Edward Luce in The Financial Times:

What kind of president would Hillary Clinton make? Since she has already lived in the White House for eight years (1993-2001), we ought to have a surer feel for the prospect than for any previous incoming president. Yet America remains as bitterly divided in its view of her as any public figure since she came to prominence 24 years ago. It is hard to think of another name — Donald Trump included — whose mere mention can more quickly turn a placid dinner party into a shouting match. Everyone has a deeply held opinion. They just don’t often overlap. “Hillary Clinton is an intensely private person — she gives away so little,” says Robert McNeely, who spent six years with the Clintons as the official White House photographer. “If she weren’t in politics, she could be a world-class poker player.” As Clinton admitted in her Philadelphia acceptance speech last week, she far prefers the “service” part of public service to the public dimension, which she sees as a necessary evil. In that regard — and many others — it is hard to think of two characters less alike than Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“Bill craves attention,” says McNeely, whose photographic book of Clinton’s years as first lady comes out in January. “Hillary really doesn’t care if people like her or not.”

More here.

Dunne and Hamilton in The Christian Science Monitor:

Of the millions of species on the planet, humans seem fairly unique. We have produced flamenco dancing and skinny jeans, jet skis and cell phones, New York and Tokyo, and fabulous art and music by creative individuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Joni Mitchell. While many aspects of human technology, culture, and society have no clear counterparts in other species, do they make us truly unique? Every species possesses traits that other species don’t, which is how we distinguish a ferret from a starfish. If every species is different, what, if anything, sets the human species uniquely apart from other species?

…Humans live about as long as the theory predicts for an organism of our size. We wean our offspring at the predicted age. We reproduce at close to the predicted rate. And so on. It turns out that across many such life-history traits, there is nothing particularly unique about the basic biology of the human species – we fit right where we should on the body-size continuum. But things get interesting when we look at the energy consumption of humans. Our basic metabolic rate, as predicted by our body size, is about 100 watts – the energy demand of an incandescent light bulb. That’s about what you’d expect given our body size, according to the theory. But in the modern industrialized world, the energy we actually consume, collectively, to fuel our lives – to do things such as construct roads and buildings, fly airplanes, drive cars, and harvest and refrigerate food – is closer to 11,000 watts, on average, for someone living in the United States. In short, people in the US consume about 110 times more energy to function in an industrialized economy than predicted for an organism with our body size. The global human average, 3,000 watts, is 30 times greater than predicted. And that does make us unique; no other species on the planet uses close to this much energy to fuel their lives. What’s more, given that the average contemporary human consumes as much as 30 times more than a pre-industrial human, our effective global population from an energetic point of view is closer to 210 billion rather than our planet’s current 7 billion humans.

More here.

Karen Barbarossa writes:

There are few publishing houses which can make one feel enchanted, and they don’t come along very often. (I’ve ‘met’ two others in my lifetime.) To create such a mystery requires foresight and intent, yet to understand this, what is one to do?

To be enchanted by a catalog, there is no better choice than Biblioteca Adelphi. Eclectic, erudite, expansive — each book explores the great questions of humankind — Who am I? Why am I here? What does it mean to be human? What is my purpose? How did the world come to be? What does it mean to have a god? Is there a god? As well, smaller questions — Should I hate my father? Why is the world trying to kill me? What are other cultures like? Whom do I love?

The majority of books in the series were published in translation to Italian; of the 653 books published to date, only a few over 100 were originally written in Italian. Many of these books were first introduced to Italy by Adelphi. There are over 30 source languages. It is an incredible legacy and a fascinating series of choices, an expression and choice of a culture, perhaps the creation of a canon. I decided I would read all the books, in order, as many as possible in the original language, some, also in Italian.

More here.

Hamilton Cain in the Star Tribune:

Microbes have an unfairly poor reputation, Ed Yong argues in “I Contain Multitudes,” his beautifully written account of the history of microbes and researchers who have explored the vital roles these microscopic creatures play in our bodies and our world. Yong — who like Carl Zimmer belongs to the highest tier of science journalists at work today — weaves revelatory anecdotes and cutting-edge reporting into an elegant, illuminating page-turner that deserves a broad readership.

Yong traces microbes back to their beginnings, when bacteria and archaea (similar in appearance to bacteria but a different domain of microorganism) swam in our planet’s early oceans. For more than 2 billion years, these simple creatures were Earth’s only inhabitants, until a virtual mathematical impossibility occurred: A bacterium merged with an archaeon, producing a new organism with a nucleus and mitochondria, fuel packs for energy.

From this primal ancestor all multicellular life has descended: funguses and firs, spiders and Sumatran tigers. And, quite recently, Homo sapiens.

“Most microbes are not pathogens. They do not make us sick,” Yong asserts, underscoring how microbes nourish our biology, from our gastrointestinal tract to our skin to our sex organs. Microbes outnumber cells in our bodies — we get our first dose from our mothers, as we move down the birth canal; and in mere days they begin to colonize our infant bodies, growing and changing as we grow and change.

More here.

Bernie Sanders in the Los Angeles Times:

The conventions are over and the general election has officially begun. In the primaries, I received 1,846 pledged delegates, 46% of the total. Hillary Clinton received 2,205 pledged delegates, 54%. She received 602 superdelegates. I received 48 superdelegates. Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee and I will vigorously support her.

Donald Trump would be a disaster and an embarrassment for our country if he were elected president. His campaign is not based on anything of substance — improving the economy, our education system, healthcare or the environment. It is based on bigotry. He is attempting to win this election by fomenting hatred against Mexicans and Muslims. He has crudely insulted women. And as a leader of the “birther movement,” he tried to undermine the legitimacy of our first African American president. That is not just my point of view. That’s the perspective of a number of conservative Republicans.

In these difficult times, we need a president who will bring our nation together, not someone who will divide us by race or religion, not someone who lacks an understanding of what our Constitution is about.

On virtually every major issue facing this country and the needs of working families, Clinton’s positions are far superior to Trump’s. Our campaigns worked together to produce the most progressive platform in the history of American politics. Trump’s campaign wrote one of the most reactionary documents.

More here.

Nirmala Jayaraman at The Quarterly Conversation:

There are habits of the mind that are nurtured by Walter Benjamin’s collection of notes, dreams, short stories, characters, and diary entries in The Storyteller. Like the art of medicine, storytelling is a practice that is both technical in terms of skill and relational in its potential to reach people across any distance; Benjamin even used surgery as a metaphor to distinguish between these two aspects of art in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” suggesting that the healing touch hidden within a surgeon’s attempt to detach from his patient could be left uncommunicated and lost like the mass proliferation of human images due to industrial advancement. Without collapsing the comparisons of medicine and writing, the larger theme at work in his prose is that the healing power of art is derived from rituals rather than material reality alone.

Benjamin pierces through layers of tissue and draws attention to the body’s beauty, in addition to its hazards. Writing about the act of listening, he describes an interior space of the ear, noting in an experimental piece:

I had suffered very much from the din in my room. Last night the dream retained this. I found myself in front of a map and, at the same time, in the landscape which was depicted on it. The landscape was incredibly gloomy and bleak, and it wasn’t possible to say whether its desolation was merely a craggy wasteland or empty grey ground populated only by capital letters.

more here.

In Which the Cartographer tells Off the Rastaman

The cartographer sucks his teeth
and says – every language, even yours,
is a partial map of this world – it is
the man who never learnt the word
‘scrupe’ – sound of silk or chiffon moving
against a floor – such a man would not know
how to listen for the scrupe of his bride’s dress.
And how much life is land to which
we have no access? How much
have we not seen or felt or heard
because there was no word
for it – at least no word we knew?
We speak to navigate ourselves
away from dark corners and we become,
each one of us, cartographers.

by Kei Miller
from The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
Carcanet, Manchester, 2014

Sameer Rahim in Prospect Magazine:

Despite his shaky poll ratings, Donald Trump’s brand of charismatic nastiness has plenty of appeal and could yet propel him to the American presidency. His recent attacks on Ghazala and Khizr Khan, the Muslim parents of an American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, showed how low he is prepared to strike. (Though is it churlish to ask why it has taken so long to point out the outrageousness of his plans to ban Muslims from the “land of the free”?) Yet there are already conspiracy theories flying around about Khizr Khan being a Muslim Brotherhood plant; an article he wrote in 1988 about Islamic law has been dredged up to prove his un-Americanness. You can be sure these are the articles being shared by Trump supporters on social media—not the mainstream outrage from Democrats and some Republicans. We are witnessing the paranoid style in American politics, turbo-charged by the internet age. How did we get to this point? Is there anything new to say about Trump and his phenomenal rise? Amid the welter of opinion, it might be worth turning to fiction. In 2004, Philip Roth wrote a brilliant counter-factual novel, The Plot Against America, which imagined the US electing a celebrity far-right leader with bigoted views about minorities and a weakness for foreign strongmen. Reading the novel, you can’t help seeing striking parallels with the rise of Trump. Roth, writing about the past but of course also about the present, anticipates the rightward shift in post-9/11 US politics.

Beginning in 1940, The Plot Against America is set in a fictionalised version of Roth’s own Newark family. The narrator is a young Philip, looking back over the troubled times of his early life. The opening lines, with a couple of adjustments, could apply equally well today to a young Muslim in Florida or a Mexican in Nevada: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.” Charles A Lindbergh was a real person. An ace pilot, in 1927, at the age of 25 he flew solo non-stop from New York to Paris. Overnight he became a hero across America. In 1932, his baby son was kidnapped and killed by an immigrant ex-convict, which brought him widespread sympathy. By 1936, Lindbergh was in Berlin for the Olympics, describing Adolf Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man… [who] I believe has done much for the German people.” In 1941 he spoke at America First rallies (the slogan resurrected by Trump), and was touted by many as the next president.

More here.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez in The New York Times:

Colson Whitehead’s novels are rebellious creatures: Each one of them goes to great lengths to break free of the last one, of its structure and language, of its areas of interest. At the same time, they all have one thing in common — the will to work within a recognizable tract of popular culture, taking advantage of conventions while subverting them for the novel’s own purposes. “The Intuitionist,” with its dystopian concerns and futuristic mood, gave way to the folkloric past of “John Henry Days”; “Zone One,” Whitehead’s contribution to the unquenchable American thirst for zombies, was his departure from “Sag Harbor,” with its coming-of-age feeling and concessions to nostalgia. His new novel, “The Underground Railroad,” is as different as can be from the zombie book. It touches on the historical novel and the slave story, but what it does with those genres is striking and imaginative. Like its predecessors, it is carefully built and stunningly daring; it is also, both in expected and unexpected ways, dense, substantial and important.

The central conceit of the novel is as simple as it is bold. The underground railroad is not, in Whitehead’s novel, the secret network of passageways and safe houses used by runaway slaves to reach the free North from their slaveholding states. Or rather it is that, but it is something else, too: You open a trap door in the safe house or find the entrance to a hidden cave, and you reach an actual railroad, with actual locomotives and boxcars and conductors, sometimes complete with benches on the platform. “Two steel rails ran the visible length of the tunnel,” Whitehead writes, “pinned into the dirt by wooden crossties. The steel ran south and north presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus.” The trains pass at unpredictable times and go to unpredictable places, but that is obviously good enough for those wanting to flee the misery and violence of slavery: its sheer inhumanity, a word that in Whitehead’s unflinching explorations seems to fill up with new meanings.

More here.

Rachel Toor in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Steven Pinker is about as close as you can come to being an academic celebrity. The Harvard professor of psychology has written seven books for a general readership in addition to his scholarly work, which is wide-ranging. Pinker frequently writes about language for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Atlantic, and also tackles subjects such as education, morality, politics, bioethics, and violence.

All of which makes him a prime candiate for this Q&A series, Scholars Talk Writing.Listing all his honors and awards could cause us mere mortals to feel inferior; you can find them on his website, Stevenpinker.com (where you’ll also see that he has a great head of hair).

Perhaps the most important thing for writers from across the disciplines to know about Pinker is that he has a recent book: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which should be required reading. (An excerpt can be found here.)

Who are the writers who influenced you in terms of your own prose?

Pinker: Since many people are under the misconception that you have to write badly in academia to be taken seriously, I’ll just mention some renowned scholars in my own field whom I read as an undergraduate and who were sparkling prose stylists…

More here.

From Phys.org:

IBM scientists have created randomly spiking neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. This demonstration marks a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing.

Inspired by the way the biological brain functions, scientists have theorized for decades that it should be possible to imitate the versatile computational capabilities of large populations of neurons. However, doing so at densities and with a power budget that would be comparable to those seen in biology has been a significant challenge, until now.

“We have been researching phase-change materials for memory applications for over a decade, and our progress in the past 24 months has been remarkable,” said IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou. “In this period, we have discovered and published new memory techniques, including projected memory, stored 3 bits per cell in phase-change memory for the first time, and now are demonstrating the powerful capabilities of phase-change-based artificial neurons, which can perform various computational primitives such as data-correlation detection and unsupervised learning at high speeds using very little energy.”

The artificial neurons designed by IBM scientists in Zurich consist of phase-change materials, including germanium antimony telluride, which exhibit two stable states, an amorphous one (without a clearly defined structure) and a crystalline one (with structure). These materials are the basis of re-writable Blu-ray discs. However, the artificial neurons do not store digital information; they are analog, just like the synapses and neurons in our biological brain.

More here.

Alec Balasescu writes:

The act of killing is as frightful as it is present, and even banalized.

In our global society, when political or ideological orientations radicalize themselves, they start to justify killing. This is not what Islam does, it is what every ideology does when pushed to the extreme.

What are the internal resorts that determine an individual to kill? What are the types of justifications used, when the act itself is not legal? In the current context, when the political agenda both in Europe and the US is easily redefined by terrorist acts, I think it is important to undertake an in-depth exploration of these questions.

Mass killing in public spaces are more and more common. One may distinguish two types of motives: individual and political. Mass shootings in US or the mass stabbing in Japan seem to be individually motivated.

Terrorism is a politically motivated (or rationalised) mass killing that frightens through its cruelty, its discretionary and rudimentary methods (that remind us of the frailty of life), and throughs its highly symbolic targets.

It is important to observe the similarity between the jihadist terrorism, other ideologically motivated terrorism such as the mass killing perpetrated by Brejivik, and those that appear to have purely individual motives. Individual is always political.

More here.

Dustin Illingworth at Literary Hub:

Few literary artifacts remain as consistently enigmatic as the author’s journal. It seems to me that the more we read of them, the more elusive their provenance becomes. The very names we employ—the aforementioned “journal,” the stuffy “diary,” the tepid “notebook”—are failures of imagination, if not outright misreadings. Staid synopses and ossified lives these are not. Rather, what we find within their pages are wild, shapeless, violent things; elegant confessions and intricate codes; portraits of anguish; topographies of mind. Prayers, experiments, lists, rivalries, and rages are all at home here, interbred, inextricable from one another. A piece of petty gossip sits astride a transcendent realization. A proclamation of self-loathing becomes a paean to literary art. News of publication shares the page with the most banal errands imaginable. That juxtaposition, in which the profound and the prosaic rub elbows, creates the space for something like a revelation of character, one that finds the writer enmeshed in the sordidness of life, either striving to ennoble it or wading in its depths like warm mud. It is hardly surprising, then, that this is a portrait enriched by trivia, vulgarity, ennui, and triumph, by messiness, by the glitter and churn of raw thought. Far from the intimidating polish of more august work, the author’s journal reveals the human substance beneath the cultural effigy, mediumistic insofar as it is both supremely meditative and utterly marginal. For fans of literary biography—or anyone interested in the unrehearsed inner-workings of genius—this is an addicting pleasure indeed.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

You knew this sculpture before you saw it. The pose is almost as well known in the mind as that of another sculpture from the ancient world — also on hand, no less — of a boy removing a thorn from his foot. But there's a piercing difference. We engage with the boy with sweetness, this softness, youth, incipient-innocence-on-the-verge experience. Dying Gaulspeaks to us in a tenor of tremulous enmeshed cosmic pathos.

Dying Gaul was part of a large sculptural grouping of an epic monument to commemorate decisive Hellenistic victories over the invading Gauls from nearby Galatia, in what is modern-day Turkey. The work was made between 100 and 200 B.C.E. and is a Roman copy of a lost bronze Greek original made about a century before by the great Hellenistic sculptor Epigonos (yes, artists had names then, too). The lost (probably melted down) bronze original was unceremoniously taken from Turkey by the Emperor Nero to Rome where it was used to decorate his gigantic gold, jewel-encrusted Golden House. Copy or not, time and distance collapse when you stand before it — a mysterious abyss opens between us and the sculpture, and recognition rushes in. We are seeing layers of beauty, strength, inwardness, isolation, vulnerability, and the sensuous antecedents of Michelangelo’s beautiful David — all the way to the even-older wisdom of Homer.

more here.

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature:

If, as the French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811, every nation gets the government it deserves, what might the United States have done to deserve Donald Trump?A well-functioning democracy should undercut the appeal of blustering, xenophobic demagogues by ensuring that most citizens have a stake in government and hope for the future. And although no single cause or problem can explain Trump’s appeal to a large part of the American electorate, his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate should be cause for serious reflection about what is going wrong in America. For many Americans, one thing that has gone wrong is that the promise of scientific and technological progress has not been fulfilled.

As Nobel-prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman put it in 1992: “What’s good for American science … is good for America.” Maybe not. Although Trump supporters are by no means a homo­geneous lot, a clever analysis in The New York Times in March showed that they can most reliably be characterized by two attri­butes. First, they identify their ancestral heritage as American, rather than any particular ethnic or religious stock. And second, they live in regions of the country that have not only failed to benefit economically from innovation, but have been harmed by it. Mainstream media analysis of the Trump phenomenon almost never links it to the science and technology policies pursued by the nation since the Second World War. Yet technological revolutions arising from these policies have contributed to more than 40 years of wealth inequality, disappearing middle-class jobs and eviscerated manufacturing communities in the places where support for Trump is strongest. Indeed, economic theory throws aside these millions of people as the inevitable losers in the ‘creative destruction’ that science catalyses, as if ruined cities and livelihoods are just side effects of the strong medicine of science-based innovation. These people are the cost of the prevailing myth of progress, and, given their core identity as ‘Americans’, it is no wonder they are susceptible to Trump’s jingoistic populism.

More here.

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
– For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

Read more »