Maria Dimitrova in the London Review of Books:

In Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language (2015), Julia Kristeva is cast as a spy for Bulgarian intelligence, responsible for the death of Roland Barthes. Last Tuesday, the Bulgarian Dossier Committee, in charge of examining and declassifying communist-era State Security records, announced that Kristeva had been an agent of the First Chief Directorate.

On Thursday, Kristeva denied the allegations, describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘completely false’. On Friday, the Dossier Commission published her entire dossier – nearly 400 pages – on their website. Yesterday, Kristeva issued another statement, insisting she had ‘never belonged to any secret service’ and had not supported ‘a regime that I fled’. She criticised the ‘credence given to these files, without there being any questioning about who wrote them or why’:

This episode would be comical, and might even seem a bit romantic, were it not for the fact that it is all so false and that its uncritical repetition in the media is so frightening.

The dossier consists of a ‘Work’ file (documents attributed to Kristeva), a ‘Personal’ file (documents collected about Kristeva) and forms and cards registering her as a ‘secret collaborator’ (dated 14 November 1969) and an ‘agent’ (21 June 1971). A faint inscription in pencil next to her name on one of the forms says ‘Refugee’: a dangerous status for her to have, especially for her relatives. ‘The contact with our authorities should be kept alive,’ Kristeva’s father advises her in a letter. ‘People should feel that in you and your sister they have grateful, patriotic fellow citizens. Such a contact will make our life here easier.’

More here.

Katia Moskvitch in Quanta:

Some laws aren’t meant to be broken. Take the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy — a measure of disorder — never decreases in an isolated system. Glass shatters, cream disperses in coffee, eggs scramble — but never the reverse. This is why heat always moves from hot to cold: Doing so increases the overall entropy. The law is so fundamental to our physical reality that some physicists believe it is responsible for the apparent flow of time.

Yet quantum systems, as ever, have a way of introducing puzzling exceptions to what seem like inviolable rules. A team of physicists has made heat flow spontaneously from a cold quantum object to a hot one. The experiment underscores the intimate relationships between information, entropy and energy that are being explored in the nascent field of quantum thermodynamics.

The team, based in Brazil, took a molecule that consisted of a carbon atom, a hydrogen atom and three chlorine atoms. They then generated a magnetic field to align the nuclear spins of the two quantum particles, or “qubits” — the carbon and hydrogen nuclei. This caused the nuclei to become linked, or correlated, turning them into a single, inseparable whole, a two-qubit quantum state.

These correlations made the puzzling behavior possible.

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the New York Times:

Often the best way to understand opposing viewpoints is to imagine the proponents in dialogue. How would Euripides have responded to Plato, his Athenian contemporary, concerning the philosopher’s banishing poets from his utopia? Or picture George Eliot cornering Arthur Schopenhauer to challenge his argument that women are unsuited for artistic and intellectual greatness. The history of ideas is filled with pairs of contemporary minds who missed the opportunity to confront each other point blank, leaving us to dream up hypothetical exchanges.

But sometimes our imaginations aren’t necessary. Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, though they never met in person, were articulate in their assessments of each other. In their disdain for the power-hungry abuses of the church, the grotesque superstitions it encouraged in the laity and the equally grotesque scholasticism it encouraged in the era’s theologians, they might have been natural allies; instead they became implacable foes. Each, in opposing the other, clarified his own point of view. In the process, the two great reformist movements of their day — the Renaissance, embodied in Erasmus, and the Reformation, embodied in Luther — were torn asunder. Michael Massing’s riveting “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind” is devoted to this fateful parting of ways.

More here.

Will Knight in MIT Technology Review (from six months ago but worth reading):

Google’s AI chief isn’t fretting about super-intelligent killer robots. Instead, John Giannandrea is concerned about the danger that may be lurking inside the machine-learning algorithms used to make millions of decisions every minute.

“The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will be biased,” Giannandrea said before a recent Google conference on the relationship between humans and AI systems.

The problem of bias in machine learning is likely to become more significant as the technology spreads to critical areas like medicine and law, and as more people without a deep technical understanding are tasked with deploying it. Some experts warn that algorithmic bias is already pervasive in many industries, and that almost no one is making an effort to identify or correct it (see “Biased Algorithms Are Everywhere, and No One Seems to Care”).

“It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

Black box machine-learning models are already having a major impact on some people’s lives. A system called COMPAS, made by a company called Northpointe, offers to predict defendants’ likelihood of reoffending, and is used by some judges to determine whether an inmate is granted parole. The workings of COMPAS are kept secret, but an investigation by ProPublica found evidence that the model may be biased against minorities.

More here.

Alexis Okeowo in The New Yorker:

For Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, anger is the most useful emotion. Anger was what motivated her to write for newspapers as a teen-ager and to make documentary films as an adult, and it is the reaction she habitually tries to provoke in audiences. Even when she is on camera, she cannot resist interrupting her own narration to register outrage at a particular injustice. Obaid-Chinoy is the best-known documentary filmmaker in Pakistan. Her films, which have won two Oscars and three Emmys, range from reportage on xenophobia in South Africa to an inquiry into the ethics of honor killings in Pakistan. “Anger is necessary for people to go beyond not liking what they see,” she said. “I need enough people who watch my stuff to be moved, and to be angry, and to do something about it.”

On a recent afternoon in Karachi, where Obaid-Chinoy lives, she visited a girls’ school in Shireen Jinnah Colony, a slum, to talk to students and to show some of her films. A volunteer administrator at the school, Tanvir Khwaja, her head covered with a pink dupatta, welcomed Obaid-Chinoy into a vast auditorium decorated with silver and green stars, where rows of eager girls in lilac-hued hijabs sat whispering. Some were as young as eight, while others were in their last year of secondary school. Khwaja had warned Obaid-Chinoy that most of the girls came from a “very, very conservative background.” Obaid-Chinoy, who is thirty-nine, wore a black shalwar kameez; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was pinned back. She is a natural reporter, watchful and carefully expressive, with a heightened impulse to gauge her companion’s mood; she has a habit of smiling quickly to offer reassurance during an uneasy silence. She is also unabashedly confident: at a party in Islamabad, I saw her tell a male guest, within moments of meeting him, that she was an Oscar winner. Soon afterward, she challenged another man, a politician, about his views on China’s business dealings with Pakistan. The politician smiled tightly and congratulated her on having her film about honor killings screened at the Prime Minister’s office. It was a shame, he added, that it showed the country in such a negative light.

Obaid-Chinoy is accustomed to this kind of mixed reaction to her work. Her critics in Pakistan have suggested that her films stoke outrage by confirming the prejudices of Western audiences. Obaid-Chinoy argues that these critics, many of whom are male, are in fact reacting against her own power as a woman, and against the misogyny she is exposing. The position of women in Pakistani society has been disputed since the country was established, in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision for the republic involved a separation of religion and politics, the equality of all Pakistanis, and the nurturing of an intelligentsia. He spoke out against “the curse of provincialism,” and said in a speech, “It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners.” In the decades since Jinnah’s death, in 1948, those in power, most notably General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled from 1977 to 1988, have eroded women’s rights, often in efforts to enforce a conservative, Islamic ideology. Although many Pakistani women attend college and pursue careers in the arts, law, and politics, they also face an entrenched patriarchy that dictates their choices when it comes to schooling, work, marriage, and self-presentation. Poor women have even less freedom. More than half of Pakistani women are illiterate, and many suffer domestic violence. They struggle to have their legal rights upheld, and face accusations of bringing dishonor upon their families if they report a rape or file for a divorce. Through her work, Obaid-Chinoy believes, she is combatting men’s power to define women’s lives.

More here.

Colm Tóibín at the TLS:

Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908. At the age of twenty, having received ecclesiastical permission, she married her mother’s younger brother. They had one son. Between the early 1930s and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she published several novels and pieces of short fiction, all in Catalan. In 1935 she began work for the Catalan Ministry of Information. Franco’s victory in the war forced her to go into exile, first outside Paris but then, as a result of the Nazi occupation, elsewhere in France. Before she left Spain, she broke up with her first husband. After much difficulty and hardship, she finally settled in Geneva, returning to Catalonia in 1979 where she died four years later.

In her best fiction, she allows the details to speak for themselves; the mind through which the world is seen is almost naive, almost detached. This means that much is achieved or hinted at by tone, through rhythm, by coiled implication. The world is viewed as though helplessly, as if it might not bear the weight of much analysis. It is up to the reader to understand the extent of the suffering, the quality of the pain. The less these things are actively named, the more deeply they will be evoked.

more here.

Jonathon Sturgeon at The Baffler:

LITERATURE IS NOT LITERATURE UNTIL SOMEONE hates it on principle. Homer and Hesiod weren’t poets, in the way we’ve come to understand the word, until Xenophanes and Heraclitus and Plato attacked poetry’s governing credentials, its pipeline to the Gods. The last of these, speaking through Socrates, displaced poetry’s authority, itself drawn from the Muses, by banishing it from the well-ordered city; poetry’s tendency to arouse madness, its toleration of clashing voices, and its foundational place in the educational curriculum made it the enemy of an imagined republic where all positions were accounted for, where all discourse was to be phlegmatically compassed toward the truth. Paradoxically, though, this exile came to define poetry. Until their banishment, Hesiod and Homer were more like perennial Teachers of the Year or cool, dead popes—but universal. We don’t have a contemporary analogue.

This is the thesis, or a thesis, of William Marx’s The Hatred of Literature, another in a line of books, following Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, that defines literature through its strongest negative, hatred of it.

more here.

Margaret Drabble at The New Statesman:

Fleur Jaeggy is multi-lingual and has also worked as a translator. Swiss by birth, born in Zurich in 1940 into an upper-class family, she writes in Italian, but she has also translated into Italian Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant and Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives.

In These Possible Lives (2017, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor) she offers three very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siècle symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Schwob is a character best known to me, bizarrely, as a kind friend to Arnold Bennett in his lonely Paris days; more pertinently, he was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred Jarry, and is said to have influenced Borges. Her three subjects are loosely linked by opium, by malady, by a delectatio morosa or morbid delight, and her essays are prose poems rather than factual narrations. She does not give facts or dates, but tells us of Wordsworth’s habit of cutting the pages of books with a butter knife, of De Quincey’s nightmares, of Schwob’s love for a tubercular working-class girl and her dolls, of Keats begging “in a lucid delirium” for more laudanum. Their hallucinatory intensity and heightened language recall the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, with their invocations of wine and hashish, their pose of le poète maudit.

more here.

.
Here’s a brook in all its April energy.

Up its steep and many-bouldered bank
a profusion of nasturtiums scatter
–“like bright syllables”
a transcendentalist poet might say.

Her eye would read that poem.
She’d hear harmonies of rock and water,
feel the soft touch of sun,
the warm taste of spring,
and think of what it meant.

Yet, air is full of a blue confidence in itself.
The world is full of fullness.

Nothing to transcend here.
.

by Nils Peterson
.

Ann Finkbeiner in Nature:

Freeman Dyson is a mathematically inclined physicist who proved in 1949 that competing theories of quantum behaviour were equivalent. In a career spanning seven decades, he branched out into myriad fields. They included condensed-matter physics, nuclear reactors, astronomical technology, extraterrestrial habitation and advising the US government on national security, sometimes as part of the elite post-war research group JASON.

Dyson grew up in Winchester, UK, and left in 1941 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. There, he began a lifelong habit of writing regular letters home. Now, aged 94 and living in the United States, he has published some of them in Maker of Patterns. They cover a remarkable range of scientific interests, acquaintances, opinions and adventures.

The patterns Dyson says he made were first those of ideas in mathematics and physics, and then those in his writing about literature and history. Readers might hope that Dyson’s own pattern — the reference frame in which his remarkable range becomes a coherent whole — would be found in his letters. As a writer who has interviewed Dyson, I would advise against such hope.

The letters read like a travel journal written for people he loves and trusts. “I think the reason I write so openly is just this,” he tells his parents in 1949, “that all these adventures in this strange new world are still somewhat unreal to me, and in writing to you about them, I bring them in contact with my familiar world and lend them some of your reality.”

Dyson notices everything. He describes Americans’ friendliness as a result of their inattention to the past, and thus of their loneliness in time.

More here.

Elie Mystal in the New York Times:

America’s bottomless fascination with “true crime” stories and “murder porn” has been capitalized on by some content creators seeking to inspire changes in the criminal justice system. But the genre tends to let the system itself off the hook. The titillating and gory details of any one case narrow readers’ focus onto particular bad actors, relegating law enforcement to a largely offscreen menace. Literature as a tool for social and legal reform further requires the reader to accept the author’s assertion that the highlighted case produced an incorrect result, which is a big ask in a country that can’t even agree on whether Han Solo shot first.

“The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist,” by the Washington Post journalist Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington, a law professor at the University of Mississippi, avoids these generic problems. There is no murder mystery. The book details the wrongful convictions of two men, Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, in the separate murders of two girls in the same rural Mississippi town in the early 1990s. But the real killer of both 3-year-olds is revealed to the reader before the wrong men are even put on trial. We are also spared the anguish of wondering if the system will ever get it right, for we know the men have already been freed thanks to the work of the nonprofit criminal exoneration organization the Innocence Project.

The crime having been solved early on, Balko and Carrington devote the bulk of the book to pulling back the curtain on the justice system’s little-known but systemic problem that put Brewer and Brooks behind bars: faulty and biased forensic evidence. Junk science convicted these men; real science set them free. The inability of judges and jurors to tell the difference is why innocent men languish in jail while the prosecutors who put them there run for higher office.

More here.

William H. Pritchard in The New Criterion:

Harold Bloom’s new book on King Lear is one in a series he is writing about Shakespeare’s personalities, including Hamlet, Falstaff, and Cleopatra.1 It is a short book of 160 pages, many of them taken up with long quotations from the play usually followed by rather brief comments from the critic. Those who have read Bloom on Shakespeare in previous books—Shakespeare, The Western Canon, The Anatomy of Influence—will find little here that is new except an even greater willingness on Bloom’s part to put himself front and center with utterances such as “It is pitiful that . . .” or “Who would not weep . . .” or “One wishes that . . .” as he takes us through the play. He even has sympathy for the absent Queen Lear: “How horrifying it would have been had she shared Lear’s privations, exposed out on the heath.” From his earlier books, we learn that Lear“ultimately baffles commentary”; that along with Hamlet it is “the height of literary experience”; and that the experience of reading it is (in a loaded word from Freud) “altogether uncanny.”

As in previous books, Bloom the critic operates through paraphrase and strong assertion, even as his posture has become increasingly isolated from other members of his profession. In The Anatomy of Influence, he lists those others in an exuberant way: “The usual rabblement: comma counters, ‘cultural’ materialists, new and newer historicists, gender commissars, and all the other academic impostors, mock journalists, inchoate rhapsodes, and good spellers.” Against them he has constituted himself “a department of one,” his main predecessor being, he admits modestly, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

More here.

Giulia Rhodes in The Guardian:

Dr Barbara Lipska was working at her computer one morning in January 2015 when her right hand suddenly disappeared. Having spent her 40-year career studying the human brain, she immediately knew just how bad this was. The neuroscientist was aware that the most likely explanation was a tumour in the area of her brain governing vision. Having twice overcome cancer – in the breast in 2009 and then melanoma three years later – the spread of the disease was already a frightening possibility.

So when Lipska’s doctor called the following morning to report the results of an emergency MRI scan – three tumours in the brain, one of them bleeding, suggesting metastatic melanoma – she was undoubtedly devastated, but not completely surprised.

The prognosis was “effectively a death sentence”. At her age, then 63, and with that number of tumours, she knew she could expect to have between four and seven months. Instead, three years later, Lipska remains the director of the Human Brain Collection at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, is training for a summer triathlon and has written an account of her experiences. She hopes this will raise awareness of an aspect of her illness about which, even with her extensive professional experience, she knew very little. “The idea that I might lose my mind didn’t enter my thoughts and was never discussed,” she says. “All anyone focused on was that I might die.”

More here.

Little by little, wean yourself.

This is the gist of what I have to say.

From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more visible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom.

At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding."

You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.

Listen to the answer.
There is no "other world."
I only know what I've experienced.
You must be hallucinating.
.

Jelaluddin Rumi, 1207-1273
from A Book of Luminous Things
translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks

Evan Kindly at The Nation:

In December 1945, Ezra Pound was committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. He was then 60 years old, internationally famous, and under indictment for treason against the United States. In an infamous series of broadcasts made on Italian radio between 1941 and 1943, Pound had declared his support for Mussolini’s regime and his contempt for the Allied forces. He parroted fascist talking points but also added a layer of byzantine anti-Semitic conspiracy theory all his own. “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-Jewed the Jew,” he admonished the British on March 15, 1942. In other broadcasts, Pound spoke of “Jew slime,” warned of the white race “going toward total extinction,” suggested hanging President Roosevelt (“if you can do it by due legal process”), praised Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and urged his listeners to familiarize themselves with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Pound had arrived at this vicious ideological position gradually. His early work, while always concerned with the relations between art and society, had rarely been political per se. Over the years, though, his long poem The Cantos, started in 1915, had drifted from a preoccupation with mythological subjects to an investigation of economics and governance, influenced by heterodox economists like C.H. Douglas and Silvio Gesell. By the time the Second World War began, Pound had come to blame the practice of usury, propagated by a secret network of nefarious Jewish bankers, for all the evils afflicting the world.

more here.

Anne Wagner at the LRB:

But even the most exuberant combinations of colour, surface and texture don’t necessarily make an ordinary object a sculpture. If a handaxe qualifies, it is as both a spatial and a bodily thing. It is made to be held, and its shape declares that purpose, though in ways that aren’t easy to put into words. Imagine a two-sided tool that is also bilaterally symmetrical – something like a broad-bladed knife, though with one crucial difference. Though planar, the back of each handlaxe is is fuller than the front. There a slight bulge, a rounding, which seems both to echo and await its user’s cupped hand.

One persuasive reason to see at least some handaxes as sculpture stems from their nuanced and exacting display of formal goals. Their consistent use of symmetry is a case in point, given that such equilibrium isn’t particularly helpful where skinning prey and stripping bones are concerned. A double-edged tool doubles the risk of injury to the palm or fingers of the working hand. By these lights symmetrical axes put the threat of injury second to the pleasure presented by a well-balanced form.

These and other features help to explain not only why some handaxes seem exceptional but also why practical necessity alone doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation of their materials and forms.

more here.

Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

On an unseasonably warm February morning, Mark Pierson takes a 20-minute drive to one of Minneapolis’s larger pet shops. Pierson, a researcher in an immunology laboratory at the University of Minnesota, often comes here to buy mice, so most of the staff know him. Today he asks for ten, and an employee fishes them out of a glass box. Pierson requests the smaller mice because they’re typically younger, but he isn’t too picky. They probably all have what he wants: germs. These mice are about to enter one of the most tightly controlled labs in the country, a facility normally reserved for studying dangerous pathogens such as tuberculosis and chikungunya virus. The rodents probably don’t carry serious human infections, but they do harbour diseases that pose a grave threat to the hundreds of other research mice in the building. The pet-shop mice are about to get new room-mates. Each one will bunk with a group of shiny black lab mice, sharing food, water, bedding and, most importantly, pathogens. Until now, the lab mice have been kept in a squeaky clean environment, free from most diseases, so some will fall ill and die. The rest will develop more robust immune systems, more like those of wild mice — and, arguably, humans.

What Pierson is doing breaks the rules. For more than 50 years, scientists have worked to make lab mice cleaner. In most labs today, the animals’ cages are sanitized, and their water bottles and food are sterilized. “We really go to great lengths to keep natural infectious experience out of the mouse house,” says David Masopust, an immunologist at the University of Minnesota who heads the lab where Pierson works. Those efforts have paid off: with the confounding effects of pathogens controlled, mouse experiments have become less variable.

But a raft of studies now suggests that this cleanliness has come at a cost, leaving the rodents with stunted immune systems. In a quest for standardized and spotless mice, scientists have made the creatures a less-faithful model for human immune systems, which develop in a world teeming with microbes. And that could have serious implications for researchers working to usher treatments and vaccines out of the lab and into the clinic. Although it’s not yet possible to pin specific failures on the impeccable hygiene of standard mouse models, Masopust thinks the artificial environment must have some effect. It’s no secret that the success rate for moving therapies from animal to humans is abysmal — according to one estimate¹, 90% of drugs that enter clinical trials fail. “You have to wonder if you might sometimes get misinformed simply because you’re in a clean environment,” says Masopust. That’s why he and other researchers are developing dirtier models that better replicate how the immune system develops in the natural world. Some groups have given their mice infections^2,3, others a more natural microbiome^4,5. But housing the dirtier mice can be risky. Pet-shop mice carry so many infections, it’s as if they came from “a Dickensian orphanage”, says Aaron Ericsson, a microbiome researcher at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Lab-animal caretakers take biosecurity very seriously and mice are a precious resource. “The last thing you’d want to do is have some sort of an outbreak.”

More here.