Tom Shone at The New Statesman:

One of the unusual things about Malick is how much life he lived before he was bitten by the film-making bug. He studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein; then he worked as a photographer and wrote for theNew Yorker, before studying film at the American Film Institute Conservatory under George Stevens.

He did a rewrite on the Dirty Harry script for Warner Bros – the serial killer in his version was a vigilante – and Marlon Brando was considered for the lead part. When Clint Eastwood was cast, however, Malick’s script was dropped in favour of an earlier one. The thought of American cinema’s premier Emersonian polishingDirty Harry’s one-liners (“You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Does your ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow? Well, does it, punk?”) remains in the realm of conjecture.

So, the man who made Badlands was no neophyte film geek, but an accomplished person, a student and a writer, fluent in Spanish and French, possessed of a quiet confidence that led people to predict great things. While shooting Badlands, he fed Sissy Spacek her lines on rolled-up pieces of paper like love notes, peppering her with questions: “What do you think of this? How do you think Holly would do this?” Spacek remembers, “Right away, he gave me ownership of the character.”

Malick told Sheen, “That gun is like a magic wand.” The spell under which the actors worked was so intense that the finished film came as something of a shock. “He’s a killer . . . a horrible killer,” said Sheen of the character he played, after seeing the film for the first time, as if he had realised it only then.

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Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

For many of us, the most pressing question about exercise is: How little can I get away with? The answer, according to a sophisticated new study of interval training, may be very, very little. In this new experiment, in fact, 60 seconds of strenuous exertion proved to be as successful at improving health and fitness as three-quarters of an hour of moderate exercise. Let me repeat that finding: One minute of arduous exercise was comparable in its physiological effects to 45 minutes of gentler sweating. I have been writing for some time about the potential benefits of high-intensity interval training, a type of workout that consists of an extremely draining but brief burst of exercise — essentially, a sprint — followed by light exercise such as jogging or resting, then another sprint, more rest, and so on. Athletes rely on intervals to improve their speed and power, but generally as part of a broader, weekly training program that also includes prolonged, less-intense workouts, such as long runs.

But in the past few years, exercise scientists and many of the rest of us have become intrigued by the idea of exercising exclusively with intervals, ditching long workouts altogether. The allure of this approach is obvious. Interval sessions can be short, making them a boon for anyone who feels that he or she never has enough time to exercise. Previously, I have written about a number of different interval programs, involving anywhere from 10 minutes of exhausting intervals in a single session to seven minutes, six, four and even fewer. Each program had scientific backing. But because of time and funding constraints, most studies of interval training have had limits, such as not including a control group, being of short duration or studying only health or fitness results, not both.

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Sughra Raza. Black Ducks, Winter 2016.

Digital photograph.

Patrick Sauer in Signature:

In his works, Vonnegut’s fondness for the Bard can be traced from Kurt Sr.’s 1949 woodworking through a 2005 essay in A Man Without A Country, the last work published in his lifetime. In that piece, Vonnegut compares Hamlet to Cinderella and Kafka’s cockroach, expounds on how apparitions are not to be trusted, compares Polonius to Rush Limbaugh, and commends Shakespeare for doing what so few people do: Telling the truth, admitting we know so little about life. It’s a theme mirrored throughout Vonnegut’s career, even if the Bard’s technique didn’t require as many authorial surrogates. Tomato, Tomahto, so it goes…

The paths of Shakespeare and Vonnegut crossed multiple times, once through dimensions only known by the Tralfamadorians. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, which originated as a series of 90-second public radio pieces, Vonnegut interviews people about the afterlife. The “tongue-tied, humiliated, self-loathing semi-literate Hoosier hack” is fisked by a feisty William Shakespeare who starts out by mocking Vonnegut’s dialect, calling it the “ugliest English he had ever heard, ‘fit to split the ears of groundlings.’” The Bard is salty throughout, responding to Kurt’s congratulations on all the Oscars Shakespeare in Love won by retorting the movie is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Both novelists and playwrights love a good callback.

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David P. Barash at the History News Network:

For now, I want to focus on why monogamy has become so popular, at least in the modern Western world, and at least in theory, if not always in practice. Although monogamy is exceedingly rare in the animal world, it is found in a few cases, and nearly always, the payoff seems to be associated with the adaptive benefit of biparental childcare, something that Homo sapiens finds especially beneficial, given that we are unusual in that our offspring are profoundly helpless at birth, remaining needy for an extraordinarily long time. Nor is it absolutely necessary that the cooperating adults be man and woman; we know from abundant sociological data that two women or two men can do an excellent job, and that when it comes to child rearing, two – of any sex – are better than one. But we also know that prior to the cultural homogenization that followed European colonialism, more than 83% of human societies were preferentially polygamous, and that polygamy was also prominent in the ancient Near East from which that presumed Western move to monogamy originated.

So my question for now is: why did such a large segment of human society switch from polygamy to monogamy? And my first answer is: at present, we don’t know. My second answer is a guess, which goes as follows. (I propose it simply as a hypothesis, in the hope that readers will not only find it interesting but also useful in generating informed discussion and, if possible, meaningful research.)

Imagine a polygynous society with an average harem size of, say, ten. This means that for every male harem-keeper, there are nine unsuccessful, sexually and reproductively frustrated, resentful bachelors. The simply reality is that polygyny is disadvantageous not only for women – for complex reasons – but even more so for men, since with a 50/50 sex ratio, there are unmated men in proportion as polygyny obtains. This, btw, runs counter to the lascivious imaginings of many men, who, when I describe the evidence for primitive human polygyny, often express regret that they weren’t alive in those days, imagining that they would be a happy harem-holder.

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Francine Prose in The Guardian:

Late in Alain de Botton’s engaging novel, a married couple, Rabih and Kirsten, find that the demands and stresses of ordinary life – work, domestic chores, financial worries, the harrowing expenditure of energy required to raise their two adored children – have made them irritable and contentious. In part, the narrator concludes, they are at odds “because they have so seldom seen their struggles sympathetically reflected in the art they know … Were Rabih and Kirsten able to read about themselves as characters in a novel, they might … experience a brief but helpful burst of pity at their not at all unworthy plight, and thereby perhaps learn to dissolve some of the tension that arises on those evenings when, once the children are in bed, the apparently demoralising and yet in truth deeply grand and significant topic of ironing comes up.”

Presumably, the novel that Rabih and Kirsten need to read is the one De Botton has written: a sympathetic account of the relationship that begins only after the besotted courtship has ended. Having fallen deeply in love, the couple “will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.”

Rabih and Kirsten are well-drawn, individualised characters, with distinct and separate backgrounds (he’s half-Lebanese, half-German; she’s Scottish), careers (he’s an architect working in an urban design studio; she’s a surveyor employed by Edinburgh City Council) and personalities (she’s confident and feisty; he’s dreamy and insecure). But what’s interesting is De Botton’s decision to make their experience so thoroughly ordinary that their lives seem emblematic, their stories interchangeable with those of countless couples.

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Jefferson Morley in The Intercept:

Last summer I paid a visit to Georgetown University’s Lauinger Libraryas part of my research on legendary CIA counterspy James Jesus Angleton. I went there to investigate Angleton’s famous mole hunt, one of the least flattering episodes of his eventful career. By the early 1960s, Angleton was convinced the KGB had managed to insert a penetration agent high in the ranks of the CIA.

In researching and writing a biography of Angleton, I constantly confront a conundrum: Was the man utterly brilliant? Or completely nuts?

Angleton is one of America’s archetypal spies. He was the model for Harlot in Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s epic of the CIA, a brooding Cold War spirit hovering over a story of corrupted idealism. In Robert De Niro’s cinematic telling of the tale, The Good Shepherd, the Angletonian character was a promising product of the system who loses his way in the moral labyrinth of secret intelligence operations.

In real life, Jim Angleton was a formidable intellectual and canny bureaucrat who helped shape the ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency we have today.

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Jeff Guo in the Washington Post:

Scholars have long puzzled over the different fates of the world’s peoples. Why, on the eve of the modern world, were some societies so technologically and politically complex? For centuries, leading intellectuals from Adam Smith to Karl Marx believed that agricultural abundance had propelled the rise of advanced civilizations. The Assyrians and Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, flourished thanks to their fertile farms, which fed an upper class that devoted itself to religion and empire.

In his 1997 bestseller “Guns, Germs and Steel,” historian Jared Diamond argued that the availability of nutritious and easily domesticated plants and animals gave some societies a head start. In the Middle East there was barley and wheat; in Asia there was millet and rice. “People around the world who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers,” Diamond later said on his PBS show. And more productivity led to more advanced civilizations.

But the staple crops associated with less-advanced peoples — like manioc, the white potato, the sweet potato and taro — weren’t necessarily less productive. In fact, manioc and the potato are superstar crops, less demanding of the soil and less thirsty for water. These plants still feed billions of people today.

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Kathleen Downes in Women's Media Center:

When I was a little girl, I held hands with my friends. It was a sign of companionship and togetherness, one that wordlessly affirmed the strong force that is female friendship. As I grew from a girl into a woman, I started to get a lot of cultural messages, implicit and explicit, that holding hands was no longer acceptable between friends because it was now assumed to be romantic, reserved for those who are “more than friends.” Suddenly, this way to be close to those I love was sexualized. Hand holding between any two people is beautiful when used as a romantic gesture. But it grieves me, as it should grieve us all, that our culture is so hypersexualized that just about anything we do stands the possibility of being perceived as sexual. This is especially true for women. A simple gesture that in my childhood served as a means of human connection is now treated as sexual, and all its other meanings—like unity, strength, and togetherness—seem to fade away in the eyes of the world.

Not wanting my friends or those around us to misinterpret a gesture of friendship as something more, I stopped holding their hands. I more or less stopped connecting with my friends through touch altogether after childhood because I didn’t want to “give the wrong idea.” When we lose social permission to hold hands as an expression of sisterhood, all women lose something. As a disabled woman, I have felt this loss uniquely and profoundly. I was born with cerebral palsy, and I spend most of my time in a power wheelchair. I view my wheelchair as a tool of freedom, as natural to me as a leg or an arm. I do not resent my wheelchair or see it as confining. Any metaphors likening my chair to a metal prison will be swiftly rejected. However, it cannot be denied that being seated on an electronic throne of metal, plastic, and overpriced foam affects my relationship with physical touch. I live in a world that does not even know how to look at me, much less touch me.

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Patrick Hennessey in The Telegraph:

You wouldn’t think that Rudyard Kipling would be particularly esteemed in modern India. Now notorious, rather than celebrated, as the “Bard of Empire,” you might imagine that, if Kipling were remembered in India at all, it would be with understandable awkwardness at best and, at worst, disdain. Memories are long in the Punjab, and few have forgiven Kipling for his public support of General Dyer, the Butcher of Amritsar. Yet as I followed in the young writer’s footsteps through modern Pakistan and India to make the documentary Kipling’s Indian Adventure, from Lahore across the hot Punjabi plain and up into the fresh foothills of the Himalayas to the Raj’s summer capital of Shimla, I discovered not only that Kipling was well known, but that many of his works are well regarded and even taught in schools — more so, I dare say, than in Britain. And no matter where I went or to whom I spoke, one particular set of stories was loved above all others: the Jungle Books. Of course, their modern reach owes a lot to the 1967 Disney animation, the very last production overseen by Walt Disney himself. On the Mall in Shimla, in the shadow of the arch-Gothic Gaiety Theatre — surely the symbolic apotheosis of the Raj — I discussed Kipling’s legacy in India with a group of young students. As soon as the Jungle Books were mentioned, someone started humming The Bare Necessities.

It was probably for the best that Kipling did not live to see the liberties Disney took with his work. But despite straying far from the original texts, the film gleefully and stubbornly kept one of Kipling’s finest creations in the hearts of successive generations — for that alone it should be applauded. No matter what one thinks of Kipling’s politics, The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) represent one of the great pieces of imaginative writing in English, allegorical tales as timeless as Aesop’s fables and flights of masterfully realized fancy on a par with Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908).

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James G. Chappel in Boston Review:

The American public sphere is blessed with many religious experts. In the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis, pundits reminded us that Christianity enjoins the welcoming of refugees. Many of the same people, it turns out, are also deeply familiar with Islam, allowing them to piously intone that it is a “religion of peace.” These claims often come from people who are not themselves affiliated with those faiths or any other: they are political interventions masquerading, sometimes insultingly, as exegesis. They serve an important function, however, as a form of wish fulfillment. If these pat, nervous descriptions of long and complex religious traditions were true, the age-old problem of religion in the public square could vanish into a puff of banalities. Peace and refugee assistance are perfectly good secular, progressive goals, and it would be convenient if Christianity and Islam, which long antedate secular progressivism, happened to enjoin the same things. Alas, the world is not so simple. But what, then, are we to do? What should we expect from religion in a secular society?

The conservative position on religiosity has the virtue of coherence: America, from this perspective, is a Christian nation. Even if other religions should be tolerated in the name of Christian charity, they should cede pride of place to America’s exceptional Christian heritage. Progressives have a much more difficult time, and we ricochet between contradictory and unsustainable positions. On the one hand, religion is transparently absurd, but on the other the triumphant atheism of Richard Dawkins is embarrassing, too. When someone such as Kim Davis forces us to confront difficult issues of law and faith, we often have recourse to uncomfortable mockery, unsure why it is wrong to disobey political authority in the name of individual conscience. The old Marxist account of religion as an “opiate of the people” survives, too, in the conventional wisdom that evangelical voters cling to guns and religion because they are distracted from their true economic interests. These attempts to sidestep the question of religion’s role are dangerous but understandable. The great philosopher Richard Rorty once sighed that religion was a conversation-stopper: If someone claims to be acting for religious reasons, what is there to say? If he were alive today, he would know that if we cease talking about religion, we start shouting about it.

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Jonathan Rée at The Guardian:

Over the past hundred years, philosophical interest in language has become, as Charles Taylor puts it, “close to obsessional”. The obsession goes back to a remark made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1915: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” If Wittgenstein was right, then language is not so much a device for recording and communicating information, as the framework of all our knowledge and experience.

But the philosophers who drew inspiration from Wittgenstein’s remark could not agree about what it implied. The positivists among them thought of language as a strict map of impersonal facts, dismissing everything else as rhetoric, emotion or superstition. The humanists, on the other hand, saw it as a creative force that gives wings to our perceptions and opens us to the unknown. For the positivists, you might say, language aspires to the condition of natural science, but for the humanists it is essentially a poem.

Taylor is on the side of the poets, and in his latest book he makes the case with eloquence, force and broad historical sweep. He starts withÉtienne de Condillac, the 18th-century proto-positivist who suggested that language came into existence when our ancestors got bored with instinctive grunts and gestures, and decided to share their ideas by means of artificial vocal sounds.

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Tara Cheesman at The Quarterly Conversation:

The Swedish writer Therese Bohman seems to have an affinity for aimless young women vulnerable to the attentions of older men. In two of her novels, Drowned and the newly translated The Other Woman, she channels the psyches of twenty-something University students engaged in liaisons with men already involved with other women.

The books share so much in common that they might be the same novel: both explore almost identical situations, share many of the same structural and plot devices, and the author’s and translator Marlaine Delargy’s prose styles remain the same from book to book. What differences there are prove to be relatively superficial. Drowned and The Other Womanare conveyances for Bohman’s thoughts on feminism, sisterhood, and perhaps even the socio-economic status of women in modern society. Regardless of the ambiguous morality of her female characters’ decisions, Bohman’s treatment of them is inarguably sympathetic. Their affairs with men may be the impetus for coming-of-age journeys, but they do not represent a final destination.

Drowned is a psychological thriller—dark, gothic, and fraught with eroticized violence—and technically the better, more innovative novel. It is the story of two sisters. Stella, the elder, lives in a beautiful “yellow wooden house” with a garden; she has the perfect job at the local parks and gardens department; her boyfriend, Gabriel, is devastatingly attractive and a successful novelist.

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