Andrew Stark in the Boston Review:

If we frequently fail to properly analyze events in terms of their probabilities, Kahneman and Tversky showed, we just as often overweight their probabilities. Buying a single lottery ticket increases the probability of our winning the jackpot by a very small amount: from zero to one in ten million. But because doing so takes us from the realm of complete impossibility into the seductive realm of possibility, that minuscule increase seems much more significant to us than it actually is. It gives us dreams to savor—buying that beachfront home, retiring and writing our long-deferred novel. The more vividly we envisage something, the more real we think it is likely to be. Thus we inflate the probability of winning.

Kahneman and Tversky spent decades cataloging a rogues’ gallery of such human psychological quirks, many of them evocatively chronicled in Michael Lewis’s lively new history of their collaboration, The Undoing Project. Each paper the duo published chipped away at the foundations of mainstream economics and its notion that people, as a whole, behave in predictably rational ways. After all, orthodox economics assumes, the market will punish us if we do not behave rationally. People who buy lottery tickets will find that they have insufficient money for groceries. Sports teams that pay enormous sums for seemingly hot players will find themselves deserted by fans. Sure, mainstream economists concede, we are not perfect. People, from time to time, unintentionally do things that are not in their own best interest. But as soon as they suffer the consequences, they right themselves.

What Kahneman and Tversky showed is that our irrationalities are not random but systemic, rooted in deep-seated psychological tendencies—such as failing to take probabilities into account in some situations and overweighting them in others.

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Rachel Spence at The Easel:

It’s often said that the measure of a great work of art is that it stands the test of time. But perhaps another criteria is that it stands the test of space. Not just then and now but also here and there. Would it be too estoric to say that Nasreen Mohamedi and Antonello da Messina are not only products of their time and place but also of each other’s? That this is the territory which Nasreen was seeking when she once enjoined herself to “See and feel primeval order”? [19]

She came from the east, he from the west, yet the geometry they share is universal. When the Roman Empire fell, so much of its knowledge would have been crushed in the rubble had not certain key classical texts been preserved in the Islamic world. For example, the great 10th- century mathematician from Baghdad, Ibrahim Ibn Sinan, translated Archimedes. Travelling through North Africa in the 12th century, the Italian mathematician Fibonacci discovered the Arabic numerals which he then introduced to the western world. Start to investigate and a myriad east-west synergies come to light; for example, the revolutionary cycle of numbers known now as the Fibonacci sequence actually originated in 6th century India.

Let’s recall too that Euclid lived and died in Alexandria, Egypt and Archimedes may have been educated there. The North African territory was part of the Greek and then Roman empires. How often do we find the borders between east and west so frail as to complicate such identities until they are barely holding?

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John Dixon Hunt at The Hudson Review:

One of the perennial issues regarding Brown was that he was and still is thought of “as being picturesque”; his foremost commentator, Dorothy Stroud, was unusual and absolutely right when she treats the picturesque as a later aesthetic whose proponents misunderstand Brown’s work. The picturesque experts usually relished an appreciation of fragments, fissures and deformities of nature, which Uvedale Price often celebrates in Three Essays on the Picturesque (1810). The way in which Brown has become tangled with the picturesque dates to the work of both Horace Walpole and William Mason, whose works overlap during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century (so much of this commentary comes after Brown’s death in 1783).

The history of Brown’s enthronement as the great landscaper began with the indifferent and clumsy verses of William Mason in The English Garden and with an essay of Horace Walpole, whose wonderfully tendentious argument prevailed for much of the later eighteenth century and continues to seduce people today. Mason and Walpole were friends and clearly followed each other’s writings and publications. Part of the reason to wrap Brown in the picturesque mantle is that therefore he can be hailed as the final, glorious climax of “natural” gardening in England.

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Eric D. Lehman at berfrois:

Conan Doyle works on our prejudices in another way, too, by setting his novel on the “primitive” landscape of the moors. We are told: “When you are once out upon [the moor’s] bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples.” The escaped convict Selden, who is described as being “a wild beast” and having “a terrible animal face” could represent civilization’s fear of the return to a primitive stage of humanity. Linguistically, we yoke all these words together: “prehistoric,” “nature, “wild,” “beast,” “animal,” “supernatural,” and “superstition.”

Conan Doyle set the novel in such a place to draw both the reader and the characters out of reason and skepticism, if only briefly. The fog threatens Holmes’s plan and Sir Henry’s life, in fact it is “the one thing on earth” that could. The Grimpen Mire is a sort of primitive place within an already primitive place, allied with the supernatural and considered to be an enemy of Holmes and order. In this arena, irrational thought might actually defeat Holmes’s machine-like, scientific mind. But primitive nature in the form of the Grimpen Mire also swallows Selden and Stapleton into its depths, spelling doom for agents of science and agents of superstition alike.

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John Leland in The New York Times:

Billie Holiday was a great American storyteller and a great American story. Her working materials were simple pop songs and standards — rarely blues — but her medium was her body itself: her voice, her back story. The past imprinted its lines on her skin; the future seemed to be running out. Few voices in America have announced themselves as unmistakably as hers, and few have carried as fully formed a narrative load. In April 1957, the freelance photographer Jerry Dantzic, working for Holiday’s record company, Decca, drew the assignment of finding a new chapter in her story during an Easter Week engagement at the Sugar Hill club in Newark. Holiday was 42 at the time and had been singing professionally for about 27 years, coming off a successful concert at Carnegie Hall and a new marriage to Louis McKay, with whom she shared a heroin habit.

Most of Mr. Dantzic’s images were never published until his son Grayson compiled them in “Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill,” which adds a quiet new dimension to the story we thought we knew about Holiday. Newark in the late 1950s was a thriving jazz hub, but more than that, it was a place where she could work – she had been barred from singing in New York nightclubs after a 1947 drug conviction. For Mr. Dantzic, who died in 2006, Newark was a place to capture her away from the pressures of her home city, including the unsparing scrutiny from law enforcement. Holiday had opened much of her life to the public with her lurid autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues,” which came out the previous year. With Mr. Dantzic, she revealed homier sides of her life, which needed no explanations and invited no judgments: at home with her husband or her dog, or visiting her co-author, Bill Dufty, and his son, Bevan, her godchild. In these images and in Mr. Dantzic’s performance shots, she is not the tragic torch singer of myth but a middle-aged woman finding simple comforts from the maelstrom, no longer as sharp in her voice but undiminished in her ability to command a stage.

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Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker:

Refugee stories often focus on transit, for obvious reasons. Children travel thousands of miles unaccompanied, hiding in train stations and surviving on wild fruit; men are beaten, jailed, and swindled just for the chance to make it on a boat that, if it doesn’t capsize and kill them, will allow them to try their luck in other dangerous seas. But in his new novel, “Exit West,” Mohsin Hamid, the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” tells a story about migration in which the refugee’s journey is compressed into an instant. (An excerpt from the novel ran in this magazine.) In the world of “Exit West,” migration doesn’t involve rubber rafts or bloodied feet but, rather, “doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away.”

When the novel opens, rumors of those doors have started circulating in a nameless, besieged country, where Saeed and Nadia, the book’s protagonists, live. They reside, at first, in an ordinary world. “In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her,” the book begins. The novel’s sentences tend toward the long and orotund: “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are puttering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.” That last phrase is a statement of purpose for both migration and romance. This is a love story, too.

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Romeo Vitelli in Providentia:

As one of the leading French mathematicians of his generation and author of two books on elementary geometry, Jacques Hadamard was always open to new mathematical ideas. When he received a mathematical proof in the mail from a previously unknown mathematician named Andre Bloch, Hadamard was mesmerized by its elegance. The proof related to a branch of elementary geometry involving paratactic circles, systems of two circles with orthogonal planes with the intersection being the common diameter of the two circles and cut according to a harmonic division. According to Bloch, parataxy remained invariant under inversion and any inversion with respect to a point situated on one of them transforms them into a circle and it's axis.

Hadamard was so intrigued by Bloch's discovery that he immediately decided to invite him to dinner. Since he had no other way of contacting Bloch, Hadamard wrote to the return address of 57 Grand Rue, Saint-Maurice with the invitation. Bloch wrote back that a visit would be impossible but asked the great mathematician to visit him instead. It was only when Jacques Hadamard finally took him up on his offer that he discovered why Bloch was unable to come to him: 57 Grand Rue, Saint-Maurice was the address of the Charenton lunatic asylum (now the Esquiral hospital) where Andre Bloch was an inmate. He had been involuntarily committed to the hospital following a brutal triple murder in 1917 and would never be allowed to leave. Although Hadamard was astonished by his discovery, he and Bloch talked at length about mathematics and he learned more about the inmate's story.

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Lisa Feldman Barrett in Popular Science:

For my daughter’s twelfth birthday, we exploited the power of simulation (and had some fun) by throwing a “gross foods” party. When her guests arrived, we served them pizza doctored with green food coloring so the cheese looked like fuzzy mold, and peach gelatin laced with bits of vegetables to look like vomit. For drinks, we served white grape juice in medical urine sample cups. Everybody was exuberantly disgusted (it was perfect twelve-year-old humor), and several guests could not bring themselves to touch the food as they involuntarily simulated vile tastes and smells. The pièce de résistance, however, was the party game we played after lunch: a simple contest to identify foods by their smell. We used mashed baby food—peaches, spinach, beef, and so on—and artfully smeared it on diapers, so it looked exactly like baby poo. Even though the guests knew that the smears were food, several actually gagged from the simulated smell.

Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis—the simulation—and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses. In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.

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Adil Najam in Newsline:

The problem with history is that it just keeps happening. Most of the time, it happens and few take notice. At least not until it is too late. At other times, although not very often, history goes into overdrive and it cannot be ignored. This is such a time.

It would be both, premature and pompous to proclaim that a new New World Order has emerged. But it is clear that whatever the world order was, it is now imploding before our eyes.

However, those who had long lamented – not without justification – that the world order was unjust, hypocritical and callous, should heed caution before they break out in celebration. Implosions, after all, are messy affairs. And what seems to be emerging, at least for now, is even less fair, blatantly dishonest, and certainly not compassionate. In fact, it is anything but.

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