Andrew Pulver and Saeed Kamali Dehghan at The Guardian:

Kiarostami’s rise to the status of one of the world’s foremost auteurs started from relatively humble beginnings. He was born in 1940 in Tehran, and originally studied painting at the University of Tehran; Kiarostami began working as a graphic designer and went on to shoot dozens of commercials for Iranian TV. In 1969 he joined Kanun (the Centre for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults), where he ran the film department, and was able to make his own films. In 2005 Kiarostami told the Guardian: “We were supposed to make films that dealt with childhood problems. At the beginning it was just a job, but it was the making of me as an artist.”

In the two decades he worked for Kanun, Kiarostami made films continuously, including his first feature, The Report, in 1977. He managed to negotiate the transition triggered by the Khomeini revolution, re-working the films he made to try and accommodate the demands of a new set of censors. Unlike many of his film-industry peers, Kiarostami decided to remain in Iran after the revolution, likening himself to “a tree that is rooted in the ground”. “[If you] transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit … If I had left my country, I would be the same as the tree.”

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John Gray at The New Statesman:

As it is being used today, “populism” is a term of abuse applied by establishment thinkers to people whose lives they have not troubled to understand. A revolt of the masses is under way, but it is one in which those who have shaped policies over the past twenty years are more remote from reality than the ordinary men and women at whom they like to sneer. The interaction of a dysfunctional single currency and destructive austerity policies with the financial crisis has left most of Europe economically stagnant and parts of it blighted with unemployment on a scale unknown since the Thirties. At the same time European institutions have been paralysed by the migrant crisis. Floundering under the weight of problems it cannot solve or that it has even created, the EU has demon­strated beyond reasonable doubt that it lacks the ­capacity for effective action and is incapable of reform. As I suggested in this magazine in last year (“The neo-Georgian prime minister”, 23 October 2015), Europe’s image as a safe option has given way to the realisation that it is a failed experiment. A majority of British voters grasped this fact, which none of our establishments has yet understood.

No single leader or party is responsible for the debacle of the Remain camp. It is true that gross errors were made in the course of the campaign. Telling voters who were considering voting Leave that they were stupid, illiterate, xenophobic and racist was never going to be an effective way of persuading them to change their views. The litany of insults voiced by some leaders of the Remain campaign expressed their sentiments towards millions of ordinary people. It did not occur to these advanced minds that their contempt would be reciprocated. Increasingly callow and blundering even as they visibly aged in office, Cameron and George Osborne were particularly inept in this regard.

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Roger Pearson in Lapham's Quarterly:

It was once said of Voltaire, by his friend the Marquis d’Argenson, that “our great poet forever has one foot on Mount Parnassus and the other in the rue Quincampoix.” The rue Quincampoix was the Wall Street of eighteenth-century Paris; the country’s most celebrated writer of epic and dramatic verse had a keen eye for investment opportunities. By the time d’Argenson made his remark, in 1751, Voltaire had amassed a fortune. He owed it all to a lottery win. Or, to be more precise, to several wins. Lotteries were all the rage in eighteenth-century Paris. There had been a financial crisis in 1719, and France had nearly gone bankrupt. The bankers were to blame, having devised financial instruments that magicked debt away, only for it to return multiplied once it was discovered that the collateral wasn’t there. With the ensuing austerity came the lottery and the blandishments of la bonne chance. Why tax a weary and resistant populace when luck might seduce them?

…In fact, Voltaire made his own luck. One surviving piece of documentary evidence records that Voltaire “acquired all the ticket books on payment of a deposit without filling them in.” Clearly he had an understanding of sorts with the notaries appointed to sell the tickets, and it seems that he did not have to pay the full price of the tickets, so certain were he and his associates—and perhaps the notaries selling the tickets, presumably cut in on the action—of winning. The records for each successive draw up to and including February 1730 still exist. While the draw of January 8 shows a wide disparity in the redeemable value of the winning tickets (as intended by the original terms of the lottery), already in February there is a marked rise in the number of winning tickets redeemable for the minimum bond value of 1,000 livres, several of them registered to the same owner. La Condamine himself is recorded by name as the owner of thirteen winning tickets that had cost him only one livre each but which now entitled him to the sum of 13,000 livres.

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George Johnson in The New York Times:

A paper in The British Medical Journal in December reported that cognitive behavioral therapy — a means of coaxing people into changing the way they think — is as effective as Prozac or Zoloft in treating major depression. In ways no one understands, talk therapy reaches down into the biological plumbing and affects the flow of neurotransmitters in the brain. Other studies have found similar results for “mindfulness” — Buddhist-inspired meditation in which one’s thoughts are allowed to drift gently through the head like clouds reflected in still mountain water. Findings like these have become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget their strange implications.

Depression can be treated in two radically different ways: by altering the brain with chemicals, or by altering the mind by talking to a therapist. But we still can’t explain how mind arises from matter or how, in turn, mind acts on the brain. This longstanding conundrum — the mind-body problem — was succinctly described by the philosopher David Chalmers at a recent symposium at The New York Academy of Sciences. “The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that,” he said. Descartes’s notion of dualism — mind and body as separate things — has long receded from science. The challenge now is to explain how the inner world of consciousness arises from the flesh of the brain. Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing.

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Olga Ziemska. Listen. Oronsko, Poland, 2003.

Plaster cast hands, locally reclaimed birch logs.

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Robert Pinsky in Slate:

Mistakes are instructive. In particular, they can become a form of analysis, as, for example, in sports or music, when getting something a little bit wrong leads to improvement in technique or understanding.

Many of us, in the imperfect memorizing of a poem, make mistakes, too—as though we were folk singers or blues artists, but without the traditional flexibility of those forms. Is it “many recognitions dim and faint,” you might ask yourself, or “many recognitions sad and faint”? And, before you can find the authoritative book and check, which one do you prefer? And why?

A dramatic demonstration of this principle came to me on a hike in the mountains years ago.

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Blake Smith in Aeon:

For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissez–faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.

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Robin Feuer Miller reviews Aileen Kelly’s new biography of Herzen in Times Higher Education:

Who was Alexander Herzen (1812-1870)? Why has this most important and courageous Russian thinker remained among the least famous, the least read? Yet he figures at the centre of Tom Stoppard’s magnificent trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia, is fundamental to Isaiah Berlin’s thought, and now is the subject of Aileen Kelly’s magisterial new biography. Herzen, like John Dewey, was witness to the complexities of his century; a man whose ideas constantly evolved, at the centre of often tragic family and extramarital relationships, the author of far-reaching essays and an autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, generally acknowledged to be a masterwork of Russian prose and one of the great autobiographies of all time. Kelly offers us a new Herzen to consider – not the last of the Romantics, or the radical Russian exile, but the man inspired since boyhood by science and the natural world. Tracing Herzen’s thought through this lens, she places Herzen firmly and unexpectedly within a line of thinkers from Francis Bacon to Charles Darwin.

Along the way, Kelly depicts Herzen’s fascinating early years. Drawing on an impressive array of scholarly and archival materials, she forges a vivid account of the University of Moscow of the day. His friendship with an eccentric cousin known as The Chemist inspired Herzen, surprisingly, to enrol in the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, a decision that shaped his thought. Thus Kelly understands his subsequent disillusionment with the upheavals of 1848 as being partly rooted in his sustained interest in science and the natural world rather than simply reflecting a rejection of Romantic political ideals.

Herzen lived primarily in exile – in Italy, France, England and Switzerland; he left Russia at 34, having spent six years in prison and internal exile, never to return. Eventually his complex political opinions alienated him from contemporary Russian writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Fyodor Dostoevsky, although an admiring Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Our Russian lives…would have been different if this writer had not been hidden from the young generation.” Kelly demonstrates how Herzen’s From the Other Shore anticipates principles affirmed a decade later by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. She situates Herzen within a “demythologizing tradition in European humanism”. His passionate attack on “philosophies of progress” and his “interest in scientific modes of inquiry and their relevance to the study of history” made him among the first to appreciate Darwin’s discovery of the role of chance in evolution as a “momentous step toward dismantling teleological systems that misrepresent the world and humans’ place in it”. He wrote to his son Sasha about his admiration for Darwin’s relegation of causes that science did not yet understand to a “black box”: “Now there’s an honest thinker…whereas others, as soon as they come up against something they can’t solve, invent a new force, such as a soul.”

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Matthew Boudway in Commonweal:

THE QUESTION “WHITHER EUROPE” has been asked so often that it has become a clichéd subcategory of another cliché, the headline writer’s “Whither X?” A Google search for “Whither Europe?” turns up more than six thousand uses of the phrase. People were asking the question after World War I and again after World War II; they asked it at the birth of the European Union and have been asking it, again and again, in the wake of debt crises that have threatened to tear that union apart. Last May the historian James J. Sheehan tried to answer the question in the pages ofCommonweal—although the editors fastidiously avoided the word “whither” in the headline (we settled for “A Continent Adrift”).

The title of George Steiner’s recent book is The Idea of Europe, but there is a strong whiff of “whither” in the book’s nervously elegiac tone. When Steiner, who is generally the kind of writer one would expect to use that archaic word without embarrassment, finally arrives at his modest speculations about Europe’s future, he settles for the more demotic “What next?” But most of this very short book is about Europe’s past, not its future—about what has set the Continent apart from the rest of the world, including America. Steiner’s method here is impressionistic and idiosyncratic: his list of “five axioms” that have defined Europe is a hodgepodge of suggestive observations and monumental truisms. It is nevertheless an interesting list. Steiner makes it interesting by dint of style and erudition. It does not quite amount to a systematic theory of Europe, but then, Steiner does not promise one. As his title indicates, he is content to offer an idea—or several ideas.

His list of things that make Europe Europe starts with the concrete and becomes gradually more abstract. Item one is the café or coffeehouse. “Draw the coffeehouse map and you have one of the essential markers of the ‘idea of Europe.’”

A cup of coffee, a glass of wine, a tea with rhum secures a locale in which to work, to dream, to play chess or simply keep warm the whole day. It is the club of the spirit and theposterestante of the homeless…. Three principal cafés in imperial and interwar Vienna provided the agora, the locus of eloquence and rivalry, for competing schools of aesthetics and political economy, of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Those wishing to meet Freud or Karl Kraus, Musil or Carnap, knew precisely in which café to look, at which Stammtisch to take their place. Danton and Robespierre meet one last time at the Procope. When the lights go out in Europe, in August 1914, Jaurès is assassinated in a café. In a Geneva café, Lenin writes his treatise on empiro-criticism and plays chess with Trotsky.

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David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, and Daniel Trilling in the LRB. Wolfgang Streeck:

Every fortnight the Institute of Race Relations publishes a round-up of racist incidents and far right activity. Many of the stories – verbal abuse on public transport, vandalism of religious memorials or places of worship, poorly attended protests by extremist groups – are culled from the local press. They’re not usually considered important enough to merit national media attention.

Now they are. On Saturday, a photograph of a National Front demonstration in Newcastle, at which a handful of supporters hung a banner demanding the ‘repatriation’ of immigrants, went viral on Twitter. Reports of EU migrants and British citizens of visible ethnic minority backgrounds being insulted or told to ‘go home’, collected under the hashtag #postrefracism, began to flow in. A Polish cultural centre in West London was sprayed with graffiti. Sima Kotecha, a Today programme reporter, was called a ‘Paki’ in her home town during a discussion on immigration and Brexit. According to the National Police Chiefs’ Council, 85 hate crimes were reported between Thursday and Sunday, an increase of 57 per cent compared with the equivalent four days last month.

Anecdotes on Twitter are difficult to verify, and reports of hate crimes can go up when more people are looking out for them, but even so it seems clear that the referendum has led to a spike in public harassment. Yet it would be a mistake to think that the referendum campaign created this racism out of nothing, or that it’s the preserve only of those who voted Brexit. While the Leave campaigns focused on a series of racist myths – the effect of Turkey’s proposed accession to the EU; a flood of refugees from the Middle East – politicians on the Remain side have also taken xenophobic positions. It was Cameron’s government that introduced the recent immigration act which turns landlords into an extension of the border police, and Cameron himself who talked of ‘swarms’ of migrants at Calais. Labour carved the words ‘controls on immigration’ into a stone tablet during the 2015 general election campaign.

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Jordan Stein in Avidly:

My mother gives me a headache. It would appear, also, that she gave me headaches. When I spoke with a neurologist last winter about the increasingly frequent migraines I was having, I told him about my mother’s medical history. He smiled sardonically, one adult survivor of Jewish parents to another, and said, “Well, the good news is that this is probably your mother’s fault!” Twenty-eight years ago, when my mother was the exact age I am now, she began to have migraines. These manifested as powerful and debilitating headaches, which, along with major pain relieving drugs administered by ER doctors and later by her neurologist, would knock her out for days. Days have a way of adding up. Enough knock outs and you stop getting up so fast. As I recall it, anyway, my mother slept on the couch in the daytime for about four years. I have memories of coming home after school and just sitting on the floor watching her sleep. I think I felt abandoned.

My mother’s neurologist was a world-famous specialist who, Google informs me, wrote what is still considered the textbook on headaches. He recommended Oliver Sacks’s book, Migraine, and when Sacks later came to our local metropolis on a book tour, my otherwise homebodyish parents went. My mother loved being taken care of, understood little science, and was in awe of doctors. Oliver Sacks blazed on her horizon like a bright star. Yet, when he signed her book, she gave him my name. Sacks inscribed my mother’s copy of Migraine “To Jordan, who taught me everything I know.” I was eleven or twelve, at home, alone. Even in those childhood days, my mother’s headaches were already marked as my inheritance. Because she suffered from migraines, there was a 40% chance I would too. But because there was some migrainous history on my father’s side, the chance jumped up to 80%. My mother repeated these numbers, and I grew up repeating them too: her words in my mouth, her pain in my head. Perhaps we each wanted to believe that having this connection was the same as her giving me what I needed. If I was being ignored as a consequence of my mother’s illness, I was being roped into it as well, made complicit with things I didn’t do and certainly didn’t understand. I coped in the ways I could: meaning, I waited out the better part of three decades, and then told this story to my therapist last week. Afterward, I walked into the independent bookstore down the block from his office and bought myself a copy of Migraine.

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Ron Rosenbaum in Smithsonian:

Love and Evil. Two great mysteries that have obsessed the greatest writers and thinkers for as long as people have thought and written. For a long time Edna O’Brien, the celebrated Irish-born, London-dwelling writer, has been known as one of the literary world’s great chroniclers of love. Of love and longing and the desperate lives of souls in the pitiless grip of passion and doomed elation. A beautiful writer who has always been able to find beauty in life, even in despair. Some have likened her to Chekhov; others have compared her to James Joyce in his early Portrait of the Artist phase. But in her latest novel, The Little Red Chairs, O’Brien shifts from love to evil. A wild and ambitious leap that takes us behind the headlines and home screens of the most tragic world news—war crimes, refugees, genocide—and which may garner her the Nobel Prize that she’s often been mentioned for and long deserved.

Moving from Ireland to London and then to The Hague, “The Little Red Chairs” is Edna O'Brien's first novel in ten years—a vivid and unflinching exploration of humanity's capacity for evil and artifice as well as the bravest kind of love. It just so happens that her new novel was published in America just a few days after the bang of a gavel in the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. The evil character she’d written about in thin disguise, Radovan Karadzic—a.k.a. the Beast of Bosnia—had been found guilty of war crimes and genocide for ordering the mass murder of more than 7,000 mostly Muslim men and boys in 1995, an act that brought the terrifying term “ethnic cleansing” into common use. He was found guilty, too, of ordering the deadly shelling of women, children and civilian noncombatants in the years-long siege of Sarajevo, a thriving city Karadzic turned into a graveyard. Guilty as well of participating in a horde that committed horrific up-close and personal acts of torture, rape and mutilation.

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The Mercy

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
eighty-three years ago was named “The Mercy.”
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
“orange,” saying it patiently over and over.
A long autumn voyage, the days darkening
with the black waters calming as night came on,
then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space
without limit rushing off to the corners
of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish
to find her family in New York, prayers
unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored
by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness
before she woke, that kept “The Mercy” afloat
while smallpox raged among the passengers
and crew until the dead were buried at sea
with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.
“The Mercy,” I read on the yellowing pages of a book
I located in a windowless room of the library
on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days
offshore in quarantine before the passengers
disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships
arrived, “Tancred” out of Glasgow, “The Neptune”
registered as Danish, “Umberto IV,”
the list goes on for pages, November gives
way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.
Italian miners from Piemonte dig
under towns in western Pennsylvania
only to rediscover the same nightmare
they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels
all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.
She learns that mercy is something you can eat
again and again while the juice spills over
your chin, you can wipe it away with the back
of your hands and you can never get enough.
.

by Philip Levine
from The Mercy
Knopf, 2000
.

Owen Hatherley at The Guardian:

Although it is a long time since anyone bar the neoliberal right believed that history was on their side, it is always nice to feel that you have a usable past. For much of the left, this has been a difficult matter. The 20th-century experiences of “really existing socialism” are understandably rather forbidding, and those of social democracy, though often fondly recalled, are just a little too conformist and mainstream. If there is a rock on which the fissile contemporary left might all agree to build itself on, it is the two-month-long Paris Commune of 1871, that bloodily suppressed, chaotic and radically democratic experiment in municipal anarcho-communism.

In the geography of David Harvey, the philosophy of Alain Badiou or the revolutionary heritage guidebooks of Eric Hazan, the Commune is the culmination of the French revolution, a “Universal Republic” whose ambitions were as expansive as its existence was brief. Kristin Ross’s recent Communal Luxury, for instance, tried to wrest the Commune out of the history of communism or the French left, instead tracing an unusual, intriguing line from the ideas of the Commune’s self-educated artisans, to those of figures such asWilliam Morris and Peter Kropotkin, who were inspired by their acts to reassess their entire approach to art, nature and politics. According to Ross, “the world of the communards” – migratory lives, precarious work, insecure housing – “is much closer to us than that of our parents”. These two books about celebrated communards, however, deal in myths and legends.

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