Leila McNeill in Smithsonian:

From a young age, Mamie Phipps Clark knew she was black. “I became acutely aware of that in childhood, because you had to have a certain kind of protective armor about you, all the time … You learned the things not to do…so as to protect yourself,” she would say later, when asked in an interview how she first became aware of racial segregation. Growing up attending an all-black school in Hot Spring, Arkansas left an indelible impression on Clark; even as a young child, she knew that when she grew up she wanted to help other children. And help children she did. Clark would go on to study psychology and develop valuable research methodology that combined the study of child development and racial prejudice— helping her field incorporate the felt experience of childhood racism. Ultimately, her work in social psychology crossed over into the Civil Rights Movement: Her research and expert testimony became instrumental to ending school segregation across the country in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954.

…Her master’s thesis, “The Development of Consciousness in Negro Pre-School Children,” surveyed 150 black pre-school aged boys and girls from a DC nursery school to explore issues of race and child development—specifically the age at which black children become aware that they were black. For the study that formed the basis of her thesis, she and Kenneth recruited the children and presented them with a set of pictures: white boys, black boys, and benign images of animals and other objects. They asked the boys to pick which picture looked like them, and then asked the girls to pick which picture looked like their brother or other male relative. The conclusion of the study showed a distinct racial awareness of self in boys aged three to four years. The results were, in Kenneth’s words, “disturbing.”

More here.

Kazim Ali at the Poetry Foundation:

Rupi Kaur isn’t just Instagram-famous, she’s famous-famous. Apparently outselling Homer, this young woman of color from the suburbs of Toronto has become a global phenomenon in two short years. Like anyone who is popular, she has her share of detractors. Some critics decry the quality of the verse, others question the means by which “fame” arrives, still others critique the politics of Kaur’s narrative, including the extent to which an exoticizing orientalism may be at more sinister work in commodifying narratives of marginalization and suffering. Regardless of those criticisms, no one can deny the immensity of her audience, both virtual and at the live readings she gives.

So one question I get from my friends and relatives who aren’t poets and who aren’t interested in poetry or in my unlikely life as a poet is, “what do you think of Rupi Kaur?” And how to answer the question? What do I think of Rupi Kaur? Well on the surface of it I’m mildly annoyed that I gave so many years to learning craft, reading deeply, doing everything I could to become a better poet, because it seems that all it takes is some superficial musings, some pretty okay (honestly) drawings, and one (admitted awesome) photo to go viral and make you the most famous poet in the world, and maybe of all time.

But you know what, on the surface of it I’m all right with a young woman of color putting the canon of Western civilization off its pedestal for once. Is it interesting as poetry? Not to me. But neither are Hallmark cards and I still buy and send those.

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Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

In 1985, when Carl Sagan was writing the novel Contact, he needed to quickly transport his protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway from Earth to the star Vega. He had her enter a black hole and exit light-years away, but he didn’t know if this made any sense. The Cornell University astrophysicist and television star consulted his friend Kip Thorne, a black hole expert at the California Institute of Technology (who won a Nobel Prize earlier this month). Thorne knew that Arroway couldn’t get to Vega via a black hole, which is thought to trap and destroy anything that falls in. But it occurred to him that she might make use of another kind of hole consistent with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: a tunnel or “wormhole” connecting distant locations in space-time.

While the simplest theoretical wormholes immediately collapse and disappear before anything can get through, Thorne wondered whether it might be possible for an “infinitely advanced” sci-fi civilization to stabilize a wormhole long enough for something or someone to traverse it. He figured out that such a civilization could in fact line the throat of a wormhole with “exotic material” that counteracts its tendency to collapse. The material would possess negative energy, which would deflect radiation and repulse space-time apart from itself. Sagan used the trick in Contact, attributing the invention of the exotic material to an earlier, lost civilization to avoid getting into particulars. Meanwhile, those particulars enthralled Thorne, his students and many other physicists, who spent years exploring traversable wormholes and their theoretical implications. They discovered that these wormholes can serve as time machines, invoking time-travel paradoxes — evidence that exotic material is forbidden in nature.

Now, decades later, a new species of traversable wormhole has emerged, free of exotic material and full of potential for helping physicists resolve a baffling paradox about black holes.

More here.

Scott Atran, Hoshang Waziri, and Richard Davis in the New York Review of Books:

Following the expulsion of the Islamic State, or ISIS, from Mosul in Iraq, and with the imminent fall of the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria, reports have suggested that ISIS fighters are defecting or surrendering en masse. But such bullish appraisals of the collapse of ISIS’s fighting spirit may be over-optimistic.

Most people who have fled from ISIS-controlled areas have done so because they were terrified of the invading Shia militias and Shia-dominated Iraqi government forces. Last month, when Iraqi forces liberated the area around the city of Hawija, north of Tikrit, it wasn’t only ISIS fighters who ran. Those from families who had a member in ISIS, even if dead, did also. Many internally displaced Sunni Arabs we interviewed told us that they left their homes and risked passing through Iraqi army and Shia militia lines to reach the Kurdish Peshmerga because “they are also Sunni” and “don’t want to kill us.”

Although there is some evidence of local ISIS forces in Iraq abandoning the fight, ISIS’s foreign volunteers are much more likely to fight to the death or melt away in the hope of fighting another day. A center run by the Kurdish intelligence service in Dibis, north of Hawija, to screen those fleeing ISIS territory had detected only one foreign fighter, an Egyptian, in recent weeks. The head of the center, Captain Ali Muhammad Syan, said that as many as eight thousand people were screened since the start of operations to retake Hawija in September. Nearly all of them, he said, had links to ISIS, mostly through family connections, but many were not actual combatants.

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Gary Cox at the TLS:

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre wrote, “There is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art”. True to a central maxim of his existentialist philosophy – “to be is to do” – Sartre built his colossal reputation as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, biographer, diarist, literary theorist, essayist and journalist out of sustained hard work. He was gifted but preferred to attribute his achievements to perspiration rather than inspiration. As he wrote in his autobiography, Words: “Where would be the anguish, the ordeal, the temptation resisted, even the merit, if I had gifts?” From childhood his ambition was to be the great, dead French writer he became. He wrote for at least six hours a day for most of his life. “If I go a day without writing, the scar burns me.”

Sartre’s prolific and often drug-fuelled output is now a part of the legend, along with his numerous love affairs (despite his self-proclaimed ugliness), his wartime adventures and the post-war, hard-left political activism that led him and his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, to fraternize with many dictators.

By the standards of most philosophers, Sartre led an exciting life. His adventures, his singular appearance, his relentless radicalism, his eccentricity, make him an easy figure to caricature, and he was canny when it came to crafting his image, but for all that there is a serious, systematic and inspiring philosophy behind the melodrama, a grand theory rooted in the best traditions of Western thought.

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Brad East at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and cultural commentator. Born and raised in Maryland, he studied at Cambridge and the University of Virginia. He has taught at Virginia, Duke, Providence, St. Louis, and Notre Dame. Since 2003, he has published 10 books, the most notable of which include Atheist Delusions, a sort of intellectual history of early Christianity in response to the so-called “New Atheists”; The Experience of God, a philosophical and interreligious elaboration of classical theism; and The Beauty of the Infinite, a full-bore metaphysics of beauty, his first published book and still magnum opus. Two of these books were published with Yale University Press, with a third coming out this November: a translation of the New Testament. And for the last decade or so, Hart has written the back-page column for the magazine First Things.

Hart’s accolades have come readily from within his guild and its various subdisciplines, including being rewarded the Michael Ramsey Prize in 2011 by Rowan Williams, then-Archbishop of Canterbury. But his books have also received notices from diverse, non-religious venues such as The New Yorker, the Guardian, the New Republic, The New York Times, The New Criterion, and National Review. The praise heaped upon Hart is extravagant: “a national treasure,” “an indispensable voice,” “the best living American systematic theologian,” “without doubt today’s most brilliant essayist, polemicist, and fabulist.”

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Carl Wilson at Bookforum:

It’s 1984 or 1985, Prince and the Revolution are in California, and they decide to drive out to Joni Mitchell’s house in Malibu for dinner. All devotees—Prince says his favorite album ever is 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns—they chat and admire her paintings, and then Prince wanders to the piano and starts teasing out some chords. “Joni says, ‘Oh wow! That’s really pretty. What song are you playing?’” as band member Wendy Melvoin later recalls. “We all yelled, ‘It’s your song!’” Prince will perform his gorgeous arrangement of Mitchell’s “A Case of You” in concerts up to the final month of his life.

This anecdote from David Yaffe’s Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell is rare for being sweet and funny, not sad or rancorous. It’s endearingly humbling, while still hinting at her ample ego: She really does love her own stuff, even when she doesn’t know it’s hers. And why shouldn’t she? For more than a decade, the singer from Saskatchewan bounded from masterpiece to masterpiece, her second-string songs superior to almost anyone else’s best. Yet, among her generation’s legends, she is the most persistently sidelined.

Mitchell is easy to pigeonhole as that “poetic, confessional female singer-songwriter,” provided you overlook half her work and the fact that, before her, there really was no such thing.

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Guia Soncini in The New York Times:

Americans and Italians are such similar creatures: We both care about news only if it concerns us. That’s why in Italy there’s no such thing as the Harvey Weinstein scandal; here, it’s the Asia Argento scandal. Either way, it hasn’t made us look good. “Victim-Blaming,” Vanity Fair proclaimed last week, after Ms. Argento, who says Mr. Weinstein raped her, declared that she was considering leaving Italy because of attacks on her by her compatriots. “Weinstein Accuser Feels ‘Doubly Crucified’ ” read the Associated Press headline. Suddenly we were patriarchal, sexist Italy again. It’s true, I thought while reading, but it’s not the whole truth.

…It hasn’t, for instance, been in the male-dominated world of newspapers where Ms. Argento has been on the receiving end of the worst attacks. While there have been some widely cited examples of egregious behavior — the editor in chief of a right-wing tabloid said Ms. Argento “must have liked it” — these are exceptions. The bulk of the Italian press has been on Ms. Argento’s side. It has, rightly, treated her gently: The newspaper La Stampa published a 2,000- word interview with her, in which she denied that she’d maintained a five-year relationship with Mr. Weinstein; the interviewer never challenged her on this revision. Prominent male columnists have come to Ms. Argento’s defense — this, in a country that has a total of zero national newspapers edited by women and zero female columnists in its main national papers.

Where the reaction to Ms. Argento’s story has been truly vicious has been on social media. And there, it has primarily come from women. There was the woman who wouldn’t believe Ms. Argento because she did not find her likable when she was competing on “Dancing With the Stars”; the one that claims “Asia asked for it” because she once filmed a scene in which she French-kissed a dog; the one who says — as if it matters — “I’ve simply never liked her.” (I won’t link to the likes of them here.) What this tells us about Italian feminism isn’t clear, but it’s certainly ugly. There’s something under-ripened about the state of feminism in my country. In other countries, to proclaim oneself a feminist is taken to mean that you are a person who defends the rights of women to live as they like, to have equal rights and opportunities, and to be in charge of their sexuality. In Italy, those who call themselves feminists treat what is supposed to be a fundamental component of one’s worldview as a sort of battle between high-school cliques: I will fight for your rights — as long as we’re friends. If a sexual assault victim has been unfriendly, we will side with the next one, the one who answers our phone calls. Our sympathies are determined not by who has suffered but by who has invited us to her dinner parties.

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

After decades of researching the impact that humans are having on animal and plant species around the world, Chris Thomas has a simple message: Cheer up. Yes, we’ve wiped out woolly mammoths and ground sloths, and are finishing off black rhinos and Siberian tigers, but the doom is not all gloom. Myriad species, thanks in large part to humans who inadvertently transport them around the world, have blossomed in new regions, mated with like species and formed new hybrids that have themselves gone forth and prospered. We’re talking mammals, birds, trees, insects, microbes—all your flora and fauna. “Virtually all countries and islands in the world have experienced substantial increases in the numbers of species that can be found in and on them,” writes Thomas in his new book, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. Thomas is a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in England. He is not easily pigeonholed. He has been a go-to scientist for the media and lawmakers on how climate change is scorching the life out of animals and plants. At the same time he can turn around and write, “Wild geese, swans, storks, herons and cranes are returning as well, and the great whales, the largest animals ever to have lived on Earth, are once more plying their way across our seaways in numbers after centuries of unsustainable butchery.” Glass half empty, meet Chris Thomas.

Inheritors of the Earth collects years of Thomas’ field research, illuminating plant and animal species—notably one of his specialties, butterflies—flourishing all over the Earth. Thomas also puts big ideas on display. Humans are just another animal on the planet, he wants us to know. Our actions are not outside the engine of evolution, even though we have the most horsepower. Environmentalists need to stop fencing off nature from humans, he argues, understand the mechanics of evolution better, including our role in it, and quit being such nattering nabobs of negativity. Once they do all those things, real conservation has a chance. The Sixth Great Extinction, he tells us, is premature.

More here.

Philip Ball in Prospect:

Edward O Wilson, the octogenarian Harvard biologist and ethologist, is one of the most productive, broad-thinking and important scientists of the past century. The central question of his work is why animals do what they do, and how evolution has shaped their behaviour. His new book, The Origins of Creativity, seeks to draw lessons from that understanding about “the unique and defining trait of our species”: creativity, which he defines, not without controversy, as “the innate quest for originality.”

Like Charles Darwin, Wilson’s research has mainly focused on non-human behaviour. His specialism is social insects, especially ants. His monumental book The Ants (1991), written with fellow myrmecologist Bert Hölldobler, won a Pulitzer Prize—his second such award—a testament to the fact that Wilson writes as eloquently as he thinks.

His first Pulitzer was for On Human Nature (1978), in which his readiness to generalise the lessons of natural history to humankind made him both influential and notorious. He was a pioneer of evolutionary psychology, which explains our impulses and instincts from a Darwinian perspective. These are, in this view, hardwired into our brains because of the reproductive success they conferred on our ancestors.

Public resistance to this idea, which he called “sociobiology,” has been widespread and vociferous. In the 1970s, Wilson was denounced as a crypto-fascist who was attempting to offer scientific justification for racism, sexism and bigotry. There were demonstrations at his lectures; during one talk he had water poured over his head.

The opposition wrongly assumed that sociobiology presented a rigidly deterministic view in which everything we do is preordained by genes.

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Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic:

Last year, a 77-year-old woman traveled to a clinic in Georgia to have stem cells injected in her eyes. She came in hope of a cure—or at least something that could help her macular degeneration, which causes a dark spot to appear in the center of vision.

The procedure was supposed to work like this: The clinic would take fat from her belly, separate out stem cells that naturally occur in fat, and inject them into her eyes to regenerate damaged tissue. The procedure cost $8,900. It had not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and was not covered by insurance. To pay out of pocket, she had to raise money on a crowdfunding site.

Her vision did not get better. It got much worse. Within three months, her retinas—the eye’s layer of light-sensitive cells—had peeled away from the rest of her eyes. As a result, she can only make out hand motions in her right eye and light in the left, according to a recent case report. She could no longer walk on her own.

In March, eye doctors based primarily at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami had published a widely covered report describing three eerily similar cases: Three elderly women with macular degeneration got stem cells derived from their own fat injected into their eyes at a different stem-cell clinic in Florida. The same thing happened: Their retinas became detached, and they went blind. The doctors ended up examining the 77-year-old woman too, which led to the recent case report describing her condition.

And there are likely even more cases.

More here.

From the New Statesman:

What’s your earliest memory?

The first time I flew in a passenger plane. I must have been about four and I was very impressed and very scared by it.

Who are your heroes?

My childhood hero was Aris Velouchiotis, who was the leader of the partisans during the Nazi occupation, a kind of Greek Che Guevara, who was never sullied by history because he died in battle during the civil war. He was never given the opportunity to disgrace himself like many others. My adult hero is Noam Chomsky, because he combines a sterling academic contribution with a lifelong commitment to progressive causes and fighting the good fight, against what I call “the deep establishment”.

What was the last book that changed your thinking?

The Circle by Dave Eggers, which scared me a little. It reminded me how complacent I was becoming about the big tech companies.

More here.

Nicholson Baker at The Baffler:

The best, saddest, fairest assassination book I’ve read, David Talbot’s Brothers, provides an important beginning clue. Robert Kennedy, who was closer to his brother and knew more about his many enraged detractors than anyone else, told a friend that the Mafia was principally responsible for what happened November 22. In public, for the five years that remained of his life, Bobby Kennedy made no criticisms of the nine-hundred-page Warren Report, which pinned the murder on a solo killer, a “nut” (per Hoover) and “general misanthropic fella” (per Warren Committee member Richard Russell) who had dreams of eternal fame. Attorney general Kennedy said, when reporters asked, that he had no intention of reading the report, but he endorsed it in writing and stood by it. Yet on the very night of the assassination, as Bobby began his descent into a near-catatonic depression, he called one of his organized-crime experts in Chicago and asked him to find out whether the Mafia was involved. And once, when friend and speechwriter Richard Goodwin (who had worked closely with JFK) asked Bobby what he really thought, Bobby replied, “If anyone was involved it was organized crime.”

To Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby was (according to biographer Jack Newfield) even more specific, ascribing the murder to “that guy in New Orleans”—meaning Carlos Marcello, the squat, tough, smart, wealthy mobster and tomato salesman who controlled slot machines, jukebox concessions, narcotics shipments, strip clubs, bookie networks, and other miscellaneous underworldy activities in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and, through his Texas emissary Joe Civello, in Dallas.

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Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

Serious but friendly, a woman who rarely jokes but readily laughs, the Los Angeles artist Laura Owens, forty-seven years old, was pleasantly dishevelled in mom attire: shirt, baggy shorts, sneakers, big glasses. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes,” she said to the children in each of the five classes she spoke to on Career Day, in June, at her nine-year-old daughter Nova’s public elementary school. She accompanied the advice with a PowerPoint slide of herself after falling from a low scaffold and being splattered with blue paint from a pail that had followed her down—a studio mishap, in 2013, that an assistant had paused to snap before helping her up. The next slide showed her paint-smudged face, smiling—no harm. The kids seemed fascinated but perplexed, as well they might have been. An essay could be written on the semantic distinctions, which Owens had just elided, between mistakes and accidents, and between accidents and pratfalls. I recognized one of the turns of mind that characterize Owens’s influential inventions of new things for the old medium of painting to do. I couldn’t match it when a fifth-grade girl asked me, as a drop-in careerist, how to become a writer. I said that she was one already, if she was writing. With a thought to Owens, I added that she should carry a notebook around, so that people would see that she is a writer. Owens has grounded her life, since childhood, on being, and being regarded as, an artist. The Whitney Museum’s description of an upcoming show of her work there as “a midcareer retrospective” seems superfluous for someone who has never not been in midcareer.

The first slide that she had shown the children was of a drawing she said she had made when she was a teen-ager. It will be included in the Whitney show. Dark and smudgy and heavily worked, it depicts a silhouetted figure in a jail cell, reaching forward through the bars, which cast long shadows, toward a dog dangling a key from its mouth. The dog appears uncoöperative. She told me that the image may have come to her in a dream, which she has no wish to analyze. The second slide documented a civic-poster contest that she had won when she was fifteen—promoting a county foster-care program for children—in her home town of Norwalk, Ohio.

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Anna Keay at Literary Review:

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king related to him in great detail his personal recollections of the six weeks he had spent as a fugitive after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. It was nothing less, in the words of Arthur Bryant, than ‘the most romantic incident in the history of the English throne’. As sovereign and secretary settled down (a scene that is surely a gift for a future scriptwriter), Charles commenced his story: ‘After that the battle was so absolutely lost as to be beyond hope of recovery, I began to think of the best way of saving myself.’

Charles Spencer’s latest book, To Catch a King, does for us exactly what Charles II intended when he asked Pepys to commit his story to paper: ensure that this most extraordinary episode is never forgotten. And what a story it is. Two years after the execution of Charles I, the young Charles II sacrificed the very principles his father had died for to do a deal with the Scots, accepting Presbyterianism as the national religion in return for being crowned King of Scots. His arrival in Edinburgh prompted the English to invade Scotland in a pre-emptive strike. This was followed by a Scottish invasion of England. The two sides finally faced one another at Worcester in September 1651. After being comprehensively hammered on the meadows outside the city by Oliver Cromwell’s army, the 21-year-old king found himself the subject of a national manhunt, with a huge bounty on his head. Over the following six weeks he managed, through a series of heart-poundingly close escapes, to evade capture before finally making it to safety in France.

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Oset Babur in Harvard Magazine:

Anyone who’s indulged in retail therapy can affirm that money can’t buy happiness—but according to new research from Harvard Business School, money can make people happier when they spend it to buy time. Assistant professor of business administration Ashley Whillans has found that, in developed countries, people across the socioeconomic spectrum who trade money for time—by choosing to live closer to work, or to hire a housecleaner, for example—are happier. “People have been trying to find ways to use their discretionary income to maximize their quality of life for a long time,” Whillans says, citing extensive research that confirms the positive emotional effects of taking vacations and going out to the movies. “We were really interested in seeing if buying ourselves out of negative experiences might be another pathway to happiness that had been relatively unexplored.”

According to the researchers, two key components of happiness make up people’s subjective sense of well-being: how they describe their life on the whole; and how satisfied they feel in the moment, which the researchers measured by checking in with participants on the day of a given experience. Feelings of “time stress”—more common among the wealthiest individuals—also affect happiness. Higher-earners feel that every hour of their time is more financially valuable, and when something is perceived as valuable (like water in a desert, Whillans says), it is also perceived as more scarce. That scarcity translates into time stress, which can easily contribute to unhappiness.

More here.

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

Jan van Deursen was baffled by the decrepit-looking transgenic mice he created in 2000. Instead of developing tumours as expected, the mice experienced a stranger malady. By the time they were three months old, their fur had grown thin and their eyes were glazed with cataracts. It took him years to work out why: the mice were ageing rapidly, their bodies clogged with a strange type of cell that did not divide, but that wouldn't die¹.

That gave van Deursen and his colleagues at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, an idea: could killing off these 'zombie' cells in the mice delay their premature descent into old age? The answer was yes. In a 2011 study², the team found that eliminating these 'senescent' cells forestalled many of the ravages of age. The discovery set off a spate of similar findings. In the seven years since, dozens of experiments have confirmed that senescent cells accumulate in ageing organs, and that eliminating them can alleviate, or even prevent, certain illnesses (see 'Becoming undead'). This year alone, clearing the cells in mice has been shown to restore fitness, fur density and kidney function³. It has also improved lung disease⁴ and even mended damaged cartilage⁵. And in a 2016 study, it seemed to extend the lifespan of normally ageing mice⁶. “Just by removing senescent cells, you could stimulate new tissue production,” says Jennifer Elisseeff, senior author of the cartilage paper and a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. It jump-starts some of the tissue's natural repair mechanisms, she says.

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Geraldine Brooks in the New York Times:

A sense of place animates many novelists, but few more than Orhan Pamuk, for whom personal geography is artistic destiny. Istanbul, his home and his muse, is the ever-present character in his novels; his city’s often-uneasy equipoise between East and West, secular and sacred, traditional and modern adding tension to whatever story is in the novel’s foreground.

“The Red-Haired Woman” once again explores this duality. Larded throughout the novel are references to two ancient and opposite tragedies of fathers and sons: Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” and the classic Persian tale of Rostam and Sohrab from Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” or Book of Kings. In the former, Oedipus unwittingly murders his father; in the latter, the father, Rostam, unknowingly kills his son, Sohrab. These two classic tales become both the obsession of the novel’s protagonist, Cem Celik, and the determinants — or overdeterminants — of the novel’s action. The Sophocles tale not only comes out of the Western canon but its notion of the headstrong individualist who probes and questions and tempts fate is convenient shorthand for the would-be tradition-killers of Western modernity. In Ferdowsi, meanwhile, the father who kills his son can stand in for an old-against-young, backward-looking extremism, wielding an airless adherence to tradition against any would-be modernizing trends.

Divided into three parts, Pamuk’s novel appears at first to be narrated by Cem, whose Marxist father is more absence than presence in the boy’s life. Even before his father was jailed as a political activist, Cem sensed that his parents didn’t love each other, that his father “was attracted to other women.” So it’s not entirely surprising when, upon his release, he deserts his family.

More here.