Charles J. Shields at his own website:

Mark Vonnegut has said that the father he knew growing up wasn’t a famous author. He was a family man, a struggling freelance writer, who couldn’t get a job teaching English at the local community community college. And that’s not to mention his father’s disasterous foray into selling SAAB automobiles on Cape Cod, either— another of Kurt’s attempts to make money.

For almost twenty years before the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, Vonnegut was broke most of the time. (Someone claiming to be his newsboy told me he was somehow never around at the end of the month to pay for delivery.)

The poignancy of how success and the comfort of money eluded him year after year can be summed up in a tale, here told for the first time: Kurt Vonnegut’s idea for an atomic bowtie (alas, another anecdote that didn’t make final draft of his biography). In 1950, Vonnegut was sure that a bowtie polka-dotted with the symbol for nuclear energy would be a big seller and bring him money he so desperately needed to keep writing and supporting his family.

More here.

Kristina Killgrove in Forbes:

The history of modern forensic anthropology is a bit murky. As an applied science rather than a “pure” one, forensics was shunned for decades, its findings inadmissible in court. But the 19th century murder of a Harvard Medical School doctor launched the field, revolutionized law in the process, and began our longstanding fascination with TV shows like CSI and Bones.

The story starts just before Thanksgiving in 1849, when Dr. George Parkman went missing. Parkman was from a wealthy Boston family, an old-timey Doogie Howser who entered Harvard at age 15. He went to medical school in Scotland, returning after the War of 1812. Parkman donated some land in Boston to Harvard Medical College so that the school could relocate from Cambridge. He was also well-known for lending money from his considerable fortune and for walking around town to collect on those debts.

A professor of chemistry and geology at Harvard, John White Webster, was one of those debtors. He had been having financial problems, requiring him to give up his family’s Cambridge mansion. Webster’s salary as a lecturer at Harvard simply didn’t cover his grandiose lifestyle. So Webster borrowed $400 from Parkman in 1842. Seems like a paltry sum, but the equivalent in today’s dollars is nearly $10,000.

More here.

Duncan Fyfe in Slate:

Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it. Who knew its origins were so lurid?

For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.

Here’s the story. In 1916, the fabulously wealthy, Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov was one of several Russian aristocrats agonizing over the unseemly influence that Rasputin—the magical healer, charismatic lech, and peasant—had over the Tsar and, particularly, the Tsarina. In December, Yusupov invited Rasputin to his palace, where he offered him cyanide-laced cakes and then shot him.

Although the Tsarina was distraught, the Tsar let Yusupov off lightly, exiling the prince and his wife Irina. (In doing so, he inadvertently spared them from the impending slaughter of the revolution.)

Sixteen years later, MGM produced Rasputin and the Empress, based on those events.

More here.

Alva Noë at NPR:

And there's the question of what types of animals you can love. You're allowed to love a dog or a cat. But can you, should you, is it appropriate, to love other kinds of animals? My brother had a hermit crab when he was a boy. I don't know how he felt about it — but can a healthy, well-rounded person love a hermit crab?

I'm not passing judgment. It strikes me that the shifting, unstable, historical, emotional, playful and earnest feelings we Americans have about animals has a lot to do with other kinds of value, meaning and quality in our lives.

And, so, it is with a real sense of curiosity that I wonder about our varying relationships with animals. Why, for example, it is that we do not even notice road kill, for the most part — let alone stop to mourn it? And what can be said about the fact that the sale of bull semen is a big part of the cattle industry — and the methods used to create supply?

You can get the salacious details in Jane C. Desmond's fascinating new book Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. This is a scholarly work devoted to looking at the variety and tensions surrounding human-animal relations in, as the subtitle puts it, art, science and everyday life. Her focus, in this gripping book, is ourcontemporary American society (to the extent that there is any such a unified thing).

More here.

Gavin Jacobson in New Statesman:

The first meeting between Walter Ben­jamin and Bertolt Brecht did not go well. It took place in Berlin in November 1924 at the home of Asja Lacis, a Latvian actress and theatre director. She recalled in her memoirs, “The conversation never got going, and the acquaintanceship petered out. I was confused. Was it possible that Brecht, such an intelligent person, could find nothing in common with Walter, a person of such intellectual curiosity and wide interests?” Benjamin, then 32 years old and unable to secure a university lectureship, was emerging as one of Germany’s pre-eminent cultural critics. His writings covered subjects as varied as art, children’s literature, food, film, gambling, graphology, Marxism, photography and toys. He wrote essays on the concept of history, the social impact of mass media, and 19th-century Paris. He produced radio programmes and translated texts by Baudelaire and Proust. There was no guiding philosophy. Yet the influence of certain traditions (such as German idealism, Rom­anticism and Jewish mysticism) was clear.

Brecht was six years younger than Benjamin. By the time they met, he had established himself as a gifted poet and playwright whose first works, such as Baal (premiered in 1923), combined lyrical force and moral dissent, especially on the theme of sexuality. Brecht’s plays departed from the aesthetic conventions of melodrama and developed a style called “epic theatre”; he argued that spectators should not be able to identify emotionally with the characters before them but should take a critical view of the action on stage instead. This was not just a visual strategy. It was driven by Brecht’s commitment to Marxism. If audiences identified with the emotional agonies of heroes such as Hamlet or Lear, then the Marxist notion that human nature is not fixed but a product of shifting historical conditions would be undermined.

More here.

Sweet Bread

It is a terrible struggle she tells me,
pulling dough from the bowl. Waking
up every morning for sixty-five years,
over forty next to him. He says you
snore, I offer and she rolls the dough
tighter, twisting it around itself
until the edges are sealed shut.
She drops it in the pan and I shine
the top with egg, ignoring the silence
that rises as we work. When he walks in,
the floor shifts beneath us, old boards heaving.
I know there are things that can’t be fixed.
Know it even stronger as I watch her
slap more dough on the table, as he takes
the empty bowl and washes it without
a word. And later, we eat the bread
in silence, its sweet crust flaking
into pieces too small to taste.
.
by Christine Klocek-Lim
from How to Photograph the Heart
The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009

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Steven Pinker and Juan Manuel Santos in the New York Times:

The peace treaty announced this week between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, marks more than the end of one war. It is a milestone for peace in the Americas and the world.

The 52-year war between the Colombian state and the FARC is the oldest and only armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere, and the last one held over from the Cold War. From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, war — in the classic sense of a violent conflict over governance or territory fought by at least one national army — has disappeared. Although drug-related gang violence in Latin America continues, the extinguishing of political armed conflicts from an entire hemisphere deserves note.

One has only to look back a few decades to see how momentous a change this is. In Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru, as in Colombia, leftist armed forces battled American-backed governments, with deaths mounting into the hundreds of thousands. In Nicaragua, the conflict was the other way around: American-backed rebels fought to overthrow a leftist government. The United States and the Soviet Union poured in support that kept such wars raging. The “dirty war” in Argentina also flowed from a clash of left and right, in which tens of thousands were killed.

More here.

Rachel Feltman in the Washington Post:

Much of the universe is made of dark matter, the unknowable, as-yet-undetected stuff that barely interacts with the “normal” matter around it. In the Milky Way, dark matter outnumbers regular matter by about 5 to 1, and very tiny dwarf galaxies are known to contain even more of the stuff.

But now scientists have found something entirely new: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy's star power. About 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter, and scientists believe it may be one of many.

The galaxy Dragonfly 44, described in a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is 300 million light years away. If scientists can track down a similar galaxy closer to home, however, they may be able to use it to make the first direct detection of dark matter.

The researchers who found Dragonfly 44 weren't looking for a dark galaxy. Another surprise: They found it using a telescope built of camera parts. The Dragonfly Telephoto Array was built by a group of astronomers at Yale University and the University of Toronto who realized that telephoto lenses — so often used for nature photography and sporting events — were well-suited for spotting the kind of large, dim objects that pose problems for typical telescopes.

More here.

Frans de Waal in Euromind:

Despite having lived and worked continuously in the USA for the past 35 years, I still feel very European. I am of Dutch origin, married to a French woman, and visit Europe several times a year.

I look at all European citizens as having a shared background, a shared history, a shared culture, and definitely shared interests. Even though all of us speak different languages (I am fluent in four), and have different cuisines, we obviously have a common cultural heritage dating back many centuries. My own country has been under Roman, Spanish, French, and German rule, and even though we generally don’t consider these invasions in a positive light, they mean that we have always been connected to and influenced by other nations. This is true all over Europe.

It has hard to formulate what makes me feel European rather than American, but one simple example is the structure of the cities. In Europe, cities are compact, with narrow streets, arranged around a square and a large church or cathedral. We all take this for granted but it is radically different from many American cities, and also from Asian ones. The way people interact, the music they prefer, the way they dress, in all of these aspects I still feel most at home in Europe.

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Anna Katherina Schaffner at the Times Literary Supplement:

“Klaus Mann was six times jinxed. A son of Thomas Mann. A homeless exile. A drug addict. A writer unable to publish in his native tongue. A not-so-gay gay. Someone haunted all his life by a fascination with death.” Thus opens Frederic Spotts’s elegantly written and deeply moving biography of the writer Klaus Mann. These lines set the tone for the exploration of the tragic life of a courageously uncompromising and truly European intellectual, who, born in 1906 and living through the darkest period of European history, was plagued by both political and personal calamities in almost equal measure. Spotts leaves the reader in no doubt that Thomas’s coldly judgemental attitude towards his eldest son was a root cause of many of Klaus’s problems.

In his diary, Klaus complained that his father’s “general lack of interest in human beings is especially strong toward me”. If there was indeed such a lack of interest, it certainly did not prevent the harshest of judgements, for, in his own diary, Thomas pronounced of Klaus: “The boy is morally and intellectually not intact”. In his novella Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925), a thinly disguised family portrait, Thomas describes the character modelled on Klaus as someone who “knows nothing, can do nothing and thinks only how to play the clown and lacks even the talent for that”. There is little if any evidence to suggest that Klaus’s remarkable achievements later in life altered his father’s damning verdict on him.

more here.

Kate Clanchy at The Guardian:

This is a short novel narrated by a foetus who is also Hamlet. “Bounded in the nutshell” of (Ger-) Trudy’s womb he listens, with a cervix for an arras, to her planning to murder his father, John Cairncross, in partnership with her lover, John’s brother Claude (-ius). The state of Denmark is being played by a decaying, but entire, Georgian town house in central London, based surely on the legendarily unimproved Islington home of the poet Hugo Williams. It has been inherited by hopeless poetry publisher John, is coveted by property developer Claude and is worth a cool £8m. Though the narrator at one point has a gorgeous and explicitly Elizabethan dream – “A cold mist on the day of my desertion, a three-day journey on horseback, long rows of the English poor in the rutted lanes” – the year is mostly 2015.

This may not sound like an entirely promising read: a talking foetus could be an unconvincing or at least tiresomely limited narrator, and updatings of Shakespeare often strain at their own seams. From the start, though, McEwan manages to establish both the groggy, gripping parameters of the uterus – “My limbs are folded hard across my chest, my head is wedged into my only exit. I wear my mother like a tight-fitting cap” – and that this foetus, Hamlet-style, is “king of infinite space”. He sounds rather like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’sLolita; the same grand, elegiac tone; the same infinite knowledge of history and English poetry, the same covetous, obsessively physical eye.

more here.

Hal Hlavinka at The Quarterly Conversation:

We meet many people across Clébert’s wanderings, and his characters (for that’s what they become) parade past the reader, page by page, each pausing only for a brief second before plunging back into the seedy tableau. While out measuring rooms for an architect, our hero is “struck by the odor of soil and dead leaves” and encounters a mushroom farm inside of an apartment. “I would have had to clamber in damp darkness,” he writes, “over little mounds of earth on which white spots were breaking out.” On the Buttes-Chaumont he discovers an artist’s workshop filled with uncaged birds, “an immense glassed-in space that stunned you with cries and colors.” A page later, on assignment in the Saint-Pierre neighborhood, we’re in an apartment-turned-serpentarium, with snakes nestled in every nook: “They were everywhere, slithering under tables and around the feet of chairs. . . . I left with my tail between my legs, ignoring the gentleman’s polite and soothing explanations.” Friends and acquaintances are equally mad. There’s Jérôme, the grave robber, “the world’s expert on the topography and benefits of Paris’s cemeteries,” who engages in the business of “headhunting.” Inside a crypt, a motivated headhunter need only avoid the caretaker, hold his breath, “grasp hold of a head by thrusting a finger and thumb into the eye sockets, twist sharply so as to snap the uppermost vertebra, and toss each skull into [a] sack.” The heads, for their part, become curios to sell to discerning bidders. And Monsieur Claude, aka Mr. Numb, “who sticks needles, pins or nails into a part of his anatomy chosen by any enthusiast who pays a round.” Only for those paying a premium does Mr. Numb reserve his best: “[He] will adorn the knob of his penis with a tight sheaf of tiny needles, a spectacle prone to make young tourists blanch and choke.” The case of Marceau and his two wives is particularly emblematic of the carefree vagabond cast. After Marceau goes missing during a multi-day bender, the police discover a corpse, which wife number one (the one and only, at the time) identifies as her husband’s. The woman grieves over free drinks from anyone who will pay their respects, until one morning when Marceau returns from the dead with wife number two in hand, “this to the outrage of the other one, who bombarded him with curses.” The polygamist remains officially deceased: “[The police] struck Marceau off the roster of the living and registered his death as accidental. End of story.”

more here.

Carrie Arnold in Nautilus:

In their 2015 book The Truth About Exercise Addiction: Understanding the Dark Side of Thinspiration, author Katherine Schreiber and Jacksonville University professor of kinesiology Heather Hausenblas write, “Exercise addicts experience physical activity as both a coping mechanism and a compulsion without which they feel they cannot survive.” People generally feel better both physically and mentally after working out. But for exercise addicts, that positive surge—similar to the ones gambling- and sex-addicts feel—is substantially higher: It can give athletes and non-athletes alike a powerful buzz of pleasure that can leave them coming back for more, ultimately leading to a life tethered to the treadmill, so to speak, and serious medical consequences, including fatigue, overuse injuries (stress fractures, pulled muscles, tendonitis), infections that won’t go away, electrolyte imbalances, cardiac issues, and, perhaps paradoxically, listlessness. To see this play out, we may need to look no further than the Olympics. Exercise addiction seems to increase, at least among athletes, the more elite they become, according to a study, published last month, in Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Tim Brewerton, a physician at the Medical University of South Carolina, agrees. “We venerate Olympic athletes almost like gods. We give them lots of praise and attention, but if we knew anything of what their lives were like…” he says, trailing off. “I think many of them likely experience some type of exercise addiction—they are training constantly for years.”

What makes exercise addiction a thorny phenomenon to study, though, is its complicated relationship with eating disorders. In the 1800s, for example, physicians treating young women with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and persistent weight loss, often noted their extreme restlessness and need to constantly move about. And in a 1984 study, a group of physicians had noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that considerably dedicated male runners, or “obligatory runners,” shared many of the same psychological traits as young women with anorexia, such as perfectionism and depression, although to a lesser degree.

More here.

Steve Silberman in The New York Times:

In the late 1930s, Charles Bradley, the director of a home for “troublesome” children in Rhode Island, had a problem. The field of neuroscience was still in its infancy, and one of the few techniques available to allow psychiatrists like Bradley to ponder the role of the brain in emotional disorders was a procedure that required replacing a volume of cerebrospinal fluid in the patient’s skull with air. This painstaking process allowed any irregularities to stand out clearly in X-ray images, but many patients suffered excruciating headaches that lasted for weeks afterward. Meanwhile, a pharmaceutical company called Smith, Kline & French was facing a different sort of problem. The firm had recently acquired the rights to sell a powerful stimulant then called “benzedrine sulfate” and was trying to create a market for it. Toward that end, the company made quantities of the drug available at no cost to doctors who volunteered to run studies on it. Bradley was a firm believer that struggling children needed more than a handful of pills to get better; they also needed psychosocial therapy and the calming and supportive environment that he provided at the home. But he took up the company’s offer, hoping that the drug might eliminate his patients’ headaches.

It did not. But the Benzedrine did have an effect that was right in line with Smith, Kline & French’s aspirations for its new product: The drug seemed to boost the children’s eagerness to learn in the classroom while making them more amenable to following the rules. The drug seemed to calm the children’s mood swings, allowing them to become, in the words of their therapists, more “attentive” and “serious,” able to complete their schoolwork and behave. Bradley was amazed that Benzedrine, a forerunner of Ritalin and Adderall, was such a great normalizer, turning typically hard-to-manage kids into models of complicity and decorum. But even after marveling at the effects of the drug, he maintained that medication should be considered for children only in addition to other forms of therapy. Bradley’s research was ignored for a couple of decades as psychoanalysis became dominant in the United States.But his discoveries laid the foundation for one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns in history, which succeeded not only in helping to transform the nascent drug industry into the multinational juggernaut known as Big Pharma, but in convincing parents, physicians and ­public health officials that 15 percent of American schoolchildren are sick enough that they would require powerful medication just to get through the day.

More here.