K Austin Collins in Slate:

Dana, you’re absolutely right to wonder what happened to The Tale; it’s exactly the kind of movie I have in mind, underseen despite tackling one of the most urgent subjects of our moment. I may have seen better movies overall this year, but I don’t think any of them had a conceit that shook me as deeply as this one. It all comes down to a simple, harrowing thing that Jennifer Fox does to depict how the heroine of the film, also named Jennifer Fox (and played by Laura Dern), remembers a sexual relationship she had with her tennis coach as a teenager. She initially remembers herself as confident and sexually self-possessed; she remembers herself, in other words, as a young woman somewhat in control of what happened to her, and, as the movie reveals, this has led her to remember what happened as a more consensual affair, rather than as abuse.

But then comes the moment that we see Fox correct her memory, replaying the same flashbacks using a teen actress closer in demeanor and body type to the scared girl Fox actually was, rather than the woman she supposed she was. It’s shattering—an exceptional feat of writing, and of course, Dern kills the performance. It’s not an easy scene to watch, but The Tale is an easy film to see and has been for most of the year—it’s right there on HBO! But short of the ability of Oscar attention to revive discussion about that film, the full-fledged online discussion cycle for it has come and gone. It’s bewildering.

More here.

Steve Ayan in Scientific American:

Peter Carruthers, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is an expert on the philosophy of mind who draws heavily on empirical psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He outlined many of his ideas on conscious thinking in his 2015 book The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us about the Nature of Human Thought. More recently, in 2017, he published a paper with the astonishing title of “The Illusion of Conscious Thought.” In the following excerpted conversation, Carruthers explains to editor Steve Ayan the reasons for his provocative proposal.

What makes you think conscious thought is an illusion?

I believe that the whole idea of conscious thought is an error. I came to this conclusion by following out the implications of the two of the main theories of consciousness. The first is what is called the Global Workspace Theory, which is associated with neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars. Their theory states that to be considered conscious a mental state must be among the contents of working memory (the “user interface” of our minds) and thereby be available to other mental functions, such as decision-making and verbalization. Accordingly, conscious states are those that are “globally broadcast,” so to speak. The alternative view, proposed by Michael Graziano, David Rosenthal and others, holds that conscious mental states are simply those that you know of, that you are directly aware of in a way that doesn’t require you to interpret yourself. You do not have to read you own mind to know of them. Now, whichever view you adopt, it turns out that thoughts such as decisions and judgments should not be considered to be conscious. They are not accessible in working memory, nor are we directly aware of them. We merely have what I call “the illusion of immediacy”—the false impression that we know our thoughts directly.

More here.

Frankie Thomas in The Paris Review:

“Are we all Joyceans here, then?” the young professor asked, poking his head into the classroom doorway.

We looked back at him uncertainly. Yes, we were all here for the Ulysses seminar that met at six thirty P.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But to call us “Joyceans” seemed like a stretch. Today—Thursday, January 29, 2015—was only the first day. And besides, this was City College.

No article about City College is complete without the obligatory phrase “the Harvard of the proletariat,” which was supposedly both our school’s nickname and its reputation in the mid twentieth century. By 2015, however, no one could deny that our beautiful Harlem campus was in decline. Governor Cuomo had recently slashed the budget for the entire CUNY system, with City College bearing the brunt of the cuts, and the disastrousness of this decision is difficult to convey without resorting to sodomitic imagery. That year, classrooms were so overcrowded that latecomers had to sit on the floor. One of my professors entered his office on the first day to find that his entire desk had been stolen. The humanities building still used old-fashioned blackboards, but the budget didn’t provide for chalk, so professors hoarded and traded it like prison cigarettes. Most bathroom stalls didn’t lock, and for several weeks, the entire campus collectively ran out of toilet paper—I’ll never forget the Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2015 and the generosity it inspired in my fellow students, who shared their own toilet paper from home and never stooped to charging for it.

It was in this context that the English department decided to offer its first-ever Ulysses seminar, though they offered it as you might offer someone a home-cooked meal that you’re secretly pretty sure contains broken glass. “NB: This is a highly demanding course with a heavy reading load,” the course catalogue warned in bold italics, “more like a graduate seminar than a 400-level college class.” I don’t think it actually said “DON’T TAKE THIS CLASS,” but that was the obvious implication. I have since learned that our idealistic young professor was met with departmental resistance when he suggested a Ulysses seminar, and I now suspect that the department was half hoping no one would register for it at all. But the department hadn’t counted on the sheer belligerence of City College students. I took one look at that warning and immediately decided, thanks to the same knee-jerk rebelliousness that had led me to avoid college until the age of twenty-seven, that I had to take this class. I wasn’t the only one: there were thirty students in the Ulysses seminar. (This is what passes for a small discussion class at City College.)

Were we all Joyceans here, then? Taking our silence as a yes, our professor stepped into the crowded classroom.

More here.

Kanishk Tharoor at The Atlantic:

Media coverage of uncontacted tribes often delights in painting indigenous groups as people out of time, hunter-gatherers in the age of Seamless. In November, an American missionary was killed trying to reach North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, home to a remote tribe thought to number about 100 people. Grainy images shot from a helicopter in 2004 of naked islanders brandishing spears flooded the internet. But when they first appear in Piripkura, Pakyî and Tamandua offer a different kind of spectacle. What is striking about them is not their timelessness, but rather their very modern resolve to persist against the odds, to be free from the outside world.

That independence is likely to come further under threat from the incoming far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has pledged not to reserve any more land for indigenous peoples. In previous years, Bolsonaro has said he would arm ranchers in their conflicts with native groups and has lamented that the Brazilian army was not as efficient as the American cavalry in exterminatingindigenous tribes. When trying to put a more benign gloss on these statements, Bolsonaro has claimed that government protections unfairly exclude indigenous people from the benefits of 21st-century life.

more here.

Susan Sidlauskas at nonsite:

Nearly two decades ago, photo historian Douglas Nickel observed that traditional art history had not yet developed the tools for handling non-art photographs.1 In many ways, much progress has been made since 2001: vernacular photographs of every kind have become worthy objects of study for scholars and critics—not only within visual culture, but in history, sociology, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. In fact, these days, as Nickel himself has pointed out, studies of vernacular photographs outpace the production of monographic books about “fine art photographers.”2

However, it remains difficult for art historians to build an interpretative model that takes full measure of the visual subtleties of non-art photographs—including their unexpected aspirations towards the aesthetic—without slighting the historical and social conditions in which they were produced.3 With that challenge in mind, I consider here those very aspirations, as they surface repeatedly in a group of “medical portraits”: casebook photographs of patients made between 1885 and 1916 at the Holloway Sanatorium in St. Ann’s Heath, Virginia Water, Surrey, England (fig. 1).

more here.

Lauren Collins at The New Yorker:

Rooney’s second novel, “Normal People,” was nominated for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, and will be released in the United States in April. According to The Bookseller, it was the year’s most critically praised book in the United Kingdom. Like “Conversations with Friends,” it is basically a romantic tragicomedy. The point is not so much the plot as the characters, and the heady relationships in and out of which they move “like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them.” In the opening chapters, Marianne, a smart and unpopular high-school student whose single mother is a lawyer, begins a secret relationship with Connell, a smart and popular high-school student whose single mother cleans Marianne’s family’s house. “She just acted the same as always, like it never happened, reading her book at the lockers as usual, getting into pointless arguments,” Rooney writes. One of the unusual pleasures of Rooney’s novels is watching young women engage in a casual intellectual hooliganism, demolishing every mediocrity that crosses their paths, just for the fun of it.

more here.

Transtional

First he said:
It is the woman in us
That makes us write–
Let us acknowledge it–
Men would be silent.
We are not men
Therefore we can speak
And be conscious
(of the two sides)
Unbent by the sensual
As befits accuracy.

I then said:
Dare you make this
Your propaganda?

And he answered:
Am I not I–here?

by William Carlos Williams
from: The Tempers, 1913

Katie Thomas and Charles Ornstein in The New York Times:

Hundreds of doctors packed an auditorium at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on Oct. 1, deeply angered by revelations that the hospital’s top medical officer and other leaders had cultivated lucrative relationships with for-profit companies. One by one, they stood up to challenge the stewardship of their beloved institution, often to emotional applause. Some speakers accused their leaders of letting the quest to make more money undermine the hospital’s mission. Others bemoaned a rigid, hierarchical management that had left them feeling they had no real voice in the hospital’s direction. “Slowly, I’ve seen more and more of the higher-up meetings happening with people who are dressed up in suits as opposed to white coats,” said Dr. Viviane Tabar, chairwoman of the neurosurgery department. “The corporatization of this institution is clear to many of us who have been here a long time,” said Dr. Carol L. Brown, a gynecologic cancer surgeon, according to an audio recording of the meeting. The meeting ended after several doctors advocated an immediate no-confidence vote in the hospital’s senior leadership. The turmoil followed reports by The New York Times and ProPublica that the hospital’s chief medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, had been paid millions by drug and health care companies and failed to disclose those ties more than 100 times in medical journals, and that hospital insiders had made lucrative side deals that stood to earn them handsome profits, sometimes for work they had done on the job.

…Tensions among doctors at the hospital over conflicts of interests mounted through September. On Sept. 28, Colin Begg, the chairman of its department of epidemiology and biostatistics, wrote other department heads. “The key substantive issue is that the problems we face were not caused by failures to disclose conflicts. The problems were due to the conflicts themselves,” he wrote in the email, a copy of which was obtained by The Times and ProPublica. Referring to Dr. Thompson and Douglas A. Warner III, the outgoing chairman of the hospital’s board of managers and overseers, who is known as Sandy, he said, “As far as I can tell neither Sandy nor Craig understand this very basic point. And if you don’t recognize that a problem exists there is no chance you will solve it.”

He also said, “Making billions is not our mission. M.S.K. is a nonprofit with a fundamentally social mission.”

More here.

Barnaby Raine at n+1:

JOHN MCDONNELL IS CAGEY when an interviewer asks, “Capitalism — inherently wrong? Or are you just the man to fix it?” It says something that the question is even posed. Just a decade ago McDonnell was the parliamentary spokesperson for picket lines and antiwar meetings, the champion of antique causes in Blair’s Britain. He was the Labour MP who welcomed the financial crash with the words, “I’m a Marxist. . . . I’ve been waiting for this for a generation.” In Who’s Who he listed his hobby as “fomenting the overthrow of capitalism.” Elsewhere he named Lenin and Trotsky among his heroes.

Now he is shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, the Labour Party’s candidate to control Britain’s money, and — even more than his old friend Jeremy Corbyn — a symbol of Labour’s leftward shift. He won exhilarated applause from many long-suffering party members when he described his economic vision to their annual conference in 2016: “You no longer have to whisper its name; it’s called socialism.”

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T.J. Clark at the LRB:

Bellini was probably even younger than Mantegna when he first saw his new relative’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple – art historians will never stop worrying about his exact birthdate. (He may have been Jacopo Bellini’s illegitimate son. Records are scarce. Mantegna was the child of a carpenter, from a very ordinary village. His birthdate is also unknown.) When Bellini turned back to The Presentation of Christ in the Temple twenty years later he was the master of a new style, and dialogue with Mantegna had established itself as an aspect of that mastery – his great Agony in the Garden, done in response to a panel by his brother-in-law, lay behind him. It is hard, therefore, not to see the redoing of The Presentation of Christ in the Temple as some kind of contest as well as homage. But I found myself as I looked convinced that for Bellini what counted most was the opportunity, within the confines of someone else’s invention, to reflect on – to discover – what his own art most deeply consisted of. Oil paint versus tempera made many things clear. And, further, coming to terms with the true nature of one’s art – one’s necessary medium – meant coming closer to the mysteries enounced in Luke’s text.

more here.

Dominic Green in Spectator:

In Western democracies, literature no longer matters to politics. Once, literature and politics could co-exist on the same typewriter or in the same person: George Orwell in Britain, André Malraux in France. But that was a long time ago. Still, the powers of politics remain linguistic, whether bureaucratic or rhetorical: the war criminal at his desk, the elected representative on her Twitter. Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist who died today aged 79, was living proof of the political powers of literature. In Israel, which is a Western democracy most of the time, Oz is seen as a great writer but a failed politician. In the West, he is seen as the still-living conscience of a political failure. Nothing shows us both sides of a story so well as a novel. And nothing occludes the quality of literature like politics.

Oz was the Everyman of Israel’s founding elite. There were elements of necessary imposture in this persona, but that is what fiction needs. As he eventually described in his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), Oz, the global face of kibbutz socialism and Peace Now, was born into a prominent Revisionist family. The Revisionists were followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who mixed liberal politics with the ‘Iron Wall’ approach to the Arabs. In the one-party state-in-the-making of Mandate Palestine, Labour Zionists already held the balance. In 1949, when the new state of Israel held its first presidential election, Amos Klausner’s great-uncle Joseph Klausner, a historian and literature professor, ran and lost as the candidate of Menachem Begin’s Herut party. In 1951, Amos’s mother committed suicide; in his telling, she was a delayed victim of the Shoah. Two years later, aged 14, he turned left, moved to a kibbutz, and extracted a new surname from the heart of his old one. ‘Oz’ means ‘strength’.

More here.

Alex Standish in Sp!ked:

Hans Rosling, who died last year, was a remarkable man. As a doctor, he practised and lectured in his home country of Sweden, and also worked in Mozambique, Tanzania, the Congo, Mexico, Cuba and India. His commitment to the medical cause was such that, in 2014, when the ebola epidemic broke out in West Africa, he headed to Liberia to help contain it. At the same time, Rosling was also engaged in another long-term project, aimed at reducing the gap between how people in the West perceive the rest of the world and its reality. Factfulness, written with his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rönnlund, is part of this project (alongside the online resource Gapminder). Its aim is to enlighten those with a ‘completely outdated idea about the rest of the world’.

…Factfulness makes for a refreshingly positive take on change and modernisation. And alongside the stats and data, Rosling also uses personal anecdotes to make his case for the importance of development. He recalls the day his family brought their first washing machine in 1960s Sweden: his grandmother so mesmerised by it that she pulled up a chair to watch the entire wash cycle. His mother told him, ‘The machine will do the work. So now we can go to the library.’ This book takes issue with those who think developing nations should not aspire to Western levels of consumption because of fears about global warming. Rosling once stood up to environmentalist and former US vice president Al Gore about this, when they met backstage at a TED conference in Los Angeles: Gore urged Rosling to use his statistical models to show a worst-case global-warming scenario, ‘to create fear’. But Rosling refused, saying that spreading fear tends to generate reactionary and ill-considered responses, and erodes trust in those who spread such fear.

He never dismissed the idea of global warming. Indeed, he identified it as one of five potential global problems we all should be worried about (the others being poverty, war, financial collapse and a global pandemic). But where environmentalists argue that the answer to climate change is to slow development, he said the opposite: ‘We must put our efforts into inventing new technologies that will enable 11 billion people to live the life that we should expect all of them to strive for.’

More here.

John Sutherland in The New York Times:

My parents’ generation, lucky enough to pass the biblical three score and 10, would describe themselves as living on “borrowed time.” Susan Gubar has been granted a longer credit line than most. In 2008, in her mid-60s, she learned she had ovarian cancer. It spread. After the cruelties of chemo, she was subjected to “debulking” — surgical evisceration. Gubar described the procedure unflinchingly in her 2012 book,“Memoir of a Debulked Woman.” It’s not easy to read unflinchingly. The postoperative prognosis was bleak, but a then-experimental drug therapy has lent her time. It’s the kind of chess-game stay of execution Ingmar Bergman dramatizes in “The Seventh Seal.”

Gubar is a literary critic and one of the few who can claim to have made a lasting difference. In 1979, in “The Madwoman in the Attic,”she and Sandra M. Gilbert redirected the reader’s central focus from the Jane Eyres to the Bertha Masons of literature (to take the title’s allusion). Chained Bertha, the first Mrs. Rochester, isn’t deranged; rather, she’s the oppressed part of Jane herself and a representative of 19th-century women in general. For those of my generation, it was as if scales had dropped from our eyes and we were able to see afresh a range of works we had fondly presumed we already knew. Living on Sarcoma Penitentiary’s death row surely concentrates the mind, in Samuel Johnson’s dry phrase. There’s no reprieve; merely, with luck, indefinite delay. In her borrowed time, Gubar thinks about life, love and literature from where she is now — existing between hospital appointments, any one of which could be, literally, terminal.

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Marianna Hunt in The Guardian:

Victor Hugo is rightly remembered for his amazing literary output, and for his philanthropic work as a member of France’s National Assembly, campaigning for an end to poverty, free education for all children and the abolition of the death penalty. But he was also incredibly eccentric and libidinous, with a penchant for writing while starkers, and armed with a party trick – swallowing oranges whole. The BBC remake of Les Misérables seeks to upturn what we think we know about the story, looking beyond the musical to the pages of the novel it came from. But what if we take a step further, looking beyond the pages to the man behind them? The stripped back (in more ways than one) Hugo is far more interesting than he’s given credit for.

On France’s Mont Donon, you can enjoy spectacular vistas across the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland. But in May 1801, Major Hugo and his wife were not paying much attention to the view – and in the 1960s, a museum curator decided to mark the spot where Hugo was conceived with an engraved sandstone block. Hugo (always the storyteller) added his own embellishments: the Celtic sanctuary on the summit became a Roman temple of love and the obscure mountain was transformed into the much more glamorous (and 3,000 ft taller) Mont Blanc. He also claimed that his mother was a half-wild Amazonian (she was born in Nantes).

Hugo’s insistent retellings of the story of his own conception might be explained by the fact that the guy was obsessed with sex. He claimed that on their wedding night he and his wife Adèle Foucher had sex nine times. Foucher reportedly lost interest in intercourse altogether – but 19th-century Paris had enough brothels to keep Hugo entertained morning, evening and night. Venerated as a saint (albeit only in the Vietnamese religion of Cao Dai), when Hugo died the brothels of Paris closed down for a day of mourning, allowing all the city’s sex workers to pay their last respects to a loyal client. Literary critic Edmond de Goncourt claimed a police officer told him that sex workers even draped their genitals in black crepe as a mark of respect.

More here.