The celebrated economist says a progressive property and income tax, greater say for workers in companies and an education system that is less biased against the poor will do more to reduce inequality than the fashionable proposal of a ‘basic income’ for all.

Thomas Piketty in The Wire:

The debate on basic income has at least one virtue, namely that of reminding us that there is a degree of consensus in France on the fact that everyone should have a minimum income. Disagreements exist over the amount. At the moment, the Revenu de Solidarité Active or RSA (the French unemployment benefit scheme) currently grants to single unemployed individuals with no dependent children 530 Euros per month, a sum which some people find sufficient, and others would like to increase to 800 Euros. But on both the Right and the Left, everyone seems to agree on the existence of a minimum income around this level in France, as is the case in other European countries. In the United States, the childless poor have to make do with ‘food stamps’ and the social state often assumes the guise of guardian or even prison. Thus, the French consensus is to be commended but at the same time we cannot consider it satisfactory.

The problem with the discussion about basic income is that in most instances it leaves the real issues unexplored and in reality expresses a concept of social justice on the cheap. The question of justice is not simply a matter of 530 Euros or 800 Euros a month. If we wish to live in a fair and just society, we have to formulate more ambitious objectives which cover the distribution of income and wealth in its entirety and, consequently, the distribution of access to power and opportunities. Our ambition must be that of a society based on a fair return to labour, in other words, a fair wage and not simply a basic income.

To move in the direction of a fair wage, we have to re-think a whole set of institutions and policies which interact with each other: these include public services, and in particular, education, labour law and organisations and the tax system.

More here.

Mary Duffy at Literary Hub:

Hazzard has a way of showing us both what hangs in front of each interaction and what is being concealed, at once. She writes everything with occlusion and revelation, circling round and round with her language the way a stand-up comedian uses a “call-back” to best effect. Each time she does this, it’s startling. In The Transit of Venus, two sisters Grace and Caroline have lost their parents in the sinking of a ship called the Benbow—more or less the inciting or defining incident of their childhoods—and an unstable maiden half-sister must take over their care. When Caro encounters Tertia, the sad, slightly villainous fiancée of the man she loves, Tertia arrives in a Bentley and describes her car as being in “showroom condition.”

In that first meeting, it is apparent that Tertia is vain, self-important. But Hazzard gives her reader curiosity and empathy with the bonus of one of her call-backs: “As to Tertia, Caroline Bell wondered what Benbow had capsized her into this showroom condition.” It’s a line I come back to again and again. Though it’s too specific to have much use as a standalone quotation, it is a shorthand I have when I meet a new person. I love the generosity of the assumption that we each have a Benbow which might explain, might allow others to forgive us our horribleness. What Benbow lurks in your past?

more here.

Vivian Gornick at The New Republic:

Marriage as a Fine Art is a book of conversations between the celebrated French power couple Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers, in which they open themselves to a barrage of questions about their own marriage. This subject matched with these participants must seem highly suspect to many: Kristeva is a world-famous psychoanalyst and feminist theorist and Philippe Sollers a novelist, critic, and magazine editor well known in France. The couple has been married for 50 years, and has for just as long been part of an elite circle of intellectual theorists—including such figures as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan—where defending marriage as such is the last thing on anyone’s agenda. So what were these two now up to?

In her preface to the book, Kristeva promises “to tell all about a given passion, with precision, without shame or shirking, without altering the past or embellishing the present, and steering very clear of the flaunting of sentimental fixations and erotic fantasies so prevalent in the current ‘selfie’ memoir.” Sollers adds that when “people get married out of calculation or delusion, time wears down this fragile normality contract, they get unmarried, they remarry, or else they stagnate in mutual disappointment. Nothing of the sort with us: Both partners equally preserve their creative personality, each stimulating the other all the time.” It’s a “new art of love,” he proposes, one that he believes society may not, however, be ready to accept. Thus, from the very start, both respondents took pains to establish their attachment as an example of the intelligence and courage that it takes to rescue the words “husband” and “wife” from their ever-increasing lack of prestige.

more here.

Ray Monk at the NY Review of Books:

“Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.”

Thus, in the New Year of 1929, was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge announced by John Maynard Keynes in a letter to his wife, Lydia Lopokova. Wittgenstein had previously been at Cambridge before World War I as a student of Bertrand Russell, but had acquired his godlike status through the publication after the war of his first and only book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was very quickly recognized as a work of genius by philosophers in both Cambridge and his home city of Vienna. Wittgenstein himself was initially convinced that it provided definitive solutions to all the problems of philosophy, and accordingly gave up philosophy in favor of schoolteaching. In 1929, however, he returned to Cambridge to think again about philosophical problems, having become convinced that his book did not, in fact, solve them once and for all.

What drew him back to Cambridge was not the prospect of working again with Russell, who by this time (having been stripped of his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, because of his opposition to World War I) was a freelance journalist, a political activist, and only intermittently a philosopher. Rather, it was the opportunity of working with Frank Ramsey, the man who had persuaded him of the flaws in the Tractatus. Most significantly, Ramsey had shown that the account Wittgenstein gives of the nature of logic in the Tractatus could not be entirely correct.

more here.

Tom Shippey in TLS:

The popular image of Scandinavians is full of contradictions. Denmark, Norway and Sweden must by several measures be the richest, happiest and most successful societies the world has ever known; yet their inhabitants are famous for melancholy, now familiar again through the depressed heroes of Scandi noir crime fiction: Wallander, Martin Beck, Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole. Scandinavia is also famous for hedonism and sexual freedom; yet the plots of Scandi noir stories often turn not on crimes but on old sins: adultery, incest, abuse. Likewise, the Scandinavian countries are probably in practice the world’s most egalitarian – but if you believe Stieg Larsson, Sweden in particular is run by far-right cabals including neo-Nazis and the families of former collaborators, a memory reinforced for Norway by the Anders Breivik massacre of July 22, 2011. What causes these extreme clashes of light and darkness? Robert Ferguson tries to get to the bottom of it through a combination of personal memoir, literary and cultural analysis, and episodic history. In the case of that last category, he has, effectively, a blank page to write on. For most anglophone readers, Scandinavian history means the Vikings – nothing before and very little after. The Kalmar Union of 1367, under which the three nations were united for more than a century? The wars between Sweden and Denmark-Norway, which lasted longer, proportionately, than the wars of England and Scotland? The British blockade of the Napoleonic era, which starved perhaps 10 per cent of the population of Norway to death? The Battle of Dybbøl and the annexation of much of Jutland by Prussia?

All a complete blank, along with mad King Christian VII of Denmark, philosophic Queen Kristina of Sweden and jolly King Christian VIII – who, in spite of his ancestors’ and descendants’ long preoccupation with archaeology, reacted to the news that the intensively studied “runic” inscriptions of Runamo were just glacial scratches by laughing uncontrollably for minutes on end, whooping out, “Oh, the scholars! The scholars! And that enormous book!” Ferguson has brought them all back to life, and very engagingly so. His histories are personal as well. Ferguson recalls actually seeing Breivik, on a train, well before the massacre, absorbed in reading a book by someone Ferguson knew. (It was While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer.) Ferguson’s first intention in writing his own book, he says, was to find the heart of melancholy, said to lie in the town of Skellefteå in north Norway, where the inhabitants have formed a society called the Friends of Darkness and the Cold.

More here.

Debra W. Soh in Scientific American:

In recent years, there has been growing discussion around the topic of sexual assault on college campuses. Prominent statistics estimate that between one in four and one in five women will experience sexual assault or rape during her time as a college student. Researchers in the field have emphasized that caution must be taken when interpreting these figures; however, the fact that sexual aggression persists at all highlights its importance as an issue of societal concern. This greater public awareness has led to an increased emphasis on improving preventative measures against sexual assault. With this aim, a recent study in Psychology of Violence has uncovered a novel way of approaching the problem and potentially lowering rates of sexual offending. Previous research has shown that a man’s tendency to misread female sexual interest—for example, mistaking friendliness for interest in sex—can lead to the commission of sexual aggression toward her. As a result, researchers at the University of Iowa were interested in testing whether this inaccuracy in perception could be improved through the use of a feedback-based computer task.

Study participants were 183 heterosexual or bisexual undergraduate male students at the university. Roughly 92% had been in at least one serious or casual relationship in the last three years. They completed two computerized tasks. For the first, they viewed and rated 232 full-body, clothed photos of undergraduate women on how sexually interested they believed the women felt, on a scale running from -10 (extremely sexually rejecting) to +10 (extremely sexually interested). Half of the men received feedback about each woman’s actual level of sexual interest, based on ratings made by the study authors and female students. All participants then viewed 110 photos and decided whether each woman in the photo would respond positively or negatively to a man’s sexual advance.

More here.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the NYT Magazine:

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.

Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of “The Great Gatsby,” Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “Murakami-style.” By contrast, Google’s translation — despite some “small unnaturalness” — reads to him as “more transparent.”

The second half of Rekimoto’s post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English. He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine.

NO. 1:

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

NO. 2:

Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.

Even to a native English speaker, the missing article on the leopard is the only real giveaway that No. 2 was the output of an automaton.

More here.

Morgan Meis in Image:

This all happened in 1998. A youngish woman, an artist, was at home in her council flat in the Waterloo neighborhood of central London. Council flats, you should know, are basically a British version of public housing. The woman’s name was Tracey Emin. She was having a lousy week.

A relationship had gone sour. More deeply than that, life had gone sour. Depression set in. She started hitting the bottle pretty hard. She couldn’t get out of bed. She smoked. She drank more. She snacked on junk food, rarely leaving the increasingly rank confines of her boudoir. This went on for days.

When she finally emerged from her downward spiral, Emin gazed upon what her drunkenness and depression had wrought. The bed spoke volumes. The rumpled and stained sheets were a testimony not to a good night’s sleep, but to despair. Next to the bed, piles of junk from her daily life. Empty bottles of vodka. A pair of dirty slippers. Cartons of cigarettes and other trash. A pair of panties soiled with menstrual blood. A container of birth control pills. Condoms.

A normal person would have wrapped all the trash up in the dirty sheets and thrown the whole lot in the rubbish bin (as they call it in Waterloo). But Tracey Emin was not then, and is not now, a normal person. As she recovered from her depressive bender, Emin had an interesting and unexpected thought: “This is art. I’ve created a work of art.”

More here.

Lawrence M. Kraus in The New Yorker:

Last week, the Space, Science, and Technology subcommittee of the House of Representatives tweeted a misleading story from Breitbart News: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” (There is always some drop in temperature when El Niño transitions into La Niña—but there has been no anomalous plunge.) Under normal circumstances, this tweet wouldn’t be so surprising: Lamar Smith, the chair of the committee since 2013, is a well-known climate-change denier. But these are not normal times. The tweet is best interpreted as something new: a warning shot. It’s a sign of things to come—a declaration of the Trump Administration’s intent to sideline science.

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not just that we’re easily misled. It’s that, by “impudently twisting the facts,” we can convince ourselves of “things which we know to be untrue.” A whole society, he wrote, can deceive itself “for an indefinite time,” and the only check on that mass delusion is that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” Science is one source of that solid reality. The Trump Administration seems determined to keep it at bay, and the consequences for society and the environment will be profound.

The first sign of Trump’s intention to spread lies about empirical reality, “1984”-style, was, of course, the appointment of Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, as Trump’s “senior counselor and strategist.” This year, Breitbart hosted stories with titles such as “1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over in 2016,” despite the fact that 2016 is now overwhelmingly on track to be the hottest year on record, beating 2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2013. Such stories do more than spread disinformation. Their purpose is the creation of an alternative reality—one in which scientific evidence is a sham—so that hyperbole and fearmongering can divide and conquer the public.

More here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no one could then grasp. It was late October, Friday the 21st, and the president had spent many of the previous weeks, as he would spend the two subsequent weeks, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Things were looking up. Polls in the crucial states of Virginia and Pennsylvania showed Clinton with solid advantages. The formidable GOP strongholds of Georgia and Texas were said to be under threat. The moment seemed to buoy Obama. He had been light on his feet in these last few weeks, cracking jokes at the expense of Republican opponents and laughing off hecklers. At a rally in Orlando on October 28, he greeted a student who would be introducing him by dancing toward her and then noting that the song playing over the loudspeakers—the Gap Band’s “Outstanding”—was older than she was. “This is classic!” he said. Then he flashed the smile that had launched America’s first black presidency, and started dancing again. Three months still remained before Inauguration Day, but staffers had already begun to count down the days. They did this with a mix of pride and longing—like college seniors in early May. They had no sense of the world they were graduating into. None of us did.

More here.

Jacob T. Levy over at the Niskanen Center's No Virtue:

Soave is a fixture on the “political correctness” beat and his post-election commentary openly acknowledged that its purpose was to tell us that he told us so.

Lilla’s book The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction had already approvingly cited the idea that “left-wing activists [in France] made a disastrous mistake in the 1970s by abandoning the traditional working class and turning toward identity politics. Deserted, the workers turned toward the National Front and adopted its xenophobia…”

Not everyone who has been sounding alarm bells about identity politics and political correctness has written a post-election commentary blaming them for Trump’s victory; longtime critic Jonathan Chait has been conspicuous by his refusal to indulge the genre. But those post-election blamings have all come from such pre-existing critics. This alone should tell us to be on the lookout for the so-called “pundit’s fallacy,” the idea that one’s own normative commitments just happen to also be the best political strategy. The pundit’s fallacy when applied to losses takes the form of a morality play: because you fools did the thing I don’t like, the voters punished you. Lilla solemnly noted that “those who play the identity game should be prepared to lose it.” The headline on Soave’s article was less subtle still: “Donald Trump won because leftist political correctness inspired a terrifying backlash: What every liberal who didn’t see this coming needs to understand.”

The 2016 election is bringing forth especially strange versions of pundits’ fallacies and morality plays. Donald Trump received a smaller share of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but his Electoral College victory was so unexpected that it seems to call forth explanation after explanation. The result is almost certainly over-explanation: theories get offered that, if they were true, would seem to imply that Trump should have done much better than he did, and much better than Romneydid. But there is a powerful temptation to attribute the surprising and dramatic fact of Trump’s win to some issue about which one had some preexisting ax to grind.

The backlash hypothesis is of this sort. Trump got a lower share of the white vote than Romney did (58% vs 59%). There was some change in both directions within the white vote: college-educated whites shifted toward the Democratic column by a few points (though a plurality still voted for Trump), but non-college-educated whites moved in larger numbers toward Trump (he got 67% of their votes, versus 62% for Romney). White men shifted toward Trump by 1% relative to 2012, white women in the other direction by 3%. This back-and-forth of course meant that Trump eked out victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and therefore the presidency, by a combined 80,000 or so votes across the three states. But fundamentally, voting patterns didn’t change enough between 2012 and 2016 to justify big claims about new national moods or about Trump’s distinctive appeal. I believe the consequences of this election will be deeply abnormal. But the voting behavior that brought it about was, in the end, very normal.

An 80,000 vote margin in a 137 million vote election, about .05%, is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations.

More here.

Emily Mace in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“What do I do with my academic books, now that I’m no longer a regular academic?” I’ve seen that question posed online, time and again, by Ph.D.s leaving academia for a different career. But this past summer, I asked that question myself — as I regarded the academic books and papers that sat unused on my shelves or buried in basement boxes. In 2012, when I left my first postgraduate home in North Carolina, everything came with me to Chicago: boxes of academic books and papers, too many course readers, and a heavy file cabinet full of meticulously organized folders holding my dissertation research. I unpacked my books but rarely opened the file cabinet in the months that followed. Now, four years later, I am no longer a traditional academic — I work as a grant coordinator in the digital humanities. We moved again, just across town, but this time, I wasn’t willing to bring everything from my old academic life with me. When I first started packing, I simply wanted to toss all of it. I’m not teaching survey courses anymore or, heaven forbid, writing graduate exams on subjects far removed from the keenest areas of my interest.

Dozens of books that I once had cherished no longer felt relevant to my life or my work. Books and papers are heavy, as any academic who’s ever moved knows all-too-well. I looked at my shelves, and suddenly all I could see were volumes I no longer read or consulted, sitting there, taking up space, refusing to make room for new ideas or new possibilities. The books felt like dead weight, holding down my shoulders as much as they did my shelves. My initial impulse was to purge everything— give away all the books, throw the course readers in the recycling bin, erase the dissertation research by tossing it, too, into the bin outside my home. Instead I hesitated. Among those books and papers were some that still meant something to me, and that might someday be relevant again to my life or work. So I started sorting. First, I organized the academic books into piles: keep, take to work, give to my husband (who happens to be in the same field), or sell. The “take-to-work” books comprised approximately two shelves’ worth of materials on late-19th-century America, the period most closely related to the grant that I administer. The “spouse” books were ones he didn’t own that were relevant to his work; he took them to his campus office rather than to our new home.

More here.

Ellis et al in Nature:

Three dozen academics are planning to rewrite Earth's history. The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (of which one of us, E.E., is a member) announced in August that over the next three years it will divide Earth's story into two parts: one in which humans are a geological superpower — an epoch called the Anthropocene — and the other encompassing all that came before our species had a major influence on Earth's functioning¹. Where to put the transition is being debated. Discussions have narrowed to defining one or more 'golden spikes': sharp global signatures in the rock record derived from the introduction of mid-twentieth century technologies, from radionuclides to plastics. Such markers will be put forward as the basis for ratifying the epoch by the International Geological Congress.

We agree that human influences on the planet should be recognized — but the formalization of the Anthropocene should not be rushed. And we question the privileging of 1950s-era markers. This ignores millennia of previous human influences, from our use of fire to the emergence of agriculture^2–6. Moreover, these markers misrepresent the continuous nature of human changes to our planet. They instil a Eurocentric, elite and technocratic narrative of human engagement with our environment that is out of sync with contemporary thought in the social sciences and the humanities^{3, 7–9}. Decades of rigorous scientific research into the history, causes and consequences of the long-term reshaping of Earth systems by humans is being ignored in the group's discussions. How can a human-centred geological period be defined without characterizing the development of societies, urbanization, colonization, trading networks, ecosystem engineering and energy transitions from biomass to fossil fuels?

We call for the Anthropocene formalization process to be rebuilt on a rigorous, transparent, open and sustainable foundation in which the human sciences have a major role.

More here.

J. Hoberman in the NYRB:

In 1929, the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard did away with the United States. In a map of the world attributed to him that year, the American republic (except for a giant Alaska) has been subsumed by Labrador in the north and a sprawling Mexico in the south.

The image of Mexico as the center of the new world—and as what André Breton called “the surrealist country par excellence”—is a take-away from the exhibition “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950,” now showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Just as Éluard’s map can be read as an early polemic against Eurocentrism, so “Paint the Revolution” presents a Mexican response to European art that, at least up until World War II, was equal to and in some regards stronger than that of North America.

To a degree, “Paint the Revolution” is the story of the three star muralists, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, who along with the posthumously canonized Frida Kahlo, defined the new Mexican art. (The exhibition borrows from the title, punctuated by exclamation point, of John Dos Passos’s 1927 New Masses article on the same subject.) But their work is situated among scores of lesser-known artists who were also responding to the decade-long Mexican revolution that broke out in 1910. Synthesizing avant-garde with folk art while embodying the tension between new and traditional media, these men and women engaged the central issues of early-twentieth-century culture.

More here.

Lynn Parramore interviews Mariana Mazzucato in Evonomics:

LP: So what’s the real story of what’s not working for so many?

MM: If we look at the complexity of the challenges facing western societies today, we see that the problems are not really about outsiders, but have their roots much closer to home.

Our current model of capitalism and the dominant ideas in policy making have led to a failure of investment by both the public and the private sector in the things that drive productivity, and which affect its distribution. Shareholder value theory — the destructive idea that companies should be run solely for the benefit of shareholders — has led to financialized businesses that do not invest in the areas that will lead to future growth or the invention of useful new products. Companies prefer to put money in the pockets of shareholders or to hoard cash rather than to raise wages or invest.

But it is not just how these ideas have affected the private sector. They have also had a detrimental impact on our understanding of the role government can play in raising both the rate of growth and shaping its direction. Mainstream economic theories popular in the last several decades have tended to downplay the government’s role in markets and to increase skepticism about even that more limited role. Austerity, particularly in Europe, has added to the problem. It has not worked, even on its own terms.

More here.

Joel Whitney in The Baffler:

The road from the capital to Acapulco was riddled with deadly switchbacks. Navigating the sharp turns left him just enough residual focus to daydream about his novel. Gabriel García Márquez was driving his family to its first vacation after long stretches of poverty. Ad work and then films had somewhat stabilized the thirty-seven-year-old Colombian writer’s finances, and some awards had come. But he’d been stalled on a novel, one he had dreamed of writing since his teens. His working title had been The House, conceived as a tribute to life in his family’s ancestral home in the little Caribbean outpost of Aracataca. Suddenly a string of words came: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” It was perfect: a first sentence which entailed the ending, a circular loop.

What happened next is shrouded in myth. The most common version has García Márquez turning around the family’s white 1962 Opel (he’d bought it with prize money from an earlier novel), returning to Mexico City, and canceling all of his hard-won work. He went into debt with his landlord and for a year he secluded himself in his “mafia cave,” as he called his smoke-filled writing studio. The book was highly anticipated; his move to Mexico City had exposed him to the city’s literati and he’d dramatized his writer’s block as the precipice above a great discovery.

The final chapters were still being written when requests came for advance excerpts. One such request came from a Uruguayan critic named Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who was editing a new literary magazine, Mundo Nuevo. But it wasn’t just any literary magazine. Gringo spy money buttressed it, went the rumors. Like much of the Latin American literary world, Rodríguez Monegal heard about the novel nearly a year before it appeared. Latin American intellectuals were still bitterly at odds over the Cuban Revolution, which Mundo Nuevo’s paymasters opposed. However willing García Márquez was to contribute to a magazine that openly sought to publish work from both sides, as this one claimed, he was not interested in doing covert cultural propaganda for the gringos.

And yet . . . as One Hundred Years of Solitude was being published to immediate and universal acclaim—the literary equivalent of Beatlemania, as one critic has written—and as the book’s author had a new empire to manage, between the foreign rights, translations, sales numbers, requests from fans, interviews, film options, and what he would write next, something like a barnacle clung to his newfound success. Newspapers were reporting that much of the cultural world had been ensnared in a CIA scheme to marshal culture for Cold War gain against the Soviets. It must have been an “oh shit” moment equal and opposite to his Acapulco epiphany: Mundo Nuevo was one of those magazines, and he had been stupid enough to say yes. He wrote his editor-friend to protest his evident ensnarement in the scheme. What did it feel like? In a quietly seething letter, he wrote that he felt like a cuckold.

More here.

Roni Jacobson in Scientific American:

Puns are divisive in comedy. Critics groan that they are the “lowest form of wit,” a quote attributed to various writers. Others—including Shakespeare—pun with abandon. The brain itself seems divided over puns, according to a recent study published in Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition. The results suggest the left and right hemispheres play different roles in processing puns, ultimately requiring communication between them for the joke to land.

To observe how the brain handles this type of humor, researchers at the University of Windsor in Ontario presented study participants with a word relating to a pun in either the left or right visual field (which corresponds to the right or left brain hemisphere, respectively). They then analyzed a subject's reaction time in each situation to determine which hemisphere was dominant. “The left hemisphere is the linguistic hemisphere, so it's the one that processes most of the language aspects of the pun, with the right hemisphere kicking in a bit later” to reveal the word's dual meanings, explains Lori Buchanan, a psychology professor and co-author of the study.

This interaction enables us to “get” the joke because puns, as a form of word play, complete humor's basic formula: expectation plus incongruity equals laughter. In puns—where words have multiple, ambiguous meanings—the sentence context primes us to interpret a word in a specific way, an operation that occurs in the left hemisphere. Humor emerges when the right hemisphere subsequently clues us in to the word's other, unanticipated meaning, triggering what Buchanan calls a “surprise reinterpretation.”

More here.

Carlin Flora in Aeon:

Think of a time when you sat across from a friend and felt truly understood. Deeply known. Maybe you sensed how she was bringing out your ‘best self’, your cleverest observations and wittiest jokes. She encouraged you. She listened, articulated one of your patterns, and then gently suggested how you might shift it for the better. The two of you gossiped about your mutual friends, skipped between shared memories, and delved into cherished subjects in a seamlessly scripted exchange full of shorthand and punctuated with knowing expressions. Perhaps you felt a warm swell of admiration for her, and a simultaneous sense of pride in your similarity to her. You felt deep satisfaction to be valued by someone you held in such high regard: happy, nourished and energised through it all.

These are the friendships that fill our souls, and bolster and shape our identities and life paths. They have also been squeezed into social science labs enough times for us to know that they keep us mentally and physically healthy: good friends improve immunity, spark creativity, drop our bloodpressure, ward off dementia among the elderly, and even decrease our chances of dying at any given time. If you feel you can’t live without your friends, you’re not being melodramatic.

But even our easiest and richest friendships can be laced with tensions and conflicts, as are most human relationships. They can lose a bit of their magic and fail to regain it, or even fade out altogether for tragic reasons, or no reason at all. Then there are the not-so-easy friendships; increasingly difficult friendships; and bad, gut-wrenching, toxic friendships. The pleasures and benefits of good friends are abundant, but they come with a price. Friendship, looked at through a clear and wide lens, is far messier and more lopsided than it is often portrayed.

More here.