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.

Christopher Ross at Literary Review:

Anyone seriously interested in contemporary Japan, in particular its theatre, cinema and struggles with national identity since the American occupation, will most likely have at some time read Ian Buruma. There are only a few scholars, journalists, critics and commentators writing about Japan in English worth reading, and Buruma is one. So I wondered what I might find in this short book, subtitled ‘A Memoir’ presumably to distinguish it from strict autobiography. Buruma can be very funny: his novel about cricket, Playing the Game, contains an unforgettable character employed by an exceedingly fat maharaja whose sole and unlikely job is, when signalled, to raise a buttock of the prone prince so he might fart more comfortably. There are many comparably improbable images, usually sexual, often harrowing, in this account of Buruma’s six years in Japan, from 1975 until 1981. It might be an unwise choice of gift for your maiden aunt.

Buruma was twenty-four when he arrived in Tokyo in 1975, having by this time rejected a legal career. After acquiring a Japanese girlfriend in Amsterdam, he became interested in avant-garde theatre and cinema (his uncle was the director John Schlesinger) and decided to try his luck in Japan, obtaining a grant to study film at Nichidai in Ekoda.

more here.

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

May Swenson
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harcourt, 1996
.

An interview with Tim Rogan, author of The Moral Economists, over at the Princeton University Press blog:

What’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. In The Moral Economists, Tim Rogan reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Examining the moral cornerstones of a twentieth-century critique of capitalism, The Moral Economists explains why this critique fell into disuse, and how it might be reformulated for the twenty-first century. Read on to learn more about these moral economists and their critiques of capitalism.

You begin by asking, ‘What’s wrong with capitalism?’ Shouldn’t we start by acknowledging capitalism’s great benefits?

Yes, absolutely. This was a plan for the reform of capitalism, not a prayer for its collapse or a pitch for its overthrow. These moral economists sought in some sense to save capitalism from certain of its enthusiasts—that has always been the project of the socialist tradition out of which these writers emerged. But our question about capitalism—as about every aspect of our social system, every means by which we reconcile individual preferences to arrive at collective decisions—should always be ‘What’s wrong with this?;’ ‘How can we improve this?;’ ‘What could we do better?’ And precisely how we ask those questions, the terms in which we conduct those debates, matters. My argument in this book is that our way of asking the question ‘What’s wrong with capitalism?’ has become too narrow, too focused on material inequality, insufficiently interested in some of the deeper problems of liberty and solidarity which the statistics recording disparities of wealth and income conceal.

More here.

Caltech scientists have created a strain of bacteria that can make small but energy-packed carbon rings that are useful starting materials for creating other chemicals and materials. These rings, which are otherwise particularly difficult to prepare, now can be "brewed" in much the same way as beer.

Emily Velasco at the Caltech website:

The bacteria were created by researchers in the lab of Frances Arnold, Caltech's Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, using directed evolution, a technique Arnold developed in the 1990s. The technique allows scientists to quickly and easily breed bacteria with the traits that they desire. It has previously been used by Arnold's lab to evolve bacteria that create carbon-silicon and carbon-boron bonds, neither of which is found among organisms in the natural world. Using this same technique, they set out to build the tiny carbon rings rarely seen in nature.

"Bacteria can now churn out these versatile, energy-rich organic structures," Arnold says. "With new lab-evolved enzymes, the microbes make precisely configured strained rings that chemists struggle to make."

In a paper published this month in the journal Science, the researchers describe how they have now coaxed Escherichia colibacteria into creating bicyclobutanes, a group of chemicals that contain four carbon atoms arranged so they form two triangles that share a side. To visualize its shape, imagine a square piece of paper that's lightly creased along a diagonal.

More here.

John Powers at NPR:

Near the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a big black monolith appears in an African desert, leaving a group of prehistoric ape-men standing there baffled. And that was pretty much the reaction that greeted the film itself when it premiered 50 years ago this week.

Nobody was quite sure what to make of it. The critics were harsh, with Varietydismissively saying flatly, "2001 is not a cinematic landmark." It's hard to imagine being more wrong.

You see, even if you don't like the movie — and I don't, particularly — the one thing that's undeniable is that it's a cinematic landmark. Not only was it the No. 1 box office movie of 1968 — young people flocked to it to have their minds blown — but in international polls, 2001 routinely ranks as one of the top 10 films of all time. An avant-garde art film dressed in Hollywood money, it unknowingly foreshadowed the future of movies as effects-driven blockbusters.

I saw it again a few days ago, inspired by Michael Benson's terrific new book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece. Though Benson is afflicted with what a friend calls the "Stanley syndrome" — he never stops telling you that Kubrick is a "genius" and "a perfectionist" — his book is filled with nifty stories. My favorite is when the control-freak director asks Lloyd's of London if they could insure him in case NASA spoiled 2001's plot by discovering extraterrestrial life before the movie came out.

More here.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

Tragically, predictably, infuriatingly, we’re again mourning a shooting —this time at YouTube’s headquarters — even as the drive for gun safety legislation has stalled in Washington. Polls show that nine out of 10 Americans favor basic steps like universal background checks before gun purchases, but the exceptions are the president and a majority in Congress.

Usually pundits toss out their own best arguments while ignoring the other side’s, but today I’m going to try something new and engage directly with the arguments made by gun advocates:

You liberals are in a panic over guns, but look at the numbers. Any one gun is less likely to kill a person than any one vehicle. But we’re not traumatized by cars, and we don’t try to ban them.

It’s true that any particular car is more likely to be involved in a fatality than any particular gun. But cars are actually a perfect example of the public health approach that we should apply to guns. We don’t ban cars, but we do work hard to take a dangerous product and regulate it to limit the damage.

We do that through seatbelts and airbags, through speed limits and highway barriers, through driver’s licenses and insurance requirements, through crackdowns on drunken driving and texting while driving. I once calculated that since 1921, we had reduced the auto fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent.

Sure, we could have just said “cars don’t kill people, people kill people.” Or we could have said that it’s pointless to regulate cars because then bicyclists will just run each other down. Instead, we relied on evidence and data to reduce the carnage from cars. Why isn’t that a model for guns?

More here.

Emily Temple at Literary Hub:

Fun fact about Marguerite Duras: in addition to being a brilliant novelist, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and playwright, she was, for many years, a committed communist. And she was very good at it. She joined the French Communist Party in 1944. She was a communist, writes Laure Adler in Marguerite Duras: A Life, “because it was the party of the working classes, because it defended the poor and the pure. But she was a particular kind of communist, a euphoric, utopian, idealistic communist.” She became fairly militant about it—knocking on doors, selling copies of L’Humanité, recruiting whomever she could find, and eventually became the secretary of her local cell. Sometimes she wrote short stories on the backs of communist pamphlets.

Her companions, Robert Antelme (her husband) and Dionys Mascolo (her lover)—by the way, did everyone know that Duras lived with both her husband and her lover and everyone was fine with it? I could not love her any more—joined too. But soon Duras began to have doubts; the Moscow trials and Stalinism, in particular, distressed her, and a new friendship with an alluring Italian named Elio Vittorini showed them a new model: “the free communist though not necessarily Marxist intellectual, the affective, protesting communist.”

more here.

Tim Stanley at Literary Review:

Everyone has a favourite president, but I’m suspicious of anyone who says it’s Lyndon Baines Johnson. Yes, he was the politician’s politician – one of the greatest legislators in US history – but he was also a monster. Kyle Longley recounts an episode when journalists were badgering Johnson to explain America’s war in Vietnam. LBJ unzipped his fly, pulled out his sizeable member and said, ‘This is why!’ They say the personal is political, but that’s taking things too far.

Longley’s new book examines a year in Johnson’s life – his final one as president – in microscopic detail. At first, you wonder why he bothers. The opening chapter deals with the writing of the State of the Union Address for 1968, an overlong speech never quoted today. The toing and froing of Johnson and his advisers makes for dull reading. But if you can stay the course as far as the third chapter, you start to get the point. Johnson’s final year in office was a fruitless struggle to get anything done at all: a cycle of trial and disaster. The State of the Union Address, in which Johnson tried to rededicate the nation to social reform, was delivered on 17 January and went down fairly well. On 30 January, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive. For the first time, Americans really contemplated defeat in Vietnam. Johnson’s plans fell apart.

more here.

Edward White at The Paris Review:

Killing was in the Sanson blood. The first of the family to act as the royal executioner was Charles-Henri’s great-grandfather, who was coerced into taking the position once his father-in-law had passed away. Over the next century, three other Sanson men inherited the role, before Charles-Henri succeeded in 1778. He was thirty-nine at the time, but already a capital punishment veteran. When his father had succumbed to a debilitating illness in 1754, Charles-Henri had taken over his duties on the scaffold, at the age of just fifteen. The boy exhibited astonishing qualities: a wisdom way beyond his years, and a stomach strong enough to see him through the strangulations, beheadings, and burnings that were his workaday life. While still a teenager, he conducted the last hanging, drawing and quartering in French history, inflicted upon Robert-François Damiens for an attempt on the King’s life. Sanson would later look back on this as a simpler time, when the worst sin imaginable was killing a king.

All we know of Sanson suggests he was an eloquent and thoughtful man. Erudite, well-read, and multi-lingual, he took his duties as a public official with the utmost seriousness. He may have felt, as his grandson would later claim, constrained and frustrated by the family business, eager to attain higher office but prohibited by the taint of the hangman’s noose.

more here.

Elegy for a Dead Labrador

Here there may be, in the midst of summer,
a few days when suddenly it’s fall.
Thrushes sing on a sharper note.
The rocks stand determined out in the water.
They know something. They’ve always known it.
We know it too, and we don’t like it.
On the way home, in the boat, on just such evenings
you would stand stock-still in the bow, collected,
scouting the scents coming across the water.
You read the evening, the faint streak of smoke
from a garden, a pancake frying
half a mile away, a badger
standing somewhere in the same twilight
sniffing the same way. Our friendship
was of course a compromise; we lived
together in two different worlds: mine,
mostly letters, a text passing through life,
yours, mostly smells. You had knowledge
I would have given much to have possessed:
the ability to let a feeling—eagerness, hate, or love—
run like a wave throughout your body
from nose to tip of tail, the inability
ever to accept the moon as fact.
At the full moon you always complained loudly against it.
You were a better Gnostic than I am. And consequently
you lived continually in paradise.

Read more »

From KurzweilAI:

MIT researchers have invented a system that allows someone to communicate silently and privately with a computer or the internet by simply thinking — without requiring any facial muscle movement. The AlterEgo system consists of a wearable device with electrodes that pick up otherwise undetectable neuromuscular subvocalizations — saying words “in your head” in natural language. The signals are fed to a neural network that is trained to identify subvocalized words from these signals. Bone-conduction headphones also transmit vibrations through the bones of the face to the inner ear to convey information to the user — privately and without interrupting a conversation. The device connects wirelessly to any external computing device via Bluetooth.

Maria Dimitrova in the London Review of Books:

In Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language (2015), Julia Kristeva is cast as a spy for Bulgarian intelligence, responsible for the death of Roland Barthes. Last Tuesday, the Bulgarian Dossier Committee, in charge of examining and declassifying communist-era State Security records, announced that Kristeva had been an agent of the First Chief Directorate.

On Thursday, Kristeva denied the allegations, describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘completely false’. On Friday, the Dossier Commission published her entire dossier – nearly 400 pages – on their website. Yesterday, Kristeva issued another statement, insisting she had ‘never belonged to any secret service’ and had not supported ‘a regime that I fled’. She criticised the ‘credence given to these files, without there being any questioning about who wrote them or why’:

This episode would be comical, and might even seem a bit romantic, were it not for the fact that it is all so false and that its uncritical repetition in the media is so frightening.

The dossier consists of a ‘Work’ file (documents attributed to Kristeva), a ‘Personal’ file (documents collected about Kristeva) and forms and cards registering her as a ‘secret collaborator’ (dated 14 November 1969) and an ‘agent’ (21 June 1971). A faint inscription in pencil next to her name on one of the forms says ‘Refugee’: a dangerous status for her to have, especially for her relatives. ‘The contact with our authorities should be kept alive,’ Kristeva’s father advises her in a letter. ‘People should feel that in you and your sister they have grateful, patriotic fellow citizens. Such a contact will make our life here easier.’

More here.

Katia Moskvitch in Quanta:

Some laws aren’t meant to be broken. Take the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy — a measure of disorder — never decreases in an isolated system. Glass shatters, cream disperses in coffee, eggs scramble — but never the reverse. This is why heat always moves from hot to cold: Doing so increases the overall entropy. The law is so fundamental to our physical reality that some physicists believe it is responsible for the apparent flow of time.

Yet quantum systems, as ever, have a way of introducing puzzling exceptions to what seem like inviolable rules. A team of physicists has made heat flow spontaneously from a cold quantum object to a hot one. The experiment underscores the intimate relationships between information, entropy and energy that are being explored in the nascent field of quantum thermodynamics.

The team, based in Brazil, took a molecule that consisted of a carbon atom, a hydrogen atom and three chlorine atoms. They then generated a magnetic field to align the nuclear spins of the two quantum particles, or “qubits” — the carbon and hydrogen nuclei. This caused the nuclei to become linked, or correlated, turning them into a single, inseparable whole, a two-qubit quantum state.

These correlations made the puzzling behavior possible.

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the New York Times:

Often the best way to understand opposing viewpoints is to imagine the proponents in dialogue. How would Euripides have responded to Plato, his Athenian contemporary, concerning the philosopher’s banishing poets from his utopia? Or picture George Eliot cornering Arthur Schopenhauer to challenge his argument that women are unsuited for artistic and intellectual greatness. The history of ideas is filled with pairs of contemporary minds who missed the opportunity to confront each other point blank, leaving us to dream up hypothetical exchanges.

But sometimes our imaginations aren’t necessary. Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, though they never met in person, were articulate in their assessments of each other. In their disdain for the power-hungry abuses of the church, the grotesque superstitions it encouraged in the laity and the equally grotesque scholasticism it encouraged in the era’s theologians, they might have been natural allies; instead they became implacable foes. Each, in opposing the other, clarified his own point of view. In the process, the two great reformist movements of their day — the Renaissance, embodied in Erasmus, and the Reformation, embodied in Luther — were torn asunder. Michael Massing’s riveting “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind” is devoted to this fateful parting of ways.

More here.

Will Knight in MIT Technology Review (from six months ago but worth reading):

Google’s AI chief isn’t fretting about super-intelligent killer robots. Instead, John Giannandrea is concerned about the danger that may be lurking inside the machine-learning algorithms used to make millions of decisions every minute.

“The real safety question, if you want to call it that, is that if we give these systems biased data, they will be biased,” Giannandrea said before a recent Google conference on the relationship between humans and AI systems.

The problem of bias in machine learning is likely to become more significant as the technology spreads to critical areas like medicine and law, and as more people without a deep technical understanding are tasked with deploying it. Some experts warn that algorithmic bias is already pervasive in many industries, and that almost no one is making an effort to identify or correct it (see “Biased Algorithms Are Everywhere, and No One Seems to Care”).

“It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

Black box machine-learning models are already having a major impact on some people’s lives. A system called COMPAS, made by a company called Northpointe, offers to predict defendants’ likelihood of reoffending, and is used by some judges to determine whether an inmate is granted parole. The workings of COMPAS are kept secret, but an investigation by ProPublica found evidence that the model may be biased against minorities.

More here.

Alexis Okeowo in The New Yorker:

For Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, anger is the most useful emotion. Anger was what motivated her to write for newspapers as a teen-ager and to make documentary films as an adult, and it is the reaction she habitually tries to provoke in audiences. Even when she is on camera, she cannot resist interrupting her own narration to register outrage at a particular injustice. Obaid-Chinoy is the best-known documentary filmmaker in Pakistan. Her films, which have won two Oscars and three Emmys, range from reportage on xenophobia in South Africa to an inquiry into the ethics of honor killings in Pakistan. “Anger is necessary for people to go beyond not liking what they see,” she said. “I need enough people who watch my stuff to be moved, and to be angry, and to do something about it.”

On a recent afternoon in Karachi, where Obaid-Chinoy lives, she visited a girls’ school in Shireen Jinnah Colony, a slum, to talk to students and to show some of her films. A volunteer administrator at the school, Tanvir Khwaja, her head covered with a pink dupatta, welcomed Obaid-Chinoy into a vast auditorium decorated with silver and green stars, where rows of eager girls in lilac-hued hijabs sat whispering. Some were as young as eight, while others were in their last year of secondary school. Khwaja had warned Obaid-Chinoy that most of the girls came from a “very, very conservative background.” Obaid-Chinoy, who is thirty-nine, wore a black shalwar kameez; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was pinned back. She is a natural reporter, watchful and carefully expressive, with a heightened impulse to gauge her companion’s mood; she has a habit of smiling quickly to offer reassurance during an uneasy silence. She is also unabashedly confident: at a party in Islamabad, I saw her tell a male guest, within moments of meeting him, that she was an Oscar winner. Soon afterward, she challenged another man, a politician, about his views on China’s business dealings with Pakistan. The politician smiled tightly and congratulated her on having her film about honor killings screened at the Prime Minister’s office. It was a shame, he added, that it showed the country in such a negative light.

Obaid-Chinoy is accustomed to this kind of mixed reaction to her work. Her critics in Pakistan have suggested that her films stoke outrage by confirming the prejudices of Western audiences. Obaid-Chinoy argues that these critics, many of whom are male, are in fact reacting against her own power as a woman, and against the misogyny she is exposing. The position of women in Pakistani society has been disputed since the country was established, in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s vision for the republic involved a separation of religion and politics, the equality of all Pakistanis, and the nurturing of an intelligentsia. He spoke out against “the curse of provincialism,” and said in a speech, “It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners.” In the decades since Jinnah’s death, in 1948, those in power, most notably General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled from 1977 to 1988, have eroded women’s rights, often in efforts to enforce a conservative, Islamic ideology. Although many Pakistani women attend college and pursue careers in the arts, law, and politics, they also face an entrenched patriarchy that dictates their choices when it comes to schooling, work, marriage, and self-presentation. Poor women have even less freedom. More than half of Pakistani women are illiterate, and many suffer domestic violence. They struggle to have their legal rights upheld, and face accusations of bringing dishonor upon their families if they report a rape or file for a divorce. Through her work, Obaid-Chinoy believes, she is combatting men’s power to define women’s lives.

More here.