Luc Sante at The Paris Review:

Judging by its austere style, this picture might have been taken by a member of the Crewe Circle, a group of British spirit photographers active in the early twentieth century. It could possibly be the work of Ada Emma Deane (1864–1957), who was in her late fifties when she first started taking photographs that included the faces of the dead. Her career was tumultuous and brief. Although she apparently managed some two thousand sessions, fame and consequent downfall came to her in 1922, when she photographed the annual Armistice Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in London. The resulting picture shows the scene blanketed by a sea of faces, purportedly those of the war dead, hovering in vapor. The Daily Sketch, however, matched many of the faces with those of living athletes, including some as famous as the Senegal-born boxing champion Battling Siki. Despite her insistences and the support of the consistently credulous Arthur Conan Doyle, she became an object of public ridicule and retreated to her suburban faithful, whom she photographed with their “extras” for a few more years before fading into complete obscurity.

Spirit photographs never fail to be eerie, if only because of their tawdriness. Like most, this one is indifferently composed; the lighting is garbage even under the circumstances; the sitter, who seems aware that she is not the subject, wears her at-home dyspeptic face, touched with apprehension.

more here.

Jared Diamond in Edge:

First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either adopt practices that are not profitable or for whatever reasons abandon practices that are profitable. But usually those fads are reversed, as a result of the societies next door without the fads out-competing the society with the fad, or else as a result of the society with the fad, like those European princes who gave up the guns, realizing they're making a big mistake and reacquiring the fad. In short, competition between human societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only in an isolated society, where there's no competition and no source of reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of a valuable technology. So that's one of the two sets of lessons that I want to draw from history, about what happens in a really isolated society and group.

The other lesson that I would like to draw from history concerns what is called the optimal fragmentation principle. Namely, if you've got a human group, whether the human group is the staff of this museum, or your business, or the German beer industry, or Route 128, is that group best organized as a single large unit, or is it best organized as a number of small units, or is it best fragmented into a lot of small units? What's the most effective organization of the groups?

…So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don't want excessive unity and you don't want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.

More here.

Julia Rosen in Science:

In a dingy apartment building, insulated by layers of hanging rugs, the last family on Earth huddles around a fire, melting a pot of oxygen. Ripped from the sun’s warmth by a rogue dark star, the planet has been exiled to the cold outer reaches of the solar system. The lone clan of survivors must venture out into the endless night to harvest frozen atmospheric gases that have piled up like snow. As end-of-humanity scenarios go, that bleak vision from Fritz Leiber’s 1951 short story “A Pail of Air” is a fairly remote possibility. Scholars who ponder such things think a self-induced catastrophe such as nuclear war or a bioengineered pandemic is most likely to do us in. However, a number of other extreme natural hazards—including threats from space and geologic upheavals here on Earth—could still derail life as we know it, unraveling advanced civilization, wiping out billions of people, or potentially even exterminating our species.

…One threat to civilization could come not from too little sun, as in Leiber’s story, but from too much. Bill Murtagh has seen how it might start. On the morning of 23 July 2012, he sat before a colorful array of screens at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, watching twin clouds of energetic particles—known as a coronal mass ejection (CME)—erupt from the sun and barrel into space. A mere 19 hours later, the solar buckshot blazed past the spot where Earth had been just days before. If it had hit us, scientists say, we might still be reeling.

More here.

Steve Locke in his blog, Art and Everything After:

This is what I wore to work today.

On my way to get a burrito before work, I was detained by the police.

I noticed the police car in the public lot behind Centre Street. As I was walking away from my car, the cruiser followed me. I walked down Centre Street and was about to cross over to the burrito place and the officer got out of the car.

“Hey my man,” he said.

He unsnapped the holster of his gun.

I took my hands out of my pockets.

“Yes?” I said.

“Where you coming from?”

“Home.”

Where’s home?”

“Dedham.”

How’d you get here?”

“I drove.”

He was next to me now. Two other police cars pulled up. I was standing in from of the bank across the street from the burrito place. I was going to get lunch before I taught my 1:30 class. There were cops all around me.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1250, the prior of a Cistercian Abbey reputedly tied a note to a leg of a barn swallow, which read: “Oh swallow, where do you live in winter?” The next spring, he got a response: “In Asia, in the home of Petrus.”

This perhaps apocryphal story marks one of the first known instances of someone tagging an animal to track its movements. Thanks to many such endeavors, we now know that every year, barn swallows migrate between their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere to wintering grounds throughout the tropics and the south. In 1912, one intrepid individual that was ringed in England turned up 7,500 miles away in South Africa.

But swallows are the exception rather than the rule. The journeys of most migratory animals, especially smaller species, are a mystery. Flocks, herds, and shoals are constantly crisscrossing the globe, but despite the intense surveillance of our planet, we often have no idea what paths they take. “They leave in one place and we don’t know what happens to them until they show up in another place,” says Meg Crofoot from the University of California, Davis.

This ignorance makes it hard to save threatened species: what works in one part of the world may be completely undone as animals travel to another. It also jeopardizes our own health. Where are the birds that harbor avian flu? Where do the bats that carry Ebola go? What about the red-billed quelea, a small finch that flocks in millions and devours crops with locust-like voraciousness?

More here.

Max Nelson in The Point:

The subtitles that appear under most foreign-language films in British and American movie theaters tend not to call attention to themselves. Moviegoers only notice them when something goes wrong—when they’ve been rendered bulbously large, or when they’ve been colored a sickly yellow, or when they disappear against a white object, fall out of sync with the dialogue, flit abruptly to another region of the screen or bear the goofily garbled translations of which a Google search for “bad subtitles” gives you hundreds of examples. Possibly because they’re designed to go unremarked, subtitle translations remain one of the least studied and most overlooked features a film can have.

The average English subtitle is a modestly sized, pleasant-looking bar of thin sans serif text between 32 and forty characters long. Unlike its ancestor, the silent film intertitle, which was often bedecked with illustrations suited to the movie and sometimes included fonts and effects that matched the words it showed, the subtitle can’t be incorporated into a film’s overall design. In that event, it would become part of the film; it, too, would need to be subtitled when the film was screened for other markets. As a visual element, the subtitle is extraneous, replaceable and unassimilated into everything else in a given frame. Critics of subtitles have protested that they seem stuck onto films where space wasn’t made for them, as if they need to atone for defacing the movie by doing their business as quietly and modestly and unobtrusively as possible.

More here.

Amanda Giracca in Orion Magazine:

Imagine: you have been studying marine invertebrates in the laboratory. Your professor has shown you videos of bioluminescence; you understand the chemical reaction that allows an organism to glow in the dark. But then you are on your first trip to Belize, wading into a lagoon at night and watching the tar-black sea illuminate around your body, the swish of your hand through water leaving a blaze of blue stars that twinkle momentarily and go dark again. You might be moved to tears, as a student of Gretchen Gerrish’s was.

Imagine never having stepped on dirt before, like many of Bobby Espinoza’s students at California State University, Northridge, who hail from the greater Los Angeles area, and who show up to their first field excursion with Samsonite suitcases and inadequate footwear. They’re used to going to the mall on the weekend, not into the woods.

Imagine a morning like the morning Steve Trombulak took his students to Middlebury College’s bird-banding station: the mist was rising and through the fog they saw a red fox leap for its morning prey; then the beavers started slapping their tails in the water, and, as if on cue, a flock of great blue herons flew right over their heads. You might be compelled to exclaim — unironically, as Trombulak insists his student did — “Wow, this is better than Discovery Channel!”

Moments like these are transformational.

And this transformation teaches empathy. Students become less absorbed in themselves and start paying attention to the world around them. They become aware of other beings, of their own impacts. It teaches autonomy, too. Harry Greene, the Cornell ecologist, likes to talk about his students during their first field sojourn. At first “they bitch and moan about having to ID these little brown birds and about the fact it’s wet.” But by the end of the semester they’re seasoned naturalists who “becalm their fellow students in order to see the rattlesnake behind a rock, or noose a fence lizard to see if it’s a female or a male.”

More here.

Michael Rustin at Eurozine:

Globalization, promoted by establishments of the centre-left and -right as a necessity that must be embraced, and from which it was alleged new opportunities could be created, has been found to have severe costs. There has been a polarization of response to this situation. Those whose positions in the labour market have been undermined by de-industrialization (in fact, by the transfer of capital to more competitive, lower-wage locations) have turned against the system; while those whose level of education and skills have enabled them to find niches in buoyant sections of the economy have remained at least tolerant of it. These differences coincide to a degree with age, with tolerance of multicultural populations and commingling, and with a more favourable attitude to the cosmopolitanism associated with the European Union. Voting in the UK referendum seems to have been roughly proportional to educational levels – the higher the average level of education in a region, the higher the support for the UK remaining an EU member state, with university graduates being the most likely to vote Remain.

Those disillusioned by this painful experience have turned not to the Left but to the Right for the expression of their discontents. Thus the Single European Market and its rules requiring the free movement both of capital and labour has been rejected by the British electorate – this is what the vote to leave the EU means. Comparable nationalist movements of the Right are in the ascendancy in many countries of Europe. What has happened is that the protests against globalization, capital and free markets by the disadvantaged have been captured by the Right, in the absence of effective resistance from the Left.

more here.

Craig Raine at the Times Literary Supplement:

O’Keeffe the academic painter is also a vestigial commercial artist. Just as she never completely left behind her early training, drawing from casts, so she suffered adéformation professionnelle from her relatively short period as a commercial artist in Chicago in 1908 – where she worked freelance for various agencies, drawing lace and embroidery for newspapers and magazines. Andy Warhol also began as a commercial artist, but his understanding of the relationship of commercial art to fine art is more subtle, more knowing, than hers. He realized that the difference was in the finish – that fine art had a rougher finish, that it disclosed the hand of the painter, whereas in commercial art the individual touch was smoothed away. Commercial art as vanishing cream. (It is telling that O’Keeffe in reproduction differs not at all from the originals. Unusually, when you encounter the pictures in person, what you have seen already is what you get.)

Accordingly, Warhol invented a drawing technique, a deliberately jagged line. This was achieved by inking over a pencil drawing, blotting it and discarding the original image. In this way, Warhol created the effect of the artist’s hand at work – the opposite of slick, machine-made art.

When Warhol was still a commercial artist, he drew a snake as a shoe for Arthur and Teddy Edelman who ran Fleming Joffe Leather. It is ingenious and witty. The snake outline is a continuous knot – to advertise a snakeskin shoe – but the marks representing texture go over the outline in places, lending it the look of something hand-crafted. O’Keeffe’s paintings are commercial in their care.

more here.

Sunila Galappatti at The Wire:

It takes a long time to tell this story to friends: to say that I have a book just out; that I worked on it for five years without speaking openly about it; that it is a memoir written in the voice of a naval officer who was held captive for eight years during the Sri Lankan civil war and that he speaks of that experience in an understated and accepting way.­

This acceptance is the most surprising thing about the story and, almost immediately, people ask, “Did he go Stockholm?” I tell them it is a joke the commodore makes. “Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome,” he will say, and laugh. How is he to know, or I? We are not able to make a diagnosis, any more than the people who ask the question.

But over time I have wondered why this particular question recurs, of so many possible questions. There is inside it an urge to know – to be able to identify as something we recognise, a story that doesn’t fit the format we expect. There is a suggestion that we might know better than the man who is telling us his story. We are quick to make an illness of his survival strategies. Above all, we are schooled to resist the story being told.

more here.

Jill Rosen in PhysOrg:

Johns Hopkins University researchers are the first to glimpse the human brain making a purely voluntary decision to act. Unlike most brain studies where scientists watch as people respond to cues or commands, Johns Hopkins researchers found a way to observe people's brain activity as they made choices entirely on their own. The findings, which pinpoint the parts of the brain involved in decision-making and action, are now online, and due to appear in a special October issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. “How do we peek into people's brains and find out how we make choices entirely on our own?” asked Susan Courtney, a professor of psychological and brain sciences. “What parts of the brain are involved in free choice?”

The team devised a novel experiment to track a person's focus of attention without using intrusive cues or commands. Participants, positioned in MRI scanners, were left alone to watch a split screen as rapid streams of colorful numbers and letters scrolled past on each side. They were asked simply to pay attention to one side for a while, then to the other side—when to switch sides was entirely up to them. Over an hour, the participants switched their attention from one side to the other dozens of times. Researchers monitored the participants' brains as they watched the media stream, both before and after they switched their focus. For the first time, researchers were able to see both what happens in a human brain the moment a free choice is made, and what happens during the lead-up to that decision—how the brain behaves during the deliberation over whether to act.

More here.

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
.

by Walt Whitman
.

John Freeman in the Los Angeles Times:

Step gently on words such as “home” or “citizen” or even “body” with a foot bornelsewhere and they combust. Place names are even more incendiary. What happens when we read BEIRUT or TEHRAN or SAIGON while sitting at a cafe in Santa Monica?

This is war’s lexicon. It incorporates and redefines, especially by naming. In the U.S., recent Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Nguyen reminds us, we know the conflict as the Vietnam War; in Saigon, they call it the American War.

If writers must return history to human scale, the last decade of American life has proved just how necessary their linguistic re-engineering will be, even within our borders. In “Citizen,” Claudia Rankine showed it was possible to rescue the suffering of black bodies from spectacle if we questioned how we watched and from where.

Meanwhile, a new generation of poets — all descendants of the American Empire — have undertaken a project similar to Rankine’s on two fronts: retelling the myth of their being, and reclaiming language which has attempted to claim them.

More here.

John Farrell in Forbes:

I’ll apologize in advance for a long review. And it’s a long review because Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture is an important book that needs to be read by a much wider audience than popular science aficionados. But let me start with a short historical prologue:

Back in the 12th century, a trickle of monks flowed from Europe into the Iberian Peninsula, at the time still heavily dominated by Muslim rule, though Christian princes were beginning to retake the territories city by city. The pilgrims needed access to better lunar and planetary charts. They had heard from travelers, that Arab star watchers had a wealth of superior data.

So, the heads of the new cathedral schools on the continent sent these clerics down to Spain to get translations: First, and foremost, of the astronomical tables, so that the popes could make more accurate assessments of when Easter should be determined in the Gregorian calendar.

They could not imagine what they were getting themselves into. In Toledo they gained access to Latin translations of far more than astronomical tables. Medical books. Philosophy. Zoology. What became known as The Translation Movement, over the next two centuries, opened to Europe access to all the best sources of Ancient Science and Philosophy that existed and had been lost to the West since the fall of the Roman Empire, from Aristotle and the Greeks onward to the greatest physicians and philosophers of Islam.

More here.

Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair:

The waiter with the handlebar mustache encourages us to “participate in the small-plate culture.” Geraldine’s, the swank spot in Austin’s Hotel Van Zandt, is brimming with tech guys, some loudly talking about money. The college student at our table recommends the ribs—she’s been here before, on “dates” with her “daddies.” “There are a lot of tech guys,” she says. “They want the girlfriend experience, without having to deal with an actual girlfriend.”

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Miranda is 22 and has the wavy bobbed hair and clipped mid-Atlantic accent of a 1930s movie star; she grew up in a Texas suburb. “I’ve learned how to look like this, talk like this,” she says. “I work hard at being this,” meaning someone who can charge $700 an hour for sex.

More here.

Ben Luke at The Evening Standard:

The view of O’Keeffe mainly as a purveyor of floral erotica has a complex history. Psychoanalytical readings were first promoted by Stieglitz’s writings on O’Keeffe but also on women’s art in general. He wrote that: “The Woman sees the World through her Womb. That is her deepest feeling. Mind comes second.” O’Keeffe’s response to this Freudian take was spirited. She rejected the idea that she was a “strange unearthly creature floating in the air” and said: “I like beef steak — and I like it rare at that.”

She also rejected readings from another viewpoint entirely, generations later, when she was adopted by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. They saw her work as a crucial influence in representing the female body from a woman’s perspective rather than through the male gaze. O’Keeffe was dismissive: any sexual or gendered symbolism was in the eye of the beholder.

But the sexual readings aren’t entirely located in the imagery; O’Keeffe’s painted language is a big factor in prompting them. I was struck throughout the show by the way she describes form in a bodily way. Progressing gradually from light to dark, she models shapes so that they evoke the fall of light and shade on a limb as it meets a torso or, as Chicago and Schapiro propose in their reading of Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow (c1923), the labia and the vagina.

more here.

William Davies at The Point:

It became clear early on in the night that Leave had extraordinary levels of support in the North East, taking 70 percent of the votes in Hartlepool and 61 percent in Sunderland. It subsequently emerged that Wales had voted for Leave overall, especially strongly in the South around areas such as Newport. It is easy to focus on the recent history of Tory-led austerity when analyzing this, as if anger towards elites and immigrants was simply an effect of public spending cuts of the past 6 years or (more structurally) the collapse of Britain’s pre-2007 debt-driven model of growth.

But consider the longer history of these regions as well. They are well-recognized as Labour’s historic heartlands, sitting on coalfields and/or around ship-building cities. Indeed, outside of London and Scotland, they were amongst the only blobs of Labour red on the 2015 electoral map. There is no reason to think that they would not stay red if an election were held in the autumn. But in the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful “spatial fix” since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialized.

more here.

Neil Shea at The American Scholar:

Few soldiers or Marines I met in Iraq had read the book. Many of them knewDispatches, but they insisted that Iraq was not Vietnam. Their protests revealed how Herr’s wisdom, and that of his generation, had been lost. This became apparent to me one day at a press conference. I attended out of boredom and despair—being there meant I was not somewhere else. The war was slipping past in the distance, and Herr had given me to know that nothing could ever be learned at a media show. The room was large and beige in the way of any official nowhere, with rows of chairs flanking a long aisle. A flock of reporters had taken seats to the right, near the podium at the front of the room. I hung back to the left and sat beside a solitary figure, an older man with a high forehead and long, thinning hair. He was Peter Arnett, a legendary war correspondent who had covered Vietnam. We chatted for a while, and then he noticed I was carryingDispatches. He told me he and Herr had been friends.

“It’s a wonderful book,” he said. “But you know he made a lot of it up.”

I did not, and was crushed again. “How do you know?” I blurted.

He laughed. A certain patience in it.

“Because I was there.”

more here.