Craig Morgan Teicher at Poetry Magazine:

Donald Revell has mastered a poetic genre few poets even attempt: the happy poem. That’s not to say that his poetry doesn’t grapple with darkness—it does, and deeply. This poem is called “Death,” after all, and Revell tries as hard as he can in this small space to meet mortality head-on. One of Revell’s possible goals is to engender a sense of awe: in his poems, life is fundamentally amazing, even though—even because—it has an ending. Poets write poems for many reasons, chief among them to express feelings, to articulate the vagaries and fine points of an emotional state. Poets also write to create emotional states in readers, and this Revell poem invites readers to accept death. Without ever forgetting the mortal stakes of every moment, Revell manages to sing joyfully, no matter his subject. He knows deeply what the words have always been telling him: that all our terrors, such as “space and time,” are “inventions / Of sorrowing men”; in this poem, he chooses not to be one.

As a celebratory poet, Revell is in good company: Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Herbert,Dickinson, and Whitman come to mind as voices playing in the background of “Death.” All these poets revel—a pun on Revell’s name that he seems to have taken seriously—in details and in the capacity of the imagination to elevate them toward a kind of holiness. Of course, many of these poets also had a particular kind of holiness in mind, as does Revell; when he (or the others) uses the word soul, he means it in the Christian sense: the immortal soul that will live eternally in heaven.

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Marshall Yarbrough at The Brooklyn Rail:

For a while now I’ve had a theory about a select group of artists who were making music in the 1960s and ’70s. These are musicians who seem related to their time only obliquely: they may have been marked by it, but they were not of it. Other artists’ greatness might lie in their perfectly embodying certain musical directions of the day—the Beatles, for example. These musicians, on the other hand, have inherent greatness; that it might have been expressed in the language of their day is instructive, but ultimately incidental—they were tapping a deeper vein.

Each Weirdo works, if not within the confines of, then at least alongside a given genre. Thus you’ve got blues and jazz Weirdos (Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa); country Weirdos (Leon Russell, Lee Hazlewood); and pop Weirdos (Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson). There’s no getting around the fact that these are all white men. In emphasizing their whiteness alongside their weirdness, I want to point out a certain self-awareness on their part, particularly when it comes to the use of rock, jazz, and blues—musical forms developed by black musicians.

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Malcolm Harris at The New Republic:

Baker is often frustrated with the material he’s asked to push on students, and this reaches its peak with a graphic Holocaust documentary called Auschwitz: Death Camp starring Oprah and Elie Wiesel that he shows to successive 10th-grade English classes. Watching piles of bodies, Baker thinks,

I knew that this was the wrong documentary to be showing to a group of choiceless, voiceless high school kids at eight-thirty on a Monday morning, in connection with a compare-and-contrast media-studies assignment … These high schoolers were being tortured to the point of numbness and indifference by gruesome imagery—and the Holocaust was being trivialized through inattention, both at the same time. Why was this happening? Why was I a part of this?

By the end of the video two girls are doing a cheerleader-style H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! chant, and Baker doesn’t know whom to blame.

Classroom technology has changed a lot since Baker last visited—even since I did—and having a substitute isn’t the break for students it used to be if their daily progress is watched by a school iPad. Some teachers take a curatorial approach, delegating a large portion of their pedagogy to instructional apps, Youtube videos, and downloaded worksheets. On day nine Baker hears two teachers discussing iPad assignments when they have subs, “You delete them without reading them?” one asks. “Yes,” the other says, “They don’t do anything anyway.”

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Carlos Lozada in The Washington Post:

Secret Muslim. Socialist. Amateur. Anti-American. Criminal.

Throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, and even before it, a chorus of writers has stood stage right, reinterpreting the era but mainly eviscerating the man. Obama, initially little known, became a literary subgenre and publishing obsession, with countless volumes attacking the president, promising to unmask who he really is, what he really thinks and why he does the things he does. And for a while, at least, the books sold well. Selecting a representative set among dozens and dozens of titles in the Obama hatred literature is not easy. Do you go with “Impeachable Offenses” or “The Manchurian President”? “Divider-in-Chief” or “The Obama Nation”? “Culture of Corruption” or “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”? A sample of such books, spanning 2008 to 2016, shows that, while the anti-Obama canon can be predictable, it is by no means static. The aversion to the president is always growing, and the nature of that aversion is always evolving toward harsher conclusions. In the beginning, there was ignorance, and the void of our Obama knowledge was filled with speculation, bits of autobiography and family lore. The senator from Illinois was deemed dangerous for all that he might be: distant, unfamiliar, foreign in so many ways. Once he sat in the Oval Office, however, the attacks shifted, and the president became that most recognizable of political creatures: unprincipled, corrupt, Chicago. As conservative disdain intensified throughout his first term, Obama came to be seen as a bungler, in over his head (think the Libya intervention or Operation Fast and Furious). Yet soon he was redefined once more, this time as a brilliant subversive: It’s not that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing but that he knows all too well. That leads, inevitably, to the final and most damning judgment — that this president is a criminal.

Donald Trump’s rise in GOP presidential politics has drawn sustenance and inspiration from the anti-Obama literature, regardless of whether its authors support the candidate. Indeed, the arc of Trump’s criticisms of the president, from his birtherism in 2011 to his more recent charge that Obama is “the founder of ISIS,” traces, in a distorted and exaggerated way, these portrayals of the president, from unknown outsider to recidivist lawbreaker. These books and writers do not necessarily agree with one another. But they do build upon each other. And if the 2016 Republican presidential nominee has succeeded in tapping into right-wing anger, it is an anger that has been chronicled, reflected and stoked by the anti-Obama literary canon.

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Andy Extance in Nature:

It was Wednesday 16 February 2011, and Goldman was at a hotel in Hamburg, Germany, talking with some of his fellow bioinformaticists about how they could afford to store the reams of genome sequences and other data the world was throwing at them. He remembers the scientists getting so frustrated by the expense and limitations of conventional computing technology that they started kidding about sci-fi alternatives. “We thought, 'What's to stop us using DNA to store information?'” Then the laughter stopped. “It was a lightbulb moment,” says Goldman, a group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, UK. True, DNA storage would be pathetically slow compared with the microsecond timescales for reading or writing bits in a silicon memory chip. It would take hours to encode data by synthesizing DNA strings with a specific pattern of bases, and still more hours to recover that information using a sequencing machine. But with DNA, a whole human genome fits into a cell that is invisible to the naked eye. For sheer density of information storage, DNA could be orders of magnitude beyond silicon — perfect for long-term archiving.

“We sat down in the bar with napkins and biros,” says Goldman, and started scribbling ideas: “What would you have to do to make that work?” The researchers' biggest worry was that DNA synthesis and sequencing made mistakes as often as 1 in every 100 nucleotides. This would render large-scale data storage hopelessly unreliable — unless they could find a workable error-correction scheme. Could they encode bits into base pairs in a way that would allow them to detect and undo the mistakes? “Within the course of an evening,” says Goldman, “we knew that you could.” He and his EBI colleague Ewan Birney took the idea back to their labs, and two years later announced that they had successfully used DNA to encode five files, including Shakespeare's sonnets and a snippet of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech¹. By then, biologist George Church and his team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had unveiled an independent demonstration of DNA encoding². But at 739 kilobases (kB), the EBI files comprised the largest DNA archive ever produced — until July 2016, when researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington claimed a leap to 200 megabytes (MB).

More here.

Mornings at Seven

Wild geese stir in the early morning calm
with the ripple of their wake.
Far off,
near the shore’s arm of dune that holds the pond,
a kayak glides,
someone seeking peace
and looking up to find it in the sky.

A sudden commotion of the water at my shore!
Two swimmers diving in together
side by side exactly.
Man and woman—
I can see the sickle-splash of arms and legs in ardent crawl,
and the watery tumult of pumping feet.

But more, and
unmistakable,
is a joyous energy of purpose in the two of them,
heading out.
And a determination to be swimming side by side,
exactly;
so that in coming up for air, their eyes can meet.

The seriousness of their purpose shouts to heaven,
and gives this pond and sky
a grounding and a glory,
announcing that their heading out, together, side by side,
is no more the single purpose of their beings,
then is the night of sleeping side by side.

And they have found that that’s the simple whole if it.
.

by Peggy Freydberg
from Poems from the Pond
Hybrid Nation, 2015
.

Eric Loomis in the Boston Review:

At least since the passage of California’s Proposition 13 in 1978—in which property owners voted to halve their property taxes—the United States has struggled with an anti-tax mentality revolving around the belief that government is ineffective. That sentiment is nowhere so clearly expressed as in wingnut Grover Norquist’s famous dictum that government should be small enough to drown in a bathtub. Indeed, the right’s efforts to starve government of the level of resources necessary for competent functioning have made a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that government is moribund.

Daniel L. Hatcher’s The Poverty Industry exposes one way that states have responded to the anti-tax climate and diminishing federal funds. Facing budget crises but reluctant to raise taxes, many state politicians treat federal dollars available for poverty-relief programs as an easy mark from which they can mine revenue without political consequence. They divert federal funding earmarked for social programs for children and the elderly, repurposing it for their general funds with the help of private companies that in effect launder money for them. A law professor at the University of Baltimore who has represented Maryland victims of such schemes, Hatcher presents a distressing picture of how states routinely defraud taxpayers of millions of federal dollars.

This is possible because there is a near-total absence of accountability for how states use federal money intended to fight poverty. Remarkably, states do not even have to pretend to have used all the funds for the stated purpose; they are only required to show that they are taking care of the populations for which the funds were intended.

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Michael Byrne in Motherboard:

Algorithms are a science of cleverness. A natural manifestation of logical reasoning—​mathematical induction, in particular—a good algorithm is like a fleeting, damning snapshot into the very soul of a problem. A jungle of properties and relationships becomes a simple recurrence relation, a single-line recursive step producing boundless chaos and complexity. And to see through deep complexity, it takes cleverness.

It was the programming pioneer Edsger W. Dijkstra that really figured this out, and his namesake algorithm remains one of the cleverest things in computer science. A relentless advocate of simplicity and elegance in mathematics, he more or less believed that every complicated problem had an accessible ground floor, a way in, and math was a tool to find it and exploit it.

In 1956, Dijkstra was working on the ARMAC, a parallel computing machine based at the Netherlands’ Mathematical Center. It was a successor to the ARRA and ARRA II machines, which had been essentially the country’s first computers. His job was programming the thing, and once ARMAC was ready for its first public unveiling—after two years of concerted effort—Dijkstra needed a problem to solve.

“For a demonstration for noncomputing people you have to have a problem statement that non-mathematicians can understand,” Dijkstra recalled in an interviewnot long before his 2002 death. “They even have to understand the answer. So I designed a program that would find the shortest route between two cities in the Netherlands, using a somewhat reduced road-map of the Netherlands, on which I had selected 64 cities.”

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Morgan Meis in The Easel:

The contemporary painter Nicole Eisenman tells a rather moving story about winning a MacArthur “genius” grant in the late summer of 2015. She went to a quiet place and wept. Similar experiences have, no doubt, beset many MacArthur recipients. The grant is a crowning glory to an artist’s career, conveying recognition at the highest level along with no small amount of legal tender ($625,000 as of last year). You too would probably cry.

It should also be said that, for Eisenman, the tears were related to art, and to painting in particular. That’s because Eisenman has, for many years now, been making paintings that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to meet the favor of critics, curators, and academics. Since those are the sorts of folk who act as judges at the MacArthur Foundation, it seemed a safe bet that Nicole Eisenman wasn’t going to be in the running. Why is this? Mostly, it is because Eisenman adopts a cartoony painting style and a light, joking attitude on many of her canvases (though by no means all). Take, for instance, a painting called The Session, from 2008.

Stylistically, the painting verges on being a panel from a cartoon strip. A figure resembling Eisenman herself reclines on a couch at her analyst’s office. She has dirty bare feet and a hole in her pants. She clutches desperately at a box of tissues as she weepingly shares tales of woe to her analyst, who jots down notes in a chair nearby. A vase near a bookcase at the left side of the painting is shaped like a phallus. It is a cute and gently self-mocking painting, but not obviously the stuff to put the contemporary art world on notice.

On second glance, however, even a relatively “light” painting like The Session is making a strong argument about what painting can and should be.

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Alan Jacobs at Harper's Magazine:

The terms “nativism,” “reactionary,” even “fascism” appear in political conversation with increasing regularity. Though few of these leaders profess deep religious commitments, their popularity seems driven in significant part by religious ressentiment — an awareness of the decline of Christian (or “Judeo-Christian”) civilization and a determination to arrest and, if possible, reverse that decline.

Political liberals who long expected to live in an increasingly liberal world may find themselves disoriented by these manifestations, whose nature they are ill prepared to understand, and they certainly wish such “forces of reaction” would just go away. But these forces will not go away. If we were to wish for something less fantastic than the disappearance of our political opposites, we might think along these lines: It would be valuable to have at our disposal some figures equipped for the task of mediation — people who understand the impulses from which these troubling movements arise, who may themselves belong in some sense to the communities driving these movements but are also part of the liberal social order. They should be intellectuals who speak the language of other intellectuals, including the most purely secular, but they should also be fluent in the concepts and practices of faith. Their task would be that of the interpreter, the bridger of cultural gaps; of the mediator, maybe even the reconciler.

Half a century ago, such figures existed in America: serious Christian intellectuals who occupied a prominent place on the national stage. They are gone now. It would be worth our time to inquire why they disappeared, where they went, and whether — should such a thing be thought desirable — they might return.

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Bert Keizer at Threepenny Review:

First, the scary subject of euthanasia. To avoid any misunderstanding: euthanasia, as I am defining it, is the handing or administering of a fatal overdose to a patient by a doctor on the patient’s request. This includes Physician Assisted Suicide. We shall not here go into all the terms and conditions attached to such an act here in the Netherlands. Suffice it to say that it is quite a procedure and not something that is arranged overnight or on the whim of a patient or a doctor. In the United States, the administering of a lethal medication by a doctor is never allowed, but under certain conditions Physician Assisted Suicide is allowed in five states—Oregon, California, Washington, Maine, and New Mexico —and may be on its way to legal status in Vermont.

It is often said that it takes courage to perform euthanasia, and a colleague described to me the other day why he finds it so difficult: “It feels somehow as if the very foundation of my existence is being undermined. The thought of it causes an experience of vertigo. A request almost seems to set me dangling above an abyss.”

I find this a very convincing description, because that is precisely what we feel when faced with the possibility of a predetermined, explicitly arranged death. It is a fearful business, but I don’t quite understand what it is we are so afraid of. Being courageous means that you realize the danger of a situation.

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Andrew J. Nathan at The NYRB:

The pudgy cheeks and flaring hairdo of North Korea’s young ruler Kim Jong-un, his bromance with tattooed and pierced former basketball star Dennis Rodman, his boy-on-a-lark grin at missile firings, combine incongruously with the regime’s pledge to drown its enemies in a “sea of fire.” They elicit a mix of revulsion and ridicule in the West. Many predict that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea cannot survive much longer, given its pervasive poverty, genocidal prison camp system identified by a UN commission of inquiry as committing crimes against humanity,¹ self-imposed economic isolation, confrontations with all of its neighbors, and its leader’s youth and inexperience. The Obama administration has adopted a position of “strategic patience,” waiting for intensifying international sanctions to force North Korea either to give up its nuclear weapons or to implode and be taken over by the pro-Western government of South Korea.

But North Korea’s other closest neighbors, the Chinese, have never expected the DPRK to surrender or collapse, and so far they have been correct. Instead of giving up its nuclear bomb and missile programs, Pyongyang is by now thought to have between ten and twenty nuclear devices and over one thousand short-, medium-, and long-range missiles, and to be developing a compact warhead that will be able to hit the US mainland.

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Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American:

The thing is, the whole concept of giftedness was, from the very beginning of its inception, tied to educational outcomes. When Lewis Terman invented the concept*, he made giftedness synonymous with high IQ scores (on his own test, of course), and linked it to high achievement (genius). What seems to be going on here (and I document this trend in my book Ungifted), is that a sizable proportion of the gifted and talented community– mostly clinicians who actually work with such children on a daily basis– fundamentally conceptualize giftedness as something very different than high achievement, and often also very different from high cognitive ability. Now, don't get me wrong: I could get behind this newer conceptualization of giftedness. What this particular segment of the gifted and talented community seem to be describing as giftedness– exquisite sensitivity to the environment— certainly is a particular dimension of human variation that is important, and most certainly has substantial variation, like the rest of human personality differences.

But here's the thing: I think in order for this new conceptualization of giftedness to be tractable, it should have more clearly delineated properties, better measurement, and it should also be more clearly tied to particular educational interventions. What can you specifically do to support children who “experience the world intensely”? How do you identify that unique population in the first place, independent of IQ tests, academic achievement, and other very non-experiencing-oriented assessments? From a scientist's point of view, and even from a pragmatists point of view, I don't know what to do with this new definition of giftedness. How do you know what other people really feel, or how intensely they feel it? You know your own qualia, and that's it.

More here.

Nguyen Phan Chanh (1892-1984). Channeling Experience with a Medium, 1931.

Silk Painting.

More here, here, and here.

Charles J. Shields at his own website:

Mark Vonnegut has said that the father he knew growing up wasn’t a famous author. He was a family man, a struggling freelance writer, who couldn’t get a job teaching English at the local community community college. And that’s not to mention his father’s disasterous foray into selling SAAB automobiles on Cape Cod, either— another of Kurt’s attempts to make money.

For almost twenty years before the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, Vonnegut was broke most of the time. (Someone claiming to be his newsboy told me he was somehow never around at the end of the month to pay for delivery.)

The poignancy of how success and the comfort of money eluded him year after year can be summed up in a tale, here told for the first time: Kurt Vonnegut’s idea for an atomic bowtie (alas, another anecdote that didn’t make final draft of his biography). In 1950, Vonnegut was sure that a bowtie polka-dotted with the symbol for nuclear energy would be a big seller and bring him money he so desperately needed to keep writing and supporting his family.

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Kristina Killgrove in Forbes:

The history of modern forensic anthropology is a bit murky. As an applied science rather than a “pure” one, forensics was shunned for decades, its findings inadmissible in court. But the 19th century murder of a Harvard Medical School doctor launched the field, revolutionized law in the process, and began our longstanding fascination with TV shows like CSI and Bones.

The story starts just before Thanksgiving in 1849, when Dr. George Parkman went missing. Parkman was from a wealthy Boston family, an old-timey Doogie Howser who entered Harvard at age 15. He went to medical school in Scotland, returning after the War of 1812. Parkman donated some land in Boston to Harvard Medical College so that the school could relocate from Cambridge. He was also well-known for lending money from his considerable fortune and for walking around town to collect on those debts.

A professor of chemistry and geology at Harvard, John White Webster, was one of those debtors. He had been having financial problems, requiring him to give up his family’s Cambridge mansion. Webster’s salary as a lecturer at Harvard simply didn’t cover his grandiose lifestyle. So Webster borrowed $400 from Parkman in 1842. Seems like a paltry sum, but the equivalent in today’s dollars is nearly $10,000.

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Duncan Fyfe in Slate:

Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it. Who knew its origins were so lurid?

For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.

Here’s the story. In 1916, the fabulously wealthy, Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov was one of several Russian aristocrats agonizing over the unseemly influence that Rasputin—the magical healer, charismatic lech, and peasant—had over the Tsar and, particularly, the Tsarina. In December, Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace, where he offered him cyanide-laced cakes and then shot him.

Although the Tsarina was distraught, the Tsar let Yusupov off lightly, exiling the prince and his wife Irina. (In doing so, he inadvertently spared them from the impending slaughter of the revolution.)

Sixteen years later, MGM produced Rasputin and the Empress, based on those events.

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Alva Noë at NPR:

And there's the question of what types of animals you can love. You're allowed to love a dog or a cat. But can you, should you, is it appropriate, to love other kinds of animals? My brother had a hermit crab when he was a boy. I don't know how he felt about it — but can a healthy, well-rounded person love a hermit crab?

I'm not passing judgment. It strikes me that the shifting, unstable, historical, emotional, playful and earnest feelings we Americans have about animals has a lot to do with other kinds of value, meaning and quality in our lives.

And, so, it is with a real sense of curiosity that I wonder about our varying relationships with animals. Why, for example, it is that we do not even notice road kill, for the most part — let alone stop to mourn it? And what can be said about the fact that the sale of bull semen is a big part of the cattle industry — and the methods used to create supply?

You can get the salacious details in Jane C. Desmond's fascinating new book Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. This is a scholarly work devoted to looking at the variety and tensions surrounding human-animal relations in, as the subtitle puts it, art, science and everyday life. Her focus, in this gripping book, is ourcontemporary American society (to the extent that there is any such a unified thing).

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