By C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Noam, are globalization and capitalism different?

Noam Chomsky: If by "globalization" we mean international integration, then it long pre-dates capitalism. The silk roads dating back to the pre-Christian era were an extensive form of globalization. The rise of industrial state capitalism has changed the scale and character of globalization, and there have been further changes along the way as the global economy has been reshaped by those whom Adam Smith called "the masters of mankind," pursuing their "vile maxim": "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people."

There have been quite substantial changes during the recent period of neoliberal globalization, since the late 1970s, with Reagan and Thatcher the iconic figures — though the policies vary only slightly as administrations change. Transnational corporations are the driving force, and their political power largely shapes state policy in their interests.

During these years, supported by the policies of the states they largely dominate, transnational corporations have increasingly constructed global value chains (GVCs) in which the "lead firm" outsources production through intricate global networks that it establishes and controls. A standard illustration is Apple, the world's biggest company. Its iPhone is designed in the US. Parts from many suppliers in the US and East Asia are assembled mostly in China in factories owned by the huge Taiwanese firm Foxconn. Apple's profit is estimated to be about 10 times that of Foxconn, while value added and profit in China, where workers toil under miserable conditions, is slight. Apple then sets up an office in Ireland so as to evade US taxes — and has recently been fined $14 billion by the EU in back taxes.

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Lisa Zyga in Phys.org:

Although there are many counterintuitive ideas in quantum theory, the idea that influences can travel backwards in time (from the future to the past) is generally not one of them. However, recently some physicists have been looking into this idea, called "retrocausality," because it can potentially resolve some long-standing puzzles in quantum physics. In particular, if retrocausality is allowed, then the famous Bell tests can be interpreted as evidence for retrocausality and not for action-at-a-distance—a result that Einstein and others skeptical of that "spooky" property may have appreciated.

In a new paper published in Proceedings of The Royal Society A, physicists Matthew S. Leifer at Chapman University and Matthew F. Pusey at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have lent new theoretical support for the argument that, if certain reasonable-sounding assumptions are made, then quantum theory must be retrocausal.

First, to clarify what retrocausality is and isn't: It does not mean that signals can be communicated from the future to the past—such signaling would be forbidden even in a retrocausal theory due to thermodynamic reasons. Instead, retrocausality means that, when an experimenter chooses the measurement setting with which to measure a particle, that decision can influence the properties of that particle (or another particle) in the past, even before the experimenter made their choice. In other words, a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.

In the original Bell tests, physicists assumed that retrocausal influences could not happen. Consequently, in order to explain their observations that distant particles seem to immediately know what measurement is being made on the other, the only viable explanation was action-at-a-distance. That is, the particles are somehow influencing each other even when separated by large distances, in ways that cannot be explained by any known mechanism. But by allowing for the possibility that the measurement setting for one particle can retrocausally influence the behavior of the other particle, there is no need for action-at-a-distance—only retrocausal influence.

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Adrianne Kalfapoulou at the Quarterly Conversation:

With “Losing our Milk Teeth,” the opening poem of Patricia Colleen Murphy’s award-winning collection, Hemming Flames, the author announces from the outset that we’re in for a thrilling ride—thrilling as in thriller as much as the acute pleasure of reading masterful poems. Hemming Flames is by turns terrifying, uncanny, and sometimes lunatic, in the ways lunacy charts (if it does chart anything) the unpredictable and uncanny. There is also a wry and blunt humor here, a consciousness latching onto what will carry it through the traumas of an imploding family.

These poems’ tonal registers, their pitch and directness, make for a “hard to put down” read more characteristic of novels than most poetry collections. In “Losing our Milk Teeth” the father will say, “pass the mother/fucking peas. And, could you//try not to murder yourself/ in front of the children.” Ritual matter-of-factness is turned into ritual high drama, as Murphy parodies a type of family-gathering etiquette meant to tame demons that can go wildly out of control. But there is so much more here as Murphy mines her family’s unraveling; she is also telling us something about the subversive and redemptive possibilities of language. Or as she puts it in “The Princess of Creeping,” “no one can say I did not live a long time/ in the danger theater, where the play begins/ with all the dolls behaving perfectly.”

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Colm Tóibín at The Guardian:

In October 1899, James Joyce, aged 17, attended all three days of the trial in Dublin of Samuel Childs for the brutal murder of his brother. This allowed him later to stitch references to the case throughout his novel Ulysses, including a moment when his protagonist Leopold Bloom and others are on their way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral in Glasnevin cemetery and pass Bengal Terrace, where the murder occurred: “Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.” When one man says: “That is where Childs was murdered … The last house,” Simon Dedalus replies: “So it is … A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off. Murdered his brother. Or so they said.”

This, as Adrian Hardiman writes in his fascinating, painstaking book on Joyce and the law, “is the first mention in Ulysses of the Childs murder case. In one way or another the case or its protagonists are referred to more than 20 times in the text, sometimes very plainly, at other times obscurely. The case thus emerges as just one of the numerous threads, often submerged but constantly recurring, that form the fabric of the novel.”

Hardiman takes us through a number of law cases that are referred to in this way in Ulysses with such clarity and vivid use of detail that it is easy to imagine how they preoccupied the characters as they wandered in Dublin on 16 June 1904.

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Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) — better known by his pen name F. Anstey — once ranked among England’s most celebrated writers. Never heard of him, you say? Well, you know his novels, or at least the central ideas that drive their plots. Before turning to “The Statement of Stella Maberly,” Anstey’s neglected tour de force of psychological horror, let me tell you about some of his more characteristic work, his humorous fantasies.

In 1882, Anstey— only in his mid-20s — published his first novel, “Vice Versa.” In it, the stout, conventional businessman Mr. Bultitude and his 14-year-old son Dick discover that an ancient talisman has inadvertently caused them to exchange bodies. Most of the action involves Mr. Bultitude and his horrible experiences at a boys’ boarding school, as he tries desperately to undo the transformation. Dick, however, would really prefer to let things stand: After all, he now possesses the money, leisure and opportunity to indulge every boyish whim. The result is one of Victorian England’s great comic classics, the source for several later topsy-turvy novels, plays and movies, most notably “Freaky Friday.”

The 1960s sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie ” derives, in part, from Anstey’s “The Brass Bottle” (1900), in which a well-meaning “Jinnee”— an elderly fellow named Fakrash — causes all sorts of mischief and havoc in the life of hapless architect Horace Ventimore.

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Lee Billings in Scientific American:

Douglas Preston in The New York Times:

Certain stories in American history carry archetypal power, and the dark majesty of the Donner catastrophe is one of them. In the winter of 1847, when the first skeletonized survivors stumbled out of the Sierra Nevada, the Donner story seized the American imagination and has never let go, generating a vast but unreliable historical record burdened with exaggeration, lies, melodrama and prurient disgust. Cannibalism was the prime reason the story lodged itself in our national psyche; but more than that, the fate of the Donner party was a denial, a violent repudiation, of the myth of Manifest Destiny: Here were a group of westward pioneers, the very picture of courage, resourcefulness and pluck, who ended up reduced to a level of squalor and barbarism almost beyond words.

The saga began in April 1846 when a prosperous band of emigrants left Springfield, Ill., heading for new lives in Alta California, then part of Mexico. At the Little Sandy River in Wyoming, 87 souls under the leadership of George Donner made a fateful decision: to follow the Hastings Cutoff, a new shortcut championed by a mountebank named Lansford Hastings. The cutoff routed them southward of the established trail, through the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert, where they were forced to build a road, suffered terribly from thirst and lost many oxen. Discipline broke down: One man was murdered for his gold; another had killed in self-defense and was banished; and a third, unable to walk, was left behind to die. By the time the emigrants reached the foothills of the Sierra in late October, they were fatally behind schedule, demoralized and already starving. Not far from the pass, an apocalyptic blizzard descended on them. The next morning, Keseberg wrote, “All I could see was snow everywhere. I shouted at the top of my voice. Suddenly, here and there, all about me, heads popped up through the snow. The scene was not unlike what one might imagine at the resurrection, when people rise up out of the earth.” But it was anything but a resurrection. Fifty-nine people in the vanguard were forced to take refuge near Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake), while the rest of the party, consisting of 22, was snowbound in a meadow six miles back. There most of them remained for months, as storm after storm piled up about 20 feet of snow, burying their rough cabins, lean-tos and crude shelters. In these filthy hovels they starved and began to die and eventually ate the dead — cooking flesh and organs, cracking bones for marrow, boiling them for grease, and processing them down into nubbins.

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Amitava Kumar in the Indian Quarterly:

When Ehsaan was young, that is to say the age I myself was when first I met him, he had gone to Tunisia for his doctoral research. In nearby Algeria, revolution had caught fire. It was said that Ehsaan had travelled to Algeria and fought in the war against the French. Had he? No one knew for certain. I never got the chance to ask him and, years later, sitting in a restaurant on Broadway, when I asked his widow that question, she quietly said, “I don’t know.” I had liked her honesty, especially when I pressed her to explain why Ehsaan had chosen to stay in the US and not return to Pakistan when his studies were over.

She laughed and said, In Pakistan the women wore the hijab. Here they showed their legs.

The very first time I had gone to Ehsaan’s office, to get my enrolment form signed for the class he was teaching, I had seen on his wall the framed poster of The Battle of Algiers. I had watched the film, when I was in my teens, in Pragati Maidan in Delhi. The poster’s background showed grainy black and white warren-like homes in the qasba, and leaning into the frame from the sides were the Algerian Ali La Pointe on the left, and, on the right, the French military colonel Mathieu.

The film’s director Gillo Pontecorvo had sought out Ehsaan when making the film. Pontecorvo had arrived in Algeria with his screenplay, but accidentally left it on the top of a car. Parts of the screenplay soon appeared in a right-wing paper. So Pontecorvo had recast the story, basing it upon interviews with revolutionaries: “a fiction written under the dictatorship of facts.”

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Sue Hubbard at Elephant:

We live in an age permeated by the digital. Just how much so we are made aware when we walk into this exhibition. In our Western consumer society the digital revolution has infiltrated and shaped our relationships on social media, as well as the way we buy and consume, find sexual partners, or learn about politics. Many individuals even develop identities that are entirely technology driven. What this exhibition does then, whether we like it or not, is capture the mood and cultural practices of the early twenty-first century by emphasising how the digital is embedded, in ways to which we’re often oblivious, in the objects, images, and structures that we encounter on a daily basis. In his 2013 book PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now,Douglas Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, or a direction because we seem to be living in a constant now. Life is but one click away. This is underlined by Nina Canell’s sculptures and installations where the cut wires of internet circuitry are displayed like archaeological fragments on traditional white plinths, reminding us that today’s technology becomes tomorrow’s obsolescence. These surprisingly beautiful aborted bits of technology seem to suggest a departure from the word, from logos, from the forms of communication that have hitherto been associated with human interaction.

Elsewhere the artist Julia Varela litters the gallery floor with broken, bent, and distorted plasma screens, which she describes as “an act or resistance”, a “hijacking”. Lying contorted and twisted they seem to evoke the end of something, as Joseph Beuys’s iconic work once signalled the End of the 20^thCentury. This detritus, only very recently used to do something–transmit information, news, and entertainment–is now presented as redundant, a collection of mediaeval relics as technology moves on its inexorable course.

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Eric Ormsby at the TLS:

Ezra Pound was not the first poet to spend years confined to a mental hospital nor will he probably be the last, but he was surely the only one to have turned his legally enforced confinement into a long-running literary soirée, his very own “Ezuversity”. As Daniel Swift puts it in The Bughouse, his lively and searching account of Pound’s years at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, from 1946 to 1958, it was “the world’s least orthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum”. Though there has been much hand-wringing over the years by Pound’s acolytes about the incarceration, it proved to be in many ways a perfect environment for the garrulous poet. His visitors ranged from illustrious old friends, such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, to eager younger poets, such as Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, to less savoury members of the real lunatic fringe, among them the violent white sup­rem­acist John Kasper, whose neo-Nazi views “Uncle Ez” warmly supported and encouraged. To the end Pound remained an anti-Semite, but now he added black Americans and civil rights protesters to his roster of well-nurtured hatreds. Best of all for Pound, however, was the opportunity to lecture and harangue his seemingly endless procession of admirers, whether on his crack-brained economic and political theories or on matters literary and aesthetic. Nor did his apparent derangement mitigate his vanity. Elizabeth Bishop noted that when Pound asked her to bring him a journal in Bengali, a language he did not know, it was principally to check as to whether his name was mentioned there (since he couldn’t read Bengali it is not clear how he managed this).

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Peter Kuitenbrouwer at The Walrus:

Born in 1842 in southern Quebec, Calixa Lavallée was Canada’s original hitmaker. He landed his first gig at age nine: he played the organ barefooted in a St-Hyacinthe church. At fifteen, he followed minstrels from Montreal to New Orleans. Lavallée enlisted in the Union army at the outset of the American Civil War and served as a cornetist; he was wounded and discharged with a monthly pension of $8.

Lavallée then worked as a composer, travelling through Quebec, Boston, and France. His big break came in 1880, when the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a group created for the growing French population of the new world, commissioned a party song. Lavallée composed the music to “O Canada,” and Adolphe-Basile Routhier, a Quebec judge and poet, wrote the French lyrics. At a skating pavilion in Quebec City on June 24, 1880, during a celebration of the province’s Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, more than 500 guests first sang what would become Canada’s national anthem.

Lavallée died penniless in Boston in 1891. His song, though, stayed on the provincial hit parade for about eighty years. The Encyclopédie du patrimoine culturel de l’Amérique française notes that “O Canada” rang out during the 300th birthday of Quebec City in 1908 and “occupied a place of honour in Quebec Catholic schools for many years.” Andrée Dufour, a researcher at Laval University who is an expert in the history of education in Quebec, says, “I knew the era when we proudly sang ‘O Canada’ in class.”

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Ian Buruma at the NYRB:

The legend of Utamaro as a demon of art, as well as an erotic connoisseur, began early on, but was later burnished in a movie by the great director Mizoguchi Kenji, entitled Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), which was based on a novel of the same title. The portrayal of the artist probably owes more to the way Mizoguchi saw himself than to historical accuracy.

The exotic image of traditional Japan as a kind of paradise of sexual refinement, which was already the product of a fantasy world promoted by artists like Utamaro, appealed to sophisticated collectors, writers, and artists in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The pleasure world of the Edo Period was seen as an elegant and sensuous antidote to the ugliness of the industrial age. And the same was true in Japan.

At first, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the Japanese were eager to modernize along Western lines, the hedonism of Floating World prints, and the wilder shores of Kabuki, were considered rather shameful. Soon, however, the popular theatrical genres and sensual entertainments of the past calcified in the culture of geisha and in classical Japanese theater, shorn of its wild inventiveness. But the art of Utamaro still retains the old spirit, which now evokes feelings of nostalgia.

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Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie at Cabinet Magazine:

Milk is versatile. One of its qualities is the capacity to separate or be separated. Milk is separated from cream, curds from whey. Its relation to separation extends in other directions. A form of physical separation is at work in the distancing or abstraction of milk from the female mammal’s body. Separation abounds in the milk industry whereby the calf is separated from the cow, and milk is extracted from animals for human consumption. Separation more broadly occurs between milk for use and milk as a commodity for exchange. Separation is also part of the process of individuation—the separation of subject and object. Humans separate from caregivers, having passed through the nexus that milk provides.

Milk extracted or abstracted is a liquid representation of an annihilation of nature over time. In order to produce cows’ milk for humans, the seasonal cycle related to gestation has been extended into the endless time of ever-increasing milk yields. This is the temporality of the market, of production and circulation. Production time is decoupled from the idea of limits and insists that what is profitable be available at all times. Milk flows across the political body, its stream an emblem of progress and the perfectibility of modern times. Situating milk as infinitely available, white, aseptic, and central to the adult Western diet was a quest of modernity. The mass industrialization of milk indicates a mode of industrial metaphysics: an abstraction from its associations with female human and non-human animal lactation and its transformation into a de-gendered industrial staple. Luce Irigaray proposed that all Western culture rests on the murder of the mother.¹

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Olivia Munk in Harvard Magazine:

This past Tuesday, a crowd gathered at Wimbledon House, the home that esteemed British architect Richard Rogers built for his parents in Wimbledon, London, to celebrate the inauguration of the Richard Rogers Fellowship in partnership with Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). In 2015, Rogers (formally Baron Rogers of Riverside) donated the home to the GSD through his charitable organization, the Richard Rogers Charitable Settlement, and this past fall, the GSD solicited the first applications for the fellowship. Beginning this spring, fellows will live in the house for three months and receive $10,000 to pursue their projects. Six fellows, hailing from around the world, were selected for the spring, summer, and fall seasons. Their projects range widely, from investigating London’s social housing, to the European migrant crisis, to urban food economies, and art and design as means for social harmony. The GSD searched for fellows who had experience and practice, but also wanted “people from all sorts of fields,” and a diversity among its candidates, said GSD dean Mohsen Mostafavi. The aim of the fellowship, he said in an interview, is to bring together research and design, as well as new ways of thinking and practice. The GSD also sought candidates eager to use London as a resource, both as a cityscape and for its local expertise, including consultants in fields like design, architecture, and structural engineering. Successful research proposals sought to use design and technology to enhance quality of life.

The GSD hopes to use the house in London and the international nature of the fellowship to enable Harvard to contribute to and affect the lives of people far beyond the boundaries of Cambridge. Besides housing fellows (two every three months, including one couple from Mexico City this summer), Mostafavi hopes the building will become a center for debate and discussion for both Harvard alumni and a wider audience. One of the first talks in the house, to be set up “salon” style, will pertain to food and the city—issues such as waste, distribution, and how food is prepared. Larger-scale events supported by the fellowship will take place in venues around the city. Events at Wimbledon House and in London, Mostafavi said, will “deal with topics that have importance and relevance” to the broader London community.

Much like the fellowship, Wimbledon House, built between 1969 and 1970, is one of a kind. Rogers described the design as a “transparent tube with solid boundary walls.” The property consists of two structures, separated by a courtyard.

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From KurzweilAI:

Mind-body interventions such as meditation, yoga*, and tai chi can reverse the molecular reactions in our DNA that cause ill-health and depression, according to a study by scientists at the universities of Coventry and Radboud. When a person is exposed to a stressful event, their sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the “fight-or-flight” response) is triggered, which increases production of a molecule called nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB). That molecule then activates genes to produce proteins called cytokines that cause inflammation at the cellular level, affecting the body, brain, and immune system. That’s useful as a short-lived fight-or-flight reaction. However, if persistent, it leads to a higher risk of cancer, accelerated aging, and psychiatric disorders like depression. But in a paper published June 16, 2017 in the open-access journal Frontiers in Immunology, the researchers reveal findings of 18 studies (featuring 846 participants over 11 years) indicating that people who practice mind-body interventions exhibit the opposite effect. They showed a decrease in production of NF-kB and cytokines — reducing the pro-inflammatory gene expression pattern and the risk of inflammation-related diseases and conditions.

David Gorski, MD, PhD, has published a critique of this study here. (Lead author Ivana Burić has replied in the comments below.) In addition to stress effects, increased sitting is known to be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and death from all causes. But regular two-minute brisk walks every 30 minutes (in addition to daily 30-minute walks) significantly reduce levels of triglyceride (lipid, or fatty acid) levels that lead to clogged arteries, researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago report in a paper published June 19, 2017 in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology.

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Jan Mieszkowski at Public Books:

The prospect of a new Kafka biography is like an invitation to a party that is bound to be entertaining but may end badly. Situating Kafka’s writing within the cultural and political landscape of European modernism and the late Austro-Hungarian Empire is a worthy, if daunting, endeavor. Less certain is whether such efforts to contextualize his corpus actually garner insights into it. Kafka’s readers are intrigued by virtually any anecdote about him, but few would allow that the abiding mysteries of his texts will be resolved by learning that he lived in Prague, was the son of a fancy goods merchant, and enjoyed going to the beach. Nor does history provide a reliable key to unlock his works, which have dates but do not date. If they are decidedly not a product of our time, there appears to be little chance of them ever going out of style.

Although Kafka’s importance is incontestable, scholars and casual fans alike fiercely debate every feature of his corpus. Each plot twist or curious turn of phrase calls for clarification, yet customary interpretive practices are seldom up to the task. To read Kafka is to lurch back and forth between the uncannily familiar and the abjectly foreign. To reread a favorite story is to risk seeing any exegetical progress made the first, second, or third time through evaporate. Given these challenges, learning more about Kafka’s life may be a good opportunity to win new perspectives on his writing, but it may also be the furthest thing from it.

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