Justin Smith on Charlie Hebdo and Literature:

Honestly, people who have signed the PEN letter are openly admitting that they have never even looked at Charlie Hebdo, and even that they would not be in a position to understand the French if they were to look it. I can accept that your overall judgment of it might, after thorough consideration, be negative (just like you might not like Lolita, Gargantua, Monty Python…), but that is just patently not what is happening here. As I've written elsewhere, it seems to me that Charlie Hebdo has been Justine Sacco'd in the Anglosphere: summarily judged, and then subject to a campaign of ruthless denunciation. Except that Charlie Hebdo is not a Tweet, but a decades-long collaborative endeavor, and those of us in the part of the world that is still capable of interpreting texts and images in a nuanced way are left scratching our heads when we see the unreflective, summary judgment passed on such a complicated body of work –often misfiring, but often unquestionably courageous and unquestionably funny– as if it were some dumb Tweet or other source of ephemeral online outrage.

An audio interview with Amitava Kumar over at The Takeaway:

Here's an excerpt from a letter of support he wrote to PEN:

“This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence.”

Writer, journalist, and Vassar College Professor Amitava Kumar is among the 145 signatories of that letter denouncing PEN's decision to honor Charlie Hebdo. Author of the forthcoming book of essays titled “Lunch With a Bigot,” Kumar tells The Takeaway why he is protesting this award.

Keith Gessen in n+1:

The response to arguments like Williams’s have been that if only he understood the context of the cartoons, he would realize that they were meant to be a mockery of racism. But Williams was writing from the French context. It was precisely the French context that made Williams feel like he was being insulted and left out.

I can imagine another objection being raised here: Williams’s subjective experience of the cartoon is not in doubt, but actually he is projecting an American standard, his own American experience, onto a French work. To an American eye, the cartoon of the black justice minister as a monkey is plainly offensive. To a French one, it is something else.

For the sake of this debate, I am willing to accept this argument, as well as the assurances of numerous French commentators that, in fact, Charlie Hebdo in the French context was progressive and anti-racist.

But the PEN Gala is not taking place in France. It is taking place in Manhattan

Christopher Beha in Harper's:

Tomorrow night at the PEN America Center’s annual gala in New York City, the organization will honor the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo with its Freedom of Expression Courage Award. As has been widely reported, several PEN members, including Francine Prose, Peter Carey, Rachel Kushner, and Michael Ondaatje, have withdrawn from the gala and dozens more have signed an open letter protesting the decision to honor the magazine, whose pages over the years have included crude images of the prophet Mohammed and other material that many readers have found offensive. The letter draws a distinction “between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” This is fair enough, so far as it goes. Most PEN members would not hesitate to condemn yesterday’s armed attack on an anti-Islamic art event in Texas. At the same time, I doubt that PEN would seriously consider giving an award to Pamela Geller, the Islamophobic agitator who organized the event.

So it’s a legitimate distinction, but one that strikes me as largely irrelevant in this case, and not just because Charlie Hebdo isn’t an Islamophobic hate group. While the protests have prompted much analysis of Charlie Hebdo’s work and its place within a larger tradition of French satire and anti-clericalism, few of the protestors who have spoken in any detail on the matter have actually suggested that the content of Charlie Hebdo’s work is the primary reason for their objections.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

The six writers are circulating a letter to PEN members, which many great and famous writers are signing: Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore. It seems to me these writers must be awfully sure that they will never fall afoul of either fanaticism or well-meaning liberalism. “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable,” it argues, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” Well, sure, but excuse me: violates the acceptable? The acceptable what? And don’t we need writing and artwork that pushes the boundary of what the acceptable is? “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” as Blake put it.

Norman Mailer, former president of PEN, had all sorts of reprehensible, ignorant and pigheaded views. When it came to politics, he was like a drunken uncle banging the table at Thanksgiving. But he pushed the boundaries back for every writer. And much as I dislike the vast bulk of his writing and his repulsive ideas about women—talk about punching down—if PEN gave him an award, I would just live with it.

John Lingan at The Baffler:

Shortly before the first election of the second President Bush, Joe Bageant convinced his third wife that they should move from Oregon to Virginia. At the time, Barbara was a bored Merrill Lynch middle manager, while Joe, a self-taught intellectual with stifled literary aspirations, was editing an agribusiness newsletter. They had money and lived well, but when Military History magazine offered him a job in Virginia, Joe saw it as an opportunity to return to his hometown of Winchester. He hadn’t been back in decades, and like many displaced Southern men on the far side of middle age, he felt the pull of home. The people were real there, he told his wife. They took care of each other. Without spending too much, Joe and Barbara could buy a colonial with a porch, right downtown, and say hello to a dozen friends every time they walked to the store.

So they moved. Bought the colonial, downtown as promised, and settled into the nominal capital of the Shenandoah Valley, a 250-year-old, tradition-bound town that had given George Washington his first political victory and Patsy Cline her first stable home. Before long, Joe shook off the cultivated air he’d acquired in his west-coast days. He started dressing in cheap work clothes and guzzling beer alongside the rednecks he’d grown up with. At karaoke nights and in the 7-Eleven parking lot, he listened to his people rail about their menial jobs, their healthcare debt, and their proud anti-liberalism.

more here.

Stephen J Pyne at Aeon Magazine:

We hold fire as a species monopoly. We will not share it willingly with any other species. Other creatures knock over trees, dig holes in the ground, hunt – we do fire. It’s our ecological signature. Our capture of fire is our first experiment with domestication, and it might may well be our first Faustian bargain.

Still, ignition came with limits. Not every spark will spread; not every fire will behave as we wish. We could repurpose fire to our own ends, but we could not conjure fire where nature would not allow it. Our firepower was limited by the receptivity of the land, an appreciation lodged in many fire-origin myths in which fire, once liberated, escapes into plants and stones and has to be coaxed out with effort.

Those limits began to fall away as people reworked the land to alter its combustibility. We could slash woods, drain peat, loose livestock – in a score of ways we could reconfigure the existing biota to increase its flammability.

more here.

Dominic Pettman at Cabinet:

Is it ironic or apt that a man who had dedicated much of his life to the future of wireless communication would fall for the ancient, living technology of a carrier pigeon? And is it ironic or apt that a man whose final years as an inventor were dedicated to a fearful direct-energy “teleforce” weapon (dubbed the “death ray” by the press) fell in love with the key symbol for peace?

We cannot know what thoughts or emotions were coiled inside Tesla’s mind and heart as he feared for the life of his nameless, winged mistress, and then mourned her passing as he would a lover. But we can discern, and appreciate, the creaturely affection that he experienced, and ultimately spoke of matter-of-factly, once the race for absolute human technical mastery had been assumed by others. For the man who invented the rotating magnetic field, “animal attraction” or “animal magnetism” was not simply a figure of speech, but an everyday experience and personal responsibility, and one that did not stop at the border between species. As such, this patron saint of the cybernetic triangle—one linking human, animal, and machine—sends us a message from the age of high industry and scientific discovery concerning love itself as the invisible but overwhelming alternating current that animates existence, and can sometimes be explicitly shared among creatures.

more here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

It was the actions of Jupiter and Saturn that quite inadvertently created life on Earth — not the gods of the Roman pantheon, but the giant planets, which once orbited much closer to the sun. Driven outward, they let loose a cascade of asteroids, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, that blasted the surface of the young Earth and created the deep pockmarks still visible on the face of the moon. In the heat of these impacts, carbon from the meteorites reacted with nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere to form hydrogen cyanide. Though a deadly poison, cyanide is nonetheless the ancient pathway for inert carbon atoms to enter the chemistry of life.

By the time the Late Heavy Bombardment had eased, some 3.8 billion years ago, the cyanide had rained down into pools, reacted with metals, evaporated, been baked and irradiated with ultraviolet light, and dissolved by streams flowing down to a freshwater pool. The chemicals formed from the interactions of cyanide combined there in various ways to generate the precursors of lipids, nucleotides and amino acids. These are the three significant components of a living cell — lipids make the walls of a cell’s various compartments; nucleotides store its information; and amino acids assemble into the proteins that control its metabolism. All of this is a hypothesis, proposed by John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Cambridge in England. But he has tested all the required chemical reactions in a laboratory and developed evidence that they are plausible under the conditions expected of primitive Earth. Having figured out a likely chemistry needed to produce the starting materials of life, Dr. Sutherland then developed this geological scenario because it provides the conditions required by the chemistry. As for the chemistry itself, that springs from Dr. Sutherland’s discovery six years ago of the key to the RNA world.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled. Botswana, March 2015.

Digital photograph.

Gary Gutting talks to Elizabeth Anderson over at The Stone:

GARY GUTTING: Public policy debates, particularly about economic issues, are often about how to treat people fairly. You argue for “democratic equality,” which says that treating people fairly requires treating them as equals. What do you mean by equality?

ELIZABETH ANDERSON: Talk about equality gets off on the wrong foot if we start from the assumption that it expresses an immediate moral demand to treat everyone the same. Of course, there are thousands of legitimate reasons why people may treat different individuals differently. What egalitarianism objects to are social hierarchies that unjustly put different people into superior and inferior positions.

G.G.: Let’s get specific. What do you see as unequal treatments that are unjust?

E.A.: Of course, there are standard cases of discrimination on the basis of antipathy against, or favoritism towards, arbitrary identity groups — such as race, gender and sexual orientation. But I want to stress the many ways in which unjust social hierarchy is manifested in other ways besides direct discrimination or formally differential treatment. The discrimination/differential treatment idea captures only a small part of what counts as unjust inequality.

On this broader view of unjust inequality, we can see three different types of social hierarchy at work. One is inequalities of standing, which weigh the interests of members of some groups more heavily than others. For example, perhaps out of negligence, a courthouse or hotel may lack elevators and ramps for people in wheelchairs. A law firm may promote a culture of off-hours socializing over drinks between partners and associates that excludes women who need to spend time with their children from opportunities for networking and promotion. As Anatole France noted, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

Another type of social hierarchy is inequalities of power: when some groups exercise arbitrary, unaccountable power over subordinates, and can order them around or harass and abuse them, without subordinates’ having a voice in how they are treated. Traditional hierarchies, as of masters over slaves, landlords over serfs, and dictators over subjects, are of this sort.

More here.

Emilie Bickerton in The New Left Review:

Literature on the social impact of the internet has always struggled to keep up with the breakneck pace set by its subject. First-generation thinking about the net took form in the early 1990s, when usage was rapidly expanding with the dissemination of early browsers; it grew out of a pre-existing thread of technology advocacy that ran back to 60s counter-cultural consumerism. Wired magazine, founded in 1993, was its chief vehicle; key figures included tech-enthusiasts Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Howard Reingold, with their ‘patron saint’ Marshall McLuhan. This euphoric perspective dominated throughout the ‘new economy’ boom: the internet was changing everything, and for the better, heralding a new age of freedom, democracy, self-expression and economic growth. Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow’s 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, delivered from Davos, set the tone: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.’ Pitted against this, there had long existed a minor current of critical left writing, also running back to at least the early 70s; this included ‘left McLuhanite’ figures such as The Nation’s Neil Postman. More overtly political, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s classic 1995 essay, ‘The Californian Ideology’, skewered Wired in its early days, while on the ‘Nettime’ listserv and in the pages of Mute magazine, writers such as Geert Lovink attempted to forge a real ‘net criticism’. But these voices were mostly confined to the dissident margins.

With the 2000–01 dot.com crash there came something of a discursive shake-out. It was in the early post-crash years that Nicholas Carr’s Does IT Matter? (2004) was published, puncturing ‘new economy’ hype. But with the Greenspan bubble and massive state-intelligence funding after 9.11, American tech was soon on its feet again. Tim O’Reilly’s coining of the ‘Web 2.0’ buzzword in 2004 captured the returning optimism. The blog craze, Wikipedia and the first wave of social media all came into play during these years, and it was now that the landscape of tech giants was consolidated: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. The technology discourses of this phase echoed the developing shape of the Web: with ‘open source’ (another O’Reilly buzzword) and Wikipedia, it was argued that undefined crowds could be superior producers of content and code than named (or paid) individuals.

When a second, much deeper crisis erupted in 2008, American tech was one of the few sectors to remain relatively unscathed, already moving into new lines of production: smartphones, tablets, e-readers. The uptake of these devices brought a qualitative expansion of internet use, blurring the boundary between everyday life and a ‘cyberspace’ that had hitherto been conceptualized as a separate sphere. Suddenly it was evident that all the talk of the internet’s capacity to instigate far-reaching social change was no mere talk. It was in these years that a set of more pessimistic and critical voices started to come to the fore, worrying about the dangers of the Web’s expanding use[.]

More here.

A conversation between Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman over at Edge:

KAHNEMAN: You seem to be describing this as something that is already happening. Are you referring to developments such as the plans to do away with death? That absolutely would not be a mass project. But could you elaborate on that?

HARARI: Yes, the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

Even a few years ago, very few doctors or scientists would seriously say that they are trying to overcome old age and death. They would say no, I am trying to overcome this particular disease, whether it's tuberculosis or cancer or Alzheimers. Defeating disease and death, this is nonsense, this is science fiction.

But, the new attitude is to treat old age and death as technical problems, no different in essence than any other disease. It's like cancer, it's like Alzheimers, it's like tuberculosis. Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, “Come. Your time has come.” And you say, “No, no, no. Give me some more time.” And Death said, “No, you have to come.” And that's it, that is how you die.

We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

More here.

James Reidel in the NYRB:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh made Franz Werfel (1890-1945) one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial authors after it first appeared in German in 1933. He had worked a miracle for Armenians around the world, taking what might have been a footnote in the history of World War I—the deportation and mass murder of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority—and writing an epic that anticipated the ominous events unfolding in Germany as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power. The erosion of civil rights, the singling out of a minority for the nation’s problems, and the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against it were becoming a reality for German Jews and this made Musa Dagh seem the work of a prophet.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh began with Werfel’s second journey to the Middle East in the winter of 1930. He had just published his third major novel, The Pure in Heart(1929) and married his lover, Alma Mahler, Vienna’s legendary consort of genius, the widow of Gustav Mahler and the former wife of the architect Walter Gropius. After touring the ruins of Karnak, Alma and Werfel traveled on to Palestine and Jerusalem. In Damascus, Werfel toured a carpet factory with Alma. He saw a number of children working the looms, many of them maimed and crippled. When he asked the factory owner about them, he was told they were Armenian orphans. Their parents had been lost in the massacres, forced deportation marches, and concentration camps of World War I. These events would not have been a surprise to Werfel. In the years following the war, the atrocities committed against the Armenians surfaced in the news stories, some tied to the revenge shootings of Talaat Bey, Jemal Pasha, and other wartime Turkish leaders, victims of an Armenian revolutionary assassination program with the chilling name of “Operation Nemesis.”

More here.

Gavin Francis in The Guardian:

Through my encounters in the clinic, I’m often aware of the ways humanity’s finest stories and greatest art can resonate with, and help inform, modern medical practice. Doctors do their jobs better when they are up to date with the science behind the treatments they prescribe, but also when they acknowledge the importance of culture, metaphor and meaning in the way we make sense of our lives. Sometimes I feel the need to take a step back from the white-tiled walls and jargon of the clinic and see medical practice in a broader context: embedded at the heart of human lives, with all their complications, disappointments and celebrations. The body is a kind of landscape after all – the most intimate one – and a storehouse of almost indescribable marvels.

There was a time when if you wanted a good day out you might go along to see a public dissection – the bodies of criminals would be laid out in a public space and anatomised. The popularity of these events was not just educational, of course – it was partly about voyeurism, but it also spoke to a deep need to glimpse deeper into the mystery of our own humanity. It was considered entertainment to see life and death stripped back to essentials; the physician-anatomist was like a guide exploring inner space. These events became popular in the 16th century but had their roots in public spectacles of the Romans. Public dissections fell out of fashion around the time doctors were growing in power: no longer guides to a mysterious inner kingdom, but autocrats protecting secret knowledge. That paternalistic attitude reached a high point perhaps two or three decades ago, but is increasingly out of fashion. The time might be right to bring back public dissection, but instead of using scalpels and saws, I prefer to cut up the body using stories, literature and art.

More here.

Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade.  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.  I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

by W.B. Yeats

Conor Myhrvold in Nautilus:

Some animals evolved to clump together when threatened because it increased their chances of survival. “Predators have the ability to focus and concentrate on individual prey,” says Ralph Tollrian, a professor in Germany who has spent his career studying the predator confusion effect. “When they handle one prey, they can’t hunt the next.” Birds and fish form groups that move chaotically in the presence of a predator, giving it “cognitive overload,” says Randy Olson, who builds computer models of predator and prey behavior at Michigan State University. The predator’s cognitive overload can be so strong that it may give up on its pursuit entirely. “A confused predator can sometimes become frustrated and not hunt at all,” Tollrian says.

Humans, too, developed a tendency to clump together in the face of danger. There are many advantages to that, Tollrian says—from defense (it’s easier for a group to fight off a threat) to safety in numbers (people can hide in a crowd). When humans moved to agrarian and urban lifestyles, our dangers changed—but our responses didn’t, says Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at Arizona State University who studies the evolutionary reasons behind anxiety. “We continue to be afraid of things that were dangerous to our ancestors,” Nesse says. When we panic, ancient instincts kick in. In a room with six exits, it seems like the most logical course of action would be for the crowd to divide evenly among all six. Instead, we stampede to just one. We disregard logic and get injured. While we may not be able to unlearn our instincts, we might circumvent them if we better understand the nature of escape panic. Since studying panicking humans is difficult, scientists are turning to an unexpected source of inspiration: ants. “Humans and ants are hugely different animals,” says physicist Ernesto Altshuler at the University of Havana, Cuba, who studied how ants escape in emergency situations. “But when you are in panic, humans behave in a very elementary way, and we may look a little bit like ants.”

More here.

Peter Reuell in the Harvard Gazette:

Navigating a cluttered environment at high speed is among the greatest challenges in biology. Yet it’s one virtually all birds achieve with ease.

It’s a feat that David Williams is working to understand. A former postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard lab of Charles P. Lyman Professor of Biology Andrew Biewener, and now a postdoc at the University of Washington, Williams is the lead author of a study that shows birds use two highly stereotyped postures to avoid obstacles in flight.

The study could open the door to new ways to program drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles to avoid similar obstacles. The study is described in a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This was somewhat surprising to us,” Williams said of the results. “In lower-order animals like insects, we think of these very stereotyped motor programs where you stimulate your muscle, and the passive dynamics of your exoskeleton or the tendons attached to that muscle control most of the motion.

“But when you look at higher-order animals, it’s common to expect that those motor programs are going to be more complex, and there’s going to be more subtle gradations in those programs. So it was surprising to see a very high-order animal like a bird using very simple motor programs. Biology is optimized to be just good enough to work, so what that indicates is those are very effective motor programs.”

More here.