Jemima Khan in New Statesman:

Zaatari camp in Jordan is a chalky pop-up city and temporary holding pen for the collateral damage from Syria’s civil war; 80,000 refugees, mostly women and children, existing in orderly limbo. Most left Syria on foot, in the dark, with only the clothes they were wearing and – if their house was not already pulverised – their door keys and documents. I have met many refugees since I started working with Unicef 13 years ago and regardless of nationality, disaster or host country, they all share one thing in common – the knowledge that they are the world’s unwanted; bereft of home, hope, possessions and expression. It was an encounter with a child refugee that first led to my involvement with Unicef. I was distributing tents to Afghan refugees who had fled civil war at the Jalozai camp in Peshawar, north-west Pakistan. It had been nicknamed “Plastic City” because its inhabitants were living in plastic bin liners during the monsoon season, with no shelter, food, water or sanitation. The Pakistani government, its resources already stretched and with resentment still high from the last influx of Afghans during the Soviet era, had refused to allow aid agencies access to the camp.

A small, emaciated boy in dust-coloured rags was bent double under the weight of a 25-kilogram tent. I told him to go and get an adult to help him. He explained that his mother had just died in the camp and his father had been killed in the fighting. He had no adult relatives and he was now the head of the household, responsible for the survival of his five younger siblings, including a small baby. He was seven years old, just a few years older than my eldest son at that time, who was still incapable of even running a bath unsupervised. His story, I learned, was far from unique.

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John Rentoul in The Independent:

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

Much of the history of human thought has revolved around our efforts to understand the nature of evil, which have never yielded anything like a satisfactory result. We are fascinated by serial killers and murderous dictators, torn between the obvious fact that they are human beings like ourselves and the conviction that in some fundamental way they must be different. Fictional embodiments of evil, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sauron or J.K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort, are essentially reassuring because they are nothing except evil; both are built on the Satanic pattern, meaning they were once pure, but have left their uncorrupted selves far behind. Even the perversely noble Satan of “Paradise Lost,” after nine days of torture by fire, knows only one purpose: “immortal hate” and “eternal War irreconcileable” against the power of heaven.

Set against this conception of inhuman monstrosity we have the countervailing evidence, famously marshaled by Hannah Arendt under the controversial term “the banality of evil.” In latter days, many scholars and Holocaust survivors have contended that Arendt misapplied this term to Adolf Eichmann. (Most notably, the late Benjamin Murmelstein, who knew Eichmann well, told “Shoah” director Claude Lanzmann that Eichmann was a sadist and a zealous anti-Semite.) But the dispute over Eichmann’s personality oversimplifies the profound philosophical insight that lies behind Arendt’s phrase, which speaks to the fact that people who do terrible things, and who hold beliefs most of us find noxious and inexplicable, often appear to be entirely normal in other areas of life.

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Mona Gainer-Salim at The Quarterly Conversation:

Kaniuk draws the reader into his fictional world as a participant, not just a spectator. The reader is forced to consider his own role in relation to the work, to reflect on his reactions and allegiances. This is true not only of The Last Jew, but also of much earlier works. Published in 1971, Adam Resurrected too centers on a Holocaust survivor, Adam Stein, who is now a patient at Mrs. Seizling’s Institute for Rehabilitation and Therapy, a pristine, state-of-the-art facility perched incongruously on a desolate chain of hills in the Israeli Negev desert. Contrary to expectations, Adam Resurrected is remarkable for its humor. Adam is by nature a trickster who starred in his own circus before war; now he uses his extraordinary intellect and flair for performance not only to give lectures for the other inhabitants, but to seduce nurses and generally to bring everyone at the Institute under his spell. Throughout the novel, he concocts a dizzying succession of schemes that veer hilariously between brilliance and absurdity. The chapter “Watermelon!” is dedicated entirely to one such escapade, in which Adam devises a plan to collect hundreds of watermelons from patients’ relatives by convincing them that an ailing fellow patient loves nothing more in life than these. However, through all his gags, it is impossible not to be disturbed by Adam’s ability to make us laugh, for Adam survived the camps by virtue of this very gift, playing a dog for the amusement of the camp director, Commandant Klein.

Each laugh Adam elicits in the reader is immediately followed by a suspicion that tragedy has been forced into the guise of comedy, and that we have been fooled into the wrong response.

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Terry Castle at The New York Times:

Plot — in the ordinary sense — is frequently subordinated to dialogue in Mantel: In fact, as in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, the dialogue seems almost to become the plot. Two ill-assorted characters — again, usually a man and woman who have never met before — bicker with each other from within some new and unanticipated intimacy. However obscurely, both seem to want something from the other. Yet the male figure does little but boast and prevaricate and subtly threaten; the woman seems mostly alienated, a bit mad even, and only becomes more so. (It’s not clear, by the way, that eros ever has anything to do with these Beckett-like exchanges.) Conversations thus peter out into muffled strings of cliché and nonsense; loony-bin theories go unchallenged; and, by the story’s end, one fears the worst. Dialogue itself can be suborned, sometimes by death. In “The Long QT” — in which a wife comes unexpectedly into her kitchen during a noisy party to find her husband in a clinch with a buxom and brainless woman named Lorraine (“It’s sad to be called after a quiche”) — instant personal extinction is simply a matter of walking from one room into another.

But, most important, all of Mantel’s stories share a similar design on the reader. One gets the feeling she wants both to frighten us (at times more than a little) and make us laugh. She likes to take us for an eerie spin and then leave us, to grimace and be gay, by the side of a road somewhere.

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Jackie Wullschlager at The Financial Times:

There are some forms of success, Degas said, that are indistinguishable from panic. The 21st-century art market is one. Prices soar, museums bloat, buyers swarm, but still everyone involved – collector, dealer, commentator, curator and even artist – operates within a frenzy of anxiety and self-justification. Is this because contemporary art is radical and difficult to fathom, or because it is empty and cynical?

It is certainly ubiquitous. “Contemporary art is steadily becoming the lingua franca of international culture,” claims Ossian Ward. “Artists have become models of unrivalled creativity . . . In their ability to make markets for their work and ideas, they inspire entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders of all kinds,” argues Sarah Thornton. Grayson Perry counters that “art is spirituality in drag”. Each author is embedded in the art world, but all three assume the position of ethnographers dissecting the behaviour of a particularly outlandish tribe.

From biennales (“a guilt-free occasion to bitch”) in Venice, Istanbul and Shanghai to museum openings in London and Doha and studio visits in New York, Beijing, Devon, Thornton spent four years crossing five continents conducting interviews to “explore the nature of being a professional artist today”.

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Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

Earlier this month, when TMZ released a video of Ray Rice punching Janay Palmer, his fiancée (now wife), in an Atlantic City* elevator, the online response followed a pattern that’s both familiar and strange. It began straightforwardly enough, with people on Facebook and Twitter sharing the reactions that best articulated their outrage. (“Watch Keith Olbermann’s Takedown of the NFL!”) But, from there, it grew more baroque. In my Facebook feed, people hate-likedterrible reactions to the video. Others wrote impassioned posts addressed to supporters of Ray Rice, even if they didn’t know any supporters. Some used the video as a “teachable moment” to share facts about “#domesticviolence,” or helpfully suggested as-yet-unblamed parties who could also be criticized. (“Why is no one talking about the role of alcohol in this?”) A widespread response was meta-outrage: asking, in an outraged tone, why there weren’t an even greater number of outraged Facebook posts about Ray Rice.

There’s nothing senseless about any of this: the world is a maddening place, and so the Web, which reflects the world, has a lot to be angry about. If anything deserves to become a target of collective frustration and anger, it’s the Ray Rice video. At the same time, though, there can be something unsettling about the Web’s communal rage, even when that rage is justified. The Rice video is part of two unfolding stories. On the one hand, there’s our increasing awareness of unchecked violence—an awareness facilitated, as Margaret Talbot pointed out in a recent Comment, by viral videos distributed on the Web. On the other hand, there’s Web culture’s increasing tendency toward anger as an end in itself. In recent years, the Web’s continuous pageantry of outrage, judgment, and punishment has become an inescapable element of contemporary life. We all carry in our pockets a self-serious, hypercritical, omnipresent, never-ending, and unpredictable justice system. Pick up your phone and court is in session; put it down and it’s in recess.

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From The Hollywood Reporter:

How bad is the decline in actor salaries over the past decade? Despite the huge sums still being raked in by such superstars as Robert Downey Jr. (his $75 million comes from his 7 percent, first-dollar slice of Iron Man 3, as well as his $12 million HTC endorsement deal) and Sandra Bullock (a 15 percent, first-dollar deal on Gravity and about $10 million more for her summer hit The Heat), most actors are feeling a definite squeeze, especially those in the middle.

“If you're [a big star], you're getting well paid,” says one top agent, “but the middle level has been cut out.” Sometimes with a hacksaw. Leonardo DiCaprio made $25 million (including bonuses) for The Wolf of Wall Street, while co-star Jonah Hill got paid $60,000. Granted, that's an extreme example — Hill offered to do the part for scale (and got an Oscar nomination for his trouble).

More here.

Mistaken Identity

I thought I saw my mother
in the lesbian bar,
with a salt gray crew cut, a nose stud
and a tattoo of a parrot on her arm.
She was sitting at a corner table,
leaning forward to ignite, on someone’s match,
one of those low-tar things she used to smoke,

and she looked happy to be alive again
after her long marriage
to other people’s needs,
her twenty-year stint as Sisyphus,
struggling to push
a blue Ford station wagon full of screaming kids
up a mountainside of groceries.

My friend Debra had brought me there
to educate me on the issue
of my own unnecessariness,
and I stood against the wall, trying to look
simultaneously nonviolent

and nonchalant, watching couples
slowdance in the female dark,
but feeling speechless, really,
as the first horse to meet the first
horseless carriage on a cobbled street.

That’s when I noticed Mom,
whispering into the delicate
seashell ear of a brunette,
running a fingertip along
the shoreline of a tank top,

as if death had taught her finally
not to question what she wanted
and not to hesitate
in reaching out and taking it.

I want to figure out everything
right now, before I die,
but I admit that in the dark
(where a whole life can be mistaken) cavern of that bar
it took me one, maybe two big minutes

to find my footing
and to aim my antiquated glance
over the shoulder of that woman
pretending not to be my mother,
as if I were looking for someone else.

by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means to Me
Graywolf Press, 2003

Atul Gawande in The Telegraph:

David Bromwich in The New York Times:

Paul Roberts thinks a society that wants it now is untenable, and he has written a prophecy to tell us why. He begins “The Impulse Society” with a parable: a visit to a rehab center for online gaming addicts. We come to see a player’s outlook, largely a matter of finding suitable opponents, may be changed by the recognition that there is more to life than that. But are we not all players, Roberts asks, when we surf the web and respond yes or no to the “choices” we are spoon-fed?

Though he writes in a neutral tone, Roberts sees that the dangers are great: “With each transaction and upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes our world.” Our society, he fears, is in the process of enacting “the merger of self and market.” Part of the merger is involuntary. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have supplied consumer data to the government, but Americans were never asked to approve the National Security Agency’s Prism and XKeyscore systems, which can record the movement of Internet users from site to site and the composition of emails from start to finish (including deletions). That extraordinary evolution of surveillance came from government and market together acting as a shepherd without the consent of the sheep. But if we are watched more than we realize, and more than we would like, it is also true that we have acquired an irrepressible eagerness to watch the lives of others. We pay to be the spectators of our own loss of privacy.

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Christopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books:

Is it to be war? It would seem so, now and for the foreseeable future. Yet the future seems, increasingly, unforeseeable, as the seers with furrowed brows, convened around the tables at CNN or PBS, predict the most extraordinary and contradictory things. Can the campaign against ISIS succeed without American “boots on the ground”? Well, yes and no. Can the Iraqi army become a reliable fighting force? That depends. Will the fickle American public—whipped into war fever by videotaped beheadings and an obscure group called Khorasan, apparently determined to attack the US from secret cells near Aleppo—still support the war when the November elections arrive? We’ll see.

When the Romans, those unsentimental warriors, considered launching a war in some far-flung locale on the margins of empire, they didn’t dilly-dally around with military experts. They consulted augurs, professional birdwatchers, who read, in the zigzag flight of birds, the course of the future, as clearly as words on the page. Such practices linger in our language whenever we “inaugurate” a president or find a course of action “auspicious.” Why shouldn’t we, like the Romans, take our bearings from the flight of birds? Would our expectations differ significantly from those of the so-called experts?

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F. D. Flam in the New York Times:

Statistics may not sound like the most heroic of pursuits. But if not for statisticians, a Long Island fisherman might have died in the Atlantic Ocean after falling off his boat early one morning last summer.

The man owes his life to a once obscure field known as Bayesian statistics — a set of mathematical rules for using new data to continuously update beliefs or existing knowledge.

The method was invented in the 18th century by an English Presbyterian minister named Thomas Bayes — by some accounts to calculate the probability of God’s existence. In this century, Bayesian statistics has grown vastly more useful because of the kind of advanced computing power that didn’t exist even 20 years ago.

It is proving especially useful in approaching complex problems, including searches like the one the Coast Guard used in 2013 to find themissing fisherman, John Aldridge (though not, so far, in the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370).

Now Bayesian statistics are rippling through everything from physics tocancer research, ecology to psychology.

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Aatish Bhatia in Nautilus:

On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.

It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius* (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”1) In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe.

Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Travelling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about 4 hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history.

So what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang? A volcano on Krakatoa had just erupted with a force so great that it tore the island apart, emitting a plume of smoke that reached 17 miles into the atmosphere, according to a geologist who witnessed it.

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Laura Levis in Harvard Magazine:

Riding the train to work every day in Chicago, Ryan Enos began to notice an intriguing pattern: at a certain downtown station, all the African-American riders seemed to get off just as Caucasian riders climbed aboard. “It was like a meeting of two worlds, where you could feel this palpable tension between two communities that otherwise are strictly segregated from each other, but occasionally come into close proximity,” he says. Now an assistant professor of government, Enos at the time was teaching high school in the historically poor and almost entirely African-American neighborhood of Englewood. The experience of moving between two worlds and thinking about how that reality was an overwhelming presence in people’s lives, shaping everything from the way they view others to their own political views, led Enos to pursue the study of “racial threat”—how people react with uncertainty to those of a different race—in graduate school and his subsequent professional career. In his most recent paper, “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us About the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” he explores how individuals’ politics are affected by the context in which they live.

Between 2000 and 2004, Enos and a group of Harvard graduate students studied a public-housing reconstruction project in Chicago that caused the displacement of more than 25,000 African Americans, many of whom had previously lived in close proximity to white voters. After the African Americans moved out of the voting district, a startling effect became apparent: the white voters’ turnout dropped by 12 to 15 percentage points, leading Enos and his team to believe that white residents’ previously higher levels of civic engagement were in large part caused by feelings of racial threat.

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From KurzweilAI:

On Sept. 23, KurzweilAI noted that scientists at the Salk Institute had discovered an on-and-off “switch” in cells that might allow for increasing telomerase, which rebuilds telomeres at the ends of chromosomes to keep cells dividing and generating. We also noted that cancer cells hijack this process and that the scientists expect that the “off” switch might help keep telomerase activity below this threshold. Now in another studypublished last week in Cell, Roger Greenberg, MD, PhD, associate professor of Cancer Biology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvaniaand his colleagues describe their discovery of a second method used by cancer cells to survive, involving a DNA-repair-based mechanism called “alternative lengthening of telomeres” (ALT).

The researchers found that approximately 15 percent of cancers use the ALT process for telomere lengthening, but that some cancer types use ALT up to 40 to 50 percent of the time. The team showed that when a cancer cell’s DNA breaks, the cell triggers DNA repair proteins (like the breast cancer suppressor protein BRCA2*) into action, along with other helper proteins that attach to the damaged stretch of DNA. These proteins stretch out the DNA, allowing it to search for complementary sequences of telomere DNA. “This process of repair triggers the movement and clustering of telomeres like fish being reeled toward an angler,” explains Greenberg. “The broken telomeres use a telomere on a different chromosome — the homologous telomere — as a template for repair.” In cancer cells that use ALT to maintain their telomeres, the team visualized these clusters of telomeres coming together.

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Clare Morgana Gillis at The American Scholar:

BENGHAZI, April 2011–A large and detailed map of Sirte hung on the wall of the general’s office where James Foley and I conducted what turned out to be our last interview before our capture by Qaddafi’s troops, leading to an involuntary stay in Tripoli. The general—I forget his name–smoked cigarettes in a natty holder and explained his strategy for taking the town, almost exactly halfway between Benghazi, the rebel capital, and Tripoli, the regime stronghold, on the narrow, brush-lined coastal road. It had served as the front line when the British fought the Axis powers during World War II: “a tactician’s paradise, a quartermaster’s hell,” one of Rommel’s generals called it. Now it was where columns of rebel gun trucks beat hasty retreats once regime Grad missiles started thunking down, and the front line that had once spanned nearly to Bin Jawwad had been pushed back to somewhere around Brega. Sometimes those small cities changed hands twice in the same day.

The general’s take on rebel capabilities was a few shades brighter than our own, but Jim was enthusiastic anyway and showed up the next morning with a bag packed for Sirte. I raised my eyebrows and scratched my head. “Are you joking me?” He smiled sheepishly and left his bags in my room, both of us taking only small backpacks.

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