Asad Rahim Khan in Herald:

As far as debuts went, there was nothing quite like it. A 250-page novel, with a three-sentence premise: “Darashikoh Shezad is an ex-banker, pot-smoker, and downwardly mobile heroin addict who also happens to have fallen for his best friend’s wife. He is on trial. You are to be his judge.”

In a land of 140 million people, with less than 14 novelists of note between them – both in English and Urdu – Pakistan was unprepared for Moth Smoke in 2000; a decline-and-fall story with everything else in between: heat and hash, nuclear bombs and car chases, kite fights and wars of succession among Mughal princes.

In a way, the 29-year-old Mohsin Hamid could be compared to the 21-year-old Bret Easton Ellis, the boy wonder who blew the lid off the Reagan years with Less Than Zero. Like Hamid’s, Ellis’s maiden novel is a tale of beautiful young drug dealers that ends in tears. Unlike Hamid, Ellis could not write to save his life.

More here.

Sameer Rahim in Prospect:

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has never been afraid of speaking out. In 2005, he broke a national taboo by speaking to a Swiss newspaper about the killing of one million Armenians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, he was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness” in a case that brought him international attention. In 2006 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, the committee praising a writer, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” During those years, Pamuk told me when I met him in London, he felt he became “too political,” asked to comment about events in his native land in a way western novelists usually are not. But the genial Pamuk also admitted that he finds it difficult to “keep my mouth shut” about the state of his country.

I asked him whether the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), has damaged Turkey’s secular identity. “Before Erdoğan came to power 13 years ago, everyone rightly thought secularism was under threat,” he told me. “Now, according to a newspaper poll, only 5 per cent of the population are worried about Turkey’s secularism, but 67 per cent think he is too authoritarian.” Erdoğan won a landslide parliamentary victory in 2002 with support from mainly poor and religious Turks. Since then he has intensified his grip on power. Last year he became the country’s President and began turning the ceremonial position into a political power base. Pamuk is disturbed by Erdoğan’s manoeuvres. “He has violated Montesquieu’s rules over the division between the judicial, legislative and executive powers. He does this without even hiding his manipulations.”

Pamuk is most worried about Erdoğan’s attitude to freedom of speech. “He is pressuring journalists and newspapers too much,” he said. “This is not acceptable.” As a Nobel prize-winner and internationally renowned writer, Pamuk is freer to criticise the government than ordinary Turkish journalists. I sensed he was speaking on their behalf.

More here.

Ross Anderson in The Atlantic:

In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”

Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.

The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.

More here.

Max Nelson in Paris Review:

The first time Oscar Wilde saw the inside of a prison, it was 1882—thirteen years before he’d serve the famous criminal sentence that produced De Profundis, his 55,000-word letter to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Financially pressed and known primarily as a public speaker—by then he had only published a thin volume of poems—he’d committed to a nine-month lecture tour of America. During his stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, he and the young literature professor George Woodberry were taken to visit the local penitentiary. The warden led them into a yard where, Wilde later wrote the suffragist journalist Helena Sickert, they were confronted by “poor odd types of humanity in striped dresses making bricks in the sun.” All the faces he glimpsed, he remarked with relief, “were mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.”

…“You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art,” Wilde tells Douglas in the letter’s lovestruck last sentence. “Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty.” After De Profundis, Wilde published only the long poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and two letters to the Daily Chronicle advocating for specific reforms designed to mitigate the “cruelties of prison life.” He died at forty-six, broke, despondent, and—at the last minute—baptized. He had lived extravagantly, suffered greatly, defended his wounded pride to the end, and hit, in De Profundis, upon a lavish, full harmony of words.

More here.

Broken Bones

She likes a man with a broken nose
Lucky for me, I suppose
Shots coming in like the monthly bills
Soon they’ll be saying I’m over the hill

Well the bell goes clang and you’re on your own
You take your medicine and go home
You take it like a man, on the chin
And you don’t make a fuss when the towel comes in

Now let me go home, got to lay in ice
And I don’t want to hear no more advice
Just give me my clothes
Get me out of this place
How many more stitches in my face?

Those broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home
Broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home

He had the punch lines, I was the joke
Every shot felt like something broke
It was all much more than a man should stand
And I finally went down to a big right hand

Now let me go home, got to lay in ice
And I don’t want to hear no more advice
Just give me my clothes
Get me out of this place
How many more stitches in my face?

Those broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home
Broken bones, you pick ‘em up and carry ‘em
Broken bones, you carry ‘em home
.

by Mark Knopfler
from Tracker

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Richard Bright in Interalia Magazine:

Richard Bright: Can we begin with you saying something about your background?

Zara Houshmand: I grew up as a third culture kid, Iranian-American raised in the Philippines, then later living in Iran, the UK, and the US. That suspension between cultures—both the outsider view and the bridging skills learned early—are very much part of who I am and the ideas I’m drawn too. Much of my work has to do with cross-cultural communication, not just the obvious—literary translation, bilingual theatre, writing from an Iranian view for Western audiences—but also dialogue between cultures in a broader sense, between science and Buddhism, art and technology, in a way that’s focused more on the process than any particular position. Collaborative process is another thread of this that’s woven throughout my life.

But at heart I’m a writer, in love with poetry and theatre. I studied English literature and an interest in oral literature through the Old English led me into traditional Asian theatre forms including Tibetan opera and Balinese shadow puppetry. I’m fascinated by the tension between traditional structures and improvisation, by the roots of theatre in ritual experienced directly, not just as history, and by the roots of composition in performance.

RB: In 2000, you made a commitment to translate one of Rumi’s quatrains every day. Can you say more about this?

ZH: When I first encountered the popular American translations of Rumi, I was disturbed. I didn’t recognize what I was reading, as if the entire mindset of Persian culture had been bleached out, leaving a generic, whitewashed spirituality.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

This isn’t, by the way, one of those misconceptions that rattles around the popular-explanation sphere, while experts sit back silently and roll their eyes. Experts get this one wrong all the time. “Inflation was a period of superluminal expansion” is repeated, for example, in these texts by by Tai-Peng Cheng, by Joel Primack, and by Lawrence Krauss, all of whom should certainly know better.

The great thing about the superluminal-expansion misconception is that it’s actually a mangle of several different problems, which sadly don’t cancel out to give you the right answer.

1.The expansion of the universe doesn’t have a “speed.” Really the discussion should begin and end right there. Comparing the expansion rate of the universe to the speed of light is like comparing the height of a building to your weight. You’re not doing good scientific explanation; you’ve had too much to drink and should just go home.The expansion of the universe is quantified by the Hubble constant, which is typically quoted in crazy units of kilometers per second per megaparsec. That’s (distance divided by time) divided by distance, or simply 1/time. Speed, meanwhile, is measured in distance/time. Not the same units! Comparing the two concepts is crazy.

Admittedly, you can construct a quantity with units of velocity from the Hubble constant, using Hubble’s law, v = Hd (the apparent velocity of a galaxy is given by the Hubble constant times its distance). Individual galaxies are indeed associated with recession velocities. But different galaxies, manifestly, have different velocities. The idea of even talking about “the expansion velocity of the universe” is bizarre and never should have been entertained in the first place.

2. There is no well-defined notion of “the velocity of distant objects” in general relativity.There is a rule, valid both in special relativity and general relativity, that says two objects cannot pass by each other with relative velocities faster than the speed of light. In special relativity, where spacetime is a fixed, flat, Minkowskian geometry, we can pick a global reference frame and extend that rule to distant objects. In general relativity, we just can’t.

More here.

Peter Boettke in Politico:

Princeton University Professor Angus Deaton has won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and it is a very worthy award. The 69-year-old Scottish-born economist has contributed to our understanding at a theoretical, empirical, and policy-relevant level throughout his very productive career. And he continues to challenge his fellow economists methodologically, analytically, and practically with new works. In many ways, this was a very inspiring choice.

Let me explain. Deaton’s first main idea was the basic one that people don’t eat growth rates: We learn a lot more from studying consumption behavior than we would from focusing our attention on aggregate income measures. It is a decidedly microeconomic approach to empirical analysis, and in so doing he innovated ways to conduct household surveys. And this way of measuring human well-being opened eyes to the plight of the world’s poor, and the economic improvements in global development. In many ways, Deaton’s work provides the scientific underpinnings of Hans Rosling’s BBC Four video, The Joy of Stats, on 200 countries, 200 Years or his TED Talk on the washing machine.

Deaton’s work made us see the impact innovation and development has had on the well-being of the world’s poor. In this sense, his receiving the Nobel is also a nod by the committee to economic history and the fundamental importance of development economics as a field as much as to the theoretical and empirical thrust of Deaton’s work on consumption behavior.

More here.

Jane Kramer in The New Yorker:

Steinem has a mantra that she says she lives by. She calls it “Ask the Turtle,” because it involves a turtle she rescued—or thought she had—on a geology-class field trip to the Connecticut River Valley in the spring of her freshman year at Smith. “I found a mud turtle on the riverbank, up by the asphalt road,” she told me. “A big snapping turtle, more than a foot long, but I picked it up—carefully—and lugged it down to the river and slipped it in. The professor saw me just as the turtle disappeared in the water. He said that the turtle had been making its way to dry land for a reason—in order to lay its eggs—and that now it was going to take that turtle months more to lay them. It was a lesson I learned to apply to people a few years later, in India—though I didn’t realize it then—when I was going from village to village with Gandhian women organizers, listening to them ask, ‘Tell us your stories. You’ve lived them, you’re the experts.’ ”

…Steinem married for the first time in her mid-sixties, inherited three stepchildren (among them the actor Christian Bale), and was widowed three years later, when her husband, David Bale, died of brain cancer, at the age of sixty-two. Bale was a South African-born British businessman and environmentalist. They met when he walked up to her at a Los Angeles Voters for Choice benefit. It was a happy marriage, “a green-card marriage, because we would have been together anyway,” Steinem told me. She says that caring for him that last year, when he was ill and “needed someone to help him out of life, and I needed someone to force me to live in the present,” had actually helped her “expiate the pain of my old terrors”—the terrors of caring for her mother when she was too young to understand or cope. Steinem has compared marriage to slavery law in this country. As a young woman, she fled one brief, ill-advised engagement. And, in her early forties, she amiably dissolved a second, to Robert Benton, who went on to write and direct “Kramer vs. Kramer.” “Neither of us was really sure we wanted to marry, so we took it in steps. The first was to do the blood tests and get the license. We did. The second was for him to buy the new suit. He did. The third was for me to buy the dress. I never got to the dress, I just couldn’t do it, and the marriage license expired.”

Four years after David Bale died, a reporter from Pakistan asked Steinem why she had changed her mind about marriage. “I didn’t change,” she told him. “Marriage changed. We spent thirty years in the United States changing the marriage laws. If I had married when I was supposed to get married, I would have lost my name, my legal residence, my credit rating, many of my civil rights. That’s not true anymore. It’s possible to make an equal marriage.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Sindy Kohuth)

Editorial in Nature:

Izabella Kaminska in the FT's Alphaville provides a transcript of a NYC Comic Con panel featuring Paul Krugman and Brad Delong, Annalee Newitz (i09), Chris Black (Enterprise writer), Felix Salmon and Manu Saadiaon post-scarcity economics of the sort enabled by Star Trek matter replicators:

MANU: The project for the book, it started out drinking beer with Chris. We were discussing about whether there is a book about Star Trek economics because there is a book about everything to do with Star Trek.

In the book I’ve tried to step out of that mindset, and tried to actually describe how it works. And I’ve discovered some very surprising things.

The biggest thing, I believe, that I got out of researching the book and writing it, is that the post scarcity in Star Trek is not driven by technology but a policy choice. And this is where having such a stellar economic panel to discuss this comes in.

FELIX: What is post scarcity?

BRAD: Well 400 years ago, in almost all human societies being rich relative to your neighbours mattered a lot. If you were poor, especially poor and female, chances were you weren’t getting the calories you needed to reliably ovulate, and chances were your children weren’t getting the nutrients that they needed for their immune systems to be protected against the common cold. 400 years ago the great bulk of humanity lived lives that were nasty, brutish, short and they were hungry pretty much all the time. And when they weren’t hungry they were wet, because the roof leaked, and when they weren’t wet they were probably cold because damp proofing hadn’t been invented.

Now we, here, in the prosperous middle class in the North Atlantic are moving into another society and Gene Roddenberry tried to paint our future by saying wait a minute what’s going to happen in three centuries? In three centuries we are going to have replicators. Anything material, gastronomic that we want indeed anything experiential with the holo-deck we we want we are going to have. What kinds of people will we be then and how will we live? And indeed, we are quite ahead on that transition already.

More here.

Suzanne Schneider in The LA Review of Books's Marginalia:

Before engaging Walzer’s argument in depth, it is worth noting that some might raise an eyebrow at the inclusion of Israel alongside India and Algeria as an instance of national liberation. In his review of the piece, Richard Falk notes that “India and Algeria were genuine liberation movements waged by indigenous nations to rid from the entire territorial space of their respective countries a deeply resented, exploitative, and domineering foreign presence.” Placing Israel in this category, while mostly ignoring the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs that its state formation entailed, “seems dubious, indeed polemical.” While I largely agree that Walzer’s personal support for Israel often overrides his own logic (more on that below), one of the peculiarities of Zionism is that, in the words of Ella Shohat, it constituted “a redemptive nationalist narrative vis-à-vis Europe and anti-Semitism and a colonialist narrative vis-à-vis the Arab people who ‘happened’ to reside in the place designated the Jewish homeland.” In my view, it is difficult to understand the internal reasoning of Israel without being attentive to the Janus-faced nature of Zionism, including the striking parallels between its political maneuvers and cultural production and those rooted in anti-colonial national struggles like India. None of this renders the nakba somehow inconsequential, but it does suggest that if we want to understand why Israel does the things it does, it is helpful to maintain a sense of historical simultaneity that either/or paradigms cannot quite accommodate. Within this context, Wazler’s comparison is not as misguided as it might initially seem.

With this in mind, let’s turn to the substance of the Walzer’s argument. Though it seems deceptively simple, the nuance of Walzer’s interpretation is best arrived at by understanding what he does not argue, as the general contours of his position might seem familiar at first glance. As he sees it, scholars have forwarded two prominent explanations to explain the salience, and indeed resurgence, of religious politics in post-colonial settings. The Marxist one, which he deems “more usefully wrong,” views nationalism as yet another form of false consciousness that shields the masses from recognizing their true material interests. Accordingly, “whatever the pretended opposition of nationalism and religious revival, these two reinforce each other, and they make for a narrow, parochial, and chauvinist politics.” The other explanation to gain credence in recent years is the post-colonial stance that regards fundamentalist religion as both a byproduct of colonial rule and the “dark twin” of national liberation.

More here.

Barack Obama interviews Marilynne Robinson in The New York Review of Books:

The President: Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.

Robinson: But having looked at one another with optimism and tried to facilitate education and all these other things—which we’ve done more than most countries have done, given all our faults—that’s what made it a viable democracy. And I think that we have created this incredibly inappropriate sort of in-group mentality when we really are from every end of the earth, just dealing with each other in good faith. And that’s just a terrible darkening of the national outlook, I think.

The President: We’ve talked about this, though. I’m always trying to push a little more optimism. Sometimes you get—I think you get discouraged by it, and I tell you, well, we go through these moments.

Robinson: But when you say that to me, I say to you, you’re a better person than I am.

The President: Well, but I want to pick up on the point you made about us coming from everywhere. You’re a novelist but you’re also—can I call you a theologian? Does that sound, like, too stuffy? You care a lot about Christian thought.

Robinson: I do, indeed.

The President: And that’s part of the foundation of your writings, fiction and nonfiction. And one of the points that you’ve made in one of your most recent essays is that there was a time in which at least reformed Christianity in Europe was very much “the other.” And part of our system of government was based on us rejecting an exclusive, inclusive—or an exclusive and tightly controlled sense of who is part of the community and who is not, in favor of a more expansive one.

Tell me a little bit about how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy.

Robinson: Well, I believe that people are images of God. There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it.

More here.

John McWhorter in The Atlantic:

Is there anything inherently “doggy” about the word “dog”? Obviously not—to the French, a dog is a chien, to Russians a sobaka, to Mandarin Chinese-speakers a gǒu. These words have nothing in common, and none seem any more connected to the canine essence than any other. One runs up against that wall with pretty much any word.

Except some. The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that you get something likebaba. The word for “dad” may also have either d or t, which is a variation on saying d, just as p is on b. People say mama or nana, and then papa, baba, dada, ortata, worldwide.

Anyone who happens to know their way around a lot of languages can barely help noticing this eerie similarity. But when it comes to European languages closely related to English, like the Romance and Germanic ones, this isn’t so surprising. After all, these languages are children of what was once one language, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European and was likely spoken on the steppes of what is now Ukraine several millennia ago. So if French has maman and papa, and Italian has mamma and babbo, and Norwegian hasmamma and papa, then maybe that’s just a family matter.

More here.

Adil Najam in LinkedIn Pulse:

I was delighted when I heard that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2015 to Prof. Angus Deaton – Scottish born, Cambridge University educated, Professor at Princeton Univeristy. They announced that it was “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare”.

Indeed. As the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences pointed out in their citation: “More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced [our understanding of individual consumption choices]. By linking detailed individual choices and aggregate outcomes, his research has helped transform the fields of microeconomics, macroeconomics, and development economics.”

This is very true. His main contributions to economics have been improving the data and the analysis, especially at the microeconomic (household) level, that shape our understanding of poverty and of inequality. But what endears him even more to someone like me is the optimism that he derives from this empiricity. Specially, since so many empiricists derive anything but that. This is best captured and represented in his magisterial tome, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2013).

More here.

Andrew Meier at The Nation:

A prominent Belarussian writer and journalist, Alexievich is doubtless well aware of what her title has lost in translation. She sees herself not as prophet (in the old Soviet writer’s extracurricular tradition) but as a guide intent on repairing her country’s fractured sense of community. What she longs for issobornost, that sense of belonging and shared ideals sacrificed long ago to Bolshevik unanimity. Throughout her work, she has sought to bring to light the hidden stories of the Soviet era. One of her first books, U voiny—ne zhenskoe litso(“War’s Unwomanly Face”), an oral history of Soviet soldiers in World War II, which broke with the heroic narratives of official history, was suppressed for two years before Gorbachev allowed it to be published in 1985. That book and its follow-up, Poslednie svideteli (1985), a collection of 100 “children’s stories” of war, sold millions of copies in the former Soviet Union and made Alexievich aglasnost celebrity. Her career hit its peak with Zinky Boys (1992), an unflinching look at the Soviet war in Afghanistan (“zinky” alludes to the zinc coffins in which more than 15,000 Soviet soldiers returned home).

As voiceless narrator and hidden editor, Alexievich is aware—too much so, her critics contend—of her singular pursuit. “For me people are like the black boxes found in the debris of airplane crashes,” she told me a few years ago in her small apartment in Minsk, Belarus’s capital. “Someone has to open them.”

more here.

Maddy Crowell at Harper's Magazine:

For centuries, writers have romanticized the Jammu and Kashmir region, an eighty-five-mile basin that today encompasses the disputed border between India and Pakistan. From the window of my plane, I could see why: the Pir Panjal Range met the Greater Himalayas like a wrinkled white curtain, exposing a fertile hotbed of saffron fields, forested hills, almond and walnut groves, apple trees, apricot orchards, and rice paddies. At the airport, I was greeted with signs that read “Paradise on Earth”—a strange slogan for a valley that has seen three full-blown wars and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

I hailed a cab to Dal Lake—a destination for tourists and the hub of Kashmir’s flailing economy. On the way, we drove through Srinagar, the capital that lies at the heart of many conflicts in India-controlled Kashmir. It was early May, and there were no traces of the protests that had broken out a week prior; only long-collapsed houses and red-dust-stained windowsills. The roads were flanked with ten-foot walls bearing water stains from last September’s severe flooding, which left around 300 dead.

more here.