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.

More here.

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).

More here.

Gavin Jacobson in New Statesman:

The first meeting between Walter Ben­jamin and Bertolt Brecht did not go well. It took place in Berlin in November 1924 at the home of Asja Lacis, a Latvian actress and theatre director. She recalled in her memoirs, “The conversation never got going, and the acquaintanceship petered out. I was confused. Was it possible that Brecht, such an intelligent person, could find nothing in common with Walter, a person of such intellectual curiosity and wide interests?” Benjamin, then 32 years old and unable to secure a university lectureship, was emerging as one of Germany’s pre-eminent cultural critics. His writings covered subjects as varied as art, children’s literature, food, film, gambling, graphology, Marxism, photography and toys. He wrote essays on the concept of history, the social impact of mass media, and 19th-century Paris. He produced radio programmes and translated texts by Baudelaire and Proust. There was no guiding philosophy. Yet the influence of certain traditions (such as German idealism, Rom­anticism and Jewish mysticism) was clear.

Brecht was six years younger than Benjamin. By the time they met, he had established himself as a gifted poet and playwright whose first works, such as Baal (premiered in 1923), combined lyrical force and moral dissent, especially on the theme of sexuality. Brecht’s plays departed from the aesthetic conventions of melodrama and developed a style called “epic theatre”; he argued that spectators should not be able to identify emotionally with the characters before them but should take a critical view of the action on stage instead. This was not just a visual strategy. It was driven by Brecht’s commitment to Marxism. If audiences identified with the emotional agonies of heroes such as Hamlet or Lear, then the Marxist notion that human nature is not fixed but a product of shifting historical conditions would be undermined.

More here.

Sweet Bread

It is a terrible struggle she tells me,
pulling dough from the bowl. Waking
up every morning for sixty-five years,
over forty next to him. He says you
snore, I offer and she rolls the dough
tighter, twisting it around itself
until the edges are sealed shut.
She drops it in the pan and I shine
the top with egg, ignoring the silence
that rises as we work. When he walks in,
the floor shifts beneath us, old boards heaving.
I know there are things that can’t be fixed.
Know it even stronger as I watch her
slap more dough on the table, as he takes
the empty bowl and washes it without
a word. And later, we eat the bread
in silence, its sweet crust flaking
into pieces too small to taste.
.
by Christine Klocek-Lim
from How to Photograph the Heart
The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009

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Steven Pinker and Juan Manuel Santos in the New York Times:

The peace treaty announced this week between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, marks more than the end of one war. It is a milestone for peace in the Americas and the world.

The 52-year war between the Colombian state and the FARC is the oldest and only armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere, and the last one held over from the Cold War. From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, war — in the classic sense of a violent conflict over governance or territory fought by at least one national army — has disappeared. Although drug-related gang violence in Latin America continues, the extinguishing of political armed conflicts from an entire hemisphere deserves note.

One has only to look back a few decades to see how momentous a change this is. In Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru, as in Colombia, leftist armed forces battled American-backed governments, with deaths mounting into the hundreds of thousands. In Nicaragua, the conflict was the other way around: American-backed rebels fought to overthrow a leftist government. The United States and the Soviet Union poured in support that kept such wars raging. The “dirty war” in Argentina also flowed from a clash of left and right, in which tens of thousands were killed.

More here.

Rachel Feltman in the Washington Post:

Much of the universe is made of dark matter, the unknowable, as-yet-undetected stuff that barely interacts with the “normal” matter around it. In the Milky Way, dark matter outnumbers regular matter by about 5 to 1, and very tiny dwarf galaxies are known to contain even more of the stuff.

But now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy's star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many.

The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the first direct detection of dark matter.

The researchers who found Dragonfly 44 weren't looking for a dark galaxy. Another surprise: They found it using a telescope built of camera parts. The Dragonfly Telephoto Array was built by a group of astronomers at Yale University and the University of Toronto who realized that telephoto lenses — so often used for nature photography and sporting events — were well-suited for spotting the kind of large, dim objects that pose problems for typical telescopes.

More here.

Frans de Waal in Euromind:

Despite having lived and worked continuously in the USA for the past 35 years, I still feel very European. I am of Dutch origin, married to a French woman, and visit Europe several times a year.

I look at all European citizens as having a shared background, a shared history, a shared culture, and definitely shared interests. Even though all of us speak different languages (I am fluent in four), and have different cuisines, we obviously have a common cultural heritage dating back many centuries. My own country has been under Roman, Spanish, French, and German rule, and even though we generally don’t consider these invasions in a positive light, they mean that we have always been connected to and influenced by other nations. This is true all over Europe.

It has hard to formulate what makes me feel European rather than American, but one simple example is the structure of the cities. In Europe, cities are compact, with narrow streets, arranged around a square and a large church or cathedral. We all take this for granted but it is radically different from many American cities, and also from Asian ones. The way people interact, the music they prefer, the way they dress, in all of these aspects I still feel most at home in Europe.

More here.

Anna Katherina Schaffner at the Times Literary Supplement:

“Klaus Mann was six times jinxed. A son of Thomas Mann. A homeless exile. A drug addict. A writer unable to publish in his native tongue. A not-so-gay gay. Someone haunted all his life by a fascination with death.” Thus opens Frederic Spotts’s elegantly written and deeply moving biography of the writer Klaus Mann. These lines set the tone for the exploration of the tragic life of a courageously uncompromising and truly European intellectual, who, born in 1906 and living through the darkest period of European history, was plagued by both political and personal calamities in almost equal measure. Spotts leaves the reader in no doubt that Thomas’s coldly judgemental attitude towards his eldest son was a root cause of many of Klaus’s problems.

In his diary, Klaus complained that his father’s “general lack of interest in human beings is especially strong toward me”. If there was indeed such a lack of interest, it certainly did not prevent the harshest of judgements, for, in his own diary, Thomas pronounced of Klaus: “The boy is morally and intellectually not intact”. In his novella Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925), a thinly disguised family portrait, Thomas describes the character modelled on Klaus as someone who “knows nothing, can do nothing and thinks only how to play the clown and lacks even the talent for that”. There is little if any evidence to suggest that Klaus’s remarkable achievements later in life altered his father’s damning verdict on him.

more here.

Kate Clanchy at The Guardian:

This is a short novel narrated by a foetus who is also Hamlet. “Bounded in the nutshell” of (Ger-) Trudy’s womb he listens, with a cervix for an arras, to her planning to murder his father, John Cairncross, in partnership with her lover, John’s brother Claude (-ius). The state of Denmark is being played by a decaying, but entire, Georgian town house in central London, based surely on the legendarily unimproved Islington home of the poet Hugo Williams. It has been inherited by hopeless poetry publisher John, is coveted by property developer Claude and is worth a cool £8m. Though the narrator at one point has a gorgeous and explicitly Elizabethan dream – “A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the English poor in the rutted lanes” – the year is mostly 2015.

This may not sound like an entirely promising read: a talking foetus could be an unconvincing or at least tiresomely limited narrator, and updatings of Shakespeare often strain at their own seams. From the start, though, McEwan manages to establish both the groggy, gripping parameters of the uterus – “My limbs are folded hard across my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit. I wear my mother like a tight-fitting cap” – and that this foetus, Hamlet-style, is “king of infinite space”. He sounds rather like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’sLolita; the same grand, elegiac tone; the same infinite knowledge of history and English poetry, the same covetous, obsessively physical eye.

more here.

Hal Hlavinka at The Quarterly Conversation:

We meet many people across Clébert’s wanderings, and his characters (for that’s what they become) parade past the reader, page by page, each pausing only for a brief second before plunging back into the seedy tableau. While out measuring rooms for an architect, our hero is “struck by the odor of soil and dead leaves” and encounters a mushroom farm inside of an apartment. “I would have had to clamber in damp darkness,” he writes, “over little mounds of earth on which white spots were breaking out.” On the Buttes-Chaumont he discovers an artist’s workshop filled with uncaged birds, “an immense glassed-in space that stunned you with cries and colors.” A page later, on assignment in the Saint-Pierre neighborhood, we’re in an apartment-turned-serpentarium, with snakes nestled in every nook: “They were everywhere, slithering under tables and around the feet of chairs. . . . I left with my tail between my legs, ignoring the gentleman’s polite and soothing explanations.” Friends and acquaintances are equally mad. There’s Jérôme, the grave robber, “the world’s expert on the topography and benefits of Paris’s cemeteries,” who engages in the business of “headhunting.” Inside a crypt, a motivated headhunter need only avoid the caretaker, hold his breath, “grasp hold of a head by thrusting a finger and thumb into the eye sockets, twist sharply so as to snap the uppermost vertebra, and toss each skull into [a] sack.” The heads, for their part, become curios to sell to discerning bidders. And Monsieur Claude, aka Mr. Numb, “who sticks needles, pins or nails into a part of his anatomy chosen by any enthusiast who pays a round.” Only for those paying a premium does Mr. Numb reserve his best: “[He] will adorn the knob of his penis with a tight sheaf of tiny needles, a spectacle prone to make young tourists blanch and choke.” The case of Marceau and his two wives is particularly emblematic of the carefree vagabond cast. After Marceau goes missing during a multi-day bender, the police discover a corpse, which wife number one (the one and only, at the time) identifies as her husband’s. The woman grieves over free drinks from anyone who will pay their respects, until one morning when Marceau returns from the dead with wife number two in hand, “this to the outrage of the other one, who bombarded him with curses.” The polygamist remains officially deceased: “[The police] struck Marceau off the roster of the living and registered his death as accidental. End of story.”

more here.

Carrie Arnold in Nautilus:

In their 2015 book The Truth About Exercise Addiction: Understanding the Dark Side of Thinspiration, author Katherine Schreiber and Jacksonville University professor of kinesiology Heather Hausenblas write, “Exercise addicts experience physical activity as both a coping mechanism and a compulsion without which they feel they cannot survive.” People generally feel better both physically and mentally after working out. But for exercise addicts, that positive surge—similar to the ones gambling- and sex-addicts feel—is substantially higher: It can give athletes and non-athletes alike a powerful buzz of pleasure that can leave them coming back for more, ultimately leading to a life tethered to the treadmill, so to speak, and serious medical consequences, including fatigue, overuse injuries (stress fractures, pulled muscles, tendonitis), infections that won’t go away, electrolyte imbalances, cardiac issues, and, perhaps paradoxically, listlessness. To see this play out, we may need to look no further than the Olympics. Exercise addiction seems to increase, at least among athletes, the more elite they become, according to a study, published last month, in Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Tim Brewerton, a physician at the Medical University of South Carolina, agrees. “We venerate Olympic athletes almost like gods. We give them lots of praise and attention, but if we knew anything of what their lives were like…” he says, trailing off. “I think many of them likely experience some type of exercise addiction—they are training constantly for years.”

What makes exercise addiction a thorny phenomenon to study, though, is its complicated relationship with eating disorders. In the 1800s, for example, physicians treating young women with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and persistent weight loss, often noted their extreme restlessness and need to constantly move about. And in a 1984 study, a group of physicians had noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that considerably dedicated male runners, or “obligatory runners,” shared many of the same psychological traits as young women with anorexia, such as perfectionism and depression, although to a lesser degree.

More here.

Steve Silberman in The New York Times:

In the late 1930s, Charles Bradley, the director of a home for “troublesome” children in Rhode Island, had a problem. The field of neuroscience was still in its infancy, and one of the few techniques available to allow psychiatrists like Bradley to ponder the role of the brain in emotional disorders was a procedure that required replacing a volume of cerebrospinal fluid in the patient’s skull with air. This painstaking process allowed any irregularities to stand out clearly in X-ray images, but many patients suffered excruciating headaches that lasted for weeks afterward. Meanwhile, a pharmaceutical company called Smith, Kline & French was facing a different sort of problem. The firm had recently acquired the rights to sell a powerful stimulant then called “benzedrine sulfate” and was trying to create a market for it. Toward that end, the company made quantities of the drug available at no cost to doctors who volunteered to run studies on it. Bradley was a firm believer that struggling children needed more than a handful of pills to get better; they also needed psychosocial therapy and the calming and supportive environment that he provided at the home. But he took up the company’s offer, hoping that the drug might eliminate his patients’ headaches.

It did not. But the Benzedrine did have an effect that was right in line with Smith, Kline & French’s aspirations for its new product: The drug seemed to boost the children’s eagerness to learn in the classroom while making them more amenable to following the rules. The drug seemed to calm the children’s mood swings, allowing them to become, in the words of their therapists, more “attentive” and “serious,” able to complete their schoolwork and behave. Bradley was amazed that Benzedrine, a forerunner of Ritalin and Adderall, was such a great normalizer, turning typically hard-to-manage kids into models of complicity and decorum. But even after marveling at the effects of the drug, he maintained that medication should be considered for children only in addition to other forms of therapy. Bradley’s research was ignored for a couple of decades as psychoanalysis became dominant in the United States.But his discoveries laid the foundation for one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns in history, which succeeded not only in helping to transform the nascent drug industry into the multinational juggernaut known as Big Pharma, but in convincing parents, physicians and ­public health officials that 15 percent of American schoolchildren are sick enough that they would require powerful medication just to get through the day.

More here.

Work

my son, who's seventeen years old,
rides his bicycle to work in the heat and rain, and his
legs and arms are bony and muscled

old men love to send them into the smoke
and trenches, into the knowledge of how easily bodies and
courtesies come apart — we did it by jesus we did it,
now you'll see

and for eight hours scrubs the burnt paint
off what he describes as iron grapefruit halves, assisting
in the trickling together of parts from the continent's
corners, some race of machines assembling itself in
Karnac, Ohio, or Oshawa, my son labouring obscurely at
the birth

handsome as never again, just getting his beard

comes home black with grease, proud and marvelling;
the other men, he says, don't talk about sports or politics,
they talk about Ed's wife who's having her first baby,
Ed says the baby's already dropped,

growing up in the country of my past, he'd often
had the shrines pointed out to him, the jobs from grade six
on (35 cents an hour to start), heaving crates of
rotten fruit, green bales of alfalfa, planks into the
planer, planks into the planer

the rubber gloves they give him are like artificial
hands

working the wire brush, water spills
into his steel shoes, and the men who pass say that looks
like fun

saving

lies in bed in the dark
smiling, sensing his growing invisible shape, his stories
building

by John Steffler
from Canadian Poetry Online

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3QD's own Namit Arora in Shunya's Notes:

Indian-Americans, a group that includes me, are one of the most visible and successful global diasporas. With the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in the US, we’re often called a ‘model minority’ in America. But what can be said about our politics as a group?

Historically, we Indian-Americans—and here I’m speaking primarily of Indians who’re naturalized US citizens or permanent residents—have overwhelmingly supported the Democrats, more so than any other large Asian group in the US. Over 80 percent of us voted for Barack Obama in 2008, second only to black Americans. This year, less than ten percent might vote for the Republican Donald Trump. Curiously, contrary to what one might expect, success and wealth haven’t driven most of us to vote for Republicans, who’re seen as friendlier to the rich. What can explain this? Is it because we are remarkably liberal as a group?

Consider some more facts. We Indian-Americans overwhelmingly support Narendra Modi too, at a rate much higher than among Indians in India. We host rockstar receptions for him in arenas like Madison Square Garden in NY and SAP Center in Silicon Valley. This despite Trump and Modi being similar in so many ways. They’re both authoritarian and anti-democratic; anti-Muslim; anti-LGBT; steeped in nationalism (white/Hindu); allied with far-right groups (KKK/RSS); economically conservative; anti-labor union; thuggish (think Amit Shah); big on defense spending; and so on. Even if we concede that Trump is worse than Modi—though some will disagree—their proximities are undeniable. So why do we Indian-Americans despise Trump yet love Modi? What’s behind this apparent paradox?

More here.

Liz Stinson in Wired:

You share more than a zip code with your neighbors. You also share bugs—microscopic organisms (think bacteria, fungi, and viruses). These microbial communities are called microbiomes, and they seem to have an impact on everything from digestion to allergies. They also happen to be everywhere—from your intestines to your phone’s screen to the sidewalk beneath your feet.

But those bugs are tough to understand, because you can’t see them. “There’s like this whole other invisible planet,” says Kevin Slavin, head of the Playful Systems group at the MIT Media Lab. In a new project called Holobiont Urbanism, Slavin’s team is working to sample, sequence, and visualize the microbial makeup of New York City. Some of the team members are designers, engineers, and biologists.

Some of them are bees.

Bees typically forage no more than a mile and a half from their hives, but in their expeditions they come into contact with the microbes in their range, and those microbes stick. Slavin’s group worked with apiarists to build beehives with removable trays at the bottom that collect detritus from the bees, like a crumb-catcher in a toaster.

More here.