AS Byatt at The Guardian:

Storytelling is part of most people’s lives, almost from the moment we can understand language at all. Family tales, fairy stories, popular history, news and gossip are integral parts of human life. When I taught literature at University College London I was lucky enough to be invited to sit in the Senior Common Room bar with the artists from the Slade School of Art. I started to think about the fact that they worked with concrete materials – clay, stone, paint, film – whereas what I work with is the language we also use to conduct our daily lives.

In Amsterdam recently I had the great pleasure of talking with Edmund de Waal about how – and how early in his life – he understood that clay was what he would work with. Why do some of us need to make works of art? How do we choose what we work with? What effect does the shift from dailiness to art have on us as writers and readers?

I remember first noticing that the written word had a form that needed to be understood and thought about. Many of my generation of British children will have grown up with the series of school reading books,The Radiant Way, in which there is the unforgettable sequence of words: “Pat can sing. Pat sing to Mother. Sing to Mother Pat. Mother sing to Pat.” And so on. We discover the “th”, the “ng” which are not part of the sounded out phrases we are first taught. We discover the written word as opposed to the spoken word.

more here.

Marcelo Ballvé at The Quarterly Conversation:

It’s difficult to find adjectives that will bear the full oddity of Mario Bellatín’s books. But it’s at least possible to say they are remarkably elastic—usually slim in size but containing a stretched-waistband world of absurd characters, uncanny scenarios, and endless transformations.

In Bellatín’s accounts of reality, nothing remains what it is for very long, nothing is cataloged properly or fixed in place. Soon enough it shifts shape, or inverts. Male to female, fanged to toothless, indecent to prim, alive to dead; Central Europe becomes California, a beauty salon an aquarium and a hospice, a roadhouse an underground railroad for Jewish refugees.

An impending transformation is at the center of Bellatín’s fictionalized autobiography, The Large Glass. In “My Skin, Luminous,” a young boy is brought to a claustrophobic convent-like bathhouse for the exhibition of his oddities, including his prodigious testicles and glowing skin. In exchange, he receives gifts. Near the end, he suffers, knowing one day he will lose his remarkable qualities. He will become less shapely, his skin more dull. He will change again. When the show ends, so will his rewards.

more here.

Simon Kuper in FT:

About four years ago, George Soros began to focus on Europe’s white working class. This was a new departure for him: in Europe, his liberal Open Society Foundations tended to study and advocate for ethnic minorities. But Soros thought the white working classes had a lot in common with European Muslims: they were mostly poor, they suffered discrimination because of the way they looked and dressed, and their voices were seldom heard.

The financier’s sympathies might surprise some in the white working class. After all, Soros featured in Donald Trump’s final campaign ad — alongside other prominent Jews in finance — as one of “these people that don’t have your good in mind”. And yet Soros’s OSF commissioned studies of six white working-class neighbourhoods around western Europe. This was groundbreaking research. The OSF believes its report on Lyonwas “the only empirical study on the majority population that has been conducted in France”. (Disclosure: as a paid sub-board member of OSF at the time, I was involved in the studies.)

Today, the white working classes aren’t forgotten any more. Mainstream parties are now desperate to win them back from populists. The OSF research suggests how this could be done.

Before visiting the neighbourhoods we studied in Manchester and Lyon, I hadn’t realised just how much the white working classes are mocked. They are called “chavs” in Britain, “white trash” in the US and, sometimes, “beaufs” (“oiks”) in France. “Poverty porn” TV shows make fun of supposedly lazy, half-witted, track-suited scroungers. Many poorer whites complain that the “elite” care about ethnic minorities and gay people, but not about them.

No wonder, because their states had often abandoned them. The people I met in Manchester lacked decent public transport, childcare, elder care and mental-health care (a particular issue for the poor). They distrusted the police. They had “zero-hours contracts” or did agency work, with no guaranteed salary. In weeks when they earned little, they had to fill in complicated forms at the benefits office, and hope for help. Some didn’t send their children to university because they couldn’t afford the living expenses. People in Lyon told me they feared ending up on the streets — an outcome they saw as entirely possible.

More here.

Jacob T. Levy over at the Niskanen Center's No Virtue:

To understand this kind of political untruth, I think we have to look to theorists of truth and language in politics; Frankfurt’s essay was only tangentially that. But the great analysts of truth and speech under totalitarianism—George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is. Sometimes—often—a leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie in order to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them.

Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”

Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them.

But in totalitarian and authoritarian politics, there seems to be something special about the lie, partly because so much of politics is about speech (and especially public speech) in the first place. Based on the evidence of his presidential campaign, I think Donald Trump understands this instinctively, and he relished the power to make his subordinates repeat his clearly outlandish lies in public. Every Sunday he provided fresh absurdities that Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Kellyanne Conway repeated on the talk shows. They didn’t persuade anyone who were strategically important to persuade; the audience for Meet the Press isn’t low-information, undecided, working-class voters, and the kinds of people who did watch those shows knew the claims were false. But making his surrogates repeat the lies compromised them; that tied them to him. And it degraded them, and made clear where power lay.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews John Kleinig in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re a philosopher who has written widely on both legal and ethical and political philosophy. How do you see the relationship between ethics, law and politics as it seems to be a relationship that needs to be borne in mind as we follow your thinking, in particular how you separate legal and moral requirements because they often parallel each other in the domains you examine.

JK: Although my earliest interests were in philosophy of religion, my masters and doctoral dissertations were on topics in moral/social/legal philosophy (conscience and punishment, respectively). That more or less set the course for my subsequent career. The interest in political philosophy came a bit later, though my main doctoral supervisor – Stanley Benn – had made significant contributions to the revival of political philosophy in the 1960s. However, I remember him remarking that one needed to be a certain age to engage with problems in political philosophy – I think he had in mind a certain breadth of understanding and experience – and so my political interests developed more slowly than the others.

As for the ethics, law, and politics relationship, there has always been a tension for me as I try to keep them distinct while recognizing their interactions. A valuable contribution to my thinking there and elsewhere was Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Mind and Politics, which reinforced for me the ways in which seemingly disparate philosophical endeavors were/are interconnected, and although I have tended to give a certain priority to ethical considerations as part of practical reasoning, I am reminded often enough that this position makes some contentious presumptions . In separating out, say, legal and moral requirements, I tend to work with paradigms rather than strict divisions – eg, paradigmatically, legal requirements are jurisdictionally bound whereas ethical requirements are aspirationally universal; ethical requirements focus especially on intentions whereas legal requirements focus primarily on conduct; ethical requirements take priority over legal requirements; and so on. One starts there, but then has to kick away the ladder with qualifications – to accommodate ethical obligations to animals, environmental objects, criminal excuses, etc. I guess something like that is true in most disciplines – we step off the ladders we necessarily construct to deal with more complex understandings.

More here.

Anthony Sudbery in Aeon:

Que sera sera
Whatever will be will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que sera sera.

So sang Doris Day in 1956, expressing a near-universal belief of humankind: you can’t know the future. Even if this is not quite a universal belief, then the universal experience of humankind is that we don’t know the future. We don’t know it, that is, in the immediate way that we know parts of the present and the past. We see some things happening in the present, we remember some things in the past, but we don’t see or remember the future.

But perception can be deceptive, and memory can be unreliable; even this kind of direct knowledge is not certain. And there are kinds of indirect knowledge of the future that can be as certain as anything we know by direct perception or memory. I reckon I know that the sun will rise tomorrow; if I throw a stone hard at my kitchen window, I know that it will break the window. On the other hand, I did not know on Christmas Eve last year that my hometown of York was going to be hit by heavy rain on Christmas Day and nearly isolated by floods on Boxing Day.

In the ancient world and, I think, to our childhood selves, it is events such as the York floods that make us believe that we cannot know the future. I might know some things about the future, but I cannot know everything; I am sure that some things will happen tomorrow that I have no inkling of, and that I could not possibly have known about, today. In the past, such events might have been attributed to the unknowable will of the gods. York was flooded because the rain god was in a bad mood, or felt like playing with us. My insurance policy refers to such catastrophes as ‘acts of God’. When we feel that there is no knowing who will win an election, we say that the result is ‘in the lap of the gods’.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis in Project Syndicate:

If Donald Trump understands anything, it is the value of bankruptcy and financial recycling. He knows all about success via strategic defaults, followed by massive debt write-offs and the creation of assets from liabilities. But does he grasp the profound difference between a developer’s debt and the debt of a large economy? And does he understand that China’s private debt bubble is a powder keg under the global economy? Much hinges on whether he does.

Trump was elected on a wave of discontent with the establishment’s colossal mishandling of both the pre-2008 boom and the post-2008 recession. His promise of a domestic stimulus and protectionist trade policies to bring back manufacturing jobs carried him to the White House. Whether he can deliver depends on whether he understands the role America used to play in the “good old days,” the role it can play now and, crucially, the significance of China.

Before 1971, US global hegemony was predicated upon America’s current-account surplus with the rest of the capitalist world, which the US helped to stabilize by recycling part of its surplus to Europe and Japan. This underpinned economic stability and sharply declining inequality everywhere. But, as America slipped into a deficit position, that global system could no longer function, giving rise to what I have called the Global Minotaur phase.

According to ancient myth, King Minos of Crete owed his hegemony to the Minotaur, a tragic beast imprisoned under Minos’s palace. The Minotaur’s intense loneliness was comparable only to the fear it inspired far and wide, because its voracious appetite could be satisfied – thereby guaranteeing Minos’s reign – only by human flesh. So a ship loaded with youngsters regularly sailed to Crete from faraway Athens to deliver its human tribute to the beast. The gruesome ritual was essential for preserving Pax Cretana and the King’s hegemony.

After 1971, US hegemony grew by an analogous process.

More here.

Joy Ho and Erin Ross in NPR:

When the ancient Greeks were naming body parts, they were probably trying to give them names that were easy to remember, says Mary Fissell, a professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. “Sure, there were texts, but the ancient world was very oral, and the people learning this stuff have to remember it.” So the Greek scholars, and later Roman and medieval scholars, named bones and organs and muscles after what they looked like. The thick bone at the front of your lower leg, the tibia, is named after a similar-looking flute.

Hippocampus

The hippocampus is one of several parts of our brain involved in memory. Some intrepid brain-dissector must have thought it looked like a seahorse, because that's exactly what hippocampus means in Greek. We agree; it really does.

More here.

Vivian Gornick in The New York Times:

“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women” is a collection of essays that, taken as a whole, is meant to increase the common reader’s understanding of and interest in the rich brew of human endeavor to be found in science and the humanities when we try to see the accomplishments of the one through the lens of the other. In its introduction, Siri Hustvedt reminds us of the famous culture war brought on in 1959 by the English scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, who warned that the gulf between those who understood either science or literature but not both would prove deadly to the future of liberal democracy. Today, Hustvedt observes, that threat seems more potent than ever, what with those who love the new technology indiscriminately, those who hate it indiscriminately, and very few in either camp who have a large grasp of its potential effect on us half a century from now. Hustvedt speaks here both as a writer of fiction (she’s got six novels under her belt) and as a serious autodidact who has spent the last decade reading and writing about neurobiology in hopes that she herself might become that marvelously integrated citizen Snow was calling for: a person who has developed a mind-set that moves with ease between understanding derived from the emotional imagination as well as the analytic intellect. The book we have in hand, however, made me wonder whether anyone can develop a sensibility so flexible it can address both sorts of experience with equal intimacy.

“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women” is divided into three parts. The first part includes essays on sexism, the arts, pornography in our time, and Hustvedt’s own psychoanalysis; the third, essays on suicide, psychological blindness, philosophy and the brain, and Kierkegaard. These essays are often richly explored — especially the ones based in philosophical thought — and, when art is the subject, touchingly personal. Reflecting on the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, Hustvedt asserts that the spiritual exchange between herself and the artist has been so intense that Bourgeois “is now part of my bodily self in memory, both conscious and unconscious” and “in turn has mutated into the forms of my own work, part of the strange transference that takes place between artists.”

More here.

Annalee Newitz in Ars Technica:

A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region's tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.

At the city's apex in 1050, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in what became the United States, bigger than London or Paris at the time. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose along the eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading across the river to St. Louis. One particularly magnificent structure, known today as Monk’s Mound, marked the center of downtown. It towered 30 meters over an enormous central plaza and had three dramatic ascending levels, each covered in ceremonial buildings. Standing on the highest level, a person speaking loudly could be heard all the way across the Grand Plaza below. Flanking Monk’s Mound to the west was a circle of tall wooden poles, dubbed Woodhenge, that marked the solstices.

Despite its greatness, the city’s name has been lost to time. Its culture is known simply as Mississippian. When Europeans explored Illinois in the 17th century, the city had been abandoned for hundreds of years. At that time, the region was inhabited by the Cahokia, a tribe from the Illinois Confederation. Europeans decided to name the ancient city after them, despite the fact that the Cahokia themselves claimed no connection to it.

Centuries later, Cahokia's meteoric rise and fall remain a mystery.

More here.

Three physicists have predicted that finding ‘echoes’ of gravitational waves coming from blackhole mergers might be signs of a theory that finally unifies quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Vasudevan Mukunth in The Wire:

Your high-school physics teacher would’ve likely taught you to think about the smallest constituents of nature by asking you to start with a large object – like a chair – and then keep breaking it down into smaller bits. For the purposes of making sense of your syllabus, you probably stopped at protons, electrons and neutrons. That’s a pity because, if you’d kept going, you’d have stumbled upon some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. At some point, you’d have hit the Planck scale: the smallest region of space, the shortest span of time. This is the smallest scale that quantum mechanics can make sense of, and this is where many physicists expect to find the fundamental particles that make up space itself.

If this region – or some phenomena that are thought to belong exclusively to this region – are found, then physicists will have made a stunning discovery. Apart from finding the ‘atoms’ of space, they’d have opened the doors to marrying the two biggest theories of physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity (GR). The former’s demesne is the small and smaller particles you passed along the way to the Planck scale. The latter’s is the largest distances and spans of time in the universe. And the discovery would be stunning because GR, created by Albert Einstein 101 years ago, doesn’t allow space to have any constituent ‘atoms’. For GR, space is smooth. And it is this fundamental conflict that has prevented the theories from being reconciled into a single ‘quantum gravity’ theory.

But the first signs of change might be here.

More here.

Charles J. Sykes in the New York Times:

After nearly 25 years, I’m stepping down from my daily conservative talk radio show at the end of this month. I’m not leaving because of the rise of Donald J. Trump (my reasons are personal), but I have to admit that the campaign has made my decision easier. The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.

In April, after Mr. Trump decisively lost the Wisconsin Republican primary, I had hoped that we here in the Midwest would turn out to be a firewall of rationality. Our political culture was distinctly inhospitable to Mr. Trump’s divisive, pugilistic style; the conservatives who had been successful here had tended to be serious, reform-oriented and able to express their ideas in more than 140 characters. But in November, Wisconsin lined up with the rest of the Rust Belt to give the presidency to Mr. Trump.

How on earth did that happen?

Before this year, I thought I had a relatively solid grasp on what conservatism stood for and where it was going. Over the previous decade, I helped advance the careers of conservatives like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan; Gov. Scott Walker; Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee; and Senator Ron Johnson. In 2010, conservatives won big majorities in the Wisconsin State Legislature, and I openly supported many of their reforms, including changes to collective bargaining and expansions of school choice.

In short, I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.

More here.

Jonathan Keates at Literary Review:

At half past one in the morning of Tuesday 19 July 1898, passengers on the cross-Channel steamer from Calais to Dover might have observed a solitary middle-aged man standing on the deck, gazing steadfastly at the sleeping port as the boat pulled out into open water. He was visibly moved and after a few minutes his eyes began filling with tears. The breeze got up, under a covering of cloud across a calm sea, but though he had brought no overcoat with him he stayed where he was until the glimmer of dawn dimmed the gas lamps along Dover’s harbour front. The traveller was singularly unprepared for the landfall he was about to make. He knew almost no English and had embarked on the journey without a change of clothes or toilet articles. Managing to reach Victoria by train, he asked a cabby to take him to the Grosvenor Hotel. The man was pardonably surprised, given that the hotel was a matter of metres from the station, but deposited his fare at the front steps anyway.

Things had been different on Emile Zola’s first visit to England five years previously, when he arrived as the honoured guest of the Institute of Journalists, whose annual conference was taking place at the Crystal Palace. Although some of his novels, such as Nana andThérèse Raquin, had been excoriated by the British press for their nauseating obscenity and dangerous influence on impressionable readers, the doyen of the French naturalist school was on that occasion whisked from a Guildhall banquet, lunch at the Athenaeum and oysters at the Café Royal to Drury Lane Theatre, the French Hospital and the Greenwich Observatory.

more here.

Tom Bissell at The New Yorker:

My day job, in lieu of teaching creative writing like a normal person, is writing scripts for blockbuster video games. Last summer, while I watched a play-through of the then-unreleased Gears of War 4, for which I was the lead writer, something odd happened. The game’s story called for a massive plane crash, out of which a single robot, operatically aflame, was intended to stride toward the player. Within the game’s fiction, robots have hitherto opposed the player, but we wanted this particular burning robot to pose no immediate threat.

The game programmers had thus switched off the hostility driven by the robot’s artificial intelligence, allowing the player to walk past the hapless robot or shoot it. Most of us on the development team, I think, hoped our game’s future players wouldn’t shoot. Just ahead of the encounter we placed what is referred to, in game design, as a frontgate—a kind of contrived environmental blockage intended to prevent players from rushing too far ahead, which can mess up loading times. In this case, our frontgate was some airplane wreckage, which has to be lifted by two characters. Typically, once the player gets into position, his or her accompanying squad-mate, controlled either by another human player or a non-player programmed to be an ally, joins and helps lift the wreckage out of the way.

more here.

Ed Simon at The Paris Review:

Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustuspremiered in 1594. Nearly forty years later, people were still talking about those earliest performances. The Puritan pamphleteer and ideologue William Prynne, in his massive 1633 antitheatrical tome Histriomastix, recounted diabolical legends surrounding this most infernal of plays. The spectators and actors “prophanely playing” in that first production, he reported, had a “visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage.” The good Puritan—soon to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he would have his ears cropped for having implied that the queen was a whore—assures us that though he was not himself familiar with such theatrical dens of iniquity, he can confirm the event’s veracity as “the truth of which I have heard from many now alive, who well remember it.”

Similarly, a monograph by someone identified only as “G.J.R” recounts that during a performance of the scene where Dr. Faustus begins his conjurations, there suddenly “was one devil too many amongst them.” It seems that the hocus pocus nonsense magic of Marlowe’s immense Latin learning had accidentally triggered an actual occult transaction, pulling one of Lucifer’s servants from hell into our own realm. On that stage in Exeter—there among conjuring circles, chanted invocations, and the adjuring of God’s love—the extras playing stock devils with caked-on red makeup and fake horns strapped to their heads found themselves with the chance to meet the real thing.

more here.

Daniel Cressey in Nature:

In a year of political turmoil and shock, science, too, came up with surprises. To document some of these wonders, photographers roamed the world, revealing objects from the microscopic to the cosmic in scale.

FANTASTIC FOOT

This spectacular tarsus — the lowermost segment of an insect leg — is roughly 2 millimetres in diameter and belongs to a male diving beetle, which uses it to attach to a female’s back during mating.

More here.

Laurie Sheck in The Atlantic:

Worldlessness, Hannah Arendt calls it—this state of radical isolation and loneliness that is so often a condition of the ill, the feared, the shunned, the stateless, the despised, the misunderstood, the powerless, the afflicted. What is taken away is a shared language, a sense of trust in being seen, the stability of genuine connection. As far back as childhood, long before I ever came across this word, I sought from books a way of drawing close to this realm of feeling. I wasn’t looking for consolation, much less explanation, but for the complex, textured presence of the uncomforted, the rawly vulnerable, the disrupted—hurt bodies and minds that in their radiance and affliction might lead me, as the jolt of illness sometimes does, toward a less protected, more open questioning. To love these hurt minds and bodies is a way of touching, however lightly, the unknowable, hurt world— and of struggling, as much as possible, to feel its ungovernable reality. This world of feeling is brought searingly to life in Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Idiot, a book that manages like no other to plunge fearlessly into suffering while at the same time illuminating the enduring, almost unspeakable beauty of the human. It opens with a young, epileptic man, Prince Myshkin, returning to St. Petersburg after years away for treatment in a sanitarium in Switzerland. The train windows are covered with fog—already there is an indication of the limits of human seeing.

This initial scene, with the frail, displaced stranger returning home to a city in many ways now unfamiliar, haunts and informs the entire book. Every aspect of the novel, even its structure, conveys a sense of precariousness and instability much like the epilepsy that alternately tightens and loosens its grip on Prince Myshkin but never lets go. It is his body’s truth, this thrashing and upheaval he experiences in his deepest being and can never fully decode. His illness instills in him an intuitive awareness of others’ suffering, and a certain apartness anchored in shame and a built-in mistrust of stability.