M. M. Owen in The Point:

The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács called the novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Other forces played more obviously into the form’s rise to literary preeminence—the consolidation of a middle class; advances in printing technology—but the link between the emergence of the novel and the decline of religiosity is strong. Three hundred years ago, reading novels (as opposed to the classics, or Shakespeare) was widely seen as vulgar, indicative of a deficient mind. So was not believing in a divine creator. Today, at least among the sort of people who tend to read literary magazines, both these thing are more likely to be regarded as signs of intellectual and moral refinement. For the critic James Wood, this is no coincidence: the novel is “the slayer of religions,” a form that swept away Biblical certitudes and replaced them with fictional narratives that move “in the shadow of doubt,” asking readers for a belief that is fundamentally and irreligiously metaphorical.

One author who would agree wholeheartedly with Wood is England’s Ian McEwan, who asserted in 2013 that the novel is a product of the Enlightenment that “has always been a secular and skeptical form.” McEwan is a committed nonbeliever, so committed that he qualifies as a junior member of the intellectual movement-cum-publishing-ploy known as New Atheism, which emerged in the wake of 9/11. Christopher Hitchens dedicated his God Is Not Great to McEwan, and McEwan blurbed Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, calling it “lucid and wise, truly magisterial.” The critics Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, in their 2010 study The New Atheist Novel, write of McEwan “it is tempting to say that—if his fiction did not exist—Dawkins and company would have had to invent it, so completely does it vindicate their worldview.” McEwan’s protagonists are universally, as Edward says in On Chesil Beach, “grateful to live in a time when religion has generally faded into insignificance.” Ostensibly, this view is never seriously challenged, the gratitude never corroded.

More here.

Charles P. Pierce in Esquire:

The most tragic and infuriating piece of writing of the week came in Tuesday’s New York Times. It carried a very plain and simple headline.

"Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country"

My short visit only confirmed my conviction and fear that the invasion would spell disaster for Iraqis. Removing Saddam was just a byproduct of another objective: dismantling the Iraqi state and its institutions. That state was replaced with a dysfunctional and corrupt semi-state. We were still filming in Baghdad when L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced the formation of the so-called Governing Council in July 2003. The names of its members were each followed by their sect and ethnicity. Many of the Iraqis we spoke to on that day were upset with institutionalization of an ethno-sectarian quota system. Ethnic and sectarian tensions already existed, but their translation into political currency was toxic. Those unsavory characters on the governing council, most of whom were allies of the United States from the preceding decade, went on to loot the country, making it one of the most corrupt in the world.

Except for Sinan Antoon’s richly deserved jeremiad, the 15th anniversary of the worst foreign policy disaster in modern American history went sailing by largely unremarked, at least in this country. After all, over here, everyone was too busy keeping track of the latest news involving the vulgar talking yam the country had installed as president, how he was still truckling to Russian oligarchs, how he was still being run to ground by Bob Mueller, and about how he was being outwitted and out-lawyered by a lady from the adult entertainment industry.

More here.

David Reich in the New York Times:

In a Sunday Review essay last weekend, David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, argued that science is changing how we think about “race” and urged a candid discussion of the findings, whatever they may be. Hundreds of readers left comments, many expressing worry about the possibility that the results could be misinterpreted or nefariously applied. Here are Dr. Reich’s responses to some of the comments. — The Editors

Unfortunately, science has always been misused. From slavery, to eugenics, to economic Darwinism, to anti-abortion politics, the latest scientific knowledge has been employed in the service of evil. The idea of forestalling such efforts is valiant but fruitless. Science must continue its pursuit of truth, and scientists, as always, must speak out when their discoveries are exploited for harmful purposes. — Syfredrick, Providence, R.I.

We scientists always need to keep in mind our social responsibilities and to think about whether what we are doing has positive or negative effects on our world.

With respect to today’s study of human variation, I am optimistic — I believe that it has been socially positive. It is making every racist view of the world untenable. In my just-published book, I explain how the ancient DNA revolution — which has provided far greater power to reveal what happened in our deep past than what was available before — has done far more to undermine racist beliefs than to support them. As I wrote in the final paragraph of my book:

The study of human variation has not always been a force for good. In Nazi Germany, someone with my expertise at interpreting genetic data would have been tasked with categorizing people by ancestry had that been possible with the science of the 1930s. But in our time, the findings from ancient DNA leave little solace for racist or nationalistic misinterpretation. In this field, the pursuit of truth for its own sake has overwhelmingly had the effect of exploding stereotypes, undercutting prejudice, and highlighting the connections among peoples not previously known to be related. I am optimistic that the direction of my work and that of my colleagues is to promote understanding, and I welcome our opportunity to do our best by the people, ancient and modern, whom we have been given the privilege to study.

My book also gives concrete examples of how it is no longer so easy to twist science to support long-cherished stereotypes because ancient DNA is now debunking the stories that used to be made up about the nature of human variation.

More here.

Matt Ridley in his blog:

The modern world stands on a cairn built by energy conversions in the past. Just as it took many loaves of bread and nosebags of hay to build Salisbury Cathedral, so it took many cubic metres of gas or puffs of wind to power the computer and develop the software on which I write these words. The Industrial Revolution was founded on the discovery of how to convert heat into work, initially via steam. Before that, heat (wood, coal) and work (oxen, people, wind, water) were separate worlds.

To be valuable, any conversion technology must produce reliable, just-in-time power that greatly exceeds — by a factor of seven and upwards — the amount of energy that goes into its extraction, conversion and delivery to a consumer. It is this measure of productivity, EROEI (energy return on energy invested), that limits our choice.

You could make your own electricity on an exercise bicycle, eating organic ice cream as fuel, but such a system would have wildly negative EROEI once you include the energetics of farming cattle and making ice cream. It would also produce a pathetic trickle of power: about 50 watts (joules per second). The average Briton uses about 4,000 watts, as much energy as if she had 240 slaves on exercise bicycles in the back room, pedalling eight-hour shifts. That’s roughly what “civilisation” looked like in ancient Egypt or China.

More here.

Kai-Fu Lee at Edge.org:

The question I always ask myself, just like any human being, is who am I and why do I exist? Who are we as humans and why do we exist? When I was in college, I had a much more naïve view. I was very much into computers and artificial intelligence, and I thought it must be the case that I’m destined to work on some computer algorithms and, along with my colleagues, figure out how the brain works and how the computer can be as smart as the brain, perhaps even become a substitute of the brain, and that’s what artificial intelligence is about.

That was the simplistic view that I had. I pursued that in my college, in my graduate years. I went to Carnegie Mellon and got a PhD in speech recognition, then went to Apple, then SGI, then Microsoft, and then to Google. In each of the companies, I continued to work on artificial intelligence, thinking that that was the pursuit of how intelligence worked, and that our elucidation of artificial intelligence would then come back and tell us, "Ah, that’s how the brain works." We replicated it, so that’s what intelligence is about. That must be the most important thing in our lives: our IQ, our ability to think, analyze, predict, understand—all that stuff should be explicable by replicating it in the computer.

I’ve had the good fortune to have met Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Herb Simon, and my mentor, Raj Reddy. All of these people had a profound influence on the way I thought. It’s consistent that they too were pursuing the understanding of intelligence. The belief at one point was that we would take the human intelligence and implement it as rules that would have a way to act as people if we provided the steps in which we go through our thoughts.

More here.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Guardian:

I watched in dismay as most of my educated, middle-class friends began, at the onset of middle age, to obsess about their health and likely longevity. Even those who were at one point determined to change the world refocused on changing their bodies. They undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure. Mostly they understood the task of ageing to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet, where one medical fad, one study or another, condemned fat and meat, carbs, gluten, dairy or all animal-derived products. In the health-conscious mindset that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious”, while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free”. Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures such as hours-long cardio sessions, fasts, purges or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.

Of course I want to be healthy, too; I just don’t want to make the pursuit of health into a major life project. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and will stave off hunger for as long as possible, such as protein, fibre and fats. But I refuse to overthink the potential hazards of blue cheese on my salad or pepperoni on my pizza. I also exercise – not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care, I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in undergoing tests to uncover problems that remain undetectable to me. When friends berate me for my laxity, my heavy use of butter or habit of puffing (but not inhaling) on cigarettes, I gently remind them that I am, in most cases, older than they are.

So it was with a measure of schadenfreude that I began to record the cases of individuals whose healthy lifestyles failed to produce lasting health. It turns out that many of the people who got caught up in the health “craze” of the last few decades – people who exercised, watched what they ate, abstained from smoking and heavy drinking – have nevertheless died. Lucille Roberts, owner of a chain of women’s gyms, died incongruously from lung cancer at the age of 59, although she was a “self-described exercise nut” who, the New York Times reported, “wouldn’t touch a French fry, much less smoke a cigarette”. Jerry Rubin, who devoted his later years to trying every supposedly health-promoting diet fad, therapy and meditation system he could find, jaywalked into Wilshire Boulevard at the age of 56 and died of his injuries two weeks later.

More here.

Mr. Love

—for my grandmother Miss Resnikoff

You see, she explained, what is now
called Love, was once named Zaslovsky.

He lived over the delicatessen
talked Yiddish in his hoarse voice,
(the vocal cords strained from all
those years of singing)

argued some about politics, got
melancholy and often put the grand-

children to bed telling Russian stories.
He loved to play pinochle
and never really gave up
his ideas.

But now, she explained, what
has taken the name of Love

fixes prescriptions, lives in
a perfect little neighborhood

and has plenty
of acquaintances.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

John Gray at Literary Review:

According to a conventional view, the most fundamental difference between humans and the other great apes is humans’ more highly developed capacities for thought and language – in other words, our superior intellects. A more decisive difference is the human capacity for feeling, and it is this that has enabled us to develop our cultures. As Damasio points out, however, cultural behaviours do not exist only in ‘minded creatures’. They can be found in very simple unicellular organisms, which rely on chemical molecules ‘to detect certain conditions in their environments, including the presence of others, and to guide the actions … needed to organize and maintain their lives in a social environment. For instance, bacteria can sense the numbers in the groups they form and in an unthinking way assess group strength, and they can, depending on the strength of the group, engage or not in a battle for the defence of their territory.’ Organisms without minds display kinds of behaviour we normally reserve for animals like ourselves; though humans do not descend directly from bacteria, our lives are governed by the same imperatives. The common thread linking the two is a process of homeostasis, operating in organisms to secure not only their survival but also a state of flourishing. This is where feeling comes in: ‘Feelings are the subjective experiences of the state of life – that is, of homeostasis – in all creatures endowed with a mind and a conscious point of view.’

more here.

Faramerz Dabhoiwala at The Guardian:

In the summer of 1520, towards the end of his life, the great German artist Albrecht Dürer travelled from his home in Nuremberg to the Low Countries, to meet his new patron, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V. At the same time, halfway across the world in the middle of the Americas, the Spanish adventurer Hernán Cortés was carrying out his merciless siege of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. By the time it fell, on 13 August 1521, much of the city lay in ruins, and as many as 100,000 of its inhabitants had already died. Many more were massacred as the victors set about plundering whatever they could lay their hands on. When the first shipment of spoils arrived in Brussels, Dürer was one of those who flocked to examine it. He was blown away. “All the days of my life,” he wrote in his diary, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.”

This vignette of cross-global inspiration is one of the highlights of David Olusoga’s new book, a richly illustrated companion volume to the two episodes he is presenting in the BBC’s new Civilisations. In outline, its format is fairly Eurocentric and conventional. Despite all the fuss that has been made about the TV project’s updating of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series Civilisation, Olusoga’s own approach is framed in terms that would hardly have shocked audiences 50 years ago: the first half of the book considers contact between civilisations in “the European Age of Discovery” (from the 15th to the 18th centuries), while the second looks at the impact of industrialisation on the art and artists of the 19th century.

more here.

Eric M.B. Becker at The Quarterly Conversation:

It’s become something of an article of faith that English-language readers are more eager than ever to devour literature in translation, and as the famous (but now outdated) three percent figure suggests, sometimes the only way to go is up. Much ink has been spilled in attempts to determine what is at the root of this world literature renaissance, and wishful thinking might suggest it’s that, as readers, Americans have simply become a whole lot more sophisticated and cosmopolitan in outlook. It’s a comforting thought, certainly, but not one borne out by sales figures, and anyone who’s spent more than two minutes in publishing also knows that while previous periods of soaring interest in literatures written beyond our shores may have been spurred on by attempts to understand cultures beyond our own (even this much is in doubt), this latest wave is, at least in part, as much a phenomenon of late-stage capitalism as of high-mindedness. Publishing international writers is now a no-brainer even in houses that haven’t traditionally published much in translation at all. It’s ever more rare to come across a recent college graduate who hasn’t spent a semester abroad, and yet there’s nothing to suggest that the increasing ease with which we move across borders (assuming we’re not one of myriad ostracized groups) has led us to engage more meaningfully with cultures beyond our own. But we like to feel that we are doing so, perhaps in the same way we watch the cinematic adaptation out of the sense that it will give us an idea of what the book is about. On the other hand, the new generation of independent publishing houses dedicated to literature in translation does attest to higher ideals in some corners.

more here.

Dina Nayeri in the New York Times:

“I take the first true measure of my body and decide that it’s shame, not sin, that’s unholy.” It’s 1955 Iran and Forugh Farrokhzad, a soon-to-be divorced mother, awakens to sex and art in Jasmin Darznik’s novel, “Song of a Captive Bird.” A few pages later, having begun an affair with a progressive Tehrani editor, Farrokhzad writes the poem that will make her both a symbol of female strength and a notorious “woman without shame,” as Persian mothers like to say. In it she confesses, “I’ve sinned a sin of pleasure / beside a body trembling and spent.” She doesn’t hide behind metaphor, and she isn’t the meek beloved of the old poems. She acts on her own desires. When she pines, it isn’t for a romantic savior but for a body. Tehran is scandalized.

Farrokhzad was Iran’s most celebrated — and controversial — female poet, and Darznik, the Iranian-born author of the memoir “The Good Daughter,” recreates her sexual and creative liberation while exploring the threat she posed to social order in prerevolutionary Iran. By the year of Farrokhzad’s debut, the “New Poetry” of Nima Yooshij and Ahmad Shamlou — both men — had made Iranian verse more accessible, freer in form and subject matter. But critics instantly denounced Farrokhzad as a silly girl, dismissing her work as an outgrowth of the national fascination with the hedonistic West, a trend Tehrani intellectuals called “Westoxification.”

More here.

Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker:

It does require a fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called “In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”

Fiverr, which had raised a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015, has more about the “In Doers We Trust” campaign on its Web site. In one video, a peppy female voice-over urges “doers” to “always be available,” to think about beating “the trust-fund kids,” and to pitch themselves to everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about “In Doers We Trust” states, “The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less.

More here.

Cynthia Haven in The Book Haven:

I visited the Old Library at Jesus College, Cambridge, last week. Prof. Stephen Heath gave an enlightening show-and-tell of the library’s incunabula to me and my fellow pilgrims, John Dugdale Bradley and Michael Gioia (Stanford alums, both). He brought out an astonishing succession of treasures, including Thomas Cranmer‘s Bible, with its triple columns for comparing the original language (Greek, on the pages I saw) to the Vulgate Latin and English.

“What would you like to see last?” he asked me. What could I say? I had no idea what wonders might be in the back rooms. “Surprise me,” I said.

And so he did. He brought out another Bible, this one from America. It was a 1663 Bible translated phonetically by John Eliot. The Natick dialect of Algonquin had no written form until he gave it one. He inscribed the particular presentation copy under my fingers for his alma mater at Cambridge, Jesus College. Was the Eliot name a coincidence? I remember a prominent New England family that spawned another famous Eliot, also with one “l”. On the other hand, I also knew that spellings of surnames were very fluid even into the 19th century.

When I got back to California, I checked on John Eliot, the Puritan missionary. He is indeed distantly related to T.S. Eliot, from the same Brahmin family in Massachusetts. Both descended from Andrew Eliot, whose family came to America via Yeovil and East Coker, Somerset.

But the Algonquin Bible haunted me for another reason: I recently attended a private screening in San Francisco of photographer’s Lena Herzog‘s Last Whispers, about the mass extinction of languages. I meant to tell her about the Algonquin Bible on my return, but now this blogpost will have to do. Perhaps the Algonquin language, which still has more than three thousand speakers, owes something to Eliot’s efforts.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

Dear Adnan Rasheed,

I am writing to you in my personal capacity. This may not be the opinion of the people of Pakistan or the policy of the government, but I write to thank you in response to the generous letter you have written to Malala Yousafzai. Thanks for owning up that your comrades tried to kill her by shooting her in the head. Many of your well-wishers in Pakistan had been claiming the Taliban wouldn't attack a minor girl. They were of the opinion that Malala had shot herself in order to become a celebrity and get a UK visa. Women, as we know, will go to any lengths to get what they want. So thanks for saying that a 14-year-old girl was the Taliban's foe. And if she rolls out the old cliche that the pen is mightier than sword, she must face the sword and find it for herself.

Like you, there are others who are still not sure whether it was "Islamically correct or wrong", or whether she deserved to be "killed or not", but then you go on to suggest that we leave it to Allah.

There are a lot of people in Pakistan, some of them not even Muslims, who, when faced with difficult choices or everyday hardships, say let's leave it to Allah. Sometimes it's the only solace for the helpless. But most people don't say leave it to Allah after shooting a kid in the face. The whole point of leaving it to Allah is that He is a better judge than any human being, and there are matters that are beyond our comprehension – maybe even beyond your favourite writer Bertrand Russell's comprehension.

Allow me to make another small theological point – again about girls.

More here.