Nina Martyris in Lapham's Quarterly:

The watch never left his side. It was the first thing Gandhi reached for when he rose each morning at 4 a.m., and the last thing he checked before going to bed, often past midnight. He consulted it frequently through the day so as never to be late for an appointment. And, at that final moment, when three bullets from an assassin’s Beretta knocked him over, his 78-year-old body slumped to the ground, and the watch also stopped. Mahatma Gandhi’s Ingersoll pocket watch, costing just a dollar, was among the handful of material possessions he owned. Since he didn’t have a pocket to carry it in, he attached the watch to his dhoti with a safety pin and a loop of khadi string. The Ingersoll is displayed in a glass case at the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi alongside his bloodstained dhoti and shawl. Together, the three items form a striking metaphor of Kala, the Hindu god of time who is also the god of death.

Gandhi’s legendary punctuality had a utilitarian imperative—without it he would never have been able to answer the sacks of letters and streams of visitors that demanded his attention each day. But, as with everything he valued, it had a moral imperative as well. Simply put, time was tied to his philosophy of trusteeship: the belief that just as we do not own our wealth but are trustees of it—and thus have to use it wisely—similarly, we are trustees of our time. “You may not waste a grain of rice or a scrap of paper, and similarly a minute of your time,” he wrote. “It is not ours. It belongs to the nation and we are trustees for the use of it.” Consequently, any abuse of time was unethical. “One who does less than he can is a thief,” he wrote to a friend. “If we keep a timetable we can save ourselves from the last-mentioned sin indulged in even unconsciously.” While this focus on punctuality may portray Gandhi as skittish and anxious, the opposite was true: a timetable allowed him to give the issue at hand his tranquil and undivided attention.

More here.

Martin Chilton in The Telegraph:

In 2011 Penguin launched 50 Modern Mini Classics. Here is our guide to the books.

HELL SCREEN (1918) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

Performance

I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was blusters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouéttes, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.
.

by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996

Jeff Gordinier at The New York Times:

Like his friend and fellow Scotsman Don Paterson, Robertson hasn’t yet crossed over into the realm of mainstream adoration that Ireland’s Seamus Heaney enjoyed among American readers, but that’s probably only a matter of time. He is not hip, and I mean that as a compliment. His work is accessible without being dopey, traditional without making him look like a fogy, and utterly free of fashionable snark. And somehow, the visceral language of a Robin Robertson poem has a way of feeling simultaneously luxurious and spartan. To put it bluntly, he writes lines that you want to read again and again: “He wore fish-gutter’s gloves to pick brambles,” and “the forest is triggered and tripwired,” and “a dab of blood on her cheek / from a rabbit or a deer.” In fact, he has such a deft hand that when his poetry takes a turn for the gory, as in “The Halving,” where he conveys the act and the aftermath of a median sternotomy, or “The Flaying of Marsyas,” his retelling of a scene of torture from Ovid, the gruesomeness can be hard to bear.

In “The Long Home” Robertson captures the atmosphere of a sleepy, crepuscular Aberdeen bar with such cinematic attention to detail that you half expect to see a boom mike hovering a few inches above the scene:

The firewood’s sap

buzzing like a trapped fly,

the granular crackle of a Green Final

folded and unfolded,

the sound of the coals

unwrapping themselves like sweets.

He only looked up when the barman

poured a bucketful of ice

into the sink, like a tremendous

burst of applause.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

In a 1998 piece in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnick described Houellebecq's literary intentions this way: “There are certain books — sardonic and acutely pessimistic — that systematically affront all our current habits of living, and treat our presumptions of mind as the delusions of the cretinous.”

The idea, in other words, is to make a mockery of our hypocrisies, to show us not as flawed but fatally self-deluded, the creators of a useless culture built on corrupt pieties.

“What I think, fundamentally,” he told the Paris Review in 2010, “is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes…. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values.”

In “Submission,” these disasters have to do with the conflict between religious and secular values. “More and more people,” he told the Telegraph this week, before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, “can’t stand living without God.”

more here.

Samuel Moyn in Dissent:

A powerful wave of historians insist, however, that federalism was no flash in the pan. They contend that the nation-state was not inevitable, especially when it was time for France to decolonize in Africa. These historians have presented tremendous evidence of what some call a “federal moment”—one which, thanks to the distended process of decolonization, lasted surprisingly long into postwar history. Frederick Cooper is the leader of the group, but several other historians like Todd Shepard and Gary Wilder have buttressed his findings. The implications of their way of thinking are profound. After millennia of imperial arrangements that incorporated different peoples into the same polity, Cooper and others say, there is no reason to regard the nation-state of our time as much more than a historical accident and political mistake—one that perhaps ought to be undone.

In an era of revulsion towards nation-states, and especially nation-states in postcolonial circumstances, we can appreciate why the story of federalism might be worth recalling. Is there anything else besides the nation that otherwise implacable enemies—liberals, Marxists, and postcolonialists—can more easily agree about, if only to agree in what they hate? The nation-state has always been exclusionary and has often been violent, offending the cosmopolitanism of liberals and the desire of Marxists for solidarity beyond borders. The nation-state has also been a severe disappointment to postcolonialists, who believe that new nations succeeded mainly in creating new elites and perpetuating the suffering of their populations at large.

However, for the history of federalism to be more than trivia, it has to be shown that it was actually possibile and that it might have yielded better results than the nation-state. Neo-federalist historians rarely take it upon themselves to solve what ought to be the central puzzle: why did the nation-state model win out, when the alternatives were supposedly so compelling?

Read the rest here.

Ferdinando Giugliano at the Financial Times:

Ever since the business cycle replaced the seasons as the prime driver of economic life, mankind has learnt to adapt to the inevitability of booms and busts. Yet, just as our farming ancestors struggled to cope with extreme weather, large-scale financial crises have repeatedly caught industrial and postindustrial societies off guard. Policy makers have had to dig deep into the past for lessons as they sought to contain bank runs and fight soaring unemployment.

The Great Recession has been no exception. After the largely benign economic fluctuations of the 1990s and early 2000s, central bankers were stunned by the financial crisis that struck in 2007-08. Their immediate instinct was to look back 80 years, to the upheavals of the Great Depression.

In Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that knowledge of what happened in the 1930s has been a mixed blessing for today’s policy makers. Hindsight allowed politicians and central bankers to avoid many of the errors made by their predecessors, sparing the world a more dramatic crisis. But Eichengreen also believes that the success of the initial response meant the reform effort stopped halfway. This has left the west vulnerable to a new financial shock.

more here.

Erik B. Steiner in Wired:

A few weeks ago, I asked the internet to guess how many coins were in a huge jar. For more than 27 years, my parents had saved their spare change. My mother recently trucked the whole load to a bank to cash in, and in so doing finally learned the stockpile’s actual value, or at least the value as calculated by that particular coin-counting machine. The update from Mom got me wondering: Might someone be able to guess that amount? What about our collective estimate—is the crowd really as wise as some say it is?

The mathematical theory behind this kind of estimation game is apparently sound. That is, the mean of all the estimates will be uncannily close to the actual value, every time. James Surowiecki’s best-selling book, Wisdom of the Crowd, banks on this principle, and details several striking anecdotes of crowd accuracy. The most famous is a 1906 competition in Plymouth, England to guess the weight of an ox. As reported by Sir Francis Galton in a letter to Nature, no one guessed the actual weight of the ox, but the average of all 787 submitted guesses was exactly the beast’s actual weight.

Galton, who also happens to be the inventor of eugenics, was shocked to find such value in “democratic judgment.”

The notion that the hive is more intelligent than the individuals comprising it is a seductive one, and a keystone of today’s bottom-up Big Data revolution. It’s democratic ideology, open-source goodness, the “invisible hand,” and New Age humility all wrapped into a big networked hug.

But is it true?

More here. By the way, I was one of the people who took part in the experiment. Below are emails between Erik and me. I didn't do so good! 🙂

Read more »

Carl Zimmer in This View of Life:

The vinegar worm (officially known as Caenorhabditis elegans) is about as simple as an animal can be. When this soil-dwelling nematode reaches its adult size, it measures a millimeter from its blind head to its tapered tail. It contains only a thousand cells in its entire body. Your body, by contrast, is made of 36 trillion cells. Yet the vinegar worm divides up its few cells into the various parts you can find in other animals like us, from muscles to a nervous system to a gut to sex organs.

In the early 1960s, a scientist named Sydney Brenner fell in love with the vinegar worm’s simplicity. He had decided to embark on a major study of humans and other animals. He wanted to know how our complex bodies develop from a single cell. He was also curious as to how neurons wired into nervous systems that could perceive the outside world and produce quick responses to keep animals alive. Scientists had studied these two questions for decades, but they still knew next to nothing about the molecules involved. When Brenner became acquainted with the vinegar worm in the scientific literature, he realized it could help scientists find some answers.

Its simplicity was what made it so enticing. Under a microscope, scientists could make out every single cell in the worm’s transparent body. It would breed contentedly in a lab, requiring nothing but bacteria to feed on. Scientists could search for mutant worms that behaved in strange ways, and study them to gain clues to how their mutations to certain genes steered them awry.

Brenner’s instinct proved correct. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz for their research on the vinegar worm. Other scientists have done pioneering work on the animal as well, with over 22,000 papers published on it over the past five decades. Today, they show no signs of slowing down.

But something fascinating unfolded along the way.

More here.

Darhil Crooks, creative director at The Atlantic:

On January 7, 12 people were brutally murdered in Paris, including journalists, editors, and illustrators. Along with the brave staff of Charlie Hebdo, freedom of expression itself was attacked that day, and, in France and elsewhere, it remains under threat. We reached out to some of our contributors and asked them to articulate their reactions to this assault the best way they know how: through illustration. This gallery is dedicated to the people who lost their lives this week.

More here.

David Ferguson in Raw Story:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that Americans are now statistically more likely to be killed by a gun than in a car accident.

The Economist reported Friday that death by cars in this country is on the decline. Safety technology continues to improve, states and municipalities have enacted tougher seatbelt laws and fewer young people are driving, which means that streets and highways in the U.S. are safer than ever.

Deaths by gunshot, however, are on a slight increase in the U.S., meaning that currently, Americans are slightly more likely to be killed by bullets — whether through suicide, accidents or domestic violence — than in a road accident.

The Center for American Progress released a report last year saying that soon the two lines would intersect for people 25 and under, but now the Bloomberg News has released its own numbers, which indicate that gun deaths have overtaken road accidents as a cause of death for the whole population, regardless of age.

More here.

Zephyr Teachout in The New York Times:

Steven Brill is not easily intimidated. The founder of Court TV and Brill’s Content, among many other ventures, Brill likes to dive deeply and quickly into complicated national policy issues — public education, health care — that he, by his own admission, knows relatively little about when he begins. This is his great appeal and can be a great frustration. It makes him vulnerable to the charisma of his sources, as was apparent in his 2011 book, “Class Warfare,” in which he seemed dazzled by individuals involved in privatizing public education, while he largely ignored the existing research.

But in Brill’s new book, “America’s Bitter Pill,” his fresh, outsider curiosity makes him a superb guide to the maze of issues in American health care and health care reform. He breaks down insider language, asks fundamental and surprising questions, and leaves the reader — at least this one — full of more questions yet with a much clearer map of the lines of debate. You may not be persuaded by his conclusions, but you’ll emerge with a broader understanding of the characters and questions shaping our health care system.

More here.

We Sinful Women

.
It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

who don’t sell our lives
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.

It is we sinful women
while those who sell the harvests of our bodies
become exalted
become distinguished
become the just princes of the material world.

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
up against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find that tongues which could speak have been severed.

It is we sinful women.
Now, even if the night gives chase
these eyes shall not be put out.
For the wall which has been razed
don’t insist now on raising it again.

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

who don’t sell our bodies
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.
.

by Kishwar Naheed
from We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry
The Women’s Press Ltd, London, 1991,
translation: Rukhsana Ahmad

Pico Iyer at Lapham's Quarterly:

From the moment westerners began living in Bali, soon after World War I, they sent back two messages, more or less contradictory: first, they were no longer foreign—they had gone native, and felt wonderfully at home in Eden; second, the rest of us would always remain outsiders, the gates to the garden having closed behind them. By 1930, Hickman Powell, a reporter from Duluth, was entitling his book on Bali The Last Paradise; soon thereafter, the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, author of Island of Bali, was wondering if Paradise was lost when its denizens began wearing shorts. Here was a truly unfallen place, every newcomer seemed to report, which would fall as soon as the next newcomer disembarked.

This is the point of the foreign. We don’t travel halfway across the world to find the same things we could have seen at home. Those who undertake long and dangerous journeys have every incentive in stressing their discovery of a world far better than the one they left behind.Paul Gauguin became a “true savage, a real Maori,” he wrote, after he traveled deep into the jungles of Polynesia (having found his first port of call, Papeete, a place polluted by “the absurdities of civilization”). His outsider’s appeal in the South Seas put to shame his Everyman status as an artist of uncertain prospects back in Paris.

more here.

Charles Baxter at The New York Review of Books:

For adolescents, something about horror never goes out of style. They often feel an excited disgust upon learning how things really are, and their disgust is merely a notch away from the more thoroughgoing pleasures of horror. It is the closest they can come to the sublime.

Every teacher of creative writing in every American college and university is no doubt familiar with the tendency of young people, usually young men, to concoct gruesome narratives that take place in an edgily unspecified locale. Mayhem, awkward sentences, paper-thin characterizations, and complicated weaponry vie for the reader’s attention. But always there are the aliens, organic or machinelike or both, and always the accompanying rage and revulsion.

The authors of these horrific fictions sit in the back of the classroom avoiding eye contact, rarely speaking to anybody. Shabbily dressed, fidgety, tattooed, hysterically sullen, they are bored by realism and reality when not actively hostile to both. When asked about their reading, they will gamely mumble the usual list of names: Neal Stephenson, Stephen King, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick. But the name that I have heard most often mentioned in these litanies is that of H.P. Lovecraft, whom they revere. He is their spirit-guide.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Between autumns of 1942 and 1943, the English critic Cyril Connolly took a break from writing articles and set out to write a masterpiece. This, he wrote on the first page of his book, is the true function of a writer. Nothing else is of consequence. “How few writers will admit it,” he wrote “or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! …. Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment.”

“Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best,” wrote Connolly, “and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.”

It was agreed that Connolly’s previous books — a satirical novel about the decadent life in the South of France, a collection of essays — had not been masterpieces. For his third attempt, Connolly had three little notebooks and a “private grief” to help him. What makes a masterpiece, wrote Connolly, are the following: A love of life and nature; an interest in, mingled with contempt for humanity; and a lack of belief in the idea of progress.

more here.