Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Milan Kundera, the Czech author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, will publish his first novel in 13 years this summer.

Faber will release Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance, translated from the original French by Linda Asher, on 18 June. The short work was first published in Italy in 2013, and has since topped charts in Italy, Spain and France.

“No, dear cynics, the novel is not dead,” ran a review in L’Express last year. “We have in France one of the greatest contemporary writers. He is called Milan Kundera, and you must read his new book as soon as possible – it could be his last, and it is magnificent, sunny, profound and funny.”

This publication will be the work’s first release in English. Kundera’s previous novel, Ignorance, was published in English in 2002 and in French in 2000.

Faber described the new book as a “wryly comic yet deeply serious glance at the ultimate insignificance of life and politics, told through the daily lives of four friends in modern-day Paris”. Said chief executive Stephen Page: “It feels incredibly relevant to the world we live in now. It’s very funny, and also quite surreal … It’s hard with an author of Kundera’s stature to talk about his best work, but this is a significant novel, an important work.”

More here.

David Sloane Wilson in This View of Life:

Major controversies in science have a way of appearing obvious in retrospect. We find it hard to understand why smart people took so long to agree that the earth revolves around the sun, that glaciers once covered the northern latitudes, that the continents drift, and that species are derived from other species.

So it is with group selection, a theory that was declared dead in the 1960’s, only to come to life as an essential tool for understanding animal and human societies. Group selection theory employs the following assumptions.

1) Natural selection is based on relative fitness.

2) Selection among individuals within groups tends to favor traits that are called selfish in human terms; that is, traits that benefit individuals at the expense of other members of the group and the group as a whole.

3) The evolution of group-advantageous traits typically requires a process of selection among groups in a multi-group population.

4) Groups are defined as the individuals who influence each other’s fitness with respect to the evolving trait.

Or, as Edward O. Wilson and I put it in a 2007 article[i], “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

More here.

Richard King in The Australian:

According to this popular view, Zizek’s philosophy is a Trojan horse, a gaudy offering to which the threat of violence is, as he might say himself, ‘‘immanent’’.

Conceived in this way, the Zizek experience is like a scene from a Batman movie, incidentally one of his favourite film franchises. First, we have the crowd-pleasing spectacle, a Cirque du Zizek of highwire philosophy and ideological contortionism — of political theory, psychoanalysis, dirty jokes and Hollywood schlock.

But the scene soon turns to one of horror. Spilling out of a little red car, a bunch of goons made up to look like Hegel, Marx and Jacques Lacan run in all directions at once and spray the audience with noxious gas. At which point the real Zizek steps forward — the apologist for totalitarianism and admirer of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, whose celebration of revolutionary mayhem — ‘‘Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent’’ — echoes around the big top.

My only problem with this characterisation is that, in one sense at least, it has Zizek backwards.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Snow is a substance that seems to have no immediate purpose. Is it a symptom or a cause? Is it living or dead? Is it an element? A force? Winter, in the Northeast of America at least, is the season of absence. It is the Great Undoing. Poets who live with four seasons often like to use winter as a metaphor for death, as in Longfellow’s “Snow-flakes.”

But for anyone who has watched the tree outside the window being stripped of its clothes, watched the garden that took so many months to grow waste away for lack of sun, watched the wasps suddenly, one morning, leave, winter is no metaphor — everything smelling of life shrivels until the last green thing is dead, icicles shoot up from the ground, changing the meadow to crust.

We accept the winter only because we have accepted the idea that death has a purpose: to make way for new life on Earth. We’ve been told from the beginning that life requires death, feeds upon it, needs our names for its young. This is the thought that makes winter bearable. We will spend months in abeyance, living in a void, standing by powerless at the retreat of our green soldiers as the army of cold advances, simply for the promise of a hint of a message that, one day, our soldiers will return. “So we wait,” wrote Rita Dove, “breeding / mood, making music / of decline. We sit down / in the smell of the past … We ache in secret, / memorizing / a gloomy line / or two of German.”

more here.

Seamus Perry at Literary Review:

Biographers of T S Eliot face a number of challenges, not least the marked disinclination of their subject to having his biography written at all. When, in the early 1960s, a scholar wrote an account relating the poetry to his early life, Eliot went through the typescript striking out unwarranted speculations. 'This is just silly', he wrote in the margin at one point, responding to the perfectly mild suggestion that an interest in Arthurian myth might have been partly prompted by the paintings in Boston Public Library. His manner with admirers' enquiries was celebrated for its unforthcoming deadpan: he was a master of disavowal and deflection. The comparison with Joyce, always happy to expand upon the ambitions and strategies of his genius for the edification of generations to come, is very striking. 'Possum', Ezra Pound's nickname for Eliot, referred to an animal that played dead to deflect predators. One manifestation of the Possum spirit was Eliot's destruction of much of his correspondence, so as to spoil the chances of his hunters.

He was an intensely private man and his greatest works revolve with a sometimes appalled fascination around the impenetrable secrecy that shrouds the innermost self, both others' and one's own. But his opposition to biographical speculation was down to more than the desire not to have his privacy violated. Eliot repeatedly expressed scepticism towards the view that knowing about a life brought anything important to an understanding of the poetry that emerged from it.

more here.

Eamon Duffy at the New York Review of Books:

Perhaps most momentously, Francis has pointed the church away from culture wars with secular society that were such a feature of Benedict’s papacy, toward a less confrontational approach to the social circumstances in which the faithful have to live, and a more fruitful reengagement with the church’s mission to the poor and underprivileged, in whom he sees both the natural and the most receptive hearers of the Gospel. Where Benedict was inclined to blame the increasing marginalization of Christianity in Western society on a collective apostasy rooted in the shallow materialism of secular modern society, Francis is inclined to attribute the corresponding decline in Latin America to the church’s own shortcomings:

Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs…perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age.

There was a sense in Benedict’s pontificate that the best response to the crisis of secularization might be a strong repudiation of secular culture and consolidation within a smaller, purer, and more assertive church. By contrast, Francis believes that the church

is called to come out of herself and to go to the peripheries, not only geographically, but also the existential peripheries: the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all misery.

More here.

As If It Were “This Is Our Music”
— “mu” one hundred eighteenth part —

Read more »

Aaron E. Carroll and Austin Frakt in The New York Times:

As we wrote last week, many fewer people benefit from medical therapies than we tend to think. This fact is quantified in a therapy’s Number Needed to Treat, or N.N.T., which tells you the number of people who would need to receive a medical therapy in order for one person to benefit. N.N.T.s well above 10 or even 100 are common. But knowing the potential for benefit is not enough. We must also consider potential harms. Not every person who takes a medication will suffer a side effect, just as not every person will see a benefit. This fact can be expressed by Number Needed to Harm (N.N.H.), which is the flip side of N.N.T.

For instance, the N.N.T. for aspirin to prevent one additional heart attack over two years is 2,000. Even though this means that you have less than a 0.1 percent chance of seeing a benefit, you might think it’s worth it. After all, it’s just an aspirin. What harm could it do? Aspirin’s N.N.H. for such major bleeding events is 3,333. For every 3,333 people, just over two on average will have a major bleeding event, whether they take aspirin or not. About 3,330 will have no bleed regardless of what they do. But for every 3,333 people who take aspirin for two years, one additional person will have a major bleeding event. That’s an expression of the risk of aspirin, complementing the fact that one out of 2,000 will avoid a heart attack.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Over Maryland. January, 2015.

Digital photo.

Brian Wang in Next Big Future:

Russian Prof Parkhomov claims to have replicated Rossi E-Cat and Parkhomov and published fully open research. Others are racing to replicate and extend the work.

Prof Alexander Parkhomov of Lomonosov Moscow State University has published a paper describing his successful replication of the E-Cat, based on the available information about it. The paper is in Russian; there is a link and commentary and video in English on E-Cat World. Parkhomov's results are more modest, but the energy output of his cloned E-Cat claimed to be up to 2.74 times as great as the input.

E-catworld has seen the work of Martin Fleischmann Memorial Project, Brian Ahern, and Jack Cole as examples of efforts now attempting to build on the work of Parkhomov (in different ways) — and he is aware of another serious attempt in the planning stages. He is sure there are more efforts underway, probably behind closed doors, at least for now

If results can be shown to be consistently repeated, and the levels of energy gain are shown to be beyond the realm of chemical reactions, then 2015 could be the year where we finally see LENR (low energy nuclear reactor) breaking out in the world, even if we don’t get anything more revealed from Rossi and Industrial Heat.

More here. [Thanks to Huw Price.]

Jackson Lears in The Nation:

The word “democracy” has been bruised and beaten during the last few centuries. It has been pressed into the service of dictators and demagogues, of dewy-eyed imperialists and utopian prophets of consumer sovereignty. It has been routinely used to endow power grabs with an aura of righteousness and to recast the pursuit of particular economic interests as a defense of universal principles. After all the ill use, there are gray moments when democracy seems to be more of a phantom than a foundation.

David Runciman is not discouraged. In The Confidence Trap, he returns to the project pioneered by Alexis de Tocqueville: to take democracy seriously as a description of actual societies rather than a mere slogan. Apart from a few such outliers as India and Japan, the societies in question are nearly all in Western Europe and North America, with the United States getting the most attention and standing in, much of the time, for democracy in general.

In Runciman’s view, democratic societies seem to lurch from one crisis to another, without ever thoroughly addressing the problems that caused them, but also without ever (well, hardly ever) collapsing altogether. The explanation for this pattern, he decides, depends on Tocqueville’s insight that faith is “the lynchpin of American democracy”—faith in the survival and ultimate triumph of democracy, everywhere.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

About a decade ago, Vincent Lynch emailed Frank Grutzner to ask for a tissue sample from a pregnant platypus. He got a polite brush-off instead.

Then, around eight years later, Grutzner got back in touch. His team had collected tissues from a platypus that had been killed by someone’s dog. They had some uterus. Did Lynch still want some?

“Hell yes!”

The platypus was the final critical part of a project that Lynch, now at the University of Chicago, had longed to do since he was a graduate student. He wanted to study the evolution of pregnancy in mammals, and specifically the genetic changes that transformed egg-laying creatures (like platypuses) into those that give birth to live young (like us).

The platypus enjoys a short pregnancy. Its embryo sits in the uterus for just 2-3 weeks, surrounded by a thin eggshell, and nourished by a primitive placenta. It then emerges as an egg. Marsupials, like kangaroos and koalas, also have short pregnancies. But mothers give birth to live young, which live in a pouch until they’re big enough. Other mammals—the placentals, or eutherians—keep their babies in the uterus for as long as possible, nourishing them through a complex placenta. Their pregnancies can be marathons—up to two years in an elephant.

The move from egg-laying to live-bearing was huge. Mammals had to go from holding a shell-covered embryo for weeks to nourishing one for months. To understand how they made the leap, Lynch compared 13 different animals, including egg-layers like the platypus, marsupials like the short-tailed opossum, and eutherians like the dog, cow, and armadillo.

More here.

Jack J. Woehr in Well.com:

At the peak of European power and culture, in the Third Republic era of French literary and artistic supremacy within Europe, Émile Zola (1840-1902) was the most popular and widely-read French novelist among French speakers. (Victor Hugo, his elder contemporary, is to this day probably more widely read in translation.) Zola wrote with a journalistic eye, filling notebooks with facts gathered by personal observation and by correspondence with his network of experts preparatory to his work of authorship. He would then write a sketch of the projected work, and finally, write daily and methodically, sometimes for years, to produce his “experimental” and “realistic” novels. Zola's novels deserve more attention today by English speakers, especially Americans, than in fact they receive: hence, this web page. Zola's most prominent work is the twenty-novel cycle (yes, 20!) Les Rougon-Macquart subtitled “Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire”, that is, “The social and natural (e.g, anthropological, genetic) history of a family under the Second Empire”. This series is not well known in the English-speaking world, though individual novels of the cycle have achieved popularity in translation, notably Germinal (1885) and L'argent (Money) (1891). The most popular in French are Germinal and L'assomoir (The Dram Shop). Many of the Rougon-Macquart novels have been made into movies in France and have circulated with subtitles in the English nations.

Each book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle is woven from four thematic threads:

1. First, each novel has an intricate plot, generally an engaging story about people caught up in the struggles of life and love and tragedies of life.
2. Secondly, there is always woven into the story a social concern. Zola points out some political or social injustice or abuse. The most notable example of this thread in the Rougon-Macquart series is Germinal (1885) which deals with the working and social conditions of coal miners in northern France under the Second Empire.
3. Thirdly was Zola's systematic indictment of the Second Empire (1851-1870), the semi-despotic, semi-parliamentary kleptocracy of Louis Bonaparte (Emperor Napoléon III) established by the coup d'etat of December, 1851. Zola had already projected ten novels of the series, and was in the course of finishing the first for publication when the Second Empire suddenly collapsed in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the Emperor himself being personally captured near the front lines at Sedan.
4. Finally, there is Zola's fascination with science, notably genetics, in exposition of which he follows two branches of a family stemming from a common ancestress wherein certain salient characteristics, particularly pathological psychological bents, repeat in individual members generation after generation. The Rougons are prosperous but given to immense appetites for money and/or power. The Macquarts are more human but full of failings, notably an inheritance of alcoholism. Any member of either family, as a descendant of the common ancestress Adelaïde Fouque, may be subject to “excessive nervosity”, i.e., congenital mental illness and breakdown at any time in life.

Though the novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle all share common features, each nonetheless posesses one or more aspects which make the individual novel unique in the cycle.

More here.

Still Light

You picture your mother as a tree
– somehow that makes it easier.
A silver birch, undressing
unhurriedly, as though days were years,
while a fine rain plays
like jazz in her hair. She drops
her fine, white leaves
one by one. Her branches
are almost bare now. See,
how beautiful she is against the darkening sky.

by Shazea Quraishi
from I Am Twenty People
publisher: Enitharmon, London, 2007
.

Nosheen Iqbal in The Guardian:

“My culture – our culture – is rich in spirituality and love,” she says, in a densely poetic Urdu. “Sufism is not a switch, the music isn't a show – it's all of life, it is religion. If I want to be recognised for anything, if we should be recognised for anything, it's the journey of the voice. And that voice is God's.”

Smoothing herself elegantly on to the sofa of a hotel suite in Manchester, Parveen gives a beatific smile. It would be eerie if it wasn't so soothing; anyone who has watched her on stage knows that this magnificent projection of calm often ends up a wild, sweaty, ecstatic mess. She has admitted to hallucinating while deep in performance and she regularly sends her audiences in Pakistan and India into swaying raptures, swooning and fainting being quite standard reactions. Her first US tour was in 1993 and she has since travelled across the world to perform at sold-out venues.

Björk counts Parveen as one of her greatest musical influences; composer John Tavener – who she performed with last Sunday night at Manchester international festival – said he had a gut-wobbling, primordial experience watching her in rehearsals for their one-off show together.

More here.