Ivan Hewett at Prospect Magazine:

The death in January of Pierre Boulez at the age of 90 robbed the musical world of a great conductor, a brilliant polemicist and an agitator for musical modernism. He was also a charismatic and intransigent human being—charming and generous to those who shared his vision, but prepared to thwart those who did not.

That much is certain about Boulez. But there is also his other role, the one he would surely like to be remembered by: as a composer. Here the situation is less certain. His music was a part of his grand project to yoke all of contemporary music to the modernist ethos. He would lead the way, through his activities as conductor of major orchestras, head of a research institute and as a composer—and he fully expected the other Young Turks of post-war modernism like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio to march in step with him. Certainty had dissolved, the old hierarchies had crumbled and everyone had to work out their own salvation. According to Boulez, to adopt the musical grammar and manners of the past was reprehensible escapism.

If Boulez was right, then reprehensible escapism is now the condition of both classical and pop music. The past has never been more in vogue. “Will pop eat itself?” is a question often asked, as old pop albums haunt the charts and younger bands echo their elders. The outpouring of grief over David Bowie’s death is surely bound up with this sense that pop’s great days are behind it. The question could be asked about film music too, where the gestures of the genre’s golden age come round again and again. And it could be asked about classical music, where to be obsessed with the past, and to weave references to it into one’s own music, is almost de rigueur.

more here.

Thomas Frank at The Guardian:

Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it.

more here.

Adam Balcer at Eurozine:

Geopolitical changes in Eurasia, aside from their political and economic context, should also be considered from a cultural and historical perspective. The issue of identity is of primary importance. The new Silk Road project is deeply rooted in the history of Central Asia and closely linked with the Great Steppe. The latter has played an important role as a highway during the great migrations from Asia to Europe, the Middle East and India. In fact, the nomads from the Great Steppe established the largest territorial powers in the history of mankind. Consider the Mongol Empire stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, from Vietnam to Lake Baikal. Their global horizons were ahead of their time. The Great Steppe also had a large impact on different forms of culture (clothing, weapons, cuisine, games, values and vocabulary) on both sides of Eurasia, from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Without it, there would have been no Ukrainian Cossacks or sarmatism, which was a unique, deeply oriental part of Polish culture. Japanese samurai culture would also not have existed, shaped as it was by contact with Korea, which was connected with the Manchurian steppe.

It is possible to anecdotally define the borders of the Great Steppe's influence by the places where people eat pierogi, a dish which comes from Central Asia. In this space, Russia is a newcomer. Its conquests are actually something quite novel. Russia conquered Belarus and most of Ukraine by the end of the 18th century, and added Moldova to this in the early 19th century. The conquest of the Caucuses ended in 1864, and that of Central Asia in the 1880s. It was in the 1850s and 1860s when China lost large chunks of territory to Russia in Central Asia, Siberia and the Far East.

more here.

The Problem of Describing Color

If I said – remembering in summer,
The cardinal’s sudden smudge of red
In the bare gray winter woods –

If I said, red ribbon on the cocked straw hat
Of the girl with pooched-out lips
Dangling a wiry lapdog
In the painting by Renoir –

If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut –

Or flecks of poppy in the tar-grass scented summer air
On a wind-struck hillside outside Fano –

If I said, her one red earring tugging at her silky lobe,

If she tells fortunes with a deck of fallen leaves
Until it comes out right –

Rouged nipple, mouth –

(How could you not love a woman
Who cheats at the Tarot?)

Red, I said. Sudden, red.
.
by Robert Hass
from Time and Materials. Poems 1997-2005
publisher: Ecco (HarperCollins Publishers), New York, 2007
.
.

Briana Pobiner in American Scientist:

Although the modern “paleodiet” movement often claims that our ancestors ate large amounts of meat, we still don’t know the proportion of meat in the diet of any early human species, nor how frequently meat was eaten. Modern hunter-gatherers have incredibly varied diets, some of which include fairly high amounts of meat, but many of which don’t. Still, we do know that meat-eating was one of the most pivotal changes in our ancestors’ diets and that it led to many of the physical, behavioral, and ecological changes that make us uniquely human.

…Cooking was unquestionably a revolution in our dietary history. Cooking makes food both physically and chemically easier to chew and digest, enabling the extraction of more energy from the same amount of food. It can also release more of some nutrients than the same foods eaten raw and can render poisonous plants palatable. Cooking would have inevitably decreased the amount of time necessary to forage for the same number of calories. In his 2009 book Catching Fire, primatologist Richard Wrangham postulates that cooking was what allowed our brains to get big. It turns out that using fossil skulls to measure brain size, we see the biggest increase in brain size in our evolutionary history right after we see the earliest evidence for cooking in the archaeological record, so he may be on to something.

More here.

From Democracy Now:

In a recent article, historian and retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich raised six questions that have been ignored in the 2016 presidential race. Most notably, he says, “Nearly 15 years after this 'war' was launched by George W. Bush, why hasn’t 'the most powerful military in the world,' 'the finest fighting force in the history of the world’ won it? Why isn't victory anywhere in sight?” Bacevich joins us from Boston to talk about the race and these missing questions. His new book, “America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History,” will be published next month. He is professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Nermeen Shaikh)

Ingrid D. Rowland in the New York Review of Books:

Artists are a biographer’s nightmare. The most important events in their lives are usually the ones that take place quietly, slowly, in the repetitive actions of work, or within the sanctum of their skulls. Even Caravaggio, an artist with a penchant for swashbuckling exploits, spent as much time putting brush to canvas as he did making trouble, and his canvases finally tell us more about the man and his art than the police blotters recording his conflicts with the law.

The life of the architect Frank Gehry poses similar challenges. The real question his biographer needs to answer is the impossible one: how a sixtyish architect from Los Angeles ever came to imagine, much less build, the coppery metal carapace of the Guggenheim Museum in the heart of Basque country, in the declining port city of Bilbao. Before that 1997 project, and the subsequent plan to build a new concert hall in Los Angeles, Gehry was best known for constructing cheap buildings of cheap materials in the funky geometric shapes that began to punctuate the cityscape of Los Angeles in the disco era, one of them his own house on a placid residential street in Santa Monica.

The answer to these mysteries of creation has as much to do with what Gehry saw as with how he lived (he is a Toronto-born transplant to the West Coast who has had two wives and four children), or what kind of a person he might have been.

More here.

Daniel Clery in Science:

GREENBELT, MARYLAND—For months, inside the towering Building 29 here at Goddard Space Flight Center, the four scientific instruments at the heart of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST, or Webb) have been sealed in what looks like a house-sized pressure cooker. A rhythmic chirp-chirp-chirp sounds as vacuum pumps keep the interior at a spacelike ten-billionth of an atmosphere while helium cools it to –250°C. Inside, the instruments, bolted to the framework that will hold them in space, are bathed in infrared light—focused and diffuse, in laserlike needles and uniform beams—to test their response.

The pressure cooker is an apt metaphor for the whole project. Webb is the biggest, most complex, and most expensive science mission that NASA has ever attempted, and expectations among astronomers and the public are huge. Webb will have 100 times the sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be able to look into the universe’s infancy, when the very first galaxies were forming; study the birth of stars and their planetary systems; and analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets, perhaps even detecting signs of life. “If you put something this powerful into space, who knows what we can find? It’s going to be revolutionary because it’s so powerful,” says Matt Mountain, director of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., and former JWST telescope scientist. Like that of Hubble, however, Webb’s construction has been plagued by redesigns, schedule slips, and cost overruns that have strained relationships with contractors, partners in Canada and Europe, and—most crucially—supporters in the U.S. Congress. Other missions had to be slowed or put on ice as Webb consumed available resources. A crisis in 2010 and 2011 almost saw it canceled, although lately the project has largely kept within its schedule and budget, now about $8 billion.

More here.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

Nobody quite knows what to make of it yet, but nobody disputes it, either: The Supreme Court of March looks nothing like the court we knew in February. The loss of a single justice, Antonin Scalia, has blown up the court and reshuffled everything. It’s the early days yet, and much of the evidence of newish, liberalish outcomes at the court lies in routine housekeeping matters: unsigned orders and withdrawn appeals. Still, it’s safe to say the high court is no longer going to be a candy store for pro-business and socially conservative litigants. What will rise in its place is still a work in progress.

As the Washington Post’s Robert Barnesput it this past weekend, with Scalia gone, “the Supreme Court, now with only eight members, seemed transformed in substance and style.” It wasn’t just the fact that Justice Clarence Thomas, after 10 years of declining to ask a single question at oral argument,suddenly did so. It wasn’t merely the fact that arguments in a blockbuster abortion case were dominated by the court’s liberal wing, while the conservative bloc struggled to land a punch.

The crazy new vibe at the court isn’t even limited to the raft of orders that have come down in the past week. Those include a critical and unanimous order affirming the right of same-sex partners to adopt children and the tossing of a death penalty conviction in Louisiana because the state withheld significant exculpatory evidence.

More here.

Alexandra Berlina at The Times Literary Supplement:

“What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the method of art isostranenie [making strange]”, proclaims Viktor Shklovsky’s best-known essay, “Art as Device” (“Iskusstvo kak priyom”), written one hundred years ago, and published in 1917.

When I say “essay”, I mean a cross between an article and a manifesto. And when I say “published”, I mean that Shklovsky had it printed on what looked like toilet paper, along with articles by other hot-headed students who believed they had found new ways of understanding literature. Following the new fashion for abbreviations, they christened their circle “OPOYAZ”, short for “Society for the Study of Poetic Language”. When others disparagingly called them formalists, they proudly took up the label. There never was a formal beginning to formalism, but the group formed around Shklovsky in 1916. This year, then, celebrates the twinned centenary of both the OPOYAZ and ostranenie – a concept that is often misunderstood as a mere textual game, when it is actually about making life more real, both in its joys and in its horrors.

In English, ostranenie is known as “defamiliarization”, “e(n)strangement”, “making strange” or “foregrounding”, all of which have the potential to confuse. Being estranged from, say, one’s wife is the emotional opposite of the reconnection through wonder that is ostranenie. One might also think of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt; though he was probably inspired by the Russian theorist, the German playwright believed in restraining feelings in order to promote critical thought. Shklovsky, on the other hand, saw thought as inseparable from emotion. (As it happens, contemporary cognitive science agrees.) To avoid such confusions, I will stick to the original term.

more here.

Venetia Thompson at The New Statesman:

In his fifteen year career as a professional matador, Spaniard Antonio Barrera has survived 23 cornadas, or “hornings”, making him the most gored torero in modern history. His journey towards retirement in December 2012 is the subject of Ido Mizrahy’s new documentary Gored, which, after a hugely successful festival run last April (including winning Best Documentary at Raindance) has just been released on Netflix and iTunes in the UK.

It is not a documentary about the rights or wrongs of bullfighting, but rather, as the director Ido Mizrahy – who does not describe himself as a fan of bullfighting, but is not against it either – tells me, “about life and death, family, broken dreams”, and one man’s single-minded obsession with doing something he isn’t great at. As the Spanish bullfighting critic J A de Moral explains in Gored, he isn’t “fino, has no ‘aesthetic grace…he isn’t one of the artist matadors with an aesthetic purity from another galaxy”. He is, however, insanely brave, and is prepared to die every time he enters the ring.

Mizrahy explains that this is what drew him and Geoff Gray, his writing partner, to Barrera as a subject – the very fact he isn’t a poster boy for bullfighting insured an honest look at the ancient spectacle that would fully demonstrate its brutality. There would be no risk of the viewer getting caught up in the romance or artistry of it, not when, according to de Moral, the spectacle never stops being “a mere fight” and so cannot become “a tragic ballet of extraordinary beauty”.

more here.

Jackson Lears at The London Review of Books:

Robert Moses was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban surroundings. Almost singlehandedly, through chicanery, fraud and bullying, he created the modern infrastructure of the New York City area: expressways, tunnels and bridges, but also parks, beaches, swimming pools and high-rise housing projects. He envisioned an American version of Le Corbusier’s ideal city, cleansed of disorder and unpredictability, focused on cars rather than pedestrians, committed to an idea of urban public space as empty plazas dominated by glass towers. He aspired to be a master builder, and his achievements ranged from the elegant – the Art Deco bathhouses at Jones Beach on Long Island – to the catastrophic: the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which destroyed thriving neighbourhoods and displaced thousands of people.

Laurel Hamers in Science:

When do we decide it’s OK to tell a lie? Perhaps when we see people in positions of power doing the same. A new study finds that individuals are more likely to lie if they live in a country with high levels of institutional corruption and fraud—suggesting that poorly run institutions hurt society in more ways than previously suspected. Past research has shown that people are more likely to break the rules if those around them are also doing so. For instance, people surrounded by graffiti and litter are more likely to drop trash themselves. “But what we really don’t know is to what extent societal norms like political fraud, corruption, and tax evasion trickle down—and to what extent such societal norms corrupt individuals,” says Shaul Shalvi, a behavioral scientist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved in the work. To find out, researchers pulled data on government corruption, tax evasion, and election fraud from the World Bank and Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that researches democracy and political freedom, for 159 countries. They combined these rates into an index that measured institutionalized rule-breaking.

Then, over the course of almost 5 years, they traveled to 23 of those countries to measure honesty at the individual level. They asked college-aged volunteers to roll a die and report the number that came up. The higher the number, the more the researchers paid the participants—but participants knew the experimenters couldn’t see the results of their rolls. When the average number of the reported die rolls from all the participants in one country turned out to be greater than expected by chance, the researchers knew that some people were lying to get more money. When they compared these rates with institutionalized rule-breaking, they found that people in countries with higher levels of rule-breaking were more likely to cheat on the task, they report today in Nature.

More here.

In 2006, after the publication of his first two stories, E. C. Osondu came to Boston to read for AGNI, the magazine I edit with Sven Birkerts. He didn’t have a driver’s license then and wasn’t ready so early in his time in the United States to jump on a bus and make the trip solo. But his friend, the novelist Daniel Torday—they were both graduate students at the time—offered to play chauffeur, and thus it was that we all met at a dinner before the reading. In the years since, E. C. and I have road-tripped, bar-hopped, camped overnight on a friend’s floor, visited each other’s digs, and talked endlessly, as friends do. Also since then, E. C. has won the Caine Prize for African Writing and published two books that I deeply admire, the story collection Voice of America and the novel This House Is Not for Sale. Our conversations led us, in 2009, to dream up and co-edit the AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction. And this year, hoping to put all our gabbing to use again, we wondered what would happen if we placed a recorder between us. This exchange took place in my apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts, punctuated by the pouring of red wine.

—William Pierce

From The Critical Flame:

E. C. Osondu: I think I’ll start by telling the story of AGNI and how we met. I left advertising in Nigeria for the MFA program at Syracuse. The internet was just starting then, so I knew a little bit about literary magazines, but I was very naive when I was sending out stuff. I didn’t know how it worked. I’d sent a story to AGNI that was rejected, but it had a note from Sven, saying, “Send us another piece.” In my advertising thinking, my hustler thinking, I thought if it said send us another piece that meant by return mail, send another piece immediately. So that’s what I did! When he wrote that note, I said, Oh, that means he’s saying send it before I forget, before the ink dries on this note. So I sent “A Letter from Home,” which you guys liked and it was taken.

WP: And that was your first published story.

ECO: First published story. And it was huge. Here I was, in the program, I think it was my second year. Here I was here in the United States, and I’d sent out a piece and it had been accepted. So that was really huge. Some of those things seem like a dream when I think back on them…

More here.

Monya Baker in Nature:

Misuse of the P value — a common test for judging the strength of scientific evidence — is contributing to the number of research findings that cannot be reproduced, the American Statistical Association (ASA) warns in a statement released today¹. The group has taken the unusual step of issuing principles to guide use of the P value, which it says cannot determine whether a hypothesis is true or whether results are important.

This is the first time that the 177-year-old ASA has made explicit recommendations on such a foundational matter in statistics, says executive director Ron Wasserstein. The society’s members had become increasingly concerned that the P value was being misapplied in ways that cast doubt on statistics generally, he adds.

In its statement, the ASA advises researchers to avoid drawing scientific conclusions or making policy decisions based on P values alone. Researchers should describe not only the data analyses that produced statistically significant results, the society says, but all statistical tests and choices made in calculations. Otherwise, results may seem falsely robust.

Véronique Kiermer, executive editor of the Public Library of Science journals, says that the ASA’s statement lends weight and visibility to longstanding concerns over undue reliance on the P value.

More here.

Bruce Fleming in Salon:

It’s all smoke and mirrors run for the benefit not of the civilians who pay for it but the military brass, whose vanity projects these institutions are, and who hook each other up once out. Remember that this is the military, not academia or a free market of ideas. Everything you hear about the service academies comes from the CO in the front office, where the weather is always sunny. Administrators at USNA have all made their careers from being graduates (all superintendents have been USNA graduates and most of the higher administrators)—it gave them a free education and employment, after all, and a network afterward. The military students (their rank is “midshipman,” which we hear is about to become gender-neutral) cannot legally talk back, or take exception in public. The fox says the henhouse is doing fine; the hens can’t even cluck. It’s a fabulous system to keep those tax dollars rolling in. Proof, please.

More here.

Owen Hatherley at n+1:

SEVERAL CITIES reconstructed immediately after the war present themselves as if nothing much had happened—unless you knew it, or ventured round the corners where the ornament on the gabled tenements is conspicuously flimsy, you wouldn’t know that the red-brick Gothic and Baroque of Gdańsk was largely a product of the 1950s; similarly, it’s only by comparing images of St. Petersburg today with photographs of the city pockmarked with bombsites from the appalling siege of Leningrad that you could realize how extensive and thorough its reconstruction was. These are less famous examples, but one city presents itself both as a reconstruction and as something entirely authentic—Warsaw. The thing about Warsaw that almost everyone knows is that 85 percent of it was destroyed in 1944 as collective punishment for the Warsaw Rising, and that it was then reconstructed to the letter after 1945. Strangely, this coexists with another idea of Warsaw as a center of wide streets, towers and general Warsaw Pact monolithism, with the peculiar consequence that the city is alternately hailed and excoriated by architectural traditionalists. Accordingly, for a certain type of architectural critic or historian, Warsaw is irresistible. It is the road not travelled (at least in the West)—a city where, instead of Modernism, we got a dignified reconstruction of the old world.

In fact, neither of the famous statements—total destruction, total rebuilding—is exactly true. Recent research makes clear that the 85 percent figure includes a great deal that was severely damaged but not irretrievably destroyed, and reconstructors were selective. Astonishingly, late-nineteenth-century buildings that had survived were actually being demolished in the early 1950s.

more here.

Tony Oursler at Artforum:

WHICH ONE OF HIS CHARACTERS do you like best? It’s hard to say. Ziggy is too easy—perhaps the Man Who Sold the World or the Thin White Duke? All of them are, of course, associated with specific lyrics and music, their own time and place: Berlin, London, LA, Bali (where he requested that his ashes be scattered). Taken as a group—now, sadly, a fixed set—these guises established the rhythm of David Bowie’s career, and his fans can remember where they were in their lives when each one emerged. We can all remember, too, when we were first entranced by his strange voice and the unlikely combination of sounds and words that somehow coalesced into a song. Bowie’s work became personal for me in the early 1970s, when my older sister Theresa introduced it to me. I instantly became a fan. This was years before she had her first straight family, or her second gay family. We were kids, and she had a small turntable; it was my first experience with stereo headphones. In retrospect, cycling through Bowie’s albums—Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), The Man Who Sold the World (1970)—through the hermetic split of left and right channels was a fitting starting point.

My first actual contact with David was like a shock of energy, fully charged with the magic of media, music, and glamour. It was as if he had somehow bilocated between our world and one of myth and didn’t fully exist in the same space as ordinary earthlings. Of course, this was all in my mind, and my reaction said much about the delusions of popular culture. Somehow this giant I’d been listening to and watching with such admiration since forever was in my studio in person. It was hard to reconcile fantasy with flesh. Later, I would notice that this was a common effect of David’s presence, sometimes with hilarious results.

more here.