Nikhil Barot in Nautilus:

A little over a decade ago, Farr Curlin, a physician and professor of medical humanities at Duke Divinity School, became curious about the spiritual lives of his colleagues. He already knew that patients’ religious beliefs and communities matter: Both influence medical decisions and change the meaning of illness. But the influence of physicians’ religiosity on their work was relatively unknown. So he and his colleagues conducted a national survey of physicians’ religious characteristics. He found that, compared to a sample of the general U.S. population, physicians were twice as likely to cope with their own major life problems without relying on a “higher power.” Doctors were also less likely to carry their religious beliefs into other dealings in life. Curlin’s survey was the first of many to show that doctors are less inclined to bring up spiritual and religious matters with patients and their families, even though addressing these dimensions of illness can help coping with death, and even though patients frequently welcome the discussion.

“When spiritual needs are not met,” concluded Michelle Pearce, a University of Maryland clinical psychologist and her colleagues in a 2012 paper, “patients are at risk of depression and a reduced sense of spiritual meaning and peace.” Yet according to a 2013 study, despite recognizing the importance of spiritual care to patients, physicians and nurses infrequently provide it. A report published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that most cancer physicians, nurses, and patients believe such care would have a positive impact. The evidence suggests that physicians might do well to take a Past Spiritual History, similar to the Past Medical and Past Surgical Histories that are a routine part of patient-doctor encounters. A Past Spiritual History represents a biopsychosocial-spiritual approach to understanding illness, which may not only “enrich the dialogue between patients and health providers,” as one 2006 study concluded, but also inform what treatments are acceptable within a given patient’s system of values. “For many people, this spiritual history unfolds within the context of an explicit religious tradition,” wrote Christina Puchalski, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, and colleagues, in the Journal of Palliative Care. “For others it unfolds as a set of philosophical principles or significant experiences.”

More here.

Lyse Doucet at the BBC:

The white bearded Reverend Good, who's been visiting this region since 2005, later told me it was a "wonderful day".

And then, the documents were passed to Ram Manikkalingam, a mediator who decided the occasion merited a suit and tie, who heads the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group.

"There were many moments when we doubted this would happen," he admitted when we sat down in the same room after he had deposited Eta's file in the French prosecutor's office in City hall.

"There were steps forward, and steps backward," recalls Mr Manikkalingam who, as chair of the International Verification Commission, has also been monitoring Eta's unilateral ceasefire declared in 2011.

It has taken since then to convince Eta fighters to give up their weaponry without getting anything in return. Tracking down what's left also took time in a highly secretive organisation with a myriad of small cells.

More here.

From Sudoscript:

Last weekend, a fascinating act in the history of humanity played out on Reddit.

For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one.

Over the following 72 hours, what emerged was nothing short of miraculous. A collaborative artwork that shocked even its inventors.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Feisal Naqvi in The News:

I am a litigator. I argue for a living. If you want to put it poetically, I’m an architect of the imagination: I make and destroy arguments for a living.

High-stakes litigation is difficult everywhere in the world because somebody’s life or somebody’s livelihood is often on the line. But what makes it immeasurably more terrifying in Pakistan is that our advocacy is still done orally, not in writing. That means that when you stand up to argue, you often have no idea what point is going to catch the judge’s fancy or what is going to disturb him: you just have to do your best and try to anticipate everything which might be flung at you.

The further consequence of this oral tradition is that a good lawyer needs to know his entire brief, inside and out, before he stands at the rostrum. As I once explained it to somebody, litigation lawyers are like stage actors: we need to know the entire play. We don’t have the option of only learning the lines needed for the next take.

As you get more experienced, it becomes easier for you to anticipate what point is likely to catch the judge’s eye. And it gets easier for you to extract the gist of the case from a two-foot high stack of documents. But at the end of the day, you still need to go through that stack. And you still need to know everything inside it. Or else.

I may or may not be correct in feeling that my job is exceptionally hard. But my point here is simpler: no matter what the job, doing it well is going to be difficult. If you think it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong.

More here.

James Longenbach at Poetry Magazine:

Most western music since the Renaissance is organized by a particular 
key, such as C major; musicians use the word tonal to describe such music. Some non-western languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, are tonal in a different sense: the Mandarin wordma, depending on whether the voice rises or remains level when uttering it, may mean either horse or mother. Although syllable stress may determine the meaning of English words, allowing us to hear the difference between contract and contract or betweenminute and minute, English is not a tonal language. And while English syllables may be uttered at different pitches relative to one another, neither is the sonic life of the English language tonal in the musical sense. What then do poets, in contrast to linguists or musicians, mean by the word tone? A poem’s diction, rhythm, or syntax is palpably describable, but asking a poet to produce a poem with an interesting tone is like asking a chef to produce a meal that tastes good: if successful, the chef will be thinking about the manipulation of particular ingredients. You can’t reach into the pantry for a cup of tone.

Consider Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Ori Freiman at The Berlin Review of Books:

Dentith is a self-described conspiracy theory theorist – meaning he theorizes about conspiracy theories from a standpoint that particular conspiracy theories can be rational (p. 8). In this book he argues that conspiracy theories are worth taking seriously and as such should be analyzed properly. The first step towards an unbiased analysis consists in discarding the pejorative connotations that are currently associated with a belief in conspiracy theory. Once that is behind us, the second step is to seriously consider the extraordinary evidence that conspiracy theories usually cite. It is only after we have considered the evidence that we can move to the third step, which is seriously assessing the conspiracy theory in question – in light of other possible explanations of the event the conspiracy theory was articulated to explain. The book consists of twelve chapters which gradually build upon each other; the division of the book into three successive steps is my own way of outlining the argument.

So why, according to this book, should we discard the pejorative meanings of the term conspiracy theory? Doing so can reveal a lot about those conspiracy theories which are rational. One of the benefits of this approach, so the argument goes, is that it enables us to treat conspiracy theories in various positive ways, for example as a mode of political expression: it enables us to view conspiracy theorists as having an important role within a democratic society – such as exposing certain failures and wrongdoings, just as whistleblowers would. Changing our attitude in this way is not an easy task: the term conspiracy currently holds an extremely large variety of pejorative meanings, perpetuated not least by the vast, and growing, academic literature about conspiracies found in various fields.

more here.

Drew Philp at The Guardian:

I was just finishing what was likely the final mowing of my lawn, just before the winter came. As I looked up, I noticed my neighbor was sitting in his truck across the road, watching me as he smoked a cigarette. Just a few years earlier, at age 23, I had purchased an abandoned house in Detroit from a live auction for $500, less than the price of a decent television. It had been empty for more than a decade and was still a shell, its bones exposed, anything of value stolen long ago.

The structure was filled with trash and had lived a hard life: two monstrous stories of no doors or windows, plumbing, or electricity – nothing. The backyard was a literal jungle, the porch needed to be ripped off and done again, the front yard looked like it wanted to be cut with a scythe. When I bought it in 2009, a white kid in Detroit was strange. Most people, white and black, were moving out. By this time I’d been working on the house for five years. I’d removed the trash – nearly ten thousand pounds of it – added windows and electricity and all the other accoutrements, and had begun to carefully insert myself into the chorus of Detroit among my neighbors. Both my house, and the neighborhood, were starting to feel like home.

more here.

Rick Perlstein in The New York Times:

Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable tale. By the end of World War II, the story goes, conservatives had become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Year Zero was 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review, the small-circulation magazine whose aim, Buckley explained, was to “articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.

I was one of the historians who helped forge this narrative. My first book, “Before the Storm,” was about the rise of Senator Barry Goldwater, the uncompromising National Review favorite whose refusal to exploit the violent backlash against civil rights, and whose bracingly idealistic devotion to the Constitution as he understood it — he called for Social Security to be made “voluntary” — led to his crushing defeat in the 1964 presidential election. Goldwater’s loss, far from dooming the American right, inspired a new generation of conservative activists to redouble their efforts, paving the way for the Reagan revolution. Educated whites in the prosperous metropolises of the New South sublimated the frenetic, violent anxieties that once marked race relations in their region into more palatable policy concerns about “stable housing values” and “quality local education,” backfooting liberals and transforming conservatives into mainstream champions of a set of positions with enormous appeal to the white American middle class.

These were the factors, many historians concluded, that made America a “center right” nation. For better or for worse, politicians seeking to lead either party faced a new reality. Democrats had to honor the public’s distrust of activist government (as Bill Clinton did with his call for the “end of welfare as we know it”). Republicans, for their part, had to play the Buckley role of denouncing the political surrealism of the paranoid fringe (Mitt Romney’s furious backpedaling after joking, “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate”). People are essentially selfish, and more so when they feel threatened economically or socially. Johnson's famous remark upon signing the…A Trump vote gave the finger to our political elites, and his policies are still giving them the finger. They are not running the store any…

It's possible to infer from this article that the author believes that the liberal or progressive electorate is qualitatively different from…Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and conservative intellectuals quickly embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished, with Goldberg explaining simply that Never Trump “was about the G.O.P. primary and the general election, not the presidency.”

More here.

Nadeem Aslam in The Guardian:

I am at my desk at midnight and I write until six or seven in the morning. I have been working this way for 25 years now. The quietness deepens at night and everything feels saturated with stillness. From 7am till midday, I read. It is often said human beings don’t come with an instruction manual; but I believe that books – libraries – are the instruction manuals for human beings. To read a great book is to realise that everything is already known. I also look at the newspapers. Many things in my books come from real life; but a novelist has to be careful in transporting a real event into the landscape of a novel. It is patient work, like moving a lake from one place to another with a teaspoon.

I go for a walk in the farmlands and orchards near my house. Insects and birds appear and disappear with the seasons. On the hilltop there are remains of a late bronze age fort. There is a wood full of bluebells in April. I climb down into the valley and enter the neighbourhood I grew up in, a cluster of mainly Muslim working-class streets, here in Yorkshire. It has produced dozens of doctors over the decades, as well as nurses and lawyers, dentists, teachers, drug smugglers, pimps, happy and bitterly unhappy arranged marriages, many of them between first cousins, and there are men and women I went to school with now under arrest for running sweatshops for migrant workers.

More here.

Gregory Gorelik in Quillette:

Like all good husbands, I took my wife to see the latest instalment of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie series—Fifty Shades Darker­­—on Valentine’s Day weekend. Admittedly, this romantic gesture was not entirely altruistic. As it happens, I am currently doing research on the role of dominance and submission in human sexuality. Although neither of us is in the “scene,” we are nonetheless swept up in the current cultural fascination with consensual sadomasochism, albeit for different reasons.

My fascination stems from my general interest in human sexuality and its evolution. My field, evolutionary psychology, has been at the forefront of exploring human behavior through the evolutionary lens for more than two decades, and has made immense advances over the years. Although its greatest accomplishments are in the realm of sex differences and mating behavior, it is not confined to the sexual realm, as is evidenced by the increasing output of research on the evolution of morality,¹ religion,² and politics.³ Indeed, E. O. Wilson’s dream of a consilience of knowledge across the biological sciences and humanities is slowly inching its way toward fulfilment.⁴

Notwithstanding the ever-expanding reach of Darwinism away from sexuality, the exploration of the evolutionary roots of human sexual behavior is not yet complete. In addition to the continuing necessity of cross-cultural research on sex differences and variations in life history strategies (i.e., how interested individuals are in short-term versus long-term relationships), knowledge of actual human copulatory behavior is mostly untapped. Ironically, evolutionary scientists have made remarkable advances in the study of human reproduction without paying much attention to the reproductive act itself.⁵ I believe that it is time to get dirty—and the modern fascination with sadomasochism might lead the way.

More here.

Josh Gidding in Agni:

I sometimes imagine my life from the point of view of a future biographer. For instance, concerning the months my parents and I were living in India in 1961, I imagine something like the following:

“From an early age he showed sensitivity towards the miserable and downtrodden. This was dramatically evident in an incident involving the ‘untouchable’ Natu, the household ‘sweeper.’ One morning the child, in front of Natu, took his mop and began to clean the floor with it. The intention was apparently to show solidarity with the sweeper. But Natu, appalled at this transgression of caste boundaries, or perhaps simply afraid that his job was being taken away from him, grabbed back the mop, and the seven-year-old burst into tears. He was often afraid of—and even, it seems, ashamed before—the beggars that were a common sight on the streets of New Delhi, hiding his eyes from them when they would approach the family’s car stopped at a light. But there could also be occasional shows of cruelty, as when he spent an entire afternoon decapitating ants in the driveway, or when he would pull on the restraining leash of ‘Tiger,’ the worm-ridden Alsatian that the family’s rental agent, Mr. Singh, had procured for him after endless entreaties to his parents….”

However, this is misleading, because when the “biographizing impulse” strikes me, it is never in full sentences—or any kind of sentences, for that matter. It comes as a momentary consciousness, the wish for a biographically-shaped pattern guiding the shapeless here-and-now of my daily experience. An awareness that this life—the rainy-day train ride into New York City, for lunch with an old girlfriend; the prolonged Instant Messenger flirtation with same, which went on for three years, which my wife found out about, and which caused her pain, anger and humiliation—a sense that my life, in its daily delinquencies and partial fulfillments, may have a larger meaning and unity, which remain elusive to me, but will not prove so to my future biographer.

I know what you are probably thinking, and yes, there is surely some grandiosity in all of this. But let us make a distinction here.

More here.

John Wilson Foster at The Dublin Review of Books:

Beyond dispute are Maud Gonne’s energy, initiative, charisma, and height. At an eye-catching six feet or more (6’5” is the tallest hero-worshipping estimate I’ve read; Adrian Frazier gives us 6’2”), she was tall but not pointlessly tall, tall beyond utility as Martin Amis claimed of Nicholson Baker. Her height, once she got into her stride, usefully gave her a leg up in a pre-Pathé News, pre-TV era of street politics, of milling crowds, marches, riots and open-air platforms. She was always visible and early came to relish and exploit that visibility (a literal high profile). Adrian Frazier’s new book recreates for me, for the first time, and perhaps without that intention, the sheer physicality of the woman, endlessly on the move from house to house, office to office, country to country (and sometimes lover to lover), cutting a swathe, it seems like, through men shorter than herself and often under her feet, getting between her and the mirage of a free independent Irish republic. She seems to have turned up everywhere in turbulent Ireland from the Land League to the Emergency, a larger-than-life Zelig but far from content with a minor role, instead elbowing her way to centre stage even when she wasn’t invited (which she usually was).

Frazier’s portrait of Gonne in its essential commotion is very different from my previous impression of her as a figure whose actions, such as trying to hurl the little streets upon the great, nonetheless had the static quality of heraldry. For Yeats her beauty was a tightened bow and out of nature, unique for her own day. “She lived in storm and strife,” Yeats may write (“That the Night Come”, 1912), but her “high and solitary and most stern” beauty is the frozen image that prevails.

more here.

Adam O'Fallon Price at The Millions:

John Cheever may be the most misunderstood and miscategorized important American author of the 20th century. On three separate recent occasions, and many more times over recent years, I have read articles/interviews that group him stylistically withRaymond Carver. This is mystifying: one would be hard-pressed to think of a body of work more antithetical to Carver’s spare, working-class realism than Cheever’s elegant, upper-class fabulism, where nymphs come to life and families vacation in Italian seaside villages. I can only guess this very bad comparison stems from people not actually having read Cheever, while knowing that 1) he and Carver were drinking buddies at Iowa, and 2) both of their names begin with C and end with VER.

He is often also (mis)paired with Richard Yates, a more understandable comparison. Both men served in the Second World War and chronicled the roiling fault lines beneath the tranquility of New York’s far suburbs. Both men were impeccable stylists, although Yates tended toward a rhetorical stylishness powered by limpid prose, while Cheever was, like John Updike, an extravagant sensualist, both in subject matter and descriptive tendency. Both men enjoyed their greatest success with novels, while exerting their greatest artistic mastery in the short story form.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

“Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism,” at the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C., is a great show, which surprised me. Bazille was not—or was not yet—a great artist when he died, in 1870, at the age of twenty-eight, in the Franco-Prussian War. His some seventy-five works in the show, notably scenes of ordinary people in outdoor settings, tantalize like an orchestra tuning up for a concert that is abruptly cancelled. A yearningly ambitious provincial, from Languedoc, Bazille lucked into the big-bang commencement of Parisian modernism, signalled by the stunning novelty of Édouard Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” in 1863. Bazille was friends with Monet and Renoir, sharing studios with them on the Left Bank and in Montmartre, and he knew everybody else in art worth knowing. You can feel the verve of the happy few in a sprightly painting by Bazille, dated 1869-70, which shows him and five of his colleagues socializing in a daylight-suffused studio. One of them, Manet, painted in the tall figure of Bazille. (At six feet two, Bazille towered in his milieu—and likely in enemy gun sights, when, on his first day of combat, he charged, and was shot dead, in the colorful uniform of a Zouave.) But to call him one of the proto-Impressionists doesn’t seem quite right. Rather, he reflected each of them, by turns, as his real but insecure talent veered back and forth, and this way and that, in their stronger gravitational fields.

What makes the show great is the point of view that it affords not only on the birth of Impressionism but also on the general dawning of modernist sentiments and sensibilities. Bazille serves as our stand-in throughout a crisply dramatic installation, by the National Gallery curator Kimberly A. Jones, which incorporates apposite paintings by, among others, Corot, Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Fantin-Latour, and Morisot. Bazille’s parallels and responses to those artists amount to a critical index of a moment when the course of art was feverishly contested and its future was trackless.

more here.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Bitchmedia:

How do you write a review of a book you've been waiting for for 17 years? I savored each page of Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure, white queer and trans disabled writer Eli Clare's long-awaited first work since his breakout debut Exile and Pride introduced many to a new kind of radical queer disability politics. (I still have the copy I shoplifted.) In Brilliant Imperfection, Clare picks up where Exile and Pride left off, exploring the difficult concept of ‘cure.’ Clare has written a masterpiece that questions the very definitions of what cure, diagnosis, and what the “body trouble” of sickness and disability mean. As a sick and disabled queer and a survivor who loves disabled genius and has my own complex relationship to diagnosis, cure, and ideas of ‘perfection’ I appreciated it deeply.

Written as a mosaic of many moments in crip time, Brilliant Imperfection argues what many crips have been saying (and what confuses the hell out of many able-bodied people when we say it)—that disability isn't a deficit, something we should want to get fixed by any means necessary. Clare believes, as I believe, that there are beautiful and important gifts disabled people have because of our disabilities—the “brilliant imperfection” of the titles—and that our lives are as worth living as they are. Disabled people, including Clare, have long argued that we would much rather have the billions of charity dollars raised annually towards cures for different disabilities to be spent on adaptive equipment and personal care attendants and nontoxic products and ASL interpretations—things that can actually increase our disabled and Deaf quality of life now. “At the center of cure lies eradication,” the eradication of disabled and Deaf people, Clare says, a belief that bleeds out into how ableism affects everyone. If we're better off cured and just like the abled, why fight for disabled folks' liberation now? Clare builds from this base in Brilliant Imperfection, diving deeper to look at the nuanced ways disabled folks relate to the supposedly neutral ideas of cure, diagnosis and treatment, examining how ableist colonialism has used cure and diagnosis as a weapon against disabled and temporarily abled people alike, and how many of us have a nuanced and complex relationship to the idea of cure. Rejecting simple answers, Clare says, “Cure rides on the back of normal and natural. Insidious and pervasive, it impacts most of us. In response, we need neither a wholehearted acceptance nor an outright rejection of cure, but rather a broad-based grappling.”

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

Evolutionary biologists have never known what to make of viruses, arguing over their origins for decades. But a newly discovered group of giant viruses, called Klosneuviruses, could be a 'missing link' that helps to settle the debate — or provoke even more discord. In 2003, researchers reported that they had found giant viruses, which they named Mimiviruses, with genes that suggested their ancestors could live outside of a host cell¹. The discovery split researchers into two camps. One group thinks viruses started out as self-sufficient organisms that became trapped inside other cells, eventually becoming parasitic and jettisoning genes they no longer needed. Another group views viruses as particles that snatched genetic material from host organisms over hundreds of millions of years. A study² published on 6 April in Science provides evidence for the latter idea, that viruses are made up of a patchwork of stolen parts. But it has already sparked controversy and is unlikely to settle the raucous debate.

After the Mimivirus discovery, some researchers developed a theory that put viruses near the root of the evolutionary tree. They proposed that viruses comprised a ‘fourth domain’ alongside bacteria, eukaryotes — organisms whose cells contain internal structures such as nuclei — and bacteria-sized organisms called archaea. Mimiviruses, which at 400 nanometres across are about half the width of an E. coli cell and can be seen under a microscope, were unique in that they contain DNA encoding the molecules that translate RNA messages into proteins. Normal viruses make their host cells produce proteins for them. The team that discovered Mimiviruses thought the virus' ability to make their own proteins suggested that these viral giants descended from ancient free-living cell type that may no longer exist². “They reinitiated the debate about the living nature of viruses, and of their relationship with the ‘cellular’ world,”

More here.

Since Donald Trump’s approval rating now looks like something that got stuck to the bottom of my shoe, I joined the flood of journalists who went to Real America to gloat see how the Trump supporters are getting along.

Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post:

In the shadow of the old flag factory, Craig Slabornik sits whittling away on a rusty nail, his only hobby since the plant shut down. He is an American like millions of Americans, and he has no regrets about pulling the lever for Donald Trump in November — twice, in fact, which Craig says is just more evidence of the voter fraud plaguing the country. Craig is a contradiction, but he does not know it.

Each morning he arrives at the Blue Plate Diner and tries to make sense of it all. The regulars are already there. Lydia Borkle lives in an old shoe in the tiny town of Tempe Work Only, Ariz., where the factory has just rusted away into a pile of gears and dust. The jobs were replaced by robots, not shipped overseas, but try telling Lydia that. (I did, very slowly and patiently, I thought, but she still became quite brusque.) Her one lifeline was an Obama-era jobs training program, but she says that she does not regret her vote for Trump and likes what he says about business. She makes a point of telling me that she is not racist, but I think she probably is, a little.

Next to her sits Linda Blarnik. Like the rusty hubcaps hanging on the wall behind her, she was made in America 50 years ago, back when this town made things, a time she still remembers fondly. She says she has had just enough of the “coastal elitist media who keep showing up to write mean things about my town and my life, like that thing just now where you said I was like a hubcap, yes you, stop writing I can see over your shoulder.” Mournfully a whistle blows behind her, the whistle of a train that does not stop in this America any longer.

More here.