Cathy Rentzenbrink in Prospect:

In the summer of 1990 my brother, Matty, was knocked over by a car. He was 16 and I was 17 and we lived in a little village in Yorkshire above the pub our parents owned. I knelt by Matty’s unconscious body in the road and travelled with him in the ambulance. I could tell by the demeanour of the ambulance men how serious it was. “We’ve got a bad one here,” said the driver, into the radio. The other man was slicing off Matty’s T-shirt which was now entirely dark red. “Why is there so much blood?” I asked, “I can’t see any cuts.” “It’s coming from the back of his head, lass,” he said. “Talk to him, love, keep talking. Keep him with us.”

I laid my hand on Matty’s bare, bloodstained chest and I talked and talked until we arrived at hospital. Then Matty was rushed away from me. I filled out forms with a nurse and rang my parents. I can still hear my mother’s voice as I delivered the information that would throw a grenade into our lives.

After my parents arrived a surgeon came to see us. “I’ve saved your son’s life,” he said. “We don’t know yet whether that was the right thing to do.” He told us that the next 48 hours were crucial. We commenced what the newspapers called our bedside vigil. More talking. I held Matty’s hand and watched his chest rise and fall as a ventilator pumped air into his lungs. All we wanted was for Matty not to die. Moving around the hospital in the night I stumbled into the chapel. I was an atheist but had been to a Catholic school and I knew the prayers. I prayed that my brother would not die. I believed we were in a binary situation. I only knew about life and death, I knew nothing of the in-between.

Now—older, wiser, sadder—I know that I was praying for the wrong thing. It would have been better for my poor, lost brother and for everyone who loved him if he’d died when he was knocked over by the car.

More here.

Sue Hubbard in Artlyst:

Yesterday the art world not only lost one of its finest and most loved abstract painters, but I lost a great friend. There will be plenty of well-deserved plaudits and obituaries for Gillian Ayres, who died yesterday at the age of 88, after a bout of illness. But I want to add something more personal.

I first met her in 1984 when, as a young arts journalist, I was sent to interview her in her Three Bears cottage in a remote glade of a Cornish valley. It was a long way to go, and I was invited to stay. Warm and chaotic, the place was full of animals, cigarette smoke and, I believe, followed the Quentin Crisp approach to housekeeping, which was that after four years the dust never got any worse. I found it amazing that Gillian was able to produce such an array of stunning, jewel-like canvases from her small studio. We hit it off right away. Feisty, opinionated, fiercely intelligent and well read, we discussed everything from art, to Shakespeare and religion, which she hated. And she cooked delicious meals.

Born in 1930, she grew up in Barnes, then still semi-rural with its wooded common and market gardens where, many years later I, myself, was to live. It was a comfortable middle-class existence. She attended St. Paul’s Girls school where her best friend was the future politician Shirley Williams. She once sent me a photograph of them sitting on a haystack. With her long golden locks, she was a stunning teenage. But it was on a day in 1943, she told me, as she was going up to the school art room, that she discovered some illustrated monographs on van Gogh, Gauguin and Monet. Already well versed in poetry and music, she had excelled at drawing and painting since she’d been a small child, but this was the moment she knew she wanted to be an artist.

More here.

Robert E. Tanner at The Quarterly Conversation:

We are lucky to have translations of the French novelist Mathias Énard, whose career suggests the exploratory, variegated template of Faulkner. A translator from Persian, Arabic, and Spanish, Énard has written nine novels in an assortment of styles and on an assortment of subjects. As Faulkner nearly always located his fiction in Mississippi, Énard has focused on the lands surrounding the Mediterranean, what he calls in his eponymous novel, the “Zone.” And as the themes of slavery, black-white relations, history, Reconstruction, and the South run through Faulkner’s novels, Énard has his touchstones of music, violence, East-West relations, and literature, all of which appear in his most recent book to be translated by Charlotte Mandell into English, the 2015 Prix Goncourt winner, Compass.

The novel takes place over a single sleepless night in 2012. The narrator, Franz Ritter, is a musicologist specializing in the “Oriental” influence on European classical music. He has just received a note along with an article written by a fellow Orientalist and long unrequited love, Sarah, and is also contending with an unspecified, possibly terminal, medical diagnosis. He reflects on their meetings over the years across Europe and the Middle East, thinks about articles he should write, and contemplates the influence of the East (which, to him, extends only as far as Iran) on the West (which he sees stretching no further than Portugal).

more here.

Charlotte Higgins at The Guardian:

Rovelli’s work as a physicist, in crude terms, occupies the large space left by Einstein on the one hand, and the development of quantum theory on the other. If the theory of general relativity describes a world of curved spacetime where everything is continuous, quantum theory describes a world in which discrete quantities of energy interact. In Rovelli’s words, “quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta”.

Both theories are successful; but their apparent incompatibility is an open problem, and one of the current tasks of theoretical physics is to attempt to construct a conceptual framework in which they both work. Rovelli’s field of loop theory, or loop quantum gravity, offers a possible answer to the problem, in which spacetime itself is understood to be granular, a fine structure woven from loops.

String theory offers another, different route towards solving the problem. When I ask him what he thinks about the possibility that his loop quantum gravity work may be wrong, he gently explains that being wrong isn’t the point; being part of the conversation is the point. And anyway, “If you ask who had the longest and most striking list of results it’s Einstein without any doubt. But if you ask who is the scientist who made most mistakes, it’s still Einstein.”

more here.

Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker:

Francis seems less intent on altering the Church’s most controversial doctrines than on exhibiting boredom with the whole angst-ridden discourse that surrounds them. When he was asked about footnote 351, shortly after “Amoris Laetitia” was published, he said that he couldn’t remember it. Earlier in his papacy, while fielding questions from the Vatican press corps on a plane, he was asked about the Church’s stance on homosexuality. He replied, “Who am I to judge?” It sounded more like a plea to move past the issue than like an actual invocation of humility. (After all, when it comes to society’s market-driven indifference to the poor, or even to Francis’s pet theological causes, such as devotion to the Virgin Mary, he is not shy about offering judgments.) Francis quickly became popular in the press, and among liberal non-Catholics. After the worst years of the clerical-abuse crisis in the Church, here was a leader who embodied Catholicism’s lastingly positive, if comparatively abstract, associations. (Few of us imagine ourselves as opposed to love, mercy, and human dignity.) He sounded willing, even eager, to leave the less comfortable conversations—about divorce, contraception, homosexuality—behind.

But the appeal of the institution of the Papacy, for many, lies in its promise of constancy. According to Catholic teaching, the office was created when Christ named the apostle Peter the first leader of the Church, saying, in a pun on the Greek meaning of Peter’s name, “Upon this rock will I build my church.” The more impressive the edifice you’d like to build, the more important a stable base becomes. Today, under Francis, and in the wake of Benedict’s resignation—he is now Pope Emeritus, a title that has never existed before—the Papacy has become the site for unexpected shifts and discontinuities.

more here.

Charles Homans in The New York Times:

Township, Pa., that a sense of what exactly it was that I was watching — what I and everyone else had been watching throughout Trump’s presidency to that point — finally clicked into place with startling clarity. This was in early March, in an unexpectedly pristine hangar by the Pittsburgh airport, its white floor buffed to a shine in which I could make out my reflection. The implicit purpose of the event was to bring some Trump magic to a fellow Republican’s faltering campaign. Moon Township is in Pennsylvania’s 18th District, which Trump won in 2016 by nearly 20 points and where in three days, the Republican state representative Rick Saccone would narrowly lose a special congressional election to Conor Lamb, a Democrat who had never run for office.

Saccone took the stage briefly before Trump did, and his people were circulating in the hangar: normal-looking suburban Republican operatives and volunteers of the sort who are still jarring to see attached to the Trump roadshow, like insurance-claims adjusters piled into the bed of a monster truck. But this was a Trump event in spirit: the email advisory from Donald J. Trump for President Inc., his official presidential campaign committee, described it as a “campaign rally” but did not mention Saccone, explaining instead that Trump would “highlight the benefits that his historic tax cuts are providing hard-working families across Pennsylvania and to celebrate our booming economy now that America is once again open for business.” Onstage, Trump seemed to intermittently remember the tax cuts and the booming economy, and even more intermittently that he was supposed to be promoting the candidate, whom he had reportedly derided in private as “weak.” But he mostly did what he usually does at his rallies: recite the latest verse of the ballad of Donald Trump, the president who would be doing great things for the people in this room were it not for his many antagonists.

More here.

Bishop Tutu's Visit to the White House: 1984

I'm afraid for you a little, for your sense of shame, I feel you are
accustomed to ordinary evil.
Your assumption will be that disagreeing with your methods, he will
nevertheless grasp the problems.
You will assume that he will be involved, as all humans must be, for
what else is it is be human,
in a notion of personal identity as a progress toward a more conscious,
inclusive spiritual condition,
so that redemption, in whatever terms it might occur, categorically will
have been earned.
How will you bear that for him and those around him, righteousness
and self are a priori equal,
that to have stated one's good intentions excuses in advance from any
painful sense of sin?
I fear you will be wounded by his obtuseness, humiliated by his pride,
mortified by his absurd power.

by C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Noonday Press, 1994

Andrew Robinson in Nature:

In 1959, the mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer — who turns 90 this month — performed what he characteristically called a “completely pointless” scientific song at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (He was a PhD student there at the time.) ‘The Elements’, now one of his most cherished works, sets the names of all the chemical elements then known to the tune of the ‘Major-General’s Song’ from The Pirates of Penzance, the comic opera by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Lehrer’s heroically precise, rapid-fire enunciation of 102 elements (reordered to allow flawless end-rhymes), ends with the much-quoted crack, “These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard/And there may be many others but they haven’t been discarvard.”

In the 1960s, Lehrer followed up with more than a dozen astringent, cynical and often pointedly political songs, such as ‘So Long, Mom, I’m Off to Drop the Bomb (A Song for World War III)’. As The New York Timeshad it, “Mr. Lehrer’s muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.” (Lehrer reprinted the quote in his album liner notes.) In the fraught geopolitics and paranoia of the cold war, however, Lehrer’s social criticism touched a chord with many in the United States. Fans might, however, have been surprised to learn that he had crunched numbers for the National Security Agency as an army draftee in the mid-1950s.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

Twenty-seven years ago, a group of physicists made an accidental discovery that flipped mathematics on its head. The physicists were trying to work out the details of string theory when they observed a strange correspondence: Numbers emerging from one kind of geometric world matched exactly with very different kinds of numbers from a very different kind of geometric world.

To physicists, the correspondence was interesting. To mathematicians, it was preposterous. They’d been studying these two geometric settings in isolation from each other for decades. To claim that they were intimately related seemed as unlikely as asserting that at the moment an astronaut jumps on the moon, some hidden connection causes his sister to jump back on earth.

“It looked totally outrageous,” said David Morrison, a mathematician at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the first mathematicians to investigate the matching numbers.

Nearly three decades later, incredulity has long since given way to revelation. The geometric relationship that the physicists first observed is the subject of one of the most flourishing fields in contemporary mathematics. The field is called mirror symmetry, in reference to the fact that these two seemingly distant mathematical universes appear somehow to reflect each other exactly.

More here.

Roy Gutman in The Daily Beast:

Syria may be the most complex problem on Earth. Four outside powers, Iran, Russia, Turkey and the United States, control territory or bases; others, like Israel, regularly carry out bombing raids. Even Iraq is waiting in the wings to intervene.

The war began seven years and one month ago, and despite the efforts of two international groupings dealing with Syria, the U.S.-Russian-led Geneva Process and the Astana group of regional rivals, Turkey, Iran and Russia, there’s been no end in sight. The impasse is usually blamed on the obduracy of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

But at its heart Syria is a vast collection of war crimes masquerading as a civil war. Shortly after Syrians took to the streets in a national uprising to demand political reform in 2011, Assad went to war against his own people, targeting cities and towns, hospitals and rescue services, mosques, schools and public markets. He directed his security forces to put hundreds of thousands under starvation siege in the Damascus suburbs, blocked the population from medical supplies and repeatedly used chemical weapons, the latest case being in Douma on Saturday.

More here. [Thanks to Idrees Ahmad.]

J. Peder Zane in The News & Observer:

Though the march of human progress is beyond dispute, the forces driving it are harder to pinpoint. Harvard Professor Pinker thinks he’s found the answer, tracing all the good news to the rise of reason — to an evidence-based, scientific world view — during the Enlightenment.

Life has indeed improved dramatically since the 17th century, but Pinker’s thesis fails to account for the steady improvement that occurred before then — a point he noted in his previous book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” which demonstrated the inexorable decline in violence since the Stone Age.

A far more comprehensive explanation is offered by Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University who grounds these happy achievements not in the arbitrary whims of humanity but the eternal laws of physics.

Bejan’s work — which was the subject of a book we wrote together, “Design in Nature,” and which will be honored in Philadelphia this week when he receives the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Medal — is so compelling, and beautiful, because of its holistic approach. His monumental discovery, the constructal law, does not see humanity as distinct from nature but as a part of it; it holds that human progress is governed and predicted by the same phenomenon that has inexorably improved the natural world.

More here.

Kathleen Stone at Ploughshares:

In her new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, Patricia Hampl meanders through disparate terrain: A garden in Llangollen, Wales. A smoky café in Prague. A library in Brno housing notebooks that detail the genetic lives of peapods. A monastery in California. Small towns near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Disparate yet similar, all places that allow the mind to wander and encourage the leisurely waste of a day. But a day of leisure is not a waste; it is, instead, necessary for reflection and introspection, even the flowering of character.

As she muses, Hampl frequently touches on her husband and on Montaigne. We first meet her husband as Hampl is having a panic attack on an airplane. One seatmate, a nurse, coaches her to breathe deeply while her husband takes her hand into his, a “beautiful hand I’ve always loved.” Several pages later she recounts their first meeting, years earlier, when she is moving into an apartment and he, resident in the building, offers to show her where the garbage bins are located. From this they build a life together, with a shared love of poetry and conversation at the kitchen table, coffee cups between them. We never learn his name though she often returns to him, just as she circles back to Montaigne, the garden in Wales, the peapods in Brno. We learn that his beautiful hand is now dust, in her words, and she slowly pays out the facts surrounding his death, only hinting at some. The details, like his name, are not the point. What is important is her memory of his voice, prodding and encouraging her, as she continues her side of their conversations.

more here.

William H. Pritchard at The New Criterion:

Put simply, a reader can approach Shakespearean drama in two ways: the first is to treat character (or “personality” as Bloom has it in this book) as arising out of motives that often require some rational justification on the reader’s part. So when Edmund dies at the play’s end, Bloom stays alive, wondering; “I always wonder who he thought he was, as he lay dying. Did he feel vindicated at having stood up for his bastardy?” Or, even more grandly at the book’s very end, “I write the final sentences . . . wondering if all of us, like Lear, should cry that we are come unto this great stage of fools.” (I was reminded of a song from the 1940s, “I wonder, I wonder, can’t help it if I wonder.”) The other approach is by way of Shakespeare rather than one of his characters. In Hamlet if one “wonders” why the prince delays in enacting his revenge, an answer might be that Shakespeare wanted it that way—that it provided a continuing way of keeping the audience listening. Is it demeaning to Shakespeare to imagine him seeing how far he can go in the desolation of loss that fills Lear? Can we think that for a moment he hesitated as to whether the plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes were a fit subject for representation on stage? In addressing that scene Bloom declares himself: “I have seen several stage performances of King Lear. The gouging of Gloucester’s eyes is not to be borne. Why did Shakespeare inflict this scene upon us, and indeed, on himself?” Another unanswerable question, though one might note incidentally that Bloom was able to bear it, since he attended several performances of the play.

more here.

Stephen W. Smith at the LRB:

In apartheid South Africa, ‘the enemy’ was ever present, day and night, from the public toilets you couldn’t use to the neighbourhood you couldn’t live in, by way of police raids at first light to check on your bedfellows, or simply to keep you terrified. When Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – who died on 2 April at the age of 81 – spoke of ‘the enemy’, the words had an intimate ring.

I met her for the first time in 1988, when a French worker-priest, one of the few white people living in Soweto, took me to her house. It was late in the evening, but we just walked in. I remember the blaring TV, the flicker on the walls of a slasher movie, bottles all over, young men slouched on sofas. They were members of her vigilante gang, the so-called Mandela United Football Club. In a drunken stupor, Winnie was lying among them.

That was the period when 14-year-old James Moeketsi Seipei – nicknamed Stompie, ‘cigarette butt’, for his small size – was clobbered for days in her house, sometimes in her presence. Suspected of being a police informant, he eventually had his throat cut. In 1991, while the sunset clauses of apartheid were under negotiation, Winnie’s chief bodyguard was convicted of murder, and the ‘mother of the nation’ was sentenced to six years for kidnapping, reduced to a fine on appeal.

more here.

In Broken Images

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
.

by Robert Graves
from To Read a Poem
Harcourt Brace 1992
.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Of all the plants that humanity has turned into crops, none is more puzzling than the sweet potato. Indigenous people of Central and South America grew it on farms for generations, and Europeans discovered it when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean. In the 18th century, however, Captain Cook stumbled across sweet potatoes again — over 4,000 miles away, on remote Polynesian islands. European explorers later found them elsewhere in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Guinea. The distribution of the plant baffled scientists. How could sweet potatoes arise from a wild ancestor and then wind up scattered across such a wide range? Was it possible that unknown explorers carried it from South America to countless Pacific islands? An extensive analysis of sweet potato DNA, published on Thursday in Current Biology, comes to a controversial conclusion: Humans had nothing to do with it. The bulky sweet potato spread across the globe long before humans could have played a part — it’s a natural traveler.

Some agricultural experts are skeptical. “This paper does not settle the matter,” said Logan J. Kistler, the curator of archaeogenomics and archaeobotany at the Smithsonian Institution. Alternative explanations remain on the table, because the new study didn’t provide enough evidence for exactly where sweet potatoes were first domesticated and when they arrived in the Pacific. “We still don’t have a smoking gun,” Dr. Kistler said. The sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas, is one of the most valuable crops in the world, providing more nutrients per farmed acre than any other staple. It has sustained human communities for centuries. (In North America, it often is referred to as a yam; in fact, yams are a different species originating in Africa and Asia.)

More here.

From The Easel:

Why do we still pay attention to Old Masters paintings? There are a handful of famous names – Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Michelangelo – toward whom adulation seems obligatory. Yet, walking the galleries of a major museum, you quickly realize there are many others. With their ornate gilded frames and often perplexing subjects, why should their works command modern attention? Indeed, why do museums continue to acquire them?

Keith Christiansen, a self-confessed addict of paintings by the Old Masters, is the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Recently Morgan Meis, Contributing Editor of The Easel, talked to Keith about the modern relevance of these works. Keith suggested framing the discussion around three (or is it four?) main works, all from the Met’s collection.

Morgan Meis: Keith, lets dive straight into the three works that you have nominated – Francesco Salviati, Diego Velázquez and Lorenzo Lotto. Starting first with Francesco Salviati. I am not so familiar with this artist or with the particular work you have suggested. Looking at the image, I can see there is skill, but am not sure what I am supposed to find beyond that.

Keith Christiansen: I fell in love with Old Master paintings during my junior year abroad in college and the travels in Europe that I took the following summer. Being a nerd, I spent most of my time in museums, and discovered that I fell in love with the works by artists I knew little or nothing about. You could say that I have been trying to make up for that ignorance ever since. What I have learned over my career is that these works tell stories, vivid stories that often seem to me to speak to our modern times.

So let’s begin with the portrait by Salviati. At the risk of upsetting your plans, I would like to approach it by introducing another painting by an artist who today enjoys more fame: Bronzino. And the reason I want to do this is because the Bronzino played a role in the Met acquiring the Salviati and it provides a context for appreciating what is so singular about Salviati’s work.

At the Met we have one of the great portraits by Bronzino, who was court painter for the Medici in Florence in the mid-16th century. I suppose that most people looking at this work would characterize the sitter as arrogant. I mean, look at his proud posture, with one arm akimbo, his aloof gaze, and the way the fingers of his right hand commandingly mark a place in the book that he is using as a kind of prop.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a method for generating numbers guaranteed to be random by quantum mechanics. Described in the April 12 issue of Nature, the experimental technique surpasses all previous methods for ensuring the unpredictability of its random numbers and may enhance security and trust in cryptographic systems.

The new NIST method generates digital bits (1s and 0s) with photons, or particles of light, using data generated in an improved version of a landmark 2015 NIST physics experiment. That experiment showed conclusively that what Einstein derided as "spooky action at a distance" is real. In the new work, researchers process the spooky output to certify and quantify the randomness available in the data and generate a string of much more random bits.

Random numbers are used hundreds of billions of times a day to encrypt data in electronic networks. But these numbers are not certifiably random in an absolute sense. That's because they are generated by software formulas or physical devices whose supposedly random output could be undermined by factors such as predictable sources of noise. Running statistical tests can help,but no statistical test on the output alone can absolutely guarantee that the output was unpredictable, especially if an adversary has tampered with the device.

More here.