Craig Lambert in The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

George Scialabba is no wild man. A soft-spoken, introverted soul, he doesn’t drink or smoke; no alcohol, tobacco, or recreational drugs. Healthy, moderate eating (no red meat, and “a kind of cerebral Mediterranean diet”) keeps Scialabba, at age 67, lean to a degree that is downright un-American. He has never married nor fathered children, and lives alone in a one-bedroom condo he has occupied since 1980. He doesn’t play sports (“I don’t exercise — I fidget”). For 35 years, Scialabba, a Harvard College alumnus, held a low-level clerical job at his alma mater that suited his low-profile style. For the past decade, his desk has occupied a windowless basement in a large academic building.

That’s the physical Scialabba: a bespectacled reed who could slip into any cocktail party nearly unnoticed.

The intellectual Scialabba is another story. Over those same 35 years, he has written nearly 400 essays and book reviews for The American Conservative, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Dissent, Grand Street, The Nation, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. His acuity, erudition, and polished prose have earned him thousands of readers and the admiration of some of the country’s leading minds.

The Harvard English professor and New Yorker contributor James Wood calls him “one of America’s best all-round intellects.” The author Barbara Ehrenreich asserts that “he is not only astoundingly intelligent, he knows just about everything — history, politics, culture, and literature.” The political theorist Daniela Cammack, currently a visiting lecturer at Yale, declares, “For my money, George is the finest living writer of nonfiction English prose. I know that’s a grand claim, but I stand by it. Every time a new book of [his] essays has come out, I’ve stayed up ’til 4 a.m. devouring it. That doesn’t usually happen.”

More here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

The World Bank and the United Nations have set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030, but achieving this target will be very difficult. Today, close to half of all extreme poverty is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which, despite some recent progress, is still beset by war, disease, and a lack of properly functioning institutions. In addition, it is important not to read too much from the extreme-poverty figures as regards the fight against poverty as a whole. If you are an African, an Asian, or a South American, just because you have edged above the World Bank’s bar doesn’t mean that you aren’t still poor. In the poorest forty per cent of countries, according to the bank’s own figures, about half the population is still in “moderate poverty,” which it defines as existing on less than four dollars a day of income.

Furthermore, some of the recent decline in the rate of extreme poverty may be an artifact of how the bank calculates it, which changed recently. In a skeptical piece in the Financial Times, Shawn Donnan explained some of the tricky technical issues, which largely revolve around how to compare prices across countries and across time. Meanwhile, Francisco Ferreira, a senior economist at the World Bank, defended its procedures in a blog post arguing that, whichever numbers are used, the trend in extreme poverty is a downward one.

That does seem to be true, and it’s something to celebrate. Above all else, it reflects the entry of China, India, and other developing countries into the global trading system, not merely as sources of raw materials and cheap labor but also, increasingly, as independent players in global capitalism. In industries ranging from steel to autos to energy to solar panels, Chinese and Indian companies are now competing head-to-head with western rivals. The global market that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about in 1848 is now largely a reality, with individual countries and corporations vying for the spoils.

That’s what trade agreements like the T.P.P. are all about.

More here.

From KurzweialAI:

Penn State researchers have developed a new lab-on-a-chip cell sorting device based on acoustic waves that is capable of the kind of high sorting throughput necessary to compete with commercial fluorescence activated cell sorters, described in the cover story in the current issue of the British journal Lab on a Chip. Commercial fluorescence activated cell sorters have been highly successful in the past 40 years at rapidly and accurately aiding medical diagnosis and biological studies, but they are bulky and too expensive ($200,000 -$1,000,000) for many labs or doctors’ offices. “The current benchtop cell sorters are too expensive, too unsafe, and too high-maintenance. More importantly, they have very low biocompatibility. The cell-sorting process can reduce cell viability and functions by 30–99 percent for many fragile or sensitive cells such as neurons, stem cells, liver cells and sperm cells,” said Tony Jun Huang, Penn State professor of engineering science and mechanics and the paper’s corresponding author. “We are developing an acoustic cell sorter that has the potential to address all these problems.”

High-speed sorting

Microfluidic cell sorters are a promising new tool for single cell sequencing, rare cell isolation, and drug screening. However, many of them operate at only a few hundred cells per second, far too slow to compete with commercial devices that operate on the order of tens of thousands of operations per second. The Penn State system can sort about 3,000 cells per second, with the potential to sort more than 13,000 cells per second. The speed is generated by using focused transducers to create standing surface acoustic waves (SSAWs).

More here.

James Wood at The New Yorker:

The publication of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi” (Liveright), in three volumes, represents a monumental and noble endeavor on the part of its publisher, its general editor, Ann Goldstein, and the many translators who have produced new versions of Levi’s work. Although his best-known work has already benefitted from fine English translation, it’s a gift to have nearly all his writing gathered together, along with work that has not before been published in English (notably, a cache of uncollected essays, written between 1949 and 1987).

Primo Levi was born in Turin, in 1919, into a liberal family, and into an assimilated, educated Jewish-Italian world. He would write, in “If This Is a Man,” that when he first learned the name of his fateful destination, “Auschwitz” meant nothing to him. He only vaguely knew about the existence of Yiddish, “on the basis of a few quotes or jokes that my father, who worked for a few years in Hungary, had picked up.” There were around fifty* thousand Italian Jews, and most of them were supporters of the Fascist government (at least until the race legislation of 1938, which announced a newly aggressive anti-Semitism); a cousin of Levi’s, Eucardio Momigliano, had been one of the founders of the Fascist Party, in 1919. Levi’s father was a member, though more out of convenience than commitment.

Levi gives ebullient life to this comfortable, sometimes eccentric world in “The Periodic Table”—a memoir, a history, an essay in elegy, and the best example of his various literary talents.

more here.

Debarati Sanyal at Public Books:

Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed last fall by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”1 This is in keeping with Modiano’s own claim that the Nazi occupation and its aftermath form the matrix of his literary imaginings, from La Place de L’Étoile (1968), which catapulted him into literary fame, to his most famous translated novel, Dora Bruder (1997), about a Jewish runaway deported to Auschwitz.2

There is, however, a much longer history to Modiano’s melancholy fiction, with its distinct blend of personal rumination and precarious historical retrieval. Its roots lie in 19th-century Paris, a city so swiftly transformed by modernization that only an “art of memory” could recollect what had been and was no longer there. Charles Baudelaire’s “The Swan” famously recalls those disappeared by modernization:

Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy
Has stirred! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone,
Old neighborhoods, all for me become allegory,
And my cherished memories are heavier than rocks.3

For Baudelaire, the modern poet was a symbolic ragpicker, less an idle flaneur than an anxious prowler who collected modernity’s debris and stored it in poetic memory.

more here.

For Example

There was an old Dutch lady
Lived in a room in the house
In front of my small shack
Who sat all day in the garden
By my door and read.
She said she knew the East
And once had seen a book
On Buddhist monks. “And you
Got no business going to
Japan. The thing to be
Is Life, is young and travel
Much and love. I know
The way you are, you study hard
But you have friends that
Come and stay, and bike, and
There’s the little tree you
Planted by the wall” As I
Filled my water bucket from
A hose. The sun lit up
Her thin white hair a bird
Squawked from the Avocado at the air
& Bodhisattvas teach us everywhere.
.

By Gary Snyder
From Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986

Thomas Frank at The Baffler:

In his 2005 study of prize-giving, The Economy of Prestige, the English professor James English takes note of the dizzying proliferation of honors and awards in recent decades—it’s “a kind of cultural frenzy,” he writes. “Just indexing all these prizes is a daunting task.” Indeed it is. In the course of researching this article, I discovered numerous distinctions I had never heard of before, including the American Creativity Association’s Special Achievement Award, a right-wing imitation of the Genius Grant called the Bradley Prize (every conservative newspaper columnist will eventually get one), and a literary honor that is named for Rob Bingham, a friend of mine who died tragically in 1999.

What James English tells us about the countless foundations and academies that make these awards is that they are not simply neutral observers, impartially recognizing merit from some lofty height. They are always engaged in a cultural project of their own—usually to establish themselves as authorities and their own concerns as correct ones.

In pursuit of that project, all award programs face the same problems. Because the reputation of the prize must itself be established for the academy in question to set about judging the merits of others, all prize programs gravitate toward convention. They tend overwhelmingly to reward people whose reputations are already made. Indeed, as the competition between prizes grows more intense, English tells us, the pressure to associate a prize with safe and unquestionably prestigious figures only grows.

more here.

Michael Lind in The Smart Set:

Can world literature exist? It depends on what is meant by world literature.

The phrase Weltliteratur was coined by Goethe. The German polymath told his disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in 1827: “I am more and more convinced that poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at times to hundreds and hundreds of men…. National literature is now a rather unmeaning term, the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”

But what is world literature? World literature comes in two alternate, conceivable versions: contemporary world literature and global classicism. Contemporary world literature is the literature of contemporary societies — particularly works of literature that obtain an international reputation. Global classicism might be described as contemporary literature inspired by the multiple traditions of the premodern regional literate civilizations of Eurasia, including the Chinese, Indian, Greco-Roman, Euro-Christian, and Muslim.

Goethe contributed to both kinds of world literature. He owed his early fame to The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel for a bourgeois readership that was strikingly modern for its time and translated into many languages. But in his subsequent literary career, after repudiating romanticism for classicism, the Sage of Weimar experimented with premodern and foreign models, adapting genres and forms from ancient Greece and Rome as well as medieval European balladry. Among the recondite late works of his old age are poems inspired by the medieval Persian poet Hafez, the West-Eastern Diwan (1819), the very name of which evokes cross-cultural exchange.

The two versions of world literature follow these two trails blazed by Goethe. There is the contemporary world literature of Werther and there is also the self-consciously classicist world literature symbolized by the West-Eastern Diwan. The one has a vast potential audience, the other a small but sophisticated audience.

More here.

David Adler in Jacobin:

“The right to the city is like a cry and a demand,” Henri Lefebvre wrote in 1967. “A transformed and renewed right to urban life.”

This is a cry and demand today heard worldwide. From a slogan among Situationists in 1968 to the central theme of the United Nations Habitat II conference three decades later, the “right to the city” has grown into a global catchphrase, tossed around by activists and policymakers alike. Its appeal is intuitive, its meaning elastic. “A dignified and secure existence in cities,” according to the UN. “A right to change ourselves by changing the city,” according to David Harvey.

Mexico City is one of the only places in the world where the effort to implement the right to the city is underway. In 2010, the Mexico City government passed the Right to the City charter, an ostensibly radical vision for the city’s future.

Building on the UN World Charter on the Right to the City, the legislation sets out core principles of urban governance — sustainability, democracy, equity, and social justice — and enshrines a diverse set of rights for urban residents. As former Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard described back in 2010, the charter is “the document with the most ambitious goals of what the city should be.”

Yet the charter remains a wish list. The housing market continues to marginalize low-income residents, pushed toward the periphery of the city. In that vast peripheral zone, informal settlements continue to proliferate, now housing over 50 percent of the city’s population and lacking access to key municipal services like water and electricity. Against the charter’s radical vision of a just and equitable city, Mexico City is still defined by segregation and inequality.

More here.

Max Nelson at The Paris Review:

Ruthless self-excoriation, dramatic acts of abandonment, intractable confidence mixed with frightening displays of vulnerability: there’s something unhinged about the line of conversion literature that began with Paul and came to include figures as diverse as Bunyan, the nineteenth-century transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, and the twentieth-century militant activist Eldridge Cleaver. That three of those four figures did much of their most influential writing from prison goes some way toward proving a fact Bunyan identified in his treatise The Acceptable Sacrifice. Converts, Bunyan argued, are threats to the state precisely because of their melancholy, their extreme dissatisfaction, and their reckless lack of care for their earthly lot:

A man, a woman, that is blessed with a broken heart, is so far from getting by that esteem with the world, that they are but burdens … such people carry with them molestation and disquietment; they are in carnal families, as David was to the king of Garth, “troublers of the house.”

As the snippets above suggest, Bunyan’s prose is too ruminative and too dense with scripture to relate events reliably. Reading Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, the feverish spiritual autobiography he wrote during his twelve years in jail for preaching to “unlawful assemblies,” you get only the dimmest sense of the man’s unfortunate, eventful life. A prolific, well-known contemporary of Milton, Hobbes, and Thomas Browne, he was born to a struggling brass worker near the end of 1628.

more here.

Kate McLoughlin at the Times Literary Supplement:

In the spring of 1915, Henry James, “sick beyond cure” that he had lived long enough to witness it, gave an interview about the First World War to the New York Times. “One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts”, James told the young journalist sent to interview him, Preston Lockwood. “The war has used up words”, he continued, “they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires . . . and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”

James seems to disprove his thesis in the act of uttering it: the two synonyms for “used up” and the reformulation of the notion of depreciation – “otherwise speaking” – suggest the war spawned, rather than exhausted, language. But the famously wordy author had nonetheless pinpointed something important early. A mere seven months into this mass, industrialized, globalized armed conflict, it was already clear to James that the power of writing both to communicate what was happening and to do something about it was alarmingly limited.

In her thoughtful and thought-provoking new study of American First World War literature, The War That Used Up Words, Hazel Hutchison makes James’s anxious observation the basis of two important and related arguments.

more here.

The Editor at The Millions:

Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. The selection of a non-fiction writer is a rare development for the Nobel, which has overwhelmingly favored fiction writers over the years.

Alexievich is known in the U.S. pretty much exclusively for her powerful book of non-fiction, Voices from Chernobyl, which was translated by Keith Gessenand initially published in hardcover by Dalkey Archive Press. The book relies on the testimony of survivors, in the vein of John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Dan Wickett wrote about the book in these pages in 2005:

I don’t think I set this 300-plus page book down once after I started reading it. Alexievich, at danger to her own self, visited the area surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and interviewed anybody she could find who would talk – people who had been firefighters, or relatives of residents who evacuated, those who didn’t, hunters of animals left behind, etc. It’s absolutely fascinating to read what happened, how people found out, and the various reactions to the news.

Alexievich’s book on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Zinky Boys, takes a similar approach, as do several other volumes which have as yet not been published in English translations.

Kelly Rae Chi in Nature:

Historically, women have been the focus of body-image studies. But as men pay more attention to their appearance, researchers are forming a clearer picture of male self-image.

Insecurities about body shape and size are a frustratingly common topic of conversation among groups of women and girls. Body-image research has shown that participating in, or even just hearing, such 'fat talk' fuels appearance dissatisfaction in women. For the past few years, whenever Northwestern University psychologist Renee Engeln presented these results, audience members would ask, 'What about men? Do men do this too?' she recalls. Intrigued by this question, she and her colleagues, based in Evanston, Illinois, designed a fat-talk scale for men. They found that men do it, too, but only in specific contexts¹. “Men talk about body dissatisfaction when they're eating and when they're at the gym,” says Engeln. “Women talk about body dissatisfaction when they're talking.”

Feeling bad about one's body is among the strongest predictors for developing an eating disorder, and one of the most modifiable. Interventions aimed at addressing such concerns are better studied in women, who are more likely than men to have a recognizable eating disorder and who have been subject to more of the superhuman beauty ideals that pervade the media. Over the past decade, however, boys and men have been exposed to similarly unattainable standards. The evidence is in the aisles. Superhero costumes for boys feature chiselled abs, and health and beauty products for men line shop shelves. Sales of men's grooming products have skyrocketed across the globe over the past few years. “Men are being addressed as consumers of health and beauty products and services in a very targeted way, in ways they haven't been historically,” says Brendan Gough who studies men's body-image issues and masculinity at Leeds Beckett University, UK. According to Gough, some young men are thought to be injecting the oil synthol into their muscles to make them look larger or taking diet pills that contain the appetite suppressant ephedrine to lose weight. Body dissatisfaction can become an obsession and can lead to clinical disorders (see page S14). These negative feelings can also trigger symptoms of depression.

More here.

Herb Brody in Nature:

This Outlook is different from most. Instead of focusing on a disease, we move up the hierarchy of human needs above survival, or even health, into the realm of aesthetics. Although beauty could include sunsets and scientific theories, our focus here is on the attraction between humans, and that between other animals that helps to fuel the engine of natural selection.

Neuroscience grants an insight into the traits that have maintained their appeal over the centuries and provides an understanding of how the brain responds to a desirable face (see page S2). In pursuit of beauty, many turn to the products and services peddled by a robust cosmetics industry. A number of these products make scientific claims — some of which are more valid than others (S4). At the more extreme end of the industry, we examine the steady growth of cosmetic surgery. The rising demand for procedures from a more diverse mix of people is leading aesthetic surgeons to rethink facial ideals in a more inclusive way (S6). Men — often neglected participants in the pursuit of beauty — are also starting to get their due (S12). Some people, however, can become obsessed with their appearance, which can lead to a preoccupation with imagined flaws.

More here.

Michal Simecka and Benjamin Tallis in Eurozine:

When the European Commission unveiled its plan for binding refugee resettlement quotas in April 2015, few had expected the governments of ex-communist Member States – which have no Middle Eastern or African immigrant communities to speak of – to warmly embrace the scheme. However, the intensity, hysteria and hypocrisy of the anti-migrant backlash shocked many, including some in the Visegrad countries themselves. Political cowardice and popular mistrust of supposedly liberal elites has allowed poisonous rhetoric directed at migrants to dominate, which risks political isolation and hinders common European action to address the crisis.

Encouragingly, counter-currents of resistance to the xenophobic rhetoric and callous political expediency are starting to emerge in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on the Visegrad governments, meeting in Prague for an emergency summit on Friday, as it becomes increasingly clear that their approach is not only out of line with Europe's moral responsibilities, but also out of line with key European states such as Germany and France.

However, these belated, weak and ineffective responses are symptomatic of deeper social and political problems in the Visegrad countries (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary). The migration crisis has exposed another crisis – of liberal democracy in post-communist societies.

t is regrettable – indeed “scandalous”, as French foreign minister Laurent Fabius put it – that on one of the few issues on which the Visegrad countries have made their collective voice heard, it contradicts European values and the ethos of the European Union. Given the region's history, it is particularly concerning that Central Europeans are currently part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

With the Commission now pushing for an expanded relocation scheme – and Visegrad policymakers struggling to respond to the hundreds of refugees arriving via the western Balkan route – the stage is set for a deepening rupture along the East-West axis, pitting new member states against Berlin, Paris and Brussels.

More here.

[Update: here is a link to video if the embedded one does not work.]

Joe Linker in Befrois (Photograph by Tony Fischer):

Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping. The poem was accompanied by a cartoon-like drawing of a man lifting up from a cot, the moon in his face and eyes, the moonlight coming through an open window and shining on the cot and a bedroom floor. Florence explained the poem to me, and wanted me to help her work on her translation of the poem into English, and we enjoyed sharing language lessons. For some time after I left the school, I kept in touch with Florence, but it’s been many years now. I used to hear from her every Christmas; she would send me a long, handwritten letter in impeccable penmanship and flawless English grammar, and usage and sentence structure, and ask me to “correct” the writing for her.

I knew the Chinese poet, Li Po, who wrote the original poem. The poem has been variously translated to describe the speaker awake at night, or awakening, thinking, far from home, or perhaps far from the past, thus perhaps rethinking the past, or what we call remembering, or reflecting. The poem might suggest a bittersweet homesickness; a longing. Usually, in translations, there’s moonlight and frost, one mistaken for the other in the night, and a mountain and a moon, a confused awakening at night with thoughts of home. Just as the moonlight is mistaken for frost, the setting is mistaken for home. Or perhaps there is no mistake. The speaker awakes, and then drops back to sleep and dreams of home. Florence said that most Chinese of her generation would recognize the poem. She invited me over to her place. She wanted to present me with a few books. The books were old and travelled. One was titled Chinese Phrase Book, published by the War Department and dated “December 10, 1943.” Another was titled Chinese Military Dictionary, also published by the War Department and dated “26 May 1944.” They were military vocabulary manuals, small enough for a foot soldier to carry in a pocket. The word poem was not included in either one.

I first met Li Po in a Chinese literature in translation class at Cal State Dominguez Hills. One of our texts was the first Evergreen edition (1967) of the 1965 Grove Press Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century, edited by Cyril Birch. I still have this book, but Li Po’s poem about the moonlight and frost and thoughts of home is not included. It is included in Robert Payne’s The White Pony: An Anthology of Chinese Poetry From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, Newly Translated (1947). The translation Payne includes of the Li Po poem is the only one I’m aware of that mentions a “couch,” and the speaker’s thoughts are of the “earth,” not explicitly of home. It’s possible to read that the speaker is sleeping outdoors.

More here.

Brían Hanrahan in The LA Review of Books:

A FEW YEARS AGO the BBC’s flagship domestic station, BBC Radio 4 (imagine a better-funded NPR, with a more central place in national life), canceled its main children’s show Go4It. Audience research had revealed — perhaps belatedly — that the average age of the listenership was well over 50. Maybe it was chastening for the program makers, maybe they knew it all along. Seen in longer historical perspective, however, the disjuncture is not so unusual. Of all mass media, radio has always had the least developed relation to children. The history of film or photography, of TV or the internet, could hardly be written without reference to the child: images of children, children as audience and market, children’s actual or hysterically invoked vulnerability. But radio has always been an overwhelmingly adult phenomenon.

Of course, there has long been broadcast radio aimed at children. There were kids’ serials in the American network golden age, cozy British stuff like Listen with Mother in the 1960s, various kinds of educational radio. There are Sirius satellite channels, and Radio TEDDY, a German children’s broadcaster, still transmits on the airwaves. But all this — and even radio hardware marketed to children — is a small and relatively unimportant part of radio as a historical phenomenon. Moreover, radio’s relation to children is indirect, even uncanny: for children, radio is above all something addressed to grown-ups, but they can overhear it, or listen in on it. Radio, in this way, becomes a channel to a world beyond the home. Voices and sounds from the radio bring traces of a different life into the cloistered spaces of childhood and family.

Any serious history of children and radio — any history going beyond a chronicle of program offerings — must include the German writer Walter Benjamin. Benjamin wrote extensively for the radio, and most of those broadcast writings — now newly translated and collected — were written for children, at least at first glance. More than that, something quintessentially Benjaminian happens in that uncanny encounter of radio and child: the hint of an unsettling remainder in the everyday, in the dislocation of sent message and received meaning, in the figure of the child who knows something his parents do not.

More here.