Christopher Schaberg in 3:AM Magazine:

1. There is a clever scene in the closing minutes of James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, when David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) is out in his driveway scraping snow and ice off his Honda Civic, and David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) furtively takes last-minute notes as he makes his final observations around Wallace’s frumpy home. At one point Lipsky enters a nearly pitch black room, and we see a dim ray of light wash over Wallace’s writing desk: we get a glimpse of a well-used personal computer, a notepad and pen, bookshelves against the wall…. It is the wish image of a writer’s sacred den, a domestic shrine that emanates the residual aura of the Author at work. It strikes me that this is one of the things some viewers want from this movie, and maybe from David Foster Wallace in general: the architectural plans, the supply list and tools, for writing—for really being a certain kind of writer. Of course it’s just a fleeting glimpse, and we know the movie is wrapping up at this point, soon to fade out.

2. I saw the film on a Saturday morning in New York City the day after it opened. The theater wasn’t crowded at all; the vibe was mellow and subdued. I chuckled several times throughout the film, but I didn’t hear anyone else laughing. The experience was like sipping warm Earl Grey tea while someone tells you a long and sometimes unintentionally funny story in a comfortable if awkward living room. I watched the movie with a former student of mine who now lives in the city. This student is working hard to become a writer—I mean to really be a full-time writer, and I sincerely believe he has what it takes. Just two nights before, we had workshopped one of his new essays, apiece that overtly grapples with—and extends—David Foster Wallace’s classic essay “Consider the Lobster.” This student was in my David Foster Wallace seminar at Loyola University New Orleans the first time I taught that class, in 2011; Wallace is one of the writers who inspired my student to want to write, and to think critically about the world. So it made sense that we should go to The End of the Tour together. I had also considered seeing the film the night before, with a few friends, as Wallace kept coming up in conversation over dinner. (In the end, we were all too tired, and we dispersed to continue our individual, ordinary lives.) But so Wallace is in the air, and there are a lot of opinions, attitudes, and emotions swirling around The End of the Tour.

More here.

Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, and Frieder Otto Wolf in Eurozine:

Does the unjust and forced “agreement” between the Greek government and the other states in the European Union (not all of whom feel the necessity for such a sanction) mark the end of one era and the beginning of another? In many ways yes, but almost certainly not in the sense indicated to us by the “Euro-Summit” statement of 12 July 2015. In reality, the agreement is fundamentally unenforceable in economic, social and political terms, though it will be “forced through” by a process that promises to be at least as brutal and even more divisive than the extremities we have seen over the last five years.

It is therefore necessary to try to understand the implications of the agreement and to discuss its consequences, avoiding all use of rhetoric but not of engagement or passion.

In order to do so we must first look at how the negotiations unfolded (those opened by Alexis Tsipras's return to Brussels on the back of his “triumph” in the 5 July referendum – which, for good reason, has not ceased to fuel incomprehension and criticism among his supporters in Greece and abroad), and secondly we must look at what these negotiations tell us about the positioning of the various European forces.

We must define the stage that the crisis in the EU has reached (a crisis of which Greece is both the symptom and the victim) in terms of three strategic domains: firstly the debt situation and the effects of the austerity measures; secondly the division of Europe into unequal zones of prosperity and sovereignty; and finally the collapse of democratic systems and the resulting rise in populist nationalism.

But first, it is vital that we include an “assessment” of the Euro-Summit agreement: “as seen from Athens” (from the Greek people's point of view) and “as seen from Europe” (which does not mean as seen from Brussels, whose institutions clearly have no awareness whatsoever of the current European climate).

More here.

Jonathan Gottschall in The Daily Beast:

It’s difficult to choose my favorite Norman Mailer fight.

There was the time he head-butted Gore Vidal in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show and then—swaggering on stage truculent with drink—got himself verbally mauled by Vidal, Cavett, Janet Flanner, and a hooting studio audience (video below). Or maybe my favorite Mailer fight was his 100 percent vérité tussle with Rip Torn in his experimental film Maidstone (capsule play-by-play: Torn taps Mailer twice on the head with a hammer; Mailer tries to bite off Torn’s ear; they go to the ground; getting the worst of it, Mailer negotiates a fake truce; Torn relents, Mailer attacks; again getting the worst of it, Mailer is saved by his ferocious wife; Torn and Mailer exchange verbal haymakers; Mailer whiffs; Torn lands). Or there was the time Mailer drunkenly fought—or tried to fight—nearly every man he invited to a party, arguing with many and stepping outside at least three times to throw dukes on the sidewalk. Later that same night he stabbed his wife twice with a pen knife after she called him a “little faggot” with no cojones (not one of my favorite Mailer fights; she almost died).

This is going to take too long. Suffice it to say that, going by J. Michael Lennon’s biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, Mailer seems to have mixed it up—verbally or physically, playfully or in dead earnest—with most of the men he ever met. The book alludes to around 20 punch-ups, the last of which occurred when, at 74, he slugged the publisher of Esquire over a review he didn’t like.

More here.

Steven Pinker in The Boston Globe:

A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.” Nor should it thwart research that has likely benefits now or in the near future by sowing panic about speculative harms in the distant future. These include perverse analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like “Brave New World’’ and “Gattaca,’’ and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. Of course, individuals must be protected from identifiable harm, but we already have ample safeguards for the safety and informed consent of patients and research subjects.

Some say that it’s simple prudence to pause and consider the long-term implications of research before it rushes headlong into changing the human condition. But this is an illusion.

First, slowing down research has a massive human cost. Even a one-year delay in implementing an effective treatment could spell death, suffering, or disability for millions of people.

Second, technological prediction beyond a horizon of a few years is so futile that any policy based on it is almost certain to do more harm than good.

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

The most obvious example of magical thinking in contemporary policy discourse, of course, is the myth of a “better deal” with Iran. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, opponents of the JCPOA keep insisting additional sanctions, more threats to use force, another round of Stuxnet, or if necessary, dropping a few bombs, would have convinced Iran to run up the white flag and give the United States everything it ever demanded for the past 15 years. The latest example of such dubious reasoning is the New York Times’s David Brooks, who thinks an agreement where Iran makes most of the concessions is a Vietnam-style defeat for the United States and imagines that tougher U.S. negotiators (or maybe war) would have produced a clear and decisive victory.

Never mind that while the United States ramped up sanctions, Iran went from zero centrifuges to 19,000. Never mind that there was no international support for harsher sanctions and that unilateral U.S. sanctions wouldn’t increase the pressure in any meaningful way. Never mind that attacking Iran with military force would not end its nuclear program and only increase Iran’s interest in having an actual weapon. Never mind that the deal blocks every path to a bomb for at least a decade. And never mind that the myth of a “better deal” ignores Diplomacy 101: To get any sort of lasting agreement, it has to provide something for all of the parties.

More here.

David C. Ward in Smithsonian:

It’s a small irony in the career of Robert Frost that this most New England of poets published his first two books of poetry during the short period when he was living in Old England. Frost was very careful about how he managed the start of his career, wanting to make the strongest debut possible, and he diligently assembled the strongest lineup of poems possible for his books A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Frost had gone to England to add further polish to his writing skills and to make valuable contacts with the leading figures in Anglo-American literature, especially English writer Edward Thomas and expatriate American Ezra Pound; Pound would be a crucial early supporter of Frost. While reviews of the first book, A Boy’s Will, were generally favorable, but mixed, when it was published in 1913, North of Boston was immediately recognized as the work of a major poet. Frost’s career was as well-launched as he could have hoped, and when he returned to the United States in early 1915, he had an American publisher and a dawning fame as his work appeared before the general public in journals like The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly.

The years in England were crucial to Frost, but they have also caused confusion in straightening out his publishing history – the books appeared in reverse order in America and the poems that appeared in the magazines had in fact already appeared in print, albeit in England. What mattered to Frost was that his English trip had worked. 1915 became the year in which he became recognized as America’s quintessential poet; in August, the Atlantic Monthly published what is perhaps Frost’s most well-known work, “The Road Not Taken.”

More here.

Lukianoff and Haidt in The Atlantic:

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might “trigger” a recurrence of past trauma. Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”

More here.

We'll Always have CGI Paris
.

Open on the galaxy, dolly zoom
through Doppler shifting stars, leave the local planets
in our wake, brush off the Moon
and rummage through the clouds to find
the crouching continent where Paris piggybacks.
Pinpoint the pyramid, dogleg along the Seine
until the camera starts to weave between the struts
of youknowwhat and youknowwhere
to finish on us kissing in the festive, fireworky air.

But we were never there. My sitcom kept me
in LA, your slasher movie debut
saw you junketing in hotel rooms out east.
We shot green screen on different days: my face
a balloon taped to a broom, your waist a tailor’s dummy;
our foggy breath was lifted from Titanic;
the cutaways to clasping hands were cut in
from a jewellery ad as all of Paris waited
to be pixellated, cut and pasted.

But we’ll always have Paris,
although our eye lines never matched
and everything we tried to hold onto
our phantom fingers passed clean through.
.

by Simon Barraclough
from Neptune Blue
Salt Publishing, Cromer, 2011

Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New York Times:

Along the western bank of the Danube, more or less halfway between Zagreb and Belgrade, there rests in historic obscurity a three-square-mile teardrop of no man’s land. It is an artifact of a border dispute of long standing, and neither Serbia nor Croatia expresses a desire to rule over this unprepossessing Gibraltar-size property. The land, marshy and prone to seasonal inundation, is choked with unregulated scrub, with here and there the lone tongue of a poplar or the gentle shag of a willow. The only road is a rutted single-lane dirt track, the only existing dwelling a flimsy hunting hovel, its provenance unknown.

The absence of governmental authority on this land is due to the manipulated course of the Danube itself. By the late 19th century, the Danube was accepted as the natural border between the regions — at that point still under Austro-Hungarian control — that would become Croatia and Serbia. There, however, the river’s path was tortuous and difficult for larger boats to navigate, so engineering work was undertaken to smooth the snaking flow. The straightened Danube was a vast improvement for international riverine transport, but in the process, four large uncontiguous bulges of Croatia became stranded alone on the Serbian side, and one small pocket of Serbia, on what was now the far bank, became attached to the Croatian mass.

This latter pocket, which local residents call Gornja Siga, is the no man’s land in question. When the two countries were neighboring republics of Yugoslavia, these orphaned riverbank plots were of little concern, but since the 1990s they have presented an intractable problem. The stranded pieces of Croatia now contiguous with Serbia are some 10 times larger, in aggregate, than the rather trifling portion of Serbia now joined to Croatia; Serbia has been all too glad to assume ownership of its expanded territory, but Croatia sees the situation as unacceptable. In light of this ongoing disagreement, for Croatia to accept Gornja Siga would constitute a de facto recognition of the Serbian view of the border and a relinquishing of Croatia’s claim to the more considerable, though equally mosquito-infested and uninspiring, portions of Serbian bank.

And yet Gornja Siga has come, over the last few months, to assume an outsize role in the imagination of many — not only in Europe, but also in the Middle East and in the United States. Its mere existence as a land unburdened by deed or ruler has become cause for great jubilation.

More here.

Barbara Moran at the website of Boston University:

Steve Grossberg has a habit he calls “taking a think walk.” When a person spends his life applying the rigor of math to the mysteries of the mind, as Grossberg has, sometimes he gets stuck. On these occasions, with the answer to a problem just out of reach, Grossberg walks. As a younger man, he strode through Boston’s Back Bay, sometimes stopping at a cafe to write down new ideas; but mostly he walked, enjoying the sparkling city at night, coaxing along the insights that always, finally, came. “Many scientists see or feel things before they fully know them,” says Grossberg, Boston University’s Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems. “Eventually things become luminous, glistening; everything becomes clear.”

Grossberg’s insights, spanning decades, have changed the way we understand the brain. One of the principal founders and current leaders in the field of neural networks, Grossberg has tried to answer two major questions: how does the brain control behavior, and how can technology emulate biological intelligence? His mathematical models touch almost every area of psychology and neuroscience, including learning, memory, vision, development, speech, language, attention, cognition, navigation, and even consciousness. The applications of his work have been equally vast, in fields from image processing to pattern recognition, manufacturing to medicine.

Grossberg’s scientific quest is also a spiritual one, sparked by early tragedy and propelled by a pursuit of transcendence. When accepting the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, he spoke movingly of his need “to grow toward something more enduring.” What Grossberg wants, simply, is to understand how the lump of gray tissue we call our brain gives rise to the creative, soulful presence we call our mind. “For me, science is a spiritual calling,” he says, “not just a profession.”

More here. [Thanks to Yohan John.]

Jacob Brogan in Slate:

When the proprietor of a Florida-based pornographic website was put on trial in 2008, he was accused of violating community standards. To prove that the operator had done nothing of the kind, his lawyer exhibited Google search data for the region, showing that residents were more likely to go online looking for “sex” than for “apple pie.” Pornography, this lawyer implied,was central to community standards, whether or not the community members were willing to admit it. In the process, he suggested that the pleasures we deny ourselves—like those that we would refuse to others—can reveal a great deal about the forces that move us. Maybe that’s why the easiest way to tell a story about sex is to tell a story about repression.

This, at any rate, is the premise of author and attorney Eric Berkowitz’s new book, The Boundaries of Desire. Over the course of seven chapters, Berkowitz sets out to explore the last century of sex law, focusing most of all on the ways that our civilization restrains the needs of some while punishing the passions of others. Attentive to changing norms but rarely content with present pieties, he surveys attitudes toward prostitution, homosexuality, pornography, and more. Throughout, he treats desire as a force that has “always carried outsize significance” because it “burns at the intersection of existence, identity, and power.”

Indeed, sex is the most personal of passions, but it is also the one in which the personal becomes interpersonal. Intercourse, as philosophers of sex have known for years, is never far from discourse, and pillow talk may be just as important as everything that precedes it. Speaking about sex by narrating the many attempts to silence it is therefore an almost deliberately paradoxical project.

More here.

Kristen C. French in Nautilus:

One Saturday in the spring of 1950, brothers Viggo and Emil Højgaard from the small village of Tollund, in Denmark, were cutting peat in a local bog when they uncovered a dead man. He looked as though he had only just passed away. His eyelashes, chin stubble, and the wrinkles in his skin were visible; his leather cap was intact. Suspecting murder, the brothers called the police in nearby Silkeborg, but the body wasn’t what it seemed.

Cracking the case required a special breed of forensic analysis. Famed Danish archaeologist Peter V. Glob, from the University of Aarhus, arranged for the body, along with its bed of peat, to be excavated and transferred to the Silkeborg Museum in a giant wooden box. An examination of the contents of the dead man’s stomach suggested—and radiocarbon dating later confirmed—that he had lived during the third century B.C., in the pre-Roman Iron Age. For more than 2,000 years, Tollund Man, as the corpse became known, had lain at the bottom of the bog, nearly untouched by time, as all of recorded history marched forward over his head.1

Since the 18th century, the peat bogs of Northern Europe have yielded hundreds of human corpses dating from as far back as 8,000 B.C. Like Tollund Man, many of these so-called bog bodies are exquisitely preserved—their skin, intestines, internal organs, nails, hair, and even the contents of their stomachs and some of their clothes left in remarkable condition.

More here.

From the Physics arXiv Blog:

One of the unsung heroes of 20th century science is the mathematician and electronics engineer, Claude Shannon, who worked at the famous Bell laboratories during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Shannon’s greatest work is the theory of information which he published in 1948 and has since had a profound influence on our world.

This theory is the basis for all digital communication. So mobile phones, digital television and radio, computers and the Internet all depend on Shannon’s theory of information. For that reason, it’s possible to argue that Shannon has had a bigger influence on 21st century technology than anybody in history.

But there’s a problem his theory of information which has stumped physicists and mathematicians in recent years. This is that it only applies to classical information, the kind of 0s and 1s that make up ordinary digital code.

But physicists have become increasingly interested in quantum information and its potential in cryptography and in quantum computing. Quantum information can be both a 1 and 0 at the same time. This among other exotic properties is what allows quantum computers to be so powerful and quantum cryptography to be perfectly secure.

More here.

Miriam Wells in Vice News:

Subjecting a small number of highly sentient beings to a horrible life and death is necessary to reduce the suffering and death of huge numbers of others. Some “survival of the fittest” also comes into it — given that human beings are the most sentient of all, and highest up on the food chain — we experiment on those below us. Over 70,000 non-human primates were used for research in the United States in 2010, according to the US Department of Agriculture. They include macaques, baboons, marmosets, and other monkeys, as well as some chimpanzees. Around 65,000 dogs, 21,000 cats, and 53,000 pigs were used, as well as hundreds of thousands of rabbits, guinea pigs, and hamsters. Around the world, dogs, cats, and primates together account for less than 0.2 percent of research animals, according to scientific lobby group Understanding Animal Research, which also points out the number of animals used for medical testing is miniscule compared to the number of animals bred and slaughtered for meat consumption. Mice, rats, fish, and birds account for the majority, with around 25 million used in US laboratories a year, while estimates for the number of animals used annually around the world vary from 60 to 115 million.

After speaking to people on either side of the debate, it was interesting how much they had in common — everyone agrees that testing on animals is deeply unpleasant, that it would be better if animals were not used, and that phasing out the use of animals in medical research is the ultimate goal. What the animal rights advocates and the scientists disagree on is how much benefit medical animal testing has brought, how fast animals should be phased out, and how they should be treated in the meantime. “People automatically assume that primates are a better model [for medical research] because they're so similar to us,” Kathleen Conlee, vice president of the US-based NGO Humane Society, told VICE News. “But the differences are enormous when you come to their biology. When it comes to the immune system that's where the greatest differences are and that's often what we're studying.” Nearly 90 vaccines that had promising results in primates have failed in clinical trials in humans, said Conlee, adding that very few detailed scientific studies on the scientific value of primate use had ever been conducted. One of the only major US studies, the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council's landmark 2011 report, Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research: Assessing the Necessity, concluded that “chimpanzees are not necessary for most biomedical research,” and that there were very few cases where chimpanzee research offered valuable enough insights to “offset the moral costs” of the experiments. The Humane Society is now pushing for a similar study to be done on research involving other primates. “Animals models are always very crude and aren't giving us the answers we need,” said Conlee. “They are always going to have limitations, whereas non-animal models will only continue to improve. So why do we continue to put such a huge investment in these animal models, and very little in alternatives?”

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Aging cripples the production of new immune cells, decreasing the immune system’s response to vaccines and putting the elderly at risk of infection, but antioxidants in the diet may slow this damaging process. That’s a new finding by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), published in an open-access paper in the journal Cell Reports. The problem is focused on an organ called the thymus, which produces T lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) — critical immune cells that must be continuously replenished so they can respond to new infections. “The thymus begins to atrophy rapidly in very early adulthood, simultaneously losing its function,” said TSRI Professor Howard Petrie. “This new study shows for the first time a mechanism for the long-suspected connection between normal immune function and antioxidants.”

How antioxidant enzyme deficiency leads to metabolic damage

Scientists have been hampered in their efforts to develop specific immune therapies for the elderly by a lack of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of this process. To explore these mechanisms, Petrie and his team developed a computational approach for analyzing the activity of genes in two major cell types in the thymus — stromal cells and lymphoid cells — in mouse tissues, which are similar to human tissues in terms of function and age-related atrophy. The team found that stromal cells were specifically deficient in an antioxidant enzyme called catalase. That resulted in elevated levels of the reactive oxygen byproducts of metabolism, which cause accelerated metabolic damage.*

More here.

Late August

cloud shreds
skid across
sandstone cliff face
dimmed red
to red
in an invisible rain
. . .
mosquito
becoming
language
. . .
scratched-off
scratch-off ticket
moldering in
a mound of
whacked
dandelions
. . .
to walk
a word
from one
weather
into another
. . .
on the window screen
a patch of beetles
peristaltic under
porch light
.

by Joseph Massey

Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014) and Illocality (Wave Books, forthcoming in 2015). He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

John Gray in The New Statesman:

My interest in Hayek, which began in the early 1970s, was as much to do with intellectual life in the Vienna of his youth as with the condition of British politics at the time. One of the first questions I asked after we had met through one of the right-wing think tanks that were proliferating around the end of that decade was whether he had known Karl Kraus, the incomparable Viennese satirist, who in 1909 had written, with some prescience: “Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin.” Hayek replied that he had not talked with Kraus, though he remembered seeing him crossing the road to enter a coffee house some time during the First World War. Hayek had little in common with Kraus. Cool and reserved, he had nothing of Kraus’s wit. Although he was academic in his manner, Hayek’s most striking intellectual trait was one that is uncommon in academic life – independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.

I was also keen to learn something of Hayek’s connection with Wittgenstein, a relative of his about whom he had written a biographical fragment, “Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein”, published in Encounter in 1977. Hayek met Wittgenstein by chance, on a railway station in August 1918, when they were both in the uniform of the Austro-Hungarian army. Travelling on together, they talked throughout the journey – a conversation Hayek told me had influenced him deeply, though not because of any philosophical exchange that he could remember. The two would never become close and their paths crossed only occasionally; but there seems to have been a meeting of minds between the two artillery ensigns on their way back to war. At the time both were ardent socialists who attributed the disaster that had befallen Europe to the malign impact of capitalism.

More here.