Ed Pavlic in the Boston Review:

On the afternoon of April 4, 1968, James Baldwin was relaxing by the pool with actor Billy Dee Williams in a rented house in Palm Springs. Columbia Pictures had put Baldwin up there after commissioning him to write a film adaptation of Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965); Williams was Baldwin’s pick to play Malcolm. The men were listening to Aretha Franklin when the phone rang. Upon hearing the news that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, Baldwin collapsed in Williams’s arms.

Baldwin had known King since 1957, when the two had met in Atlanta. They had seen each other twice in the previous weeks. Both spoke at Carnegie Hall on February 23 in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois. For the event, Baldwin read aloud from his defense of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, an essay that had recently also been published in the Manchester Guardian. And on March 16, along with Marlon Brando, Baldwin introduced King at a fundraiser at Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel.

In Baldwin’s estimation, King was struggling to guide what remained of the Freedom Movement, contending with the growing appeal of younger militants such as Carmichael while traveling nonstop to support nonviolent action wherever it showed promise. The Freedom Movement had always been chaotic. But by 1968 it was a volatile tumble of organizations, personalities, and philosophies. All were entangled in an increasingly violent culture, one Baldwin had been warning the country about since the early 1960s, most notably in The Fire Next Time (1963).

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.

Several families of giant viruses are now known, and some of those giants have more than 1,000 genes; one has a whopping 2,500. (By comparison, some small viruses have only four genes.) Among those genes are ones involved in translation, the synthesis of proteins — a finding that came as a shock. “It appears that giant viruses are as complex as living organisms,” said Chantal Abergel, an evolutionary biologist at Aix-Marseille University in France.

That conclusion was reinforced last week when scientists reported in Nature Communications that they had found two new giant amoeba-infecting viruses in Brazil, which they named tupanviruses (after Tupã, a thunder god of the regional people). Tupanviruses are striking, and not just because they possess long tails: They have the most complete set of translation-related genes seen to date, including those for all 20 of the enzymes that determine the specificity of the genetic code. The only components they are missing are full-length ribosomal genes. Whether all those elements actually function still needs to be tested.

More here.

Molly Ringwald in The New Yorker:

Earlier this year, the Criterion Collection, which is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world,” released a restored version of “The Breakfast Club,” a film written and directed by John Hughes that I acted in, more than three decades ago. For this edition, I participated in an interview about the movie, as did other people close to the production. I don’t make a habit of revisiting films I’ve made, but this was not the first time I’d returned to this one: a few years back, I watched it with my daughter, who was ten at the time. We recorded a conversation about it for the radio show “This American Life.” I’ll be the first to admit that ten is far too young for a viewing of “The Breakfast Club,” a movie about five high-school students who befriend one other during a Saturday detention session, with plenty of cursing, sex talk, and a now-famous scene of the students smoking pot. But my daughter insisted that her friends had already seen it, and she said she didn’t want to watch it for the first time in front of other people. A writer-director friend assured me that kids tend to filter out what they don’t understand, and I figured that it would be better if I were there to answer the uncomfortable questions. So I relented, thinking perhaps that it would make for a sweet if unconventional mother-daughter bonding moment.

It’s a strange experience, watching a younger, more innocent version of yourself onscreen. It’s stranger still—surreal, even—watching it with your child when she is much closer in age to that version of yourself than you are. My friend was right: my daughter didn’t really seem to register most of the sex stuff, though she did audibly gasp when she thought I had showed my underwear.

More here.

Lucy Rock in The Guardian:

Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.

While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.

Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”

It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.

The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.

Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.

More here.

Simina Mistreanu in Foreign Policy:

Rongcheng was built for the future. Its broad streets and suburban communities were constructed with an eye to future expansion, as the city sprawls on the eastern tip of China’s Shandong province overlooking the Yellow Sea. Colorful billboards depicting swans bank on the birds — one of the city’s tourist attractions — returning there every winter to escape the Siberian cold.

In an attempt to ease bureaucracy, the city hall, a glass building that resembles a flying saucer, has been fashioned as a one-stop shop for most permits. Instead of driving from one office to another to get their paperwork in order, residents simply cross the gleaming corridors to talk to officials seated at desks in the open-space area.

At one of these stations, Rongcheng residents can pick up their social credit score.

In what it calls an attempt to promote “trustworthiness” in its economy and society, China is experimenting with a social credit system that mixes familiar Western-style credit scores with more expansive — and intrusive — measures. It includes everything from rankings calculated by online payment providers to scores doled out by neighborhoods or companies. High-flyers receive perks such as discounts on heating bills and favorable bank loans, while bad debtors cannot buy high-speed train or plane tickets.

By 2020, the government has promised to roll out a national social credit system. According to the system’s founding document, released by the State Council in 2014, the scheme should “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

More here.

Always
—for Charles Simic

Always so late in the day
In their rumpled clothes, sitting,
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters were hard at work.
They tilted their heads to one side, closing their eyes.
Then a house disappeared, and a man in his yard
With all his flowers in a row.
The great forgetters wrinkled their brows.
Then Florida went and San Francisco
Where tugs and barges leave
Small gleaming scars across the Bay.
One of the great forgetters struck a match.
Gone were the harps of beaded lights
That vault the rivers of New York.
Another filled his glass
And that was it for crowds at evening
Under sulphur yellow street lamps coming on.
And afterwards Bulgaria was gone, and then Japan.
"Where will it stop?" one of them said.
"Such difficult work, pursuing the fate
of everything known," said another.
"Down to the last stone," said a third,
"And only the cold zero of perfection
Left for the imagination." And gone
Were North and South America,
And gone as well the moon.
Another yawned, another gazed at the window:
No grass, no trees . . .
The blaze of promise everywhere.

by Mark Strand
from To Read a Poem
Harcourt Brace, 1992
.

Jason Cowley in New Statesman:

One summer afternoon in 1997, on assignment for the Times, I visited Bryan Magee at his flat in Kensington, west London. I read philosophy at university in the late 1980s and my understanding of the subject was transformed through watching Magee’s BBC Two series The Great Philosophers (1987) and then reading the subsequent book adapted from it. He is unsurpassed in the postwar period in Britain as a populariser of philosophy, and I learned more from the 15 episodes of that series as well as the book than from any lecture or seminar I attended. It achieved, as the philosopher and biographer Ray Monk has written, the near-impossible feat of presenting to a mass audience the recondite issues of philosophy without the loss either of accessibility or intellectual integrity. The format was extraordinarily simple. Magee sat alongside an eminent philosopher (“two boffins on a sofa” was how the Guardian’s witty TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith described the set-up in a favourable review) and together they interrogated the work of one of the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and so on. Magee asked the questions and clarified or summarised the replies. The series was revelatory – at least to me. So, this is how to read and talk about philosophy!

Magee and I chatted for a couple of hours that afternoon as bright sunshine streamed through the high windows of his sitting room. What I liked about his approach was his willingness to demystify philosophical problems by demonstrating that they were not theoretical but existential – about the nature of reality, encountered in the course of living. Yet as I prepared to leave that afternoon, Magee, who through choice lived alone having once been briefly married, said something that I’ve never forgotten. “I get the impression,” he said, “that you feel I am lonely and unfulfilled.” There was some truth in this: he did seem unfulfilled, and not because he lived alone. There was something restless in his manner: an irritable reaching after fact and reason, as Keats wrote in a different context. And he’d never committed himself fully to one discipline, preferring instead to occupy many different public roles as a broadcaster, politician, teacher, author and poet. And he told me – he was 67 at the time – that he believed himself still to be capable of “doing great things”. He used a German word to describe how he felt about his own potential, Machtgefühl. Macht = power, Gefühl = feeling or sense. So, in broad translation, Machtgefühl: a feeling of or having a sense of power. I have also seen the word translated as “feeling of superiority” (even though I haven’t seen macht translated as “superiority”).

As an impressionable younger man, I was pretty impressed by what Magee had achieved already. What more could he do or have done? Why even now such restlessness and vaulting ambition? In his book, Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), which is a history of Western philosophy told through his own intellectual journey, Magee offers what could be a partial answer to these questions when he describes how in his late thirties, despite having a passionate attachment to life, he was driven to the edge of mental illness, even suicide, by metaphysical terror. He learned to control his terror, which, though he did not say so, recalled Blaise Pascal’s fear of “immensity of spaces which I know not and which know not me”, through reading the writings of others, notably Arthur Schopenhauer. “I think the feeling of meaninglessness is worst of all, worse than the fear of death itself,” Magee said. “The feeling that nothing matters, that there’s no point to anything. Certainly, I have experiences, in the forms of extreme existential terror, states of mind that bordered on the intolerable.”

More here.

Bryan Appleyard in The Times:

Her parents were already splitting up when she was born. She was passed round the family. As a teenager, she started looking for the love she had been denied. There was Harry on the school basketball team. “That was love at first sight, and it was, like, ‘Whoom!’” She clutches her stomach at the memory. They went out for a year, then he started seeing other girls. “All of my relationships in the early days were broken hearts. I had a hard time.”

By the age of 16, she was living in St Louis with her sister, Aillene. In a club, they saw a band, Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. One day he grabbed a mic and sang, and he took her into the band and, after a while, seduced her, in spite of the fact that she didn’t fancy him at all.

“I felt awful. I didn’t know how to say no, because I needed the work. I think I wasn’t educated to handle that.”

They married in 1962, and she suffered years of violent abuse. But Ike made her a star. When he released Tina singing A Fool in Love in 1960, he unleashed one of rock’n’roll’s greatest stars on the world.

She sang and yelled through Ike’s arrangements, often with a black eye or a busted lip, or even worse. On stage, she was the most powerful creature anybody had ever seen; off stage, she was enslaved.

More here.

Adam Becker in Aeon:

The Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli suffered from a guilty conscience. He’d solved one of the knottiest puzzles in nuclear physics, but at a cost. ‘I have done a terrible thing,’ he admitted to a friend in the winter of 1930. ‘I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.’

Despite his pantomime of despair, Pauli’s letters reveal that he didn’t really think his new sub-atomic particle would stay unseen. He trusted that experimental equipment would eventually be up to the task of proving him right or wrong, one way or another. Still, he worried he’d strayed too close to transgression. Things that were genuinely unobservable, Pauli believed, were anathema to physics and to science as a whole.

Pauli’s views persist among many scientists today. It’s a basic principle of scientific practice that a new theory shouldn’t invoke the undetectable. Rather, a good explanation should be falsifiable – which means it ought to rely on some hypothetical data that could, in principle, prove the theory wrong. These interlocking standards of falsifiability and observability have proud pedigrees: falsifiability goes back to the mid-20th-century philosopher of science Karl Popper, and observability goes further back than that. Today they’re patrolled by self-appointed guardians, who relish dismissing some of the more fanciful notions in physics, cosmology and quantum mechanics as just so many castles in the sky. The cost of allowing such ideas into science, say the gatekeepers, would be to clear the path for all manner of manifestly unscientific nonsense.

But for a theoretical physicist, designing sky-castles is just part of the job.

More here.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in the New York Times:

A few years ago I traveled with a group of friends from the southern Yemeni port city of Aden to the capital of Sanaa in the north, taking the long coastal road that twists and curves around the bulge of Yemen’s southernmost tip. After passing the Bab el Mandeb strait, the road stretches along the seashore. Under a clear bright sky, the waters of the Red Sea shimmered and the sand glowed a warm ocher, the monotony interrupted only by an occasional fisherman’s shack, a small nomadic settlement or a bleached one-room mosque. Flat-topped trees looming in the distance suggested an African landscape.

Ahead of us lay the port of Mokha, or Al-Mukha in Arabic, where from the 15th century onward ships set sail with precious Yemeni coffee bound for Istanbul, London, Amsterdam and eventually New York — so much coffee that the word “mocha” became synonymous with it.

Those days are gone. In Yemen today, sweet chai masala is far more prevalent than coffee, and as my friends and I drove through the dusty lanes of Mokha that afternoon, the town appeared to be little more than a cluster of mud-colored hovels and shacks built from cinder blocks and metal sheets. Mokha’s only association with coffee was the half-ruined, ancient mosque of Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, the Sufi credited with bringing the coffee plant from Ethiopia to Yemen. Coffee seemed to have been relegated to history.

Enter Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the soft-spoken young Yemeni-American protagonist of Dave Eggers’s latest nonfiction book, “The Monk of Mokha,” who got into his head the mad idea of reviving that long-dead trade and exporting high-quality coffee arabica beans out of Yemen.

More here.

Bill Gates in his blog:

I talk about the developed and developing world all the time, but I shouldn’t.

My late friend Hans Rosling called the labels “outdated” and “meaningless.” Any categorization that lumps together China and the Democratic Republic of Congo is too broad to be useful. But I’ve continued to use “developed” and “developing” in public (and on this blog) because there wasn’t a more accurate, easily understandable alternative—until now.

I recently read Hans’ new book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. In it, he offers a new framework for how to think about the world. Hans proposes four income groups (with the largest number of people living on level 2):

This was a breakthrough to me. The framework Hans enunciates is one that took me decades of working in global development to create for myself, and I could have never expressed it in such a clear way. I’m going to try to use this model moving forward.

Why does it matter? It’s hard to pick up on progress if you divide the world into rich countries and poor countries. When those are the only two options, you’re more likely to think anyone who doesn’t have a certain quality of life is “poor.”

More here.

Michael J Sandel in The New York Times:

In recent decades, American public discourse has become hollow and shrill. Instead of morally robust debates about the common good, we have shouting matches on talk radio and cable television, and partisan food fights in Congress. People argue past one another, without really listening or seeking to persuade. This condition has diminished the public’s regard for political parties and politicians, and also given rise to a danger: A politics empty of moral argument creates a vacuum of meaning that is often filled by the vengeful certitudes of strident nationalism. This danger now hovers over American politics. More than a year into the presidency of Donald Trump, however, liberals and progressives have yet to articulate a politics of the common good adequate to the country’s predicament.

Robert B. Reich’s new book, “The Common Good,” is a welcome response to this challenge. One of the most prominent voices among progressives, Reich has written insightfully about the changing nature of work brought about by globalization and the growing inequality it has generated. He served as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, but in 2016 endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Reich’s book diagnoses the decline of the common good in American life and suggests ways of restoring it. He begins by observing that even the term has fallen into disuse: “The common good is no longer a fashionable idea. The phrase is rarely uttered today, not even by commencement speakers and politicians.” Reich defines the common good as consisting in “our shared values about what we owe one another as citizens who are bound together in the same society.” What binds us as Americans, he argues, is not birth or ethnicity but a commitment to fundamental ideals and principles: respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions, toleration of our differences and belief in equal political rights and equal opportunity.

More here.

Tony Malone at The Quarterly Conversation:

Asking who Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is may seem a little bizarre, especially to those with any kind of interest in Japanese literature. Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and even shortlisted the year before his death, Tanizaki is one of the more prominent figures in modern Japanese literature, and he is also well-known for his other endeavors, such as his translation of The Tale of Genji from old Japanese into the modern language.

But on a more personal level, the question is not quite as strange as it might initially appear. Readers often develop an image of a writer while working through their books, and many of the top Japanese authors seem easily classifiable, from the eccentric Kōbō Abe to the calm, traditionalist aesthete Yasunari Kawabata, the political protests of Kenzaburō Ōe, and, more vivid than most, Yukio Mishima’s unique blend of homoerotic and right-wing tendencies. But who exactly is Tanizaki?

To get a clearer picture of a writer, we can, of course look to his body of work, or at least those books that are available in translation. Major works like The Makioka Sisters, Some Prefer Nettles, Naomi, and Quicksand show a writer with a fascination for certain themes, including cultural differences between the Japanese regions and the sometimes-fraught relationships between the sexes.

more here.

Ian Sansom at The Guardian:

Patient X is told in Peace’s trademark fragmented, incantatory style, as distinctive in its way as, say, full-blown Henry James, using repetition, hyperbole and italicised interior monologue to create swirling hallucinatory effects. “In his study, sweating and bitten, Ryūnosuke felt like a flying fish, lucklessly fallen onto the dusty deck of a dry-docked ship, to die tormented by the screams of cicadas, tortured by the probosces of mosquitoes.” “You stare at your face, your skin and your skull. […] You are the magician, you are the sorcerer. In your tuxedo, in your top hat.”

Unlikely as it seems, Peace’s extraordinary, highly performative style is as well suited to depicting Akutagawa’s various struggles as a writer as it was to portraying the drama of being Brian Clough. “Down there was a man named Ryūnosuke, who was writing in Hell with all the other sinners. This man had once been an acclaimed author but he had led a most selfish life, hurting even the people who loved him.” This is essentially a novel about a man being confronted with “his selves, his legion of selves – son and father, husband and friend, lover and writer, Man of the East and Man of the West […] his selves and his characters too […] his many creations and, of course, his sins, his countless, countless sins: his pride, his greed, his lust, his anger, his gluttony, his envy and his sloth.”

more here.