Tom Shone at The New York Times:

These are good times for Alfred Hitchcock. The refurbishment of the director’s reputation, which began in 1966 when François Truffaut published his landmark book of interviews, “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” reached its conclusion in 2012 when the film critics polled by Sight and Sound voted “Vertigo” the greatest film of all time, kicking Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” from a top spot it had enjoyed for decades. Wellesians bit their knuckles, and the rest of us scratched our heads. “Vertigo” is not Hitchcock’s best, but rather, with its lush morbidity, somnolent pace, poor box office and relative scarcity of jokes, the Hitchcock film for those who most wish he were French. Flops make film critics feel useful — they are the film-crit equivalent of the deserving poor. What else can you do with a gleaming hit maker except overpraise his misses?

It’s just one poll, but beneath it, broader tectonic shifts can be detected. If a director who was repeatedly slighted by the academy during his lifetime is today the most acclaimed and certainly the most watched director of classical Hollywood, it may well be because modern Hollywood has largely rebuilt itself in his image. Back in 1976, when Hitch’s last film, “Family Plot,” was dragging itself from theater to theater in search of an audience, his virtues — string-of-pearl set-piece construction, perpetual-motion plots, coupled with a healthy disrespect for American landmarks — seemed as cobwebbed as Norman Bates’s ma. “Jaws” had come out the year before. “Young Spielberg,” Hitchcock said after seeing Steven Spielberg’s perversely gleeful frightener, “is the first one of us who doesn’t see the proscenium arch.”

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Dara Horn at the Jewish Review of Books:

Why does Cynthia Ozick, at 88 an undisputed giant of American letters, still seem obsessed with fame?

Like nearly everyone else who appreciates Cynthia Ozick’s brand of genius—and I don’t mean “brand” in the 21^st-century sense, but rather the brand plucked from the fire, searing one’s lips into prophecy (the distinction between the two neatly encapsulates Ozick’s chief artistic fascinations)—I’m not the type of person who is a fan of anything at all. As something close to Ozick’s ideal reader, I am skeptical of the entire concept of fandom, religiously suspicious of the kind of artistic seduction that would make one uncritical of anything created by someone who isn’t God. But I am nevertheless a fan of Ozick’s, in the truly fanatical sense. I have read every word she’s ever published, taught her fiction and essays at various universities, reviewed her books for numerous publications (occasionally even the same book twice), written her fan letters and then swooned over the succinct handwritten replies in which she graciously gave me a sentence more than the time of day, and even based my own work as a novelist on her concept of American Jewish literature as a liturgical or midrashic enterprise (a stance she has since rejected, though too late for me). As a young reader I was astonished by what she apparently invented: fiction in English that dealt profoundly not with Judaism as an “identity,” but with the actual content of Jewish thought, at a time when almost no one, and certainly no one that talented, was quite bothering to try.

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Michael Gorra at The Millions:

The little charmer published this month as The Daily Henry James first appeared as The Henry James Yearbook in 1911, bound in a deep burgundy cloth and with a typeface that matched that of the great New York Edition of James’s works, an edition that had finished its run only two years before. It offers a quotation for each day of the year, many of them apposite to the season though none of them obvious, taken from the full range of James’s production, the criticism and travel writing as well as the novels and tales.

The book was put out by the Gorham Press, a Boston publisher that, as a Harvard website delicately puts it, produced its things “at their authors’ expense.” We’d probably call it a vanity press, but in James’s day such books were usually described as having been privately printed, a category that included not only the work of his own father but even such classics as The Education of Henry Adams. Not that the Henry James Yearbook stayed private. H.L. Mencken noticed it in The Smart Set, reviewing it alongsideJoseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, and in 1912 the English firm of J.M. Dent brought out a trade edition, using sheets imported from Boston.

And then the book more or less vanished. A few older works of criticism list it in their bibliographies, and a small press in Pennsylvania reissued it in 1970. But no scholar has ever paid it much attention, and for decades it survived in the only way that forgotten books do survive: undisturbed in the stacks.

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Elizabeth Gudrais in Harvard Magazine:

Studies that probe the link between happiness and health outcomes are still relatively rare in scientific work, but the new Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health aims to change that as it pursues a new approach to health maintenance: focusing on specific factors that promote the attainment and maintenance of high levels of well-being.

…The researchers also hope to solidify evidence that emotional health influences physical health, and not just the other way around. This notion was challenged last year, when The Lancet published a study finding no connection. But critics (including Kubzansky, who coauthored a letter of response in the same journal) took issue with the study’s methodology, noting that in adjusting for self-rated health (which is partly defined by emotional well-being), the study’s authors essentially adjusted for the very factor they were trying to investigate as a predictor. The debate exemplifies the tension underlying research in this area: the public seems to find the subject enormously compelling, but some segments of the scientific community remain skeptical. Kubzansky and her colleagues aim to amass enough evidence of biological connections between emotional and physical health that eventually the link will be taken for granted, much as exercise is generally regarded as beneficial. Yet even if that link is established, how can it be applied? If some people are innately happier than others, are the latter doomed to ill health?

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Lisa Appegnanasi in The Guardian:

Like some bloodhound on the trail of Berlusconi or a mafia magnate, the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti recently unearthed financial documents suggesting that the pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante, author of the acclaimed Neapolitan novels, was really a translator with little link to Naples except through her husband. To many of her readers, the outing felt like a violation, and not only of authorial privacy. It also gave off a sweaty odour of macho politics. Rumours had long travelled the Italian circuit suggesting that no woman could be both so brilliant and so popular a writer: ergo Elena must be a man. Now, by linking his “real” Elena to a well-known Neapolitan writer-husband, Gatti had reinforced that rumour. The finger-pointing revelations have been denied. But the fact that they have preceded the publication of a new book of reflections, letters and interviews, by just a few weeks, shadows one’s reading of it: your eyes linger a little over the passages that state or assume a childhood in Naples, that ponder truth and lies. Such is the polluting power of journalistic innuendo – as our tabloids have long known.

Ferrante’s insistence on staying out of the stranglehold of celebrity culture has been to avoid this scrutiny. The reduction of a book to its author and spurious autobiography is one of the recurring themes in her interviews, never conducted in person. “Lacking a true vocation for ‘public interest’, the media,” she writes, “would be inclined, carelessly, to restore a private quality to an object that originated precisely to give a less circumscribed meaning to individual experience. Even Tolstoy is an insignificant shadow if he takes a stroll with Anna Karenina.” And Shakespeare’s plays will remain great whether we know for certain or not that he sported a beard and travelled to Italy.

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Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian:

Paul Beatty may be the first American to win the Man Booker prize, after a rule change three years ago that made authors of any nationality eligible for the £50,000 award, so long as they were writing in English and published in the UK. But he very nearly wasn’t published in Britain at all. Beatty calls his fourth novel “a hard sell” for UK publishers. His rumbustious, lyrically poetic novel was turned down, his agent confirms, by no fewer than 18 publishers. And then, finally, a small independent called Oneworld – founded by a husband-and-wife team in 1986 – took it up. The company is celebrating the unusual achievement of a second consecutive Man Booker win, because it also published Marlon James’s A History of Seven Killings.

“It’s weird for me,” says Beatty, who is 54. The morning after the night before, the New York-based, Los Angeles-born writer is slightly dazed, somewhat short of sleep and good-naturedly overcoming his reluctance to talk about his work. “I think it’s a good book. I was like, ‘Why? What’s all that about?’ I would be uncomfortable guessing [why I couldn’t get a publishing deal]. I would hurt myself. It would be like, ‘Really? Still?’ I guess they thought the book wouldn’t sell.” He won’t be drawn, but the implication is that he suspects publishers may have found the material too harsh, too unconventional, too unfamiliar – and, conceivably, beneath all that, in some undefinable way too black. It is certainly a book in which one gasps frequently – amid deeply uncomfortable laughter and, at times, tears. Nothing is sacred in The Sellout, in which the book’s narrator (surname Me) decides to reinstate segregated schools and reluctantly takes on a slave in his home district of Dickens, Los Angeles. All things, no matter how piously regarded, up to and including the US civil rights movement, are there to be punctured by Beatty’s fierce and fizzing wit.

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Scott Korb in the LA Review of Books:

In her nonfiction, Robinson often confronts the gap between herself and her fellow Christians. Her 2006 essay “Onward, Christian Liberals” draws those lines in language that is, from the start, as confrontational as it is introspective. She begins: “I realize that in attempting to write on the subject of personal holiness, I encounter interference in my mind between my own sense of the life of the soul and understandings that are now pervasive and very little questioned.” My own students have taken a great deal of time figuring out what she means in this opening line; at a secular university, they’re often less comfortable than Robinson discussing personal holiness and the life of the soul. Robinson’s initial obliqueness with regard to her opponents is also cause for some confusion. Nevertheless, she eventually sums up those pervasive and little-questioned understandings quite clearly and with distinctive good humor — she appreciates a joke as much as anybody — by contrasting them with the teachings of Christ:

[T]he supposed Christian revival of today has given something very like unlimited moral authority to money, though Jesus did say (and I think a literal interpretation is appropriate here if anywhere), “Woe to you who are rich!” (Luke 6:24) If this seems radical, dangerous, unfair, un-American, then those who make such criticisms should at least have the candor to acknowledge that their quarrel is with Jesus.

Robinson approaches a related gap between herself and other Christians in a later essay, “Wondrous Love,” from 2010 — although by this time her tone has grown somewhat doleful: “[T]he fact is that we differ on this crucial point, on how we are to see the figure of Christ.”

Taking up, for instance, the awareness that Christ’s preaching (which was itself “a new understanding of traditional faith”) would divide families, she rereads what’s been called “the sword of the Lord” passage from Matthew’s gospel — “Do not think I have come to bring peace on earth: I have come not to bring peace, but a sword” — as an “inevitable and regrettable” notion, for him, in his time. “In the narrative as I understand it,” Robinson concludes, “his words would have been heavy with sorrow” — a bit like hers here, a bit like Obama’s. Those who would want to use this passage from Matthew — both historically, and even still today — as evidence that Christ promoteddivision, denunciation, or murder, for the sake of Christianity, see him differently than Robinson does.

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Alfred Mele in The Philosophers' Magazine:

You’re enjoying a leisurely walk in the woods when you come to a fork in the path. You pause to think about what to do, and you decide to go right. According to some philosophers, if free will was at work at the time, you could have acted differently.

Philosophers tend to be cautious about theoretical matters. Decided to go left is a different mental action from deciding to go right. But we might say that deciding a bit later than you actually did – say, deciding on the right fork after an extra thirty seconds of thought – is another way of acting differently. Other alternatives include deciding to turn back and deciding to sit for a while. The main point, according to the philosophers I have in mind, is that if you freely decided on the right fork, you could have done something else instead at the very time you made that decision.

What does the idea that you could have done something else at the time come to? According to some philosophers, it comes to this: in a hypothetical universe that has exactly the same past as our universe and exactly the same laws of nature, you do something else at this very time. In our universe, you decide on the right fork at noon. And in a possible universe that would have been actual if you had behaved differently at noon – one with the same past as the actual universe right up to noon and the same laws of nature – you do something else at noon. Having a label for this idea will save space: I’ll call it Openness.

Does Openness fit your experience of decision-making, at least in some cases? I predict you’ll say yes. I’m not saying that you experience other possible universes. The question is whether it sometimes seems to you that, when you decide to do something, you could have done something else instead – and not just in the sense that if the past (or the laws of nature) had been different, you would or might have done something else. Your answer, I’m guessing, is yes.

How do your decision making processes work if and when you have Openness?

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Noam M. Elcott at Artforum:

“MOHOLY-NAGY: FUTURE PRESENT” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the artist’s first major American retrospective in nearly half a century and surely among the most stunning ever presented, compels us to ask a once-unthinkable question: His accepted biography is less exceptional than it is emblematic of artists of his generation. An assimilated Jew from Central Europe forced into exile after the short-lived Communist regime in Hungary, Moholy relocated to Berlin as the city became a capital of the avant-garde. He joined the Bauhaus and helped shepherd it toward a unity of art and technology. Forced into exile again, now due to the German fascists, he settled in Chicago to found the New Bauhaus. His American pedagogy and publications shaped the contours of art and design for much of the post–World War II period, which he barely lived to see, dying in 1946 at the age of fifty-one.

In the intervening years, Moholy’s reputation has suffered; he has been dismissed as a second-rate painter, a dilettante, and a halfhearted revolutionary. “Future Present,” however, made an eloquent, if convoluted, case for his primacy. The massive show, which was curated by Karole P. B. Vail, Matthew S. Witkovsky, and Carol S. Eliel, comprised some three hundred works in more than a dozen distinct and hybrid media, spanning photography of every stripe, paintings on myriad substrates, sculptures, printed matter, treatises, graphic design, films, exhibitions, theater, and works that still defy categorization. Yet objects were frustratingly grouped according to medium—paintings exalted in hallowed bays; photographs and photomontages (“photoplastics,” per Moholy’s neologism) bundled on floating gray walls; printed matter, including Moholy’s all-important books, trapped in vitrines; and Plexiglas sculptures perfectly lit on an ameboid platform.

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Jon Baskin at The Point:

The director of four films beginning with Badlands in 1973, Terrence Malick studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell at Harvard before abandoning a doctorate on Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. A promising journalist and academic—as well as an outstanding high school football player—in 1969 Malick published what is still the authoritative translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons. That same year he ended his academic career and enrolled alongside David Lynch and Paul Schrader in the American Film Institute’s new conservatory, developed to encourage “film as art” in America. Although his background has long encouraged commentators to investigate his influences and sources, Malick’s films also merit consideration as artistic achievements that confront their audiences with a distinctive experience. Like any great filmmaker, Malick demands that we see in a new way. Unlike most filmmakers, his films are also about the problem of seeing—that is, of perspective.

Avner Offer in Project Syndicate:

Of the elites who manage modern society, only economists have a Nobel Prize, whose latest recipients, Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström, have just been announced. Whatever the reason for economists’ unique status, the halo conferred by the prize can – and often has – lend credibility to policies that harm the public interest, for example by driving inequality and making financial crises more likely.

But economics does not have the field entirely to itself. A different view of the world guides the allocation of about 30% of GDP – for employment, health care, education, and pensions – in most developed countries. This view about how society should be managed – social democracy – is not only a political orientation; it is also a method of government.

Standard economics assumes that society is driven by self-seeking individuals trading in markets, whose choices scale up to an efficient state via the “invisible hand.” But this doctrine is not well founded in either theory or practice: its premises are unrealistic, the models it supports are inconsistent, and the predictions it produces are often wrong.

The Nobel Prize in economics was endowed by Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, in 1968. The timing was not an accident. The new prize arose from a longstanding conflict between the interests of the better off in stable prices and the interests of everybody else in reducing insecurity by means of taxation, social investment, and transfers. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize, but Sweden was also an advanced social democracy.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Riksbank clashed with Sweden’s government over the management of credit. Governments gave priority to employment and housing; the Riksbank, led by an assertive governor, Per Åsbrink, worried about inflation. As recompense for restrictions on its authority, the Riksbank was eventually allowed to endow a Nobel Prize in economics as a vanity project for its tercentenary.

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Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

Nash’s paintings – and his photographs, woodcuts, writings and book illustrations for the likes of Robert Graves, T E Lawrence and Siegfried Sassoon – were proof that there was no intrinsic incompatibility between Britishness and European modernism. Indeed, what his work showed was that the avant-garde was a means of reinvigorating the British landscape tradition. There was everything personal about his art but nothing insular; Nash may have been, in the eyes of many, heir to the mystic pastoralism of William Blake and Samuel Palmer – and may have returned repeatedly to such heart-of-England subjects as Iron Age Dorset and Oxfordshire, the Sussex Downs, Romney Marsh, and the fields and orchards of Buckinghamshire – but he treated them with a sensibility that had a strongly European component.

How Nash managed to “Go Modern” and still “Be British” is the underlying theme of Tate Britain’s magnificent and comprehensive retrospective, which contains about 160
works. Nash the artist of two world wars is necessarily here, but the focus of the exhibition lies in his non-martial work. Nevertheless, it was the wars that defined him.

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Donna Laframboise in Spectator:

We’re continually assured that government policies are grounded in evidence, whether it’s an anti-bullying programme in Finland, an alcohol awareness initiative in Texas or climate change responses around the globe. Science itself, we’re told, is guiding our footsteps. There’s just one problem: science is in deep trouble. Last year, Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, referred to fears that ‘much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue’ and that ‘science has taken a turn toward darkness.’ It’s a worrying thought. Government policies can’t be considered evidence-based if the evidence on which they depend hasn’t been independently verified, yet the vast majority of academic research is never put to this test. Instead, something called peer review takes place. When a research paper is submitted, journals invite a couple of people to evaluate it. Known as referees, these individuals recommend that the paper be published, modified, or rejected.

If it’s true that one gets what one pays for, let me point out that referees typically work for no payment. They lack both the time and the resources to perform anything other than a cursory overview. Nothing like an audit occurs. No one examines the raw data for accuracy or the computer code for errors. Peer review doesn’t guarantee that proper statistical analyses were employed, or that lab equipment was used properly. The peer review process itself is full of serious flaws, yet is treated as if it’s the handmaiden of objective truth. And it shows. Referees at the most prestigious of journals have given the green light to research that was later found to be wholly fraudulent. Conversely, they’ve scoffed at work that went on to win Nobel prizes.

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The Unknown Bird

Three lovely notes he whistled, too soft to be heard
If others sang; but others never sang
In the great beech-wood all that May and June.
No one saw him: I alone could hear him
Though many listened. Was it but four years
Ago? or five? He never came again.
Oftenest when I heard him I was alone,
Nor could I ever make another hear.
La-la-la! he called, seeming far-off—
As if a cock crowed past the edge of the world,
As if the bird or I were in a dream.
Yet that he travelled through the trees and sometimes
Neared me, was plain, though somehow distant still
He sounded. All the proof is—I told men
What I had heard.

I never knew a voice,
Man, beast, or bird, better than this. I told
The naturalists; but neither had they heard
Anything like the notes that did so haunt me,
I had them clear by heart and have them still.
Four years, or five, have made no difference. Then
As now that La-la-la! was bodiless sweet:
Sad more than joyful it was, if I must say
That it was one or other, but if sad
'Twas sad only with joy too, too far off
For me to taste it. But I cannot tell
If truly never anything but fair
The days were when he sang, as now they seem.
This surely I know, that I who listened then,
Happy sometimes, sometimes suffering
A heavy body and a heavy heart,
Now straightway, if I think of it, become
Light as that bird wandering beyond my shore.
.

by Edward Thomas
from Poetry Magazine
.

Alexandra Fanning in AlterNet:

Artist Joseph Grazi is known for his eccentric shows, extensive research and balancing his fine art career with his Orthodox Jewish background, as documented in the film Primal Heritage. In his latest exhibition, Cecil: A Love Story, on view at Joseph Gross Gallery in New York, Grazi uses a variety of media, including drawing and taxidermy, to examine the public debate surrounding Cecil the lion, whose killing by Walter Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, sparked global outrage. Grazi creates a dialogue surrounding how we process atrocities committed against animals deemed beautiful versus those considered ugly, and delves into the rose-tinted lenses of Western privilege. At the same time, the artist explores the suction of internet activism with the consideration of easily digestible narratives such as, “Wealthy White Male Kills Defenseless Lion.” I spoke to Grazi about how he used the artistic process to explore Cecil’s story.

Alexandra Fanning: What did you initially think and how did you react when you first heard about Cecil the lion’s death?

Joseph Grazi: My initial thoughts were ruined by the public outcry, because I read about it first just like most everyone else probably did, which was through an angry friend posting it on Facebook. So my first reaction was to the reaction rather than the event itself.

AF: What encouraged you to explore this event in your artistic practice?

JG: I actually never thought about it artistically at first. Morality and aesthetics have always been a part of my work and I executed a few lion pieces before I realized that it was all really just one thing, almost perfectly contained into one news story and public reaction.

AF: Tell me about your fascination with animals, dead or alive.

JG: Always had pets growing up and gravitated towards animals in general. Although I can’t tell you 100 percent why. Though many non-human species have “culture,” there is something about the bareness of animals’ appearance and behavior—no clothes, no laws—just pure existence. I definitely found something tranquil in that.

…Cecil’s life compared to the life of a chicken or pig in a factory farm is not even comparable. One lived a life of being purely wild up until the day; the other is literally tortured to death over long spans of time. Yet only the first induces mass rage. I hope my work helps viewers to look further inward at the inconsistency of these behaviors and perhaps, over time, adjust for the better.

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Owen Bennett-Jones in the LRB:

Should women carry out knife attacks? In the September issue of its Inspire Guide, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula argued against it. In October an article in the Islamic State publication Rumiyah (‘Rome’) took the opposite view. Having discussed possible targets – ‘a drunken kafir on a quiet road returning home after a night out, or an average kafir working his night shift’ – the magazine praised three women who, on 11 September, were shot dead as they stabbed two officers in a Mombasa police station.

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Caelainn Hogan at Harper's Magazine:

On a gray Sunday in Belfast, police stood cross-armed in front of a line of armored jeeps, primed like racehorses in the stocks. They formed a barricade across a wide shopping street in the center of the city, starting at Poundworld and cutting off the KFC from the Disney Store one door down. The street was an eventual meeting point of the famous Falls and Shankill roads, the thoroughfares of West Belfast’s predominantly Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, divided by a looming peace wall. A solid concrete barricade topped with metal fencing, the wall runs for miles along the lonely bend of Cupar Way, rising higher than a double-decker bus. One of many peace lines built up more than four decades ago to prevent clashes between the two communities, on one side of the wall, fenced-off estates fly the English Cross of Saint George, while on the other, houses hang the Irish tricolor. Spike-topped security gates stand at the point at which the peace line crosses Lanark Way, traffic streaming through during the day. But the gates still shut automatically at designated times, barricading one side from the other.

That morning, Khaled Berakdar, his head and face freshly shaven, nipped down a back alley lane, making his way through empty streets and past the line of police, to meet his younger brother Ibrahim. With slicked-back hair and a thick beard, Ibrahim was sporting a rubber bracelet that read “Syria.” They embraced before making their way towards the Falls, where a crowd was mustering for a parade in honor of the Irish uprising against the British.

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Tyler Zimmer at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

IN THE COLD WAR era and the decade or two following it, a few cheap jabs were enough to shut down any public conversation about the merits of socialist ideas. The mention of the Gulag, Pol Pot, or Stalin was sufficient to put the entire matter to rest. This is no longer the case.

If polls are to be trusted, young people today are decidedly more positive about the idea of socialism than they are about the profit-driven system they currently inhabit. A few months ago, 43 percent of Iowa Democrats said they identify as socialists. It is anything but clear what will become of the excitement generated by the (now failed) candidacy of Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimeddemocratic socialist, but the surprising success that his campaign enjoyed in the last year is itself significant; if nothing else, it shows that there is a large audience for the idea that we need, as Sanders put it, a “political revolution against the billionaire class.”

The reasons for this left-wing shift in political consciousness ought to be obvious. For an entire generation of people, the 2008 global economic meltdown cast profound doubt on the once hegemonic myth that the free market always knows best.

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