Amy Fleming in More Intelligent Life:

THE REWARD SYSTEM exists to ensure we seek out what we need. If having sex, eating nutritious food or being smiled at brings us pleasure, we will strive to obtain more of these stimuli and go on to procreate, grow bigger and find strength in numbers. Only it’s not as simple in the modern world, where people can also watch porn, camp out in the street for the latest iPhone or binge on KitKats, and become addicted, indebted or overweight. As Aristotle once wrote: “It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.” Buddhists, meanwhile, have endeavoured for 2,500 years to overcome the suffering caused by our propensity for longing. Now, it seems, Berridge has found the neuro-anatomical basis for this facet of the human condition—that we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.

If you had opened a textbook on brain rewards in the late 1980s, it would have told you that the dopamine and opioids that swished and flickered around the reward pathway were the blissful brain chemicals responsible for pleasure. The reward system was about pleasure and somehow learning what yields it, and little more. So when Berridge, a dedicated young scientist who was more David than Goliath, stumbled upon evidence in 1986 that dopamine did not produce pleasure, but in fact desire, he kept quiet. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after rigorous research, that he felt bold enough to go public with his new thesis. The reward system, he then asserted, has two distinct elements: wanting and liking (or desire and pleasure). While dopamine makes us want, the liking part comes from opioids and also endocannabinoids (a version of marijuana produced in the brain), which paint a “gloss of pleasure”, as Berridge puts it, on good experiences.

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A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me
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Hal Hlavinka at The Quarterly Conversation:

For Bedford, histories that start in the parlor room can only end in the street. To illustrate the public temperament surrounding the novel’s scandals, Bedford provides unmarked fragments of dialogue, pulled, so it seems, from the cafés, the sitting rooms, and the street corners. Some are clearly from on high. When Eduard’s wife, Sarah, promises never to pay another of her husband’s debts, two voices muse: “She might have done it less subtly.” / “This kind of thing can only be done in that way or not at all.” / “Then it cannot be done at all.” Others, from on low. When the Felden Scandal erupts, so do the lower classes: “Ourtaxes.” / “That’s right.” / “Our savings.” / “Hear, hear!” / “The working man’s pence.” / “That’s where they go!” / “Lunatics in luxury.” And anti-Semitism: “Did you see—Jews got their fingers in it too.” / “Whenever there is something rotten in the state of Denmark . . . ” Like the Dreyfus Affair in Proust, the Felden Scandal occasions a glimpse into the larger social context beyond our principals; unlike Proust, Bedford knows where the sentiments are headed—where and when and how the casual and mocking anti-Semitism turns from words into actions.

A Legacy doesn’t find answers to the postwar era’s questions; to be fair, few books do and none conclusively. Rather, Bedford’s novel shows that the roots of our evils—our social evils, our political evils—are not just in decisions made in bunkers or boardrooms, but in kitchens and bedrooms as well. And they don’t start as evils, perhaps. Death might begin as a disagreement over dinner. That’s putting it lightly, but all histories are linked. As Sarah notes, “Crisis? There are no crises. It’s all a chain, a long chain.”

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David Priestland at the Financial Times:

In January 2014 Michael Gove, then Britain’s education secretary, opened the centenary year of the first world war in typically belligerent style, with a full-frontal attack on the “myth” that the conflict was a “misbegotten shambles — a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”. This falsehood was propagated, he claimed, by various guilty parties — from the authors of Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder to “leftwing academics”. “Leftwing academics” duly returned fire, and Gove came in for a drubbing in the liberal press.

Yet to be fair to Gove, he was simply echoing, albeit rather crudely, the work of academic historians. Hew Strachan and others have for some time been challenging the “lions led by donkeys” view of the war, championed by AJP Taylor in the bracingly anti-elitist 1960s. For Strachan, the British fought a necessary war against an illiberal and militaristic Germany. Nor does Taylor’s stress on callous elitism and aristocratic arrogance find much favour in Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers — one of the most important books of the centenary season. For Clark, all of Europe’s rulers, including Britain’s, were blameworthy, but it is their myopic misreadings of international politics, not their aristocratic values, that he sees as culpable.

Andrew Solomon at The New York Times:

Medicine is dominated by the quants. We learn about human health from facts, and facts are measurable. A disease is present or not present; a reckonable proportion of people respond to a particular drug; the inability to predict gene-­environment interactions reflects only a failure to map facts we will eventually be able to determine; and if the observable phenotype varies for an established genotype, the differences must be caused by calculable issues. In this version of things, the case histories that constituted most of medical literature up to the early 20th century reflect a lack of empirical sophistication. Only if we can’t compute something are we reduced to storytelling, which is inherently subjective and often inaccurate. Science trades in facts, not anecdotes.

No one has done more to shift this arithmetical naïveté than Oliver Sacks, whose career as a clinician and writer has been devoted to charting the unfathomable complexity of human lives. “All sorts of generalizations are made possible by dealing with populations,” he writes in his new memoir “On the Move,” “but one needs the concrete, the particular, the personal too.” The emergent field of narrative medicine, in which a patient’s life story is elicited in order that his immediate health crisis may be addressed, in many ways reflects Sacks’ belief that a patient may know more about his condition than those treating him do, and that doctors’ ability to listen can therefore outrank technical erudition. Common standards of physician neutrality are in Sacks’ view cold and unforgiving — a trespass not merely against a patient’s wish for loving care, but also against efficacy.

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Molly Hannon in The Daily Beast:

“You are born, you grow up, and you become a wife.” “But what if it wasn’t this way?” asks Kate Bolick, the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. What if women did not have to worry about getting married, or agonize about when and if it will happen—two questions, Bolick claims, that will hound a young girl into her adult life, regardless of where she was raised, or her religious association. “Men don’t have the same problems,” she argues. And she’s right. They don’t. So what if women were like men? What if marriage was not an end goal, but simply a choice—a choice to not settle, a choice to not search, or even the choice to forgo waiting for Mr. Right to magically appear? What if women could save themselves and carve out a life of their own—on their own terms, and be content with that choice, or at least free from the judgment of others?

Bolick’s book, which reads more like a memoir than a manifesto on the single life, manages to deliver an honest confession about the perils of being alone. She does not gush. Instead, she tells. She recounts childhood and puberty with a wry and self-deprecating fondness, homing in on how young girls are quickly evaluated on their looks—and marketability. Then, there is the confusing joy of hormones and high school, and the gradual transition into college, and the debauchery and free love that follows. From that, women come to a point where they can settle, push on, or wait. Does one venture out into the real world, where Solo cups of beer and parties are not always present or available? Or should we resist and go our own way?

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Julian Baggini in Aeon:

The idea that IVM might have a part to play in a cleaner, fairer food system runs counter to a central idea put forward by many critics of industrial agriculture: that farming needs to be based more on traditional, natural, biological and ecological systems not artificial mono-cultures. Surely in vitro meat would be the most artificial mono-culture of them all.

Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University presents his 'cultured beef' burger. Photo by David Parry/PA

The belief that we have to choose between a food system that is over-dependent on technology and one that is more in harmony with nature rests on the assumption that there is a neat moral and conceptual contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, and that this lines up neatly with the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. If IVM is the greenest, most animal-friendly meat, yet it is even more artificial than a pitiful, intensively reared broiler chicken, then no one can maintain the fantasy that bucolic nature has a monopoly on good, ethical food.

For those who have campaigned for a more ethical and sustainable food system, IVM is a good test of where their values really lie: with hard-nosed ethics or soft-focus sentiment. After all, it is hard for anyone concerned about the environment or animal welfare to disagree with Post’s claim that ‘from an ethical view [IVM] can have only benefits’. Cultured meat has the potential to replace lame, belching, farting, grain-guzzling, confined beasts with clean, safe, sustainable meat, direct from the factory floor.

Faced with this unsettling truth, how have greens and animal rights campaigners responded to Post’s synthetic burger?

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Joseph Brodsky: I don’t really keep up. There are directions, I suppose. And they all smack of something unpleasant. If the piece is about, say, national pride, then it’s full of chauvinism or just general idiocy. If it’s something romantic, there is an agenda.

EM: Socialist realism?

JB: Exactly. Or, if it’s a satirical piece, it’s just plain negative. There is no sense that a person is engaged in satire from some high viewpoint. He stays within the imposed frame of reference. There are a handful of poets who could have gotten somewhere, but now it may be too late. They were not silenced, or shot, or even prosecuted. They more or less choked on lack of air, lack of an outlet. In any art, but especially in writing, you have to be totally possessed by it if you are to keep going in spite of any circumstances. Because sooner or later you are visited by the thought, “What on earth am I playing at? It’s just a pleasant hobby, really, one needs to make a living.” So you begin to look around, maybe compose a little play, a little script, sell it on the side. Become a hack. After all, hackwork is literature too. And the distinction isn’t that important in the end. So you can’t get published, so what. Chewing on the same negative emotion is exhausting. A sense of relativity sets in, and that’s really dangerous.

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Peter Strothard at the Times Literary Supplement:

In the seventh century BC, before there was a new city called Naples, there was an old city on more or less the same site called Parthenope. Both were Greek, both founded by Greeks who were occupying many other coastal parts of southern Italy at the time. Exactly which Greeks and when? That is a question which still exercises scholars, including Lorenzo Miletti at the beginning of this book. Were these occupiers invaders or colonists? As a general rule of historiography Romans “invade” and Greeks “colonize”, but any distinction made by the locals has not survived. The story of one of the Western world’s oldest continuously occupied cities begins with Parthenope.

The city name was a part of that first occupying process. Parthenope was one of the local Sirens who in Book XII of the Odyssey, and many variant versions of the story, sang songs to lure the Greek hero Odysseus to his doom, not anticipating that he would block the seductive sound by filling his sailors’ ears with wax. In shame at her poor defensive performance she hurled herself from her cliff, akatapontismos that made her “tomb” a fine foundation stone for a new Greek city. All occupiers wanted their own link to the Trojan War, known to all Greeks as part of their defining narrative of themselves. Parthenope was perfect and her name, though lasting only a hundred years or so on the ground, has long resounded through literature and scholarship, and as far as this fascinating collection of essays in OUP’s series, Classical Presences.

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Martin Filler at the New York Review of Books:

Frei Paul Otto was born in 1925 and grew up in Berlin. His uncommon first name—which means “free” in German—reflected the values of his idealistic parents, members of the Deutscher Werkbund, which promoted public education in good design and collaboration between craftsmen and industry. Otto developed an early passion for sail gliding, which shaped his fascination for lightweight structures. Soon after he began his studies in 1943 at what is now the Technical University of Berlin, he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe. Captured by the Allies, he was incarcerated for two years, during which he served as a prison-camp architect, a position that forced him to address the most basic function of architecture—shelter.

After the war Otto completed his education and confronted the central challenge of his generation of German architects: how to create large-scale buildings that avoided the taint of Nazi design. Otto’s familiarity with aeronautic engineering led him to devise ultra-lightweight forms that derived from thin-membrane airplane parts made from reinforced fabric, the antithesis of the ponderous, stone-clad Stripped Classicism favored by Hitler. One of his earliest public successes was the gossamer-light dance pavilion he designed in 1957 for the Federal Garden Exhibition in Cologne, a five-peaked, mast-supported, white-fabric canopy in the shape of an exotic bloom that evoked the botanical theme of the event.

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David Foster Wallace in Vulture:

David Letterman retires next Wednesday, which means for about a month now, the internet has been awash in a deluge of valentines. But for our money, the best tribute to Letterman's mind-bending cultural legacy might just be David Foster Wallace's “My Appearance,” a short story about a panicked guest waiting to step in front of the cameras, and remarkable now (among other reasons) for the way it showcases Dave at peak irony — when he hadn't mellowed yet or gotten lovably grandpa-grumpy, but was still so militantly ironic that a guest could be legitimately terrified of speaking a single earnest word in his presence. The story was first published in Playboy in 1988 (as “Late Night,” Wallace's first story in a major national magazine), and then again a year later in the collection Girl With Curious Hair. It appears here with the generous permission of that collection's publisher, W.W. Norton, and might just be the best thing ever written about television in America, period — by a writer who was famously obsessed with both.

I am a woman who appeared in public on “Late Night with David Letterman” on March 22, 1989. In the words of my husband Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. And whose heart’s heart is invisible, and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied. The week that surrounded March 22, 1989 was also the week David Letterman’s variety-and-talk show featured a series of videotaped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband, whose name is better known inside the entertainment industry than out of it, was anxious: he knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist. It was on Sunday that he told me to handle and be handled by Letterman. March 22 was to be Wednesday. On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC’s News Division. The executive, whom my husband had met and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands. “He’s waiting for the poor old bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel,” Rudy grimaced, smoking. On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC’s chief of Creative Development’s huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said: “Is this entertainment ladies and gentleman? Or what?”

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Matthew Hutson in Scientific American:

In the past two years the study of narcissism has gotten a face-lift. The trait is now considered to have two distinct dimensions: admiration seeking and rivalry. Subsequent studies, including a recent look at actors, revealed a more nuanced picture of personality than did past work. The actors, for instance, want admiration more than most people but tend to be less competitive than the average Joe—they may crave the spotlight, but they will not necessarily push others out of the way to get it.

The new understanding of narcissism started with a 2013 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that identified narcissism's two dimensions. “Previous theories and measures of narcissism dealt with this trait as a unitary construct, mixing up agentic aspects—assertiveness, dominance, charm—with antagonistic aspects—aggressiveness and devaluation of others,” says Mitja Back of the University of Münster in Germany, the study's primary author. Lumping both aspects together made narcissistic behavior confounding. Studying hundreds of healthy subjects, Back's team found that traits related to narcissism clustered into two categories, with both facets of narcissism serving to maintain a positive self-image. Self-promotion draws praise, whereas self-defense demeans others to fend off criticism. Admiration seeking and rivalry each have different effects on body language, relationship health and personality.

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William Rosen in Lapham's Quarterly (image Gabrielle D’Estrées and One of Her Sisters, c. 1594. Louvre Museum, Paris, France.):

On Sunday, January 18, 532, the sun rose fairly late over Constantinople—had one been available, a modern watch would have read 7:29 a.m.—but no one in the world’s most populous city saw it through the smoke. The city, which had been the center of the Roman Empire ever since Constantine had founded it as his eponymous capital two centuries before, was on fire. Five days earlier, what had begun in the city’s chariot-racing stadium as a protest against two planned hangings had turned into the biggest civil insurrection in the empire’s history. Tens of thousands of rioters had vandalized and burned the imperial senate, the city’s most important church, the enormous public Baths of Zeuxippus, and dozens of other buildings. By Sunday, the riot had escalated into a rebellion. The insurgents demanded the abdication of the current emperor, whose own bodyguards had him and his empress besieged in their own palace.

The trapped ruler had traveled a long and indirect route to the pinnacle of the empire founded by Augustus six centuries before. Christened Flavius Petrus Sabbatius in the last years of the fifth century, he had come to Constantinople as the protégé of his uncle, a successful officer in the palace guard. There, he took advantage of the capital’s substantial educational opportunities and his own even more substantial intelligence to place his uncle on the imperial throne, and to succeed him, under the name he gave himself: Justinian.

He was already first in line for the crown when he met his future empress, Theodora, whose path to the palace was even more improbable than Justinian’s own. His father was a Balkan peasant; hers was an animal trainer for Constantinople’s circuses. He had spent his early years as a student of theological dogma and an undistinguished soldier. She had been a high-priced prostitute and Constantinople’s most famous erotic actress: a petite, wavy-haired beauty with enormous dark eyes and a stage act that was three parts Mae West, two parts Jenna Jameson.

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Susan Price in The Atlantic:

In his first work, published in 1747, Immanuel Kant cites the ideas of another philosopher: a scholar of Newton, religion, science, and mathematics. The philosopher, whose work had been translated into several languages, is Émilie Du Châtelet.

Yet despite her powerhouse accomplishments—and the shout-out from no less a luminary than Kant—her work won’t be found in the 1,000-plus pages of the new edition of The Norton Introduction to Philosophy. In the anthology, which claims to trace 2,400 years of philosophy, the first female philosopher doesn’t appear until the section on writing from the mid-20th century. Or in any of the other leading anthologies used in university classrooms, scholars say.

Also absent are these 17th-century English thinkers: Margaret Cavendish, a prolific writer and natural philosopher; Anne Conway, who discusses the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (which is influenced by the Kabbalah); and “Lady” Damaris Masham—the daughter of a Cambridge Platonist and a close friend of John Locke who published several works and debated ideas in letters she exchanged with the German mathematician and philosopher G.W. Leibniz.

Despite the spread of feminism and multiculturalism, and their impact on fields from literature to anthropology, it is possible to major in philosophy without hearing anything about the historical contributions of women philosophers. The canon remains dominated by white males—the discipline that some say still hews to the myth that genius is tied to gender.

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