Victoria Glendinning at Literary Review:

I knew a man of Iris Murdoch’s generation, attractive to many women, who told me how he dreaded the ‘fat envelopes’ addressed to him at his office, stuffed with closely written pages. Wonderful though Iris Murdoch was, I could not help wondering as I read these overwhelming letters, published for the first time in this book (two printed pages of which constitute ten pages of her writing paper), whether some of her friends and lovers occasionally felt the same. She talked on paper as immoderately as some people talk on the telephone.

In her youth and in her prime she continually fell in love, or into intense friendships. ‘I find myself quite astonishingly interested in the opposite sex, and capable of being in love with about six men at once,’ she confessed. This led to imbroglios. Here is an extract from a letter written in 1945 to a former love, her Oxford contemporary David Hicks:

but anyway, it started when I went to live with a young man whom I didn’t love but whom I felt sorry for because he was in love with me, and because he has a complex about women (because of a homosexual past) … This was one Michael Foot [the historian M R D Foot] of Oxford, whom you may remember. In the midst of this, the brilliant and darling Pip Bosanquet came to lodge at Seaforth, who was then breaking off her relations with an economics don at Balliol, called Thomas Balogh, a horribly clever Hungarian Jew. I met Thomas, fell terribly in love, and he with me, and thus involved Michael in some rather hideous sufferings – in the course of which I somehow managed to avert my eyes and be, most of the time, insanely happy with Thomas. That is until I began to realize that Thomas was the devil incarnate and that I must tear myself away, although I adored him more and more madly every day. Pip, whom I love too, more than I ever thought I could love any woman, fell in love with Michael, most successfully salvaged what was left after my behaviour and married him.

more here.

Ingrid D. Rowland at The New York Review of Books:

The Frick is a marvelous place to compare Andrea’s virtuosity with that of other great painters from the same Italian tradition. In contrast to an artist like Paolo Veronese, who paints with unrelenting intensity right to the very corners of his canvases, or Raphael, who can give a tiny background the same definition as the main event, Andrea concentrates his effort on a few central figures, or, as in the case of the scholar with the book that can also read as a block, on a face, leaving the rest in a pleasant haze. This uneven level of attention is surely what Vasari meant when he said that Andrea “lacked the elaboration, grandeur, and versatility of style that can be seen in others.” His paintings, beneath their ravishing surfaces, are rather stark and simple compared with the pinpoint detail of Bronzino, or Vasari’s crowd scenes, or Pontormo’s intricately interlaced compositions.

Like his contemporary Baccio Bandinelli, a divine draftsman and a competent sculptor, Andrea del Sarto may be one of those Florentine artists for whom drawing had become an activity that Giorgio Vasari was perhaps the first to understand in all its significance: the most essential act in the mysterious process of making art.

more here.

Taciana Arcimovic at Eurozine:

The topic of “neighbourhood” has probably never been more of a burning issue in eastern European than today, both in terms of physical geography and political space. The annexation of Crimea and military action in eastern Ukraine have destroyed the illusion of stable borders post-1990, jeopardizing the chances for peaceful neighbourhoods throughout Europe. Having seen what has already happened in Transnistria and South Ossetia, it is quite possible that the “unresolved” question of Russian activities in Ukraine might trigger similar “conflicts” with other “neighbouring” countries, particularly now that the Russian government no longer seeks to conceal its imperial paradigm. This is also certain to affect the geopolitical situation in Europe in general. In this context, it is hardly surprising that countries such as Lithuania, Belarus and Estonia have voiced concern regarding their own autonomy. In light of their centuries-old experience of being Russia's “neighbours”, questions such as Is Lithuania next? Or will it be Belarus? Or perhaps Narva? are fully justified.

This is why discussion of this topic seems more crucial today than ever, especially for former Soviet bloc countries, because of the multiple traumas linked to their “shared history”, first as part of the Russian empire and later of the Soviet Union, and subsequently their status as neighbours of present-day Russia. Many of these traumas have yet to be properly discussed and processed by the global community, which continues to regard the post-Soviet space as a single entity or, more precisely, a region, rather than in terms of individual autonomous entities.

more here.

Variations on the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

by Margaret Atwood

Shoshana Devora in The F Word:

Linda starts with a sales pitch at the Swan Beauty Corporation (visually and linguistically striking in its resemblance to a much more familiar beauty brand). The protagonist after whom the play is named is advocating a new ad campaign, ‘Visibility’. She explains that women in the over-fifties category suffer from a feeling of invisibility. They’re not represented in the media, except by Helen Mirren. Products are marketed to them using models in their thirties. People in the workplace talk over them. Women become concerned when nobody whistles anymore as they walk past construction sites. Linda wants to “help invisible women feel seen again”. Naturally, this feels a little problematic. No women should feel invisible and it’s true that older women are underrepresented in the media and denied a prime place in society. Yet it’s hardly positive that the opposite – being visible – means being sexually harassed and exploited or that visibility is seen exclusively in terms of physical beauty and sexuality.

This duality of women’s visibility or otherwise is one of the central themes of the play. There are women who become invisible, because they’re no longer seen as sexually relevant in society, and are denied opportunities as a result – women such as Linda herself. And then there are the women, like Linda’s daughter Alice, who seek invisibility as a remedy to the constant objectification they face and uninvited attention on their bodies. Alice is Linda’s older daughter; a decade previously she was a victim of what is now known as ‘revenge porn’, when her ex-boyfriend released explicit photos of her after she ended their relationship, causing her academic ambitions to be dashed. She has suffered ever since and now camouflages herself in a skunk onesie in an attempt to repel male attention.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Stat:

Reaching into the jetsam on his desk, Epstein fished out a metal washer the size of a beer coaster. The hole at the center was sealed with two disk-shaped membranes. He showed it off for a little while, and then he retrieved three black boxes. They had perforations on their sides and were each about the size and shape of a stick of chewing gum. Finally, Epstein unearthed a cast-off box originally used for storing pipette tips. One side was open, and the other was lined with a membrane sheet.

These are the tools that Epstein and his colleagues have used to make scientific headlines. And they’re cheap. The hacked pipette tip box costs less than $10 to make. “You could build this in your garage,” he said, turning the box over in his hand.

Behind these cheap items there’s a powerful idea. Bacteria make antibiotics naturally, which means that if you can grow new bacteria in a lab, the microbes can offer up new drugs. Unfortunately, for the past century, microbiologists have failed to unlock the secret to cultivating the vast majority of bacterial species.

Now Epstein and his colleagues have found a way to make many of them thrive.

More here.

Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian:

This week, Angus Deaton will receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” Deservedly so. Indeed, soon after the award was announced in October, Deaton published some startling work with Ann Case in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – research that is at least as newsworthy as the Nobel ceremony.

Analysing a vast amount of data about health and deaths among Americans, Case and Deaton showed declining life expectancy and health for middle-aged white Americans, especially those with a high school education or less. Among the causes were suicide, drugs, and alcoholism.

America prides itself on being one of the world’s most prosperous countries, and can boast that in every recent year except one (2009) per capita GDP has increased. And a sign of prosperity is supposed to be good health and longevity. But, while the US spends more money per capita on medical care than almost any other country (and more as a percentage of GDP), it is far from topping the world in life expectancy. France, for example, spends less than 12% of its GDP on medical care, compared to 17% in the US. Yet Americans can expect to live three full years less than the French.

More here.

Patrick McNamara in Aeon:

The medical literature abounds with descriptions of creative bursts following infusion of dopamine-enhancing drugs such as l-dopa (levodopa), used to treat Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Bipolar illness, which sends sufferers into prolonged bouts of dopamine-fuelled mania followed by devastating spells of depressive illness, can sometimes produce work of amazing virtuosity during the manic phase. Often these individuals refuse to take anti-dopamine drugs that can prevent the manic episodes precisely because they value the creative activity of which they are capable during these altered states.

Hallucinogenic drugs such as Psilocybin and LSD, which indirectly stimulate dopamine activity in the brain’s frontal lobes, can produce religious experience even in the avowedly non-religious. These hallucinogens produce vivid imagery, sometimes along with near psychotic breaks or intense spiritual experience, all tied to stimulation of dopamine receptors on neurons in the limbic system, the seat of emotion located in the midbrain, and in the prefrontal cortex, the upper brain that is the centre of complex thought.

Given all these fascinating correlations, sometime after the attack on the twin towers in New York City, I began to hypothesise that dopamine might provide a simple explanation for the paradoxical god effect. When dopamine in the limbic and prefrontal regions of the brain was high, but not too high, it would produce the ability to entertain unusual ideas and associations, leading to heightened creativity, inspired leadership and profound religious experience. When dopamine was too high, however, it would produce mental illness in genetically vulnerable individuals. In those who had been religious before, fanaticism could be the result.

While pursuing these ideas, I had a lucky break during routine office hours at the VA (Veterans Administration) Boston Healthcare System, where I regularly treat US veterans. I was doing a routine neuropsychological examination of a tall, distinguished elderly man with Parkinson’s Disease. This man was a decorated Second World War veteran and obviously intelligent. He had made his living as a consulting engineer but had slowly withdrawn from the working world as his symptoms progressed. His withdrawal was selective: he did not quit everything, his wife explained. ‘Just social parts of his work, some physical stuff and unfortunately his private religious devotions.’

When I asked what she meant by ‘devotions’ she replied that he used to pray and read his Bible all the time, but since the onset of the disease he had done so less and less. When I asked the patient himself about his religious interests, he replied that they seemed to have vanished.

More here.

Ezra Klein and Alvin Chang in Vox:

For Shanto Iyengar, director of Stanford's political communications lab, the marriage polls were yet more evidence that something important was changing in American politics.

The big institutions and broad outlines of our political system have been so stable for so long that it makes it hard for people to see when the tectonic plates of American politics are actually shifting. There's been a Democratic Party and a Republican Party for most of the country's history, and they've always bickered, so it's easy to assume — particularly in a country with a short historical memory — that the partisanship we see now is simply how it's always been.

But Iyengar was coming to believe that today's political differences were fundamentally different from yesterday's political differences; the nature of American political partisanship, he worried, was mutating into something more fundamental, and more irreconcilable, than what it had been in the past.

Political scientists have mainly studied polarization as an ideological phenomenon — in this view, party polarization is really another term for political disagreement, and more polarization simply meant more severe disagreements. But it's hard to find the evidence that the disagreements among ordinary Americans have really become so much more intense.

“If you look at Americans' positions on the issues, they are much closer to the center than their elected representatives,” Iyengar says. “The people who end up getting elected are super extreme, but the voters are not.”

But even as American voters remained relatively centrist, they seemed to be getting angrier and more fearful of the other side.

More here.

Mona Ali over at LSE US Center's blog:

My findings revealed that US-owned subsidiaries were much more profitable than foreign-owned subsidiaries in the US. The former’s rates of return were between 16 percent pre-tax to 10 percent post-tax above the latter. Contrary to the risk-return tradeoff in which high profits are associated with higher risk investment, American investment overseas was also less risky compared to foreign-owned investment in the US.

I also found that research and development (R&D) expenditures were twice as great for US firms overseas compared to foreign firms in the US. While this finding may appear to bolster Hausmann and Sturzenegger’s ‘dark matter’ thesis, to rely on relatively higher R&D expenditures as a proxy for ‘dark matter’ is problematic. For one, foreign firms in the US might choose to locate their R&D expenditures in their home countries. Moreover, intangibles—such as human capital, brand equity and reputation—may be inadequately captured by this proxy measure.

Is tax avoidance partially responsible for the apparently low profits of US-based industries (note that these industries include foreign firms located in the US)? It is clear that taxation is an important consideration in determining where multinational corporations locate their foreign subsidiaries. Modes of tax avoidance have become increasingly complex. Current strategies include extracting royalties and management fees—thereby stripping income from profits—from subsidiaries in high-tax zones or re-locating a firm’s assets to special-purpose entities in tax havens. Larger companies with more extensive transnational networks are more advantaged compared to smaller ones. The current ‘tsunami’ of US firms engaged in corporate inversions—whereby firms reduce their global tax bill by shifting their corporate headquarters overseas when merging with a smaller foreign rival—suggests the skillfulness of US firms at tax avoidance.

Given the confidentiality of firm-level data, it is difficult for tax authorities and statisticians to figure out which modes of ‘tax planning’ are at work. Using industry data, I found that the effective corporate tax burden (corporate income as a share of pre-tax income) was fairly similar for US investment overseas (20 percent) compared to foreign investment in the US (18 percent). However the tax burden for US based firms (which includes foreign firms located in the US) was remarkably lower – around 5 percent. This finding backs Kleinbard’s claim that US-based firms are leaders in tax avoidance. It is worth noting that foreign investment in the US is overwhelming acquired through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Here profits might artificially suppressed through amortization of goodwill effects and M&A tax avoidance strategies.

More here.

Lola

Under the orange-tree
she washes baby-clothes.
Her eyes of green
and voice of violet.

Ay, love,
under the orange-tree in bloom!

The water in the ditch
flowed, filled with light,
a sparrow chirped
in the little olive-tree.

………Ay, love,
under the orange-tree in bloom!

Later, when Lola
has exhausted the soap,
young bullfighters will come.

……..Ay, love,
under the orange-tree in bloom!

by Frederico García Lorca
Translated by A. S. Kline © 2007

Bajo el naranjo, lava
pañales de algodón.
Tiene verdes los ojos
y violeta la voz.

¡Ay, amor,
bajo el naranjo en flor!

El agua de la acequia
iba llena de sol,
en el olivarito
cantaba un gorrión.

¡Ay, amor,
bajo el naranjo en flor!

Luego cuando la Lola
gaste todo el jabón,
vendrán los torerillos.

¡Ay, amor,
bajo el naranjo en flor!

From KurzweilAI:

Exercise may enhance plasticity of the adult brain — the ability of our neurons to change with experience — which is essential for learning, memory, and brain repair, Italian researchers report in an open-access paper in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.

Their research, which focused on the the visual cortex, may offer hope for people with traumatic brain injury or eye conditions such as amblyopia, the researchers suggest. “We provide the first demonstration that moderate levels of physical activity enhance neuroplasticity in the visual cortex of adult humans,” says Claudia Lunghi of the University of Pisa in Italy. Brain plasticity is generally thought to decline with age, especially in the sensory region of the brain (such as vision). But previous studies by research colleague Alessandro Sale of the National Research Council’s Neuroscience Institute showed that animals performing physical activity — for example rats running on a wheel — showed elevated levels of plasticity in the visual cortex and had improved recovery from amblyopia compared to more sedentary animals.

More here.

Lisa Ruddick in The Point:

In the course of interviewing some seventy graduate students in English for a book on the state of literary criticism, I’ve encountered two types of people who are having trouble adapting to the field. First, there are those who bridle at the left-political conformity of English and who voice complaints familiar from the culture wars. But a second group suffers from a malaise without a name; socialization to the discipline has left them with unaccountable feelings of confusion, inhibition and loss.

Those in the latter group share a quality of inwardness. In interviews, they strike me as reflective, intuitive individuals, with English teacher written all over them. These are the people who say that something in this intellectual environment is eating them alive. Gina Hiatt, the president of a large coaching service for academic writers, tells me that many of her clients in the humanities have a similar experience. She believes these clients sense “an immorality they can’t put their finger on” in the thought-world of the humanities. They struggle as writers because talking the talk would make them feel complicit, yet they cannot afford to say, in Hiatt’s words, that “the emperor has no clothes.” Some keep their best ideas out of their scholarship for fear that if they violate certain ideological taboos, others will “hate” them (a verb Hiatt hears repeatedly). Hiatt describes these individuals as “canaries in the mine.”

Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism? This essay is not just for those who identify with the canaries in the mine, but for anyone who browses through current journals and is left with an impression of deadness or meanness.

More here.

James Marcus at Harper's Magazine:

Primo Levi’s literary conquest of America has been slow, sketchy, almost diffident. The English translation of his first book, If This Is a Man, appeared in this country in 1959, twelve years after the publication of the original in Italy, and despite a handful of good reviews, it sank without a trace. Perhaps it was too soon for Levi’s clear-eyed account of life in Auschwitz — perhaps, for readers enjoying the postwar boom and the pleasures of the Pax Americana, the book seemed too bitter, even medicinal. His second book, The Truce, repeated this disappearing act in 1965. Levi, of course, kept writing and publishing in Italy, where he won every literary prize and came to be regarded as one of the sanest, sharpest, and most sweetly rational voices of the century. There, he was a major writer and public intellectual (who happened to make his living as a chemist). Here, he was invisible — until The Periodic Table showed up in 1984, an elemental masterpiece and a reminder to American readers that they had an awful lot of catching up to do.

In short order, English versions of Levi’s work began spilling from the chute: fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs. It was a windfall to have all this stupendous work at last. It was also a lot to digest in a hurry. Levi’s suicide, in 1987 — there are still doubters, but most agree that the author threw himself down the stairwell of his Turin apartment building — seemed for some time to contaminate the pleasure that so many had taken in his work. And even after the initial shock faded, his substantial oeuvre felt somewhat scattered.

more here.

K. C. Cole in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Why build a universe anyway?

To create something beautiful, concludes Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek in his relentlessly engaging new book, A Beautiful Question. “Many motivations have been ascribed to the Creator,” he points out, “but artist ambition is rarely prominent among them.”

The beautiful question the book considers, stated simply, is this: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?”

The answer is an emphatic yes: “You bet it does,” Wilczek writes. “And so do you.”

What is the meaning of “beautiful”? Physics is pretty clear on the issue, and Wilczek makes the argument deeper, broader, and far more colorful (literally and figuratively) than ever before: it is harmony, balance, and above all symmetry, the core of artistry.

Symmetry is seductive, whether it appears in natural forms, like snowflakes, snails, and faces, or in human creations, like doilies, arches, and decorative tiles.

In physics, symmetries underlie every fundamental law, because symmetries reveal the deep truths often hidden behind superficial differences. Energy and matter are two sides of a coin, as are space and time, electricity and magnetism, waves and particles.

More here.

Michael Upchurch at The American Scholar:

Our native language can be like a well-worn shirt, so comfortable that it’s easy to forget one is wearing it. But all permutations seem possible with language once we’ve been jarred out of our own. With the help of polyglots and linguists, we can even begin to make sense of the babel.

Two new books provide the lay reader with lively tours through the mysteries of language. Dutch writer Gaston Dorren’s Lingo serves up story after story about linguistic differences. He notes how the definite article (“the”) is attached to the ends of nouns in Romanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian rather than in front of them as a separate word. He suggests that Icelandic has stayed so unchanged over the centuries thanks to its “monolingual environment, strong social networks and perhaps the absence of a youth culture.” And he explains why, if we want to say “I call her” in Basque, we’ll wind up saying something that translates literally as “Me calls she.”

more here.

Anne Enright at the London Review of Books:

It is tempting to see Antigone as a play not just about the mourning female voice, or about kinship and the law, but about the political use of the body after death. Creon, the ruler of Thebes, dishonours the body of his nephew to serve as a warning to other potential enemies of the state. One brother, Eteocles, has been buried ‘in accordance with justice and law’, the other, Polynices, ‘is to lie unwept and unburied’ – this according to their sister Antigone, who has already decided at the play’s opening to ignore Creon’s edict and bury the corpse. And so she does. When asked to deny the crime, she says, in Anne Carson’s 2012 translation of Sophocles: ‘I did the deed I do not deny it.’ She does not seek to justify her actions within the terms of Creon’s law: she negates the law by handing it back to him, intact – ‘If you call that law.’

Antigone later says she is being punished for ‘an act of perfect piety’, but that act is also perfectly wordless in the play. The speeches she makes to her sister Ismene and to Creon are before and after the fact. She is a woman who breaks an unjust law. We can ask if she does this from inside or outside the legal or linguistic system of the play, or of the state, but it is good to bear in mind that Antigone does not bury her brother with words, but with dust.

more here.

Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.

Some of the most popular framing ideas include talking about climate change in the context of economic opportunity (solving climate change will lead to a clean energy boom), national security (not solving it will make the world a dangerous place), faith-based ethics (we need to be good stewards of the Creation) and public health (climate change will make us sicker, or lead to the spread of diseases).

Now, however, a new study suggests not only that these messages may not be particularly effective, but that messages espousing climate change doubt or denial — which are ever-present in the din of public debate and discourse — appear to have considerably more impact.

More here.