Jeffery Gleaves at The Paris Review:

James Tate, who wrote that the main challenge of poetry “is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit,” died yesterday in Massachusetts at age seventy-one. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award, Tate’s poems were “always concerned to tell us that beneath the busyness and loneliness of our daily lives, there remains in us the possibility for peace, happiness and real human connection,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New York Times.

Tate was born in Missouri but lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, since 1971. “I’ve imagined that every character and every single event takes place in this town, Amherst,” he once confessed. But John Ashbery once opined that Tate is a “poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous, and these phenomena exist everywhere.”

His poetry is often described as absurdist, and indeed the speakers in his poems come across as bewildered narrators who are as inquisitive as they are clueless—which is all part of their charm. His poetry has also been described as comic, ironic, hopeful, lonely, and surreal; “I love my funny poems,” he said, “but I’d rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that’s the best.

more here.

Liv Constable-Maxwell in New Statesman:

“Every major city has a holocaust museum, so why shouldn’t they have an empathy museum”, says Roman Krznaric. He is talking to me about his newest venture, the Empathy Museum.

It's a project that aims to salvage us from our self-absorbed and narcissistic lives by engaging with people we may not normally come across. These are words I’ve heard already on the promo video for the museum, but am no less struck by the uncomfortable premise.

Empathy, it seems, is quite the hot topic. The Independent reports that, despite the hours we spend online communicating with one another, “empathy is not spreading effectively”, while I’m sure everyone will be relieved to read the Guardian’s claim that empathy “could be the thing that saves us [from extinction]”.

Which is why Krznaric is giving us all a helping hand. He has spent the last few years co-founding The School of Life with Alain De Botton, a project that aims to promote “emotional intelligence” through culture. Its courses, which include titles such as “The Art of Sadness” and “The Secret History of Your Emotions”, promise to enlighten you for the small sum of £45 a session.

Krznaric’s attentions have now turned to the creation of a museum all about empathy. A travelling, interactive project that will open in September, as part of London's Totally Thames festival.

The key thinking behind the museum is to take us away from our “hyper-individualistic society”, moving “from an age of introspection to an age of outrospection” (buzzphrases I recognise well from Krznaric’s promotional work).

“I define empathy as to be able to step into someone else’s shoes,” remarks Krznaric.

Which might explain the “empathy shoe shop”. It’s an activity where you wear shoes that belong to someone else. “They may be those of a Syrian refugee, or a Chinese factory worker,” Krznaric tells me. “You will be wearing headphones and hear a recording of them talking about their own lives.

More here.

Stephanie Bernhard in The LA Review of Books:

ADAPTING A NOVEL with a plot as unwieldy as that of Thomas Hardy’sFar From the Madding Crowd (1874) for the screen requires compromise: the film must either remove a number of scenes that appear in the novel or squeeze as many scenes as possible into a watchable span of time. Thomas Vinterberg’s recent adaptation almost always opts for the latter technique, and the result is a film that is completely dutiful, very attractive, and mostly dull.

In fairness to Vinterberg, Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd is crowded with so much confounding, brilliant, baroquely intricate action that to remove a single element from a retelling risks toppling the whole story. Hardy packs a fallen woman tale, an untimely death, a mysterious disappearance, and a feminist bildungsroman into a central romance in which not two but three suitors — the shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), the farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), and the soldier Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge) — compete for the hand of Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), that wonderfully vexing, eternally modern creation for whom the phrase “fiercely independent” must have been invented. Every time she twitches, the novel quakes with great drama. Agitated, perhaps, by the novel’s inexhaustible action, Henry James famously complained that “everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.”

More on the sheep and the dogs in a moment. James may have despised the rustic, exaggerated humans of Far From the Madding Crowd, but quickly after panning the book he stole its human plot for The Portrait of a Lady (1881). He deleted the sheep and dogs and clothed his humans more fashionably, but the bones of the story are the same. A bright, beautiful, ferociously independent young woman fends off marriage proposals from two appealing men who offer to raise her social and economic status; instead, after inheriting a dazzling pile of property, she accepts the hand of a vile man who requires her to support him. In both novels, the heroine’s continuous indecision (and eventual disastrous decision) makes for a compelling drama, dense with dramatic irony.

But there is a key difference between James’s novel and Hardy’s, one crucial for filmmaking, and it involves the sheep and dogs.

More here.

Aatish Taseer at The New York Times:

Few books need more urgently to be written than a definitive oral history of the 1947 partition of India. The partition, even by the standards of a bloody century, was hideous; it left between one and two million people dead and displaced 15 million others; it caused the dismemberment of a syncretic society and led to the largest forced migration in the history of humanity. The generation that lived through that terrible time is on its way out, taking its unrecorded memories.

In “Midnight’s Furies,” a fast-moving and highly readable account of the violence that accompanied the partition, Nisid Hajari sets himself a more modest task: How did two nations with so much in common end up such inveterate enemies so quickly?

Hajari answers this question with a dramatization of the violent year that preceded partition. The dramatis personae are introduced, as per conventions established by Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi.” There is the “famously handsome” Jawaharlal Nehru with his “high, aristocratic cheekbones and eyes that were deep pools — irresistible to his many female admirers”; there is the “mystical, septuagenarian” Mahatma Gandhi; there is the monocled, slightly sinister Mohammad Ali Jinnah, “cheekbones jutted out of his cadaverous face like the edges of a diamond”; and, lastly, there is Lord Louis Mountbatten, “tall and tanned,” the “Hollywood version of a British prince.”

more here.

Andrea Wulf at the Financial Times:

The question that Frank Wilczek poses in this book sounds simple — “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” — but the answer is complicated. It’s a long “meditation”, as the Nobel laureate physicist calls it, on the idea of beauty as the organising principle of the universe, and also a eulogy on the importance of beauty as a source of inspiration for scientists past and present.

Wilczek chooses a historical approach because it allows him to move from simpler to more complex ideas, gently easing the reader into his argument. He begins with thinkers such as Pythagoras and Plato, moves on to Kepler and Newton, and ends with quantum physics. “In beauty we trust, when making our theories,” Wilczek believes, and so did many before him. Pythagoras’s theorem about right-angled triangles reveals the beautiful relationship between numbers and shapes, while Newton used mathematics to understand the fundamental laws of nature. In the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell’s work brought together electricity, magnetism and light as part of one concept — a unifying idea of a physical reality that was made up of space-filling fields — and he explained this through a system of equations. When these equations are written “pictorially” or in terms of flows, Wilczek explains, they become “a dance of concepts through space and time”.

more here.

Matt Windsor at UAB News:

Google’s cars can already handle real-world hazards, such as cars’ suddenly swerving in front of them. But in some situations, a crash is unavoidable. (In fact, Google’s cars have been in dozens of minor accidents, all of which the company blames on human drivers.) How will a Google car, or an ultra-safe Volvo, be programmed to handle a no-win situation — a blown tire, perhaps — where it must choose between swerving into oncoming traffic or steering directly into a retaining wall? The computers will certainly be fast enough to make a reasoned judgment within milliseconds. They would have time to scan the cars ahead and identify the one most likely to survive a collision, for example, or the one with the most other humans inside. But should they be programmed to make the decision that is best for their owners? Or the choice that does the least harm — even if that means choosing to slam into a retaining wall to avoid hitting an oncoming school bus? Who will make that call, and how will they decide?

More here.

Katherine Reynolds Lewis in Mother Jones:

How we deal with the most challenging kids remains rooted in B.F. Skinner's mid-20th-century philosophy that human behavior is determined by consequences and bad behavior must be punished. (Pavlov figured it out first, with dogs.) During the 2011-12 school year, the US Department of Education counted 130,000 expulsions and roughly 7 million suspensions among 49 million K-12 students—one for every seven kids. The most recent estimates suggest there are also a quarter-million instances of corporal punishment in US schools every year.

But consequences have consequences. Contemporary psychological studies suggest that, far from resolving children's behavior problems, these standard disciplinary methods often exacerbate them. They sacrifice long-term goals (student behavior improving for good) for short-term gain—momentary peace in the classroom.

University of Rochester psychologist Ed Deci, for example, found that teachers who aim to control students' behavior—rather than helping them control it themselves—undermine the very elements that are essential for motivation: autonomy, a sense of competence, and a capacity to relate to others. This, in turn, means they have a harder time learning self-control, an essential skill for long-term success. Stanford University's Carol Dweck, a developmental and social psychologist, has demonstrated that even rewards—gold stars and the like—can erode children's motivation and performance by shifting the focus to what the teacher thinks, rather than the intrinsic rewards of learning.

More here. [Thanks to Yousaf Hyat.]

Todd May reviews Étienne Balibar's Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, in Notre Dame Philosophical Review:

Étienne Balibar is one of the most rigorous thinkers of contemporary politics, especially European politics, that his generation in France has produced. A student of Louis Althusser, Balibar has consistently rejected shoehorning politics into a pre-given theoretical grid but has instead sought to understand political phenomena on their own terms. The current work is no exception. Violence and Civility, consisting of three re-worked chapters that were originally the 1996 Welleck lectures at Columbia bookended by a 1992 lecture on themes from Jacques Derrida's thought and a 2003 lecture from a conference in Paris, is an original and sustained attempt to consider the role violence and what Balibar calls “anti-violence” play in the formation of political relationships.

The book is dedicated to Derrida's memory. It is not hard to see why. Balibar sees a necessary haunting by violence of all political movements that seek to eliminate it — that is, all political movements. Thus there is an economy of violence and the attempt to suppress it with which political reflection must come to terms. Among the implications of this is that, contrary to many utopian political movements of the twentieth century, “we must renounce eschatological perspectives, even in their secularized forms, which, as we know, were always insistent in the revolutionary discourse about politics, especially in its communist variants.” (xiv)

What is violence, then? Balibar does not say. He notes that there are many forms of violence, and his examples include not only physical violence but also exploitation in the Marxist sense, domination, marginalization, and degradation. Much of the latter phenomena have been gathered under the rubric of structural violence, a term to which Balibar occasionally has recourse. However, what is of interest to him specifically are two forms of extreme violence, of what he calls cruelty, that are often intertwined but that, he insists, must be recognized in their distinct specificity. These he calls ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence.

He contrasts these two forms of violence in this way:

the first [ultraobjective] kind of cruelty calls for treating masses of human beings as things or useless remnants, while the second requires that individuals and groups be represented as incarnations of evil, diabolical powers that threaten the subject from within and have to be eliminated at all costs, up to and including self-destruction. (52)

Or again:

one of which [ultraobjective] proceeds by way of an inversion of the utility principle and the transformation of human beings into not useful commodities but disposable waste, while the other proceeds by installing in place of the subject's will the fetishized figure of an 'us' reduced to absolute homogeneity. (61)

More here.

Martin Filler at the New York Review of Books:

Although sacred structures of all sorts have been central to every culture throughout history, religious architecture has attained even greater importance in times of social upheaval. This was certainly true in mid-nineteenth-century Barcelona, the ancient Mediterranean port that became an economic powerhouse with the advent of industrialized textile manufacturing. As the strains caused by this rapid shift from small workshop to large factory production worsened, many felt that the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy was unresponsive to the travails of increasingly downtrodden urban laborers. Thus during the 1870s pious (and wealthy) barcelonés conceived a monumental building project for a working-class neighborhood that they hoped would stem religious disaffection by harking back to the devotional fervor, communal brotherhood, and civic pride fostered by the grand cathedral construction campaigns of the Middle Ages.

The result is one of the most celebrated shrines in Christendom, known in Catalan as the Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family). It was begun in 1882 using the conventional neo-Gothic designs of Francisco de Paula del Villar, who after two years of persistent quarrels with diocesan supervisors quit and handed the job over to his largely untested assistant Antoni Gaudí.

more here.

Colm Tóibín at Bookforum:

In Washington Square, Henry James created a great bullying father who sought to control his daughter's destiny and prevent what he saw as a foolish marriage. In viewing his daughter as dull, Dr. Sloper missed what the reader of the novel began to see—Catherine Sloper was not merely sensitive but also deep, even passionate. Thus the book dramatized a matter that concerned James profoundly in both his life and his art—control and dominance within his own family and then within the families that he began to imagine during his long career as a novelist.

Henry James's brother William wrote that the novelist was “a native of the James family, and has no other country.” During their childhood and adolescence, the James children were taken back and forth across the Atlantic by their restless and wealthy father. They got to know France and England, but they barely felt at home in America. Because their father had no profession, he spent his time watching over his five children. By the time Henry was in his twenties, he was desperate to get away to Europe. His early letters show him depending on his parents for money and guidance, and using illness as a further excuse to stay away, but also to get sympathy and attention. He was deeply involved with his family for all of his life, but the relationship, like many of the relationships in his fiction, was ambivalent. James also treasured his own solitude, his own apartness and autonomy.

more here.

Katie Halper interviews Margaret Cho in Guernica (Photograph by Mary Taylor):

Guernica: In your foreword to BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine, you write, “Whenever anyone has called me a bitch, I have taken it as a compliment. To me, a bitch is assertive, unapologetic, demanding, intimidating, intelligent, fiercely protective, in control—all very positive attributes…. These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks.” Can “tasteless,” which is generally intended as an insult, also be a compliment?

Margaret Cho: Things that are in “bad taste” are often renegade and rebellious. They go against the status quo, and the laws of decorum and modesty. And that can be really thrilling. I’m a huge fan of the people and things that are considered the epitomes of tastelessness—things like drag and raunchy comedy. People like John Waters and Divine.

It’s always considered bad taste to comment on a tragedy right when it’s happening, but I love when something is considered too soon to talk about because then you can blast past that social censorship to get into something real. Often something that is in bad taste or considered to be in bad taste is something that’s just very true but that people are unwilling to discuss or comment on.

Guernica: What’s the saying? Comedy equals tragedy plus time?

Margaret Cho: Yes. But I don’t even think you need time. There’s no reason to wait.

Guernica: Did you expect such a backlash to your appearance at this year’s Golden Globes as Cho Yung Ja?

Margaret Cho: The response was out of proportion. But I think that sometimes people [who overreact or lash out] will hang on to their point just because they’re so embarrassed that they made it. They won’t set it down because they are the authors of these [disproportionate responses] and they have a lot to be embarrassed about.

More here.

Slavoj Žižek at The New Statesman:

This brings us to the crux of the matter: Tsipras and the former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned on 6 July, talk as if they are part of an open political process where decisions are ultimately “ideological” (based on normative preferences), while the EU technocrats talk as if it is all a matter of detailed regulatory measures. When the Greeks reject this approach and raise more fundamental political issues, they are accused of lying, of avoiding concrete solutions, and so on. It is clear that the truth here is on the Greek side: the denial of “the ideological side” advocated by Dijsselbloem is ideology at its purest. It masks (falsely presents) as purely expert regulatory measures that are effectively grounded in politico-ideological decisions.

On account of this asymmetry, the “dialogue” between Tsipras or Varoufakis and their EU partners often appears as a dialogue between a young student who wants a serious debate on basic issues and an arrogant professor who, in his answers, humiliatingly ignores the issue and scolds the student on technical points (“You didn’t formulate that correctly! You didn’t take into account that regulation!”). Or even as a dialogue between a rape victim who desperately reports what happened to her and a policeman who continuously interrupts her with requests for administrative details.

more here.

Kevin Berger interviews Mazviita Chirimuuta in Nautilus:

What is your theory of color?

Going back to that problem about this dichotomy between the inner and outer, there’s been this tendency to say, “well, anything that’s subjective in our knowledge or in our experience isn’t on the same footing as things that we know about as being completely objective.” I say that this sort of difficulty that people have of accepting subjective aspects of experience and knowledge then leaves people to say well, “if color’s not part of physics, then it must be a complete illusion”; and I’m saying well, actually we need a way of theorizing subjectivity in such a way that we’ll just acknowledge that there are parts of our experience and our perceptual knowledge of things that are generated by the particular ways that we interact with the world.

As humans who have three kinds of photoreceptors, or two, or sometimes one kind of photoreceptor for daylight vision—that means we interact with the world in a particular way that informs our experience of the world. If our visual systems were built differently, our whole visual experience, and probably our knowledge of the world, would be quite different; but there’s nothing inherently problematic about that. So I think of color as a property, or something that can only be understood in terms of the particular ways that we interact with the world. That’s my way of saying that we should try and see those inner and outer domains as not as separate from each other as we think. Really, there’s this constant back and forth between the two and that’s how visual experience is generated, and knowledge maybe more generally.

How have you changed the debate about color?

The way the debate has standardly gone is to say, “well, if color is anything, if color exists, then it’s a property of objects.” So if you’re a realist, you’ll say “yeah, the maroon property belongs to this seat; the whiteness property belongs to that wall.” If you’re an anti-realist, you’ll just say “no, no objects have those properties; color doesn’t exist.” What I’ve done is say that actually, a better way of thinking about color is not as a property of objects, but as a property of interactions that perceivers have with objects. In my view, which is the view I call color adverbialism, there are perceptual processes that are going on all the time. Every time we look around a room, light’s bouncing off the walls into my eyes and my brain’s processing this information and I’m saying that that whole extended interaction between myself and my surroundings, that’s the thing that has color, not the objects that I see. So when I talk about what’s there in my surroundings, I say that color is my way of seeing those things, so I see that wall in a white way, so really the whiteness is modifying that perceptual experience. It’s more a property of the experience or that process, that activity I’m doing, rather than the wall itself.

More here.

Chris Woolston in Nature:

Albert Einstein mastered the violin. Richard Feynman banged bongos. Following in the tradition of multi-talented physicists, Federica Bianco likes to take a break from her research to punch people in the face. Bianco, an avid boxer who is also an astrophysicist at New York University, flew to Richmond, California, for her first professional bout in April. It did not go well for her opponent. Bianco pinned her competitor to the ropes with a flurry of punches and did not let up until the referee called the fight. It took just one minute and twenty seconds. “I didn't want to stop, but she was taking too much punishment,” Bianco says.

From the original German by Gavin Schalliol and published by The Wire in arrangement with Die Zeit:

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?

Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?

Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece.

More here.

Peter Stothard at the Times Literary Supplement:

Antonia Fraser has been a force in literary and political London for more than half a century – from her first biography, of Mary Queen of Scots in 1969, through studies of Charles II, Oliver Cromwell and Marie Antoinette, the autobiography of her life with Harold Pinter, her passionate histories of lost English Catholicism and early women’s rights, and her crime novels in the spaces in between. My History is her “memoir of growing up”, an early life which she portrays as itself a piece of history. A celebrant of characters from the distant past, she summons here a universe of hardly less lost worlds, in politics, religion and what until recently was known as society.

She begins with a deceptively simple epigraph from the autobiography of the Whig historian, G. M. Trevelyan:

“the poetry of history lies in the miraculous fact that once on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow”.

more here.

Sam Kean at The American Scholar:

In 1956, novelist Sybille Bedford mourned the passing of an era in physics—that age where “the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a workshop set up behind the stables.” This was science as Newton and Darwin practiced it, a solitary genius matching wits with nature. No more. Nowadays, virtually all scientists collaborate, working in teams of three, four, a dozen others. A paper from a particle accelerator experiment or big genome project might include several thousand authors.

Ironically enough, as Michael Hiltzik explains in Big Science, this shift was itself largely the doing of a single genius. Ernest Lawrence is best known today for his 1931 invention of the cyclotron, a “proton merry-go-round” that accelerates subatomic particles, like protons, to high speeds. Located in the Radiation Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, where Lawrence conducted his experiments, the first cyclotron didn’t exactly scream Big Science—it was a mere 4.5 inches in diameter. But it proved remarkably effective for probing the structure of the atomic nucleus, which prompted Lawrence to build a larger model, at 11 inches. This proved still more effective, so he built a bigger one, and then a bigger one. Each new model—27 inches, 37 inches, 60 inches—gave Lawrence a glimpse of new vistas to explore. But the only way to do so was by building bigger and more expensive equipment.

more here.

George Scialabba at Boston Review:

Aristotle and Marx may not have agreed on much else, but they agreed on the purpose of life. Aristotle defined the highest happiness as “the pursuit of excellence to the height of one’s capacities in a life affording them full scope.” For Marx, the mark of a rational, humane society is that free, creative labor has become “not only a means to life, but life’s prime want.” Not leisure, not entertainment, not consumption, but creative activity is what gives human beings their greatest satisfaction: so say both the sage of antiquity and the prophet of modernity.

How much creative activity does work life in the contemporary United States encourage or allow?
“Creative” is not a well-defined word, so no precise answer is possible. But it’s hardly controversial that the “de-skilling” of the workforce has been the goal of scientific management since the beginning of the industrial age, and is accelerating. In his invaluable Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans (2014), journalist Simon Head tracks the rapid spread of Computerized Business Systems (CBS): job-flow, business-process software designed to eliminate every vestige of initiative, judgment, and skill from the lives of workers and even middle managers. CBS, he writes, “are being used to marginalize employee knowledge and experience,” so that “employee autonomy is under siege from ever more intrusive forms of monitoring and control.” Head cites a 1995 report that “75–80 percent of America’s largest companies were engaged in Business Process Reengineering and would be increasing their commitment to it over the next few years,” and a 2001 estimate that 75 percent of all corporate investment in information technology that year went into CBS. They’re expensive, but they’re worth it: insecure, interchangeable workers mean lower labor costs.

more here.