Alasdair Lees in The Independent:

What would Shakespeare have made of Trump? It’s one of the impish and fascinating questions at the heart of this nimble and intriguing study of the Bard’s lurid gallery of vicious despots. Greenblatt is the Harvard Shakespeare expert who co-founded new historicism, the lit-crit practice that seeks to place works in their historical context. The 45th president is not mentioned anywhere by name in Tyrant, but the analogies are clear.

Shakespeare, Greenblatt explains, had to speak of authoritarianism in code, lest he lose his head on charges of treason. The Elizabethan period was a “fragile” era politically, haunted by the shadow of Roman Catholic terrorism. Greenblatt’s strategies, though, are transparently forthright, perhaps to the point of being a little forced, but they are never less than illuminating. Tyrant was borne out of a New York Times article Greenblatt wrote just before the 2016 US election; he confesses to having been moved to extend it into a book after the election result confirmed his “worst fears”.  The ogres Greenblatt focuses on – Macbeth, Richard III, Lear, Coriolanus and Leontes from A Winter’s Tale – unsurprisingly exhibit a checklist of the obvious Trumpian traits: narcissism, impulsiveness, indecency, incompetence. They peddle in lies and, in the case of Coriolanus, collusion with foreign powers.

These parallels, though, while playfully toothsome, are less striking than Greenblatt’s other preoccupations. These include the role of the masses in the tyrant’s rise, the opportunistic and self-deceiving “enablers” in his court (who are invariably swiftly dispensed with), and how for the despot there is “remarkably little satisfaction”, or serenity, once the throne is taken. In a passage that could equally be applied to the Brexit vote, Greenblatt hones in on the complicity of the masses, those who “take vicarious pleasure in the release of pent-up aggression, in the black humour of it all, in the open speaking of the unspeakable”. The masses for a period share the tyrant’s “gleeful contempt” for the common good. “Something in us enjoys every minute of his horrible ascent to power,” Greenblatt argues.

More here.

Hattie Garlick at the TLS:

Refashioning history to include its countless heroines is essential work, long overdue. But what of the future? Will these books, as the introduction to Herstory implores, truly encourage young girls to “take inspiration from these . . . amazing women and girls and shake things up!”? Perhaps. Last year, Science magazine published research investigating the age at which girls begin to think that they are less intellectually brilliant than boys. The study involved reading two stories to children between the ages of five and seven. One, they explained, was about a “really, really smart” person; the other, a “really, really nice” one. Afterwards, the children were asked which was about a girl, and which about a boy. At five, the boys were sure the “really, really smart” character was a boy, the girls equally adamant it was a girl. By six, however, something had changed. In the space of twelve months, the girls had become 20 per cent less likely to think that a clever character could share their gender. According to Dario Cvencek, a research scientist at the University of Washington, the results would be more depressing still had the hero of the book been a mathematician. Children absorb the gender prejudices on display in their environments and reading matter from the age of around five, he says – especially the idea that girls don’t do numbers. The stereotypes portrayed in their reading material become their own stereotypes and, worse still, the limits of their ambitions. The most powerful way to combat this, as the psychologist Nilanjana Dasgupta has found, is through providing successful female role models to small girls before the disease sets in, as a form of “stereotype inoculation”.

more here.

Darryl Pinckney at the NYRB:

Cornel West is right or I am on his side, another old head who believes that history is human-made. Afro-pessimism and its treatment of withdrawal as transcendence is no less pleasing to white supremacy than Booker T. Washington’s strategic retreat into self-help. Afro-pessimism threatens no one, and white audiences confuse having been chastised with learning. Unfortunately, black people who dismiss the idea of progress as a fantasy are incorrect in thinking they are the same as most white people who perhaps believe still that they will be fine no matter who wins our elections. Afro-pessimism is not found in the black church. One of the most eloquent rebuttals to Afro-pessimism came from the white teenage anti-gun lobbyists who opened up their story in the March for Our Lives demonstrations to include all youth trapped in violent cultures.

more here.

Daniel Rayson in Nautilus:

It is not uncommon that I lie about what I do for a living. When meeting strangers, basic introductions quickly turn into conversational quicksand for me. Whether posed for identification, categorization, assessment of social status, or to fill an empty conversation, inquiries about work are difficult to avoid. I know that such questions are innocent attempts to situate me somewhere in the atmosphere; we use the occupational compass to direct us toward an identifiable point in each other’s lives. I know this, and yet the job question, when it comes, often has me squirming for answers. My eyes dart away from the pair in front of me expecting a straightforward reply.

The question triggers a peculiar type of “flight or fight response,” as if the topic of what I do for a living poses a personal threat. Most of the time I dodge the issue or flee entirely. At other times, I will stay and face the question in the easiest way possible, avoiding the pitfall of pretending to be an accountant in front of the local manager of H&R Block. First, I say I’m a doctor. In response to the inevitable question, “What kind …?” I’ll sometimes blankly respond, “Oh, a general practitioner—a family doctor …” After all, I was one of those once, so it’s not really a bold-faced lie. I know about triaging colds and flu, about vaccinating kids and monitoring benign conditions. I know about diagnostic skills at risk of becoming blunted by seeing so many “walking well” and about desperately hoping not to miss a serious illness cloaked in a veneer of nonspecific anxieties and nondescript sensations and pains. But, in truth, I am no longer one of those.

When I don’t escape or lie—there is no way to predetermine when the urge for honesty will suddenly strike—I answer, “I’m a cancer specialist,” and then feel the immediate lurch to the edge of a conversational cliff. This answer can be as shocking to my conversation partner as when I passingly ask someone, “How’s it going,” expecting a bland “not bad,” but instead have to respond to, “Oh just horrible—this has been one of the worst weeks of my life.” A momentarily stunned, uncomfortable silence follows. Responses to my profession confession vary and often include vignettes of how the person has been touched by cancer in the present or past, whether through the closest of loved ones or the most distant of acquaintances. When no such vignette is forthcoming, the conversation often turns to “how close ‘they’ are to a cure” or to imaginative hypotheses surrounding etiologies and best preventive methods. The possible collusion of industry and government in preventing the dissemination of a simple, natural cure also comes up commonly. Inevitably, there is a tinge of disbelief: Most people know someone who has been impacted by a malignancy, but have never met someone who deals with the onslaught of disease and despair day in and day out.

More here.

.
…. I plucked off petal after petal, as if you were a rose
in order to see your soul
but I didn’t see it.
………. While all around
—horizons of fields an seas—
everything, all the way to infinity,
was filled with an essence,
immense and alive

by Juan Ramón Jiménez
from The Poet and the Sea
White Pine Press, 2009

~~~~~~~~~

…. Te deshojé, como una rosa,
para verte tu alma,
y no la vi.
……….. Mas todo en torno
—horizontes de tierras y de la mares—
todo, hasta el infinito,
se colmó de una esencia
inmensa y viva.

Jonny Thakkar in The Point:

A few months into a cushy postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, where the walls were a soothing yellow and poached salmon was a staple, it dawned on me that I could reasonably be considered an arsehole. This wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to me: after all, I am the kind of Brit who insists on the difference between a donkey, otherwise known as an ass, and a backside, otherwise known as an arse. But on this occasion my reflection was prompted not by looking in the mirror or by hearing a recording of my voice but by the experience of being a philosopher in a non-philosophical setting. Calling yourself a philosopher already makes you sound a bit of an arse, but the fact remains that I have spent most of my professional life studying, discussing, writing and teaching philosophy—and it is this, I submit, that has made me liable to appear a right royal arsehole.

More here.

Nick Lane in Nature:

Few subjects have afforded more room for doubt, or caused more harm through false certainty, than heredity. In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, an illuminating survey of the concept through history, science writer Carl Zimmer shows that scientists have often clung to travesties of the truth — and that we are still in danger of doing so.

The book is a beguiling narrative of more than 600 pages. It blends popular science and history with a personal journey, culminating in a plea for a nuanced view of heredity. Zimmer ably navigates some of the most fraught developments in research, politics, religion and race: from eugenics, slavery and genocide to IQ and genetic engineering in humans. He combines a deep personal empathy with clear scientific understanding. For instance, in presenting controversial figures such as Henry Goddard — who coined the term ‘moron’ and helped to foster the US eugenics movement in the early twentieth century — he examines their hopes, fears and delusions, before dispassionately gutting their scientific errors and the disastrous consequences.

Compellingly, Zimmer delves into his own genome. After having it sequenced at 90% coverage by Illumina in San Diego, California, he got his hands on the raw data, and approached experts such as Dina Zielinski of the New York Genome Center to help him unravel his genes’ secrets. Zimmer uses this backstory to illustrate how genomes break up into millions of short stretches of DNA, each with its own history from around the world.

More here.

Evan Mandery in Politico:

If you wanted to feel the full force of the intellectual whirlpool that is American politics in 2018, the place to go on April 2 was the Village Underground, a nightclub beneath West 3rd Street, where Alan Dershowitz, the longtime Harvard Law professor and civil liberties lion, was debating the future of American democracy on the side of President Donald Trump.

Opposing him were a National Review writer and a former FBI agent, arguing that the special investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign is well within the bounds of American law. Dershowitz, along with a conservative columnist for the Washington Examiner, was making the case that the Mueller investigation is dangerous to our entire system. In the room, which is normally a comedy club, it was impossible to shake the feeling that something was off. Two years ago, it would’ve seemed far more natural for the quartet to swap partners and switch sides.

On our way out, my wife and I were handed free copies of Dershowitz’s newest book, “Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy,” in which Dershowitz writes that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is subjecting Trump to “the legal equivalent of a colonoscopy.”

The woman behind us in line took her free book, turned to her husband and asked, “What happened to Alan Dershowitz?”

More here.

Tanya Gold at Harper’s Magazine:

Of course, I am happy for those I have never met. Prince Henry (Harry), who lost his mother at twelve—lost her to monarchy, and the occasionally murderous intrusions that now define it—found a woman to hold him and, I think, he laid his heart before her. She was touched by him—Harry is a lonely prince, a semi-mythical being—and she picked it up. It looked real. I hope it is real, even as I resent having an opinion on a stranger’s love. That this was televised in an event as emotionally grasping as the funeral that incited the very need we thought we saw sated on Saturday should be obvious, but it was not mentioned. It should be the final, impolite word on the royal wedding.

But the people want more, and so does the monarchy. They feast, unhappily, on each other. Britain is a co-dependent state that is not in recovery from its past.

more here.

Nick Ripatrazone at The Millions:

Read a few lines of a talented poet charged with God—from the otherworldly lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins on forward to Akbar himself—and you see what faith can do to language. There’s a lift. A particular lean. A curious mixture of confidence and humility. A strangeness borne of awe. Peter O’Leary’s book of criticism, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, considers what it means when religious poets continue to write such charged verse when the broader world reacts with skepticism, and perhaps derision, in response to such devotion.

The subject matter is in capable hands. O’Leary’s a poet himself, but he also knows how to curate rather than perform—he offers a healthy amount of sample lines to let the poets shine. He’s also comfortable with God talk. Few things sour many contemporary critics of poetry more than authentic and earnest religious devotion. The problem isn’t always illiteracy of religious texts—and a working knowledge of theology might be a bit much to ask.

more here.

Graeme Wood at The American Scholar:

Wolfe’s preposterous clothing was a constant reminder of a core journalistic truth: to be an observer requires distance, and a writer’s alienation from his subject is not to be annihilated but managed and, most often, treasured. His was a much better pose. There are few worthwhile memoirs of the space program or the High (in at least two senses) Counterculture. But The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test are as close to imperishable as journalism ever gets. In both cases, Wolfe examined a scene with a subjectivity and style exclusive to himself. He saw things as Tom Wolfe, with his own gift of studied by playful detachment.

He was the Great Detached. If that phrase sounds like an esoteric Hebrew name for God, then you are not far off: much of what felt new about Wolfe’s style was the way it coopted the omniscient voice. Readers had been trained to think of omniscience as the exsanguinated black-and-white prose to be found on the front of any daily newspaper.

more here.

Matt Goldberg in Collider:

The Tale is one of the bravest and smartest movies I’ve ever seen. Writer-director Jennifer Fox dives into the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager, and proceeds to interrogate her own memories with unflinching clarity. Furthermore, rather than simply stick to her background as a documentary filmmaker and try to tell her story in that medium, she wisely decides to make a narrative feature that gives her the tools to more effectively dive into both the abuse she suffered and the investigation to find the truth behind her own memories. With an outstanding cast, led by the incomparable Laura Dern, at her disposal, Fox weaves a captivating and gut-wrenching story about the lies told to us, and the lies we tell ourselves. Documentarian and professor Jennifer (Dern) comes home from working on a project to get a frantic series of voicemails from her mother Nettie (Ellen Burstyn). While cleaning out some boxes, Nettie discovered a story Jennifer wrote when she was thirteen recounting a romantic relationship she had with her running coach Bill (Jason Ritter) and riding instructor Mrs. G (Elizabeth Debicki). Although Jennifer acknowledges she had a relationship with an older man, it isn’t until she starts reading her own story closer that she starts to discover her own flawed assumptions, thinking she was more mature when pictures show a small, plain 13-year-old Jenny (Isabelle Nélisse). Rattled by how her memories may have betrayed her, Jennifer starts an investigation to uncover the truth behind her original story.

In the age of #MeToo, The Tale shows how every story of sexual abuse is unique even if the predators always prey on more than one victim. Fox is fearless in showing the details of her story, and I imagine that some scenes could trigger viewers with a history of abuse, whether it’s the way that Mrs. G and Bill work to lower Jenny’s defenses or the deeply disturbing sexual intercourse between Bill and Jenny. Fox presents these moments because the whole point of The Tale is about a character discovering the truth as best she can remember, and to shy away from upsetting moments would be a disservice to herself and to other victims of sexual abuse.

More here.

Giorgia Guglielmi in Nature:

Bertrand Routy earned a lamentable reputation with Parisian oncologists in 2015. A doctoral student at the nearby Gustave Roussy cancer centre, Routy had to go from hospital to hospital collecting stool samples from people who had undergone cancer treatments. The doctors were merciless. “They made fun of me,” Routy says. “My nickname was Mr Caca.” But the taunting stopped after Routy and his colleagues published evidence that certain gut bacteria seem to boost people’s response to treatment¹. Now, those physicians are eager to analyse faecal samples from their patients in the hope of predicting who is likely to respond to anticancer drugs. “It was an eye-opener for a lot of people who couldn’t see the clinical relevance of gut microbes,” says Routy, who is now at the University of Montreal Health Centre in Canada.

Cancer has been a late bloomer in the microbiome revolution that has surged through biomedicine. Over the past few decades, scientists have linked the gut’s composition of microbes to dozens of seemingly unrelated conditions — from depression to obesity. Cancer has some provocative connections as well: inflammation is a contributing factor to some tumours and a few types of cancer have infectious origins. But with the explosive growth of a new class of drug — cancer immunotherapies — scientists have been taking a closer look at how the gut microbiome might interact with treatment and how these interactions might be harnessed. After preliminary findings in mice and humans revealed that gut bacteria can sway responses to such drugs, scientists started trying to decipher the mechanisms involved. And researchers are launching a handful of clinical trials that will test whether the gut microbiome can be manipulated to improve outcomes.

Some proponents say that strategies to mould the microbiome could be game-changing in cancer treatment. “It’s a smart place to be,” says Jennifer Wargo, a surgeon–scientist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. But others are worried that the move to the clinic is premature. William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, calls the idea “phenomenally interesting”, but adds: “I have some anxiety about the notion that only beneficial effects are possible.”

More here.

Before Dark

From the porch at dusk I watched
a kingfisher wild in flight
he could only have made for joy.

He came down the river, splashing
against the water’s dimming face
like a skipped rock, passing

on down out of sight. And still
I could hear the splashes
farther and farther away

as it grew darker. He came back
the same way, dusky as his shadow,
sudden beyond the willows.

The splashes went on out of hearing.
It was dark then. Somewhere
the night had accommodated him

—at the place he was headed for
or where, led by his delight,
he came.

by Wendell Berry
from Collected Poems.
North Point Press, 1985

Annie Zaidi in Scroll.in:

There is nothing solid or pragmatic about happiness, grief, love. A successful business, however, has to be run along sensible lines, and a businessman must be able to count on his employees just as he can count on the food on his plate actually being there. It is at this junction of reason, driven by the evidence of one’s physical senses, and the other, intangible, unbelievable world that Tabish Khair places his new novel.

A slender, brisk narrative, it takes its title, Night Of Happiness, from “Shab-e-baraat”, a festival when some Muslim sects visit graveyards, light incense and consecrate halva in memory of ancestors and other departed family members. Naturally, a reference to the dead suggests a paranormal setting. This is, however, not so much a paranormal tale as it is a story about the struggle to retain one’s sense of reality, to remain centred, and about trust.

The narrator is an “import-export” businessman, Anil Mehrotra, who boasts a company several employees and an international clientele. His right hand man is Ahmed, a man who is both dignified and dependable, reticent and hard-working almost to an extreme. An unhurried, deeply self-respecting man, and therefore also commanding respect. He has unusual linguistic abilities, and is at ease with cultural differences. But he will no more bow to a mullah’s dictates than he will give up on his own faith.

More here.

Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong:

The past month has seen quite a few events and articles celebrating the 100th anniversary of Richard Feynman’s birth (see for example here, here, here and here). Feynman was one of the great figures of twentieth century physics, with a big intellectual influence on me and on many generations of particle theorists. In particular, his development of the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and the Feynman diagram method for calculating and understanding what quantum field theories are telling us are at the center of how we have learned to think about fundamental physics and apply it to the real world.

When I first started studying physics, in the seventies, Feynman was a major figure to physicists, but not that well-known outside the subject. After the 1985 appearance of the book of anecdotes “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and his 1986 role in the report on the Challenger disaster (followed by more anecdotes in the 1988 “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”) Feynman became a huge public figure. The Physics section of any book store that carried science books would often have nearly a whole shelf of books by and about him, with the only competition the shelf of books about Einstein (the Hawking shelf didn’t get going until a bit later).

I avidly read the Feynman anecdote books when they came out and was suitably entertained, but I also found them a bit disturbing.

More here.

Khaled A Beydoun in The Guardian:

When will Muslims step up and reform Islam?” asked the self-identified “progressive and intersectional” college student, following a presentation of my book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear, at New York University.

The student wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt and a colorful assortment of pins and patches on his camouflage backpack calling for “equality now” and claiming that “The future is female”. The young man, by way of verbal admission and the myriad of political statements he proudly wore, was a political progressive. And indeed, a representative of a swelling population of leftists who embrace progressive principles yet see Islam as inimical to liberal values and in conflict with American identity.

The left is saturated with pundits and self-styled public intellectuals who disseminate discourses that Islam is monolithic; that Muslims must choose between liberal principles and their faith, and, echoing the college student I encountered at in March, a religion that is in need of “reform”.

A diverse and eclectic litany of prominent Islamophobes occupies the left. These liberal Islamophobes, like Bill Maher and Sam Harris, weaponize atheism as an ideology that not only discredits the spiritual dimensions of Islam but also demonizes it in line with longstanding orientalist, political terms.

More here.

Karin Jones in The Times:

It’s not possible to justify my liaisons with married men; I won’t even try. I’m not proud that, for a few years while living near London, I entered into casual relationships with married men. But I don’t regret it. What I learnt from these men warrants discussion, even though I’ve recently been publicly condemned for doing so in The New York Times.

I want to know the wife’s perspective. But what I have is the story told by their husbands. It’s an issue we might all want to talk about, say, annually, the way we get the yearly MOT to keep the family car from breaking down.

I was adrift when I separated from my husband of 23 years. We had only been living in the UK for just over a year, so I wasn’t close enough to the kind of people you commiserate with after you’ve torn down the walls that once sheltered you both physically and mentally. When I set up accounts on Tinder and OkCupid, I was too raw to want to date anyone looking for a relationship. Instead I looked for no-strings-attached company. A fair number of men who responded to my profile were married; sometimes headless or faceless or insouciantly grinning in their photos. But all of them came to me first. I simply responded. Sure, that makes me complicit, but I felt drawn to married men, perhaps because I instinctively needed what they were also seeking: affection and sex with someone uninterested in attachment. Just a few hours of levity.

I know this is dicey because you can’t always control your emotions when body chemicals mix, but I reasoned that because they had wives, children and mortgages, they wouldn’t go overboard with their affections. We were safe bets for each other.

More here.