David Hajdu in The Nation:

I cannot imagine a work in any art form that could evoke the particular madness of our time with more potency than Real Enemies, the album of jazz-orchestra music released this fall by the Brooklyn-based, Canadian-born composer Darcy James Argue. Conceived more than a year before this November’s presidential election, it was not intended as a statement on Trumpism explicitly. Rather, it was designed to explore the broader themes of cultural paranoia and false truth, which infuse the current climate and have laced through the history of American politics. Real Enemies is sweeping and meticulous, as serious as music can be, and, at the same time, a terrific thrill to experience.

Argue efficiently established his reputation as a major musical voice with his two previous albums, Infernal Machines (2009) and Brooklyn Babylon (2013), both of which were composed for and recorded by Argue’s ongoing ensemble, the 18-piece band called Secret Society. The group, by nature of its instrumentation, qualifies as a jazz big band, though the music is not big-band jazz by a definition Count Basie or Buddy Rich would have used. The Secret Society rarely swings in the traditional way, though it can cook up a sly, churning funk groove when Argue wants it to. If Argue’s society of 21st-century virtuosos has a secret, it’s the fact that it could be a ballroom band with all the pizzazz of, say, Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, if it had a leader less creative and forward-thinking than Darcy James Argue.

More here.

John Weeks in Open Democracy:

The iconic slogan “Yes, we can!” inspired the wave of enthusiasm that swept up millions of Americans during the presidential election of 2008 and carried Barack Obama to the White House. If that slogan epitomized the beginning of the Obama presidency, he had an equally iconic ending: the first African-American president shaking hands with the first president-elect in at least 100 years endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

In November 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency with almost 53% on a voter turnout of 58%. The winning percentage was the highest since 1988 and the turnout the largest for 50 years. The first non-white president took office on a surge of enthusiasm exceeding any since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (by comparison John Kennedy went to the presidency with less than half of total votes and a winning margin of 0.2 percentage points).

The enthusiasm for Obama arose from fervent hope for specific changes: 1) a universal, affordable health system; 2) the end of two disastrous wars (Afghanistan and Iraq); 3) economic recovery from the worst collapse in 80 years; and 4) action against banks and bankers to prevent a recurrence of the collapse.

To fulfil these hopes, Obama had majorities in both houses of Congress, 58 of 100 Senators (largest majority of any party in 30 years) and 257 seats in the House (most since 1992). By any measure the new president enjoyed an overwhelming majority. Under some circumstances the Republican minority in the Senate could prevent voting, but a determined and bold president could force votes within the arcane Senate rules.

More here.

Tom Vanderbilt in Nautilus:

Princeton’s Palmer Field, 1951. An autumn classic matching the unbeaten Tigers, with star tailback Dick Kazmaier—a gifted passer, runner, and punter who would capture a record number of votes to win the Heisman Trophy—against rival Dartmouth. Princeton prevailed over Big Green in the penalty-plagued game, but not without cost: Nearly a dozen players were injured, and Kazmaier himself sustained a broken nose and a concussion (yet still played a “token part”). It was a “rough game,” The New York Times described, somewhat mildly, “that led to some recrimination from both camps.” Each said the other played dirty. The game not only made the sports pages, it made the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. Shortly after the game, the psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril interviewed students and showed them film of the game. They wanted to know things like: “Which team do you feel started the rough play?” Responses were so biased in favor of each team that the researchers came to a rather startling conclusion: “The data here indicate there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’ ” Everyone was seeing the game they wanted to see. But how were they doing this? They were, perhaps, an example of what Leon Festinger, the father of “cognitive dissonance,” meant when he observed “that people cognize and interpret information to fit what they already believe.”

In watching and interpreting the game footage, the students were behaving similarly to children shown the famous duck-rabbit illusion, pictured above. When shown the illusion on Easter Sunday, more children see the rabbit, where on other Sundays they are more likely to see the duck.¹ The image itself allows both interpretations, and switching from seeing one to the other takes some effort. When I showed duck-rabbit to my 5-year-old daughter, and asked her what she saw, she replied: “A duck.” When I asked her if she saw “anything else,” she edged closer, forehead wrinkled. “Maybe there’s another animal there?” I proffered, trying not to sound as if magnet school admission was on the line. Suddenly, a shimmer of awareness, and a smile. “A rabbit!”

More here.

Laurie Sheck in billmoyers.com:

A Few Facts

1. He wore 5-pound shackles on his ankles every day for four years.

2. This was in the prison camp in Omsk where he was serving out a sentence of hard labor after being convicted of sedition for being part of a revolutionary cell dedicated to the liberation of the serfs and freedom of the press.

3. For the seven months following his arrest, he’d been kept in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva, his cell window smeared with an oily paste to prevent any daylight from seeping through.

4. One morning he was suddenly taken to Semyonov Square, where he was given a white death-shirt to put on and allowed to kiss the cross. He was sixth in line for execution, with only minutes left to live, when the announcement came that the Czar had decided to spare the prisoners’ lives. Apparently this had been planned all along.

5. On the way to the prison camp, they stopped for the night in Tobolsk where a town bell had been sent into exile, convicted of ringing for seditious purposes. Its sentence was eternal silence.

6. In Tobolsk, he met a man who was chained to the wall. He had been chained there for eight years. The chain was 7 feet long and extended from his sleeping pallet to the opposite wall. The man spent every day walking from the pallet to the wall and back. He said he didn’t mind. He showed where the chain attached to his underclothes, and the most comfortable way to lie down on the sleeping pallet. When he spoke, his voice was mild with a slight lisp. He said he had once been a government official.

7. It was in Omsk that the epileptic seizures began. They came mostly once or twice a month. Sometimes, though rarely, twice a day. They could lie dormant for as long as four months. After each seizure something in him grieved. Words blackened or grew muffled for days, sometimes a week, their distant contours alien and heavy. He tried but couldn’t lift them.

8. He wasn’t allowed a single book for almost four years. Except the Bible.

9. “Awkward, immobile, silent … his pale, thin, earthen-colored face covered in dark red spots,”a young prison guard described him years later.

10. “I look at their pale faces, at their poor beds, at all of this impassable nakedness and poverty — I peer in — and it is as if I want to make sure that it is not the continuation of a disfigured dream, but actual truth. But it is truth: I hear someone’s groan, someone throws out his hands heavily and clangs his chains,” he would remember in The House of the Dead.

…Dostoyevsky experienced more than one hundred major seizures, walked in chains and prison garb, wasn’t permitted to hold a pen or pencil for nearly four years or read any book but one. He watched two children die and wrote several times of a man’s inner life in the minutes and seconds before execution. He had Myshkin think about a donkey’s goodness and importance, and led him to the room where he would stroke and soothe Rogozhin. His books offer the words to feel into pursued to their radical end, embodied. To feel into — which doesn’t mean to understand, or analyze, or interpret, or heal. Doesn’t mean to solve, define, make steady, claim knowledge of, but has something to do with drawing close, with how there’s a radiance more mysterious, more unspeakable than horror; more private in its wounds, more lasting.

More here.

Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker:

The Jamaican-born poet Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, “House of Lords and Commons,” is a study of place and memory rendered in what used to be called “the grand style”: the timeless, high-literary idiom that nearly anyone who has ever learned the language would identify as “poetry,” based on its sound alone, and that nonplussed readers of contemporary poetry sometimes say they miss. Of course, the irony is that timelessness itself can seem dated; modernism emerged in part to change the acoustics within which lines of poetry were heard. Our ears changed, and fewer and fewer poets of note wanted to make those old sounds. There are analogues in nearly every art: modes and vocabularies that we accept in the work of the past but which seem, in new work, like period reënactment or, if the seams are exposed, like postmodern bricolage.

More here.

Josh Freed at the Brookings Institution:

So what, after a 30-year drought, is drawing smart young people back to the nuclear industry? The answer is climate change. Nuclear energy currently provides about 20 percent of the electric power in the United States, and it does so without emitting any greenhouse gases. Compare that to the amount of electricity produced by the other main non-emitting sources of power, the so-called “renewables”—hydroelectric (6.8 percent), wind (4.2 percent) and solar (about one quarter of a percent). Not only are nuclear plants the most important of the non-emitting sources, but they provide baseload—“always there”—power, while most renewables can produce electricity only intermittently, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-based organization that is the leading international body for the assessment of climate risk, issued a desperate call for more non-emitting power sources. According to the IPCC, in order to mitigate climate change and meet growing energy demands, the world must aggressively expand its sources of renewable energy, and it must also build more than 400 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years—a near-doubling of today’s global fleet of 435 reactors. However, in the wake of the tsunami that struck Japan’s Fukushima Daichi plant in 2011, some countries are newly fearful about the safety of light water reactors. Germany, for example, vowed to shutter its entire nuclear fleet.

More here.

Alice Yoo in My Modern Met:

“In painting and calligraphy, the first stroke is the most important. It comes from nothing and manifests something.” San Francisco-born artist Karl Martens creates beautiful paintings of birds using materials not often paired together – Japanese and Chinese calligraphy brushes with watercolor. What's most fascinating is that he paints all of his works by memory, without reference to any guide. What you'll notice first are the sweeping brushstrokes and then you'll see all the fine details. While he uses large Japanese and Chinese calligraphy brushes to create the general shape and posture of the birds, the intricate markings of them are done using charcoal pencil and smaller calligraphy brushes. Martens studied birds for so long that he knows how to paint both the large and subtle differences including the birds' beaks.

Martens is inspired by Shih-t’ao (1642-1707), one of the most famous Chinese painters in the early Qing dynasty. He was considered revolutionary during that time because he didn't believe in imitating old masters, while he respected them, he forged his own path. He valued innovation, and as such, he used bold, impressionistic brushstrokes and he left white space to suggest distance. Above all, Shih-t’ao believed that the artist must trust his or her own ability. He coined the term Holistic Brushstroke, which means that one could create something out of nothing. As Martens describes it, “Optimally, it contains no planned thought. It emanates from 'emptiness.'”

More here. [Thanks to Frans de Waal.]

Anthony DePalma in the New York Times:

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday. He was 90.

His death was announced by Cuban state television.

In declining health for several years, Mr. Castro had orchestrated what he hoped would be the continuation of his Communist revolution, stepping aside in 2006 when he was felled by a serious illness. He provisionally ceded much of his power to his younger brother Raúl, now 85, and two years later formally resigned as president. Raúl Castro, who had fought alongside Fidel Castro from the earliest days of the insurrection and remained minister of defense and his brother’s closest confidant, has ruled Cuba since then, although he has told the Cuban people he intends to resign in 2018.

Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II. He became a towering international figure whose importance in the 20th century far exceeded what might have been expected from the head of state of a Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.

More here.

H. Charles J. Godfray in Nature:

Combining a personal memoir with serious discussion of a scientific subject is a difficult literary trick. The Finnish biologist Ilkka Hanski succeeded with aplomb in his last book, Messages from Islands, in which each chapter begins with insights from an island that moulded his thinking about ecology, evolution and conservation. Hanski, one of the foremost ecologists of his generation, died in May (A.-L. Laine Nature 534, 180; 2016). Finland is a land of lakes and islands, so perhaps it is not surprising that Finnish ecologists are drawn to investigating how populations and communities persist in fragmented habitats. Hanski is most celebrated for developing the ecological concept of a metapopulation — a population of populations connected by dispersal — and its applications to conservation. There are several types, but a classical metapopulation is sometimes likened to a collection of “blinking lights”, with individual short-lived populations winking in and out of existence while the whole ensemble persists.

Hanski explored the concept through his 25-year, and ongoing, study of the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) in the Åland Archipelago between Finland and Sweden. This checkerspot butterfly has exacting habitat requirements: it occupies a fluctuating number of the small woodland meadows that constitute a habitat archipelago within the geographical archipelago. The meadows are so tiny that they support only a small butterfly population; each has a high risk of extinction every year. Hanski, his colleagues and an ever-changing army of students surveyed all 4,000 or so meadows, which support 400–800 populations each year. Through this and many experiments, such as quantifying rates of dispersal between patches, they constructed a model of the butterfly's metapopulation — the most detailed and satisfying description of such a population structure currently available, by some distance.

More here.

Robert Minto at Open Letters Monthly:

The Odessa stories are less well known than Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, a collection of reports from the front of the Polish-Soviet War that secured his reputation as one of the greatest 20th century Russian writers, and they have their own quite different atmosphere. Pushkin Press has published them together in a short volume, retranslated by Boris Dralyuk, to highlight the unity of the set. The book is broken into parts which show Odessa in its romantic heyday, run by the gangsters, and then in its Soviet decline, as it is ruthlessly standardized, normalized, and drained of color. Babel’s autobiographical notes and essays about Odessa are tacked onto the end, to make the book a complete testament to his vision of the city.

That vision is complex and tragic. Odessa in pre-Soviet days may have been a region of mythic heroes, who share something of the amoral vigor of the bandits and warriors of folklore, but it also hosted a plundered populace. A city run by bandits is a paradise for no one but the strong. Still, compared to the regime that pacified the city, old Odessa may not have been so bad after all. The Soviet government rooted out corruption and crime, but it also cracked down on religion and innocent customs, reorganizing here as everywhere according to the blunt dictates of unnuanced rationality.

more here.

Emily Bazelon in The New York Times:

In 2005, Tim O’Brien, then a financial reporter at The New York Times, published the book “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” O'Brien talked to sources with an up-close view of Donald J. Trump’s finances, who concluded that the real-estate developer’s net worth was $150 million to $250 million, rather than the $2 billion to $5 billion Trump had variously claimed. Trump, who had courted O’Brien by taking him for rides in his Ferrari and private jet, sued O’Brien for libel in New Jersey in 2006. Trump called O’Brien a “wack job” on the “Today” show — while, O’Brien says, continuing to curry favor with him privately. O’Brien’s publisher, Warner Books, was also named in the suit and hired top lawyers who put Trump through an unsparing two-day deposition. Asked about his finances, Trump was caught lying or exaggerating 30 times. “He thought he’d get a friendly judge, and we would roll over,” says O’Brien, who is now the executive editor of Bloomberg View. “We didn’t.” The case went through four judges and was dismissed in 2009. Trump’s suit against O’Brien is one of seven forays President-elect Trump and his companies have made as libel plaintiffs. He won only once, when a defendant failed to appear. But the standard measure — defending his reputation and achieving victory in court — isn’t how Trump says he thinks about his investment. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he told The Washington Post in March about the hefty sum he spent on the case against O’Brien. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

Trump was wrong: Warner Books spent less than he did, and O’Brien paid nothing. But that doesn’t make Trump’s central idea any less jarring: that libel law can be a tool of revenge. It’s disconcerting for a superrich (if maybe not as rich as he says) plaintiff to treat the legal system as a weapon to be deployed against critics. Once installed in the White House, Trump will have a wider array of tools at his disposal, and his record suggests that, more than his predecessors, he will try to use the press — and also control and subdue it. As a candidate, Trump blustered vaguely that he wanted to “open up our libel laws.” I asked his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, by email what he meant by that, but she didn’t answer the question (or others I posed). It’s not within the president’s direct powers to change the rules for libel suits. But our legal safeguards for writers and publishers aren’t foolproof. In the last few years, Trump has been joined by at least two billionaires who are determined to exploit cracks in the wall of defense around the press. The members of this club are innovators. They have sued or funded suits to defend reputations or protect privacy. But an underlying aim appears to be to punish critics like O’Brien or even destroy entire media outlets.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Who was Picabia? On some level it is astonishing that anyone would have to ask. Born wealthy in Paris in 1879, Picabia is a crucial co-inventor of five of the most far-reaching movements of the 20th century — Cubism, Dada (which he broke with), Surrealism (which he renounced), abstraction, and postmodernism. Provocative from start, he claimed to have made perfect copies of the art in his parent's home, selling the originals and replacing them with his own work. Picabia was smash success by the age of 26, called “a master” for his stiff Impressionism. The next year, he was showing internationally; the year after that brought the first monograph on his work. Revolutionary until the day he died, a bon vivant and ladies' man who often had overlapping wives or mistresses all living and traveling together, he said the “phallus should have eyes” to see “love up close.” (Put eyes inside the vagina as well and who could not love him!)

It’s not easy to generalize about what his work looks like since what really characterized his life was his overwhelming aesthetic restlessness. Picabia is the least know of the great modern masters. His animalistic unwillingness to be caged into any style or ism, his “can't step in the same river twice” insistence on constant artistic flux makes Picabia the Heraclitus-like God of Change of Modern Art. He said “the only movement is perpetual movement”; called isms “absurd traffic”; espoused a continuous “revolution in taste”; asserted that anything not modern has “no reason to exist.” Importantly, he refused to see art as a career, calling painting movements and isms the “paintocracy.”

more here.

James Ward at The Dublin Review of Books:

William Blake sets out his vision of the universe in the volumes known as his prophetic books. Botched creation, cruelty and liberation are the obsessive themes of his cosmogony, focused through filters of sexuality and gender difference. Famously described by Northrop Frye as being “in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry” in English, these books still go largely unread. But they were not really designed to be read according to conventional practice of deriving meaning from lines and blocks of text. Instead, on every page, serpentine lines writhe, coil and contort across fields of spectacular colour to form bodies and letters which combine to remind us that to “illustrate” means to make words lustrous. Much as “watching” falsely imputes careful monitorship to our consumption of television, “reading” hardly seems an adequate name for what goes on when we look at these works. Even though comics and graphic novels have made the pleasure a familiar one, there is still no good word in English for the simultaneous comprehension of words and pictures, which underlines the exceptional originality of what Blake was doing back at the turn of the eighteenth century. Hand-inscribed, chemically etched and mechanically printed, Blake’s visual-verbal poems represent a heroic but thankless effort to divert the historic course of book technology and propel the illuminated manuscript into the age of print. They could in theory have sold by the thousand but the intensity of labour involved in their production, the obtuse incomprehension of contemporaries and the indifference of the public meant that few copies were produced, and fewer bought, in his lifetime.

Even after his acceptance as a major poet (which came as late as the 1950s), reading Blake in anthologies or paperback classics feels wrong because the images are either entirely omitted or confined to a few grainy reproductions, with the unified whole inaccessible until very recently to those lacking privileged access to scholarly archives or expensive facsimile editions.

more here.

Sonali Campion and Taryana Odayar at the website of the London School of Economics:

SC: You have said that looking at the end point of a debate is not an ideal way of understanding the wider discussion. This seems relevant in relation to economic policy today, where developing countries aspire to high and continuous growth. What’s your view on the current Indian government’s manner of pursuing growth?

AS: Let me make a clarification first. The point about the end point not being the only issue asks what were the counter arguments that were considered? What were the different points of view that may or may have not have been aired, even if the end point is correct? That only becomes relevant when you agree with the end point. In the case of the policy as it stands now, that is not the case. I think the end point is wrong. The argumentation process is wrong as well, but there are two distinct issues here.

India is the only country in the world which is trying to become a global economic power with an uneducated and unhealthy labour force. It’s never been done before, and never will be done in the future either. There is a reason why Europe went for universal education, and so did America. Japan, after the Meiji restoration in 1868, wanted to get full literate in 40 years and they did. So did South Korea after the war, and Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and China.

The whole idea that you could somehow separate out the process of economic growth from the quality of the labour force is a mistake against which Adam Smith warned in 1776. It’s an ancient danger, and he might have been right to think that the British government at the time did not pay sufficient interest in basic education for all. Unfortunately that applies today to government of India as well. It doesn’t acknowledge the relevance of the quality of human labour.

More here.

Steven Donoghue in The Christian Science Monitor:

Pause for a moment from your rapt attention to this review of Ian Mortimer's terrific new book Millennium and look up. Look around you. Try to see the layers of time that blanket every feature of your world. It's a gambit that Mortimer employs often throughout his study of “how civilization has changed over a thousand years,” and it's unfailingly instructive. You're able to read this at all, in the first place, whereas for most of the previous thousand years, you probably wouldn't have been able to, unless you were a member of the clerical or landed elite. You're reading it in English, which no national publication would have used in the 11th century or for a good deal of time afterwards. The review is about a book, which scarcely anybody would have owned. Likewise the review assumes a common readership, which would have been forbidden – sometimes by fire or the rack – for more than half of the centuries under Mortimer's consideration. And if you're reading this on some kind of electronic device, we suddenly exclude all of history right up until the last twenty years. But it's more than that. One of the most bracing aspects of “Millennium” is the breadth of factors it covers, from food production to sanitation conditions to the Christian Church Militant to the development of firearms to radical changes in transportation of both people and products. If you employ a similar wide angle, the sheer scope of the changes Mortimer analyzes becomes staggering.

…The four core changes he identifies in his book, the “four primary sources underlying change over the last millennium,” are a) the weather in terms of how it affected food supply, the need for security, the fear of sickness, and the “desire for personal enrichment.” And the method Mortimer uses to track the fluctuating fortunes of these four core items (and plenty more) is at once thought-provoking and self-evidently artificial: He looks at each of the last 10 centuries as discreet, watertight eras and tries to assess the predominant changes each century saw that the others didn't see, prefacing the whole exercise with a smile-inducing bit of understatement: “Many of the important developments in Western culture do not fit neatly within the borders of a single century.”

More here.