Andy Fitch in the Los Angeles Review of Books blog:

How to address in catalyzing prose the policy ramifications of your family’s most intimate personal struggles? How (and why) to construct a poetics of prison reform? When I want to ask such questions, I pose them to Danielle Allen. This conversation, transcribed by Phoebe Kaufman, focuses on Allen’s Cuz, a kaleidoscopic account of her cousin Michael’s life before, during, and after incarceration.

ANDY FITCH: Before we get to anything like Michael’s legal case, or treat Michael’s circumstances as a case study of broader social concerns, could you just introduce him, and maybe introduce Cuz’s “I” at the same time? Readers of your book will be charmed to hear of Michael’s smile and playful exuberance. Here could you offer some scene maybe not in the book, but which exemplifies your relationship to each other as cuz?

DANIELLE ALLEN: My time with Michael divides into two phases: first from eight to 18 for me, and from birth to 10 for him. That phase was full of ordinary joys of cousinhood in Southern California: climbing trees, playing football in the street in front of our house, riding bikes, playing with Hotwheel cars. And family holidays: food, talk, lots of football on the television. Then I left for college and Michael, his mom, his siblings, and his mother’s new husband moved to Mississippi. This is when their lives exploded, which I experienced from a distance. Then my second time with Michael ran from about 1998 until his death in 2009, so for me from age 27 to 37. We had nearly weekly phone calls for eight years, and then the intensive period together when Michael got out of prison. Michael was my closest confidante during this period. He probably heard more of my griping about work and marital woes than anyone else.

More here.

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Ruth Scurr at the TLS:

Julian Barnes’s thirteenth novel, like many of its predecessors and his memoir, Levels of Life (TLS, May 3, 2013), is divided into three parts and concerned with love. In the first part, written in the first person, the character Paul, one in a long line of Barnes’s mildly unlikeable but refined male narrators, reminisces late in life about his early relationship with a much older married woman, Susan. Paul and Susan met in the 1960s in suburban Surrey at their local tennis club, when he was nineteen, and home from Sussex University for the summer, and she was forty-eight. Their affair was not a stereotypical “sweet summer interlude” but a romance that lasted over a decade, which, in retrospect, Paul recognizes as the defining, or only, story of his life.

The comic incongruousness of Continental sophistication transplanted to provincial England is evoked early in the novel when a delicatessen opens in the village: “some thought [it] subversive in its offerings of European goods: smoked cheeses, and knobbly sausages hanging like donkey cocks in their string webbing”. Paul rejects the French cliché of an older woman teaching “the arts of love” to a younger man, as in Colette’s novel Chéri (1920): “But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. We were English and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress”.

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Ali Smith at The Guardian:

Recently I found myself rereading Muriel Spark’s novel The Mandelbaum Gate for the first time in 30 years. I’ve been rereading a lot of Spark over this last year and a half, because the times we’re in right now, and the way the information speedfests are forming our everyday history and asking such challenging questions about truth and lies and fiction, mean that I’ve found I’ve had the need of Spark like never before – her intelligence, her longsightedness, her wit, her liberating merriment, her formidable blitheness.

Can blitheness be formidable? I think Spark’s is. She’s this formidable, she’s thisgenerous, I thought, holding The Mandelbaum Gate open in my hands on a train early last November – rereading it at a time when, on the fronts of all the free Evening Standards round me up and down the train, our then British international development secretary happened to have been off having one-sided “secret” talks with the Israeli government. The moral complications of the contemporary were pretty fresh, to my mind anyway, on pages 28 and 29 of The Mandelbaum Gate, set in 1961 in the Jerusalem of the Adolf Eichmann trial.

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Tara Cheesman-Olmsted at The Quarterly Conversation:

Born April 12, 1933, Yoshio Aramaki’s writing comes to us from a different time. His novel The Sacred Era, originally published in Japanese in 1978, has more in common with classic American sci-fi short story writers like Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury—sharing their preoccupation with wonky metaphysics, biblical allegories, and performative misogyny—than with speculative fiction writers working in the present day. He leads readers down the same well-trodden genre path where impoverished young men discover they are, despite an often remarkable lack of initiative, destined for great things. But Aramaki’s brilliant leaps of imagination and use of experimental, non-linear plot structures are too ambitious for the resulting work to be dismissed as outdated or derivative.

On a dying planet Earth ruled by a future iteration of the Roman Catholic Church, a young man named K is sent to the capital city to take what amounts to a Civil Services exam. On passing (an outcome of which there is never any doubt) he will join the elite ranks of the Papal Court of the Holy Empire of Igitur. He will be sent to study Planet Bosch, a distant planet named for and said to resemble a banned painting by the Twilight Era artist Hieronymus Bosch. Planet Bosch is a green, verdant paradise in stark contrast to the dystopian and dying desert landscape that Earth has become.

more here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

John Banville in The Guardian:

Nietzsche would have given four cheers for this intricately argued book, which is at once scientifically rigorous and humanely accommodating, and, so far as this reviewer can judge, revolutionary. Antonio Damasio, a professor of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, sets out to investigate “why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct our selves … and how brains interact with the body to support such functions”. We are not floating seraphim, he reminds us, but bodies that think – and all the better for it. From Plato onwards, western philosophy has favoured mind over “mere” body, so that by the time we get to Descartes, the human has become hardly more than a brain stuck atop a stick, like a child’s hobbyhorse. This is the conception of humanness that Damasio wishes to dismantle. For him, as for Nietzsche, what the body feels is every bit as significant as what the mind thinks, and further, both functions are inextricably intertwined. Indeed, from the very start, among the earliest primitive life forms, affect – “the world of emotions and feelings” – was the force that drove unstoppably towards the flowering of human consciousness and the creation of cultures, Damasio insists.

The idea on which he bases his book is, he tells us, simple: “Feelings have not been given the credit they deserve as motives, monitors, and negotiators of human cultural endeavours.” In claiming simplicity, it is possible the author is being a mite disingenuous. The tone in which he sets out his argument is so carefully judged, so stylistically calm and scientifically collected, that most readers will be lulled into nodding agreement. Yet a moment’s thought will tell us that we conduct our lives largely in contradiction of his premise, and for the most part deal with each other, and even with ourselves, as if we were pure spirit accidentally and inconveniently shackled to half a hundredweight or so of forked flesh. “Feelings, and more generally affect of any sort and strength,” Damasio writes, “are the unrecognised presences at the cultural conference table.” According to him, the conference began among the bacteria, which – who? – even in their “unminded existence … assume what can only be called a sort of ‘moral attitude’”. In support of his claim, he adduces the various ways in which bacteria behave that bear a striking resemblance to human social organisation.

More here.

a little hopeful song

—for Sile

I give thee the sun as guarantee
and the Egyptian faience beads

and the little silver oar that was gifted once
to an English harbor master.

I give thee the silk dress
with its triple-ruffled sleeves and

the cloaks with big hoods that fall full
though some are pulled in at a central button.

I give thee the little colored goats
that go down on their knees as penitents.

I give thee the death mask
and the plaster hand of Seán Ó Riada,

for he is among the best loved of the musicians.

by Bernadette Hall

Bee Wilson in the London Review of Books:

In July 1923 at the Lewes assizes, Mr Justice Avory handed an anonymous letter containing some ‘improper words’ to a respectable-looking woman. He asked her if she had ever used such foul language. ‘Never during the whole of my life, either in writing or talking, never,’ she replied. The woman’s father, a retired house painter with a grey beard, was asked whether he had ever heard his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my family of nine children.’

Edith Swan, a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was accused of sending a letter to a sanitary inspector called Charles Gardner that contained words of ‘an indecent, obscene and grossly offensive character’. The full letter has not survived, but the gist of it was that Mr Gardner would be very sorry that he had ever called Swan’s ‘dust boxes’ a nuisance. Three witnesses had seen Swan post this letter. Offensive letters had been circulating in Littlehampton for several years, and the police had taken the unusual step of installing a periscopic mirror in the post office’s mail drop. Whenever anyone posted anything, it was retrieved by post office staff and examined by two clerks from the Special Investigation Branch. Looking through the periscope, Edwin Baker, one of the clerks, saw Miss Swan’s hand posting the letter to the sanitary inspector along with a letter addressed to her sister in Woking. The stamps on both letters had been marked with invisible ink, and had been sold to Swan at the request of the police, who had long suspected her of being behind the rash of anonymous letters.

Despite all of this, Mr Justice Avory was not convinced that the slender, self-possessed woman in front of him was capable of writing such a letter. The Brighton Argusreported that he directed the jury to ‘consider whether it was conceivable that she could have written this document’ given that her ‘demeanour in the witness box was that of a respectable, clean-mouthed woman’. The judge said that the jury must ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’.

The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest.

More here.

Micah Johnson in Scientific American:

Charles J. Whitman and his wife Kathleen

Charles Whitman lived a fairly unremarkable life until August 1, 1966, when he murdered 16 people including his wife and mother. What transformed this 25-year-old Eagle Scout and Marine into one of modern America’s first and deadliest school shooters? His autopsy suggests one troubling explanation: Charles Whitman had a brain tumor pressing on his amygdala, a region of the brain crucial for emotion and behavioral control.

Can murder really be a symptom of brain disease? And if our brains can be hijacked so easily, do we really have free will?

Neuroscientists are shedding new light on these questions by uncovering how brain lesions can lead to criminal behavior. A recent study contains the first systematic review of 17 known cases where criminal behavior was preceded by the onset of a brain lesion. Is there one brain region consistently involved in cases of criminal behavior? No—the researchers found that the lesions were widely distributed throughout different brain regions. However, all the lesions were part of the same functional network, located on different parts of a single circuit that normally allows neurons throughout the brain to cooperate with each other on specific cognitive tasks. In an era of increasing excitement about mapping the brain’s “connectome,” this finding fits with our growing understanding of complex brain functions as residing not in discrete brain regions, but in densely connected networks of neurons spread throughout different parts of the brain.

More here.

Pascal Boyer at the Cognition and Culture Institute:

A few weeks ago, a TV interview of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson by journalist Cathy Newman became a minor Internet phenomenon, thanks to the journalist’s extraordinary interviewing style. She handled the conversation so badly that the Atlantic commented on that car-crash of an interview under the title Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?

To provide some background: Jordan Peterson is somewhat famous for defending anti-political correctness positions, for instance arguing that respect for transgender people does justify proposals for legislation that would compel people to use particular pronouns when referring to them, of the kind considered in Canada. He also defends a broadly conservative agenda in social and cultural matters.

But that’s not the point here. The reason that interview became an Internet sensation is the bewildering behavior of the interviewer. Like a Theme and variations piece, the conversation between Peterson and Newman follows a simple pattern that is repeated multiple times:

• Jordan Peterson makes a point, tries to provide arguments and occasionally appeals to some evidence.
• Then Newman interrupts him (often in mid-sentence) with the words “So, you’re saying that…” followed by some fantastically distorted version of what Peterson just said.

The most egregious example occurs towards the end of the segment, when Peterson tries to argue that surely the fact that we have hierarchies in human societies is not surprising, given that there are such hierarchies in very distant species.

More here.

Martin Gayford at The Spectator:

Peter Paul Rubens thought highly of Charles I’s art collection. ‘When it comes to fine pictures by the hands of first-class masters,’ he wrote from London in 1629, ‘I have never seen such a large number in one place.’ In Charles I: King and Collector the Royal Academy has reassembled only a fraction of what the king once owned, yet even so this is a sumptuous feast of an exhibition. Some of what’s on show will be familiar to an assiduous British art-lover, since it comes from the Royal Collection and the National Gallery. But the sheer concentration of visual splendour is overwhelming and the installation spectacular.

The Renaissance, like spring, came late to northern Europe — and last of all to distant Britain. But in painting and architecture, it flowered briefly at the Stuart court. Charles persuaded two of the foremost living painters — Rubens and Van Dyck — to work for him and amassed the works of the great dead in enormous qualities: Raphaels, a small Michelangelo marble, Correggios, Veroneses, Tintorettos, Guido Renis and —above all — multitudes by Titian, the king’s favourite painter (and who can blame him).

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Susan E. Haddox at Marginalia Review of Books:

What does it mean to be a man? It is not an easy question to answer. One of the contributions of the field of masculinity studies has been to observe that masculinity is not a stable quality, but one that must be contested and negotiated in different contexts and between different groups. The malleable nature of masculinity has particular relevance in examining biblical characters. The frequent characterization in the biblical texts of God as male creates difficulties for men, an idea that has been detailed by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. How does a person construct a relationship with the divine within social concepts of gender? Eilberg-Schwartz argues that the natural complementary partner for a male god would be a woman. To have a relationship with a male god, a male worshipper must assume the role of a woman. Because this relationship threatens normal standards of masculinity, women must be excluded from the cult entirely, in order to preserve a tenuous hold on maleness. Although Eilberg-Schwartz did not use this terminology, assuming a female identity in relation to God queers the male body. The male body is no longer exclusively male, but assumes an indeterminate gender identity, moving more toward the feminine. What does this do to the male psyche? What does this do to cultural concepts of women?

Rhiannon Graybill’s book Are We Not Men? takes an innovative approach to the issue. She explores the question of the queer bodies of men in relation to God, specifically the bodies of prophets, who have a direct and intimate connection to the divine.

more here.

Erin Blakemore at Poetry Magazine:

When Ramesses II died in 1213 BCE, the 96-year-old Egyptian pharaoh was so unusually old for ancient times that most of his subjects couldn’t imagine life without him. Some feared that his death meant the end of the world itself. After all, he had reigned for 66 years—long enough that many Egyptians lived and died without ever knowing another ruler. Several centuries later, and thousands of miles away, Ramesses II was resurrected: not in Egypt this time, but in Britain, where he was the subject of an impromptu literary competition that spawned “Ozymandias” one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most beloved works and a staple of poetry anthologies.

Two hundred years later, it’s hard to imagine literature without Shelley’s oft-quoted poem. That wasn’t always the case. Were it not for the tireless work of Mary Shelley, Percy’s second wife, collaborator, and posthumous editor, “Ozymandias” would probably be forgotten today. Likewise, Mary’s own work, including her most famous book, Frankenstein, might not exist in its current form without Percy’s encouragement. The potent brew of collaboration, competition, and chaos that fed the Shelleys’ shared literary lives was rare but not singular.

more here.

At the City Pound

I’m in charge of a cage. I know those that won’t.
I don’t mean can’t. Just won’t. There’s a roster
for Tuesdays, Fridays. Dogs to die.

The disconsolate, the abandoned, those with recurrent
symptoms, the incorrigible mutt — oh, a dozen
choices by way of reasons. Even so,

some won’t. Won’t play along once their number’s
up. The “rainbow bridge” in the offing
as the posher clinics put it, a pig’s ear

as a final treat, a venison chew, the profession
behaving beautifully at a time like this.
Still, those that won’t. Won’t go nicely, I mean,

with a gaze to melt, a last slobbed lick.
Those with a soul’s defiance, though embarrassment
in the lunchroom should you come at that one!

Even after the bag is zipped, you feel it:
We’re real at the end as you are, buster. We sniff
the wind. What say if we say it together? Won’t.
.

by Vincent O'Sillivan
from Poetry (February 2018)

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

Two types of bacteria commonly found in the gut work together to fuel the growth of colon tumors, researchers reported on Thursday. Their study, published in the journal Science, describes what may be a hidden cause of colon cancer, the third most common cancer in the United States. The research also adds to growing evidence that gut bacteria modify the body’s immune system in unexpected and sometimes deadly ways. The findings suggest that certain preventive strategies may be effective in the future, like looking for the bacteria in the colons of people getting colonoscopies. If the microbes are present, the patients might warrant more frequent screening; eventually people at high risk for colon cancer may be vaccinated against at least one of the bacterial strains. “I can’t guarantee you these bacteria will be the holy grail of colon cancer, but they should be high on the list” of possible culprits, said Christian Jobin, a professor of medicine at the University of Florida who studies bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

An estimated 50,000 Americans are expected to die of colon cancer in 2018. The new study focused on the earliest stages of the disease.

Two types of bacteria, Bacteroides fragilis and a strain of E. coli, can pierce a mucus shield that lines the colon and normally blocks invaders from entering, the researchers found. Once past the protective layer, the bacteria grow into a long, thin film, covering the intestinal lining with colonies of the microbes. E. coli then releases a toxin that damages DNA of colon cells, while B. fragilis produces another poison that both damages DNA and inflames the cells. Together they enhance the growth of tumors. Not everyone carries the two types of bacteria in their colon. Those who do seem to pick up microbes in childhood, where they simply become part of the diverse mass of bacteria in the intestinal tract — the so-called microbiome. For most who carry them, it is not clear the bacteria would ever be a problem, said Dr. Eric Pamer, an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Robin Dembroff in the New York Review of Books:

As California residents rang in 2018, they joined residents of Oregon and Washington, D.C., in having the option to revise their legal genders from either “male” or “female” to “nonbinary.” California’s enactment of the Gender Recognition Act, which was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown last October and starts to take effect later this year, is but one more sign of a slow but steady sea-change. Washington State has followed suit, and similar third-gender options are under consideration in New York and Vermont. Under California’s new law, legal gender is dramatically reframed. No longer is it based on which sex (male/female) one was assigned as birth. Instead, legal gender will be based on what California lawmakers deem “fundamentally personal”: gender identity.

A person’s gender identification encompasses identification with certain physical features as well as gender expressions, gender norms, and gendered language. This means that, regardless of one’s physical characteristics, a Californian who does not identify as a man or a woman may change their legal gender to “nonbinary.” The motivation for this shift is clear: according to California Senator Scott Wiener, the nonbinary option means that “transgender and non-binary people will now be able to identify themselves as they are, not as who society tells them they should be.” (California’s law goes further than other states’ measures, permitting citizens to opt for nonbinary on their birth certificates, as well as other official documents like driving licenses.)

California legislators, and progressive lawmakers in other states, may be acting from the best of motives, but this swath of new legislation rests on a dangerous mistake. I say this as a nonbinary person, one who identifies as genderqueer and uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them. I’m also a philosophy professor and spend much of my time thinking about the ways in which gender categories are constructed and enforced.

More here.

Nicole Yunger Halpern in Preposterous Universe:

I’ve been grateful for opportunities to interview senior scientists, over the past few months, from coast to coast. The opinions I collected varied. Several interviewees latched onto the question as though they pondered it daily. A couple of interviewees balked (I don’t know; that’s tricky…) but summoned up a sermon. All the responses fired me up: The more wisps of mist withdrew from the nature of extraordinary science, the more I burned to contribute.

I’ll distill, interpret, and embellish upon the opinions I received. Italics flag lines that I assembled to capture ideas that I heard, as well as imperfect memories of others’ words. Quotation marks surround lines that others constructed. Feel welcome to chime in, in the “comments” section.

One word surfaced in all, or nearly all, my conversations: “impact.” Extraordinary science changes how researchers across the world think. Extraordinary science reaches beyond one subdiscipline.

This reach reminded me of answers to a question I’d asked senior scientists when in college: “What do you mean by ‘beautiful’?” Replies had varied, but a synopsis had crystallized: “Beautiful science enables us to explain a lot with a little.” Schrodinger’s equation, which describes how quantum systems evolve, fits on one line. But the equation describes electrons bound to atoms, particles trapped in boxes, nuclei in magnetic fields, and more. Beautiful science, which overlaps with extraordinary science, captures much of nature in a small net.

More here.