Ariane Tabatabai in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

After months of negotiations, Iran and six world powers have finally reached a framework agreement on limiting the country’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The deal announced on Thursday is intended as the basis for a comprehensive agreement to be worked out by the end of June.

Getting to this agreement was a crucial step, as virtually all technical issues have now been addressed, but much work still remains to be done. The coming months will involve a great deal of legal and political wrangling. In the United States especially, due to anxious allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel) and some domestic opposition (especially among Republicans in Congress), negotiations will keep the White House busy.

Nonetheless, this is a good agreement for both sides, as indicated by some of its key components.

First, most of the public discussion about the negotiations has until now been focused on quantifiable elements, such as the number of centrifuges and amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran gets to keep, and the length of the deal’s implementation. But perhaps the most crucial aspect lies in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) access to Iranian facilities. In the framework deal, Tehran has said it will once again voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol to its existing IAEA safeguards agreement, granting the nuclear watchdog more inspections authority.

More here. And there is also this: Iranians erupt with joy after nuclear deal.

Valeriu Nicolae in Eurozine (Photo: Steve Evans. Source: Flickr):

For most politicians and bureaucrats, the social inclusion of Roma is a terrifying and complex issue impossible to solve during a typical five-year term in office. After a sporadic few years of small efforts here and there, and decades of very strong but mainly empty rhetoric, Roma remain the most discriminated-against ethnic group in Europe and the most underrepresented within decision-making structures. Due to a chronic lack of expertise among senior management at the level of national government and inter-governmental institutions, tackling the situation of Roma is seen as a professional quagmire. It is very difficult to envision how the incentives required for conventional political parties to tackle this issue – such as opportunities for fast, impressive results, or electoral gains – could become available.

Paying lip service, preserving the status quo and avoiding controversy are, from a pragmatic point of view, the best career moves for many of the decision-makers involved. For the past two decades, most of the new appointments in high positions dealing with Roma have led to long periods of inaction, sometimes followed by the reinvention, rediscovery and repetition of previous measures. It is not rare for catastrophic approaches disguised as positive practices in sycophantic reports to make their way back on to the table of the new Roma tsars. This points toward the existence of structural racism within those institutions and the very poor standards of professionalism required for occupying these positions.

Accountability for failures or lack of progress in addressing Roma social inclusion is exceptionally rare for many reasons. Whether due to disinterest, or professional inability on the part of member states and inter-governmental institutions, the kinds of systems that can hold people and institutions accountable simply do not exist. Those in charge develop instead the ability to shift or avoid responsibility. Poor civic and political involvement of Roma within European societies results in the inability of Roma to exert sufficient, or any, political or social pressure to make structures and people accountable.

More here.

Aaron Brady in New Inquiry:

If you didn’t see it on twitter on facebook a few days ago, you may have seen it somewhere like Buzzfeed: Chinua Achebe has died again. First in 2013, and then again in 2015. First as tragedy and then as farce.

These sorts of things happen, a bit like forest fires. You can track down the place where it started if you want—as the novelist Porochista Khakpour did here—but to understand and predict a forest fire, you need to pay attention to why there was so much dry flammable material waiting for a spark. That spark is eventually going to come, but the fire only goes “viral” if there’s something there to burn.

With Achebe, there was something there to burn. While Facebook and Twitter are excellent vectors for this kind of misinformation, Chinua Achebe is the sort of writer who would die twice. For one thing, he’s a hyper-canonized writer whose sainthood outstrips his actual literary currency: because he is more deeply revered than he is deeply read, one can fall easily into the orthodox reaction to news of his passing—gestures like #RIP—without the encumbrance of a personal relationship to the author himself getting in the way. To a great many people (particularly non-Nigerians), the ideaof Chinua Achebe means a lot more than does the actual writer himself. Their experience of him is socially mediated, and socially mandated: his books are praised, assigned, and mythologized. Sometimes they are also read, but not as often as you’d expect.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

We're all irrational some of the time. Yet many past philosophers have put a great emphasis on human rationality as what sets us apart, and even made it a condition of moral action. In this episode of Philosophy Bites Lisa Bortolotti (@lisabortolotti) explores some different types of irrationality and the implications for human agency.

Listen to Lisa Bortolotti on Irrationality

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Liza Batkin in n+1 (image via Badlands Unlimited):

EARLY IN CLAUDIA LA ROCCO’S NEW COLLECTION, in a poem entitled “Just go for it, go for it,” she writes: “Some things were accurate and some weren’t, he says. Yes, no, maybe, I dunno. You can’t always trust the people you interview. I mean, you never should.” These halting, doubtful lines introduce a voice far from the one most of La Rocco’s readers will be familiar with, the public voice of the New York Times’ longtime daily dance critic. Here instead is a voice that revises itself within a single chain of thought—yes, no, maybe; can’t always, never should—and tosses authority aside with a slangy “I dunno.”

While a dance critic at the Times, from 2005 until 2012, La Rocco reviewed performances at every dance venue in the city, from Lincoln Center, Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and Danspace, to the literal underground of subway cars. Her reputation among professional dancers and choreographers is made apparent by her involvement in a variety of collaborative performances, including one with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener that she writes about in the collection. In 2012 she left her regular dance post and has since written primarily for the theater and book review sections of the Times. She has also continued to write about dance for the Brooklyn Rail and Artforum. The Best Most Useless Dress includes dance reviews and essays that previously appeared in all these publications.

Because it arrives two years after La Rocco’s resignation from the Times dance beat, the collection might seem a gesture of summation. But The Best Most Useless Dress is more than a compilation of old dance reviews; La Rocco has surrounded them with poems and punctuated the writings with photographs and scans of handwritten notes. The result is a strange hybrid of voices and media that provides a unique perspective onto a critic’s concerns.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria at Dissent:

July 15, 1961

The trouble had begun in the 1950s, when Mohammad Ali Bogra, the prime minister of Pakistan, fell in love with his secretary. No one begrudged the boss, balding and middle aged, his dalliance. He was, after all, a powerful man, adept at making the right impression. When he spoke, it was with just enough British vowels pinned to his Bengali consonants to announce his class, and with just enough stately reserve to proclaim his pedigree. When he put on his neatly tailored suits he added a carefully chosen tiepin or a curious boutonniere: the hint of nonconformity that would lend him an air of (utterly unthreatening) eccentricity.

It could have been predicted—even expected—that such a master of aesthetic arithmetic would wish to sample the best of what was available beyond amenities like cigars and wine. The secretary he romanced was not just any woman shuffling papers, but a white woman, an American, selected by the discerning Mr. Bogra while he served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States before he became prime minister.

Despite his savvy with suits, accent, and politics, in the matters of the heart Mohammad Ali Bogra made a miscalculation. In adding up the delights his new companion could offer, and in glibly remembering that he, as a Muslim and as prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, was allowed four such companions, he left out an essential digit.

more here.

Gisle Selnes interviews Alberto Toscano at Eurozine:

GS: Could you perhaps take us back to the beginning of the concept of fanaticism and especially the significant conjunction between politics and religion? It has its origin in ancient religious cults, and then it re-emerges in the revolutionary Christian movements in the sixteenth century…

AT: It's a term that originates in ancient Rome to describe certain religious cults, linked to groups that had come to Rome from what we now would call the Middle East or Near Asia. The word fanatic comes from fanum, temple, the same root from which we get profanation, which is of course one of the things that fanatics are said to be particularly obsessed with. Recently one of the main things the Islamic State has been known for is destruction of temples, and the whole question of iconoclasm is also part of this. But fanaticism was originally intended to designate a kind of religion, a seemingly violent or uncontrolled religion of the other. There is an interesting story of false etymology as well; during the Enlightenment, a lot of thinkers presume or project into this idea of fanaticism that which has to do with fantasy, the fantastic and phantasms.

Within the Enlightenment itself, or at least within the eighteenth century's intellectual and philosophical movements that we can link to the Enlightenment, the concept of fanaticism had a whole set of contested and contradictory uses. Among these we identify a popular idea in the 2000s, formative of liberal political thought: the distinction or opposition between tolerance and fanaticism. This is of course the Enlightenment response to the menace of religious wars, and it is at the crux of Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance, where the philosopher would be on the side of tolerance, and those who tried illegitimately to mix political action with religion would be on the side of fanaticism. Fanaticism is the source of the worst in a society: civil war.

more here.

Mike Powell in Grantland:

In November 2001, an unemployed Japanese travel agent named Takako Konishi was found dead outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Nobody knew Konishi was a travel agent, or what she was doing in Detroit Lakes, only that she was young, pretty, and far from home.

About a week earlier, she had checked into a Holiday Inn in Bismarck, North Dakota. The morning after she arrived in Bismarck, a man had seen her wandering around a landfill and offered help. Konishi didn’t speak English, so the man took her to the police, where Konishi showed officers a crudely drawn map of a tree and a road and started repeating a word that soon everyone came to hear as “Fargo.”

Fargo: A city nearly 200 miles east of Bismarck on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, best known for a 1996 Coen brothers movie in which a car salesman hires two men to kidnap his own wife for ransom. Things go wrong (things always go wrong in Coen brothers films) and one of the men ends up killing the other with an ax after an argument about a 1987 Cutlass Ciera, but not before the ax victim buries the ransom in a briefcase in the snow.

A story about Konishi emerged: Here was a woman who had traveled a very long way under the great misunderstanding that the movie Fargo was real. Only one of the officers at the Bismarck Police Department had seen the movie, which, incidentally, opens with a title card that reads: THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

Read the rest here.

Jacob Brogan in Slate:

When I teach courses on writing, I try to avoid arbitrary rules. Following the late style expert Joseph Williams, I hold that good writing is basically good storytelling. To tell a story well, we need to clearly identify our characters and then show the reader what those characters do. The passive voice makes storytelling more difficult because it hides the characters deep in the sentence—if it shows them at all. On Reddit, Kristin Sainani, an associate professor of health research and policy at Stanford University, took a similar position, arguing that the passive voice “obscures who is responsible for what.” The passive has its place (I used it to open the prior paragraph), but, more often than not, it disrupts the flow of a narrative, making it difficult for the reader to connect one idea to the next.

By contrast, Elliott argues that scientists should use the passive voice in order to highlight their results. She writes, “The main advantage of the passive voice, in my opinion, is that it allows the writer to put the important concepts, ideas, findings, principles, and conclusions first. …” In other words, the passive voice allows us to discuss discoveries rather than the scientists who discovered them. In theory, it plays an important rhetorical function, because it insists on the factual truth of discoveries by minimizing the role that fallible human subjects play in the equation. Ultimately, however, scientists may be doing themselves a disservice by downplaying their place in the scientific process. Sainani holds that there’s something slightly untrustworthy about passive constructions, writing, “It’s more accurate and honest to say, ‘We found that …’ since this emphasizes the role that the experimenters played in designing, conducting, and interpreting the experiments.”

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A tweak to a technique that edits DNA with pinpoint precision has boosted its ability to correct defective genes in people. Called CRISPR, the method is already used in the lab to insert and remove genome defects in animal embryos. But the genetic instructions for the machinery on which CRISPR relies — a gene-editing enzyme called Cas9 and RNA molecules that guide it to its target — are simply too large to be efficiently ferried into most of the human body’s cells. This week, researchers report a possible way around that obstacle: a Cas9 enzyme that is encoded by a gene about three-quarters the size of the one currently used.

…Gene-therapy researchers often harness a virus called AAV to shuttle foreign genes into mature human cells. However, most laboratories use a gene encoding the Cas9 protein that is too large to fit in the snug confines of the AAV genome alongside the extra sequences necessary for Cas9 function. Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues decided to raid bacterial genomes for a solution, because the CRISPR system is derived from a process that bacteria use to snip unwanted DNA sequences out of their genomes. Zhang’s team analysed genes encoding more than 600 Cas9 enzymes from hundreds of bacteria in search of a smaller version that could be packaged in AAV and delivered to mature cells. The gene encoding Cas9 in Staphylococcus aureus — a bacterium best known for causing skin infections and food poisoning — was more than 1,000 DNA letters smaller than the one for the commonly used Cas9. The researchers packed it into AAV along with RNAs that would target the enzyme to modify a cholesterol regulatory gene in the liver. Within a week of injecting mice with the modified virus, the team found that more than 40% of liver cells contained the modified gene.

More here.

Over at Rationally Speaking:

Neville Morley over at The Sphinx Blog:

The Melian Dialogue in Thucydides has been of interest to game theorists since the earliest development of the field; it was discussed on several occasions by John von Neumann, generally accepted founder of this approach, and it appears in the work of a leading game theorist like Thomas Schelling. It’s entirely understandable: the dialogue presents two sides in a high-stakes, zero-sum conflict, pursuing very different strategies with a limited number of possible outcomes, and – if you want to push the boundaries of game theory a bit further, it also offers interesting examples of how each side seeks to anticipate and influence the decision-making of the other, and raises some fundamental questions of rationality. I fully expect to find lots of other examples when I have time to pursue this theme in depth, but for today I want to focus on one case of a game theoretical discussion of the Dialogue, written by the current Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis (1997; revised version 2014: 262-83). It is in itself an interesting reading of the situation, in relation both to Thucydides and to the normal assumptions of game theory, but there are also some striking implications for the current negotiations between Greece and the EU, especially Germany, which I will consider in the final section.

1. Varoufakis on Thucydides

Varoufakis speaks of Thucydides with familiarity and confidence, and knows him well enough to offer his own translations rather than relying on a standard version. These are generally close to the conventional readings, though with occasional interesting variations. The passages quoted are as follows, in order of their mention:

5.89: On the one hand the principles of justice, encompassed in human reason, hinge on the equal capacity to compel, yet on the other hand, the strong actually do what is possible and the weak suffer what they must.

Varoufakis here echoes (if not follows) Crawley in seeing the weak as ‘suffering’ rather than simply ‘accepting’ what they have to; and is in the tradition of emphasising that the strong ‘do’ what they are able to do rather than, more narrowly, ‘exact’ what they are able to exact. His choice of the phrase ‘encompassed in human reason’ isn’t wholly clear; I feel uncertain whether he wants to emphasise the human element (the idea that, as other translations make clearer, discussions of justice in debased human terms rest on issues of strength and power whereas true, divine justice operates by different rules) or the rational element (which edges into the neo-realist assumption that Thucydides here describes presents lawless anarchy as the true and reasonable state of things, rather than as something to be deplored). Finally, Varoufakis is the only translator I can recall off-hand who seeks to contrast the two parts of the sentence – justice depends on equal power and yet the strong exact and the weak endure – rather than seeing these as consecutive – justice depends on equal power and so the strong exact and the weak endure (i.e. there is no equality and so no justice).

More here.

Ramachandra Guha in Caravan Magazine:

The shortage became strikingly apparent last August, when Y Sudershan Rao was appointed the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. It has further manifested itself in the growing influence over school curricula of Dina Nath Batra. Rao’s publication list is meager—he wrote one little-noticed book 25 years ago, and has no publications in peer-reviewed journals. From the statements he has made since assuming office, it is clear he does not know the difference between fact and fiction, or between history and myth. Batra’s claims to scholarship are even more tenuous. He is of the view that when god made man, he placed the various strands of humanity in an oven—the strain taken out too early became the whites, the strain taken out too late became the blacks, the strain taken out at just the right time became the brown Indians, perfectly coloured and destined thereafter to rule the world.

Both Rao and Batra have long-standing connections with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Although the RSS describes itself as a cultural organisation, it is in fact intensely ideological and deeply political. Its ultimate goal is the construction of a Hindu rashtra, a state run by and for Hindus. The RSS has very close ties with the BJP—as it did with the party’s predecessor, the Jana Sangh—supplying it with cadres, ministers, and an unending stream of advice.

Rao and Batra’s influence over public policy is based not on their claims to scholarship but on the strength of their links to the RSS. Their statements and proposals have attracted a fair amount of criticism, largely merited, in the media. This could have been avoided if, instead of Rao and Batra, the new government had promoted and patronised scholars with political views congenial to the ruling dispensation and with a string of books and research papers to their name. That alternative, alas, was not available, since intellectuals who meet this twin desiderata do not exist.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the NYT (photo: Ferhat Bouda/Agence Vu, for The New York Times):

What impressed me about Daoud’s writing, both his journalism and his novel, was the fearlessness with which he defended the cause of individual liberty — a fearlessness that, it seemed to me, bordered on recklessness in a country where collectivist passions of nation and faith run high. I wondered whether his experience might provide clues as to the state of intellectual freedom in Algeria, a peculiar hybrid of electoral democracy and police state. Late last year, I had an answer of sorts. Daoud was no longer merely a writer. He was now someone you had to take a side on, in Algeria and in France.

His ordeal began on Dec. 13, during a book tour in France, where “Meursault” received rapturous reviews, sold more than 100,000 copies and came two votes shy of winning the Prix Goncourt, the nation’s most prestigious literary prize. He was on a popular late-night talk show called “On n’est pas Couché” (“We’re Not Asleep”), and he felt, he would tell me later, “as if I had all of Algeria on my shoulders.” He insisted to the French-Lebanese journalist Léa Salamé, one of the guests on the program, that he considered himself an Algerian, not an Arab — a view that’s not uncommon in Algeria, but that is opposed by Arab nationalists. He said that he spoke a distinct language called “Algerian,” not Arabic. He said that he preferred to meet with God on foot, by himself, rather than in an “organized trip” to a mosque, and that religious orthodoxy had become an obstacle to progress in the Muslim world. Daoud said nothing on the program that he hadn’t said in his columns or his novel. But saying it in France, the country that ruled Algeria from 1830 to 1962, got him noticed by people back home who tend to ignore the French-language press.

One of them was an obscure imam named Abdelfattah Hamadache, who had reportedly been an informer for the security services. Three days after Daoud’s appearance on French television, Hamadache wrote on his Facebook page that Daoud — an “apostate” and “Zionized criminal” — should be put on trial for insulting Islam and publicly executed. It was not quite a call for Daoud’s assassination: Hamadache was appealing to the state, not to freelance jihadists. But Algeria is a country in which more than 70 journalists were murdered by Islamist rebels during the civil war of the 1990s, the so-called Black Decade. Those murders were often preceded by anonymous threats in letters, leaflets or graffiti scrawled on the walls of mosques. Hamadache’s “Facebook fatwa,” as it became known, was something new, and uniquely brazen, for being signed in his own name.

More here.

William Logan in The New Criterion:

As he recalled it,

I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel. That night as I went home along the rue Raynouard I was still trying. I could get nothing but spots of colour. I remember thinking that if I had been a painter I might have started a wholly new school of painting. . . . Only the other night, wondering how I should tell the adventure, it struck me that in Japan, where a work of art is not estimated by its acreage and where sixteen syllables are counted enough for a poem if you arrange and punctuate them properly, one might make a very little poem which would be translated about as follows:—

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough.”

—“How I Began,” T.P.’s Weekly, June 6, 1913

Early in March 1911, Ezra Pound arrived in Paris. By late May he had moved on. The specters in the Métro obviously haunted him. The lines were finished by fall the following year, when he sent Poetry a batch of poems that, he hoped, would “help to break the surface of convention.” When these “Contemporania” were published at the head of the April 1913 issue, the poem appeared in this fashion:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd : Petals on a wet, black bough .

The first thing striking about the couplet is the subject—beauty discovered underground.

More here.

Emily Anthes in Nature:

In 2009, a major California hospital was looking for ways to cut costs. Stanford Hospital and Clinics was on track that year to purchase nearly US$6.8 million worth of blood for transfusions. But a growing body of evidence was suggesting that physicians could often forego the procedure. So, beginning in July 2010, whenever a clinician used the hospital's computerized ordering system to request blood, it would call up the patient's most recent lab results. If the numbers indicated that she or he should be healthy enough to get by without a transfusion, an alert would pop onto the screen gently reminding the doctor of the guidelines and requesting further justification for the order.

The results, detailed in two papers published in the past 18 months^{1, 2}, were dramatic. The number of red-blood-cell transfusions dropped by 24% between 2009 and 2013, representing an annual savings of $1.6 million in purchasing costs alone. And as transfusion rates fell, so did mortality, average length of stay and the number patients who needed to be readmitted within 30 days of a transfusion. By simply asking doctors to think twice about transfusions, the hospital had not only reduced costs, but also improved patient outcomes. Transfusions are common procedures, at least in developed nations. In 2011, US doctors transfused 21 million units of blood and blood products; in the United Kingdom, the number was nearly 3 million. But although transfusions can be lifesaving, they are often unnecessary and are sometimes even harmful. “I think we were kind of brainwashed into thinking that blood saves lives, and the more you give the better,” says Steven Frank, an anaesthesiologist and director of the blood-management programme at the Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore, Maryland. “We've gone 180 degrees, and now we think that less is more.”

More here.

From Jam Tarts:

How has your experience as a professor of creative writing and literature influenced your personal tastes? How has what you've taught – and perhaps who you've taught – over the years challenged or even transformed your sense of what’s pleasing and what’s not?

RP: For years I've required the young poets in my MFA workshop to compile an anthology: 36 pages that show what you mean by the words “poem” or “poetry.” Ideally, typed up by hand. The students learn from the exercise – sometimes typing something they didn't realize they liked, sometimes beginning to type something they thought they liked, then abandoning it.

A kind of secret function of that exercise has been to develop and expand my taste. The student anthologies are scouts for me, keeping my taste limber, I think. Sometimes, there’s the plausible mediocrity that the young poets (or their teachers) are reading in a particular decade, or lustrum, or year. But sometimes I get some free education. Not only contemporary finds (it may have been in one of those anthologies that I first read a poem by Terrance Hayes or Katie Peterson) but poets translated from other languages. And re-discoveries: some very hip, rather experimental young poet types out “Lycidas” and I realize I’ve sort of underestimated it as a dusty, ornate perennial.

More here.