Abraham Verghese in The New York Times:

On June 17, 1977, Rita and Doug Swan noticed that Matthew, their 15-month-old child, was having difficulty walking. Both parents were raised in the Christian Science faith, and they called a Christian Science practitioner, Jeanne Laitner, to pray for the child. Rita’s prior experience with an illness of her own is relevant to this choice: When repeated prayer “treatments” failed to give her relief from a painful ovarian cyst, she allowed physicians to operate. But she was viewed as having abandoned her faith. She was no longer permitted to lead church meetings or teach Sunday school. To Rita this loss of community was profound, and perhaps explains why, as her baby was getting worse, she did not seek medical care. Laitner claimed that Matthew’s continued illness was evidence of what, in the author’s words, was the parents’ “failure to fully embrace God and his majesty.” Another Christian Science practitioner, June Ahearn, was called in to pray. Her response to worried phone calls from the parents was: “It’s only been an hour and a half since you [last] called. He can’t possibly be in bad shape. It’s you and Doug with your fear that are holding this whole thing up!” Finally Ahearn allowed that the boy might have a broken bone as a cause of his severe neck pain; Christian Scientists are allowed to see doctors to set broken bones. Once Matthew was taken to the hospital, it became abundantly clear that he had meningitis, but his condition was so advanced that abscesses had developed in the brain. He died of what would have been a survivable illness had he been treated earlier.

With Matthew gone, members of Rita Swan’s church banded together, arguing that “children with meningitis die all the time . . . especially in hospitals”; Matthew’s death was evidence that medical science couldn’t do much better. Rita and Doug were ostracized for speaking out at what they saw as medical malpractice. Looking back, Rita Swan offered an explanation for her failure to treat her son, although she had a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt and her husband had one from the University of Vermont in mathematics. Both were well informed, but their faith had cut them off from life­saving treatment: “Christian Science has all the features of a cult,” she explained. “We should never have allowed ourselves to be isolated like that.”

Moonlight in Mourning of Someone
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Ben Zimmer in the Wall Street Journal:

Copy editors might seem like stick-in-the-mud traditionalists when it comes to language change, but when I attended the American Copy Editors Society’s annual conference in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago, I found growing acceptance of a usage that has long been disparaged as downright ungrammatical: treating “they” as a singular pronoun.

According to standard grammar, “they” and its related forms can only agree with plural antecedents. But English sorely lacks a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, and “they” has for centuries been pressed into service for that purpose, much to the grammarians’ chagrin. Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular “they” may be easing their stance.

“They” most often turns singular in common usage when its antecedent is considered generic, not referring to a single known person. Nearly everyone would find that they can stomach the “they” in this very sentence, agreeing with “nearly everyone.”

Things get trickier when the antecedent of “they” more clearly refers to one person. Areader of this column may not like what they see in this sentence, for instance.

More here.

Saul Austerlitz in The New Republic:

Hannah Arendt was a good friend. When she was a teenage girl, she was forbidden by her mother and stepfather from visiting an acquaintance named Anne Mendelssohn, but she went anyway, walking to a nearby town at night, throwing pebbles at Anne’s window, and cementing a lifelong friendship. She came to the rescue of her friend and intellectual sparring partner Mary McCarthy after she suffered a traumatic miscarriage, as Jon Nixon tells us in his engaging biography, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship, and again while she was going through an emotionally draining divorce. She sent care packages to her former teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers when he and his wife were stuck in Germany, impoverished and hungry, after the war. She protected her husband Heinrich Blucher, as much a friend as a romantic partner, during his professional difficulties as an academic.

Arendt’s web of allegiances opens up a new avenue of approach into her career. More than a bodiless thinker, or a walking scandal, Arendt is depicted here as a woman hungry for companionship, and for the exchange of ideas. It also opens up an area of inquiry into the complex and under-explored dynamic of friendship. “Friendships are not the application of some theory of friendship,” Nixon writes, “nor do they rely on an ongoing reflective meta-dialogue between the friends regarding the nature of their friendship. … There is a great deal that is appropriately and courteously implicit in friendship.” Nixon intends Arendt to be an exemplar of what he repeatedly hints is a now-lost era.

Arendt saw friendship as a middle ground between the solitude and solipsism of internal dialogue, and the terror of the public square. It was a protected space in which ideas could be unveiled, sanded down, hardened, and polished. Her friends were her intellectual compatriots, and her boundless loyalty toward them was also an expression of her deep-seated appreciation for their kindnesses. Friendship was an intensely appealing concept for a woman who spent much of her life as a refugee among refugees, a Jew expelled from her country of birth, adrift in foreign countries. It was a protective amulet, as well as a symbol of the higher values crushed under the boot of totalitarianism. Nazism’s mission was “to eradicate totally any trace of human freedom,” and friendship’s playfulness and compassion was a symbol of rebellion against fascism’s inhumanity.

More here.

Rachel Kaadzi Ghanash in The NYT Magazine (Katy Grannan for The New York Times):

[W]hen the poet Henry Dumas went to his death, the way so many black boys and men do, it was Morrison, who never had a chance to meet him and published his work posthumously, who sent around a book-party announcement that was part invitation, part consolation, which read: “In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.”

Two years after Dumas’s death, Morrison published her first novel, at 39. In many ways, she had prepared the world for her voice and heralded her arrival with her own editorial work. And yet the story of Pecola Breedlove, a broken black girl who wants blue eyes, was a novel that no one saw coming. Morrison relished unexpectedness. The first edition of “The Bluest Eye” starts Pecola’s story on the cover: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.”

Morrison’s work, since she published that first novel, has always delivered a heavy load. Her books are populated by both history and the people who are left out of history: a jealous, mentally ill hairdresser with a sharp knife (“Jazz,” 1992); a man who as a child suckled at his mother’s breast until those in the community found it odd (“Song of Solomon,” 1977); an enslaved woman, who would rather slice her own daughter's neck than let captivity happen to her (“Beloved,” 1987); and a destitute little girl, belly swollen with her father’s child, holding a Shirley Temple cup, desperate to have Temple’s bright blue eyes (“The Bluest Eye,” 1970).

On one level, Morrison’s project is obvious: It is a history that stretches across 11 novels and just as many geographies and eras to tell a story that is hardly chronological but is thematically chained and somewhat continuous. This is the project most readily understood and accepted by even her least generous critics. But then there is the other mission, the less obvious one, the one in which Morrison often does the unthinkable as a minority, as a woman, as a former member of the working class: She democratically opens the door to all of her books only to say, “You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I’m glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn’t built for you or by you.” Here, blackness isn’t a commodity; it isn’t inherently political; it is the race of a people who are varied and complicated. This is where her works become less of a history and more of a liturgy, still stretching across geographies and time, but now more pointedly, to capture and historicize: This is how we pray, this is how we escape, this is how we hurt, this is how we repent, this is how we move on.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Liza Herzog in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: When you discuss the philosophy of markets you begin by pointing out that economists theorizing and modeling markets are inadequate. What’s the problem?

LH: Economic models make simplifying assumptions about human agency and about social interaction. If one only used these models to answer the questions they are supposed to answer, taking into account their methodological limitations, there wouldn’t be any problem. But often they are used to make much wider claims. For example, predications are based on a theoretical model, but with insufficient discussion of whether the assumptions of the model also hold in reality. Along the way, one often finds that normative judgments sneak in, but without being made explicit. Thus, one cannot even ask critical questions, for example whether certain theories serve the interests of certain social groups – whether they are ideologies in the classical sense.

3:AM: You also suggest that philosophers like Rawls’s on justice and others discussing social and political issues like Elizabeth Anderson tend to discuss the market as something to be tamed from the outside rather than be the central subject. Can you say something about this?

LH: Markets are often treated as “black boxes” in normative theorizing, maybe because of an implicit assumption that they are the economists’ business, not ours. Thinking about the boundaries of markets, and about their place in society, is very important, but it is not the only question we can, and should, ask about them. We also need to think about the internal structures of markets: what is their ontology, what kinds of social relations do they create between individuals, what internal distributive features do they have? Some might say that by treating markets from a philosophical perspective, we bestow too much honor to them, replicating the dominance that the economic sphere already has on our lives. But I think we can best resists the tendencies of markets to colonize the life world, as Habermas put it, if we get a better understanding of what they are, and what is problematic about them.

More here.

From Sam Harris's blog:

S. Harris: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Johann. You’ve written a wonderful book about the war on drugs—about its history and injustice—and I hope everyone will read it. The practice of making certain psychoactive compounds illegal raises some deep and difficult questions about how to create societies worth living in. I strongly suspect that you and I will agree about the ethics here: The drug war has been a travesty and a tragedy. But you’re much more knowledgeable about the history of this war, so I’d like to ask you a few questions before we begin staking out common ground.

The drug war started almost exactly 100 years ago. That means our great-grandparents could wander into any pharmacy and buy cocaine or heroin. Why did the drug war begin, and who started it?

J. Hari: It’s really fascinating, because when I realized we were coming up to this centenary, I thought of myself as someone who knew a good deal about the drug war. I’d written about it quite a lot, as you know, and I had drug addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to.

And yet I just realized there were many basic questions I didn’t know the answer to, including exactly the one you’re asking: Why were drugs banned 100 years ago? Why do we continue banning them? What are the actual alternatives in practice? And what really causes drug use and drug addiction?

To find the answers, I went on this long journey—across nine countries, 30,000 miles—and I learned that almost everything I thought at the start was basically wrong. Drugs aren’t what we think they are. The drug war isn’t what we think it is. Drug addiction isn’t what we think it is. And the alternatives aren’t what we think they are.

If you had said to me, “Why were drugs banned?” I would have guessed that most people, if you stopped them in the street, would say, “We don’t want people to become addicted, we don’t want kids to use drugs,” that kind of thing.

What is fascinating when you go back and read the archives from the time is that that stuff barely comes up.

More here.

Alexis Okeowo at Granta:

The city of Lagos takes the form of an awkwardly shaped octopus, with tentacles reaching east and west, plucking up land that was once outside of its edges or part of neighbouring states. The metropolis, the commercial capital of Nigeria, is inundated with water, a fact never more obvious than during the rainy season – about half the year. Pushed up against a lagoon, riddled with creeks and canals and lacking drains, the city sinks under the rain and roads disappear. Lagosians pull up their trousers to wade through the water and cars slow to a near-halt as they tentatively plow through rapidly forming lakes. Most residents live on what is called the mainland, the body of the octopus, where quarters continue to become denser as migrants pour into the city. Settlers build precariously on the wetlands, and the homes, constructed quickly and cheaply, routinely fall in on their residents. At least one hundred and thirty-five buildings in Lagos have collapsed over the last seven years, some of them of considerable scale and some of which were schools.

Every morning, more than 60 per cent of the mainland’s inhabitants, from the upper-class neighbourhoods to the poorest shanty towns, cross three choked bridges, leaving the mainland to work on a series of islands. The original downtown of the city is a tight grid of markets, parks and commercial and government buildings called Lagos Island. Today, the city center includes Victoria Island, Lagos’s financial centre, and its adjacent residential area, Ikoyi.

more here.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids worldwide bop to Beyoncé.

Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.

The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world. We may thump our chests and boast that we’re No. 1, and in some ways we are. But, in important ways, we lag.

The index ranks the United States 30th in life expectancy, 38th in saving children’s lives, and a humiliating 55th in women surviving childbirth. O.K., we know that we have a high homicide rate, but we’re at risk in other ways as well. We have higher traffic fatality rates than 37 other countries, and higher suicide rates than 80.

We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.

Ouch. “We’re No. 87!” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it?

Michael E. Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who helped devise the Social Progress Index, says that it’s important to have conventional economic measures such as G.D.P. growth. But social progress is also a critical measure, he notes, of how a country is serving its people.

More here.

Jeff Wise in Nautilus:

For any pilot, losing engine power is a nerve-wracking experience. Engine failure in a plane like the ATR-72-600 is not in itself a catastrophe. It’s an eventuality that the planes are designed for—it’s why they have multiple engines—and pilots train for. But Liao had to take the right steps immediately. His heart pounding, he knew that he had to throttle back the stricken engine and turn it off to reduce the risk of fire. Once that was done, he’d have enough power from the remaining engine to maintain altitude and maneuver back to the airport for a safe landing.

The plane’s black boxes recorded what happened next. Liao reached forward and pulled back on one of the engine throttle levers. But he pulled back on the left one—the one for the good engine. Now the plane was 1,000 feet over one of the most densely populated cities in the world, 25 tons of metal, fuel, and human flesh, with no engines to keep it in the air. A worrisome but manageable problem had suddenly become an imminent and severe one.

More here.

Martin Enserink in Science:

Insecure about your height? You may want to avoid this tiny country by the North Sea, whose population has gained an impressive 20 centimeters in the past 150 years and is now officially the tallest on the planet. Scientists chalk up most of that increase to rising wealth, a rich diet, and good health care, but a new study suggests something else is going on as well: The Dutch growth spurt may be an example of human evolution in action. The study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that tall Dutch men on average have more children than their shorter counterparts, and that more of their children survive. That suggests genes that help make people tall are becoming more frequent among the Dutch, says behavioral biologist and lead author Gert Stulp of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection,” says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn't involved in the study. “It strikes at the core of our understanding of human nature, and how malleable it is.” It also confirms what Stearns knows from personal experience about the population in the northern Netherlands, where the study took place: “Boy, they are tall.” For many years, the U.S. population was the tallest in the world. In the 18th century, American men were 5 to 8 centimeters taller than those in the Netherlands. Today, Americans are the fattest, but they lost the race for height to northern Europeans—including Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Estonians—sometime in the 20th century. Just how these peoples became so tall isn't clear, however. Genetics has an important effect on body height: Scientists have found at least 180 genes that influence how tall you become. Each one has only a small effect, but together, they may explain up to 80% of the variation in height within a population. Yet environmental factors play a huge role as well. The children of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, for instance, grew much taller than their parents. Scientists assume that a diet rich in milk and meat played a major role.

The Dutch have become so much taller in such a short period that scientists chalk most of it up to their changing environment. As the Netherlands developed, it became one of the world's largest producers and consumers of cheese and milk. An increasingly egalitarian distribution of wealth and universal access to health care may also have helped. Still, scientists wonder whether natural selection has played a role as well.

More here.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in Bookforum:

In the months that have passed since three young men, two of them ex-convicts, gunned down the staff of a satirical magazine and patrons of a kosher grocery in Paris, killing seventeen people, including several artists—during which time another young man, also an ex-con, shot up a café and a synagogue in Copenhagen, killing two more, including a filmmaker—much has been written to put these events in context. With each new text, the narrative has thickened with nuance, anger, digression, and distraction, as writers, in accordance with their nature, have tied themselves in knots to make sense of the killings in terms of terrorism, religious intolerance, ideological indoctrination, postcolonial injustice, racial prejudice, economic depravation, government neglect, bad schools, terrible prisons, dangerous clerics, and the potential for radicalization among disaffected young men prone to messianic delusion.

In one way or another, all of these texts belong to what Adam Phillips, describing Freud, has termed “a long spiritual, religious tradition of crisis writing.” Perhaps that ever-expanding mass of storytelling, messy and oversensitive and argumentative as it may be, is truer to the experience of these events around the world, where reactions have been everywhere mixed, and nowhere the same, not even in the mind of a single person, to say nothing of the popular imagination of a single place.

In Europe and the United States, a story of the attacks has settled into a moment of much-needed but still dubious repose, as responsibility is passed to “moderate Muslims” around the globe to deal with religious extremism, reform their faith, and thicken their skin. “What is entirely out of the government’s control—out of anyone’s control,” argues Mark Lilla, writing about France in the New York Review of Books, “is what happens next in the larger Muslim world.”

This is true enough. But there are a great many cities out there in the not-so-distant, not-so-frightful Muslim world. In those cities, one might listen for the subtleties of a self-reflexive criticism and hear a brash and lively satire in return. One might discover a rich history of progressive ideas that have developed in close proximity to Islam over hundreds of years. Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul are three such cities. Others are just as relevant, but in these three, artists have established a particularly strong tradition of pushing public discourse. And in these three, regular people are dealing all the time with the kinds of dangers and ideological distortions that ripped through France and Denmark this winter.

Read the rest here.

Kathy Knapp in LA Review of Books:

Mad Men still has a half-season to go, but Don Draper’s obituary has already been written. We don’t know exactly how it will end for Don, but the critical consensus is that his fate is sealed: for the past seven years, we’ve watched him follow the same downward trajectory his silhouetted likeness traces in the opening credits, so that all that’s left is for him to land. In a piece lamenting the “death of adulthood in American culture,” A. O. Scott says that Mad Men is one of several recent pop cultural narratives — among them The Sopranos and Breaking Bad — that chart the “final, exhausted collapse” of white men and their regimes, but I’m not convinced. Don has a way of bouncing back. Where one episode opens with him on an examination table, lying to his doctor about how much he drinks and smokes as if his bloodshot eyes and smoker’s cough didn’t give him away (even bets on cirrhosis and emphysema), another finds him swimming laps, cutting down on his drinking, and keeping a journal in an effort to “gain a modicum of control.” Over the course of the past six and a half seasons, Don has been on the brink of personal and professional destruction too many times to count, and yet when we last saw him at the conclusion of “Waterloo,” the final episode of the last half-season, which aired last May, he was fresh-faced and back on top. The truth is that Mad Men has something far more unsettling (and historically accurate) to tell us about the way that white male power works to protect its own interests, precisely by staging and restaging its own death.

In fact, a closer look at “Waterloo” in particular makes clear that the show does not chronicle the last gasp of the white male, as Scott would have it, but outlines the way that a wily old guard has followed the advice of E. Digby Baltzell (who coined the acronym WASP in 1964) by “absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks” in order to maintain its grip on power. After several episodes of unrelenting humiliation for Don, this installment was so thoroughly upbeat that it had critics wondering just whose Waterloo it was, anyway. Unlike Napoleon, Don doesn’t defiantly march into a futile, fatal battle to save his job, but instead surprises everyone by stepping graciously aside, handing a big pitch for Burger Chef to his protégé, Peggy Olson. Peggy protests she can’t, because she’s a woman; it seems a clear sign that the times are indeed a-changing that Don concludes, “Maybe that’s better.

More here.

Lawrence Berger in the NYT's The Stone:

A cognitive scientist and a German philosopher walk into the woods and come upon a tree in bloom: What does each one see? And why does it matter?

While that may sound like the set-up to a joke making the rounds at a philosophy conference, I pose it here sincerely, as a way to explore the implications of two distinct strains of thought — that of cognitive science and that of phenomenology, in particular, the thought of Martin Heidegger, who offers a most compelling vision of the ultimate significance of our being here, and what it means to be fully human.

It can be argued that cognitive scientists tend to ignore the importance of what many consider to be essential features of human existence, preferring to see us as information processors rather than full-blooded human beings immersed in worlds of significance. In general, their intent is to explain human activity and life as we experience it on the basis of physical and physiological processes, the implicit assumption being that this is the domain of what is ultimately real. Since virtually everything that matters to us as human beings can be traced back to life as it is experienced, such thinking is bound to be unsettling.

For instance, an article in The Times last year by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, about whether we humans are “really conscious,” argued, among other things, that “we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.”

One feature of this line of thought that may strike us as particularly strange is that rather than being in direct contact with people and things, we are said to process bits of information that go to form representations of the world that are the basis for any relations that we have with our fellows. That would appear to be quite different from the way we actually experience things, but we are told to trust that science is more reliable because experience is often misleading in this regard.

More here.

Olivier Blanchard over at the IMF:

Seven years since the onset of the global financial crisis, we are still assessing how the crisis should change our views about macroeconomic policy. To take stock, the IMF organized two conferences, the first in 2011, the second in 2013, and published the proceedings in two books, titled “In the Wake of the Crisis” and “What Have We Learned?“.

The time seems right for a third assessment. Research has continued, policies have been tried, and the debates have been intense. But have we truly made much progress? Are we closer to a new framework? To address these questions, Raghuram Rajan, Ken Rogoff, Larry Summers and I are organizing a third conference, “Rethinking Macro Policy III: Progress or Confusion?” that will take place on April 15-16 at the IMF.

Much of the discussion in recent years has centered (rightly) on the policy issues of the day: What measures to take during a financial or sovereign crisis, what to do at the zero lower bound, how to design quantitative easing, at what rate should fiscal consolidation take place?

The focus of our conference will be instead on the architecture of policy when (hopefully) policy rates have become positive again, and most countries are growing and have stabilized debt-to-GDP ratios.

In other words, how will/should macro policy look once the crisis is finally over?

Here are some questions to start the discussion (I hope, in a later blog, to summarize the answers coming out of the conference).

It is now well understood that the financial crisis resulted from the interaction of excessive leverage in the financial system and extensive interconnectedness and complexity of balance sheets of both banks and non banks. In other words, the crisis revealed the presence of large, undetected, systemic risks. Since then, much effort has gone toward improving our understanding and assessment of systemic risk. Questions: Where do we stand? Are some dimensions of systemic risk easier to measure (e.g., leverage in the banking sector vs. interconnectedness of banks and non-banks or risks outside the banking sector)? How should we assess the experience with stress-tests? And have we made enough progress in reducing systemic risk since the crisis, e.g., with Dodd-Frank, the Vickers commission, the Financial Stability Board, etc?

More here.

Sue Prideaux at the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1887–8, August Strindberg wrote the experimental autobiographical novel Le Plaidoyer d’un fou; but only now is it available in a translation taken directly from the author’s original manuscript, lost shortly after its first publication in Paris in 1895. The manuscript resurfaced in 1973 in the safe of the Anatomy department of Oslo University – a curious location rendered curiouser when you remember that Strindberg, a Swede, never visited Norway.

Throughout his life, Strindberg wrote a series of autobiographies that shared no common style or language, each aiming at “an analysis of the soul or psychological anatomy” that was truthful to himself at the particular moment of writing. The whole was deliberately designed to display the discontinuity of his “evolution as a human being” and as a writer. Plaidoyer was written as Strindberg was approaching forty. He wrote it in French, hoping Paris would be receptive to a new form of literature “more realistic than Flaubert, more experimental than Zola”. It was to be the opposite of the French tradition of the novelist-observer reporting elegantly on the human condition, the reverse of a neat encapsulation of experience. Written in the first person, it recorded his tortured ambivalence during the thirteen years of his adoring passion for his first wife, Siri von Essen.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Kawara’s art is not always quite so -rarefied. His most familiar work is his “Today” series, better known as “date paintings,” which he began producing in 1966 and continued making throughout his life: they are signlike works in acrylic on canvas showing the date on which the painting was made, inscribed in white sans serif letters and numerals, usually on a dark gray background (although there are some red and blue date paintings too). Because Kawara doesn’t space the numbers and letters of the date in the smooth way a typographer would, there is quirky rhythm to the inscriptions. The nearly 3,000 paintings are of various sizes, but most are quite modest in scale, often as small as eight by ten inches. It is thanks to these date paintings that “Kawara is a brand,” one of the many self-declared experts on the booming art market proclaimed a few years ago, “and his branding stands as a beacon for every contemporary dealer and every aspiring conceptual artist.”

Each painting is housed in (or, in the case of the larger paintings, merely accompanied by) a cardboard box that also contains a clipping from that day’s newspaper. At the Guggenheim, the boxes and clippings are mostly displayed in vitrines beneath the corresponding paintings. The selections are unpredictable. Beneath a painting from New Year’s Day, 1970, is the front page of The New York Times, with items on, for instance, the inauguration of John Lindsay for his second term as mayor and a dispute between the city and the transit workers’ union, which had turned down the offer of a 12 percent wage increase (how times have changed).

more here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta:

In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.

McKay, of Concordia University in Montreal, happened to pick up a mathematics paper in a completely different field, involving something called the j-function, one of the most fundamental objects in number theory. Strangely enough, this function’s first important coefficient is 196,884, which McKay instantly recognized as the sum of the monster’s first two special dimensions.

Most mathematicians dismissed the finding as a fluke, since there was no reason to expect the monster and the j-function to be even remotely related. However, the connection caught the attention of John Thompson, a Fields medalist now at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who made an additional discovery. The j-function’s second coefficient, 21,493,760, is the sum of the first three special dimensions of the monster: 1 + 196,883 + 21,296,876. It seemed as if the j-function was somehow controlling the structure of the elusive monster group.

Soon, two other mathematicians had demonstrated so many of these numerical relationships that it no longer seemed possible that they were mere coincidences. In a 1979 paper called “Monstrous Moonshine,” the pair — John Conway, now of Princeton University, and Simon Norton — conjectured that these relationships must result from some deep connection between the monster group and thej-function. “They called it moonshine because it appeared so far-fetched,” said Don Zagier, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany.

More here.