Dave Zirin in The Nation:

The reverberations. Not the rumbles, the reverberations. The death of Muhammad Ali will undoubtedly move people’s minds to his epic boxing matches against Joe Frazier and George Foreman, or there will be retrospectives about his epic “rumbles” against racism and war. But it’s the reverberations that we have to understand in order to see Muhammad Ali as what he remains: the most important athlete to ever live. It’s the reverberations that are our best defense against real-time efforts to pull out his political teeth and turn him into a harmless icon suitable for mass consumption.

When Dr. Martin Luther King came out against the war in Vietnam in 1967, he was criticized by the mainstream press and his own advisors who told him to not focus on “foreign” policy. But Dr. King forged ahead and to justify his new stand, said publicly, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all—black and brown and poor—victims of the same system of oppression.”

When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, he said that Muhammad Ali gave him hope that the walls would some day come tumbling down.

When John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists on the medal stand in Mexico City, one of their demands was to “Restore Muhammad Ali’s title.” They called Ali “the warrior-saint of the Black Athlete’s Revolt.”

When Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers in Lowndes County, Alabama launched an independent political party in 1965, their new group was the first to use the symbol of a black panther. Beneath the jungle cat’s black silhouette was a slogan straight from the champ: “WE Are the Greatest.”

When Billie Jean King was aiming to win equal rights for women in sports, Muhammad Ali would say to her, “Billie Jean King! YOU ARE THE QUEEN!” She said that this made her feel brave in her own skin…

More here.

More photos here.

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of a stolen bicycle, a sixty-dollar red Schwinn that he could not bear to lose. Eventually, Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage.

More here. And here's what I said about him on 3QD eight years ago.

Simon Winchester at The New York Times:

Once there were just nomads, their wanderings no more than necessary for survival. But then came the stockades their successors built and the fire-warmed ­settlements in which they huddled — and suddenly travel changed, becoming what for most would henceforth be a pursuit more elective than essential. There were many motives for it. Sheer curiosity — what’s beyond the fence? — came first. Then a need to trade, to inhabit, to conquer, to preach, to take part in a pilgrimage, to migrate and settle anew, to wage a war or to seek refuge. These and any of a thousand other proddings of the sharp stick would send travelers out on the road.

Before long, humankind had been whipped into a frenzy of wandering, one that has never let up. And nowadays, with technology and low cost combining to create a perfect storm of wanderlust, we see the results: the vast Lunar New Year crowds at a Chinese railway station, the lethal scrums at the hajj in Mecca, the endless security lines at Heathrow and Kennedy and Sheremetyevo, all vivid testimony to the unanticipated backwash of our pathological desire for ceaseless mobility. And yet just why, fretted Blaise Pascal back in the 17th century, when all of this seemed to get going, why the urge to engage in so much movement? Why all this transnational Brownian motion? Surely all of man’s ills must stem, the philosopher wrote, from his simple inability to remain quiet and alone, serenely in the comfort of his own home.

When confronted with this season’s tottering tower of new travel literature, I found it easy to sympathize with poor Pascal.

more here.

Mieke Chew at The Sydney Review of Books:

Ágota Kristóf was born in Csikvánd, a Hungarian village, in 1935. On foot she fled her home country in 1956, during the Hungarian uprising, as part of a small group that included her husband and infant daughter. They walked for hours in darkness afraid they were going round and round in circles and would soon be arrested, still in Hungary. Having successfully crossed into Austria, she travelled, by bus and train, to Switzerland. She had two bags, one containing diapers, clothes, and things for her baby, the other dictionaries. Completely by chance, she arrived in a Francophone city, where, she writes, ‘I confront a language that is totally unknown to me.’

Kristóf’s estrangement from language gave her a special distance from the syntax of quotidian speech. Her prose is rigorously simple in its grammar. Not a single word is wasted. As she explains in her memoir, ‘I know I will never write French as native French writers do, but I will write it as I am able to, as best as I can.’ Kristóf’s arduous and determined path to literacy in her adopted language, in a country she did not choose, gave rise to a radical prose style. Kristóf’s expression has an air of purity; her rigor and labor working as a kind of distillation process. She did not think to write in Hungarian. French, she has said, ‘killed my mother tongue.’ She had no choice but to accept French. But, as one of her translators, Nina Bogin, writes, her background created a special kind of prose: ‘French written through the prism of Kristóf’s native language, Hungarian.’

more here.

William Egginton at the Financial Times:

In January 1605, an ageing veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire published the strangest of books. Unlike the bestsellers of the day, it was not a chivalric romance, a pastoral drama or the fictional confession of an outlaw. Instead, it told the story of a gentleman so besotted with reading those kinds of books, especially the ones about knights errant and their magical adventures, that he loses his mind and begins to believe they are real.

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was an immediate and roaring success. Demand for copies was so high that within a few months its author, Miguel de Cervantes, was having the book distributed throughout the Iberian peninsula while his publishers began work on a second edition. Two pirated versions appeared in London, along with two others in Valencia and Zaragoza; stacks of copies were loaded on to the galleons embarking for the New World. By June the book’s two central characters had become iconic figures, their effigies carried in parades and imitators popping up in celebrations both royal and plebeian.

Don Quixote would become perhaps the most published work of literature in history. Its influence on writers has been unparalleled. When the Nor­wegian Nobel Institute polled 100 leading authors in 2002 to name the single most important literary work,Don Quixote was a handsome winner; no other book came close.

more here.

AN Wilson in The Spectator:

Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even when supposedly writing on politics or arranging love poems to his dream-women. The core of this new book about him can be found in a sentence following Dante’s banishment from Florence, and his setting out as a poverty-stricken exile, deprived of all power, separated from his wife and family and stripped of his wealth. Marco Santagata writes:

One of the typical features of Dante’s personality, which qualifies him as an ‘intellectual’ in the modern sense of the word, is his endless reflection on what he is doing, both as an author and as a man.

Santagata is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Pisa, and this substantial work incorporates all the most recent Dantean scholarship. There is much to chew upon, since Dante lived at the very centre of his city’s political life. After his exile he became embroiled in the drama of the French Pope (Clement V, Bertrand de Got), and in November 1308 endorsed the candidature of Henry of Luxembourg as Holy Roman Emperor. Santagata, thoroughly steeped in the politics and genealogies of the period, gives the best account I have ever read of Dante in his historical context. We follow him as an enthusiastic Guelph, in the battle of Campaldino in 1289 against the Ghibellines of Arezzo, and on through his political and religious journey as a would-be politician. He falls foul of the bitter feuding between the ‘White’ Guelphs and the ‘Blacks’ — chief of whom in Florence was Dante’s wife’s terrifying and thuggish relation Corso Donati.

More here.

Colin Grant in The Guardian:

Have you been to or, for that matter, even heard of “Negroland”? Here’s a clue. It’s not Harlem or Chicago’s South Side or any conurbation of black Americans. As Margo Jefferson illuminates in her captivating memoir, Negroland is not so much a geographic location as a state of mind; an exclusive club without discernible borders, to which few have ever belonged. Over the years, its members have been characterised by descriptions ranging from “the coloured 400” (families) to “the blue vein society”.

If you have to ask how you gain entry to Negroland, you’ve already betrayed your lack of credentials. It’s a society composed of a “better class” of Negro, though such people’s judgment is not always sound. In one of Jefferson’s many startling passages she reveals that, at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, the nation’s slave owners included free black members of the elite, such as Nicolas Augustin Metoyer of Louisiana and his family, who collectively owned 215 slaves. Back then, polished and fragrant members of Negroland breathed in the rarefied air of privilege and held their noses at the passing by of any johnny-come-lately, just as Britain’s “old money” class did at the advent of the codfish aristocracy.

More here.

It Begins in August

I

You think back to childhood
when the days of summer seemed
endless, and time long enough.

Then the school bell rang,
and you woke with a jolt
into the mortality of arithmetic.

II

After supper, it was too dark
to go out again for very long,
then just too dark to go out,

then just too dark. So you begin
to learn to live with Night,
admire her, even love her a little.
.

by Nils Peterson

Martin Smith in the Oxford University Press Blog:

We often want to know how likely something is. I might want to know how likely it is that it will rain tomorrow morning; according to the Met Office website, at time of writing, this is 90% likely. If I’m playing poker, I might want to know how likely it is that my opponent has been dealt a “high card” hand. With no other information available, we can calculate the probability of this to be about 50%. There seems to be close link between likelihood and belief; if something is likely, you would be justified in believing it, and if something is unlikely, you would not be justified in believing it. That might seem obvious, and the second part might seem especially obvious – surely you can’t be justified in believing something that’s unlikely to be true? I will suggest here that, sometimes, you can.

Some philosophers and psychologists have argued that it can sometimes be a good thing for people to hold irrational beliefs. That may be right, but it’s not the point I want to make. I think that believing the unlikely can not only be a good thing, but can be fully rational. The reason has to do with testimony, and when we owe it to other people to believe what they say. So much of what we believe about the world is based on the testimony of others. And, while we don’t always accept what others tell us, disbelieving a person’s testimony is not something to be taken lightly. If someone tells me, say, that there’s a coffee shop nearby and, for no reason at all, I refuse to believe it, then this is not just about me – another person is involved, and I’m doing that person a wrong. If I refuse to believe what someone tells me, then I need to have a good reason for doing this.

What does this have to do with believing the unlikely?

More here.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl Optimized:

A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. The way it worked was, Penrose spoke for a half hour about his ideas about consciousness (Gödel, quantum gravity, microtubules, uncomputability, you know the drill), then I delivered a half-hour “response,” and then there was an hour of questions and discussion from the floor. Below, I’m sharing the prepared notes for my talk, as well as some very brief recollections about the discussion afterward. (Sorry, there’s no audio or video.) I unfortunately don’t have the text or transparencies for Penrose’s talk available to me, but—with one exception, which I touch on in my own talk—his talk very much followed the outlines of his famous books, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind.

More here.

Andrew Mitchell Davenport in Full Stop:

There are many stories in Don Quixote, but perhaps not a single one so unbelievable as the story of its creator. Miguel de Cervantes didn’t have it easy. William Egginton’s new work, The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016), makes this abundantly clear. But Egginton’s book focuses on the ways in which Cervantes, with his literary talents and his time-tested sense of humor, persevered in a world that seems to have conspired to keep him down. Cervantes was no ordinary chap. He was a humanist in an age of inquisition. Somehow he kept his head.

Who was this man? And how did his life inform his art? Egginton pursues these questions and presents his audience with enormously rich readings of Cervantes’ fictions while demonstrating how a man with a dream can overcome the limits imposed by reality.

A.M. Davenport: Bill, how would you describe Don Quixote to an alien?

William Egginton: This is a novel written by a deeply disillusioned soldier many years ago, about a deeply deluded soldier living in his own time. It’s about a friendship between two very different men who can’t quite see the world in the same way, and the love they feel for one another despite, or even because of those differences. And finally, it’s a novel about how sure we humans are about what we know to be true, how dreadfully wrong we can be, and how incredibly funny that fact is, once we can learn to see the truth of our situations.

More here.

Max Goldman in New Humanist:

If I told you that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had recently declared a chemical weedkiller widely used on our crops and in our gardens to be “possibly carcinogenic”, you’d rightly be alarmed. You’d quite understand moves to ban the substance and if it looked like the authorities were resisting the ban, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a scandal. That’s the debate being had over a herbicide called glyphosate. It was classified by the WHO’s International Agency of Research into Cancer (IARC) as “possibly carcinogenic” last year. It has already been banned for gardening use in France. Consumer pressure has taken it off the shelves at Waitrose and, in Bristol, the authorities are trialling its replacement with a natural alternative: vinegar. But the EU, despite protestations, approved it for use again this year – although it shortened the licence from 15 to seven years, following uproar from several MEPs. It seems pretty awful. But what does “possibly carcinogenic” even mean? The IARC reviews the scientific evidence available on the cancer-causing potential of every­thing from hairdressing to plutonium, then categorises things from those that definitely cause cancer (group 1) to those that probably don’t (group 4). The system includes a group for things that possibly cause cancer, including glyphosate (group 2B). The subtlety in understanding this system comes in the difference between “risk” and “hazard” – two words that might sound broadly synonymous but have, in the space between them, a world of misunderstanding. A few years ago, I went skydiving. The worst-case scenario when jumping out of an aeroplane at 12,000 feet is terrifying but skydiving (according to figures from Skydive magazine, which I suppose has some incentive to say it) is pretty safe. I’m about as likely to get killed making a single parachute jump as I am from travelling 4,000km in a car. That’s safe enough for me. Both driving and skydiving are activities that can kill you. That’s the hazard. Yet the important calculation is not whether something can kill you (pretty much anything can) but the actual chances of it killing you. That’s the risk.

What the IARC fails to make clear is that its classification system is all about cancer hazard, not risk. Often risk comes down to dose: there are many potentially dangerous substances (like cyanide in apple seeds) that are harmless at low exposure. Glyphosate is one of hundreds of agents, both naturally occurring and industrially manufactured, that the IARC has reviewed that might cause cancer. The same misunderstanding happened with mobile phones a few years ago. Despite no compelling evidence that mobile phone radiation causes cancer, the suspicion lingers. When the IARC decided in 2011 to classify mobile phone radiation as a group 2B carcinogen (“possibly causes cancer”, just like glyphosate), it added fuel to the fire of anti-radiation campaigns. They made no mention that aloe vera, nickel and coffee are all also classified 2B. The absurdity of this system is highlighted by the tiny number of things the IARC has felt confident enough to put in group 4, “probably not carcinogenic”.

More here.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times:

IN the last half-century, the prevalence of autoimmune disease — disorders in which the immune system attacks healthy tissue in the body — has increased sharply in the developed world. An estimated one in 13 Americans has one of these often debilitating, generally lifelong conditions. Many, like Type 1 diabetes and celiac disease, are linked with specific gene variants of the immune system, suggesting a strong genetic component. But their prevalence has increased much faster — in two or three generations — than it’s likely the human gene pool has changed. Many researchers are interested in how the human microbiome — the community of microbes that live mostly in the gut and are thought to calibrate our immune systems — may have contributed to the rise of these disorders. Perhaps society-wide shifts in these microbial communities, driven by changes in what we eat and in the quantity and type of microbes we’re exposed to in our daily lives, have increased our vulnerability. To test this possibility, some years ago, a team of scientists began following 33 newborns who were genetically at risk of developing Type 1 diabetes, a condition in which the immune system destroys the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.

The children were mostly Finnish. Finland has the highest prevalence — nearly one in 200 under the age of 15 — of Type 1 diabetes in the world. (At about one in 300, the United States isn’t far behind.) After three years, four of the children developed the condition. The scientists had periodically sampled the children’s microbes, and when they looked back at this record, they discovered that the microbiome of children who developed the disease changed in predictable ways nearly a year before the disease appeared. Diversity declined and inflammatory microbes bloomed. It was as if a gradually maturing ecosystem had been struck by a blight and overgrown by weeds. The study, published last year, was small. But for Ramnik Xavier, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and a senior author on the study, the findings suggested for the first time that intervention might be possible. Maybe clinicians could catch and correct the microbial derangement in time to slow — or even prevent — the emergence of the disorder.

More here.

Bruce Bawer at The Hudson Review:

It’s curious: on the one hand, Stevens was constantly noticing people around him (such as a “doddering girl” with “idiot eyes” whom he espied in church) who were much worse off than he was—and whom he regarded with meticulously recorded contempt; on the other hand, he felt extremely sorry for himself, as if absolutely everyone else’s existence were richer than his, as if he weren’t getting anywhere near the life he deserved. So taken in are we by his conviction that the fates had dealt him a lousy hand that we’re thrown for a loop when, at age twenty-eight, Stevens—who at the time was working as a legal advisor for the Equitable Life Assurance Company—runs down to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Theodore Roosevelt to discuss getting “the country back on its feet in the wake of the financial downturn.”

Pretty impressive. Why, then, wasn’t this level of achievement enough for him? How did he come by his sky-high expectations? To whose life was he comparing his own?

Often, on weekends during those bachelor years, Stevens wandered lonely as a cloud along the Palisades, where he sat alone for hours at a time brooding about the meaning of life, death, and the universe. Mariani exhaustively paraphrases these musings and seems to take them very seriously; yet one can’t help being reminded of Byron’s facetious account of the young Don Juan, whose unconsummated longing for Donna Julia causes him to “wander . . . by the glassy brooks,” pursuing “self-communion with his own high soul,” until he “turn[s], without perceiving his condition, / Like Coleridge, into a metaphysician.” Briefly put, Stevens, like Don Juan, was horny.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

All the same, despite the seeming suddenness of Guston’s shift to figuration, hints that he was trying to go in that direction (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, trying to avoid an irresistible pull in that direction) are recurrent. They are most evident in the rather awkward work for which the Hauser & Wirth show is titled,Painter III (1963), in which the large central black oval is clearly enough the head of the painter whose brush-wielding hand can be made out just below. Looking (1964) gets its title from the eye-like marks that seem to face the viewer from the head-and-shoulders form on the painting’s right. Reverse (1965) anticipates the head in lost profile (with cigarette and smoke) of Guston’s 1978 Friend-To M.F. ( The composer Morton Feldman was one of the friends whom Guston thought had turned away from him in 1970.) Even earlier works like Fable II and Rite, both from 1957, earn their titles by the nonspecific figurative connotations of their bunched shapes; it would take only a little bit of further manipulation to turn those forms into the kind of stylized figures found in the paintings that Jan Müller was making around this time, or Bob Thompson just a little later. This was the period in which, as Frank O’Hara would write, Guston’s forms “pose, stand indecisively, push each other and declaim.” As early as 1961, the conservative New York Times critic John Canaday was wondering whether “in the end it should prove that he has really gone in a circle, carrying abstract expressionism back to its figurative start.” Just as Guston’s paintings explored the porous boundary between sameness and difference, his career was an essay in the single-mindedness of a chameleon.

more here.

Peter Marshall at Literary Review:

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, initiating the Protestant Reformation. In fact, as scholars have long known, and Lyndal Roper immediately concedes, whether Luther ever actually posted the Theses in this way is doubtful. But there is no doubting the momentous consequences of the confrontation with the Papacy sparked by Luther’s disquiet over the theology of indulgences. In Britain interest in the anniversary has so far been relatively muted – a contrast with Germany, where an entire decade of official commemorative events is accelerating towards its climax. But Luther undoubtedly belongs to that relatively select company of eminent dead foreigners of whom nearly all British people have heard, and he enjoys the reputation of being a force for historical good: a prophet of individual conscience and liberty against oppressive structures of power and inherited patterns of thinking.

Roper’s beautifully written life is not exactly an exercise in debunking, but she admits that Luther is a ‘difficult hero’. Her publishers’ claim that the book represents the first historical biography ‘for many decades’ is hyperbolic chutzpah, but it is certainly among the most interesting, provocative and original biographies of Luther to appear in recent years – one that tackles head on the challenge of entering into and exploring the interior life of its subject.

more here.