Ian Thomson at the Times Literary Supplement:

Of course, Levi was more than a witness to contemporary barbarism. In much of the newly translated journalism, fiction and poetry he explores the border zone between science and literature. His great scientific memoir, The Periodic Table, published in Italy in 1975, was ahead of its time: only in recent years has science become, in publishing terms, popular and attractive. Long before Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and others, Levi had sought to make science accessible to the layperson. The Periodic Table gathers up an extraordinary range of writing, from detective fiction to learned scientific commentary. Chronicled are the fumes, stinks, bangs and fiascos (as well as the occasional triumphs) of Levi’s early chemistry experiments in 1930s Turin, his deportation to Auschwitz and post-war recovery as a writer and chemist.

Over a quarter of a century has passed since Levi died in 1987, yet his fame has grown during this period. In certain quarters of the United States, nevertheless, his suicide provoked a degree of moral outrage. By taking his life, an anonymous diarist objected in the New Yorker, Levi had cheated his readers. So violent a gesture (he pitched himself down the stairwell of the block of flats where he lived in Turin) was seen to be at odds with the calm reason of his prose. The belief remains as vulgar as it is short-sighted: the manner of Levi’s death in no way diminishes the importance of his writing. In The Complete Works Levi portrays himself variously as courageous, cowardly, prophetic or naive, but usually well balanced; in reality he was not at all well balanced. Levi and his books are not one and the same. If anything, his suicide reminds us that the life of the artist does not run parallel to his art. The suicide was provoked by a clinical depression, which was compounded by a number of factors, among them the fear of memory loss and, possibly, guilt at having survived Auschwitz. These three volumes, appearing two decades after the two-volume Opere published in Italy in 1997, confirm Primo Levi as one of the most important writers of our time.

more here.

Tom Stern at Literary Review:

Which famous philosopher wrote, ‘I have experienced so much, happy and sad, enlivening and dispiriting, but God has led me safely through it all as does a father his weak little child’? The words are taken from the autobiography of the profoundly religious thirteen-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was given to writing autobiographies. The most famous of these, Ecce Homo, was penned in 1888, shortly before, or perhaps during, his descent into madness. You might have heard of that one because it contains chapters such as ‘Why I am So Clever’ and ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’. From 1858 to the end of the 1860s, Nietzsche wrote at least six autobiographies. These take centre stage in Daniel Blue’s new book on Nietzsche, covering the years 1844–69. We might be tempted to think of this as ‘Nietzsche: The Early Years’, but that would have misleading connotations. ‘Early Nietzsche’ customarily refers to the period 1868–76, when he was overtly under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Richard Wagner’s personality. In Blue’s 320 page account, Nietzsche buys Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation on page 216 and meets Wagner on page 300. This is ‘Nietzsche: Before the Early Years’. Eight years old on page 58, eighteen halfway through, we leave him aged twenty-four, arriving in Basel to take up his first university position in philology: employed, financially independent and no longer asking his mother to do his washing.

more here.

Drew Nellins Smith at The Millions:

Literature about sex, no matter who has written it, is almost always terrible, and everybody knows it. This is widely known and acknowledged — even on this very site, by both the great Sonya Chung and Julia Fierro. We’re all so tuned into its legendary badness that even relatively minor offenses in the realm of sex writing annoy us far more than other writerly transgressions. An imperfect depiction of sex is far worse for some reason than an inept description of someone entering a room or having a marital spat or whatever other things a book might get wrong without anyone disapproving quite so mercilessly.

There is sufficient scorn for bad sex writing that the Literary Review famously awards an annual prize for it. Though “prize” seems like a funny term for becoming the object of public ridicule and mockery. It’s a missing component of the human brain, the ability to recognize one’s own completely botched attempts at writing about penetration, blow jobs, and the rest of it. Most writers, one must assume, push themselves away from their desks at the end of their earnest writing sessions and think to themselves, Job well done. Only to discover a few months or years later that they have gone and humiliated themselves, at least according to a bunch of smug bastards on the other side of the ocean.

Which isn’t to say I’m not in sympathy with the smug bastards. In writing my own book full of sex, there was almost no one I could turn to for inspiration. There wasn’t a single book I looked to and thought, “What I’m trying to do is write sex like she did or like he did.”

more here.

Rupert Neate in The Guardian:

Getting locked up is unlikely to be good for your health but it’s “terrific, terrific” business for the booming private industry supplying doctors and nurses to jails and prisons. Many of those suppliers descended on Austin, Texas, last month to tout their services directly to jail administrators at the 35th annual American Jail Association conference.

As trade fairs go, this one is a little macabre. Companies line up to market everything from jumpsuits and meal trays to masks to stop prisoners from spitting, straitjackets and other full-body restraints. Once the national anthem had been observed and the AJA’s chaplain had led a prayer for jailers across the country, those gathered at Austin’s convention centre could get down to business: making money.

How long prisons will continue to be such money-spinners could depend on who wins the race for the White House. On the campaign trail Hillary Clinton has vowed to “end private prisons and private detention centers. They are wrong.” Donald Trump, on the other hand, has called for increased outsourcing of prisons. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations, and private prisons it seems work a lot better,” he said in an MSNBC town hall earlier this month.

In the meantime, Ahmad Afzal and his two brothers are making a “very good living” manufacturing prison jumpsuits, underwear and suicide safety smocks in Pakistan and selling them to US jails.

More here. [Thanks to Anna Hall.]

Refugee Blues

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you've got no passport you're officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

by WH Auden
from Selected Poems
Vintage Books 1979

Eboo Patel in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I recently met a graduate of an elite liberal-arts college who was working as the activities coordinator in a facility for senior citizens. The most interesting part of her job, she said, had to do with the diverse religious identities of her clients. She was constantly organizing event spaces for various religious holidays, working with the kitchen to make sure food was prepared in a manner that met different religious specifications, and arranging for funeral services according to the rites of diverse faith traditions. Occasionally she had to help calm an argument over doctrinal disagreements or contradictory religious practices. “I had to learn most of this on the fly,” she told me. “The one part of identity we never talked about in college was faith.” I was reminded of this story as I read through the recent Chronicle special report on diversity. As usual, the articles were sharp and provocative. And as usual, religious identity was totally ignored.

This is not so much a critique of The Chronicle as it is an observation about higher-education discourse more generally. Colleges are generally quick to respond to one set of important identity issues (racialized policing, transgender accommodations, sexist pay disparities) with academic and co-curricular programs meant to prepare leaders who can engage such challenges. Unfortunately, other dimensions of diversity, namely religion, get short shrift. But even a casual perusal of The New York Times on any given day illustrates that religious diversity issues — from diplomacy across religious divides to tailoring public-health campaigns to particular religious communities — are just as challenging as other identity issues. And the experience of the recent graduate I mentioned earlier who was working through religious issues at a senior citizens’ center could as easily have taken place at a school, a company, a hospital, a YMCA, or, indeed, a college campus — in other words, the spaces where much of American life takes place, and where college graduates get jobs.

Given this reality, I’d like to make a small proposal: Any college that promises to prepare global citizens has to take religious diversity seriously enough to educate their students to be interfaith leaders.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Geneticists from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that tumour protein TP53 knows exactly where to bind to our DNA to prevent cancer. Once bound to this specific DNA sequence, the protein can activate the right genes to repair damaged cells. All cells in our body have the same DNA, yet they're all very different. One cell may become a brain cell, the other a muscle cell. This is because not all genes are active – or 'switched on' – in every cell. Professor Stein Aerts and his team study the 'switches' that turn genes on and off. Gaining insight into these mechanisms is very important, because genetic defects and differences may not only be in our genes, but also in the 'switches' that control them. It's a known fact that genes are activated when a protein binds to a specific sequence on our DNA. But how does this protein find its way in our extraordinarily complex DNA? Scientists have thus far been assuming that one protein could never locate the exact DNA sequence to activate a specific gene all by itself – at least not in human beings. However, Professor Aerts and his colleagues from the Department of Human Genetics at KU Leuven, Belgium, have now shown that some of these proteins are in fact capable of locating their targets autonomously. Furthermore, the composition of some DNA switches turns out to be unexpectedly simple.

“We used next-generation sequencing to test the capacity of DNA sequences to act as switches for more than 1500 DNA sequences at the same time,” explains Professor Stein Aerts. By way of comparison: in the past, researchers had to test all switches one by one. “We then used supercomputers and advanced computer models to examine the differences between effective and non-effective switches. That's how we discovered that TP53 is able to locate the exact DNA sequence to which it needs to bind – all by itself.” “The protein TP53 plays a crucial role in the prevention of cancer. When a cell is damaged – because of UV or radioactivity, for instance – TP53 switches on the right genes to repair the cell. A cell sometimes loses TP53, so that cancer can start developing there. In about 50% of all cancers, there's a problem with the protein TP53. That's why it's so important to unravel its underlying mechanisms.”

More here.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey in Reason:

Contrary to economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty, our riches cannot be explained by the accumulation of capital, as the misleading word capitalism implies. The Great Enrichment did not come from piling brick on brick, or bachelor's degree on bachelor's degree, or bank balance on bank balance, but from piling idea on idea. The accumulation of capital was of course necessary. But so were a labor force and the existence of liquid water. Oxygen is necessary for a fire. Yet it would be unhelpful to explain the Chicago Fire of October 8–10, 1871, by the presence of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere.

The modern world, in other words, can't be explained by routine brick piling, such as the Indian Ocean trade, English banking, canals, the British savings rate, the Atlantic slave trade, the enclosure movement, the exploitation of workers in satanic mills, or the original accumulation of capital in European cities. Such routines are too common in world history and too feeble in quantitative oomph to explain the 30- to 100-fold enrichment per person unique to the past two centuries.

Hear again that amazing fact: In the two centuries after 1800, the goods and services made and consumed by the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 to 100—that is, a rise of 2,900 to 9,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments. It was caused by massively better ideas in technology and institutions.

More here.

From the website of The Sync Project:

WHAT IS IT?

The Sync Project is a biotech company developing music as precision medicine.

Intuitively we know the power that music has over us. We use music to regulate mood, to get pumped up, to work out, to relax. There is also strong directional evidence in science. Recent research has shown that music affects the same neural pathways that are regulated by pharmaceuticals such as psychostimulants and other drugs.

The Sync Project is building on this foundation and partnering with the world’s leading scientists and musicians on the first-ever large-scale studies to measure how the structural properties of music – like beat, key and timbre – impact biometrics such as heart rate, brain activity and sleep patterns.

We’ve built the mobile app and platform to gather this dataset and have started collecting data across a range of conditions. The platform integrates with streaming music services (like Spotify) and biometric sensors (like Apple Watch, Basis Peak, MUSE, ŌURA Ring and others). We then apply machine learning to this unique dataset to develop personalized music therapeutics. Think of us as a biometric recommendation engine for music.

Our goal is the clinical application of music in a variety of health conditions including sleep disorders, fatigue, movement disorders, stroke recovery, anxiety and pain.

YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?

Quite serious. The Sync Project is based on the best neuroscience and clinical studies on the health effects of music. Take the example of pain. It may seem surprising, but studies have shown that when people are played the right music after an operation they request less opioids (pain medication). Opioid abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, and it often begins with a prescription for pain medication following surgery or injury. We need to pursue alternative solutions for managing pain and other conditions, and clinically-validated, personalized music therapeutics present a promising option.

More here.

David Brin in Evonomics:

Even conservatives now admit that conservatism has changed. Take the Ronald Reagan who Republican activists idolize in abstract; in real life he raised taxes, increased regulations, signed environmental laws, and (worst of all) negotiated countless compromise give-and-take, pragmatic measures in tandem with a Congress run by the other party. As did Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, giants who argued with genteel courtesy and who revered both knowledge and intellect, especially science. Even the most fervid Tea Party aficionado would avow that today’s GOP has little room for such things—as Goldwater and Buckley themselves proclaimed, to their dismay, before they died.

In this analysis, I’d like to focus on one of the directions that conservatism has gone a-wandering. But note first: I’ll try to do this without taking a single position that could fairly be called even slightly left-of center—by the old standards at least.

My entire critique will be from what used to be a completely conservative perspective. You’ll know this by the historical figure whom I cite above all others.

It begins provocatively, with prominent online commentator John Robb, who offers a simple and clearly-correct explanation for the gross mismanagement of the U.S. economy in the first decade of the 21st Century—an appraisal that seems both tragically on-target and stunningly ironic. Ironic in ways I plan to elaborate—and I expect you’ll not look at the hoary old “left-vs-right” axis in the same way, ever again.

More here.

Vasudevan Mukunth in The Wire:

The experiment that first directly detected gravitational waves in the spacetime continuum has repeated the feat, scientists announced at a meeting in San Diego on June 15. The achievement establishes the experiment, called LIGO, as the primary tool with which astrophysicists now observe the play of gravity around massive bodies in the universe. It also reposes faith in some of the sophisticated techniques developed by scientists to detect and study gravitational waves, and highlights the challenges in the road ahead.

“This finding confirms the fact that the first detection wasn’t an isolated event,” P. Ajith, leader of the astrophysical relativity group at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru, told The Wire. “But more importantly, this is the beginning of serious gravitational astronomy.”

LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. Its two identical detectors are located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. In the wee hours of December 26, 2015, they detected gravitational waves originating from a pair of black holes that were about to merge, about 1.3 billion lightyears away. Before the merger, in the inspiral phase, the black holes rapidly spiral in tight orbits around each other, their acceleration sending away ripples of gravitational energy that alternatively contract and expand spacetime (by minuscule amounts) as they move through it – much as a wave passing through a sheet of cloth would.

More here.

Kevin Jackson at Prospect Magazine:

Was there more to it than mere anarchy? Yes; or possibly no; or possibly blago bung. Look up “Dada” in reference books of art history and you will usually find it mentioned in passing as a short-lived local craze that became diluted into the rather more polite (and, eventually, lucrative) rebellion of Surrealism, or into the politically engaged art of Germany in the Weimar period. You may also read that it was essentially a protest movement. Outside neutral Switzerland, the young men of Europe were blowing themselves to lumps of bone and meat in their millions; Dada was a howl of rage not only against the present War but against the classical humanist values that both sides claimed to represent—logic, clarity, harmony, order. Dada was a fart in the general direction of Western Civilisation.

Such accounts are not altogether wrong, and in later years some of the founding members began to spout the same, rather pious, party line about Dada always being at heart an anti-war movement. This, to put it mildly, does not quite tally with contemporary records. (Huelsenbeck, circa 1917: “We were for the war, and Dadaism today is still for war. Life must hurt…”) Whatever its original intent, the Dada spirit soon mutated and, like an opportunistic virus, spread rapidly around the globe, infecting New York, and Paris, and Berlin, and Tokyo. Among the big names who carried the Dada torch for at least a few years were Francis Picabia, George Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Hans Richter, Max Ernst and, most influential of all, Marcel Duchamp.

more here.

Peter E. Gordon at The Nation:

Unlikely as their friendship may seem, Scholem and Adorno had one thing in common: They had both been friends of the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, though at first this connection did little to awaken warm feelings between the two. Scholem had known Benjamin since their Berlin days in the Youth Movement during World War I, and he feared that Adorno would lead his friend astray—from Judaism and toward Marxism. He also had little patience for the elaborations of Adorno’s dialectic. On reading Adorno’s early study of Kierkegaard, Scholem wrote to Benjamin that it “combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah.”

Despite this initial chill, the mutual suspicion between the two men soon gave way to a shared concern for the fate of their friend. After the Nazi invasion of France, Scholem and Adorno exchanged details on Benjamin’s flight southward from Paris and eventually to Portbou, the town on the Spanish border where he committed suicide. The awful event is reported in a letter dated October 8, 1940, sent by Adorno (then in New York) to Scholem (in Jerusalem). It stands among the earliest letters in their correspondence. Whatever their ideological differences, the tragedy of Benjamin’s death would loom over their friendship for the next three decades, and the bond between them would be forged from the shared experience of mourning. As Asaf Angermann notes in his editor’s afterword, the publication of this volume closes the circuit of correspondence among three of the most esteemed European intellectuals of the 20th century. The letters between Scholem and Benjamin span the years 1932 to 1940; those between Benjamin and Adorno, 1928 to 1940. Those between Adorno and Scholem cover a full three decades, from 1939 to 1969, and are the most extensive of the three collections—a dialogue between survivors.

more here.

Aleksandar Hemon at Lapham's Quarterly:

I’m of a staunch belief that anything that can be said and thought in one language can be thought and said in another. The words might have a different value or interpretative aura, but there is always more than enough overlapping not to dismiss the project of translation, which is essential not only to the project of literature, but to the project of humanity as well.

But then there is the Bosnian word kata­strofa, which, most obviously, comes from the same Greek word (katastrophe [καταστροφή], meaning overturning) as its English counterpartcatastrophe. But in Bosnian—or at least in the language my family uses—katastrofa has a substantially different value and applicability than catastrophe has in English. We use it all the time, deploying it in the contexts that would be less appropriate in English. My mother would thus reprimand my father by saying, “Ti si, ćale, katastrofa!” (translatable as: You, Pop, are a catastrophe!) because he left a trail of dirty socks all the way to the bedroom. Or my father, in his report on a pipe bursting in their house wall, would use katastrofa to refer to the necessity of digging through said wall to find the source of the leak. My sister, who lives in London, would describe the leaden January skies depressingly looming over England and her head as katastrofa. And I could apply katastrofa to, say, the inability of Liverpool FC to defend corner kicks, or to the realization that I’m in the bathroom without toilet paper and the nearest roll is a hallway away. One of the few Bosnian words Teri understands is katastrofa, mainly by way of hearing me bemoan various unfortunate turns of events.

more here.

Amartya Sen in New Statesman:

It cannot be said that the European ­Union is doing particularly well at this time. Its economic performance has been mostly terrible, with high unemployment and low economic expansion, and the political union itself is showing many signs of fragility. It is not hard to understand the temptation of many in Britain to call it a day and “go home”. And yet it would be a huge mistake for Britain to leave the EU. The losses would be great, and the gains quite puny. And the “home” to go back to no longer exists in the way it did when Britannia ruled the waves.

…The proposal of Brexit is born out of panic, and it is as important to see that the reasoning behind the panic is hasty and weak as it is to recognise that wisdom is rarely born of fright. In his Nexus Lecture, called “The Idea of Europe”, given a dozen years ago, George Steiner wondered about the prospects for Europe playing a leadership role in the pursuit of humanism in the world. He argued: “If it can purge itself of its own dark heritage, by confronting that heritage unflinchingly, the Europe of Montaigne and Erasmus, of Voltaire and Immanuel Kant may, once again, give guidance.” Brexit would certainly be a bad economic move, but the threat that it carries is very much larger than that.

More here.

Susan Schneider in KurzweilAI:

Some things in life cannot be offset by a mere net gain in intelligence. The last few years have seen the widespread recognition that sophisticated AI is under development. Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and others warn of the rise of “superintelligent” machines: AIs that outthink the smartest humans in every domain, including common sense reasoning and social skills. Superintelligence could destroy us, they caution. In contrast, Ray Kurzweil, a Google director of engineering, depicts a technological utopia bringing about the end of disease, poverty and resource scarcity. Whether sophisticated AI turns out to be friend or foe, we must come to grips with the possibility that as we move further into the 21st century, the greatest intelligence on the planet may be silicon-based. It is time to ask: could these vastly smarter beings have conscious experiences — could it feel a certain way to be them? When we experience the warm hues of a sunrise, or hear the scream of an espresso machine, there is a felt quality to our mental lives. We are conscious.

A superintelligent AI could solve problems that even the brightest humans are unable to solve, but being made of a different substrate, would it have conscious experience? Could it feel the burning of curiosity, or the pangs of grief? Let us call this “the problem of AI consciousness.” If silicon cannot be the basis for consciousness, then superintelligent machines — machines that may outmode us or even supplant us — may exhibit superior intelligence, but they will lack inner experience. Further, just as the breathtaking android in Ex Machina convinced Caleb that she was in love with him, so too, a clever AI may behave as if it is conscious. In an extreme, horrifying case, humans upload their brains, or slowly replace the parts of their brains underlying consciousness with silicon chips, and in the end, only non-human animals remain to experience the world. This would be an unfathomable loss. Even the slightest chance that this could happen should give us reason to think carefully about AI consciousness.

The philosopher David Chalmers has posed “the hard problem of consciousness,” asking: why does all this information processing need to feel a certain way to us, from the inside? The problem of AI consciousness is not just Chalmers’ hard problem applied to the case of AI, though. For the hard problem of consciousness assumes that we are conscious.

More here.

Jessica Johnson in The New Republic:

One of the most pure and innocent of decisions, at least in theory, is the ritual of choosing a flavor in an ice cream shop. There, behind the counter, is the bounty of options ranging from the classic (vanilla, chocolate) to the nostalgic (rocky road, butter pecan) to the exotic (what is in that blue barrel over in the corner?). Somewhere in the frosty air hangs the suggestion that whatever selection we end up with will be uniquely “us”—along with an idea that, whatever everyone else gets, all options are uniquely good.

A cone of ice cream, one vanilla and one chocolate, appear on the two different covers, one red and one blue, of You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Tom Vanderbilt’s new book on the mechanisms of the aesthetic world. Vanderbilt suggests there is probably very little that is natural, independent, or even “right” about any of our choices. “The more a person’s experience with a product matches his expectation, the more he will like it, and vice versa,” he writes, reporting on a research facility that develops M.R.E. rations. It turns out the reason soldiers can tolerate the same bland food for months may also be why your mother always orders vanilla. Human beings are wired both for familiarity and novelty, the gas-and-brake system of evolution. While an initial arc of appreciation for what’s new and exciting quickly tapers, the familiar has longevity—perhaps also reflecting some innate biological prejudice against extremes. In other words, “What did not kill you last time is good for you this time.”

In the hallways of the Louvre, Vanderbilt finds further insight into the wisdom of crowds: Visitors marvel at the Mona Lisa over, say, a lesser-known work nearby, because they have already been told to expect a masterpiece.

More here.

Nona Robinson in Inference:

Umberto Eco died in Milan on February 19, 2016. Like the mathematician Giuseppe Peano, Eco was born in the Piedmont, the rice-growing region of Italy that slopes upward toward the Alps. There is a current of sympathy that flows between the two men. Peano was much taken with a form of Latin stripped of its declensions, what he called Latino sine flexione, and argued for its adoption in a paper published in the Revue de Mathématiques. A masterpiece in its own way, the paper begins in classical Latin and by its end is expressed entirely in pidgin; had he kept it up, Peano would, no doubt, have invented Italian. Like Peano, Eco was an accomplished Latinist, an incurable erudito, a great poker into obscure facts. His family name, an acronym of the phrase ex caelis oblatus (a gift from the skies), was bestowed by a city official on his grandfather, a foundling.

Eco studied medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin, writing his thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas—Il problema estetico in San Tommaso. In the preface to the 1970 Italian edition of Il problema, Cristina Farronato argued that what originally inspired Eco to write about Aquinas was his immersion in the Thomistic religious universe. Fair enough. But while writing his dissertation, she adds, Eco “distanced himself more and more from [its] spiritual content and was left with a methodological experience.”¹ This might suggest an enveloping sense of aridity on Eco’s part. Readers who know nothing of Eco’s story-telling gusto might imagine that he often required a glass of water.

Not at all. Eco was wet by nature.

More here.