Ryan Cooper in The Week:

A recent review of studies convincingly argues that FBI Director James Comey's letter vaguely announcing a new chapter in the email investigation eroded Clinton's margins by enough to make her lose. It was a damning announcement, coming from a relatively respected institution, at about the worst possible time. There were also an unusually large number of undecided voters that late in the campaign, and the FBI's announcement got saturation coverage.

It's important to emphasize that in such a close election, there are dozens of things that could also have tipped the balance. The fact that it was close enough to tip in the first place shows that Clinton was a terribly weak candidate — it is a virtual certainty that had Obama been on the ballot, he would have weathered such a blow. But it's still highly alarming that without a single action taken by the head of the FBI, Donald Trump would not have been elected president.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg. As Glenn Greenwald demonstrates, much of the 2016 election played out as a proxy war between the pro-Clinton CIA and the pro-Trump FBI, with dueling op-eds, anonymous leaks, and accusations.

This kind of thing is perhaps the major reason to preserve due process and civil liberties in the security apparatus. One of the more shameful aspects of the Obama presidency was watching liberals reverse-engineer reasons for why Bush-era security policies were now good, as they became Obama-era security policies. The most common rationale they landed on was the usual one about there being a tradeoff between security and privacy, and in a dangerous world we've simply got to give the spooks greater latitude (read: break whatever laws they want).

This argument is trash for many reasons, but among them is that it presents an incomplete picture of what is being sacrificed. Individual privacy is harmed by dragnet surveillance and unaccountable security agencies, but so is the basic democratic nature of the political system.

More here.

Liz Stinson in Wired:

THE MOST INTERESTING thing about Herzog and De Meuron’s newly opened concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie, isn’t its wave-like facade, which rises above the city of Hamburg, Germany. It’s not the gently curved elevator at the base of the lobby that deposits you into the belly of the Swiss architects’ alien landscape. And it’s not the Escher-esque stairways that guide you from one floor to the next.

Though Hamburg’s $843 million philharmonic is filled with stunning architectural gems, its most interesting feature is the central auditorium, a gleaming ivory cave built from 10,000 unique acoustic panels that line the ceiling, walls, and balustrades. The room looks almost organic—like a rippling, monochromatic coral reef—but bringing it to life was a technological feat.

The auditorium—the largest of three concert halls in the Elbphilharmonie—is a product of parametric design, a process by which designers use algorithms to develop an object’s form. Algorithms have helped design bridges, motorcycle parts, typefaces—even chairs. In the case of the Elbphilharmonie, Herzog and De Meuron used algorithms to generate a unique shape for each of the 10,000 gypsum fiber acoustic panels that line the auditorium’s walls like the interlocking pieces of a giant, undulating puzzle.

More here.

Lisa Miller in New York Magazine:

In May, Underwood drew all kinds of flak for agreeing to let George Zimmerman sell the Kel-Tec PF9 that killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on his site. Underwood defends the decision still. Zimmerman was a “dipshit,” he concedes, but he was acquitted at trial, his gun was legally purchased, and he was licensed. Underwood was able to resell it for $250,000 (all of which, he says, went to Zimmerman). “What would you do?”

Underwood was coming to New York to meet Carolyn Tuft, though neither one of them knew it yet. Tuft, who lives in Salt Lake City, is a survivor of the 2007 Trolley Square shooting, the massacre that seriously injured four people and left five dead — including Tuft’s 15-year-old daughter, Kirsten, the youngest of her four children. Tuft herself was shot three times, in the arm and point blank in the lower back. The 54-year-old has so much buckshot in her body that she suffers from lead poisoning, and she wakes up each day nauseated and in pain. Her manner is both assured and halting — the result, she explains, of constant painkiller use.

Underwood, Tuft, and more than a dozen others on both sides of the gun debate — a hunter; two Baltimore cops; a criminal-court judge from New Orleans; a couple of high-schoolers who grew up in the ganglands of Chicago’s South Side — had agreed to meet face-to-face, tell each other their stories, and try to understand one another’s points of view, in an experiment in radical empathy organized by New York Magazine in partnership with a nonprofit group called Narrative 4. Each traveler carried a personal story about guns: Lauren Green, a divorced mother from Connecticut, was raped at gunpoint as a child; Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, a former Florida state legislator and proponent of campus-carry laws, had fended off an assailant, a former boyfriend, with a gun.

More here.

Isaac Butler in the LA Review o f Books:

THE CLIMAX OF THIEF, Michael Mann’s first feature film, is the kind of sequence it feels like only he can pull off. In it, expert safecracker Frank (James Caan) breaks into a vault to steal some diamonds for the mob. He’s been preparing for the job for much of the film’s second act — it’s the venerable last big score he needs to retire and finally get his personal life in order for good. He’s in the room; the alarms are hacked; it’s showtime.

We’re never in suspense, watching this scene. At no point do we worry that Frank will get caught. Frank doesn’t seem too worried either: just focused, determined, no-nonsense, something out of a Jules Dassin or Jean-Pierre Melville film. The thrill doesn’t come from narrative tension; it instead comes from what Mann is able to do with light, sound, and texture — the way he composes them all in a breathtaking dance. Breaking into the vault entails melting a hole in it with a thermal lance, a long metal rod pumping compressed oxygen, heated to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. One of his crew must stand beside the rod with a fire extinguisher, putting out the sparks of steel, aluminum, and titanium that fly off of it. Soon the frame is all fog, fireworks, and silhouettes — molten metal turned into lava floes. The scene is nearly wordless, aside from Frank declaring, early on, that his team “owns” the room. Just as the images reduce down to iconic flares of light and molten steel, the screenplay focuses on ownership, what ownership entails, and how you can own and be owned, one of the film’s dominant concerns.

More here.

Patricia J. Williams at The New York Times:

Nearly every image of Coretta Scott King since her husband’s death has seemed suffused with preternatural stillness, her face fixed with the brave solitude of timeless interior bereavement. For all of her accomplishment and vivacity in real life, she has remained frozen in the collective imagination, among that sad pantheon of civil-rights-era icons: the political widow in a pillbox hat. King describes the weight of that identity in “My Life, My Love, My Legacy,” her posthumous memoir, as told to the journalist Barbara Reynolds over a period of 30 years. “There is a Mrs. King. There is also Coretta. How one became detached from the other remains a mystery to me,” King says.

This book is distinctly Coretta’s story. While there is nothing to radically challenge the impression of her as carefully restrained, what makes “My Life” particularly absorbing is its quiet account of a brutal historical era, as experienced by a very particular kind of African-American woman: well educated, cautious, a prototypically 1950s-style wife and mother. The book’s cover features a picture of King, young and smiling, but still radiating that unmistakable aura of church-lady reserve.

more here.

Jack Saebyok Jung at The Quarterly Conversation:

Translating one of the most experimental novels to come out from South Korea in recent memory is no easy task, and Yewon Jung’s translation dutifully recreates Jung Young Moon’s sustained deconstruction of sentences and narratives. Still, there are certain basic differences between English and Korean grammar that have yet to be conveyed successfully by any English translator of Korean language. The hallmark of Jung Young Moon’s style in Korean is that his words are almost always plain spoken, and the repetitions feel natural and quick to grasp. The real difficulty in translating Jung Young Moon is in how he uses the built-in ambiguity of pronouns and tense in Korean syntax. Korean allows the syntactic subject to be omitted from the sentence, especially when that subject is obvious. There is no “it is raining” in Korean, there is only “raining.” Thus, pronouns are hardly ever used unless they are there to stress or embellish a certain point. In the case of Vaseline Buddha in which the narrator and the author are two distinct entities, the natural ambiguity of Korean sentences suddenly becomes a key component in creating uncertainty as to the identity of the speaker at any given moment. Korean grammar leads the reader to subconsciously fill in the blanks so to speak, and by foregrounding this subconscious mechanic in his prose, Jung forces the reader to confront the oddness of the narrator’s shifting identity. This is possible not simply because the narrator is saying that he is many different things but because the very language he uses keeps his identity ambiguous.

more here.

^{Lucy Worsley at The Guardian:}

^“Downright nonsense” was the verdict of Mrs Augusta Bramston, a Hampshire friend and neighbour of the Austen family, on reading Pride and Prejudice. In 1814, Jane Austen published Mansfield Park, a sophisticated study of love and family life. Mrs Bramston nevertheless thought she ought to give it go, and having struggled through volume one, “flattered herself she had got through the worst”.

Jane Austen recorded this and other hilarious remarks from friends in a list of opinions on Mansfield Park. The document, in Austen’s own neat handwriting, is just one of the funny and sad items in the British Library’s new exhibition, Jane Austen Among Family and Friends, which opened on Tuesday.

Austen surely recorded the comments in a spirit of malicious mockery rather than regret. Even if only a small number of readers appreciated her at the time of her death in 1817, she hopefully knew just how brilliant a writer she was. Two hundred years later, everyone knows it. Her face is to appear on £10 notes and £2 coins, and the bicentenary of her death will see a slew of exhibitions showcasing her writing and world.

more here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Never in human history have so many diverse peoples lived together as in our time. Nor has the appeal of democracy ever been so widespread. The promise of equal rights and citizenship held out by modern society has been universally embraced, especially keenly by people long deprived of them. But, as Donald Trump, the favoured candidate of white supremacists, becomes president of the United States, the quintessential multicultural democracy, the long arc of the moral universe, as Martin Luther King called it, does not seem to be bending to justice. Trump came into political prominence accusing the first black president of the United States of being foreign born; he rose to supreme power stigmatising Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists. His election victory was engineered by Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, an online site notorious for its antisemitism, racism, misogyny and xenophobia. The joint arrival of Trump and Bannon in the White House, where they will enjoy nearly unlimited power, completes a comprehensive recent rout of the founding principle of the modern world: that, as the revolutionary phrases of 1776 had it, “all men are created equal”, entitled to the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

…The African American thinker WEB Du Bois had diagnosed the built-in contradictions of democracy and liberalism as early as the 19th century. In his view slavery had violently coerced Africans into a world economic system, and then global capitalism, binding together more people of different social and historical backgrounds, had piled new economic inequalities on to older racial prejudices and discrimination. Both forms of degradation were vital to the making of prosperous democracies in the Atlantic west; and they made it arduous, if not impossible, for the degraded to realise the modern promise of freedom and equality. “The problem of the 20th century,” Du Bois predicted in 1903, would be “the problem of the colour-line.”

More here.

Gary Taube in The New York Times:

The first time the sugar industry felt compelled to “knock down reports that sugar is fattening,” as this newspaper put it, it was 1956. Papers had run a photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower sweetening his coffee with saccharin, with the news that his doctor had advised him to avoid sugar if he wanted to remain thin. The industry responded with a national advertising campaign based on what it believed to be solid science. The ads explained that there was no such thing as a “fattening food”: “All foods supply calories and there is no difference between the calories that come from sugar or steak or grapefruit or ice cream.”

More than 60 years later, the sugar industry is still making the same argument, or at least paying researchers to do it for them. The stakes have changed, however, with a near tripling of the prevalence of obesity in the intervening decades and what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures reveal to be an almost unimaginable 655 percent increase in the percentage of Americans with diabetes diagnoses. When it comes to weight gain, the sugar industry and purveyors of sugary beverages still insist, a calorie is a calorie, regardless of its source, so guidelines that single out sugar as a dietary evil are not evidence-based. Surprisingly, the scientific consensus is technically in agreement. It holds that obesity is caused “by a lack of energy balance,” as the National Institutes of Health website explains — in other words, by our taking in more calories than we expend. Hence, the primary, if not the only, way that foods can influence our body weight is through their caloric content.

More here.

Amanda Taub in the New York Times:

In his farewell address as president Tuesday, Barack Obama warned of the dangers of uncontrolled partisanship. American democracy, he said, is weakened “when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character are turned off from public service, so coarse with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are not just misguided, but somehow malevolent.”

That seems a well-founded worry. Partisan bias now operates more like racism than mere political disagreement, academic research on the subject shows. And this widespread prejudice could have serious consequences for American democracy.

The partisan divide is easy to detect if you know where to look. Consider the thinly disguised sneer in most articles and editorials about so-called fake news. The very phrase implies that the people who read and spread the kind of false political stories that swirled online during the election campaign must either be too dumb to realize they’re being duped or too dishonest to care that they’re spreading lies.

But the fake-news phenomenon is not the result of personal failings. And it is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. Rather, Americans’ deep bias against the political party they oppose is so strong that it acts as a kind of partisan prism for facts, refracting a different reality to Republicans than to Democrats.

More here.

Kevin Tobia in Aeon:

What does it take to be the same person over time? This question has vexed philosophers for millennia. If an individual’s character changes enough, can this disrupt identity to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to say that we are dealing with the same person? That seems a reasonable conclusion to draw when the change is extreme. But I wanted to explore whether there might be more going on than this, and specifically whether the direction of change, not just the magnitude of change, might be a key factor.

In order to explore this question, I presented participants (Aeon readers who responded to a survey) with one of two different scenarios. The two scenarios expressed different versions of a classic thought experiment. They were based on the well-known story of Phineas Gage: a 19th-century railroad worker who had an unfortunate accident in which a tamping rod went right through his skull; he survived, but underwent a major character transformation as a result of brain damage – or so the story goes. Consider a vignette based on the myth of Gage:

Phineas is extremely kind; he really enjoys helping people. He is also employed as a railroad worker. One day at work, a railroad explosion causes a large iron spike to fly out and into his head, and he is immediately taken for emergency surgery. The doctors manage to remove the iron spike and their patient is fortunate to survive. However, in some ways this man after the accident is remarkably different from Phineas before the accident. Phineas before the accident was extremely kind and enjoyed helping people, but the man after the accident is now extremely cruel; he even enjoys harming people.

Gage’s friends and family were inclined to regard the man after the accident as ‘no longer Gage’. This case study is often taken to show that some substantial changes of character can disrupt personal identity to the extent that it seems reasonable to say that this is a different person in an important sense. However, in this case, the accident involved not just a large change, but specifically a deterioration: the man after the accident is seen as worse than Gage before the accident. The typical interpretation of this case is that sufficient magnitude of character transformation disrupts identity. But might this other feature, the direction of change (‘improvement’ or ‘deterioration’) be partly responsible for judgments about identity?

More here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

Author of the anti-racist jeremiad Black Skin, White Masks; spokesman for the Algerian Revolution and author of The Wretched of the Earth, the ‘bible’ of decolonisation; inspiration to Third World revolutionaries from the refugee camps of Palestine to the back streets of Tehran and Beirut, Harlem and Oakland; founder, avant la lettre, of post-colonialism; hero to the alienated banlieusards of France, who feel as if the Battle of Algiers never ended, but simply moved to the cités: Frantz Fanon has been remembered in a lot of ways, but almost all of them have foregrounded his advocacy of resistance, especially violent resistance.

Fanon was not a pacifist, but the emphasis on his belief in violence – or ‘terrorism’, as his adversaries would say – has obscured the radical humanism that lies at the heart of his work. In her 1970 study, On Violence, addressed in part to Fanon’s student admirers, Hannah Arendt pointed out that both his followers and his detractors seemed to have read only the first chapter – also entitled ‘On Violence’ – of The Wretched of the Earth. There Fanon described how violence could serve as a ‘cleansing force’ for the colonised, liberating them not only from their colonial masters, but from their inferiority complex. Decolonisation, he suggested, was nothing less than the ‘creation of new men’ – a notion much in vogue among 1960s revolutionaries, from Che Guevara to Malcolm X. The Wretched of the Earth has few of the autobiographical, elegiac cadences of his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, but explores the same relationship between racism, colonialism, mental illness and freedom. Crucially, it ends with a harrowing account of the mental disorders Fanon encountered as a psychiatrist during the Algerian War of Independence. The argumentative force of this closing chapter, and its position in the book, throw doubt on the first chapter. Violence was never Fanon’s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage for colonised communities and individuals who had become mentally ill, in his view, as a result of the settler-colonial project, itself saturated with violence and racism. Like Walter Benjamin, Fanon believed that for the oppressed, the ‘“state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’, and that his revolutionary duty was to help ‘bring about a real state of emergency’. Fanon’s clinical work was the practice that underpinned his political thought. He was only slightly exaggerating when he estimated that there were ‘more than ten million men to treat’ in Algeria. For Fanon, colonialism was a perversity. The coloniser and the colonised were locked together – and constructed – by a fatal dialectic. There could be no reciprocity, only war between the two, until the latter achieved freedom.

More here.

Michael Meyer in The Paris Review:

I saw a good deal of Graham Greene in the late forties and fifties. Once he mentioned that he was writing a film script. He told me the plot and it sounded pretty boring. I wondered who would want to see it. It turned out to be The Third Man. Graham’s account of it ranks with Orwell’s of Animal Farm as the most inadequateprécis of a work by its author that I have heard or can imagine.

Graham was a great practical joker. Once he heard that Cyril Connolly was giving a party to which he felt he should have been invited, and telephoned Connolly in the middle of it saying in an assumed accent that he was their chimney sweep and would be coming first thing next morning, so would Mr. Connolly please have the dust covers over all the furniture? The impersonation proved successful, for Connolly, after vainly pleading that the sweep should postpone his visit, obeyed, which must have been a tedious chore in the small hours after the last guest had gone. Graham also invented a terrible game, usually played around midnight or later. Each of you opened the telephone directory at random, picked a name blindly and rang the number; the winner was whoever kept his or her victim talking the longest. Graham always won. He told me that he had discovered another Graham Greene, a retired solicitor in Golders Green. The first conversation between them went something as follows: “Are you Graham Greene?” “My name is Graham Greene, but—” “Are you the man who writes these filthy novels?” “No, I am a retired solicitor.” “I’m not surprised you’re ashamed to confess you’re the author of this muck.” “No, really, I assure you—” “If I’d written them at least I’d have the guts to admit it, etc.” Graham told me that he had made several such calls using different accents, and that in the end the unfortunate man removed his name and number from the directory He also kept other people’s visiting cards, which he would use for a variety of harmless purposes, such as sending them across restaurants to friends who had not spotted him, with cryptic and sometimes obscene invitations written on them. This was the bright side of his temperament. I glimpsed the other side only a few times during these years, but I remember asking Edward Sackville-West, an old friend of his, what he thought Graham would be writing in twenty years, and nodding in agreement as Eddie replied, “Oh, Graham will have committed suicide by then.” “The fifties were for me a period of great happiness and great torment,” Graham wrote in Ways of Escape. “Manic depression reached its height in that decade.”

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist and a major public intellectual, is dead at 91 – or, as his widow put it, he has changed his place of residence “to liquid eternity.”

According to The New York Times, “The Polish-born left-wing thinker’s works explored the fluidity of identity in the modern world, the Holocaust, consumerism and globalization.” The article continued:

Renowned for an approach that incorporated philosophy and other disciplines, Bauman was a strong moral voice for the poor and dispossessed in a world upended by globalization. Whether he was writing about the Holocaust or globalization, his focus remained on how humans can create a dignified life through ethical decisions.

He wrote more than 50 books, notably “Modernity and the Holocaust,” a 1989 release in which he differed with many other thinkers who saw the barbarism of the Holocaust as a breakdown in modernity. Bauman viewed the mass exterminations of Jews as the very outcome of such pillars of modernity as industrialization and rationalized bureaucracy.

“It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable,” Bauman wrote.

In the 1990s, Bauman coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe a contemporary world in such flux that individuals are left rootless and bereft of any predictable frames of reference.

In books including “Liquid Times” and “Liquid Modernity” he explored the frailty of human connection in such times and the insecurity that a constantly changing world creates.

more here.

Christian Wiman at The American Scholar:

Here’s an obvious truth: I am somewhat ambivalent about religion—and not simply the institutional manifestations, which even a saint could hate, but sometimes, too many times, all of it, the very meat of it, the whole goddamned shebang. Here’s another: I believe that the question of faith—which is ultimately separable from the question of “religion”—is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not.

As for myself, I have found faith not to be a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish. Failing that, I would like them to be free to make of their anguish a means of peace, for themselves or others (or both), with art or action (or both). Failing that—and I suppose, ultimately, here in the ceaseless machinery of implacable matter, there is only failure—I would like them to be able to pray, keeping in mind the fact that, as St. Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand.

more here.

Magdalena Kay at The Dublin Review of Books:

The Aeneid features a hero, Aeneas, who is renowned for his sense of duty and honour. Yet his emotions are human. His devotion to his father, Anchises, is an especially moving feature of this epic, one that surely attracted Heaney. His love for both parents permeates his work. Meanwhile, the talkative Anchises (quite different from the reticent Patrick Heaney) is in many ways the most interesting figure in Book VI. Does Heaney wish that his own father had spoken more, or that he could have had the same glorious vision of the future, of his children’s children and their accomplishments, that Anchises is given?

There is more to wonder about. Nearly every reviewer mentions the deaths of Heaney’s parents as a link to Book VI, in which Aeneas is able to meet with the dead, even to plan his future by conversing with them. But such singular deaths are here situated within a larger story. Book VI does not focus upon Aeneas’s grief, and is not primarily a poem of mourning. Indeed, this seems to be one of its most problematic features. Instead of dwelling on the pathos of death, it dramatises the journey that Aeneas takes, first onto the shore of Latium, then to find the golden bough, and most strikingly, down and through the various realms of the world below. It ends with a long list of the descendants of Anchises and their destinies. Aeneas’s reascent to the daylight realm is quick and straightforward. The reader is left with a sense of glory and drama to come. This is, of course, in keeping with the patriotic, pro-imperial tenor of the poem. The Aeneid is more political than personal.

more here.

Barron H. Lerner in Slate:

When then-President Richard Nixon launched the “war on cancer” in 1971, there was no more admirable cause to support. The dreaded disease was the second leading cause of death that year for Americans, after heart disease, and has maintained that spot for decades. Yet John C. Bailar III, a physician and epidemiologist who died in September at age 83, persistently challenged the war—at a time when doing so was almost sacrilege. In recent years, others have picked up Bailar’s points, such as the notion that early cancer detection may not save lives. And we’ve moved on to a new metaphor for cancer control: the “moonshot,” championed by Vice President Joe Biden. But, in an era in which even a cancer moonshot is likely to be politicized, it is worth remembering a critic like Bailar, who thoughtfully opposed quick fixes for a complicated disease. Bailar would have been the first to say that it is impossible to separate science and rhetoric, but as a scientist and an advocate, he always tried to focus on what he believed the data showed.

…Bailar’s salvo, “Mammography: A Contrary View,” appeared in the well-respected medical journal the Annals of Internal Medicine. In it, he registered several concerns, many of them drawing from his statistical background. First, he wrote, the benefits of screening mammography “have not been determined.” Although a research study then being run by the Health Insurance Plan of New York suggested its value for women over 50, no such data existed for younger women. “Not every lesion discovered by screening should be considered a success of the program,” Bailar wrote. This conclusion drew on the epidemiologic concepts of lead-time and length-time bias, which falsely elevate actual survival rates by focusing on the date of cancer detection rather than a patient’s actual outcome. Second, according to Bailar, the risks of mammography “may be greater than are commonly understood.” Among his concerns was the worry that the radiation from repeated mammograms could actually cause breast cancer and that many of the machines being used in the BCDDP were using higher-than-necessary doses of radiation.

More here.