Christian Lorentzen in New York Magazine:

Like most Norwegian schoolchildren of his generation, Karl Ove Knausgaard started learning English at the age of 10. The curriculum didn’t extend to the study of literature, so he had to come to British and American authors on his own. Though he says the opposite, his English is excellent, but there were two words I used that he didn’t know: placid (crucial because he grew up in a placid country, but in a home that was anything but); and refinement (crucial because his prose is marked by its high variance of refinement, veering between the cooked and the raw). I met Knausgaard on a recent afternoon outside the offices of the New YorkTimes, which had just published his review of Michel Houellebecq’sSubmission. (Our meeting occurred before the attacks in Paris.)

We walked east a few blocks and up to 44th Street for a drink at the Blue Bar of the Algonquin Hotel. I was disappointed to learn that massive international literary celebrity is such that you can pass through Times Square without being stopped by a fan. Knausgaard stands about six-foot-six, and his hair and beard at age 46 are a touch grayer than they appear on the cover of book two of his My Struggle series — the fourth of six volumes that appeared in English translation last spring. Two nights before he had been fêted at a gala at the New York Public Library, and he would be again that night at MoMA. At the Algonquin, Knausgaard had a black coffee and a Diet Coke, and I had a bloody Mary. I’ve been told that I’m a laconic interlocutor and in this Knausgaard was more than my match; on the recording of our conversation, the long pauses are filled with Sinatra songs playing from the bar’s speakers.

More here.

Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review:

A professor’s claim to have created an algorithm that dramatically simplifies one of theoretical computer science’s most notorious problems has experts preparing to reconsider a long-established truth of their field. It is also seen as a reminder that similar algorithmic breakthroughs are possible that could weaken the tough-to-crack problems at the heart of the cryptography protecting the world’s digital secrets.

In a packed lecture theater on Tuesday and Thursday this week, University of Chicago professor László Babai gave the first two of a series of three lectures describing his new solution to a problem called graph isomorphism. The problem asks a computer to determine whether two different graphs—in the sense of a collection of “nodes” connected into a network, like a social graph—are in fact different representations of the same thing.

Babai’s lectures have caused excitement because graph isomorphism is known as a very challenging problem believed for more than 30 years to be not too far from the very hardest class of problems for computers to solve. If Babai is right, it is in fact much closer to falling into the class of problems that can be solved efficiently by computers, a category known as P (see “What Does ‘P vs. NP’ Mean for the Rest of Us?”).

“This has caught everyone’s imagination because the improvement is so large,” says Richard Lipton, a professor who works on theoretical computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology. “He got it down to a much lower class.” After MIT associate professor Scott Aaronson heard about Babai’s claim, he bloggedthat it could be “the theoretical computer science result of the decade.”

More here.

Janine di Giovanni and Noah Goldberg in Newsweek:

At the annual Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, an elite Middle East security summit held in late October, the keynote speaker was Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, General el-Sissi took the stage and addressed a packed audience of ministers, diplomats and senior U.S. State Department officials. He talked of Egypt’s role in the conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Libya.

But the general’s main concern—as a staunch military man who has been in the army since the age of 23—was the rise of armed factions in the Middle East. “We are concerned by the undoing of the national state and the rule of law by armed militias,” el-Sissi emphasized at the gathering, just days before a Russian passenger plane went down in the Sinai Desert in what increasingly looks like a bombing by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS).

After being lauded at Manama, where he met with the German minister of defense and other bigwigs, el-Sissi flew home to take stock of the Russian airline crisis and to prepare for an official visit to Britain, where he would meet with Prime Minister David Cameron. After a period when the West was cautious about his ascent to power, el-Sissi’s visit underlined the fact that he is firmly back at international diplomacy’s top table, just weeks after Egypt was elected to the U.N. Security Council.

More here. [Thanks to Ken Roth.]

More here.

Hari Raghavan in Avidly:

In the second or third grade, a girl in my class took me aside one day while we both washed our hands to give one of my arms a thorough inspection. I was confused, but submitted anyways. That was my way, back then, when things happened to me that I didn’t quite grasp. I’d smile benignly, I’d wait it out, I’d make light of it after. So, when she returned my arm to me with a grin, and said more to herself than me – in a tone of triumph I still remember vividly – “So it doesn’t wash off,” I didn’t think twice. Things hadn’t quite clicked yet. Hearing the story later, though, my mother, in her kind and knowing way, sighed, took my hands in hers, and asked me: “Was this girl white?” I should mention, here, that this experience wasn’t to me what it might’ve been to someone else. It didn’t shape me profoundly, it didn’t alter the course my life took (to my knowledge), it didn’t activate my political consciousness (that happened later). In fact, I didn’t even so much as bring it up with that girl again. I think instead I went to her birthday party, which had a tea party theme I hated but cupcakes I fucking ruined. I also became convinced thereafter that white people (of which there were multitudes in the Portland suburb that raised me) had it made. They had an ease to them I couldn’t find elsewhere, a cool and confidence in the way they navigated the world. They could say what they liked about race and think nothing of the attendant complications. They literally could get away with murder. I coveted the freedom they enjoyed, and the space they claimed for themselves.

I was reminded of all this anew when I recently started watching Netflix’s remarkable new series, Master of None. In its premiere episode, the show’s main character Dev (Aziz Ansari) spends a day babysitting his friends’ two white kids who couldn’t be more terrible (my opinion). They visit a frozen yogurt shop, where one of the kids promptly proceeds to point at strangers and yell out their ethnicities: “Black! Chinese man!” The scene is hilarious, obviously, but it’s strangely incisive, too, about how at ease white people– especially children!– are with classifying and claiming space for themselves by pointing fingers at others.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of just this phenomenon in his memoir Between the World and Me, when he thinks back to a scene he once observed in Harlem – young white parents, letting their son run free ahead of them, stomping and screaming as he pleases. Coates laments that many children of color may never know this same joy or how to claim space themselves, for the realities their parents fear; his own child was once shoved on an escalator by a white woman twice his age. It’s not that the people who live with this certainty mean to offend in the questions they ask or things they grab. It’s that they have a unique ability to claim space (or feel entitled to it) while forgetting how the people of color around them, conversing with them, are constantly compelled to shrink themselves.

It’s a delicate kind of shape-shifting that takes an eventual toll, and Aziz Ansari, first generation South Asian that he is, seems to know something of the burden in the question his show asks repeatedly: How can he (and I by extension, and others like us) carve out and claim space in a culture or establishment that doesn’t allow us the room?

More here.

Priyanka Sindhar-Sharma in The Atlantic:

This is the story of my struggle to allow myself to be the kind of parent I want to be. I grew up in India, but moved to the U.S. in my 20s and became a mother here in my 30s. I had never felt like an outsider, ever—until I had a child. I read a lot of books so that I would be the best mom I could be. And I suddenly found myself wondering, did the Indian parents I saw in my parents’ generation—and many in mine—get it wrong? My father was a big believer in the importance of a child’s first five years. I often heard him tell people how he couldn’t scold me until I was five. He reprimanded his younger brother for raising his voice at his kids before they turned five. Raised voices or not, we didn’t have any concept of time-outs anywhere around us. I can’t recall a time when I cried and a grown up didn’t come to console or hold me. They always did. I slept with my mother until I was five. My father would tease me and say I was my mother’s tail, but neither of them did anything to get me to sleep alone or in a different room with my siblings.

…If you’re wondering what 'elephant parent' means, it’s the kind of parent who does the exact opposite of what the tiger mom, the ultra-strict disciplinarian, does. Here’s a short video clip that shows how real elephants parent. And that’s what I’m writing about here—parents who believe that they need to nurture, protect, and encourage their children, especially when they’re still impressionable and very, very young. My elephant mom was a doctor with infinite patience. I failed a Hindi test when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and I remember going to her, teary-eyed, with my results—and hearing her tell me that it didn’t matter. There were many more tests ahead. As I sobbed in her lap, she stroked my hair, hugged me, and told me there would be another test, and I could pass that one. (I did get the annual proficiency prize for Hindi a year later at the same school.)

More here. (Note: For my sister Ga who is both an amazing mother and an elephant lover)

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone, Selected Poems of…
Wesleyan University Press, 1983
translation: Robert Bly

Read more »

William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

One wet autumn night in 1951, the travel writer Peter Fleming – the elder and, at that point, more famous brother of Ian – was leaving the theatre when he heard a woman ask her companion to dinner to meet “a friend back from Rangoon”.

This fleeting snatch of conversation prompted Fleming to write a celebrated essay about how isolated and provincial postwar, post-imperial Britain had suddenly become. Twenty years earlier, he realised, half his friends and contemporaries would have been working in such cities across the British empire. Now, he wrote, “a man who has just come back from Rangoon is a rare and potentially interesting phenomenon. The contraction of our empire on one hand, and our incomes on the other, have reduced very considerably our knowledge – as a nation – of the world.” Gone were the days when “remote, romantic place names became domesticated in English households, and grandmothers headed for Asia in the Autumn … [Now] our horizons have shrunk … The British at the moment are more out of touch with the rest of the world than they have been for several generations.

This introversion, and the growing confusion and embarrassment it began to generate about the recent colonial past, had a dramatic effect on the arts in postwar Britain, and particularly on attitudes towards the country’s substantial holdings of imperial art. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, images of empire came to be regarded with something between a deep ambivalence and a profound distaste: paintings with Indian, African or Caribbean imperial themes seemed at best fuddy-duddy and passe, at worst mawkishly jingoistic.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

We all know about schadenfreude, but which other wonderful words does is the English language missing?

–Bakku-shan (Japanese) A woman who looks beautiful – but only when viewed from behind

-Zhaghzhagh (Persian) The chattering of teeth in the cold

–Backpfeifengesicht (German) A face badly in need of a fist

–Schnapsidee (German) A brilliant plan one hatches while drunk

–Prozvonit (Czech) To save money by calling someone's mobile phone and hanging up after one ring so they will call you back

–Bilita Mpash (Bantu, in the Congo) A wonderful dream that surpasses good dreams. One that starts your day on a high and that you could properly describe as the opposite of a nightmare

More here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

Before the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the Lebanese have almost miraculously exhibited since the mid-1970s. Même pas peur, they have declared with admirable defiance on posters, and on the walls of the place de la République. But the fear is pervasive, and it’s not confined to France. In the last few weeks alone, Islamic State has carried out massacres in Baghdad, Ankara and south Beirut, and downed a Russian plane with 224 passengers. It has taunted survivors with threats of future attacks, as if its deepest wish were to provoke violent retaliation.

Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates in Point of Inquiry:

Coates joins Lindsay Beyerstein to discuss the heightening racial tension in America, the result of what he describes as a country built on black bodies and black suffering. In this evocative conversation, Coates compels us to look clearly at our illusions about American identity and social mobility, and explores what difficult remedies will be necessary to begin to rectify the damage American policies have done to black men and women over the centuries. He also considers how his atheism has influenced his own thinking about civil rights, justice, and forgiveness.

More here.

David L. Phillips in Huffington Post:

Is Turkey collaborating with the Islamic State (ISIS)? Allegations range from military cooperation and weapons transfers to logistical support, financial assistance, and the provision of medical services. It is also alleged that Turkey turned a blind eye to ISIS attacks against Kobani.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu strongly deny complicity with ISIS. Erdogan visited the Council on Foreign Relations on September 22, 2014. He criticized “smear campaigns [and] attempts to distort perception about us.” Erdogan decried, “A systematic attack on Turkey's international reputation, “complaining that “Turkey has been subject to very unjust and ill-intentioned news items from media organizations.” Erdogan posited: “My request from our friends in the United States is to make your assessment about Turkey by basing your information on objective sources.”

Columbia University's Program on Peace-building and Rights assigned a team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Turkey to examine Turkish and international media, assessing the credibility of allegations. This report draws on a variety of international sources — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, BBC, Sky News, as well as Turkish sources, CNN Turk, Hurriyet Daily News, Taraf, Cumhuriyet, and Radikal among others.

Allegations

Turkey Provides Military Equipment to ISIS

• An ISIS commander told The Washington Post on August 12, 2014: “Most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war came via Turkey, and so did our equipment and supplies.”

• Kemal Kiliçdaroglu, head of the Republican People's Party (CHP), produced a statement from the Adana Office of the Prosecutor on October 14, 2014 maintaining that Turkey supplied weapons to terror groups. He also produced interview transcripts from truck drivers who delivered weapons to the groups. According to Kiliçdaroglu, the Turkish government claims the trucks were for humanitarian aid to the Turkmen, but the Turkmen said no humanitarian aid was delivered.

• According to CHP Vice President Bulent Tezcan, three trucks were stopped in Adana for inspection on January 19, 2014. The trucks were loaded with weapons in Esenboga Airport in Ankara. The drivers drove the trucks to the border, where a MIT agent was supposed to take over and drive the trucks to Syria to deliver materials to ISIS and groups in Syria. This happened many times. When the trucks were stopped, MIT agents tried to keep the inspectors from looking inside the crates. The inspectors found rockets, arms, and ammunitions.

More here. Also see here.

Ferdinand Mount at The New York Times:

How on earth did they do it? The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century B.C., was the first to ask the question: “Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organization, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than 53 years?” It was not as if Rome was a promising spot: a swampy piece of ground up a barely navigable river surrounded by scrubby hills, its few thousand inhabitants alternately flooded out and ravaged by malaria.

Even its founding myth suggested a bumpy ride ahead: Romulus and Remus, those twins born to a delinquent priestess, were abandoned on the banks of the Tiber, then rescued by an improbable she-wolf, who suckled them. This shared ordeal engendered no brotherly love. Romulus murdered Remus on the city’s first day, and then with his gang abducted a bunch of women from the Sabine Hills to provide mothers for their children. So Rome began with a murder and a mass rape. From the start, its people were aggressive and acquisitive, and its narrow streets were a hide-out for the riffraff of Italy. Romans were like New Yorkers. They came from somewhere else, and they were proud of it.

In “SPQR,” her wonderful concise history, Mary Beard unpacks the secrets of the city’s success with a crisp and merciless clarity that I have not seen equaled anywhere else.

more here.

Geoff Wisner at The Quarterly Review:

For a country as vast as it is, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has not produced much literature. (Ruthless oppression and exploitation will have that effect.) Tram 83 may not be a novel in the usual sense—it is more of a francophone triumph of style over substance—but it is a welcome voice from that quarter, and a promise of lively works to come.

As the book begins, a young man named Requiem waits at a decrepit railway station for his old friend Lucien to arrive. Requiem and Lucien haven’t seen each other in years. A woman named Jacqueline once came between them in some never-explained way.

Lucien is the prototypical starving artist, dressed in black and furiously at work on his play, which a contact in Paris has promised to produce. Requiem writes a bit too, but he also makes introductions (he’s a pimp), moves “merchandise” (he’s a drug dealer, or maybe a smuggler), and exercises leverage over foreigners with the use of compromising photos (he’s a blackmailer).

Requiem’s most attractive quality is his genuine enthusiasm for the hookers who congregate in a nightclub called Tram 83. “Your thighs have the allure of a vodka bottle,” he tells one, and he gets incensed at Lucien for his indifference to the pleasures on offer.

more here.

John Sutherland at the Financial Times:

There is a telling exchange with Edmund Wilson, who had offered a sympathetic and intelligent review of The Waste Land. Wilson, Eliot politely protested in a letter, had “over-understood” his poem. It’s an interesting term. In one of his most cited utterances, Eliot declared that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. Possibly the poem will never be understood, in the sense that a crossword puzzle is solved. But the poem does not, for that reason, fail in its poetic purpose. If, that is, it is “genuine”. There is a strong whiff of incense-wafting here — Cardinal Newman’s “grammar of assent” is evoked. As with Christianity, great poetry requires an act of faith: something beyond mere “understanding”. One should never forget that Eliot is the greatest of his century’s religious poets.

Eliot would jest, on coming across some particularly owlish exegesis, that the critic had got more from the poem than he, Eliot, did. Of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) he recalled, wearily, “I have . . . seen some quite astonishing over-interpretation of this poem”. Should we approach his poems in something of the spirit of children going to a performance of the musical he inspired, Cats — not to understand but to experience and enjoy? That is too simple, of course, but on the right lines.

It would be easy to argue that Christopher Ricks and his assisting co-editor Jim McCue have, with this massive annotation, over-ballasted the ship.

more here.