Alain de Botton in The New York Times:

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with. Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

More here. (Note: Also watch the video of Mr. Alain de Botton's talk posted below on Saturday)

At the Center

Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
and I'm filled with peace, perfect peace

No longer shall I speak of electrocuted poets
or the ones who inhaled gas until
they danced in the dizziness of death
But of brown women
who turn the soil with their hands
making vegetable gardens and tending fruit trees

Today I went into my storehouse
selected the choicest oil and annoint my body
wrapped myself in the rarest cloth
of a deep wine red
stood at my front gate
and words poured from my mouth in flaming chants

Today the craftsman has come
to make a design for me
of a woman sitting in deep repose
with doves flying from her head
He has made all the pieces and they fit
well together
I shall hang it at my window for all the world to see

by Afua Cooper
from Understatement: An Anthology of 12 Toronto Poets
Toronto: Seraphim Edition, 1996.
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Nicola Barker in The Spectator:

The rough English translation of Kamasutra is pleasure (kama) treatise (sutra). In the West, since it was first (rather surreptitiously) translated and published back in 1883, the book has generally been associated with a series of beautiful, ancient illustrations of a couple determinedly coupling in a variety of fascinating — and often utterly improbable — positions; as essentially ‘the erotic counterpart to the ascetic asanas of yoga’. But there is so much more to it than that, as Wendy Doniger doggedly contends in this, her fine collection of frank, brief, clear-eyed essays. Doniger believes the Kamasutra to be not only a precious and under-appreciated part of the Sanskrit canon, but also a great Indian literary landmark which has been — for way too long now — criminally undervalued in its place of origin. Hence its need for ‘redemption’ (a paradoxically Christian notion, perhaps).

She traces the history of the Kamasutra, detailing how the three aims of human life (the Triple Set in Indian parlance) are dharma(religion), artha (power) and kama (pleasure). In a satisfying parallel, these three aims are underpinned by a trinity of ancient texts; theDharmashastra (written by the sober, strict and rather sexist Manu), the Arthashastra (by Kautilya, the Indian Machiavelli-plus) and theKamasutra (by the slightly slippery but often refreshingly open-minded Vatsyayana).

More here.

Dina Fine in Scientific American:

Federal scientists released partial findings Friday from a $25-million animal study that tested the possibility of links between cancer and chronic exposure to the type of radiation emitted from cell phones and wireless devices. The findings, which chronicle an unprecedented number of rodents subjected to a lifetime of electromagnetic radiation starting in utero, present some of the strongest evidence to date that such exposure is associated with the formation of rare cancers in at least two cell types in the brains and hearts of rats. The results, which were posted on a prepublication Web site run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, are poised to reignite controversy about how such everyday exposure might affect human health.

Researchers at the National Toxicology Program (NTP), a federal interagency group under the National Institutes of Health, led the study. They chronically exposed rodents to carefully calibrated radio-frequency (RF) radiation levels designed to roughly emulate what humans with heavy cell phone use or exposure could theoretically experience in their daily lives. The animals were placed in specially built chambers that dosed their whole bodies with varying amounts and types of this radiation for approximately nine hours per day throughout their two-year life spans.

More here.

Lorraine Daston in The Point:

Some of you may be mentally re-parsing my title to something more like “Can Liberal Education Be Saved from the Sciences?” For today’s embattled humanities, the sciences have come to stand for the antithesis of what is now understood to constitute the content and values of a liberal education, namely: the cultivation of the intellectual and artistic traditions of diverse cultures past and present, the assertion of the generalist’s prerogatives over those of the specialist, and the defense of non-utilitarian values as preparation for civic engagement in the cause of the commonweal. In contrast, what are currently known as the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—stand for knowledge that is presumed universal and uniform, for narrow specialization and, above all, for applications that are useful and often lucrative. A comparative glance at the budgets for the sciences and for the disciplines that constitute the core of the Core seems to tell it all: it’s not the sciences that need saving, most certainly not by the likes of liberal education, a minnow—a starving minnow, at that—sent out to rescue a fat and sassy whale.

Nonetheless, I’m sticking to my original title. In the scant time allotted, I’m going to gallop through the history of the place of the sciences and mathematics in the liberal education curriculum, from the medieval university through the present. This is a history that packs some surprises. I’ll then draw some lessons for the place of the sciences in a liberal education for the here and now.

More here.

Dwight Garner at The New York Times:

In “Danko’s Burning Heart,” a short story by Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), a group of people are lost in a forest at night. Danko wants to lead them to safety. His heart burns with such desire that it catches fire. He rips it from his chest and uses it to light the way.

There’s a bit of Danko, an element of self-sacrifice, in the lives and work of Russia’s best journalists. I’m thinking of Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated on Vladimir V. Putin’s birthday in 2006. I’m thinking too of Svetlana Alexievich, born in Ukraine, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Ms. Alexievich is an investigative journalist who compiles, in Studs Terkel-like fashion, dense volumes of oral history about postwar Russia. Her books bring her trouble. “Zinky Boys” (1992), for example, about Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, led her to be put on trial for defaming the Soviet Army. (She was acquitted.)

When she won the Nobel, Ms. Alexievich was little known in the West. Her major books are slowly making their way into English. Here now is her newest, “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets,” a sprawling examination of life in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a feral brand of capitalism.

more here.

Nikil Saval at The New Yorker:

Julian Barnes’s new novel, “The Noise of Time,” is about Shostakovich, and it begins with the composer enduring the humiliation and misery of his exclusion from musical life, in 1936. “All that he knew was that this was the worst time,” the first part opens. Barnes has Shostakovich repeat it twice more, at the beginnings of the novel’s two other sections, in response to fresh sources of persecution in 1948 and 1960, bringing to mind Edgar from “King Lear”: “The worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ “ The novel’s title comes from the nineteenth-century poet Alexander Blok, who used the phrase to describe history. The Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam chose it for the title of his memoir, published in 1923—Mandelstam, who would indeed suffer Stalin’s worst. For Barnes’s Shostakovich, “the noise of time” is counterposed to “that music which is inside ourselves—the music of our being—which is transformed by some into real music.” Real artists, Barnes has Shostakovich say, protect that private part of themselves against history, but if the music “is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time” it is “transformed into the whisper of history.” So we watch as Shostakovich struggles to live a life devoted to music, with history constantly intervening.

What Shostakovich’s music had to do with history has been one of the most fraught questions in the history of music. He lived through the most terrifying decades of the Soviet Union to become its most celebrated composer. Despite his transgression with “Lady Macbeth,” many of his compositions—such as the Seventh Symphony (“Leningrad”), performed in 1942 in the midst of the devastating siege and broadcast over loudspeakers into no man’s land—served the purposes of official propaganda (though the music itself was more multilayered than its use would suggest).

more here.

Thom Cuell at 3:AM Magazine:

“Either the wallpaper goes or I do.” “A certain butterfly is already on the wing”. “I haven’t had champagne for a long time.” We love to package celebrity deaths up with a final quote, a summing up of the subject’s life and character – a way to process the messiness of mortality into something clean and understandable. In 2016, this year of notable deaths, we are updating the symbolic language surrounding death for the social media age: there is the temporary Facebook profile filter – the digital equivalent of the Victorian widow’s weeds – the hashtag, the contrarian newspaper columnist’s cynical response, the street party. In her new book The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe looks at the reality behind these tropes, exploring the process of death through biographical essays on six writers who were notable for their engagement with mortality: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter.

Each of these writers worked in the shades of the prison-house; as Roiphe describes it, her chosen subjects are “especially sensitive or attuned to death… [writers and artists] who have worked through the problem of death in their art, in their letters, in their love affairs, in their dreams”. Through close examination of their final days, Roiphe aims to find some insight into the way the artist’s mind responds to impending mortality. Underlying her work are the questions of whether creativity can have a palliative function, and whether an artistic engagement with the subject can prepare us for the reality of death. Although fans of Roland Barthes (himself the victim of a bizarre, disputed death, run over by either a laundry van or a milk float, depending on who you believe) might query the close identification between the writer and the work, Roiphe hopes that “it is in the specifics, the odd, surprising details, the jokes, the offhand comments, that some other greater story is told and communicated”.

more here.

David Rennie in 1843Magazine:

It started with this book. I read this book, and I wrote to the author, and he said ‘come and meet me’,” says Eva Longoria, recalling her political awakening. The book is “Occupied America” by Rodolfo Acuña, a firebrand professor of Chicano studies, (as some call Mexican-American studies, notably since 1960s and among the West Coast left). His book is a densely argued blast written to awaken his students to centuries of colonial oppression and white racism. Longoria met Acuña, and he suggested that she should take his introductory course. “I was so unfamiliar with the word ‘Chicano’. Growing up in Texas where ‘Tejano’ was the term. And also ‘Chicano’ was a very politicised term.” She took Chicano 101 and only became more curious. “So then the next semester he said, you should take a Chicano feminism class, so I took Chicano feminism, and Chicano art.” At the time, Longoria was filming “Desperate Housewives”, then the biggest TV show in the world. “From the set of ‘Desperate Housewives’ I would drive an hour to the school, take a class from seven to ten at night, then be on set at six in the morning. I would be doing my homework behind the sets.”

Even in today’s Hollywood, where liberal politics is de rigueur and activism fashionable, Eva Longoria is unusual. She has campaigned for Democratic presidential contenders since 2004. In 2012 she was a co-chair of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, and, at the height of the campaign in Florida, she addressed seven cities in one day. Political types, Longoria says wryly, call every election the most important of their lifetimes. But in 2016 she is sure that the stakes are unusually high. This time one of the Republican front-runners, Donald Trump, says he would build a wall on the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it and claims – fantastically – that his government would deport the estimated 11m immigrants in America without legal papers. His chief Republican rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, whose own father arrived as a penniless student from Cuba, has promised to rescind the executive orders with which Obama has shielded millions of migrants from deportation, notably those brought to America as children and educated in the country. But the election will also be a test of confident predictions that Hispanics will soon be a demographic block capable of deciding who occupies the White House. The Pew Research Centre, a non-partisan think-tank, predicts that a record 27.3m Hispanics will be eligible to vote in the elections of 2016 – with enough of them concentrated in a series of battleground states to swing the election results in places such as Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Yet Hispanics have, so far, failed to realise their potential power. Turnout among Latinos is woeful.

Longoria hopes to change that.

More here.

Bernard-Henri Levy in The New York Times:

“A man’s home is his castle,” Joseph ­Goebbels told the League of Nations in 1933, so “we will deal as we see fit” with our various “opponents” and, in particular, “our Jews.” At the time, Goebbels’s view was almost universally shared. However shocking, detestable and morally indefensible it might seem today, no one dreamed of contesting it then. ­Sovereignty — a term that muddled people’s right to decide for themselves and the right of despots to decide for their people — was the first and last word in international relations. If the same cannot be said today, if dictators are no longer seen to hold the power of life or death over their subjects, if the archcriminals of Cambodia, Sudan and Rwanda are ­indicted and sometimes even punished, in short, if the idea of international justice has gradually gained a semblance of meaning, we owe it to two ideas, or more precisely two concepts — as well as to the two men who brought them to life: Hersch Lauterpacht for the concept of the crime against humanity and Raphael Lemkin for that of genocide. Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London, recounts the life and work of both men in “East West Street: On the Origins of ‘Genocide’ and ‘Crimes Against Humanity.’ ”

Sands begins by drawing distinctions between the two concepts. He is careful to show how, despite their complementarities, the two rest on different, even opposing, notions of rights. One is ­rooted in individual rights, the other in the rights of groups. One places at the top of the scale of offenses those perpetrated on individual men and women, the other the intention to annihilate the population or community from which those individuals spring.

More here.

What is the Difference

Stein asked what is the difference. She did not ask what is the
sameness. Did not ask what like is. Or proximity. Resemblance.
Did not ask what child of what patriarch what height what depth
didn’t use a question mark but still wondered at the difference
what mutinies it carries over what vast Arctic what far shore.

What is the difference between blind and bond. Between desk
and red. Between capsize and sail. Between commodity and
question. A lively thing, a fractured thing. To smile at the difference.

(Such gray clouds passing over. Thick, wet sky.)

What is the difference between mutiny and dust. Between noose
and edge. Between brittle and obey.

Between shunned and stun. What is the difference.

As now, Mary Shelley’s monster flees to the north, his sack of
books his lone companions.

by Laurie Sheck
from the Academy of American Poets

b

Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post:

Just minutes before his birthday, Masonda Ketanda Olivier was beaten to death. The Congolese national was confronted by a mob of men late at night last Friday in New Delhi and killed. Police said the incident was a dispute over the hiring of an autorickshaw; Olivier's friend, an Ivorian national, said it was a clear hate crime, with racial epithets repeatedly invoked.

This week, irate African diplomats in the Indian capital pointed to Olivier's murder as evidence of wider discrimination and bigotry against black people who visit and live in India. Olivier, who reports indicate was about to turn 24, was teaching French.

“The Indian government is strongly enjoined to take urgent steps to guarantee the safety of Africans in India including appropriate programmes of public awareness that will address the problem of racism and Afro-phobia in India,” Alem Tsehage, the Eritrean ambassador and the diplomat representing other African envoys in New Delhi,said in a statement. They also warned against new batches of African students enrolling in Indian universities.

More here.

Marcus du Sautoy in Prospect:

If I ruled the world, the first thing I would do is to make sure that everyone understood Euclid’s proof that there is an infinity of prime numbers. To some people that might seem like a strange suggestion, so let me explain. In itself, Euclid’s proof is not particularly useful for anything. But what it shows is the power of analytical thinking and the magic of mathematics. Studying Euclid would plant a seed in people’s minds that would grow into an appreciation of how this extraordinary tool can help us to navigate the world. Mathematics helps us predict the future. We know about climate change, for example, because of mathematical equations.

Mathematics is not only about utility—it’s also about wonder and beauty. This goes to the heart of the problems with mathematical education in the UK. Governments want to teach mathematical skills that will be useful to the person on the street. But most of the stuff pupils learn at school—quadratic equations, trigonometry—they are never going to use. What they are being taught is the power to string together a logical argument, to see patterns in behaviour. With Euclid’s proof, you see how a finite series of logical arguments can get you to an extraordinary revelation: that you can conceive of the infinite. That, for me, is an amazing breakthrough in human thought.

More here.

From Li.st:

• The President is very comfortable with chopsticks. He handled the sticky, hard to separate noodles that accompany the pork and the broth components of Bun Cha skillfully. He even went in for seconds.
• The President is an Asiaphile. He spoke wistfully of his time in Indonesia and his memories of the smells and flavors of street food there. He clearly enjoyed sitting on a low plastic stool eating bun Cha.
• It felt to me like his night off. Even with Secret Service lurking nearby.

More here.

Olga Khazan at The Atlantic:

Russians’ fondness for the gentle scowl seems even more unusual to expats than its actual, climatic cold. And the cultural difference cuts both ways: Newcomers to America often remark on the novelty of being smiled at by strangers.

So why is this? Why do some societies not encourage casual smiling? I got my answer, or at least part of one, when I stumbled across a new paper by Kuba Krys, a psychologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences. In some countries, smiling might not be a sign of warmth or even respect. It’s evidence that you’re a fool—a tricky fool.

Krys focused on a cultural phenomenon called “uncertainty avoidance.” Cultures that are low on this scale tend to have social systems—courts, health-care systems, safety nets, and so forth—that are unstable. Therefore, people there view the future as unpredictable and uncontrollable.

Smiling is a sign of certainty and confidence, so when people in those countries smile, they might seem odd. Why would you smile when fate is an invisible wolf waiting to shred you? You might, in those “low-UA” countries, even be considered stupid for smiling.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

The change comes slowly at first; Guston is always fighting it. As Jasper Johns put it about being an artist, “If you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can't avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable.” Guston did that. The opening gallery shows his first steps — so small you might not see them, thinking, Oh, he’s getting choppier, is all. I guess that triangle could be a hood or something. In 1957, Guston’s colors turn more opaque; warm tones turn frosty and muddy; odd, armlike shapes appear, torsos or trunks, hillocks, shadowy head configurations. But nothing definite. Being figurative was so strictly verboten that at one point Guston said he painted a can with paintbrushes in it, lost his nerve and scraped it off. It was just too much. In the next gallery, Guston’s backgrounds turn blocky. The shimmery thing is gone. So are the little snaky strokes. Things are thickening. A huge maroon hand thing emerges from the top of one canvas. Compositions get optically bolder. In Garden of M, named after his wife and daughter (both named Musa), we spot something like a patchy garden grid, or maybe two lumpy figures clutching each other in bed. Sooty grays, yellows, and crimsons abound. But things stay abstract. What’s happening is that Guston is looking for every way possible not to make a figurative painting. He couldn't just paint that single thing inside a canvas, a head, or even a can, without retreating back into abstraction. It must have been hellish. These works are almost ugly.

more here.

Christopher Benfey at the New York Review of Books:

What was it about handles—door-handles, axe-handles, the handles of pitchers and vases—that transfixed thinkers in Vienna and Berlin during the early decades of the twentieth century, echoing earlier considerations of handles in America and ancient Greece?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, as everyone knows, abandoned philosophy after publishing his celebrated Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921. He took up gardening instead, in a monastic community on the outskirts of Vienna, where he camped out for a few months in a toolshed. It was in part to draw him back into “the world” that his sister Margarete (Gretl) invited him to join the architect Paul Engelmann in designing her new house, a rigorous Modernist structure that, much changed, now houses the Bulgarian Embassy.

Wittgenstein’s participation in the project was relatively limited, his biographer Ray Monk maintains (though Engelmann himself, from professional modesty or perhaps ambivalence about the final product, claimed the collaboration was more extensive):

His role in the design of the house was concerned chiefly with the design of the windows, doors, window-locks and radiators. This is not as marginal as it may at first appear, for it is precisely these details that lend what is otherwise a rather plain, even ugly, house its distinctive beauty. The complete lack of any external decoration gives a stark appearance, which is alleviated only by the graceful proportion and meticulous execution of the features designed by Wittgenstein.

more here.

Sheherzad Raza Preisler in Nautilus:

Suicide-bombing ants. Bone-breaking frogs. Spit-flinging arachnids. Back-birthing toads. And bone-dissolving worms. What do all of the above have in common? Specialized adaptations. They’ve become so accustomed to their distinct habitats that they’d be more likely to perish, compared to their more generalist relatives, if moved to a slightly different locale. Each of them, as a result, make the variety of beak sizes among Darwin’s famous finches seem mundane by comparison. That’s because each of these five species below illustrates the seemingly eccentric paths evolution can take groups of organisms on—they’ve become, with time and struggle, distinctive offshoots of their less-specialized ancestors.

The Wolverine Frog (Triobatrachus robustus)

Native to Cameroon, Africa, the Wolverine Frog boasts an uncommon adaptation for living amphibians: claws. Scientist David C. Blackburn and his team released a study on the frog in 2008, explaining that these claws are unique due to their lack of keratinous covering. It was initially believed that these talons existed purely to provide a better grip for the frogs as they were about to leap, but Blackburn postulated that they were actually for defense, as they had the capacity to create deep punctures. Cameroonians hunt the frog using machetes and spears to not get injured handling them directly. These claws emerge from the frog’s extremities by breaking through their ventral skin, resulting in a “traumatic wound in which the skin is torn.” It’s still unknown whether or not the original connection between the bony nodule and terminal phalanx regenerates once the claws are retracted.

More here.