Category: Recommended Reading

Indifference & The End of Literary Lives

Posted on by Robert Fay

by Robert Fay

Sergio Pitol

The great Mexican writer Sergio Pitol died in April. He was 85, a recipient of the Cervantes Award—the highest honor for works in the Spanish language—and in his The Art of Flight trilogy, he writes of his 20 years living and working in Europe, “the thread that ties those years together, I’ve always known, is literature…for many years, my experience traveling, reading, writing merged into a single experience.” The particular life he lead as “a man of letters,” is now unrepeatable, even by today’s best writers. And it’s not a lack of talent or courageousness, but of the inevitable consequence of cultural indifference. Literature must be respected or at least feared to have relevance, and the resulting electricity from this attention is the crucial spark for great lives, competitive coteries, great books, and perhaps most critical of all, a savvy reading public who awaits genius, demands it, and who lives for the spirit of the logos.

The Art of Flight, written in Pitol’s final years, demonstrates a freedom of form that many writes yearn to explore, but find they have neither the courage nor the savoire faire to take on. The trilogy is a pastiche of memoir, travel reportage, literary criticism, dream diaries and stolen glances from Pitol’s working notebooks. In 1960 after scattered work as a translator, Pitol joined the Mexican Foreign Service as a cultural attaché and served for over 20 years at a number of posts, including Moscow, Barcelona, Belgrade and Rome. His career afforded him the privilege to meet an enviable array of international writers, artists, academics and diplomats, an opportunity well beyond what Mexico City and its regional, Spanish-language literary milieu could have provided. Read more »

The Dangers Of The Unitary Executive Theory

Posted on by Anitra Pavlico

by Anitra Pavlico

In April, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted favorably on a bill aimed at protecting Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by the President without good cause. Some Republican senators doubted the legality of the bill, based on a one-judge dissent in a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 1988, Morrison v. Olson. One senator even considered himself “bound” by Justice Scalia’s dissent in that case. A dissent in a case in Supreme Court, or any court, is the losing argument and cannot bind anyone to follow its reasoning. Was Scalia’s opinion correct and the rest of the Supreme Court justices made a terrible mistake? Maybe shooting down the bill is what the framers of the Constitution–because this is in fact a constitutional question–would have wanted? Well, no. As constitutional scholar Victoria Nourse writes, “Cloaking themselves in Scalia’s lonely and incorrect dissenting opining, senators opposing the Integrity Act are attempting to upend the Constitution by embracing a dangerous constitutional argument contrived to render the President immune from scrutiny.”

The so-called unitary executive theory animates critics’ claims that the bill impermissibly curtails the President’s authority. Under this theory, any attempt to limit the President’s control over the executive branch is seen as unconstitutional. You may recall it rearing its head during George W. Bush’s presidency, as its adherents relied on it to justify the infamous “torture memo” drafted by White House counsel John Yoo, who argued, “The historical record demonstrates that the power to initiate military hostilities, particularly in response to the threat of an armed attack, rests exclusively with the President. [. . .] Congress’s support for the President’s power suggests no limits on the Executive’s judgment whether to use military force in response to the national emergency.” Carried to its extreme, the unitary executive theory could potentially undermine a democracy. Read more »

Between the Lines

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Try it: try talking about the subject of reading without drifting off into how the Internet has changed the way we absorb information. I, along with the majority of people I know whose reading habits were formed long before the advent of digital magazines and newspapers, Google Books, blogs, RSS feeds, social media, and Kindle, usually feel I’m only really reading when it’s printed matter, under a reading lamp, with the screen and phone turned off. But the reality is that I do a vast amount of reading online.

Unsurprisingly, my attention span has gotten jumpy: I click from one article to another, suddenly remember a mail I need to write, consult the online dictionary on a browser that has at least thirty-five open tabs, and before I reach my destination, I see that I have several new Facebook notifications and check these first. By the time I click on the dictionary, a half hour has been lost and I can no longer remember the word I intended to look up. The result of all this is the humbling admission to a new handicap: the need for an Internet access-blocker with a Black List.

For my seventeen-year-old son and his growing brain, the potential for relentless distraction is far more pernicious. This is a kid who was read to every night of the first thirteen years of his life for at least an hour at bedtime, more often than not longer, and yet the dominance of smart-phone technology in his young life means that the greater part of his access to the world of ideas now takes place online.

I’m not going to explore the anxiety of parenthood in the digital age or argue the pros and cons of the Internet here; I myself am far too entrenched to ponder a life without it. But what strikes me is the profound change we’ve undergone in our collective ability to think critically. In an era of fake news and AI technology sophisticated enough to produce video footage that looks like the real thing, the conclusion I’ve come to is this: the ability to read is not the only thing we have to salvage for the next generation; we have to save, from oblivion, our ability to read between the lines. Read more »

On the Road: Rapa Nui

Posted on by Bill Murray

by Bill Murray

Polynesia could swallow up the entire north Atlantic Ocean. It’s that big.

Only half of one per cent of Polynesia is land, and 92 per cent of that is New Zealand. Then there’s Tonga and Samoa, the Cook and Hawaiian islands, the French possessions, and back in its own lonely corner, Rapa Nui, the famous Easter Island. Four and a half hours flying time to South America and six hours to Tahiti, Rapa Nui is a mote, a tiny place that feels tiny, forlorn, a footnote.

How in the world did proto-Polynesians cast their civilization from Papua New Guinea all the way to Rapa Nui in canoes, with thousand year old tech, sailing against prevailing winds and all odds?

If you think about it at all, you might suppose Rapa Nui was an accidental discovery, storm-damaged canoes drifting off course, perhaps, or voyages of exile dashed upon obscure rocks. Who imagines resolute, purposeful voyages of discovery on stone-age ships no match for the vastness of the sea?

I do. I fancy single-minded voyages of exploration carried out by well-provisioned scouts sailing with, say, a month’s food, who set out in the more difficult direction, “close to the wind.” If no land were found in a fortnight, when half the food was gone, they could sail home downwind, faster. Read more »

Others’ Thoughts on Science and the Humanities

Posted on by Richard Passov

by Richard Passov

Researching the history of a particular computer has taken me along an arc spanning George Boole to Claude Shannon. By some measures the works of these men combine to give us our modern, programmable computer. 

Shannon recast Boole’s Calculus of Thought into the modern symbolism for computer logic. And while that work has been labeled as the most important master’s thesis of the 20th century, ten years later Shannon would release a more profound work – his Theory of Information.

Profound works are sometimes simple and perhaps this is why a few mathematicians derided Information Theory. Shannon, secure in his finding, generally ignored his critics. Among his many endeavors and though unnecessary, John Pierce took up Shannon’s defense. That’s how I found his writings. 

Sometimes men have been concerned with religion, sometimes with mathematics and philosophy, sometimes with exploration, trade and conquest, sometimes with the theory and practice of government, sometimes with ancient learning, sometimes with the arts. —John R. Pierce in Electrons, Waves and Messages

*       *      *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Pierce and Shannon worked together at Bell Labs. By the time Shannon came aboard Pierce was a mainstay, having risen to director of “…all research concerned with Electrical Communications.” Read more »

Return to The Atomic Cafe

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Will you know what to do when the atomic bomb drops? This question, and others like it, are vividly on display in the 4K restoration of Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty’s 1982 documentary, The Atomic Café. Having seen the movie when it was first released (my kids’ reaction to this information was “of course you did”) I was determined to return to my roots. But, this being 2018, I took full advantage of technologies not available in the Neolithic Age: I quickly went online and bought two tickets for a night when the filmmakers themselves would be there for a Q&A. Then I fired off a few text messages to friendly liberals of a similar vintage to see who else was going, because you really don’t go to one of these things without a posse.  

I was not to be disappointed.  Six of us converged on the newly renovated, but still decidedly funky Film Forum.  First, my 26-year old son, who spared me the dubious honor of being the only person in the audience in a suit, white shirt, and dark tie (we looked like refugees from a Book of Mormon casting call). Then four of the like-minded, three of whom could be described as gracefully aging hipsters (wearing, respectively, a pair of gray braids, a great-looking gray Van Dyke, and a graying inside out T-shirt) and finally, my pal (and liberal conscience) Melinda.  

I could write books about Melinda, and I should, because there aren’t enough Melindas in the world.  She’s a Yellow Dog Texas Democrat who brought with her to New York an indestructible accent, an odd affinity for driving minivans as basic transportation in a car-unfriendly city, and an inexhaustible capacity for good works. If there was a protest anywhere, Melinda knew about it, probably organized it, and occasionally got arrested for it. There are still places that are off-limits to her, for a variety of Deep State-ish reasons. Greenwich Village, of course, is not one of them. Melinda is the genuine article.

But I digress. The movie is the thing you came to see, and the movie is what you should get. Read more »

Sunday, August 19, 2018

BDS: how a controversial non-violent movement has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian debate

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Nathan Thrall in The Guardian:

The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel – known as BDS – has been driving the world a little bit mad. Since its founding 13 years ago, it has acquired nearly as many enemies as the Israelis and Palestinians combined. It has hindered the efforts of Arab states to fully break their own decades-old boycott in pursuit of increasingly overt cooperation with Israel. It has shamed the Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah by denouncing its security and economic collaboration with Israel’s army and military administration. It has annoyed the Palestine Liberation Organization by encroaching on its position as the internationally recognised advocate and representative of Palestinians worldwide.

It has infuriated the Israeli government by trying to turn it into a leper among liberals and progressives. It has exasperated what is left of the Israeli peace camp by nudging the Palestinians away from an anti-occupation struggle and towards an anti-apartheid one. It has induced such an anti-democratic counter-campaign by the Israeli government that it has made Israeli liberals fear for the future of their country. And it has caused major headaches for the Palestinians’ donor governments in Europe, which are pressured by Israel not to work with BDS-supporting organisations in the Palestinian territories, an impossible request given that nearly all major civil society groups in Gaza and the West Bank support the movement.

More here.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution owes more to his garden than the Galápagos

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Ben Garrod in The Conversation:

It’s one of the greatest stories in science, right up there with Neil Armstrong’s small step on the moon and Jane Goodall’s overhaul of ideas on non-human relationships. When naturalist Charles Darwin first set foot in the Galápagos, an archipelago of volcanic islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean, he was just moments away from a revelation so significant it would change the way we look at life on Earth forever.

His arrival in the Galápagos was a seminal point in a five-year voyage. Once there, finches and giant tortoises were believed to provide the eureka moment from which our understanding of evolution through natural selection would emerge, evolve and flourish.

At least this is the story most of us know. But it’s not quite the full story. For those willing to read his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, you might be surprised to discover that the Galápagos does not form its central premise at all. In fact, those iconic finches barely get a mention. In terms of revelatory moments in the Galápagos, the various tortoises and mockingbirds held more importance for Darwin.

More here.

Sisterhood and sexual empowerment in Kenya

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Lucy Purdy in Positive News:

Nobody wants to feel helpless or desperate. The days of charities showing people as one-dimensional victims are – hopefully – numbered. Theo Sowa, chief executive of the African Women’s Development Fund, has said: “When people portray us as victims, they don’t want to ask about solutions. Because people don’t ask victims for solutions.”

These Kenyan girls and women have been asked. They are among the people who work with health development charity Amref Health Africa to try to make pregnancy safer and improve women’s access to reproductive health services.

One of the portraits is of 13-year-old Lilian, who bravely avoided female genital mutilation (FGM) by going to school where she knew she would be safe. Now, instead of simply getting married, which happens to so many girls after FGM, she dreams of being a pilot.

In the same region – Loitoktok, where there is a large Maasai community – Amref is helping local women develop alternative rites of passage ceremonies: rituals that maintain tradition without hurting girls.

More here.

Call Me Heena: Hijra, The Third Gender

Posted on by Azra Raza

Shahria Sharmin in lensculture:

“I feel like a mermaid. My body tells me that I am a man but my soul tells me that I am a woman. I am like a flower, a flower that is made of paper. I shall always be loved from a distance, never to be touched and no smell to fall in love with.”

—Heena, 51, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2012

“Hijra,” a term of South Asia which have no exact match in the modern Western taxonomy of gender, designated as male at birth with feminine gender identity and eventually adopts feminine gender roles. They are often grossly labeled as hermaphrodites, eunuchs, transgender or transsexual women in literature. presently a more justified social term for them is the “Third Gender.” Transcending the biological definition, hijras are a social phenomena as a minority group and have a long recorded history in South Asia. However, their overall social acceptance and present conditions of living vary significantly in countries from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Perhaps the Hijras in Bangladesh face the worst situation, which forces a good number of them to leave their motherland and migrate to India. Instead of coming from various social and family backgrounds, Hijras feel the strongest sense of belonging with their own group—fellow Hijra. These groups give them the shelter of a family and the warmth of human relationship. Outside the group, they are discriminated and scorned almost everywhere. Traditionally, these individuals earned their living based on the cultural belief that Hijras can bless one’s house with prosperity and fertility. Because of the shared geographical and cultural history of the subcontinent, this particular Hindu belief slowly made room in the Muslim culture of this land. Times have changed and Hijras have lost their admired space in the society. Now they make a living by walking around the streets collecting money from shopkeepers, bus and train passengers or through prostitution.

I, like almost everyone else in my society, grew up seeing them as less than human. Their habits, way of life, and even looks marked them as different and deviant, as if a living testimony of biological aberration. Then I met Heena, who showed me how wrong I was. She opened her life to me, made me a part of her world and helped me to see something beyond the word “Hijra.” She made me understand her and other members of her community, as the mothers, daughters, friends and lovers that they actually are.

More here.

‘A different way of living’: why writers are celebrating middle-age

Posted on by Azra Raza

Lara Feigel in The Guardian:

When Viv Albertine performs her 2009 song “Confessions of a Milf” live, she alternates between two voices. There’s the saccharine lisp of a brainwashed housewife chanting “home sweet home”, and there’s the raging chant of an angry punk proclaiming that “if you decide one day that you’ve had enough”, you can walk away. Though swans and seahorses mate for life, “we ain’t so nice”. In the 70s, when Albertine performed with her punk band, the Slits, she appeared fully immersed in her performance of exuberant anger, but also strikingly unformed, too busy bouncing and shouting to hold the gaze of her audience. Then, she retained the vulnerability of her younger self, but there was a steeliness underlying it. Now she stares out at us, no longer interested in hiding.

…In her recent memoir To Throw Away Unopened, Albertine describes deciding to return to music after more than a decade as a housewife, ending her marriage as a result. In the past century of fiction, the middle-aged male protagonist has sprawled and rutted his way to a kind of bathetic greatness in the hands of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. The middle-aged woman has appeared far less often as a protagonist questing for a style and identity, but that is changing fast. Albertine is one of several writers this year to tackle lives that follow divorce and the menopause. Lavinia Greenlaw’s forthcoming novel is a middle-aged love story. Deborah Levy uses the moment of transition from one life to another to fashion a new story about femininity in her “living autobiography” The Cost of Living. Like Albertine’s, Levy’s career began in an era when the young insisted on their own youthfulness. What’s striking is that both writers have found a way to incarnate their middle-aged selves in new voices that don’t reject the spontaneity of punk but reinvent it in a quieter yet no less vigorous form.

More here.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

The Conqueror Who Longed for Melons

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Mark Hay in Atlas Obscura:

ZAHIR AL-DIN MUHAMMAD, THE 16TH century Central Asian prince better known as Babur, is renowned for his fierce pedigree and proclivities. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he used military genius to overcome strife and exile, conquer northern India, and found the Moghul dynasty, which endured for over 300 years. He was a warlord who built towers of his enemies’ skulls on at least four occasions. Yet he was also a cultured man who wrote tomes on law and Sufi philosophy, collections of poetry, and a shockingly honest memoir, the Baburnama, in which he appears to us as one of the most complex and human figures of the early modern era.

Through the Baburnama, we learn that Babur was versed in courtly Persian speech and custom, yet nonetheless a populist who built strong ties with nomads and championed the vernacular Chagatai Turkic tongue in the arts. He was a pious man, but was also given to libertine escapades, including massive, wine-fueled parties.

But the first—and arguably one of the most culturally consequential—personal details he reveals is that he was a food snob.

More here.  [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Cross species transfer of genes has driven evolution

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

From Phys.org:

Far from just being the product of our parents, University of Adelaide scientists have shown that widespread transfer of genes between species has radically changed the genomes of today’s mammals, and been an important driver of evolution.

In the world’s largest study of so-called “jumping genes”, the researchers have traced two particular jumping genes across 759 species of plants, animals and fungi. These jumping genes are actually small pieces of DNA that can copy themselves throughout a genome and are known as transposable elements.

They have found that cross-species transfers, even between plants and animals, have occurred frequently throughout evolution.

Both of the transposable elements they traced—L1 and BovB—entered mammals as foreign DNA. This is the first time anyone has shown that the L1 element, important in humans, has jumped between species.

More here.  [Thanks to Yohan John.]

American Breakdown

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

David Bromwich in the London Review of Books:

A seasonal report on the Trump presidency had better begin with a disclaimer. Anything one says is sure to be displaced by some entirely unexpected thing the president does between writing and publication. This has happened once already, with the Putin-Trump press briefing in Helsinki and the strange spectacle it afforded: the almost physical manifestation of Trump’s deference to Putin. It may happen again, whether as a result of the volume of sabre-rattling or the onset of war with Iran; a decision to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel who is investigating meddling in the 2016 election; a shutdown of the federal government to extort funds for the wall with Mexico; a sudden intensification of the president’s attacks on his political enemies and accusers in pending court cases.

These eruptions of breaking news are not only possible but certain to occur, because Trump comports himself not as a president or even a politician, but as a reality TV host. He is a showman above all. In a process where the media are cast as reviewers, and voters as spectators, the show is getting bad reviews but doing nicely: the clear sign of success is that nobody can stop talking about the star. He keeps up the suspense with teasers and decoys and unscheduled interruptions, with changes in the sponsors and the supporting cast and production team. The way to match the Trump pace is by tweeting; but that is to play his game – a gambit the White House press corps have found irresistible. Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an infectious vulgarity, and with it comes the power to make his enemies act with nearly as little self-restraint as he does. The proof is in the tweets.

More here.  [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

The Consolations of Physics

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Graham Farmelo at The Guardian:

Why do wealthy societies spend good money on projects such as this? Higgs bosons and images from the Voyager spacecraft don’t do anything useful and don’t make any of us richer, as Radford acknowledges, though he has no time for such philistinism. His heart and his mind are with the Roman thinker Boethius, who wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, from which Radford takes several of his cues. He stands shoulder to shoulder with Boethius: philosophy can be consoling “even if it is limited to just thinking about thinking”. Beneath his jocularity, Radford is an unapologetic intellectual.

He glories in telling the remarkable story of the first direct observation of gravitational waves in 2015, almost a century after Einstein foresaw them. A huge team of astronomers detected the waves via a signal that lasted 20 milliseconds and caused a disturbance smaller than a millionth of the width of an atom – a result of two massive black holes merging violently in outer space more than a billion years ago.

more here.