Arifa Akbar in The Independent:

Sean Elder in Newsweek:

An odd blend of old and new San Francisco turned out to see Gary Snyder at the Nourse Theater one evening in May. Former counterculture standard-bearers such as Michael McClure and Peter Coyote mixed with young tattooed hipsters, curious techies and California Governor Jerry Brown. When I pulled out my reporter’s notebook, the young Indian man sitting next to me said, “Are we supposed to take notes?”

Wouldn’t hurt. Snyder, who turned 85 the week before, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet (for the 1975 collection Turtle Island), award-winning essayist, early conservationist, community activist, pioneering bio-regionalist, amateur geologist, avid mountaineer, conscientious omnivore (before the term existed), multi-linguist, Asian art and history expert, Native American story archivist and perhaps the person most responsible for awakening a generation of beatniks and hippies to Buddhism. (A former Zen monk, Snyder translated the ancient Chinese Buddhist poet Han Shan—Cold Mountain Poems—and was the unwitting model for the hero of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums.) And he shows little sign of slowing. Though he’ll later tell the assembled that his new collection, This Present Moment, is “the last book of poems I’ll publish,” he has a new book with artist Tom Killion (California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Prints, Poetry and History) and is gearing up to finish another based on the history of the environment in China—the kind of thing he makes sound like a little side project, the way you might talk about building a treehouse for the kids.

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Abigail Deutsch at Harper's Magazine:

Last Boxing Day, in my annual attempt to figure out what Boxing Day is, I embarked on an Internet expedition from the confines of my chilly bedroom in New York City. Before long, I came across this tidbit on Time magazine’s website: “The Irish still refer to the holiday as St. Stephen’s Day, and they have their own tradition called hunting the wren, in which boys fasten a fake wren to a pole and parade it through town.”

Hunting the wren, I thought. I know what that is. I was sure I’d seen the ceremony before, watched a procession of boys in tunics march over a misty hillock on a cold day, one piping a melancholy tune while the others hoisted a platform woven of branches and reeds. The platform supported a delicate bird—until, quite abruptly, the bird turned into a woman…..

Once the Celtic haze had lifted, I recognized, with some disappointment, that I couldn’t possibly have witnessed this scene. I glanced across the room, toward the low bookshelf that houses my favorite childhood paperbacks. And suddenly I felt certain of the vision’s source. It was a series of fantasy books I’d read and reread between eight and eighteen—a series that transported me from New York City to the foggy shores of Wales, that ushered me into King Arthur’s tent on the eve of the Battle of Badon, that both encouraged and capitalized on my mania for British folklore.

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Eugenia Williamson at The Baffler:

The adventure began in 2013, and picked up steam early last year with Fiona Duncan’s “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion,” a blowout exploration of the anti-individualist Normcore creed forNew York magazine. Duncan remembered feeling the first tremors of the revolution:

Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”

Brad, however eloquent and charming, did not coin the term himself. He got it from K-HOLE, a group of trend forecasters. To judge by K-HOLE’s name alone—a slang term for the woozy aftereffects of the animal tranquilizer and recreational drug ketamine—the group was more than happy to claim Normcore as its own licensed playground. As company principals patiently explained to the New York Times, their appropriation of the name of a toxic drug hangover was itself a sly commentary on the cultural logic of the corporate world’s frenetic cooptation of young people’s edgy habits.

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Anne Gerritsen at the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1938, Japanese forces advanced inland from China’s coastal regions. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army had no defence against the Japanese bombers. The Chinese soldiers who had taken possession of the large residence of Liu Feng Shu, Huan Hsu’s great-great-grandfather, were more concerned with chopping up the house’s heavy door for fuel than defending the area. As the soldiers retreated and the local residents prepared to flee, Liu made the decision to hide his treasures. Over the course of several nights, together with his trusted servant and his eldest granddaughter, he dug a hole as large as a bedroom. They filled the vault with the family’s heirlooms: jades, bronzes, paintings and calligraphy, as well as his beloved collection of fine porcelain. A few days later, they stuffed the remaining jewellery and silver coins in their pockets, barricaded the door and fled. This story would accompany the members of Liu Feng Shu’s extended family as they scattered across the globe, some remaining in mainland China, some moving to Taiwan, and others settling in the United States.

Liu’s great-great-grandson, Huan Hsu, grew up an all-American kid, with little interest in the language or culture his parents had left behind. An encounter in the Seattle Art Museum with a piece of eighteenth-century porcelain changed all that. Because this red dish with a scalloped rim and decorated with characters in gold “might have once passed through my great-great-grandfather’s hands”, Hsu decided he wanted to dig for the buried treasures of his family. In The Porcelain Thief, he embarks on a three-year journey to try to reunite the story of the family’s treasure with the pieces of porcelain themselves. Along the way, he learns Mandarin, meets relatives, and slowly gains an understanding of the way things work (and don’t work) in China.

more here.

Bicycles in the Sixties

Early morning, free of clothes
I stay indoors, coolness like a fine silk covers my skin.
I light up a cigarette, and reopen the book
to where I left off yesterday, the small town
in Ireland where Beckett spent his childhood,
his father taking him to Dublin in 1916.
There, the burning fires of an uprising
troubled him all his life.
In my youth—the Cultural Revolution—
the buses roaring through the streets
with Red Guards brandishing guns, tearing down the replicated
Imperial Dam. It was time to “Break the Four Olds”.
I remember leaving home for middle school

two miles away, and saw a young guard in glasses
raised his gun and started shooting porcelain vases
off the power poles.
Shattered pieces flew like birds in all directions.
Armed conflict. The corpse wrapped in asphalt,
abandoned in a roadside truck, shone a blackened light
in the sun. And my mother, head of a small factory unit,
wanted by the opposing faction of the Red Guards,
fled to someplace remote, in fear.
I returned home and saw grandmother worried, a blackened light
in her eyes.
.

by Sun Wenbo
from Poetry International
translation Ming Di and Neil Aitken

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Ahsan Butt in Foreign Policy:

Earlier this year, retired Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who was in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons for 15 years, delivered a message to policymakers in the United States. In his prepared remarks, Kidwai argued that nuclear weapons have rendered conventional war in South Asia “near redundant.” In turn, if conventional war is unimaginable, Kidwai reasoned, India and Pakistan should be able to invest more in their populations’ socioeconomic well-being — as long as their leaders are up to it.

There is precedent to Kidwai highlighting the potential welfare-increasing effects of nuclear weapons. When Western leaders first grappled with its political effects in the early 1950s, they believed that this new and dangerous technology could help them save money. The strategy of “massive retaliation” in the first decade of the Cold War prioritized nuclear over conventional deterrence against the Soviet Union, and was pursued partly in the hope of cutting long-term defense expenditures. Indeed, the intellectual case for massive retaliation was most persuasively made by Britain in its 1952 Global Strategy Paper, primarily due to its dire economic situation. Even France, pushed by former President Charles de Gaulle’s fiscal conservatism, emphasized nuclear weapons in its defense policy for budgetary reasons.

These states were acting on what, on the surface, appears to be sound reasoning. All countries operate in an environment of scarce resources. Those resources must be channeled to the population’s well being, through building schools and hospitals, as well as the state’s security, through buying tanks and missiles.

Nuclear weapons seemingly allow states to ameliorate the pressures of this guns-butter tradeoff; their awesome power means that states locked in arms races do not necessarily have to match their rivals’ conventional acquisitions.

More here.

Tim Lott in The Telegraph:

If I were to list the things I knew when I was 17, it would be a very short list and most of those things would be wrong. I ‘knew’ for instance, that my parents were idiots, that girls were both more boring and nicer than boys, that the most important thing in life was to be popular and that anyone who had a ‘straight’ job was a fake and a sellout. It was me, of course, rather than my parents who was idiotic, but then at least I shared my foolishness with most teenagers. I did however have a sense even at the early age that I knew very little indeed (and this made me defensively certain about the opinions I did have). Forty years on, and I look back on a life in which I understand that my ignorance persisted for a remarkable amount of time. In fact, most of my life – since one thing I have learned is that knowledge is remarkably hard to come by. But perhaps I have suffered different qualities of ignorance at different times in my life.

In my own life, I would not pretend to know less than I did when I was 17 – that would be difficult indeed. And there are a number of things I would tell my 17-year-old self if I happened to bump into him – not that he would listen for a moment, since I am old, and therefore by definition, stupid. The first thing I would tell him is not to be afraid. Because although teenagers are meant to be fearless, I’m not sure that they are at all – in fact I suspect they are secretly terrified. Terrified of failing, terrified of being cast out of their homes and into an uncaring world, terrified of being unattractive, unlovable, unfashionable, unpopular. But fear, which is part of all our make-ups, is a fundamentally useless emotion most of the time, simply hampering effective action. I’m not saying there’s nothing to worry about – I’m just saying that worrying doesn’t do any good.

My 17-year-old self was fundamentally confused, and I think I would tell him that this was not because there was anything wrong with him, but because the world really was confusing – incomprehensible in fact. So incomprehensible that one of the most fundamental truths about the world is that people spend their lives trying to deny uncertainty by clinging rigidly on to whatever their world beliefs/philosophies happen to be. This is why most people never change their minds, once their minds are made up, and why they do crazy things, like go to war, or become suicide bombers, in order to defend their sense of meaning. So I would say to 17-year-old Tim – it’s not you that’s crazy, it’s the world.

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Mitch Leslie in Science:

The patient who walked into Joel Lavine's office at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), medical center one day in the mid-1990s didn't know how sick he really was. He was morbidly obese. A brownish blemish known as acanthosis nigricans sprawled over the nape of his neck and into his armpit, signaling that he probably had developed insulin resistance, a condition in which cells don't respond normally to the hormone that controls blood sugar. A biopsy revealed striking damage to the patient's liver: so much fat crammed into the cells that it squashed their nuclei and other contents. Cirrhosis, or severe liver injury, was beginning as scar tissue ousted healthy cells. The patient essentially had the liver of a middle-aged alcoholic. Yet he was only 8 years old. To Lavine, a pediatric hepatologist, it was clear the boy was suffering from nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). A condition usually associated with obesity, NASH results from excess fat in the liver and, as the name indicates, doesn't stem from the alcohol abuse that causes many cases of severe fatty liver disease. Because NASH can destroy the liver, patients can require a liver transplant or even die.

…Ultimately, says molecular biologist Jay Horton of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, fatty liver “is a disease of caloric excess.” The imbalance between calories consumed and burned triggers a complex series of changes that transform the organ's character. Many of the diet-derived fatty acids in the bloodstream make their way to the liver, which directs them to other parts of the body. “The liver is your traffic cop” for these building blocks of fats, says Elizabeth Parks, a nutritional physiologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. But the organ itself typically holds onto little fat. For instance, Parks says, a fairly fit 70-kg man will carry about 14 kg of body fat—and only 125 g will reside in the liver. “

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Michael Saler in The Nation:

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari recounts how humans have developed from brutes to demigods in the course of their evolutionary history: a grand narrative, one would think, but he perceives it as a comic-tragedy, and details it with mordant humor. Even the book’s subtitle, A Brief History of Humankind, is punning, making “Brief” the soul of wit. At slightly over 400 pages, the narrative is indeed concise, but Sapiens is also an extended brief about the suffering our species has caused itself and others. (The “historical record,” he summarizes for his jury of readers, “makes Homo sapienslook like an ecological serial killer.”) “Brief” is also used ironically, since Sapiens is manifestly “big” in key respects. Harari, an Israeli historian, may not have anticipated that his tome would become such a huge hit: Following its initial publication in Hebrew in 2011, it has become available in 26 languages, and the online lecture series derived from it has attracted 65,000 auditors. But Harari also knows that Sapiens is a characteristic work of “Big History,” a relatively new field of research that spans everything from the Big Bang (which Harari mentions in his first sentence) to speculations about the future (which Harari offers in his last chapter).

Because Sapiens summarily dispatches over 13 billion years of cosmic and terrestrial history in its opening paragraphs, focusing instead on our species’ trials and tribulations during the past 70,000 years, it might more accurately be defined as “Deep History,” another recent approach to historiography that extends the historian’s remit to the origins of the human species. Like Big History, Deep History views the lack of written records for human “prehistory” as an inspiring challenge to historians rather than an insurmountable obstacle, one that can be overcome by recent scientific findings and techniques. Both subfields have provoked controversy, but even more excitement, within and outside of academia. (Bill Gates has committed some of his personal fortune to institutionalizing Big History in high schools: See his bighistoryproject.com.) Deep History has brought historians and biologists into mutually beneficial conversations, both hoping to promote a degree of consilience while avoiding the reductive conclusions that plagued sociobiology in earlier decades, to say nothing of earlier pseudosciences like phrenology and eugenics. Histories Big or Deep by David Christian, Daniel Lord Smail, Jared Diamond, Ian Morris, and others have appealed to lay and professional audiences alike, especially over the past 10 years.

The similar global success of Sapiens raises the question: Why are works covering such vast timescales popular today, when in other respects we remain fixated on the hyperpresent, as manifested in tweets, instant news updates, and high-tech innovations that come so swiftly they have made “planned obsolescence” itself obsolete? One answer is that the Internet’s surfeit of information prompts a craving for the orientation provided by large narratives, those user-friendly global and historical positioning systems of the mind. These fell out of fashion in the heyday of postmodernism, when claims to objectivity and universality were regularly attacked for being subjective and self-interested. Contemporary “metanarratives,” however, tend to be more conscious of their status as provisional guides rather than God’s-eye views. And the new availability of Big Data and visualization tools for tracking patterns over time and space, such as Google’s Ngram Viewer and Stanford’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project, gratify this hunger for temporal and spatial bearings in handy ways.

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David Berreby in Psychology Today:

In a sparsely appointed trailer in northern Iraq, close to the sandbagged front line where Kurds faced the advancing forces of the Islamic State, fighters sat on the floor last spring and talked to Lydia Wilson about war. “Here,” one would say, pointing to his neck, “is where I was wounded—and here, and here.” Another trailed off from his own story to tell her about the wars in which his father and grandfather had fought in defense of their ethnic identity. Others praised their French allies’ efficiency in carrying out air strikes—the Americans, they said, took too long to arrive and flew away too soon. Some wondered out loud whether the coming night would bring suicide attackers driving trucks laden with explosives toward their position. Daytime offered quiet and some respite in the trailer, but by nightfall, they knew, ISIS would be back.

Wilson, an ebullient English research fellow at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford, sat beside the men asking questions, listening intently, and scribbling in her notebook. At certain points she focused her attention on two men in particular. They had been led into the trailer in handcuffs and with their eyes down and at first had little to say. These men, the Kurds told her, had been working undercover for ISIS, planting car bombs and plotting assassinations. They had already been tried in Mosul and would soon be executed. For Wilson, the opportunity to talk with them could offer valuable information for her study of what motivates young men to kill or die in war.

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Steve Wasserman in LARB:

And yet and yet: the sound of Susan’s voice is still in my head. Her lust for life, her avidity, her pursuit of aesthetic bliss, her detestation of philistinism, her love of learning, her opposition to ethical and aesthetic shallowness, her insistence on being a grown-up, her passion for justice and capacity for outrage, and, always, her hatred of suffering and death are everywhere to be found in her sentences, in her essays, and in her stories. Her exemplary effort to swallow the world, as she concludes her revelatory short story “Unguided Tour,” tells the tale:

If I go this fast, I won’t see anything. If I slow down —

Everything. — then I won’t have seen everything before it disappears.

Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.

The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.

I hear most of all her cri de coeur, given to the narrator of her story “Debriefing” — it could be her epitaph, her final aria, as she ends her story with the defiant throbbing declaration:

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up — up, up. And… down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

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Alastair Sooke at the BBC.com:

It must be one of the most familiar images in modern art: a space-distorting interior that could never exist in reality, dominated by staircases sprouting surreally in all directions, and filled with expressionless, mannequin-like figures walking up and down like members of a religious order calmly going about their daily business.

Since the original lithograph was produced in the summer of 1953, Relativity – which belongs to a series of five prints by the same artist also featuring impossible constructions and multiple vanishing points – has been reproduced countless times on posters, mugs, T-shirts, items of stationery and even duvet covers.

Yet, if we’re honest, how much do most of us really know about its creator, the Dutch printmaker MC Escher (1898-1972)? The truth is that outside his homeland Escher remains something of an enigma.

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Elizabeth Gumport at Bookforum:

The Men in My Life, Vivian Gornick’s 2008 collection of critical writing, begins with an essay on the nineteenth-century British novelist George Gissing. Gornick particularly admires his novel The Odd Women (1893). In the book’s feminist reformer, Rhoda Nunn, Gornick writes, “I see myself, and others of my generation, plain.” Caught between her ideological opposition to marriage and the uncertainties of taking a lover, Nunn falters, and “she becomes,” as Gornick puts it, “a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice.” This gap is familiar territory for Gornick: In her work as a critic and memoirist over the past several decades, she has studied moments in history when ideas remade our daily reality—and the times when the world, or we, would not yield. “I knew intimately what was tearing these people apart,” Gornick writes of Gissing’s characters. “What’s more, I recognized myself as one of the ‘odd’ women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as ‘new’ women, ‘free’ women, ‘liberated’ women—but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the ‘odd’ women.”

Gissing’s novel echoes through Gornick’s new memoir, The Odd Woman and the City. The book is ostensibly about Gornick’s thirty-year friendship with Leonard, “a witty, intelligent, gay man” (and fellow native of the Bronx). Scenes from their relationship are broken up by vignettes of Gornick’s daily life in the city, her encounters as a solitary walker on the streets of Manhattan. Like Gornick, Leonard loves to explore the city on foot, but that is not their only shared interest: “Our subject is the unlived life. The question for each of us: Would we have manufactured the inequity had one not been there, ready-made—he is gay, I am the Odd Woman—for our grievances to make use of?”

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John Keay at Literary Review:

The original Great Game, those bouts of strategic shadow-boxing that preoccupied the intelligence communities of British India and tsarist Russia in the 19th century, was played out under the big skies of Central Asia and across the high passes of the western Himalayas. Camels and yaks did a lot of the heavy work; beards and turbans made for easy disguise. Bagging forbidden cities and bartering for rare bloodstock rivalled the gunrunning and the surveying. Heavy books and solid reputations resulted.

The arena earmarked by Bertil Lintner for what he calls the 'Great Game East' could not be more different. Squeezed between the Tibetan plateau, the southeast Asian rainforest and the Bay of Bengal, the leech-infested triangle where northeast India meets southwest China (with some nudging from Burma, Bangladesh and Bhutan) is one of the most impenetrable zones on earth. Heavy rainfall, dense forest and interminable hills defy developmental initiatives and harbour a scattered and impossibly diverse population. Adjacent settlements speak mutually incomprehensible languages; even 'tribe' proves to be a colonial term of convenience corresponding to little more than highly localised kinship. Ethnolinguistic identities – Indo-Bengali, Tai-Shan, Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer – are crisscrossed with confessional allegiances, ranging from messianic Christianity to militant Islam, with Buddhism, Hinduism and numerous indeterminate forms of animism as default settings. Anthropologists have long thrived here. Ideologists have found the going tougher.

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From KurzweilAI:

A new study has found quantifiable evidence that supports the common-sense idea that walking in nature could lower your risk of depression. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, found that people who walked for 90 minutes in a natural area, as opposed to participants who walked in a high-traffic urban setting (El Camino Real in Palo Alto, California, a noisy street with three to four lanes in both directions), showed decreased activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a brain region active during rumination — repetitive thought focused on negative emotions. “These results suggest that accessible natural areas may be vital for mental health in our rapidly urbanizing world,” said co-author Gretchen Daily, the Bing Professor in Environmental Science and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “Our findings can help inform the growing movement worldwide to make cities more livable, and to make nature more accessible to all who live in them.” “This finding is exciting because it demonstrates the impact of nature experience on an aspect of emotion regulation — something that may help explain how nature makes us feel better,” said lead author Gregory Bratman, a graduate student in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, the Stanford Psychophysiology Lab and the Center for Conservation Biology. “These findings are important because they are consistent with, but do not yet prove, a causal link between increasing urbanization and increased rates of mental illness,” said co-author James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford.

Essential for urban planners to incorporate nature

It is essential for urban planners and other policymakers to understand the relationship between exposure to nature and mental health, the study’s authors write. “We want to explore what elements of nature — how much of it and what types of experiences — offer the greatest benefits,” Daily said. As noted in the paper, “Never before has such a large percentage of humanity been so far removed from nature [1]; more than 50% of people now live in urban areas, and by 2050, this proportion will be 70% [2]. Although urbanization has many benefits, it is also associated with increased levels of mental illness, including anxiety disorders and depression [3-5].”

More here.

Brian E. Gray at The Morning News:

There is a poignant scene in Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous in which the rock critic Lester Bangs warns 15-year-old William Miller of the perils of seduction by the musicians Miller is covering for Rolling Stone magazine. Banks (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) says to Miller (Patrick Fugit portraying a young Cameron Crowe):

“They make you feel cool. And, hey, I’ve met you. You are not cool.”

This profound advice extends well beyond the worlds of rock ‘n roll and music criticism. All writers should take heed of Bangs’s insight that trying to be cool when you simply aren’t risks muddling one’s clarity of observation and analysis and jeopardizes credibility with readers. Journalists, historians, novelists, academics, judges—perhaps especially judges—should take note.

I recalled this scene while reading the two most recent opinions of Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s junior member. Justice Alito wrote the opinion of the Court inPleasant Grove City v. Summon, which held that a local government does not violate the first amendment by maintaining a monument to the Ten Commandments in a public park while refusing to install other permanent monuments that express differing religious views.

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