Carina del Valle Schorske at The Point:

Melancholy is a word that has fallen out of favor for describing the condition we now call depression. The fact that our language has changed, without the earlier word disappearing completely, indicates that we are still able to make use of both. Like most synonyms, melancholy and depression are not in fact synonymous, but slips of the tongue in a language we’re still learning. We keep trying to specify our experience of mental suffering, but all our new words constellate instead of consolidate meaning. In the essay collectionUnder the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag writes about her intellectual heroes, who all suffer solitude, ill temper, existential distress and creative block. They all breathe black air. According to her diagnostic model, they are all “melancholics.” Sontag doesn’t use the word depression in the company of her role models, but elsewhere she draws what seems like an easy distinction: “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” But what are the charms of melancholy?

There is a long history in Western thought associating melancholy and genius. We have van Gogh with his severed ear. We have Montaigne confessing, “It was a melancholy humor … which first put into my head this raving concern with writing.” We have Nina Simone and Kurt Cobain, Thelonious Monk and David Foster Wallace.

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Jane Yong Kim at Bookforum:

“I was born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye,” an unnamed female narrator states at the outset of Guadalupe Nettel’s autobiographical novel, The Body Where I Was Born. The spot, she describes, “stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain.” And so, “in the same way an unventilated tunnel slowly fills with mold, the pupillary blockage led to the growth of a cataract.”

Thus begins a remarkable exploration into sight and the perceptions of childhood. Nettel, a talented Mexican writer who has been named one of the Bogota 39—one of the most promising young Latin-American writers under the age of thirty-nine—has called the novel’s narrator “I, myself.”

From the vantage of adulthood, on a psychoanalyst’s couch, she peers into her past, relitigating the bounds of normativity, the expectations of family, and the limits of medical science. She recounts how doctors, unable to repair the cataract, prescribed a torturous treatment that her parents took up with a passion, which involved subjecting her “to a series of annoying exercises to develop, as much as possible, the defective eye.” To strengthen it, a patch—a piece of flesh-colored cloth with sticky, adhesive edges—was placed over her other eye, making the world a mess of sounds and smells. Wearing the patch, she had to insert her head daily into a small black box with moving images of animals, a process she describes as agonizing.

more here.

Aseem Shrivastava in Caravan:

Around two years ago, on 25 August 2013, my mother, a loyal reader of Jansatta—a Hindi daily—asked me to read a small piece in the editorial section of the newspaper. The piece in question was a reprint of an essay originally titled ‘Rajyavaad Aur Samrajyavaad’—“Monarchy and Imperialism”—written by Munshi Premchand, the renowned Hindi novelist. The original essay had been printed in a journal named Swadesh, in 1928. In the essay, Premchand made the argument that imperialism had proved to be no better than monarchy, and that communism might prove to be equally, if not more, dangerous than imperialism. He argued that all the perils of capitalism would also plague communism, perhaps in an even more aggravated form.

…In a few vernacular paragraphs, penned 87 years ago, Premchand depicted the modern world to be, above all, a system of power. He felt that this system was so deep and insidious that everyone was already a devotee of power and domination, and that the subjugation of countless others lower in the hierarchy was a corollary of this contagious habit. Premchand concluded his prescient essay with this paragraph: “In the time of monarchies only one individual was drunk on power. Under imperialism an entire community is consumed with this headiness, and they are capable of anything. All the affluence, all the knowledge and science, all religions and philosophies of the West are narrowed down today to one word: ‘selfishness’, and justice, truth, compassion, grace, rationality—everything is sacrificed at the altar of ‘selfishness.’”

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A complete lack of formal scientific training has not kept Johan Sosa from dabbling with one of the most powerful molecular-biology tools to come along in decades. Sosa has already used CRISPR, a three-year-old technology that makes targeted modifications to DNA, in test-tube experiments. Next week, he hopes to try the method in yeast and, later, in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Hailed for its simplicity and versatility, CRISPR allows scientists to make specific changes to a gene’s sequence more easily than ever before. Researchers have used CRISPR to edit genes in everything from bacteria to human embryos; the technique holds the potential to erase genetic defects from family pedigrees plagued by inherited disease, treat cancer in unprecedented ways or grow human organs in pigs. One researcher has even proposed modifying the elephant genome to produce a cold-adapted replica of the long-extinct woolly mammoth. Such feats are beyond the reach of do-it-yourself (DIY) ‘biohackers’, a growing community of amateur biologists who often work in community laboratories, which typically charge a recurring fee for access to equipment and supplies. But CRISPR itself is not. Driven by an inventive spirit that inspires them to fiddle with yeast to alter the flavour of beer, build art installations out of bacteria or pursue serious basic-research questions, these amateurs cannot wait to try the technique. “It’s, like, the most amazing tool ever,” says Andreas Stürmer, a biohacker and entrepreneur who lives in Dublin. “You could do it in your own home.”

Sosa is an IT consultant from San Jose, California, who took up biohacking as a hobby about three years ago, when he decided that he would like to grow organs — or maybe other body parts — in the lab. At first, he had no idea how unrealistic that goal was. “I just thought you take a bunch of stem cells and add stuff to them,” he says. The challenge of manipulating living cells sank in as he began to read molecular-biology textbooks, attend seminars and teach himself laboratory techniques. He joined the BioCurious community lab in Sunnyvale, California.

More here.

An interview with the poet and writer Wendy S. Walters over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn:

I wanted to talk about your introduction to Multiply/Divide. When I first saw it, I initially talked about it as an essay collection, but then I saw that you divided the pieces into essays, lyric essays, and fiction. Do you generally know, when you sit down to write a piece, what approach you’re going to take?

The thing for me is, the paradox is where the piece starts. You’ll come across something, and you’ll go, “Hmm. Why are these red berries growing on this bush that always produces blueberries?” I think that’s interesting–is it the soil, is it the season, is it pollution? What’s the trigger? The inciting incident often tells me a lot about the form. I tend to think of written works in kind of an architectural way. That comes from writing songs or writing plays. There’s certainly a visual cue from the subject that’s going to suggest to me how I might put a piece together. I’m usually pretty clear on how long the piece is going to be before I start it. I used to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design; I taught there for many years. I think the art students I worked with definitely influenced my process; I’ve also worked with musicians for many years. I had a sculpture student who told me one thing that I thought was brilliant, about carving in stone. He said that his approach to carving in stone was, he picked the piece of stone, and he asked it what was inside of it. His job was to cut away the parts of the stone that were not essential to reveal what was always inside of it. I think of my composition process as pretty similar to that.

More here.

Pumpkin Flower
.
For thirty-three years as a poet
I merrily defined what beauty was.
Each time, without hesitation
I would declare: beauty is like this, or:
this is a betrayal of beauty.
I went crazy over several different kinds
of aesthetic theory.
But beauty was never
in those aesthetic theories.
I was falling asleep
with the light on.
What fear in the days gone by!
From now on I will strictly refrain
from any definitions of beauty!
Define away!
Define away!
As if beauty can ever be defined!
All through the weeks of summer rain
no flowers bloomed on the pumpkin creepers.
Now the rains are over
and at long long last a flower has bloomed,
inside it a bee is quivering,
outside it I am quivering.
Pumpkin flower brimming full of life:
you are true beauty!

by Ko Un
from The Sound of My Waves
Cornell East Asia Series, 1996

Corey Robin over at Crooked Timber:

I’ve spent the past few days reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and posting about it on Facebook. Rather than rewriting those posts as a single piece here, I thought I’d take some screen shots, and share them with some additional commentary. A shout-out to my friend Lizzie Donahue, whose queries to me on our daily walk this morning prompted the last and lengthiest post.

Here’s the first post.

And here’s a short addendum to this post, where I comment further on the theme of education and Coates’s discussion of his time at Howard University.

I say here that breaking with the mytho-poetic view of a heroic African past was the second great trauma of Coates’s life. I should be more precise. I mean disillusionment. But it was a disillusionment that was immensely productive. More than the loss of a specific view of things, the break with black nationalism made Coates suspicious of all master narratives, all collective platforms of totality. As an alternative, he turned to the specificity and concreteness of poetry, “of small hard things,” as he says: “aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars.” And in that specificity “I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power.” The “gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.” This is a writer for whom the struggle to see what is in front of his nose is a lifelong effort, a hard-won right to see things as they are, without mediation or adornment or chastising authority.

More here.

Daniel Goodwin in Scientific American [h/t: Marko Ahtisaari]:

Science urgently needs hackers—hackers in the original, Tech Model Railroad Club of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sense of the word. Their engineering and design skills will be useful, but what is most desirable is the true hacker's resourcefulness, curiosity and appetite for fresh challenges. Particularly in a field like neuroscience, helpers could be invaluable in exploring the daunting wilderness of newly revealed neural networks.

A few pioneers are leading the way. One is H. Sebastian Seung, a professor at the Neuroscience Institute and in the department of computer science at Princeton University. A few years ago he and his collaborators set out to map the retina's neural connections. As they collected an overwhelming mass of electron microscopy data, the question was how they would ever manage to interpret it all. Seung's familiarity with state-of-the-art computing told him that no artificial-intelligence algorithm in existence could possibly handle the task alone.

The solution—then almost unheard of in lab science—was to enlist thousands of human volunteers alongside a state-of-the art AI and harness their collective brainpower. On December 10, 2012, Seung and his team launched the online game EyeWire, in which players score points by helping to improve a neural map.

More here.

Deborah Baker in The Wire:

A year before the first Gulf war, I felt that the pro Soviet/anti Americanism of the Bengalis was more of a salutary practice than a firm conviction, not unlike choosing low fat milk over whole. To someone’s proposition that the CIA had orchestrated the rise of Solidarity and the more recent fall of the Berlin wall, I once replied “you can’t be serious.” This was a mistake. On occasion some inane remark of mine at what I imagined was a friendly dinner party would end up in the society pages accompanied by a snarky comment. This happened more than once. It took me awhile to catch on that I was a subject of suspicion.

During one of these evenings at Tarapada’s house, he suddenly turned and spoke directly to me. He told me that he had known the American poet Allen Ginsberg, that he and his fellow poets had met him in the famed College Street coffeehouse in North Calcutta. Again, the tail end of the thought was lost in an explosion of incomprehensible and fearful sounds finishing in a deadly quiet. I smiled and Tarapada glared.

I had met Allen Ginsberg just once, several years before. He was smaller than I had imagined; his stature further undermined by the folds and cushions of an off white sectional sofa at an upper west side cocktail party. The once rabbinical beard was then trim and graying and there were suede patches on the elbows of his jacket befitting his new position as a professor at Brooklyn College. He carried the weight of his legend lightly, with none of the affectations the young are so quick to discover and disparage. He had kind eyes—one slightly drooping from an illness we had all heard about—behind thick spectacles.

Nearly everyone at the party had a claim on him but any direct approach was made somewhat awkward by the arrangement of furniture. The party took place in one of those storied pre-war classic six apartments, with a book lined hallway running its length, the kitchen at one end and a living room and its sofa at the other. Just being in an owner occupied apartment back then gave me an outsider’s sense of belonging, a sense of having cracked New York City in some essential way.

More here.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Dan SpeberThe traditional story about reason is that it evolved to help humans see the world more clearly and (thereby) make better decisions. But on that view, some mysteries remain: why is the human brain so biased? Why are we so much better at defending our pre-existing views than at evaluating new ideas objectively?

In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia talks with guest Dan Sperber, professor of cognitive and social sciences, who is famous for advancing an alternate view of reason: that it evolved to help us argue with our fellow humans and convince them that we're right.

Dan Sperber is a social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics. Sperber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

More here.

Ben Dreyfuss in Mother Jones:

Wine is a joke. Whether it's in a bottle, a box, or a boot, it's a stupid drink. Since time immemorial people have consumed wine, but for most of that time people were backwards and lived in fields and didn't know anything. Now we live in the 21st century and drink wine? Lol.

It doesn't even taste good! It tastes ok sometimes, but it's really sugary! It gives you terrible hangovers! It doesn't get you drunk! It ruins your teeth! You know who drinks wine? Europeans.

Americans who drink wine do so because they think they are living in a BBC adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. It feels rich and smart to have thoughts about wine and to order fancy, expensive bottles of wine. You are not smart. You are not fancy. You are not rich—or at least you won't be if you keep pissing your money away on wine.

You drink alcohol because your life is hard and you need a respite from the pain. You drink wine because you have been tricked by society into thinking it is a shibboleth of class and taste.

More here.

Patrick Iber at The Awl:

Through the CCF, as well as by more direct means, the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the closest thing that the U.S. government had to a Ministry of Culture. This left a complex legacy. During the Cold War, it was commonplace to draw the distinction between “totalitarian” and “free” societies by noting that only in the free ones could groups self-organize independently of the state. But many of the groups that made that argument—including the magazines on this left—were often covertly-sponsored instruments of state power, at least in part. Whether or not art and artists would have been more “revolutionary” in the absence of the CIA’s cultural work is a vexed question; what is clear is that that possibility was not a risk they were willing to run. And the magazines remain, giving off an occasional glitter amid the murk left behind by the intersection of power and self-interest. Here are seven of the best, ranked by an opaque and arbitrary combination of quality, impact, and level of CIA involvement.

more here.

Bill McKibben at The New York Review of Books:

It is, therefore, remarkable to actually read the whole document and realize that it is far more important even than that. In fact, it is entirely different from what the media reports might lead one to believe. Instead of a narrow and focused contribution to the climate debate, it turns out to be nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet—an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary. In scope and tone it reminded me instantly of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and of the essays of the great American writer Wendell Berry.1 As with those writers, it’s no use trying to categorize the text as liberal or conservative; there’s some of each, but it goes far deeper than our political labels allow. It’s both caustic and tender, and it should unsettle every nonpoor reader who opens its pages.

The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’…as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.”

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

The chromatic subtleties contribute to an unsettled feeling. A more substantial jolt occurs when you register an over-all spatial distortion: the forms stretch horizontally, so that the length of Anna’s concealed legs, angled and descending to an upholstered footstool, suggests the anatomy of an N.B.A. draft pick. The more you notice of the composition’s economies—such as the cavalier indication of the bentwood chair legs, at the lower right, and, at the lower left, three perfunctory diagonal strokes that do for establishing the plane of the floor—the more happily manipulated you may feel, in ways that, like the camera tricks of a great movie director, excite a sense of the scene as truer to life than truth itself. It took me an hour of inspection to take in an inconspicuous, brownish strip across the bottom of the canvas. Anna’s dress falls smoothly past it and out of the picture. It is the edge of a stage or a platform. Whistler is looking up at his mom.

“Yes, one does like to make one’s mummy just as nice as possible,” Whistler allowed years later, answering friends who praised the speaking likeness of the portrayal. But he was exasperated by sentimental responses to the work. He regularly preached that subject matter should be regarded merely as a pretext for adventures in aestheticism. He said, “To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?”

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John S. Rosenberg in Harvard Magazine:

Imagine a simple triangle diagram of the planet’s population. A fortunate couple of billion upper-income people—in the United States and Canada, much of Europe, Japan, Australia, and prospering urban centers in parts of Asia and Latin America—occupy the apex. The invisible hand of market capitalism supplies this prominent minority with bountiful goods and services. But that leaves a lot of people out. At the very bottom of the pyramid, a billion or more humans live in poverty (on less than $1.25 per person per day), often depending on government programs and charitable aid to subsist.

In between, pointed out V. Kasturi (universally, “Kash”) Rangan, live the low- and low-middle-income majority of mankind: perhaps four billion people who are entering or are already in the cash economy—but barely, with incomes of up to $15 per day. In a conversation, he compared the lives of these people, the base of the pyramid, with those at the top. Because they likely do not own property, and lack rent or tax receipts, they are not bankable, so they turn to exploitative money lenders for credit to stock a shop or start a small business. For medical care, they choose among local healers, vendors of patent nostrums, or queues at public clinics (where it may take a bribe to advance in line). Their labor, often interrupted by those queues or long bus trips to remit cash to a rural family, may be seasonal, itinerant, and legally unprotected. Functioning markets, he noted, imply a level playing field between consumers and producers, but most of these people aren’t getting a remotely fair deal. It is as if the broad base of the pyramid were an alternate universe where familiar rules don’t apply.

More here.

Jan Hoffman in The New York Times:

A common impairment with lifelong consequences turns out to be highly contagious between parent and child, a new study shows. The impairment? Math anxiety. Means of transmission? Homework help. Children of highly math-anxious parents learned less math and were more likely to develop math anxiety themselves, but only when their parents provided frequent help on math homework, according to a study of first- and second-graders, published in Psychological Science. Researchers tested 438 children from 29 public and private schools in three Midwestern states for math ability as well as math anxiety, at the beginning and end of the school year. Their parents completed questionnaires about math anxiety, and about how often they helped their children with homework.

So much for good intentions. The more the math-anxious parents tried to work with their children, the worse their children did in math, slipping more than a third of a grade level behind their peers. And the children’s weaker math achievements increased their nascent math anxiety. “The parents are not out to sabotage their kids,” said Sian L. Beilock, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Chicago and the author of “Choke,” about anxiety and performance. “But we have to ensure their input is productive. They need to have an awareness of their own math anxiety and that what you say is important.” For example, she said, comforting a homework-distressed child, by saying, “ ‘I’m not a math person either, and that’s O.K.,’ is not a good message to convey.”

More here.

From a Balcony

The sun is an orange from the Peloponnese
staining clouds and stuccoed walls,

sailboats tacking out to sea.
Damson shapes chase light from under vines;

shadows grope their way,
thick arabesques of lace furrowed at the frame.

Hills are a smoke-stained fresco flaking,
rooftops shrill as pomegranate seeds.

Poplars are the spears of long-dead warriors
sprouted from a rill of dragon’s teeth.

Rising from that faded terracotta dome
come the curling throaty notes

of evening mass below, swelling in
and out of polyphony like a weaver’s skilful woof

their path the disappearing smoke
dragged from a censer’s golden arc.

Far across this dim intaglio
a white cat pads along a cooling lintel stone.

Only the distant thrum of a scooter
navigating narrow roads.
.

by Sarah Howe
from A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia
Tall-lighthouse, Luton, 2009

David Noonan. White Rabbit, 2013.

Silk screen on linen collage.

More here, here, and here.