Megan Abbott at The Millions:

There’s always been a drumbeat of disapproval of Plath’s work, and it often comes down to: She’s just too much. A 1966 Time review of Ariel refers to “Daddy” as that “strange and terrible poem” Plath composed during her “last sick slide toward suicide,” adding that its style is as “brutal as a truncheon.” M.L. Rosenthal’s 1965 review of Ariel in The Spectator finds several of the poems “hard to penetrate in their morbid secretiveness” and puzzles uncomfortably over the way they seem to “make a weirdly incantatory black magic against unspecified persons and situations.” Years later, in the New Criterion, Bruce Bawer would refer to Plath’s “shrill, deranged” voice in the Ariel poems. She’s too much, too loud, too hysterical; she’s taking up too much space. It’s fascinating to read this criticism today, when political and cultural rhetoric runs searingly hot, when the standards for hyperbole have dramatically shifted, and when charges of female shrillness resonate more deeply than ever.

more here.

Cody Delistraty at The Paris Review:

The idea behind the career-spanning exhibition of Gabriele Münter at the Louisiana is to take a woman who should be one of Germany’s most famous artists and to break her free from Kandinsky—here, she is presented as an artist, separately and simply. Isabelle Jansen, the show’s curator, notes in her recent book on Münter that “through the narrow lens of her relationship with Kandinsky many of her accomplishments have lingered in obscurity.” Jansen hopes to approach “Münter’s oeuvre in all its richness: from classic genres such as portraits and landscapes to interiors, abstractions, and her works of ‘primitivism.’ ”

Münter worked ceaselessly to make herself into an individual and to wield her partnership with Kandinsky as an asset. She prided herself on her fearlessness and boldness of style. “My pictures are all moments of life,” she told Edouard Roditi in a 1958 interview. “I mean instantaneous visual experiences, generally noted very rapidly and spontaneously. When I begin to paint, it’s like leaping suddenly into deep waters, and I never know beforehand whether I will be able to swim.” Her brushstrokes render reality in eerie simplification.

more here.

When Geometric Diagrams

When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing and kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.

Novalis / 1800
translated by Robert Bly

Richard Wolffe in The Guardian:

George Orwell conjured up a totalitarian regime where Ignorance Is Strength, but he surely never conceived of this. How can we know that two and two make four, or that the DNC isn’t responsible for its own hacking, or that Vladimir Putin isn’t a bigger American friend than the entire European Union and Nato alliance? As Trump explained so clearly, when he talks about Russia as a rival, he really means it as a compliment, no matter what your lying ears have told you.

…“My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said that it’s Russia,” Trump said, referring to his own director of national intelligence. That would be the American director of American national intelligence. “I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia,” Trump continued, talking about the Russian president of the Russian Federation. “I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be. But I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. I, I really believe that this will probably go on for a while. But I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? Thirty-three thousand emails gone. Just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails.”

You know what else is missing? Elvis Presley at the chip shop. The X-files on Area 51. And the president’s patriotic duty, if not his brain. It seemed so normal that this eruption was the first work-product of Trump’s new communications chief, Bill Shine, the former Fox News exec, jammed in just before no less than two Fox News interviews with those titans of journalism, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Why take the word of all your intelligence agencies when you have the word of Putin and Fox News to outweigh them?

More here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

The Stanford prison experiment is a case in point. In the summer of 1971, Philip Zimbardo, a midcareer psychologist, recruited 24 college students through newspaper ads and randomly cast half of them as “prisoners” and half as “guards,” setting them up in a mock prison, compete with cells and uniforms. He had the simulation filmed. After six days, Dr. Zimbardo called the experiment off, reporting that the “guards” began to assume their roles too well. They became abusive, some of them shockingly so. Dr. Zimbardo published dispatches about the experiment in a couple of obscure journals. He provided a more complete report in an article he wrote in The New York Times, describing how cruel instincts could emerge spontaneously in ordinary people as a result of situational pressures and expectations. That article and “Quiet Rage,” a documentary about the experiment, helped make Dr. Zimbardo a star in the field and media favorite, most recently in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in the early 2000s.

Perhaps the central challenge to the study’s claims is that its author coached the “guards” to be hard cases. Is this coaching “not an overt invitation to be abusive in all sorts of psychological ways?” wrote Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College who decided to exclude any mention of the simulation from his popular introductory textbook. “And, when the guards did behave in these ways and escalated that behavior, with Zimbardo watching and apparently (by his silence) approving, would that not have confirmed in the subjects’ minds that they were behaving as they should?”

Recent challenges have echoed Dr. Gray’s, and earlier this month Dr. Zimbardo was moved to post a response online.“My instructions to the guards, as documented by recordings of guard orientation, were that they could not hit the prisoners but could create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear and a sense of powerlessness — that is, ‘we have total power of the situation and they have none,’” he wrote. “We did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.” In an interview, Dr. Zimbardo said that the simulation was a “demonstration of what could happen” to some people influenced by powerful social roles and outside pressures, and that his critics had missed this point.

Which argument is more persuasive depends to some extent on where you sit and what you may think of Dr. Zimbardo. Is it better to describe his experiment, questions and all — or to ignore it entirely as not real psychology?

More here.

Dear Readers and Writers,

First of all, I want to thank all the people who have sent me excellent samples of their writing as a response to our call for new Monday Magazine columnists. I had promised that I would announce the names of the new people who will be writing for us today but, after doing some thinking and talking to various colleagues and friends, I am not going to do that and here’s the reason: among the approximately 40 excellent people who have applied, there is not a single woman. This is very strange and nothing like it has ever happened before at 3QD. While we do not follow anything like quotas and basically make our decisions based on the quality of the pieces submitted, this complete lack of women applicants is so anomalous that it has caused me to think hard about what we might be doing to discourage women from applying. I have spoken to a couple of experts on diversity in hiring about this and even ran the text of my initial call for writers through an AI-based program which tries to identify language which might not appeal to certain groups of people (based on a deep-learning analysis of several hundred million job descriptions and responses to them) but it had little criticism of what I had written and even diagnosed my writing as “slightly feminine”.

One woman whom I asked for advice said to me that, “Sometimes the problem is not what you say but what you don’t say”. This struck me as sensible and so I would like to open up the window for submissions for another 5 days to everyone again after saying this:

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose?

The new deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm, Friday, July 20, 2018 (New York Time). Please click here for details of what to send if you want to write for us. I now plan to announce whom we’ll be taking next Monday, July 23, 2018. Sorry about the delay.

Best wishes,

Abbas

New Posts Below

Kenneth Roth and Salil Shetty in Foreign Policy in Focus:

Four years ago, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—joining hundreds of others—urged the United Nations Security Council to send atrocity crimes committed in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution. Then, the conflict had already claimed 100,000 lives, overwhelmingly civilians. Today, the death toll is estimated at over half a million, with each day bringing new violations and unlawful killings.

Yet the ICC has been unable to act. Russia’s veto at the Security Council continues to block a path to justice for Syria’s victims. Other council members, including the United States, have also used or threatened to use their veto to block action on other atrocity crimes.

This sad situation is a far cry from the summer of 1998, when many governments with the support of nongovernmental organizations came together in Rome to create the ICC. Many of the major powers including the US opposed the effort, but smaller and medium-sized governments seized what turned out to be a fleeting moment. With a post-cold war faith in multilateralism and a resolve driven by genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, these governments acted on longstanding but unrealized ambitions for a permanent, global criminal court. The Rome Statute, the court’s founding document, was adopted on July 17, 1998, and the court was set up four years later.

More here.

W. Ralph Eubanks in The Hedgehog Review:

The obelisk bearing the chiseled gray-granite face of a Confederate soldier enters my field of vision each morning as I stroll across campus. After forty years away from Mississippi, I returned last year to teach at my alma mater, Ole Miss. Having entered the University of Mississippi in 1974, only twelve years after James Meredith shattered the color barrier, I was one of about fifty black students in a freshman class of more than 800, African Americans then making up less than 5 percent of the entire student body.

During my time as a student at Ole Miss, the culture, heritage, and traditions of the university stood as obdurate barriers to a black person attempting to feel part of the university, much less at home in it. And though Ole Miss and the state of Mississippi more broadly have since made certain commendable strides in reckoning with the past, the statue is a reminder of how the forces of race and history remain in constant collision, and of how the misinterpretation of the past can sometimes overshadow historical reality.

“Most white Americans are obviously and often all too unconsciously committed to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy,” wrote the essayist and critic Albert Murray more than forty years ago in his enduring reflections on our nation’s “mulatto” culture, The Omni-Americans. What we are witnessing today, however, is quite conscious.

More here.

Tania James in the New York Times:

In Tamil, farewells are never final. As Akil Kumarasamy pointed out in a 2017 interview, the Tamil equivalent of goodbye is poyittu varen, meaning “I’ll go and return.” These are parting words especially suited to the refugee: ever running away, ever looking back.

Kumarasamy poignantly illustrates this tension in her debut story collection, “Half Gods.” Across decades and continents, her characters are haunted by catastrophic violence, their emotional scars passed from one generation to the next.

Wisely, Kumarasamy takes a muted approach to the violence. In “The Office of Missing Persons,” a Sri Lankan Tamil father engages with the police to find his teenage son — this during the final and bloodiest phase of the nearly 30-year Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the separatist Tamil Tigers. From the outset, it’s obvious that Jeganathan, an entomologist beloved for his research by the Sinhalese government, will never find his son, and so the story’s momentum feeds on a growing dread that is crystallized when “the officer asked for Jeganathan’s son’s name and he knew it was a trick. He needed his name to find him and then have reason not to find him.” Between those lines exists an entire world in which killing a man is as easy as erasing his name from a ledger of missing persons.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Last month, the artificial intelligence company DeepMind introduced new software that can take a single image of a few objects in a virtual room and, without human guidance, infer what the three-dimensional scene looks like from entirely new vantage points. Given just a handful of such pictures, the system, dubbed the Generative Query Network, or GQN, can successfully model the layout of a simple, video game-style maze.

There are obvious technological applications for GQN, but it has also caught the eye of neuroscientists, who are particularly interested in the training algorithm it uses to learn how to perform its tasks. From the presented image, GQN generates predictions about what a scene should look like — where objects should be located, how shadows should fall against surfaces, which areas should be visible or hidden based on certain perspectives — and uses the differences between those predictions and its actual observations to improve the accuracy of the predictions it will make in the future. “It was the difference between reality and the prediction that enabled the updating of the model,” said Ali Eslami, one of the project’s leaders.

According to Danilo Rezende, Eslami’s co-author and DeepMind colleague, “the algorithm changes the parameters of its [predictive] model in such a way that next time, when it encounters the same situation, it will be less surprised.”

Neuroscientists have long suspected that a similar mechanism drives how the brain works.

More here.

Aida Edemariam in The Guardian:

On Sunday night, Michael Ondaatje stepped on to the wide stage of the Royal Festival Hall in London. He found a lectern and, white head bowed, reached into his pocket for a small piece of paper. “It began with a small night conversation between a burned patient and a nurse,” he said. “I did not know at first where it was taking place, or who the two characters were. I thought it might be a brief novella – all dialogue, European-style, big type.”

The audience laughed. Because what actually turned up, of course, was The English Patient: 300-plus pages about four people inhabiting the mined rooms of a remote Italian villa at the end of the second world war; four very different people who meet in damaged solitude, who talk (there are a lot of night conversations), who love, whose histories, revealed in vivid flashes, become a taut, outraged meditation on the idea of war, of nationalism and of prejudice; a meditation that slips between spies and explorers, Suffolk and the Egyptian desert; the Punjab and Women’s College Hospital, Toronto, as easily as the sapper, Kip, slips into bomb craters to defuse bombs.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqaL9so8CHQ

John Carreyrou in Wired:

ALAN BEAM WAS sitting in his office reviewing lab reports when Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes poked her head in and asked him to follow her. She wanted to show him something. They stepped outside the lab into an area of open office space where other employees had gathered. At her signal, a technician pricked a volunteer’s finger, then applied a transparent plastic implement shaped like a miniature rocket to the blood oozing from it. This was the Theranos sample collection device. Its tip collected the blood and transferred it to two little engines at the rocket’s base. The engines weren’t really engines: They were nanotainers. To complete the transfer, you pushed the nanotainers into the belly of the plastic rocket like a plunger. The movement created a vacuum that sucked the blood into them. Or at least that was the idea. But in this instance, things didn’t go quite as planned. When the technician pushed the tiny twin tubes into the device, there was a loud pop and blood splattered everywhere. One of the nanotainers had just exploded. Holmes looked unfazed. “OK, let’s try that again,” she said calmly. Beam¹ wasn’t sure what to make of the scene. He’d only been working at Theranos, the Silicon Valley company that promised to offer fast, cheap blood tests from a single drop of blood, for a few weeks and was still trying to get his bearings.

He knew the nanotainer was part of the company’s proprietary blood-testing system, but he’d never seen one in action before. He hoped this was just a small mishap that didn’t portend bigger problems. The lanky pathologist’s circuitous route to Silicon Valley had started in South Africa, where he grew up. After majoring in English at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (“Wits” to South Africans), he’d moved to the United States to take premed classes at Columbia University in New York City. The choice was guided by his conservative Jewish parents, who considered only a few professions acceptable for their son: law, business, and medicine.

More here.