Anthony Bourdain in The New Yorker:

Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits.

Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own.

A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim.

More here.

Tell them come take my eyes / Before my body gives out

I shudder at this sorry sight
How many are like this
jealous of vision

In whose portion will be no riches of witness
Whose fate is to see no celebration nor celebrant
Who thirst to see the rays stream down
Who say it isn’t the alighting
look to the road

Tell them come take my eyes
Before my body gives out
Before this soul of dust is also gone
Before some great calamity befalls

Save my eyes from becoming a notion
Put my eyes in their faces

Who will be able to bear though
the ruin my eyes have seen
Who will be so brave
keep their eyes always open
Even as chimeras roll down
the branches of their lashes
Even as shrapnel twists
and encamps in the breath
Even as life cries out
for the rest of life

by Ahmad Faraz,
from Guernica Magazine
June 6, 2018
translated from Urdu by Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Clemens J. Setz at Music and Literature:

They are highly virtuosic pieces, which, I assume, must not be played slowly, because then you would hear and see nothing, just as when you walk too slowly past a fence, you perceive the flashes of life from behind it not as a cohesive picture, but rather only as disparate snapshots. The first etude, “In C,” is indeed, as the title reveals, built around this fundamental note. It conveys a mysteriously contemplative and at the same time very harmonious impression. In several slow breaths, flickering structures are built up repeatedly to towering heights. In the second part, nested rhythms become so dense that they generate the gingerbread men feeling. The etude is heading for a climax, but then no explosive outburst occurs; instead, individual melodic lines break free in a high register and simply waft away.

more here.

Andy Merrifield at Literary Hub:

For much of the 1980s, André Gregory rehearsed Chekhov nearby in another boarded up Broadway jewel, the ruined Victory Theater. There he persuaded a small group of actors—Julianne Moore and playwright Wallace Shawn included—to show up for free, in their spare time, to rehearse Uncle Vanya each week, for years, a marathon odyssey before a handful of invited friends and family. Gregory later managed to raise $900,000 to fund and entice Louis Malle to shoot the entire play. (Malle had worked with Gregory and Shawn before, on the 1982 miracle My Dinner With André.)

They spent two weeks filming in the New Amsterdam Theatre, in a movie that begins with footage of the actors playing themselves, dressed in everyday modern garb, emerging from the subway. They greet one another, pace through Times Square’s streets to the theater.

more here.

Brian Stelter at CNN:

Anthony Bourdain, a gifted storyteller and writer who took CNN viewers around the world, has died. He was 61.

CNN confirmed Bourdain’s death on Friday and said the cause of death was suicide.

“It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague, Anthony Bourdain,” the network said in a statement Friday morning. “His love of great adventure, new friends, fine food and drink and the remarkable stories of the world made him a unique storyteller. His talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much. Our thoughts and prayers are with his daughter and family at this incredibly difficult time.”

Bourdain was in France working on an upcoming episode of his award-winning CNN series “Parts Unknown.” His close friend Eric Ripert, the French chef, found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning.

More here.

Jan-Werner Müller at the NYRB:

But Podemos’s own standards for success are not the only available measures. What Podemos and the FSM, as well as the left-wing Syriza party in Greece, have achieved is that the main conflict in today’s southern Europe—essentially austerity versus anti-austerity—can be represented inside the political system. That’s not much, radical critics might say. But when compared to the impression, held especially by young southerners, that the party system consisted of two main political blocs alternating in power, with little discernible policy difference in practice, and much in the way of corruption on both sides, this development seems important. Podemos and the FSM managed to get well-educated young people who were either unemployed or stuck in jobs for which they were completely overqualified back to the voting booths. It was not a given that young people whose opportunities in life have been heavily damaged by the crisis of the eurozone would first protest in public squares, then vote for new parties—and then, after those parties had failed to gain majorities, resolve to try again. Back in the 1970s, for instance, young people in Italy had very different ideas—as the terrorist violence of the Red Brigades, and their fascist opponents, demonstrated.

more here.

Samuel Reilly in More Intelligent Life:

Ian Volner in Curbed:

Every two years, a few dozen nations deputize a small circle of curators and thinkers to represent them at the show; many of the participating countries are regulars, with permanent pavilions of their own, often dating back to the early 20th century, and located in the leafy Giardini della Biennale near Venice’s easternmost tip. But each edition of the exhibition also brings a batch of wildcards, never-before-seen entrants whose homelands have decided, for whatever reason, to throw their hats into the ring. This year, first-timers included Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. And social media (full disclosure: mine included) took a special shine to the premier outing from the Vatican, a brace of inventive freestanding chapels by architects both well- and lesser-known. There was one rookie nation, however, whose appearance at the Biennale was especially poignant, both for the character of its installation and for the mere fact of its being in Venice at all: Pakistan.

“This is a very political statement,” says Salman Jawed, a member of Coalesce Design Studio, the collaborative, multidisciplinary firm that helped bring the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to Venice for the first time. The politics he’s speaking about are not, at least at first, overtly evident: Situated in a small public park not far from the Giardini, the Pakistani installation, titled “The Fold,” is a roughly four-yard-square cage of irregularly-spaced steel bars towering some twenty feet in the air.

Slipping into this rather forbidding envelope via a narrow passage, the visitor discovers a playground-like atmosphere within, a trio of wooden swings dangling from overhead beams, and a pair of wooden benches on curved, brushed-steel rockers. The contrast between stern exterior and playful interior gives a pleasant jolt. But understanding its polemical intent requires a little more digging. As Coalesce partner Zeba Asad explains, in Karachi, “all the urban spaces are in the street.” The Pakistani capital is home to over 21 million people, most of them jammed into a relatively small wedge of the metropolis, with little room for parks, plazas, or other urban amenities. Seen from one perspective, “The Fold” is an attempt to address this condition: The placement of the swings at odd angles means that users are constantly at risk of colliding with their fellow swingers, just as the children of Karachi must hazard cars, pedestrians, and one another as they play in the city’s crowded streets.

More here. (Thanks to Batool Raza)

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which reworks Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone to tell the story of a British Muslim family’s connection to Islamic State, has won the Women’s prize for fiction, acclaimed by judges as “the story of our times”.

The British Pakistani author’s seventh novel riffs on the ancient Greek play in which Antigone is forbidden to bury her brother Polynices after he is declared a traitor. The novel follows three orphaned siblings, elder sister Isma and twins Aneeka and Parvaiz, the latter of whom has left London to work for the media arm of Isis. When Eamonn, son of the British Muslim home secretary, enters their lives, Aneeka hopes to use him to save her missing brother.

Announcing Home Fire as winner of the £30,000 award, chair of judges Sarah Sands said the panel “chose the book which we felt spoke for our times … Home Fire is about identity, conflicting loyalties, love and politics. And it sustains mastery of its themes and its form. It is a remarkable book which we passionately recommend.”

More here.

Erika D. Price:

I’ve been a psychology professor since 2012. In the past six years, I’ve witnessed students of all ages procrastinate on papers, skip presentation days, miss assignments, and let due dates fly by. I’ve seen promising prospective grad students fail to get applications in on time; I’ve watched PhD candidates take months or years revising a single dissertation draft; I once had a student who enrolled in the same class of mine two semesters in a row, and never turned in anything either time.

I don’t think laziness was ever at fault.

Ever.

In fact, I don’t believe that laziness exists.

More here.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

The cost of college is a notoriously complex subject. The list price at many private colleges, including tuition, fees, room and board, has reached the bewildering sum of $70,000 a year. But the real price, taking into account financial aid, is often vastly lower.

How much lower? We’re here to help answer that question.

More than 30 top colleges now participate in a simple online calculator that provides cost estimates to families. (And those 30 typically charge similar prices to other selective colleges.) The New York Times has analyzed the data from the calculator and is publishing the results here. It’s a snapshot of what college really costs.

Our central finding is that top colleges are more affordable than many people realize – not only for poor students but also for those from the middle-class.

Typical lower-income students – from a family earning $50,000 or less, for example – face an annual bill of $6,000. Students can often cover that cost through part-time work and a small annual loan, without their parents having to pay additional money.

Middle-class families pay a higher price, but nothing like the list price.

More here.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at The Nation:

A running theme throughout The Recovering is the relationship of alcohol to truth. “In vino veritas was one of the most appealing promises of drinking: that it wasn’t degradation but illumination, that it wasn’t obscuring truth but unveiling it,” Jamison writes. For her, at least, that promise proved illusory. But as Pollan’s book argues, psychedelics really can deliver illumination. While they have acquired associations with visual hallucinations, users overwhelmingly report that they don’t distort reality so much as reveal it for the first time. The other, related hallmark of the psychedelic experience is the dissolution of the ego, the melting of boundaries between the self and the world. These two features make psychedelic trips revelatory, sometimes mystical experiences that can affect their beneficiaries for years.

more here.

Tegan Bennet Daylight at the Sydney Review of Books:

What is Essayism? Its writer admits to us that he has ‘no clue how to write about the essay as a stable entity or established class, how to trace its history diligently from uncertain origins through successive phases of literary dominance’ – and praise be for that. The book is instead a series of attempts, of essays, of course, at delineating or describing the form. Each chapter is a few pages, beginning with an idea: ‘On essays and essayists’, ‘On origins’, ‘On lists’, and as the book begins to become something else, ‘On consolation’. The book is also a story of the book being written, and of Dillon going under entirely. ‘Each day I sat at my desk in an office at the end of the garden,’ he tells us, early on, ‘and cried and smoked and tried to write – tried to write this book – and each day finally gave myself up to fantasies of suicide. I would walk out of this suburb along country lanes to a secluded stretch of railway line and lay my head on the track in the moonlight.’

more here.

Sarah Jilani at the TLS:

The questioning of long-held beliefs and understanding of the full histories behind institutions should have positive repercussions for everyone. But as the Brooklyn, Liverpool and Birmingham cases highlight, decolonizing cultural institutions is not straightforward. Their attempts suggest that the key issue at this early stage is a lack of understanding about what decolonizing an institution means, and what it entails. A genuinely decolonial approach would see museums interrogate their positions as apparently objective caretakers of non-Western objects and artefacts. The assumption of Western objectivity is not only divorced from the material conditions in which those objects have come to be “owned” by Western knowledge – knowledge informed by a history of contact on unequal terms  – but it also instantiates the exceptionalism with which Western cultures have felt entitled to the final, objective say on other cultures. By acknowledging this, and then pursuing new roles and missions, institutions could take a number of concrete steps, such as repatriating objects where feasible, especially if they were plundered from peoples for whom they sustain cultural value; embracing greater accountability towards their local communities; and consider the colonial and racial legacies informing their operations and governance.

more here.

Scott Samuelson in Aeon:

In 1826, at the age of 20, John Stuart Mill sank into a suicidal depression, which was bitterly ironic, because his entire upbringing was governed by the maximisation of happiness. How this philosopher clambered out of the despair generated by an arch-rational philosophy can teach us an important lesson about suffering. Inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s ideals, James Mill’s rigorous tutelage of his son involved useful subjects subordinated to the utilitarian goal of bringing about the greatest good for the greatest number. Music played a small part in the curriculum, as it was sufficiently mathematical – an early ‘Mozart for brain development’. Otherwise, subjects useless to material improvement were excluded. When J S Mill applied to Cambridge at the age of 15, he’d so mastered law, history, philosophy, economics, science and mathematics that they turned him away because their professors didn’t have anything more to teach him.

The young Mill soldiered on with efforts for social reform, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d become a utilitarian machine with a suicidal ghost inside. With his well-tuned calculative abilities, the despairing philosopher put his finger right on the problem:

[I]t occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered: ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.

For most of our history, we’ve seen suffering as a mystery, and dealt with it by placing it in a complex symbolic framework, often where this life is conceived as a testing ground. In the 18th century, the mystery of suffering becomes the ‘problem of evil’, in which pain and misery turn into clear-cut refutations of God’s goodness to utilitarian reformers. As Mill says of his father: ‘He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness.’

For a utilitarian, the idea of worshipping the creator of suffering is not only absurd, it undercuts the purpose of morality. It channels our energies toward the acceptance of what we should remedy. To revere the natural order could even turn us into moral monsters. Mill says: ‘In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature’s every day performances.’ What Mill calls the ‘Religion of Humanity’ involves pushing aside the old conception of God, and taking over responsibility for what happens in the world. We’re to become the good architect that God never was.

More here.

Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

Like most other neurological disorders, Huntington’s disease has proved to be a costly and frustrating target for drug developers. But it also has distinctive features that make it a good match for treatments that target genes. It arises from a mutation in a single gene that encodes the protein huntingtin, and a disease-causing copy of the gene can be readily distinguished from a normal copy by the presence of an overlong stretch of a repeated triplet of nucleotides, CAG. Before turning to CRISPR, Davidson and her colleagues had some success in treating animal models of Huntington’s disease with RNA interference (RNAi), which uses synthetic molecules of RNA to prevent the production of mutant huntingtin — although it took them a considerable amount of time to get there. “We’ve focused the last 17 years on RNAi-based approaches,” says Davidson. However, both this and a promising related treatment for Huntington’s disease that involves antisense oligonucleotides will probably require long-term, repeated administration to provide sustained benefits.

By contrast, CRISPR could achieve the same benefits through a single dose that permanently inactivates the defective gene with remarkable efficiency, as Davidson’s team demonstrated last year¹, both in cells from people with Huntington’s disease and in mouse models of the condition. “I was surprised how easy it was — I think that’s the beauty of the system,” she says. In the past five years, several teams of researchers have independently shown that genome editing can reliably eliminate the gene that encodes mutant huntingtin, thereby halting the production of the toxic protein and its accumulation into clumps in experimental models.

But clearing protein clumps in mice is of questionable value when researchers often struggle to translate such findings into treatments for people — in general, potential therapies for brain disorders have a long history of failure and disappointment in clinical trials. Accordingly, the early adopters of CRISPR are trying to obtain clearer evidence of its probable clinical benefits while grappling with thorny questions related to its safety, efficacy and delivery that it is crucial to answer before trials in people can take place. “I believe we can now seriously consider clinical strategies to edit huntingtin,” says Nicole Déglon, a neurologist at the Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, “but I would say we are still at the very beginning of the story.”

More here.

Tim Maudlin in the Boston Review:

People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.

Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one’s own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.

The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason.

More here.