Martin Wehmer. Woman in Green. 2014.

More here and here.

Robert MacFarlane in the New Statesman:

In 1972, Gregory Bateson published Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a collection of his essays from the previous three decades. Bateson was a dazzlingly versatile thinker, whose work shaped the fields of anthropology, linguistics and cybernetics, as well as the movement we now call environmentalism. Near the end of the book, Bateson deplored the delusion of human separation from nature. “We are not,” he warned, “outside the ecology for which we plan.” His remedy for this separatism was the development of an “ecology of mind”. The steps towards such a mind were to be taken by means of literature, art, music, play, wonder and attention to nature – what he called “ecological aesthetics”.

Bateson, who died in 1980, would have been excited by what has happened in the culture of our islands over the past 15 years. An ecology of mind has emerged that is extraordinary in its energies and its diversity. In nurseries and universities, apiaries and allotments, transition towns and theatres, woodlands and festivals, charities and campaigns – and in photography, film, music, the visual and plastic arts and throughout literature – a remarkable turn has occurred towards Bateson’s ecological aesthetics. A 21st-century culture of nature has sprung up, born of anxiety and anger but passionate and progressive in its temperament, involving millions of people and spilling across forms, media and behaviours.

More here.

John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:

Some stories are so well known in outline that we don’t really know them at all. The headline news about the Wright brothers’ invention of powered flight is so familiar that it’s easy to think we know all about it. David McCullough’s excellent biography The Wright Brothers brings the story back to life with facts that the non-specialist either doesn’t know or has blotted out with a misplaced broad brush. Yeah yeah, we get it: the brothers were provincial tinkerers who first flew their invention at Kitty Hawk, then became world-famous. It turns out, though, that there is a lot of devil in the details.

The tinkering, for instance. The Wrights were pioneers in the cycling business who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur was born in 1867 and Orville in 1871. They were an unusually close pair who all their lives lived together, worked together, ate together and shared a joint bank account. (McCullough is too respectful of their boundaries to say so, but it seems likely that they were both lifelong virgins.) One of the only things they didn’t do together was fly: that would have been too much of a risk to the irreplaceable knowledge they’d jointly accumulated. Their father, Milton, was a bishop in the United Brethren Church who accepted his sons’ lack of faith with equanimity, and was going on suffragettes’ marches with his only daughter, Katherine, in his eighties. Katherine, a teacher, was the only family member to go to university, and the only sibling to have consummated a relationship, marrying at the age of 52.

‘It isn’t true,’ Wilbur later wrote, ‘to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favour was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.’ Wilbur’s interest in flight began in childhood; it turned into an obsession and then into a practical plan. Other pioneers of flight were focused on the question of power. The Wrights were fascinated by birds, and learned a lot from their study of them. One of Wilbur’s crucial insights was that flying, like cycling, was a question of balance. He saw that bird flight was all about equilibrium: about the bird’s keeping itself in the air with the maximum efficiency and minimum effort.

More here.

Dawn Field in Aeon:

In case you weren’t paying attention, a lot has been happening in the science of genomics over the past few years. It is, for example, now possible to read one human genome and correct all known errors. Perhaps this sounds terrifying, but genomic science has a track-record in making science fiction reality. ‘Everything that’s alive we want to rewrite,’ boasted Austen Heinz, the CEO of Cambrian Genomics, last year.

It was only in 2010 that Craig Venter’s team in Maryland led us into the era of synthetic genomics when they created Synthia, the first living organism to have a computer for a mother. A simple bacterium, she has a genome just over half a million letters of DNA long, but the potential for scaling up is vast; synthetic yeast and worm projects are underway.

Two years after the ‘birth’ of Synthia, sequencing was so powerful that it was used to extract the genome of a newly discovered, 80,000-year-old human species, the Denisovans, from a pinky bone found in a frozen cave in Siberia. In 2015, the United Kingdom became the first country to legalise the creation of ‘three-parent babies’ – that is, babies with a biological mother, father and a second woman who donates a healthy mitochondrial genome, the energy producer found in all human cells.

More here.

William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

For better or for worse, the British empire was the most important thing the British ever did. It altered the course of history across the globe and shaped the modern world. It also led to the huge enrichment of Britain, just as, conversely, it led to the impoverishment of much of the rest of the non-European world. India and China, which until then had dominated global manufacturing, were two of the biggest losers in this story, along with hundreds of thousands of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans sent off on the middle passage to work in the plantations.

Yet much of the story of the empire is still absent from our history curriculum. My children learned the Tudors and the Nazis over and over again in history class but never came across a whiff of Indian or Caribbean history. This means that they, like most people who go through the British education system, are wholly ill equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world.

This matters. We see British diplomats, businessmen and politicians repeatedly wrongfooted as they constantly underestimate the degree to which we are distrusted across the breadth of the globe, and in a few places actively disliked. Because of the wrong-headedly positive spin we tend to put on our imperial past, we often misjudge how others see us, and habitually overplay our hand.

Last month a video went viral in India of the eloquent Congress politician and writer Shashi Tharoor arguing at the Oxford Union that Britain owed India immense reparations for the damage inflicted by the empire: at last count the YouTube video of his speech had around 3m views.

More here.

Ariel Levy in New York Magazine:

Possibly, there are even more naked women at Maureen Dowd’s house today than there were when this place was JFK’s Georgetown bachelor pad in the fifties. They are lounging in the vintage posters, carved into her Deco furniture, painted in huge trompe l’oeil pastorals on the living-room wall. “My girlfriend Michi said, ‘You’ve got to paint clothes on them,’ like you know how they did at the Sistine Chapel?” says Dowd, who is drinking white wine from a goblet with a naked woman carved into its stem. “But I like them. I think they’re kind of campy.” Michi is Michiko Kakutani, one of Dowd’s circle of extremely close female friends at the New York Times, where Dowd is, of course, the only female op-ed columnist. It’s a post she says she is “not temperamentally suited to,” despite the fact she’s been doing it for ten years and has won a Pulitzer and a passionate army of fans in the process, because Dowd doesn’t like “a lot of angst in my life,” and it is specifically her job to provoke. Her natural inclination—her fundamental drive—is, rather, to seduce. But then those two things are not entirely unrelated.

…Dowd says she’s not the “private-plane type. It makes me nervous. I mean, I don’t even like to fly first class.” But her taste for famous men has, from time to time, required it of her. She describes Michael Douglas, whom she dated right before he married Catherine Zeta-Jones, as “a really nice guy, a very romantic guy.” The humor of their romance is not lost on her: “Whether he can handle a woman who wields ice picks? I used to tease him about that. Sometimes actors ask me out, and then I’m worried because they can act like they’re not scared of me, or threatened? But then maybe later they are. I remember him announcing at dinner, like way after we knew each other: ‘I’m not scared of you.’ But it made me nervous that he had to tell me. I also became close with his father, Kirk,” says Dowd. “He told me this funny story once about when he was first discovering his Judaism and he was making The Bad and the Beautiful and he was fasting on certain days, and he looked at me and he goes, ‘Do you have any idea how hard it is to make love to Lana Turner on an empty stomach?’ ”

More here.

A conversation with John Markoff in Edge:

I'm in an interesting place in my career, and it's an interesting time in Silicon Valley. I grew up in Silicon Valley, but it's something I've been reporting about since 1977, which is this Moore's Law acceleration. Over the last five years, another layer has been added to the Moore's Law discussion, with Kurzweil and people like him arguing that we're on the brink of self-aware machines. Just recently, Gates and Musk and Hawking have all been saying that this is an existential threat to humankind. I simply don't see it. If you begin to pick it apart, their argument and the fundamental argument of Silicon Valley, it's all about this exponential acceleration that comes out of the semiconductor industry. I suddenly discovered it was over. Now, it may not be over forever, but it's clearly paused. All the things that have been driving everything that I do, the kinds of technology that have emerged out of here that have changed the world, have ridden on the fact that the cost of computing doesn't just fall, it falls at an accelerating rate. And guess what? In the last two years, the price of each transistor has stopped falling. That's a profound moment.

…Ubiquitous computing, or the Internet of things, is all supposed to disappear. The problem is, is it going to disappear into us? What could possibly go wrong? There is an argument that these machines are going to replace us, but I only think that's relevant to you or me in the sense that it doesn't matter if it doesn't happen in our lifetime. The Kurzweil crowd argues this is happening faster and faster, and things are just running amok. In fact, things are slowing down. In 2045, it's going to look more like it looks today than you think.

More here.

Boy with a Halo at the Farmers Market
.

The metal halo was bolted into his skull,
little drills secured the scaffold,
so his bones could rebuild themselves.
How truly graced he must have been
to survive a broken neck. Someday
he’ll remember how he had to turn
his whole body, caged, to watch
the fruit vendor polish apples. His hair
will cover the evenly spaced scars.
He’ll go to school for architecture,
having learned to appreciate girders.
He’ll come to love the gold leaf halos
of medieval art, the flash of The Savior
in cracked oils. He may carry himself
a little gingerly, he may never ride a horse
again, but he’ll kiss his wife’s neck
in a dark theater, taking leisure, blessing
each vertebra, one lucky break at a time.
.

by Sonia Greenfield
from Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market
© Codhill Press, 2015.

Kathleen Rooney at The Poetry Foundation:

A glance at celebrity websites and magazines serves to confirm that it is possible to make a living by taking photos of very famous people doing very ordinary things: walking dogs, pumping gas, dropping children off at daycare. It might be difficult to identify the precise desire that these images are intended to stoke or satisfy—the thrill of peeking through the regimented scrim of celebrity to glimpse something genuine, maybe, or simply the reassurance that despite their exalted state, these stars’ quotidian concerns are not wholly different from our own. But the rush is clearly widespread, if not universal.

This spring, Wesleyan University Press released Sarah Blake’s debut poetry collection,Mr. West, which achieves its momentum from examining the distant spectacle of celebrities alongside the enduring curiosity about what they might really be like as human beings. This “unauthorized lyric biography,” as Blake calls it, juxtaposes Kanye West’s life as a black male celebrity with Blake’s own as a white female artist and soon-to-be-mother. “You miss her and I miss him but // surely I cannot say if, when you think of death, you, Kanye, think of the / heart,” she writes in “Kanye’s Circulatory System,” writing of the death of her grandfather and of West’s loss of his mother, Donda. By putting their lives in conversation, she provokes her readers to wonder:What are we able to know about superstars, as far as we are from their fabulous orbits? What are we ever able to know definitively about the experience of someone else? Her answer: people have a great deal to learn from their experience of celebrities, particularly the feeling—familiar to all who have ever considered themselves fans—of identifying with a person whom one has likely never seen in person.

Mr. West builds the enigma and inaccessibility of celebrities—and the way their images are mediated—into the text. Presumably for permissions reasons, Blake can’t quote extensively from West’s lyrics. Thus, she replaces quotations with blacked-out bars and attributions so that readers can find them for themselves.

More here.

Sasha Weiss at the New York Times:

Tracy Daugherty, the author of “The Last Love Song,” the first full-length biography of Didion, seems both intimidated by and worshipful of his subject, who chose not to cooperate with his project. He begins his book with a disclaimer: “Does a biography of a living person make sense? . . . Is the proper distance for evaluation possible now?” He attempts to reproduce “her mental and emotional rhythms” and to apply to her work her own literary methods “revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, P.R., self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature.” Such a hedge followed by a lofty mission statement is unpromising, but you want to give Daugherty the benefit of the doubt. You want to know who Didion is, precisely because she hides in plain sight.

Didion became known for writing about the world in the first person. Whether her subject is the drifting confusions of the ’60s or the incursions of big industry on the California landscape, she herself is the probe. One of the great pleasures of reading her is watching the way she takes her own point of view as a given. But there is a fundamental unreliability at the center of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” the books that established her reputation: the gap between the natural authority with which she casts judgments and her professed nervous, quarrelsome self. It’s a gap that has always been enticing to Didion’s readers, and one we’d hope her biographer would plumb.

more here.

Mark Mazower at The Financial Times:

“I need to write this bitterness out of myself,” Joseph Goebbels confessed in 1923 as he began his diary. And how he tried, and kept on trying, long after unemployment was a distant memory and he had become one of the Führer’s most trusted associates. The diaries amount to 32 volumes. Nor was this just Goebbels’s problem: the regime’s logorrhoea began at the top. Pity Hitler’s adjutants who had to sit through those interminable after-dinner ramblings, and pity the poor historian who has to wade through not only these dutifully transcribed testimonies to the inner workings of the Nazi mind, but the commentary of several generations of scholars as well. There have been thousands of books published on the Holocaust since the millennium, and some 500 and counting in this year alone, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Crispin Sartwell over at the NYT's The Stone:

Human beings have made progress in various areas, though it is often fitful, double-edged and reversible. But are we capable of substantial moral improvement? Could we someday be much better ethically than we are now? Is it likely that members of our species could become, on average, more generous or more honest, less self-deceptive or less self-interested? I have known individual people who have improved morally in various ways (and many who have made the opposite journey) but I’m not sure that as a species as a whole we are any better than we were 100 or even 10,000 years ago.

This question has been explored throughout history — we might turn to Confucius or Aristotle, or to Jesus or the Buddha, to help illuminate the matter. But I’d like to focus here on a more recent moment: 19th-century America, where the great optimism and idealism of a rapidly rising nation was tempered by a withering realism.

It is often said that the American character is inherently hopeful, always expecting things and ourselves to be better. There is perhaps no better embodiment of this than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, in a lecture delivered in Boston in 1844, confidently awaited the emergence of “the young American”:

Here stars, here woods, here animals, here men, abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of other’s censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.

Emerson thought that “the Spirit who led us hither” would help perfect us; others have believed the agent of improvement to be evolution, or the inevitable progress of civilization. More recent advocates of our perfectibility might focus on genetic or neurological interventions, or — as in Ray Kurzweil’s “When Singularity Is Near” — information technologies.

More here.

Brad Delong, Manu Saadia, and Adam Gomolin discuss the economics of Star Trek, over at Delong's website:

Adam (to Brad): Off the top of your head, if you were teaching a course on Trekonomics what would you be covering on Week One of the Economics of Star Trek or Trekonomics?

Brad: Week One of Star Trek economics has to be “we’re in a post scarcity society”.

Adam: What does that mean?

Brad: It means that we have as much of the material necessities of life that we need or that in some sense we want. That we don’t have to earn money so that we can then spend it to get what is necessary or even convenient or even luxurious for us, as far as material goods are concerned. The society has enough resources for us go off and see, say, the double stars of Beta Lyrae with their gas streamers pulled off of each other by the gravitational pull of the double star system… if that’s what we want. That we don’t have to scrimp and save and earn up money so we can afford to spend time at the Four Seasons Kapalua Bay. We want to actually go to the Four Seasons and spend. That we do what we want with our time rather than being under the gun of necessity.

Adam: What color and context would you add to that?

Manu: I would also say that the very notion of luxury and the positional value of consumption is radically altered. It reminds me of something Keynes had said…

Brad: …That the economic problem wasn’t the permanent problem of the human race. That within three generations, Keynes was writing in 1930….at least in Britain, we can hand over people who act like the Ferengi with a disgusting shudder, to the specialists of mental disease.

Manu: He said it’s a mental disease.

Adam: Can one conspicuously consume in the 23​rd​ Century?

Manu: What would be the point?

Brad: What would be the point?  On technological progress, satiation and wine

Adam: Well, in world of unlimited scarcity, can there be such a thing as conspicuous consumption?

More here.

Gregory Jusdanis in Berfrois:

What made C. P. Cavafy write some of the most original poetry in the world? I went to Athens in January 2015 to find out.

Born in Alexandria on April 29, 1863, Cavafy died there, on the same day seventy years later. He came from a prosperous family with aristocratic roots but, when he was a child, his family lost this fortune and, as an adult, he found work as a civil servant.

The Cavafy we know from his mature poetry—he published only 154 poems of the hundreds he had written—seems emotionally distant, dedicated only to his craft. Though he enjoyed company, received visitors regularly, and was admired as a conversationalist, he lived a loveless life.

The letters from his adulthood, often terse, lack affection, personal indiscretion, or self-revelation. Contemporaries paint a picture of a sociable person, eager to talk about his poetry or ancient history but one devoid of intimate friends. No one described him as a loving or empathetic person.

I was greatly surprised, therefore, to discover material that presents a different Cavafy, at least in his youth.

For instance, in a letter to his friend, Pericles Anastasiadis, housed in the ELIA Archive, Cavafy appears as a compassionate friend. Written in English sometime in the 1890’s and sent to Paris where Peri was traveling, the letter exists only in draft form with sentences crossed out, others added, and many words composed in short hand. Reading it is like reading his poem “In the Month of Athyr,” in which a modern reader tries to interpret an ancient inscription.

From my attempts to decipher the text, Cavafy appears to console his friend. He speaks of sorrow, referring perhaps to a death of a family member, friend, or a lover. I’m not sure.

More here.