Geoff Ward at The Dublin Review of Books:

So what was it that made Robinson Crusoe different from previous English fiction? First, Defoe was the first major writer in English literature who did not take a plot from mythology, history, legend or prior literature. The next was to be Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) whose immensely important novel Pamela(1740) it will be relevant to mention a little later. In the plots of these two writers we see the difference, for example, from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. Second, Defoe was the first to convey the reality of time, to portray a life in the bigger picture of a historical process, and in terms of day-to-day thoughts and activities. Although his timings are inconsistent, his narrative convinces us that the action is occurring at a particular time. Third, Defoe was the first to produce a whole narrative as if it took place in a physical environment to which a character was attached by means of vivid detail: the description of objects, for example, such as clothing and implements. Previously and traditionally, place was treated in a vague and generalised way, with only incidental physical description. Fourth, the use of figurative language, previously a prominent feature of romances, was noticeably reduced; it was much rarer in Defoe and Richardson than in any writer before.

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Moeko Fujii at The New Yorker:

Before I knew who Claire Denis was, she taught me how to dance. When I was eighteen, it was easier to stay in with a movie than to go to a party and be surrounded by strangers. One night, I watched Denis’s film “Beau Travail,” from 1999. Afterward, I couldn’t sleep. I kept replaying the ending, transfixed by a man with a battered face, Galoup. For ninety minutes, Galoup (Denis Lavant) is small and hunched, a military officer who, after being ejected from the French Foreign Legion, can’t find meaning in civilian life. In a closing scene, he makes his bed, carefully tucking in the corners, and lies down, clasping a gun. Then we hear the pulse of Corona’s disco hit “The Rhythm of the Night.” We cut to Galoup smoking in a night club, leaning against a panelled mirror. He bobs his head to the music, tracing loose arcs in the air with his cigarette. He snarls. He spins in a tight circle, smoke trailing him like a cape. Then, at the chorus, unsmiling and intent, he lets himself go, flying into the air, fingers splayed like a gecko’s. I can’t describe what it felt like watching him for the first time, more blur than human. But I remember what it did to me. I got up and I began to wave my hands above my head, alone in the dark.

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Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian:

As Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône goes on show at Tate Britain, it is, in one sense, coming home. This might sound like wishful thinking. For the past half century the painting has hung in Paris, and its singing Mediterranean colours, which the artist himself described as “aquamarine”, “royal blue” and “russet gold”, bear little resemblance to the murky half-tints of the Thames, which runs past Tate Britain’s Millbank site. Yet its spring exhibition, Van Gogh and Britain, is organised on the principle that the foundations of the Dutchman’s art, both his eye and his intellect, were laid not in the south of France, nor in the misty light of the Low Countries, but in London, where he spent three life-defining years (1873-76) as a young man.

A case in point: if you look beyond the hallucinogenic brilliance of Starry Night Over the Rhône, which Van Gogh painted in 1888, two years before his death, you will notice a family resemblance to a small black and white engraving that he first encountered more than a decade earlier, during his London stay. Gustave Doré’s Evening on the Thames shows London from Westminster Bridge, a view Van Gogh knew intimately from his commute between his suburban lodgings and the Covent Garden office where he worked as a clerk. It wasn’t the pomp of the neo-gothic Houses of Parliament that drew Van Gogh to Doré’s image so much as the regular pattern made by the gaslights as they flared across the river. Fifteen years later he would transpose this jolt of modernity to Starry Night Over the Rhône, a view of Arles in which new-fangled streetlamps compete with exploding stars to light up the sky.

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Matt Richtel in The New York Times:

Cancer immunotherapy drugs, which spur the body’s own immune system to attack tumors, hold great promise but still fail many patients. New research may help explain why some cancers elude the new class of therapies, and offer some clues to a solution. The study, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, focuses on colorectal and prostate cancer. These are among the cancers that seem largely impervious to a key mechanism of immunotherapy drugs. The drugs block a signal that tumors send to stymie the immune system. That signal gets sent via a particular molecule that is found on the surface of some tumor cells. The trouble is that the molecule, called PD-L1, does not appear on the surface of all tumors, and in those cases, the drugs have trouble interfering with the signal sent by the cancer.

The new study is part of a growing body of research that suggests that even when tumors don’t have this PD-L1 molecule on their surfaces, they are still using the molecule to trick the immune system. Instead of appearing on the surface, the molecule is released by the tumor into the body, where it travels to immune system hubs, the lymph nodes, and tricks the cells that congregate there. “They inhibit the activation of immune cells remotely,” said Dr. Robert Blelloch, associate chairman of the department of urology at the University of California, San Francisco, and a senior author of the new paper. The U.C.S.F. scientists discovered that they could cure a mouse of prostate cancer if they removed the PD-L1 that was leaving the tumor and traveling to the lymph nodes to trick the immune system. When that happened, the immune system attacked the cancer effectively. Furthermore, the immune system of the same mouse seemed able to attack a tumor later even when the drifting PD-L1 was reintroduced. This suggested to Dr. Blelloch that it might be possible to train the immune system to recognize a tumor much the way a vaccine can train an immune system to recognize a virus.

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Liesl Schillinger in the New York Review of Books:

If you leaf through the pages of one of the tall, puffy black leatherette volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Macropædia (a portmanteau made from the Greek words for “big” and “education), you will find Arthur Koestler’s long essay on “Humour and Wit,” which is the only laugh-out-loud-funny encyclopedia entry anyone is likely to encounter anywhere. You can’t read the whole thing online, it has been abridged; to see the genuine article, you have to hold the actual book in your hand. Koestler wrote the essay for the maiden edition of the Macropædia in the 1970s, adapting it from his capacious books Insight and Outlook (1949) and The Act of Creation (1964), which break down the various manifestations of creativity, talent, originality, and genius. The six pages in the Britannica provide, if you will, the gist.

The purpose of his essay is to demonstrate how and why humor works. Koestler begins by listing jokes that illustrate distinct comic principles. My favorite, #5, appears under the heading “The Logic of Laughter.” It’s a joke Freud liked to tell as well, about a Marquis in the court of Louis XV who enters his bedroom to find a bishop making love to his wife. After observing them in flagrante, the Marquis calmly steps to the window, opens it, and extends his arms, blessing the people on the street below.

“What are you doing?” cried the anguished wife.
“Monseigneur is performing my functions,” replied the Marquis, “so I am performing his.”

This joke works, Koestler explains, because the Marquis’s behavior is “both unexpected and perfectly logical—but of a logic not usually applied to this type of situation.” The reader expects the Marquis to respond with moral outrage, or even to draw a sword; instead, in an absurdly literal-minded way, he reevaluates his job description on the spot, and acts accordingly.

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Leonard Sax in Psychology Today:

If there are superstar scholars, Berkeley professor Judith Butler is a superstar. She is best known for pioneering the idea that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs. She writes that “because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.” For this insight, she has been rewarded with an avalanche of scholarly honors and prizes, including the Mellon Prize, which carries with it a $1.5 million cash award. (By comparison, the Nobel Prize gets you just $1.1 million.)

Butler is a professor of comparative literature, not a neuroscientist, but her ideas about gender have become widely accepted worldwide in the nearly 30 years since the publication of her book Gender Trouble. In 2017, Cordelia Fine, professor of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, published a book titled Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds. Following Butler, Fine asserted that any claims that women and men differ significantly in brain or behavior are simply myths perpetuated by the heteronormative patriarchy. Fine’s book promptly received the Royal Society’s prestigious prize for best science book of the year.

The worldview promulgated by Butler, Fine, and their followers now constrains what neuroscientists are allowed to say in public.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over, and we contemplate what it would mean for a computer to be conscious or truly human. It should probably come as no surprise that these ideas aren’t new to modern society — they go way back, at least to the stories and mythologies of ancient Greece. Today’s guest, Adrienne Mayor, is a folklorist and historian of science, whose recent work has been on robots and artificial humans in ancient mythology. From the bronze warrior Talos to the evil fembot Pandora, mythology is rife with stories of artificial beings. It’s both fun and useful to think about our contemporary concerns in light of these ancient tales.

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Stuart Schrader in the Boston Review:

I recently stumbled across a statue in Baltimore that celebrates the young men of the city who fought in the “Spanish War.” On a narrow triangle in a residential neighborhood, this lone soldier stands at ease, holding a rifle across his body and staring into the distance, unperturbed by the city buses screeching past or the litter that collects below his feet. The pedestal records the years, from 1898 to 1902, when these brave Americans fought against Spain’s weak imperialist hold on the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Known as “The Hiker,” fifty or so versions of this statue still quietly dot city streets and parks across the United States. The bulk were erected in the 1920s in northern states, with Baltimore’s in 1943, and the last in 1965 near Arlington Cemetery.

Their anti-imperialist sentiment resonated with a different kind of monument that emerged in the same period—those to the Confederacy. To numerous white Americans, the democratic reconstruction of the former Confederacy was an imperialist exercise, and both types of statue celebrated a fight against empire. But they mobilized a rose-tinted vision of past war-making to reject the contemporary reality of early twentieth-century U.S. statecraft: Washington had built an empire, subjecting millions with dark skin to its rule. The anti-imperialist sentiment implicit in the statues, whatever its source, did not curtail empire. It denied its existence.

These monuments—both to the Confederacy and to far-flung operations and occupations—reveal just how vexing the term “empire” is in the U.S. vocabulary.

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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Last year saw the publication of a book that could well turn out to be a future classic of art writing. Jack Whitten’s Notes From the Woodshed was released just a few months after the painter’s death in New York at the age of 78. More than 500 pages of journal entries, written between March 24, 1962, and December 27, 2017, Notes From the Woodshed gives as true a sense of how the life of an artist is lived, and how it’s lived for the sake of his work, as any I’ve read. The book’s hallmarks are a kinetic energy of thought and immediacy of expression that trump literary style or even good spelling. By the end of his life, Whitten knew that his notes would be published—he wrote a prefatory essay in September 2015, more than two years before his last journal entry—but he didn’t gussy them up. They have been abridged, though, partly because he could be as critical of his fellow artists as he could be generously enthusiastic about them, and “a few of his writings have been redacted here to protect the living,” notes the book’s editor, Katy Siegel, who also curated last year’s exhibition, “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017,” at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Met Breuer.

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Lucy Wasensteiner at the TLS:

The subsequent outpouring of creativity at the Bauhaus has since become the stuff of legend. Yet despite its popularity among teachers and students, the school and its methods were consistently controversial. As the clouds of nationalism gathered over Germany, many in Weimar were troubled by the blatant internationalism of the Bauhaus. Others attacked the emphasis on freedom and experimentation as inappropriately indulgent for a state-funded school. The economic uncertainties of the early 1920s only increased the pressure on Gropius. In 1925, the authorities in Weimar closed the school, forcing its relocation to Dessau, about 100 miles to the northeast.

This move provided Gropius the architect with perhaps his best-known commission: new premises for the Bauhaus and living quarters for its staff and students. Dessau also marked a new chapter in the ideology of the school. In 1926 – the year of the reopening – Gropius published what amounted to a second manifesto, his “Principles of Bauhaus Production”.

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Daniel Mendelsohn at the NYRB:

This familiar Strindbergian theme is underscored in The Best Intentions by an ingenious device to which the author turns more than once: the juxtaposition of some ostensibly documentary evidence from the “real life” that he’s fictionalizing—a photograph he has found of this or that relative or an entry in someone’s diary—with his novelistic reconstruction of the person or incident in question. This technique can shed ironic light on the characters. A passage, for instance, when Bergman quotes a diary entry by Henrik’s mother, Alma, after she meets her future daughter-in-law for the first time: “Henrik came with his fiancée. She is surprisingly beautiful and he seems happy. Fredrik Paulin called in the evening. He talked about tedious things from the past. That was inappropriate and made Henrik sad.”

This text is cited, pointedly, at the end of a long passage that has dramatized the moment that Alma so tersely summarizes in her diary: the visit by Anna, the interruption of the family friend, Fredrik.

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Lois Beckett in The Guardian:

Romance readers compound the sin of liking happy, sexy stories with the sin of not caring much about the opinions of serious people, which is to say, men. They are openly scornful of the outsiders who occasionally parachute in to report on them. In late 2017, Robert Gottlieb – the former editor of the New Yorker and unsurpassable embodiment of the concept “august literary man” – wrote a jocular roundup of that season’s best romances in the New York Times Book Review. He opined that romance was a “healthy genre” and that its effect was “harmless, I would imagine. Why shouldn’t women dream?” The furious public response from romance readers – “patriarchal ass” was among the more charitable comments – prompted a defensive editor’s note from the NYT, which later announced it was hiring a dedicated romance columnist, who happened to be both a woman and a long-time fan of the genre.

Coverage of the romance industry often dwells on the contrast between the nubile young heroines of the novels and the women who actually write the books: ordinary women with ordinary bodies, dressed for their own comfort. Reporting on the first annual conference of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) – the major trade association for romance authors – in 1981, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the 500 authors who attended were “not the stuff of which romance heroines are made – at mostly 40 and 50, they were less coquette and more mother-of-the-bride”. That observation – combining creeping horror at the idea that middle-aged women might be interested in sex, with indifference to the fact that male authors are rarely judged for failing to resemble James Bond – is typical.

Part of the intense scorn romance authors face is the result of their rare victory. They have built an industry that caters almost completely to women, in which writers can succeed on the basis of their skill, not their age or perceived attractiveness.

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Chelsea Wald in Nautilus:

Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, thinking, I have to stop going places with her if I ever want to … get there! You too can measure yourself on the “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale,” a tool developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon James. While walking in a crowd, do you find yourself “acting in a hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster than expected)” and “enjoying thoughts of violence?”

Slowness rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines—they all drive us crazy. Even the opening of this article may be going on a little too long for you. So I’ll get to the point. Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that’s been vanquished in the Twitter age. Once upon a time, cognitive scientists tell us, patience and impatience had an evolutionary purpose. They constituted a yin and yang balance, a finely tuned internal timer that tells when we’ve waited too long for something and should move on. When that timer went buzz, it was time to stop foraging at an unproductive patch or abandon a failing hunt.

“Why are we impatient? It’s a heritage from our evolution,” says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act. But that good thing is gone. The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay.

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Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is a bland name for a dreadful piece of law likely to reshape our use of the internet. “The transformation of the internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users,” was how Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, and 70 other technology pioneers described it in a letter to the president of the European parliament last year. And they’re right.

The two most controversial parts of the new directive are articles 11 and 13 (though, just to complicate matters, in the final law, these have become articles 15 and 17). Article 11, dubbed a “link tax”, obliges search engines and news aggregate platforms to pay for use of snippets from publishers. Article 13 holds platforms, such as Google and YouTube, responsible for material posted without copyright permission and enforces penalties for failure to block infringing content.

Online platforms, the EU argues, make huge profits by either hosting or linking to creative content without funnelling that cash back to the creators. As a writer, I love to be paid for my work and anything to squeeze more money out of every word I write, the better. The trouble is that the EU directive will do little for “content creators” like me. What it will do is constrain my use of the internet.

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Stan Carey in Sentence First:

Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel has an engrossing chapter on the evolution of writing as a communication technology. It includes a brief account of the development of a syllabary – a set of written characters that represent syllables – for the Cherokee language. The syllabary looks like this:

Some of the signs (or ‘syllabograms’) will look familiar, others like variations of familiar shapes. But any similarity to the Roman, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets is misleading. For example, in a nice demonstration of the arbitrariness of the sign, the first three, R, D, W, encode the sounds e, a, la. So what’s going on?

I’ll let Diamond tell most of the story. First, a step back.

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From the editors of Democracy:

We are at an inflection point in the Democratic Party’s history, and in the economic history of the country; similar, perhaps, to the mid-1930s and the late-1970s. In the first period, the country embraced Keynesian, demand-side economics. In the second, during a time of pummeling inflation and wage stagnation, the country turned away from Keynes and toward Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.

To us, on the merits, the two systems aren’t close. Keynesian principles helped drive the greatest era of expansion, prosperity, and equality the United States has ever known. Supply-side economics has been good for the top 10 or 15 percent, great for the top 1 percent, but rather bad for everyone else. Yet, because it’s done so well for the people who have money, finance political campaigns, and run things, and because the Democratic Party never quite made the case for an alternate theory of growth (despite this journal’s frequent efforts), supply-side has hung around well past its sell-by date.

That date may finally have come. There are numerous signs that the American people are beginning to question the supply-side assumptions that dominated our economic debates for four decades. Are the signs real?

More here.