Stephen Smith in Esquire:

“Who’s behind me?” hisses Martin Scorsese with a voice like bologna hitting a hot skillet. “I’m Sicilian. We don’t sit with our backs to the door. We never sit with our backs to the door. Who’s behind me? Who’s got my back?”

This is the way you dreamed it would go down, of course. The sit-down: the milk-fed veal, the carmine carafes, the rubber of post-prandial card games abruptly abandoned. The diminutive figure of the maestro bristles across the table from you. As he reacts to the sound of voices from the darkened doorway, a tremor of unease transmits itself through Scorsese’s people, his crew.

The director himself reaches for his piece. You watch in astonishment as the garlanded Hollywood insider fingers the barrel of his… inhaler.

It’s nighttime in New York City, and Scorsese has called a meeting at a favorite low-key joint a block or two from his home. But instead of the spaghetti house straight out of the old country, this is a chintzy suite in a boutique hotel, with its surprising lacunae: the pelmets concealing foxed wainscoting, the MDF boxing and panelling that shuts away eyesore cables.

The filmmaker, 72, is briefly between pictures, the gab and hustle for his most recent outing The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is behind him, and he is generously putting aside some time after standing me up on a previous date.

More here.

June Thomas in Slate:

The holiday season may be a TV wasteland here in the United States, but in Britain it’s always a veritable fiesta of Christmas specials and Boxing Day bonus episodes. This year, though, the Brits have outdone themselves: A Downton Abbey comedy sketch created for a charity fundraising campaign is better than anything we’ll see on U.S. television until 2015 rolls around—and George Clooney, who makes a cameo, is the least interesting part of the skit.

It’s lovely to see the familiar Downton characters once again, but it’s especially fun to learn that everyone is aware of the show’s tendency toward repetition. In the first part of the sketch, a declaration of family happiness is followed—as it always seems to be on the show—by bad news. A telegram arrives with word that Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) has managed to lose the family fortune. “Not again!” says his wife, Cora—and everyone who has ever watched Downton Abbey. The sketch then morphs into a version of It’s a Wonderful Life, with Joanna Lumley (Patsy Stone on Absolutely Fabulous) as an angel, showing Lord G. how terrible life would’ve been if he had never been born. (If you’re wondering why Jeremy Piven shows up as retail pioneer Harry Selfridge, it’s because, like Downton, Mr. Selfridge airs on ITV in Britain.

More here.

From DelancyPlace:

Seven-year-old Truman Capote, abandoned by his divorced parents, is taken in by depression-poor cousins in the rural South. One of these cousins, a distant, elderly cousin, becomes his closest friend and only refuge — but she is only in his life for two more short years. As Christmas approaches, they make fruitcakes as presents for people they barely know: Imagine a morning in late November. A coming-of-winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar. “A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable — not unlike Lin­coln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. 'Oh my,' she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, 'it's fruitcake weather!' “The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very dis­tant ones, and we have lived together — well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, rela­tives; and though they have power over us, and fre­quently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was for­merly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child. …

“The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweet­ens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke. In four days our work is done. Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask on window sills and shelves. “Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed, the larger share are intended for persons we've met maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt.

More here.

Sandip Roy at NPR:

The British are long gone from Calcutta, but they left behind the fruitcake. The West jokes about indestructible fruitcake as the gift that keeps on giving, but Calcutta — the old British capital — embraces it. Around Christmas, bakeries set up counters just to sell these treats, which also are known as plum cakes.

Flurys, a legendary European-style tearoom, stays open all night on Christmas Eve, says manager Rajeev Khanna. He says the big draws are the old favorites: “It's the plum cake which has been marinated just last week of November. Dundee. Rum and raisin. Mince pie.”

In Goa, the former Portuguese colony, where the Saldanhas are from, Christmas still has a strong Catholic feel to it. But here in Calcutta, a far more mixed city, Christmas is simply called Boro Din, or Big Day. And it's universal.

Cake knows no religion. At Nahoum and Sons, the city's only Jewish bakery, a lady who gave her name only as Mrs. Maxwell waits in a long line as her grandson plays with a toy pistol. She says that despite all the fancy new patisseries in malls, she comes here every year. “Nothing to beat Nahoum,” she says. “You buy the same plum cake from somewhere else at a much higher price, you immediately find the difference.”

At Sheik Nuruddin's storefront bakery, there's a photograph of Mecca on the wall. But in December, you can rent his oven and his bakers for your own Christmas cake. The wood-fired oven turns out seven cakes an hour, from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m., says Nuruddin.

Read the rest here.

Ken Kalfus in n + 1:

A half-century after the conclusion of the Apollo mission, we have entered a new age of space fantasy—one with Mars as its ruling hallucination. Once again stirring goals have been set, determined timetables have been laid down, and artist’s renderings of futuristic spacecraft have been issued. The latest NASA Authorization Act projects Mars as the destination for its human spaceflight program. Last month’s successful test flight of the Orion space vehicle was called by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden “another extraordinary milestone toward a human journey to Mars.” The space agency’s officials regularly justify the development of new rockets, like the Space Launch System, as crucial to an eventual Mars mission.

But human beings won’t be going to Mars anytime soon, if ever. In June, a congressionally commissioned report by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, punctured any hope that with its current and anticipated level of funding NASA will get human beings anywhere within the vicinity of the red planet. To continue on a course for Mars without a sustained increase in the budget, the report said, “is to invite failure, disillusionment, and the loss of the longstanding international perception that human spaceflight is something the United States does best.”

The new report warns against making dates with Mars we cannot keep. It endorses a human mission to the red planet, but only mildly and without setting a firm timetable. Its “pathways” approach comprises intermediate missions, such as a return to the moon or a visit to an asteroid. No intermediate mission would be embarked upon without a budgetary commitment to complete it; each step would lead to the next. Each could conclude the human exploration of space if future Congresses and presidential administrations decide the technical and budgetary challenges for a flight to Mars are too steep.

The technical and budgetary challenges are very steep. A reader contemplating them may reasonably wonder if it’s worth sending people to Mars at all.

More here.

Old Man Leaves Party

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?
.

by Mark Strand
from Blizzard of One: Poems
Alfred A. Knopf Publishing 1998

Michael McCarthy review Fred Block and Margaret Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique by in Boston Review:

Karl Polanyi is far less well known than the big three of economics: Marx, Keynes, and Hayek. But Polanyi’s ideas are distinct. Like Marx, he viewed capitalist markets as harmful and a source of social catastrophe. But unlike Marx, he thought they were necessary. Like Keynes, he rejected a zero-sum approach to politics, arguing instead that working-class gains could be achieved alongside business gains. Unlike Keynes, he rejected technocratic politics in which well-trained bureaucrats manage an economy. Instead, Polanyi favored a politics of direct democracy that emphasizes the active political contention and mobilization of all the different segments of society. Finally, he stands in starkest contrast to Hayek. Polanyi challenges the choice between free markets and regulated markets as a false one. Not only are efforts to impose free markets destructive, the assumption that markets can, in principle, be free has never been true, nor could it be.

Yet the free market axiom is now widespread, notwithstanding glaring and recurrent market failures. Once the ideological stomping grounds of the Republican and Tory right, it now forms the rhetorical bedrock of policy paradigms across the Western world. And the neoliberal project to realize this political utopia seems to have advanced since the 2008 crash. In The Power of Market Fundamentalism (hereafter TPMF) Fred Block and Margaret Somers revive Polanyi to analyze the free market’s origins and staying power.

Polanyi’s key work, The Great Transformation(1944), demonstrates that markets and states are not separate entities, each with its unique and endogenous dynamics. Instead they are inescapably intertwined and mutually constitutive. Markets, in neoclassical economics, are theoretical abstractions that barely reflect reality. From a Polanyian view, what the price mechanism captures so elegantly is not how the market actually works, but rather the belief that markets can be autonomous and, if left alone, will obey natural laws of supply and demand that generate positive equilibria, a belief that Block and Somers call social naturalism. This approach to economic activity is not unlike the way the biological sciences explain how living organisms know when to heal a wound or the way the laws of physics account for orbiting planets.

Block and Somers’s unique contribution is to argue that these public narratives about the economy are key drivers of regulatory policy. Why, for instance, did free market ideals, revived under Reagan and Clinton, weather the storm of the Great Recession, while policies adopted after World War II—policies rooted in people’s connectedness and the public good—are long lost? Free market narratives have immense cultural power; the popular rhetoric about the economy plays into centuries-old ways of thinking about the economy and indeed into people’s very sense of identity. And this power explains why the free-market policy paradigm is so persistent.

More here.

Pico Iyer in Lapham's Quarterly (Image: Spring Time, from The Lost Paintings Series, by Taner Ceylan, 2013. Oil on canvas, 55 ½ x 82 ¾ inches.):

The foreign has long been my stomping ground, my sanctuary, as one who grew up a foreigner wherever I happened to be. Born to Indian parents in Oxford, England, I was seven when my parents moved to California; by the third grade, I was a foreigner on all three of the continents that might have claimed me—a little Indian boy with an English accent and an American green card. Foreignness became not just my second home, but my theme, my fascination, a way of looking at every place as many locals could not. As some are born with the blessing of beauty or a musical gift, as some can run very fast without seeming to try, so I was given from birth, I felt, the benefit of being on intimate terms with outsiderdom.

It’s fashionable in some circles to talk of Otherness as a burden to be borne, and there will always be some who feel threatened by—and correspondingly hostile to—anyone who looks and sounds different from themselves. But in my experience, foreignness can as often be an asset. The outsider enjoys a kind of diplomatic immunity in many places, and if he seems witless or alien to some, he will seem glamorous and exotic to as many others. In open societies like California, someone with Indian features such as mine is a target of positive discrimination, as strangers ascribe to me yogic powers or Vedic wisdom that couldn’t be further from my background (or my interest).

Besides, the very notion of the foreign has been shifting in our age of constant movement, with more than fifty million refugees; every other Torontonian you meet today is what used to be called a foreigner, and the number of people living in lands they were not born to will surpass 300 million in the next generation. Soon there’ll be more foreigners on earth than there are Americans. Foreignness is a planetary condition, and even when you walk through your hometown—whether that’s New York or London or Sydney—half the people around you are speaking in languages and dealing in traditions different from your own.

Yet for all the global culture and busy crossroads we might share, it’s treacherous to assume these imply common values or assumptions.

More here.

Ari Paul in Souciant (via Doug Henwood):

Brown wasn’t killed by fancy military weaponry but with a simple pistol. Eric Garner, the Staten Island man whose killing by an NYPD officer this year has furthered the anti-police outrage, was choked to death with a man’s bare hands. Protests against police may bring out the heavy artillery, but the incidents that spark the unrest involve police in their civilian ideal.

The real problem is unseen. It’s in the hearts and minds of the rank-and-file. And more troublingly, it’s a reflection of anxieties in American culture.

Kristian Williams, an activist with the Committee Against Political Repression and author of Our Enemies In Blue: Police and Power in America, explained in a phone interview that Americans have tended to focus on aspects of militarization easily seen, but the mentality of the police force began to change dramatically in response to the upheaval of the 1960s. “There was a move toward community policing, a reorganization of police departments away from the model of individual cops, ones and twos on patrol more or less at random around the city, and more toward things like strategic deployment, and organizing police into platoons,” he said. “One of the results of that was that police self-identified as a military apparatus, as sort of a domestic soldier.”

That hasn’t just changed the nature of law enforcement where citizens are regarded as potential enemy combatants, where social inequities are viewed simply as breeding conditions for a new front line, rather than something to be addressed with public services. Unionization, Williams told me, also led to police acknowledging themselves as an independent political organization, a kind of extension of the existing law enforcement system, accountable only to cops and not pesky taxpayers or legislative oversight.

And quite unlike others unions, which had an inherently conflictual relationship with their employers, Williams said “in policing there’s vertical solidarity.” Cops are able to perpetuate the notion that they should get the benefit of the doubt because they have dangerous jobs, because that mythology also allows department heads to insist on more funding and staff. By contrast, job titles with higher at-work fatality rates don’t carry the same kind of mythology, because while new safety regulations would benefit construction workers, they would stifle surplus value extraction for company owners.

Bolstering the cops’ hand is prevalent public fear of crime, despite the various metrics showing that the United States has gotten safer since the 1980s.

More here. Also see Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic here.

The idea of “police reform” obscures the task. Whatever one thinks of the past half-century of criminal-justice policy, it was not imposed on Americans by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are, at the very least, byproducts of democratic will. Likely they are much more. It is often said that it is difficult to indict and convict police officers who abuse their power. It is comforting to think of these acquittals and non-indictments as contrary to American values. But it is just as likely that they reflect American values. The three most trusted institutions in America are the military, small business, and the police.

Richard Marshall in 3:AM Magazine:

Nabakov on Kafka (approximately):’Kafka’s private nightmare was that the central human character belongs to the same private fantastic world as the inhuman characters around him. Kafka’s tragedy was his struggle to climb out of that world and into the world of humans. This is what killed him.’

The tales given to the world by the Grimms read as correlatives of that Kafkaesque struggle. Their ugly beauty is hasped to pity facing charmless, evil days. They are tales with uncanny insect voices living at their boundaries, each an impression of terror, misery, hatred, logic, cancellation, prohibition, fertility, growth, illness, potential, animals, children, cellars, schools, swarms, sex, death, revenge, possession and known via a sort of telepathy nuanced into reading but expanding from the inside-outside of an open mouth to dust. Why pity? Because beauty dies. These tales are of a stranger life than the one that needs respectable sanities.

If there is an erstwhile hope that all would be physics and art it’s a hope that is a force from out some other place, one where faith healers, witches, magic and engineers of body-hair, frogs’ eyes and blood droplets conjugate verbs and kill victims to materialize it. What the open mouth tells is in a supercharged vernacular of spatial patterns of wholeness and simultaneity. This works like a language of divorce, one that includes everything in the very process of division and severance. Everything is hyphenated and so simultaneously conjoined and separated, or like Manley Hopkins’ word ‘buckled’ from his ‘The Windhover’, just a single world both ‘joined up’ and ‘broken apart’ braced at a poem’s spine. These doubled selves rip up and shape-shift to fathom themselves, like sigils of a daemon. The unforgettable equation that Ted Hughes calculates to reveal the device of Shake-speare’s own name – ‘On the catastrophe and heel of pastime’ becoming ‘The point and impact of the tempered word’ to ‘The shock and spear of will’ enables Shakespeare, having ‘converted the parts of his name to active images, as in the ‘Sonnets’ and ‘As You Like It’,’ to develop this heraldic device ‘… as a structural means of expressing his antithetical selves as a dialectical ‘system’ in iconic form…’ which , as we hear in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ gifts us;
‘union in partition;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.’

The Grimms have been appropriated by U.S. America because defying the inhuman is as urgent there as anywhere else and its unhinged power leaves behind the innocent and the beaten. What Zipes has done in these two books is remind us that there’s a need for the naked struggle of Kafka, where speech goes to extremes without strategy, without masks, without calculation. The tales of this first edition are as much a part of an old weird Americana as bluesman Howling Wolf singing ‘Going Down Slow’ where, as Greil Marcus notes; ‘… decent people they will have to conceal as much envy as delight…’:

‘Go dig a hole in the meadow, good people
Go dig a hole in the ground
Come around all you good people
And see this poor rounder go down.’

More here.

Lary Wallace in Aeon (Photo by Raymond Depardon/Magnum):

[I]ndifference really is a power, selectively applied, and living in such a way is not only eminently possible, with a conscious adoption of certain attitudes, but facilitates a freer, more expansive, more adventurous mode of living. Joy and grief are still there, along with all the other emotions, but they are tempered – and, in their temperance, they are less tyrannical.

If we can’t always go to our philosophers for an understanding of Stoicism, then where can we go? One place to start is theUrban Dictionary. Check out what this crowdsourced online reference to slang gives as the definition of a ‘stoic’:
stoic
Someone who does not give a shit about the stupid things in this world that most people care so much about. Stoics do have emotions, but only for the things in this world that really matter. They are the most real people alive.
Group of kids are sitting on a porch. Stoic walks by.
Kid – ‘Hey man, yur a fuckin faggot an you suck cock!’
Stoic – ‘Good for you.’
Keeps going.

You’ve gotta love the way the author manages to make mention of a porch in there, because Stoicism has its root in the word stoa, which is the Greek name for what today we would call a porch. Actually, we’re more likely to call it a portico, but the ancient Stoics used it as a kind of porch, where they would hang out and talk about enlightenment and stuff. The Greek scholar Zeno is the founder, and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius the most famous practitioner, while the Roman statesman Seneca is probably the most eloquent and entertaining. But the real hero of Stoicism, most Stoics agree, is the Greek philosopher Epictetus.

He’d been a slave, which gives his words a credibility that the other Stoics, for all the hardships they endured, can’t quite match. He spoke to his pupils, who later wrote down his words. These are the only words we know today as Epictetus', consisting of two short works, theEnchiridion and the Discourses, along with some fragments. Among those whom Epictetus taught directly is Marcus Aurelius (another Stoic philosopher who did not necessarily expect to be read; hisMeditations were written expressly for private benefit, as a kind of self-instruction).

More here.

Jodi Kantor in the NYTimes (via Longreads):

In the history of American higher education, it is hard to top the luck and timing of the Stanford class of 1994, whose members arrived on campus barely aware of what an email was, and yet grew up to help teach the rest of the planet to shop, send money, find love and navigate an ever-expanding online universe.

They finished college precisely when and where the web was stirring to life, and it swept many of them up, transforming computer science and philosophy majors alike into dot-com founders, graduates with uncertain plans into early employees of Netscape, and their 20-year reunion weekend here in October into a miniature biography of the Internet…

The reunion told a more particular strand of Internet history as well. The university, already the most powerful incubator in Silicon Valley, embarked back then on a bold diversity experiment, trying to dismantle old gender and racial barriers. While women had traditionally lagged in business and finance, these students were present for the creation of an entirely new field of human endeavor, one intended to topple old conventions, embrace novel ways of doing things and promote entrepreneurship…

Yet instead of narrowing gender gaps, the technology industry created vast new ones, according to interviews with dozens of members of the class and a broad array of Silicon Valley and Stanford figures. “We were sitting on an oil boom, and the fact is that the women played a support role instead of walking away with billion-dollar businesses,” said Kamy Wicoff, who founded a website for female writers.

Read the rest here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Every year, I pick my favourite science features—or ‘longreads’, as they have been rebranded as—from the previous 12 months. It’s always hard. Despite much hand-wringing about how the internet is killing journalism/reading/attention/civilisation, I see a constant stream of great long pieces, written by writers who are at the top of their game, and published by organisations willing to pay well. So, without further ado, here are my favourite dozen from the year, and a dozen more runners-up. In no particular order:

1) One of a Kind, by Seth Mnookin, for The New Yorker. A magnificently told, and often heartbreaking, story about a family trying to solve their son’s unique genetic mystery.

“That fall, Bertrand was rushed to the emergency room after suffering a series of life-threatening seizures. When the technicians tried to start an I.V., they found Bertrand’s veins so scarred from months of blood draws that they were unable to insert a needle. Later that evening, when Cristina was alone with Matt, she broke down in tears. “What have we done to our child?” she said. “How many things can we put him through?” As one obscure genetic condition after another was ruled out, the Mights began to wonder whether they would ever learn the cause of their son’s agony. What if Bertrand was suffering from a disorder that was not just extremely rare but entirely unknown to science?”

2) How “Titanic” is helping a South Pacific tribe understand why their island is disappearing, by Brooke Jarvis, for Matter. In this beautiful, moving piece, Jarvis meets the people most affected by climate change.

“A large, brown bone washed against my calf. At first I thought it belonged to some sort of marine mammal, maybe a dugong, and picked it up. But then I saw what was clearly a human jaw, five teeth still embedded in the bone, in the water next to me. I stared at the bone in my hand, shocked to realize that I was gripping a person’s femur. Once I started to see them, it seemed there were bones everywhere. Vertebrae swirled around my feet.”

More here.

Piers Benn in Prospect:

Many people living in liberal societies take it for granted that toleration and freedom of expression are positives. They support the view that no one has the right to impose their political, religious or moral views on others; that almost all views have the right to be heard, and especially, that no one should be hounded by the law, censored or ostracised simply for holding certain beliefs. Yet today as much as ever, free expression is under threat when it comes to matters deemed “sensitive.” Index on Censorship reports numerous recent cases. In September over 30 student organisations at Yale University protested against the inclusion of the campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali in its visiting speaker programme, on the grounds that, as a vocal apostate from Islam, her words might be offensive to Muslim ears. The Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley recently sent a memo to students, saying that free speech should be qualified by “civility”, meaning that it should be permitted only in so far as it allowed others to feel “safe and respected” [my italics]—two words which are, of course, not synonymous. And in Turkey, where the curious crime of “insulting the Turkish Nation” is already on the statute book, people who “insult” the President can also find themselves in trouble. The list goes on.

Of course, many liberal minded people are appalled by these restrictions. But others worry that their support for toleration comes from a general “non-judgmental attitude”, a lack of personal conviction, or even a relativistic denial that there is such a thing as the truth about, say, religious or ethical matters. For this reason, in the eyes of some critics, toleration is merely another name for indifference.

More here.