Jennifer Egbebike in The Feminist Wire:

Dear Guy-on-the-Subway,

Are you familiar with the term manspreading?*

While I struggle to keep my legs crossed and take up as little space as possible as a common courtesy to the other passengers on this train, it’s a wonder that you’re so comfortable taking up as much space as you possibly can. I bet you don’t even notice. You must just have some sort of subconscious entitlement to space that persuades you to mark your territory and display your “dominance.” We have been taught to act in opposites. I’ve tried to sit like you once before, and was quickly scolded to close my legs and behave more “lady-like.”

Why do we teach women to take up as little space as possible while we teach men the opposite?

More here.

Marcel Theroux in The New York Times:

Salman Rushdie’s literary immortality is assured. His second novel, “Midnight’s Children,” lit up fiction in English with the exuberance of a Diwali firework. It was uniquely honored, winning both the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers, for the best novel in the prize’s history. With his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, inadvertently conjured a jinni of intolerance.

…As the storytelling grows more manic, what comes through clearly — much too clearly — is the novel’s controlling theme: an allegory about humanity’s struggle between superstition and reason. “The battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself.” The book’s title is a nod to “One Thousand and One Nights,” but this kind of overt commentary is a long way from the ­authorlessness and economy of fairy tales, which never lecture and whose bareness — envious stepmother, noble prince, dark forest — extends a more subtle invitation to the reader. The most felt things in the book are about Geronimo the gardener, lonely and aging in an unfamiliar city. He is doubly uprooted, separated both from the earth itself and the Indian birthplace that he loved. The prose quickens with specific detail when he mourns the loss of his childhood home: “He wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor’s story, every boy selling pirated novels at traffic lights.” It’s a huge relief when Geronimo finds himself back on more solid ground; it will be an ever bigger one when his author does too.

More here.

Lawrence M. Krauss in Nautilus:

Whenever you say anything about your daily life, a scale is implied. Try it out. “I’m too busy” only works for an assumed time scale: today, for example, or this week. Not this century or this nanosecond. “Taxes are onerous” only makes sense for a certain income range. And so on.

Surely the same restriction doesn’t hold true in science, you might say. After all, for centuries after the introduction of the scientific method, conventional wisdom held that there were theories that were absolutely true for all scales, even if we could never be empirically certain of this in advance. Newton’s universal law of gravity, for example, was, after all, universal! It applied to falling apples and falling planets alike, and accounted for every significant observation made under the sun, and over it as well.

With the advent of relativity, and general relativity in particular, it became clear that Newton’s law of gravity was merely an approximation of a more fundamental theory. But the more fundamental theory, general relativity, was so mathematically beautiful that it seemed reasonable to assume that it codified perfectly and completely the behavior of space and time in the presence of mass and energy.

The advent of quantum mechanics changed everything. When quantum mechanics is combined with relativity, it turns out, rather unexpectedly in fact, that the detailed nature of the physical laws that govern matter and energy actually depend on the physical scale at which you measure them. This led to perhaps the biggest unsung scientific revolution in the 20th century: We know of no theory that both makes contact with the empirical world, and is absolutely and always true. (I don’t envisage this changing anytime soon, string theorists’ hopes notwithstanding.) Despite this, theoretical physicists have devoted considerable energy to chasing exactly this kind of theory. So, what is going on? Is a universal theory a legitimate goal, or will scientific truth always be scale-dependent?

More here.

Greg Grandin in Salon:

The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.”

Reading the diplomatic record, it’s hard not to imagine his weariness as he prepared for his sessions with the Shah, considering just what gestures and words would be needed to make it clear that his majesty truly mattered to Washington, that he was valued beyond compare. “Let’s see,” an aide who was helping Kissinger get ready for one such meeting said, “the Shah will want to talk about Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the Kurds, and Brezhnev.”

During another prep, Kissinger was told that “the Shah wants to ride in an F-14.” Silence ensued. Then Kissinger began to think aloud about how to flatter the monarch into abandoning the idea. “We can say,” he began, “that if he has his heart set on it, okay, but the President would feel easier if he didn’t have that one worry in 10,000 [that the plane might crash]. The Shah will be flattered.” Once, Nixon asked Kissinger to book the entertainer Danny Kaye for a private performance for the Shah and his wife.

The 92-year-old Kissinger has a long history of involvement in Iran and his recent opposition to Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, while relatively subdued by present Washington standards, matters. In it lies a certain irony, given his own largely unexamined record in the region.

More here.

Ian Buruma at Harper's Magazine:

As military coups go, Thailand’s putsch on May 22, 2014, was rather polite — no mass imprisonments, no stadiums full of students tortured and shot. The toppled prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, was detained for only three days. Before the coup, there had been months of street clashes between loyalist “red shirts” and opposition “yellow shirts,” and now General Prayuth Chan-ocha’s junta promised to “restore happiness to the people.”

There have since been some public protests against martial law. Students were arrested in Bangkok for flashing a three-finger salute copied from The Hunger Games, the novel and attendant movie about a rebellion against a fictional dictatorship. Modest three-finger student demonstrations have also taken place in Khon Kaen, a city in the rural northeast that is considered the main red-shirt stronghold. The salute is now banned in Thailand, as is public reading of George Orwell’s 1984. But so far, opposition to the junta has not found a popular voice — no great demonstrations, no acts of violence.

It is easy, under such relatively tranquil conditions, not to take Thailand and its coups entirely seriously. Military takeovers occur with some regularity there. Eight years before Yingluck Shinawatra was deposed, her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra — an ex-policeman who made a fortune in the cell phone business before being elected prime minister in 2001 — was similarly removed from office.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

We don’t think of Picasso as a sculptor, but we should. He was a great one. In the years after that summer with Braque, Picasso performed a vivisection of 500 years of Western spatial perspective. For much of the 19th century, artists like Constable, Corot, Courbet, Manet, and many others tried to break the rigid illusionistic strictures and the structure of vaunted Renaissance perspective. Yet no matter what artists did, including Monet — breaking down every brushstroke into a physical thing that functioned at once as a mark and a picture, each one being absolutely equal to every other stroke, all but doing away with illusionistic space altogether — still, the borders and surfaces of the object reasserted themselves. With collage and assemblage, Picasso finally jarred space from a kind of 500-year sleeping sickness, a system that had silted up, impeded, and confined vision. With these works, Picasso broke forever from Renaissance tradition into modernist, Einsteinian relativity, the paradoxical space where things exist in different dimensions at once. It’s important to remember, of course, that Renaissance perspective was maniacally practiced only in the West. In Asia, Africa, and most of the rest of the world, systematic illusionistic space never caught on. In the West, however, Picasso (and the others) set space free.

Now, for the first time since the Museum of Modern Art’s epic 1967 “The Sculpture of Picasso,” MoMA returns to this fertile delta with more than 150 of his slabbed, shattering, avian-shaped, hallucinogenically assembled sculptures. This is a fantastic show.

more here.

Gary Wilder at Aeon Magazine:

From the perspective of power politics, Césaire and Senghor’s projects might be regarded as utopian schemes with little hope of being realised, out of sync as they were with the nationalist direction in which history seemed to be moving. They were not revolutionary nationalists, and revolutionary nationalism carried the day. Their untimely belief that decolonisation might not require national independence and that self-determination might not require state sovereignty helps to explain why Césaire and Senghor are neglected figures.

But from the present vantage point, their visions seem more pertinent than ever. Since the end of the Cold War, the limits of state sovereignty and the failures of internationalism have become more evident. Private economic actors, unaccountable international agencies, and technocratic experts have superseded state and democratic sovereignties. The failed promises of national self-determination and universal human rights are underscored by Fortress Europe’s handling of the Mediterranean refugee crisis, or the Greek debt crisis. The bankruptcy of international law is revealed by the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Russia’s annexation of Eastern Ukraine, not to mention the new forms of US imperialism that are legitimised through UN‑sanctioned policies regarding human rights, humanitarianism, and the ‘responsibility to protect’. The absence of a vital framework for internationalist solidarity is clear given the left’s inability to effectively challenge Islamic State’s assaults on Syrian Kurds.

more here.

Ta-Nahisi Coates in The Atlantic:

“lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart.”

By his own lights, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador, senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father, John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother, Margaret, remarried, had another child, divorced, moved to Indiana to stay with relatives, then returned to New York, where she worked as a nurse. Moynihan’s childhood—a tangle of poverty, remarriage, relocation, and single motherhood—contrasted starkly with the idyllic American family life he would later extol. “My relations are obviously those of divided allegiance,” Moynihan wrote in a diary he kept during the 1950s. “Apparently I loved the old man very much yet had to take sides … choosing mom in spite of loving pop.” In the same journal, Moynihan, subjecting himself to the sort of analysis to which he would soon subject others, wrote, “Both my mother and father—They let me down badly … I find through the years this enormous emotional attachment to Father substitutes—of whom the least rejection was cause for untold agonies—the only answer is that I have repressed my feelings towards dad.”

More here.

Moritz Koch in Handelsblatt (image: Alex Schmidt, DDP):

Handelsblatt: Professor Habermas, you criticized the German government for behaving like the “Europe’s chief disciplinarian” during the Greece debt crisis. Has Chancellor Merkel redeemed herself with her generosity in the refugee crisis?

Jürgen Habermas: I’m as surprised as I am delighted. For years, I haven’t been thought as highly of our government as I have since late August. Now, here in America, I keep referring to something she said which also keeps being mentioned in the German press.

You mean when she said, “we can manage?”

No, I mean her statement, “If we also have to apologize for showing a friendly face in emergency situations, then this is not my country.” That’s a very strong sentence. Who would have expected that from Ms. Merkel, who has stuck to pragmatic, hesitant statements, oriented towards popular opinion for years? That was a decisive, normative sentence. I was so happy when I read that. And it wasn’t only Ms. Merkel, it was the whole government, and supported by different statements, visits to Heidenau and so on.

You’re all enthusiasm…

What delights me is that once our government finally made a normative statement and took a stand – and then the public reacted in an almost fairy tale way.

You said Berlin was taking a “hegemonic attitude” with Greece, for the first time in the post war era. Now, the right wing is making this same criticism about immigration policy, calling Ms. Merkel’s welcome culture “moral imperialism.”

Well, it’s not surprising that there’s been a reaction to Germany’s decisive policy of opening the borders and our emphasis on the normative content of our already restricted right to asylum. But I can’t take that seriously, the idea that this policy is being associated with a hegemonic attitude from Germany. It’s true that Ms. Merkel’s immigration initiative was a solo effort – followed by a justifiable attempt to create a shared European response.

More here.

From Science Daily:

A team of scientists led by the University's Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain has investigated the connections in the brains of 461 people and compared them with 280 different behavioural and demographic measures that were recorded for the same participants. They found that variation in brain connectivity and an individual's traits lay on a single axis — where those with classically positive lifestyles and behaviours had different connections to those with classically negative ones. The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience. The team used data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a $30m NIH-funded brain imaging study led by Washington, Minnesota and Oxford Universities. The HCP is pairing up functional MRI scans of 1,200 healthy participants with in-depth data gained from tests and questionnaires. “The quality of the imaging data is really unprecedented,” explains Professor Stephen Smith, who was the lead author of the paper. “Not only is the number of subjects we get to study large, but the spatial and temporal resolution of the fMRI data is way ahead of previous large datasets.” So far, data for 500 subjects have been released to researchers for analysis. The Oxford team took the data from 461 of the scans and used it to create an averaged map of the brain's processes across the participants. “You can think of it as a population-average map of 200 regions across the brain that are functionally distinct from each other,” explains Professor Smith. “Then, we looked at how much all of those regions communicated with each other, in every participant.”

…They found one strong correlation that relates specific variations in a subject's connectome with their behavioural and demographic measures. Interestingly, the correlation shows that those with a connectome at one end of scale score highly on measures typically deemed to be positive, such as vocabulary, memory, life satisfaction, income and years of education.

More here.

Jonathan Kalb in The Brooklyn Rail:

Emojis are an infantilization of language in the name of amusement. A New Yorkmagazine cover story last year compared them admiringly to ancient hieroglyphs without mentioning that civilization bounded forward after advancing from pictographs to symbolic language. Emojis are also a flagrant and increasingly common means of pandering to the young. What else are the White House’s emoji-peppered online notices to millennials about the Affordable Care Act, or The Guardian’s emoji translation of Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address?

The nadir of emoji pointlessness, in my view, is Fred Benenson’s Emoji Dick, a 736-page, crowd-sourced emoji translation of Melville’s Moby-Dick that was accepted into the Library of Congress in 2013. It beggars belief that anyone but Benenson has ever read this book cover to cover.

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.

The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.

I am obviously an emoji skeptic, yet I found myself drawn to investigate them for deeply personal reasons. I have lived for more than a decade with facial palsy that distorts my smile and causes a lot of social misunderstanding. I employ a raft of improvised strategies to clarify the emotional intentions behind my quirky facial expressions, and emojis, I realized, were doing something similar for normal people. These tiny cartoonish faces and glyphs were deployed as digital masks. Millions were grasping at them to elucidate their feelings because their addiction to faceless communication modes had put them at a comparable disadvantage to mine.

More here.

Wolfgang Streeck in Eurozine:

The slogan with which the German government eventually sold the euro to the German electorate became: “The euro – as stable as the mark”. Germany's partners signed the treaty in the end, presumably hoping to amend it later under the pressure of economic realities, if not on paper then in practice. It helped that the 1990s were a period when, issuing from the United States, fiscal consolidation was a common political objective for the countries of OECD capitalism, in the context of financialization and the transition to a neoliberal, non-Keynesian money regime. It was in the spirit of the era to commit to a ceiling on public debt of sixty per cent of GDP and to budget deficits that would never exceed three per cent; financial markets would have looked with suspicion upon any country refusing to fall into line.

Today it is Germany, together with countries like the Netherlands, Austria or Finland, which is reaping the benefits of the EMU. But it is important not to forget that this has only been so since the financial collapse of 2008. During the first years of EMU, Germany was “the sick man of Europe”, and monetary union had a lot to do with it (Scharpf 2011). The common interest rate set by the European Central Bank, which had to take into account the economies of all member countries, was too high for a low-inflation political economy like Germany. A possible solution might have been wage increases forced by aggressive trade unions. In a heavily industrialized, export-dependent country like Germany, however, this would have meant not just fewer exports but also, in a time of increasing capital mobility, a drain of jobs to foreign countries. This explains the, to many outside observers, mysterious wage moderation of German unions since the early 2000s. By comparison, the more inflationary economies of the Mediterranean enjoyed negative real interest rates, coupled with a dramatic fall in the cost of public borrowing – the latter on the assumption by capital markets, encouraged by the European Commission, that with a common currency there would also be some sort of common responsibility for the solvency of member states. The result was a boom in the South and stagnation, along with high unemployment and growing public debt, in Germany.

That situation was reversed in 2008, and contrary to popular neoliberal mythology this had little to do with the “Hartz reforms”. They made a dent in public spending, especially as regards unemployment insurance, and opened the door to an expansion of low-wage employment outside of the core sectors of German economic strength. What really mattered was that the German economy, traditionally driven by foreign demand and due to its perennial “over-industrialization”, was in a position after 2008 to serve global markets in the high-quality manufacturing sector. As a result, it suffered much less from the fiscal crisis and the breakdown of credit than more domestic demand-led EMU countries.

More here.

Paul Richardson in More Intelligent Life:

It is one of the great American sententiae, as sonorous and moving as the Gettysburg Address. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1845, living for two years and two months in a cabin he had built on the north shore of Walden Pond. The book resulting from his experiment in simplicity was published in 1854, to lukewarm reviews. A century and a half later, however, “Walden” is a fundamental text of the ecological movement, and the pond, a crucial topos of American history, has become a place of pilgrimage.

I come to the woods in a taxi from Logan Airport, leaving Boston on Route 2. My taxi driver is a young Ethiopian woman with a printed headscarf wound around her head, nervous on her first day of work. We leave the highway at the turn-off for Lincoln, and up there on the exit sign I see the name in big letters: Walden Pond. It has become a destination in itself.

The pond lies a few miles out of Concord village in the state of Massachusetts. The pond isn’t really a pond, at least not in the English sense of a small body of standing water, often found at the bottom of a garden. It’s a roundish lake surrounded by forest, with a patch of boggy meadow at its western end. The water in this kettle lake or pothole lake (as geographers variously define it), tinged benignly blue-green at the edges and scarily black towards the middle where it plunges to a depth of 33 metres, is filtered as it pushes up through the sandy soil around it, and has a mesmerising clarity I’ve never seen in any English pond.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

When we think about the ingredients necessary for life on Earth, liquid water is always right at the top of the list. Without it, there’s simply no good way to for transport of ions and molecules to occur. Sure, some other liquid might — in principle — be able to substitute for water, but nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane don’t have that awesome polar structure that water has, which allows for such a wide variety of molecules to dissolve and be moved from one location to another.

For a long time, it was known that Mars had a wet, watery past, likely for over a billion years in the early Solar System. Things like dried up riverbeds, sedimentary rock formations, round spherules known as Martian blueberries and other patterns of erosion teach us that — at one point long ago — Mars likely had oceans covering its surface more than a mile deep.

But all that ended long ago. As Mars is much smaller than Earth, its core cooled more quickly, meaning it lost its protective magnetic field. Without it, there was insufficient protection against the solar wind, which over just a few million years stripped that thick atmosphere away, making stable, liquid water on the surface impossible. What was left either had to exist as water vapor (the gaseous phase) or ice (the solid phase), something we’ve found copious amounts of evidence for. When we look at the Martian surface today, we find polar icecaps, clouds, sub-surface ice (via digging) that sublimates as soon as it’s exposed, and even seasonal frozen lakes.

More here.

Walt Hickey in Five Thirty Eight:

Bob Ross was a consummate teacher. He guided fans along as he painted “happy trees,” “almighty mountains” and “fluffy clouds” over the course of his 11-year television career on his PBS show, “The Joy of Painting.” In total, Ross painted 381 works on the show, relying on a distinct set of elements, scenes and themes, and thereby providing thousands of data points. I decided to use that data to teach something myself: the important statistical concepts of conditional probability and clustering, as well as a lesson on the limitations of data.

So let’s perm out our hair and get ready to create some happy spreadsheets!

What I found — through data analysis and an interview with one of Ross’s closest collaborators — was a body of work that was defined by consistency and a fundamentally personal ideal. Ross was born in Daytona, Fla., and joined the Air Force at 17. He was stationed in Fairbanks and spent the next 20 years in Alaska. His time there seems to have had a significant impact on his preferred subjects of trees, mountains, clouds, lakes and snow.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

Mark Bostridge at the Times Literary Supplement:

In the spring of 1914, one of the most famous images of authorship in English literary history went on public display for the first time. Branwell Brontë’s portrait of his sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, had been discovered in Ireland, on top of a ward-robe at Hill House, Banagher, formerly the home of Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte Brontë’s widower, together with a portrait fragment of Emily Brontë from a lost work by Branwell, known as the “Gun Group” (Nicholls had cut the fragment from the painting and destroyed the rest).

Hurriedly purchased by the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London, at “a very moderate cost”, and relined but not restored, the heavily creased painting of the three sisters – folded at one time to an eighth of its original size – was hung next to a portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson. The portrait of Emily, purchased at the same time, was displayed directly beneath. As the public flocked to see the two paintings, articles in the press focused on “The Three Sisters” group, marvelling at its chance rediscovery, “negligible” status as a work of art, and compensating value as a historical relic. A few dissident voices attacked the late Mr Nicholls for his neglect of the painting and the consequent damage to it, as well as for his desecration of the “Gun Group”. “Oh, the barbarism of Charlotte’s husband”, lamented a reporter in the Daily Graphic.

more here.

Elias Rodriques at n+1:

I WENT TO THAT black barbershop for the reason millions like me have done so before—to feel at home. But for years, as Quincy Mills’s fascinating Cutting Across the Color Line reveals, black barbershops in America were unavailable to people of my lineage and color. Though they became a stereotypical image of a black social institution, crystallized best in Barbershop, they began as institutions of segregation and white supremacy. In the antebellum era, but also well into the period of Reconstruction, black barbershops—predominantly in the South but often in the North—only served white men. Prohibiting black men from cutting black hair for a profit allowed slave owners to control their slaves’ relationship to their own and to other black bodies. At the same time, slave owners profited from their enslaved barbers by hiring their slaves out to cut the hair of white townspeople. If the barber was lucky, his owner allowed him to take a percentage of the profits, which he sometimes used to purchase his freedom.

Their distance from harsh, manual labor made these positions relatively privileged ones, leading Mills to argue that barbers initially occupied an unstable class position. “As captive capitalists in a slave society,” Mills writes, free barbers represented “both the possibilities and limits of freedom for African Americans in the antebellum period.”

more here.

Colm Tóibín at the London Review of Books:

Besides the complexes that blokes in the 21st century may have about castration and the shivering joy many take in explaining all this to a psychoanalyst, there is another reason the castrato may continue to fascinate us. It is the old idea that while heard melodies are sweet, those unheard are haunting. Feldman writes that castrato voices had ‘strong resonance … understood as relative loudness and intensity, with timbral richness’. If we want to imagine what a castrato sounded like perhaps it would help to listen to a recording by a deep and powerful contralto – Hilde Rössel-Majdan, for example, or Maureen Forrester – and then follow this by listening to a countertenor, David Daniels, for example, or Andreas Scholl, or Iestyn Davies (or go on YouTube and listen to a recording of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, who died in 1922, singing the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’, with what Feldman called a vibrato that is ‘often lush and plentiful’, and the ‘Crucifixus’ from Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle). But all of these offer merely clues.

Some of the clues are fascinating, however, perhaps because the language used to describe a castrato singing has its own luscious, plaintive sound. The French soprano Emma Calvé wrote in her autobiography about hearing the castrato Domenico Mustafà in 1891: ‘He had an exquisite high tenor voice, truly angelic, neither masculine nor yet feminine in type – deep, subtle, poignant in its vibrant intensity … He had certain curious notes which he called his fourth voice – strange, sexless tones, superhuman, uncanny!’ Another writer wrote of a castrato voice that it was ‘so soft, and ravishingly mellow, that nothing can better represent it than the Flute-stops of some Organs’, which themselves were ‘not unlike the gentle Fallings of Water’.

more here.