Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Highway 1, looks like any other highway in the world. This fact alone is disconcerting. The road to Jerusalem should be special. Somewhere deep down I suppose I wanted it to be a dirt road, a cobblestone road, anything but a normal highway. I even fantasized that the ascent from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would not happen by means of a road at all. It would just happen. In reality, it is a highway. A highway filled with too many cars and bastard truck drivers probing the limits of vehicular stability and good sense.

About two thirds of the way up to Jerusalem, however, an interesting and unusual sight does present itself. It is the sight of abandoned vehicles along the side of the road. They aren’t normal vehicles, passenger cars or trucks. The vehicles are painted in the telltale green that only gets slapped on things owned by the military. You don’t get much time to inspect these military vehicles as you drive by on the highway. It is hard to guess their purpose, though it looks like they’ve been there for a while, remnants from something that happened in the first half of the 20th century.

My friend Ori, who was driving me from Ben-Gurion airport outside of Tel Aviv, explained that the vehicles were remnants of the military convoy that broke the Arab siege of Jerusalem during the War of Independence in 1948. The convoy was led by an American general, Mickey Marcus, Ori told me. “We call him the first Israeli general—aluf in Hebrew—since biblical days, since Joshua blowing his trumpet at the walls of Jericho.” The aluf, Ori said, was shot dead in the final days of the campaign. But the convoy made it through to Jerusalem.

For a week or so, while exploring Jerusalem old and new, the sight of those abandoned military vehicles along the road sat unbothered in the back of my brain. Then, I saw them again on a trip back down to Tel Aviv to visit friends. I began to understand what had nagged at me when I saw the vehicles the first time.

Half-destroyed military vehicles do not normally sit alongside a modern highway. These vehicles are monuments to the military struggles that attend the founding of the modern state of Israel. Such monuments might, in another country, come with an acknowledgment. No such luck in Israel.

More here.

Polls for the UK election were all very off. Ben Lauderdale offers some possible reasons in FiveThirtyEight:

The only thing we can say on our behalf is that in comparative terms, our forecast was middle of the pack, as no one had a good pre-election forecast. Of course the national exit poll, while not as close to the target as in 2010, was far better than any pre-election forecast.

Steve Fisher at ElectionsEtc came closest to the seat result: his 95 percent prediction intervals nearly included the Conservative seat total, although they missed the Liberal Democrat interval substantially, just as ours did. Several other forecasts were further away than we were.

The most obvious problem for all forecasters was that the polling average had Labour and the Conservatives even on the night before the election. This was not just the average of the polls, it was the consensus. Nearly every pollster’s final poll placed the two parties within 1 percentage point of each other. Based on the polling average being level, we predicted Conservatives to win by 1.6 percentage points on the basis of the historical tendency of polls to overstate changes from the last election. This kind of adjustment is helpful for understanding how the 2010 result deviated from the national polls on election day, as well as the infamous 1992 U.K. polling disaster, when the polls had the two parties even before the election and the Tories won by 7.5 percentage points. The Conservative margin over Labour will be smaller than that when the 2015 totals are finalized, but not a lot smaller (currently it is 6.4 with all but one constituency declared). So our adjustment was in the right direction, but it was not nearly large enough. Part of the reason Fisher did better is that he applied a similar adjustment, but made it party-specific, leading to a larger swingback for the Tories than for other parties because of that 1992 result.

Before the election, we calculated expectations for three measures of performance — absolute seat error, individual seat error, and Brier score — based on the uncertainty in our forecast. (More about how those three errors are defined can be found in this article.) We have now calculated each of these quantities for our forecasts, given the final results. We did not do as well as we had expected to do by any of these measures. Our absolute seat error was 105 . We incorrectly predicted 63 individual seats (out of 632 in England, Wales and Scotland). Our Brier score was 96 (the best possible score would have been 0, and the worst 632). Not good.

More here.

Richard Seymour in Jacobin (photo Ben Stanstall / AFP):

This is not 1992. In a way, it’s far worse than that. Imagine this: Labour has given the Conservatives their “Portillo moment,” with Ed Ballslosing his seat in Morley and Outwood, not from incumbency but from opposition.

The perspective gets even worse when you look at the figures. Overall, the Tory vote has barely shifted from 36.1% to (on present counts) 36.8%. That is, the Tories have a bit more than a third of the vote, and fractionally more than the total with which they failed to win a parliamentary majority in 2010. This is not, chiefly, a Tory surge. In previous elections, historically, a vote share of this scale would have left the Tories on the opposition benches.

But Labour’s vote also flatlined, currently about 30.6%, compared to 29% in 2010 — which was its worst share of the vote since 1918. In key marginals, like Nuneaton, it barely made a dent. In some relatively safe Tory seats where it should have had a swing, like North Swindon (a safe Tory area since 2010 boundary changes), the Tories actually gained.

National turnout looks like it was about 66%, which is fractionally above the turnout in 2010, and most of that increase will have been in Scotland and certain UKIP hot spots like Thanet South. So, Labour has mobilized almost no one who hadn’t previously voted Labour during its worst election defeat since 1918.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are in the middle of a long-term crisis, neither has done anything to reverse that, and the question in this election was: whose crisis is worse?

More here. Also see here in Vox.

Simon Callow at The Spectator:

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great auteurs maudits of this century, Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein simply died young. Not Welles. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for cheap liquor (he, the great bon viveur; he, for whom the very word commercial was an insult when applied to film), he sent a pang through the world’s heart.

Pity, for the man who made Citizen Kane, three other masterpieces including the peerless Chimes at Midnight, and at least two lesser but exquisite short films? Pity, for the man who revolutionised radio, whose theatre productions have never been rivalled for audacity and innovation, whose acting performances in the few good films he made for other directors (The Third Man, Compulsion) will never be forgotten? Yes, pity for what might have been: the very thing that haunted Welles himself. ‘Considering what I thought of myself at 14, I’m a mess,’ he admitted. ‘I started at the top,’ he famously said, ‘and worked my way downwards.’

more here.

Robert T. Tally Jr. at the LA Review of Books:

Admittedly, I come to this as a notorious Orc-sympathizer, but I cannot bring myself to trust Galadriel, as well as the elves more generally. In my view, Galadriel has a rather ambiguous moral character. She is benevolent, to be sure, but her sense of good and evil rests on a dubious foundation, inasmuch as she perceives change itself as undesirable. For those beings who are not entirely satisfied with the status quo, Galadriel’s intentions may not be so noble, and her powers may well seem like forms of dark magic.

In my “Song of Saruman” essay, I suggested that the traitorous White Wizard was really an inverted Galadriel. When she refuses to take up the One Ring, she “passed the test,” whereas Saruman’s desire for power — even if it was for the power to do good — led him to become a Sauron-like villain. But lest we chalk up Galadriel’s noble choice to some inherent beatitude, thus denying how powerful the temptation really was and in turn robbing her of the truly heroic aspect of her refusal, we ought to remember that Galadriel is far more like Saruman, or even Sauron, than most Tolkien enthusiasts care to believe.

As we learn from her fascinating backstory, Galadriel came to Middle-earth as an unrepentant imperialist.

more here.

Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker:

Hayes is forty-three and lives in Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon. In 2010, his volume “Lighthead” won a National Book Award, and last year he received a MacArthur “genius” grant. He played basketball for Coker College, in South Carolina, where he was an Academic All-American, but he has the bounding imagination of someone fortified and defended, for years, by shyness. If you judge a poem by how big a chunk of reality it smuggles into language before returning it, transformed, you will have a hard time beating this catalogue from “Wigphrastic”:

Nonslip polyurethane patches, superfine lace,

Isis wigs, Cleopatra wigs, Big Booty Judy wigs

under the soft radar-streaked music of Klymaxx

singing, “The men all pause when I walked into the room.”

An ekphrastic poem is one that describes a work of art; “Wigphrastic” describes Ellen Gallagher’s “DeLuxe,” a portfolio of sixty works on paper that depict, among other things, vintage ads for hair straighteners and skin whiteners.

more here.

Canto 28 of the Inferno

I saw it, I’m sure, and I seem to see it still:
A body with no head that moved along,
moving no differently from all the rest;

he held his severed head up by it hair,
swinging it in one hand just like a lantern,
and as it looked at us it said: ‘Alas!’

Of his own self he made himself a light
and they were two in one and one in two.
How could this be? He who ordained it knows.
.

by Dante Alligieri
from The Inferno
translated by Mark Musa, 1971

Randy Kennedy in The New York Times:

VENICE — The 18th-century novelist William Beckford wrote that he couldn’t help thinking of this city’s most beloved sight, St. Mark’s Basilica, as a mosque, with its “pinnacles and semicircular arches” all “so oriental in appearance.” But despite the profound stamp that Islamic culture has left on Venice’s art and architecture over centuries, it remains one of the few prominent European cities without a mosque near its historic center, leaving Islamic residents who work there to pray in storerooms and shops amid the tourist crush. For the next seven months, however, Venice will find itself in the middle of the roiling debate about Islam’s place in Europe. On Friday, as part of the Venice Biennale, a former Catholic church in the Cannaregio neighborhood will open its doors as a functioning mosque, its Baroque walls adorned with Arabic script, its floor covered with a prayer rug angled toward Mecca and its crucifix mosaics hidden behind a towering mihrab, or prayer niche.

The transformation is the work of a Swiss-Icelandic artist, Christoph Büchel, who has become known for politically barbed provocations. But the mosque, which will serve as Iceland’s national pavilion during the Biennale, is a cultural symbol and a kind of ready-made sculpture conceived with the active involvement of leaders of the area’s Islamic population, which has been growing for many years. Against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia in Italy and fears, like those at full throttle in France, of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Muslim leaders in Venice said they saw the proposal to create a temporary mosque in the international spotlight of the Biennale as a perfect way to communicate their desire to more fully participate in the life of their city. “Sometimes you need to show yourself, to show that you are peaceful and that you want people to see your culture,” said Mohamed Amin Al Ahdab, president of the Islamic Community of Venice, which represents Muslims of about 30 nationalities living in greater Venice.

More here.

Mark Greif at n+1:

A SURPRISE OF BEING AROUND POLICE is how much they touch you. They touch you without consent and in both seemingly friendly and unfriendly ways. The friendly touch is the first surprise. A policeman allowing protesters to cross the street touches you on the arm or back as you cross. Face to face, police will put a hand on your shoulder, from the front, intimate as a dog putting his paw up. It is unnerving. Women say male police know very well how to touch, even in public sight, in ways that are professional and neutral, and also in ways that are humiliating and sexual, with no demonstrable distinction dividing the two. The police know, and you know. Like a reversal of electric polarity from protective to hostile, this conversion of mood does not only follow the policeman’s individual initiative. It traces something like an atmospheric charge among police in groups, their silent experience of a phenomenon, their habitual tactics in response.

In confrontations on a curb (when you stay on your sidewalk, because the public street is forbidden except to police), they may press lightly on your collarbone, “holding you back,” just measuring out the distance with their arms. You can even be held up in this way, if you relax.

more here.

Michael Schulman at The Believer:

In April 2013, Robert Black, a grad student at California State University, moved into a small apartment in South Pasadena. He and his wife of ten years had decided to split up, and he found himself spending much of that summer alone. He missed his kids: Hayley, Kieran, and Saer. “I needed something structured and regular in my life,” he recalled. On August 2, Black wrote a blog post entitled “On me in 3… 2… 1…” It was a line from the 1993 film Groundhog Day, which he had vowed to watch every day for a year.

The movie, if you’ve managed to miss it, follows a Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors, played with impeccable sourness by Bill Murray. While reporting on the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Phil gets trapped in a mysterious time loop that forces him to relive the same day over and over again. By the end of the film, he has learned to embrace humanity and the charm of small-town life, and has won the affection of his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell).

“Phil Connors,” Black wrote his first post, “is not only a great central character for a good comedy like this—not that there are many comedies like this—but he works as an everyman and he goes through all the emotions we all do every day of our lives. There is time in the film (not to mention the many parts of his journey we don’t see on screen) for joy, for sadness, for arrogance and humility, silliness and seriousness, flippancy and philosophy.”

more here.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto at Literary Review:

On the 'Golfing for Cats' principle, Noel Malcolm's publishers thought, presumably, that knights, corsairs, Jesuits and spies were saleable, whereas the real subject of Malcolm's new book, which might be expressed as 'A Reconstruction of the Political Activities of Members of Two Related Albanian Families in the Late Sixteenth-Century Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans', would be poor window-dressing. But good stories, well told, made bestsellers of The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. We can be honest about Agents of Empire without fear of impeding sales.

Malcolm's protagonists are the Bruni and Bruti dynasties, who came from Venice to settle in Ulcinj, a predominantly Albanian-speaking port on the Venetian-dominated fringe of the Adriatic, in what is now Montenegro. They inhabited and traversed a frontier zone, hovering between Ottoman and Venetian empires, Spanish and Italian spheres of influence, Christendom and Islam, Roman and Eastern Churches and Romance, Slavic, Albanian, Greek and Turkish language areas. From a historian's point of view, it was a great place to live – one of those fateful peripheries where states and civilisations rub against each other and generate seismic effects. Malcolm was wise to look to this region for better, more vivid and more revealing insights than one gets from the usual metropolitan skylines. From the dwellers' perspective, however, the homeland of the Bruni and Bruti was dangerous, unstable and racked by war, want, plague and piracy. To Malcolm's indefatigable scholarship it yields stories of triumph and tragedy as compelling as any in fiction.

more here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

Gray was killed by a novel method: he was driven while black. Three police officers on bike patrol saw him at 8.30 a.m. on 12 April. It’s not clear why he was a person of interest, other than that he was a young black male. They made eye contact, and he ran, for reasons unknown. The officers arrested him and placed him face down. Unable to breathe, he asked for an inhaler, to no avail. The officers found a sliding knife on him, which is legal to carry, but charged him with possession of a switchblade, which isn’t. He was then shackled, placed in the back of a police wagon and driven without a seatbelt, as required by department regulations. By 8.59 a.m., he had suffered a major injury to his spinal cord. Again, he said that he couldn’t breathe and asked for medical assistance. The police waited another 25 minutes before calling for a medic. Gray died in hospital a week later.

This account of Gray’s killing was presented, in riveting, forensic detail, by Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, at a press conference on 1 May. Toward the end of her 16-minute speech, Mosby, a 35-year-old African-American woman, did the unthinkable: she charged six police officers with crimes ranging from murder to involuntary manslaughter. She promised justice to Gray’s parents and pleaded for peace so that she could do her work. Her press conference was as swift as it was bold. When someone dies in their custody, the Maryland police are not required to say anything until ten days later, a law that has been widely criticised by local politicians. Mosby beat the police to it, and made plain that it was unacceptable for them to leak details of the investigation. Black Baltimore, expecting an official whitewash, was electrified.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

A study tying the aging process to the deterioration of tightly packaged bundles of cellular DNA could lead to methods of preventing and treating age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, scientists at the Salk Institute and the Chinese Academy of Science note in a paper published Thursday, April 30 in the journal Science. They found that the genetic mutations underlying Werner syndrome, a disorder that leads to premature aging and death, resulted in the deterioration of bundles of DNA known as heterochromatin. The discovery, made possible through a combination of cutting-edge stem cell and gene-editing technologies, could lead to ways of countering age-related physiological declines by preventing or reversing damage to heterochromatin.

Werner syndrome is a genetic disorder that causes people to age more rapidly than normal. It affects around one in every 200,000 people in the U.S. People with the disorder suffer age-related diseases early in life, including cataracts, type 2 diabetes, hardening of the arteries, osteoporosis and cancer, and most die in their late 40s or early 50s. The disease is caused by a mutation to the Werner syndrome RecQ helicase-like gene (the “WRN gene”), which generates the WRN protein. Previous studies showed that the normal form of the protein is an enzyme that maintains the structure and integrity of a person’s DNA. When the protein is mutated in Werner syndrome it disrupts the replication and repair of DNA and the expression of genes, which was thought to cause premature aging. However, it was unclear exactly how the mutated WRN protein disrupted these critical cellular processes. “Our study connects the dots between Werner syndrome and heterochromatin disorganization, outlining a molecular mechanism by which a genetic mutation leads to a general disruption of cellular processes by disrupting epigenetic regulation,” says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a senior author on the paper. “More broadly, it suggests that accumulated alterations in the structure of heterochromatin may be a major underlying cause of cellular aging. This [raises] the question of whether we can reverse these alterations — like remodeling an old house or car — to prevent, or even reverse, age-related declines and diseases.”

More here.

Ellen Meister in the Wall Street Journal:

Here’s a trivia question to try out at a cocktail party: What famous figure of the Jazz Era started her career as a caption writer for Vogue, referencing Shakespeare when she described a skimpy garment with the phrase “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”?

Chances are, many will know it was Dorothy Parker. But here’s something they might not know. The famously acerbic wit, who could shatter an opponent in a single barb, had a soft heart when it came to injustice.

Renowned as a member of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker was also known as a theater critic, short story writer, essayist, book reviewer, screenwriter and poet. She is famous for such withering quotes as, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,” and “That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say ‘No’ in any of them.”

As a theater critic, she wrote, “The House Beautiful is, for me, the play lousy,” and once complained that a performance by Katharine Hepburn “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Parker was also known for the darkness of her poetry, which was often humorous but macabre, with its focus on death and suicide.

But her sharp tongue and dark spirit belied the tender heart that drove her activism, and inspired the surprising contents of her will.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang:

With all that the Hubble Space Telescope has done — including staring at a blank patch of sky for weeks worth of time — you might think there’s no limit to how far it can see. After all, what appears to be dark, empty space is illuminated by the light from thousands upon thousands of galaxies, leading to the conclusion that there are hundreds of billions of them out there spanning the entire sky.

In fact, some of these galaxies are so faint and distant that Hubble can barelysee them. But what might surprise you is that there are two reasons Hubble’s limited in what you can see, one reason that’s obvious and one reason that’s much more subtle.

1. Obviously: Hubble “only” has a 2.4 meter diameter mirror, meaning it can only gather as much light — as many photons — as that mirror can collect. Even over 23 days, the longest exposure of a region ever taken, that only enables it to see very bright galaxies at the greatest distances.
2. Subtlely: the farther out we look in the Universe, the redder any object’s light will appear.

For a little while, this second point is actually a good thing!

You see, when it comes to the youngest, hottest, brightest stars, most of their light isn’t what humans perceive as visible: it’s actually ultraviolet. And as the Universe expands, with galaxies getting farther apart, the fabric of space expands along with it.

This means that photons, the individual quanta of light that exist in this spacetime — emitted from distant stars and galaxies en route to our eyes — get redshifted as well, their wavelengths stretched by the expansion of the Universe itself.

More here.

Omar Ali in Brown Pundits:

PEN American Center decided to honor the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo with an award for the magazine's courage in standing up for free speech. This is an award for courage in the face of censorship; a free speech award. It was meant to recognize the fact that CH was repeatedly threatened by groups of extremist Muslims who insisted that their particular theological rules must be respected by everyone and no one is allowed to cross their red lines. Even with their lives under threat (and the threats were always serious, not taken as a joke even before they were carried out) CH insisted on their right to satirize and comment on every subject, including the subject of Islam. In response their offices were attacked by armed fanatics and several CH staff were killed, as was one Muslim policeman of Algerian ethnic origin. It must be noted that Islam was not an obsession for CH and was not their main target by any means.

Anyway, the magazine insisted that they had the right to write about Islam in the same way as they wrote about other subjects, and they paid a heavy price. Then, with several colleagues lying dead, the magazine refused to back down and published an intelligent and eminently sane issue to show that they were not cowed. Courage is clearly something they do not lack and PEN American Center decided to honor them for this very straightforward exhibition of devotion to the cause of free speech. A cause that used to be a liberal and progressive cause and which is one of the few ways in which modern democratic society really is superior to other civilizations, past and present.

But everyone did not jump on this “free speech” bandwagon. A group of writers (including a few real stars like Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey and Junot Diaz) announced that they were boycotting the award ceremony because CH is not a fit candidate for this award. Most writers (even most liberals) refused to join the refuseniks, but there was support, especially within the postmarxist Left.

More here.

Andrew Aghapour in Religion Dispatches:

If Daniel Dennett is anything, he is a champion of the facts. The prominent philosopher of science is an advocate for hard-nosed empiricism, and as a leading New Atheist he calls for naturalistic explanations of religion. Dennett is also the co-author (along with Linda LaScola) of the recently expanded and updated Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Faith Behind, which documents the stories of preachers and rabbis who themselves came to see…the facts.

Caught in the Pulpit is a close cousin to The Clergy Project, an outreach effort to “current and former religious professionals who no longer hold supernatural beliefs”—many of whom must closet their newfound skepticism to preserve their careers and communities.

For Dennett, closeted atheist clergy are not simply tragic figures, they are harbingers of great things to come. Peppered amongst Caught in the Pulpit’s character vignettes are mini-essays in which Dennett predicts a sea change in religious doctrine and practice. Our digital information age, he argues, is ushering in a “new world of universal transparency” where religious institutions can no longer hide the truth. To survive in an age of transparency, religions will need to come to terms with the facts.

Dennett spoke recently with The Cubit about institutional transparency, the parallels between religious and atheistic fundamentalism, and the future of religion.

You describe non-believing clergy as “canaries in a coal mine.” Why does this group hold such significance for understanding the future of religion?

I think that we are now entering a really disruptive age in the history of human civilization, thanks to the new transparency brought about by social media and the internet. It used to be a lot easier to keep secrets than it is now.

In the March issue of Scientific American, Deb Roy and I compare this to the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian Explosion happened 540 million years ago, when there was a sudden, very dramatic explosion of different life forms in response to some new change in the world.

More here.