Thomas Berenato at The Point:

Logue’s long exposure to Homer cautioned him not to count your chickens before they hatch; asked the most important lesson life has taught him, he replied: “Count your blessings.” Logue, who marched to Aldermaston against the Bomb, understood that the rumor of war is an eternal murmur ever about to erupt into the wrath of Achilles, whose talking horse here pledges to leave his heroic master “not for dead, but dead.” More than disgust, violence as Homer saw it inspired in Logue a fatal hopelessness: war was the only god he could believe in; it alone was awesome enough to inspire his holy dread. He identified in the Iliad a stoic resignation to war’s ongoingness that attracted and revulsed him in equal measure. Logue innovates by transposing this dynamic into explicitly erotic terms. (His half-jealous Aphrodite calls our attention to Hera’s “gobstopper nipples.”) Rivalrous fear and sexual self-loathing will always be with us; in both love and war alike they manifest themselves as “the hatred human animals / Monotonously bear towards themselves.” What Logue admired most in Homer was his preternatural ability to match his muse against this terror on its own terms. “Homer keeps you on the move,” he said.

He found this same nerving, and unnerving, flickering quality in the work of Samuel Beckett, a friend. “It is not verse. It is not prose. It ‘floats,’” is how Logue once characterized the dialogue in Beckett’s plays unmetrical, but “broadly rhythmical,” and to that extent in sync with the jolting rhythm of life and death as it is felt along the heart. Less curt than Beckett but in search of the same sensation of verbal whiplash, Logue worked perpetual variations on a loose pentameter line. The reader should feel present, “there” in the fray, carried along by the carnage—and by the jokes. “Except humorously, our times cannot deal with these creatures,” he said of Homer’s gods and heroes.

more here.

Henrik Bering at The New Criterion:

When we think of propaganda art, images of Soviet Stakhanovites furiously exceeding their production quotas, heroic tractor drivers on their mighty machines, and fresh-faced collective farm girls in abundant wheat fields fill the mind. Above it all rules Stalin, the Man of Steel, who comes in two basic versions: as the unshakable defender of Mother Russia against fascism, or as the bountiful father of the nation, whichever suits the occasion.

F. S. Shurkin’s Morning of our Fatherland from 1948 has it all: Stalin—the man who had dismissed the famine of 1932–33 as just a minor bureaucratic foul-up by a few overeager officials who were “dizzy with success”—positively glows with benevolence as he surveys the landscape, while the combine harvesters whir and the power lines sing. About the portrait, the wonderfully sycophantic artist has pronounced: “In the sound of the tractors, in the movement of the trains, in the fresh breath of the spring fields. In everything I saw and felt the image of the leader of the people.”

“Official” propaganda art, we have all been taught, is crude and laughably primitive, invariably inferior to real art. Except, of course, when it isn’t. And here the career of Jacques-Louis David is highly instructive. David became France’s leading artist during the nation’s most turbulent period, first acting as the high priest of the Revolution, then switching horses to become the celebrator-in-chief of Napoleon.

more here.

Ingrid D. Rowland at The New York Review of Books:

There has never been a painter quite like Jheronimus van Aken, the Flemish master who signed his works as Jheronimus Bosch. His imagination ranged from a place beyond the spheres of Heaven to the uttermost depths of Hell, but for many of his earliest admirers the most striking aspect of his art was what they described as its “truth to nature.” The five hundredth anniversary of his death in 1516 has inspired two comprehensive exhibitions, at the Noordbrabants Museum in his hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch and at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado, as well as an ambitious project to analyze all of his surviving work, drawn, painted, and printed, according to the latest scientific techniques (the Bosch Research and Conservation Project). Yet despite all we have learned through these undertakings—and it is a great deal—the man his neighbors knew as “Joen the painter” remains as mysterious as ever.

How could it be otherwise with so strange and masterful an artist? His early admirers celebrated the boundless ingenuity of his work, but they also recognized the sureness of his hand and his unerringly observant eye. In the precision of his draftsmanship, his sensitivity to landscape, his fascination with animals, he shows some surprising affinities with his contemporary from Florence, Leonardo da Vinci—who else but Leonardo would have noticed, and recorded, as Bosch does, the way that evening light can turn the waters of a distant river into a radiant mirror? Both artists were fascinated by grotesque human faces, but Bosch also detailed grotesque human behavior with a bawdy abandon all his own. No matter how closely we look at his minutely particular works, there is always something more to see.

more here.

Jeff Hecht in Nature:

On 19 June, several hundred thousand US fans of the television drama Game of Thrones went online to watch an eagerly awaited episode — and triggered a partial failure in the channel's streaming service. Some 15,000 customers were left to rage at blank screens for more than an hour. The channel, HBO, apologized and promised to avoid a repeat. But the incident was just one particularly public example of an increasingly urgent problem: with global Internet traffic growing by an estimated 22% per year, the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it.

Although huge progress has been made since the 1990s, when early web users had to use dial-up modems and endure 'the world wide wait', the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system. The copper lines that originally formed the system's core have been replaced by fibre-optic cables carrying trillions of bits per second between massive data centres. But service levels are much lower on local links, and at the user end it can seem like the electronic equivalent of driving on dirt roads. The resulting digital traffic jams threaten to throttle the information-technology revolution. Consumers can already feel those constraints when mobile-phone calls become garbled at busy times, data connections slow to a crawl in crowded convention centres and video streams stall during peak viewing hours. Internet companies are painfully aware that today's network is far from ready for the much-promised future of mobile high-definition video, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence and interactive 3D virtual-reality gaming.

More here.

Robert L. Kehoe III in The Boston Review:

We are used to the Olympics being sold as boons to economic prosperity. But they never seem to make good on that promise, not least because local communities can’t benefit from structural improvements if they are never completed. As Vanessa Barbara recently reported from Rio de Janeiro, “Bricks and pipes are piled everywhere; a few workers lazily push wheelbarrows as if the Games were scheduled for 2017. Nobody knows what the construction sites will become, not even the people working on them.” Rife with commercial and political corruption, the games in Rio are only the latest example of a now-familiar trend. But once the spectacle begins the cameras will capture sixteen days of drama, our eyes will delight in moments of heart-stopping beauty, and the leaders of the XXXI Olympiad will echo their claim that anything done in the name of sport is above and beyond public scrutiny or political protest.

This is a far cry from the way the Greeks would have seen it. According to historian Nigel Spivey, the games of antiquity never ignored or hid from their political significance, serving as an unabashed display of military power. Far from an apolitical exercise, stadiums were

decked with the spoils of armed conflict. Altars were attended by specialists in sacrosanct military intelligence; events were contested to the point of serious injury and fatality; and the entire program of athletic ‘games’ could be rationalized as a set of drills for cavalry and infantry fighting.

In other words, “all games were war games.” If the spectacular events we now watch in high definition do not portray themselves this way, it is largely due to the father of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who worked hard to obscure the political nature of sport.

More here.

David Auerbach in the LA Review of Books:

To find a personality that captures the sheer vacuousness of Trump’s anti-ideology, we have to turn to literature, and specifically to Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Begun in Austria in 1921 and left uncompleted at the time of Musil’s death in 1942, The Man Without Qualities is a surgical examination of the varieties of European intellectual pretense and folly in the years leading up to World War I. Musil’s work, begun in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, only became more urgent and desperate in the 1930s as events continued to bear out his direst assessments. The novel stands as a testament to the importance of maintaining independent, sober perception and thought in times of mass hysteria and madness.

The character who concerns us here is Christian Moosbrugger, a working-class murderer of women who becomes an object of fascination for many of the characters in the novel and for the Vienna they inhabit. While standing trial for the brutal killing of a prostitute, he becomes a celebrity due to his cavalier and eccentric manner:

During his trial Moosbrugger created the most unpredictable problems for his lawyer. He sat relaxed on his bench, like a spectator, and called out “Bravo!” every time the prosecutor made a point of what a public menace the defendant was, which Moosbrugger regarded as worthy of him, and gave out good marks to witnesses who declared that they had never noticed anything about him to indicate that he could not be held responsible for his actions.

The rationale for Moosbrugger’s behavior, Musil explains, is his overwhelming neediness, his desire to have himself recognized by others as a superior person:

He was clearly ill, but even if his obviously pathological nature provided the basis for his attitude, and this isolated him from other men, it somehow seemed to him a stronger and higher sense of his own self. His whole life was a comically and distressingly clumsy struggle to gain by force a recognition of this sense of himself.

Moosbrugger will gladly go to jail as long as it reinforces and perpetuates his fame. Yet this formal need for public attention is not backed up by any fixed essence.

More here.

J. W. Mason in Evonomics:

I’ve felt for a while that most critiques of economics miss the mark. They start from the premise that economics is a systematic effort to understand the concrete social phenomena we call “the economy,” an effort whose methods unfortunately are unsound. But I don’t see any method at all.

It seems to me that Deirdre McCloskey was right: Economics is not the study of the economy. Economics is just what economists do. Economic theory is essentially a closed formal system; it’s a historical accident that there is some overlap between its technical vocabulary and the language used to describe concrete economic phenomena. Economics the discipline is to the economy, the sphere of social reality, as chess theory is to medieval history: The statement, say, that “queens are most effective when supported by strong bishops” might be reasonable in both domains, but studying its application in the one case will not help at all in applying it in in the other.

A few years ago Richard Posner said that he used to think economics meant the study of “rational” behavior in whatever domain, but after the financial crisis he decided it should mean the study of the behavior of the economy using whatever methodologies. (I can’t find the exact quote.) Descriptively, he was right the first time; but the point is, these are two different activities. Or to steal a line from my friend Suresh, the best way to think about what most economists do is as a kind of constrained-maximization poetry. It makes no more sense to ask “is it true” than of a haiku.

One consequence of this is that radical criticism of the realism or logical consistency of orthodox economics does nothing to get us closer to a positive understanding of the economy. Another consequence is that when we turn to concrete economic questions there isn’t really a “mainstream” at all. Left critics want to take academic orthodoxy, a right-wing political vision, and the economic policy preferred by the established authorities, and roll them into a coherent package. But I don’t think you can. I think there is a mix of common-sense opinions, political prejudices, conventional business practice, and pragmatic rules of thumb, supported in an ad hoc, opportunistic way by bits and pieces of economic theory. It’s not possible to knock over the whole tottering pile by pulling out a few foundational texts.

More here.

Om Malik in The New Yorker:

We are ever more dependent on digital connectivity. Want to get somewhere? Tap the Uber app or ask Siri to give you directions. Want to buy diapers? Order them on Amazon—maybe even ask Alexa to order them for you—and have them delivered the next day. Want to check up on friends and family? Open Facebook. Each of these conveniences was adopted with astonishing speed, and demand for products and platforms that enable connection will remain huge. The Big Five provide those platforms of the future.

A skeptic might point out that the Big Five are reminiscent of the “Four Horsemen of Tech,” a moniker for Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco Systems coined by the CNBC commentator and hedge-fund manager Jim Cramer during the first Internet boom, in 1999. They grew at breakneck speed as the commercial Internet weaved its way into our lives. Three of the four companies’ fortunes have faded, but I would argue that is because they weren’t platforms.

A platform is essentially a business model that thrives because of the participation and value added from third parties with only incremental effort from the owner of the platform. Take Apple. With the iPhone and iPad, the company has put its iOS in the hands of hundreds of millions of people. That has allowed its active App Store to thrive—Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, recently tweeted that Apple has given away about fifty billion dollars to its developers. Assuming a thirty-per-cent cut for Apple, that means more than twenty billion dollars to Apple for little effort.

Size clearly has its advantages. No one would award Apple a gold medal for its Internet services, but the revenues from those services—Apple Music, iCloud, and Apple Pay, among others—grew nineteen per cent during the last quarter, to six billion dollars, thanks in large part to hundreds of millions of iOS users. Today, services account for fourteen per cent of Apple’s quarterly revenues and, if Cook’s predictions are right, will be “the size of a Fortune 100 company next year.” This growth occurred despite the chorus of critics, including me, panning Apple Music as well as iCloud’s multiple outages.

More here.

Microfiction from the excellent current special issue of 91st Meridian, edited by Shabnam Nadiya and Daisy Rockwell:

“How are cattle born?” The teacher asked.

“When the cattle sprout legs, the cattle are born,” the child replied.

“Wrong,” the teacher said. The teacher recited the following from the textbook, “No one is born as cattle. Instead, first, one gets fifteen years of education, a job, a wife, a car and a television set. Then, in due course, as a child is born, a household is set up.

“Together, progress is dutifully achieved.

“Thereafter, horns begin grow on the head.

“Or else,

“They work in a factory or a field. Or even at a university or an office.

“They labor and struggle against difficulties.

“Together, they dream up revolutions.

“For all this too, as a reward, horns sprout on the head.

Hearing this, the child was overcome with sorrow.

“Is there any way to avoid becoming cattle oneself?” he asked the teacher.

“I don’t know,” replied the teacher as he scratched the tip of his horns.

Much more here.

Scott Barry Kaufman in The Atlantic:

Americans spend billions of dollars each year on books and seminars claiming to help people change their personalities. These books are built on the assumptions that personality can change, and that changing personality is good: Altering the basics of who you are will make you a better, healthier, happier person. Last week, I wrote about how the latest science of personality suggests that personality can indeed change—either through natural maturation, new responsibilities, or intentional strategies. But would changing your personality actually make you happier? Recently, a series of studies in Australia looked to see whether changes in personality (regardless of the cause) were associated with increases in life satisfaction. The series drew on the country’s HILDA Survey (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia), which annually assesses the personality, life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect of a large, nationally representative sample of Australia’s population. In one of the studies, researchers examined the data from 11,104 Australians, ages 18 to 79, over the course of four years. They found that increases in extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were all associated with increased life satisfaction, whereas increases in neuroticism were associated with decreased life satisfaction.

Another study, conducted on more than 8,000 Australians, found that personality changes during this same time period occurred as often as changes in socio-economic factors, such as income, unemployment, and marital status. Together, these two studies add to a growing body of literature suggesting that personality changes are related to changes in life satisfaction, and that personality change can even be a better predictor of life satisfaction than many of the external variables that are normally considered in economic models of happiness.

More here.

Martyn Wendell Jones at Open Letters Monthly:

In the world of letters, overt religiosity can seem an offense against taste. Gone are the days of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Reinhold Niebuhr; in their place have stepped artists, writers, and intellectuals of faith who, in the words of novelist Doris Betts, “whisper” rather than “shout.” Faith is a private affair; its public mandate for the individual believer is discomfiting, especially to those who have no truck with it. Ours is an age of pronounced religious anxieties.

It’s refreshing, then, to find someone whose personal faith is an aesthetic and intellectual enablement rather than an encumbrance. Gregory Wolfe, editor of the quarterly journalImage, is unabashedly Catholic, but ideologically nonpartisan. (Though he came of age under the tutelage of William F. Buckley at the National Review, he left a career in political commentary behind during the Reagan administration to dedicate himself to culture and the arts.) His book The Operation of Grace contains editorial statements for issues of the journal as well as essays and public addresses; their historically and culturally wide-ranging reflections are focused through Image’s guiding themes of art, faith, and mystery.

The pieces collected here are loosely arranged by topic; the six groupings of chapters include headings such as “Art Speaks to Faith,” “Christian Humanism: Then and Now,” and “Scenes from a Literary Life.” A portrait of Wolfe emerges in his treatments of current events, historically diverse literary figures, and theology. He is no mystic longing for another world; nor is he a staid cleric with his collar starched.

more here.

Francine Prose at The New Yorker:

I feel a kind of messianic zeal, which I share with many writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved. One can speculate about the possible reasons why she is not more universally known. Though her work appeared regularly and for decades (from the nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-nineties) in The New Yorker, where it attracted a loyal and enthusiastic readership, Gallant, who died in 2014, never became quite as popular, as widely recognized, or as frequently celebrated as any number of writers who published as regularly in the magazine during roughly the same period of time.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that she was a Canadian short-story writer, born in Montreal, in 1922, living in Paris, where she worked initially as a journalist, writing in English, and publishing in the United States. It was hard for any country to claim her, to make her a public figure (which she would have resisted) or for readers to classify her as one thing or another. Things (including books) are always easier to describe when they are like something else, and it was Gallant’s great strength and less-than-great public-relations problem that her work is so unlike anyone else’s. What one extracts from what (little) Gallant has said about her life is the central fact of her wanting to do what she wanted, which was to write.

more here.

Phillip Lopate at The American Scholar:

On July 4, a great artist and a remarkable human being, Abbas Kiarostami, died—unnecessarily, as it turns out. I knew him slightly, having interviewed him several times and written about him often. He was, to my mind, not simply the greatest Iranian filmmaker but one of the two or three greatest filmmakers alive (and now I have to amend that last word). Although his name barely registered on the American public, he was a revered figure on the international art film festival circuit. He began making short films about children, having been invited to start the filmmaking branch of the Kanoon Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Iran. From these shorts he graduated to superb feature films, such as Homework, Close-Up, Where Is My Friend’s House, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees, and The Wind Will Carry Us, which combined neorealist humanism in the tradition of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Satyajit Ray, with a formalist rigor (choreographed long-duration shots) and a playful, postmodernist self-referentiality. In a sense, he solved the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. His films were gifted with patient observation and curiosity about ordinary people; there were always humorous bits, they breathed naturally, and they were healthy for you—that is, they made me feel engrossed, suspenseful yet at peace, when watching them.

more here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Some of the voices inside Caroline White’s head have been a lifelong comfort, as protective as a favorite aunt. It was the others — “you’re nothing, they’re out to get you, to kill you” — that led her down a rabbit hole of failed treatments and over a decade of hospitalizations, therapy and medications, all aimed at silencing those internal threats. At a support group here for so-called voice-hearers, however, she tried something radically different. She allowed other members of the group to address the voice, directly:

What is it you want?

“After I thought about it, I realized that the voice valued my safety, wanted me to be respected and better supported by others,” said Ms. White, 34, who, since that session in late 2014, has become a leader in a growing alliance of such groups, called the Hearing Voices Network, or HVN. At a time when Congress is debating measures to extend the reach of mainstream psychiatry — particularly to the severely psychotic, who often end up in prison or homeless — an alternative kind of mental health care is taking root that is very much anti-mainstream. It is largely nonmedical, focused on holistic recovery rather than symptom treatment, and increasingly accessible through an assortment of in-home services, residential centers and groups like the voices network Ms. White turned to, in which members help one another understand each voice, as a metaphor, rather than try to extinguish it. For the first time in this country, experts say, psychiatry’s critics are mounting a sustained, broadly based effort to provide people with practical options, rather than solely alleging abuses like overmedication and involuntary restraint. “The reason these programs are proliferating now is society’s shameful neglect of the severely ill, which creates a vacuum of great need,” said Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University.

More here.

Nalini Malani. My hope is the last breath. My hope is the first battle. 2015.

Digital print.

Current installation “In Search of Vanished Blood” & exhibition at Boston ICA.

More here, here, and here.

Lloyd N. Trefethen in Siam News:

Nearly everyone has heard of the Faraday cage effect. So when I needed to learn about it, I assumed it would be a matter of looking in some standard physics books, maybe the ones I’d studied as an undergraduate. This was the beginning of a journey of surprises.

The Faraday cage effect involves shielding of electrostatic and electromagnetic fields. A closed metal cavity makes a perfect shield, with zero fields inside, and that is in the textbooks. Faraday’s discovery of 1836 was that fields are nearly zero inside a wire mesh, too. You see this principle applied in your microwave oven, whose front door contains a metal screen with small holes. The screen keeps the microwaves in, while allowing light, with its much smaller wavelength, to pass through.

The essence of the matter can be captured by a two-dimensional model (see Figure 1), where the cage is approximated by a circle or a line of dots representing cross-sections of wires all at the same voltage (connected somewhere in the third dimension). To keep things simple, we focus on electrostatic fields – the Laplace equation.

Let me explain how I got interested in this problem. André Weideman and I were finishing a survey of the trapezoidal rule for periodic analytic functions, which we’d been working on for eight years [5]. We knew the mathematics of that problem: if ff is analytic and periodic and you add up sample values at equispaced points, you get an exponentially accurate approximation to its integral. Intuitively, sinusoidal oscillation in one direction corresponds to exponential decay in the direction at right angles in the complex plane. A contour integral estimate of Fourier coefficients exploits this decay to prove exponential accuracy.

To enrich our survey, I thought we should comment on the analogy between this mathematics of the trapezoidal rule and that of the Faraday cage. It seemed obvious the two must be related – it would just be a matter of sorting out the details.

More here.

Edward Luce in The Financial Times:

What kind of president would Hillary Clinton make? Since she has already lived in the White House for eight years (1993-2001), we ought to have a surer feel for the prospect than for any previous incoming president. Yet America remains as bitterly divided in its view of her as any public figure since she came to prominence 24 years ago. It is hard to think of another name — Donald Trump included — whose mere mention can more quickly turn a placid dinner party into a shouting match. Everyone has a deeply held opinion. They just don’t often overlap. “Hillary Clinton is an intensely private person — she gives away so little,” says Robert McNeely, who spent six years with the Clintons as the official White House photographer. “If she weren’t in politics, she could be a world-class poker player.” As Clinton admitted in her Philadelphia acceptance speech last week, she far prefers the “service” part of public service to the public dimension, which she sees as a necessary evil. In that regard — and many others — it is hard to think of two characters less alike than Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“Bill craves attention,” says McNeely, whose photographic book of Clinton’s years as first lady comes out in January. “Hillary really doesn’t care if people like her or not.”

More here.

Dunne and Hamilton in The Christian Science Monitor:

Of the millions of species on the planet, humans seem fairly unique. We have produced flamenco dancing and skinny jeans, jet skis and cell phones, New York and Tokyo, and fabulous art and music by creative individuals from Leonardo da Vinci to Joni Mitchell. While many aspects of human technology, culture, and society have no clear counterparts in other species, do they make us truly unique? Every species possesses traits that other species don’t, which is how we distinguish a ferret from a starfish. If every species is different, what, if anything, sets the human species uniquely apart from other species?

…Humans live about as long as the theory predicts for an organism of our size. We wean our offspring at the predicted age. We reproduce at close to the predicted rate. And so on. It turns out that across many such life-history traits, there is nothing particularly unique about the basic biology of the human species – we fit right where we should on the body-size continuum. But things get interesting when we look at the energy consumption of humans. Our basic metabolic rate, as predicted by our body size, is about 100 watts – the energy demand of an incandescent light bulb. That’s about what you’d expect given our body size, according to the theory. But in the modern industrialized world, the energy we actually consume, collectively, to fuel our lives – to do things such as construct roads and buildings, fly airplanes, drive cars, and harvest and refrigerate food – is closer to 11,000 watts, on average, for someone living in the United States. In short, people in the US consume about 110 times more energy to function in an industrialized economy than predicted for an organism with our body size. The global human average, 3,000 watts, is 30 times greater than predicted. And that does make us unique; no other species on the planet uses close to this much energy to fuel their lives. What’s more, given that the average contemporary human consumes as much as 30 times more than a pre-industrial human, our effective global population from an energetic point of view is closer to 210 billion rather than our planet’s current 7 billion humans.

More here.