Dorian Stuber in Open Letters Monthly:

For three months in the fall of 1943, the Italian writer Primo Levi joined a small band of partisans based in the Piedmontese Alps. More than thirty years later, Levi described the group in characteristically modest terms: “We were cold and hungry, we were the most disarmed partisans in the Piedmont, and probably also the most unprepared.” Much of their time was spent wheedling supplies from the locals, who were often suspicious of their aims. The rest was spent looking for ammunition. According to Levi, they had nothing but a “tommy gun without bullets and a few pistols.”

In his fascinating new book, Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto explains that, however insignificant Levi and his comrades may have seemed to themselves, they had attracted the attention of officials in the Italian Social Republic. Popularly known as the Republic of Salò, after the town in Lombardy where it was headquartered, the Republic had been formed in September 1943 when the Germans reinstalled the deposed Mussolini as head of a satellite state. Italy was split in two: in the south a government supported by King Victor Emmanuel III worked with the Allies, while in the north fascism persisted.

Salò took its orders from Berlin; Luzzatto focuses on how that obedience played out in a small corner of northern Italy. He does so by showing how the actions of individuals made a difference in a time when so many of the larger political entities were in flux. One of those individuals was the zealous Police Prefect for the region of Aosta, Cesare Carnazzi. Carnazzi was eager to arrest two kinds of people: the partisans who were forming the nascent Italian Resistance and Jews who were to be deported to satisfy the demands of the Republic’s Nazi allies. In the mountains of Piedmont, those people were often the same.

More here.

June Gruber at Edge.org:

One of the biggest questions I've been asking myself is why positive emotions have been so deeply neglected, particularly in the understanding of mental illness. I think of this as the neglected role of positive emotions.

We know a lot about negative emotions in psychopathology, which has been important in getting to the root of disorders such as anxiety, substance abuse, and depression. This knowledge has been effectively disseminated in order to develop etiological models and create effective treatment. We know far less about the role of positive emotions in human health and also human dysfunction, which is one of the biggest questions that I've been trying to tackle lately. It's not a trivial question.

Why should we care about the fact that studying positive emotions has been absent in our understanding of severe and chronic mental illness? There're two broad reasons as to why this question matters and why I've been spending time thinking about it. One of them is a practical reason and one of them is a more theoretical reason. The practical reason we should care about positive emotions in our conceptualizations of human health and severe mental illness is because, to put it plainly, severe and chronic psychiatric diseases are a societal burden. We know that, for example, substance use disorders alone are accounting for $500 billion a year in annual cost. Anxiety disorder is not far behind in terms of cost relating to days missed in work productivity and healthcare utilization. We also know that many common and chronic disorders—depression or bipolar disorder—are in the top ten causes of leading worldwide disability.

More here.

Drew Hinshaw and Joe Parkinson in the Wall Street Journal:

Wellington Jighere with his trophy after winning the world championship.

Nigeria is beating the West at its own word game, using a strategy that sounds like Scrabble sacrilege.

By relentlessly studying short words, this country of 500 languages has risen to dominate English’s top lexical contest.

Last November, for the final of Scrabble’s 32-round World Championship in Australia, Nigeria’s winningest wordsmith, Wellington Jighere, defeated Britain’s Lewis Mackay, in a victory that led morning news broadcasts in his homeland half a world away.

It was the crowning achievement for a nation that boasts more top-200 Scrabble players than any other country, including the U.K., Nigeria’s former colonizer and one of the board game’s legacy powers.

“In other countries they see it as a game,” said Mr. Jighere, now a borderline celebrity and talent scout for one of the world’s few government-backed national programs. “Nigeria is one of the countries where Scrabble is seen as a sport.”

Once, almost all of Scrabble’s champions hailed from North America or Europe. Most stuck to a similar “long word” strategy—mastering thousands of seven- and eight-letter plays like QUIXOTRY, a 365-point-move in American Michael Cresta’s record-breaking 830 point win in 2006.

That seems smart Scrabble. A player who can unload all seven tiles gets an extra 50 points, in what is called a bingo.

Global competition and computer analytics have brought that sacred Scrabble shibboleth into question, exposing the hidden risks of big words.

More here.

Neal Ascherson in the London Review of Books:

Werner Willikens was quite a senior Nazi civil servant. In the crushed and castrated government of Prussia, he had become the state secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture. It was in February 1934, just over a year after Adolf Hitler had become chancellor, that Willikens made a speech to agriculture officials from all over the Reich, using words that have come in our own time to fascinate historians. ‘The Führer,’ he said, ‘finds it very difficult to bring about by order from above things which he intends to realise sooner or later.’ It was, therefore, ‘the duty of each one of us to try to work towards him in the spirit of the Führer’. The German, not easy to translate precisely, is ‘im Sinne des Führers ihm entgegenzuarbeiten’.

Willikens was not revealing some unknown fact. But he was offering posterity (as well as the party comrades in front of him) a really useful way of understanding how decisions were made in the Third Reich. ‘Working towards the Führer’ explains how many initiatives, including some of the worst, originated in the wider Nazi bureaucracy rather than with Hitler himself. And it can be argued that this commandment to second-guess and anticipate Hitler helped him to surf into ever more radical and terrible policies which are usually attributed to his invention alone.

As Volker Ullrich points out, there is an apparent contradiction here. On the one hand, the Leader’s will was supposed to be absolute and monocratic, and anyone who could claim convincingly that he was carrying out ‘the Führer’s will’ would get his way. On the other, a chaotic, ‘Darwinian’ struggle of overlapping Nazi institutions raged as each competed to make up Hitler’s mind for him. Behind all this was the weird, slovenly manner in which Hitler formed policies.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin.]

James Campbell at the Times Literary Supplement:

Writing to Richard Aldington in March 1957, Lawrence Durrell relayed the boast of his friend Henry Miller that, at the age of sixty-five, he could still dance for his grandchildren, “without straining anything. ‘Like a doe’ he says – always prone to self-admiration! . . . He’s a most endearing gentle and babyish character – not at all the cannibal he acts when he writes.” Durrell assured Aldington that he would enjoy meeting Miller. “Everyone has a picture of him as a sort of ghoul from his work; but a gentler, more honourable, considerate and devoted man it would be impossible to find.”

Miller’s most famous books – Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn – were banned in Britain and America at the time, remaining so until Grove Press risked prosecution by printing Tropic of Cancer in 1961, to be followed by a John Calder edition in the UK two years later. They were none the less widely read, being available legally in Paris, first in the original editions from the Obelisk Press, the creation of the Mancunian Jack Kahane, then from Obelisk’s post-war offshoot, Olympia Press (overseen by his son, Maurice Girodias), and were obtainable under the counter in English-speaking countries. Their fugitive status in the 1950s and 60s, together with that of other titles –The World of Sex, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Nexus andPlexus) – conspired to make Miller the hardiest of that alluring mid-century species, the sexual outlaw, perhaps the last of its kind in Western lands.

more here.

Dominic Green at The New Criterion:

The typical Modiano novel begins with a mystery of origins and identity, and proceeds by passivity and vagueness. Sometimes, the story terminates in a tragedy of life foreshortened. Sometimes the track runs full circle, as though life is a series of improvisations, each designed to keep you where you are. Either way, the “force of circumstances” determines the outcome.

The premise of a Modiano mystery mimics that of a detective novel, but the execution eschews the vulgarity of a traditional detective plot.Voyages des noces, translated into English as Honeymoon (1995), begins with the narrator, Jean B., in a hotel bar.

A woman had committed suicide in one of the hotel rooms two days before, on the eve of the fifteenth of August. The barman was explaining that they had called an ambulance, but in vain. He had seen the woman in the afternoon. She had come into the bar. She was on her own. After the suicide, the police had questioned him. He hadn’t been able to give them many details. A brunette.

Instead of solving the crime like Sam Spade, Jean leaves his wife and child, pretends to fly to Rio, and then holes up in Paris. There, he reimagines the movements of a young refugee couple that he had met twenty years earlier, during the German occupation. The mystery turns out to be existential.

more here.

Nicholas Mayes at The Spectator:

Here we might learn something from the Wahhabis. Plenty of observers have bewailed the Saudi authorities’ bulldozing of many of Mecca’s and Medina’s earliest buildings, pulled down lest they become shrines in themselves and distract from the core tenets of Islam. But the custodians of the holy mosques understand that Muhammad, like Ben Jonson’s Shakespeare, ‘is not of an age but for all time’.

The same principle holds for Palmyra and its wonders, and for the best art of our own era: to preserve, regenerate. The stones and gongs that make up a temple or a piece of art can change without destroying the ideas they hold up or erasing the history that holds them up. In Palmyra’s case, that history speaks of cosmopolitanism, religious pluralism and world trade; we should make it stand for these things again, before Putin makes it stand for whatever it is he’s after. In that spirit, we should help rebuild the arches and temples of Palmyra if the Syrians wish, and let viewers organise and reorganise Calder’s sculptures if they wish.

more here.

Homa Khaleeli in The Guardian:

What can you recite by heart? Your times tables? German verb formations? The Lord’s Prayer? Salman Rushdie thinks it should be poetry. Speaking at the Hay Festival, the novelist described memorising poems as a “lost art” that “enriches your relationship with language”. But doesn’t learning poetry by rote make children learn the words but lose the meaning? Not necessarily, according to David Whitley, a senior lecturer at Cambridge University currently researching poetry and memory. He says that, while some people remember with horror having to recite poems in front of an audience, for many, learning poetry by heart can be “life-enhancing”. Whitely, whose Poetry and Memory project surveyed almost 500 people, says: “Those who memorised poems had a more personal relationship [with the poem] – they loved it for the sound and meaning, but it also connected with their life currents – people they loved, or a time that was important to them. “For people who memorise a poem, it becomes a living thing that they connect with – more so than when it is on a page. Learning by heart is often positioned as the opposite of analysis. But for many people who know a number of poems, their understanding grows over time and changes.”

Whitley says that while learning poems was mandatory up until the first world war, and popular in the interwar period, it fell out of fashion in the 50s and 60s, thanks to its association with rote learning. Now, he says, teachers tend to be reluctant to embrace the idea of teaching poems by heart, because they are wary it will be standardised and tested. But while learning poems has become less frequent in schools, it has not disappeared. “One of the interesting things is when [memorising poetry] dropped out of school culture … it became part of a family culture. Often, there is a father who has a lot of poems, and it becomes part of the family culture that people recite and share them. It’s almost a special language.”

More here.

Virginia Gewin in Nature:

Hossam Haick, a nanotechnology researcher at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, has developed devices to detect cancer using exhaled breath rather than through biopsies. But, he explains, life in Israel can be difficult for Arab scientists. He is therefore trying to use his science to bridge cultural boundaries.

How many Arab professors are at the Technion?

Out of 600 faculty members, there are 9 Arab professors. The Arab community in Israel is 20% of the population, but in academia, it is roughly 1%. There is a pervasive belief in Israel that the Arab community is not educated. I try to dispel that notion.

How did you get the idea to use breath to diagnose disease?

I read a lot of the history. From the ancient Greeks 2,400 years ago to Alexander Graham Bell in the early 1900s, there were long-standing hypotheses of the smell of chronic disease in breath. I also heard hypotheses that dogs could smell cancer. I decided to see if I could prove scientifically whether there is something about exhaled breath that can reveal signs of disease.

At what stage is the research?

We have shown that exhaled breath contains unique fingerprints of specific diseases. We have lab results, as well as animal experiments. We have run clinical studies with 5,000 patients across 19 departments and 9 institutions, where we collected breath with a small device called NaNose, which is able to detect more than 1,000 different compounds in the breath from all of these people. We started with lung cancer, and have extended studies to gastric, colorectal and breast cancers, as well as to degenerative disease such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis. In the case of lung cancer, we are able to discriminate between benign and malignant tumours with 88% accuracy. By using breath to discriminate between benign and malignant tumours, we could save people from having to undergo unnecessary biopsies and surgeries.

More here.

Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri over at the IMF (yes, that IMF):

MILTON Friedman in 1982 hailed Chile as an “economic miracle.” Nearly a decade earlier, Chile had turned to policies that have since been widely emulated across the globe. Th e neoliberal agenda—a label used more by critics than by the architects of the policies— rests on two main planks. Th e fi rst is increased competition—achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets, including fi nancial markets, to foreign competition. Th e second is a smaller role for the state, achieved through privatization and limits on the ability of governments to run fi scal defi cits and accumulate debt.

There has been a strong and widespread global trend toward neoliberalism since the 1980s, according to a composite index that measures the extent to which countries introduced competition in various spheres of economic activity to foster economic growth. As shown in the left panel of Chart 1, Chile’s push started a decade or so earlier than 1982, with subsequent policy changes bringing it ever closer to the United States. Other countries have also steadily implemented neoliberal policies (see Chart 1, right panel).

There is much to cheer in the neoliberal agenda. The expansion of global trade has rescued millions from abject poverty. Foreign direct investment has often been a way to transfer technology and know-how to developing economies. Privatization of stateowned enterprises has in many instances led to more efficient provision of services and lowered the fiscal burden on governments.

However, there are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected.

More here.

Ezra Klein in Vox:

Eduardo Porter’s broadside against a universal basic income focuses almost entirely on the cost and efficiency of cutting every American a check that would keep them out of poverty. But the harder — and more important — question around a UBI is about how it interacts with our culture of work. And the truth is I have no idea how to answer it.

Here is the question: Could we respect people who live off a universal basic income?

Porter thinks not. Work, he writes, “is not just what people do for a living. It is a source of status. It organizes people’s lives. It offers an opportunity for progress. None of this can be replaced by a check.”

Later, he says that “in this world … where work remains an important social, psychological and economic anchor, there are better tools to help than giving every American a monthly check.”

Notice what he did there. “In this world.” So long as any discussion of a universal basic income is predicated on those three words, then I agree: It’s a bad idea. But the whole argument over a UBI, as I see it, is about the legitimacy of those three words. A UBI is the kind of radical policy that asks whether we actually need to live in this world, or whether there are better worlds on offer, if only we have the political and cultural courage to find them.

Does work — as currently conceived — have to be our primary source of status? Should it organize our lives? And can those dynamics be changed by a check?

Human beings are almost endlessly adaptable. Studies show that even the worst tragedies — the loss of a family member, the loss of a limb — only temporarily cut their happiness. But there are some conditions we never quite get used to. Among them is an extended bout of unemployment.

One major theory is that the pain of unemployment comes from the loss of social status. “Worker” is an identity you can be proud of, even if you don’t like your job. Having to recategorize yourself as “unemployed” robs you of your self-respect — and self-respect, it turns out, matters more than mere limbs.

More here.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi in Boston Review:

Two weeks ago, after recording what was perhaps her last official address and signing a net-neutrality addendum to Brazil’s landmark 2014 Internet civil rights legislation (the Marco Civil da Internet), Dilma Rousseff was temporarily removed from the office of president of Brazil. For a period of up to six months, the Senate will deliberate on whether to remove her permanently from office or reinstate her to finish her term, depending on if she is found guilty of a “crime of responsibility” for fiscal inconsistencies in the national budget. Meanwhile Vice-President Michel Temer, acting as interim president, has shuffled the country’s ministerial line-up and declared a series of policy reversals, primarily in an effort to restore national and international confidence in the country as a stable and business-friendly environment.

But despite the celebratory mood conveyed by Brazil’s corporate media, the country’s future is entirely uncertain. Not only is it far from assured that the Senate will vote at the end of the process to permanently suspend Rousseff, or that the Supreme Court will uphold the impeachment. The bigger uncertainty is whether the interim Temer administration will meet the minimum conditions to govern or be accepted as legitimate by a sufficient percentage of the population. For too many Brazilians at every level of the social ladder, the Rousseff impeachment seems transparently political, seeking to remove an unpopular but democratically elected president on thin, procedural grounds under the banner of fighting corruption. An unelected administration composed of several politicians themselves implicated in corruption is now beginning to carry out policies that the Brazilian public would have a hard time accepting at the ballot box. Internationally, the bizarre spectacle of the impeachment joins other recent power grabs by conservative forces in Latin America, notably in Paraguay and Honduras, which have sought to manipulate public institutions to facilitate elite interests.

More here.

Barbara Rose at The Easel:

Throughout his career, Richard Smith refused to be a theoretician or cite dogma or to become part of any given circle or style. Yes, the kites are shaped paintings– but only in their own and not any generic sense. They hang lightly, gingerly from an exposed hook, their balance, although carefully engineered, seemingly effortless. They remain fascinating because they occupy two zones of consciousness at the same time. They are neither this nor that, not entirely image nor entirely object. They are brilliantly resolved in terms of composition and color relationships, but not in terms of their status as things in the world.

Color and light, as much if not more than surface and edge, remain Smith’s principle preoccupations. Smith’s thoroughly original palette, his unexpected slightly off shades and tints and his mix of colors from the divergent worlds of fine art, textiles, advertising, cinema and nature distinguishes his painterly style. He invents colors as much as he invents shapes, something one could never say of the familiar contrasts of most hard edge or color field painting. Not until the late work produced when he moved to the heart of Renaissance Italy did Al Held create a palette as extensive and original as that of Richard Smith. Indeed, the two seem to stand apart as alchemists of color, willing to use and combine every kind of color from that of the old sand modern masters to the tones and tints of the countryside in all seasons to the artificial brash colors of industry and technology. And with all the talk about color field painting, this has neither been noted nor discussed in any meaningful way, perhaps because Held and Smith were too independent to be acknowledged by Greenberg who demanded fealty to his authority from those he promoted.

more here.

Aleksandar Hemon at Literary Hub:

I didn’t sign the Letter.

For one thing, if the writers take the American electoral system to be legitimate and legal, the way to oppose Trump’s candidacy is to vote against him—that’s what voting is for. It’s true, as the writers assert, that “the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies,” but Trump is presently abiding by the rules of democratic election, as are his followers, rabid as they may be. It’s also true that “neither wealth nor celebrity qualifies anyone to speak for the United States, to lead its military, to maintain its alliances, or to represent its people.” But what would qualify Trump to speak for the United States is his being elected in the fall, horrifying as that may seem, that’s how the system works—the election is the job interview. The Open Letter demands that Trump be excluded from the democratic process because he and his words are repellent, because his pelt and short fingers tarnish the comforting picture of American history that “despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together.”

It’s questionable, however, that his absence from the electoral process would restore the said picture to its full American glory. Would the writers have written a letter opposing Ted Cruz, an ardent sociopath who at some point in his life must have tortured rodents, and who is just as hateful as Trump, because he would’ve conformed to the accepted practices of American politics? Would Ben Carson, a stranger to reason, comply with the writers’ belief “that any democracy worthy of the name rests on pluralism, welcomes principled disagreement, and achieves consensus through reasoned debate”?

more here.

Peter Dorman at nonsite.

It’s been over a year since Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate was published to generally favorable, and sometimes ecstatic, reviews. Why write about it at this late date? If the purpose of a book review is to advise readers whether they should add a new line to their to-read list, there’s not much point. But I think Klein’s book and its reception have important implications, most of them unpleasant, for the state of the left in the United States and deserves a close reading for that reason.

Klein takes many stands in this book (several on some pages), and it’s impossible to summarize all of them. As we’ll see, it’s even difficult to sum up her central argument, since she contradicts it liberally. In my view, the central thread of this book is not analytical (hypotheses about the causes and cures of the climate crisis) but associative and evangelical. By the first, I mean that she interprets the politics of climate change as a battle between two forces, one good and the other evil, and much of the book is devoted to sorting people into these two categories. (There is virtually no ambiguity or overlap between them.) By the second, I have in mind the notion that what divides the villains from the heroes is their respective consciousnesses. If the battle is still in doubt, it’s because true ideas have not yet triumphed over faulty and wicked ones, so politics is fundamentally a matter of conversion. To be blunt, readers who pick up Klein’s book hoping to learn something about the impact of capitalism on the climate crisis will be disappointed, since by “capitalism” Klein means capitalist thinking.

more here.

Anthony Lane at The New Yorker:

Arbus inherited both strains: the urge to follow your star, plus the rage to cut yourself off and plunge into personal lockdown. One further twist in her upbringing was that she did not endure it alone, for her brother, Howard, was close to her, although whether that closeness offered aggravation or relief is open to debate. Both were precocious students, and they shared other talents, too. Diane masturbated in the bathroom with the blinds up, to insure that people across the street could watch her, and as an adult she sat next to the patrons of porno cinemas, in the dark, and gave them a helping hand. (This charitable deed was observed by a friend, Buck Henry, the screenwriter of “The Graduate.”) Not to be outdone in these vigorous stakes was her brother, who later, in a book called “Journal of the Fictive Life,” defined his self-abuse as “worship.” He added, “My father once caught me at it, and said he would kill me if it ever happened again.” A friend of Gertrude’s once told Howard that reading Freud would make you sick. On the contrary, it would be like a day in the life of the Nemerovs.

The summit of this weirdness comes before Lubow has reached page twenty, with the disclosure, from Arbus, that “the sexual relationship with Howard that began in adolescence had never ended. She said that she last went to bed with him when he visited New York in July 1971. That was only a couple of weeks before her death.” The source for this is a psychiatrist named Helen Boigon, who treated Arbus in the last two years of her life, and who was interviewed—though not named—by Patricia Bosworth for her 1984 biography of Arbus.

more here.

Matthew Sweet in More Intelligent Life:

Cycling one morning over the East Bay Hills, Professor Dacher Keltner had a near-death experience. “I was riding my bike to school,” he recalls, “and I came to a four-way intersection. I had the right of way, and this black Mercedes just barrelled through.” With two feet to spare before impact, the driver slammed on his brakes. “He seemed both surprised and contemptuous, as if I was in his more important way.” Keltner’s first response was a mixture of anger and relief: no Berkeley psychology professor with surfer-dude hair had been smeared over the Californian tarmac that day. His second was more academic. Was there, he wondered, a measurable difference between the behaviour of Mercedes owners and those of other cars? Cars that didn’t cost twice the average annual income of an American middle-class family? Had the guy who nearly killed him bought something else, along with $130,000-worth of German engineering? The professor put a group of students on the case; sent them out with clipboards to loiter on the traffic islands of Berkeley. They monitored vehicle etiquette at road junctions, kept notes on models and makes. They observed who allowed pedestrians their right of way at street crossings; who pretended not to see them and roared straight past. The results couldn’t have been clearer. Mercedes drivers were a quarter as likely to stop at a crossing and four times more likely to cut in front of another car than drivers of beaten-up Ford Pintos and Dodge Colts. The more luxurious the vehicle, the more entitled its owner felt to violate the laws of the highway.

What happened on the road also happened in the lab. In some experiments Keltner and his collaborators put participants from a variety of income brackets to the test; in others, they “primed” subjects to feel less powerful or more powerful by asking them to think about people more or less powerful than themselves, or to think about times when they felt strong or weak. The results all stacked the same way. People who felt powerful were less likely to be empathetic; wealthy subjects were more likely to cheat in games involving small cash stakes and to dip their fists into a jar of sweets marked for the use of visiting children. When watching a video about childhood cancer they displayed fewer physiological signs of empathy.

More here.