Douglas Starr in Aeon:

[I]f you look at the totality of peer-reviewed studies of the past several years, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that biology plays some role in criminal behaviour, impossible to quantify. The new science of epigenetics proposes an interaction between environment and heredity, in which environmental factors (such as childhood abuse) can affect the expression of genes. In other words, the nature-nurture division that scientists have been arguing about for more than a century is narrowing, and might someday disappear. Genes and brain structure do not represent a simple on-off switch that determines a person’s behaviour but, as some studies show, they can indicate a vulnerability. A temperamentally-impulsive young man who lives in deprivation and has been handed a gun is more likely to make a bad decision than an equally impulsive guy from a nice neighbourhood holding a tennis racket.

Raine has been studying brain scans for decades, and he has come up with a kind of grand unified theory of violence. He describes it with the phrase ‘from genes to brain to antisocial behaviour’. Certain gene abnormalities can lead to structural brain abnormalities that lead to emotional and cognitive abnormalities (such as poor impulse control) that can lead to anti-social behaviour. At the same time, he writes, early life experiences – including maternal neglect, poor nutrition, or being surrounded by gang violence – can feed into the cycle.

‘In this context,’ writes Raine, ‘how moral is it for us to punish many criminals as harshly as we do?’

Here’s where today’s researchers fundamentally diverge from their 19th-century forbearers, not only in the content of their research but its direction. No one is suggesting the existence of ‘born criminals’, or that such people need to be permanently locked away. Fallon posits a ‘three-legged stool’ model of psychopathy, involving genes, brain function and early childhood exposure to emotional, physical or sexual abuse. The one component we can affect – childhood violence – involves social, not biological, intervention. Raine and other criminologists propose that courts consider an alleged criminal’s genetic and neurological make-up prior to sentencing – not to impose lifetime segregation for someone with violent predispositions, but to include appropriate treatment and care.

More here.

Her Body is Private

in spite of all
the sweet inducements to disrobe
in the public eye, to sunbathe
in the hot glow of the spotlight (not be
forgotten for a minute, maybe two);
in spite of all
the cash that flows to those
who wear their heart, not on their sleeve
in that old innocence, but on their naked
wrist, or butt, like a tattoo;
in spite of all
emoluments, of shrinks who swear
that secrets eat the lining from the guts
and that the more you tell, the less
you burn in hells intestinal;
in spite of all,
her memory, like her body, is
her own, and serpents guard it
like a tree with treasure in a myth;
if you approach, she’ll turn
the blank side of her words, a shield
to the light, to fix your face
in the bright circle
of its mirror. This time Medusa
has the shield, and the last word.
.

by Eleanor Wilner
from Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems
Copper Canyon Press, 1998
.

Courtney Baker in Avidly:

The images and videos of Castile’s and Sterling’s deaths are coming fast and furious. They find us in our homes, in our offices, at the supermarket—anywhere we have access to the internet. Those of us who live daily with the knowledge and fear that we and our kin are hated and hunted, that we are not safe and that the police are often the cause of that sense of insecurity, are dealing with the trauma and indignity of the visual and video reminders of our own precarious lives. We are enraged, we are disgusted, we are mourning, and we are terrorized by the uncritically circulated spectacles of our destruction. Being forcibly confronted with auto-played videos online and on televised news broadcasts and with, as one print outlet offered, a full-color, front-page photograph of a Black man murdered by those, the police, who insist they are our best hope for peace and safety and who will most likely not be found at fault for their actions by a court of law is the twenty-first century equivalent of having to endure the lynched body’s circulation through town by members of the lynch mob (as happened to teenager Jesse Washington’s corpse in Waco, Texas in 1916). As I noted above, we have seen these images of Black destruction before when they were put into service for a Black liberationist cause. However, in those instances, the harrowing images were contextualized and controlled by pro-Black advocates like the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people. In its antilynching circular, the NAACP printed an explicit photograph of a lynching and used the caption to further manipulate the image’s reception. The caption instructed readers quite clearly. “Do not look at the Negro,” it read, “His earthly problems are ended. Instead, look at the seven WHITE children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle.” Both Wells and the NAACP reproduced images of the “gruesome spectacle,” but their doing so in the Black press, in an explicitly antilynching context, counteracted the then-more frequent and popular circulation networks for these images which were expected to be kept in and controlled by white hands.

The videos and photographs of Castile and Sterling, like the videos and photographs of Garner, Brown, Scott, and Bland are not being kept and controlled by Black hands or even by institutions invested in the protection and defense of Black bodies. The contexts of care and of justice are absent and at times anathema to the mass media entities that carelessly circulate these images for titillation or profit or some bad faith interpretation of the exposé. As long as these images and videos are published alongside cries that blue lives matter and queries about black-on-black crime and recitations of the victims’ irrelevant criminal histories, they have no place in the public sphere. And they certainly have no place on my screen.

More here.

Luca Santarelli in New Statesman:

Technology can be awkward. Our pockets are weighed down with ever-larger smartphones, and attempts to introduce more easily accessible smart watches have so far fallen flat. But what if a part of your body could become your computer, with a screen on your arm and maybe even a direct link to your brain?

Artificial electronic skin (e-skin) could one day make this a possibility. Researchers are developing flexible, bendable and even stretchable electronic circuits that can be applied directly to the skin. As well as turning your skin into a touchscreen, this could also help replace feeling if you’ve suffered burns or problems with your nervous system. The simplest version of this technology is essentially an electronic tattoo. In 2004, researchers in the US and Japan unveiled a pressure sensor circuit made from pre-stretched thinned silicon strips that could be applied to the forearm. But inorganic materials such as silicon are rigid and the skin is flexible and stretchy. So researchers are now looking to electronic circuits made from organic materials (usually special plastics or forms of carbon such as graphene that conduct electricity) as the basis of e-skin. Typical e-skin consists of a matrix of different electronic components – flexible transistors, organic LEDs, sensors and organic photovoltaic (solar) cells – connected to each other by stretchable or flexible conductive wires. These devices are often built up from very thin layers of material that are sprayed or evaporated onto a flexible base, producing a large (up to tens of cm²) electronic circuit in a skin-like form.

More here.

Orhan Pamuk in The Art Newspaper:

All museums are genuine treasures of humankind, but I am against these precious and monumental institutions being used as models for the institutions to come. Museums should explore and uncover the population as a whole and the humanity of the new and modern man that emerges from the growing economies of non-Western countries. I address this manifesto in particular to Asian museums that are experiencing an unprecedented period of growth.

The aim of the great state-sponsored museums is to represent a state and that is neither a good nor innocent aim. Here are my proposals for a new museum, some themes on which we must reflect now more than ever.

The great national museums like the Louvre and the Hermitage assumed the form of tourist institutions with the opening of royal and imperial palaces to the public. These same institutions, today national symbols, present the narrative of nation, History with a capital H, as much more important than the histories of individuals. This is a shame, since individual histories lend themselves much better to portraying the depths of our humanity.

More here.

Maggie Koerth-Baker in FiveThirtyEight:

Q: I want to hear what the loudest thing in the world is! — Kara Jo, age 5

No. No, you really don’t. See, there’s this thing about sound that even we grown-ups tend to forget — it’s not some glitter rainbow floating around with no connection to the physical world. Sound is mechanical. A sound is a shove — just a little one, a tap on the tightly stretched membrane of your ear drum. The louder the sound, the heavier the knock. If a sound is loud enough, it can rip a hole in your ear drum. If a sound is loud enough, it can plow into you like a linebacker and knock you flat on your butt. When the shock wave from a bomb levels a house, that’s sound tearing apart bricks and splintering glass. Sound can kill you.

Consider this piece of history: On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, ranchers on a sheep camp outside Alice Springs, Australia, heard a sound like two shots from a rifle. At that very moment, the Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa was blowing itself to bits 2,233 miles away. Scientists think this is probably the loudest sound humans have ever accurately measured. Not only are there records of people hearing the sound of Krakatoa thousands of miles away, there is also physical evidence that the sound of the volcano’s explosion traveled all the way around the globe multiple times.

More here.

Jeff Gordinier at The NY Times:

“Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is,” he writes. “I, too, dislike it, and have largely organized my life around it (albeit with far less discipline and skill than Marianne Moore) and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are for me — and maybe for you — inextricable.”

Mr. Lerner’s own poetry, like his fiction, has a habit of floating off in directions that the reader does not anticipate. “The Hatred of Poetry” expands on that signature move. After establishing that poetry is a magnet for scorn, Mr. Lerner does not do what you might expect. He does not go all Garrison Keillor and mount a passionate defense. He does not raise a frothy toast to the glorious music of verse. He does not say, “I realize that you hate poetry, dear reader, but I’m going to make you fall in love with it.”

Instead, he devotes the lion’s share of this pocket volume to exploring some of the ways that poetry has bothered and disappointed various factions, starting with Plato and passing through the countless magazine essayists who have, with tedious regularity over the decades, gnawed on the old thematic bone of “the death of poetry.”

more here.

Interesting article by Jack Hitt in Mother Jones about nine months ago:

In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he'd probably get popped for nonpayment of child support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn't the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing “running” really stretches the bounds of literary license.

But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when theNew York Times revealed Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.

More here.

Daniel Green at The Quarterly Conversation:

Friedman’s work is most often considered as a contribution to the emergence of “black humor” in American fiction, but his first novel, Stern (1962), could at the time have easily enough been regarded as absurdist, an existential comedy about the angst of Jewish assimilation. The novel’s title character finds himself in alien territory—the American suburbs—confused and beset by a series of humiliations he struggles to understand. The story of his misadventures is funny, but in the way the plays of Beckett and Ionesco are funny, in a detached and deadpan manner that can also be disconcerting. The same is true of Friedman’s second novel, A Mother’s Kisses (1964), although here the subject, a meddling Jewish mother, is more conventionally “comedic” in its overtones. In this novel the humor comes from the straight-faced way in which the narrator relates his mother’s speech and actions, as if it is simply expected in the ordinary course of things for a mother to say outrageous and embarrassing things and behave erratically enough that she would fly with her son to Kansas on his first day of college and remain with him for several weeks as he adjusts to the place, staying in a hotel room the two occupy together.

By the time Friedman published A Mother’s Kisses, this sort of unadulterated comedy delivered in an impassive tone had come to be called black humor. Indeed, Friedman himself edited an influential anthology of black humor fiction that did much to delineate and draw attention to this newly prominent mode of fiction (not literally new, since Friedman traces it as far back as Gogol, and one of the included writers is Céline). Friedman doesn’t insist on too strict a definition of black humor, just that “the work under discussion, if not black, is some fairly dark-hued color,” while “the humor part of the definition is probably accurate although I doubt that the writers are bluff and hearty joke-tellers who spend a lot of time at discotheques.”

more here.

Jackie Wullschlager at the Financial Times:

When Joseph Mallord William Turner told a friend that “no one would believe, upon seeing my likeness, that I painted those pictures”, he pinpointed the tragic irony that would jinx every presentation of his life and work.

Turner is still outwitting his stalkers. His secrecy, and embarrassment about his crudeness, has always forced either a defensive blandness — AJ Finberg, author of the standard 20th-century life, concluded that Turner was “a very uninteresting man” — or a sensationalising prurience. The two new biographers here try to escape the traps, mostly by amplifying historical context; neither wholly succeeds.

more here.

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

The Near East School of Theology in Beirut is housed in a bland grey and brown building near the Mediterranean Sea. A few days ago, the audience in its underground lecture theatre was witness to one of the most remarkable lectures on ancient and modern Islam in recent times, which – had it been more widely advertised – might have had just about every shade of religious protester huffing and puffing outside in the aptly named Jeanne D’Arc Street. The speaker was Dr Tarif Khalidi, one of Islam’s foremost scholars and translator of the latest English-language edition of the Koran, whose earlier works on Jesus in Muslim stories match his most recent anthology of Arab literature. The title of his address was an almost frightening world-beater: Does Islam need a Martin Luther? Khalidi’s short answer was “yes, please”, the more Luthers the merrier – despite Luther’s violent indictment of Islam. It wasn’t clear whom Luther disliked more, the terrible Turk or the terrible Pope, and if you’ve got to shake up any religion you might as well do it “in as wonderful a cascade of rhetoric as his”.

Khalidi recalled Lucretius’ castigation of all religions – “to so much evil can religion urge mankind” – and evil was all too obvious these days. It was obvious in all monotheistic religions, Khalidi insisted, “among certain so-called fundamentalist and apocalyptic sects in the US, among racist and fundamentalist settlers in Israel, among Daesh [Isis] and other horrifying groups in our own immediate neighbourhood.” Khalidi, a generously-bearded Palestinian who talks English with TS Eliot precision, called all this the “Age of Dis-enlightenment”, which should move us to study “how and why religions can from time to time get lost, and mistake the road to heaven for the road to hell.” Every 100 years in Islamic history, Khalidi observed, a renewer of faith – a mujaddid – would arise to breathe new life into the religion. The two “great wings” of Islam began their careers as reform movements, the Sunnis emphasising the importance of the unity of the community, the Shias emphasising the integrity of government, each splintering of these wings a form of reconstruction which now appear “like two great trees with numerous branches”.

And the most urgent task today? To “unpack” the ideas of Isis and to show how and why “its path leads to hell”.

More here.

John Freeman interviews the writer at Literary Hub:

Annie Proulx is 80 years old and still not sure where she belongs. Standing in the atrium of her home in the Snoqualmie Valley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist eyes a photograph of the cottage she once occupied in Newfoundland, the setting of her 1993 novel, The Shipping News. “I fell in love with that landscape,” Proulx says, speaking in the tone of a woman describing an ex-lover.

“But ultimately, I did not belong there.”

After 20 years in Wyoming—several spent building a dream home she later sold—Proulx had a similar epiphany about that state. As she did about Vermont, and Texas, and New Mexico, and any number of places where she has lived. In an age of itinerary writer-teachers, Proulx’s boomerangs back and forth across North America are exceptional.

Now she’s made a similar discovery of the wooded idyll east of Seattle.

For months Proulx struggled to figure out why she was having reactions to foods she typically ate. At last she learned she was allergic to red cedar, the trees that rise up fragrantly around her house. Proulx laughs as she describes this, partly out of annoyance, but also because she moved to this home to finish her massive and extraordinary new masterpiece, Barkskins, a novel about climate change and landscape in which one of the book’s central characters is the forest itself.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers,” he said. “They are beautiful shapes.” The video is available on YouTube.

Vonnegut was representing in graphical form an idea that writers have explored for centuries—that stories follow emotional arcs, that these arcs can have different shapes, and that some shapes are better suited to storytelling than others.

Vonnegut mapped out several arcs in his lecture. These include the simple arc encapsulating “man falls into hole, man gets out of hole” and the more complex one of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.”

Vonnegut is not alone in attempting to categorize stories into types, although he was probably the first to do it in graphical form. Aristotle was at it over 2,000 years before him, and many others have followed in his footsteps.

However, there is little agreement on the number of different emotional arcs that arise in stories or their shape. Estimates vary from three basic patterns to more than 30. But there is little in the way of scientific evidence to favor one number over another.

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Andrew Reagan at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a few pals. These guys have used sentiment analysis to map the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and then used data-mining techniques to reveal the most common arcs. “We find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives,” they say.

More here.

From Dawn:

Born to a family of traders in Gujarat, Mr Edhi arrived in Pakistan in 1947.

The state’s failure to help his struggling family care for his mother – paralysed and suffering from mental health issues – was his painful and decisive turning point towards philanthropy.

In the sticky streets in the heart of Karachi, Mr Edhi, full of idealism and hope, opened his first clinic in 1951. “Social welfare was my vocation, I had to free it,” he says in his autobiography, ‘A Mirror To The Blind’.

Motivated by a spiritual quest for justice, over the years Mr Edhi and his team created maternity wards, morgues, orphanages, shelters and homes for the elderly – all aimed at helping those who cannot help themselves.

The most prominent symbols of the foundation – its 1,500 ambulances – are deployed with unusual efficiency to the scene of terrorist attacks that tear through the country with devastating regularity.

More here.