Vivek Wadhwa in The Washington Post:

Just as an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs that ruled the Earth and made way for small furry mammals, a new wave of planetary disruptions is about to occur. The new asteroid is called “exponential technology.” It is going to wipe out industries in a similar manner to the rock which fell on Earth during the Cretaceous Period. That is the premise of a new book by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World. It makes bold predictions and teaches entrepreneurs how to thrive in the same way as our mammalian ancestors: by being nimble and resilient. In their previous book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Diamandis and Kotler discussed how advancing technologies are making it possible to solve problems that have long plagued humanity, such as disease, hunger, and shortages of energy. The authors analyzed the exponential progress of fields such as computing, medicine, 3D printing, robotics, and artificial intelligence and postulated that shortages of material goods and knowledge would soon be a thing of the past; that humanity is heading into an amazing era of abundance. As most people still are, I used to be pessimistic about the future. I feared overpopulation; worldwide shortages of food, water, and energy; pandemics and disease; and a bankruptcy of our health care and social welfare systems. Then, about three years ago, I joined the faculty of what is effectively an “abundance think-tank,” Singularity University, which had been founded by Diamandis and legendary futurist Ray Kurzweil. I learned that the future that Diamandis described in Abundance is actually coming true — and doing so faster than we would expect.

…The key premise of Bold –that entrepreneurs can solve global-scale problems — is based on a framework called the “six Ds of exponentials:” digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. These are a chain reaction of technological progress, the path that technology takes, to create the upheaval — and the opportunity.

More here. (Note: Just read this and recommend highly…thanks to Dinesh Paliwal and Vania Apkarian)

David L Ulin at the LA Times:

There's not much to Milan Kundera's 10th novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” — his first work of fiction since 2000's “Innocence” — but then that's part of the point. Revolving around five middle-aged friends living in Paris, it offers not a narrative so much as a collection of vignettes, or reflections: the novel as a set of asides.

“Time moves on,” one of Kundera's characters tells us. “Because of time, first we're alive — which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there's another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people's memories, but, lacking any authentic witnesses now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes.”

This, of course — the issue of meaning in the face of human vanity — has long been at the center of Kundera's work. His first novel, “The Joke,” published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, describes in part the fallout from a satirical postcard (“OPTIMISM IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE!” it declares. “THE HEALTHY ATMOSPHERE STINKS! LONG LIVE TROTSKY!”) sent by a Czech student to a young woman he wishes to seduce: humor that cannot be read as humor, in other words.

more here.

Eric Beinhocker at the Financial Times:

We instinctively think of “information” as a human phenomenon. But modern science sees it as a measure of something more fundamental: as a point on the continuum between perfect order and perfect randomness, the latter being the state towards which, according to the laws of thermodynamics, the universe inexorably drifts. Flows of energy can fight this tide of entropy, allowing order to develop and pockets of information to be stored — cells, brains and ecosystems are all examples of this process. In Why Information Grows, Hidalgo observes that our economy is full of such energy-fuelled pockets of order. All of the products and services around us are examples, and it is the information embedded in these products and services that gives them their value.

For example, Hidalgo notes that a Bugatti Veyron sports car sells for $2.5m. He then conducts a thought experiment, asking the value if one drove it into a wall — presumably less. Yet all of the atoms in the car would still be there (assuming one kept the broken bits). What has changed is the order or arrangement of the atoms in the car. That order reflects the information embedded in the product, which in turn reflects the knowledge and know-how of its designers and manufacturers. One can think of “knowledge” as information that is useful to humans — when it is embedded in a product, it enables that product to do useful things.

more here.

Laila Lalami at The New York Times:

When I was 15, a shy and bookish sophomore at a high school in Morocco, my French class was assigned Albert Camus’s “The Stranger.” I remember being intrigued by the fact that the story was set in neighboring Algeria. I remember the novel’s indelible first line: “Mother died today.” I remember what an odd hero Meursault seemed to me, unabashed and remorseless, a man who shows no emotion at his mother’s funeral. And I still remember how distressing it was to come upon the crucial scene in which Meursault, walking on a beach under the midday sun, shoots a nameless Arab. Our class discussed Meursault, his mother, his fight with the priest, existentialism and the absurd. All the while, I had to quiet the voice inside me that kept asking, “But what about the Arab?”

The Algerian writer Kamel Daoud has answered this question in his rich and inventive new novel, “The Meursault Investigation.” Its premise is that the murder committed by Meursault in 1942 was a true crime, which catapulted him to worldwide fame after the publication of a book about it. Daoud gives the Arab a name — Musa — and, along with it, a family, a home and a story. But like his Quranic and biblical counterpart, Musa (Moses) isn’t able to speak for himself, so his brother, Harun (Aaron), will do it in his stead. It is Harun who narrates the events of that fateful day, his first line already a counterpoint to Meursault’s: “Mama’s still alive today.”

more here.

Azar Nafisi in The New York Times:

For a while, every time I borrowed a book from my local library in Washington, D.C., I was greeted by an Orwellian poster: “Big Brother Is Watching You!” I often wondered if others paused to reflect on the implication of these words, if they understood how profoundly living under surveillance distorts a society. It transforms your perspective, your manners, your relationships with friends, colleagues, students, with every waiter and cabdriver you meet. It changes your relationship with yourself. When I lived in Tehran in the 1980s, I kept a diary in an idiotic secret language I can no longer decipher. To write about my relatives and friends who were imprisoned or on the run, I’d fictionalize them and make myself a character: a westernized woman who, alienated from her traditions, sees everything in black and white. My mother developed elaborate codes to evade the censors while talking on the phone. Her conversations were almost nonsensical. She would say, in Persian, “Agha marizeh” (“The gentleman is ill”) to signal that things were going badly for the regime, and then whisper anxiously, “Do you understand? Do you understand?”

Censorship entered our minds and hearts early. Veils were added to the illustrations of children’s books like “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “Daddy Long Legs” and “Beauty and the Beast.” A friend’s 8-year-old daughter became afraid to go to the bathroom alone because her religious teacher had told her that if blasphemous thoughts entered her mind there, each strand of her hair would transform into a snake. In university literature classes, love scenes were regularly stricken from novels. The word “wine” was excised from Hemingway’s stories. Censors frowned on villains in fiction or film having beards or having religious names. A theater director I know used to complain that every scene with a husband and wife in a bedroom required a quarrel. Tenderness was too risky.

More here.

Li Zhou at Smithsonian Magazine:

Two hundred years ago, the Battle of Waterloo marked a historic turning point in European history when French forces, led by Napoleon, fell to the British and Prussians—ending French reign of the region and two decades of war. As photographer Sam Faulkner points out, the battle was also the last major European conflict to take place prior to the invention of the camera. As such, no photographs exist of the event or the soldiers involved beyond the imagined ones.

Faulkner’s new book, Unseen Waterloo: The Conflict Revisited, envisions what those photographs could have looked like, featuring portraits of Waterloo re-enactors, clad in ornate military garb and staring straight into the camera after they’ve just come off the battlefield. The photos were shot in a pop-up studio on the field in Belgium where Waterloo was fought, taken during annual reenactments over the course of five years, starting in 2009.

more here.

Matthew Clark at The Morning News:

It was a party. There was a curried dish and guacamole and a slow-cooked pork shoulder and there was a mule deer piñata and there were paper plates and heirloom silver and a tuba and sequins and spangles and a general hip and tooth and pink-cheek commotion appropriate for an occasionless celebration. The riflemaker, however, stood apart. He braced himself against the modern countertop in the vacant kitchen. He sipped a tumbler of Scotch. It was ten months prior to my Jackson gun delivery. It was November, and though the evening was cold enough to frost the inside of the window glass, the riflemaker wore shorts. His legs were skinny and fit. His pointed goatee, streaked with gray, served to bring his narrow features into line with those of a well-adapted predator and if there was any incongruity, it resided in his hands and arms, which were Bunyanesque.

I had never met the riflemaker before, and I introduced myself.

Nathan Heineke builds $15,000 custom rifles. He is 41 years old. He works alone. In the 10 years since he left the storied New Jersey gunsmithing shop of Griffin and Howe—where he had worked since completing college—he has, from start to finish, built more than 30 unique rifles. It is a meticulous process, interrupted by walk-ins, supply-chain delays, repairs, the whim of clientele, and some rifles take more than a year to complete.

more here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Across the savannahs of Africa, millions of stomachs are busy converting plant tissue into animal flesh. The continent’s leaves and grasses are under constant assault from impala, wildebeest, buffalo, zebra, gazelles, and giraffes. Even acacia trees get bulldozed by elephants. There can be up to 25 species of these large plant-eaters in a given place, and many of them gather in gargantuan herds. How do they co-exist?

“It’s not obvious why competition for food doesn’t whittle the number of species down to just a few dominant competitors,” says Tyler Kartzinel from Princeton University. The prevailing idea says that different species have different food preferences. Grazers like zebra and wildebeest eat grass and little else. Browsers like dik-diks and giraffes nibble on leaves and shrubs—collectively called “browse”. Some animals, like elephants and impala, go for both.

Within each category, animals partition themselves in space. Zebras eat the tallest grasses; wildebeest munch the shorter ones. Dik-diks browse on the lowest leaves; impala take the mid-level; and giraffes pluck the loftiest foliage. But despite these nuances, “there’s still been this coarse distinction between grass and other plants,” says Kartzinel, “as if you partition those two resources finely enough, and suddenly there’s enough space in the savannah for dozens of herbivores.”

This picture is too simple. By using DNA to actually identify the plants that these animals eat—something no one had done before—Kartzinel has shown that their preferences go much deeper than just grass versus browse.

More here.

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Roland Barthes once said that “the only sort of interview that one could, if forced to, defend would be where the author is asked to articulate what he cannot write.” One could set a similar standard for the literary biography, demanding that it construe from the writer’s life what can’t be conveyed through his or her work. The less the author has concealed, the more redundant the biographer’s task. Saul Bellow will always pose a unique problem here because of how thoroughly he dissected his own life for the novels and short stories he published over the course of half a century. In his zeal to articulate himself, he seems to have left nothing for the interviewer, let alone the unfortunate biographer.

For decades after the 1953 publication of The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow was regularly deemed the preeminent American novelist. Although his readership has shrunk in the 21st century, a handful of passionate Bellowites, most of them British — Martin Amis, James Wood, Ian McEwan — have insured his continued presence in the literary conversation. With the centenary of his birth and the 10-year anniversary of his death, that conversation has picked up again, spurred by the publication of two new books: a collection of Bellow’s essays, reviews, interviews, and talks entitledThere Is Simply Too Much to Think About, edited by Benjamin Taylor; and the first fat volume of a two-part biography by Zachary Leader called The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964.

The shadow of James Atlas’s authorized biography, titled Bellow: A Biography, hangs over this Season of Saul. Its appearance in 2000 disappointed many who felt that Atlas had kept a great writer “penned in his petty biographical yard,” in Wood’s description, reducing masterpieces like Herzog to the byproducts of love triangles, divorce, and revenge.

More here.

Zack Coplin in Slate:

Browse the nominees in the list below and then go to the bottom of the post to vote.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: A Place Called Home
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Dadland
3. 3 Quarks Daily: Eight Decades of Indian Contemporary Art
4. 3 Quarks Daily: Transmutations of the Qasida Form and Ghalib’s Qasida for Queen Victoria
5. 454 W 23rd Street, New York, NY 10017-2157: Anonymous asked: who makes race real?
6. A Wine Dark Sea: On Smoking Whale Vomit
7. Anatomy of Norbiton: Spatial
8. Avidly: Editing as carework: the gendered labor of public intellectuals
9. Avidly: Weird Sex
10. Grant Loewen: Rowan and the gravel faeries
11. Granta: Ventimiglia
12. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Song of a Mansi Elder
13. Literary Kicks: First There Is A Mountain
14. Liverpool's Season Review: Defense Shaky Again, but Reds Still Cruise
15. Los Angeles Review of Books: 18 Hours Before the Mast
16. Los Angeles Review of Books: Brown Broads, White TV
17. Los Angeles Review of Books: Richard Pryor's Comedy of Fear
18. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Postman Scar-Jo
19. N + 1: You were on Diving with the Stars
20. Night RPM: In Memoriam: TJ (1967-2014). New Year’s Eve. The Book of the Dead.
21. Novel Readings: “A life entirely through objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
22. Parmanu: Tankwa Karoo and the CIA plot
23. Public Books: Can there be a feminist world?
24. Public Books: On Pansodan Road: The Second-Hand Books of Yangon
25. Public Books: Respect
26. Public Books: The Essential Gratuitousness of Cesar Aira
27. Public Books: The Novel's Forking Path
28. Public Books: To Translate Is To Betray: On the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon in Italy and the US
29. Public Books: What's the matter with Dystopia?
30. Quantum Bayesian Networks: How Tara the Elephant and Bella the Dog Saved Mankind
31. Saxon Henry: Mme Cezanne at the Met
32. Terrain: The Good, the Bad, and the White Man's Mexico Novel
33. The Art of Future Warfare: War in Heaven
34. The Brooklyn Rail: Palace Art Squat
35. The Homing Pigeon Experience: Skin in the Game: Two Versions of Cheap Meat
36. The Millions: A World Made of Words: On Anthony Doerr’s Nouns and Verbs
37. The Millions: Dance to the Music of Time
38. The Millions: Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living
39. The Millions: Getting Meta about Mules: Faulkner and the Fine Art of Slowing Down
40. The Millions: One Long Country Song: What Friday Night Lights Taught Me About Storytelling
41. The Millions: The Last English Teacher
42. The New Inquiry: The Real Image
43. The Philosopher's Beard: The Case for Subsidising Art (and Taxing Junk Entertainment)
44. The Quarterly Conversation: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan
45. Vapour Trails: Miss Lonelyhearts

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being mentioned there or added to your blogroll. Please don't forget!

Voting ends on June 17th at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most-voted-for posts) will be posted on the main page on June 18th. The finalists will be announced on June 19th and winners of the contest will be announced on June 29th, 2015.

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Thank you.

Public Space
.

Wandering wordless through the heat of High
Park. High summer. Counting the chipmunks
who pause and demand the scrub stand by
till their flitty, piggybacked equal signs can think
through this math of dogwood, oak-whip, mulch.
Children glue mouths to ice cream and chips, punch
and kick at the geese, while rug-thick islands
of milt-like scum sail the duckpond’s copper stillness –
Over-fat, hammerhead carp with predator brains . . .
We can wreck a day on the shoals of ourselves.
Cramped, you broke last night and wept at the war,
at the ionized, cobalt glow that fish-tanked the air.
We’re here to be emptied under the emptying sky,
eyes cast outward, trolling for the extraordinary.

by Ken Babstock
from Days into Flatspin
publisher: Anansi, Toronto, 2001

Katie Kilkenny in PSMag:

In recent years, the bro has been called out for his privilege, for his sexism, his racism, and the rhetorical ubiquity of the term that defines him. It wasn't always this way; around 10 years ago, at least in my middle school, “bro” was the ultimate compliment for the unassured teen boy: “Nice goal, bro” and “sick Air Jordans, bro” were par for the course. Being called “bro” was the linguistic equivalent of convincing your mom to buy you $70 Abercrombie khakis: It conferred group identity, acceptance, and distinction—precisely because it made you so indistinctive.

How times have changed. Nowadays, the bro moniker is more likely to be linked to sexual assault on campuses and in the military than it is casual camaraderie. The bro is contributing to racism on campus and misogyny in country music. He is, according to Vice, the “the worst guy ever.”

In this cultural climate, many industry analysts believed that last week's release of a feature-length Entourage movie was box-office suicide. Entourage, which ran for eight seasons on HBO and capped at an audience high of 8.4 million viewers per episode, was a show about bros, marketed at bros. Its appeal stemmed from the fun it derived from conversations between men, as well as the glamorous Hollywood industry it portrayed—in particular the easy-on-the-eyes vapidity of its disposable female characters. But few television shows have made real money from big-screen adaptations. And Entourage suffered harsh critical backlash in its final season; in Slate, Eric Thurm argued this was due to a shift in television criticism that favored political meaning over entertainment value. At the heart of Entourage's downfall? “Its highly objectionable ethic of bro-ness.” A feature-length elaboration seemed primed for failure.

Read the rest here.

Katy Chevigny in The Brooklyn Quarterly:

In making documentary films, we frequently use the word “document” as a verb. When we write treatments of our proposed films, we say things like: “In this film, we will document the work of human rights investigators,” and what we mean is that we are going to record the sound and image of events taking place and the resulting work will be a document of certain events.

When Ross Kauffman and I co-directed our film E-TEAM, we were in the unusual position of following a group of intrepid emergency researchers at Human Rights Watch (the film’s title is their nickname) as they worked to gather evidence on alleged human rights violations. You could say we were documenting the documenters.

Following the researchers and their work took us to remote locations in Syria and Libya in order to make a portrait of the E-Team’s extraordinary work. But some people were puzzled by our approach. In fact, some colleagues asked us, why don’t you just film the events in Syria themselves? Why film other people taking notes and asking questions?

I was initially surprised by this question. Eventually, I realized that moviegoers have absorbed the idea that the camera itself is a documenting agent, and expect the people doing the documenting—in this case the E-Team members—to be left out of the picture. In fact, this extra layer that we included, in portraying how a group of investigators might go about the act of documenting, helped to shine a light on how fraught and difficult the act of documentation often is.

It’s worth taking a minute to talk about the differences between what we as artists did documenting events in the film and what the E-Team does documenting human rights abuses. The E-Team members we followed—Fred, Peter, Anna and Ole—are searching for “evidence” to “corroborate” key “facts” that they have “documented.” Ross and I never use words like “evidence” or “corroborate” in our work, and we rarely use the word “facts,” because we see ourselves as storytellers first and foremost, and we are aware that our artistic judgment is subjective.

More here.