Richard Skinner in 3:AM Magazine:

If you tell the story of Citizen Kane, it’s not much of a story. An old rich mogul man is dead. He said a word we don’t understand. We don’t discover so much, just some pieces of his life and finally it is just a sled. Is that a story? It is not much. What makes Citizen Kane so interesting is the way [Welles] told us about the man—intriguing us about what people think about him.
— Agnès Varda

If Agnès Varda’s 1985 movie Vagabond is like any other movie, then it would be Citizen Kane. When you’ve seen both, you see that Varda almost certainly used the structure of Orson Welles’ 1941 movie as a blueprint for her own. Both start with a death, both are an investigation into a life, both end inconclusively.

Vagabond is about a young woman, Mona, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who has perished from the cold, and the attempts by numerous people who crossed her path to assign meaning to her chosen way of living. There are 18 ‘visions’ of Mona presented by those who came across her. The film is a series of gazes, of one-way exchanges from different people—dropouts, hippies, a prostitute, an itinerant worker, a maid (the ‘punctum’ moment when the maid addresses the camera directly)—but each of these ‘witnesses’ is not seeing Mona, but a reflection of their own regrets, secrets, longings. As the film makes transparently clear, Mona refuses to be co-opted into any image they may have of her. She defies identification and empties the mirror of any meaning. Her peripatetic and solitary existence (‘I move’) is a deliberate choice and functions metonymically for her unfixability. Mona is the blank centre of the film and she leaves no trace of her existence.

In Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Agnès Varda made frequent use of tracking shots to follow Cléo along Parisian streets; there is a lot of the same kind of camerawork in Vagabond. But while the narcissistic Cléo is nearly always in the center of the frame, Mona can barely stay in the picture. As she walks along beaches, streets, fields—confirming the viewer’s sense of her restlessness and rootlessness—she either walks into the frame of an already-in-motion tracking shot, or falls behind, or walks out of frame as the camera keeps moving. It’s as though she is on the periphery of her own movie. Varda says, “The whole film is one long tracking shot … we cut it up into separate pieces and in between them are the ‘adventures’.” There are 14 of these highly formal tracking shots and they all frame Mona at some kind of juncture. They are Mona’s ‘signature’.

More here.

Ruth Marshall in The Immanent Frame:

Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religionmakes an extremely important and timely contribution to a conversation that the discipline of political science should be but still isn’t really having. The continued lack of serious, analytically sophisticated attention to religion and religious phenomena by scholars of international relations and comparative politics is all the more baffling given the place of religion in political life around the world today. Religious affiliation has become thecentral category for a geo-political remapping of the world since 9/11. The results have been depressingly vapid analyses that underscore, once again, the ideological force of Samuel Huntington’s self-fulfilling prophecy, and the bankruptcy of dominant approaches in our discipline that continue to treat religion in the most reductionist, identarian, instrumentalist, and frankly, unthinking fashion. In this regard, Shakman Hurd’s book constitutes a truly novel and vital contribution and I cannot recommend this book highly enough to my co-disciplinarians, whether interested in religion or not. I underscore this point, since many scholars who frequent The Immanent Frame are not mainstream political scientists and are thus unaware of the bleak nature of the wilderness into which rare and prophetic voices like Shakman Hurd’s are crying.

In her approach to the intellectual and political stakes of the current global doxa on religious freedom, her central focus and angle of attack is a deconstruction of the problematic ways in which the category “religion” is deployed in academic, governmental and policy discourses and practices, and the ways these should prompt us to think more critically about the contradictions of liberalism, in particular, the ambivalence of liberalism’s understanding of religion and the connection between its discourses of tolerance, pluralism, rights, freedom and new forms of global governance. This choice of focus is crucial, since political scientists, (unlike scholars of religion or anthropologists) appear completely unaware of the problematic ways in which the category of “religion” is used in the literature. The unreflective use of a highly Christian, indeed Protestant, understanding of religion as belief, inner conviction, and a matter of personal choice which can be entered into and exited freely, has come to dominate the academic and policy field, enabling “scholars, practitioners and pundits to leap straight into the business of quantifying religion’s effects, adapting religion’s insights to international problem-solving efforts, and incorporating religion’s official representatives into international political decision making, public policy, and institutions.”

More here.

Thessaly La Force at Artsy:

Over the last couple of decades, Ed Ruscha’s work has come to symbolize Los Angeles and the West, but lately, it seems, Ruscha the artist has too. At 78, he is still very much a handsome man, with placid blue eyes and rugged features. He speaks deliberately and slowly, with a slight drawl—he says “Los Angeles” instead of “L.A.,” and “Cali-for-knee-ah,” not “Califor-nyah.” It’s a way of speaking that is reminiscent of the late ’50s and early ’60s, when cowboys first roamed through Marlboro ads and Marilyn Monroe dressed down in Levi’s rolled at the cuff. To those who admire him now, Ruscha is a little bit like a Kennedy, a type of man that we lost in the 21st century—old-fashioned but masculine, well-mannered but tough. He possesses a laid-back cool that has helped to define—along with others such as the late Chris Burden and John Baldessari—what we understand as the Los Angeles artist.

Opening this month at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, “Ed Ruscha and the Great American West” emphasizes Ruscha’s deep commitment to place, and acknowledges the pioneer he was for heading west, not east, when he first set out to be an artist. “I felt California had something to offer me,” said Ruscha earlier this week over Skype, explaining his decision at the age of 18, in 1956, to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as California Institute of the Arts or CalArts). “New York was the center of the art world,” Ruscha conceded. “People dreamed about New York. When I visited, it was every bit of what I thought it would be like. But I didn’t have the urge to move there. It seemed to be too cold and complicated and expensive. It would have been difficult to get across town with a piece of lumber.” Instead, the palm trees and sunsets and sprawl were more alluring. “California,” he said, “was like a new swanky place for me to go.”

more here.

Allen Shelton at Public Books:

For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of the leather jacket in the New York Times Magazine, Foucault appears like a god alongside Marlon Brando and the Ramones as a marker for the mid-1970s, when he was becoming a worldwide celebrity. I first encountered Foucault in collections of structuralist essays in the stacks of a small Southern college library around that time. Only one other person at the school read those books; a bald French professor named Simpson. His name was always ahead of mine on the checkout card. Unbeknownst to me, Foucault was in New York at the time, as a visiting scholar for the French department at SUNY Buffalo. While he was there he visited the town of Attica, and the prison there. He gave a lecture on Manet at the museum on a Thursday night. He lived in an old hotel half a mile from where I would eventually live. A friend of mine saw him give a lecture at the university. He was dressed in a black velvet suit. The talk was entirely in French. My friend didn’t understand a single word, but he described it as a turning point in his life. There were shockwaves emanating from Foucault. This was before he became an institution and declined into something like an ancient part of Las Vegas; the inevitable result of thousands of dissertations, essays, and books appropriating his voice. Is it possible today to write anything about Foucault that isn’t already empty?

This is the big question the sometimes poet, hypertext novelist, and theorist Michael Joyce’s epistolary novel confronts. The letters are addressed to a ghost-like woman named Gabrielle, and to the historical figures of Foucault’s lover Jean, his mother, and a colleague and mentor.

more here.

Jesse McCarthy in Harvard Magazine:

Colson Whitehead ’91 has written a zombie-apocalypse novel, a coming-of-age novel set in the world of the black elite, a satiric allegory following a nomenclature consultant, a sprawling epic tracing the legend of the African American folk hero John Henry, a suite of lyrical essays in honor of New York City, and an account of drear and self-loathing in Las Vegas while losing $10,000 at the World Poker Series. That work has won him critical acclaim. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, and has been a finalist for almost every major literary award; he won the Dos Passos Prize in 2012 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. In an era when commercial pressure reinforces the writerly instinct to cultivate a recognizable “voice,” his astonishingly varied output, coupled with highly polished, virtuosic prose, makes Whitehead one of the most ambitious and unpredictable authors working today.

He has gained a reputation as a literary chameleon, deftly blurring the lines between literary and genre fiction, and using his uncanny abilities to inhabit and reinvent conventional frames in order to explore the themes of race, technology, history, and popular culture that continually resurface in his work. In a country where reading habits and reading publics are still more segregated than we often care to admit, his books enjoy a rare crossover appeal. His first novel, The Intuitionist, is a detective story that regularly turns up in college courses; the zombie thriller Zone One drew praise from literary critics and genre fiction fans alike; Sag Harbor, about black privileged kids coming of age in the 1980s, was a surprise bestseller. Beyond the books, Whitehead swims effortlessly in the hyper-connected moment: he maintains an active presence on Twitter, where his sly and dyspeptic observations on the curious and the mundane have gained him a devoted following. A sampling includes sagacious tips for the aspiring writer—“Epigraphs are always better than what follows. Pick crappy epigraphs so you don’t look bad”—and riffs on Ezra Pound: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough / Probably hasn’t been gentrified though.”

More here.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times:

In recent decades, the prevalence of asthma and allergies has increased between two- and threefold in the United States. These days, one in 12 kids has asthma. More are allergic. The uptick is often said to have started in the late 20th century. But the first hint of a population-wide affliction — the sneezing masses — came earlier, in the late 19th century, among the American and British upper classes. Hay fever so closely hewed to class lines, in fact, it was seen as a mark of civilization and refinement. Observers noted that farmers — the people who most often came in contact with pollens and animal dander — were the ones least likely to sneeze and wheeze. This phenomenon was rediscovered in the 1990s in Switzerland. Children who grew up on small farms were between one-half and one-third less likely to have hay fever and asthma, compared with non-farming children living in the same rural areas. European scientists identified livestock, particularly dairy cows, fermented feed and raw milk consumption as protective in what they eventually called the “farm effect.” Many scientists argued that the abundant microbes of the cowshed stimulated children’s immune systems in a way that prevented allergic disease. Then, a few years ago, researchers found an American example of the phenomenon: the Amish. Children from an Amish community in Indiana had an even lower prevalence of allergies than European farmers, making them among the least allergic subgroup ever measured in the developed world.

Now a study released on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine advances the research. The authors did something new and important: They found a suitable comparison group for the Amish in another farming community, the Hutterites. The two groups share genetic ancestry. Both descend from German-speaking stock. But unlike the Amish, the Hutterites, who live in the upper Midwest, are as allergic as your average American. Why doesn’t farming protect the Hutterites?

More here.

Alison Gopnik in the New York Times:

Parents and policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more, faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science.

In the last 30 years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century as capital was in the 19th, or land in the 18th. In the same 30 years, scientists have discovered that even very young children learn more than we once thought possible. Put those together and our preoccupation with making children learn is no surprise.

The trouble is that most people think learning is the sort of thing we do in school, and that parents should act like teachers — they should direct special lessons at children to produce particular kinds of knowledge or skill, with the help of how-to books and “parenting” apps. Studies prove that high-quality preschool helps children thrive. But policy makers and educators are still under pressure to justify their investments in early childhood education. They’ve reacted by replacing pretend corners and playground time with “school readiness” tests.

But in fact, schools are a very recent invention.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

You’re holding a surprise party for a friend. The door opens, the lights flick on, everyone leaps out… and your friend stands there silent and unmoved. Now, you’re the one who’s surprised. You assumed she had no idea, and based on that, you made a (wrong) prediction about how she would react. You were counting on her ignorance. This ability to understand that someone else might be missing certain information about the world comes so naturally to us that describing it feels mundane and trite.

And yet, according to two psychologists, it’s a skill that only humans have. “We think monkeys can’t do that,” says Alia Martin from Victoria University of Wellington.

This claim is the latest volley in a long debate about how our fellow primates understand each other. Of particular interest is the question: Do they have a “theory of mind”—an understanding that others have their own mental states, their own beliefs and desires, their own ways of viewing the world?

More here.

John Blake at CNN:

One Child Has Brown Eyes

One child has brown eyes, one has blue
One slanted, another rounded
One so nearsighted he squints internal
One had her extra epicanthic folds removed
One downcast, one couldn’t be bothered
One roams the heavens for a perfect answer
One transfixed like a dead doe, a convex mirror
One shines double-edged like a poisoned dagger
Understand their vision, understand their blindness
Understand their vacuity, understand their mirth
.
by Marilyn Chin
from Poetry Magazine
.

William J. Mello and Altemar da Costa Muniz at nonsite:

The political farce perpetrated against the Brazilian people on Sunday, April 17, when the country’s national congress approved the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (PT—Partido dos Trabalhadores/Workers Party) is a critical moment in an ongoing class war against the left, labor and the poor. Instead of an exercise in democratic political sovereignty, as the center-right coalition would prefer the rest of the world believe, the congressional vote is a de-facto political coup. The amalgam of rightwing /neoliberal free marketers, with the support of the media, blatantly attacked basic democratic rule of law, as well as the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty.” Most of all, there is no evidence that a crime was ever committed. The entire process was marked by the manipulation of legal procedures. This is just a small illustration of how far Brazil’s neoliberal representatives are willing to go to undermine popular democracy and working-class power.

The pathetic statements made by rightwing congressmen as they justified their votes in favor of impeachment—“for god, country and family” is just one of the more bizarre (to say the least) justifications too inane to repeat—are scarily similar to right-wing mobilizations of the past, when a U.S. backed military coup seized power in 1964. The current “crisis” in Brazil represents long-term tensions between the interests of important financial sectors (both in the US and Brazil) aligned with right-wing free marketeers and the neoliberal “left”2 all united by the objective of putting an end to the expansive socioeconomic and political policies implemented over the past 13 years, policies that have moved millions of Brazilians out of historical abject poverty while providing greater inclusion for working class organizations in the political decision making process.

more here.

Gavin Jacobson in New Statesman:

In 1893 Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche returned to her mother’s adopted home town of Naumburg in Germany. She had been living in Paraguay with her husband, Bernhard Förster, a nationalist and anti-Semite who had founded an Aryan colony to begin “the purification and rebirth of the human race”. Elisabeth’s brother, Friedrich Nietzsche, had condemned her husband’s anti-Semitism and her decision to join him in South America. The experiment failed in any case. Blighted by disease, poor harvests and intercommunal strife, the outpost collapsed in two years. Förster committed suicide in 1889. Around this time, Nietzsche began his final descent into madness and Elisabeth came back to take care of him and his legacy.

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872 while he was a professor at the University of Basel, received marginal attention. It wasn’t until the 1890s that his writings gained a wide readership across Europe. Elisabeth soon took control of Nietzsche’s literary estate and, little by little, transformed him into an instrument of her fascist designs. She began to rework his notebooks and to clip, cross out and fabricate quotations, so that, in the public imagination, her brother went from an opponent of German nationalism to a lover of the fatherland, from the author of The Antichrist to a follower of the gospel, and from an anti-anti-Semite to a venomous ­Jew-hater. Before his death in 1900, Nietzsche had asked his sister to ensure that “no priest or anyone else utters falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer defend myself”. He could not have foreseen this betrayal by Elisabeth, as she cast him as the lodestar of National Socialism.

More here.

From Kurzweil AI:

Prolonged sitting, such as watching a lot of television every day, may increase your risk of dying from a blood clot in the lung, according to a new open-access research letter published July 26 in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation. A lung blood clot (pulmonary embolism) usually begins as a clot in the leg or pelvis as a result of inactivity and slowed blood flow (deep vein thrombosis). If the clot breaks free, it can travel to a lung and become lodged in a small blood vessel, where it is especially dangerous. From 1988 to 1990, Japanese researchers asked 86,024 participants, age 40-79, how many hours they spent watching TV. Over the next 19 years, 59 participants died of a pulmonary embolism*.

The researchers found that compared to participants who watched TV less than 2.5 hours each day, deaths from a pulmonary embolism increased by 70 percent among those who watched TV from 2.5 to 4.9 hours; by 40 percent for each additional 2 hours of daily TV watching; and 2.5 times among those who watched TV 5 or more hours. “Pulmonary embolism occurs at a lower rate in Japan than it does in Western countries, but it may be on the rise,” said Hiroyasu Iso, M.D., Ph.D., professor of public health at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine and study corresponding author. “The Japanese people are increasingly adopting sedentary lifestyles, which we believe is putting them at increased risk.”Authors noted that the risk is likely greater than the findings suggest. Deaths from pulmonary embolism are believed to be underreported because diagnosis is difficult. The most common symptoms of pulmonary embolism — chest pain and shortness of breath — are the same as other life-threatening conditions, and diagnosis requires imaging that many hospitals are not equipped to provide.Other risks factors studied were obesity (the strongest link after hours sitting), diabetes, cigarette smoking, and hypertension.

More here.

Isaac Chotiner in Slate:

“Manhattan is just all bank branches,” said Jonathan Franzen as he walked through the living room of his home in Santa Cruz, California. When he visits his former neighborhood on the Upper East Side these days, he can only think: “This was a nice grocery store; now it’s a bank. This was a nice liquor store; now it’s a bank.” Santa Cruz, a college town and beach city, suits him better. Franzen’s house, though part of a generic housing development, is perched on a beautiful ravine with a lovely view of both the ocean and the conservation area below. There are plenty of opportunities for birding, which Franzen loves. (When the conversation happened to turn to Jamaica, he casually stated that he had seen 27 of the island’s 29 unique bird species.) He shares the place with his longtime partner, Kathy Chetkovich, also a writer.

I first caught sight of Franzen, casually dressed, picking up his mail outside. Inside, the modest living room is tidy, and less book-heavy than one might expect. Franzen is now 56, but despite his grayish hair and unshaven chin, his face is still boyish. For someone so often characterized as remote or even curmudgeonly, he is strikingly friendly and inquisitive. When I confessed under questioning that I am not a birder, he recommended the practice with passionate generosity, offering specific locations I could visit in my hometown of Oakland, California, and doing so with the sincerity of someone who is not trying to tell you how to behave but rather suggesting something that he believes will genuinely offer you pleasure.

More here.

Drake Baer in New York Magazine:

About 2,000 miles east of Australia is collection of islands called New Caledonia. The French territory is astonishingly beautiful, but the most astonishing thing about it has got to be the crows. With their beguiling smarts, New Caledonian crows are the valedictorians of the avian world (which is saying a lot, since birds’ have neuron counts on par with apes). New Caledonians can solve certain logic puzzles as well as 7-year-olds do,construct their own tools, and they’ve sussed out that if you drop a stone into a glass of water, it will rise.

Now those New Caledonians have been observed doing yet another holy crap, that’s awesome kind of thing. As reported in New Scientist, the crows have now been seen using tools to carry another object, like slipping a wooden stick into a metal nut. It’s reportedly the first time that a nonhuman animal has been seen inserting one object into another to transport it somewhere. “One subject used a stick to transport an object that was too large to be handled by beak, which suggests the tool facilitated object control,” writes lead author and Lund University cognitive scientist Ivo F. Jacobs and his colleagues. “The function in the other cases is unclear but seems to be an expression of play or exploration.”

More here.

Hamna Zubair in Vogue:

“Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian Murdered by Brother,” screamed headlines a few short hours after news broke that Pakistani social media sensation Qandeel Baloch had been killed on July 15 in her home by her brother, in what authorities have deemed a case of honor killing.

In their scramble to locate Baloch in contemporary discourse on Internet celebrities and women’s empowerment, newspapers in Pakistan and abroad latched onto the nearest comparison that came to mind: Kim Kardashian West. On the surface of it, the comparison seemed apt. Both Kardashian West and Baloch adopted highly sexualized personas on social media. Was it such a stretch to compare a West Coast fashionista who shot to stardom via a sex tape to a Pakistani woman who shook up society with daring selfies?

To many, it was. “She wasn’t rich. She was a working-class woman. Let’s not [compare] her to Kim Kardashian,” said a Pakistani journalist of Baloch soon after these headlines appeared.

And just like that, the floodgates opened for a larger debate about Baloch, one that called into question her feminist credentials. And though comparing Baloch to Kardashian West might in fact be unfair, the debate her persona stirred up is familiar, resembling heated discussions on Kardashian West’s nude selfies—which have everyone from Emily Ratajkowski to Chloë Grace Moretz taking sides—and calling her female empowerment “watered-down feminism.”

More here. [Thanks to Batool Raza.]