Phong Bui at The Brooklyn Rail:

Rail: Earlier you said you hoped a painting could be perceiving of perception, and observing observation. I wonder how the viewer, who is once removed, would be able to mediate the whole experience?

Schnabel: Well, it means different things in different mediums. If I’m making a film, for example, instead of making certain scenes more naturalistic I’d just change the color to a more of green palette so you know you’re watching a movie. Or there’s a cut in it that’s more abrupt, which may cause you to have a physical sensation. That may be a part of the narrative that I might desire, though somebody else might think, Oh, that looks like a mistake. And maybe that notion of idiosyncratic work, where something looks like it’s atypical in some way, or jarring, is something that I am attracted to. Around 2001 I was at the sculpture museum in Rome, and there were all these extraordinary busts and torsos installed all around the courtyard, but in the middle there was a tree that was nearly fossilized. I couldn’t believe there were a couple of leaves on it. It also had a brace on the bottom, cause it was so old, and I thought, Wow, that looks like something! So when I came home, I built Ahab (2001), which is very much like what I saw. I remember clearly, I felt like I knew what sculpture was at that moment. I knew what I needed to do.

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Will Collins at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Why is Blanch’s influence on Dune worth recognizing? Celebrating Blanch is not a means to discredit Herbert, whose imaginative novel transcends the sum of its influences. But Dune remains massively popular while The Sabres of Paradiselanguishes in relative obscurity, and renewed public interest in Blanch’s forgotten history would be a welcome development.

Great travel writing makes no pretense of objectivity, and The Sabres of Paradiseowes more to Blanch’s background as a travel writer than any traditional history. Blanch traveled and wrote extensively about the Middle East and Russia, and she doesn’t bother hiding her affection for her subject matter. She was clearly captivated by the culture and peoples of the Caucasus, and it’s difficult not to be swept away by her enthusiasm.

The history she produced is a minor masterpiece, an unabashedly romantic account of a conflict that continues to inform religious and political tensions in the Caucasus to this day. (It’s no accident that Chechnya was the geographic core of Imam Shamyl’s movement, or that the Murids’ austerely militant Islamic faith recalls the theology of modern fundamentalists.) Blanch was not a professional historian, and one suspects that an academic would have produced an altogether less satisfying account of this period. The climax of The Sabres of Paradise, a tension-fraught exchange of hostages between the Russian army and the insurgents, would probably be relegated to a few dry paragraphs in an academic tome. For Blanch, it occupies an entire chapter — a magnificent account of the trade of three Georgian princesses, kidnapped in a daring Muslim raid, for Shamyl’s firstborn son, captured as a boy and raised to manhood in the court of the The Great White Czar.

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Robert Service at Literary Review:

It is one of the paradoxes of Soviet history that Mikhail Gorbachev, who did more than any other Kremlin leader to show his ‘personal’ side to a watching world, has eluded his biographers. Nobody before William Taubman has achieved an in-depth psychological portrait. Political accounts have been two a penny; economic and ideological studies have come at a discount. But what made Gorbachev tick, as a man and a leader, has always been hooded in speculation. Taubman has dedicated a dozen years to gathering first-hand evidence from the man himself. This cannot have been an easy task. When I met Gorbachev in the early 1990s I ruined my brief chance of getting him to open up by mentioning that I was doing research on Lenin. Gorbachev instantly closed down what he sensed might be an indelicate conversation. Taubman, by contrast, has gained Gorbachev’s full cooperation, even though the man himself warned him, ‘Gorbachev is hard to understand.’

Leaders who speak of themselves in the third person often turn out to be egotists of the first degree. Julius Caesar exhibited this linguistic trick to rhapsodise about his war against the Gauls. Leon Trotsky found that it enabled him to commandeer the historical spotlight without committing the sin of direct self-eulogy. But neither Caesar nor Trotsky presented himself as an enigma. Perhaps it is Gorbachev’s way of consoling himself in old age, living as he does in a Russia that seems unimpressed with the freedoms that he provided and has unhappy memories of the economic collapse over which he presided. While Germans continue to fete him as the statesman who reunited their nation, Russians cannot forget the mess that he left behind when the USSR fell apart in 1991.

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Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

When we visited Vijay Iyer three years ago, on Sept. 11, at his home in Harlem, the monthly Nautilus theme was Genius. The jazz pianist was glad to talk about the subject and play signature pieces by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane for us. But the first thing he wanted to tell us was he didn’t care for the label “genius.” Too often the term was used to describe a lone master, born with special genes, and that was the wrong way to think about an artist. “The ‘G word’ is often used to shut down conversation or inquiry into a particular artist, into his or her community and connection to others,” Iyer said. “No music happens in a vacuum. Anybody who’s able to make music, who’s had the privilege of doing it for others, got there through the help of others. Even singular talents have been nurtured and brought into a community. So I always try to understand the term relationally, to understand artists in the social and political currents they were living in.” Once you appreciate artists in their environs, you realize a select few leave their mark. Take Monk, the New York pianist and composer, who lived from 1917 to 1982, and wrote the now jazz standards “ ’Round Midnight” and “Straight, No Chaser.” “When you see the impact of Monk on the language of American music, that’s when you can start to use—and even then it’s relational—a term like ‘genius,’” Iyer said. “Certainly you can say this guy had ideas that stood out from the community he was in, that influenced that community, that stuck and are still here.”

Iyer, who has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley—his dissertation explored embodied cognition and music—and today teaches at Harvard, analyzes the morphology of jazz with the precision of a scientist. In our article, “Rhythm’s the Thing,” he explained what made the voicings of Monk and Coltrane original, and backed up his explanations with demonstrations on the piano. When our conversation rolled around to his own compositions, we asked the pianist to play a work that represented his own voice. He chose “Remembrance” from his 2006 album, Raw Materials.

More here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

In this country, many colleges encourage Econ 101 students to buy (or rent) expensive textbooks, which can cost up to three hundred dollars, or even morefor some hardcover editions. The core curriculum includes a lengthy e-book titled “The Economy,” lecture slides, and quizzes to test understanding. Some of the material has already been used successfully at colleges like University College London and Sciences Po, in Paris.

The project is a collaborative effort that emerged after the world financial crisis of 2008–9, and the ensuing Great Recession, when many students (and teachers) complained that existing textbooks didn’t do a good job of explaining what was happening. In many countries, groups of students demanded an overhaul in how economics was taught, with less emphasis on free-market doctrines and more emphasis on real-world problems.

Traditional, wallet-busting introductory textbooks do cover topics like pollution, rising inequality, and speculative busts. But in many cases this material comes after lengthy explanations of more traditional topics: supply-and-demand curves, consumer preferences, the theory of the firm, gains from trade, and the efficiency properties of atomized, competitive markets. In his highly popular “Principles of Economics,” Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw begins by listing a set of ten basic principles, which include “Rational people think at the margin,” “Trade can make everybody better off,” and “Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.”

The core approach isn’t particularly radical. (Students looking for expositions of Marxian economics or Modern Monetary Theory will have to look elsewhere.) But it treats perfectly competitive markets as special cases rather than the norm, trying to incorporate from the very beginning the progress economists have made during the past forty years or so in analyzing more complex situations: when firms have some monopoly power; people aren’t fully rational; a lot of key information is privately held; and the gains generated by trade, innovation, and finance are distributed very unevenly. The corecurriculum also takes economic history seriously.

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Helena Bottemiller Evich in Politico:

Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and a half-dozen other graduate students that scientists had discovered something mysterious about zooplankton.

Zooplankton are microscopic animals that float in the world’s oceans and lakes, and for food they rely on algae, which are essentially tiny plants. Scientists found that they could make algae grow faster by shining more light onto them—increasing the food supply for the zooplankton, which should have flourished. But it didn’t work out that way. When the researchers shined more light on the algae, the algae grew faster, and the tiny animals had lots and lots to eat—but at a certain point they started struggling to survive. This was a paradox. More food should lead to more growth. How could more algae be a problem?

Loladze was technically in the math department, but he loved biology and couldn’t stop thinking about this. The biologists had an idea of what was going on: The increased light was making the algae grow faster, but they ended up containing fewer of the nutrients the zooplankton needed to thrive. By speeding up their growth, the researchers had essentially turned the algae into junk food. The zooplankton had plenty to eat, but their food was less nutritious, and so they were starving.

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John Judis in The New Republic:

If you take the percentage of Americans that the U.S. census defines as “minorities” and project their past voting habits into the next decade and beyond, you’ll come up with a very sunny version of the Democrats’ prospects. There are only two problems with this line of thinking, but they’re pretty big ones. For starters, the census prediction of a “majority-minority” America—slated to arrive in 2044—is deeply flawed. And so is the notion that ethnic minorities will always and forever continue to back Democrats in Obama-like numbers.

The U.S. census makes a critical assumption that undermines its predictions of a majority-nonwhite country. It projects that the same percentage of people who currently identify themselves as “Latino” or “Asian” will continue to claim those identities in future generations. In reality, that’s highly unlikely. History shows that as ethnic groups assimilate into American culture, they increasingly identify themselves as “white.”

Whiteness is not a genetic category, after all; it’s a social and political construct that relies on perception and prejudice. A century ago, Irish, Italians, and Jews were not seen as whites. “This town has 8,000,000 people,” a young Harry Truman wrote his cousin upon visiting New York City in 1918. “7,500,000 of ’em are of Israelish extraction. (400,000 wops and the rest are white people.)” But by the time Truman became president, all those immigrant groups were considered “white.” There’s no reason to imagine that Latinos and Asians won’t follow much the same pattern.

In fact, it’s already happening. In the 2010 Census, 53 percent of Latinos identified as “white,” as did more than half of Asian Americans of mixed parentage. In future generations, those percentages are almost certain to grow. According to a recent Pew study, more than one-quarter of Latinos and Asians marry non-Latinos and non-Asians, and that number will surely continue to climb over the generations.

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David Sims at The Atlantic:

Since it was announced, the prime selling point of Darren Aronofsky’s new film mother! has been two-fold: that it stars one of the most famous actresses working today, Jennifer Lawrence, and that the particulars of its plot are an utter mystery. Well, after months of secrecy, the movie hit theaters in wide release last weekend, and audiences are finally getting the chance to puzzle over this bizarre, chaotic work of horror.

Aronofsky’s tale is blunt, fantastical, and obviously laden with symbolism, but for me, the biggest delight about mother! is how many people have shared with me their different takes on the film’s message. My colleague Christopher Orr discussed the movie’s openness to multiple interpretations in his review, noting both the story’s Biblical allusions and its apparent self-referential tone about the difficulty of life as an artist, and how monstrous creators can become. Now that mother! is out, it’s worth dig more deeply into the great debate that’s already emerged over the film’s meaning.

The plot of mother! is very simple—at least until it starts getting more unhinged. It begins on a shot of a woman’s crying face in the middle of a vast inferno, after which a man (Javier Bardem) inserts a crystal into a pedestal and magically repairs the burnt home around him. Cut to: an unnamed woman (Jennifer Lawrence) who lives in this gorgeous house in the middle of nowhere with her husband (Bardem). He’s a poet of some renown, busy toiling on his next great work (although he appears to be suffering from writer’s block). She’s devotedly renovating their home, painting the walls and such, and seems to have some mystical power to “feel” the heart of the house, by touching the walls and visualizing a giant, pumping organ.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

My real problem with Documenta 14 isn’t its possible relation to neocolonialism, which may be significant but hard to assess. What bugged me was that every curatorial “move” seemed so damned familiar. The new style of global exhibition-making that began tentatively with David’s Documenta, in 1997, and asserted itself more forcefully with Enwezor’s, in 2002, has by now been repeated in innumerable biennials and triennials worldwide. It has hardened into a formula. The recipe goes something like this: Put the accent on the documentary side of art without entirely neglecting its imaginative or formal core (what Khalili refers to as “fiction”), while framing the curatorial project in terms of what the artist Liam Gillick—a veteran of Documenta X and many biennials—has described as “an ethical demand that exceeds what is being produced by artists and posits new models in advance of art being made today.” It is this perception that art is inadequate on its own that has given rise to the by-now-standard Documenta/biennial tactics of mixing art with folklore and anthropological research; of exhibiting musical and choreographic scores, architectural plans, literary manuscripts, and all sorts of archives and collectibles as if they were drawings, paintings, or sculptures. Sometimes the artist is called on as an intermediary: for instance in Kassel, where Igo Diarra and La Medina presented a compendium of memorabilia of the great Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Touré. But at other times this collecting and archiving can be done directly by the curators, as in another part of the Kassel edition, where various materials relating to the Brothers Grimm, the Nazi-era art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, and other aspects of local and national history were displayed without much explanation. These are all tactics for evoking an idea of art beyond what today’s artists can express through their works.

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Pankaj Mishra at the London Review of Books:

Is it finally closing time in the gardens of the West? The wails that have rent the air since the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory rise from the same parts of Anglo-America that hosted, post-1989, the noisiest celebrations of liberalism, democracy, free markets and globalisation. Bill Emmott, the former editor of the Economist, writes that ‘the fear now is of being present at the destruction' of the ‘West’, the ‘world’s most successful political idea’. Edward Luce, for example, a Financial Times columnist based in Washington DC, isn’t sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our liberal democratic systems, can survive’. Donald Trump has also chimed in, asking ‘whether the West has the will to survive’. These apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, wants the Democratic Party, which under Bill Clinton captured ‘Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny’, to abandon identity politics and help liberalism become once more a ‘unifying force’ for the ‘common good’. Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, thinks that Trump might just save Western civilisation.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

In rocks and soil, air, ponds and oceans, life is dominated by creatures that humans cannot see. Microbes thrive everywhere, from gardens and kitchens to the harshest environments on the planet: under polar ice, in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, in hot springs that spew acid. A single gram of soil teems with billions of them, and their genetic diversity is equally impressive, dwarfing that of all the plants and animals on Earth. Life at the Edge of Sight: A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World (forthcoming from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), brings the planet-shaping diversity of these single-celled, microscopic organisms into view through stunning images. Co-authors Roberto Kolter, professor of microbiology and immunology, and Scott Chimileski, a research fellow in microbiology and immunology at Harvard Medical School, share their passion for the subject in part by magnifying what cannot be seen unaided, in part by revealing large-scale microbial impacts on the landscape. Kolter has long been a leader in microbial science at Harvard, while Chimileski brings to his scholarship a talent for landscape, macro, and technical photography.

Humanity, they note in the preface, is a fleeting presence in the four-billion-year-old story of life on the planet. Microbes, on the other hand—omnipresent and abundant beyond comprehension—have dominated that story for three billion years. In fact, microbes have written it, forming rocks and giving rise to the oxygen in the atmosphere, and underpinning many other atmospheric and geological processes that can span millennia. In crafting a human-scale narrative, the authors remind readers that the local ecology of microbes is closely tied to health: most germs protect people by keeping harmful microbes in check, boost access to nutrients in food, and only rarely cause disease—not surprising, because genus Homo evolved in a microbial world. Humans have even domesticated some microbes, albeit unwittingly for most of history: in the fermentation of wine, or the culturing of cheese. From these familiar examples, the authors pivot to specimens so bizarre that they seem almost extraterrestrial: single-celled intelligent slime molds (cabbage-sized, or larger) that can crawl along a decaying log at five centimeters an hour, or a “humongous fungus,” covering 10 square kilometers in Oregon, that lives in the soil and reaches up into trees, fruiting from under the bark as mushrooms each autumn. The mutability and generative force of microbes are so great, in fact, that Kolter and Chimileski assert that if life exists in distant galaxies, microbes are almost certainly involved.

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Justin Gillis in The New York Times:

As Hurricane Harvey bore down on the Texas coast, few people in that state seemed to understand the nature of the looming danger. The bulletins warned of rain falling in feet, not inches. Experts pleaded with the public to wake up. J. Marshall Shepherd, head of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia and a leading voice in American meteorology, wrote ahead of the storm that “the most dangerous aspect of this hurricane may be days of rainfall and associated flooding.” Now we know how events in Texas turned out. Dr. Shepherd and his colleagues have spent their careers issuing a larger warning, one that much of the public still chooses to ignore. I speak, of course, about the risks of climate change. Because of atmospheric emissions from human activity, the ocean waters from which Harvey drew its final burst of strength were much warmer than they ought to have been, most likely contributing to the intensity of the deluge. If the forecasts from our scientists are anywhere close to right, we have seen nothing yet. In their estimation, the most savage heat waves that we experience today will likely become routine in a matter of decades. The coastal inundation that has already begun will grow worse and worse, forcing millions of people to flee. The immense wave of refugees that we already see moving across continents may be just the beginning.

Scientists urged decades ago that we buy ourselves some insurance by cutting emissions. We yawned. Even today, when millions of people have awakened to the danger, tens of millions have not. So the political demand for change is still too weak to overcome the entrenched interests that want to block it. In Washington, progress on climate change has stalled. The administration has announced its intent to withdraw from the global Paris climate accord. And top Trump appointees insist that the causes of climate change are too uncertain and the scientific forecasts too unreliable to be a basis for action. This argument might have been halfway plausible 20 years ago – or, if you want to be generous, even 10 years ago. But today?

Today, salt water is inundating the coastal towns of the United States, to the point that they are starting to put giant rulers in the intersections so people can tell if it is safe to drive through. The city leaders are also posting “no wake” signs — not on canals but on the streets, to stop trucks from plowing through the water so fast as to send waves crashing into nearby homes. We all see the giant storms, more threatening than any in our lifetimes — and while scientists are not entirely comfortable yet drawing links between the power of these hurricanes and climate change, many people are coming to their own common-sense conclusions.

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Andrew Motion in The Guardian:

Orhan Pamuk has written better than most contemporary novelists about the relationship between east and west. His great book Istanbul: Memories of a City mingles history, personal reminiscence and political analysis to produce a panorama of the city that is also a map of the world – at once clearly drawn and poetically evocative. Much the same goes for his novels. While they explore separations, they look for elements that unite.

The Red-Haired Woman, translated by Ekin Oklap, is driven by the same obsessions, but develops them in suggestive new directions. While establishing a link “between the nature of a civilisation and its approach to notions of parricide and filicide”, it blends the close observation of details with the broad brushstrokes usually associated with myth-making and fables.

There are three sections, the first two apparently narrated by Cem Celik, the teenage son of a leftist who in the mid 1980s is snatched from his family by the state police, and later abandons his home for more selfish reasons. This leaves Cem searching for a father substitute, which he finds in the figure of Master Mahut, a well-digger who employs him as an apprentice.

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Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two mathematicians have shown that two different variants of infinity are actually the same size. The advance touches on one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics: whether there exist infinities between the infinite size of the natural numbers and the larger infinite size of the real numbers.

The problem was first identified over a century ago. At the time, mathematicians knew that “the real numbers are bigger than the natural numbers, but not how much bigger. Is it the next biggest size, or is there a size in between?” said Maryanthe Malliaris of the University of Chicago, co-author of the new work along with Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University.

In their new work, Malliaris and Shelah resolve a related 70-year-old question about whether one infinity (call it p) is smaller than another infinity (call it t). They proved the two are in fact equal, much to the surprise of mathematicians.

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Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

“As identity consciousness has increased among liberals,” Lilla has observed, “political consciousness has decreased.” That is to look at the issue back to front. It is not so much that identity consciousness has diminished political consciousness, but rather that the diminishment of ideological politics has allowed the politics of identity to flourish. In the 1960s, the struggles for black rights and women’s rights and gay rights were closely linked to the wider project of social transformation. But as the labour movement lost influence and radical struggles faltered, from the 1980s on, so the relationship between the promotion of identity rights and broader social change frayed. Eventually, the promotion of identity became an end in itself. The universalism that once fuelled radical movements has largely evaporated.

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David Sloan Wilson interviews Sigrun Aasland in Evonomics:

DSW: Thanks for this background—very helpful. Now let’s dive in. I first met you at a talk I gave at BI, Norway’s largest business school. My talk was titled “The Competitive Advantage of Cooperation” and you were present as a commentator. I was struck by how you described the Norwegian economy as a complex adaptive system with interlocking parts. Could you please repeat that succinct description?

SA: I would love to. My main point – well illustrated recently by the Economistand others, is that the Nordic model makes sense economically. It is not just about justice and equality. It is also – and more importantly – about using all the talent, using all the technology possible and changing all the time. That means high productivity.

The so-called Nordic model can be illustrated as a triangle consisting of three interlocking factors: First: a strong tax-funded welfare state providing education, healthcare and social safety nets. Second, an open market economy with active monetary and fiscal policies to ensure stability, distribution, and full employment. And third, strong collaboration in an organized labor market with coordinated wage formation and company-level collaboration.

Now this model has demonstrated the ability to combine relatively high taxes with high productivity. Productivity growth has fallen less in Norway than in many other countries. There are a number of reasons for this.

A collectively bargained and compressed salary structure means that low-skilled labor is relatively expensive while high-skilled labor is relatively cheap. Since high-skilled labor complements technology while low-skilled labor substitutes technology, three things happen. First, employers invest in technology to replace the expensive low-skilled workers. They also choose high skilled over low-skilled workers since the cost differential is small. Second, unless highly productive, the same employers cannot afford to keep workers and have to let them go. This ensures adaptability within companies but also among companies. Adapt or die.

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