John Simon in The Weekly Standard:

"There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest." If it were not for that “my,” you might think this written by some philistine—after all, The Importance of Being Earnest is the wittiest comedy in the English language. To be sure, Oscar Wilde, who was right about a lot of things, could also be wrong about others, such as his involvement with “renters,” young male prostitutes, some of whom testified against him at his fateful trial. But Nicholas Frankel, author of Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, is only passingly concerned with Wilde’s pre-trial life; his book is mostly about the three and a half years between Wilde’s release from prison in 1897 and his pitiful, untimely death. Frankel, who previously edited the uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, has done a thorough job of digging through the plethora of material about Wilde that has been committed to paper. His purpose is to refute the traditional view of Wilde ending as a broken martyr, a victim of hypocritical Victorian morality. As explained on the book’s dust jacket, Frankel aims to give us a Wilde who pursues his “post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.” Wilde was not successful in the attempt. As Frankel shows, Wilde was unable to produce new work during these final years—with the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by far his best poem, about his and his fellow prisoners’ reactions to the hanging of a wife-killer.

When you come right down to it, why shouldn’t Wilde have been unrepentant? He had paid heavily for a crime not unpopular in Britain, albeit generally practiced more clandestinely. How it must have rankled that, for example, Lord Rosebery remained free. Wilde, as he emerges from Frankel’s book, was basically a kindly, warm-hearted chap. He himself, and everyone he encountered, attested to his talk being superior to his writings, delightful as they are. Many people live by their wits, but the exiled Wilde largely lived by his wit alone. No wonder he had several devoted friends, starting with his first gay lover and later literary executor, the Canadian Robbie Ross, who commissioned and is buried in a small compartment of Wilde’s large, heroic funerary monument by Jacob Epstein. Only at the very last did Wilde become anything less than a charming companion and exquisite conversationalist, when soliciting money from everyone he knew, however slightly.

More here.

Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian:

This International Women’s Day comes five months after the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long campaign of misogynist punishments of women first broke, and with them more things broke. Excuses broke. Silence was broken. The respectable appearance of a lot of institutions broke. You could say a dam broke, and a wall of women’s stories came spilling forth – which has happened before, but never the way that this round has. This time around, women didn’t just tell the stories of being attacked and abused; they named names, and abusers and attackers lost jobs and reputations and businesses and careers. They named names, and it mattered; people listened; their testimony had consequences. Because there’s a big difference between being able to say something and having it heard and respected. Consequences are often the difference.

Something had shifted. What’s often overlooked is that it had shifted beforehand so that this could happen. Something invisible had made it possible for these highly visible upheavals and transformations. People often position revolution and incrementalism as opposites, but if a revolution is something that changes things suddenly, incrementalism often lays the groundwork that makes it possible. Something happens suddenly, and that’s mistaken for something happening out of the blue. But out of the blue usually means out of the things that most people were not paying attention to, out of the slow work done by somebody or many somebodies out of the limelight for months or years or decades.

More here.

The Grandmother

Better born than married, misled,
in the heavy summers of the river bottom
and the long winters cut off by snow
she would crave gentle dainty things,
"a pretty little cookie or a cup of tea,"
but spent her days over a wood stove
cooking cornbread, kettles of jowl and beans
for the heavy, hungry, hard-handed
men she married and mothered, bent
past unbending by her days of labor
that love had led her to. They had to break her
before she would lie down in her coffin.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming a Handbook
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967
.

John Crowley in the Boston Review:

In 1973, when I finished my first novel, the difficulties of the blurb-solicitation process were enormous, or would surely seem so to writers now who send digital files effortlessly to famous people through websites and email. The great new advance then was the Xerox machine; you at least didn’t have to produce carbons (hopeless) or photostats (expensive) to send out. But still, as often as not—or more often than not—your solicitations weren’t responded to, which could seem like a foretaste of failure: perhaps readers wouldn’t respond either. Now and then a query would get a curt reply asking that the manuscript not be sent, that the recipient didn’t read such submissions.

I once sent a large manuscript to Anne Rice, the vampire biographer­. What I got back was a postcard, filled edge to edge with typing, asking why I felt I had a right to send her this mass of paper, did I really think she had any reason to read it—she did not—and what was she supposed to do with it? I thought of writing her back to say that she might just toss it in the trash with the rest of the week’s paper, but I didn’t.

So for that first novel, I was amazed and grateful to actually get a few brief comments back. The one that meant the most to me, for several reasons, was a hand-written postcard from Ursula K. Le Guin. It was generous, kind, even humorous—the note ended with ironic congratulations on my impressively consistent misspelling of the word “guard”—and as a whole, the effect was her welcoming me into the fold.

More here.

From the website of the Central Intelligence Agency:

A quarter mile from CIA’s Headquarters building, within the confines of CIA property, sits a four story Georgian Revival house at 6200 Georgetown Pike. The house is the oldest standing structure on CIA grounds. Built in 1926, the house was occupied by Margaret Scattergood and Florence Thorne for 53 years. Looking for a quiet retreat, they purchased the house and 20 acres of land in 1933. Margaret was a Quaker and a pacifist who devoted a significant portion of her time and funds to advancing liberal causes.

Neither Margaret nor Florence could have ever predicted that within 30 years of purchase, their home would be enclosed on CIA property, behind its protective barriers, while hundreds of CIA officers came to work just a stones’ throw away.

Margaret Scattergood was born into a wealthy and religious Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1926 she moved to Washington to work for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). There she met Florence Thorne, 17 years her senior, who eventually became the research director for the AFL. The two women struck up a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

Margaret and Florence purchased a plot of land that contained a wood-framed house, a modest tenant house, a guest house/office, two car garage and a barn. They dubbed it, “the Calvert Estate,” in tribute to Florence’s distinguished lineage (Florence’s mother was a direct descendant of Sir George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore of Maryland). The land consisted of gently rolling slopes with tall, mature pine and oak trees that lined the driveway. There was an apple orchard that produced delicious apples they sold at market. Margaret spent much of her time riding on the land; she was a skilled horsewoman and spent many hours in the saddle.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

David Chandler in MIT News:

Progress toward the long-sought dream of fusion power — potentially an inexhaustible and zero-carbon source of energy — could be about to take a dramatic leap forward.

Development of this carbon-free, combustion-free source of energy is now on a faster track toward realization, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and a new private company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS will join with MIT to carry out rapid, staged research leading to a new generation of fusion experiments and power plants based on advances in high-temperature superconductors — work made possible by decades of federal government funding for basic research.

CFS is announcing today that it has attracted an investment of $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni. In addition, CFS continues to seek the support of additional investors. CFS will fund fusion research at MIT as part of this collaboration, with an ultimate goal of rapidly commercializing fusion energy and establishing a new industry.

“This is an important historical moment: Advances in superconducting magnets have put fusion energy potentially within reach, offering the prospect of a safe, carbon-free energy future,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “As humanity confronts the rising risks of climate disruption, I am thrilled that MIT is joining with industrial allies, both longstanding and new, to run full-speed toward this transformative vision for our shared future on Earth.”

More here.

Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books:

In the second century BCE, Liu An, king of Huainan, asked the scholars of his court to prepare a book that would outline everything a wise monarch should know about statecraft, philosophy, and general world knowledge. The result was the massive ‘Huainanzi’, which runs to nine hundred large pages in English translation. Here are some excerpts, based on the translation by Sarah A. Queen and John S. Major:

If a ruler rejects those who work for the public good, and employs people according to friendship and factions, then those of bizarre talent and frivolous ability will be promoted out of turn, while conscientious officials will be hindered and will not advance. In this way, the customs of the people will fall into disorder throughout the state, and accomplished officials will struggle.

If the ruler ignores what he should preserve and struggles with his ministers and subordinates about the conduct of affairs, then those with official posts will be preoccupied with holding on to their positions, and those charged with official duties will avoid dismissal by following the whims of the ruler. This will cause capable ministers to conceal their wisdom.

If the ruler is frequently exhausted by attending to lesser duties, proper conduct will deteriorate throughout the state. His knowledge by itself will be insufficient to govern, and he will lack what it takes to deal with the world.

More here.

David Pilling in the FT:

More than two dozen countries saw their wealth per capita fall in the 20 years to 2014, according to the most comprehensive attempt so far to produce a “balance sheet” of nations’ assets.

The World Bank study seeks to provide a more comprehensive picture of economic progress than gross domestic product data alone.

It tracks four different types of capital for 141 countries between 1995 and 2014: produced capital (such as roads, machinery and buildings); human capital (based on estimating the present value of a labour force’s future earnings); financial capital (net foreign assets); and natural capital (mainly sub-soil energy resources, minerals, forests and agricultural land).

Using the methodology, there was a big increase in per capita wealth in Asia during those years, driven by capital formation in China and India. Sub-Saharan Africa, the only region to go backwards, experienced a slight fall in per capita wealth, largely as a result of continued high birth rates in many countries that offset a rise in nominal wealth. In contrast to the more positive GDP numbers, the data showed the poorest African countries “shearing away” from the rest of the world, said Paul Collier, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

More here.

John Yau in Hyperallergic:

It is routine to characterize the 1970s as a decade dominated by Conceptual Art, and artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Mel Bochner. Part of this thinking is market-driven: the phenomenon of a group of artists who conveniently fall under a single heading and who steadily gain attention over the course of a decade. In 1978, LeWitt had a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Critics described Conceptual Art as the next logical step after Minimalism while suggesting that artists engaged with painting did three things wrong: they worked in an obsolete form; they did not go beyond the reductiveness of Minimalism in a way that could be labeled; and they did not accept Donald Judd’s dim view of painting:

The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.

The painter Carroll Dunham opens his essay “Shapes of Things to Come: On Elizabeth Murray” (Artforum, November 2005) with this blanket judgment: “Painting in New York during the second half of the 1970s was a mess.” I want to take issue with this received view of the 1970s because it continues to perpetuate a myth that painting, after taking a hiatus in the 1970s, “returned” in the 1980s. This view justifies the fact that painting was ignored or denigrated during the 1970s, as it verifies the appetites of the marketplace.

When Wallace Stevens said “Money is a kind of poetry,” he could have applied it to certain precincts of the art world, where it is a kind of criticism. Those who believe that the cream always rises to the top, and that success in the marketplace is a reliable measure of an artist’s ambition, tend to be white male critics.

More here.

Resemblances

On top of those low mountains the surprising snow lingers.
Here in the valley beside the small stream, a snow of almond blossoms.
A congruence, then, between high and low, or is it only the eye
playing its old game of this is like that?

How much we’ve learned from these resemblances,
the white horses of the waves, the white spume of their manes
flying behind their fierce, measured charge to the shore.
To make the image whole we see, behind them, a flash of the sea god riding his chariot.

And when upon us a bolt of lighting hurtles like a spear,
we think of the hurler and meet, for the first time, the sky lord.
We must give him a place on which to stand and so, heaven.
And when the sweetness of spring softens our small wills, the Goddess
comes sailing on her shell into the bay of our wondering.

I know I have left out their dark brother, but he is never not here. The mountain
snow will melt. The almond blossoms, already, have fallen from the trees..

by Nils Peterson
.

Robert Colls in Spiked:

On 27 September 1938 Eileen Blair wrote to her sister-in-law Marjorie Dakin saying that her husband George Orwell (Eric Blair) was waiting to hear ‘what he calls the voice of the people’, which ‘he thinks might stop the war’. Right up to the declaration of war a year later and even after that, Orwell went on hoping that the people would speak so that war might be avoided. In fact, the British people came to the decision that war was unavoidable a year before Orwell and at least six months before its outbreak. Living in Marrakesh, the Blairs were clearly out of touch. While George was writing a pacifistic novel in his shirtsleeves, Eileen was expressing her horror at the Dakin family’s struggles to build an air-raid shelter. ‘It’s fantastic and horrifying that you may all be trying on gas masks at this moment.’ Eileen went on to refer to her husband’s belief in the people as a streak of ‘extraordinary political simplicity’ in him, but where else was he to look? Churchill was no political simpleton and he, too, was trying to find the people in this moment of danger. In the event, once the fighting started in earnest, in a bear-pit called the House of Commons, the people found him.

All Orwell’s writing can be seen as an attempt to listen. This often meant putting his ear to places, Wigan for example, he never really knew. He did know, however, that whole peoples could be misrepresented by their rulers. His first politics had been against the British Empire. Later, he would write about his prep school as a master class in deception. He saw the Soviet Union in the same light and, as everyone knows, Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the systematic misrepresentation of people to the point of extinction.

In 1940, Orwell stopped worrying about peace and waded into the fight. A spate of unashamed celebrations of Englishness followed, including ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ (1940); ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940); ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940); essays on Dickens (1940), Kipling (1942), and Wodehouse (1945); The Lion and the Unicorn(1941); a composite, The English People, written in 1943 but not published until 1947; Animal Farm (1945), and an essay on liberty, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). His critics might call this propaganda but he would have called it turning up the volume. Born in an age when only the toffs spoke for England, Orwell devoted his life to giving the people their voice and between them, they worked it out. That is what great writers do. They resonate and keep on resonating with those who follow. Orwell stands now as England’s most favoured way of talking about itself.

More here.

Claudia Wallis in Scientific American:

In health, as with so many things, our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness. Take our astonishingly sophisticated response to injury and infection. Our bodies unleash armies of cellular troops to slaughter invaders and clear out traitors. Their movements are marshaled by signaling chemicals, such as the interleukins, which tell cells where and when to fight and when to stand down. We experience this as the swelling, redness and soreness of inflammation—an essential part of healing. But when the wars fail to wind down, when inflammation becomes chronic or systemic, there's hell to pay. I'm looking at you, arthritis, colitis and bursitis, and at you, diabetes, colon cancer, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease is the world's biggest killer, and we've known for 20 years that inflammation (along with too much cholesterol) ignites the buildup of plaque in our arteries. Still, no one knew if runaway inflammation could actually pull the trigger on heart attacks and strokes—until this summer. Results from a large, well-designed trial showed that certain high-risk patients suffered fewer of these “events” (as doctors so mildly call them) when given a drug that precisely targets inflammation (aiming at interleukin 1). It was sweet vindication for cardiologist and principal investigator Paul Ridker of Harvard University, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital, who had long contended that inflammation was as vital a target as cholesterol.

More here.

Tony Phillips in Signature:

A big blue bus is parked in front of San Francisco’s City Hall. It is now branded with the familiar logos of a verdant sun, leaf and lightbulb certifying it an environmentally-friendly green, but other than its solar panels, sustainably forested wood and hybrid generator—and the fact that today it’s dispensing $16 cups of imported coffee—this is your bookmobile of yore, launched in 19th century England as a horse-drawn “perambulating library” and gaining traction in our own country as a pre-war, WPA project. But today, it’s been hijacked by bestselling author Dave Eggers and his latest subject, Yemeni coffee impresario Mokhtar Alkhanshali.

Alkhanshali is, in fact, standing on the steps of City Hall, mere blocks away from his free-range childhood in the rough and tumble Tenderloin district that plays in Eggers book like a Steven Spielberg-directed Oliver Twist. The City Supervisor, borrowing Eggers latest title, has proclaimed today Monk of Mokha Day and now Alkhanshali—I’m just going to start calling him Mokhtar because everyone else does—is at the mic. And knowing San Francisco’s head librarian Luis Herrera, who fought hard for and won his city’s impressive seven-day library week, is in the crowd, the fast-talking Mokhtar can’t resist a play for clemency. “I said I may or may not owe the library a few books,” he relays on a call the following week, “so I asked him to give me amnesty.”

It’s something the 29-year-old is quite used to – both chasing the American dream here at home to deliver a coffee from his homeland, ranked number one by industry bible Coffee Review, to being chased himself when a Houthi coup at the beginning of 2015 interrupts his bean-grading tour of coffee’s birthplace, which has unfortunately also birthed a civil war that seals all exit points. Guns? Sure, but that’s nothing new for Mokhtar, having seen his first gun in our country at the tender age of 11. And the aforementioned fast-talking? It’s a bitch to transcribe, but he’s able to put one of his $16 cups of coffee into play to jive his way out of a hypothetical parking ticket. It’s also handy when you’re mistaken for Houthi by opposing forces still loyal to ousted president Abdrabnuh Mansour Hadi, blindfolded, and tossed in the back of a pickup, then casually informed, “We plan to kill you.”

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

This seems to occur in all societies at all scales. It is a well-studied pattern called a power law that crops up in a wide range of social phenomena. But the distribution of wealth is among the most controversial because of the issues it raises about fairness and merit. Why should so few people have so much wealth?

The conventional answer is that we live in a meritocracy in which people are rewarded for their talent, intelligence, effort, and so on. Over time, many people think, this translates into the wealth distribution that we observe, although a healthy dose of luck can play a role.

But there is a problem with this idea: while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.

The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.

And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.

More here.

David P. Barash in Nautilus:

It is a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible or even unlikely that a hybrid or a chimera combining a human being and a chimpanzee could be produced in a laboratory. After all, human and chimp (or bonobo) share, by most estimates, roughly 99 percent of their nuclear DNA. Granted this 1 percent difference presumably involves some key alleles, the new gene-editing tool CRISPR offers the prospect (for some, the nightmare) of adding and deleting targeted genes as desired. As a result, it is not unreasonable to foresee the possibility—eventually, perhaps, the likelihood—of producing “humanzees” or “chimphumans.” Such an individual would not be an exact equal-parts-of-each combination, but would be neither human nor chimp: rather, something in between.

If that prospect isn’t shocking enough, here is an even more controversial suggestion: Doing so would be a terrific idea.

The year 2018 is the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, subtitled the modern Prometheus. Haven’t we learned that Promethean hubris leads only to disaster, as did the efforts of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein? But there are also other disasters, currently ongoing, such as the grotesque abuse of nonhuman animals, facilitated by what might well be the most hurtful theologically-driven myth of all times: that human beings are discontinuous from the rest of the natural world, since we were specially created and endowed with souls, whereas “they”—all other creatures—were not.

More here.

Shadi Hamid in The American Interest:

There are seemingly two types of Trump laments being published these days: end of democracy books and end of liberalism books. Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy is the latest entrant in the former category, and probably the most ambitious. It manages to avoid the overwrought alarmism, partisan attacks, and Hitler references that sullied Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die and Timothy Snyder’s occasionally silly pamphlet On Tyranny.Yet as with all books that speak to a present danger—its unsubtle subtitle is “Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It”—Mounk, like a good Paul Thomas Anderson film, struggles in the final third.

The problem with populists—or more precisely the problem with writing about them—isn’t that they’re anti-democratic but rather that they can be quite democratic, more democratic than their opponents, perhaps even too democratic. This is also one of the main reasons—besides racism or Russian meddling—that they seem to do quite well in elections. And not surprisingly, the better they do in elections, the more they seem to like democracy. Anyone who wishes to make sense of populist success, as well as learn from it, must start here. This is precisely what Mounk does, offering a much needed dose of conceptual clarity.

More here.

Siddhartha Deb in Columbia Journalism Review:

Last September, as the journalist Gauri Lankesh was returning to her home from work, a man approached her in the driveway, his face obscured by a motorcycle helmet. He fired a pistol as she ran toward her house, about 10 feet away. She collapsed before she made it inside. Autopsy reports suggested she had been shot twice in the chest and once in the back. A fourth shot had missed or misfired. The footage from security cameras showed only two men on a motorcycle, including the helmeted shooter, a man about five feet tall, but the police suggested that two other men had also been involved, following the first pair on a second motorcycle.

Lankesh, the editor and publisher of a Bangalore weekly, the Gauri Lankesh Patrike, was an outspoken left-wing journalist working in an India that, since the 2014 election of Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as prime minister, has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a reporter. But the BJP is only the most overt face of a Hindu right that comprises more than 30 loosely affiliated organizations. Together, they all subscribe to the virulent brand of Hindu nationalism known as Hindutva, and they have in recent years been associated with activities ranging from lynchings, riots, and bomb blasts to threats of rape, dismemberment, incarceration, and hanging of people critical of them and their sectarian idea of India.

More here.