Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept:

Kudos to Germany's spooks. Back in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence agency, BND, distributed a one-and-a-half-page memoto various media outlets titled: “Saudi Arabia — Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation.” The document was pretty astonishing, both in its undiplomatic bluntness and remarkable prescience.

“The current cautious diplomatic stance of senior members of the Saudi royal family will be replaced by an impulsive intervention policy,” the memo warned, focusing on the role of Mohammed bin Salman, who had been appointed as deputy crown prince and defense minister at the age of 30 earlier that year.

Both MBS, as he has come to be known, and his elderly father King Salman, the BND analysts wrote, want Saudi Arabia to be seen as “the leader of the Arab world” with a foreign policy built on “a strong military component.” Yet the memo also pointed out that the consolidation of so much power in a single young prince’s hands “harbors a latent risk that in seeking to establish himself in the line of succession in his father’s lifetime, he may overreach,” adding: “Relations with friendly and above all allied countries in the region could be overstretched.”

And so it has come to pass.

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Amy Harmon in The New York Times:

As one of the exceedingly rare members of her species to live beyond age 110, Goldie Michelson had divulged her secrets to longevity countless times before dying last year at 113. “Morning walks and chocolate,” the Gloucester, Mass., resident and onetime oldest living American told the steady stream of inquisitors that marked her final years. Unlike the growing ranks of nonagenarians and centenarians, those who breach a 12th decade, known as supercentenarians, rarely face protracted illness or disability before they die, a boon that many of them have ascribed to personal habits. “I try to live the truth,” said Shelby Harris, who threw out the first pitch of the local minor league baseball team’s 2012 season a few months before he died at 111 in Rock Island, Ill. Emma Morano of Verbania, Italy, still cooking her own pasta until a few years before she died last April at 117, prescribed raw eggs, and no husband. But even as they indulged the notion that exceptionally healthy longevity can be explained by lifestyle, each agreed to donate DNA to a private effort to find the secrets in supercentenarian genes. The full genetic sequences of Ms. Michelson, Mr. Harris and Ms. Morano are among some three dozen genomes of North American, Caribbean and European supercentenarians being made available this week by a nonprofit called Betterhumans to any researcher who wants to dive in.

…The rare cache of supercentenarian genomes, the largest yet to be sequenced and made public, comes as studies of garden-variety longevity have yielded few solid clues to healthy aging. Lifestyle and luck, it seems, still factor heavily into why people live into their 90s and 100s. To the extent that they have a genetic advantage, it appears to come partly from having inherited fewer than usual DNA variations known to raise the risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other afflictions. That is not enough, some researchers say, to explain what they call “truly rare survival,” or why supercentenarians are more uniformly healthy than centenarians in their final months and years. Rather than having won dozens of hereditary coin tosses with DNA variations that are less bad, scientists suggest, supercentenarians may possess genetic code that actively protects them from aging. But the effort to find that code has been “challenged,” as a group of leading longevity researchers put it in a recent academic paper, in part by the difficulties in acquiring supercentenarian DNA.

More here.

Tobin Harshaw at Bloomberg:

Of all the famous things Mark Twain never actually said, perhaps none is repeated more often and with less justification than "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." And since the election of Donald Trump as president, history as verse has become a farce: He is Hitler, he is Stalin, he is Mao, he is Caligula, he is Cyrus the Great, he is Pharaoh, he is Joe McCarthy, he is Charles Lindbergh, he is King George III (both the sane and insaneversions), he is Julius Caesar, he is Hamlet, he is the Know-Nothing Party, he is Charles Manson, he is Jimmy Carter, he is Andrew Jackson, he is Herbert Hoover, he is Woodrow Wilson, he is — wait, what: Woodrow Wilson? Seriously?

"Ironically," writes Trygve Throntveit in Time, "Trumpism finds ample historical precedents in the immediate and long-term aftermath of U.S. intervention in World War I." He adds that in pledging to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson was foreshadowing "Trump's make-America-great-and-safe-first foreign policy."

Hmmm. I'm not sure I'm sold that the 28^th president was the MAGA man of his day. 1But it's a fresher take than the many uninformed comparisons of Trump to the Republican isolationists who followed Wilson, and thus a contribution to the growing body of journalistic analogies between our present moment and the era of the Great War. You can see the parallels, we are told, in Brexit, the backlash against immigrants in the U.S. and Europe, a radical autocracy in Russia roiling the West with propaganda, the collapse of order in the Middle East, secessionist movements in Europe (Serbia, meet Catalonia), and so on.

So, with this Veterans Day marking the centennial of the final year of the War to End All Wars, I decided to hash out which of these supposed historical echoes make sense, and whether lessons learned 100 years ago can help see us through the fraught present. And I was lucky enough to get to do so with Sir Max Hastings.

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Mark Athitakis at the website of the NEH:

Poe churned out reams of puff-free reviews—the Library of America’s collection of his reviews and essays fills nearly 1,500 dense pages. Few outside of Poe scholarship circles bother reading them now, though; in a discipline that’s had its share of so-called takedown artists, Poe was an especially unlovable literary critic. He occasionally celebrated authors he admired, such as Charles Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But, from 1835 until his death in 1849, the typical Poe book review sloshed with invective.

Tackling a collection of poems by William W. Lord in 1845, Poe opined that “the only remarkable things about Mr. Lord’s compositions are their remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, platitude, stupidity, and bombast.” He opened his review of Susan Rigby Morgan’s 1836 novel, The Swiss Heiress, by proclaiming that it “should be read by all who have nothing better to do.” The prose of Theodore S. Fay’s 1835 novel, Norman Leslie, was “unworthy of a school-boy.” A year later, Poe doomed Morris Mattson’s novel Paul Ulric by pushing Fay under the bus yet again, writing, “When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric.”

Such candor did Poe’s career no favors. Fay was the editor of the New York Mirror, where Poe would later go begging for a job in 1844, landing only a low-level copyediting gig. Three years earlier Poe had declared H. T. Tuckerman, editor of the Boston Miscellany, an “insufferably tedious and dull writer,” a statement that haunted Poe a year later when he submitted “The Tell-Tale Heart” to Tuckerman for publication. “If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles,” Tuckerman wrote in his icy rejection letter, “he would be a most desirable correspondent.” Upon Poe’s death, critic Rufus Griswold wrote an obituary for the New York Tribune of surprising meanness. Griswold claimed that Poe “had few or no friends” and that “few will be grieved” by his passing—perhaps an act of revenge for Poe’s own cruelties toward Griswold as a rival critic. Poe once dismissed him as a “toady” destined to “sink into oblivion.”

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

At the age of 7, Hassan had already seen more than his fair share of hardship. A week after he was born in Syria, a blister appeared on his back. The doctors there diagnosed him with a genetic disorder called epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, which leaves one’s skin extremely fragile and prone to tearing. There was no cure, they said. When Hassan’s family fled Bashar al-Assad’s regime and moved to Germany as refugees, the doctors there said the same thing. Meanwhile, the blisters were getting bigger.

In June 2015, Hassan was admitted to the burn unit of a children’s hospital in Bochum, Germany. By that time, around 60 percent of his epidermis—the top layer of his skin—was gone. His back, flanks, and limbs had become a continuous landscape of open wounds, red and raw. Much of it was badly infected. The pain was excruciating. “Why do I have to live this life?” he asked his father.

Five weeks later, Hassan’s doctors had run out of options, and were planning to start end-of-life care. But after his father asked about experimental treatments, they contacted Michele de Luca, a stem-cell biologist at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Over the past decades, de Luca had been working on a way of giving EB patients fresh skin. He would collect stem cells from their body, edit the faulty genes that were causing their condition, use the corrected cells to grow healthy epidermis, and graft these new layers back onto the patients.

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Sarah Wildman in Vox:

In my mid-20s, I was an assistant editor toiling on the lower rungs of the New Republic, working late nights and long shifts. One evening, most of the staff went to a bar after work. The usual lines of banter were soon crossed; the teasing turned darkly sexual. As the night progressed, Leon Wieseltier, the magazine’s intellectual luminary and literary editor, cornered me, alone by the bathroom, and put his mouth on mine. I clapped my hand over my mouth in surprise. “I’ve always known you’d do that,” I recall he said.

A few days later, I told the story to the editor of the magazine, Peter Beinart. The mortification of the moment wasn’t just from the kiss, I explained. It was the intimacy of the touch and the dialogue that accompanied it. There was a clear invitation to continue an assignation elsewhere. Other women, he had intimated, had apparently accepted similar such offers. When I fled, I thought I heard him laugh.

In disclosing this incident to my superiors, the outcome was, in many ways, far worse than the act itself. It’s not exactly that I was disbelieved; it’s that in the end, I was dismissed. Over one wrenching week I learned why women, typically, don’t divulge such stories. Me — I regretted it immediately.

I can’t even quite explain why I came to Beinart, other than that after this event, I felt strangely unmoored. Anyway, as far as I knew, the New Republic had no system for reporting sexual impropriety, and, even if they had, I wasn’t seeking some sort of formal inquiry. (This is not, I know now, unusual.) I certainly wasn’t hoping to have Wieseltier punished. Some 15 years later, I’m still not.

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Josie Appleton in Sp!ked:

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1805), Hegel argues that Luther’s great insight is that individuals should find themselves at home in the truth. Truth should not be something that is externally imposed upon us, prescribed from without. It should not only be experienced as out there, in doctrine, scripture, or injunction, but also as something inner, internal to the individual. The truth should be something that we recognise, feel, and believe to be our truth. Luther, in this sense, is the culmination of a process that began in Ancient Greece, whereby the question of conscience, of right conduct or right knowledge, became increasingly inner, and increasingly freed from external impositions. This occurred through a series of conflicts between individuals and social authorities. The question of wrongdoing was at first an external matter: in primitive law, the harmful act is considered as a disruption or pollution, and atonement takes the form of compensation or magical acts to remove these physical consequences. Indeed, crime in Greece retained a pseudo-physical element: the criminal courts were religious sites and crimes were atoned for not only by punishments but also by religious rites, to remove the contamination that had been created. The question of right conduct was also deeply reliant on external guidance, with citizens or army generals alike posing questions to oracles or seers and following their prescriptions.

In Moral Conscience Through the Ages (2014), Richard Sorabji points out that there was a shift in Greek drama in the 5th century BC, from a more external to a more internal view of events. In Aeschylus’ early telling of a young man’s (Orestes) killing of his mother, the young man’s wrongdoing is made clear through his pursuit by the furies: his wrongdoing takes an external form. In Euripides’ later version, however, Orestes ‘shares knowledge with himself’, and Orestes is about his own view of his actions. His matricide was ordered by an oracle, to avenge her murder of his father, but it goes against his sense of right: ‘I can’t believe that what the god told me is right.’ The consequences of his murderous act are less the practical ones (of the impending trial, or communal punishment) than Orestes’s and his sister Electra’s realisation of their wrong. The torment is a subjective one:

‘O Phoebus, in the command of your oracle
Justice was hidden from me;
But in its fulfilment
You have made torment clear.’

Here, we see individuals start to develop their own standards of right, their own inner source of guidance and principles.

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Bret Stetka in Scientific American:

In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard University psychologist and famed intellect Steven Pinker argues humans are now living in the most peaceful era in the history of our species. At the time the U.S. was mired in two wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, the conflict in Darfur had just come to a close and terrorist insurgent group Boko Haram was setting off bombs across northern Nigeria. Such examples still abound years later. Last week violent incidents in New York City and Sutherland Springs, Texas, left many dead and injured. “The claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene,” Pinker wrote. “I know from conversations and survey data that most people refuse to believe it.” Yet there is plenty of evidence supporting Pinker’s claim. Most scholars agree the percentage of people who die violent war-related deaths has plummeted through history; and that proportionally violent deaths decline as populations become increasingly large and organized, or move from “nonstate” status—such as hunter–gatherer societies—to fully fledged “states.” Still, there are many ways to look at the data—and quantifying the definition of a violent society. A study in Current Anthropology published online October 13 acknowledges the percentage of a population suffering violent war-related deaths—fatalities due to intentional conflict between differing communities—does decrease as a population grows. At the same time, though, the absolute numbers increase more than would be expected from just population growth. In fact, it appears, the data suggest, the overall battle-death toll in modern organized societies is exponentially higher than in hunter–gatherer societies surveyed during the past 200 years.

The study—led by anthropologists Dean Falk at The Florida State University and Charles Hildebolt at Washington University in Saint Louis—cut across cultures and species and compared annual war deaths for 11 chimpanzee communities, 24 hunter–gatherer or other nonstate groups and 19 and 22 countries that fought in World Wars I and II, respectively. Overall, the authors’ analysis shows the larger the population of a group of chimps, the lower their rate of annual deaths due to conflict. This, according to the authors, was not the case in human populations. People, their data show, have evolved to be more violent than chimps. And, despite high rates of violent death in comparison with population size, nonstate groups are on average no more or less violent than those living in organized societies. Falk and Hildebolt point out Pinker’s claims are based on data looking at violent death rates per 100,000 people. They contend such ratios don’t take into account how overall population size alters war death tallies—in other words how those ratios change as a population grows, which their findings do. There is a strong trend for larger societies to lose smaller percentages of their members to war, Falk says, but the actual number of war deaths increases with growing population sizes. “This is not what one would predict if larger societies were less violent than smaller ones,” she says. Falk adds that small communities are not necessarily more violent than larger populations—they are simply more vulnerable to losing a significant portion of their population due to outsider attacks. “If I walk down a dark alley at night, I am potentially more vulnerable to being killed than I am when I attend a football game,” Falk says. She admits citing a population of one in an alley is an extreme example. But she adds that smaller populations suffering a higher percentage of casualties at the hands of another population are not necessarily more innately violent than large modern societies are—they might instead just be the victims.

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Lucina Schell at The Quarterly Conversation:

Before Leonora Carrington became a famed surrealist artist and writer, she went mad. In the late 1930s, the English debutante was living with her lover Max Ernst (more than 20 years her senior) in a farmhouse in Provence, when Ernst was imprisoned on a visit to Paris and sent to a concentration camp. As the German army advanced, Carrington fled across the Pyrenees into Spain, where, after exhibiting increasingly deranged behavior, she was interned in an insane asylum in Santander. Down Below is Carrington’s brief yet harrowing account of her journey to the other side of consciousness.

It was André Breton who encouraged Carrington to write down her experience. Liberation of the mind was the ultimate aim of surrealism, and Carrington, already consecrated as a surrealist femme-enfant, a conduit for her much older lover to the realms of youth and mystery, had now traveled further than any of them and lived to tell the tale. While she was predisposed to find artistic merit in her experience of madness, Carrington’s reasons for telling her story seem more personal and therapeutic: “How can I write this when I’m afraid to think about it? I am in terrible anguish, yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory…I know that once I write it down, I shall be delivered.”

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Patrick McGuiness at The Guardian:

Thom Gunn was one of those poets you studied at school in the 1960s or 70s if your teacher had their finger on the pulse: Plath, Hughes, Heaney and Gunn. He had his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954), accepted for publication while still an undergraduate at Cambridge, and brought out his second, The Sense of Movement, in 1957 – the same year as Ted Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain. Gunn and Hughes were prolific and famous enough, in 1962, to share a joint Selected Poems from Faber. Gunn met his life partner, Mike Kitay, an American visiting student, at Cambridge, and moved with him to California in 1954. By the time Gunn died at his home in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, he had lived in the US for nearly 60 years, and had become – as he put it – an “Anglo-American poet”.

In “To Thom Gunn in Los Altos, California”, his friend Donald Davie wrote: “Conquistador! Live dangerously, my Byron, / In this metropolis / Of Finistere. Drop off / The edge repeatedly, and come / Back to tell us!”

This homage captures something of Gunn’s aura in the 1960s: explorer, risk-taker, connoisseur of edges. Davie nicely turns the cliche around by evoking a poet who “drops off … repeatedly” and returns to tell the tale. Ted Hughes stayed in England, dug in and dug deep; Gunn flew to America and spread himself out.

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Donna Zuckerberg at the TLS:

Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and The Roman Way, originally published in 1930 and 1932, are classics in their own right. Praised for their lucidity and accessibility, her books served as an introduction to classical antiquity for the general American public for much of the twentieth century. Although less well known in Europe, Hamilton achieved such popularity in the United States that, when I tell people that I study Classics, most people over the age of fifty who are familiar with the subject tell me that Hamilton was their entry point. The Greek Way was a favourite volume of Robert Kennedy, and – he claimed – a text that helped him process his grief after the assassination of his brother. Hamilton’s works underlie one traditional American approach to the Classics. Do they deserve re-publication?

Hamilton herself is a figure about whom much has been written lately (for example, the excellent chapter by Judith Hallett in the volume Women Classical Scholars, 2016). She had two distinguished careers, first as headmaster at Bryn Mawr, then as a writer about the ancient Mediterranean. It is tempting to compare Hamilton to her British contemporary Jane Ellen Harrison, but while Harrison’s work on Greek mythology became the foundation of scholarship on the subject, Hamilton’s work on mythology and classical civilization was unapologetically popularizing.

As with most classic works, Hamilton’s books present something of a conundrum to readers today: they are obviously products of a different time. Mary Beard, in her SPQR (2015), has compared studying ancient Rome to “walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act. If you look down on one side, everything seems reassuringly familiar . . . on the other side, it seems completely alien territory”. Reading Hamilton is a similar experience.

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John Banville in The Nation:

The vigorously kicked-up dust has long since settled, and one wonders anew what all the fuss was about. He sent himself to Paris in the 1920s, which was the place to be just then. He shrewdly latched on to a lot of influential literary people and later learned how to be a celebrity by associating with stars of the screen and the corrida. He wrote a clutch of good stories and a handful of novels ranging from fresh and original through mediocre to abysmally bad—although the posthumously published The Garden of Eden is nearly very good, in its weird way. He mythologized himself as the Great American Novelist, despite the fact that none of his novels is set in America (except To Have and Have Not, a minor work) and he was arguably at his best in the medium of the short story. Later in life, he blundered into depression, alcoholism, paranoia, and manic delusion, and killed himself. At best, much of his life was only of passing notoriety—or so one would have thought—and yet the legend lives on, as tenacious as ever. How to account for it?

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Skye C. Cleary and Massimo Pigliucci at IAI News:

When every day many of us wake up to read about fresh horrors on our fresh horrors device, we might find ourselves contemplating the question as to whether, as Albert Camus supposedly put it, one should kill oneself or have a cup of coffee. If there is any philosopher who is famous for contemplating suicide, it’s Camus who, in a more serious tone, proposed that, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”[1]

The existentialists and Stoics are notorious for being at loggerheads on many issues. Yet Simone de Beauvoir, who was much less famous for her views on suicide than Camus, gives an example that shows the existential answer isn’t so far removed from the Stoic one – a fascinating case of philosophical convergence, two millennia apart.

In 1954, Beauvoir was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize for her book The Mandarins, in which the main character Anne contemplates suicide. When once she saw the world as vast and inexhaustible, she now looks at it with indifference: “The earth is frozen over; nothingness has reclaimed it.” Her great love affair has collapsed, her daughter has grown up and no longer needs her, and she finds her profession unfulfilling. It’s not only that she feels her life no longer counts, but also existing is torturous and her memories are agony. Suicide seems like an escape from the pain. Clutching the brown vial of poison, Anne hears her daughter’s voice outside and it jars her into considering the effect of her death on other people. “My death does not belong to me,” she concludes, because “it’s the others who would live my death.”

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Duncan Kelly in the New York Times:

A. C. Grayling, a British philosopher and critic whose subjects range from 17th-century epistemology to 20th-century war crimes, has come to tell us what he knows: that at one time we admired and understood representative democracy, and not without reason, but that in the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, democracy has been “made to fail.” Why has this happened? Because of insufficient checks on the power of political and economic elites, a failure in the civic education required of an informed populace and the ideological distortions created through the lobbying efforts of special interests.

Representative democracy ticks more of the boxes citizens want from their government than any other system we’ve tried to design. But when we forget this, rancorous populism and plebiscitary politics take hold, and we need to be given an old-fashioned history lesson to warn of the dangers ahead. As Grayling reminds us, democracy, understood as the rule of the majority, has never been sufficient in itself. Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli all knew that more was needed, whether that meant enshrining constitutional rules to avoid the arbitrary exercise of power, imposing standards of behavior on elected officials or supporting a healthy ambivalence toward rulers by the ruled.

More here.