Jonathan Clarke at The Millions:

In 1943, Dwight MacDonald, one of the co-founders of the literary journal Partisan Review, lost an internal power struggle over its editorial direction and left to found a new magazine, Politics, that better suited his vision. The reasons for MacDonald’s split with the other PR founders, Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, are complex and have been examined at length elsewhere, but in principle they involved both a difference of opinion regarding the participation of the United States in the war against Germany and Japan (which MacDonald opposed) and the question of whetherPartisan Review would be principally a journal of leftist politics (as MacDonald wished) or one equally committed to independent-minded literary and cultural criticism. After MacDonald’s departure, Partisan Review did not abandon politics, but it remained known as a journal open to distinguished work even from those who differed from the editors ideologically. Before finally closing in 2003, PR would go on to publish criticism — by fellow travelers (Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin) and ideological enemies (Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren) alike — that set a standard that other journals of opinion still strive to match.

Ancient squabbles at a now-defunct literary magazine, involving a good deal of now dated Marxist cant, are not inherently very interesting. But the Partisan Review, both in its high editorial standards and in its struggles to resolve inherent tensions between the domains of politics and art, continues to be a point of reference in our literary culture. The founders of n + 1 have cited PR as an example, even as they have produced a journal with a hipper, more contemporary voice; several of the core PR critics, including Lionel Trilling, remain culture heroes; and New York Times critic A.O. Scott maintains what amounts almost to an obsession with PR, citing its writers in his work, contributing an admiring introduction to a collection of essays by another PR stalwart, Mary McCarthy, and undertaking a book project surveying the American novel since World War II that seems consciously to invoke Kazin’s landmark study of the preceding period, On Native Grounds.

more here.

Spencer Lenfield in Harvard Magazine:

The subtitle of former Harvard president Neil L. Rudenstine’s new book, Ideas of Order, announces that it is “A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” But it is not really a “close reading” in the usual sense—and that is the heart of its strengths. Rudenstine instead interprets the sonnets as a sequence, paying special attention to how the poet develops his increasingly pessimistic concerns about the honesty and durability of romantic love in these 154 lyric poems.

“Close reading” was the favored term of the New Critics in the 1930s to describe and denote the method of interpretation they advocated to replace the philological criticism and belletrism then dominating the study of literature. They wanted to study poetry not just as an instance of language, but as art. However, they insisted that literary study should be more like a science than like mere book-reviewing, with a rigorous consideration of a poem as a self-enclosed object possessing its own internal coherence. At its best, close reading is the literary equivalent of microscope work in a biology lab: scrutinizing every element of a poem, no matter how minute, and its impact on the poem’s range of meaning. The technique, which has long outlasted the doctrine that gave it rise, has forcefully shaped the way poetry is taught in the English-speaking world in both high schools and colleges. Entire class sessions are often spent on a handful of short lyric poems. It is somewhat unusual to find a syllabus assigning an entire volume of poetry by a single poet that is taught as a continuous whole rather than as a set of discrete texts.

More here.

Natalie Angiers in The New York Times:

The 10 hibernating little brown bats hang from a corner of their tailor-made refrigeration chamber at Bucknell University like a clump of old potato skins, only less animated. In torpor, bats become one with their wintry surroundings, their body temperatures falling to just above freezing, their heart rates slowing to one or two beats a minute, their breathing virtually undetectable. But suddenly, a male yanks himself free of the bunch and hops down to a dish on the floor. After taking a long, slow drink of water, the bat uses the claws on his folded wings to hoist himself along the wire mesh of the chamber, his motions angular, deliberative and spidery. A second bat rappels down for a drink, and then a third. “Well, that’s a lucky break,” said Thomas Lilley, a tall and crisply composed postdoctoral fellow from Finland. “Multiple rounds of bat drama.”

As Bucknell’s de facto bat concierge, Dr. Lilley helps wild bats acclimate to life in captivity, a difficult task with an urgent spur. He and his colleagues are laboring mightily to understand white-nose syndrome, a devastating fungal disease that has killed at least six million North American bats since it first appeared in Albany a decade ago and that threatens to annihilate some bat species entirely. Because the fungus attacks bats as they hibernate in caves, the researchers are exploring the complex biology of normal bat hibernation, and so-called arousal bouts turn out to be a big part of the puzzle, said Kenneth Field, an associate professor of biology. Hibernating bats will warm themselves out of torpor every week or two throughout the winter, for several hours at a stretch. Though researchers don’t yet understand the reasons for the thermal interludes, they have quantified just how important such thaws must be to bat survival.

More here.

Late Summer Fires

The paddocks shave black
with a foam of smoke that stays,
welling out of red-black wounds.

In the white of a drought
this happens. The hardcourt game.
Logs that fume are mostly cattle,

inverted, stubby. Tree stumps are kilns.
Walloped, wiped, hand-pumped,
even this day rolls over, slowly.

At dusk, a family drives sheep
out through the yellow
of the Aboriginal flag.

by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996

Annie Lapin. Feel, 2009.

More here, here, and here.

by Aditya Dev Sood

In just a few days Startup Tunnel (STun) will begin. Twenty-one young founders building nine startups over thirteen weeks. I'm in charge of this experimental incubator, which is backed not by Microsoft or Google, not by Valley money, nor even the Times of India, but by a motley network of entrepreneurs, technologists, professionals and consultants, who've come together and agreed to try and mentor these new companies. It's a lot like a snake eating it's own tail. There's every reason to be sceptical, every reason to worry, not least for all the talk of another tech bubble brimming, of which we ourselves might be the latest worrying sign.

The nine companies we are supporting do things like deliver services to your doorstep, allow freelancers to connect, improve sourcing and hiring for companies, integrate your social media feeds and allow health professionals to share information. It's a motley mix of different ends of the online economy, almost always addressing the professional and personal needs of urban elites — the global and connected middle class — of which there is now a critical mass not only in India, but also Indonesia, the Philippines, South-East Asia and other parts of the world, all now addressable from India.

I feel compelled to explain why I think incubators and accelerators like STun are a good thing. So much is written about the culture of Silicon Valley and how new wealth is creating new disparities there. Uber is the new ethically-challenged face of startups, not only in India, but everywhere else in the world. And the magnates of Sand Hill Road were among the first to slam Picketty's book, Capital in the 21st Century, for failing to understand how capitalism really works. I'm sympathetic to both sides, and often struggle to articulate my sense that these worldviews can be reconciled, that they're both right in different ways. I for one find Picketty's statistically-supported argument, that we are indeed living in a more unequal society, quite compelling. But I also sense, in a way that I can't yet defend, that the way for us to get to a more equal society is to find ways to funnel capital more effectively towards the kind of social and technical innovation that might envision and create newer better ways with which to navigate our everyday lives.

Read more »

Lani Guinier in Salon:

“Manly, Christian character.” That was the ideal that Endicott Peabody, a member of the New England Brahmin class, hoped to cultivate in the boys who attended his private boarding school, Groton. Peabody founded Groton in 1884 with the purpose of building character and embedding the value of “noblesse oblige” into the social fabric of late-nineteenth-century America. Groton students, like young men from seven other boarding schools in the northeastern United States, were to embody character, manliness, and athleticism. The “Big Three” colleges—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—validated these ideals by admitting nearly all boarding-school applicants and conferring honorary degrees upon Peabody.

Admission into the “Big Three” was fairly easy if the applicant possessed a “manly, Christian character.” He had to pass subject-based entrance exams devised by the colleges, but the tests weren’t particularly hard, and he could take them over and over again to pass. Even if a student didn’t pass the required exams, he could be admitted with “conditions.” Once enrolled at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, he would focus primarily on his social life, clubs, sports, social organizations, and campus activities, while often ignoring his academic work.

Admissions began to change, however, when Charles William Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869. Annoyed with “the stupid sons of the rich,” Eliot sought to draw into the university’s fold capable students from all segments of society. To ensure that smart students could attend Harvard regardless of their means, Eliot, in 1898, abolished the archaic Greek admission exams that were popular up until that time. He also replaced Harvard’s admissions exams with exams created by the College Entrance Examination Board because it tripled the number of locations where applicants could be tested. The result of Eliot’s changes was the admission of more public school students, including Catholics and Jews.

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

The British chemist Lesley Orgel had a rule: Evolution is cleverer than you.Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have repeatedly proven him right.

Since humans started making antibiotics for ourselves in the 1940s, bacteria have evolved to counteract our efforts. They are now winning. There are strains of old foes that withstand everything we can throw at them. Meanwhile, our arsenal has dried up. Before 1962, scientists developed more than 20 new classes of antibiotics. Since then, they have made two.

More, hopefully, are coming. A team of scientists led by Kim Lewis from Northeastern University have identified a new antibiotic called teixobactin, which kills some kinds of bacteria by preventing them from building their outer coats. They used it to successfully treat antibiotic-resistant infections in mice. And more importantly, when they tried to deliberately evolve strains of bacteria that resist the drug, they failed. Teixobactin appears resistant to resistance.

Bacteria will eventually develop ways of beating teixobactin—remember Orgel—but the team are optimistic that it will take decades rather than years for this to happen. That buys us time.

Teixobactin isn’t even the most promising part of its own story. That honour falls on the iChip—the tool that the team used to discover the compound. Teixobactin is a fish; the iChip is the rod. Having the rod guarantees that we’ll get more fish—and we desperately need more.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show “solidarity” with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. “The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack,”announced Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous satire.”

More here.

Jenni Marsh in South China Morning Post Magazine:

“My husband is the best Chinese chef in Zambia,” says Liu Xiuyi, a former takeaway employee from Chongqing. “Whenever the president has Chinese guests in Lusaka, my husband is hired to cook for them.”

Twenty years ago, with no savings or formal education, the couple emigrated to Zambia when Liu's husband was hired as a chef by a Chinese state-owned construction company contracted to build roads in dusty Lusaka.

Now in their 50s, the Lius have just built a 15 million kwacha (HK$18.3 million) three-star hotel and restaurant, called the Golden Chopsticks, in the former British colonial outpost of Livingstone. They also own property in the Zambian capital; employ about 100 staff, local and Chinese; and rub shoulders with presidents and diplomats.

The Lius are among the estimated 20,000 to 100,000 Chinese living in the copper-rich southern African nation – weak census practices mean precise figures are elusive – and were among the first wave of daring migrants who sought their fortune here.

Although mining and construction brought the Chinese to Zambia, their presence is now having a significant effect on another industry: tourism.

Zambia, one of Sub-Saharan Africa's most politically stable states, is an underdeveloped tourism market, home to wild elephants, lush safari parks and the world's biggest series of waterfalls – the Mosi-oa-Tunya, or “the smoke that thunders”, which was found by Scottish explorer David Livingstone in 1855 and renamed after Britain's Queen Victoria.

In 2013, China became the world's largest outbound tourist market, with an increasing number of the estimated 100 million Chinese who left the mainland for leisure travel turning their attention away from Europe towards Africa; Chinese tourist arrivals to the continent grew by 56 per cent from 2011 to 2012.

Read the full story here.

Nina Martyris in Lapham's Quarterly:

The watch never left his side. It was the first thing Gandhi reached for when he rose each morning at 4 a.m., and the last thing he checked before going to bed, often past midnight. He consulted it frequently through the day so as never to be late for an appointment. And, at that final moment, when three bullets from an assassin’s Beretta knocked him over, his 78-year-old body slumped to the ground, and the watch also stopped. Mahatma Gandhi’s Ingersoll pocket watch, costing just a dollar, was among the handful of material possessions he owned. Since he didn’t have a pocket to carry it in, he attached the watch to his dhoti with a safety pin and a loop of khadi string. The Ingersoll is displayed in a glass case at the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi alongside his bloodstained dhoti and shawl. Together, the three items form a striking metaphor of Kala, the Hindu god of time who is also the god of death.

Gandhi’s legendary punctuality had a utilitarian imperative—without it he would never have been able to answer the sacks of letters and streams of visitors that demanded his attention each day. But, as with everything he valued, it had a moral imperative as well. Simply put, time was tied to his philosophy of trusteeship: the belief that just as we do not own our wealth but are trustees of it—and thus have to use it wisely—similarly, we are trustees of our time. “You may not waste a grain of rice or a scrap of paper, and similarly a minute of your time,” he wrote. “It is not ours. It belongs to the nation and we are trustees for the use of it.” Consequently, any abuse of time was unethical. “One who does less than he can is a thief,” he wrote to a friend. “If we keep a timetable we can save ourselves from the last-mentioned sin indulged in even unconsciously.” While this focus on punctuality may portray Gandhi as skittish and anxious, the opposite was true: a timetable allowed him to give the issue at hand his tranquil and undivided attention.

More here.

Martin Chilton in The Telegraph:

In 2011 Penguin launched 50 Modern Mini Classics. Here is our guide to the books.

HELL SCREEN (1918) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Performance

I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was blusters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.
.

by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996

Jeff Gordinier at The New York Times:

Like his friend and fellow Scotsman Don Paterson, Robertson hasn’t yet crossed over into the realm of mainstream adoration that Ireland’s Seamus Heaney enjoyed among American readers, but that’s probably only a matter of time. He is not hip, and I mean that as a compliment. His work is accessible without being dopey, traditional without making him look like a fogy, and utterly free of fashionable snark. And somehow, the visceral language of a Robin Robertson poem has a way of feeling simultaneously luxurious and spartan. To put it bluntly, he writes lines that you want to read again and again: “He wore fish-gutter’s gloves to pick brambles,” and “the forest is triggered and tripwired,” and “a dab of blood on her cheek / from a rabbit or a deer.” In fact, he has such a deft hand that when his poetry takes a turn for the gory, as in “The Halving,” where he conveys the act and the aftermath of a median sternotomy, or “The Flaying of Marsyas,” his retelling of a scene of torture from Ovid, the gruesomeness can be hard to bear.

In “The Long Home” Robertson captures the atmosphere of a sleepy, crepuscular Aberdeen bar with such cinematic attention to detail that you half expect to see a boom mike hovering a few inches above the scene:

The firewood’s sap

buzzing like a trapped fly,

the granular crackle of a Green Final

folded and unfolded,

the sound of the coals

unwrapping themselves like sweets.

He only looked up when the barman

poured a bucketful of ice

into the sink, like a tremendous

burst of applause.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

In a 1998 piece in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnick described Houellebecq's literary intentions this way: “There are certain books — sardonic and acutely pessimistic — that systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous.”

The idea, in other words, is to make a mockery of our hypocrisies, to show us not as flawed but fatally self-deluded, the creators of a useless culture built on corrupt pieties.

“What I think, fundamentally,” he told the Paris Review in 2010, “is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes…. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values.”

In “Submission,” these disasters have to do with the conflict between religious and secular values. “More and more people,” he told the Telegraph this week, before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, “can’t stand living without God.”

more here.

Samuel Moyn in Dissent:

A powerful wave of historians insist, however, that federalism was no flash in the pan. They contend that the nation-state was not inevitable, especially when it was time for France to decolonize in Africa. These historians have presented tremendous evidence of what some call a “federal moment”—one which, thanks to the distended process of decolonization, lasted surprisingly long into postwar history. Frederick Cooper is the leader of the group, but several other historians like Todd Shepard and Gary Wilder have buttressed his findings. The implications of their way of thinking are profound. After millennia of imperial arrangements that incorporated different peoples into the same polity, Cooper and others say, there is no reason to regard the nation-state of our time as much more than a historical accident and political mistake—one that perhaps ought to be undone.

In an era of revulsion towards nation-states, and especially nation-states in postcolonial circumstances, we can appreciate why the story of federalism might be worth recalling. Is there anything else besides the nation that otherwise implacable enemies—liberals, Marxists, and postcolonialists—can more easily agree about, if only to agree in what they hate? The nation-state has always been exclusionary and has often been violent, offending the cosmopolitanism of liberals and the desire of Marxists for solidarity beyond borders. The nation-state has also been a severe disappointment to postcolonialists, who believe that new nations succeeded mainly in creating new elites and perpetuating the suffering of their populations at large.

However, for the history of federalism to be more than trivia, it has to be shown that it was actually possibile and that it might have yielded better results than the nation-state. Neo-federalist historians rarely take it upon themselves to solve what ought to be the central puzzle: why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling?

Read the rest here.