Julia Franz at PRI:

“Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing,” is a statistical analysis of famous books — and in it, Blatt uncovers some surprising facts about well-known writing.

For instance, did you know that the word “she” only appears once in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”? Or that James Patterson averages 160 clichés per 100,000 words in his best-selling Alex Cross detective novels?

The statistical study of literature isn’t just trivia worthy: As Blatt points out in the book’s introduction, two statisticians in the 1960s used word frequency and probability to pinpoint the authors of "The Federalist Papers," which had been a mystery since 1787. Blatt wanted to apply a similar analysis to a larger body of literature, to get a better understanding of how great books — and less-great ones — are constructed.

“One thing that made this book possible is that writers are consistent from book to book and really years and decades later,” he says. “It's not that in one book they write one way, in one book they write another way. There are some words and patterns and techniques that they use that are remarkably consistent over the course of their life.”

In the book, Blatt refers to these patterns as an author’s “stylistic fingerprint.” In one line of inquiry, he dusts for prints by calculating famous authors’ favorite words — the terms they use “at an extreme ratio” compared to other writers. He calls them “cinnamon words,” after an anecdote about the novelist Ray Bradbury.

More here. [Thanks to Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb.]

Ed Yong in Aeon:

The classic novel by H G Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) – a tale of England besieged by Martian conquerors – ends not with a rousing and heroic victory but an accidental one. The aliens subjugate humanity with heat rays and black smoke but, at the height of their victory, they die. Their machines come to a standstill amid the ruins of a deserted London, and the birds pick at their rotting remains. The cause of their downfall? Bacteria. As the novel’s unnamed narrator says, they were ‘slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things’.

Wells’s logic was simple. Humans have immune systems that protect us from the infectious germs that we’ve been exposed to since our earliest origins. We still get diseases, but at least we can put up a fight. The Martians, despite their technological superiority, could not. ‘There are no bacteria in Mars,’ the narrator explains, ‘and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.’

When I first read the book about two decades ago, this final twist seemed like a cop-out. It comes out of nowhere – a sort of deus ex microbia rescue – and, besides, Earth’s microbes could not possibly grow in an alien body. But more recently, I have come to realise that Wells, writing at the close of the 19th century, was inadvertently hinting at a truth about bacteria that even today’s microbiologists sometimes forget: these organisms can become lethal through evolutionary accidents.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

‘All politics is identity politics.’ And ‘Without identity politics there can be no defence of women’s rights or the rights of minority groups.’ So run the two most common contemporary defences of identity politics. As criticism of the politics of identity has become more developed and fierce, so has the defence. So, I want here to begin a critique of the critique, as it were, and in so doing reassert the necessity for challenging identity politics.

Identities are, of course, of great significance. They give each of us a sense of ourselves, of our grounding in the world and of our relationships to others. At the same time, politics is a means, or should be a means, or taking us beyond the narrow sense of identity given to each of us by the specific circumstances of our lives and the particularities of personal experiences. As a teenager, I was drawn to politics because of my experience of racism. But if it was racism that drew me to politics, it was politics that made me see beyond the narrow confines of racism. I came to learn that there was more to social justice than challenging the injustices done to me, and that a person’s skin colour, ethnicity or culture provides no guide to the validity of his or her political beliefs. Through politics, I was introduced to the ideas of the Enlightenment, and to the concepts of a common humanity and universal rights. Through politics, too, I discovered the writings of Marx and Mill, Baldwin and Arendt, James and Fanon. Most of all, I discovered that I could often find more solidarity and commonality with those whose ethnicity or culture was different to mine, but who shared my values, than with many with whom I shared a common ethnicity or culture but not the same political vision.

Politics, in other words, did not reinforce my identity, but helped me reach beyond it. If I was growing up today, though, it is quite possible that my political education would be much narrower, because it would be shaped primarily by my personal identity and experience, rather than providing a means of transcending it; because all politics has, for so many, come to be seen as identity politics.

To understand the characteristics of contemporary identity politics, we need first to go back to the origins of modern politics, at the end of the eighteenth-century.

More here.

Guy Davenport at The New Criterion:

What “The Dispersion of Seeds” establishes is that Thoreau was inventing the study we now call ecology—how nature keeps house. In France at the same time that Thoreau was plotting how individual trees have their seeds distributed by squirrels, birds, wind, snow, rain, and a free ride on human trousers and skirts, Louis Pasteur was disproving the age-old belief in spontaneous generation.

Even though the introduction by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., places this text historically and biographically, showing how it reflects Thoreau’s acceptance of On the Origin of Species over his allegiance to Louis Agassiz’s theory of repeated cataclysms and geneses, there is a deeper dimension to Thoreau’s text. At the center of his detective work is Thoreau’s observation that pine seedlings thrive best in stands of oak, and vice versa: exactly the opposite of what one would expect. Thoreau sees in this a cunning arrangement whereby if an oak forest goes down to a forest fire or the axe, a pine forest is there ready to replace it. But he does not have the knowledge of soil chemistry to account for why pine seedlings fare better among oaks than near their parent trees. It was in the reforestation of Jutland that the Danes discovered that the mountain pine (Pinus montana) seemed to be dependent on the proximity of spruce (Pica alba), neither of which grew into healthy trees without the other. A Colonel E. Delgar established this mutuality as a principle, and thus reforested large areas of a country that was being taken over by sand dunes. I suspect that Thoreau had discovered a similar relationship of interdependency far ahead of botany’s ability to account for it.

more here.

Cecilia Heyes at the TLS:

Fifty years on, some experts on reasoning – working in economics, philosophy and psychology – still respond to evidence of human irrationality with denial. They either ignore the evidence altogether, or insist that it does no more than find rare exceptions to the rational norm. According to this traditional view, as long as we are not misled by vanity, emotion, or tricky ways of posing the question, we do actually reason in the way we should reason – as prescribed by probability theory, decision theory and logic, for example – and via mental processes that are captured pretty well by formalisms such as: All As are Bs, All Cs are As, Therefore all Cs are Bs. If we know (or are told by Aristotle) that All humans are mortal and All Greeks are human, we can compose sentences in our heads where “humans” appears in the “A” slot, “mortal” in the “B” slot, and “Greeks” in the “C”slot, and then turn a handle marked “deductive syllogism” to discover that All Greeks are mortal. And we are mighty good at performing this kind of operation. On the traditional view, reasoning is, as Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber put it, a human “superpower” that sets us apart from all other animals.

But the majority of experts are no longer in denial. Instead they respond to evidence of irrationality with deflection, duplication, dedication, or despair. The deflection response suggests that reasoning conforms to non-standard principles. Perhaps the logical standards we meet, or even the processes in our heads, are not those devised by Aristotle. The duplicators – most famously, Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow – believe there are two psychological systems involved in answering questions such as “Is Linda more likely to be a bank teller, or a bank teller and an active feminist?”

more here.

Kate Maltby in New Statesman:

In a 1984 interview with American Theatre magazine, the playwright and actor Sam Shepard pondered human knowability. “I feel like there are territories within us that are totally unknown. Huge, mysterious and dangerous territories. We think we know ourselves, when we really know only this little bitty part… Catharsis is getting rid of something. I’m not looking to get rid of it, I’m looking to find it. I’m not doing this in order to vent demons. I want to shake hands with them.” Catharsis remained something notably lacking from the plays of Shepard, who died today in Kentucky at the age of 73. His characters stumble blindly, brutalizing and needling each other with fists and words, but they rarely stagger into self-knowledge. There is no reward for suffering. Shepard was born in 1943 on the Fort Sheridan military base in northern Illinois. His father, a hardened alcoholic, moved the family to the American southwest after the war, where Shepherd worked on ranches and made the first steps in his own troubled relationship with alcohol. He would later talk frankly in a Paris Review interview about his second-generation alcoholism – which saw him arrested at least twice for drunken driving – and the societal disruption he observed in his working class community when its men returned from the second world war.

But while Shepard would draw inspiration from his Western roots to fuel his drama, he also fled from them. By 1962, he was living in Greenwich Village New York and creating plays at the emerging Theatre Genesis under the name Sam Shepherd. After winning six Obie awards between 1966 and 1968, he became viable as a commercial screenwriter. By the age of 28, Shepherd was living between NYC and Hollywood. This success in film would also lead to significant work as an actor and eventually an Academy Award nomination for his performance as pilot Chuck Yeager in the The Right Stuff. His greatest achievement, however, was always as a playwright. If Shepherd was less known in the UK than his native US, it is perhaps because his particular brand of American gothic feels acutely alien in London or Edinburgh. Even to American audiences, throughout the 50 states, the pioneer-country violence of Shepard’s scenarios often seemed exotic in its rural absurdity and archaism.

More here.

Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times:

Much of the scientific research on resilience — our ability to bounce back from adversity — has focused on how to build resilience in children. But what about the grown-ups? While resilience is an essential skill for healthy childhood development, science shows that adults also can take steps to boost resilience in middle age, which is often the time we need it most. Midlife can bring all kinds of stressors, including divorce, the death of a parent, career setbacks and retirement worries, yet many of us don’t build the coping skills we need to meet these challenges. The good news is that some of the qualities of middle age — a better ability to regulate emotions, perspective gained from life experiences and concern for future generations — may give older people an advantage over the young when it comes to developing resilience, said Adam Grant, a management and psychology professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “There is a naturally learnable set of behaviors that contribute to resilience,” said Dr. Grant, who, with Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, wrote the book “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy.” “Those are the behaviors that we gravitate to more and more as we age.”

Scientists who study stress and resilience say it’s important to think of resilience as an emotional muscle that can be strengthened at any time. While it’s useful to build up resilience before a big or small crisis hits, there still are active steps you can take during and after a crisis to speed your emotional recovery. Last year Dr. Dennis Charney, a resilience researcher and dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, was leaving a deli when he was shot by a disgruntled former employee. Dr. Charney spent five days in intensive care and faced a challenging recovery. “After 25 years of studying resilience, I had to be resilient myself,” said Dr. Charney, co-author of the book “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.” “It’s good to be prepared for it, but it’s not too late once you’ve been traumatized to build the capability to move forward in a resilient way.”

Here are some of the ways you can build your resilience in middle age.

More here.

James Norton in The Christian Science Monitor:

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

David Sexton in the Evening Standard:

There’s been quite a spate of novels recently about people becoming severely unstuck abroad — holiday noir, a trend-spotting article called it last week.

If that’s a genre, its master is Lawrence Osborne. In the past few years, he has published fine novels about Westerners losing their bearings in Morocco, Macau and Cambodia (the excellent Hunters in the Dark). Beautiful Animals is another such tale of moral disorientation, his best version of it yet.

It’s set on the small Greek island of Hydra, once a boho hangout where in the Sixties Leonard Cohen bought a house for $1,500 but now a favoured retreat for the super-rich and the art world. Osborne wrote a sly, observant travel-piece about Hydra and its yacht-owning billionaires for the

New York Times in 2014 — and in this novel he brings together the privileged holidaying Westerners and a stranded would-be migrant.

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quartz:

When players are at equilibrium, no one has a reason to stray. But how do players get to equilibrium in the first place? In contrast with, say, a ball rolling downhill and coming to rest in a valley, there is no obvious force guiding game players toward a Nash equilibrium.

“It has always been a thorn in the side of microeconomists,” said Tim Roughgarden, a theoretical computer scientist at Stanford University. “They use these equilibrium concepts, and they’re analyzing them as if people will be at equilibrium, but there isn’t always a satisfying explanation of why people will be at Nash equilibrium as opposed to just groping around for one.”

If people play a game only once, it is often unreasonable to expect them to find an equilibrium. This is especially the case if — as is typical in the real world — each player knows only how much she herself values the game’s different outcomes, and not how much her fellow players do. But if people can play repeatedly, perhaps they could learn from the early rounds and rapidly steer themselves toward an equilibrium. Yet attempts to find such efficient learning methods have always come up dry.

“Economists have proposed mechanisms for how you can converge [quickly] to equilibrium,” said Aviad Rubinstein, who is finishing a doctorate in theoretical computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. But for each such mechanism, he said, “there are simple games you can construct where it doesn’t work.”

Now, Rubinstein and Yakov Babichenko, a mathematician at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, have explained why. In a paper posted online last September, they proved that no method of adapting strategies in response to previous games — no matter how commonsensical, creative or clever — will converge efficiently to even an approximate Nash equilibrium for every possible game.

More here.

German Lopez in Vox:

Much of the attention to mass incarceration, including from reform efforts, has gone to low-level offenses, especially for drug and property crimes. In large part, this is likely a result of the media focusing too much on the federal prison system instead of the state prison systems: While about half of federal prisoners are in for drug crimes, only about 16 percent of state prisoners are — and more than half of state prisoners are in for violent crimes.

This is notable because the great majority — 87 percent — of prisoners in the US are housed at the state level, not the federal level. So to greatly reduce incarceration, the country will need to focus on the state level. And to do a lot at the state level, the US will need to reduce the incarceration of violent offenders.

This obviously gets a lot trickier, politically, than addressing low-level drug offenses. A pollconducted by Morning Consult for Vox last year, for example, found that nearly eight in 10 US voters support reducing prison sentences for people who committed a nonviolent crime and have a low risk of reoffending. But fewer than three in 10 backed shorter prison sentences for people who committed a violent crime and have a low risk of reoffending.

“It’s one of the spaces where the policy and public safety arguments are going to have the least impact,” Pfaff acknowledged, “because many will view it as the right thing to do to lock them up forever.”

But there are ways to cut prison sentences for violent offenders without leading to more crime.

For one, incarceration is simply not a good way to combat crime. A 2015 review of the research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration — and its abilities to incapacitate or deter criminals — explained about 0 to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s. Other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop since the ’90s. And a 2014 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that states that reduced their imprisonment rates also saw some of the biggest drops in crime, suggesting that there isn’t a hard link between incarceration and crime.

More here.

David Adger on Arrival in Inference:

IN THE ORIGINAL short story, ideas from physics and mathematics are crucial to the plot. Among them is Fermat’s principle of least time. This states that light traveling between two points traverses the shortest possible path. The refraction of light can be understood in terms of this principle. Upon coming into contact with water, a beam of light changes direction because the index of refraction of water is different from that of air. Because light travels more slowly through water than air, the amount of time light spends travelling through water is minimized. The overall length of the path is also minimized. Understanding the behavior of a beam of light at the interface between air and water seems to require knowledge of both its starting and end points—a notion that is counterintuitive.

Fermat’s principle describes behavior in the physical world in terms of how the system works globally. The difference between the immediate agent of change and some final result that the system aims to achieve has been the subject of study for centuries, going back as far as the time of Aristotle and the distinction he made between effective (efficient) cause and final cause. In 1744, Leonhard Euler wrote that “there is absolutely no doubt that every effect in the universe can be explained as satisfactorily from final causes … as it can from the effective causes.”

In the original short story, not just light, but the whole universe is depicted as being susceptible to explanation from two distinct standpoints. Human language and physics are shaped by an inclination to see the world in terms of cause and effect. It is for this reason that Fermat’s principle seems unintuitive. The aliens in Arrival understand the universe as involving final, not efficient, causes. Humans think of refraction as being caused by the differing densities of air and water—in effect, a succession of causal chains. The aliens would see it as a point of equilibrium of the system, and the system as an atemporal whole.

Chiang’s short story interweaves ideas from both linguistics and physics, but the latter are largely absent from the film. Fermat’s principle featured in early versions of the script, but did not make the final cut. This is a shame because the notion that the world can be perceived and understood from two distinct perspectives, local and causal versus global and atemporal, helps to explain the effects that learning the alien language has on Banks. In the original story, the physics and linguistics reinforce one another. In the film, more has to be taken on trust.

More here.