Louise McCune at the LARB:

During a psycholinguistics lecture on diacritics, our narrator marvels that, in Europe, “even the alphabet [emits] exuberant sparks” (see: a, â, á, and à). One could apply a similar assessment to Batuman’s prose style: her wit is like a firecracker. In passages like this one, Batuman shows us that she can fill daydreams and “empty” days with exuberant sparks:

The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet — and this was ironic — there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours.

These moments of cunning wordplay, subtle humor, and deft imagery are frequent, but alone they do not fuel this novel. While the pyrotechnics delight, there is a fire smoldering beneath that can burn. This is a coming-of-age novel: at the gravitational center of Selin’s reveries is the question of how to be: How to be a writer? How to be a lover? How to be a person?

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Samuel Freeman at The NYRB:

Walter Benjamin is regarded by many (including Jeffries) as the most original thinker associated with the Frankfurt School. His literary criticism on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire, and others has been enormously influential, as have his essays on modern art and on the philosophy of history.² Despite Frankfurt School members’ efforts to help him, he was unable to find an academic position or escape from Europe in the late 1930s. Jeffries describes Benjamin’s tragic life, including his suicide in Port Bou, Spain, near the French border, as he was trying to escape the Gestapo and to embark for America via Portugal.³

Benjamin famously said in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”⁴Equally renowned is his metaphor in the same essay that the Angel of History looks backward and witnesses the constantly accumulating wreckage of history as a single catastrophe. This concept of the inseparability of civilization and barbarism, a recurring theme in Benjamin, deeply influenced the Frankfurt School. Jeffries cites the “Theses” as the basis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the most prominent single work of the Frankfurt School. In that book’s preface, the authors say they set out to do “nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” They argue that Nazi totalitarianism was not a historical aberration. It was rooted in capitalism, in the Enlightenment, and in Western civilization.

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Alice Kaplan at The Nation:

The War of Liberation has dominated Algerian history so unequivocally that it has relegated all other eras and influences to the shadows. But today, the Algerians who were 20 or 30 years old in 1962 are dying, and their children and grandchildren will have to invent a future for the country without them. Toumi and his editors at Éditions Barzakh, Sofiane Hadjadj and Selma Hellal, hope readers will see the reflection of a new Algeria in the writing and publishing of books open to all imaginative possibilities.

Editing and publishing were not in the life plan of either Hadjadj or Hellal, who are a couple. Hadjadj, who is 46 years old, is secular, but his background is deeply religious. His father came to Algiers from the oasis farming community of El Goléa, in the Sahara, and the family owned small businesses before moving to the city and making a fortune in the building trade. Hadjadj, who is dark-skinned, describes his father as black. His mother, who wears the veil, grew up in the Casbah of Algiers, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. In high school, and with the encouragement of his family, Hadjadj spent six years in Tunis studying the Quran to prepare for a future as an imam. Then he decided to study architecture instead.

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Holland Cotter in The New York Times:

New York is catching up on Africa’s modern art history, though our big museums aren’t much in the picture. Two of that continent’s leading 20th-century painters are having first major solos here, not at the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim, but at small downtown galleries. And a remarkable contemporary artist collective from the Democratic Republic of Congo is making its New York debut at an alternative space in Queens. The Senegalese artist Mor Faye (1947-1984) made a vivid impression two decades ago in a group show at the now-defunct Museum for African Art, then in SoHo. His work, all but absent since, is being reintroduced by Skoto Gallery in one of the most stimulating painting shows in Chelsea this season.

Born in Dakar, Faye was a prodigy. At 14, he studied with the great modernist Iba N’Diaye, and within a few years was a teacher himself. His career coincided with a high postcolonial moment. Senegal’s poet-president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, gave art a leading role in shaping a national culture aligned with the literary movement called Négritude. In 1966, Faye was a star of the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. And he was able, thanks to Senghor’s importing of European shows to Africa, to absorb first hand a wide range of Western art history. But problems developed. A restless experimenter, Faye came to resent a state-dictated aesthetic that he viewed as too simplistic in its demand that art combine a recognizably African content and a European look. Adding to the tension was his history of psychiatric illness. His behavior grew unpredictable. In 1976, he stopped exhibiting, and spent time in mental hospitals until his death, at 37, from cerebral malaria.

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Ariel Conn in KurzweilAI:

Just about everyone found something to dislike about 2016, from wars to politics and celebrity deaths. But hidden within this year’s news feeds were some really exciting news stories. And some of them can even give us hope for the future.

Climate Change

With recent news from climate scientists indicating that climate change may be coming on faster and stronger than previously anticipated and with limited political action on the issue, 2016 may not have made climate activists happy. But even here, there was some hopeful news. Among the biggest news was the ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement. But more generally, countries, communities and businesses came together on various issues of global warming, and Voices of America offers five examples of how this was a year of incredible, global progress. But there was also news of technological advancements that could soon help us address climate issues more effectively. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered a way to convert CO2 into ethanol. A researcher from UC Berkeley has developed a method for artificial photosynthesis, which could help us more effectively harness the energy of the sun. And a multi-disciplinary team has genetically engineered bacteria that could be used to help combat global warming.

In the course of about two years, CRISPR-cas9 went from a new development to what could become one of the world’s greatest advances in biology. Results of studies early in the year were promising, but as the year progressed, the news just got better. CRISPR was used to successfully remove HIV from human immune cells. A team in China used CRISPR on a patient for the first time in an attempt to treat lung cancer (treatments are still ongoing), and researchers in the US have also received approval to test CRISPR cancer treatment in patients. And CRISPR was also used to partially restore sight to blind animals.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Guardian:

Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor was impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense ancient population”. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.

Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.

But Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”, which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.

Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind.

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From the website of The New School:

Elise Burchard: How important is the element of sound to your reading and writing process? What do you see or hear? You begin At the Foundling Hospital with “Instrument,”—a poem that evokes the sounds of strings and plucking. How does your experience with music, sound, and translation inspire your work and perhaps this work, in particular?

Robert Pinsky: The sentence-melodies are at the heart of poetry for me. In a way, “writing” isn’t the right word for what I do—composing might be more accurate. I can do it with both hands on the steering wheel, or in the shower. The actual sound of the lines is primary. I may have ideas and feelings for months or years— but they don’t become a poem until I have the tune of a sentence and hear how the sentence-melody might play with and against the lines.

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Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

I am not crazy for saying that drugs are cheap. They are in fact in almost all cases cheap to manufacture.

To take one example that has frequently been in the news in the United States, the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi has a list price of $84,000 for a three-month course of treatment. By all accounts, the drug is genuine breakthrough in the treatment of the Hepatitis C, in most cases curing a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease. There has been an extensive public debate as to whether insurers or government health care programs should be forced to pay for this expensive drug. The issue is complicated further by the fact that many people suffering from Hepatitis C might have contracted it through intravenous drug use.

The United States is estimated to have 3 million people suffering from Hepatitis C. This implies a bill of well over one hundred billion dollar if everyone were to be treated, even if its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, provided substantial discounts.

But it doesn’t cost $84,000 or anything close to that figure to manufacture Sovaldi. In fact, in India a high quality generic version of the drug is available for $200 for a three month course of treatment, less than 0.3 percent of the list price in the United States.1 We wouldn’t need a major debate to decide whether we would spend $200 for a drug that would hugely improve a patient’s health and would possibly save their life. The reason we have this debate is that the drug has a list price that is more than 400 times higher.

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Andrew Stark in the Boston Review:

If we frequently fail to properly analyze events in terms of their probabilities, Kahneman and Tversky showed, we just as often overweight their probabilities. Buying a single lottery ticket increases the probability of our winning the jackpot by a very small amount: from zero to one in ten million. But because doing so takes us from the realm of complete impossibility into the seductive realm of possibility, that minuscule increase seems much more significant to us than it actually is. It gives us dreams to savor—buying that beachfront home, retiring and writing our long-deferred novel. The more vividly we envisage something, the more real we think it is likely to be. Thus we inflate the probability of winning.

Kahneman and Tversky spent decades cataloging a rogues’ gallery of such human psychological quirks, many of them evocatively chronicled in Michael Lewis’s lively new history of their collaboration, The Undoing Project. Each paper the duo published chipped away at the foundations of mainstream economics and its notion that people, as a whole, behave in predictably rational ways. After all, orthodox economics assumes, the market will punish us if we do not behave rationally. People who buy lottery tickets will find that they have insufficient money for groceries. Sports teams that pay enormous sums for seemingly hot players will find themselves deserted by fans. Sure, mainstream economists concede, we are not perfect. People, from time to time, unintentionally do things that are not in their own best interest. But as soon as they suffer the consequences, they right themselves.

What Kahneman and Tversky showed is that our irrationalities are not random but systemic, rooted in deep-seated psychological tendencies—such as failing to take probabilities into account in some situations and overweighting them in others.

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Rachel Spence at The Easel:

It’s often said that the measure of a great work of art is that it stands the test of time. But perhaps another criteria is that it stands the test of space. Not just then and now but also here and there. Would it be too estoric to say that Nasreen Mohamedi and Antonello da Messina are not only products of their time and place but also of each other’s? That this is the territory which Nasreen was seeking when she once enjoined herself to “See and feel primeval order”? [19]

She came from the east, he from the west, yet the geometry they share is universal. When the Roman Empire fell, so much of its knowledge would have been crushed in the rubble had not certain key classical texts been preserved in the Islamic world. For example, the great 10th- century mathematician from Baghdad, Ibrahim Ibn Sinan, translated Archimedes. Travelling through North Africa in the 12th century, the Italian mathematician Fibonacci discovered the Arabic numerals which he then introduced to the western world. Start to investigate and a myriad east-west synergies come to light; for example, the revolutionary cycle of numbers known now as the Fibonacci sequence actually originated in 6th century India.

Let’s recall too that Euclid lived and died in Alexandria, Egypt and Archimedes may have been educated there. The North African territory was part of the Greek and then Roman empires. How often do we find the borders between east and west so frail as to complicate such identities until they are barely holding?

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John Dixon Hunt at The Hudson Review:

One of the perennial issues regarding Brown was that he was and still is thought of “as being picturesque”; his foremost commentator, Dorothy Stroud, was unusual and absolutely right when she treats the picturesque as a later aesthetic whose proponents misunderstand Brown’s work. The picturesque experts usually relished an appreciation of fragments, fissures and deformities of nature, which Uvedale Price often celebrates in Three Essays on the Picturesque (1810). The way in which Brown has become tangled with the picturesque dates to the work of both Horace Walpole and William Mason, whose works overlap during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century (so much of this commentary comes after Brown’s death in 1783).

The history of Brown’s enthronement as the great landscaper began with the indifferent and clumsy verses of William Mason in The English Garden and with an essay of Horace Walpole, whose wonderfully tendentious argument prevailed for much of the later eighteenth century and continues to seduce people today. Mason and Walpole were friends and clearly followed each other’s writings and publications. Part of the reason to wrap Brown in the picturesque mantle is that therefore he can be hailed as the final, glorious climax of “natural” gardening in England.

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Eric D. Lehman at berfrois:

Conan Doyle works on our prejudices in another way, too, by setting his novel on the “primitive” landscape of the moors. We are told: “When you are once out upon [the moor’s] bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples.” The escaped convict Selden, who is described as being “a wild beast” and having “a terrible animal face” could represent civilization’s fear of the return to a primitive stage of humanity. Linguistically, we yoke all these words together: “prehistoric,” “nature, “wild,” “beast,” “animal,” “supernatural,” and “superstition.”

Conan Doyle set the novel in such a place to draw both the reader and the characters out of reason and skepticism, if only briefly. The fog threatens Holmes’s plan and Sir Henry’s life, in fact it is “the one thing on earth” that could. The Grimpen Mire is a sort of primitive place within an already primitive place, allied with the supernatural and considered to be an enemy of Holmes and order. In this arena, irrational thought might actually defeat Holmes’s machine-like, scientific mind. But primitive nature in the form of the Grimpen Mire also swallows Selden and Stapleton into its depths, spelling doom for agents of science and agents of superstition alike.

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John Leland in The New York Times:

Billie Holiday was a great American storyteller and a great American story. Her working materials were simple pop songs and standards — rarely blues — but her medium was her body itself: her voice, her back story. The past imprinted its lines on her skin; the future seemed to be running out. Few voices in America have announced themselves as unmistakably as hers, and few have carried as fully formed a narrative load. In April 1957, the freelance photographer Jerry Dantzic, working for Holiday’s record company, Decca, drew the assignment of finding a new chapter in her story during an Easter Week engagement at the Sugar Hill club in Newark. Holiday was 42 at the time and had been singing professionally for about 27 years, coming off a successful concert at Carnegie Hall and a new marriage to Louis McKay, with whom she shared a heroin habit.

Most of Mr. Dantzic’s images were never published until his son Grayson compiled them in “Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill,” which adds a quiet new dimension to the story we thought we knew about Holiday. Newark in the late 1950s was a thriving jazz hub, but more than that, it was a place where she could work – she had been barred from singing in New York nightclubs after a 1947 drug conviction. For Mr. Dantzic, who died in 2006, Newark was a place to capture her away from the pressures of her home city, including the unsparing scrutiny from law enforcement. Holiday had opened much of her life to the public with her lurid autobiography, “Lady Sings the Blues,” which came out the previous year. With Mr. Dantzic, she revealed homier sides of her life, which needed no explanations and invited no judgments: at home with her husband or her dog, or visiting her co-author, Bill Dufty, and his son, Bevan, her godchild. In these images and in Mr. Dantzic’s performance shots, she is not the tragic torch singer of myth but a middle-aged woman finding simple comforts from the maelstrom, no longer as sharp in her voice but undiminished in her ability to command a stage.

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