Alex Clark in The Guardian:

Mary-Kay Wilmers has been the editor of the London Review of Books since 1992, and has just celebrated her 80th birthday; almost a decade ago, she published The Eitingons, an account of her mother’s Russian family, including Leonid Eitingon, a general in Stalin’s KGB who features in an essay, My Distant Relative, included in this selection of Wilmers’s writing from 1974 to 2015.

Most of the pieces are book reviews, and all but three were written for the LRB; only occasionally does Wilmers venture into strictly personal territory, most notably in a zinging delve into the menopause. “I have complained a lot about men in my time,” she begins. “In fact, I do it more and more… Here I am, four paragraphs into my musings, or ravings, and beginning to doubt whether I will find anything to say about the menopause that isn’t a way of saying something about men.”

What’s most striking about Human Relations, though, is how much Wilmers has to say about women, and often women of a particular kind: what we’d now call the dysfunctional (the novelist Jean Rhys appears substantively in two pieces here, including a deliciously painful review from 1983 of David Plante’s Difficult Women, whose triad is completed by Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer), and those whose lives appear to be defined almost entirely by their relation to men.

That “appear” is deliberate; how to properly assess the ambiguous life of Barbara Skelton – wife of Cyril Connolly and then the publisher Lord Weidenfeld – whose memoir Tears Before Bedtime Wilmers reviewed in 1987, is not clear. Though it isn’t hard to alight on a juicy detail when faced with such good material – Skelton, seeing Connolly in a mess, asks what he has all over his face, to which he replies “hate”; at night, he keeps her awake by loudly whispering “poor Cyril” repeatedly, sure that she can hear – Wilmers has a terrific way of marshalling all this to wicked effect. “Instead of a child,” she explains, “they acquire Kupy, a small animal that bites.” But, argues Wilmers, although the couple both indulged in “monstrous behaviour”, Connolly was granted a latitude rarely extended to Skelton. She is similarly even-handed when it comes to Ian Fleming’s widow, Ann, citing a lament on loneliness filled with pathos: “I don’t like an empty house at sunset.”

More here.

Tariq Ali at the LRB:

Naipaul and C.L.R. James were educated at the same colonial school. The high quality of teaching in classics and English literature left its mark on both men. Both of them came to England. There the similarity ends. James moved to Marxism and became a great historian in that tradition. Naipaul put politics on the back-burner, joined the lesser ranks of vassalage (the BBC) and cultivated a cultural conservatism that later became his hallmark both politically and socially. The classical heritage of the European bourgeoisie had completely bewitched him. He saw it as the dominant pillar of Western civilisation and this led him to underplay, ignore and sometimes to justify its barbaric sides both at home and abroad.

In later years, James (in private conversation) would refer to Naipaul as someone who is often needed in an imperialist country trying to create a post-colonial culture so as to say things about native peoples that are no longer acceptable in polite society. Naipaul was never, by any stretch of the imagination, a card-carrying Tory. He lived his life through a circle of friends that he had carefully selected. Most, if not all, were figures on the right.

more here.

Louise Steinman at the LARB:

IN 1970, when artist Robert Smithson first set his gaze on the Great Salt Lake’s Rozel Point Peninsula, he knew that he’d found the right site. Smithson was among a vanguard of artists in the late ’60s moving their work out into the landscape, freeing it from the containment of the gallery. Now he was determined to build an earthwork on a massive scale. Smithson had specific requirements: he wanted the color red — like the salt lakes he’d read about in Bolivia, their surface tinged in carnelian tones by micro-bacteria in the water. He wanted remote and he wanted vast — few to no markers of human artifice — to fuck with the viewer’s sense of scale. He wanted a site that would itself inform what he wanted to build.

Smithson and his wife, artist Nancy Holt, scouted Great Salt Lake’s southern shore; but, as he later wrote in his 1972 essay “The Spiral Jetty,” the water wasn’t red enough. At another site near Syracuse, Utah, on the eastern side of the lake, they were shooed off by angry ranchers.

more here.

Feast Day

There’s a patron saint for everything.
Nearly all the early ones
were martyred. The world has always been
this bloody. St. Justus was nine
when he was reported
as a Christian. Beheaded, he held
his head in his hands. My grandmother
confessed, as doctrine willed it, weekly.
She was so good, and always right.
What could she have confessed? She knew
the name for every kind of fork
and where to place each one
for the dinner party. The Devil
was real perhaps but not to be
spoken of, God a disapproving uncle
you’d do your best not to disappoint.
Which saint could she have prayed to
when her first daughter, days old,
died for no reason? When she woke,
years later, from childbirth, with no womb
to bear more children? Impolite
to speak of the body and its openings
and its failures. At seventy and seventy-five
she spoke still of driving an elderly friend
to the doctor, but by eighty she’d grown tired
of opening the paper each morning
to find the obituaries filled with names she knew.
Each saint is feasted on their dies natalis, the birth
into the next life. It was my birthday
the day my grandmother died, and so now
we share the day with St. Liberata, St. Gwen,
and St. Luke, whose gospel is the only one
to tell the story of the Annunciation. The saints
can’t touch us, or else they’re ineffectual,
or unjust. Confession doesn’t count
if you say it only to yourself. The first daughter’s name
is my name. My grandmother wrote
her own obituary, and when the paper ran it
not one of us knew what the middle initial
of the daughter who preceded her stood for.
There was no one left to ask.

by Nancy Reddy
from Ecotheo Review 4/18

Noson S. Yanofsky in Nautilus:

Was it a chance encounter when you met that special someone or was there some deeper reason for it? What about that strange dream last night—was that just the random ramblings of the synapses of your brain or did it reveal something deep about your unconscious? Perhaps the dream was trying to tell you something about your future. Perhaps not. Did the fact that a close relative developed a virulent form of cancer have profound meaning or was it simply a consequence of a random mutation of his DNA? We live our lives thinking about the patterns of events that happen around us. We ask ourselves whether they are simply random, or if there is some reason for them that is uniquely true and deep. As a mathematician, I often turn to numbers and theorems to gain insight into questions like these. As it happens, I learned something about the search for meaning among patterns in life from one of the deepest theorems in mathematical logic. That theorem, simply put, shows that there is no way to know, even in principle, if an explanation for a pattern is the deepest or most interesting explanation there is. Just as in life, the search for meaning in mathematics knows no bounds.

First, some preliminaries. Consider the following three strings of characters:

1. 100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100

2. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

3. 38386274868783254735796801834682918987459817087106701409581980418.

How can we describe these strings? We can easily describe them by just writing them down as we just did. However, it is pretty obvious that there are shorter descriptions of the first two strings. The first is simply the pattern “100” over and over. The second pattern is simply a listing of the first few prime numbers. What about the third string? We can describe it by just printing the string. But is there a better, shorter description?

More here.

Colin Marshall in The LA Review of Books:

JE SUIS la jeune fille: though I’ve never formally studied French, I’ve had that phrase stuck deep in my linguistic consciousness since childhood. So, surely, have most Americans of my generation, hearing it as we all did over and over again for years in the same television commercial. Frequently aired and never once updated, it advertised a series of language-instruction cartoons on videotape. Even more memorable than the French words spoken by that young girl were the English ones spoken by the product’s both grandmotherly and severe pitchwoman: “Yes, that’s French they’re speaking, and no, these children aren’t French, they’re American. And they’ve acquired their amazing new French skills from Muzzy.”

In those same years, an early episode of The Simpsons saw Bart sent off to France, an ostensible student exchange meant to punish him for his constant pranks. He spends two months in the French countryside mistreated by a couple of crooked vintners who, in a plot point ripped from the headlines of the era, spike their product with antifreeze. When a shoeless and disheveled Bart finally spots a passing gendarme, he can’t make himself understood in English. Only when he reaches the brink of emotional breakdown does he realize that, unconsciously and effortlessly, he has internalized the French language: “Here, I’ve listened to nothing but French for the past deux mois, et je ne sais pas un mot. Attendez! Mais, je parle Français maintenant! Incroyable!”

All this convinced me, on some subconscious level, that to learn a foreign language meant almost by default to learn French.

More here.

W Patrick McCray in Aeon:

[C]onsider the Otts. Somewhere in Kansas during the early years of the Great Depression, Bill Ott and his daughter Lizzie did something different with their car. By removing the rear tyre and adding a drive belt, they built a homemade car-powered washing machine. As an ‘innovation thought leader’ at Davos or TED might say, the Otts hacked the automobile and re-invented the washing machine. Stated simply – they innovated. So how come you haven’t heard of the Otts? Because the Great White Man narrative of innovation ignores the critical role that anonymous, unrecognised people such as Bill and Lizzie Ott play in the incrementalism that is the real stuff of technological change. Most of the time, innovators don’t move fast and break things.

Over the past two centuries, almost all professional scientists and engineers have worked not to cut down the old trees of technologies and knowledge and grow new ones, but to nurture and prune the existing ones. In corporate-based science and technology, disruption is very rare, continuity rules, and makes change and advance possible. At different times in history, such disruption was even discouraged. At the great industrial labs of the early 20th century, companies such as General Electric (GE) or AT&T didn’t want their engineers and scientists to create excessive technological novelty – tens of millions of company dollars had been invested to build existing technological systems. Instead, research managers such as Willis R Whitney, head of GE’s research, sought incremental improvements that would marginally advance the company’s technologies and extend its intellectual property regime.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Tsenay Serequeberhan in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You approach philosophy, and in particular African philosophy, from a hermeneutical perspective, a tradition that you place Heidegger as being an important (though personally odious) figure. So, can you first say why you think a Heideggerian and Gadamerian hermeneutics is the best approach to contemporary African philosophy, especially given that it is a tradition heavily indebted to a specific Eurocentric and Germanic orientation in its beginnings?

TS:  In responding to this question, I would like to begin by pointing out the obvious. From an Africanist perspective—of any strip—most of the European philosophical tradition is rather odious. Indeed, as I have shown, by exploring destructively the historical-political perspectives of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, the views of these icons of the Occidental tradition are saturated with a Eurocentrism which they take to be consubstantial with the humanity of the human as such. And it is not only them. If one is willing to do the detailed destructive leg-work, one will see that the Occidental tradition is grounded on a metaphysics that privileges the Christian West. By contrast, Heidegger (his personal and odious political blunders not withstanding) articulates a question—the being question— that systematically undermines this tradition by putting it into question and pointing out that it, this tradition, has forgotten/covered-over what it means to be.

Now, an African philosophical perspective, that takes itself seriously, must engage the question of being—i.e., what to be means—for contemporary Africa, since colonialism, above all else, destroyed the differing modes of African being-in-the-world. Indeed, the struggle for African freedom (which presently has achieved only the status of formal independence) is aimed at precisely this; reclaiming the African experience of being from within the context of our contemporary world. This is what Amilcar Cabral means by “return to the source.”

More here.

Mark Ames in Jacobin:

Although a reactionary, Naipaul was never a lackey like today’s right-wing “intellectuals”; he never shied away from describing the brutality of colonialism (unlike bootlicking scum like Dinesh D’Souza, who never missed an opportunity to glorify his white right-wing masters for colonizing India, despite the tens of millions of Indians who died of famine in the Raj).

Naipaul continues:

And at last Cleaver stood up. He was tall beside the CIA man. He was paunchy now, even a little soft-bellied. His blue shirt had a white collar and his dark red tie hung down long. The touch of style was reassuring.

Somebody asked about his political ambitions. He said he wanted to get on the Berkeley city council. And then, inevitably, someone asked about his attitude to welfare. His reply was tired; he gave the impression of having spoken the words many times before. “I’m passionately opposed to the welfare system because it’s made people a parasitic dependency on the federal system. . . . I want to see black people plugged into the economic system. . . . Welfare is a stepping-stone to socialism because it teaches people the government is going to solve our problems.”

That was more or less it. It seemed to be all that was required of “Eldridge,” that statement about socialism and welfare. And soon the session was declared closed. A repeat began to be prepared. As in a fair, shows were done over and over again, and in between business was drummed up.

Naipaul is so affected by the sight of this conquered, lobotomized-Republican Eldridge Cleaver that he goes back again to Cleaver’s Black Panther days and finds himself not just empathizing but actually appreciating Cleaver’s literary and intellectual talents, something Naipaul couldn’t see back in the sixties:

. . . Away from the dark corner, Cleaver, placid, gray-haired, leaned against a wall. Two or three journalists went to him. But the very simplicity of the man on display made the journalists ask only the obvious questions, questions that had already been asked.

More here.

Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian:

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (“nobody’s land”), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early 20th century, a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of “a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]”. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored.

In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter “p” does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, “F” stands for “P”, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth.

More here.

From NPR:

Lennon-McCartney is likely one of the most famous songwriting credits in music. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote lyrics and music for almost 200 songs and The Beatles have sold hundreds of millions of albums. The story goes that the two Beatles agreed as teenagers to the joint credit for all songs they wrote, no matter the divide in work.

Over the years, Lennon and McCartney have revealed who really wrote what, but some songs are still up for debate. The two even debate between themselves — their memories seem to differ when it comes to who wrote the music for 1965’s “In My Life.”

If the songwriters’ memories (perhaps tainted by the mind-altering era they were writing in) have failed, how can this mystery ever be solved? Well, we can get by with a little help from math.

Mathematics professor Jason Brown spent 10 years working with statistics to solve the magical mystery.

More here.