. Vaccines could be impure or improperly administered, and even in the best of times, there is always a residual risk that the vaccine itself will transmit the very disease that it is supposed to prevent. So long as other individuals are vaccinated, the rational free rider decides that it pays not to vaccinate his or her own children. They receive the protection afforded by herd immunity, without subjecting their loved ones to the risks, however small, that vaccinations always present.

The second factor that reduces vaccination levels is the spread, sometimes deliberate, of misinformation that overstates vaccination risks. This sentiment is often fueled by powerful suspicions that drug companies are greedy and governments corrupt. This entire episode was fueled by fraudulent studies published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in 1998 in Lancet magazine, which twelve years later the journal eventually retracted, but only after much of the damage was done. Those studies, which had been funded in part by plaintiffs’ lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers, purported to find a (nonexistent) link between vaccines that were manufactured using a mercury-based compound, Thimerosal, and autism. Unfortunately, Lancet’s forthright retraction of the article did not quell the uneasiness about vaccines in either Britain or the United States. Indeed, it may well have fueled populist concerns of an ever-wider conspiracy among establishment figures.

This combination of free-riding and misinformation may now be exacting a high toll, as the increased spread of measles puts a large population of unvaccinated persons at risk for the disease, no matter what their overall health. It is not surprising, therefore, that the anti-vaccine groups have now been put on the defensive in part by a recent lawsuit brought in California by Carl Krawitt on behalf of his six-year old son Rhett, who suffers from leukemia and therefore cannot safely take the vaccine.

Krawitt’s suit demands that his local school board require all students who can, but have not, been vaccinated to stay at home, so that Rhett can more safely attend the school. Legally, his suit is likely to flounder on the shoals of modern administrative law, which vests a large and virtually unreviewable discretion in local health officials to decide whether this action is required. Yet by the same token, if the school board should deem the risk sufficient to call for those suspensions, it is equally unlikely that any parent who refuses to vaccinate their children for either religious or medical reasons could have any success in keeping them in school.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

One day in the summer of 1896, Maxim Gorky’s mind was blown. Gorky was attending a Russian fair and had gone to visit an exhibit by a couple of Frenchmen known as the Lumiére Brothers. Sitting in a darkened room, Gorky saw what seemed to him a photograph of the streets of Paris projected onto a large screen. It was a nice photograph, but Gorky was not particularly impressed. He’d seen plenty of photographs before. Then the damn thing began to flicker and come to life. This was something new.

Gorky watched what was happening on the screen in deepening amazement. He wrote about the experience a couple of days later:

Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the carriages.

Gorky was watching reality unfolding in front of his very eyes, in real time. Yet, this reality was also not reality. These were images, moving images projected onto a screen. As Gorky watched, he was struck more and more by the dichotomy between the striking realism of the scenes and his distance from that reality. This effect was heightened by the fact that the Lumiére Brothers shot their films in black and white and without sound (sound and color being technological developments that would only come decades later).

“Noiselessly,” Gorky wrote, “the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colors of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.” For Gorky, there was something inherently unnerving and melancholy in the act of watching other people’s lives pass by on a screen.

More here.

Samantha Storey in the New York Times:

Raul Roa has been a general-assignment photographer in Los Angeles for 20 years. He covers everything. The overturned tractor-trailer on I-5. The water polo meet at Glendale High. The protests in downtown Los Angeles after Ferguson. He does it all.

But the geography of his beat — north of Los Angeles — and where it is in relation to his home in Whittier, south of there, has unexpectedly birthed a hobby. Every day as he drives home, he sees planes swooping down to land at Los Angeles International Airport.

He lives right under the airport’s flight path.

It would not be a stretch to say that some people might find this irksome — the noise alone — but Mr. Roa, 49, has an eye, of course, and his eye, one commute home 18 months ago, turned to a ripe full moon perched in the sky, plump as could be. He noticed how perfectly silhouetted the planes were as they flew past the moon. He was driving along the Pomona Freeway. He took the next exit, which led him to the parking lot of the Montebello mall.

“I waited for another plane to go by,” Mr. Roa said. “It was nighttime. Clear. Two or three planes went by and I snapped a couple of shots. And there it was. I had it.”

More here.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan in The Guardian:

A multimillion-dollar biopic about the childhood of the prophet Muhammad – Iran’s most expensive and lavish film to date – is set to premiere on Sunday.

Tehran’s Fajr international film festival, which coincides with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, is scheduled to show the country’s own version of how Islam’s most revered figure lived. To protect the prophet’s dignity, the film will be shown out of competition.

Iran has been a vocal critic of the prophet’s portrayal in the west, recentlyexpressing strong condemnation of the Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon in the aftermath of the deadly attacks in Paris, which depicted Muhammad weeping and holding up a sign reading Je Suis Charlie.

The film, to be released as Muhammad, Messenger of God” in the festival’s opening ceremony, is made by Majid Majidi, a leading pro-establishment Iranian director who has worked for more than five years – with a great deal of secrecy – to produce what is only the second big-budget feature made about the prophet. The first was Moustapha Akkad’s 1976 The Message, starring Anthony Quinn, which sparked controversy despite not showing the prophet on screen to avoid hurting Muslim sensitivities.

Majidi has had his own doubts about Akkad’s biopic, which he said failed to do justice to Muhammad’s life by showing “only Jihad and war” and also because “the image of Islam in that film is the image of a sword”.

Majidi’s state-sponsored film, which is the first part of an ambitious trilogy about the prophet’s life, tells the story of Muhammad from his birth to the age of 12, ending with his first visit to Sham (Syria) where Bahira, a Christian monk, is believed to have predicted he would one day become a prophet.

More here.

Amanda Baker in Scientific American:

Adolescence – the period extending from puberty to the point of independent stability – is often portrayed as a very dramatic time with a new emphasis placed on the importance of friendships and social input. Researchers have even found during this period that many adolescents value the input of their peers even over the input of their family. The current generation of teens are faced with the addition of social media and digital content to their lives, additions which seem to have pushed many age-driven differences in behavior into a new arena. There are even notable differences in the way the current generation of teens consumes media. While older adults watch ~47 hours per week of television on average, current teens are only watching about 19 hours. Instead, they are consuming vast amounts of online video – like Youtube, Vine, and vlogs. In traditional television or movies the stars and the plots are often mysterious people and ideas that cannot be touched by the outside world. In contrast, young vloggers and stars of Youtube and Vine often host Q&A sessions with their fans; integrate feedback into future content; and express their gratitude not to their fans, but to their “6 million friends.”

Move up just a few years to young adults and there is already a shift, with this group watching five times as much television as online video. At least some part of that difference can perhaps be accounted for with changes that occur in this period to the brain itself. One of the areas going through important structural changes in this period – with additions of gray matter and changes in shape – is the area that deals with “social emotions.” Social emotions are those that require you to consider what others might be thinking – like guilt or embarrassment – rather than your own emotional experience – like fear. When researchers ask adolescents and adults to explain certain emotions, both groups feel and describe them in the same way. But the activity that is happening in the brain, and the way that information is being processed, differs between the two groups.

More here.

Tinnitus

My father’s tinnitus is like the hiss off a water cooler,
only louder. And it doesn’t just stop like, say, a hand-dryer— the worst is
it comes and goes. Or you shine a light on it
and it looks permanent as the sea,

a tideless sea that won’t go away. The masker
he’s been prescribed is a tiny machine, an arc of white noise
that blacks out a lot
but can’t absorb the interference totally

any more than you or I — taking the air,
stirring milk into coffee, daydreaming through the six o’clock news,
trying to sleep on a wet night —
can simply switch off what’s always there, a particular memory

nagging away, the erosive splash off a little river
wearing down the road, say, on the Connor Pass,
a day out, through which he’d accelerate
in the flash, orange Capri.

by John McAuliffe
from Next Door
publisher: Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2007

Richard Marshall in 3:AM Magazine:

Penelope Maddy is the candy-store kid of metaphilosophical logic and maths. She’s stocked up with groovy thoughts about the axioms of mathematics, about what might count as a good reason to adopt one, about mathematical realism, about Gödel’s intuitions, naturalism, second philosophy, Hume and Quine, world-word connections, about where mathematical objectivity comes from, about the limitations of drawing analogies, about depth, about Wittgenstein and the logical must, about the Kantianism of the Tractatus and about the relationship between science and philosophy. Suck it and see, this one has a fizz …

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Are you a lone brooder or prefer to think and argue aloud with others?

Penelope Maddy: I started out in mathematics and was moved from there to philosophy by others, oddly enough, without really understanding what was going on. Foundational questions captured my interest early on: one of my most cherished memories is the sudden realization that the number 1 could be defined in naive set theory! Poking around in my great high school math teacher’s secret book closet, I soon came to understand that 2+2=4 and the rest of classical mathematics could be proved from the standard assumptions of axiomatic set theory, but that one of the first and most natural questions about infinite sets, the Continuum Hypothesis (CH), couldn’t be settled one way or the other on the basis of those same axioms. What could a solution to such an open question even look like?!

At the time, UC Berkeley was the place to go to study set theory: forcing was new, and larger and larger large cardinal axioms were being proposed in turn. Another vivid memory is watching in awe as one of my professors showed us the proof that if there’s a measurable cardinal, then one of the open questions (not CH, alas) has an answer (there are sets outside Gödel’s minimal universe). This was just the answer one would want and expect, but why in the world would one think that this candidate for a new axiom — ‘there are measurable cardinals’ — is true?! Perhaps there could be new axioms even to settle CH, but what counts as a proper argument for or against a proposed axiom?

Without realizing it, I’d slipped into philosophy. When I applied to the Princeton math department for graduate school, they admitted me instead into the program in history and philosophy of science on the basis of my statement of interests. Being from Berkeley, I figured this must be a program like their Logic and Methodology, but when I arrived, it turned out I was pretty much just in the philosophy department. The transition took some fierce adjustments and teetered on disaster at times, but I eventually came to see the wisdom of those admissions officers.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

Each year, billions of people get infected with viruses–with common ones like influenza and cold viruses, and rarer ones like polio and Ebola. The viruses don’t stay all that long inside of us. In most cases, our immune systems wipe them out, except for a few refugees that manage to escape to a new host and keep their species alive. In some cases, the viruses kill their unfortunate hosts, and end their own existence as well. But in some exquisitely rare cases, viruses meld with the genome of their hosts and become part of the genetic legacy their hosts pass down to future generations.

Scientists know this melding has happened because viruses have distinctive genes. When scientists scan the human genome, they sometimes come across a stretch of DNA that bears the hallmarks of viruses. The easiest type of virus to recognize are retroviruses, a group that includes HIV. Retroviruses make copies of themselves by infecting cells and then using an enzyme to insert their genes into their host cell’s DNA. The cell then reads the inserted DNA and makes new molecules that assemble into new viruses.

Most of the time, retroviruses behave like other viruses, jumping from host to host. But sometimes a retrovirus will end up in the genome of an egg or sperm. If it then ends up in a new embryo, the embryo will carry a copy of the virus in every single cell–including its own egg or sperm. And on and on, from parents to children to grandchildren.

If the virus DNA remains intact, it still has the capacity to multiply. It may produce new viruses that break out of a cell, and even leap into a new host. But over the generations, the virus DNA may mutate and degrade. It may no longer be able to escape its own cell. But the virus may still have a bit of life left to it: it can make new viruses that insert their genes back into the genome at a new location.

More here.