Mark Polizzotti in the New York Times:

Translation is the silent waiter of linguistic performance: It often gets noticed only when it knocks over the serving cart. Sometimes these are relatively minor errors — a ham-handed rendering of an author’s prose, the sort of thing a book reviewer might skewer with an acid pen.

But history is littered with more consequential mistranslations — erroneous, intentional or simply misunderstood. For a job that often involves endless hours poring over books or laptop screens, translation can prove surprisingly hazardous.

Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous statement in 1956 — “We will bury you” — ushered in one of the Cold War’s most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other. But it turns out that’s not what he said, not in Russian, anyway. Khrushchev’s actual declaration was “We will outlast you” — prematurely boastful, perhaps, but not quite the declaration of hostilities most Americans heard, thanks to his interpreter’s mistake.

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta:

The theoretical physicist John Wheeler once used the phrase “great smoky dragon” to describe a particle of light going from a source to a photon counter. “The mouth of the dragon is sharp, where it bites the counter. The tail of the dragon is sharp, where the photon starts,” Wheeler wrote. The photon, in other words, has definite reality at the beginning and end. But its state in the middle — the dragon’s body — is nebulous. “What the dragon does or looks like in between we have no right to speak.”

Wheeler was espousing the view that elementary quantum phenomena are not real until observed, a philosophical position called anti-realism. He even designed an experiment to show that if you hold on to realism — in which quantum objects such as photons always have definite, intrinsic properties, a position that encapsulates a more classical view of reality — then one is forced to concede that the future can influence the past. Given the absurdity of backward time-travel, Wheeler’s experiment became an argument for anti-realism at the level of the quantum.

But in May, Rafael Chaves and colleagues at the International Institute of Physics in Natal, Brazil, found a loophole.

More here.

Ken Roth at the website of Human Rights Watch:

The endgame of the war in Syria is likely to come down to the northwestern province of Idlib, on the Turkish border, where some 2.3 million people are now trapped. As Russian-Syrian forces now finish retaking the smaller southwestern province of Daraa, Idlib will be the last significant enclave in anti-government hands. If Russian-Syrian forces resume pummeling the city and surrounding area from the air, its civilians could face the horrible choice of bunkering in place or desperately trying to cross the Turkish border, which has been effectively closed since 2015.

Recently, however, there is some evidence that Russia might be willing to act more constructively. Russian officials have been seeking reconstruction aid for Syria from Western donors. According to sources close to United Nations-brokered negotiations among the parties to the Syrian conflict, Russia has floated the idea of stopping the military advance on Idlib, and perhaps handing over to Turkey a degree of control similar to that now exercised by Turkey over the neighboring region of Afrin, in return for a major Western commitment to help reconstruct Syria’s devastated cities and infrastructure. That may give the West new leverage to stop the atrocities taking place in Syria. The question is how to use it.

More here.

Omar Waraich in The Atlantic:

At long last, Imran Khan is the prime minister of Pakistan. After winning the highest number of seats in parliament in this week’s election, the former cricket legend and philanthropist is now set to form a national government and possibly rule two of Pakistan’s four provinces, making him the country’s most powerful civilian leader in decades. It’s a remarkable reversal of fortunes for Khan, who for decades was mocked by his opponents as a naïve, inexperienced celebrity keen to perpetuate his own fame. Khan, however, remained determined. “I always fight till the last ball,” he told me a few years ago.

Khan won a special place in Pakistani hearts in 1992, when he led the national cricket team to victory at the World Cup. In a country where passions for cricket can reach near-religious fervor, the cricket team is seen as a metaphor for the government: full of rarely realized potential, but thwarted by poor leadership and appalling greed. After the World Cup, and Khan’s retirement, there were lurid allegations of ball-tampering and match-fixing. The sporting heroes were reduced to the status of grasping politicians. Khan’s fans wistfully recalled the glory days of his captaincy; now they hope he can do the same for the country.

More here.

Alex Preston in The Guardian:

This is a story about a book that just kept selling, catching publishers, booksellers and even its author off guard. In seeking to understand the reasons for the book’s unusually protracted shelf life, we uncover important messages about our moment in history, about the still-vital place of reading in our culture, and about the changing face of publishing. The book is Sapiens, by the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, published in the UK in September 2014. It’s a recondite work of evolutionary history charting the development of humankind through a scholarly examination of our ability to cooperate as a species. Sapiens sold well on publication, particularly when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2015. What’s remarkable about it, though, is that it’s still selling in vast numbers. In its first two and a half years of life, Sapiens sold just over 200,000 copies in the UK. Since 2017, when Harari published Homo Deus, his follow-up, Sapiens has sold a further half million copies, establishing itself firmly at the top of the bestseller lists (and convincingly outselling its sequel). Sapiens has become a publishing phenomenon and its wild success is symptomatic of a broader trend in our book-buying habits: a surge in the popularity of intelligent, challenging nonfiction, often books that are several years old.

…These are febrile, unpredictable times, with society facing new challenges and quandaries each day, from the rise of populist politics to the migrant crisis to climate change. Mark Richards, publisher at John Murray Press, sees the return to serious works of nonfiction as a response to the spirit of the age. “We’re living in a world that suddenly seems less certain than it did even two years ago, and the natural reaction is for people to try and find out as much about it as possible,” he says. “People have a hunger both for information and facts, and for nuanced exploration of issues, of a sort that books are in a prime position to provide.”

More here.

Brent Staples in The New York Times:

The suffragist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony seized control of the feminist narrative of the 19th century. Their influential history of the movement still governs popular understanding of the struggle for women’s rights and will no doubt serve as a touchstone for commemorations that will unfold across the United States around the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020.

…The famous suffrage convention convened in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 featured Stanton and her partner-in-arms, Lucretia Mott, in addition to the towering figure of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and dyed-in-the-wool supporter of women’s rights who was on his way to becoming one of the most famous speakers of the century. Were it not for Douglass’s oratory, the historian Lisa Tetrault tells us in “The Myth of Seneca Falls,” the “controversial” resolution demanding the vote for women might actually have failed.

It became clear after the Civil War that black and white women had different views of why the right to vote was essential. White women were seeking the vote as a symbol of parity with their husbands and brothers. Black women, most of whom lived in the South, were seeking the ballot for themselves and their men, as a means of empowering black communities besieged by the reign of racial terror that erupted after Emancipation. The tension escalated in the run-up to the 15th Amendment, a provision that ostensibly barred the states from denying Negro men the right to vote. Reasonable people could, of course, disagree on the merits of who should first be given the vote — women or black men. Stanton, instead, embarked on a Klan-like tirade against the amendment. She warned that white woman would be degraded if Negro men preceded them into the franchise. Admiring historians have dismissed this as an unfortunate interlude in an exemplary life. By contrast, the historian Lori Ginzberg argues persuasively that racism and elitism were enduring features of the great suffragist’s makeup and philosophy.

More here.

Round 3

—after Tyehimba Jess

Freedom is what you can buy
with a left jab & a right cross.

You’ve got the uppercut of a champ.
On a sweaty August night, you watch

Ramos v Ramos from the Olympic
on TV. You turn off the blaring AC,

want to hear the fighters’ tssiiuu tssiiuu, exhaling
as they attempt to break each other’s skin.

You’re light on your feet like Mando,
got Sugar’s hand speed. Freedom

is your girl by your side telling you to fight.
She brings your boxing license

in a lunch bag while you labor
at Lockheed, roots for you in Rocky

Lane’s garage on a Sunday
as you spar any man who dares.

She wipes your burning face
with a cool towel, the sinewed shape

of your body surfacing quick
after you trade in Budweiser for a jump

rope. Freedom is the rattle in your jaw
the first time you take a hook

to the gut, the way a glove slides
across your nose slick with Vaseline

as you size up the weary contender,
know that look in his eyes that whispers

across the canvas between rounds. Finish me
already, body shriveling in the corner, you’ve won.

by Eloisa Amezcua
from The Academy of American Poets

From KurzweilAI:

Lauren Groff in The New York Times:

There are books that enter your life before their time; you can acknowledge their beauty and excellence, and yet walk away unchanged. This was how I first read Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” after it was recommended in David Shields’ “Reality Hunger,” a thrilling manifesto that tries to make the case that our contemporary world is no longer well represented by realist fiction. While I loved “Sleepless Nights” on that first read — it is brilliant, brittle and strange, a book unlike any preconceived notion I had of what a novel could be — I moved on from it easily. I’ve lived two thousand and some odd days since, read hundreds of other books and published three of my own, all in a bright, hot landscape of somewhat-realist fiction.

The middle of the night has become a lonely stretch of time, especially in the past few years, with vastly increased anxiety — over climate change and politics and what lies in wait in my little sons’ future. I normally salve insomnia with reading, but few new books have felt so revolutionary or so brave as to be able to rock my tired brain to attention. Only the great ones remain: George Eliot’s infinite wisdom in “Middlemarch,” Jane Austen’s gracious and low-stakes sublimity, Dante’s “The Inferno,” which makes our world above seem downright kind. And strangely, of all the books I have reread to comfort myself, I have turned most often to Hardwick’s “Sleepless Nights,” not without a little bitter tang of irony because of its title. The book didn’t dovetail with my heart on the first reading, but the world has changed around me, and now I find myself hungering for its particularity, the steady voice of Elizabeth Hardwick a balm to my aching, vulnerable mind.

Elizabeth Hardwick grew up in Kentucky, a charming young woman with a dagger of a mind. She left for New York City after college and took up with the Partisan Review crowd, becoming best friends with Mary McCarthy and writing for The New York Review of Books from its inception. “Sleepless Nights,” her third novel, is unambiguously her chef d’oeuvre; it was published when she was 63, after a career of writing sharp, ingenious pieces of criticism and after her long marriage to (and divorce from, then reunification with) the poet Robert Lowell, whose profound psychological struggles and infidelities and plagiarism of Hardwick’s letters in his books must surely have tested her strength. As a result, “Sleepless Nights” feels elemental, an eruption of everything that had been slowly building up over decades. Though there are books that are distant kin to it — Renata Adler’s “Speedboat,” Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” — I have read nothing close enough to be called a sibling. This is rare; a feat of originality.

More here.

Alessandra Scotto di Santo in the Daily Express:

The Oxford-educated leader delivered his victory speech in Islamabad on Thursday declaring himself as the new Prime Minister, despite the official figures of the Pakistan election not yet expected until this evening.

During his victory speech, Mr Khan promised a welfare state system based on the British model.

He also pledged to “strengthen institutions” and “increase income” in order to “get more taxes and benefit the country”.

He said: “When I came into politics, I wanted Pakistan to become the kind of country that our leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted.

“This election is a historic election in Pakistan. In this election, people have sacrificed a lot.

“There was terrorism in this election. I want to especially praise the people of Balochistan, the kind of difficulties that they had to face. The way they came out to vote, I want to thank all those people.

“I saw the scenes on TV, the way the elderly and disabled came out in the heat to vote, the way overseas Pakistanis came out to vote. I want to praise them because they strengthened our democracy.”

More here.

David Robert Grimes in The Guardian:

Last week the Observer published an article by Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie on a disturbing topic – the idea that telecoms giants might collude to suppress evidence that wireless technology causes cancer. The feature was well written, ostensibly well researched, and deeply concerning. Its powerful narrative tapped into rich themes; our deep-seated fears about cancer, corporate greed, and technology’s potentially noxious influence on our health. It spread rapidly across social media – facilitated by the very object on which it cast doubt.

Yet as enthralling as Hertsgaard and Dowie’s narrative might be, it is strewn with rudimentary errors and dubious inferences. As a physicist working in cancer research, I found the authors’ penchant for amplifying claims far beyond that which the evidence allows troubling. And as a scientist deeply invested in public understanding of science, I’ve seen first-hand the damage that scaremongering can do to societal health. While it is tempting to rage into the void, perhaps this episode can serve as a case study in how public understanding of science can be mangled, and what warning signs we might look out for.

More here.

Joshua Roebke in Quanta:

In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.

More here.

Ranjit Hoskote in Open:

SAY ‘KASHMIR’, and most people would reach for images of stone-throwing teenagers and harried soldiers. Every other aspect of life has been eclipsed by the protracted violence. Or been devalued as insufficiently urgent by comparison with the fight-to-the-death between the State and militant groups. For many of us, the first, instinctive, tragic response on hearing a Kashmiri place name is to locate it on a list of towns and villages associated with some horrible atrocity, some act of brutalisation. Such a list of place names would not—thankfully, not yet—feature Burzahom (Burzahama), 16 km northeast of Srinagar, and Gufkral, near Tral in the troubled Pulwama district.

These names are infused with the region’s deep history. ‘Burzahom’ enshrines burza, from the Sanskrit bhurja, the birch tree, on whose bark some of the earliest extant Vedic manuscripts were written. ‘Gufkral’ is, literally, the ‘potter’s cave’, and we recall that the kröjü, the potter’s wife, played a pivotal role in the Tantric chakra puja or wheel ritual. These sites—along with others such as Begagund, Hariparigom, Jayadevi-Udar, Olchibag, Pampore, Panzgom, Sombur, and Thajiwor—are associated with quite another period in Kashmir’s long history, and stones other than those pelted by protestors in the streets of Srinagar and Anantnag.

Burzahom and Gufkral are among the oldest Neolithic or New Stone Age sites in South Asia.

More here.

Marina Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine:

WHEN PEOPLE DESCRIBE feeling “angry” or “distressed” or “dejected,” what do they really mean? Psychologists vigorously debate whether the words individuals use to describe their emotions actually reflect fixed states in the brain, or are merely convenient fictions for talking about feelings. “Are anger, sadness, and disgust” really distinct, universal emotions, asks Erik Nook, a fourth-year doctoral student in clinical psychology, “or is it the case that, because we have learned different concepts for different emotions, we produce those emotions?” Nook particularly wants to understand why some people seem to have more precise, granular emotional concepts—they distinguish among feeling disappointed, frustrated, or discouraged, for example—while others describe a general, undifferentiated negativity.

Disentangling what emotional concepts mean, and how people understand them, is part of Nook’s work with Leah Somerville, an associate professor of psychology whose lab focuses on how the mind develops in adolescence. A new paper in Psychological Science by Nook, Somerville, and colleagues at the University of Washington examines how emotional differentiation (people’s ability to separate emotional experiences into different types) changes from childhood into early adulthood.

Their subjects, 143 recruits ranging in age from five to 25, were each shown a set of images designed to elicit negative emotions, such as a baby crying or a cemetery, and asked to rate on a scale from 0 to 100 how strongly they experienced five different feelings—angry, scared, disgusted, sad, and upset. Measuring emotion is a tricky business, Nook concedes, and image prompts are probably not a perfect way to evoke emotions. But the photographs come from a standard repertoire of images used in psychological research (so the results can be compared to other work in the field), and, he adds, there’s “a lot of good evidence that showing people pictures makes them feel things.”

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

A whole lot of books on the brain are published these days and you can read yourself into a coma trying to make sense of their various messages. So it was with my usual low-burn curiosity that I starting reading The Mind Is Flat by British behavioral scientist Nick Chater. At least the title is intriguing. But as I started reading it, I perked right up. Maybe that’s because it starts with a long riff on Anna Karenina and asks us to plumb the motivations of her suicide. Can we explain them? What if the great steam engine slammed on its brakes and Anna didn’t die? Would she be able to explain her own motivations to a psychologist while convalescing in a Swiss sanatorium?

Chater writes it makes no difference that Anna is a fictional character. We would go through the exact same mental peregrinations with a real person. In fact, the surviving real person, struggling to find clarity in the muddle of her feelings, would only be telling the psychologist a story about why she wanted to take her life. Chater’s point is a bold one: There is no deep truth about motivations to be found. “No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives,’ not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find,” he writes. “The inner, mental world, and the beliefs, motives, and fears it is supposed to contain is, itself, a work of the imagination.”

More here.

And so it goes