André Naffis-Sahely at The Nation:

Three months after Alessandro Spina’s death in July 2013, Ilario Bertoletti, his Italian editor, published a memoir in which he described his first near-encounter with the notoriously reclusive writer: “It was June, 1993. The bell rang in the late afternoon; moments later, a colleague entered my office: ‘A gentleman dropped by. He looked like an Arab prince, tall and handsome. He left a history of the Maronites for you.’”

The editor made some inquiries and discovered that Spina had been quietly publishing a number of novels and short stories since the early 1960s. It was an oeuvre that charted the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the sleepy Ottoman province, all the way to 1966, when petrodollars sparked an economic boom, exacerbating the corruption and nepotism that eventually paved the way for Muammar Qaddafi’s coup d’état in 1969. Bertoletti runs an independent imprint based in Brescia, and it took him fifteen years to persuade Spina to let him reissue his books, or rather to assemble them into a 1,280-page omnibus edition entitled I confini dell’ombra: In terra d’oltremare (The Confines of the Shadow: In Lands Overseas).

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

There’s no better evidence for the idea that watching a great actor means watching a great director at work than the career of Lauren Bacall, who, at the time that she was discovered by the director Howard Hawks, was hardly even an actress. She was a model whom Hawks’s wife, Slim Hawks, had spotted on a magazine cover. Howard Hawks claimed that Bacall, rather than her résumé, ended up in his office as a result of a misunderstanding. When he met her, he hated her high voice and told her to alter it to a throaty purr.

She was nineteen; he instructed her (so he said) to sass men, and, when she sassed Clark Gable, Hawks told his screenwriter Jules Furthman, “Do you suppose we could make a girl who is insolent, as insolent as Bogart, who insults people, who grins when she does it, and people like it?” They started writing, and, Hawks said, “I would try out the scenes on Bacall,” and here’s the thing—he added, “She was working all the time.” He got her to work even more, with a series of demanding lessons in accents. He maintained her natural, somewhat feline look—as Bacall wrote in her autobiography, “By Myself,” “Howard had chosen me for my thick eyebrows and crooked teeth and that’s the way they would stay.”

more here.

Vali Nasr in the New York Times:

The Arab world today is the product of maps drawn by the British diplomat Sir Mark Sykes and his French counterpart François Georges-Picot in 1916, and sanctified at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. European rule over Arab states that were only nominally independent followed; this left these states struggling with legitimacy ever since. When the Europeans left, they were followed by dictators who talked of nationalism, but failed to convince their own citizens that they were important participants in the nation.

That was because the arbitrary boundaries had left these new Arab states open to perpetual internal clashes based on rivalries among tribes and religious sects. Their leaders spoke the language of modern nationalism, but their states never quite united. So they turned to domination by one tribe or sect over others.

The Ottomans, by contrast, knew how to manage diversity. Their decentralized model embraced a rudimentary pluralism that saw politics as the pursuit of a workable balance between differing tribes and religious communities. More often than they do now, these communities could tolerate and coexist with one another, despite differences.

In the failure of the Arab Spring and the ascendance of Islamist militancy, we are seeing a new explosion of tribal and sectarian differences. This is the real root of the challenge posed by nonstate movements that seek to form shadow governments in ungoverned territories. We have seen them before in Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian territories.

More here.

Nadia Al-Issa in ArtAsiaPacific:

“How Green Was My Valley” was a poetic meditation on the backbreaking labor, bittersweet sacrifice and precious pleasures entailed in the Palestinian people’s love for their homeland and struggle for its liberation. Featuring photography, painting, sculpture, video and installation art by 15 emerging and established Palestinian artists, the exhibition at Whitebox Art Center, New York, foregrounded the potential for absurd humor and daring dreams rooted in the cruel and oppressive landscape of occupation, and stood as a testament to the stubborn refusal of Palestinians to let go of hope.

Rendering activism as labor, and labor as activism, Amer Shomali’s Pixelated Intifada (2012) is an animated, black-and-white 3D model of a cow that pays tribute to an act of resistance from the not-so-distant but increasingly elusive era of the late 1980s, and represents a labor movement undertaken to create a Palestinian economy autonomous from the Israeli military occupation. In 1987, a number of residents in Beit Sahour, a Palestinian town east of Bethlehem, set up a dairy farm to supplant the monopoly of the Israeli co-op Tnuva. The Beit Sahour farm was soon raided and shut down by the Israeli army, and the Palestinian activists involved were incarcerated. In retaliation, the activists hid the raided farm’s livestock in the surrounding countryside, spurring a four-year-long hunt by the Israeli army for the cows, which evolved into a symbol of sovereignty for Palestinians. Shomali’s pixelated cow revolves on the video screen, as if suspended in midair.

More here.

Ed Yong in National Geographic:

The program running on Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill’s computer is deceptively simple. First, it creates a cylinder. As the cylinder grows, it sprouts branches, first to the left and then to the right, always at the same specified angle. Each of the branches then becomes a stem in its own right, producing its own branches according to the same rules. On they go, branches off branches off branches, four levels deep. The results look like the leaves of ferns, but they’re much more. They look a lot like an ancient group of creatures called rangeomorphs, which existed in a time before skeletons, shells, legs, mouths, guts, and nervous systems. They were just a few inches long, but in a planet dominated mostly by single-celled creatures, they represented one of the first experiments in building relatively large and complex bodies.

…The best-preserved of the rangeomorph fossils show beautiful patterns that seem to repeat at different scales, with smaller versions of the same shape branching off larger ones. In other words, they look like fractals. Palaeontologists have always described them as such, but more in a metaphorical way than a mathematical one. “It had been suggested that they look a bit fractal-like but that hadn’t been tested,” says Hoyal Cuthill. She used her skills in computer science to write a program that uses simple rules of branching and growing to churns out a wide variety of body shapes, which look remarkably like actual fossils. The program has just 28 parameters, including the angle of the branches, their curvature, and how quickly the stems grow. Tweak the parameters, and you get a wide rangeomorph zoo. “It’s a relatively simple program but it’s versatile enough to generate a good approximation of the things we observe in the fossil record,” says Hoyal Cuthill.

More here.

Akim Reinhardt in The Public Professor:

In the late 1960s, when my father was just starting Ken’s Home Improvements, the contracting business he decided to get up and running now that he had a young son *cough* he relied on recommendations to get his first customers.

An early break came when someone recommended him to New York Timesfilm critic Rex Reed.

Reed was by then one of the nation’s top critics and had landed himself an apartment in The Dakota, the landmark Manhattan building on Central Park West. It would later become infamous as the home of John Lennon, when he was shot in front of it in 1980.

The Dakota is hard to describe. How many apartment buildings do you know that have their own Wikipedia entry, complete with a list of notable residents and cultural references?

It’s the only building I can think of that’s had the distinction of being jarringly out of place not once, but twice.

When it opened in 1884, the building stood in what was then still considered the northerly reaches of Manhattan. There were farms and trees, and not much else. Indeed, that’s where the name supposedly comes from; when Singer Sewing Machine magnate Edward Clark first announced his plans to build a luxury building all the way up on W. 72nd St., someone supposedly sneered, “That’s practically Dakota!”

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Salman Rushdie wrote an amusing little book in 1992. The title of the book is The Wizard of Oz. It’s about the famous movie with Judy Garland’s Dorothy and Toto and the Wicked Witches, East and West. The movie The Wizard of Oz is celebrating its 75-year anniversary this month. For three-quarters of a century, this unusual movie has been infecting the brains of young people all over the world. Rushdie was one of them. At age ten, Rushdie wrote his first story. He called it “Over the Rainbow.” Strange to think that there is a direct line from The Wizard of Oz to Rushdie’s now-classic tale of the partition of India, Midnight’s Children (1980).

Rushdie is an unabashed lover of the film. Call the film, he writes, “imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.” Rushdie also has strong opinions about what this artful film is and is not about. It is not about going home. Yes, Dorothy frequently talks about going home. After her house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East, the munchkins and the Good Witch Glinda tell her to go home immediately. She isn’t safe in Oz, they tell her, not with the Wicked Witch of the West still lurking about. So Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road in order to find the Wizard, who will help her return to her home in Kansas. At the end of the movie, she clicks her ruby slippers together and repeats, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” In a movie that Rushdie says is not about going home, there is quite a lot of home-talk.

But that’s not, says Rushdie, the real story. “Anybody,” he writes, “who has swallowed the screenwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler — East, West, home’s best — would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up towards the skies.”

Point taken. Garland’s Dorothy does yearn and tilt as she sings her famous song.

More here.

Bjorn Carey at the Stanford website:

Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford, has been awarded the 2014 Fields Medal, the most prestigious honor in mathematics. Mirzakhani is the first woman to win the prize, widely regarded as the “Nobel Prize of mathematics,” since it was established in 1936.

“This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians,” Mirzakhani said. “I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years.”

Officially known as the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, the Fields Medal will be presented by the International Mathematical Union on Aug. 13 at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held this year in Seoul, South Korea. Mirzakhani is the first Stanford recipient to win this honor since Paul Cohen in 1966.

The award recognizes Mirzakhani's sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects. Although her work is considered “pure mathematics” and is mostly theoretical, it has implications for physics and quantum field theory.

More here.

From Letters of Note:

Early-2006, during a bout of depression, a young lady by the name of Crystal Nunn wrote a desperate letter to Stephen Fry. Says Crystal:

“I had no idea who to turn to. But I really needed someone to turn to and to ease the pain. So I wrote to Stephen Fry because he is my hero, and he has been through this himself. And low and behold, he replied to my letter, and I will love him eternally for this.”

Mr. Fry's wonderful reply can be seen below.

More here.

Amir Alexander in Scientific American:

In 1842, when the famed German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacobi was invited to speak to a scientific meeting in Manchester, he had a surprise in store for his English hosts. “It is the glory of science to be of no use,” he announced to the startled gathering of physical scientists. The true aim of science is “the honor of the human spirit,” and whether it turns out to be of any practical use matters not at all.

Jacobi made few converts that day. His declaration, he reported to his brother with satisfaction, “caused a vehement shaking of heads,” which was only to be expected from a crowd of men who were devoting their careers to improving industrial processes in the manufacturing capital of Europe. But things were different among Jacobi’s mathematical colleagues, who increasingly came to share his view that mathematical truths stood for themselves, and needed no further justification.

To be sure, no one (including Jacobi) denies that some fields of mathematics have proven extremely useful, and had made modern technology possible. But other fields, including some of the greatest mathematical discoveries ever, seem to serve no practical purpose whatsoever.

It was so from the beginning. The ancient science of geometry, as its name suggests, had its origins in the practical art of land measurement, but by the time Euclid codified it around 300 BCE it had strayed far from its roots.

More here.

Ahmed Humayun in Foreign Policy:

Although he won a big mandate last year at Pakistan's polls, Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan and head of the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim league (PML-N), is under siege at home. The country's vociferous media is hyping up the clash between Sharif and Imran Khan, Sharif's foremost political challenger and the head of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), who is organizing a “long march” on Islamabad on Pakistan's upcoming Independence Day on August 14. Meanwhile, Tahirul Qadri, the influential Pakistani-Canadian preacher, has announced a competing “Revolution” march on the same day to overthrow the political system. Widespread discontent at Sharif's performance in office to date and the determination of the security establishment to avoid ceding primacy to civilian rule has added to the sense of a looming political crisis.

Sharif made extravagant promises during the 2013 electoral campaign that have yet to be fulfilled. For example, the delivery of basic services remains dismal across the board — in particular, the severe energyshortage shows no sign of resolution. Another problem is that political power is excessively centralized. Sharif and his closest associates call the shots on all major initiatives, which has reduced the pool of available technocratic expertise and made the regime vulnerable to the charge of crony governance. Sharif himself has been disengaged from parliament, appearing a mere seven times in the national assembly over the course of the first parliamentary year. And much needed economic reforms that could result in job creation and significant economic growth — such as the widening of the tax base — have yet to be undertaken, in part due to the fear of political fallout.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

It was, perhaps, his most statesmanlike moment: a president brought to the decision he didn’t want to make, to defend a far-off nation he’d hoped was part of our nation’s past. “Earlier this week, one Iraqi cried that there is no one coming to help,”President Obama said in a somber statement delivered from the State Dining Room. “Well, today America is coming to help.” The New York Times described the situation with a certain amount of prissiness:

Speaking at the White House on Thursday night, Mr. Obama also said that American military aircraft had dropped food and water to tens of thousands of Iraqis trapped on a barren mountain range in northwestern Iraq, having fled the militants, from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who threaten them with what Mr. Obama called “genocide.”

Dropping the “g” word gives gravitas to any presidential statement. What Mr. Obama “called” genocide presumably included not only the attempt to wipe the small tribe of Yezidis off the face of the earth by allowing them to die of thirst and hunger on a mountain, but also the attempt to erase 2,000 years of Christian history in Iraq, along with its Chaldean, Assyrian, and other adherents (some of whom are the last speakers of Aramaic anywhere – we wrote about that here), along with the massacre of hundreds of young Shia men at Takrit, with more, much more, to come.

more here.

Andrew Graybill at The American Scholar:

For years, Claudio Saunt vividly recalled the summer of 1976, when as an eight-year-old boy he went to see an enormous birthday cake that had traveled cross-country to his hometown of San Francisco in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial. The cake, purportedly the world’s largest confection, stood three stories tall, weighed 35,000 pounds, and was festooned with scenes from the American Revolution. But as Saunt, now a professor of history at the University of Georgia, explains in his marvelous new book, he was betrayed by his memory. From contemporary accounts, he has learned that the cake was actually a thoroughly local affair, created by a pastry chef to celebrate the Bay Area’s own 200-year anniversary, traced to the establishment of a Spanish outpost there in 1776. As Saunt puts it: “San Francisco’s history was at such odds with the narrative being celebrated for the national Bicentennial that my fourth-grade imagination turned the cake into a tribute to events in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere along the East Coast.”

West of the Revolution is Saunt’s attempt to take in what was happening at other places in North America at the moment that the 13 colonies—which together represent just four percent of the continental landmass—were declaring their independence from England.

more here.

John S. Sledge at Virginia Quarterly Review:

On the page, Epstein aspires to be one of the “laughing skeptics” and mostly succeeds. He is mistrustful of “large ideas, and especially idea systems,” but his touch is light, and he dishes out the bons mots without meanness or acerbity. One may not always agree with his judgments, but they are rendered with art and wit. For example, his definition of a “middlebrow” is “anyone who takes either Woody Allen or Spike Lee seriously as an artist.” Contemporary poetry is “slightly political, heavily preening, and not distinguished enough in language or subtlety of thought to be memorable.” He likes Henry James (though his enthusiasm for The Princess Casamassima strikes me, a student of James myself, as somewhat unusual), Willa Cather, and Ralph Ellison. Held in low regard, “second- or third-rate writers,” are Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, and Adrienne Rich.

In his essay “What to Do about the Arts?” (1995), originally published inCommentary, Epstein relates the story of how, after Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, he was contacted by a British journalist for an opinion about the now-late poet and memoirist Maya Angelou. The man was surprised when Epstein said that he had no opinion about Angelou because he didn’t read her and knew no one who did.

more here.

Jordy Greenblatt in Put It All On Red:

You’re a doctor? I don’t really know anything about medicine, but can you explain exactly how the endocrine system works in two minutes or less?

You’re a writer? I had a terrible writing teacher in high school. I bet I wouldn’t like you.

You’re a carpenter? You must be super good at carpentering.

You’re a singer? I stopped singing in 11th grade. The last song I sang was… hmmmmm… let’s see… Mozart’s Requiem. I wasn’t very good at that song.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

Emily Dreyfuss in Wired:

My favorite thing on the internet might be your favorite thing, too. As of right now 8.8 million people “like” it on Facebook. Humans of New York, the photo blog and Facebook page run by Brandon Stanton, is a bulwark of hope in what sometimes feels like an onslaught of despair. And as of yesterday, it’s operating from a warzone. In case you’re not familiar, Brandon takes a photo of a stranger on the street (usually in New York City, but notably sometimes as far away as Iran) and posts a snippet of conversation with the subject. Somehow this snapshot manages to capture a whole life, and with it parts of our lives, too, our hopes and dreams and sorrows.

…That’s why right now Brandon is travelling with the U.N. on a World Tour. This is not the first time he has partnered with the U.N.: he spoke at the 37th UNIS-UN conference last year. Brandon announced this trip on Wednesday, writing: “The point of the trip is not to “say” anything about the world. But rather to visit some faraway places, and listen to as many people as possible.” While visiting 10 countries, Brandon will be helping to promote the eight Millennium Development Goals that U.N. member states hopes to achieve by 2015, among them eradicating child poverty and hungry and encouraging universal primary education. Commenters have suggested he name the tour Humans of the World, but Brandon is the first to point out that it “would be rather foolish to claim that these portraits and stories somehow represent ‘the world,’ or humanity as a whole.” But, like the snapshots he shares, this glimpse at a part will speak volumes about the whole. He writes, “we hope this trip may in some way help to inspire a global perspective, while bringing awareness to the challenges that we all need to tackle together.” Two days ago he traveled to Iraq. Yesterday morning EST he posted three photos from Irbil, in Kurdistan. Two such photos broke my (and 8 million other people’s) heart. One shows a smiling man in a wheel chair, his underdeveloped legs resting atop a box. This is the caption:

“My happiest moments are whenever I see my mother happy.”
“What’s the happiest you’ve ever seen her?”
“When I was a child, some German doctors told us that I could have a surgery in Italy, and my legs would work again. She was so happy she started crying. But I never had the money to go.”

The next photo is a close up of the man’s phone, his hands and feet out of focus in the background. On the screen is an image he photoshopped of his face onto a healthy body, “to see what I would look like.”

More here.

A O Scott in The New York Times:

Some years ago, at a party at the Cannes Film Festival, I was leaning against a rail watching a fireworks display when I heard a familiar voice behind me. Or rather, at least a dozen voices, punctuating the offshore explosions with jokes, non sequiturs and off-the-wall pop-cultural, sexual and political references. There was no need to turn around: The voices were not talking directly to me and they could not have belonged to anyone other than Robin Williams, who was extemporizing a monologue at least as pyrotechnically amazing as what was unfolding against the Mediterranean sky. I’m unable to recall the details now, but you can probably imagine the rapid-fire succession of accents and pitches — macho basso, squeaky girly, French, Spanish, African-American, human, animal and alien — entangling with curlicues of self-conscious commentary about the sheer ridiculousness of anyone trying to narrate explosions of colored gunpowder in real time. Very few people would try to upstage fireworks, and probably only Robin Williams could have succeeded. I doubt anyone asked him for his play-by-play, an impromptu performance for a small, captive group, and I can’t say if it arose from inspiration or compulsion. Maybe there’s not really a difference. Whether or not anyone expected him to be, and maybe whether or not he entirely wanted to be, he was on.

…Janet Maslin, reviewing his standup act in 1979, cataloged a tumble of riffs that ranged from an impression of Jacques Cousteau to “an evangelist at the Disco Temple of Comedy,” to Truman Capote Jr. at “the Kindergarten of the Stars” (whatever that was). “He acts out the Reader’s Digest condensed version of ‘Roots,’ ” Ms. Maslin wrote, “which lasts 15 seconds in its entirety. He improvises a Shakespearean-sounding epic about the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, playing all the parts himself, including Einstein’s ghost.”

More here.