Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times:

If you’ve ever struggled with the task of composing a guest list for the ultimate fantasy dinner party, Laura Claridge’s biography of Blanche Knopf (née Wolf) will show you whom to put at the head of your table. That dream guest is, of course, Claridge’s subject: the petite, intense and, as Robert Gottlieb once put it, “fierce and exigent” co-founder of the great literary publishing house Alfred A. Knopf. She was an intuitive and visionary champion of contemporary authors, a voracious bookworm, a tireless hobnobber, a snappy dresser and a lifelong dog-lover (of tiny, fluffy ones, not of the imposing, austere borzoi she chose to grace the Knopf colophon, a breed she regarded as “cowardly, stupid, disloyal, and full of self-pity”). To round out the notional gathering, you might wheedle the illustrious publisher into bringing along some of her devoted friends, from Thomas Mann, H.L. Mencken, Albert Camus and Muriel Spark to Langston Hughes, John Hersey and Willa Cather. Or you could invite one of her many musical boyfriends, a group that included (but was not limited to) Jascha Heifetz, Leopold Stokowski and Arthur Rubinstein. An added perk: You wouldn’t need to worry about entertainment. Her pals Paul Robeson and George Gershwin could be counted on to drop by and provide the music, while Blanche herself (and chums Helen Hayes and Anita Loos) could dance the Charleston, the Lindy Hop and the Black Bottom. In 1925, at one of her dinner parties, Blanche performed a spirited medley of all three while sporting a top hat and cane, prompting her husband and business partner, Alfred, to “applaud vigorously; even as the guests seemed unsure what to think.” This, Blanche’s biographer makes plain, was a rare instance of spousal approval.

The typical tenor of the couple’s rapport, Claridge establishes early on, was acrimonious. Indeed, the Knopf conference room seems to have resembled the living room in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (published by Knopf in 1962), with Blanche intentionally “nettling” Alfred, provoking him to shout, and Alfred “swooping down on her just as she thought there was an all-clear.”

Picture: Laura Claridge has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently the story of an American icon, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners (Random House), for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

More here.

Poetry

Who broke these mirrors
and tossed them
shard
by shard
among the branches?
And now…
shall we ask L’Akhdar to come and see?
Colors are all muddled up
and the image is entangled
with the thing
and the eyes burn.
L’Akhdar must gather these mirrors
on his palm
and match the pieces together
any way he likes
and preserve
the memory of the branch.
.

by Saadi Youssef
Banta, 26/3/1980

Frances Madeson in Ms. Magazine:

Typing the word “survivance” into the Ms. Blog’s search bar yields no results. So perhaps there is no better way to introduce this term here, as theorized in Native American circles of academe, than via Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play Sliver of a Full Moon. Sliver is a dramatization of the legislative struggle to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 2013, and includes powerful testimony by three Native women lucky to be alive to tell their own stories.

“Survivance” is Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor’s portmanteau of survival and resistance, or survival and endurance, and offers a way to understand both Nagle’s work, and the reasons the formerly abused women have chosen to participate in her play: creating dramatic art as “a renunciation of dominance, tragedy, victimry.”

In this instance, victimry is structured by law. It arose in the wake of Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, a 1978 Supreme Court decision that stripped Indian Nations of the ability to exercise their inherent criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who come onto tribal lands and commit crimes. About 67 percent of the crimes committed against Native women on tribal lands are by non-Native men—so it’s been open season on Native women for almost 40 years.

More here.

Vishwas R. Gaitonde in the Prague Review:

In Renaissance Italy, one of the perennial debates was whether sculpture was superior to painting, or the other way round. Many said two dimensional paintings couldn’t hold up against sculpture, which was three dimensional. Michelangelo, an archrival of Leonardo and who regarded himself as a sculptor first and a painter second, used the medium to depict movement; an excellent example was his statue, David. David’s head is slightly turned so that the point he faces is different from the point in front of his body. As a result, the body seems to be in motion. This is heightened by distributing the body weight unevenly between the two legs. The positioning of the face and upper body half-way through a motion was called contrapposto.

Donald Sassoon, a professor of Comparative European History and an authority on the Mona Lisa, describes the process Leonardo went through before he created Mona Lisa. Leonardo firmly believed that contrapposto was not the sole property of sculptors, that it could be employed in two-dimensional forms as well. The trick was to capture a moment in sequence rather than paint a static pose as though one was painting still life. When the face of the person pointed to a different direction from that which the torso was facing, the body would appear to be in movement. Leonardo perfected contrapposto in painting with the Mona Lisa.

More here.

Eric Michael Johnson in Evonomics:

Why do we choose to cooperate and how can we promote greater cooperation in world affairs? These are the questions that Robert Axelrod has pursued for more than 40 years. His career has been an interdisciplinary exploration that has encompassed mathematics, political science, and evolutionary biology. Now, his signature achievements in the areas of economic game theory and complex systems have earned him the highest scientific honor that the United States can bestow: the National Medal of Science.

I first encountered Axelrod’s work during my graduate studies working with great apes. His suggestion that cooperation could evolve as an adaptive strategy was an inspiration for me in a field still dominated by the view that selfish interests were the primary driver of evolution. After several years of watching bonobos – one of our closest evolutionary relatives – as they peacefully shared their resources with groupmates and avoided violence at all costs, I was eager for an alternative explanation. Axelrod’s publications with the celebrated evolutionary biologist William Hamilton had put the study of cooperation on a new foundation. What’s more, his application of this work to economics and political science offered the potential for an evolutionary framework that could help reduce violence and encourage mutual aid between nations and peoples.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

The profound impact of LSD on the brain has been laid bare by the first modern scans of people high on the drug.

The images, taken from volunteers who agreed to take a trip in the name of science, have given researchers an unprecedented insight into the neural basis for effects produced by one of the most powerful drugs ever created.

A dose of the psychedelic substance – injected rather than dropped – unleashed a wave of changes that altered activity and connectivity across the brain. This has led scientists to new theories of visual hallucinations and the sense of oneness with the universe some users report.

The brain scans revealed that trippers experienced images through information drawn from many parts of their brains, and not just the visual cortex at the back of the head that normally processes visual information. Under the drug, regions once segregated spoke to one another.

Further images showed that other brain regions that usually form a network became more separated in a change that accompanied users’ feelings of oneness with the world, a loss of personal identity called “ego dissolution”.

More here.

Neil Irwin and Quoctrung Bui in the New York Times:

For poor Americans, the place they call home can be a matter of life or death.

The poor in some cities — big ones like New York and Los Angeles, and also quite a few smaller ones like Birmingham, Ala. — live nearly as long as their middle-class neighbors or have seen rising life expectancy in the 21st century. But in some other parts of the country, adults with the lowest incomes die on average as young as people in much poorer nations like Rwanda, and their life spans are getting shorter.

In those differences, documented in sweeping new research, lies an optimistic message: The right mix of steps to improve habits and public health could help people live longer, regardless of how much money they make.

One conclusion from this work, published on Monday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is that the gap in life spans between rich and poor widened from 2001 to 2014. The top 1 percent in income among American men live 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent; for women, the gap is 10 years. These rich Americans have gained three years of longevity just in this century. They live longer almost without regard to where they live. Poor Americans had very little gain as a whole, with big differences among different places.

More here.

Morris Dickstein at The Times Literary Supplement:

In 1959 a long essay appeared in the TLS(anonymously, of course) that took notice of an important new turn in American writing. It had a vague, slightly patronizing title, “A Vocal Group: The Jewish part in American letters”, as if the headline writer were not quite sure what to make of it. The author, an unknown young critic named Theodore Solotaroff, had been suggested to the paper’s Editor, Alan Pryce-Jones, by a friend from the University of Chicago, Philip Roth. Roth had recently published a handful of audaciously gifted stories that made him a controversial figure in that vocal group. The article caught the eye of Norman Podhoretz, the newly appointed Editor of Commentary, and on the strength of it he hired its author as an assistant editor. Solotaroff would eventually make a major mark as an editor and writer; Roth would go on to become, well, Philip Roth.

The essay covered considerable ground, taking in not only important post-war Jewish novelists such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud but also the acute young critics who helped to clear a space for them, especially the literary intellectuals of the Partisan Review circle – Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv and Irving Howe. In his article Solotaroff returned to Fiedler’s account – in an essay published the year before in Midstreammagazine – of the “breakthrough” exemplified by Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (1953), notably his shift from small-scale, carefully crafted fictions to messier, more ambitious works, as well as his ability to write from inside the mind and heart of his feelingful protagonists (Herzog was not yet on the horizon). In writers like the hell-raising Fiedler and the newly emboldened Bellow, Solotaroff saw “a willingness to revolt, to take chances, to trust one’s own instincts and insights and standards, to risk a crushing failure and even ridicule”. By casting Augie as a descendant of Huck Finn, Bellow had overcome the provinciality of pre-war Jewish writers to work within the American grain, filtering national motifs through an urban Jewish sensibility.

more here.

Terry Eagleton at Commonweal:

THE IDEA OF culture is traditionally bound up with the concept of distinction. High culture is a question of rank. One thinks of the great haut-bourgeois families portrayed by Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann, for whom power and material wealth are accompanied by a lofty cultural tone and bear with them certain moral obligations. Spiritual hierarchy goes hand in hand with social inequality. The aim of advanced capitalism, by contrast, is to preserve inequality while abolishing hierarchy. In this sense, its material base is at odds with its cultural superstructure. You do not need to proclaim your superiority to other peoples in order to raid their natural resources, as long as by doing so you maintain the material inequalities between them and yourself. Whether Americans regard themselves as superior to Iraqis is really neither here nor there, given that it is political and military control over an oil-rich region they have in their sights. Culturally speaking, late capitalism is for the most part a matter not of hierarchy but hybridity—of mingling, merging, and multiplicity—while, materially speaking, the gulf between social classes assumes ultra-Victorian proportions. There are plenty of exponents of cultural studies who take note of the former but not the latter. While the sphere of consumption is hospitable to all comers, the domain of property and production remains rigidly stratified. Divisions of property and class, however, are partly masked by the levelling, demotic, spiritually promiscuous culture in which they are set, as they were not in the era of Proust and Mann. In contrast to that stately milieu, cultural and material capital now begin to split apart. The brokers, jobbers, operators, and speculators who float to the top of the system in their spiritual weightlessness are hardly remarkable for their aesthetic wisdom.

The breaking down of cultural hierarchies is clearly to be welcomed. For the most part, however, it is less the upshot of a genuinely democratic spirit than an effect of the commodity form, which levels existing values rather than contesting them in the name of alternative priorities. Indeed, it represents an assault less on cultural supremacism than on the notion of value as such.

more here.

Tm Barker at n+1:

IN 2006, I SAW MERLE HAGGARD open for Bob Dylan in Orlando, Florida. I assumed everyone else who had shelled out fifty bucks was there to see Dylan, too. But the group in front of me, after conspicuously enjoying Haggard’s set, got up and left without looking back.

At the time, I was mildly puzzled. Eventually I came to understand the abrupt exit as a minor episode in the conflict which made Merle Haggard famous. In the 1960s, Haggard became known, even to people who never listened to country music, as a singing spokesman for the Silent Majority, the musical equivalent of the “hardhats” who beat up antiwar demonstrators. He was the Bob Dylan of the counter-counterculture. The counterculture responded in kind, like when hip TV comedian Tom Smothers mockingly introduced a Haggard performance while pretending to get high. The kind of people who listened to Dylan were supposed to hate Haggard, and the kind of people who listened to Haggard were supposed to hate the people who listened to Dylan. But the fact that, decades later, he was touring with Dylan suggested there was more to Haggard’s politics than right-wing backlash.

As it turned out, everything about Merle Haggard was confusing. And nothing was more confusing than his 1969 chart topper, “Okie from Muskogee.”

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Andrew Pulver in The Guardian:

Immersive is a word normally associated with thrillride films such as Gravity or Lord of the Rings, or boutique costumed events such as Secret Cinema; it is not one that tends to be linked with cinematic descriptions of human misery at its most extreme. But that is how Hungarian film-maker László Nemes likes to refer to his Oscar-winning Holocaust picture Son of Saul, which penetrates to the heart of the grotesque killing machine of Auschwitz. Nemes, 39, says he wanted Son of Saul, his first full-length feature film, to be a visceral experience and that he had “spent years experimenting with immersive strategies”; really, what he is talking about is Son of Saul’s extraordinary ability to evoke both the baleful dread inside the concentration camp, and the frenetic chaos of its extermination process. For virtually the entire film, the camera is rammed hard into the face of its protagonist Saul Ausländer (the surname, pointedly, means “alien” in German), with unspeakable cruelties largely enacted in blurred, out-of-focus sections of the frame, or just off-screen. The restricted perspective, Nemes says, was designed to reflect the fragmentary experience of the prisoners themselves. “The human experience within the camp was based on limitation and lack of information. No one could know or see that much. So how do you convey that?”

Right from the first frames, Nemes’s techniques pay jolting, heartstopping dividends. A continuous three-and-a-half-minute handheld shot begins with indistinct figures running in panic, then moves with Ausländer as he helps to control a trainload of new arrivals for one of the notorious rail-platform “selections”. There is little obvious violence on display: just glimpses of the desperate, cowed deportees and the vicious bellowing soldiers; a confused babel of shrill whistling, blaring music and barking dogs. Through all this, Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) exhibits an eerie, beatific placidity, as if attempting to transmit some sort of calmness to the panicked crowds around him. If it isn’t immediately apparent, it becomes clear quickly enough that Ausländer is a figure apart: one of the Sonderkommando, the special squads of death camp inmates forced to assist in the extermination process by cleaning gas chambers, disposing of corpses, shepherding prisoners and the like. Every few weeks, they themselves were executed, and new Sonderkommando teams were formed.

More here.

Address

There are many ways of saying Chinese
in American. One means restaurant.
Others mean comprador, coolie, green army.

I’ve been practicing
how to walk and talk,
how to dress, what to do in a silk shop.

How to talk. America: Meiguo,
second tone and third.
The beautiful country.

In second grade we watched films
on King in Atlanta.
How our nation was mistaken:

They said we had hidden the Japanese
in California.
Everyone apologized to me.

But I am from Eldorado Drive
in the suburbs. Sara Lee’s
pound cake thaws in the heart

of the home, the parakeet bobs on a dowel,
night doesn’t move. The slumber party
teems in its spot in the dark

Read more »

George Soros in the New York Review of Books:

The asylum policy that emerged from last month’s EU-Turkey negotiations—and that has already resulted in the deportation of hundreds of asylum seekers from Greece to Turkey—has four fundamental flaws. First, the policy is not truly European; it was negotiated with Turkey and imposed on the EU by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Second, it is severely underfunded. Third, it is not voluntary. It imposes quotas that many member states oppose and requires refugees to take up residence in countries where they don’t want to live, while forcing others who have reached Europe to be sent back. Finally, it transforms Greece into a de facto holding pen without sufficient facilities for the number of asylum seekers already there.

All these deficiencies can be corrected. The European Commission implicitly acknowledged some of them this week when it announced a new plan to reform Europe’s asylum system. But the Commission’s proposals still rely on compulsory quotas that serve neither refugees nor member states. That will never work. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans is inviting an open debate. Here is my contribution.

More here.

Michael Brooks interviews Sean Carroll for New Scientist:

Are you enjoying the current popularity of physics that’s come as a result of discoveries like the Higgs boson and gravitational waves?

It’s interesting, because physicists sort of ruled the 20th century with quantum mechanics, the atomic bomb and all sorts of technologies. We had the most political power and intellectual heft. Now the biologists are stealing that from us. Biology is advancing enormously quickly, and has a much more direct impact on our lives. But such advances – gene editing, for example – can be double-edged swords. In a sense, this works in favour of physics: the kinds of discoveries we’re making now don’t have immediate implications for technology or our everyday lives. No one’s worried about how the Higgs boson or gravitational waves are going to be used – they’re just really cool.

These physics breakthroughs have come from proving mathematical theorems. Should we continue to use maths to guide research?

It’s not just that mathematics is helpful in understanding nature, it’s the scientific methodology too. The bigger point is that these things illustrate the knowability of our world. There’s a quiet debate between people who think nature is fundamentally mysterious versus those who think it is fundamentally intelligible. These kinds of discoveries remind us is that our puny little brains have the power to make amazing predictions about far away and very difficult-to-access aspects of the natural universe.

More here.

luam/asa-luam

…. the afterworld sea

there was a water song that we sang
when we were going to fetch river from the river,
it was filled with water sounds
& pebbles. here, in the after-wind, with the other girls,
we trade words like special things.
one girl tells me “mai” was her sister’s name,
the word for “flower.” she has been saving
this one for a special trade. I understand
& am quiet awhile, respecting, then give
her my word “mai,” for “water,”
& another girl tells me “mai” is “mother”
in her language, & another says it meant,
to her, “what belongs to me,” then
belonging,” suddenly, is a strange word,
or a way of feeling, like “to be longing for,”
& you, brother, are the only one,
the only one I think of to finish that thought,

to be longing for
. mai brother, my brother

by Aracelis Girmay
from Poetry Magazine, April 2016

Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books:

As Beijing prepared to host the 2008 Olympics, a small drama was unfolding in Hong Kong. Two years earlier, middlemen had come into possession of a batch of waterlogged manuscripts that had been unearthed by tomb robbers in south-central China. The documents had been smuggled to Hong Kong and were lying in a vault, waiting for a buyer.

Universities and museums around the Chinese world were interested but reluctant to buy. The documents were written on hundreds of strips of bamboo, about the size of chopsticks, that seemed to date from 2,500 years ago, a time of intense intellectual ferment that gave rise to China’s greatest schools of thought. But their authenticity was in doubt, as were the ethics of buying looted goods. Then, in July, an anonymous graduate of Tsinghua University stepped in, bought the soggy stack, and shipped it back to his alma mater in Beijing.

University administrators acted boldly. They appointed China’s most famous historian, seventy-five-year-old Li Xueqin, to head a team of experts to study the strips. On July 17, the researchers gingerly placed the slips in enamel basins filled with water, hoping to duplicate the environment that had allowed the fibrous material to survive so long.

The next day, disaster struck. Horrified team members noticed that the thin strips had already started developing black spots—fungus that within a day could eat a hole through the bamboo. Administrators convened a crisis meeting, and ordered the school’s top chemistry professors to save the slips.

More here.

Jesse Marczyk in Psychology Today:

Having one's research ideas scooped is part of academic life. Today, for instance, I'd like to talk about some research quite similar in spirit to work I intended to do as part of my dissertation (but did not, as it didn't end up making the cut in the final approved package). Even if my name isn't on it, it is still pleasing to see the results I had anticipated. The idea itself arose about four years ago, when I was discussing the curious case of Tucker Max's donation to Planned Parenthood being (eventually) rejected by the organization. To quickly recap, Tucker was attempting to donate half-a-million dollars to the organization, essentially receiving little more than a plaque in return. However, the donation was rejected, it would seem, under fear of building an association between the organization and Tucker, as some people perceived Tucker to be a less-than-desirable social asset. This, of course, is rather strange behavior, and we would recognize it as such if it were observed in any other species (e.g., “this cheetah refused a free meal for her and her cubs because the wrong cheetah was offering it”); refusing free benefits is just peculiar.

As it turns out, this pattern of behavior is not unique to the Tucker Max case (or the Kim Kardashian one…); it has recently been empirically demonstrated by Tasimi & Wynn (2016), who examined how children respond to altruistic offers from others, contingent on the moral character of said others. In their first experiment, 160 children between the ages of 5 and 8 were recruited to make an easy decision; they were shown two pictures of people and told that the people in the pictures wanted to give them stickers, and they had to pick which one they wanted to receive the stickers from. In the baseline conditions, one person was offering 1 sticker, while the other was offering either 2, 4, 8, or 16 stickers. As such, it should come as no surprise that the person offering more stickers was almost universally preferred (71 of the 80 children wanted the person offering more, regardless of how many more).

Now that we've established that more is better, we can consider what happened in the second condition where the children received character information about their benefactors.

More here.