Kenneth M. Pollack in the New York Times:

This is the book on the Middle East you have been waiting to read.

“A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS,” by Robert F. Worth, tells the story of the 2011 Arab Spring and its slide into autocracy and civil war better than I ever could have imagined its being told. The volume is remarkably slender for one of such drama and scope — beautifully written, Worth’s words scudding easily and gracefully across the pages. It is also a marvel of storytelling, with the chapters conjuring a poignancy fitting for the subject.

Worth, a former correspondent for The New York Times, employs the familiar journalistic conceit of telling the history of the Arab Spring by presenting the stories of different individuals whose lives became caught up in it. While the method is timeworn, it has rarely been done with such skill.

More here.

Summer Brennan in Literary Hub:

Like a lot of avid readers, I enjoyed Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but bristled when it came to the section about books. The gist of her now-famous method is this: go through all your possessions by category, touch everything, keep only that which “sparks joy,” and watch as your world is transformed. It seems simple enough, but Kondo gives minimalism the hard sell when it comes to books, urging readers to ditch as many of them as they can. You may think that a book sparks joy, she argues, but you’re probably wrong and should get rid of it, especially if you haven’t read it yet.

Paring down one’s wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, “keep only the words they like?” For those of us for whom even the word “book” sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect. Still, as the weather gets warmer, many readers will tackle their spring cleaning with The Life-Changing Magic in hand.

I wondered, can Kondo’s Spartan methods be adapted for someone who feels about books the way the National Rifle Association feels about guns, invoking the phrase “cold dead hands”? I decided to give it a try.

More here.

Cade Metz in Wired:

The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December.

But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn’t that no one was looking. It was that everyonewas looking. When some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI’s freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers—some made at the conference itself—were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup. “The amount of money was borderline crazy,” says Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who was joining OpenAI after internships at both Google andFacebook and was among those who received big offers at the eleventh hour.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

This year is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to be exhibited. The exhibit (Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius) is at the Noordbrabants Museum through May 8^th. Such is public demand to see the show that this normally sedate regional museum has extended its opening hours until past midnight. And Bosch mania will not end there. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is hosting its own blockbuster Bosch exhibit beginning at the end of May and running into September. The crowds at the Noordbrabants Museum and the activity in the global press suggests that Bosch is more relevant, more interesting to the public mind than ever. Bosch mania is set to peak at the same time as the heat of the Northern summer, with festival events scheduled throughout the summer.

This extraordinary level of interest is generated by the simple fact that whosoever sees the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch does not soon, it is safe to say, forget them. That’s because they are fantastic works of art. There’s so much going on in a typical Bosch painting (more on that later) that the eye cannot but dart around, taking in the strange imagery. For that reason, Bosch’s work was popular from the very beginning—that beginning being the 15^th century, when Bosch was alive and painting away in the lands of Northern Europe we now call The Netherlands. Throughout the ensuing years, Bosch’s star waxed and waned, but his work never passed out of public consciousness completely. Then, in the early part of the 20^th century, he was “rediscovered” in full force. The 20^th century public loved the outrageous scenarios to be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, artists especially. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington explicitly referenced Bosch in their own work, just to name a few.

More here.

Willibald Sauerländer at the New York Review of Books:

But let us turn to the most important work that has survived from Piero’s oeuvre, the frescos of the Legend of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo. They were the donation of a rich family, the Bacci, and took a long time to be completed. Piero joined the project in 1452 at the latest and created one of the most imposing fresco cycles of the early Renaissance. In fourteen scenes he depicts—probably following the text of the Legenda Aurea—the Legend of the True Cross from the death of Adam to the Cross’s entrance into Jerusalem. Again it is perspective in its interplay with light that gives the scenes their vivid presence. He places his powerful figures near the front edge of the pictures, so that in their statuesque physicality and colorful garments they move as if on a stage. Piero is a gripping narrator who never diverts our attention from the main figures and the predominant events.

In the depiction of emotional agitation, emphatically recommended by aesthetic theories of the time, Piero is restrained. For him, it is gesture and especially gaze that are most important. We encounter only one figure who is emotional in the expressive sense defined by the art historian Aby Warburg: the mourning woman at the burial of Adam who raises her arms and opens her mouth in a wail. The gracefulness Vasari praises in Piero is evident in the female figures surrounding the Queen of Sheba and the Empress Helen. Piero’s sensitive feeling for light culminates in the scene of the slumbering Constantine, where the dark of night is wonderfully illuminated by the heavenly messenger bringing the dream in which he is shown the True Cross by an angel.

more here.

David Bennun in More Intelligent Life:

“Lemonade” is about race and sex, subjects which are now at the forefront of the American political landscape, as the Black Lives Matter movement gains momentum and women find themselves fending off those who would strip them of their reproductive rights. “Lemonade”, the visual album, combines these subjects: it is explicitly about female blackness. It isn’t a manifesto – it’s not that coherent, nor does it attempt to be – but it is by its existence both a kind of mutiny and a proclamation of solidarity. It is defined by who it is for: black women.

Yet at no point does Beyoncé fall short as an entertainer. This is agitprop with a sky-high budget; “Lemonade” is lavishly styled, immaculately shot and full of beautiful people. Often surreal, it taps deep into a psychosexual dream world, and borrows from the visual language of Buñuel and Dali.The effect is unsettling. Among the unsettled is Piers Morgan, who wrote about how uncomfortable it makes him, and how much he preferred it when Beyoncé was fun and apolitical. In my book, you should as a rule take note of Morgan’s opinions only to assure yourself they do not align with your own. But in this case Morgan is useful: he stands in for the kind of person Beyonce is trying to disturb, which is anybody unnerved or threatened by a black woman who doesn’t conform to their expectations. “Lemonade” isn’t meant to be easy going: it’s high-gloss art that’s disruptive and subversive (all the more so because it will probably sell in the millions). It’s no doubt clever and calculated, but so what? When, in pop music, did that become a sin? This record wants everything its own way, to be at once shiny mass-market product and gritty sedition – and it just about pulls it off. “Lemonade” lives up to its title: acid-sharp, amply sugared and mightily refreshing.

More here.

Michael Singer at the Times Literary Supplement:

Though shy by nature, Farman is a writer and singer of Kurdish music, who started at the age of twelve performing for the Kurdish diaspora in Streatham, south London. He returned to this region in 2013 and now gets by performing at weddings and cafés to the accompaniment of electric organ or the more traditional tembûr. With wages usually several months in arrears, most Peshmerga have a second job when not at the front, but to our constant surprise they still turn up to train and fight whenever called to do so. Farman’s repertoire, though traditional in style, covers subjects as conventional as unrequited love and as contemporary as the economy and the victims of the current war. It includes elegies to those who have died in flight, drowning in their bid to cross the Mediterranean. But when among his comrades, the most popular tunes are his paeans to the Peshmerga – “those who face death”. These are always well received and have the ability to animate a group of tired fighters training in a cold, steady drizzle in a way that we, with our translated encouragements, can only long for.

Slowly catching the attention of his fellow Peshmerga who begin to gather round, weapons slung and cigarettes lit, he starts to sing. Quietly at first, retaining a youthful self-consciousness, he soon gets into his stride, encouraged by the increasing accompaniment of the clapping crowd, who by the end, arms linked, have broken into a dance. Sometimes another Peshmerga will dare to join in, to the delight of everyone, as we are now in for a treat. The resulting lyrical exchange – part duet, part duel – is a tense one and clearly hard fought (even to those who can’t fully comprehend it). The result rarely seems in doubt, with the youthful and diminutive Farman usually emerging victorious. The encounters hold a particular appeal for some of our younger soldiers, attuned as they are to a similar style of adversarial performance in rap music.

more here.

Tom Shone at The New Statesman:

One of the unusual things about Malick is how much life he lived before he was bitten by the film-making bug. He studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein; then he worked as a photographer and wrote for theNew Yorker, before studying film at the American Film Institute Conservatory under George Stevens.

He did a rewrite on the Dirty Harry script for Warner Bros – the serial killer in his version was a vigilante – and Marlon Brando was considered for the lead part. When Clint Eastwood was cast, however, Malick’s script was dropped in favour of an earlier one. The thought of American cinema’s premier Emersonian polishingDirty Harry’s one-liners (“You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Does your ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow? Well, does it, punk?”) remains in the realm of conjecture.

So, the man who made Badlands was no neophyte film geek, but an accomplished person, a student and a writer, fluent in Spanish and French, possessed of a quiet confidence that led people to predict great things. While shooting Badlands, he fed Sissy Spacek her lines on rolled-up pieces of paper like love notes, peppering her with questions: “What do you think of this? How do you think Holly would do this?” Spacek remembers, “Right away, he gave me ownership of the character.”

Malick told Sheen, “That gun is like a magic wand.” The spell under which the actors worked was so intense that the finished film came as something of a shock. “He’s a killer . . . a horrible killer,” said Sheen of the character he played, after seeing the film for the first time, as if he had realised it only then.

more here.

Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

For many of us, the most pressing question about exercise is: How little can I get away with? The answer, according to a sophisticated new study of interval training, may be very, very little. In this new experiment, in fact, 60 seconds of strenuous exertion proved to be as successful at improving health and fitness as three-quarters of an hour of moderate exercise. Let me repeat that finding: One minute of arduous exercise was comparable in its physiological effects to 45 minutes of gentler sweating. I have been writing for some time about the potential benefits of high-intensity interval training, a type of workout that consists of an extremely draining but brief burst of exercise — essentially, a sprint — followed by light exercise such as jogging or resting, then another sprint, more rest, and so on. Athletes rely on intervals to improve their speed and power, but generally as part of a broader, weekly training program that also includes prolonged, less-intense workouts, such as long runs.

But in the past few years, exercise scientists and many of the rest of us have become intrigued by the idea of exercising exclusively with intervals, ditching long workouts altogether. The allure of this approach is obvious. Interval sessions can be short, making them a boon for anyone who feels that he or she never has enough time to exercise. Previously, I have written about a number of different interval programs, involving anywhere from 10 minutes of exhausting intervals in a single session to seven minutes, six, four and even fewer. Each program had scientific backing. But because of time and funding constraints, most studies of interval training have had limits, such as not including a control group, being of short duration or studying only health or fitness results, not both.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Black Ducks, Winter 2016.

Digital photograph.

Patrick Sauer in Signature:

In his works, Vonnegut’s fondness for the Bard can be traced from Kurt Sr.’s 1949 woodworking through a 2005 essay in A Man Without A Country, the last work published in his lifetime. In that piece, Vonnegut compares Hamlet to Cinderella and Kafka’s cockroach, expounds on how apparitions are not to be trusted, compares Polonius to Rush Limbaugh, and commends Shakespeare for doing what so few people do: Telling the truth, admitting we know so little about life. It’s a theme mirrored throughout Vonnegut’s career, even if the Bard’s technique didn’t require as many authorial surrogates. Tomato, Tomahto, so it goes…

The paths of Shakespeare and Vonnegut crossed multiple times, once through dimensions only known by the Tralfamadorians. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, which originated as a series of 90-second public radio pieces, Vonnegut interviews people about the afterlife. The “tongue-tied, humiliated, self-loathing semi-literate Hoosier hack” is fisked by a feisty William Shakespeare who starts out by mocking Vonnegut’s dialect, calling it the “ugliest English he had ever heard, ‘fit to split the ears of groundlings.’” The Bard is salty throughout, responding to Kurt’s congratulations on all the Oscars Shakespeare in Love won by retorting the movie is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Both novelists and playwrights love a good callback.

More here.

David P. Barash at the History News Network:

For now, I want to focus on why monogamy has become so popular, at least in the modern Western world, and at least in theory, if not always in practice. Although monogamy is exceedingly rare in the animal world, it is found in a few cases, and nearly always, the payoff seems to be associated with the adaptive benefit of biparental childcare, something that Homo sapiens finds especially beneficial, given that we are unusual in that our offspring are profoundly helpless at birth, remaining needy for an extraordinarily long time. Nor is it absolutely necessary that the cooperating adults be man and woman; we know from abundant sociological data that two women or two men can do an excellent job, and that when it comes to child rearing, two – of any sex – are better than one. But we also know that prior to the cultural homogenization that followed European colonialism, more than 83% of human societies were preferentially polygamous, and that polygamy was also prominent in the ancient Near East from which that presumed Western move to monogamy originated.

So my question for now is: why did such a large segment of human society switch from polygamy to monogamy? And my first answer is: at present, we don’t know. My second answer is a guess, which goes as follows. (I propose it simply as a hypothesis, in the hope that readers will not only find it interesting but also useful in generating informed discussion and, if possible, meaningful research.)

Imagine a polygynous society with an average harem size of, say, ten. This means that for every male harem-keeper, there are nine unsuccessful, sexually and reproductively frustrated, resentful bachelors. The simply reality is that polygyny is disadvantageous not only for women – for complex reasons – but even more so for men, since with a 50/50 sex ratio, there are unmated men in proportion as polygyny obtains. This, btw, runs counter to the lascivious imaginings of many men, who, when I describe the evidence for primitive human polygyny, often express regret that they weren’t alive in those days, imagining that they would be a happy harem-holder.

More here.

Francine Prose in The Guardian:

Late in Alain de Botton’s engaging novel, a married couple, Rabih and Kirsten, find that the demands and stresses of ordinary life – work, domestic chores, financial worries, the harrowing expenditure of energy required to raise their two adored children – have made them irritable and contentious. In part, the narrator concludes, they are at odds “because they have so seldom seen their struggles sympathetically reflected in the art they know … Were Rabih and Kirsten able to read about themselves as characters in a novel, they might … experience a brief but helpful burst of pity at their not at all unworthy plight, and thereby perhaps learn to dissolve some of the tension that arises on those evenings when, once the children are in bed, the apparently demoralising and yet in truth deeply grand and significant topic of ironing comes up.”

Presumably, the novel that Rabih and Kirsten need to read is the one De Botton has written: a sympathetic account of the relationship that begins only after the besotted courtship has ended. Having fallen deeply in love, the couple “will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.”

Rabih and Kirsten are well-drawn, individualised characters, with distinct and separate backgrounds (he’s half-Lebanese, half-German; she’s Scottish), careers (he’s an architect working in an urban design studio; she’s a surveyor employed by Edinburgh City Council) and personalities (she’s confident and feisty; he’s dreamy and insecure). But what’s interesting is De Botton’s decision to make their experience so thoroughly ordinary that their lives seem emblematic, their stories interchangeable with those of countless couples.

More here.

Jefferson Morley in The Intercept:

Last summer I paid a visit to Georgetown University’s Lauinger Libraryas part of my research on legendary CIA counterspy James Jesus Angleton. I went there to investigate Angleton’s famous mole hunt, one of the least flattering episodes of his eventful career. By the early 1960s, Angleton was convinced the KGB had managed to insert a penetration agent high in the ranks of the CIA.

In researching and writing a biography of Angleton, I constantly confront a conundrum: Was the man utterly brilliant? Or completely nuts?

Angleton is one of America’s archetypal spies. He was the model for Harlot in Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s epic of the CIA, a brooding Cold War spirit hovering over a story of corrupted idealism. In Robert De Niro’s cinematic telling of the tale, The Good Shepherd, the Angletonian character was a promising product of the system who loses his way in the moral labyrinth of secret intelligence operations.

In real life, Jim Angleton was a formidable intellectual and canny bureaucrat who helped shape the ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency we have today.

More here.

Jeff Guo in the Washington Post:

Scholars have long puzzled over the different fates of the world’s peoples. Why, on the eve of the modern world, were some societies so technologically and politically complex? For centuries, leading intellectuals from Adam Smith to Karl Marx believed that agricultural abundance had propelled the rise of advanced civilizations. The Assyrians and Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, flourished thanks to their fertile farms, which fed an upper class that devoted itself to religion and empire.

In his 1997 bestseller “Guns, Germs and Steel,” historian Jared Diamond argued that the availability of nutritious and easily domesticated plants and animals gave some societies a head start. In the Middle East there was barley and wheat; in Asia there was millet and rice. “People around the world who had access to the most productive crops became the most productive farmers,” Diamond later said on his PBS show. And more productivity led to more advanced civilizations.

But the staple crops associated with less-advanced peoples — like manioc, the white potato, the sweet potato and taro — weren’t necessarily less productive. In fact, manioc and the potato are superstar crops, less demanding of the soil and less thirsty for water. These plants still feed billions of people today.

More here.

Kathleen Downes in Women's Media Center:

When I was a little girl, I held hands with my friends. It was a sign of companionship and togetherness, one that wordlessly affirmed the strong force that is female friendship. As I grew from a girl into a woman, I started to get a lot of cultural messages, implicit and explicit, that holding hands was no longer acceptable between friends because it was now assumed to be romantic, reserved for those who are “more than friends.” Suddenly, this way to be close to those I love was sexualized. Hand holding between any two people is beautiful when used as a romantic gesture. But it grieves me, as it should grieve us all, that our culture is so hypersexualized that just about anything we do stands the possibility of being perceived as sexual. This is especially true for women. A simple gesture that in my childhood served as a means of human connection is now treated as sexual, and all its other meanings—like unity, strength, and togetherness—seem to fade away in the eyes of the world.

Not wanting my friends or those around us to misinterpret a gesture of friendship as something more, I stopped holding their hands. I more or less stopped connecting with my friends through touch altogether after childhood because I didn’t want to “give the wrong idea.” When we lose social permission to hold hands as an expression of sisterhood, all women lose something. As a disabled woman, I have felt this loss uniquely and profoundly. I was born with cerebral palsy, and I spend most of my time in a power wheelchair. I view my wheelchair as a tool of freedom, as natural to me as a leg or an arm. I do not resent my wheelchair or see it as confining. Any metaphors likening my chair to a metal prison will be swiftly rejected. However, it cannot be denied that being seated on an electronic throne of metal, plastic, and overpriced foam affects my relationship with physical touch. I live in a world that does not even know how to look at me, much less touch me.

More here.

Patrick Hennessey in The Telegraph:

You wouldn’t think that Rudyard Kipling would be particularly esteemed in modern India. Now notorious, rather than celebrated, as the “Bard of Empire,” you might imagine that, if Kipling were remembered in India at all, it would be with understandable awkwardness at best and, at worst, disdain. Memories are long in the Punjab, and few have forgiven Kipling for his public support of General Dyer, the Butcher of Amritsar. Yet as I followed in the young writer’s footsteps through modern Pakistan and India to make the documentary Kipling’s Indian Adventure, from Lahore across the hot Punjabi plain and up into the fresh foothills of the Himalayas to the Raj’s summer capital of Shimla, I discovered not only that Kipling was well known, but that many of his works are well regarded and even taught in schools — more so, I dare say, than in Britain. And no matter where I went or to whom I spoke, one particular set of stories was loved above all others: the Jungle Books. Of course, their modern reach owes a lot to the 1967 Disney animation, the very last production overseen by Walt Disney himself. On the Mall in Shimla, in the shadow of the arch-Gothic Gaiety Theatre — surely the symbolic apotheosis of the Raj — I discussed Kipling’s legacy in India with a group of young students. As soon as the Jungle Books were mentioned, someone started humming The Bare Necessities.

It was probably for the best that Kipling did not live to see the liberties Disney took with his work. But despite straying far from the original texts, the film gleefully and stubbornly kept one of Kipling’s finest creations in the hearts of successive generations — for that alone it should be applauded. No matter what one thinks of Kipling’s politics, The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) represent one of the great pieces of imaginative writing in English, allegorical tales as timeless as Aesop’s fables and flights of masterfully realized fancy on a par with Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908).

More here.