Andreas Schmidt-Colinet and Andrea Zederbauer at Eurozine:

AZ: For some time now, there has been talk about reconstructing antique sites destroyed by IS. The German art historian Horst Bredekamp has spoken of ‘combative reconstruction’. In his opinion, the art of reconstruction must triumph over the destruction wrought by IS: as a show of resistance against its iconoclasm.

ASC: There is a neo-colonial undertone in this discussion that I don’t like at all. According to this argument, it is the temples excavated by ‘our’ archaeologists for ‘our’ tourism that are supposed to be reconstructed. In a sense, we have prepared a skeleton – for example the Temple of Bel in its 2015 state – and put it on display. And it is above all the West and its scholars that have done this. Today, neither archaeologists nor any institution responsible for cultural heritage would do it the same way. To then speak of reconstructing the temple is in some way perverse. This will not return the skeleton to life. No. I think, we should do absolutely nothing! We can only make suggestions, perhaps create 3D animations, but above all, we can provide funding and perhaps specialized personnel.

But first, precise records have to be made of everything, and the destruction must be recorded exhaustively. We archaeologists know how to create detailed architectural documentation of a destroyed building and how to reconstruct a temple or to rebuild it. It will take years just to identify all the stones that are lying there. Furthermore, why should one rebuild the temple as it looked between 1929 and 2015? That was the shortest phase of its life. During the longest phase, it was a mosque. One could leave the ruins as they are today. One could even carry out more excavations.

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Stephen Lovell at the TLS:

What more fitting monument to a millenarian movement could there be than a thousand-page “saga”? Yuri Slezkine’s guiding argument in this remarkable, many-layered account of the men (rarely women) who shaped the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. In an extended essay on comparative religion that constitutes just one of his thirty-three chapters, he puts Russia’s victorious revolutionaries in a long line of millenarians extending back to the ancient Israelites; in their “totalitarian” demands on the individual believer, he suggests, the Bolsheviks are cut from the same cloth as the sixteenth-century Münster Anabaptists and the original “radical fundamentalist”, Jesus Christ.

Slezkine is by no means the first person to draw the analogy between the Bolsheviks and sectarians (Lenin himself is reported to have taken an interest in the Münster Anabaptists and Cromwell’s Puritans as he pondered Russia’s revolutionary potential in the early twentieth century), but no one before him has extracted such analytical mileage from it.

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John Horgan at Scientific American:

This is a time, part of me thinks, for men to listen to women rather than pontificating about sexism. But I just talked about sexism in science with my friend Robert Wright on Meaningoflife.tv. And I feel obliged to say something about this issue because I teach at an engineering school where females account for less than 30 percent of the professors and students. Below are points I made or wanted to make during my conversation with Wright.

Is science sexist? Of course it is, in two ways. First, women in science (including engineering, math, medicine) face discrimination, harassment and other forms of maltreatment from men. Second, male scientists portray females as males’ intellectual inferiors. These two forms of sexism are mutually reinforcing. That is, male scientists use science to justify their sexist attitudes toward and maltreatment of women. Then, when women fail to thrive, the men say, See? Women just aren’t our equals.

In her important, timely new book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story, British science journalist Angela Saini documents how science has long denigrated females.

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Harriet Fraad and Richard Wolff in Alternet:

Susan Lindquist in Phys.Org:

For patients with mild cognitive impairment, don't be surprised if your health care provider prescribes exercise rather than medication. A new guideline for medical practitioners says they should recommend twice-weekly exercise to people with mild cognitive impairment to improve memory and thinking. The recommendation is part of an updated guideline for mild cognitive impairment published in the Dec. 27 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Regular physical exercise has long been shown to have heart health benefits, and now we can say exercise also may help improve memory for people with mild cognitive impairment," says Ronald Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., lead author, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging. "What's good for your heart can be good for your brain." Dr. Petersen is the Cora Kanow Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research.

Daniel Felsenthal in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Arguably most famous for the sordid details of his violent death, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote two novels during the 1950s — Ragazzi di vita (1955) and Una vita violenta (1959) — that are all but unknown in the English-speaking world. William Weaver translated both novels into English, yet Pasolini’s fiction is not as widely read in the United States as that of Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia, his fellow Italians and friends. In 2016, Europa Editions reissued Ragazzi di vita(as The Street Kids) in a new translation by Ann Goldstein, providing an opportunity for American readers to reassess Pasolini’s literary reputation.

Weaver himself admitted, in a 2002 interview with the Paris Review, that A Violent Life (as he titled Una vita violenta) is the only translation of his career with which he is unhappy. The novel follows a boy, Tomasso, from his beginnings as a prepubescent “snot-nose” to his premature death by consumption at the age of 20, through a beleaguered Roman underworld dominated by a natural-feeling yet largely fantastical sexuality. Tomasso and his friends (named “Shitter” and “Stinkfeet” and less scatalogical things like “The Patient” and “Brooklyn”) are impoverished Romans living first in the Pietralata, a suburb of shantytown huts, and later in the homogenous, fortress-like high-rises that postwar Italy erected during its “economic miracle” — a phenomenon Pasolini would satirize in his neorealist masterpieces Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma(1962). In the novel, Tomasso and his friends pursue romantic targets of either gender, commit repeated acts of violence and petty crime, and flirt with political allegiances.

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Aaron M. Bornstein in Nautilus:

We don’t know what our customers look like,” said Craig Berman, vice president of global communications at Amazon, to Bloomberg News in June 2015. Berman was responding to allegations that the company’s same-day delivery service discriminated against people of color. In the most literal sense, Berman’s defense was truthful: Amazon selects same-day delivery areas on the basis of cost and benefit factors, such as household income and delivery accessibility. But those factors are aggregated by ZIP code, meaning that they carry other influences that have shaped—and continue to shape—our cultural geography. Looking at the same-day service map, the correspondence to skin color is hard to miss.

Such maps call to mind men like Robert Moses, the master planner who, over decades, shaped much of the infrastructure of modern New York City and its surrounding suburbs. Infamously, he didn’t want poor people, in particular poor people of color, to use the new public parks and beaches he was building on Long Island. Though he had worked to pass a law forbidding public buses on highways, Moses knew the law could someday be repealed. So he built something far more lasting: scores of overpasses that were too low to let public buses pass, literally concretizing discrimination. The effect of these and dozens of similar decisions was profound and persistent. Decades later, bus laws have in fact been overturned, but the towns that line the highways remain as segregated as ever. “Legislation can always be changed,” Moses said. “It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.”

Today, a new set of superhighways, built from data shaped by the old structures, refresh these divisions. While the architects of the new infrastructure may not have the same insidious intent, they can’t claim ignorance of their impact, either.

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Andrew Taggart in Aeon:

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else – the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated – would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.

And how, in this world of total work, would people think and sound and act? Everywhere they looked, they would see the pre-employed, employed, post-employed, underemployed and unemployed, and there would be no one uncounted in this census. Everywhere they would laud and love work, wishing each other the very best for a productive day, opening their eyes to tasks and closing them only to sleep. Everywhere an ethos of hard work would be championed as the means by which success is to be achieved, laziness being deemed the gravest sin. Everywhere among content-providers, knowledge-brokers, collaboration architects and heads of new divisions would be heard ceaseless chatter about workflows and deltas, about plans and benchmarks, about scaling up, monetisation and growth.

In this world, eating, excreting, resting, having sex, exercising, meditating and commuting – closely monitored and ever-optimised – would all be conducive to good health, which would, in turn, be put in the service of being more and more productive.

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Jean M. Twenge at The Atlantic:

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

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Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:

Romain Gary was a great big liar. The French novelist, war hero, and diplomat made up stories the way other people make up beds: daily and conscientiously and without much premeditation. He lied all the time, and about many things. He lied about his background: born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, in 1914, right at the beginning of the European catastrophe, as a poor Jew among poor Jews. He lied about his mother, his father, his education, his literary history, his loves. His fine and patient and entirely admiring biographer, David Bellos, not only called his study of Gary “A Tall Story” but throughout uses words like “bullshit” and “eyewash” to characterize the tales his subject told.

But Gary was a big liar. This desperately poor Eastern European Jew reinvented himself as a French patriot and literary figure, titles he earned by fighting for France and by writing very good novels in French, one of which won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary award. And then, when he was famous under one made-up name and persona, he invented another name and persona, and wrote well enough in this very different voice to win a second Goncourt Prize.

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Philip Hensher at Literary Review:

Thom Gunn started out as a member of the Movement, that 1950s collection of like-minded British poets, but he looks now like a consistent outsider. When he left England and went to America, he detached himself from one poetic community without, it seems, quite attaching himself to another – the judgement of his biographers is that he never reached the status in American poetry circles that he should have. This is just about the point where we might expect an august Collected Poems with juvenilia, footnotes, drafts and unpublished poems; instead, we have an attractive but rather slight Selected Poems, updating a 1979 edition. Is he a minor poet? Or are there other explanations?

Often, Gunn’s mode is exquisitely formal. He had real knowledge and understanding of English lyric poetry, producing an edition of Ben Jonson’s poetry – anyone who goes beyond Jonson’s most famous plays into the lyrics and, especially, the court masques will quickly appreciate his virtuosity. Gunn’s first volume, Fighting Terms, used this formality in approved ways for rather dignified subjects: the Trojan War, the landscapes of the Romantic poets. Between his first and second books, Gunn moved to America to be with the man he spent the rest of his life with.

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Scott Rennie and Michael Platt in Nature:

Social interactions are often complicated by conflicts of interest. Humans and other animals adopt diverse strategies to resolve such disputes. Stronger individuals can often secure their interests at the expense of weaker individuals, but this strategy can be costly if it requires aggression. Strategies that are more cooperative and egalitarian can also develop among kin¹ or individuals who reciprocate in repeated interactions². Theoretical and experimental studies suggest that cooperation depends on cognitive control processes that override the impulse to acquire tangible rewards³. This theory now finds support from Choe et al.⁴, writing in Nature Communications. The authors demonstrate that pairs of mice can learn to coordinate their behaviour to achieve an egalitarian distribution of rewards — but only when rewards are delivered directly to the brain, rather than through food.

Choe et al. set out to investigate whether mice have the capacity to override their natural tendencies towards dominance-based conflict resolution. To do this, they developed a clever coordination task. They trained mice to enter a central start zone in a three-chambered box, and then to follow a visual cue to either the left or right chamber of the box to receive a reward. Next, they paired trained animals to take the trial together. When both mice occupied the start zone, a trial was initiated (Fig. 1a). The first mouse to enter the correct chamber received a reward of either food pellets or wireless brain stimulation (WBS) of the medial forebrain bundle — a region that, when stimulated, can override all other rewards, including food, water and sex⁷ (Fig. 1b). In the WBS trials, the reward was terminated if the second mouse entered the chamber (Fig. 1c), although this was not possible in the food trial. As expected, when mice were rewarded with food pellets, dominant ones coerced their subordinate partners into the start zone to enable the trial to begin, and then monopolized the rewards. By contrast, Choe and colleagues found that most animals that were rewarded with WBS developed and maintained a simple alternate-side-allocation rule: each mouse in a pair monopolized only one reward chamber and avoided the other (Fig. 1d). As a result, one mouse gained rewards in trials when the left-hand chamber was the reward chamber, and the other gained rewards when the right-hand chamber was the reward chamber. By following this rule, mice increased both the total amount of reward received and the equality with which that reward was divided.

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Bill Bryson in Delancey Place:

Herbert Hoover went from a spectacular career in mining to international acclaim and celebrity in a war relief effort to derision and blame for the Great Depression.

…"Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 thirty miles west of the Missis­sippi (he would be the first president from west of that symbolically weighty boundary) in the hamlet of West Branch, Iowa, in a tiny white cottage, which still stands. His parents, devout Quakers, died tragically early — his father of rheumatic fever when little Bert was just six, his mother of typhoid fever three years later — and he was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Oregon. …"Though he never finished high school — his uncle, disregarding his brightness, sent him to work as an office boy in Salem, Oregon, instead­ — Hoover nurtured a fierce ambition to better himself. In 1891, at age sev­enteen, he passed the entrance examinations for the brand-new Leland Stanford Junior University (or just Stanford as we now know it), which then was a free school. As a member of Stanford's first-ever class, he studied geology and also met there his future wife, Lou Henry, who by chance was also from Iowa. (They would marry in 1899.) Upon graduat­ing, Hoover took the only job he could find, in a gold mine in Nevada City, California, loading and pushing an ore cart ten hours a day seven days a week for 20 cents an hour — a meager salary even then. That this was the permanent lot for his fellow miners seems never to have troubled him. Hoover was a great believer in — and a living embodiment of — the notion of personal responsibility.

Bill Moyers at his own website:

Our times at last have found their voice, and it belongs to a Pakistani American: Ayad Akhtar, born in New York, raised in Wisconsin, an alum of Brown and Columbia, actor, novelist, screenwriter and playwright, with an ever-soliciting eye for the wickedness and wonders of the world. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, his plays revel in the combustions of an America on edge, bursting with excess — too much of everything, from wealth and impoverishment to religion, rage and radicalism, from sad hearts and hollow souls and shifting identities to the glorious celebration of money. Perhaps that should be the inglorious celebration of money: E Pluribus Unum transformed into Every Man a Midas. His latest play, Junk, is running through Jan. 7 at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center: Lucky you if you can get there over the holidays. One critic calls Junk “an epic, strutting, restless, sexually charged, slam-bang-wham piece of work… A Shakespearan history play of spiraling national consequence.” That’s too modest; Junk is not only history but prophecy. A Biblical-like account of who’s running America — and how. Last week, before I announced that I would be signing off in retirement again, I asked Ayad to join me for this conversation, the last in a series. We had a great time together; it was worth the wait.

Bill Moyers: When your play Junk came to an end, I sat there in my seat, marveling that what I had just seen on the stage was fiction which from my own experience as a journalist I knew to be true.

Ayad Akhtar: Well, Picasso says that art is the lie that tells the truth. So if this absorption in the fictional doings of people is oriented toward the truth in some way — the truth of society or a character or a situation — then you get to the end hopefully having had that experience. I’m very gratified to hear that you did.

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Bridget Heal at History Today:

Five hundred years ago, in an obscure town in a remote part of Germany, an Augustinian friar set in train a series of events that led to the permanent splintering of western Christendom. The story of Martin Luther posting his Ninety-Five Theses against Indulgences to the door of the castle chapel in Wittenberg is a defining moment in German history. But what were the origins of Luther’s movement for religious reform? How should we understand the individuals and the events that propelled his protest from Wittenberg onto the European stage? And how can we explain the Reformation’s significance in the context of contemporary concerns?

The eldest of nine siblings, Martin Luther was born in Eisleben in the county of Mansfeld on November 10th, 1483. His origins were relatively lowly: ‘I am a peasant’s son; my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father were true peasants’, he commented later in life. This was an exaggeration. Although his family was of peasant origin, his father, Hans Luder, had become a senior figure in the local mining industry and wanted his eldest son to study law. Luther attended school in Magdeburg and Eisenach and in 1501 he enrolled at the university in Erfurt, where he gained a master’s degree in 1505.

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