Oliver Traldi in Quillette:

Another semester, another academic publishing scandal, complete with calls for penitence and punishment. This time the catalyst is “The Case for Colonialism,” a “Viewpoint” editorial in Third World Quarterly. In this essay, Bruce Gilley argued that “it is high time to question [the anti-colonial] orthodoxy. Western colonialism was, as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found, using realistic measures of those concepts.” Gilley’s article has since been withdrawn due to “serious and credible threats of personal violence” made against the journal’s editor. This obviously troubling development should make us wonder: just what evil would this article have brought about if not withdrawn? The Streisand effect is in full display here. The article – detailed, abstruse, and not always beautifully written – has no doubt been far more widely read than it would have been without the controversy.

The publication of “The Case for Colonialism” faced criticism on several grounds: it was offensive; it was unscholarly; the journal did not follow its normal procedures in publishing it (now officially disputed by the publisher); the journal is a special venue for anti-colonial perspectives. This last one is particularly reminiscent of last spring’s Hypatia affair. As in that case, we should be skeptical of appeals to “academic standards” in political disciplines. Often such standards are simply substantive moral or political stances for which the field provides a “safe space”. In a representative attack on the article’s scholarly quality, Sahar Khan says that “the article seems like a bad joke. Can someone, a scholar no less, actually make a case for colonialism?”. A Change.org petition asserts that its “goal is to raise academic publishing standards and integrity,” but then calls on Third World Quarterly‘s editors to “apologize for further brutalizing those who have suffered under colonialism”. And a letter of resignation from some members of the journal’s editorial board even suggests that “caus[ing] offence and hurt . . . clearly violates [the] principle of free speech”.

More here.

Interviewed by William Weaver and Damien Pettigrew in The Paris Review 1992:

Upon hearing of Italo Calvino’s death in September of 1985, John Updike commented, “Calvino was a genial as well as brilliant writer. He took fiction into new places where it had never been before, and back into the fabulous and ancient sources of narrative.” At that time Calvino was the preeminent Italian writer, the influence of his fantastic novels and stories reaching far beyond the Mediterranean. Two years before, The Paris Review had commissioned a Writers at Work interview with Calvino to be conducted by William Weaver, his longtime English translator. It was never completed, though Weaver later rewrote his introduction as a remembrance. Still later, The Paris Review purchased transcripts of a videotaped interview with Calvino (produced and directed by Damien Pettigrew and Gaspard Di Caro) and a memoir by Pietro Citati, the Italian critic. What follows—these three selections and a transcript of Calvino’s thoughts before being interviewed—is a collage, an oblique portrait.

—Rowan Gaither, 1992

Thoughts Before an Interview

Every morning I tell myself, Today has to be productive—and then something happens that prevents me from writing. Today . . . what is there that I have to do today? Oh yes, they are supposed to come interview me. I am afraid my novel will not move one single step forward. Something always happens. Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills . . . always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then . . . I cannot do without them. They are like a drug. In short, only in the afternoon do I sit at my desk, which is always submerged in letters that have been awaiting answers for I do not even know how long, and that is another obstacle to be overcome.

Eventually I get down to writing and then the real problems begin.

More here.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis in The New York Times:

Arash Azizi in Iran Wire:

The annual announcement of the recipient of the Nobel prize for literature is always big news. Last year, many were shocked (some even offended) when the award went to the songwriter Bob Dylan. Why celebrate a big celebrity when the award could shed light on lesser known talents? In previous years, of course, some grumbled precisely because the award went to what the New York Times recently called “obscure European writers whose work was not widely read in English.” The article listed a few laureates who supposedly fit this description, including the French novelist Patrick Modiano, who won in 2014.

But what if we look at the award given by the Swedish Academy more globally? The Iranian literary community, for instance, would not have considered Modiano “obscure,” as his work was widely translated into Persian and the subject of numerous studies and book events in the country, some in small provincial towns.

This year’s winner, the Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, is well known around the world, a fact partly explained by the fact that he writes in English. But he is also very well known in Iran, where he can perhaps be counted as one of the most-read novelists in the country.

Every single novel by Ishiguro has been translated into Persian, often more than once, and not just by anybody, but by the giants of Persian literature and translation. Ishiguro’s Persian life began when Najaf Daryabandari, arguably the greatest living literary translator working in the Persian language, translated Remains of the Day.

More here. [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Leah Crane in New Scientist:

The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe – protons, neutrons and electrons – unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space.

You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far.

Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas.

“The missing baryon problem is solved,” says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before.

More here.

Larry Siems in The Guardian:

There were 20 cells inside the prison, each a stand-alone concrete box. In 16, prisoners were shackled to a metal ring in the wall. In four, designed for sleep deprivation, they stood chained by the wrists to an overhead bar. Those in the regular cells had a plastic bucket; those in sleep deprivation wore diapers. When diapers weren’t available, guards crafted substitutes with duct tape, or prisoners were chained naked in their cells. The cellblock was unheated, pitch black day and night, with music blaring around the clock.

“The atmosphere was very good,” John “Bruce” Jessen told a CIA investigator in January 2003, two months after he interrogated a prisoner named Gul Rahman in the facility. “Nasty, but safe.”

Jessen, one of the two contract psychologists who designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”, spent 10 days in the secret prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, in November 2002. Five days after he left, Rahman, naked from the waist down and shackled to the cold concrete floor, was discovered dead in his cell from hypothermia.

More here.

Jerry Lembcke at Public Books:

In their May 29 New York Times op-ed advertisement for the series, Burns and Novick give a lofty rationale for their film. Succumbing to another cliché, they claim it is about healing. But the discourse of healing misleads as much as it informs, presupposing a prewar America that was a seamless unity, where everyone got along. As sociologist Keith Beattie showed in his 1998 book The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War, that America was mythical. The real one was already torn by racism and McCarthyism, and frayed by modern technology. Domestic class conflict and racial and gender anxieties, too, continued right through the war, as the historian Milton Bates pointed out in his 1996 book The Wars We Took to Vietnam.

That fractured America was complicit in its going to war, not simply a passive victim of it. Burns and Novick intentionally exclude scholars like Beattie and Bates, however. “No historians or other expert talking heads” mar their film, they told the Times’s reviewer Jennifer Schuessler. “Instead,” Schuessler reports matter-of-factly, their “79 onscreen interviews give the ground-up view of the war from the mostly ordinary people who lived through it.”

more here.

Leon Ross in The Guardian:

Jane Harris’s first two historical novels showcased the voices of unsung, socially disadvantaged characters: a young Irish immigrant in The Observations, an elderly Victorian spinster in Gillespie and I. Harris is an empathetic and intelligent writer, with an instinct for the delicate alchemy that produces page-turners. In her third novel, based on a true story, Harris takes us to 1765 and the voice of Lucien, a “mulatto” slave who is “thirteen or fourteen or thereabouts”, and has been brought over to Martinique from his native Grenada. Lucien works tending livestock on a plantation run by French friars. His only family is older brother Emile, who works “a long day hike away”. Lucien is a vivid character from the first page: when called from the cows to his master’s side, he responds to the slack-jawed messenger with the delicious scorn of youth (“he had froth at the corner of his mouth from which signs I deem him to be of no startling intelligence”), while exhibiting a soft centre in regard to the animals (“She had the fluffiest, most velvety ears of any cow you did see”).

The summons is important: Father Cleophas wants the brothers to undertake a highly suspect mission. They must return to Grenada and smuggle back 42 slaves, former property of the friars, but claimed by English invaders when they took over that island two years ago. Celeste, Emile’s former sweetheart, is among them. Cleophas says the endeavour is blessed by the English governor of Grenada, but also warns that the plantation overseers strongly contest their claim. Harris’s decision to cast this as an adventure story – tremulous tone and all – seems intended to express the joie de vivre of our young protagonist. Her gentle beginning barely nods to slavery’s barbarity. What with the humorous references to the eccentric “dummie” of a ship’s captain, Bianco, who swigs rum as he whisks them across the sea, and with Lucien’s hero-worship of Emile and Emile’s longing for Celeste, readers may feel as if they’re on a jolly themselves. By the time they reach Grenada, and begin to convince their old friends to return with them, I wanted to scribble a huge note in the margin as a reminder that slaves have been sent to gather other slaves, and that the 289-kilometre trip from Grenada back to Martinique would be a journey into more slavery.

More here.

Stefan Auer at Eurozine:

Whatever else it signifies, Brexit marks a serious setback to the ideal of borderless Europe, praised by EU enthusiasts as ‘a conscious and successful attempt to go beyond the nation state’. According to Robert Cooper, for example, European integration was meant to have given rise to ‘a new form of statehood’, heralding the emergence of a better, postmodern state system in which states ‘are less absolute in their sovereignty and independence than before’. In such a world, borders turn from nouns to verbs; they are seen as social constructs that are fluid, ever changing and contested. Thus, scholars working in critical border studies have advocated ‘a move towards a more sociological treatment of borders as a set of contingent practices throughout societies’ and prefer talking about ‘bordering practices’ rather than borders. The very existence of the EU, on this account, has challenged old certainties about ‘ fixed and unquestioned political boundaries between states’.

Indeed, from its early beginnings the project of European unity was about challenging borders. That is surely the practical meaning of the ideal of an ‘ever closer union’ spelled out in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. More recently, from the Schengen Treaty (signed in 1985, implemented in 1995) that sought to cement the ideal of freedom of movement for European citizens by abolishing internal borders between EC/EU member states, to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that further enhanced this project by creating conditions for a monetary union, Europe appeared to be moving towards this ideal. Up to mid 2015, the EU’s internal borders continued to lose importance, yet its external boundaries remained largely impenetrable.

more here.

Ethan Iverson at The New Yorker:

At the beginning, Thelonious Monk was a shadowy figure known only to fellow-innovators. To help generate publicity, the Blue Note label dubbed him “the high priest” for his first records, as a bandleader, in the late nineteen-forties. After Monk spent a few more years in penniless obscurity, suddenly, most of New York City went to the Five Spot, where he was in residence for multiple months in 1957. From there he became a household name and one of the biggest draws on the European circuit. In 1964, he even appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and was profiled by Lewis Lapham, in the Saturday Evening Post, although most of the mainstream press during Monk’s lifetime made unhappy allusions to craziness, infantilism, and negroid primitivism. Eventually, the record companies decided that he wasn’t a religious icon (“the high priest”) but a warrior instead, and his last significant major-label release, “Underground,” depicted him on the cover with guns, grenades, and a captured Nazi.

During Monk’s ascendency, his style was so different from that of any other bebop or modern-jazz pianist. It was stubborn, incantatory, utterly African. Occasionally, when his left hand opened up and gave an accurate quotation of glorious Harlem stride, it became downright anachronistic. Some of the cognoscenti were bewildered, at least at first.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

An analysis of more than 1,000 mouse models of cancer has challenged their ability to predict patients’ response to therapy. The study, published today in Nature Genetics¹, catalogues the genetic changes that occur in human tumours after they have been grafted into mouse hosts. Such models, called patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), are used in basic research and as ‘avatars’ for individual patients. Researchers use these avatar mice to test a bevy of chemotherapies against a person's tumour, in the hope of tailoring a treatment plan for the patient's specific cancer. But fresh data from geneticists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggest that transplanting human cancer cells into a mouse alters the cells' evolution, reshaping the tumour's genome in ways that could affect responses to chemotherapy.

“The assumption is that what grows out in the PDX is reflective of the bulk of the tumour in the patient,” says cancer geneticist Todd Golub, a lead author on the study. “But there’s quite dramatic resculpting of the tumour genome.” No animal model is perfect, and researchers have long acknowledged that PDXs have their limitations. To avoid an immune assault on the foreign tumour, for example, PDXs are typically grafted into mice that lack a functioning immune system. This compromises scientists' ability to study how immune cells interact with the tumour — an area of increasing interest given the success of cancer therapies that unleash the immune system. PDXs can also take months to generate, making them too slow to serve as avatars for those patients who need to make immediate decisions about their therapy.

More here.

Robert B Talisse in Aeon:

The term democracy is used today to denote everything that is wholesome in the social world. Yet there is such a thing as too much democracy. By this I do not mean that democracy needs to be tempered by some autocratic or elitist political ideal. Rather, I mean that we must reserve space in our shared social lives for that which is not political at all. Even in a democracy, politics must be kept in its place.

Keeping democracy in its place is not easy. The very idea of collective self-government tempts us into thinking that citizens must be perpetually fixated on the task of ruling themselves. Accordingly, a central message of most democratic theory has been that our social lives as such should be driven by democratic aims and projects. And this theoretical message has clearly worked its way into practice. Democratic politics has thoroughly infiltrated our social lives. Our daily interactions, from coffee shops and street corners to comment threads and blog posts, are increasingly structured by our political allegiances, and those allegiances ever more frequently supply the content of our casual conversations.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the United States today, your choices about mundane matters – where to buy groceries, what television shows to watch, the sports teams you follow, how to get to work, where you go on vacation, how you spend Sunday mornings – are all deeply tied to your political profile.

More here.

Nick Holdstock at 3:AM Magazine:

Reading the short, melancholy Katalin Street made me remember the time when machine-gun wielding Yugoslav soldiers removed me from a train in the middle of the night. It also made me recall being robbed by two men in the shadows of Tahrir Square in Cairo, how close they held a knife to my face as I lay trembling on the ground. I wouldn’t say these were defining moments in my life, but they certainly cast a long shadow. I cannot walk down any street at night without being startled by the sound of footsteps approaching behind me, not even the quiet, familiar dead end street I live on. The persistence of trauma is the dominant theme of Katalin Street, Magda Szabó’s 1969 novel, now available in a new translation by Len Rix. It shows the way in which the lives of the inhabitants of three adjacent Budapest households in the 1930s and 1940s are badly warped by the death of one of the children during the Second World War, so much so that many of them seem to “die long before their real death”.

Though Szabó, who died in 2007, had a long, distinguished career in Hungary, her work only began to reach a wide readership in English after Rix’s translation of her novel, The Door, appeared in 2005. The Door is a confessional story about a painful, yet intensely close relationship between a writer and Emerence, the elderly woman who works as her cleaner. At times the novel verges on the supernatural: Emerence seems able to control the writer’s dog even when she is absent.

more here.

David Biale at Literary Review:

Only a quotation, taken pretty much at random, can capture the charming but equally irritating quality of the second volume of Simon Schama’s highly personal and idiosyncratic history of the Jews:

There was a time when Jewish catering opened doors. Every Friday afternoon, following Muslim prayers but before the Jewish Sabbath, a caravan of confections from the villa of the Great Jew in Pera was delivered to Topkapi Palace. Seated upon silk cushions, the yellow-haired sultan, Selim II, awaited with keen anticipation the delicacies brought to him on Chinese porcelain: pigeon dainties baked in rose water and sugar, goose livers chopped with Corinth raisins and the spices which were, after all, the Jew’s to command; also some items preserved in the kitchen of culinary nostalgia, from the ancient Turkic days of tents and flocks and racing ponies; the sour yogurts and yufka, the unleavened bread that was wrapped around a pilaf. In the new style there was an array of zeytinyagli dishes, named for the olive oil (another Jewish import trade) in which they were cooked and served cold – a corrective, the physicians said, to the black bile that would come on the humid summers.

This passage is vintage Schama: lush in evocative detail, a veritable word picture, but also self-indulgently overwritten. The passage goes on for another page and a half before we learn the identity of this Jewish confectioner, Don Joseph Nasi, a refugee from the Iberian Peninsula, who became one of the richest and most powerful men (and certainly the richest and most powerful Jew) in the Ottoman Empire.

more here.

Paul Lewis at The Guardian:

Justin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook. But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of social media and other addictive technologies.

Rosenstein purchased a new iPhone and instructed his assistant to set up a parental-control feature to prevent him from downloading any apps.

A decade after he stayed up all night coding a prototype of what was then called an “awesome” button, Rosenstein belongs to a small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics who complain about the rise of the so-called “attention economy”: an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.

more here.

Ed Yong in The Huffington Post:

Heather Murphy in The New York Times: