Peter Bloom at 3:AM Magazine:

The contemporary age is marked by what appears a definite contradiction. On the one hand, public and social institutions tasked with meeting human needs are struggling under the weight of a continued recession and an economic order that increasingly prioritizes profit at the expense of general welfare. On the other hand, popular discourse and private organizations are progressively emphasizing the centrality of “wellness” for citizens and employees. The Wellness Syndrome by Carl Cederström and André Spicer provides an important and sophisticated critical understanding of this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Their book reveals concisely and accessibly—without sacrificing theoretical subtlety—how our current age is marked by a pathological and dangerous fixation with “health” and “wellness,” an obsession that effectively targets individuals with its market-based rhetoric of personal and professional well-being, while strategically masking deeper contradictions of modern neo-liberal capitalism.

Overall, The Wellness Syndrome is a comprehensive but readable account of the rise of this titular “syndrome.” It takes aim simultaneously at the “wellness” industry and at the growing common sense assumptions that are fueling this lucrative trend. It can be found in places as diverse as innovative tech companies like Google to American evangelical congregations. Further, even where it is not being implemented, it remains a tantalizing desire for many twenty-first-century citizens—a dream of “work/life balance” that may be reserved only for the privileged few but can one day also be their own

more here.

Christian Lorentzen at the London Review of Books:

Just about everybody who doesn’t beat or rape Jude loves him: his friends; his pro-bono physician, Andy, who despite his better judgment never has Jude committed for his self-harm; and his law professor, Harold, who introduces him to the wonders of contract law, gets him a clerkship with a judge, and adopts him as an adult to make him his heir, as well as to fill the gap left by his own son, who died of a neurodegenerative disease. In proper melodramatic manner, Jude goes from the pits straight to, if not the top, the upper middle class. The ghastly litany of his childhood sufferings is at least coherent. Jude, an adult player in a melodramatic lifestyle novel, in which the point is to observe the way the passing of time affects the cast of characters, is static. This is the formula: insert a case of arrested development into a contemporary male version of The Group. The one question that remains is whether Jude will enter into an adult sexual relationship. On his first try, at around the age of forty, he takes up with Caleb, a fashion executive who proves to be another abuser and winds up invading his apartment and beating him senseless. The episode eventually drives Jude to a suicide attempt. In its aftermath, as anyone might have guessed from the start, he and Willem, now a major motion picture star, recognise that they’re more than friends. It’s not unheartwarming, but Jude’s issues remain the same as they were two decades earlier: he won’t divulge his past and he still cuts himself. By now the narration has degenerated into a series of repetitive contemplations of the scenario, alternating between Jude and Willem’s points of view. The middle-aged Jude has become a corporate lawyer who harasses whistleblowers on the stand on behalf of big pharma.

more here.

Terry Eagleton at Bookforum:

Nations, like political creeds, can be upbeat or downbeat. Along with North Korea, the United States is one of the few countries on earth in which optimism is almost a state ideology. For large sectors of the nation, to be bullish is to be patriotic, while negativity is a species of thought crime. Pessimism is thought to be vaguely subversive. Even in the most despondent of times, a collective fantasy of omnipotence and infinity continues to haunt the national unconscious. It would be almost as impossible to elect a US president who advised the nation that its best days were behind it as it would be to elect a chimpanzee, though as far as that goes there have been one or two near misses. Any such leader would be a prime target for assassination. An American historian remarked recently that “presidential inaugural speeches are always optimistic whatever the times.” The comment was not intended as a criticism. There is a compulsive cheeriness about some aspects of American culture, an I-can-do-anything-I-want rhetoric which betrays a quasi-pathological fear of failure.

In an excruciatingly styleless study entitled The Biology of Hope, the American scholar Lionel Tiger, anxious to place his country’s ideology of hope on a scientific basis, is much preoccupied with drugged monkeys, mood-altering substances, and chemical changes found in the excretion of parents grieving for their dead children. If only one could search out the physiological basis of joviality, it might be possible to eradicate political disaffection and ensure a permanently ecstatic citizenry. Hope is a politically useful stimulant. “The possibility exists,” Tiger comments, “that it is a common human obligation to augment optimism.” Stalin and Mao seem to have held much the same view. It is our moral duty to insist that all is well, even when it self-evidently isn’t.

more here.

David Gilmour in delanceyplace:

In 1861, when the Italian peninsula was finally united into a single political entity, only 2.5 percent of “Italians” spoke the Italian language. In fact, the citizens of every major Italian city — Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, and others — each spoke a different language. The situation was similar in the other countries of Europe: “The posthumous role of Dante Alighieri in the development of Italian has long been treated with reverence and solemnity. The great Florentine poet was, according to one scholar, not only 'the father of the Italian language' but also 'the father of the nation and the symbol of national greatness through the centuries'. It is doubtful that Dante would have thought the second part of the description applicable to him, especially as he believed Italy should be part of the Holy Roman Empire and not a nation by itself. Yet he did write The Divine Comedy (or, as he himself called it, simply La Commedia) in Italian and extolled the virtues of the vernacular, the 'new sun' that would put Latin in the shade, in De vulgari eloquentia, a book he wrote in Latin.

“The works of Dante, like those of his younger fellow Tuscans Petrarch and Boccaccio, advanced the cause of the Florentine vernacular in the later Middle Ages, even though Petrarch usually wrote in Latin and Dante thought bolognese a more beautiful language. By the sixteenth century it was widely felt that the peninsula's literary language should be close to theirs, a feeling which suggests that, if the great trio had been born in Sicily, the island's dialect would have been adopted as Italian, which foreigners would have had great difficulty in understanding. Pietro Bembo, the Venetian scholar and cardinal, argued that, if writers in Latin imitated Cicero and Virgil, then writers in the vernacular should model themselves on Petrarch and Boccaccio. … Later, around 1600, another towering Tuscan, the Pisan astronomer Galilee, demanded that scientific work also should be conducted in the vernacular, arguing that more people would then be able to understand his work — an argument which the papacy failed to appreciate. …

More here. (Note: For Margit and Abbas)

Garry Hamilton in Nature:

In February, the UK government approved mitochondrial replacement therapy, a technique that would allow a woman with a mitochondrial disorder to give birth to healthy children by pairing her nuclear DNA with the healthy mitochondria from a donor's egg. The approval came after a 3.5-year effort to review the safety and ethics of creating individuals with DNA from three people (what some refer to as three-parent babies). And although many scientists lauded the decision, some worry that it is premature. “They're not looking at the bigger picture,” says Ted Morrow, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, who is arguing for more-rigorous safety testing. “The standards for a shampoo seem to be harsher.” A common refrain in favour of the therapy is that the genetic contribution from mitochondria is very small. And against the 3 billion base pairs of DNA and 20,000 genes found in the human nucleus, the mitochondrial genome can seem pretty insignificant (see 'A complicated relationship'). Inherited solely through a mother's egg, it comprises fewer than 17,000 base pairs and just 37 genes. But one cell can have thousands of copies of the mitochondrial genome, compared with just two of the nuclear genome — one from mum and one from dad. Mitochondrial DNA also accumulates mutations incredibly fast, at about ten times the rate of nuclear DNA — and geneticists can use the resulting variation as a sort of molecular clock.

…One way to examine whether mitochondria in one population work differently from those in another is to swap them. Such experiments would be unethical in people and impractical in many other animals, so Rand turned to fruit flies. He cross-bred two fly strains with different mitochondria and then repeatedly back-crossed them until the mitochondria from one were neatly paired with the nucleus of the other. He then put fruit flies with similar nuclear genomes but different mitochondria together in a cage, and found that flies with specific mitochondrial genomes would quickly come to dominate the population². Something in the mitochondria was giving them a survival advantage. Subsequent work by Rand, Dowling and others has shown that it is not just the mitochondrial genome, but rather its interaction with the nuclear one that seems to be affecting a range of traits, including lifespan, reproductive success, rate of development, ageing, growth, movement, morphology and behaviour.

More here.

Morning at the Window

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

by T.S. Elliot
1917

Isaac Butler in Slate:

More here.

Ivan Krastev at Eurozine:

On the European level, a new paradox has also emerged as a result of both the European crisis and the situation in Ukraine. In recent years we have witnessed the Europeanization of broad policies while we see an emergence of a renewed national sentiment on the nation-state level. Citizens across Europe are beginning to feel frustrated with the EU. You can see how solidarity and borders can be redrawn. Germans are not ready to do for the Greeks what they did for East Germans in the 1990s. What is more, Germany's approach to Greece was not a decision of one government or one party; there was a general consensus in Germany towards Greece. And this sentiment is not limited to Germany, but most of the EU states as well.

In his 1992 book The European Rescue of the Nation State, British economic historian Alan Milward argued against the thesis that European integration would break up the nation-state. Indeed, European integration re-legitimized the nation-states. Since one of the outcomes of the Second World War was the collapse of the nation-state, integration brought back legitimacy to these nation-states. This was generally the case since about ten years ago with the success of European integration in Central Europe, which highlights the fact that many of the problems that we face today are not a result of failure, but a result of success. This is why it is so difficult to respond to these problems.

more here.

Joan DeJean at Lapham's Quarterly:

Today, to the extent to which the fashion industry is regulated, the process is managed principally by multinational luxury-goods conglomerates that control many of the most prestigious fashion houses, and to some extent by national professional organizations such as the Council of Fashion Designers of America and the Fédération Française de la Couture. Prior to the French Revolution, the right to produce luxury garments was far more tightly controlled: each European country had a guild system; to make garments for the rich, it was necessary to be accepted into a prominent guild. In England men vied for admission to the Merchant Tailors Company; in France they sought positions as maîtres tailleurs, master tailors. These tailors worked for an elite and tiny clientele of nobles, who followed the fashions of the day. When Louis XIV appeared in a striking new outfit, for example, master tailors were sure to be asked to create a line-by-line copy.

In order to maintain the economic value of an appointment as master tailor, guild leaders controlled the number of positions. As part of this effort, for centuries, guilds in all countries fought off any attempt by women to win access to the highest ranks of fashion design. Officially, there were only tailors—and never seamstresses.

more here.

J. P. Smith at The Millions:

Unlike Marcel Proust’s great novel, and unlike the romans fleuves of the last century, such as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, Modiano’s work, including his most recent novel, Pour Que Tu Ne Te Perdes Pas Dans Le Quartier (So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood), released in France just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is more a series of incremental epiphanies on the past, on lost opportunities, on lost people, on the small gaps in memory that leave his narrators and protagonists in a world from which they are one step removed. The language in the later books is uncomplicated, and what the author leaves out is as important as what he puts on the page.

What readers find most audacious about La Place de l’Étoile is how intimate the writing is. To deal with a period in which one never lived, to make a leap of imagination and bring the voice of the past vividly and credibly to life, is very much a part of what being a novelist is. But the difference between the historical novelist — who, in adding facts and details and color in hoping to contextualize the fiction, inevitably distances the readers — and what Modiano does in this trilogy is to lend an immediacy and an intimacy to the muddy tide of those years, catching the language, the flow, the Zeitgeist of the period without once having to step back to situate us in the narrative. SinceLa Place de l’Étoile I haven’t stopped following Modiano, reading each new volume as it’s released, and celebrating his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. My apologies, monsieur. My rancor was entirely misplaced.

more here.

Eliza Griswold at the website of The Poetry Foundation:

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.

The teenage poet who uttered this folk poem called herself Rahila Muska. She lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and one of the most restive of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001. Muska, like many young and rural Afghan women, wasn’t allowed to leave her home. Fearing that she’d be kidnapped or raped by warlords, her father pulled her out of school after the fifth grade. Poetry, which she learned from other women and on the radio, became her only form of education.

In Afghan culture, poetry is revered, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet — a landay — an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Traditionally, landays are sung aloud, often to the beat of a hand drum, which, along with other kinds of music, was banned by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, and in some places, still is.

A landay has only a few formal properties. Each has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second. The poem ends with the sound “ma” or “na.” Sometimes they rhyme, but more often not. In Pashto, they lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love.

More here. [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

Madihah Akhter in The Feminist Wire:

One Friday afternoon, as I was settling down to listen to a sermon in my local mosque in Orange County, California, a woman leaned over to me and whispered that I needed to take my toenail polish off to properly complete ablutions. Many people believe that since water can’t touch nails because of the impermeable polish barrier, one can’t perform ablutions. Without successfully performed ablutions, my prayers would not be accepted. My toenails have been a source of contention in mosques spanning the globe. I’ve been lectured on the moral ills of nail polish in languages I don’t understand. While I interpret lectures on ‘correct’ practices as policing, many women feel these corrections are religious and generational duties that contribute to community construction. While being scolded for nail polish may seem trivial, it is actually an entry point into a set of debates regarding how to accommodate the inherent diversity of beliefs and practices within religious spaces, especially among young American Muslims, many of whom find these comments intrusive. This experience is also the basis for a new initiative, the Women’s Mosque of America.

…The first question the board faced in creating the Mosque was how to reflect an inclusive mindset in policy. The organizers tackled this issue by having a diverse set of khateebahs. Ideal khateebahs reflect the diversity the Mosque embraces, including diversity in ethnicity, background, and sectarian affiliation. This diversity is also reflected on the advisory board itself, which is composed of men and women, Shias and Sunnis, and members from the various schools of Islamic jurisprudence who maintain varying degrees of practice. Finally, diversity is reflected in the Mosque’s “come as you are” policy, which recognizes that there is no one definition of female modesty, and pluralism in religious practice should be respected and encouraged. The goal is to avoid policing among congregation members. On one hand, this view of diversity is beautiful. It is a much-needed reminder that the American Muslim community is not a monolith. We define ourselves according to a wide ranging set of beliefs and practices informed by family background, upbringing, and experiences, in addition to varying interpretations of religious texts. On the other hand, this idealism begs the question: how can the Mosque practically implement and maintain these policies? The first step, according to Sana Muttalib, a co-founder, is to make the Mosque’s policies clear to the entire congregation. The khateebah announces this policy before her sermon and board members to keep an eye out for women policing other women within the congregation during prayer.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

As the Inuit people spread across the Arctic, they developed one of the most extreme diets on Earth. They didn’t farm fruits, vegetables or grains. There weren’t many wild plants to forage, aside from the occasional patch of berries on the tundra. For the most part, the Inuit ate what they could hunt, and they mostly hunted at sea, catching whales, seals and fish. Western scientists have long been fascinated by their distinctly un-Western diet. Despite eating so much fatty meat and fish, the Inuit didn’t have a lot of heart attacks. In the 1970s, Danish researchers studying Inuit metabolism proposed that omega-3 fatty acids found in fish were protective. Those conclusions eventually led to the recommendation that Westerners eat more fish to help prevent heart disease and sent tens of millions scrambling for fish oil pills. Today, at least 10 percent of Americans regularly take fish oil supplements. But recent trials have failed to confirm that the pills prevent heart attacks or stroke. And now the story has an intriguing new twist.

A study published last week in the journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit bodies, reducing their heights and weights. Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the new study, said that the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said. Food is a powerful force in evolution. The more nutrients an animal can get, the more likely it is to survive and reproduce. Humans are no exception. When we encounter a new kind of food, natural selection may well favor those of us with genetic mutations that help us thrive on it. Some people, for example, are able to digest milk throughout their lives. This genetic adaptation arose in societies that domesticated cattle thousands of years ago, in such places as Northern Europe and East Africa. People who trace their ancestry to other regions, by contrast, tend to more often be lactose-intolerant.

More here.

At One-ment
… —Yom Kippur, 9/22/15

To find the means to a mend

To try a new take to forsake a mistake

To unfold the past and straighten its bend

To un-muddy a pool and make it clear

To lift the flat rock of our self and let the sun do its work

To yank the inside out and give it some air

To make a whole man of the stuff of a jerk

To morph a long fall into a hairpin turn

To lance a boil and do what’s best for us

To kindle the badly done and watch it burn

To unbury the past and make its corpse a Lazarus

To sew a split in one cloth now two

To impossibly do what the humble do

To end a grudge and make us whole again,

atonement then
.

by Jim Culleny
9/13/13

Yom Kippur

Ana Teresa Fernandez. Video still from Borrando La Frontera. 2011.

More here and here.

Over at the Boston Review, a forum on Ira Katznelson's piece on democracy, with responses from Larry Kramer, David M. Kennedy, Mark Schmitt, Rick Perlstein, Mohammad Fadel, Michael C. Dawson, Hélène Landemore, Michael Gecan, Martin O’Neill, Nadia Urbinati, Melissa S. Williams, Alex Gourevitch, and Richard Trumka:

Since the late eighteenth century, liberal constitutional regimes have recurrently collided with forms of autocratic rule—including fascism and communism—that claim moral superiority and greater efficacy. Today, there is no formal autocratic alternative competing with democracy for public allegiance. Instead, two other concerns characterize current debates. First, there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people. There is also widespread anxiety that national borders no longer define a zone of security, a place more or less safe from violent threats and insulated from rules and conditions established by transnational institutions and seemingly inexorable global processes.

These are recent anxieties. One rarely heard them voiced in liberal democracies when, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama designated the triumph of free regimes and free markets “the end of history.” Fukuyama described “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,“ a “victory of liberalism” in “the realm of ideas and consciousness,” even if “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” Tellingly, the disruption of this seemingly irresistible trend has recently prompted him to ruminate on the brittleness of democratic institutions across the globe.

Perhaps today’s representative democracies—the ones that do not appear to be candidates for collapse or supersession—are merely confronting ephemeral worries. But the challenge seems starker: a profound crisis of moral legitimacy, practical capacity, and institutional sustainability.

More here.

The author, most recently, of “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” says that more or less everything by Christopher Hitchens makes him laugh: “The laughter is what I miss most about the Hitch.”

From the New York Times:

What books are currently on your night stand?

“Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I just finished and which impressed me; “Genghis Khan,” by Jack Weatherford, which is next up; “The White Album,” by Joan Didion, which is great to rediscover, and as good as I remembered it being; “The Heart of a Goof,” by P. G. Wodehouse, which can actually make me care about the game of golf, at least while reading it; and “Humboldt’s Gift,” by Saul Bellow, which seems to be on the night stand more or less permanently.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

“Of all time” is a long time. There are days when it’s Kafka, in whose world we all live; others when it’s Dickens, for the sheer fecundity of his imagination and the beauty of his prose. But it’s probably Joyce on more days than anyone else.

More here.

Nathan Halverson at PRI:

The springs fed the lush oases depicted in the Bible and Quran, and as the water disappeared, these verdant gardens of life were returning to sand.

“I remember flowing springs when I was a boy in the Eastern Province. Now all of these have dried up,” the head of the country’s Ministry of Water told The New York Times in 2003.

The springs had bubbled for thousands of years from a massive aquifer that lay underneath Saudi Arabia. Hydrologists calculated it was one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.

So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried, forcing them to drill ever deeper. They soon were drilling a mile down to continue tapping the water reserves that had transformed barren desert into rich irrigated fields, making Saudi Arabia the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat.

But the bounty didn’t last. Today, Saudi Arabia’s agriculture is collapsing. It’s almost out of water. And the underlying cause doesn’t bode well for farmers in places like California’s Central Valley, where desert lands also are irrigated with groundwater that is increasingly in short supply.

So what what happened? And what can the United States, China and the rest of the world learn from Saudi Arabia?

More here. [Thanks to Azeem Azhar.]