Daniel Beer at Literary Review:

In March 1945, with victory over Nazi Germany only weeks away, Pravda praised the nearly one million Soviet women who had fought the Germans and their allies. They had ‘proved themselves as pilots, snipers, submachine gunners. But they don’t forget about their primary duty to nation and state – that of motherhood.’ In accordance with the official policy of the state, women combatants were henceforth to lay down not only their arms but also their wartime identities. While men were celebrated in the postwar years as frontoviki, frontline soldiers who had made heroic sacrifices to defeat fascism, the contribution of women to the struggle was reduced in popular memory to the traditionally familiar wartime occupations of nursing and cooking.

Drawing on diaries and her own interviews with veterans, Lyuba Vinogradova seeks to recover the experiences of Soviet women combatants from the obscurity to which they were consigned. Vinogradova’s rambling but highly readable Avenging Angels follows snipers from their first days of training and their first kills to their participation in great set-piece battles on the Eastern Front and their eventual deployment in the assault on Berlin. Some became accomplished soldiers who fought in the vanguard of the Soviet army and notched up dozens of confirmed kills. Yet in Vinogradova’s account, their voices are frequently submerged beneath a narrative that cannot decide whether it wants to be an exciting account of the heroic exploits of women in combat or a more reflective meditation on the personal dislocations, exhilarations and traumas of war. The female snipers themselves remain, for the most part, psychologically inaccessible. They fight, suffer the death of comrades, fall in love, participate in fierce battles, witness atrocities and (in some cases) eventually return home, often in a few short paragraphs that tend to summarise rather than illuminate.

more here.

Stephen Akey in The Smart Set:

Towards the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a newly graduated magistrate is sent to a small Colombian town to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of the novel’s ill-fated protagonist, Santiago Nasar. 25 years after the murder, the narrator, conducting his own investigation, travels to the Palace of Justice in Riohacha to examine the magistrate’s report. Although the narrator can’t find the magistrate’s name on any of the surviving papers, “it was obvious that he was a man burning with the fever of literature. He had doubtless read the Spanish classics and a few Latin ones, and he was quite familiar with Nietzsche, who was the fashionable author among magistrates of his time . . . He was so perplexed by the enigma that fate had touched him with, that he kept falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his profession.”

In the decades since I first read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I’ve often thought back to that unnamed magistrate, for one simple and terrible reason: He reminds me of me. Not that I’ve ever been tasked with anything so consequential as a murder investigation. My professional responsibilities as a lifelong librarian have tended to such things as answering reference questions and pointing patrons the way to the bathroom. What I share with the magistrate is the “fever of literature,” together with a choice of métier at variance with any literary dreams we might have had. Spiking our official reports about murder (in his case) and circulation statistics (in mine) with allusions to Nietzsche afforded some temporary relief of the fever but “ran contrary to the rigor” of our professions. Lamentably, no supervisor ever congratulated me on the lapidary elegance of my inter-office memos. I was lucky I didn’t get fired.

More here.

Brian Resnick in Vox:

Over the last several years, doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness.

In these trials, neither doctors nor patients know who is on the active drug and who is taking an inert pill. At the end of the trial, the two groups are compared. If those who actually took the drug report significantly greater improvement than those on placebo, then it’s worth prescribing.

When researchers started looking closely at pain-drug clinical trials, they found that an average of 27 percent of patients in 1996 reported pain reduction from a new drug compared to placebo. In 2013, it was 9 percent.

What this showed was not that the drugs were getting worse, but that “the placebo response is growing bigger over time,” but only in the US, explains Jeffrey Mogil, the McGill University pain researcher who co-discovered the trend. And it’s not just growing stronger in pain medicine. Placebos are growing in strength in antidepressants and anti-psychotic studies as well.

“The placebo effect is the most interesting phenomenon in all of science,” Mogil says. “It’s at the precise interface of biology and psychology,” and is subject to everything from the drug ads we see to our interactions with health care providers to the length of a clinical trial.

More here.

Asma Afsaruddin in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In his influential History of the Saracen Empires, the early-18th-century British scholar Simon Ockley remarks benignly about Islam and its beliefs: "The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the hours of the Prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtues; and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion." Such views influenced Edward Gibbon and his largely favorable depiction of Islam in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Similar positive assessments of Islam continued to be found through the first quarter of the 19th century; Goethe lists the Prophet Muhammad as his third source of inspiration, after Jesus and Apollo.

But a very different view emerges in the latter half of the 19th century. More typical of European attitudes during this period was that expressed by the French philosopher Ernest Renan in his now (in)famous lecture titled "Islam and Science," delivered at the Sorbonne in 1883. Renan pilloried Islam as being opposed to reason, progress, and reform. Continuing a familiar Orientalist theme grounded in the racial theories of the period, he attributed medieval Arab advances in the sciences and philosophy to Aryan and non-Muslim (primarily Greco-Sassanian) influences.

Cemil Aydin, in his thoughtful and provocative new book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press), explores the reasons for this sea change in fundamental European attitudes toward Muslims. His study of the historical record demonstrates that the racialization of Muslims as a homogeneous group and the construction of the "Muslim world" as a seamless whole began in this period, with the onset of Western colonization of much of what we term today the Middle East and other parts of Asia.

What is interesting is that this European project of constructing a monolithic "Muslim world" was bolstered by Muslim intellectuals themselves, who, in the same period, sought refuge in Pan-Islamism.

More here. [Thanks to Yogesh Chandrani.]

Roger Kimball in New Criterion:

In The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, Stephen Kern sets out to show how the burst of technological, intellectual, and artistic innovation around the turn of the century “created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.” This challenging task will attract anyone who is interested in modernism, though it is worth noting at the outset that Mr. Kern's “distinctive new modes” of experience are not really new but have their foundation in the revolutionary view of man's relation to nature that Descartes crystalized in the seventeenth century. Near the end of the Discourse on Method, Descartes notes that his study of philosophy has led him to a “knowledge that is most useful in life.” That knowledge is first of all not contemplative or theoretical but practical. It excludes the traditional idea that the world is a system of final causes in which man's destiny is figuratively writ, and it views nature as material to be grasped and manipulated according to human designs. The model is the artisan's knowledge of his craft: we really know something when we know how to make it. The index of such knowledge is the power and control it affords. Descartes thus envisions the growth of a “practical philosophy” that, unlike the speculative philosophy of the scholastics, can explain natural phenomena by explaining how things work. Hence the famous declaration that his method will render man “the master and possessor of nature.”

The success of modern technology has shown that Descartes's vision was not idle. For in an important sense, technology has remade the world, bringing close what was far away, delivering up the past to the inspection of the present. “All distances in time and space are shrinking,” Heidegger wrote in a late essay,

It may be, as Heidegger is at pains to argue, that this conquest of time and space brings with it a new sense of distance, one less susceptible of technological abridgement. “Short distance,” he observes, “is not in itself nearness.” In taking charge of reality, man has not yet defeated distance. Instead, the speed and effectiveness with which he manipulates the world make genuine community and intimacy more elusive than ever. The dream of a “global village” remains unrealized.

More here.

Samuel Fury Childs Daly in Africa is a Country:

In 2005, a former diplomat from the Republic of Biafra, named Godwin Alaoma Onyegbula reflected in his memoir on what being Nigerian meant to him: “I was born in this country, over seventy years ago, and know no other country better than I know Nigeria. I have lived through colonial Nigeria, independentNigeria, Biafran Nigeria, and present Nigeria.” Onyegbula continued, “We think we have lived through [this], [as] one country, but experience suggests otherwise. It is becoming more difficult to find an ‘authentic’ Nigerian; that is, someone whose ‘Nigerianess’ is obvious, and clearly distinguishable, to himself and others.” In the last 50 years, hundreds of people like Onyegbula who supported Biafra or fought against it have written their memoirs, ranging from small hand-printed pamphlets to thick, heavily-footnoted volumes. In various ways, all address what it means to be Nigerian in the wake of the Nigerian Civil War. In the long period of military rule that followed the end of the war, closed archives and an officially enforced silence meant that few historians openly reckoned with Biafra’s legacy.

Fiction was one site where Nigeria worked through the meanings of the war, especially in the work of well-known novelists, such as Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Cyprian Ekwensi. Today the younger fiction writers, Chinelo Okparanta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sefi Atta are helping to bring debates about the war back into public discussion. But by volume, the most significant body of writing on Biafra is neither history nor fiction, but memoir. A vast number of memoirs on Biafra circulate in Nigeria, and only a fraction of them are available outside of the country. The topics they address vary, from fiery political screeds on the causes and consequences of the war to intimate recollections of suffering and loss. Many, though not all, are written by people who supported the Biafran side. Some blend genres, mixing rumor with recollection, and a few take liberties with the war’s plot. As Onyegbula candidly warned in his own memoirs, “biography becomes boring when entirely true.” Virtually every important military figure on both sides wrote accounts of their lives (some, like Olusegun Obasanjo, wrote more than one). A fair number of these were ghostwritten or “as told to” someone else; penning memoirs for prominent people has become a cottage industry for Nigerian historians and journalists. The recollections of well-known figures in the war – government officials, officers, scientists and intellectuals among them – are widely read and discussed in Nigeria today. Some are hawked in bus stations and taxi ranks, alongside self-help books and prayer manuals. The contents of one unpublished autobiography by Emmanuel Ifeajuna, a 1966 coup-plotter turned Biafran officer, generates enormous speculation about the conspiracies leading up to the war.

More here.

Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman in IEEE Spectrum:

Looking back on the last months of 1940, Claude Shannon was quite open about his desire to avoid the World War II draft: “Things were moving fast there, and I could smell the war coming along. And it seemed to me I would be safer working full-time for the war effort, safer against the draft, which I didn’t exactly fancy. I was a frail man, as I am now…. I was trying to play the game, to the best of my ability. But not only that, I thought I’d probably contribute a hell of a lot more.”

Shannon’s opportunity to contribute came at Bell Labs, which took him on board as a government contractor, and then as a full-time employee. His work for the war effort brought him to the Labs’ headquarters in Manhattan’s West Village, a scientific smorgasbord: chemical labs, vast production rooms, and “a warren of testing labs for phones, cables, switches, cords, coils, and a nearly uncountable assortment of other essential parts,” as the eminent U.S. engineer Vannevar Bush later described it.

With a host of new wartime projects under way and hundreds of new faces streaming through the office, including many in military uniforms, the thirteen stories on the Hudson’s edge felt especially chaotic. Even as several hundred Labs employees departed for active-duty service in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Bell’s in-house workforce swelled: 4,600 employees became over 9,000 in only a matter of a few years. More than 1,000 research projects were launched, each one a small piece of the war machine. The tempo picked up accordingly, and many of Shannon’s colleagues found themselves working six days a week.

More here.

Emily Reynolds in Wired:

Cementing their status as the most terrifying of all the birds, a new study has found that ravens are able to imagine being spied upon — a level of abstraction that was previously thought to be unique to humans.

The ability to think abstractly about other minds is singled out by many as a uniquely human trait. Now, a study from the Universities of Houston and Vienna have found that ravens are able to adapt their behaviour by attributing their perceptions to others.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that if a nearby peephole was open, ravens guarded pockets of food against discovery in response to the sound of other birds — even if they didn't see another bird. This was not replicated when the peephole was closed, despite hearing the same auditory clues.

According to the study's authors, the discovery "shed[s] a new light on Theory of Mind" — the ability to attribute mental states to others. A number of studies have found that animals are able to understand what others see — but only when they can see the head or eyes, which provide gaze cues. This suggests that these animals are responding only to surface cues, and are not experiencing the same abstraction as humans.

More here.

From the BBC:

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics, has died in the US.

The 40-year-old had breast cancer, which had spread to her bones.

Nicknamed the "Nobel Prize for Mathematics", the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years to between two and four mathematicians under 40.

It was given to Prof Mirzakhani, an Iranian, in 2014, for her work on complex geometry and dynamical systems.

"A light was turned off today. It breaks my heart… gone far too soon," her friend, Nasa scientist Firouz Naderi, posted on Instagram.

Born in 1977, Prof Mirzakhani was brought up in post-revolutionary Iran and won two gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad as a teenager.

She earned a PhD at Harvard University in 2004, and later a professorship at Stanford.

More here.

Kristina Moriconi in The Nervous Breakdown:

She researches genealogy. Collects. Organizes. Obsesses. Discovers distant relatives all along the Adriatic Coast. Roots stretching across continents and seas. But don’t ask her about cells or strands of DNA. About heredity or the odds of what might be passed down. Don’t ask her for the truth. There is a story the family tells. Well-rehearsed. Plausible. By now, she may even believe it herself: It is a hunting accident that killed her brother fifty years ago. A father, his two grown sons in the woods of Big Pocono State Park. What they don’t say: These are seasoned hunters, antlers and disembodied heads displayed like trophies in their living room and den. Someone careless, the story goes, cleaning a gun.

Approximately 1,000 people in the United States and Canada are accidentally shot by hunters every year, and just under a hundred of those accidents are fatalities.

That part is true.

But so is this: There are 20,000 gun suicides in the United States every year, more than 50 every single day. It can happen right inside the home. In the den, beside the gun cabinet, beneath the 15-point buck hung proudly on the wall.

Note: Blood becomes much harder to remove from carpet once it has dried. Spray the stains with water to keep the area wet. Blot. Do not rub. Apply salt paste. Blot again. Repeat.

But some things never go away.

More here.

Cal Flyn in New Humanist:

Henrietta Rose-Innes at the Times Literary Supplement:

The South African writer Mike Nicol once expressed the thought that, after apartheid fell, the country needed a decade or so to process its violence culturally. He was talking about crime writing – and saw its popular emergence, ten years after the democratic elections, as a result of this digestion. It’s true that things on the ground change pretty fast in South Africa, and literature can take its own sweet time to catch up.

The past twenty years have been an interesting time to come of age as a novelist in South Africa. In 1994, there were many confident predictions that the fall of apartheid would usher in an age of unprecedented creative freedom – an artistic blossoming. When I first entered the publishing world, we were well into the post-apartheid era, but it seemed like local literature was only just beginning to reflect, and reflect on, the changes we’d been through.

In 1998 I’d been one of the first students enrolled in the first Creative Writing masters course in the country, at the University of Cape Town. This felt like a fairly eccentric choice at the time; there was no precedent, and I wasn’t entirely sure of my motivations, other than wanting the rare opportunity to be taught by J. M. Coetzee. It was a bare-bones curriculum back then – my fellow students were wraith-like beings whom I never saw. When I began writing I knew no other local authors, certainly not ones of my own age (then twenty-eight).

more here.

Nathan Knapp at The Quarterly Conversation:

One wonders what Sontag would’ve made of Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments, which appears on first blush to be almost entirely made up of aphorisms. Manguso, who at the age of 42 has already published seven books including this one, published her first book of poetry, The Captainlands in Paradise at age 28. Since following that book up two years later with another collection of poetry, all of her books have been prose. Two years ago she published Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, which was quite literally an exercise in “notebook-thinking”: the book was a meditation on her diaries, which she had at that point kept for 25 years and totaled more than 800,000 words. Her book on this massive document ran to a mere 144 pages. “Write as short as you can,” wrote John Berryman in an early Dream Song (and proceeded to publish 385 of them).

300 Arguments takes Berryman’s advice quite literally. Any worry brought on by the volume implied by the numerousness of the book’s title is allayed by the brevity of its page count (90 pages). The physical book itself, pocket-sized and filled with large print, comes with a set of instructions, printed as an unattributed blurb (it is from Manguso herself) on the back of the Graywolf paperback edition: “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” a command not issued inside the book until nearly two-thirds of the way through. One wonders if Graywolf was worried that readers approaching the book without any prior information as to its structure might be confused, or irritated that they had not purchased a more conventional book of either nonfiction or poetry. Manguso is certainly no stranger to the prescriptive voice. In an essay published two years ago she advised would-be writers to “Be relentless,” to “Learn to live on air,” to “Stay healthy; sickness is a waste of time and money,” to “Avoid all messy and needy people including family,” not to smoke, not to drink, not to have a gym membership, not to “give favors to people or institutions that lack authority or consequence,” to “learn graciously to decline,” to “be kind to everyone you meet,” to “become tempered by life,” and to make “compromises for love”.

more here.

Isaac Yuen in Orion Magazine:

45° The angle at which the heads of commuters on the 8:16 morning train are locked while swiping their phones to make fragments of text and digital candy disappear, lest the things on their screens grow long and nourishing like daydreams of fresh baguettes and weekend meanders outside the city, up to the mountain headwaters, that central source.

65° The angle at which other heads of commuters on the 8:16 morning train are positioned in their search for other eyes—watery and reddened perhaps from fussy babies or a hard night out, or restless and darting from imagining worst-case scenarios in some future job interview. The eyes tack into the storm of faces, seeking stories and solace in this gorgeous, desperate city, even if only for an instant—lock and release.

…

180° The degree at which you contemplate transience on a moonless August night standing atop a mountain to watch the Perseid meteor showers with your jaw agape, partly due to awe but partly because staring straight up is conducive to slack jawedness, all the while sifting through the ambient chatter of chips crunching and dogs barking and people prattling on in Chinese and English and Korean and French until a streak of fire slashes the firmament, teaching them to gasp all at once, that mother tongue.

0° Because sometimes you should switch things up and see the world from above as well as below, so that you can notice the kinnikinnick carpeting the forest floors after learning its name, or the pink spine of a pigeon linking flight feathers together to form a miniature and grotesque angel, or the industriousness of sidewalk ants bustling to and fro, like commuters on a train, except the ants know each other very well, being close of kin, never worry about job interviews or loneliness, being hive minded and united, and have no need for tiny glittering screens that can distract them from their very full and present lives.

More here.

Sarah Jones in the New Republic:

Like the Kingdom of God, the Republic of Gilead is both now and not yet. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale conjures a theocratic dystopia—a version of the United States taken over by fundamentalist Christians after a terrorist attack on Washington. Women are now divided into rigid classes determined by an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. Atwood’s protagonist, Offred, is a Handmaid—a fallen woman who is forced to bear children for righteous couples—and the book follows her sufferings under the Gilead regime. Atwood paints in garish strokes intended to shock: This new society calls homosexuality “gender treachery” and forbids women to read, own property, or choose their own clothing.

Since the novel’s publication three decades ago, Gilead has existed as a paper nightmare that gains or loses dimension based on the state of our national politics. Of course, we don’t divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them “the help,” “surrogates,” the working class, and the one percent. America has never forced fertile women to bear children for infertile ones, but Trump’s pussy-grabbing presidency has given cover to the sort of blatant misogyny many thought consigned to the past. “In Trump’s America, The Handmaid’s Tale matters more than ever,” The Verge declared the day after Trump’s election. In February, the book overtook George Orwell’s 1984 on the Amazon best-seller list. Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead and now that Mike Pence is our vice president, the entire country will look more like Gilead, too.

Set in the very near future, Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale subtly updates Atwood’s dystopia.

More here.

David Mitchell in the New Statesman:

Naoki Higashida is an amiable and thoughtful young man in his early twenties who lives with his family in Chiba, a prefecture adjacent to Tokyo. Naoki has autism of a type labelled severe and non-verbal, so a free-flowing conversation of the kind that facilitates the lives of most of us is impossible for him. By dint of training and patience, however, he has learned to communicate by “typing out” sentences on an alphabet grid – a keyboard layout drawn on card with an added “YES”, “NO” and “FINISHED”. Naoki voices the phonetic characters of the Japanese hiragana alphabet as he touches the corresponding Roman letters and builds up sentences, which a transcriber takes down. (Nobody else’s hand is near Naoki’s during this process.)

If this sounds like an arduous way to get your meaning across, you’re right, it is; in addition, Naoki’s autism bombards him with distractions and prompts him to get up mid-sentence, pace the room and gaze out of the window. He is easily ejected from his train of thought and forced to begin the sentence again. I’ve watched Naoki produce a complex sentence within 60 seconds, but I’ve also seen him take 20 minutes to complete a line of just a few words. By writing on a laptop Naoki can dispense with the human transcriber, but the screen and the text-converter (the drop-down menus required for writing Japanese) add a new layer of distraction.

I met Naoki’s writing before I met Naoki. My son has autism and my wife is from Japan, so when our boy was very young and his autism at its most grimly challenging, my wife searched online for books in her native language that might offer practical insight into what we were trying (and often failing) to deal with. Internet trails led to The Reason I Jump, written when its author was only 13. Our bookshelves were bending under weighty tomes by autism specialists and autism memoirs, but few were of much “hands-on” help with our non-verbal, regularly distressed five-year-old.

More here.

David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine:

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news.

More here.