Tom Whipple in More Intelligent Life:

IN AN UNDERGROUND vault beneath a hill overlooking Paris, behind a steel door whose lock requires three keys—only two of which are in France—and protected by three glass covers, lives the kilogram. Not a kilogram but The kilogram. For the past 125 years, this sleek cylinder of platinum-iridium has defined mass for the world. The vault is buried under the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), a whitewashed stately home a discreet distance from Paris, with extensive gardens for physicists to roam in and views across a grand meander of the Seine. The BIPM exists to control, define and distribute the Standard International (SI) units by which science—and indeed non-science—makes its measurements: the second, the metre, the mole, the candela, the ampere, the kelvin and the kilogram. You might call it the spiritual centre of the metric system—if the rational world of revolutionary France’s metrification programme allowed room for anything as irrational as the spiritual.

…THE KILOGRAM AS we know it was created at the first General Conference on Weights and Measures, held in France in 1889 and attended by 20 of the world’s more science-minded nations. As the Enlightenment progressed, spreading knowledge and developing the modern empirical methods, it became clear that, for science to work, its practitioners had to agree on units. If an experiment in Rio de Janeiro used a gram of catalyst heated to 75 degrees, someone repeating that experiment in Tokyo needed to know that a gram and a degree meant the same on both sides of the Pacific. Following almost a century of discussion, the conference defined the key units of measurement, and the kilogram was forged and incarcerated. In the years since 1889, around 100 daughter kilograms have been made, some in platinum-iridium, others in stainless steel. Most have been distributed around the world to provide national mass standards. Six are kept here in Paris, to be used as a check on the main kilogram.

More here.

Rhubarb

My Clan Mother is the great she-devil
of the forest. She stands twenty feet
over fields of wild rhubarb, Dutch cabbage.

Her face is black, blacker than the blue
of night where stars shed tears into rivers,
lakes, onto the windscreen of my car.

If I weren’t in such a hurry
I would pull over, wait for her
to pluck me from the hard shoulder.

Together we could hunt boar
in the forest and at night stay dry
beneath the cauls of newborn children.
.

by Celia de Freine
from Faoi Chabáistí is Ríonacha
publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2001

Ben Zimmer in the Wall Street Journal:

What happens when a dictionary adds the word “clickbait” to its pages and publicizes the news with a bit of clickbait?

Last week, Merriam-Webster said it had added 1,700 new entries to its Unabridged Dictionary. It defined “clickbait,” one of the words featured, as “something (such as a headline) designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink, especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest.”

And in a move that poked fun at the conventions of clickbait itself, Merriam-Webstershared a link to the announcement on Twitter with the come-on, “You won’t believe what we just added to the dictionary!” (Other additions include “emoji,” “meme” and “jegging.”)

Not everyone was amused.

More here.

Kyle Gann at The New York Times:

The “making” of a composer is the real subject of “Words Without Music.” Glass outlines his years before the successes of his operas “Satyagraha” (1980) and “Akhnaten” (1983) in loving detail; his life and work since then — including his film scores for Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Errol Morris and others — is skimmed through, with all-too-quick descriptions of the remarkable (and mostly nonfamous) people he has known.

One struggles to imagine how any human could have kept his schedule in the late ’50s and early ’60s: composing from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., loading trucks in the evenings, practicing piano several hours a day, attending classes, taking music and yoga lessons, going to movies and art exhibitions with friends, driving a motorcycle cross-country. Side stories feature cameos by figures one might not associate with Glass. He shared an apartment with the blind composer Moondog, who dressed as a Viking and played his ­compositions on the streets of Midtown Manhattan. And he recounts inventing the “Hardart,” a keyboard of toy instruments, for the fictional P. D. Q. Bach’s ­Concerto for Horn and Hardart, written by his Juilliard chum Peter Schickele — and making it a transposing instrument in the key of E so Schickele would have an added challenge.

more here.

James Campbell at The Observer:

While studying in Utrecht in 1764, the trainee lawyer and diarist James Boswell met a young woman called Belle de Zuylen – known as Zélide in Boswell’s journal – a novelist, religious doubter and amorous adventurer, with a lightning mind which “flashes with so much brilliance [it] may scorch”. Boswell was in search of a wife, and Belle, he assumed, would be in need of a husband.

Despite being rebuffed, he persisted in his attentions, finally applying, not to Belle herself, but to her father. The “terms of the treaty”, as Robert Zaretsky puts it in Boswell’s Enlightenment, were “as onerous as they were outlandish”. As Mrs Boswell, Belle would swear never to see, or write to, another man, not to publish any literary works without her husband’s approval and, in the words of the proposal, “never to speak against the established religion or customs of the country she might find herself in”, which was most likely to be Scotland. It appears that Belle’s father passed on the invitation because when Boswell tried again a year later, Belle herself replied that all she knew of Scotland was that it produced “decidedly despotic husbands and humble, simple wives who blushed and looked at their lords before opening their mouths”.

more here.

William H. Pritchard at The Boston Globe:

A new book by Helen Vendler is always occasion for gratitude, since for more than 50 years she has provided us with the most exacting writing about poetry of any American critic. Even more welcome than the 27 essays on poets — all of them, except for Herman Melville, from the past century — is a 14-page introduction in which she accounts for her life as a critic. The principles under which she has operated are unqualifiedly stated, the major one being the “compulsion to explain the direct power of idiosyncratic style in conveying the import of poetry.” This means a distaste for considering poems “under gross thematic rubrics,” and a belief that, one poet, one poem, is superior to another, the critic’s job being among other things to demonstrate these distinctions in value.

Vendler’s learning has shown itself in books on Yeats, Wallace Stevens, George Herbert, Keats, Shakespeare, and Emily Dickinson. As with the poets she writes about, that learning is less traditional and scholarly than, in her words, “deeply etymological and architectonic.” She notes that historically, the academic profession of English as she knew it, while “not unfriendly” to literary criticism (the old battles between literary history and close reading having ended), was unfriendly to reviewing, considering it to be mere journalism. For Vendler, reviewing poetry — and with a single exception all her writing has been about poetry — was rather a chance to speak forcefully and originally about a contemporary poet, or to see an older one, like Melville, in a new perspective.

more here.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

Several years ago, Martin Amis chaired a literary festival panel on “The Crisis of American Fiction” with Richard Ford, Jay McInerney and Junot Díaz. I was in the audience, and halfway through the discussion leaned over to the person sitting next to me and said: “Clearly the crisis of American fiction is that there are no women in it.” It’s not just that there weren’t any women on the stage. In the entire discussion, which lasted nearly an hour, there was no mention of Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Proulx, Anne Tyler, Donna Tartt, Jhumpa Lahiri or any other contemporary female writer. A single reference to Eudora Welty was the only acknowledgment that women in the US have ever had anything to do with the world of letters. Díaz, near the end of the hour, made the point that the conversation had centred on white American males, but it was too little, too late,

…I would argue that is time for everyone, male and female, to sign up to a concerted campaign to redress the inequality. Last year a number of readers, critics and at least one literary journal, the Critical Flame, signed up to a “Year of Reading Women” (for the Critical Flame it was female writers and writers of colour). Why not take it a step further? Why not have a Year of Publishing Women: 2018, the centenary of women over the age of 30 getting the vote in the UK, seems appropriate. Of course, there will be many details to work out, but the basic premise of my “provocation” is that none of the new titles published in that year should be written by men. I’ve been considering literary fiction so far but other groups within fiction – and non-fiction – publishing could gain from signing up too. The knock-on effect of a Year of Publishing Women would be evident in review pages and blogs, in bookshop windows and front-of-store displays, in literature festival lineups, in prize submissions. We must learn from the suffragettes that it’s not always necessary or helpful to be polite about our campaigns.

More here.

Bas Dreisinger in The New York Times:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson’s ribald, incisive novel “Loving Day.” Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it’s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: “I look at the buckling floors. I look at the cracks in all the walls, the evidence of a foundation crumbling beneath us. I smell the char of the fire, the sweet reek of mold, the insult of mouse urine. I see a million things that have to be fixed, restored, corrected, each one impossible and each task mandatory for me to escape again.” The house is haunted. There are ghosts, mostly of neighborhood crackheads — that is, if we take Warren’s word for it; our narrator’s psyche is as wrecked as his inheritance. An “inept” comic book artist — “My work is too realistic, too sober” — he has moved back to America from Wales after a failed business and broken marriage. He’s wrecked, too, by his liminal ­racial status: His father was an Irishman, his mother was black and he comfortably claims neither — call him a man divided against himself. “I am a racial optical illusion,” he says.

Warren lives and breathes what W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness, by which the American black person is “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.” Except Warren’s body is white, making things even thornier; he’s perpetually performing a black identity that isn’t written all over his face — as when he describes “letting my black voice come out, to compensate for my ambiguous appearance. Let the bass take over my tongue. Let the South of Mom’s ancestry inform the rhythm of my words in a way few white men could pull off.” In “Loving Day,” Johnson, author of the graphic novel “Incognegro” and the novel “Pym,” delivers an extended literary metaphor about race and mixed-race in America. It’s a semi-autobiographical one — he has called the book “my coming out as a mulatto” — that can at times feel belabored, but the novel ultimately triumphs because it is razor-sharp, sci-fi-flavored satire in the vein of George Schuyler, playfully evocative of black folklore à la Joel Chandler Harris — yet it never feels like a cold theoretical exercise. “Loving Day” is that rare mélange: cerebral comedy with pathos.

More here.

Thomas Piketty reviews Anthony B. Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done?, in the NYRB (Keystone/Getty Images):

Atkinson here makes two especially innovative suggestions. On the one hand, he calls for the establishment of a national savings program allowing each depositor to receive a guaranteed return on her capital (below a certain threshold of individual capital). Given the drastic inequality of access to fair financial returns, particularly as a consequence of the scale of the investment with which one begins (a situation that has in all likelihood been aggravated by the financial deregulation of the last few decades), this proposal strikes me as particularly sound. In Atkinson’s view, it is intimately bound up with the larger issue of a new approach to public property and the possible development of a new form of sovereign wealth fund. The public authority cannot resign itself merely to go on piling up debt and endlessly privatizing everything it possesses.

On the other hand, alongside this national guaranteed and insured savings program, Atkinson proposes establishing an “inheritance for all” program. This would take the form of a capital endowment assigned to each young citizen as he or she reached adulthood, at the age of eighteen. All such endowments would be financed by estate taxes and a more progressive tax structure. In concrete terms, Atkinson estimates that, with current revenue from the British estate tax, it would be possible to finance a capital endowment of slightly more than £5,000 for each young adult. He calls for a far-reaching reform of the system of inheritance taxation, and especially for greater progressivity with regard to the larger estates. (He proposes an upper rate of 65 percent, as with the income tax.) These reforms would make it possible to finance a capital endowment on the order of £10,000 per young adult.

More here.

Curtis Brown in Aeon:

No. There isn’t. It might be a bit more complicated than that but not much. I was about to write “child molestation” when I remembered the comic novel generally regarded as America’s greatest after Huck Finn(which, for its part, joked about slavery). “I am now faced with the distasteful task of recording a definite drop in Lolita’s morals,” says its narrator at one point, when his 12-year-old stepdaughter-cum­-mistress demands a raise in her weekly allowance. “Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters.”

Laugh not, indeed, for there is something dark at the heart of laughter. Like sex, it is impossible to morally zone and regulate, but we can’t stop trying. The most familiar law is that of the decent interval: “comedy equals tragedy plus time.” It’s sometimes attributed to Woody Allen, and it does actually feature in his tragicomic Crimes and Misdemeanors. What people forget is that he put it in the mouth of Lester, the TV producer and brother-in-law — superbly brought to life by Alan Alda — who is probably the single most fatuous ass in the entire Allen canon. Like everything else Lester says, “tragedy plus time” is smug, pernicious nonsense. Timing is everything in comedy. But whatever else it means, it doesn’t mean waiting around until the coast is clear.

More here.

Claire Preston at Literary Review:

When Thomas Browne, physician and natural philosopher, went hunting in the 1650s in books, on beaches, and in hedgerows for quincunxes in nature and culture, he discovered them in the structure of pine cones, the battle formations of the Greeks, the angles of incidence of light upon the retina, and the planting patterns of orchards. It turns out the quincunx (imagine the corners of a diamond with a dot in the middle) is everywhere. Three and a half centuries later, on a psychogeographic Brownean pilgrimage between Bury and Norwich, Hugh Aldersey-Williams found in those same hedgerows quincuncial hubcaps, which in turn prompted a meditation on that most modern of molecules, the pentagonal buckminsterfullerene. Browne's apparently eccentric observational exercise amounts to a rule in nature, one he was able to identify with an indifferent set of magnifying lenses, the naked eye, and shanks's pony. The instruments were primitive, but his slender quincuncial essay The Garden of Cyrus (1658) (its first known reader called it 'no ordinary book') epitomises the imagination of this most intellectually open and adventurous of Renaissance polymaths.

Browne's much more influential book was a massive encyclopaedia of human misunderstanding, a register of vulgar errors that catalogues epidemical false thinking, as well as the extent of his remarkable curiosity. The chiefest of pseudodoxies is a belief in whatever is generally believed: for us, that's quack diets, alien abduction, demonic possession, conspiracy theories of all kinds; for him, it's nonsense from folk wisdom, Aristotle, and the Fathers of the Church. Is it true that 'Crystal is nothing else but Ice strongly congealed'? Obviously not, he answers – the meanest understanding shows that it doesn't melt in hot weather and doesn't float in water, despite the assertions of Pliny, Ezekiel, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Do chameleons really live on air alone?

more here.

Jeremy Treglown at the Times Literary Supplement:

The first person to communicate to a global audience the experience of being in a nuclear holocaust did not come from Japan, where the misnamed Civil Information and Education Section of General MacArthur’s occupying army exerted a muddled but intimidating censorship. Nor was he a scientist, though researchers had poured into the area. Instead, the news was brought to the world by an American Wasp in his late twenties: tall, handsome, sporty, popular, a member of the most exclusive of Yale’s secret societies, married to a rich ex-girlfriend of John F. Kennedy. John Hersey told the story in the New Yorker, most of whose readers were either a bit like him, or aspired to be. Published in August 1946, soon after the first anniversary of the bombing, that issue of the magazine famously broke precedent by containing – ads and listings apart – only his 30,000-word article. It quickly sold out. Albert Einstein, who had already begun his anti-nuclear-proliferation pressure group the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, ordered 1,000 copies to distribute but had to make do with facsimiles. The article was reprinted in scores of newspapers and magazines, published as a book and translated all over the world. (Japan, though, because of the censorship, had to wait a couple of years.) How did Hersey come to write it?

Some of the answers are to be found in a fat cardboard box normally kept in a secure, temperature-controlled warehouse in Hamden, Connecticut. This is the depository of much of the vast collection of rare books and manuscripts held by Yale’s Beinecke Library, a beautiful building, though one which Czesław Miłosz, whose own papers are there, compared to a monumental tomb. In a sunken quadrangle outside the reading room stands a three-piece white marble sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, who like almost all other Japanese Americans spent the Second World War in an internment camp. His Zen-influenced “The Garden (Pyramid, Sun and Cube)” symbolizes what the catalogue of Yale’s public art calls a balance of cosmic forces and a synthesis of East and West. A similar synthesis is found in box 37 of the Hersey Papers.

more here.

Hannah Gersen at The Millions:

In 1940, Joseph Mitchell published a New Yorker profile of “Bowery celebrity” Mazie P. Gordon, a career ticket-taker at the Venice movie theater whose charity toward drunken bums was as legendary as it was mysterious. Seventy years later, the profile came to the attention of novelistJami Attenberg when her friend John McCormick named his bar Saint Mazie.

“He said she was the closest thing to a saint that he’d ever heard of,” Attenberg said. “So then I became interested in her, too, and did a bunch of research on her — although there’s not actually a lot to do.”

I met Attenberg in her Williamsburg apartment, a loft with an excellent view, a minimal kitchen, and a whole lot of books. Her dog, Sid, sat at our feet for the majority of the interview, and if you follow Attenberg on any of her online platforms (Twitter, TinyLetter, Tumblr, etc.), both Attenberg and Sid are pretty much as advertised: friendly, warm, curious, and easygoing. The only time Attenberg seemed even the slightest bit taken aback was when I asked her what made her think there was a novel in Mitchell’s profile “Mazie.”

“I thought there were like 10 novels in there! I mean, she was like, friends with Chinese gangsters. That is a novel. Like, right there. All of Joseph Mitchell’s work is one massive writing prompt. He’s so good at the most precise details and leaving a little mysterious edge to everything. So I read that and it was like, complete lift-off.”

more here.

Amanda Gefter profiles Christopher Fuchs in Quanta Magazine (Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine):

Christopher Fuchs describes physics as “a dynamic interplay between storytelling and equation writing. Neither one stands alone, not even at the end of the day.” And indeed Fuchs, a physicist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has a radical story to tell. The story is called QBism, and it goes something like this.

Once upon a time there was a wave function, which was said to completely describe the state of a physical system out in the world. The shape of the wave function encodes the probabilities for the outcomes of any measurements an observer might perform on it, but the wave function belonged to nature itself, an objective description of an objective reality.

Then Fuchs came along. Along with the researchers Carlton Caves and Rüdiger Schack, he interpreted the wave function’s probabilities as Bayesian probabilities — that is, as subjective degrees of belief about the system. Bayesian probabilities could be thought of as gambling attitudes for placing bets on measurement outcomes, attitudes that are updated as new data come to light. In other words, Fuchs argued, the wave function does not describe the world — it describes the observer. “Quantum mechanics,” he says, “is a law of thought.”

Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism as Fuchs now calls it, solves many of quantum theory’s deepest mysteries. Take, for instance, the infamous “collapse of the wave function,” wherein the quantum system inexplicably transitions from multiple simultaneous states to a single actuality. According to QBism, the wave function’s “collapse” is simply the observer updating his or her beliefs after making a measurement. Spooky action at a distance, wherein one observer’s measurement of a particle right here collapses the wave function of a particle way over there, turns out not to be so spooky — the measurement here simply provides information that the observer can use to bet on the state of the distant particle, should she come into contact with it. But how, we might ask, does her measurement here affect the outcome of a measurement a second observer will make over there? In fact, it doesn’t. Since the wavefunction doesn’t belong to the system itself, each observer has her own. My wavefunction doesn’t have to align with yours.

More here.