Tom Burgis at The Financial Times:

Alongside Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls (the author studied at Harvard with the latter, whose ideas on the primacy of justice inform the book), Wenar cites an African ruler who features in many a polemic against the oil business. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is the embodiment of what theorists call the “resource curse”, the cruel law that condemns those born in the states richest in natural wealth to be among the most wretched of the earth.

Obiang seized power in 1979, since then Equatorial Guinea has been his fief. The stories of what goes on in Black Beach prison alone are enough to convey the hideousness of his rule. The fortune amassed by his son — who serves, if that is the right word, as vice-president of a nation where one in 10 children dies before the age of five — includes Michael Jackson’s crystal-encrusted glove and a fleet of luxury cars.

Wenar argues that Obiang, like his fellow kleptocrats, has no just right to dispose of his county’s natural wealth. He calculates that more than half of the world’s oil production cannot currently be exported without violating property rights because the people who live where that crude is pumped — and to whom it rightfully belongs — are too cowed to have any meaningful say in decisions about their national patrimony. That goes for other extractive commodities too, such as the diamonds that sustained Charles Taylor’s onslaught in Sierra Leone and Liberia. If we agree, then “international oil and mining companies are flying, trucking and sailing away billions of dollars of stolen wealth every day”.

more here.

Found

My wife waits for a caterpillar
to crawl onto her palm so she
can carry it out of the street
and into the green subdivision
of a tree.

Yesterday she coaxed a spider
into a juicier corner. The day
before she hazed a snail
in a half circle so she wouldn’t
have to crawl all the way
around the world and be 2,000
years late for dinner.

I want her to hurry up and pay
attention to me or go where I
want to go until I remember
the night she found me wet
and limping, felt for a collar
and tags, then put me in
the truck where it was warm.

Without her, I wouldn’t
be standing here in these
snazzy alligator shoes.
.

by Ron Koertge
from The Best American Poetry 2006

Sam Sacks in Open Letters Monthly:

To the naysayers who complain that critics are nothing more than parasites of art and culture, A. O. Scott has dismaying news: You too are a critic, that very opinion constitutes criticism, welcome to the club, pull up a chair. The premise of his new book Better Living Through Criticism is that the act of criticism is synonymous with the act of thinking, in the manifold ways this can done—wondering, questioning, investigating, examining, shaping ideas, forming judgments. You might imagine criticism to be a more professional pursuit—in Scott’s case, for instance, in his capacity as a film critic for the New York Times, it sometimes involves writing in-depth excurses on the latest superhero blockbuster. But Scott contends that in writing such a review,

a critic will be no different from anyone else who stops to think about the experience of watching The Avengers (or reading a novel or beholding a painting or listening to a piece of music). Because that thinking is where criticism begins. We’re all guilty of it. Or at least we should be.

That “should” is the keyword of this fluent and appealing if strangely slippery book. In its simplest sense it amounts to an exhortation: You already think about things all the time, so embrace that fact and try to do it as well as possible. “This is no simple task,” Scott writes. “It is easier to seek out the comforts of groupthink, prejudice, and ignorance. Resisting those temptations requires vigilance, discipline, and curiosity.” If this is stirringly motivational, it’s also rhetorically shrewd, since it sets the terms in such a way as to make disagreement impossible. Either you’re a critic or you’re a narrow-minded, bigoted rube. Your choice, friendo.

Scott, who is both learned and open-minded, has a talent for this kind of argumentative knight fork, in which he both anticipates and disables any resistance readers might conceivably raise to his gospel of critical thinking.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

On the surface, people are more or less symmetrical. Aside from small differences, our right sides mirror our left. The same isn’t true for our innards. The heart, stomach, and spleen typically sit slightly to the left, while the liver and gall bladder sit to the right. That’s the usual set-up, but it’s mirrored in one in every 10,000 people, who have a condition called situs inversus. Donny Osmond has it. So did James Bond’s adversary Dr. No, who once survived a murder attempt because his would-be assassin stabbed the left side of his chest and missed his heart.

Whether standard or inverted, there is asymmetry, which raises the obvious question: What creates it? We begin life as a single fertilised cell, which divides again and again into the trillions of the adult form. At what point in that process does left begin to differ from right?

The standard answer, as least for the embryos of back-boned animals, is that tiny beating hairs called cilia push fluid in a typically leftward direction. This current concentrates molecules on one side of the embryo, including those that steer its subsequent development, including one called Nodal. Hence: asymmetry. That’s why people with genetic disorders that disable their cilia have 50:50 odds of owning a right-sided heart.

But that can’t be the whole story because by the time the cilia start to beat, the embryo is already asymmetrical. There must be some earlier symmetry-breaking event.

More here.

Amanda Taub in Vox:

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly become so popular?

What's made Trump's rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates. And whereas most Republican candidates might draw strong support from just one segment of the party base, such as Southern evangelicals or coastal moderates, Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses.

Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.

Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.

More here.

Ben Ratliff at Bookforum:

On New Year’s Day of 1947, not long after Random House published Mezz Mezzrow’s memoir, Really the Blues, there took place at Town Hall a kind of musical-revue version of his life. “Mr. Mezzrow himself served as the narrator,” reported The New York Times the following day. “He told how he had encountered different jazz players in different places. Then the curtains opened and instrumentalists or singers acted the parts of the performers mentioned, performing in the styles of the originals.”

Mezzrow was an early traditionalist: His love for jazz centered on New Orleans–derived music and swing, and stopped before bebop, then a current language. He was a white jazz musician who played on some excellent records (including some sessions organized in late 1938 and early 1939 by the jazz critic Hugues Panassié, led variously by Mezzrow or the trumpeters Tommy Ladnier and Frankie Newton, and described in this book’s appendix 3); had a rigorous and principled feeling for the blues; followed a lifelong yearning to “be a musician, a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can”—yet was generally overshadowed, talent-wise, by his peers.

At Town Hall, the pianist Sammy Price played the role of Tony Jackson, who shows up early in the book. Jackson was a New Orleans–born musician who moved to Chicago, Mezzrow’s town, and died not long after the teenage Mezzrow saw him play at the Pekin Inn; he never recorded. And so Mezzrow’s eyewitness account of him, however stylized, remains valuable.

more here.

Michelle Stacey at The Paris Review:

Keats’s near obsession with death—“youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies”; “many a time I have been half in love with easeful death”; “now more than ever seems it rich to die”—becomes a palpable entity in this house. A cabinet displays the barbarous-looking instruments he used as a medical student, before he turned to poetry; a portrait depicts his younger brother, Tom, whom Keats nursed until he died of consumption, and from whom Keats almost surely caught the disease that would kill him as well. In the early nineteenth century, the disease killed one in three Londoners, but it was also something of a family curse: Keats had nursed his mother as she died eight years before Tom, and his older brother, George, who had emigrated to America in 1818, would die of it as well, in 1841.

Upstairs, the echoes of mortality reach a crescendo. In the back bedroom, a placard on the bed describes a night in early February 1820, a year before his death, when Keats returned home after catching a bad chill and staggered upstairs in a fit of coughing. A few minutes later, he called to his housemate Charles Brown to bring him a candle, and used it to illuminate a stain on the sheets: blood he had coughed up. “I know the colour of that blood,” Keats said to him. “It is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that colour—that drop of blood is my death warrant—I must die.” In the hallway outside the bedroom, a copy of Keats’s life mask sits beside one of his death mask, and the difference is stark. By 1821, his face had narrowed, his cheeks sunk; he had withered away as his lungs corroded.

more here.

Oliver Harris at the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1972 Fidel Castro’s Ministry of the Interior announced a competition to develop the crime genre in Cuba. They wanted stories that would deter anti-social behaviour, promote vigilance and establish heroes so principled they didn’t even swear. The contest attracted no entries. The Ministry’s miscalculation reflects the complexity of the genre’s appeal. Does crime fiction, as some have argued, serve as a prop to the status quo, reinforcing the law and even, via the palliative presence of a detective, helping accommodate us to social injustice? Or is it quite the opposite: a means of critique, shining a light into otherwise unexplored corners? In truth, the genre thrives on this duality. As the failure of the Cuban competition suggests, didacticism is a turn-off. What the putative crime writers of Havana wanted was to explore corruption. What readers wanted, then as now, was not a morality tale but stories of jaded men and women playing by their own rules.

No figure embodies this ambivalent appeal as effectively as the private eye. The legendary PI emerges via true-crime tales and pulp fictions to supplant the cowboy as modern hero: a romantic loner mistrusted by both police and crooks, playing both ends against the middle. It is this rugged individualist that John Walton’s eye-opening research tears to pieces. In The Legendary Detective: The private eye in fact and fiction, Walton asks how the American detective of collective memory arises out of one of the country’s most controversial and partisan industries.

more here.

Randy Rieland in Smithsonian:

The human brain is a remarkable, stunningly complex organ. And yet, scientists are discovering something about it that the likes of Harry Houdini and other great magicians have known for a long time—the brain can be surprisingly easy to trick. That’s because in order to be so efficient, it has evolved to create shortcuts in response to outside stimuli, such as light or sound. But those shortcuts and the consistency with which the brain follows them can also make it vulnerable to deception. Take, for example, recent research by Stanford scientists exploring a new way to fight jet lag. For a while, researchers have known that exposure to light before taking a trip can help your body adjust to the changes in your sleep cycles that come with traveling across time zones. The most common preventive treatment involves sitting in front of bright lights for hours at a time during the day.

…Here are three other recent studies in which researchers have found how the brain can be deceived.

…Don’t watch what you eat: If you can’t see what you’re eating, you’re less likely to eat as much. That’s the conclusion of scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany after asking 90 students to eat three different flavors of ice cream.

… Beware of overthinking: A study at the University of Southern California found that if you want to develop a new habit, you should avoid thinking too much about it. The researchers asked a group of people to watch a video that shows how to make sushi. And they determined that when people were able to watch the video over and over without any other specific instructions, they learned the sushi-making process better than those who were told to try to remember what came next.

… Is someone there?: Do you ever have that feeling where you can sense the presence of another person in the room with you when no one else is around? Well, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology say it’s likely a case of your brain perceiving something that’s not there. That’s based, in part, on research done with a group of people who were blindfolded, given ear plugs and had their fingers connected to a device. The subjects were told to move the device, and when they did, a robotic arm poked them in the back. Because the poke was synchronized with their movements, the subjects’ brains recognized it as something they had done to themselves. But when the researchers caused a slight delay between when the people moved the device and when they were poked, the study participants had a different reaction.

More here.

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
.

by Stanley Kunitz
from The Collected Poems
W.W. Norton, 2000
.
.

Freddy Gray in The Spectator:

It’s time to face reality. Barring a dramatic and unprecedented reversal of fortune, Donald Trump is going to be the Republican candidate for the presidential election on 8 November. Which means that, by January, a fulminating demagogue with more than a whiff of the mad dictator about him could be in charge of the most powerful nation on earth. This says something disturbing about the state of America. The most benevolent superpower in history is turning nasty. In Donald Trump’s America, greed isn’t just good — it is great. As he put it in his victory speech in Las Vegas last week, ‘We’re going to get greedy for the United States. We’re gonna grab and grab and grab. We’re gonna bring in so much money and so much everything. We’re going to Make America Great Again, I’m telling you folks.’ The crowd screamed. In Donald Trump’s America, viciousness is beautiful. As he put it in another victory speech in South Carolina, ‘There’s nothing easy about running for president. It’s tough, it’s nasty, it’s mean, it’s vicious, it’s… beautiful.’

The Trump phenomenon seems too mad to be real. But it’s happening, folks, and it’s yuge. Pundits who dismiss Trump’s chances do so at their peril. In November, Donald Trump will almost certainly face Hillary Clinton, a woman who has not yet won a competitive major election and who is a perfect example of the fetid elite that American voters so detest. The odds are still against Trump. But then, a few months ago, he was a 50-1 shot to be the Republican nominee. Look at him now. Trump’s critics compare his candidacy to that of Barry Goldwater in 1964, an insurgent campaign that wooed the radical right only then to be slaughtered by Lyndon B. Johnson, a machine Democrat. But the comparison misunderstands and undervalues Trump’s strengths. In his celebrity and ability to appeal to very different voters, Trump more resembles Ronald Reagan, a man who can remodel politics in his own image. The depth and breadth of Trump’s appeal is endlessly surprising. He is more popular than other Republican candidates among men, women, whites, blacks, Hispanics, old, young, married and unmarried, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, those with college degrees and those without (‘I love the poorly educated,’ he said last week, a comment which prompted much chortling from the better educated). Trump has majority support among Republican voters who earn a lot of money and those who earn little, from self-described conservatives and moderates. As you might expect from someone who promises to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, he wins with people who worry most about immigration. But he also wins with those who cite the economy and terrorism as their chief concerns. In short, he wins a lot. Since the financial crash, and despite the so-called recovery, an ever larger number of Americans feel angry at the system. The Donald embodies their rage and multiplies it as in a hall of mirrors.

The consolation — and how people will cling to it in the coming weeks! — is that Trump probably won’t be president. According to the polls, a large majority of Americans hold an ‘unfavourable’ opinion of him. He may reflect the rage of Republican voters but no one in the history of the republic has been as reviled as Trump and reached the White House.

More here.

Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

By the late 1980s, every humanities academic on earth talked of his or her Umberto Eco novel in the drawer.

Not a novel by Umberto, of course. No, the novel soon to be written that would equal the international acclaim of Eco’s medieval thriller, The Name of the Rose (1980), which eventually sold 30 million copies in more than 40 languages.

Did any of those books ever get done? Hardly a one. Because to produce a work comparable to that still-singular first novel — not to mention its six successors, Foucault’s Pendulum(1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino,(2000), The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), The Prague Cemetery (2010), and Numero Zero (2015) — you needed to be Umberto. That is, impossibly learned. Indefatigably hardworking. Singularly modest and self-critical. Uniquely open to people and culture high, low, and middle. Quick to laugh and joke. Wise to the importance of entertaining readers — with puns, plot, playful Latin, lighthearted examples, exotic hypotheticals — while guiding them.

You had to be hungry for the latest news and gossip — about anything — and willing to plop it into a narrative composed largely of more sober elements. You had to possess a common touch, an ability to talk and write in the language of the street, which Umberto possessed to a degree I’ve never seen in any other scholar of his stature.

More here.

From Edge.org:

People talk about the future of the intelligent machines, and whether intelligent machines are going to take over and decide what to do for themselves. What one has to figure out, while given a goal, how to execute it into something that can meaningfully be automated, the actual inventing of the goal is not something that in some sense has a path to automation.

How do we figure out goals for ourselves? How are goals defined? They tend to be defined for a given human by their own personal history, their cultural environment, the history of our civilization. Goals are something that are uniquely human. It's something that almost doesn't make any sense. We ask, what's the goal of our machine? We might have given it a goal when we built the machine.

The thing that makes this more poignant for me is that I've spent a lot of time studying basic science about computation, and I've realized something from that. It's a little bit of a longer story, but basically, if we think about intelligence and things that might have goals, things that might have purposes, what kinds of things can have intelligence or purpose? Right now, we know one great example of things with intelligence and purpose and that's us, and our brains, and our own human intelligence. What else is like that?

More here.

Douglas Lain in Zero Books Blog:

Stefany Anne Golberg is a writer for magazines such as The Smart Set, the former Critic-in Residence at Drexel University, a multi-media artist, and a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. Her husband Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy is a founding member of Flux Factory as well, and is a recipient of the Whiting Award. Together their book Dead People, a collection of literary and critical obituaries, is due out from Zero Books in June of this year.

As this week’s episode is about remembering and attempting to understand the significance of the dead it seems appropriate here at the start to offer up a short excerpt from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:

The dead individual, by his having detached and liberated his being from his action or his negative unity, is an empty particular, merely existing passively for some other, at the mercy of every lower irrational organic agency, and the [chemical, physical] forces of abstract material elements, both of which are now stronger than himself, the former on account of the life which they have, the latter on account of their negative nature.(1) he family keeps away from the dead this dishonouring of him by the desires of unconscious organic agencies and by abstract elements, puts its own action in place of theirs, and weds the relative to the bosom of the earth, the elemental individuality that passes not away. Thereby the family makes the dead a member of a community(2) which prevails over and holds under control the powers of the particular material elements and the lower living creatures, which sought to have their way with the dead and destroy him.

In this episode you’ll hear from Thomas J.J. Altizer on Hegel and the death of God, an clip from Gene Martin and Reverend AA Allen and the gospel hymn “God’s Not Dead,”a bit of dialogue from the television show True Detective, a clip from the documentary film “Manufacturing Consent,” and Dan Lett’s “Yeah It’s All Right.”

Morgan Meis in Image:

On a moonless night you can drive around parts of the city, and it is dark. Just dark. No streetlights, no houselights. Nothing. Just the stars and the beams from your headlights illuminating the cracked roads in front of the car.

A few months back, on the east side, near some abandoned buildings and the husks of a few houses that had been burned down almost completely, I heard a rustle in the nearby bushes. A ring-necked pheasant emerged from the undergrowth. It strutted across the grass, clucking and preening. Cocky.

Suddenly, a hawk swooped down from a tree nearby. The hawk, talons extended, made a grab for the pheasant. The pheasant ducked and parried at just the right time and then scurried back into the thicket from which it had emerged.

This, in the middle of metropolitan Detroit.

More here.

Philip Horne at the Times Literary Supplement:

Despite failing health, particularly chronic angina pectoris, James might have completed more books but for the advent of war. He wrote to Edward Emerson on August 4, 1914 that “It has all come as by the leap of some awful monster out of his lair – he is upon us, he is upon all of us here, before we have had time to turn round”. The effect was devastating: “It gives away everything one has believed in & lived for”. British friends and their children were wounded or killed. James flung himself into the war effort – caring for Belgian refugees, visiting wounded soldiers, serving as honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. Though it was draining, James could cherish what he called, writing to Edith Wharton in May 1915, “the unspeakable adventure of being alive in these days”. He was especially tormented by the prolongation of American neutrality in the face of German aggression – to the point of taking the oath of allegiance on July 26, 1915. “Civis Britannicus sum!” he wrote to Edmund Gosse. London friends were pleased. On August 8, he told Rhoda Broughton of the many welcoming reactions to his act of conscience, declaring that “like old Martin Luther, ‘Here I stand, I can no other’”. But his given reasons looked suspect if not downright treasonous to American detractors, and he hoped for relief, as he told Lucy Clifford the next day, from “White’s Spectator thing” of August 14 – Dr J. William White’s article revealing “another and probably a controlling factor” in James’s decision: an “intense dislike for and disapprobation of the official attitude of America since the beginning of the war”, based on “the principles of civilization and of humanity”.

The strain seems to have been too much. On July 30, only four days after his great step, James was again taken ill. His diary would look back: “Date from that day the beginning, with intermissions, very brief, of all this late and present (Sept. 12th) crisis”.

more here.

Reinaldo Laddaga at Cabinet Magazine:

I’ve always found it intriguing that canonical histories of early twentieth-century art and literature, usually so generous in their treatment of the emergence of the historical avant-garde, never mention its most spectacular development: the creation, and ultimate failure, of the so-called Italian Regency of Carnaro. In a certain way, this omission is understandable. What happened between 1919 and 1920 in the contested city of Fiume, when—under the leadership of writer Gabriele D’Annunzio—a peculiar alliance of soldiers, artists, and adventurers occupied the city with the initial intention of annexing it to Italy, complicates the most common narrative in which modern art and progressive politics by nature go together.¹ But, as historian Roger Griffin’s excellent Modernism and Fascism observes, a number of avant-garde movements shared fascism’s aspiration to cure the world (or at least Europe) of anomie and a loss of vitality. These conditions were understood as by-products of modernity, and particularly so at the end of a war that made patent the failure of modernity’s promise of material and social progress. Both movements proposed a return, in the midst of crisis, to a primordial space where the envoys of a new humanity could gather the seeds for a future world. In Fiume, fascists and Dadaists, futurists and Bolsheviks, were, for a few months, in the same camp.

Let’s try to imagine Italy at the end of World War I. A constitutional monarchy the disparate regions of which had only very recently integrated, it had entered the war in 1915 on the side of the British-French alliance one year after the hostilities started, having received from France and England guarantees of territorial compensation. The ensuing three years of combat caused in this mostly traditionalist, agrarian society an even deeper upheaval than the one suffered by its allies.

more here.

James McWilliams at The American Scholar:

In 2012, Paul Miller, a 26-year-old journalist and former writer for The Verge, began to worry about the quality of his thinking. His ability to read difficult studies or to follow intricate arguments demanding sustained attention was lagging. He found himself easily distracted and, worse, irritable about it. His longtime touchstone—his smartphone—was starting to annoy him, making him feel insecure and anxious rather than grounded in the ideas that formerly had nourished him. “If I lost my phone,” he said, he’d feel “like I could never catch up.” He realized that his online habits weren’t helping him to work, much less to multitask. He was just switching his attention all over the place and, in the process, becoming a bit unhinged.

Subtler discoveries ensued. As he continued to analyze his behavior, Miller noticed that he was applying the language of nature to digital phenomena. He would refer, for example, to his “RSS feed landscape.” More troubling was how his observations were materializing not as full thoughts but as brief Tweets—he was thinking in word counts. When he realized he was spending 95 percent of his waking hours connected to digital media in a world where he “had never known anything different,” he proposed to his editor a series of articles that turned out to be intriguing and prescriptive. What would it be like to disconnect for a year? His editor bought the pitch, and Miller, who lives in New York, pulled the plug.

more here.