William Nakabayashi at The Believer:

Filmistan Studios occupies five acres in Goregaon, India, which is technically an outer suburb of Mumbai, but denser than most New York City neighborhoods. If you take the train from the city proper and fight the foot traffic that crowds the bazaar area around the station, you’ll reach a pair of steel gates. Just on the other side are Filmistan’s soundstages, which have been in continuous operation since 1943. In the Golden Age of Hindi Film, up to the 1960s, the industry worked along lines similar to those of the old Hollywood studio system, with each production house fielding its own stable of talent. Unlike most of its former rivals, Filmistan has remained open for business as a production facility, and the grounds now accommodate eight stages and several outdoor shooting areas, including a Hindu temple, a jailhouse exterior, and a village. But Filmistan is more than a collection of sets. Behind the scenes, there are real people living there. I came to Filmistan as an anthropologist in training, with a research project that looked solid enough, on paper, to win a Fulbright grant. One thing about ethnography they don’t teach you in school, though, is how awkward it can be getting started. Reaching out to people to do research with—soliciting “informants”—can feel like approaching strangers for a date. Left to myself in Mumbai, with my sun-glasses and clumsy Hindi, I was a field-work wallflower

more here.

Bernard Porter at Literary Review:

Reading this magisterial new biography of Mohandas K Gandhi, one could almost imagine that the British Empire might have been saved had the imperial government, not to mention the Indians, listened to him more. As is pretty well known, he didn’t turn against the empire until well into his career, long convinced – beyond reason, perhaps – that the nation of John Stuart Mill and of the numerous liberal friends he had made while studying law in London would eventually show what he took to be its ‘best side’ and grant self-government to India, on the same basis as Canada and Australia, under the aegis of its beloved king-emperor. It was for this reason that he actually aided the British side in the Boer War, the Zulu War and the First World War (his work on behalf of the Indian diaspora in South Africa is retailed in Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India, the prequel to this volume, reviewed here in December 2013). Gandhi sustained his faith in the people of Britain for some time after his enthusiastically celebrated return to India, already a hero, in January 1915.

more here.

Heather Murphy in The New York Times:

Alvinella pompejana, a type of deep sea worm, can thrive at temperatures that would kill most living organisms. It has been used in skin creams — and sequences of its genes appear in 18 patents from not only BASF, but also a French research institution. Genetic prospectors — a term some find offensive, while acknowledging there’s not a great alternative — have a range of motivations. Some are hoping to develop a novel treatment for cancer. Others want to create the next Botox. Most are looking for organisms with exceptional traits that might offer the missing piece in their new product. That is why patents are filled with“extremophiles,” known for doing well in extreme darkness, cold, acidity and other harsh environments, said Robert Blasiak, a researcher from the Stockholm Resilience Centre who was involved in the patent study.

But how can multiple entities patent the same worm — or snail? In most countries it’s not possible to patent “a product of nature.” But what companies and research institutions can do is patent a novel application of a given organism, or more specifically, its genes. “It often requires making these Frankenstein synthetic organisms; a little bit of DNA from a lot of different things,” said Mr. Blasiak. What that basically means is your cat or a coyote in your backyard cannot be patented. “But if you went out and created a transgenic coyote that no one has done before, then probably yes,” said Dr. Robert Cook-Deegan, a professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.

More here.

Ron Chernow The Warburgs from Delancey Place:

In 1933, with Hitler and the Nazis boycotting Jewish businesses, many powerful Jews in Germany and the powerful American Jewish charities opposed retaliation, advocating negotiation instead. Some viewed Hitler as a “weak man” and wanted to “strengthen his hand”: “Once the Nazis had cleansed Germany of opposition parties and ended parliamentary government, they turned their attention to the Jews. By mid-­March, the rank-and-file were storming department stores and demanding a boycott of Jewish businesses. As much to guide as to incite these volatile emotions. Hitler and Goebbels championed the idea of a boycott. In a March 27 radio broadcast, the government announced that on the morning of April 1st, at the stroke of ten, SA and SS members would take up positions outside Jewish stores and warn the public not to enter. This offense was portrayed as a defensive measure against ‘Jewish atrocity propaganda abroad.’ To add further terror, Göring told Jewish community leaders that they would be held responsible for any anti-German propaganda appearing abroad. Eager to create jobs through exports, Hitler wanted to minimize adverse publicity overseas.

“In reacting to the boycott, a split was immediately apparent between foreign Jewish groups who wished to fight and German Jews who wished to negotiate. The latter feared that foreign protest would only seem to confirm the notion of a world Jewish conspiracy inimical to Germany. They also knew that they and not their vocal brethern abroad would feel the stinging lash of reprisals. As a result of their tenuous absorption into German life, the jewish community had always preferred diplomacy and negotiation to public confrontation.

“Overseas Jews labored under no such need to appease the Nazis. The day that the boycott was announced, twenty thousand people crowded into a Madison Square Garden rally in New York to condemn the treatment of German Jews, while another thirty-five thousand milled about the outside. When a counterboycott of German exports was launched, it posed an excruciating dilemma for the American Jewish Committee [charity]. Started by the Jews of German ancestry, the committee feared exposing relatives to reprisals. At the same time, they had to respond to the spontaneous anguish of American Jewry. In the end, the committee opposed the boycott of German goods and tried to halt the Madison Square Garden rally, urging speakers to cancel their appear­ances. A fatal division sapped ‘International Jewry’ even as the Nazi press claimed that it operated with a single, implacable will.

More here.

Joyce Maynard in Vogue:

In the fall of 1971, I set out from the small New Hampshire town where I’d spent the first 17 years of my life and rode a Greyhound bus to New Haven. I had a trunk of clothes, a portable stereo housed in a red Samsonite suitcase, and a couple dozen vinyl albums—Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, the Rolling Stones—that I hauled up three flights of stairs to a fourth-floor dormitory room. Yale had gone coed two years before, but ours was the first class in which women would complete the full four years.

Most did. I didn’t.

I had a million plans that fall. I was going to study art—but I also wanted to learn about history, political science, poetry, film animation. I was going to act in plays and join a dance class. I would make friends with whom I’d stay up late talking about music and movies. Weekends, I’d visit New York City—the place I hoped one day to live. Somewhere in there, though not close to the top of my list, I figured I’d do a little writing, having published work in Seventeen.

I spent only one year as a student at Yale. The spring of my freshman year, an essay I wrote appeared as a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. In a world before the Internet, that article (“An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life”—the irony of the title escaped me at the time) propelled me into a public sphere I could not have envisioned.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

Light always moves at the same, constant speed: c, or 299,792,458 m/s. That’s the speed of light in a vacuum, and LIGO has vacuum chambers inside both arms. The thing is, when a gravitational wave passes through each arm, lengthening or shortening the arm, it also lengthens or shortens the wavelength of the light within it by a corresponding amount.

This seems like a problem on the surface: if the light is lengthening or shortening as the arms lengthen or shorten, then the total interference pattern should remain unchanged as the wave passes through. At least, that’s what you would intuit.

But that’s not how it works. The wavelength of the light, which is highly dependent on how your space changes as a gravitational wave passes through, isn’t important for the interference pattern. What is important is the amount of time the light spends traveling through the arms!

More here.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in The Nation:

After the crash of 2008, the language of inequality began to trickle into the popular discourse. Then the Occupy movement launched it into the mainstream; the fall of 2011 was the first time in generations that concerns about distributive justice drove crowds into the streets and made front-page news. Scholars, pundits, and politicians all took note, and before long, Gornick and her colleagues found themselves at the center of what President Barack Obama called “the defining challenge of our time.” Reporting from a gathering at the Brookings Institution in late 2012, the journalist Chrystia Freeland (now Canada’s minister of foreign affairs) observed: “Three decades later, trickle-down economics”—the theory that slashing taxes on businesses and the rich would spur investment and eventually benefit society as a whole—“has met its antithesis. We are set for one of the great battles of ideas of our time.”

Even the International Monetary Fund, which for decades has imposed privatization and austerity programs on nations as the price of its financial aid, began to sound repentant. In 2013, IMF head Christine Lagarde conceded at Davos, of all places, that “the economics profession and the policy community have downplayed inequality for too long,” and that “a more equal distribution of income allows for more economic stability, more sustained economic growth, and healthier societies.”

These events set the stage for an unlikely best seller: The English translation of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014, sold over 700,000 copies. Since then, enthusiasm for the subject has not waned.

More here.

Andrew Levine in Counterpunch:

In his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Brett Kavanaugh put on a prodigious display of vacuity and mendacity.  Kavanaugh is the retrograde jurist picked by Donald Trump to fill the Supreme Court vacancy that arose when the Court’s “swing vote,” Anthony Kennedy, retired. His politics is god awful, but that is hardly news.  It was a sure thing that Trump would nominate someone with god-awful politics.  Because he knows little and cares less about the judicial system, except when it impinges on his financial shenanigans, and because, as part of his pact with “conservatives” Trump outsourced judicial appointments to the Federalist Society, anyone he would nominate was bound to come with god-awful politics. At least, this particular god-awful jurist is well schooled, well spoken (in the way that lawyers are), and intelligent enough to talk like a lawyer or judge, while dissembling shamelessly and saying nothing of substance.  That puts him leagues ahead of Trump.  It also puts him head and shoulders above the average Republican. But let’s not praise him too much on that account; much the same could be said of Ted Cruz.  Because politically the two of them are so much alike, it is instructive to compare Kavanaugh with that villainous Texas Senator.

Cruz is perhaps the most detested legislator in Washington.  It has been said of him that “loathsome” attaches to his name in the way that, in the Iliad, “fleet footed” attached to the name of Achilles. On the other hand, Kavanaugh is said to be a nice guy.  As much or more than his qualifications, the GOP public relations line on him focuses on what a fine, husband, father, neighbor, and colleague he is.  Perhaps he really is.  But why should anyone who doesn’t have to live with or otherwise deal with him on a personal basis care? Could it be that his handlers don’t want anyone to think of him in the same frame as Cruz or, for that matter, the president who put his name forward?   Niceness marks a clear difference between him and them.

More here.