Alexa Tsoulis-Reay in New York Magazine:

Prosopagnosia is a neuropsychological condition that impairs the sufferer’s ability to recognize faces. It’s also known as face-blindness, and those who are afflicted lack a skill that comes naturally to most humans, forcing them to find ways to work around this deficit. Oliver Sacks, the face-blind neurologist, relied on distinguishing features like flaming red hair or heavy glasses to identify his best school friends, but he still had difficulties: Once, he ignored his own psychiatrist when he saw him in the lobby shortly after their session (as he wrote in the New Yorker, his assistant would instruct their dinner-party guests to wear name tags).

The artist Chuck Close managed his condition through his work — after photographing his larger-than-life portraits, he could remember the person attached to the face: “Once I change the face into a two-dimensional object, I can commit it to memory,” he once told a newspaper. Face-blindness is generally accompanied by a raft of problems, including a lack of interest in people, social anxiety, inattentiveness, and various phobias (Sacks avoided conferences or large gatherings). According to the National Institutes of Health, face-blindness “is thought to be the result of abnormalities, damage, or impairment in the right fusiform gyrus, a fold in the brain that appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory.” At the moment, there aren’t any treatments that are known to be effective — management of the condition, the NIH notes, should focus on “develop[ing] compensatory strategies.”

More here.

Bird

When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me.

The air feathered
as I knelt
by my open window for the charm –
black on gold,
last star of the dawn.

Singing, they came:
throstles, jenny wrens,
jack squalors swinging their anchors through the clouds.

My heart beat like a wing.

I shed my nightdress to the drowning arms of the dark,
my shoes to the sun’s widening mouth.

Bared,
I found my bones hollowing to slender pipes,
my shoulder blades tufting down.
I spread my flight-greedy arms
to watch my fingers jewelling like ten hummingbirds,
my feet callousing to knuckly claws.
As my lips calcified to a hooked kiss

silence

then an exultation of larks filled the clouds
and, in my mother’s voice, chorused:
Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the Winter.

So I left girlhood behind me like a blue egg
and stepped off
from the window ledge.

How light I was

as they lifted me up from Wren’s Nest
bore me over the edgelands of concrete and coal.

I saw my grandmother waving up from her fode,
looped
the infant school and factory,
let the zephrs carry me out to the coast.

Lunars I flew

battered and tuneless

the storms turned me insideout like a fury,
there wasn’t one small part of my body didn’t bawl.

Until I felt it at last the rush of squall thrilling my wing
and I knew my voice
was no longer words but song black upon black.

I raised my throat to the wind
and this is what I sang . . .
.

by Liz Berry
from Black Country
Chatto & Windus, London, 2014

Note:
charm : birdsong or dawn chorus
jack squalor : swallow
fode : yard

.

Samuel Moyn in The Immanent Frame:

Christmas Day, 1942. The outcome of World War II was undecided, but the pope had something new to say.

A month before, the tide at Stalingrad had turned against the Germans. Just two days before, General Erich von Manstein had abandoned his efforts to relieve the Wehrmacht’s doomed Sixth Army. But there was no telling that the extraordinary German strength in the war so far would now ebb quickly.

The Americans had formally entered the war a year before, but the Allies would not reach mainland Italy for another nine months, or make it to Rome for a year and a half. The pope—Eugenio Pacelli, or Pius XII—was in dire straits. His relationship with Benito Mussolini had long since soured, and he was a prisoner in his own tiny Roman domain.

As for the Jews, the worst victims of the conflict, millions were dead already; the victims at Babi Yar had lain in their ravine for more than a year; Treblinka, the most infernal death camp, had come on line six months before and already completed much of its grim work.

Officially, of course, the Catholic Church and its leader were neutral, and didn’t play politics. Many of his flock were to be found on both sides of the war.

To the extent people have revisited his Christmas message, it has been to argue about whether Pius could or should have said more about the Holocaust than he did. But the real interest in the message is what the pope was for, not what he was against. In this fight, Christianity stood for values, and in the perspective of world history, Pius XII had some new ones.

The very first of the five peace points that Pius XII offered that day ran as follows: “1. Dignity of the Human Person. He who would have the Star of Peace shine out and stand over society should cooperate, for his part, in giving back to the human person the dignity given to it by God from the very beginning…He should uphold respect for and the practical realization of…fundamental personal rights…The cure of this situation becomes feasible when we awaken again the consciousness of a juridical order resting on the supreme dominion of God, and safeguarded from all human whims; a consciousness of an order which stretches forth its arm, in protection or punishment, over the unforgettable rights of man and protects them against the attacks of every human power” (emphases added).

More here.

Atul Dev in Caravan:

Last month, Gopinath Ravindran, the member secretary of the Indian Council of Historical Research since (ICHR), resigned from his post without completing his term. His decision was reportedly prompted by a disagreement with Y Sudershan Rao, the chairman of the ICHR. The conflict had stemmed from Rao’s dissent over the ICHR Council’s decision to dissolve the editorial board and advisory committee of the “Indian Historical Review” (IHR) that included historian Romila Thapar. Ravindran’s resignation is the latest in a series of individual departures from organisations that function under the Ministry of Human Resource Development. On 1 July 2015, Atul Dev, a reporter at Vantage, visited Ravindran at his home in New Delhi. During the course of their conversation, Ravindran spoke to Dev about his decision to resign, the reorientation of the ICHR under Rao and the potential impact it could have on academic research in India.

Atul Dev: At what point did you decide that your presence in the ICHR as member secretary had become redundant?
Gopinath Ravindran: The immediate reason for my resignation was that I disagreed with the change in the Advisory Committee and that I was not being allowed to put this disagreement on paper. I knew, very well, that institutions such as the ICHR would be undergoing changes with the change in the central government. This was pretty clear to everybody. However, I thought that by remaining there I would at least be able to record my dissent—if the event arose and the protocols of historical research were deliberately breached—in the public domain, as the minutes of all the meetings held by the ICHR Council are put up on the website. With that episode, it became clear that they would not allow me to hold a contrary view even formally. So, I decided that there was no point in continuing anymore.

AD: Was the decision to disband the advisory committee unanimous? Were you the only person in the council meeting to voice any opposition?
GR: I was the only person in that meeting who disagreed. This is also available in the draft minutes, which the chairperson did not sign. He said that I couldn’t disagree with a decision taken by the committee. During the meeting of the council, when I asked for the reason behind taking such a decision, I was not given a satisfactory answer. Various epithets such as “elitists” and “goondas” were used with reference to the former members of the advisory committee. This was clearly unacceptable.

More here.

Wolfgang Streeck over at the Verso blog:

There is progress in Europe after all. When the then Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou wanted to hold a referendum in 2011 on the austerity demands of his European colleagues, they summarily dismissed him.

As his successor, Brussels and Berlin appointed a certain Loukas Papademos, an agent of international finance who in the early 2000s, as head of the Greek central bank, had helped to make his country ready for Europe with the help of Goldman Sachs. There was no repeat this time round – precisely thanks to the remnants of national democracy that German Europhiles want to suspend in favour of a future “European democracy”.

No one can say in detail how things will go after the overwhelming “no” from the Greek people. The situation is too volatile, too much is happening at the same time, the causal connections are weak and untested, predictions are still only guessing games. What we do know, however, is that the whole unspeakable campaign of intimidation was unsuccessful, not even the widely distributed advice of the unanimous German press, which has always known better what is good for Greece than the elected Greek government itself. What has also been shown is that in southern Europe referendums as well as elections can be won with posters of Merkel and Schäuble.

The self-proclaimed “Europeans” in the secure north underestimated the despair of the Greeks after the collapse of the frivolous experiment of their membership of the currency union, as well as their anger at being made the object of secret Brussels negotiations. Whether the Brussels professionals will learn something from their defeat at the hands of the Athenian amateurs is something we may well doubt. They will rather try to make up for their failure to remove the Greek government beforehand.

More here.

Michael Welton in CounterPunch (image from wikimedia commons):

Habermas addresses a theme that will preoccupy him in the following decade and half. He points out the “other side of religious freedom”—the “pacification of the pluralism of worldviews” (ibid.)—distributes “burdens unequally” (ibid.). This is a monumental critique and illumination of what has been taken-for-granted and seldom commented upon. Christian, Jewish or Muslim citizens (and other religious faith-communities), unlike secular citizens, have to split their identities into private and public elements. The pressure crushes down on the religious citizenry to “translate their religious beliefs into a secular language before their arguments have any chance of gaining majority support” (ibid.), or of gaining any kind of purchase on public opinion.

Habermas provides the example of German Christians (Protestant and Catholic) who claim the “status of human rights for the gamete fertilized ex utero; this is how they engage in any attempt (an unfortunate one, I think) to translate man’s likeness to God into the secular language of the constitution” (p. 332). Only if the “secular side” remains open to the “force of articulation inherent in religious language will the search for reasons that aim at universal acceptability not lead to an unfair exclusion of religion from the public sphere, nor sever secular society from important resources of meaning” (ibid).

Habermas admits that the boundaries between the secular and the religious are fluid. But the boundaries ought to be guarded by both sides. In post-Enlightenment and secularized societies, the religious segment of the population must not bear the brunt of fending off the dominating and bullying secular self-awareness.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian:

Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief. Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.

In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring the debt and reforming the economy; and the toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending that it remains solvent.

Official Europe chose the second option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt holdings.Keen to avoid confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case of “solidarity” with the Greeks.

To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece, whose national income, in turn – from which new and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this process could not end well.

More here.

Morgan Meis in Art Hopper:

I came to Cleveland carrying the same bias with which most visitors arrive. I thought I was coming to a broken city. Cleveland was broken, I assumed, for the same reason that all the other cities and towns of the Rust Belt are broken. The jobs went away, more or less, when heavy industry collapsed. What was left was a city gutted. The famous Cuyahoga River fire of 1969 still burned in my own consciousness (as I suspect it does for many) as the city’s primary symbolic event. The river itself caught fire. It still seems an incredible and outrageous event. How does a river become so polluted that it catches fire?

I remember listening to the Randy Newman song “Burn On” when I was a little kid.

Cleveland, city of light, city of magic
Cleveland, city of light, you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
‘Cause the Cuyahoga River goes smokin’ through my dreams

Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on

Mr. Newman was employing a high degree of irony and humor when he called Cleveland a “city of light” and a “city of magic.” Paris is called “The City of Light” because it is so beautiful and because of its historical role in The Enlightenment. Randy Newman called Cleveland the “city of light” because he saw it as a hell on Earth, an environmental catastrophe where the rivers burn night and day.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

“If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry“

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

“The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing – and then marry him.”

American singer Cher (1946-)

“Basically my wife was immature. I'd be in my bath and she'd come in and sink my boats”

Comedian Woody Allen (1935-)

“I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.”

Comedian and actor Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

“I was dating a transvestite, and my mother said, 'Marry him, you'll double your wardrobe'”

Comedian Joan Rivers (1933-2014)

“I don't think my wife likes me very much, when I had a heart attack, she wrote for an ambulance”

Irish comedian Frank Carson (1926-2012)

“She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

“Love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage”

Ambrose Bierce (1842-c1914)

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus. Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”

More here.

Jeffery Gleaves at The Paris Review:

James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Tate’s poems were “always concerned to tell us that beneath the busyness and loneliness of our daily lives, there remains in us the possibility for peace, happiness and real human connection,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Times.

Tate was born in Missouri but lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1971. “I’ve imagined that every character and every single event takes place in this town, Amherst,” he once confessed. But John Ashbery once opined that Tate is a “poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere.”

His poetry is often described as absurdist, and indeed the speakers in his poems come across as bewildered narrators who are as inquisitive as they are clueless—which is all part of their charm. His poetry has also been described as comic, ironic, hopeful, lonely, and surreal; “I love my funny poems,” he said, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.

more here.

Liv Constable-Maxwell in New Statesman:

“Every major city has a holocaust museum, so why shouldn’t they have an empathy museum”, says Roman Krznaric. He is talking to me about his newest venture, the Empathy Museum.

It's a project that aims to salvage us from our self-absorbed and narcissistic lives by engaging with people we may not normally come across. These are words I’ve heard already on the promo video for the museum, but am no less struck by the uncomfortable premise.

Empathy, it seems, is quite the hot topic. The Independent reports that, despite the hours we spend online communicating with one another, “empathy is not spreading effectively”, while I’m sure everyone will be relieved to read the Guardian’s claim that empathy “could be the thing that saves us [from extinction]”.

Which is why Krznaric is giving us all a helping hand. He has spent the last few years co-founding The School of Life with Alain De Botton, a project that aims to promote “emotional intelligence” through culture. Its courses, which include titles such as “The Art of Sadness” and “The Secret History of Your Emotions”, promise to enlighten you for the small sum of £45 a session.

Krznaric’s attentions have now turned to the creation of a museum all about empathy. A travelling, interactive project that will open in September, as part of London's Totally Thames festival.

The key thinking behind the museum is to take us away from our “hyper-individualistic society”, moving “from an age of introspection to an age of outrospection” (buzzphrases I recognise well from Krznaric’s promotional work).

“I define empathy as to be able to step into someone else’s shoes,” remarks Krznaric.

Which might explain the “empathy shoe shop”. It’s an activity where you wear shoes that belong to someone else. “They may be those of a Syrian refugee, or a Chinese factory worker,” Krznaric tells me. “You will be wearing headphones and hear a recording of them talking about their own lives.

More here.

Stephanie Bernhard in The LA Review of Books:

ADAPTING A NOVEL with a plot as unwieldy as that of Thomas Hardy’sFar From the Madding Crowd (1874) for the screen requires compromise: the film must either remove a number of scenes that appear in the novel or squeeze as many scenes as possible into a watchable span of time. Thomas Vinterberg’s recent adaptation almost always opts for the latter technique, and the result is a film that is completely dutiful, very attractive, and mostly dull.

In fairness to Vinterberg, Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd is crowded with so much confounding, brilliant, baroquely intricate action that to remove a single element from a retelling risks toppling the whole story. Hardy packs a fallen woman tale, an untimely death, a mysterious disappearance, and a feminist bildungsroman into a central romance in which not two but three suitors — the shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), the farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), and the soldier Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge) — compete for the hand of Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), that wonderfully vexing, eternally modern creation for whom the phrase “fiercely independent” must have been invented. Every time she twitches, the novel quakes with great drama. Agitated, perhaps, by the novel’s inexhaustible action, Henry James famously complained that “everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.”

More on the sheep and the dogs in a moment. James may have despised the rustic, exaggerated humans of Far From the Madding Crowd, but quickly after panning the book he stole its human plot for The Portrait of a Lady (1881). He deleted the sheep and dogs and clothed his humans more fashionably, but the bones of the story are the same. A bright, beautiful, ferociously independent young woman fends off marriage proposals from two appealing men who offer to raise her social and economic status; instead, after inheriting a dazzling pile of property, she accepts the hand of a vile man who requires her to support him. In both novels, the heroine’s continuous indecision (and eventual disastrous decision) makes for a compelling drama, dense with dramatic irony.

But there is a key difference between James’s novel and Hardy’s, one crucial for filmmaking, and it involves the sheep and dogs.

More here.

Aatish Taseer at The New York Times:

Few books need more urgently to be written than a definitive oral history of the 1947 partition of India. The partition, even by the standards of a bloody century, was hideous; it left between one and two million people dead and displaced 15 million others; it caused the dismemberment of a syncretic society and led to the largest forced migration in the history of humanity. The generation that lived through that terrible time is on its way out, taking its unrecorded memories.

In “Midnight’s Furies,” a fast-moving and highly readable account of the violence that accompanied the partition, Nisid Hajari sets himself a more modest task: How did two nations with so much in common end up such inveterate enemies so quickly?

Hajari answers this question with a dramatization of the violent year that preceded partition. The dramatis personae are introduced, as per conventions established by Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi.” There is the “famously handsome” Jawaharlal Nehru with his “high, aristocratic cheekbones and eyes that were deep pools — irresistible to his many female admirers”; there is the “mystical, septuagenarian” Mahatma Gandhi; there is the monocled, slightly sinister Mohammad Ali Jinnah, “cheekbones jutted out of his cadaverous face like the edges of a diamond”; and, lastly, there is Lord Louis Mountbatten, “tall and tanned,” the “Hollywood version of a British prince.”

more here.

Andrea Wulf at the Financial Times:

The question that Frank Wilczek poses in this book sounds simple — “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” — but the answer is complicated. It’s a long “meditation”, as the Nobel laureate physicist calls it, on the idea of beauty as the organising principle of the universe, and also a eulogy on the importance of beauty as a source of inspiration for scientists past and present.

Wilczek chooses a historical approach because it allows him to move from simpler to more complex ideas, gently easing the reader into his argument. He begins with thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato, moves on to Kepler and Newton, and ends with quantum physics. “In beauty we trust, when making our theories,” Wilczek believes, and so did many before him. Pythagoras’s theorem about right-angled triangles reveals the beautiful relationship between numbers and shapes, while Newton used mathematics to understand the fundamental laws of nature. In the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell’s work brought together electricity, magnetism and light as part of one concept — a unifying idea of a physical reality that was made up of space-filling fields — and he explained this through a system of equations. When these equations are written “pictorially” or in terms of flows, Wilczek explains, they become “a dance of concepts through space and time”.

more here.

Matt Windsor at UAB News:

Google’s cars can already handle real-world hazards, such as cars’ suddenly swerving in front of them. But in some situations, a crash is unavoidable. (In fact, Google’s cars have been in dozens of minor accidents, all of which the company blames on human drivers.) How will a Google car, or an ultra-safe Volvo, be programmed to handle a no-win situation — a blown tire, perhaps — where it must choose between swerving into oncoming traffic or steering directly into a retaining wall? The computers will certainly be fast enough to make a reasoned judgment within milliseconds. They would have time to scan the cars ahead and identify the one most likely to survive a collision, for example, or the one with the most other humans inside. But should they be programmed to make the decision that is best for their owners? Or the choice that does the least harm — even if that means choosing to slam into a retaining wall to avoid hitting an oncoming school bus? Who will make that call, and how will they decide?

More here.