Sasha Weiss at the New York Times:

Tracy Daugherty, the author of “The Last Love Song,” the first full-length biography of Didion, seems both intimidated by and worshipful of his subject, who chose not to cooperate with his project. He begins his book with a disclaimer: “Does a biography of a living person make sense? . . . Is the proper distance for evaluation possible now?” He attempts to reproduce “her mental and emotional rhythms” and to apply to her work her own literary methods “revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, P.R., self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature.” Such a hedge followed by a lofty mission statement is unpromising, but you want to give Daugherty the benefit of the doubt. You want to know who Didion is, precisely because she hides in plain sight.

Didion became known for writing about the world in the first person. Whether her subject is the drifting confusions of the ’60s or the incursions of big industry on the California landscape, she herself is the probe. One of the great pleasures of reading her is watching the way she takes her own point of view as a given. But there is a fundamental unreliability at the center of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” the books that established her reputation: the gap between the natural authority with which she casts judgments and her professed nervous, quarrelsome self. It’s a gap that has always been enticing to Didion’s readers, and one we’d hope her biographer would plumb.

more here.

Mark Mazower at The Financial Times:

“I need to write this bitterness out of myself,” Joseph Goebbels confessed in 1923 as he began his diary. And how he tried, and kept on trying, long after unemployment was a distant memory and he had become one of the Führer’s most trusted associates. The diaries amount to 32 volumes. Nor was this just Goebbels’s problem: the regime’s logorrhoea began at the top. Pity Hitler’s adjutants who had to sit through those interminable after-dinner ramblings, and pity the poor historian who has to wade through not only these dutifully transcribed testimonies to the inner workings of the Nazi mind, but the commentary of several generations of scholars as well. There have been thousands of books published on the Holocaust since the millennium, and some 500 and counting in this year alone, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Crispin Sartwell over at the NYT's The Stone:

Human beings have made progress in various areas, though it is often fitful, double-edged and reversible. But are we capable of substantial moral improvement? Could we someday be much better ethically than we are now? Is it likely that members of our species could become, on average, more generous or more honest, less self-deceptive or less self-interested? I have known individual people who have improved morally in various ways (and many who have made the opposite journey) but I’m not sure that as a species as a whole we are any better than we were 100 or even 10,000 years ago.

This question has been explored throughout history — we might turn to Confucius or Aristotle, or to Jesus or the Buddha, to help illuminate the matter. But I’d like to focus here on a more recent moment: 19th-century America, where the great optimism and idealism of a rapidly rising nation was tempered by a withering realism.

It is often said that the American character is inherently hopeful, always expecting things and ourselves to be better. There is perhaps no better embodiment of this than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in a lecture delivered in Boston in 1844, confidently awaited the emergence of “the young American”:

Here stars, here woods, here animals, here men, abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of other’s censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.

Emerson thought that “the Spirit who led us hither” would help perfect us; others have believed the agent of improvement to be evolution, or the inevitable progress of civilization. More recent advocates of our perfectibility might focus on genetic or neurological interventions, or — as in Ray Kurzweil’s “When Singularity Is Near” — information technologies.

More here.

Brad Delong, Manu Saadia, and Adam Gomolin discuss the economics of Star Trek, over at Delong's website:

Adam (to Brad): Off the top of your head, if you were teaching a course on Trekonomics what would you be covering on Week One of the Economics of Star Trek or Trekonomics?

Brad: Week One of Star Trek economics has to be “we’re in a post scarcity society”.

Adam: What does that mean?

Brad: It means that we have as much of the material necessities of life that we need or that in some sense we want. That we don’t have to earn money so that we can then spend it to get what is necessary or even convenient or even luxurious for us, as far as material goods are concerned. The society has enough resources for us go off and see, say, the double stars of Beta Lyrae with their gas streamers pulled off of each other by the gravitational pull of the double star system… if that’s what we want. That we don’t have to scrimp and save and earn up money so we can afford to spend time at the Four Seasons Kapalua Bay. We want to actually go to the Four Seasons and spend. That we do what we want with our time rather than being under the gun of necessity.

Adam: What color and context would you add to that?

Manu: I would also say that the very notion of luxury and the positional value of consumption is radically altered. It reminds me of something Keynes had said…

Brad: …That the economic problem wasn’t the permanent problem of the human race. That within three generations, Keynes was writing in 1930….at least in Britain, we can hand over people who act like the Ferengi with a disgusting shudder, to the specialists of mental disease.

Manu: He said it’s a mental disease.

Adam: Can one conspicuously consume in the 23​rd​ Century?

Manu: What would be the point?

Brad: What would be the point?  On technological progress, satiation and wine

Adam: Well, in world of unlimited scarcity, can there be such a thing as conspicuous consumption?

More here.

Gregory Jusdanis in Berfrois:

What made C. P. Cavafy write some of the most original poetry in the world? I went to Athens in January 2015 to find out.

Born in Alexandria on April 29, 1863, Cavafy died there, on the same day seventy years later. He came from a prosperous family with aristocratic roots but, when he was a child, his family lost this fortune and, as an adult, he found work as a civil servant.

The Cavafy we know from his mature poetry—he published only 154 poems of the hundreds he had written—seems emotionally distant, dedicated only to his craft. Though he enjoyed company, received visitors regularly, and was admired as a conversationalist, he lived a loveless life.

The letters from his adulthood, often terse, lack affection, personal indiscretion, or self-revelation. Contemporaries paint a picture of a sociable person, eager to talk about his poetry or ancient history but one devoid of intimate friends. No one described him as a loving or empathetic person.

I was greatly surprised, therefore, to discover material that presents a different Cavafy, at least in his youth.

For instance, in a letter to his friend, Pericles Anastasiadis, housed in the ELIA Archive, Cavafy appears as a compassionate friend. Written in English sometime in the 1890’s and sent to Paris where Peri was traveling, the letter exists only in draft form with sentences crossed out, others added, and many words composed in short hand. Reading it is like reading his poem “In the Month of Athyr,” in which a modern reader tries to interpret an ancient inscription.

From my attempts to decipher the text, Cavafy appears to console his friend. He speaks of sorrow, referring perhaps to a death of a family member, friend, or a lover. I’m not sure.

More here.

Robin Black in The New York Times:

There’s always the danger, with novels structured around a marriage, that they’ll be perceived as centrally concerned not only with that particular relationship but with the nature of marriage itself. A domestic union set prominently in a work of fiction has the sometimes unfortunate capacity to obscure whatever else is going on. Yet “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s remarkable new novel, explodes and rages past any such preconceptions, insisting that the examination of a long-term relationship can be a perfect vehicle for exploring no less than the nature of existence — the domestic a doorway to the philosophical. The title sets the tone for this project, while also serving as a road map of sorts. The novel is divided into two sections, the first of which, “Fates,” is largely concerned with the husband, Lancelot (Lotto) Satterwhite, an unconventionally irresistible beacon of good will and good faith — and more than a bit of a narcissist. The opening lines introduce us both to him and to his wife, Mathilde Yoder, but we are soon told: “For now, he’s the one we can’t look away from. He is the shining one.” Wordplay abounds in “Fates and Furies,” starting with Lotto’s name and its link to such chance-related activities as lotteries. He’s the central character explicitly associated with fate and destiny, and as such he’s the more passive, the more accepting of the pair. And why not? From the beginning, fate seems to look on him with benevolence. His parents and his aunt, a crucial figure throughout, believe from Lotto’s birth that he’s destined for greatness: “It was taken for granted by this trio of adults that Lotto was special. Golden.” And indeed, despite some setbacks — including not being particularly gifted at his first career of choice, acting — he goes on to achieve world fame as a playwright. Still, Lotto’s life isn’t perfect, his optimism not always justified. An early tragedy primes him, the golden one, to need Mathilde, a woman as canny as he is trusting, as comfortable behind the scenes as he is in the spotlight, and as dissembling as he is a (mostly) open book.

The second section of the novel, “Furies,” shifts to Mathilde. Her life has never been defined by a sense of glorious destiny but rather by a compulsion to even the score, any score, many scores.

More here.

We are Not Separate

We are not separate beings, you and I
We are different strands of the same being

You are me and I am you
and we are they and they are us

This is how we’re meant to be,
each of us one
each of us all

You reach out across the void of Otherness to me
and you touch your own soul!
.

by Leonard Peltier
from Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance

Sovereign Imagination: The art of Leonard Peltier

.

Sharmila Tagore in The Wire:

In 1955, a visit to the cinema was a rare experience for us, something the adults in our family severely frowned upon.Pather Panchali, however, was an exception. The anticipation had built up weeks before the film was finally released. Our joint family household was abuzz with excited speculation about the film and its maker. Here at last was a film good enough for our children.

I remember watching the film with my cousins, rapt with attention, feeling distraught when Durga was being thrashed, shocked by the naughty things she got up to, and somewhat envious of her free spirit. All the while, not having a clue that three years on, I would be on that big screen in front of me and others would be watching me. That was 60 years ago, the years seem to have gone by so quickly.

My association with Satyajit Ray began in 1958 and continues to this day even after his passing. What a privilege and education it has been, both professionally and personally. Is it not incredible that 60 years after he made his first film, and 23 years after his death, his work continue to be a part of our discourse and consciousness, seen and admired in so many countries and across so many cultures? It is a tribute, not only to the artistic merit of his films, but to what has been called the ‘essential humanism’ of Ray – which has lived on through time and space.

More here.

Stefan Collini in The Guardian:

There must now be a risk of Berlin-fatigue setting in. This is the fourth large volume of his letters, and it comes on the back of seven collections of essays and other occasional pieces assembled by Henry Hardy before Berlin’s death in 1997, plus a further seven since. Berlin recognised that it was the devoted Hardy’s efforts that “have suddenly converted me from someone who has hardly written anything into an almost indecently prolific author”. There have also been a biography, at least two series of interviews, several full-length studies, and two Festschriften. It seems doubtful whether his writings on liberty and on value pluralism would, by themselves, have merited such a small industry of attention had he not also known everybody who was anybody. Rare is the memoir or biography of a leading intellectual or cultural figure in Britain who flourished between the 1930s and 80s in which Berlin does not make some kind of appearance. As a result, his personality may have come to seem more important than his intellectual achievements. As he cheerfully confided when about to receive yet another honour: “I do not complain; to be overestimated is not the most painful of states.”

As a historian of ideas, Berlin was wide-ranging, even learned in an eccentric way, but that way was far removed from the contemporary academic model of specialised “research”. He moved easily in the company of the thinkers from the 18th and 19th centuries who most interested him – figures such as Vico, Herder and his great hero, the Russian liberal Alexander Herzen. He understood the outlook of such writers, drawing on a kind of intellectual empathy to reanimate their ideas for later generations, but he did not build up a thickly textured context of lesser minds or grub around in archives. Though he was well informed about the intellectual history of the period from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, he found it much less congenial, regarding it as, at best, a silver age, at worst a thin epilogue to the main action. As he confessed to one correspondent: “I feel firmly tied to the values of the 19th century.”

That allegiance could make the famously genial Berlin a surprisingly dyspeptic observer of the late 20th century.

More here.

My brother Abbas Raza wrote this email to family and friends a day or two after 9/11:

Hello,

As time elapses, I am more clearly able to identify and articulate what it is that has been making me so sad about this attack. It is this: some cities do not belong to any particular country but are treasures for all people; cosmopolitan and international by nature, they are the repositories of our shared world culture and artistic production, testaments to what is common and binding among diverse peoples, and sources of creative energy. They come to stand for our notions of community and brotherhood. New York has been by far the most magnificent of these world treasures, and it still is today. Here, on every block you will meet people from forty different countries. Here you can speak Urdu with the cab drivers, and Korean at the grocery store. Here, bhangra rhythms and classical sitar mix with calypso and Finnish ambient chants. Here is where mosques and synagogues are separated by no green-lines. Here is where Rodney King's wish has mostly come true: we do get along. This city is the least provincial; no nationalism flourishes here. It is the most potent fountainhead of intellectual and artistic endeavor. What this mindless attack has done is desecrate and damage the ideals of international community that this city not only symbolizes, but instantiates as fact and lovely example. And it is this desecration which is so devastatingly heart-breaking.

I recall two things: one, the pleasure and awe with which my mother took in the incomparably stunning view from the 110th floor observation deck of the World Trade Center on a visit from Pakistan in 1974. And two, her reading in Urdu, the words of welcome inscribed in the lobby of that building in over one hundred languages, to all people of the world. Alas, no one shall ever do either again.

Abbas

Marina Koren in The Atlantic:

When the Twin Towers came down14 years ago, about 200,000 tons of steel slammed into the ground. In the months after, rescuers searched through the debris and the mangled metal, looking for those who survived and those who didn’t. Every day, hundreds of trucks carried rubble out of the site. Shortly after the attacks, New York City sold 175,000 tons of World Trade Center steel scrap to be made into something else. Some went to cities in the United States; about 60,000 tons went to companies in China, India, and South Korea. But some steel was recovered from Ground Zero for a different purpose: to be memorialized. For years, that steel, along with hundreds of other artifacts from that day—crushed police cars, elevator parts, souvenirs, and jewelry from the underground mall—was stored in an 80,000-square-foot hangar at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The 840 pieces of steel were cut to create 2,200 chunks. Since 2008, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has doled out these artifactsto government and nonprofit organizations for free. Now, just 30 remain.

The Port Authority program has provided artifacts to 1,500 entities nationwide, in all 50 states and several countries. Across the country, bits of beams that once held up the towers stand outside of fire departments, inside municipal buildings and libraries, in town squares and museums, including the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero. The biggest chunk of steel, weighing 47,000 pounds, was given to the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which raises money for first responders injured or killed in the line of duty. The smallest—a handful of nails fused together—was given to the office of New York Senator Chuck Schumer. There’s steel at American military bases in Afghanistan and South Korea, the U.S. Embassy in Germany, the Imperial War Museum in London, even a police station in Brazil. In Westerville, Ohio, an 18-foot-long, two-ton piece of steel, bent in the middle from the impact of the first plane, stands in First Responders Park. “It wasn’t just a New York or New Jersey tragedy,” says Tom Ullom, a retired Westerville firefighter who called the Port Authority once a week for seven years to ask for the steel. “It just affected so many people everywhere.”

More here.

Rachel B. Sussman at Nautilus:

NASA Ames is filled with the exotic technologies of a future that didn’t quite come to pass. Ancient computers still operate equipment in the machine shop. A decommissioned nuclear missile sits in a parking lot, and the twin of the International Space Station sits out in the open air, under a tarp.

Originally dedicated as the Sunnyvale Naval Air Station in 1933, the site was to serve as a home base for the Navy dirigible, the U.S.S. Macon, which crashed in 1935. The Aeronautical Laboratory was founded in 1939, and in 1958 became a part of the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. In its earliest days, Ames broke new ground in aerodynamics and high-speed flight. Today it is still an active participant in various NASA missions, including leading the Kepler space telescope mission, and partnering on the Mars Curiosity Rover.

I came to Ames as part of a creatively motivated examination of the felt experience of deep time and deep space, in conjunction with the LACMA Art + Tech Lab. How does one make art—let alone make sense—out of our human experience of the cosmos?

more here.

Harriet Washington at The American Scholar:

One dramatic health difference between rich and poor countries is the prevalence of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, which afflict a billion people worldwide, most of whom live in the kind of extreme poverty that characterizes the Global South.

Apocalyptic images of dramatic medical crises such as AIDS and Ebola captivate the West and spur altruism, but when it comes to the NTDs that chronically compromise health and challenge mental abilities, our myopia has been profound. Ebola-racked Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone also harbor the highest-known concentrations of hookworm victims. Since 2013, 11,000 people have died from Ebola in sub-Saharan Africa, but 10 million people—nearly half the population of these countries—suffer from at least one NTD or malaria or both. And NTDs plague extremely poor denizens of the subtropics not only of sub-Saharan Africa, but also of Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India, China, Indonesia, and Mexico. They are, in the words of Peter Hotez, the dean at Baylor, “great disablers rather than killers.”

Yet the HIV disease prevalent on the African continent and throughout the developing world deranges thinking, too. Children who acquire HIV prenatally from their mothers risk central nervous system disease that can cause a spectrum of brain dysfunction from encephalopathy to subtle cognitive impairment.

more here.

Ann Neumann at The Baffler:

There are around three hundred thousand Amish people in America, but millions upon millions of readers are choosing to live vicariously in a pristine Amish settlement of the imagination, where zippers, cars, and many of the breathlessly touted gadgets of the digital age are forbidden. While you’d be hard pressed to find a more stolidly patriarchal religious community than the Amish, who prohibit divorce and deny women any alternative to obeying their male masters in the home and any position of spiritual authority in the church, the audience for this curious genre is overwhelmingly female.

Whether readers are motivated by a hazy Luddism or a nostalgia for the old male-supremacist order of things, there’s no mistaking the potent commercial lure of the “bonnet books”—so called because of the young Amish women plastered on their covers. In less than a decade, bonnet titles have overtaken bestseller lists, Christian and non-Christian alike. More than eighty such books will be published in 2015, up from twelve titles in 2008. Three novelists, Beverly Lewis (who launched the genre in 1997 with The Shunning), Cindy Woodsmall, and Wanda Brunstetter, are together responsible for the sale of more than twenty-four million books. Today, there are approximately thirty-nine authors of Amish-themed fiction; their collective output works out to one Amish fiction book published every four days. Often wrongly called “bonnet rippers,” these novels seldom offer fare any more lurid than a much-regretted kiss. Sex is always offstage, and mere carnal longing is usually mastered by the more powerful desire to do God’s will.

more here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

“Dear colleagues — I need the help of the whole community,” palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger posted on social media on 6 October 2013. Berger, based at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had just learned of a small underground chamber loaded with early human fossils. He was looking for experienced excavators to collect the delicate remains before they deteriorated further. “The catch is this,” Berger went on. “The person must be skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience.” Less than two years after he posted this missive, Berger and his team have pieced together more than 1,500 ancient human bones and teeth from the Rising Star cave system — the biggest cache of such material ever found in Africa. The remains belong to at least 15 individuals of a previously undescribed species that the team has dubbed Homo naledi, and they may mark the oldest known deliberate burial in human history, Berger and his colleagues report in eLife^{1, 2}. For Berger, the research marks a milestone in a campaign to transform palaeoanthropology into an open and inclusive field, in which rare fossils are rapidly shared with the scientific world instead of being squirrelled away as an elite few scrutinize them for years.

…The team intends to publish at least a dozen papers from the workshop in coming months; the two published today are the first. They describe the site and the anatomy of Homo naledi, whose skull encased a small, fist-sized brain much like those of other early members of the genus Homo and of the more ancient australopiths. In other ways, its body is more like those of modern humans, with the lower limbs and feet of a biped and hands that could have gripped tools with precision. The researchers estimate that H. naledi would have stood just under 1.5 metres tall and weighed between 40 and 55 kilograms.

More here.

Map

A hill, a farm,
A forest, and a valley.
Half a hill plowed, half woods.
A forest valley and a valley field.

Sun passes over;
Two solstices a year
Cow in the pasture
Sometimes a deer

A farmhouse built of wood.
A forest built of bones.
The high field, hawks
The low field, crows

Wren in the brambles
Frogs in the creek
Hot in summer
Cold in snow

The woods fade and pass.
The farm goes on.
The farm quits and fails
The woods creep down

Stocks fall you can’t sell corn
Big frost and tree-mice starve
Who wins who cares?
The woods have time.
The farmer has heirs.

by Gary Snyder
from Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press

Rafia Zakaria in Aeon:

In 1820, in the Indian city of Benares, an English Baptist missionary named Smith helped to save a woman from the Hindu practice of sati, the burning of widows. He described the scene: ‘As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediately the Brahmins seized her, in order to put her again into the flames: she exclaimed, “Do not murder me! I don’t wish to be burnt!” The Company Officers being present, she was brought home safely.’ A London magazine reported the heroic efforts of Britain’s East India Company under the headline ‘A Woman Delivered’. If there was one thing 19th-century Europeans knew about India, it was probably sati.

Mr Smith’s 1820 account of valiant British men rescuing an Indian woman from her husband’s funeral pyre is one of many such contemporary reports. The East India Company had just become the effective governing authority of India. As a trading presence, it had been uninterested in culture. As a ruling presence, it set out to reform the barbaric local customs.

More recently, it is Afghan women who’ve needed the Anglo-American empire to deliver them. In 2002, a coalition of Western women’s organisations sent an open letter to the US President George W Bush asking him to ‘to take emergency action to save the lives and secure the future of Afghan women’. Its signatories included Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation in Virginia, together with other notable feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon. US women overwhelmingly support the war, they noted, because it will ‘liberate Afghan women from abuse and oppression’.

More here.