Matthew Shaer in The New York Times:

A few years ago, a scientist named Nenad Sestan began throwing around an idea for an experiment so obviously insane, so “wild” and “totally out there,” as he put it to me recently, that at first he told almost no one about it: not his wife or kids, not his bosses in Yale’s neuroscience department, not the dean of the university’s medical school. Like everything Sestan studies, the idea centered on the mammalian brain. More specific, it centered on the tree-shaped neurons that govern speech, motor function and thought — the cells, in short, that make us who we are. In the course of his research, Sestan, an expert in developmental neurobiology, regularly ordered slices of animal and human brain tissue from various brain banks, which shipped the specimens to Yale in coolers full of ice. Sometimes the tissue arrived within three or four hours of the donor’s death. Sometimes it took more than a day. Still, Sestan and his team were able to culture, or grow, active cells from that tissue — tissue that was, for all practical purposes, entirely dead. In the right circumstances, they could actually keep the cells alive for several weeks at a stretch.

When I met with Sestan this spring, at his lab in New Haven, he took great care to stress that he was far from the only scientist to have noticed the phenomenon. “Lots of people knew this,” he said. “Lots and lots.” And yet he seems to have been one of the few to take these findings and push them forward: If you could restore activity to individual post-mortem brain cells, he reasoned to himself, what was to stop you from restoring activity to entire slices of post-mortem brain?

To do so would be to create an entirely novel medium for understanding brain function. “One of the things we studied in our lab was the connectome — a kind of wiring map of the brain,” Sestan told me. Research on the connectome, which comprises the brain’s 90 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses, is widely viewed among neuroscientists as integral to understanding — and potentially treating — a range of disorders, from autism to schizophrenia. And yet there are few reliable ways of tracing all those connections in the brains of large mammals. “I thought, O.K., let’s see if this” — slices of cellularly revived brain tissue — “is the way to go,” Sestan said.

More here.

Leonard Benardo in The American Progress:

When I was in graduate school, I had the good fortune to hear Eric Hobsbawm lecture on nationalism. The year was 1992. Hobsbawm had just published his widely read and sharply debated book on the theme, and in the aftermath of the implosion in communist Central and Eastern Europe and the revival of the so-called captive nations, everyone wanted to hear his take on the subject. Hobsbawm’s talk was packed. Edward Said, the esteemed Columbia University professor of literature, arrived late and found a spot only on the floor in the back. With Hobsbawm at perhaps his reputational apogee, the event felt more like an Event, a happening of unusual significance.

Richard Evans’s appreciative and deeply researched biography of the Marxist historian and intellectual, only a handful of years since Hobsbawm’s passing, is an event in itself. Clocking in at nearly 800 pages, it is an imposing summation and a contribution to a boutique subgenre: historical biography of major historians by practicing historians.

In a university age where disciplines punish scholars for moving off-script, Hobsbawm was an old-fashioned person of letters. Trained in Cambridge, Hobsbawm ranged far and wide, disallowing the strictures of disciplinary pressure to confine his intellectual reach. No subject was too remote, no idea un-germane. Devoted to a general approach that prized economic explanation, it was never an economics at the expense of culture, politics, or ideology, even if the economic “base” generally would have primacy. There was a logic to history for Hobsbawm, a materialist logic, yet contingency was never sacrificed at its altar.

More here.

Eric Foner in The Nation:

Alan Brinkley, who died on June 16 at the age of 70, was one of the most influential historians of his generation and a public intellectual whose writings helped to shape our understanding of modern American politics. His books are models of historical scholarship, written in a wonderfully accessible style. And, to employ a much-abused word, they are remarkably relevant. His central preoccupations—the strengths, limits, and vulnerabilities of the 20th-century American liberal tradition; the challenges to it, both internal and external; the connections between popular movements and political leadership; and the enduring legacies of the New Deal—are at the center of debate today.

The son of the prominent television newscaster David Brinkley, Alan Brinkley grew up in Washington in a household immersed in national politics. His first book, Voices of Protest, examined the 1930s careers of the popular demagogues Huey Long and Father Charles E. Coughlin. A winner of the National Book Award, it reflected his enduring interest in how modern communications media—in the case of Long and Coughlin, the radio—revolutionized the circulation of political ideas. He returned to this theme in his biography of Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life, and other mass-circulation magazines.

In The End of Reform, Brinkley offered a pioneering account of how New Deal liberalism shifted in the late 1930s from a commitment to regulating and restructuring modern capitalism to acceptance of the corporate economy coupled with the hope that the fruits of economic growth stimulated by government spending would be widely shared.

More here.

Lida Maxwell in the LA Review of Books:

IN ANNA BURNS’S Man Booker Prize–winning novel, Milkman, the main character — “middle sister” — learns about two-thirds of the way through the book that she has been defined as a “beyond-the-pale” in her community. This status comes not as a result of her attempts to avoid the sexual stalking of a local paramilitary leader (“Milkman”), but instead as a result of her habit of walking while reading. “Longest friend” tells her that her behavior is “not natural”; it is “disturbing,” “deviant,” “[n]ot public-spirited,” “[n]ot self-preservation.” Walking while reading, her friend tells her, is an activity that is “incapable of being mentally grasped, of being understood.” She is “[going] around in a political scene” with her “head switched off.”

Of course, middle sister’s head is very much switched on, but not in the way her community demands. Rather than using her head to defer to what Astra Taylor calls “constraining common sense,” middle sister goes about in public letting her body and mind inform each other, opening up new possibilities for thought and movement.

Burns’s book is my example, not Taylor’s, but “walking while reading” is as good a description as any for the kind of democratic citizenship Taylor advocates in her magnificent, paradigm-shifting new book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone. Taylor’s book challenges the very old idea that the demos is the “belly” of the polity, which depends on the “head” of elites to direct and guide it.

More here.

Martin Jay in The Point:

There is, in other words, a certain amount of bad faith in Geuss’s arguing against argumentation, giving reasons against the power of reasoning. But the performative contradiction reproach, let it be admitted, only goes so far in rebutting Geuss’s disillusioned take on the role of communicative rationality in the public sphere. It smacks too much of a clever schoolboy trick to stifle a discussion before it can begin. Geuss’s case should be addressed on its own merits, taking his points, both empirical and theoretical, at their strongest. Otherwise, the defender of communicative rationality will be open to the charge of performative contradiction in turn.

Let me begin by conceding that the current political discourse in liberal democracies—Geuss’s main case is the cacophonous Brexit debate, but it would be easy to give other examples on both sides of the Atlantic—provides ample evidence that we are a long way in practice from Habermas’s ideal speech situation. Of course, he always posited it as a counterfactual, which could only be approached asymptotically with no guarantee that we are going in the right direction. Like the democracy that is always “to come,” as Derrideans are wont to say, or “the perfect union” that is always a task, not an accomplished state of affairs, it is an aspirational goal. By making the obvious point that we have not yet achieved it, does it follow that its function as such a goal is negated? Geuss is thus setting up a straw man in asserting that “no amount of exertion will suffice to permit us to establish within the domain of the natural phenomenon ‘communication’ a safe-zone that is actually completely protected on all sides from the possible use of force.” Would the same disconnect between imperfect achievement and enduring aspiration also render otiose other such laudable goals as, say, equality, dignity, autonomy or abundance for all?

More here.

Manjit Kumar at The Guardian:

Unsurprisingly from the author of The Strangest Man, an award-winning biography of Dirac, Farmelo has offered a thoughtful, well-informed reply to those who believe the quest for mathematical beauty has led theoretical physicists into adopting sterile, ultra-mathematical approaches divorced from reality. He makes a persuasive case as he argues that theorists have not spent the last 40 years wasting their time writing quasi-scientific fairytales and that many of the ideas and concepts that have emerged will endure.

Most of this is not conventional science, Farmelo admits. Rather, it is speculative science. But it is science nonetheless because it’s rooted in the two great theories of the 20th century: quantum mechanics and relativity. At the heart of this book is an account of how physics has stimulated mathematical breakthroughs and maths has led to advances in physics.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Walter Bagehot — pronounced Badge-it — was first called “the greatest Victorian” by that capaciously learned historian of 19th-century England, G.M. Young. The phrase has been attached to Bagehot’s name ever since and is again used by James Grant in the subtitle of this new biography, even though it would be more accurate to call its subject “the most versatile Victorian.”

Born the son of a country banker, Bagehot (1826-1877) attended University College London, where he received the gold medal for outstanding work in intellectual and moral philosophy. Soon after, he joined his father at Stuckey’s Bank, where he eventually became one of its directors. Seemingly tireless, young Walter simultaneously established himself as a journalist, initially making his name with irreverent essays about Shakespeare, Dickens and other canonical figures of English literature and history but eventually specializing in critical articles about economic and financial subjects.

more here.

James Delbourgo at Literary Review:

By suspending the normal rules of earth-bound weight and motion, swimming pools bend certain rules of mental operation too, presenting possibilities for divine transformation and fatal transgression. Their creative potential often takes perverse and sometimes cruel forms. A Barbara Laing photograph from 1991 features a mule falling through the air towards a tank of water during ‘The World’s Only High-Diving Mules Show’ at the New Mexico State Fair in Albuquerque. Penned into a grandstand and shading their brows, fairgoers watch expectantly. One marvels at the bizarre freak-show machinations that brought this animal to its improbable plunge.

All swimming pools, however, deal in the unnatural. Southern California is the modern heartland of this glorious folly. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which the diversion of water away from Owens valley to Los Angeles is likened to an incestuous act of rape, still resonates. 

more here.

Rachel Cooke in The Guardian:

It takes a little over two hours to drive from Multan, a city in southern Punjab, Pakistan, to the village of Shah Sadar Din, and the first time the journalist Sanam Maher made the journey, her eyes widened at every turn. In Dera Ghazi Khan, a town close to the village, none of the faces of the women she saw on the streets were visible. Some wore what looked like black ski masks with slits for their eyes. Others were covered by burqas with no eye-slits at all and so extensive that she felt half naked under her own dupatta (scarf). A thin funnel rises from the top of this kind of burqa: a device to allow air inside so that the wearer does not suffocate. Her contact in the town, noticing her staring, mentioned a place not far away, where the tribal belt of Balochistan province starts: the women there, he told her, were not given shoes. She was confused. Why not? “You’ll never look at any man if you’re scared of where your naked foot might fall when you leave your home,” he replied impatiently, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Maher, who is based in Karachi, was in Shah Sadar Din to investigate the life and death of Fouzia Azeem, AKA Qandeel Baloch, Pakistan’s first social media celebrity and the woman some like to describe as its Kim Kardashian. Baloch was born here, the daughter of a poor family, and when she was murdered on 15 July, 2016, her body was supposed to end up in the village’s brown river, a spot well known for being the final resting place of women who have died at the hands of their relatives in so-called “honour” killings. On the day in question, however, there were too many people around to manage this (another villager had died; crowds of mourners were gathering). Baloch’s mother found the body at home; her father informed the authorities. When the police arrived, Baloch was still lying where she had been drugged and asphyxiated, in a bedroom at the small house that she rented for her parents in Multan. She was just 26.

“Visiting Shah Sadar Din was a huge culture shock for me,” says Maher, whose book about the case, A Woman Like Her, is published in the UK next month (it has already caused something of a sensation in south Asia). “The women were so completely covered: I’d never seen that anywhere that I’d lived or worked. But it’s important to say straight off that, though this is typical of south Punjab, it has nothing at all to do with religion. These [dress codes] are cultural diktats, just as honour killing and other forms of violence against women are cultural diktats. This is men wanting to control how the women around them live.”

More here.

Charles Yu in The New York Times:

Straw poll: Who thinks we’re living in the Matrix?

On the one hand, are we really to believe a single human is responsible for the body of work — entertaining, brilliant, immense — that Neal Stephenson has produced over the past quarter-century? Turning out thousand-page novels every couple of years? It seems much more likely that a computer is behind all of this. On the other hand, have you read Neal Stephenson? His mind is capable of going places no one else has ever imagined, let alone rendered in photorealist prose. And he doesn’t just go to those places; he takes us with him. The very fact of Stephenson’s existence might be the best argument we have against the simulation hypothesis. His latest, “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell,” is another piece of evidence in the anti-Matrix case: a staggering feat of imagination, intelligence and stamina. For long stretches, at least. Between those long stretches, there are sections that, while never uninteresting, are somewhat less successful. To expect any different, especially in a work of this length, would be to hold it to an impossible standard. Somewhere in this 900-page book is a 600-page book. One that has the same story, but weighs less. Without those 300 pages, though, it wouldn’t be Neal Stephenson. It’s not possible to separate the essential from the decorative. Nor would we want that, even if it were were. Not only do his fans not mind the extra — it’s what we came for.

In this particular case, the extra stuff is also kind of the point. The mind-melting density of detail in Stephenson’s work can sometimes overwhelm or bog down the narrative, but in “Fall” it is very much in service of the book’s subject: reality, and how it might one day be simulated. How those simulations could be iterated and upgraded over time, through technological progress and at great financial cost, to an arbitrary degree of verisimilitude. How the resources of our “Meatspace” civilization would increasingly become inputs and raw material for the creation and improvement of a digital civilization (“Bitworld”), gradually sucking all of humanity into the Matrix in the process. Exploring the implications and possibilities of this, on a grand and granular scale, plays to Stephenson’s strengths. This is a case of author and substance and story and style all lining up; a series of lenses perfectly arranged to focus the power and precision of Stephenson’s laser-beam intellect.

More here.

Notice

This evening, the sturdy Levi’s
I wore every day for over a year
& which seemed to the end
in perfect condition,
suddenly tore.
How or why I don’t know,
but there it was: a big rip at the crotch.
A month ago my friend Nick
walked off a racquetball court,
showered,
got into this street clothes,
& halfway home collapsed & died.
Take heed, you who read this,
& drop to your knees now & again
like the poet Christopher Smart,
& kiss the earth & be joyful,
& make much of your time,
& be kindly to everyone,
even to those who do not deserve it.
For although you may not believe
it will happen,
you too will one day be gone,
I, whose Levi’s ripped at the crotch
for no reason,
assure you that such is the case.
Pass it on.

by Steve Kowit
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harcourt Brace 1996

Wilfred M. McClay in The Hedgehog Review:

In the fall of 1941, during a stint as a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope. “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” as it was titled, is not anything he is known for. Indeed, it is a sad reflection on the preoccupations of literary biography that, while we know far more than any sane person would ever want to know about Auden’s desperately unhappy love life, we know little about the origins or trajectory of this remarkable course. It is mentioned only in passing in some of the biographical accounts of Auden’s life and in a few testimonials from students who took the course (including Kenneth Millar, better known by his detective-fiction pseudonym Ross McDonald). Otherwise, it has gone largely unnoticed or unremarked upon.

That is, until recently. Seventy-one years after “Fate and the Individual in European Literature” came and went, a faded, marked-up copy of Auden’s original one-page syllabus was posted online by the literary scholar Alan Jacobs of Baylor University. Soon an image of that copy was circulating far and wide on the Internet, eliciting a surprising amount of commentary. Scholars and writers were excited by the syllabus, originally uncovered by Auden’s literary executor Edward Mendelson, because it provided them with a list of texts that Auden himself, one of the greatest poets and critics of the twentieth century, considered central to the Western intellectual and literary tradition. It was like a guided tour of the essential furnishings of a great poet’s mind.

More here.

Tom Batchelor in The Independent:

“What was once considered catastrophic warming now seems like a best-case scenario,” Mr Alston said.

“While people in poverty are responsible for just a fraction of global emissions, they will bear the brunt of climate change, and have the least capacity to protect themselves.

“We risk a ‘climate apartheid’ scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer.

“Climate change is, among other things, an unconscionable assault on the poor.”

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Figs in Winter:

Readers who have followed several incarnations of my blogs (like this one, and this one, and this one) will have easily figured out that, politically speaking, I lean left, though with a number of qualifications and caveats. But I make a point of reading conservative authors and columnists, for a couple of reasons: first, to keep up with what they say and how they think (so to sharpen my own opinions and arguments), and second because they too, at least some of the times, have something interesting or constructive to say.

A recent example is David Brooks, a regular New York Times columnist, who is defined by Wikipedia as a Canadian-born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. On April 15, he has published a column for said newspaper entitled “Five lies our culture tells us.” I’d like to examine each of the lies in turn, in order to stimulate a discussion that may help us all see why such lies contribute to (or even, as Brooks argues, are at the root of) our political problems.

Lie n. 1: Career success is fulfilling. Brooks suggests that this lie is most evident at the point of college admissions, which put a lot of pressure on students (and their families) by instilling status anxiety. I think he is far too modest in his claim. Status anxiety is built into the very fabric of American society from the moment people are born. I live in Manhattan, and I know parents who fiercely compete (and pay outrageous amounts of money, and sometimes cheat) so that their five-year olds get into the best elementary schools. And it only gets worse from there.

More here.

Richard Tillinghast at The Hudson Review:

There are at least four Robert Blys. One is the poet of pure lyrics like the ones I have quoted. Then there is Bly the political poet of the Vietnam War years. After his political and antiwar poetry, Bly turned to the self-help or human potential movement. His book Iron John: A Book about Men, was a best seller, and Bly became a guru of the men’s movement. And there is at least one more Bly: the polemicist. After service in the Navy, graduation from Harvard and Iowa and a few years in New York, Bly settled in rural Minnesota where, in the tradition of poets who used their magazines to advance their views, like T. S. Eliot with The Criterion and John Crowe Ransom with the Kenyon Review, he edited his fiercely polemical magazine, The Fifties (later, predictably enough, The Sixties and The Seventies). Warmly loyal to his friends, Bly was also ready to attack, sometimes viciously, those whose approach to poetry did not agree with his.

more here.

Erika Balsom at Film Quarterly:

The claim to appreciate a film exclusively on pure merit has always been spurious, for it disavows how thoroughly the very notions of achievement and relevance are shaped by power, generally to the detriment of those who have historically been excluded from the practices and institutions that build canons and criteria. There are only five films by women out of some 150 titles in the BFI Classics book series, but not because women have made no great films. Echoing filmmaker Lis Rhodes, who asked “Whose history?” it is now vital to query, “Whose classics?”[7] Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983), Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror, 1972), Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975), Variety (Bette Gordon, 1983), Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966), The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977), Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999), Incident at Restigouche (Alanis Obomsawin, 1984), Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991): where are they? To appreciate a film’s “quality” with minimal regard for social factors, with minimal awareness of the biases inherent in such a stance – an attitude widely held, even by critics who would never speak of PC pedants – is to blithely inhabit the privilege of a false universalism. The growing prominence of writing on cinema by women and people of color heralds a reckoning with that falsity.

more here.

Harrison Stetler at The Point:

There are many conclusions to be drawn from the last seven months in France, but one seems unavoidable: a great many people—a majority, perhaps: silent, moral or whatever you want to call it—just don’t like Emmanuel Macron and the world he stands for. It’s only partially misleading to speak of this majority in the aggregate. There are certainly those who want to recreate the cultural makeup of some bygone France. Some of them hate immigrants and others are anti-Semitic. Still others just don’t like the cocky cosmopolitanism of a supposedly new type of elite that casts itself as modern and tolerant and is all the more self-assured because of it. But these are the shadow actors seeking to exploit a far more legitimate and widespread anger. One doesn’t need to be a pollster to pick apart what it really means when, in late December, 70 percent of people in a modern society supported a movement that for several consecutive weekends was rampaging through France’s well-off metropolitan centers and blocking critical road junctures, demanding more economic justice, redistribution, investment in public infrastructure and social services.

more here.

Myron Magnet in City Journal (2014):

In the greatest of the Federalist Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed (as did all the Founding Fathers), to safeguard rights that come from nature, not from government—rights to life, to liberty, and to the acquisition and ownership of property. Before we joined forces in society and chose an official cloaked with the authority to wield our collective power to restrain or punish violators of our natural rights, those rights were at constant risk of being trampled by someone stronger than we. Over time, though, those officials’ successors grew autocratic, and their governments overturned the very rights they were supposed to protect, creating a world as arbitrary as the inequality of the state of nature, in which the strongest took whatever he wanted, until someone still stronger came along.

In response, Americans—understanding that “kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people,” as Jefferson snarled—fired their king and created a democratic republic. Under its safeguard of our equal right to liberty, each of us, Madison saw, will employ his different talents, drive, and energy, to follow his own individual dream of happiness, with a wide variety of successes and failures. Most notably, Federalist 10 pointed out, “From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.” That inequality would be a sign of the new nation’s success, not failure. It would mean that people were really free.

More here.