Andrew Bacevich in Moyers & Company:

Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately succeeds in winning the White House, historians are likely to rank him as the most consequential presidential candidate of at least the past half-century. He has already transformed the tone and temper of American political life. If he becomes the Republican nominee, he will demolish its structural underpinnings as well. Should he prevail in November, his election will alter its very fabric in ways likely to prove irreversible. Whether Trump ever delivers on his promise to “Make America Great Again,” he is already transforming American democratic practice. Trump takes obvious delight in thumbing his nose at the political establishment and flouting its norms. Yet to classify him as an anti-establishment figure is to miss his true significance. He is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma. Each represents in exaggerated form the distilled essence of a much larger and more disturbing reality. Each embodies the smirking cynicism that has become one of the defining characteristics of our age. Each in his own way is a sign of the times.

In contrast to the universally reviled Shkreli, however, Trump has cultivated a mass following that appears impervious to his missteps, miscues and misstatements. What Trump actually believes — whether he believes in anything apart from big, splashy self-display — is largely unknown and probably beside the point. Trumpism is not a program or an ideology. It is an attitude or pose that feeds off of, and then reinforces, widespread anger and alienation. The pose works because the anger — always present in certain quarters of the American electorate but especially acute today — is genuine. By acting the part of impish bad boy and consciously trampling on the canons of political correctness, Trump validates that anger. The more outrageous his behavior, the more secure his position at the very center of the political circus. Wondering what he will do next, we can’t take our eyes off him. And to quote Marco Rubio in a different context, Trump “knows exactly what he is doing.”

Targeting Obama’s Presidency

There is a form of genius at work here. To an extent unmatched by any other figure in American public life, Trump understands that previous distinctions between the ostensibly serious and the self-evidently frivolous have collapsed. Back in 1968, then running for president, Richard Nixon, of all people, got things rolling when he appeared on Laugh-In and uttered the immortal words, “Sock it to me?” But no one has come close to Trump in grasping the implications of all this: in contemporary America, celebrity confers authority. Mere credentials or qualifications have become an afterthought. How else to explain the host of a “reality” TV show instantly qualifying as a serious contender for high office?

More here. (Thanks to Nermeen Shaikh)

Nancy Owano in PhysOrg:

The mind at its laziest sees the old—books in print—and the new—the digital universe—as opposites, in an either-or historic transition from one to the other. Goodbye, brick and mortar book shops, hello, Kindle. Reading words on paper with binding, so yesterday. Reading the same words off a screen, so now. One publishing industry response is that everyone benefits if there is a merging of digital and print for learning as well as entertainment. Publishing Perspectives, a trade journal for the book publishing industry, reported that consultant Bruce Harris voiced enthusiasm for the role of augmented reality (AR) in publishing, saying there was potential in “a true amalgamation of digital and print.”

Not just physical print forms but even digital forms could benefit from AR. Harris said, “In some ways, digital has been “a frozen print experience,” in that the reader is often looking at the same thing in both print and digital versions.” Once you add AR, you are experiencing movement, extra sound, “a lot of extra qualities” with the content. Reading behavior in the AR vein might involve people using their phones or tablet apps to scan their physical page and see extra elements pop up. You are not throwing your printed book into the dustbin to read the same online. Instead, “You use your device to discover more content. The content is digitally appealing and has stuff you can manipulate, but you need the actual book in order to do it.”

More here.

Self-Portrait

My childhood is all memories of a patio in Seville,
A orchard in the light where lemons ripened every fall,
My life as a young man- some twenty years about Castille,
My adult life- a few things I would rather not recall.

I've never gone Lothario or played at Don Juan at parties.
It's obvious from my slovenly apparel that I can't.
Still, I endured the arrow meted out to me by Cupid
And loved as much as women's hospitality could grant.

Though drops of leftist rebel blood may pulse throughout my body,
My verse has welled forth from a peaceful spring through all my days
More so than the good boys who follow all the holy strictures,
I stand as a good man, and in the good sense of the phrase.

I give myself to beauty. In contemporary fashion
I've cut some classic roses from the garden of Ronsard
But I've no love for make-up of the Modernist beauticians
And do not flock with birds that sing in high-flown avant-garde.

And I dislike the balladry of hollow lovelorn tenors,
The cricket-choirs and tweety-birds who warble at the moon.
I cock my ear to try and tell the voices from the echos,
And of the many voices I but listen to the one.

Read more »

Maliha Diwan in Dawn:

Karachi Raj encapsulates the different personas of the metropolis: the reader is taken from Regal Chowk to the heart of the film industry, from the Basti to the inner workings of KU. Characters from all walks of life populate the novel: NGO-wallahs, philanthropists, socialites, the Pakistani president, a feisty rickshaw-wallah, construction workers, shopkeepers, a housewife, and an anthropologist, but in many ways the central character is the city itself. How did you go about writing this novel? And what was the inspiration behind it?

As someone born in Karachi, who harbors intimate knowledge of the city, I felt it had not yet received its due in fiction. The original title of the novel wasThe Slums of Karachi, but the novel is about much more than slums. It seeks to capture the different classes in their interactions with each other, and to penetrate the smokescreens of obfuscation the middle and upper classes in Pakistan throw up around themselves.

What is the unique nature of Karachi’s optimism and energy? Where does Karachi succeed in fulfilling its citizens’ dreams for a better life and where does it fail? What is the hierarchy of values and how does it get translated into distribution of resources and rewards? What is special about Karachi’s history — for example as the locus of much of the migration that occurred after Partition — and how does this illuminate the trajectory of other cities in comparable situations? This is what I was after in depicting the various physical manifestations of the city.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Marina Stajic worked for nearly three decades as director of the forensic toxicology lab at the medical examiner’s office in New York City. Last week Dr.. Stajic, 66, filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming she had been forced into retirement last year in part because of a disagreement with her superiors over the accuracy of certain DNA tests.

There is more at stake here than Dr. Stajic’s retirement. The cutting-edge technique at the center of this legal dispute, called low copy number DNA analysis, has transformed not just police work, but also a range of scientific fields including cancer biology, in vitro fertilization, archaeology and evolutionary biology. Yet some of the technique’s applications have triggered scientific controversy.

The medical examiner’s office has become a strong advocate for the technique. It is the only public lab in the United States that uses low copy number DNA to develop profiles for use in criminal cases. But experts have long warned that investigators must take particular care in interpreting these tests: analyzing so few DNA molecules can lead to errors.

More here.

Chris Hedges in TruthDig:

Richard Rorty in his last book, “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998, presciently saw where our postindustrial nation was headed.

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment. The sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that the disenfranchisement of a class of people from the structures of society produced a state of “anomie”—a “condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.” Those trapped in this “anomie,” he wrote, are easy prey to propaganda and emotionally driven mass movements.

More here.

Hope Jahren in The New York Times:

OVER the past two decades as a professor, I’ve grown thousands of plants, studying how their biology shifts in response to our changing environment. Soon I’ll begin to design and build my fourth laboratory; I’ll teach classes and take on more staff members, as I do every year. Like all professors, I also do a lot of extra jobs for which I was never trained, such as advising former students as they navigate the wider world. Last year, after one of my most talented students left to start her next adventure, she would text me now and then: “This is such a great place,” “I am learning so much here” and “I know this is where I am supposed to be.” Then, a month ago, she wrote and asked me what to do. She forwarded an email she had received from a senior colleague that opened, “Can I share something deeply personal with you?” Within the email, he detonates what he described as a “truth bomb”: “All I know is that from the first day I talked to you, there hadn’t been a single day or hour when you weren’t on my mind.” He tells her she is “incredibly attractive” and “adorably dorky.” He reminds her, in detail, of how he has helped her professionally: “I couldn’t believe the things I was compelled to do for you.” He describes being near her as “exhilarating and frustrating at the same time” and himself as “utterly unable to get a grip” as a result. He closes by assuring her, “That’s just the way things are and you’re gonna have to deal with me until one of us leaves.”

…The scientific method may be impartial, but the scientific culture is not. From grad-school admission on up through tenure, every promotion can hinge on a recommendation letter’s one key passage of praise, offered — or withheld — by the most recent academic adviser. Given the gender breakdown of senior scientists, most often that adviser is a man. Perhaps she decides to ignore this first email — and this is often the case — knowing that she has little to gain, and a lot to lose, from a confrontation. Once satisfied with her tendency toward secrecy, the sender then finds a way to get her alone: invites her to coffee, into his office, out for some ostensibly group event. At said meeting he will become tentatively physical, insisting that if people knew, they just wouldn’t understand. At this point, any objection on her part wouldn’t just be professionally dangerous, it would seem heartless — and she’s not a horrible person, is she?

More here.

Max Nelson in The Paris Review:

On the back cover of the manuscript of his prison memoir, which he completed in New York’s Auburn state jail sometime after 1858, Austin Reed pasted a clipping of the third chapter of Lamentations: “I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath … / He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail. / He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.” Around the thirtieth verse, the tone shifts to one of reassurance—“For the Lord will not cast off forever”—and then, by the fifty-fifth, to one of retributive anger. The last verses Reed excerpted are a plea “out of the low dungeon” for God to avenge the poem’s narrator against his enemies: “Persecute and destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the Lord.”

These lines suggest the tone and shape of a literary genre: a lament in which sorrow coexists with requests for divine vengeance. By placing them at the end of The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict—acquired by Yale’s rare-book library in 2009 and published last month with helpful editorial comments by the scholar Caleb Smith—Reed was making a strong suggestion about the kind of book he’d written. The text itself, however, is an amalgam of genres that wouldn’t seem to combine: a picaresque memoir in which sermons jostle up against pulpy adventure anecdotes; dutiful recollections of fact move with little notice into fantasies and dreams; radical gestures of black empowerment share the page with the coarsest kinds of racial caricatures; and assertive denunciations of the prison system coexist with passages of meek and guilty self-recrimination. It’s puzzling to make sense of these apparent contradictions—to decide what Reed meant his book to do.

More here.

Brenda Wineapple at The New York Times:

If the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson is remembered at all, it’s mostly for her dresses. And these weren’t just any ­dresses. These were the dark silk ones that, after her sudden death, Henry James presumably tried to drown in a Venetian lagoon, hurling them from his gondola and jabbing them with a pole to keep them from rising. But he failed, and to Woolson’s admirers his failure is symbolic: You can’t keep this good writer down.

Woolson’s latest advocate is Anne Boyd Rioux, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans, whose very reliable “Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist” resurrects her subject as a pioneering author who chose a literary career over the more conventional options of marriage and motherhood, a choice made in spite of the debilitating depressions that plagued her and her family.

Woolson’s bookish father, a prosperous New England stove manufacturer, was an insecure man whose deafness intensified his inherent melancholy, and the deaths of three of her older sisters, weeks after Wool­son’s birth in 1840, so devastated her mother that she never recovered. In the aftermath, the Woolsons moved to Cleveland, but more family tragedy — the sudden deaths of two more sisters, shortly after they married — persuaded the 13-year-old Woolson to fear “the ways women gave up their health and even their lives to love and marriage.”

more here.

Ariel Starling at The Quarterly Conversation:

Though Hollow Heart is centered on the death of Dorotea Giglio, the narrative does not much rely on or emphasize the specificity of its contemporary Sicilian setting, or even in many ways the details of Dorotea’s life or character. This may be the point: “When they’re alive,” Di Grado writes, “people are so free that they need boundaries . . . the rip-off comes when you find out the truth. There’s no wall, no dividing line, no boundary, no end. . . . I’m equal to everything.” However, this reading is somewhat undercut by the complex relationships maintained by individual dead to their bodies, as well as the individuality maintained by Dorotea in her letters to fellow dead and her relationship with her mother. Whether or not this is intentional by Di Grado (and one could certainly argue that it is), it is probably best not to look to Hollow Heart for a final message or cleanly constructed metaphysical frameworks. Its aim is to provide an aesthetic experience of the contemplation of death, rather than an argued treatise on the afterlife.

Despite certain small issues it poses to the book’s structure, the mother-daughter component is perhaps the most compelling element of the story. Reminiscent of Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, Dorotea and Greta Giglio’s relationship is characterized by troubled obsession and a tendency toward the psychoanalytic. A largely unsuccessful children’s fashion photographer, Greta spent much of Dorotea’s childhood trying to “make her disappear entirely” through stylized shots with long exposure times, causing the young Dorotea’s features to blend into her surroundings—notably similar to the blurring of identity which she describes after her death.

more here.

Tom Burgis at The Financial Times:

Alongside Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill and John Rawls (the author studied at Harvard with the latter, whose ideas on the primacy of justice inform the book), Wenar cites an African ruler who features in many a polemic against the oil business. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is the embodiment of what theorists call the “resource curse”, the cruel law that condemns those born in the states richest in natural wealth to be among the most wretched of the earth.

Obiang seized power in 1979, since then Equatorial Guinea has been his fief. The stories of what goes on in Black Beach prison alone are enough to convey the hideousness of his rule. The fortune amassed by his son — who serves, if that is the right word, as vice-president of a nation where one in 10 children dies before the age of five — includes Michael Jackson’s crystal-encrusted glove and a fleet of luxury cars.

Wenar argues that Obiang, like his fellow kleptocrats, has no just right to dispose of his county’s natural wealth. He calculates that more than half of the world’s oil production cannot currently be exported without violating property rights because the people who live where that crude is pumped — and to whom it rightfully belongs — are too cowed to have any meaningful say in decisions about their national patrimony. That goes for other extractive commodities too, such as the diamonds that sustained Charles Taylor’s onslaught in Sierra Leone and Liberia. If we agree, then “international oil and mining companies are flying, trucking and sailing away billions of dollars of stolen wealth every day”.

more here.

Found

My wife waits for a caterpillar
to crawl onto her palm so she
can carry it out of the street
and into the green subdivision
of a tree.

Yesterday she coaxed a spider
into a juicier corner. The day
before she hazed a snail
in a half circle so she wouldn’t
have to crawl all the way
around the world and be 2,000
years late for dinner.

I want her to hurry up and pay
attention to me or go where I
want to go until I remember
the night she found me wet
and limping, felt for a collar
and tags, then put me in
the truck where it was warm.

Without her, I wouldn’t
be standing here in these
snazzy alligator shoes.
.

by Ron Koertge
from The Best American Poetry 2006

Sam Sacks in Open Letters Monthly:

To the naysayers who complain that critics are nothing more than parasites of art and culture, A. O. Scott has dismaying news: You too are a critic, that very opinion constitutes criticism, welcome to the club, pull up a chair. The premise of his new book Better Living Through Criticism is that the act of criticism is synonymous with the act of thinking, in the manifold ways this can done—wondering, questioning, investigating, examining, shaping ideas, forming judgments. You might imagine criticism to be a more professional pursuit—in Scott’s case, for instance, in his capacity as a film critic for the New York Times, it sometimes involves writing in-depth excurses on the latest superhero blockbuster. But Scott contends that in writing such a review,

a critic will be no different from anyone else who stops to think about the experience of watching The Avengers (or reading a novel or beholding a painting or listening to a piece of music). Because that thinking is where criticism begins. We’re all guilty of it. Or at least we should be.

That “should” is the keyword of this fluent and appealing if strangely slippery book. In its simplest sense it amounts to an exhortation: You already think about things all the time, so embrace that fact and try to do it as well as possible. “This is no simple task,” Scott writes. “It is easier to seek out the comforts of groupthink, prejudice, and ignorance. Resisting those temptations requires vigilance, discipline, and curiosity.” If this is stirringly motivational, it’s also rhetorically shrewd, since it sets the terms in such a way as to make disagreement impossible. Either you’re a critic or you’re a narrow-minded, bigoted rube. Your choice, friendo.

Scott, who is both learned and open-minded, has a talent for this kind of argumentative knight fork, in which he both anticipates and disables any resistance readers might conceivably raise to his gospel of critical thinking.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

On the surface, people are more or less symmetrical. Aside from small differences, our right sides mirror our left. The same isn’t true for our innards. The heart, stomach, and spleen typically sit slightly to the left, while the liver and gall bladder sit to the right. That’s the usual set-up, but it’s mirrored in one in every 10,000 people, who have a condition called situs inversus. Donny Osmond has it. So did James Bond’s adversary Dr. No, who once survived a murder attempt because his would-be assassin stabbed the left side of his chest and missed his heart.

Whether standard or inverted, there is asymmetry, which raises the obvious question: What creates it? We begin life as a single fertilised cell, which divides again and again into the trillions of the adult form. At what point in that process does left begin to differ from right?

The standard answer, as least for the embryos of back-boned animals, is that tiny beating hairs called cilia push fluid in a typically leftward direction. This current concentrates molecules on one side of the embryo, including those that steer its subsequent development, including one called Nodal. Hence: asymmetry. That’s why people with genetic disorders that disable their cilia have 50:50 odds of owning a right-sided heart.

But that can’t be the whole story because by the time the cilia start to beat, the embryo is already asymmetrical. There must be some earlier symmetry-breaking event.

More here.

Amanda Taub in Vox:

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly become so popular?

What's made Trump's rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates. And whereas most Republican candidates might draw strong support from just one segment of the party base, such as Southern evangelicals or coastal moderates, Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses.

Perhaps strangest of all, it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory. In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.

Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries.

More here.