Jessica Lahey in The Atlantic:

Jessica Lahey: You write that you taught grammar “successfully.” How did you define “success” when you were teaching?

Stephen King: Success is keeping the students’ attention to start with, and then getting them to see that most of the rules are fairly simple. I always started by telling them not to be too concerned with stuff like weird verbs (swim, swum, swam) and just remember to make subject and verb agree. It’s like we say in AA—KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.

Lahey: When people ask me to name my favorite books, I have to ask them to narrow their request: to read or to teach? You provide a fantastic list of books to read at the end of On Writing, but what were your favorite books to teach, and why?

King: When it comes to literature, the best luck I ever had with high school students was teaching James Dickey’s long poem “Falling.” It’s about a stewardess who’s sucked out of a plane. They see at once that it’s an extended metaphor for life itself, from the cradle to the grave, and they like the rich language. I had good success with The Lord of the Flies and short stories like“Big Blonde” and “The Lottery.” (They argued the shit out of that one—I’m smiling just thinking about it.) No one puts a grammar book on their list of riveting reads, but The Elements of Style is still a good handbook. The kids accept it.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

Computers have always had trouble identifying objects in real images so it is not hard to believe that the winners of these competitions have always performed poorly compared to humans.

But all that changed in 2012 when a team from the University of Toronto in Canada entered an algorithm called SuperVision, which swept the floor with the opposition.

Today, Olga Russakovsky at Stanford University in California and a few pals review the history of this competition and say that in retrospect, SuperVision’s comprehensive victory was a turning point for machine vision. Since then, they say, machine vision has improved at such a rapid pace that today it rivals human accuracy for the first time.

So what happened in 2012 that changed the world of machine vision? The answer is a technique called deep convolutional neural networks which the Super Visison algorithm used to classify the 1.2 million high resolution images in the dataset into 1000 different classes.

This was the first time that a deep convolutional neural network had won the competition, and it was a clear victory. In 2010, the winning entry had an error rate of 28.2 percent, in 2011 the error rate had dropped to 25.8 percent. But SuperVision won with an error rate of only 16.4 percent in 2012 (the second best entry had an error rate of 26.2 percent). That clear victory ensured that this approach has been widely copied since then.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

Mark Blyth in Foreign Affairs (photo: Paul Hackett / Courtesy Reuters):

An independent Scotland would have a massively oversize banking system, with assets possibly exceeding 1,000 percent of GDP. This would represent an Icelandic-sized risk to British taxpayers, who would have to stand behind the liabilities of the Scottish banks if they ran into trouble. As the Financial Times put it in a recent editorial, no British government would back those banks “unless Scotland were to accept very heavy constraints over its public finances.” In short, budgetary austerity and conservative policies would remain the only game in town, even after independence.

To get out of this bind, an independent Scotland would need its own currency, an option the Yes campaign has only recently acknowledged as a possible “plan B.” Without monetary sovereignty, a country can neither print nor devalue its way out of trouble. And if it doesn’t want to default, austerity is the only way forward.

Yet to establish an independent currency, Scotland would need three things: a central bank, a bond shop, and independent tax institutions. For now, Edinburgh has none of these. And it would take five to ten years to build them. In the meantime, the country Scotland just broke up with would be raising the taxes, paying the bond investors, and running the currency — and charging a pretty penny to do so. Joining the euro, the only other alternative, would simply mean austerity would come from another direction, from Berlin rather than London.

Given all this, if Scotland votes in favor of independence, the United Kingdom’s reaction would not likely be the velvet divorce the Yes campaigners envision. Nationalism, like most forms of identity politics, thrives only in the face of a foreign other. Far from safeguarding Scotland’s position in Europe, the United Kingdom’salready resurgent nationalism will likely grow fiercer. Edinburgh’s exit would probably make London’s withdrawal from the EU more likely, complicating the Yes campaign’s desire to protect European interdependence.

Yet perhaps the oddest thing about the Scottish debate has been its lack of concern for issues of language, culture, or past sins — all central features of Basque, Catalan, and other independence movements. On the surface, it’s been all about the money, which makes the recent turn at the polls all the more telling. Although the No camp has largely won the economic arguments, the Yes campaign has gained the upper hand. The question is why?

More here.

Mira Sucharov in Forward:

Art Spiegelman — celebrated comics book artist, illustrator and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” — has broken his silence on the subject of Israel. At least that’s how he put it to his Facebook followers last week when he shared a collage he designed for a recent issue of the magazine The Nation.

Prefacing the social media post by saying that he has spent a “lifetime trying to NOT think about Israel,” Spiegelman went on to say that “Israel is like some badly battered child with PTSD who has grown up to batter others.”

Captioned “Perspective in Gaza (The David and Goliath Illusion),” the Biblical-style art image consists of two panels. On the left is a traditional rendering of David facing Goliath. The right-hand panel presents a shrunken Goliath brought closer to the foreground. Using the tricks of size and perspective to make what is surely not an original political point, it’s a clever play on Spiegelman’s life’s work as an illustrator.

At least two important questions arise from this. First, what does it say when The Jewish Museum in New York mounted a Spiegelman retrospective which overlapped with the controversy over Israel critic Judith Butler’s slated talk there on a subject unrelated to Israel? (Butler later pulled out amidst the pressure.) Had Spiegelman spoken up against Israel earlier, might the museum’s donors and critics have applied similar tactics?

More here.

Fears in Heaven
.

My father asks me to call him
by his first name which is Ali
because we are, after all
now the same youthful age

It feels extremely odd
when this devout Muslim
politely asks me to join him
for a stiff drink, or two

He asks me if I want
to take any of his virgins
because it is his plan
to stay with my mother

I ask him if he is certain
whether she wants to do that
and he betrays his doubts
with an uneasy crooked smile

So here we stand with our
drinks, anxious and awkward
but knowing we have time
to settle into eternal dullness
.

by S. Abbas Raza,
September 10, 2014

Vijay Prashad in HimalSouthAsian:

Faisal Devji and I went to graduate school together at the University of Chicago. We worked with Barney Cohn, a scholar with an adventurous sense of scholarship. Devji’s early studies were conducted at the feet of Fazlur Rahman, the intellectual of Islam (author of Islam, 1966 and 1979), who died in 1988, two years after Devji got to Chicago. Among our small cohort, Devji was the smart one – clear in his head that he wanted to uncover the intellectual foundations of Muslim nationalism in the Subcontinent. His was, however, the experience that haunts graduate students – having travelled the archives, making notes and photocopies, he returned to the US, where his bag with the research notes was stolen. Undaunted, Devji wrote a brilliant intellectual history – Muslim Nationalism: Founding Identity in Colonial India (1993). His study spanned the time from Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat al-arus (The Bride’s Mirror, 1869) to Mohammed Iqbal’s Pas Chih Bayad Kard ay Aqwam-i-Sharq (What Should Then Be Done, Oh People of East, 1936), from the era of post-Mutiny reform to the emergence of a new patriotic confidence. Lingering behind the close readings of Iqbal were his European interlocutors Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, enriching the dissertation to a level that was not common among people of our age.

…Reading Muslim Zion is not easy. This is an intellectual’s intellectual history. Even though Devji scorns évènementiel history for its “mechanism”, it is worthwhile to have some grounding in the historical worlds of the Subcontinent to best benefit from this book. Much can be gained when an author takes the risk to tie the loose ends of human life into a coherent story. But for Devji such a narrative might stand in for a continuity that does not exist in the intellectual emergence of the idea of nationalism in the Muslim League and its environs. If he had written a history that began with Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and ended with Liaquat Ali Khan’s premiership, as so many histories of Muslim nationalism do, it would have seemed that Pakistan was already evident in the pages of the journal Tahzib al-Akhlaq (Refinement of Morals), founded in 1870. Here and there in Devji’s pages is evidence of a conflict between Muslim elites in different cities, rooted in different parts of the colonial bureaucracy and the social relations of capitalism (Devji notes that much is buried in the “unexplored history of Muslim capitalism”). The Pakistan movement was not rooted amongst the heirs of Sir Sayyid among the Aligarh intellectual grandees nor was it rooted in the religious redoubts of Deoband. It had its leadership amongst the western Indian (mainly Shia) elites such as Aga Khan and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and in the royal households of the Gangetic plain, such as Mahmudabad and Jehangirabad.

More here.

Trevor Cox in American Scientist:

While I was on an expedition to record singing sand dunes, I experienced something quite rare: complete silence. The scorching summer heat kept visitors away. Most of the time my recording companion, Diane Hope, and I were on our own. We camped at the foot of Kelso Dunes, in a barren, scrubby valley with dramatic granite hills behind us. Virtually no planes flew overhead, and only very occasionally did a distant car or freight train create noise. Much of the day there was a great deal of wind, but at twilight and early in the morning the winds calmed down and the quiet revealed itself. Overnight I heard the silence being interrupted only once, when a pack of nearby coyotes howled like ghostly babies. Early on the second morning, while I was waiting for Diane to set up some recording equipment, I had a chance to contemplate real silence. The ear is exquisitely sensitive. When perceiving the quietest murmur, the tiny bones of the middle ear, which transmit sound from the eardrum to the inner ear, vibrate by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Even in silence, tiny vibrations of molecules move different parts of the auditory apparatus. These constant movements have nothing to do with sound; they stem from random molecular motion. If the human ear were any more sensitive, it would not hear more sounds from outside. Instead, it would just hear the hiss generated by the thermal agitation of the eardrum, the stapes bone of the middle ear, and the hair cells in the cochlea.

…A former colleague of mine, Stuart Bradley from Auckland University, has visited Antarctica, another place devoid of vegetation where silence can be heard. Stuart is a tall New Zealander, sporting a fine mustache like a soccer player from the 1970s. Ironically, what Stuart does in Antarctica is make noise and briefly ruin the pristine natural soundscape. He uses a sodar (a sound radar system) to measure weather conditions, sending up strange chirps that bounce off of turbulent air in the atmosphere before returning to the ground to be measured. I asked Stuart if he had experienced silence in Antarctica, and he told me about his time in the dry valleys, possibly the most barren places on Earth, which lack snow and ice cover: “Sitting up on the valley wall on a still day, there was no sound I could identify (except heartbeat? breathing?). No life (apart from me). So no leaves either. No running water. No wind noise. I was certainly struck by the primeval ‘feel.’” Stuart commented on how different this was than the sound of a silent laboratory, “I didn’t get the claustrophobic feel one can get in an anechoic chamber …I suspect this is because, although it was incredibly quiet, it was also a very, very open vista. The valley walls were 1,500–2,000 meters high, and the visibility was amazing!”

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

The Victorian Age, by most accounts, was dirty and crowded and busy. It was an age in which nobility and refinement were greatly valued because they were so fragile. Ideal busts like those in the Corcoran Atrium were not made for museums or galleries. They were made for private homes, to be installed in the parlor. Sculptors like Hiram Powers could hardly keep up with the demand for ideal busts. Still, even as Powers churned them out, his ambitions for the busts were high. Powers called his sculptures “unveiled souls.” The ideal bust shed the body to reveal what was within.

Why did we create a form of sculpture that gives us only the head, neck, and shoulders? Perhaps it is because man is made of dust but pointed to the stars. Our heads drag our cumbersome bodies around town. We move hunched over, propelled by the weight of our thought-machines. We are mental locomotives. Only what rises above the shoulders is truly important. What lurks below the heart is dark and hidden. Our heads are the keepers of our brains and our eyes. Our bodies hold our inner stuff. Our motion may be in our legs but our dreams are in our skulls.

It seems natural that we would create a form of sculpture expressing this Cartesian inclination. A bust has just enough body to hold up the head. Nonetheless, a head alone will not suffice. A disembodied head evokes the guillotine and the sword. As a sculpted portrait, a simple head on a stick won’t do.

more here.

William Deresiewicz at The New Republic:

He knew who he was, and he knew 
who he wanted to be: an unembarrassed, unreconstructed middle-American. He shied away from nothing that he saw or learned in modern art or thought—not then, not ever—but the self-assurance that he carried with him out of Berks County made him proof against adopting the attitudes they entail. Atheism, alienation, and angst; elitism and cosmopolitanism; aesthetic 
austerity and experimentalism; political and spiritual extremism: these were not for him. Updike’s life and work are testaments to the idea that mid-American values, beliefs, and sensibilities are adequate to address and interpret modern experience. The conviction made him, and to many it has 
made him unforgivable.

Ipswich was the place where Updike did his finest work, and also where he found, reveled in, and immortalized the “adulterous society” of young professionals at play in the prosperity of Ike and JFK, the 
“post-pill paradise” of Tarbox and Couples. The novel’s magic circle of ten marriages (and about that many liaisons) is modeled, Begley tells us, on the even dozen that composed the Updikes’ little world. Ten of the twelve were adulterous, and all of the 
former ended in divorce.

more here.

Alexander Christie-Miller at The White Review:

Each autumn as the cold spreads across Russia and Eastern Europe it sets in train a vast migration of birds of prey. Passing through the Caucasus and entering Anatolia, eagles, kites, harriers, buzzards and hawks gather in the thousands where they travel through narrow bottlenecks formed by the passes of the Kaçkar Mountains.

A few months before I witnessed this spectacle myself, I had met a Turkish conservationist who described a tradition connected with it. As the migration reaches its peak in September, the men of the region send their children to hunt for an insect, a large burrowing cricket. This is placed alive inside a trap where it acts as bait for a bird, the red-backed shrike. Once the shrike is caught it is tethered to a long pole, which, after two or three days, it becomes accustomed to using as a perch. Equipped with these aerial rods, the men take to the mountains to fish the skies for sparrowhawks. Attracted by the fluttering of the shrike, the hawks plunge into nets. From that moment, the men keep the birds with them almost constantly, and within only a few hours a hawk has forgotten its wildness to the point that it is content to eat from a man’s fist. Within as little as a week, it may trust its new keeper so completely that it will fall asleep on his hand. When the birds are thoroughly tame, usually within ten days, they are taken out to the cornfields to hunt quail, which pass through the region on a parallel migration. The hawk is held in the palm of the hand and cast like a winged javelin at its quarry. If properly trained, the bird will remain with its kill until its captor comes to retrieve it. After about a month and a half of hunting in this way, when the quail season ends, the hawks are released back into the wild to complete their migration, bound for North Africa or the Mediterranean.

more here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

A run of bets originating in Sweden has seen the odds plummet on Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the distinguished Kenyan author, winning the Nobel prize for literature next month. The chances of the recently-retired Philip Roth taking the Nobel have also fallen dramatically, according to betting firm Ladbrokes.

Ladbrokes said that odds on Ngugi being named winner of the world's most prestigious literary award, given out every October in Stockholm, had shortened from 33/1 to 10/1. “It's always worth following the Swedish money and at this stage the one they like is Ngugi wa Thiong'o,” said spokesman for the betting firm Alex Donohue. Ngugi's books include Caitani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross), a novel written on toilet paper while he was imprisoned following the performance of his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which was critical of the inequalities of Kenyan society. He had been a favourite to take the Nobel in 2010, but that year the prize went to Mario Vargas Llosa. Tomas Tranströmer, 2010's fourth favourite to win, went on to take the Nobel in 2011.

Favourite this year, according to Ladbrokes' odds, is Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami at 5/1,with Ngugi in joint second place with Algerian novelist Assia Djebar. Roth, who recently announced his happy retirement from the world of novel writing, comes in at 16/1, as do the feted Czech writer Milan Kundera, and the Syrian poet, Adonis.

More here.

Asad Raza in The New Yorker:

Change, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, comes from the changing of generations. Tennis fans understand the sentiment, and a constant theme of U.S. Open commentary is worrying about when the next generation of stars will emerge. Maybe the Open’s placement in the calendar, on the cusp of fall, inspires these annual reflections. This year, the tone of these conversations is louder and more pessimistic—one writer, not atypical, pronounced, “Call me Cassandra if you like. The ATP Dark Age is coming.” In the lead-up to Flushing Meadows, these anxieties seemed to intensify, to the point that the question was no longer “When will they get here?” but “Will they get here at all?”

Some of this worry is a natural, if preëmptive, reaction to the imminent disappearance of champions who link us to the sport’s past. Thirty-four-year-old Venus Williams, who reached her first final here in 1997, and whose accomplishments include being the first African-American woman No. 1 in the Open era, joined the tour when it still featured Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, and Monica Seles. Her sister, thirty-two-year-old Serena Williams, who first won this tournament in 1999, possesses seventeen Grand Slam singles trophies, four Olympic gold medals (an achievement matched by her sister), and a regal bearing that has edged beyond diva and toward natural force. Then there is thirty-three-year-old Roger Federer, whose win over Pete Sampras in the fourth round at Wimbledon, in 2001, is considered the dawn of the most numerically successful and aesthetically appreciated career in the history of men’s tennis.

It’s hard to say goodbye to beloved players, followed faithfully for many years, and this might explain fans’ escalating worry about what the sport will be like after Federer and Serena Williams.

More here.

Kathleen Geier in After Hours:

There's something about the outpouring of sentimental tributes to the late Joan Rivers that just feels wrong. The Rivers celebrations have shown a disconcerting tendency to sanitize this messy, maddening, and sometimes appalling human being. In truth, Rivers was a profoundly unsettling figure, and if you were paying any attention at all, it's almost impossible not to have deeply ambivalent feelings about her.

Erin O'Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

People socialize online more than ever: posting photos on Instagram, job-hunting on LinkedIn, joking about politics on Twitter, and sharing reviews of everything from hotels to running shoes. Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues against using real names for most of these Internet interactions and relying instead on pseudonyms. A made-up handle is essential to maintain privacy and manage one’s online identity, she says. Her new book, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (MIT Press, 2014), also contends that well-managed pseudonyms can strengthen online communities, an idea that contradicts the conventional wisdom that fake names bring out the worst in people, allowing “trolls” to bully others or post hateful, destructive comments without consequences. Real names, such thinking goes, keep online conversations civil.

But Donath often uses a pseudonym online, not because she wants to “anonymously harass people or post incendiary comments unscathed,” as she explained in a commentary published on Wired.com this spring, but because she prefers to separate certain aspects of her life. In the age of Google, a quick search of a person’s name gathers everything he or she has posted under that name, from résumés to college party photos. As a public figure who studies how people communicate online, Donath’s academic writing can be found online under her real name. But when she writes product reviews on shopping sites such as Drugstore.com, or restaurant reviews on Yelp, she might use a pseudonym. “I would like to be known online for what I write,” she says. “I don’t necessarily feel like I need to be known for what I’ve been eating.”

More here.

Florence Williams in The New York Times:

Sandeep Jauhar’s new memoir, “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician,” tells the story of two midlife crises: the author’s own,, and that of modern American medicine, now in about its fourth decade under managed care. Both prove to be frustratingly intransigent, with only small signs of hope. “Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation” t become much better, at least not for Dr. Jauhar, who takes his first job at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and becomes the director of its heart failure program. (He is also an occasional contributor to The New York Times.) Full of ideals about saving lives and providing compassionate, ethical care, he finds himself underpaid, overworked and pressured to cut corners in every direction. describes a profession that is like so many of its patients: full of malaise and desperation. Doctors are reported to commit suicide at a higher rate than other professionals, and Dr. Jauhar cites a 2008 survey in which only 6 percent of 12,000 physicians rated their morale as positive.

Then again, Dr. Jauhar is constitutionally dissatisfied. Just ask his father, who says of his wife, the author’s mother, “Like you, she is not a happy person.” (Some of the best scenes feature the father, who comes across as comically histrionic, neurotic and self-absorbed. “If you lose your job,” he tells his son, “we are finished. I will be the first to have a heart attack!” And then he tosses in: “And make some friends, Sandeep. You have no friends.”) Then Dr. Jauhar has his wife to contend with. Also a doctor, she keeps putting off her own job to stay home with their toddler, while telling her husband to bring home more money. “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” he counters. “Yes it does!” she replies.

More here.

Loss

Something in me repeats in an obsessive beat
that I may have lost something
or left it behind
in the café or the bookstore
where I’d been
I searched my possessions
and no loss was found
nor did I discover what had been lost
but the loss
kept asserting its existence
through palpitations and minor fits
Athenian sophists philosophized:
“A thing you haven’t lost
is necessarily in your possession
you haven’t lost a tail—therefore, you have a tail
or vice versa
what you’ve lost was necessarily yours”
but what have I lost?
I must look for my loss
in order to know what I’m looking for
is it an object or a thing or the thing
and was it mine before it was lost
or is it that some inner authority
is trying to bequeath me, like a Hellenistic sophist,
something I had never possessed
as for example a chance
as if I ever stood a chance

by Mordechai Geldman
from Halachti Shanim Le-Tzidcha
publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Mossad Bialik, 2011

Ryan Moritz. From the Banzu Tree. 2014.

Digital photograph.

Thanks to Ryan.