Colm Toibin in The Guardian:

I needed Orestes to be someone uneasy in the world, easily led or distracted, in two minds about many things. And stricken with a sense of loss. And ready, under pressure, to do anything.

…The problem then was to make this world credible for the reader of a contemporary novel – mother, mother’s lover, daughter, son, all paranoid, all living in a space that was like domestic space, rather than the stage of a Greek theatre, or a page of translated Greek text. The story had to stand on its own, even though it had echoes of actual events that were occurring as I was writing the book, even though many of the characters were based on figures from Greek theatre. I remembered something then, an article I had read in Vogue magazine in 2011 about the home life of Bashar al- Assad and his wife Asma in the time before the Syrian uprising. It was a truly remarkable piece of work because it gave us a sense not only of how the couple wanted the world to see them but how, in the waking dream of their days, they might actually have seen themselves. It was well written, informative, and accompanied by a marvellous photo of the devoted Assads playing with their lovely children. Some of the descriptions of the Assads at home, however, were laugh-out-loud. And it was hard to know what to do when the first lady was described as having “a killer IQ” except to feel that it must have come in useful for her, and might still.

The first lady’s mission, according to the article, was to encourage the 6 million Syrians under 18 to engage in “active citizenship”. She told Vogue: “It’s about everyone taking shared responsibility in moving this country forward, about empowerment in a civil society. We all have a stake in this country; it will be what we make it.” And then there was the appearance of her husband Bashar. He was casually dressed, friendly, wearing jeans. “He says he was attracted to studying eye surgery,” the article pointed out, quoting him directly: “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.” This article intrigued me because it gave a picture of murderousness as something under control, in the background, something that maybe only needed to appear at proper moments as though it were a metaphor for meal times, or vice versa. It emphasised how people might manage to create an illusion as each day dawned that what they did yesterday or planned to do next hardly mattered compared with some soft image they could project of themselves.

Thus Clytemnestra, who has, in House of Names, developed a hunger for murder and become involved in the most brutal and cruel crimes, also genuinely loves her son Orestes and wants to spend quality time with him, as she wishes to walk in the garden with Electra, even though Electra loathes her. When Orestes returns, his mother wants his room to be comfortable, and she does what she can to make him happy. She is filled with darting desires, and lives for much of the day as though she is guilty, really, of nothing, but rather is much put upon. She complains of the heat, sits with her lover and her son and daughter at the table as food is served, making small talk. The murders she orders, or does with her own hands, are something that happened, that is all. Not the banality of evil, but its regulated presence and absence, its being there and then its becoming invisible, unpleasant, its way of living in the body, coming and going, like a heartbeat, like systolic pressure.

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Seligman and Tierney in The New York Times:

We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans. What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power o.f prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behaviorists thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition. Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception. But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead. Prospection enables us to become wise not just from our own experiences but also by learning from others. We are social animals like no others, living and working in very large groups of strangers, because we have jointly constructed the future. Human culture — our language, our division of labor, our knowledge, our laws and technology — is possible only because we can anticipate what fellow humans will do in the distant future. We make sacrifices today to earn rewards tomorrow, whether in this life or in the afterlife promised by so many religions.

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Matt Staggs at Signature:

What do you, your town, and your employer all have in common? Scalability. According to physicist Geoffrey West, there are mathematical principles that govern the growth and longevity of complex organisms, crowded cities, and even corporations. West’s new book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, introduces readers to this hidden, fascinating world.

In the following interview, West explains the difference between complicated and complex, what the rise of Donald Trump suggests about the state of the world, and why the company you work for could be living on borrowed time.

SIGNATURE: You’re known as “the dean of complexity theory”. A lot of our readers may not understand what complexity means and why you study it.

GEOFFREY WEST: Science has progressed, at least beginning with the physical sciences, by always being what’s called reductionistic: that is, reducing things to their primary elements, whether they’re electrons, atoms, molecules, or genes and so forth. That has been enormously successful, but one of the things that we’ve begun to appreciate more and more — especially in the last 50 years, certainly the last 20 — is that kind of paradigm has extraordinary limitations.

When you try to build up from these fundamental elements to the collective whole, you discover that the whole is much greater than, behaves differently than, and is structured differently from the sum of its parts. What you recognize in parallel with that is almost all of the major issues that we face on the planet in a tsunami of challenges and crises — everything from climate change and the question of stability in markets to potential questions about risk and how we deal with things like cancer, and the encroaching threat of global urbanization — are what we call complex. They’re not easily, or even potentially, reduced to the sum of their parts.

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Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The 2016 presidential election, with its tides of rage, party divisions, and Russian meddling, was always going to howl for the kind of radical treatment given to earlier historic campaigns, like Norman Mailer’s and Joe McGinniss’s books on the 1968 race, Hunter S. Thompson’s and Timothy Crouse’s dispatches from 1972, and David Foster Wallace’s profile of John McCain’s 2000 bid.

Now former Huffington Post reporter Scott Conroy has given us one of the first of an expected horde of books on the 2016 election, but with a soda-straw view that delivers intriguing results. Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary: America’s Discerning, Magnificent, Absurd Road to the White House — a mouthful of a title, perhaps — offers a good helping of telling particulars about the most eccentric and often most important stop on the presidential nomination calendar.

Like those earlier works, Conroy’s account is highly personalized, and much of the fun comes from seeing this peculiar place through the eyes of an often-tentative intruder. Speaking directly to the reader, for example, he recommends the Errol Motel as a cozy option if one needs “to dispose of a corpse.” Of a man he meets during a protest, Conroy writes, “as nice as he was, Bill seemed like the kind of guy who might mistake me on a foggy morning for a tasty looking wild turkey and take a shot at me.” A revealing New Hampshire idiosyncrasy he uncovers is the local prestige associated with low-numbered license plates, and how former Governor John H. Sununu used to offer one of these coveted items to sway a state senator’s endorsement toward a particular candidate.

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Daniel Engber in Slate:

It seemed obvious, at first, that Jade Wu was getting punked. In the fall of 2009, the Cornell University undergraduate had come across a posting for a job in the lab of one of the world’s best-known social psychologists. A short while later, she found herself in a conference room, seated alongside several other undergraduate women. “Have you guys heard of extrasensory perception?” Daryl Bem asked the students. They shook their heads.

While most labs in the psych department were harshly lit with fluorescent ceiling bulbs, Bem’s was set up for tranquility. A large tasseled tapestry stretched across one wall, and a cubicle partition was draped with soft, black fabric. It felt like the kind of place where one might stage a séance.

“Well, extrasensory perception, also called ESP, is when you can perceive things that are not immediately available in space or time,” Bem said. “So, for example, when you can perceive something on the other side of the world, or in a different room, or something that hasn’t happened yet.”

It occurred to Wu that the flyer might have been a trick. What if she and the other women were themselves the subjects of Bem’s experiment? What if he were testing whether they’d go along with total nonsense?

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Francine Prose in The New York Times:

How challenging it can be, these days, to distinguish the dystopian from the naturalistic, to tell the difference between an artist’s darkest imaginings and current events. With its vision of a culture driven mad by technology, the British television series “Black Mirror” resembles 21st-century reality, fancifully tweaked. Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel, “Exit West,” depicts a near future in which the sheer number of people driven from their homes by war has destabilized global civilization. Wallace Shawn’s new play, “Evening at the Talk House,” posits a not-so-distant era in which ordinary citizens facilitate targeted long-distance killings as a way to pay the rent. Now Nadeem Aslam’s powerful and engrossing fifth novel, “The Golden Legend,” introduces us to a world that may at first seem to be a dire and distorted version of our own. In the city Aslam calls Zamana, the rule of law is a distant memory and the social order has thoroughly deteriorated. Aslam’s characters must struggle to survive in a society ruled by mob violence, sectarianism and intolerance, presided over by fanatical despots. Danger lurks everywhere: in the households and neighborhoods controlled by religious extremists and in the sky above, where drones take aim at civilians selected for execution by the American military. This apparent dystopia is, in fact, all too real. The nightmare Aslam so forcefully describes is, he suggests, a portrait of the most turbulent and painful aspects of everyday life in contemporary urban Pakistan.

As the novel opens, books are being transferred from an older library to a new structure that Massud and Nargis — a middle-aged married couple, both celebrated architects — have designed. Because the Islamic texts “contained the names of Allah and Muhammad somewhere, it had been decided that they should be taken from one building to the other by hand. In a truck or cart the risk was too great of something coming into contact with uncleanliness. Nargis and Massud would be walking to the nearby Grand Trunk Road to be part of a human chain, and the books would travel a mile-long succession of hands.” Among the treasures passed in this manner is a ninth-century Abbasid Quran, soon “followed by a book of Mughal paintings of which Rembrandt had made copies in 17th-century Holland.” As the “human chain” performs its reverential ritual, two young men on a motorcycle attack a car that has stopped nearby. Riding in the car is an American, who promptly whips out his gun and fires blindly into the crowd. In the ensuing chaos, Massud is shot and killed. Within days, the grieving widow is visited by a mysterious and clearly sinister “soldier-spy” who informs her that, as a way to help calm the volatile, anti-American mood of the local population, she must declare in court that she has forgiven her husband’s murderer. When Nargis hesitates, her visitor makes it clear that unless she complies she will be made to suffer.

More here.

Lucina Schell at The Quarterly Conversation:

The human-precipitated Anthropocene promises unprecedented loss: of beauty and wildness in the natural sphere, and the comforts of convenient consumption in the domestic sphere—yet outside of science fiction, this has yet to register in our literature. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that the blame should be put on the very structure of the novel, which employs depictions of mundane reality to conceal a scaffold of more remarkable plot points, and which developed at a time when nature was viewed as a bucolic canvas upon which human individuals acted rather than a system of which we are part. The best way to think about the Anthropocene may be through images, Ghosh suggests—film and television already seem to be having a more successful time. Danish writer Josefine Klougart’s cinematic experimental novel, Of Darkness, would seem to be the sort of novel Ghosh would appreciate: it moves in and out of images, dissolving the false border between human beings and nature in a series of interlocked vignettes that add up to a metonym for the large-scale loss implied by climate change.

Readers who prefer plot-driven novels will not be satisfied. A cohesive narrative never emerges from the various sections that retrace recurring scenes in forms as diverse as flash prose, lineated prose, Sapphic fragments, and even a screenplay. (Personally, I feared they might draw together by the end, and was relieved when they did not.) Tellingly, the screenplay section spends much more time describing the setting and directing the shots than on dialogue between its two characters, WOMAN and MAN.

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Brian Van Reet at The Guardian:

If “hurry up and wait” is the army’s unofficial motto, “storyteller” has to be one of the soldier’s many unofficial occupations. War, as they say, comes in long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of intense terror; so, with plenty of time to kill and anxious boredom to ease, soldiers do what tense and idle people throughout the ages have always done. They talk. They tell each other stories. War stories, sure, but soldiers will shoot the breeze about anything, from the winner of a hypothetical fight between a crocodile and a gorilla, to the nuances of geopolitics, to loved ones back home. Given how war foreshortens mortality, the fear of death – and its corollary, the want of sex – are common topics of conversation even when the focus is ostensibly elsewhere. In any case, the subjunctive mood dominates. What if, what if, what if?

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Two centuries ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was, with the possible exception of Lord Byron, the most famous writer of his time. His 1774 short novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther ”— about a poetical young man whose unrequited passion for a married woman ends in suicide — had swept across Europe, elevating its youthful author into a cultural celebrity. Napoleon, no less, claimed to have read it seven times. Yet Goethe was even more accomplished as a poet. Just think of his chilling ballad “Der Erlkönig” (The Erl-King), the limpidly beautiful “Heidenröslein,” (Heather Rose) or “Gretchen am Spinnrade”(Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) — all of which provided the texts for some of Schubert’s most beautiful lieder. Not least, Goethe’s verse drama “Faust” — in which a Renaissance magus sells his soul to the devil — stands high among the world’s classics.

Needless to say, all this sounds very impressive, but is Goethe still read outside of an ever-diminishing number of college courses in German literature? I suspect he isn’t, which is why I hoped Rüdiger Safranski’s “Goethe: Life as a Work of Art” might re-introduce this great writer to American readers. Alas, the book, though excellent in its way, won’t do that. Safranski — the author of biographies of Schopenhauerand Nietzsche , and a philosopher himself — focuses on Goethe’s evolution as a thinker and artist at the expense of narrative excitement and anecdote. Given how little of the German’s work most Americans have read, we don’t really need analysis so much as enthusiastic cheerleading.

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David Roberts in Vox:

Paul Hawken is a legend in environmental circles. Since the early 1980s, he has been starting green businesses, writing books on ecological commerce (President Bill Clinton called Hawken’s Natural Capitalism one of the five most important books in the world), consulting with businesses and governments, speaking to civic groups, and collecting honorary doctorates (six so far).

A few years ago, he set out to pull together the careful coverage of solutions that had so long been lacking. With the help of a little funding, he and a team of several dozen research fellows set out to “map, measure, and model” the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change, using only peer-reviewed research.

The result, released last month, is called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan EverProposed to Reverse Global Warming.

Unlike most popular books on climate change, it is not a polemic or a collection of anecdotes and exhortations. In fact, with the exception of a few thoughtful essays scattered throughout, it’s basically a reference book: a list of solutions, ranked by potential carbon impact, each with cost estimates and a short description. A set of scenarios show the cumulative potential.

It is fascinating, a powerful reminder of how narrow a set of solutions dominates the public’s attention. Alternatives range from farmland irrigation to heat pumps to ride-sharing.

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning, which together could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050 — more than on- and offshore wind power combined (99 GT).

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Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Chelsea Manning was revealed as the whistleblower responsible for one of the most important journalistic archives in history, her heroism has been manifest. She was the classic leaker of conscience, someone who went at the age of 20 to fight in the Iraq War believing it was noble, only to discover the dark reality not only of that war but of the U.S. government’s actions in the world generally: war crimes, indiscriminate slaughter, complicity with high-level official corruption, and systematic deceit of the public.

In the face of those discoveries, she knowingly risked her own liberty to disclose documents to the world that would reveal the truth, with no expectation of benefit to herself. As someone who has spent years touting the nobility of her actions, my defenses of her always early on centered on the vital nature of the material she revealed and the right of the public to know about it.

It is genuinely hard to overstate the significance of those revelations: Aside from exposing some of the most visceral footage of indiscriminate slaughter by the U.S. military seen in decades, the leaks were credited — even by harsh WikiLeaks skeptics such as New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller — with helping to spark the Arab Spring. Even more significantly, revelations about how the U.S. military executed Iraqi civilians, then called in a bombing raid to cover up what they did, prevented the Iraqi government from granting the Obama administration the troop immunity it was seeking in order to extend the war in Iraq.

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Ashish George in Liberal Currents:

The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability is Barnes’s attempt to add disabled people to the polyphonic exchange that creates our norms and policies. Progressives and libertarians ought to read it if they want to improve their understanding of what disabled people have to offer society. Barnes’s thesis is that the common view of disability as a tragedy to be overcome is mistaken. Disability is more like being gay or being a woman: complicated as a result of social stigma and some aspects of the condition itself (more trips to the doctor, for example), but on the whole neither better nor worse than alternative ways of being embodied. Disability, Barnes maintains, is neutral with respect to well-being. In 187 pages, Barnes addresses several different theories of well-being in the philosophical literature, draws attention to how disability is constructed by social perceptions, and makes the case for pride as a corrective for shame and ostracism.

Liberals should pay particular attention to chapter four, which Barnes devotes to the importance of firsthand testimony. She draws on the work of Miranda Fricker, whom she credits for delineating the concept of hermeneutical injustice. Barnes summarizes the idea:

In cases of hermeneutical injustice, we harm people by obscuring aspects of their own experience. Our dominant schemas—our assumptions, what we take as common ground—about a particular group can make it difficult for members of that group to understand or articulate their own experiences qua members of that group.

This attenuates the impact disabled voices can have on our politics in the realms of fairness and interpersonal respect.

In discussions about inclusion, political liberalism’s quarry is incorporating groups into a previously negotiated arrangement. The through-line connecting progressives and libertarians is a commitment to procedural neutrality about what constitutes an adequate comprehensive moral perspective for individuals. Like the proverbial watchmaker god of deism, liberalism prescribes parameters, not ultimate outcomes. Unfortunately, hermeneutical injustice throws a monkey wrench into the works.

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Edward Hughes at the TLS:

The vogue for the American novel in France in the 1930s helps explain why Hemingway is frequently cited as an influence on Camus. Kaplan focuses more tightly, however, on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and draws some striking parallels. And yet the origins of L’Étranger were intensely local. As Kaplan explains, Camus’s work as a reporter working for Alger-Républicain meant that he was covering court cases that reflected the tensions and violence that were part and parcel of colonial Algeria. In the edgy Algiers life of the period, pimping, street violence and machismo were all part of the mix. Kaplan reports specifically on a case of racial segregation on Zéralda beach outside Algiers in the summer of 1942 and the killings of Arabs that followed.

If such a climate of violence finds its way into L’Étranger, so too does the posturing of courtroom officials that had caught the eye of a young journalist on the lookout for copy. Kaplan cites the example of a French judge, Louis Vaillant, who, dealing with a Muslim defendant accused by the colonial authorities of murdering a conservative Islamic leader (this was the El Okbi trial of June 1939), produced a crucifix to let the defendant see what the guiding principle of the judge’s life was. In the novel, Camus would assign the cross-wielding role to Meursault’s examining magistrate.

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James Walcott at the London Review of Books:

In Making It, Podhoretz spun his local-boy-makes-good story as a Brooklyn lad who apprenticed under Trilling, F.R. Leavis and the polemical fight club of Partisan Reviewinto a living endorsement of the American Dream, taking a victory lap around his precocious career as a hotshot critic, magazine editor and merchant of ideas (what we would call today, if we hadn’t any shame, a thought leader). Putting extra pep into Podhoretz’s trot is the beaming knowledge that his success transcends that of mere mortal scribblers and red pencillers. To borrow from a popular song of the period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’.

In daydream moments in between the usual author agonising, Podhoretz may have anticipated the publication of Making It as a climactic solo bringing down the curtain on act one of his career and a springboard for his next move. The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the sales appeal of his candour. Numerous interventionists attempted to save him from himself. His agent didn’t want to handle the book. His original publisher rejected the manuscript. His friend and fellow editor Jason Epstein advised him to throw it in the river. Even Lionel Trilling, seldom stirred to intervene in the affairs of mortals, urged him not to publish the book, and Gandalf is never wrong. But Podhoretz persevered, stuck his chin out, and boy did he get creamed. He was pelted with reviews that were not only scathing but mocking, jeering (‘a career expressed as a matchless 360 page ejaculation’ – New Leader); like Carrie at her prom, Podhoretz found himself in the swirling fly-eye of ridicule.

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Sarah Churchwell at The New Statesman:

F Scott Fitzgerald’s publishing career lasted just two decades, from 1920 to 1940, when he died aged 44. But in that brief time he published four novels, a play and 178 short stories (some of which he compiled into four collections), while leaving an unfinished novel as well as many incomplete stories, fragments, notes, screenplays and film scenarios. Most have gradually trickled into print over the 77 years since his death, and with the publication of I’d Die For You, the trickle all but ends: these are the last known uncollected stories from the archives.

Despite the collection’s subtitle (And Other Lost Stories) most of these were not, as their editor Anne Margaret Daniel notes, lost: they were just unpublished. Some have been sitting in various archives since Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, first donated her parents’ papers to Princeton University Library in the early 1950s; other drafts turned up over the years and were preserved, but not published. Seven more were found among family papers in 2012, and now the Fitzgerald estate has decided to publish them all in an authoritative edition, perhaps motivated by inflated recent claims about the “discovery” of “long-lost” Fitzgerald stories by means of the remarkable stratagem of going to a library and reading the catalogue. This happened in 2016 with a 1939 story called “Temperature” (which, as Daniel wrote at the time, Fitz­gerald noted should be “Filed Under False Starts”) and in 2015 with “Ballet Shoes” (1936), which was misleadingly publicised as a “fragment of a lost novel”.

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Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

The Booker-shortlisted novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah gives us a story with a secret at its core – and yet, there is nothing manipulative about the withholding of the truth, and no sense that the author is relying on a breadcrumb trail of clues to keep us reading. Instead, and more satisfyingly, he is writing about the cost of secrets that are based on imbalances of power – imbalances of class, gender and love. The “secret” at the start of the book seems nothing more than a domestic falling-out. Salim is seven, in 1970s Zanzibar, when his father abandons the house; at first his mother says he has only gone away for a few days. Soon it becomes clear that he has moved out and is renting a room in another part of town. At first she delivers him a basket of food every day, then she asks Salim to take over the duty. Neither parent ever speaks of the reason for their discord. The novel is divided into three parts. The first gives us Salim’s life in Zanzibar, growing up in a happy family that bafflingly becomes broken. Eventually certain truths about his mother’s life become distressingly clear to him, but he manages only a half-conversation about it with her and becomes increasingly isolated within his own anger and confusion. When his uncle Amir offers him the opportunity to move to London as a student, it seems like an escape.

The second part is Salim’s life in the UK, when he begins to understand more of what happened between his parents, and also discovers the sadness and dislocation of being away from home. He doesn’t know how to belong in the strange place in which he has found himself but feels increasingly cut off from the world he’s left behind. This is not a new subject for novelists – Gurnah himself has written about exile in his sixth novel By the Sea – but that does nothing to take away from its emotional strength. In By the Sea, the exiled figure was an asylum seeker, facing all the difficulties that such a position brings. Salim is in a far more privileged position – his education leads to employment and there is no fear of deportation or penury. His sorrows come from having two countries and no home; he also feels the awful weight of knowing he has cast himself out of his place of birth because something unbearable has happened that no one knows how to confront. The UK does, in time, become a kind of home with friends and lovers. But Salim never quite manages to follow his father’s advice: “As you travel keep your ear close to your heart.”

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Ben Panko in Smithsonian:

The “Mona Lisa,” one of the world’s most famous works of art, hangs on a featureless tan wall in a large, sparse room in the Louvre. There’s little to draw one’s eye away from Leonardo da Vinci’s small painting. Now a psychologist argues that this design scheme, common in traditional art museums from the early 20th century onward, actually plays into human psychology—because humans that aren’t distracted are better able to appreciate beauty. "Museums have often tried separate art from life and to create a pure, neutral environment," says Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. This so-called "white cube" layout isn't how things always were, however. Throughout the 1800s, patrons would often find art crammed from floor to ceiling. But by the late-19th century, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink model was under fire. “The general mental state produced by such vast displays is one of perplexity and vagueness, together with some impression of sore feet and aching heads,” wrote one William Stanley Jevons in an 1882 essay titled “The Use and Abuse of Museums.” To combat this “museum fatigue,” art scholars recommended that, among other things, institutions displaying art should simplify. Boston Museum of Fine Arts secretary Benjamin Ives Gilman, for example, recommended that curators avoid the “perpetual variety of wall coloring, found in many newer museums,” in favor of a neutral, standard color. By the early 20th century, the cleaner, sparser style had become in vogue.

Anne Brielmann, a graduate student of psychology at New York University, got the idea to study the effects of distraction on art appreciators after dropping out of a painting program in Europe. Inspired by her time at art school, she has turned her focus to the growing field of neuroaesthetics, which aims to understand how our brains decide whether things are aesthetically pleasing using psychological experiments, brain scanning and other tools of neuroscience. "It would be wonderful if I could combine these two passions and do a psychological and scientific investigation of this phenomenon," Brielmann says of her motivation. Given that neuroaesthetics is a relatively new field, Brielmann and her adviser, NYU psychologist Denis Pelli, turned instead to philosophers, who "have been talking about this topic for thousands of years." They came across the work of the influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty is not an inherent property of an object, but is instead subjective to the person observing it. Kant’s argument, in Brielmann’s interpretation, depends on the idea that a person must exert conscious thought to determine whether something is beautiful or not. So it follows that, "if we do need thought to experience beauty, you should not be able to experience beauty any more if we take your thoughts away from you," she says.

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