A.E. Stallings at The Hudson Review:

Some of the most ravishing descriptions of the sea being whipped up into a tempest are contained in an empirical scale of wind force as encountered on sea and on land, the modern Beaufort scale. Escalating from zero, “Calm” (“Sea like a mirror; smoke rises vertically”), up through “Fresh Breeze,” “Gale,” “Storm” and so on, it goes on to a hurricane force of 12, where the “Sea is completely white” and “debris and unsecured objects are hurled around.” The observations have the keen-eyed perceptions of a poet: “well marked streaks of foam are blown along the direction of the wind,” “small flags extended,” “dust and loose paper raised.” The scale is in fact a favorite with poets, Don Paterson’s “Scale of Intensity” being perhaps the most successful homage. Alongside the stranger symptoms in Paterson’s scale, such as the change in weight of ordinary objects, or reversed vortex in the draining bath, Paterson makes sure to begin “Sea like a mirror” and to end on that paradoxical phrase of howling violence and visual stillness (one imagines a Turner painting), “Sea white.”

While the Beaufort scale is still named after Sir Francis Beaufort, upon whose 1805 scale the modern one is based, his observations had a nautical briskness and reflected not the wind’s effect on the sea, or the land, but on the sails of a British Navy frigate, from calm and “or just sufficient to give steerage way” to hurricane, “or that which no canvas can withstand” (poetic phrases which incidentally tend to natural iambic pentameters).

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B. D. McClay at Commonweal:

Mary McCarthy had a famous smile, but it didn’t help her much. Usually a smile is a sign of friendliness, attraction, general sociability. But not Mary’s. Her smile was known to be a trap and a weapon, a “long, white upper blade of handsome, emphatic teeth,” as one reporter put it in Esquire. “She can smoke through it, argue through it, spill the beans through it, even smile through it.” You couldn’t trust it. You couldn’t trust her.

The Mary of the switchblade smile is the one we remember. Her legacy has been her scandals: the libel suit after calling Lillian Hellman a liar, her frank writing about sex, her habit of putting her friends in her novels, her leave-nothing-out memoirs. She was a “cold and beautiful novelist who devoured three husbands and a crowd of lovers in the course of a neatly managed career,” according to Simone de Beauvoir, who should know, one supposes.

And yet, here we are: Mary McCarthy has elbowed her way into posterity and arrives to take her place in the Library of America. This inclusion of her novels in the series would surprise a good many of her peers.

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Molly Crabapple at The Paris Review:

A cantastoria is a vagabond fusion of art and music, so old it turns up all over the world. In each set, a performer displays an illustrated scroll, then, while pointing to each image with a stick, tells a story in song. The cantastoria first developed in India as a way for itinerant performers to bring the legends of gods from door to door. By the time it hit Central Europe in the sixteenth century, it had mutated away from its sacred roots into a wandering carny show of sex, crime, and political sedition.

After the hurricane, the Puerto Rican puppetry collective Papel Machete created a new cantastoria: Solidarity and Survival for our Liberation. Estefanía Rivera painted the scroll; Isamar Abreu and Agustín Muñoz wrote the script. Muñoz, Sugeily Rodriguez Lebron, and Rocio Natasha Cancel piled into the Papel Machete van with their instruments and art and drove to the mutual-aid centers that had sprung up after Maria, and after neighborhoods realized that no help would come from the authorities. In fifteen centros, one each day, they unfurled their scroll in front of the lines of Puerto Ricans waiting for their arroz con pollo, and they began to sing.

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Tom Whipple in 1843 Magazine:

The best way to enter the Exposition Universelle, held in Paris in 1900, was via the gate on the Place de la Concorde. As was appropriate for a world fair exhibiting the best technology that the planet had to offer, the gate was studded with electric lights, which illuminated the archway’s intricate geometric design. Today, a viewer might guess that it was inspired by an Islamic palace or perhaps the onion-dome towers of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. Back then, Parisian visitors would have known otherwise. The architect modelled the gate’s design on a drawing he had seen in one of the more unlikely bestsellers of the 19th century. That drawing? A microscopic creature called a radiolaria which, down a microscope, resembled a delicate latticework of interlocking arches and circles. The sketch was by Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist born in 1834 who – though he had no formal art training – made his fame drawing microscopic sea creatures. With his left eye he would look through the microscope, with his right he would attend to the sketch in progress. He did not do so in the name of art but in the name of science. No camera could capture the world he saw down his lens.

But two things elevated his work beyond mere draftsmanship. The first was that it was beautiful, as “The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel”, a new book reproducing 450 of his prints, makes clear. Somehow these exact and faithful re-creations, albeit with occasional liberties taken in the choice of colour, alluringly captured these creatures’ fragility. His books sold in the hundreds of thousands and the alien ecosystems they illuminated inspired art and architecture, from the works of Gustav Klimt to the design of the Dutch stock exchange. The second was that these drawings were not just aesthetically pleasing; they also made an argument. The creatures were ordered, categorised and carefully placed in “trees” of life (he was one of the first to produce such diagrams), with each animal evolving from a lower life form, right down to the point where animals, plants and bacteria diverged.

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The Editors of The Point:

If you happened to log onto Facebook around Thanksgiving, you might have seen these words, blinking in white against an emergency-red background: “URGENT: If you’re not freaking out right now about net neutrality you’re not paying attention.” The occasion was the FCC’s announcement that they would allow companies to charge for faster broadband speeds, and it was hard to deny the potentially catastrophic consequences. It was also hard to deny, as you tried to clear your mind for a rare holiday from news-fueled outrage (not that either turkey or football could any longer be enjoyed innocently), that you might not have any more mental broadband left for freaking out.

It had been a season filled with things to freak out about, from the future of the free internet to the tax code to the nuclear codes. But the reckoning that echoed most loudly was about a more ordinary menace: men. The first to fall were the celebrities, then came the journalists, then the politicians, and finally (some of us had been waiting) the academics. But that was only the beginning. The male hazard, it transpired, lurked in the kitchens of trendy restaurants, in venture-capital board rooms, at suburban malls, backstage at comedy clubs and opera houses. The daily dribble of revelations—Charlie Rose! Russell Simmons! Tariq Ramadan!—only reinforced the idea that the problem could not be isolated to any location, industry or demographic. It was borderless, ubiquitous, unexceptional: an “open secret” the whole world had been keeping from itself.

As the initial shock began to wear off, there ensued a debate about the best way to publicly channel disgust and disappointment—that is, about how to freak out as effectively as possible.

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Amy Maxmen in Nature:

A study of some of the world’s most obscure marine life suggests that the central nervous system evolved independently several times — not just once, as previously thought¹.

The invertebrates in question belong to families scattered throughout the animal evolutionary tree, and they display a diversity of central nerve cord architectures. The creatures also activate genes involved with nervous system development in other, well-studied animals — but they often do it in non-neural ways, report the authors of the paper, published on 13 December in Nature.

“This puts a stake in the heart of the idea of an ancestor with a central nerve cord,” says Greg Wray, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “That opens up a lot of questions we don’t have answers to — like, if central nerve cords evolved independently in different lineages, why do they have so many similarities?”

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Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

Southeast Bangladesh, near the Myanmar border — “Ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide” are antiseptic and abstract terms. What they mean in the flesh is a soldier grabbing a crying baby girl named Suhaifa by the leg and flinging her into a bonfire. Or troops locking a 15-year-old girl in a hut and setting it on fire.

The children who survive are left haunted: Noor Kalima, age 10, struggles in class in a makeshift refugee camp. Her mind drifts to her memory of seeing her father and little brother shot dead, her baby sister’s and infant brother’s throats cut, the machete coming down on her own head, her hut burning around her … and it’s difficult to focus on multiplication tables.

“Sometimes I can’t concentrate on my class,” Noor explained. “I want to throw up.”

In the past I’ve referred to Myanmar’s atrocities against its Rohingya Muslim minority as “ethnic cleansing,” but increasingly there are indications that the carnage may amount to genocide.

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Christopher G. Moore in CulturMag:

Swimming pools of ink have been emptied in the discussions of the intense verbal warfare in America about politics as the president fires tweets like a machine-gunner at a wide range of enemies. In all of these dramatic battles, there’s not been much discussion about a central question that defines our humanity: have we loss our sense of empathy? Exactly what makes empathy a desirable trait? I recently read an interview with Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, who writes about the danger of AI; he is worried that mankind might suffer an existential crisis should AI lack empathy. In an interview with Andy Fitch of the Los Angeles Review of Books Bostrom draws what is, I believe, a useful distinction between two different meanings of empathy.

In the first sense, empathy is our ability to read the mind of others: their intentions, emotions, and feelings. Our theory of mind is based on the words, gestures, posture, and the context that provides enough information to make a reasonably good prediction of what another person wants or is seeking to obtain from his or her own actions. If you can predict with reasonable accuracy what someone is after, this is a huge opportunity to take advantage of another’s vulnerability.

In the second sense, empathy is using the theory of mind to dissect the wants, urges and desires of others, and genuinely being interested in and caring about their intentions and feelings. What makes us human is this innate sense of caring.

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Angela Saini in New Humanist:

Martin Rees in The Atlantic:

Albert Einstein said that the “most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” He was right to be astonished. Human brains evolved to be adaptable, but our underlying neural architecture has barely changed since our ancestors roamed the savannah and coped with the challenges that life on it presented. It’s surely remarkable that these brains have allowed us to make sense of the quantum and the cosmos, notions far removed from the “commonsense,” everyday world in which we evolved. But I think science will hit the buffers at some point. There are two reasons why this might happen. The optimistic one is that we clean up and codify certain areas (such as atomic physics) to the point that there’s no more to say. A second, more worrying possibility is that we’ll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. There might be concepts, crucial to a full understanding of physical reality, that we aren’t aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends Darwinism or meteorology. Some insights might have to await a post-human intelligence.

Scientific knowledge is actually surprisingly “patchy”—and the deepest mysteries often lie close by. Today, we can convincingly interpret measurements that reveal two black holes crashing together more than a billion light-years from Earth. Meanwhile, we’ve made little progress in treating the common cold, despite great leaps forward in epidemiology. The fact that we can be confident of arcane and remote cosmic phenomena, and flummoxed by everyday things, isn’t really as paradoxical as it looks. Astronomy is far simpler than the biological and human sciences. Black holes, although they seem exotic to us, are among the uncomplicated entities in nature. They can be described exactly by simple equations. So how do we define complexity? The question of how far science can go partly depends on the answer. Something made of only a few atoms can’t be very complicated. Big things need not be complicated either. Despite its vastness, a star is fairly simple—its core is so hot that complex molecules get torn apart and no chemicals can exist, so what’s left is basically an amorphous gas of atomic nuclei and electrons. Alternatively, consider a salt crystal, made up of sodium and chlorine atoms, packed together over and over again to make a repeating cubical lattice. If you take a big crystal and chop it up, there’s little change in structure until it breaks down to the scale of single atoms. Even if it’s huge, a block of salt couldn’t be called complex.

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Suzanne Joinson in the New York Times:

S. A. Chakraborty’s novel, the first of a projected trilogy, opens with a veiled woman fortunetelling in what appears to be 18th-century Cairo. We quickly learn that Nahri earns her money as a thief and a leader of zars (rituals for the exorcism of bad spirits), and speaks a language, inherited from her long-dead parents, whose name she doesn’t know. It seems we are about to be plunged into a cultural mash-up of “The Thousand and One Nights” and any number of young adult novels with plucky female protagonists, but when Nahri walks through Cairo’s spooky cemetery things take a speculative turn. Puff! A warrior in robes emerges from among the gravestones, flashing his scimitar, bows and arrows aquiver. Next come ghoulish zombies: “The tattered remains of burial shrouds hung from their desiccated frames, the scent of rot filling the air.” Nahri and the warrior must escape, but how? A flying carpet, of course, and when Nahri responds, “A rug? How is a rug going to help us?” it’s clear we’re in the hands of a playful writer.

The warrior is a type of spirit called a daeva, his name is Dara and, as luck would have it, he’s “frighteningly beautiful,” with the “type of allure Nahri imagined a tiger held right before it ripped out your throat.” As kidnapper-rescuers go, he’s hot as hell. Also, he knows the answer to the mystery of Nahri’s origins: She’s a shafit, descendant of an ancient half-human, half-magical tribe thought to have become extinct. A birdlike creature then explains that Nahri is in danger and that her handsome protector must take her away to the city of Daevabad. Thus their adventure begins, complete with snowy plains, forbidding mountain ranges and fierce confrontations.

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Jay Elwes in Prospect:

Each day, humans create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. A byte is the amount of data needed by a computer to encode a single letter. A quintillion is one followed by 18 zeros. We float on an ocean of data.

You’d arrive at an even bigger number if you put it in terms of “bits”, the ultimate basic building block out of which every wonder of the digital age is built. A bit is simply a one or a zero or, equivalently, a single switch inside an electronic processor that must be either on or off. Put eight in a row, and you’ve got enough combinations to label and store every character on your keyboard—there are thus eight bits to the byte.

These days your newspapers, your tax records, your shopping list and perhaps your love life are nothing more than a long series of “ons” and “offs” generated by the digital processors that lurk in your phone, your car, or your TV. The correct sequence of ones and zeros is all that computers need in order to control the traffic lights at the end of your street, run a nuclear power station, or find you a date for next Friday night. From one perspective, they are simply doing—on a vast scale—the tallying and reckoning we have always done on our fingers: on our digits.

The “digital age” is a colossal achievement of human ingenuity. But this world of ones and zeros is not an end state. Humankind has passed through other ages before: bronze, iron, the era of steam and then of the telegraph, each of which constituted a revolution, before being brought to a close by some further advance of human ingenuity. And that raises a question—if our present digital age will pass just like all the rest, what might come after it?

We are starting to see the answer to that question, and it looks as though the successor to the age of the digital computer will be a startlingly new kind of device—the quantum computer.

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Emran Feroz in The New Arab:

Emran Feroz: One of your central arguments in your recent book "Age of Anger" is that many aspects of today's violence are connected to the violence that took place in Europe in the 19^thcentury. Why is that the case?

Pankaj Mishra: I think the book essentially steps away from the foolish arguments we have heard over and again – that social or economic problems, religious fundamentalism and militancy are all connected to a country's culture or religion.

This is what we heard in so many analyses coming out of Western Europe and the United States. What I am trying to do is show that crises like the kind we are witnessing today form part of a very long history.

These problems don't really have to do much with religion, tradition or philosophy. They are rather connected to our political and economic structures, whether that is the nation-state or industrial capitalism.

The latter is an exploitative and destructing process, and we have seen the effects of these institutions and ideologies in one country after another.

An "Age of Anger" has arisen in almost every country as an attempt to broaden our analytical frameworks.

These had been incredibly narrow and ended in some very stupid and counterproductive conclusions of many current problems.

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Jesse McCarthy in Harvard Magazine:

Black studies, or African American studies, emerged out of the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s, as students and faculty members demanded that universities recognize the need for departments engaged in scholarship on race, slavery, and the diasporic history and culture of peoples of African descent. Since its institutionalization, these departments have grown many branches of inquiry that maintain a rich interdisciplinary dialogue. One is a school of thought known as jazz studies, which investigates the intersections of music, literary and aesthetic theory, and politics. Moten is arguably its leading theoretician, translating jazz studies into a vocabulary of insurgent thought that seeks to preserve black studies as a space for radical politics and dissent. In his work he has consistently argued that any theory of politics, ethics, or aesthetics must begin by reckoning with the creative expressions of the oppressed. Having absorbed the wave of “high theory”—of deconstruction and post-structuralism—he, more than anyone else, has refashioned it as a tool for thinking “from below.”

Moten is best known for his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003). “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist,” is the book’s arresting opening sentence, announcing his major aim: to rethink the way bodies are shaped by aesthetic experience. In particular, he explores how the improvisation that recurs in black art—whether in the music of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey, or the conceptual art of Adrian Piper—confounds the distinctions between objects and subjects, individual bodies and collectively experienced expressions of resistance, desire, or agony. Since 2000, Moten has also published eight chapbooks of poetry, and one, The Feel Trio, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014. He is that rare literary figure who commands wide and deep respect in and out of the academy, and who blurs the line between poetics as a scholarly pursuit, and poetry as an act of rebellious creation, an inherently subversive activity.

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Melissa Beck at The Quarterly Conversation:

Bakkhai continues to be one of Euripides’s (c. 484-406 b.c.e.) most popular plays to stage, translate, and interpret, even though it was never performed in its author’s lifetime. The ancient Greek playwright and Athenian wrote Bakkhai in the last few years of his life in Macedonia, where he had fled after becoming disillusioned with his native city-state. The play was found among his papers after his death and produced posthumously by either his nephew or his son at the Dionysia, the festival held annually for the eponymous god in Athens. The drama presents the god Dionysos arriving in Thebes disguised as a mortal to establish his cult in that city and exact a brutal punishment on his cousin, King Pentheus, who denies the existence of the god. Anne Carson’s unconventional new translation of Bakkhai is a fitting interpretation of what is arguably Euripides’s most enigmatic tragedy.

Dionysos is the first character to appear on stage in the play, and he tells us that he is harboring anger for his maternal family who have denied his immortality. Dionysos is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman, Semele, daughter of the king of Thebes. When Semele is pregnant with Dionysos, she is tricked by Hera into viewing Zeus, undisguised, in all his glory as the mighty god of sky and lightning.

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Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

“No Time to Spare” and “Don’t Save Anything” collect, respectively, the recent essays and the freelance journalism of two distinguished, but very different American writers. There are, however, at least three reasons to link Ursula K. Le Guin, an outspoken feminist and award-winning creator of imaginary lands and ambiguous utopias, and James Salter, the courtly chronicler of fighter pilots, intense love affairs and dissolving marriages.

First, each writes fiction of wondrous serenity and authority. Just consider the opening paragraphs of Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” or the final one of Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime.” The language is limpid, the sentences deliberate and grave, their cumulative power . . . immeasurable. Go see for yourself.

Second, both Salter and Le Guin are moralists. Courage and heroism, the testing of character, doing the right thing, the acceptance of responsibility, the getting of wisdom — these themes run through all their writing.

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