“The devil took Jesus to a high mountain
and showed him all the world and said, I'll
give you all of this if you'll worship me.”

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The Third Temptation
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He watched with all his organs of concern
How princes walk, what wives and children say;
Re-opened old graves in his heart to learn
What laws the dead had died to disobey.

And came reluctantly to his conclusion:
“All the arm-chair philosophers are false;
To love another adds to the confusion;
The song of pity is the Devil's Waltz.”

And bowed to fate and was successful so
that he was king of all the creatures:
Yet, shaking in his autumn nightmare, saw,

Approaching down a ruined corridor,
A figure with his own distorted features
That wept, and grew enormous, and cried Woe.

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by W.H. Auden
from Selected Poems
Vintage Books, 1975

Edith Hall in The Guardian:

In 1748, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son: “Classical knowledge, that is, Greek and Latin, is absolutely necessary for everybody … the word illiterate, in its common acceptance, means a man who is ignorant of these two languages.” Classical knowledge is here limited to linguistic knowledge, education to men, and literacy to reading competence in Greek and Latin. Greek was also handy when white people wanted to deride the intellectual abilities of black ones. In 1833-4, American pro-slavery thinkers were on the defensive. The senator for South Carolina, John C Calhoun, declared at a Washington dinner party that only when he could “find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax” could he be brought to “believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man”. This snipe motivated a free black errand boy, Alexander Crummell, to head for Cambridge University in England. There he indeed learned Greek as part of his studies, financed by abolitionist campaigners, in theology at Queens’ College (1851–3).

The best-known example is the hero of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Jude Fawley, a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village, is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes on the spires and domes of the University of Christminster – they “gleamed” like topaz. The lustrous topaz shares its golden colour with the stone used to build Oxbridge colleges, but is one of the hardest minerals in nature. Jude’s fragile psyche and health inevitably collapse when he discovers just how unbreakable are the social barriers that exclude him from elite culture. Hardy was writing from personal experience: as the son of a stonemason himself, and apprenticed to an architect’s firm, he had been denied a public school and university education; like Fawley, he had struggled to learn enough Greek to read the Iliad as a teenager. Unlike Jude, Hardy rose through the social ranks to become a prosperous member of the literary establishment. But he never resolved his internal conflict between admiration for Greek and Latin authors and resentment of the supercilious attitude of some members of the upper classes who had been formally trained in them.

More here.

Vivian Gornick in The Nation:

In New York Jew, published in 1978, Alfred Kazin recalled that the “twin reading rooms” of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street “gave me a sense of the powerful amenity that I craved for my own life, a world of power in which my own people had moved about as strangers…. I was hungry for it all, hungry all the time. I was made so restless by the many minds within my reach that no matter how often I rushed across to the Automat for another bun and coffee…I could never get back to my books and notes…without the same hunger pains tearing me inside.”

What, exactly, was the “it” that the 22-year-old Kazin was so hungry for, sitting in the library in 1938? It was the English language. Not the American, the English. He was mad to read it, and also to write it, teach it, interpret it; to swallow it whole; to possess and be possessed by it. This was the “powerful amenity” he craved for his own life. Immigrant Jews who had fallen in love with English had been sitting in public libraries in New York since the 1880s, and many of them had longed to be intimates of the language in exactly the same way; but at the turn of the 20th century, to think of the language as anything other than a means to an end would have meant that you had climbed the ladder of acculturation three steps at a time. It wasn’t until the late 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, that this longing had begun to articulate itself with some real, rather than fantasy-ridden, hope of fulfillment. The first generation of college-educated Jews, born in America around 1914, was itself only half-in, half-out; but the hybrid experience alone allowed for their consideration of the exotic notion that English as a destiny might be seen as something other than utopian.

More here.

Rachel Nuwer at the BBC:

People come from all over the world to experience the impeccable luxury of the Maldives, a nation composed of around 1,200 islands, located 370 miles (595km) off the southernmost tip of India. Despite its remoteness, the resorts here – each located on its own private island – are unparalleled. Guests can sip $40 (£25.60) glasses of Champagne at freshwater pools’ swim-up bars, dine on Russian caviar and Wagyu steak, and stream the latest episode of Game of Thrones in their air-conditioned suite. Nothing is lacking, nothing is out of reach.

Yet amid all this, a sinking realisation constantly undermines the islands’ carefully manicured perfection. It’s the knowledge that all of this may soon be gone. The nation, with its low-lying islands, has been labelled the most at-risk country in South Asia from the impact of climate change. Even if the swooning honeymooners do not allow this thought to mar their vacation, for the ever-smiling staff members, it’s harder to ignore. “Of course I’m concerned about climate change, about the reef, the environment and pollution,” says Mansoor, a Maldivian who works at one of the resorts. “But what can I do? I don’t know.”

Climate change threatens waterfront developments and seaside cities around the world, but for some, the stakes are higher than simply having to move a few miles inland, or even having to relinquish large cities like Miami, Amsterdam and Shanghai. For the citizens of around six to 10 island nations, climate change could rob them of their entire country.

More here.

A.O. Scott at The New York Times:

A great deal of modern popular culture — including just about everything pertaining to what French savants like to call le nouvel âge d’or de la comédie américaine — runs on the disavowal of maturity. The ideal consumer is a mirror image of a familiar comic archetype: a man-child sitting in his parents’ basement with his video games and his “Star Wars” figurines; a postgraduate girl and her pals treating the world as their playground. Baby boomers pursue perpetual youth into retirement. Gen-Xers hold fast to their skateboards, their Pixies T-shirts and their Beastie Boys CDs. Nobody wants to be an adult anymore, and every so often someone writes an article blaming Hollywood, attachment parenting, global capitalism or the welfare state for this catastrophe. I’ve written one or two of those myself. It’s not a bad racket, and since I’m intimately acquainted, on a professional basis, with the cinematic oeuvre of Adam Sandler, I qualify as something of an expert.

Stephen Henighan at The Quarterly Conversation:

A popular critical shorthand describes Clarice Lispector as the Virginia Woolf of South America. A better analogy would be Silvina Ocampo. Benjamin Moser’s Lispector biographyWhy This World (2009) makes clear that as a poor Jewish immigrant who grew up in an isolated region, married a diplomat, and wrote most of her early fiction abroad, Lispector was a latecomer to her country’s Rio de Janeiro–based literary firmament. By contrast, Ocampo, like Woolf, was a descendant of 19th-century aristocrats, married a well-known man from her own social class, and spent nearly her entire career in the capital city where she was born. As Woolf was able to publish through her husband Leonard’s Hogarth Press, so Ocampo had at her disposal the magazine and publishing house of her sister Victoria’s famous Sur. Like the inhabitants of Bloomsbury, the Buenos Aires clique to which Ocampo belonged—an extension of the European-influenced Florida poetry movement of the 1920s—was cosmopolitan in its reading, apolitical or reactionary in its ideology, and sexually intertwined. In aesthetic terms, the writing of Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Sur’s long-time managing editor, José Bianco, constituted a coherent literary statement. Until recently, this unity has been overlooked: Borges overshadowed the other three writers’ work, shrinking their achievements to acolytes’ imitations of a master. The reassessment of Bioy Casares’s fiction has begun to correct this imbalance; now it is Silvina Ocampo’s turn.

more here.

Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times:

Salter's reputation as a novelist was made with 1967's “A Sport and a Pastime,” a story of an American's affairs in postwar France that was laudedby the New York Times as “a tour de force in erotic realism.”

In the 1975 novel “Light Years” Salter wrote, “Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue-checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.”

He often considered the connection between writing and life. In his 1997 memoir “Burning the Days” he wrote, “In describing a world you extinguish it,” and, more optimistically, “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.”

In 2013, at age 88, he surprised many readers with his first novel in 35 years. “All That Is” is a sweeping novel of an American soldier who returns from World War II to work in publishing and, over the course of four decades, seeks love and romance.

more here.

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

Among the many turning points in the constant remaking of the English novel – the dazzle of Sterne (No 6 in this series); the quieter, witty genius of Austen (No 7); the polyvalent brio of Dickens (No 15); the vernacular brilliance of Twain (No 23), and so on – the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1981 now stands out as a particularly significant milestone. Salman Rushdie’s second novel took the Indian English novel, revolutionised it by marrying the fiction of Austen and Dickens with the oral narrative tradition of India, and made a “magical realist” (the label was still in its infancy) novel for a new generation. This emergent global readership would find, in a story set in Bombay, a work of contemporary fiction that mashed up tales of east and west into a self-confessed fabrication narrated by the highly symbolic figure of Saleem Sinai, an Indian boy born on the stroke of midnight, 15 August 1947, a boy whose distinctive nose seems like a miniature embodiment of the sub-continent whose history has just taken him prisoner. Saleem sets out his stall as the narrator in the novel’s third paragraph: “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow a lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me…” And so, off we go. Saleem, whom Rushdie inhabits for his own purposes, is a character with many unusual powers, especially a psychic connection to all the other children born as he was, at the very moment of modern India’s birth. An equally important, and sometimes neglected, element of the novel is Rushdie’s angry response to the repressions of the 1970s “Emergency”. With Saleem, the personal and the historical become indistinguishable, and Rushdie makes a further duality when he exchanges his narrator for a second baby, an alter ego who expresses Saleem’s dark side. All this is described in Indian English prose that pulsates between the tumultuous and the fantastic.

A page of Rushdie is a rich, jewel-encrusted tapestry of allusions, puns, in-jokes, asides, and the unconsidered trifles of popular culture. Some readers may find this diet close to indigestible, but Rushdie’s charm, energy and brilliance, with his sheer joie de vivre, justify the critic VS Pritchett’s verdict (in the New Yorker) that, with Midnight’s Children, “India has produced a great novelist… a master of perpetual storytelling”.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

From 2003 to 2013, the death rate from coronary heart disease fell about 38 percent, according to the American Heart Association citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the primary federal agency that funds heart research, says this decline has been spurred by better control of cholesterol and blood pressure, reduced smoking rates, improved medical treatments — and faster care of people in the throes of a heart attack. “It may not be long before cardiovascular disease is no longer the leading cause of death” in the United States, said Dr. Michael Lauer, the director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. And care has improved not just in elite medical centers, but in local hospitals like Our Lady of Lourdes, here in a city littered with abandoned buildings and boarded-up homes that is among the poorest in America, according to the Census Bureau. Disparities that used to exist, with African-Americans, Hispanics and older people facing the slowest treatment times, have disappeared, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale, and his colleagues said in a paper in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The reinvention of protocols to hasten treatment is part of a broad rethinking of how to tackle coronary heart disease, which accounts for one of every seven deaths in the United States or 375,000 a year. Just this month, powerful drugs from the first new class of medicines to lower bad cholesterol levels in a generation neared approval by the Food and Drug Administration, raising hopes that they will further reduce the death rate from heart disease. At the same time, new, less invasive methods for replacing aged heart valves are raising hopes that ailing patients will be able to live longer. And researchers are immersed in resolving issues that remain unsettled: the utility of stents to treat the heart pain known as angina and the ideal level for blood pressure.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

In the first days following the news of Rachel Dolezal’s ruse, there appeared to be some real hope emerging that, at long last, the deadlock of identitarian politics might finally be over. Compelling voices spoke up to acknowledge the simple truth, that identitarianism is essentialism, no matter how much its defenders will ornament their essentialism with the acknowledgment that race is, in the end, a social construction. No one said it more compellingly than Adolph Reed, Jr., who seemed almost poised to become the progressive voice of the new political moment: one that pays attention to serious things.

But then, yesterday, yet another racist attack by a homegrown terrorist took place, and even before the crime scene had been cleaned up we Americans were being scolded for having considered the possibility, for a moment, that racial categorisation (and the essentialism that flows from the practice) is something we might hope to move beyond. Right away, people were being referred to, in the identitarian manner, as ‘bodies’ instead of as people. And the fact of ‘being a black body’ was reinscribed back into the natural order of things. As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, closing off the Dolezal affair, “The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black.”

But the existential question needs to be asked again and again, and the belief that there is a simple answer to it is part of the reason America cannot overcome its murderous pathology, cannot really end the Civil War. Rachel Dolezal grew up in a society that told her, constantly: “You're white, you're white, you're white,” and she seems to have thought to herself, “Really, now, can it be so simple as that?”

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Here’s David Attenborough, chilling out on a rock in the middle of Africa, with four lumps of plasticine. The smallest one on the far left represents the brain of a bushbaby, a small primate that lives on its own. The next one is the brain of a colobus monkey, which lives in groups of 15 or so. The one after that is a guenon, another monkey; group size: 25. And on the far right: a baboon that lives in groups of 50. “Were you to give a skull to a researcher who works on monkeys, even though they didn’t know what kind of monkey it belonged to, they would be able to accurately predict the size of group in which it lived,” says Attenborough.

That sequence, from The Life of Mammals, is a wonderful demonstration of the social brain hypothesis—a bold idea, proposed in the 1980s, which suggests that living in groups drove the evolution of large brains. Social animals face mental challenges that solitary animals do not: they have to recognise the other members of their cliques, cope with fluid and shifting alliances, manage conflicts, and manipulate or deceive their peers. So as social groups get bigger, so should brains. This idea has been repeatedly tested and confirmed in many groups of animals, including hoofed mammals, carnivores, primates, and birds.

What about insects? Ants, termites, bees, and wasps, also live in large societies, and many of them have unusually big brains—at least, for insects. But in 2010, Sarah Farris from West Virginia University and Susanne Schulmeister from the American Museum of Natural History showed that in these groups, large brains evolved some 90 million years before big social groups. If anything, they correlated with parasitic body-snatching rather than group-living.

More here.

Hunter Dukes at 3:AM Magazine:

Perhaps the strangest object to surface after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq is known only as the Blood Quran. When I first heard its name, I pictured Dead Sea scrolls of carmine papyrus, quartered away in some limestone crypt. But while the words are ancient, the edition is new. Commissioned by the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on his 60th birthday, the book was printed in the blood of its patron. Over the course of two years (and twenty-something litres) master penman Abbas Shakir Joudi al-Baghdadi calligraphed 605 pages of sanguine verse. Now, kept under lock and key in a Baghdad mosque, the book presents a double bind. It has been ruled haram (forbidden) to copy the Quran in bodily fluids; it is also frowned upon to destroy a working copy of the sacred text. This exegetical uncertainty, the language’s messy entanglement with the actual life force of a former despot, and the surprisingly aesthetic quality of the object make it difficult to determine what should be done with the book of blood.

Knowingly or not, Hussein was acting in lineage with a number of religious precursors, real and imagined. The British Library holds a tenth-century copy of the Diamond Sutra, written in the blood of an ascetic octogenarian who pricked a finger when his nib ran dry. The Codex Gigas (or ‘Devil’s Bible’) might be the largest surviving medieval manuscript, but its red ink is rumored to have flowed through human veins before being set upon the page. H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, a fictitious grimoire that appears across his writing, was revised by horror director Sam Raimi into a work of anthropodermic bibliopegy—bound in skin, written in blood.

more here.

The Editors at The Guardian:

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si’, is the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years, since it is addressed not just to Catholics, or Christians, but to everyone on earth. It sets out a programme for change that is rooted in human needs but it makes the radical claim that these needs are not primarily greedy and selfish ones.

We need nature, he says, and we need each other. Our need for mutuality, and for giving, is just as real as the selfish aspects of our characters; the need for awe and stillness in front of nature is just as profound as any other human need. The care of nature and the care of the poor are aspects of the same ethical commandment, and if we neglect either one we cannot find peace. The environment, in the pope’s use of the word, is not something out there: nature as opposed to the human world. The term describes the relationship between nature and humans, who are inextricably linked and part of each other. It is that relationship that must be set right.

Starting from that premise, he launches a ferocious attack on what he sees as the false and treacherous appetites of capitalism and on the consumerist view of human nature.

more here.

Josephine Livingston at n+1:

In 1995, Acker was touring in Australia, almost all of her major books already done. She was big in the way that avant-garde artists can be big: she was culty, glam, and cool. Acker embodies a lot of the things about 1990s femininity that are bang on trend right now: she was a tattooed confesser in silver jewellery and clompy boots, vocal about sex and vocal about vocalizing. In ‘95 Blood and Guts in High School and Great Expectations were selling pretty well. Wark was (and still is) a professor who thinks about screens and globalization and the way that we perceive events happening very far away via the little screens that are so close to us all the time. In 1995, Wark had just published Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, a landmark achievement in media theory that made his name internationally, at least as far as such fame can go for an academic: one review was very positive, but referred to Wark as “she” throughout. Wark and Acker met in Sydney that year and, like so many human beings before them, didn’t stop at a kiss on the cheek. Two cool kids, tangled up. Plus ça change!

This book collects the after-messages following that short romance. The dialogue only spans a few weeks. Each email is timestamped, with Acker and Wark’s nerdy ‘90s email addresses repeated over and over again, page after page. They map the unwinding and rewinding and unwinding again of tension, attention, and affection, telling the story-about-nothing of the first truly great collection of electronic love letters.

more here.

Alice Jones in The Independent:

Aziz Ansari is an American comedian and a star of the sitcom Parks and Recreation. In both guises he is obsessed with the opposite sex. As Tom in Parks and Rec, he is a relentless flirt whose pick-up technique is to hand out spare house keys to attractive women. In his stand-up, his main meat is dating and sex, marriage and children. Unmarried and childless, he doesn’t have much time for the latter two. In his 2013 live show, Buried Alive, he describes the idea of getting married – saying “I want to keep hanging out with you until one of us dies” – as “the most insane thing ever”, and mocks the proposal tales of his audience. As for children, when his friends send him baby pictures, he replies with a single word: unsubscribe.

It is all good fodder for stand-up and now, aged 32, good material for a book about love in the 21st century. The catalyst was a text message he sent to a girl he met at a party, which never got a reply. “Then I look on social media. I see her logged onto Facebook chat. Do I send a message? No! Don’t do that, Aziz. Be cool. Be cool. Later I check Instagram, and this clown Tanya is posting a photo of some deer. Too busy to write me back, but she has time post a photo of some deer?”

More here.