Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

Southeast Bangladesh, near the Myanmar border — “Ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide” are antiseptic and abstract terms. What they mean in the flesh is a soldier grabbing a crying baby girl named Suhaifa by the leg and flinging her into a bonfire. Or troops locking a 15-year-old girl in a hut and setting it on fire.

The children who survive are left haunted: Noor Kalima, age 10, struggles in class in a makeshift refugee camp. Her mind drifts to her memory of seeing her father and little brother shot dead, her baby sister’s and infant brother’s throats cut, the machete coming down on her own head, her hut burning around her … and it’s difficult to focus on multiplication tables.

“Sometimes I can’t concentrate on my class,” Noor explained. “I want to throw up.”

In the past I’ve referred to Myanmar’s atrocities against its Rohingya Muslim minority as “ethnic cleansing,” but increasingly there are indications that the carnage may amount to genocide.

More here.

Christopher G. Moore in CulturMag:

Swimming pools of ink have been emptied in the discussions of the intense verbal warfare in America about politics as the president fires tweets like a machine-gunner at a wide range of enemies. In all of these dramatic battles, there’s not been much discussion about a central question that defines our humanity: have we loss our sense of empathy? Exactly what makes empathy a desirable trait? I recently read an interview with Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, who writes about the danger of AI; he is worried that mankind might suffer an existential crisis should AI lack empathy. In an interview with Andy Fitch of the Los Angeles Review of Books Bostrom draws what is, I believe, a useful distinction between two different meanings of empathy.

In the first sense, empathy is our ability to read the mind of others: their intentions, emotions, and feelings. Our theory of mind is based on the words, gestures, posture, and the context that provides enough information to make a reasonably good prediction of what another person wants or is seeking to obtain from his or her own actions. If you can predict with reasonable accuracy what someone is after, this is a huge opportunity to take advantage of another’s vulnerability.

In the second sense, empathy is using the theory of mind to dissect the wants, urges and desires of others, and genuinely being interested in and caring about their intentions and feelings. What makes us human is this innate sense of caring.

More here.

Angela Saini in New Humanist:

Martin Rees in The Atlantic:

Albert Einstein said that the “most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” He was right to be astonished. Human brains evolved to be adaptable, but our underlying neural architecture has barely changed since our ancestors roamed the savannah and coped with the challenges that life on it presented. It’s surely remarkable that these brains have allowed us to make sense of the quantum and the cosmos, notions far removed from the “commonsense,” everyday world in which we evolved. But I think science will hit the buffers at some point. There are two reasons why this might happen. The optimistic one is that we clean up and codify certain areas (such as atomic physics) to the point that there’s no more to say. A second, more worrying possibility is that we’ll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. There might be concepts, crucial to a full understanding of physical reality, that we aren’t aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends Darwinism or meteorology. Some insights might have to await a post-human intelligence.

Scientific knowledge is actually surprisingly “patchy”—and the deepest mysteries often lie close by. Today, we can convincingly interpret measurements that reveal two black holes crashing together more than a billion light-years from Earth. Meanwhile, we’ve made little progress in treating the common cold, despite great leaps forward in epidemiology. The fact that we can be confident of arcane and remote cosmic phenomena, and flummoxed by everyday things, isn’t really as paradoxical as it looks. Astronomy is far simpler than the biological and human sciences. Black holes, although they seem exotic to us, are among the uncomplicated entities in nature. They can be described exactly by simple equations. So how do we define complexity? The question of how far science can go partly depends on the answer. Something made of only a few atoms can’t be very complicated. Big things need not be complicated either. Despite its vastness, a star is fairly simple—its core is so hot that complex molecules get torn apart and no chemicals can exist, so what’s left is basically an amorphous gas of atomic nuclei and electrons. Alternatively, consider a salt crystal, made up of sodium and chlorine atoms, packed together over and over again to make a repeating cubical lattice. If you take a big crystal and chop it up, there’s little change in structure until it breaks down to the scale of single atoms. Even if it’s huge, a block of salt couldn’t be called complex.

More here.

Suzanne Joinson in the New York Times:

S. A. Chakraborty’s novel, the first of a projected trilogy, opens with a veiled woman fortunetelling in what appears to be 18th-century Cairo. We quickly learn that Nahri earns her money as a thief and a leader of zars (rituals for the exorcism of bad spirits), and speaks a language, inherited from her long-dead parents, whose name she doesn’t know. It seems we are about to be plunged into a cultural mash-up of “The Thousand and One Nights” and any number of young adult novels with plucky female protagonists, but when Nahri walks through Cairo’s spooky cemetery things take a speculative turn. Puff! A warrior in robes emerges from among the gravestones, flashing his scimitar, bows and arrows aquiver. Next come ghoulish zombies: “The tattered remains of burial shrouds hung from their desiccated frames, the scent of rot filling the air.” Nahri and the warrior must escape, but how? A flying carpet, of course, and when Nahri responds, “A rug? How is a rug going to help us?” it’s clear we’re in the hands of a playful writer.

The warrior is a type of spirit called a daeva, his name is Dara and, as luck would have it, he’s “frighteningly beautiful,” with the “type of allure Nahri imagined a tiger held right before it ripped out your throat.” As kidnapper-rescuers go, he’s hot as hell. Also, he knows the answer to the mystery of Nahri’s origins: She’s a shafit, descendant of an ancient half-human, half-magical tribe thought to have become extinct. A birdlike creature then explains that Nahri is in danger and that her handsome protector must take her away to the city of Daevabad. Thus their adventure begins, complete with snowy plains, forbidding mountain ranges and fierce confrontations.

More here.

Jay Elwes in Prospect:

Each day, humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. A byte is the amount of data needed by a computer to encode a single letter. A quintillion is one followed by 18 zeros. We float on an ocean of data.

You’d arrive at an even bigger number if you put it in terms of “bits”, the ultimate basic building block out of which every wonder of the digital age is built. A bit is simply a one or a zero or, equivalently, a single switch inside an electronic processor that must be either on or off. Put eight in a row, and you’ve got enough combinations to label and store every character on your keyboard—there are thus eight bits to the byte.

These days your newspapers, your tax records, your shopping list and perhaps your love life are nothing more than a long series of “ons” and “offs” generated by the digital processors that lurk in your phone, your car, or your TV. The correct sequence of ones and zeros is all that computers need in order to control the traffic lights at the end of your street, run a nuclear power station, or find you a date for next Friday night. From one perspective, they are simply doing—on a vast scale—the tallying and reckoning we have always done on our fingers: on our digits.

The “digital age” is a colossal achievement of human ingenuity. But this world of ones and zeros is not an end state. Humankind has passed through other ages before: bronze, iron, the era of steam and then of the telegraph, each of which constituted a revolution, before being brought to a close by some further advance of human ingenuity. And that raises a question—if our present digital age will pass just like all the rest, what might come after it?

We are starting to see the answer to that question, and it looks as though the successor to the age of the digital computer will be a startlingly new kind of device—the quantum computer.

More here.

Emran Feroz in The New Arab:

Emran Feroz: One of your central arguments in your recent book "Age of Anger" is that many aspects of today's violence are connected to the violence that took place in Europe in the 19^thcentury. Why is that the case?

Pankaj Mishra: I think the book essentially steps away from the foolish arguments we have heard over and again – that social or economic problems, religious fundamentalism and militancy are all connected to a country's culture or religion.

This is what we heard in so many analyses coming out of Western Europe and the United States. What I am trying to do is show that crises like the kind we are witnessing today form part of a very long history.

These problems don't really have to do much with religion, tradition or philosophy. They are rather connected to our political and economic structures, whether that is the nation-state or industrial capitalism.

The latter is an exploitative and destructing process, and we have seen the effects of these institutions and ideologies in one country after another.

An "Age of Anger" has arisen in almost every country as an attempt to broaden our analytical frameworks.

These had been incredibly narrow and ended in some very stupid and counterproductive conclusions of many current problems.

More here.

Jesse McCarthy in Harvard Magazine:

Black studies, or African American studies, emerged out of the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s, as students and faculty members demanded that universities recognize the need for departments engaged in scholarship on race, slavery, and the diasporic history and culture of peoples of African descent. Since its institutionalization, these departments have grown many branches of inquiry that maintain a rich interdisciplinary dialogue. One is a school of thought known as jazz studies, which investigates the intersections of music, literary and aesthetic theory, and politics. Moten is arguably its leading theoretician, translating jazz studies into a vocabulary of insurgent thought that seeks to preserve black studies as a space for radical politics and dissent. In his work he has consistently argued that any theory of politics, ethics, or aesthetics must begin by reckoning with the creative expressions of the oppressed. Having absorbed the wave of “high theory”—of deconstruction and post-structuralism—he, more than anyone else, has refashioned it as a tool for thinking “from below.”

Moten is best known for his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003). “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist,” is the book’s arresting opening sentence, announcing his major aim: to rethink the way bodies are shaped by aesthetic experience. In particular, he explores how the improvisation that recurs in black art—whether in the music of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey, or the conceptual art of Adrian Piper—confounds the distinctions between objects and subjects, individual bodies and collectively experienced expressions of resistance, desire, or agony. Since 2000, Moten has also published eight chapbooks of poetry, and one, The Feel Trio, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014. He is that rare literary figure who commands wide and deep respect in and out of the academy, and who blurs the line between poetics as a scholarly pursuit, and poetry as an act of rebellious creation, an inherently subversive activity.

More here.

Melissa Beck at The Quarterly Conversation:

Bakkhai continues to be one of Euripides’s (c. 484-406 b.c.e.) most popular plays to stage, translate, and interpret, even though it was never performed in its author’s lifetime. The ancient Greek playwright and Athenian wrote Bakkhai in the last few years of his life in Macedonia, where he had fled after becoming disillusioned with his native city-state. The play was found among his papers after his death and produced posthumously by either his nephew or his son at the Dionysia, the festival held annually for the eponymous god in Athens. The drama presents the god Dionysos arriving in Thebes disguised as a mortal to establish his cult in that city and exact a brutal punishment on his cousin, King Pentheus, who denies the existence of the god. Anne Carson’s unconventional new translation of Bakkhai is a fitting interpretation of what is arguably Euripides’s most enigmatic tragedy.

Dionysos is the first character to appear on stage in the play, and he tells us that he is harboring anger for his maternal family who have denied his immortality. Dionysos is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes. When Semele is pregnant with Dionysos, she is tricked by Hera into viewing Zeus, undisguised, in all his glory as the mighty god of sky and lightning.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

“No Time to Spare” and “Don’t Save Anything” collect, respectively, the recent essays and the freelance journalism of two distinguished, but very different American writers. There are, however, at least three reasons to link Ursula K. Le Guin, an outspoken feminist and award-winning creator of imaginary lands and ambiguous utopias, and James Salter, the courtly chronicler of fighter pilots, intense love affairs and dissolving marriages.

First, each writes fiction of wondrous serenity and authority. Just consider the opening paragraphs of Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” or the final one of Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime.” The language is limpid, the sentences deliberate and grave, their cumulative power . . . immeasurable. Go see for yourself.

Second, both Salter and Le Guin are moralists. Courage and heroism, the testing of character, doing the right thing, the acceptance of responsibility, the getting of wisdom — these themes run through all their writing.

more here.

Naomi Wolf at the TLS:

In 1903 Edith Wharton met the writer Vernon Lee in Italy, and started reading John Addington Symonds. By 1905 she had begun an intimate friendship with Henry James and the circle of male homosexual writers around him, and was soon reading Walt Whitman and Nietzsche, while having an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. Through these influences, Wharton was drawn away from American discourses about sexuality in fiction (which were generally moralistic in this period, regardless of the gender of the writer), and towards British and European aestheticism and sexual liberation. It is after this period that we begin to see the multiple echoes of Oscar Wilde in her work. Wharton used Wilde in order to engage in a necessary, indeed central, argument about what happens to the aestheticist and sexual liberationist project once it is undertaken by heterosexual women.

From 1905 to the end of her career Wharton at times imitated Wilde’s phrasing, and not always successfully. She attempted Wildean paradoxes: in The Fruit of the Tree (1907), for example, the household confidante Mrs Ansell notes that “Most divorced women marry again to be respectable”, to which Mr Langhope, the heiress’s father, replies, nearly quoting Wilde, “Yes – that’s their punishment”.

more here.

Carl Wislon in The New York Times:

John Ashbery’s death in September gave my world a lurch, as the 90-year-old eminent American experimentalist was my favorite living poet. But the compensation was to discover how many others felt the same way. The appreciations became a rare public conversation about poems rather than about Poetry, and what it is or isn’t (as in last year’s exhausting brouhaha over Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize) or whether it’s “dead,” or corrupted by elitist obscurism, or replaced by popular music, or secretly thriving. On social media, people posted their favorite Ashbery poems and passages, like this one from 1977’s “The Other Tradition,” which might seem to refer to those cyclical debates: “They all came, some wore sentiments / Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness / Of the hour … ” It was sweet while it lasted. But now the T-shirts have come a-blazing again, because the 25-year-old Canadian poet Rupi Kaur has published her second book, “The Sun and Her Flowers.” Kaur is the kind of poet who prompts heated polemics, pro and con, from people you never otherwise hear mention poetry, because among other things she is young, female, from a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant family, relatively uncredentialed and insanely successful. Her first collection, “Milk and Honey,” has sold two and a half million copies internationally since it was published in 2014. “The Sun and Her Flowers” debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times paperback fiction best-seller list in October, and has remained near the top ever since.

These are airport novel numbers, not poetry ones. Ashbery’s publishers were delighted if any of his books sold north of 10,000 copies, which generally happened only if he’d won the Pulitzer or National Book Award that year. But Kaur established herself not in poetry journals but on platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram (where she has 1.8 million followers, and posts glamorous shots of herself). And she’s only the biggest of several popular “Instapoets” who have graduated from being retweeted by Kardashians to publishing books, including Tyler Knott Gregson, Lang Leav, Amanda Lovelace and the pseudonymous Atticus.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in Vogue:

Salman Rushdie with sisters Sameen and Nevid

When I was growing up in Bombay (which wasn't Mumbai then, and still isn't in my personal lexicon), Christmas wasn't really a thing. Not only were we not Christians, we weren't a religious household, so December 25 was just that: the 25th of December. New Year's Day was much more significant. The above paragraph is not completely true. For one thing, the school I went to was called the Cathedral School, or, in full, the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School, run "under the auspices", whatever "auspices" were, of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society, whatever that was. As a result there were hymns at assembly every day of the year and "O Come, All Ye Faithful" and "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing" in December, and all of us, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, had to sing along. And because we were, after all, schoolboys, we learned the comic version of "Hark!" also. "Hark! the herald angels sing/ Beecham's Pills are just the thing./ If you want to go to heaven/ Take a dose of six or seven./ If you want to go to hell,/ Take the whole damn box as well."

Also, my sisters and I had a wonderful Christian ayah, Mary Menezes from Mangalore, a devout Roman Catholic who helped to raise us, and because of whom my mother put up a (very small) tree and made us sing carols to her on Christmas morning. Other than the brief appearance of the tree and the singing, though, there was nothing. Turkey? Mince pies? Brussels sprouts? Of course not. We had much tastier food to eat. And presents were for birthdays and Eid.

More here.

More here.

Sophie Pinkham in The Nation:

Commemoration can consolidate national feeling through celebration or mourning. It can remind a country of its gravest mistakes, or it can whitewash them. Evolving national historical narratives turn defeats into victories and villains into heroes, and vice versa. Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, a new history of the famine, illustrates the perils of using the past in the service of today’s politics. Drawing on archives opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, newly available oral histories, and recent scholarship, Applebaum provides an accessible, up-to-date account of this nightmarish but still relatively unknown episode of the 20th century. Her historical account is distorted, however, by her loathing of communism and by her eagerness to shape the complicated story of the famine into one more useful for the present: about a malevolent Russia and a heroic, martyred, unified Ukraine.

In 1928, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had a food problem. Because of policies that gave farmers little incentive to sell their grain, the state could no longer feed the urban population. Stalin became convinced that counterrevolutionary “kulaks”—a mostly imaginary class of fat-cat capitalist peasants—were hoarding grain. He ordered requisitions that angered the peasants and discouraged production, leading to further grain shortages, which in turn were followed by even more requisitions. Stalin had quickly made his own suspicions come true: Peasants began to hoard and hide grain—in protest and as a means of survival.

In response to this crisis, the Communist Party’s Central Committee decided to collectivize agriculture in 1929.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin.]