John Gray at Literary Review:

In 1962, Martin Heidegger went on a cruise to the Aegean. Going to Greece had not been an easy decision. Seven years earlier he had got so far as to buy train and boat tickets; when the enormity of what he was attempting dawned on him, he cancelled the trip. He tried again in 1960, and once more called the trip off. Visiting the homeland of the oracular pre-Socratics and the only truly ‘philosophical’ language apart from German was too much of a risk. When he finally screwed up the courage to take the cruise, he hated the country he found. With Olympia now a mass of ‘hotels for the American tourists’, the ancient site no longer ‘set free the Greek element of the land, of its sea and its sky’. When the boat reached Crete and Rhodes, he stayed on board reading Heraclitus.

Sarah Bakewell’s witty account of Heidegger’s journey recalls the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser’s response to the Heideggerian question, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ‘Even if there had been nothing,’ Morgenbesser is supposed to have quipped, ‘he’d still not be satisfied.’ Heidegger was a central figure in generating the loosely defined current of thought commonly known as existentialism. His own thought was in many ways derivative, but he never allowed a debt – intellectual or personal – to stand in the way of his own advancement. He owed his academic career to Edmund Husserl, who more than anyone else originated existentialist thinking with his call for the direct study of human experience – phenomenology – to be accepted as the foundation of philosophy, and whose chair at the University of Freiburg Heidegger inherited.

more here.

Jessica Leigh Johnston in National Post:

Have you ever heard of the Rosenhan experiment? Psychologist David Rosenhan, in 1973, feigned mental illness in order to be institutionalized. Seven of his associates did the same. But after their internment, they acted completely normal. They even took notes, openly, about the experiment they were conducting. The asylum staff took this behaviour to be further evidence of their madness. Rosenhan and his associates were only released after claiming to have taken their antipsychotic meds, which they had covertly flushed down the toilets. Once judged insane — on limited evidence — the system was incapable of viewing their behaviour normally. The experiment had a second part, which was even more disturbing than the first. When Rosenhan published the results of his first experiment, uproar occurred. During the controversy, one hospital claimed to be impervious to such errors. Rosenhan said, OK, let’s see about that. He told them he’d send them a number of pseudo-patients like the ones in his previous experiment. A few months later, they triumphantly responded that they had caught some of his fakes. Rosenhan then confessed that he had, in fact, sent no fake patients. The hospital had been turning away people with real symptoms.

So: psychiatry is fairly fallible. Mental institutions make errors about their patients. Once you’ve admitted someone, it actually becomes more difficult, in some ways, to figure out how sane they are: you’re sticking them in an extraordinary environment where it may be to their advantage to feign unusual behaviours.

More here.

Sujata Gupta in Nature:

Around 6 million years ago, primates started moving from tropical forests into the savannahs. Unlike today, these prehistoric expanses were humid and probably provided a year-round supply of fruit and vegetables. But then, some 3 million years ago, the climate changed and the savannahs — along with their plentiful food supply — dried up. Many mammals, including some primates, went extinct, but others adapted. Archaeologists working at sites in modern Ethiopia have discovered animal remains that date back almost 2.6 million years. The telltale cut marks on their bones are almost certainly signs of butchery¹, says Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, a palaeoanthropologist at Complutense University in Madrid. Only two types of primate survived the climate catastrophe, says Domínguez-Rodrigo. There was a “plant-processing machine on the one hand and a meat-eating machine on the other hand”, he says. “The meat-eating machine evolved a bigger brain.”

The meat-eating machine became us.

To build and maintain a more complex brain, our ancestors used ingredients found primarily in meat, including iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and fatty acids. Although plants contain many of the same nutrients, they occur in lower quantities and often in a form that humans cannot readily use. For instance, red meat is rich in iron derived from haemoglobin, which is more easily absorbed than the non-haem form found in beans and leafy greens.

More here.

Parade

Peter says if you’re going to talk about suffering
you have to mention pleasure too.
Like the way, on the day of the parade, on Forbes Avenue,
one hundred parking tickets flutter
under the windshield wipers of one hundred parked cars.
The accordion band will be along soon,
and the famous Flying Pittsburgettes,
and it’s summer and the sun is shining on the inevitable flags—
Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
—never objecting, never making an apology.
I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
disappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.
My attitude is like what God says in the Bible:
Love your brother, or be destroyed.
Then Moses or somebody says back to God,
If I love you,
will you destroy my enemies?
and God says—this is in translation—, No Problemo.
Here, everyone is talking about the price of freedom,
and about how we as a people are united in our down payment.
about how we will fight to the very bottom of our bank account.
And the sky is so blue it looks like it may last forever
and the skinny tuba player goes oompahpah
and everybody cheers.
In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone’s hand.
What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?
What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?
.

by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means to Me
Graywolf Press, 2003
.
.

Melissa Dinsman in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

MELISSA DINSMAN: Like me, you come from a literary background, so how did you first come to enter what we will broadly call, at this point, the digital field?

FRANCO MORETTI: I have been interested in a scientific approach to literature for a long time, since the late-1980s when I wrote on evolutionary theory in literature. From here I moved to geography and wrote the Atlas of the European Novel. While doing geographical research, I realized that quantitative methods helped considerably with mapmaking. So I became interested in quantitative approaches to history of all kinds. Around 2000-2001, I gave a series of lectures at the University of California, Berkeley that pulled all these threads together. This became the book Graphs, Maps, Trees. But the lucky moment was that right then Matt Jockers came to Stanford as a technology specialist. We met and started working together. So for me, digital humanities was really like the fourth or fifth station along a much longer course, which also means that I've never seen digital humanities as, so to speak, a total novelty as some of its practitioners do. For me it’s basically the form taken in the digital age by scientific, explanatory, empirical, rationalistic, call it what you want, approaches to the history of literature and culture.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

In the past couple of years imbroglios erupted on college campuses across the U.S. over trigger warnings (for example, alerting students to scenes of abuse and violence in The Great Gatsby before assigning it), microaggressions (saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”), cultural appropriation (a white woman wearing her hair in cornrows), speaker disinvitations (Brandeis University canceling plans to award Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree because of her criticism of Islam's treatment of women), safe spaces (such as rooms where students can go after a talk that has upset them), and social justice advocates competing to signal their moral outrage over such issues as Halloween costumes (last year at Yale University). Why such unrest in the most liberal institutions in the country?

Although there are many proximate causes, there is but one ultimate cause—lack of political diversity to provide checks on protests going too far. A 2014 study conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, Higher Education Research Institute found that 59.8 percent of all undergraduate faculty nationwide identify as far left or liberal, compared with only 12.8 percent as far right or conservative. The asymmetry is much worse in the social sciences. A 2015 study by psychologist José Duarte, then at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, entitled “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” found that 58 to 66 percent of social scientists are liberal and only 5 to 8 percent conservative and that there are eight Democrats for every Republican. The problem is most relevant to the study of areas “related to the political concerns of the Left—areas such as race, gender, stereotyping, environmentalism, power, and inequality.” The very things these students are protesting.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Claudia Dreyfus in the New York Times:

This week, the biologist Edward O. Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University and recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes, will publish his 32nd book, a personal exhortation to conserve biodiversity titled “Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”

The book offers an improbable prescription for the environment: Dr. Wilson suggests that humans set aside roughly 50 percent of the planet as a sort of permanent preserve, undisturbed by man.

We spoke for three hours in the cafeteria of the assisted-living facility in Lexington, Mass., where Dr. Wilson and his wife, Irene, have lived the past 14 years. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

Q. Why publish this book now?

A. Because a lifetime of research has magnified my perception that we are in a crisis with reference to the living part of the environment.We now have enough measurements of extinction rates and the likely rate in the future to know that it is approaching a thousand times the baseline of what existed before humanity came along.

Reading your book, one senses you felt a great urgency to write it?

The urgency was twofold. First, it’s only been within the last decade that a full picture of the crisis in biodiversity has emerged. The second factor was my age. I’m 86. I had a mild stroke a couple of years ago. I thought, “Say this now or never.”

And what I say is that to save biodiversity, we need to set aside about half the earth’s surface as a natural reserve. I’m not suggesting we have one hemisphere for humans and the other for the rest of life. I’m talking about allocating up to one half of the surface of the land and the sea as a preserve for remaining flora and fauna.

More here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Throughout the country, the arts are pumping new life into the bodies and minds of the elderly. Two summers ago, a remarkable documentary called “Alive Inside” showed how much music can do for the most vulnerable older Americans, especially those whose memories and personalities are dimmed by dementia. The film opens with a 90-year-old African-American woman living in a nursing home being asked about her life growing up in the South. All she could say in response to specific questions was, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.” But once she was fitted with an iPod that played the music she had enjoyed in her youth, her smile grew wide and her eyes sparkled as vivid memories flooded her consciousness. She was now able to describe in detail the music and dances she had relished with her young friends. At another nursing home, a man named George with advanced dementia refused to speak or even raise his head when asked his name. He too was outfitted with an iPod, and suddenly George came back to life, talking freely, wiggling to the music in his wheelchair and singing along with the songs he once loved.

The Music and Memory project that provided the iPods was the inspiration of a volunteer music lover named Dan Cohen, and has since spread to many nursing homes and facilities for the aged around the country. Alas, not nearly enough of them. Medicaid, which fully covers the cost of potent drugs that can turn old people into virtual zombies, has no policy that would pay for far less expensive music players. So the vast majority of nursing home residents who might benefit are deprived of this joyous experience. Nonetheless, across the country, the arts in their myriad forms are enhancing the lives and health of older people — and not just those with dementia— helping to keep many men and women out of nursing homes and living independently.

More here.

M. Anthony Mills at The New Atlantis:

One of the controversies attending the publication of Laudato Si’ is about the claim that the encyclical is “anti-modern,” a description that has been alternatively a point of cautious praise and a barbed criticism. Matthew Schmitz and R.R. Reno of First Things magazine provide good examples of the two interpretations. Both argue in different ways that, for better or for worse — for Schmitz better, for Reno worse — the encyclical attacks the heart of modern social, political, and economic life, namely, the techno-economic nexus that draws science, technology, and capitalism together in a system of efficient economic production and material consumption. In so doing, the pontiff is said to break with his more conciliatory predecessors, allying himself with an older strain of Catholic orthodoxy that never came to terms with modernity.

This strain, exemplified by Pope Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors, holds that the economic self-interest and scientific rationalism characteristic of modernity are incompatible with the truths of the Gospel, which are rooted in spiritual poverty and caritas. Pope Francis allegedly casts his lot with the anti-moderns, while adding, in a nod to his namesake — and to the ecologists who look up to Saint Francis — that environmental degradation is among the important sins of the modern era. A return to Christian virtue, then, entails a return to pre-modern forms of economic production and social organization, whereby nature is tilled for the common good, not exploited for the few.

Descriptions of Laudato Si’ as “anti-science” or “anti-progress” are particularly striking, since so many self-described progressives, representatives of the scientific community, and environmentalists have warmly welcomed the recent encyclical in the hope that it would motivate action on climate change.

more here.

Nathaniel Popkin at The Cleaver:

In early 1951, when the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis was almost eleven, he came home from playing soccer with friends and, following a vague urge, took his brother’s shotgun to the yard. He shot into the air, scattered the birds aloft from the sapodilla tree, and dropped the shotgun to the ground. The gun fired and struck Aridjis in the stomach. He barely survived. The accident, writes Chloe Aridjis, his daughter, “cleaved in two” his life and sealed off his early childhood “like a locked garden.” In the aftermath of the accident, Homero Aridjis began reading and writing in earnest, the crucible of an astonishingly prolific career, but without access to memories of his own boyhood.

Twenty years after the gun accident, with his wife, Betty Ferber, pregnant with Chloe, the couple’s first child, Aridjis began to have “astonishingly vivid dreams” of his childhood. These dreams unlocked the garden of memory. He eventually recounted them in a slender memoir of childhood, El poeta niño, published in 1991. Now, Chloe Aridjis, the author of the novel Book of Clouds, has produced an English translation, The Child Poet, brought out by Archipelago Books this month.

I am particularly hungry for this book because my own childhood is locked away, and my writing suffers for it. It isn’t clear why—there is nothing so acute as a gun accident in my history.

more here.

Mel Ahern at The New Inquiry:

In 1980, Michel Foucault gave an anonymous interview for Le Monde because he was, in his words, “nostalgic for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard.” Calling himself the “Masked Philosopher,” he suggested that the unknown author has an “unrippled” “surface of contact” with the reader, and that the book without an author might “land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of.” He temporarily shed the authority of his name, because “a name makes reading too easy.”

Genres, too, make reading easy. Genres are information-bearing: like a kind of literary meta-data, a text’s genre tells you what discourses regulate it and what counts as knowledge within; it says who the author is and where her authority lies. The psychoanalyst does not reach for hard-numbered sociological data, and the quantitative researcher cares nothing for his subject’s dreams. Genre is therefore, as the good Masked Philosopher taught us, an apparatus of power. Ask any high school student, journalist, grant writer, or PhD candidate, and she will tell you that the things she writes must offer up certain kinds of observations, arguments, and evidence. The modes in which we write determine what we’re able say. Even the art critic lacks permission to dream.

The problem with this is not so much that discourses confine us, or even that they produce us. That they do both is old news. No, the problem is that this whole process of comporting certain facts to certain discourses just takes so much time. Say—to borrow an episode from The Irresponsible Magician—that you have a dream in which the actor Ed Harris plays a madcap minimalist sculptor slash magician slash respected art professor who obtained tenure by building an endless glass window into ancient Rome.

more here.

The People of the Other Village

hate the people of this village
and would nail our hats
to our heads for refusing in their presence to remove them
or staple our hands to our foreheads
for refusing to salute them
if we did not hurt them first: mail them packages of rats,
mix their flour at night with broken glass.
We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We de-vein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.
We trained some birds to steal their wheat.
They sent to us exploding ambassadors of peace.
They do this, we do that.
We canceled our sheep imports.
They no longer bought our blankets.
We mocked their greatest poet
and when that had no effect
we parodied the way they dance
which did cause pain, so they, in turn, said our God
was leprous, hairless.
We do this, they do that.
Ten thousand (10,000) years, ten thousand
(10,000) brutal, beautiful years.
.

by Thomas Lux
from New and Selected Poems
Houghton Mifflin, 1997
.

Iris van Herpen. Water Splash Dress. From the Crystallization Collection, 2013.

PET plastic, acrylic spray.

Photograph by Sughra Raza on March 6, 2016 at Boston's MFA.

More here and here.