Jonathan Beckman in The Economist:

At cocktail hour on a mild October evening, as thousands of Londoners are wadded face to armpit on their tube journeys home, half a dozen residents of a handsome, brown-brick townhouse in Chelsea have gathered in the basement kitchen. Jonny Sywulak, a 34-year-old software engineer and former bartender, is standing behind a balustrade of vodka bottles, demonstrating how to concoct a Bloody Mary. Each glass is served with an elaborate garnish – a slice of lime, a slice of lemon, an olive, a nub of blue cheese and a shrimp – that slumps against the rim like a half-felled totem pole. “I’m just following instructions here,” says Isa Landaeta, the house’s community manager. “I’ve never made a garnish like this before. Also, do olives really taste good with shrimp?”

Nicolas Geeraert in The Conversation:

The academic discipline of psychology was developed largely in North America and Europe. Some would argue it’s been remarkably successful in understanding what drives human behaviour and mental processes, which have long been thought to be universal. But in recent decades some researchers have started questioning this approach, arguing that many psychological phenomena are shaped by the culture we live in.

Clearly, humans are in many ways very similar – we share the same physiology and have the same basic needs, such as nourishment, safety and sexuality. So what effect can culture really have on the fundamental aspects of our psyche, such as perception, cognition and personality? Let’s take a look at the evidence so far.

Experimental psychologists typically study behaviour in a small group of people, with the assumption that this can be generalised to the wider human population. If the population is considered to be homogeneous, then such inferences can indeed be made from a random sample.

However, this isn’t the case. Psychologists have long disproportionately relied on undergraduate students to carry out their studies, simply because they are readily available to researchers at universities. More dramatically still, more than 90% of participants in psychological studies come from countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D). Clearly, these countries are neither a random sample nor representative for the human population.

More here.

Leonard Mlodinow in the New York Times:

I always thought that Stephen Hawking would outlive me. I broke into tears when I heard on Wednesday that he had not. He died at his home in Cambridge, England, at 76, after more than half a century of living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

When a man is given three years to live at 21, and he dies 55 years later, it shouldn’t come as a shock. But though I’m 15 years younger then Stephen was, and he had been gravely ill for years, if you knew him you couldn’t help thinking that he would always be around, that his life force was inexhaustible, that he would always have another miracle to pull off.

The scientific community rightly makes much of one of his miracles, a discovery he made in 1974 of something now known as Hawking radiation: the phenomenon in which black holes — so named because nothing can escape them — actually allow radiation to get out.

In popular culture Stephen was another kind of miracle: a floating brain, a disembodied intellect that fit snugly into the stereotype of the genius scientist.

But to me Stephen was also the everyday miracle of an ordinary embodied human — albeit one who had to battle in heroic ways within the confines of his particular shell.

More here.

Here's David Byrne's original video of "Everybody's Coming to my House" from his new album American Utopia:

And here is the version from the Vocal Jazz Ensemble of the Detroit School of Arts:

Benjamin A. Schupmann in the Oxford University Press Blog:

The rise of extremist populism in recent years places liberal democracy, not to mention committed liberal democrats, in an awkward position. There has been an alarming rise in public support for such extremist movements, even in established liberal democratic states. In states such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela, democratically elected governments are enacting illiberal and anti-democratic political goals and values into law and in some cases directly into their constitutions. Once in power, these movements have sought – among other things – to concentrate political power in the executive branch, subordinate the judiciary and the civil service to the executive, intimidate and disempower domestic opposition, undermine press freedoms, infringe on minority rights, limit freedoms of expression and assembly, control universities, and finally stoke xenophobic, anti-pluralist, anti-Semitic, and racist sentiments.

Victor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, has characterized this development as “illiberal democracy.” Defenders of liberal democracy and theorists of populism, in turn, have responded by condemning this turn as simply undemocratic. The abuse of democratically obtained powers to dismantle liberal and democratic commitments is democratic suicide.

A sort of paradox sits at the heart of democratic suicide, however. If a majority or supermajority legallyseeks to enact laws that undermine liberal constitutionalism and democracy, is it best characterized as undemocratic? What constitutional measures can be taken to prevent democratic suicide from happening, if any?

It is widely believed in the West today that democracy is the ultimate basis of political authority. If true, liberal democrats have little recourse when a majority or super majority of the people legally amend liberal and democratic values out of the constitution – except to hope that voters will come around by the next election.

Gillian Osborne in Nautilus:

There was no single job title for those who practiced science prior to 1834. Naturalists, philosophers, and savans tramped around collecting specimens, recorded astral activity, or combusted chemicals in labs, but not as “scientists.” When William Whewell proposed this term, he hoped it would consolidate science, which he worried otherwise lacked “all traces of unity.” Whewell saw scientists as analogous to artists. Just “as a Musician, Painter, or Poet,” are united in pursuit of a common goal—the beautiful—Whewell believed a botanist, physicist, or chemist should be united in their common pursuit of understanding nature.

Built into his concept of what it means to be a scientist was a relation between what the poet and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a contemporary of Whewell, called “Each and All”: an attention to the particular that keeps the big picture in sight. For Emerson, the “All” was Nature and the “Each” could be a shell, or bird, a humblebee, or a Rhododendron. The point of science, according to Whewell and Emerson, was to investigate the relation between these two scales. Today, we have other terminology for “Each and All”: the reflection within the local, for example, of global phenomenon. Consciousness emerging from the activity of individual neurons. Spring flowers in Concord whose earlier blooming reflect changes in planetary climate patterns. In the video below, Harvard professor Elisa New sits down with former Vice President Al Gore to discuss Emerson’s poem, “Each and All,” in conjunction with 19th-century science, 20th-century space exploration, and contemporary climate change. The conversation, along with others featured on Nautilus, are part of New’s Poetry in America project. New’s conversation with Gore is part of a new Poetry in America initiative focused on the “Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky.”

More here.

King of Kreations

Onliest man who lay hands on me. Pointer finger pad between my eyes.
Pinky knuckle cool on cheekbone. God of precision, blade at my throat,

for a half hour, you love me this way. Together we discover what I got
from my folks—widows peak, dandruff, hair growing fast in concentric O’s.

Claude, so damn beautiful, I can count on one hand the times I’ve looked
directly in your face, for fear I might never come back. You knower of me.

To get right I come to you. When I’m finna interview. When I’m finna banquet
or party. When I must stunt, I come to you—

It is mostly you, but, not always. After all you gotta eat too.
So sometimes it’s Percival, face like stones, except when he’s smiling.
Sometimes it’s Junior who sings the whole time he lines up the crown.

No matter how soft my body…. or how many eyes find it and peel
when I walk in the shop…. in the chair, I am of them.
Not brother. Not sister….. When he wields the razor and takes me
low it’s like when a woman gets close to the mirror to slide the lipstick
on slow. Draws a line so perfect she cuts her own self from the clay.
.
by Angel Nafis.
from the Academy of American Poets

Roger Penrose in The Guardian:

The image of Stephen Hawking – who has died aged 76 – in his motorised wheelchair, with head contorted slightly to one side and hands crossed over to work the controls, caught the public imagination, as a true symbol of the triumph of mind over matter. As with the Delphic oracle of ancient Greece, physical impairment seemed compensated by almost supernatural gifts, which allowed his mind to roam the universe freely, upon occasion enigmatically revealing some of its secrets hidden from ordinary mortal view.

Of course, such a romanticised image can represent but a partial truth. Those who knew Hawking would clearly appreciate the dominating presence of a real human being, with an enormous zest for life, great humour, and tremendous determination, yet with normal human weaknesses, as well as his more obvious strengths. It seems clear that he took great delight in his commonly perceived role as “the No 1 celebrity scientist”; huge audiences would attend his public lectures, perhaps not always just for scientific edification.

The scientific community might well form a more sober assessment. He was extremely highly regarded, in view of his many greatly impressive, sometimes revolutionary, contributions to the understanding of the physics and the geometry of the universe.

Hawking had been diagnosed shortly after his 21st birthday as suffering from an unspecified incurable disease, which was then identified as the fatal degenerative motor neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Soon afterwards, rather than succumbing to depression, as others might have done, he began to set his sights on some of the most fundamental questions concerning the physical nature of the universe. In due course, he would achieve extraordinary successes against the severest physical disabilities. Defying established medical opinion, he managed to live another 55 years.

More here.

Daniel Felsenthal in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I leave the apartment soon after the snow begins to fall. The linoleum stairs are slick from days of muck, and in the little courtyard that separates the two wings of the housing complex, bikes are chained to the racks in defiance of winter, a blanket of white on their frames. My boyfriend, Jeff, is taking a shower. I slide across the frozen walkway. I am wearing Jeff’s hat, with ear flaps and a drawstring, as well as his gloves, which barely reach my wrists. I brought so few necessities on our trip that I can fit them easily into a small backpack. But because I was not sure what I might want to read, I carried a second piece of luggage, a black Nike duffle bag my parents gave me some years ago, which I filled with books. I have Ravelstein, the last novel by Saul Bellow, in the pocket of my puffy coat.

It is December 23, 2017. I have just read that this is the 18th birthday of the last child Saul Bellow sired, Naomi Rose, born when her father was 84. The Québecois amble on happily toward Christmas, a holiday that has probably overshadowed Naomi’s last 17 birthdays. The snowbanks flanking the path on the Rue Beaudry force pedestrians to walk in single file. Unhurried by the cold, they turn back to laugh, gesticulate, listen to one another. A police car rolls past the strip of gay bars on the Rue Sainte-Catherine. In front of the metro stop, men slouch in some indeterminate middle ground between loitering and cruising. A white-haired bundle of clothes walks past them unnoticed, changing his trajectory to intersect with mine as I walk in the opposite direction toward the car. He slides a map from somewhere in his peacoat. I realize, a moment before he begins to speak French, that his intention is to talk with me.

More here.

Jackson Arn in The Point:

I discovered anatomical drawing years before I could understand what I was looking at. When I was in the first grade, my grandfather took my interest in crayons and colored pencils as a sign that I might follow in his footsteps. He’s a doctor, with charmingly old-fashioned ideas about the unity of art and science, and looking back, it feels inevitable that he should have introduced me to Leonardo da Vinci.

I was too young to hold the book myself, but when he lifted it from the shelf and held it in his lap it seemed almost sacred, too complicated for any single person to comprehend. I still remember the yellowish sketches: ribs and tendons cross-hatched into three dimensions; perfectly rounded skulls that made me furious with my own clumsy hands; the fetus cleanly sliced from its mother’s womb. Mostly, I remember my envy for the man, centuries dead, who’d drawn all this so effortlessly—envy that was deeply bound up in awe and confusion and discomfort with how deeply he’d gazed into the body.

I felt similar emotions when I visited “The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal” at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish doctor often considered the father of modern neurology, won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his twenty years of research on the nervous system.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

In 1953, Walter and the love of his life Eileen Galway set sail to London for a planned ten-year European Grand Tour: nothing but love, ambition, and promise was on the horizon. Yet by the time he died, in 2009, he had spent the last two decades of his life living alone, dirt-poor, in a shack without running water, electricity, or access to roads, on the side of an Antigua mountain. Here, rocketing between brilliant insight, wild imagination, full-on hallucination, and fits of delusional grandeur he produced an epic series of almost entirely unseen work — including a 25,000-page typed manuscript on philosophy, history, art, geology, and biology; numerous plays, poems, musical scores; and hundreds of hours of recorded audiotape. He also made over 5,000 sculptures, paintings, drawings, diagrams, cosmic charts, and heraldry designs on cardboard, wood panels, old photos, the backs of album covers, paper bags, planks, metal signs, and any surface he could scavenge. (All of this would likely have been lost were it not for art historian Barbara Paca happening upon his work in Antigua at the very end of Walter’s life, and seeing genius. In 2017, Paca oversaw Walter being named the representative of Antigua and Barbuda at the Venice Biennale.)

more here.

Amy Taubin at Artforum:

EVEN IF YOU’VE SEEN WILLIAM KLEIN’S Muhammad Ali, The Greatest (1974) online or in a museum or festival, those are no substitutes for seeing it right now in a theater with an audience, just like you’ve seen Black Panther (2018). Take your kids, or any kids you know, to see a real-world hero. Muhammad Ali is one of the best films in “The Eyes of William Klein,” a retrospective at Quad Cinema of narrative and documentary features and shorts by the ninety-year-old photographer and filmmaker.

In a documentary made for the BBC (not part of this series) to coincide with the filmmaker’s 2012 retrospective at the Tate Modern, someone tells the story of how Klein got what in Muhammad Ali seemed to be almost unlimited access to the boxer in 1964–65, when he won the heavyweight championship against Sonny Liston in Louisville, Kentucky and then beat him at their rematch in Maine. Klein was flying to Miami, hoping to get a chance to shoot Ali during training, and took the only empty seat on the plane, which turned out to be next to Malcolm X. Somehow by the end of the flight the New York–born photographer of Hungarian-Jewish descent, best known for his Vogue fashion shoots as well as the street photography published in his book Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels (1956), had managed to convince Malcolm to recommend him to Ali.

more here.

Janet Malcolm at the NYRB:

Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It was almost universally disliked when it came out in 1967. It struck a chord of hostility in the mid-twentieth-century literary world that was out of all proportion to the literary sins it may or may not have committed. The reviews were not just negative, but mean. In what may have been the meanest review of all, Wilfred Sheed, a prominent critic and novelist of the time, wrote:

In this mixture of complacency and agitation, he has written a book of no literary distinction whatever, pockmarked by clichés and little mock modesties and a woefully pedestrian tone…. Mediocrities from coast to coast will no doubt take Making It to their hearts and will use it for their own justification…. In the present condition of our society and the world, I cannot imagine a more feckless, silly book.

Even before the book was published it was an object of derision. Podhoretz’s friends urged him not to publish it, and his publisher shrank from it after reading the manuscript. Another publisher gamely took the book, but his gamble did not pay off. Word had spread throughout literary Manhattan about the god-awfulness of what Podhoretz had wrought. This and the reviews sealed the book’s fate. It was a total humiliating failure.

more here.

My Husband Before the Occupation

He stumbled between his fear and his fire
I was slave but his mistress, lady

His name, a tattoo of my pain
His past, a crematorium for my poetry

Once upon a time, my husband—

My husband after the occupation

I said to my husband—
Be like a brother to me
Let’s not wet our marriage bed with even one drop of happiness

The Mujahideen, now in our house,
would smell love’s musk, our sweat

They’d behead anyone
who had both love and breath
.

by Amal Al-Jubouri
from Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation
Alice James Books, 2011
translated from the Arabic by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Husam Qaisi
.

David Castelvecchi in Nature:

Stephen Hawking, one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century and perhaps the most celebrated icon of contemporary science, has died at the age of 76. The University of Cambridge confirmed that the physicist died in the early hours of 14 March at his home in Cambridge, England. Since his early twenties, Hawking had lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease in which motor neurones die, leaving the brain incapable of controlling muscles. Hawking’s health had been reportedly deteriorating; just over a year ago, he was hospitalized during a trip to Rome.

His death was marked by statements from scientists around the world. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, wrote on Twitter: "His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake. But it's not empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric of spacetime that defies measure." One of Hawking’s former students at Cambridge, theoretical physicist Raphael Bousso, told Nature that his teacher was a brilliant physicist who also excelled at communicating science to the public. “These are two distinct skills. Stephen excelled at both.” Bousso, now at the University of California at Berkeley, recalls how he had to learn to shake off his awe and relax around Hawking. “Stephen was a joyful and lighthearted person, not to be burdened by excessively respectful and convoluted interactions,” he says. The British physicist was born in Oxford in 1942. He was diagnosed with ALS when he was 21, while a doctoral student in cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Hawking first realized that something was wrong when he went ice skating with his mother one day, he recalled in a speech on his 75th birthday celebration last year. “I fell over and had great difficulty getting up,” he told the audience. “At first I became depressed. I seemed to be getting worse very rapidly.” Although physicians initially gave him just a few years to live, his disease advanced more slowly than expected. He went on to have an active career for decades, both as a theoretical physicist and as a popularizer of science. Still, Hawking progressively lost use of most of his muscles, and for the last three decades of his life was communicating almost exclusively through a voice synthesizer.

More here.

Stephen Hawking's long survival against all odds after being told that he would be dead in his 20s almost made me subconsciously think that he is immortal. So it was a bit of a shock to read the news today. And the news of his death made me think of this, which is not a bad way to remember him today:

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

In 1500, Leonardo was an artist working for hire. One of his clients was Louis XII of France. The painting he had just completed was a portrait of Jesus Christ, quite possibly a commission from the French monarch. History does not record whether the completed work met with approval but, once painted, Salvator Mundi began a rather improbable journey in and out of oblivion. A couple of decades after it was completed (and by way of royal marriages) Salvator Mundi ended up on the British Isles. For the next hundred and fifty years, the painting was in the possession of various English courts and palaces. Then, in the late 18th century, the painting disappeared from the historical record. That’s the oblivion part of the story.

During the oblivion years, Leonardo’s painting fell on hard times. It was damaged and – in an attempt at restoration – painted over in such a way as to make Christ look like one of the dopier members of the Manson Family. The painting, no longer recognizable as a Leonardo, was sold at auction in 1904 – mentioned in a long CNN video on the piece that is here. It appeared at auction again in 1958, selling for the modest sum of forty-five British pounds.

It was sold again in the US in 2005 to a consortium of dealers led by Robert Simon. They got it for around $10,000. Simon, a New York fine art dealer specializing in Renaissance works, suspected it was worth much more than that, though he dared not yet dream it might be the lost Leonardo. Years of restoration work brought out the Leonardo concealed beneath the third-rate overpainting. It then sold for $75 million in 2013 and right away again for $127.5 million. Finally, just last October, Salvator Mundiwas purchased by a Saudi prince (on behalf of the Louvre Abu Dhabi) for $450.3 million dollars, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold.

More here.

Eric Boodman in Stat News:

On the night before his weekly trip into the slaughterhouse, Fraser Taylor stepped into the back of the truck to make sure everything was in place. The hold still smelled faintly of cow — a subtle whiff of something grassy — but the equipment inside seemed better suited to a day of spelunking through the sewers. There were hard hats and hoses and straps. There were huge conical tanks, and a valve-laden contraption that might come in handy for siphoning off the contents of pipes. The truck itself was white. It bore no sign of the company it belonged to or the strange journey it was about to take.

Taylor looked tired. It was almost 5 p.m., there was a snowstorm, and the team was already running late. Snow drifted down into the lights of the loading dock as Taylor slid the truck door shut. The roads would be terrible, just tire marks through slush instead of lanes. They had to go tonight, though. Lateness was not an option on Tuesday mornings. If they didn’t get onto the floor before the cattle started coming by, there would no way to load their equipment in, and they would get none of the precious liquid they’d come to collect.

It’s a substance that most meat processing plants hardly think about: Just another fluid in the fluid-filled business of turning an animal into a side of beef. But Taylor would panic if he saw any spill on the slaughterhouse floor — those lost drops could have saved babies’ lives.

This small firm had carefully courted slaughterhouses so that its workers could be allowed inside to suck this off-white foam out of cow lungs. Then, they purified the hell out of it, and shipped vials of it across Canada, and to India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Ecuador, and Iran, where it was shot into the lungs of struggling premature infants.

More here.

Michael Doliner in CounterPunch:

Creeps are big in the news these days and it is a truth universally acknowledged that all American creepiness is a Russian plot the notorious KGB agent, Vladimir Nabokov, hatched with his novel, Lolita. Humbert Humbert, it’s pseudonymous narrator, everyone agrees, is a creep. But he is not a run-of-the-mill creep. Humbert is not a creep because women find him disgusting and he tries to touch them, water-cooler style. On the contrary, he is quite “attractive” to women, that is women he finds, well… creepy. No, Humbert is a creep because he desires prepubescent “nymphets” and he is a 42-year-old man.

The novel, Lolita, with a couple of additions, is Humbert’s “confession”, the story of how he met the Hazes, mother and daughter, discovered that the girl, Dolores, was the nymphet, Lolita, then violated, imprisoned and lost her. Only through Humbert do we know anything about Lolita. Only Humbert can see Lolita. So without Humbert, Lolita would not exist. She would have remained Dolores Haze with the fate John Ray Jr. PhD., another Nabokov nom de plume reveals in his forward to Humbert’s confession. According to Ray, she dies as Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, in childbirth in Alaska. Even Mrs Richard F. Schiller would never have been mentioned without Humbert, for Ray would not have written his forward without Humbert’s confession.

More here.