Chris Wilson in Time Magazine:

When it comes to political warfare, the Republican party has the superior ground game—literally. “If land could vote, the Republicans would do a lot better,” says Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, who dabbles in election forecasting when not studying time travel or general relativity. A glance at the map of any recent presidential contest confirms this. Due to their dominance in large, low-population states like Wyoming and the Dakotas, Republicans appear visually to command a dominant lead even when the actual results are very close. To remedy that problem, Gott and fellow cosmologist Wes Colley invented a map that visualizes each state with blocks according to the number of electoral votes it receives, such that the area of red and blue exactly corresponds to the results of the electoral college. TIME developed an interactive version of this map below that you can populate with a variety of different forecasts for the 2016 election.

In 2004, the method that Colley and Gott developed correctly predicted every state except Hawaii, where only two polls were conducted. In 2008, they missed three states and one electoral vote in Nebraska, one of two states that splits its electoral votes by congressional district. (The other is Maine, which is why the above map specifies district numbers for those two states.) In 2012, they only missed Florida. This year, Gott points out, Clinton has a “firewall” of 273 electoral votes—three more than she needs to win—in which she has won nearly every poll conducted. The most vulnerable of those is Colorado, according to his method. So don’t be surprised if you see her heading there in the coming weeks. Virtually every forecaster has Clinton with better-than-even odds of winning, but that gap is narrowing. And there are many more polls to come.

More here.

James Tozer in The Economist:

Most people would happily work for fewer hours each week. But data from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development show that having more downtime is no guarantee of feeling more at ease. Countries with longer working hours – which tend to be poorer places – generally have fewer reported cases of stress-related illness. Countries with shorter working hours – mostly richer places – typically have high incidences of anxiety and depression. Long holidays aren’t a guarantee of contentment either. The French and Finnish governments require workers to be given six weeks’ paid leave a year, yet those countries have high levels of reported stress.

These data are put together by the WHO, which tallies cases in each country, weighted by severity. The most stressed nation in this sample is the Netherlands. In 2012, anxiety and depression cost 30- to 60-year-old Dutch adults about 32 years of healthy life per 1,000 people. Measured in those terms, the burden was greater than stomach, colon, liver, pancreatic, lung, breast and cervical cancers put together. Mexican workers, by contrast, clock 60% more hours at work, and are a third as wealthy – yet are diagnosed with psychological problems half as often as the Dutch.

More here.

After Lorca

—for M. Marti

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.
When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a
wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it's crazy.

by Robert Creeley
from Contemporary American Poetry
Penguin Books, 1962
.

Julian Barnes in The Guardian:

I was an unconfident and late-arriving first novelist. Metroland was published when I was 34, and I’d been working on it for seven or eight years. I’d put it in a drawer for long periods, shown it to friends with mixed response, worried about it, liked it, despised it. Some first novelists behave as if the world has been waiting to hear from them, and occasionally this is the case: the world doeswant to hear this new story, told by this new voice, in this new manner. I had no such self-belief. Besides, I’d been reading serious fiction for nearly 20 years: what made me think I could add anything to the literary world’s store of wisdom, human insight and technical craft? Neither did I feel that this was some necessary, if meagre, first step for me: learn with and from my first novel, grow in confidence, then “become a novelist”. I was entirely lacking in ideas for future books; indeed, perhaps I wanted to “be a novelist” mainly in the sense of “having published a single novel”.

While I was drafting and redrafting Metroland, I showed it to the only two writer friends I had. Both were poets, which might have been a mistake. One was substantially evasive, while telling a mutual friend that I should suppress the book now, as otherwise I’d “regret it” later. The other told me I ought to rereadGreat Expectations and “put in a wanking scene”. I didn’t confess that I could hardly reread Great Expectations as I hadn’t ever read it in the first place; nor did I put in a wanking scene. So at least I had a certain stubbornness, which is a necessary part of being a writer.

I had a theoretical agent; but the only contract she had so far drawn up – for a new edition of Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to be co-edited by me and the “wanking” poet – had petered out as a project almost immediately.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

Physics, unlike biology or geology, was not considered to be a historical science until now. Physicists have prided themselves on being able to derive the vast bulk of phenomena in the universe from first principles. Biology – and chemistry, as a matter of fact – are different. Chance and contingency play an important role in the evolution of chemical and biological phenomena, so beyond a point scientists in these disciplines have realized that it's pointless to ask questions about origins and first principles.

The overriding “fundamental law” in biology is that of evolution by natural selection. But while the law is fundamental on a macro scale, its details at a micro level don't lend themselves to real explanation in terms of origins. For instance the bacterial flagellum is a product of accident and time, a key structure involved in locomotion, feeding and flight that resulted from gene sharing, recombination and selective survival of certain species spread over billions of years. While one can speculate, it is impossible to know for certain all the details that led to the evolution of this marvelous molecular motor. Thus biologists have accepted history and accident as integral parts of their fundamental laws.

Physics was different until now.

More here.

Abheet Singh Sethi in the Hindustan Times:

If India and Pakistan fought a war detonating 100 nuclear warheads (around half of their combined arsenal), each equivalent to a 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb, more than 21 million people will be directly killed, about half the world’s protective ozone layer would be destroyed, and a “nuclear winter” would cripple the monsoons and agriculture worldwide.

As the Indian Army reports striking terrorist camps across the border, and a member of Parliament (MP) of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) urges a nuclear attack and the Pakistan defence minister threatens to “annihilate” India in return, these projections, made by researchers from three US universities in 2007, are a reminder of the costs of nuclear war.

More here.

Tomoé Hill at The Quarterly Review:

To say that Pascal Quignard’s words are a meditation or an exploration is too simplistic—there is a philosophical stream of consciousness in his writing that has a realism both enlightened and carnal which attempts to grasp the essence of human nature in a handful of grand themes. While these are revisited (and often together), the nuances of the subjects in which he finds connections ensure that an originality is retained: sex, whether the act itself or the analysis of its echoing effects on the psyche; art; mythology; books; and death, as found in Sex and Terror, The Sexual Night, and The Roving Shadows, among others. These are his themes, and memory is always present in what links them. Reading Quignard, one is struck by the feeling that they are witnessing someone transcribing his thoughts, pure and fresh as they form in the mind, or to use a fitting mythological connection, Athena springing from the head of Zeus.

A Terrace in Rome, his fictional tale of the engraver Meaume, once handsome until disfigured by an acid attack to the face by the fiancé of his lover Nanni, does not stray from Quignard’s singular view of people. The result is a seamless blending of real and fantasy. His signature fragmentary reflections come together to create a character so convincing that one could be excused from wondering if Meaume was in fact a real engraver of the seventeenth century.

more here.

Anthony Doerr at the New York Times:

“Time Travel” begins at what Gleick believes is the beginning, H.G. Wells’s 1895 “The Time Machine.” “When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine,” Gleick argues, “he also invented a new mode of thought.” Western science was undergoing a sea change at the same time, of course: Lyell and Darwin had exploded older conceptions of the age of the Earth, locomotives and telegraphs were transforming space, and Einstein was about to punch a major hole in Newton’s theory of absolute time. Meanwhile, in literature, Marcel Proust was using memory to complicate more straightforward storytelling, and it wouldn’t be long before modernists like Woolf and Joyce were compressing, dilating, and folding time in half.

But according to Gleick, Wells was the first to marry the words “time” and “travel,” and in doing so, “The Time Machine” initiated a kind of butterfly effect, the novel fluttering with each passing decade through the souls of more and more storytellers, who in turn influenced more and more of their successors, forking from Robert Heinlein to Jorge Luis ­Borges to Isaac Asimov to William Gibson to Woody Allen to Kate Atkinson to Charles Yu, until, to use Bradbury’s metaphor, the gigantic dominoes fell. Nowadays, Gleick writes, “Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children’s cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, doorways and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans and police boxes.”

more here.

Mary Beard at The Guardian:

In February 1969, I watched the first episode of Kenneth Clark’s famous TV series, Civilisation. I can still picture him, standing on barbaric northern headlands, explaining that “our” civilisation had barely survived the collapse of the Roman empire. We had come through only “by the skin of our teeth”. It was an incongruous scene: Clark – Winchester and Oxford educated, connoisseur and collector, former director of the National Gallery – looked every inch the toff as he walked in his brogues and Burberry over the battered countryside, where wellington boots and a woolly would have been more appropriate. But I tingled slightly as he repeated that phrase, “by the skin of our teeth”. I was just 14, and it had never struck me that “civilisation” might be such a fragile thing, still less that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.

A few years later, now more a devotee of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (a TV series and book devised in hostile reaction to Civilisation), I began to feel decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the “great man” approach to art history – one damn genius after the next – that ran through the series. I was very doubtful, too, about the image of wild barbarians at the gates that Clark conjured up in that first episode: it was as crude an oversimplification of barbarism as his dreamy notion of ideal perfection was an oversimplification of classicism. Nonetheless,Civilisation had opened my eyes, and those of many others; not only visually stunning, it had shown us that there was something in art and architecture that was worth talking, and arguing, about.

more here.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

One of the novels I love is Peter Hobbs’s In the Orchard, the Swallows. It’s set entirely in the north of Pakistan – and is beautiful and true (a better word than “authentic”). If anyone tried to dispute Hobbs’s right to have written that book (and I should say, every Pakistani I know who has read it has expressed only admiration), I would be the first in line to defend him, and it. But the point about the book is that it’s wonderfully and sensitively written; it has no interest in peddling stereotypes, or making great claims about the place in which it’s located; there is no whiff of arrogance or entitlement. I don’t know what went on in Hobbs’s mind when he wrote it but I feel fairly confident it wasn’t: “How dare anyone dispute my right to write this?”

In fact, if you do start with an attitude that fails to understand that there are very powerful reasons for people to dispute your right to tell a story – reasons that stem from historical, political or social imbalances, you’ve already failed to understand the place and people who you purport to want to write about. That’s a pretty lousy beginning, and I wouldn’t want to read the fiction that comes out of it. Far better to understand the reasons, and perhaps even use those reasons as a way into character and story. So by all means, let’s have a broadening of the imagination. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the patch of ground on which you live – but it would be helpful if you looked at who else is on that patch of ground with you. To continually return to the same subset of humanity, and declare that there is no one else who imaginatively engages you or who you know how to imaginatively engage with, strikes me as one of the most dispiriting things a writer can say. In short: don’t set boundaries around your imagination. But don’t be lazy or presumptuous in your writing either. Not for reasons of “political correctness”, but for reasons of good fiction.

More here.

Robert Draper in The New York Times:

When Trump declared his candidacy in June 2015, the part of his announcement speech that most clearly foreshadowed the campaign to come had to do with immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he told the crowd at Trump Tower. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” The line struck Sykes as awfully familiar when he heard it. A month before, he had run a segment with Ann Coulter, who had just published her 11th book, an anti-immigration screed titled “¡Adios, America!” Sykes was well aware of Coulter’s views, but he was taken aback when she began a riff on Mexican rapists surging into the United States (a subject that takes up an entire chapter of “¡Adios, America!”). “I remember looking at my producer and going, ‘Wow, this is rather extraordinary,’ ” he told me. “When Trump used that line, I instantly recognized it as Ann Coulter’s.”

In fact, Corey Lewandowski had reached out to Coulter for advice in the run-up to Trump’s announcement speech. The address Trump delivered on June 16 bore no resemblance to his prepared text, which contained a mere two sentences about immigration. Instead, he ad-libbed what Coulter today calls “the Mexican rapist speech that won my heart.” When Trump’s remarks provoked fury, Lewandowski called Coulter for backup. Three days later, she went on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” and, amid shrieks of laughter from the audience, predicted that Trump was the Republican candidate most likely to win the presidency. One evening this past March, Trump received Coulter at Mar-a-Lago, his estate-turned-club in Palm Beach. Though in recent years the two had developed a rapport on Twitter, she had met him face to face only once before he declared his candidacy, a lunch date at Trump Tower in 2011. Over lunch, Trump gave Coulter the impression that he had read her books. He also gave her a few items from his wife’s line of costume jewelry and told Coulter, who keeps a house in Palm Beach, that she was welcome to use the pool at Mar-a-Lago anytime.

…Still, she has become the Trump campaign’s most unrepentant brawler. When Khzir Khan, the Pakistani-American father of a U.S. Army captain who was killed in combat in Iraq, spoke critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention, Coulter wrote on Twitter: “You know what this convention really needed: An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria[sic].” That tweet provoked disgust from fellow conservatives, among them Erick Erickson, who tweeted: “What a terrible thing to say about a man whose son died for this country.”

More here.

For My Sister Molly
Who In The Fifties

Once made a fairy rooster from
Mashed potatoes
Whose eyes I forget
But green onions were his tail
And his two legs were carrot sticks
A tomato slice his crown.
Who came home on vacation
When the sun was hot
and cooked
and cleaned
And minded least of all
The children’s questions
A million or more
Pouring in on her
Who had been to school
And knew (and told us too) that certain
Words were no longer good
And taught me not to say us for we
No matter what “Sonny said” up the
road.

For My Sister Molly Who In The Fifties

Knew Hamlet well and read into the night
And coached me in my songs of Africa
A continent I never knew
But learned to love
Because “they” she said could carry
A tune
And spoke in accents never heard
In Eatonton.
Who read from Prose and Poetry
And loved to read “Sam McGee from Tennessee”
On nights the fire was burning low
And Christmas wrapped in angel hair
And I for one prayed for snow.

Read more »

Edmund White in the Times Literary Supplement:

I never met Vladimir Nabokov face to face, though I exchanged phone calls and letters with him. My psychiatrist encouraged me to visit him in Switzerland, but I was too afraid that I would quickly sabotage close-up whatever good impression I might have managed to create long-distance. As an editor at the American Saturday Review, I had orchestrated a cover story dedicated to Nabokov on the publication of his novel Transparent Things (1972), and sent Antony Armstrong-Jones to take a portfolio of photographs, including one that showed the novelist dressed as Borges in a poncho. (My boss had wanted to send a great artistic photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, but I believed Nabokov would be more amused by Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, who had been married to Princess Margaret since 1960 and was, I guessed, more polished than the austere French genius. The two men got along famously.) Nabokov wrote a short piece on “Inspiration” for us, which I illustrated with a reproduction of “Pygmalion and Galatea” by Jean-Léon Gérôme, a big bad nineteenth-century painting of the infatuated sculptor embracing his creation as she turns from marble to flesh, feet last.

A number of tiny errors, typographic and even grammatical, had crept into Nabokov’s text. I had the copy set twice in print, my version and his, and sent them both by overnight express. He wired back, “your version perfect”. In the Nabokov “number” I included rather grudging essays by Joyce Carol Oates, William Gass and Joseph McElroy – and of course my own ecstatic response.

More here.

A new study looks at rates of lethal violence across a thousand species to better understand the evolutionary origins of humanity’s own inhumanity.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Which mammal is most likely to be murdered by its own kind? It’s certainly not humans—not even close. Nor is it a top predator like the grey wolf or lion, although those at least are #11 and #9 in the league table of murdery mammals. No, according to a study led by José María Gómez from the University of Granada, the top spot goes to… the meerkat. These endearing black-masked creatures might be famous for their cooperative ways, but they kill each other at a rate that makes man’s inhumanity to man look meek. Almost one in five meerkats, mostly youngsters, lose their lives at the paws and jaws of their peers.

Gómez’s study is the first thorough survey of violence in the mammal world, collating data on more than a thousand species. It clearly shows that we humans are not alone in our capacity to kill each other. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, have been known to wage brutal war, but even apparently peaceful creatures take each other’s lives. When ranked according to their rates of lethal violence, ground squirrels, wild horses, gazelle, and deer all feature in the top 50. So do long-tailed chinchillas, which kill each other more frequently than tigers and bears do.

The point of this macabre census was to understand the origins of our own behavior.

More here.

Michael Chabon in GQ:

Half an hour late, and just ahead of his minder—he was always a step ahead of his ponderous old minder—Abraham Chabon sauntered into the room where the designer Virgil Abloh was giving a private preview of Off-White's collection for spring-summer 2017 to a small group of reporters, editorial directors, and fashion buyers. Abe's manner was self-conscious, his cheeks flushed, but if his movements were a bit constrained they had an undeniable grace. Saunter was really the only word for it.

“Now, this dude here, that's what I'm talking about,” Abloh said, smiling at Abe from the center of the room, the attic of an old photo studio in the Latin Quarter: crisscrossing steel beams, wide pine floorboards, every surface radiant with whitewash except for the gridded slant of windows in the steep-pitched roof. From their folding chairs opposite the atelier windows, the buyers and editors turned to see what Abloh was talking about. So did the four male models lined up and slouching artfully in front of the people in the folding chairs. By the time his minder caught up with him, everyone in the room seemed to have their eyes on Abe. Prompt people never get to make grand entrances.

“Come over here,” Abloh said. Abloh was a big man, solidly built, an architect by training who had emerged in the early 2000s from the fizzy intellectual nimbus—one-third hip-hop, one-third hustle, one-third McLarenesque inside joke—surrounding fellow Chicagoan Kanye West. Abloh had made a name for himself in fashion along the avant-garde perimeter of streetwear, screen-printing diagonal crosswalk stripes and cryptic mottoes onto blank Champion tees and dead-stock Rugby Ralph Lauren flannel shirts that he re-sold for dizzying multiples of their original retail price. Abe thought Virgil Abloh was “lit,” the highest accolade he could award to anyone or anything. “Come right on over here. Hey, look at you!”

Abe went on over, sleeves rolled, hands thrust into his pockets, tails of his pale gray-green shirt freshly tucked into the waist of his gray twill trousers.

More here.

These are taken from NPR's transcript of the first presidential debate. Only newlines have been inserted.

From Geoff Greer's website:

Travel

I just left Detroit and
I just left Philadelphia and
I just –
you know,
you’ve seen me,
I been all over the place.
You decided to stay home,
and that’s OK.
But I will tell you
I’ve been all over

More here.

Debora MacKenzie in New Scientist:

Try, for a moment, to envisage a world without countries. Imagine a map not divided into neat, coloured patches, each with clear borders, governments, laws. Try to describe anything our society does – trade, travel, science, sport, maintaining peace and security – without mentioning countries. Try to describe yourself: you have a right to at least one nationality, and the right to change it, but not the right to have none.

Those coloured patches on the map may be democracies, dictatorships or too chaotic to be either, but virtually all claim to be one thing: a nation state, the sovereign territory of a “people” or nation who are entitled to self-determination within a self-governing state. So says the United Nations, which now numbers 193 of them.

And more and more peoples want their own state, from Scots voting for independence to jihadis declaring a new state in the Middle East. Many of the big news stories of the day, from conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to rows over immigration and membership of the European Union, are linked to nation states in some way.

Even as our economies globalise, nation states remain the planet’s premier political institution. Large votes for nationalist parties in this year’s EU elections prove nationalism remains alive – even as the EU tries to transcend it.

Yet there is a growing feeling among economists, political scientists and even national governments that the nation state is not necessarily the best scale on which to run our affairs. We must manage vital matters like food supply and climate on a global scale, yet national agendas repeatedly trump the global good. At a smaller scale, city and regional administrations often seem to serve people better than national governments.

How, then, should we organise ourselves? Is the nation state a natural, inevitable institution? Or is it a dangerous anachronism in a globalised world?

More here.