John Tierney in The New York Times:

Just be yourself. The advice is as maddening as it is inescapable. It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself. But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself? How you can force yourself to relax? How can you try not to try? It makes no sense, but the paradox is essential to civilization, according to Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists. He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.” Pronounced “ooo-way,”it has similarities to the concept of flow, that state of effortless performance sought by athletes, but it applies to a lot more than sports. Wu wei is integral to romance, religion, politics and commerce. It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal. Dr. Slingerland, a professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, argues that the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common good. But there was always the danger that someone was faking it and would make a perfectly rational decision to put his own interest first if he had a chance to shirk his duty. To be trusted, it wasn’t enough just to be a sensible, law-abiding citizen, and it wasn’t even enough to dutifully strive to be virtuous. You had to demonstrate that your virtue was so intrinsic that it came to you effortlessly. Hence the preoccupation with wu wei, whose ancient significance has become clearer to scholars since the discovery in 1993 of bamboo strips in a tomb in the village of Guodian in central China. The texts on the bamboo, composed more than three centuries before Christ, emphasize that following rules and fulfilling obligations are not enough to maintain social order.

These texts tell aspiring politicians that they must have an instinctive sense of their duties to their superiors: “If you try to be filial, this not true filiality; if you try to be obedient, this is not true obedience. You cannot try, but you also cannot not try.” That paradox has kept philosophers and theologians busy ever since, as Dr. Slingerland deftly explains in his new book, “Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity.” One school has favored the Confucian approach to effortless grace, which actually requires a great deal of initial effort.

More here.

Egon Schiele. Self Portrait with Chinese lantern Fruits. 1912.

More here, and here.

Current show at Neue Galerie, NYC.

Ted Underwood, Hoyt Long, and Richard Jean So in Slate:

Six-hundred-page books about economics translated from French don’t usually become best-sellers. Part of the reason Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been so widely read is that it refuses to be just a book about economics. It traces the history of economic inequality with graphs of wealth and income, arguing that the past several decades have seen soaring disparity between the 1 percent and the rest of us. But it also shows how inequality shaped individual lives with stories drawn from novels. When Piketty spoke to President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in April, even they responded to the literary aspect of his work, quibbling over his interpretation of Balzac.

As literary historians, we’re thrilled to see economists arguing over details in a novel. But Piketty’s claims about fiction and inequality are important enough to probe in more depth, which is why we decided to test some of them on a scale only recently made possible by computers. Piketty’s account of literary history turns out to be wrong—but wrong in a way that casts a surprising new light on the way novels dorespond to the changing economic fortunes of people in the real world.

Novels by Balzac and Jane Austen matter for Piketty because they dramatize the immobility of a 19th-century world where inequality guaranteed more inequality—a world our own century is beginning to resemble once again. Since returns on capital were reliable, especially for large fortunes, the best way to get ahead was to start out ahead; income from labor could never catch up. The stability of 19th-century wealth is felt not only in plots that center on inheritance, but also, Piketty adds, in the references that flesh out a fictional world.

More here.

Sven Beckert in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If capitalism, as many believe, is about wage labor, markets, contracts, and the rule of law, and, most important, if it is based on the idea that markets naturally tend toward maximizing human freedom, then how do we understand slavery’s role within it? No other national story raises that question with quite the same urgency as the history of the United States: The quintessential capitalist society of our time, it also looks back on long complicity with slavery. But the topic goes well beyond one nation. The relationship of slavery and capitalism is, in fact, one of the keys to understanding the origins of the modern world.

For too long, many historians saw no problem in the opposition between capitalism and slavery. They depicted the history of American capitalism without slavery, and slavery as quintessentially noncapitalist. Instead of analyzing it as the modern institution that it was, they described it as premodern: cruel, but marginal to the larger history of capitalist modernity, an unproductive system that retarded economic growth, an artifact of an earlier world. Slavery was a Southern pathology, invested in mastery for mastery’s sake, supported by fanatics, and finally removed from the world stage by a costly and bloody war.

Some scholars have always disagree with such accounts. In the 1930s and 1940s, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams argued for the centrality of slavery to capitalism, though their findings were largely ignored. Nearly half a century later, two American economists, Stanley L. Engerman and Robert William Fogel, observed in their controversial book Time on the Cross(Little, Brown, 1974) the modernity and profitability of slavery in the United States. Now a flurry of books and conferences are building on those often unacknowledged foundations. They emphasize the dynamic nature of New World slavery, its modernity, profitability, expansiveness, and centrality to capitalism in general and to the economic development of the United States in particular.

Read the rest here.

Serge Schmemann in The New York Times:

There is no way that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the C.I.A. could have been anything less than devastating, but at least it could have been a demonstration of how a great democracy confronts terrible acts it committed at a time of high stress and confusion, how it acknowledges the wrong and seeks ways to prevent it from ever happening again. Yet even before the report was released, it had been relegated to fodder in the tedious and agonizingly petty partisan squabbling that has become the norm in Washington. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the committee, deserves great credit for her perseverance in having at least the executive summary of the report released despite the resistance of Republicans and the timidity of the White House.

…The head of the C.I.A., John O. Brennan, and other apologists for the agency are now arguing that the interrogators were “patriots,” and that the problem consisted of some officers who went “outside the bounds” of the rules. But if the people who ordered, justified and inflicted the waterboarding, “rectal hydration” and the like were patriots, why did the White House keep it secret even from members of its own administration? The report cites a striking internal C.I.A. memo relaying instructions from the White House to hide the program from then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, because he would “blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s going on.” That the White House felt compelled to withhold the C.I.A.’s clandestine activities from a distinguished soldier who was serving as its own secretary of state is a clear indication that those who ordered these abuses knew perfectly well what they amounted to.

More here.

Corner of 50th St. and Fifth Av.

Taking my usual walk
I run into sirens flashing red, turning
and a small crowd
watching the dark-haired man
with the thin mustache,
PR about 30
maricón, a voice in the crowd shouts.

Two uniforms have his head
wedged down in the gap
between the bucket seats,
red sirens turning turning
just over his head.

Another pulls down his pants
holds him tight around the waist
the fourth pummels
the pale orbs over and over
till the PR's face is flushed
the cop's fist red
the sirens turning turning.
The first two look bored
eyes drifting slowly
over the crowd
not meeting our eyes.
He just thud got out thud of jail
I hear a Rican say
thud, the cop's arms like baseball bats.
Finally the thuds end.
They pull his head out of the crack,
pull pants over livid cheeks,
manacled hands going down
to cover his buttocks

the sirens turning turning
I wade through the thick air thinking
that's as close as they let themselves get
to fucking a man, being men.
.

by Gloria Anzaldúa
from Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza
Aunt Lure Books, San Francisco, 1999

Lapata in Chapati Mystery:

This summer, Israel bombarded the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of civilians, bombing schools and hospitals, and even UNRWA shelters. This might just have been another chapter in the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories, but this summer, there was something new: an unprecedented number of photographs and videos made it through to the international community via twitter and other social media platforms. Those who refuse to believe the extent of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, or who believe the oppression of the Palestinian people is strategically justified for the survival of the Israeli state, were in denial about the many images rushing into the rest of the world.

Most famously, George W. Bush’s former speech writer, David Frum, latched onto a conspiracy theory that held that a series of images of two Palestinian brothers expressing raw grief over the death of their father whom they’d just brought to the hospital was simply a piece of propaganda. According to this theory, the photographs were staged, and this could be seen from the fact that in one, the more distraught brother had blood on his hands, and in another, he did not. The blood had been added for effect, went the theory. Unfortunately for Frum and his ilk, these photos had been taken by numerous professional photographers working for international news services, who spoke up and outlined the sequence of events, showing that while the men arrived at the hospital soaked in blood, in the interim, as their father lay in the operating room, they’d washed their hands.

More here.

For 50 years, scientists have ignored widespread cell contamination, compromising medical research. Why are they so slow to fix it?

Jill Neimark in Discover:

In the field of thyroid cancer, 58-year-old Kenneth Ain is a star. As director of the thyroid oncology program at the University of Kentucky at Lexington, Ain has one of the largest single-physician thyroid cancer practices in the country and more than 70 peer-reviewed publications to his name. Until recently, Ain was renowned for a highly prized repository of 18 immortal cancer cell lines, which he developed by harvesting tissue from his patients’ tumors after removal, carefully culturing them to everlasting life in vials. Laboratories around the world relied on the “Kentucky Ain Thyroid,” or KAT lines, both to gain insight into cellular changes in thyroid carcinoma and to screen drugs that might treat the disease, which strikes more than 60,000 Americans each year.

n June 2007, all that changed. Ain attended the annual Endocrine Society meeting in Toronto, where Bryan Haugen, head of the endocrinology division at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told Ain that several of his most popular cell lines were not actually thyroid cancer. One of Haugen’s researchers discovered that many thyroid cell lines their laboratory stocked and studied were either misidentified or contaminated by other cancer cells. Those included some of Ain’s. They were now hard at work unraveling the mystery.

There was a disaster brewing — it just wasn’t yet official.

Ain was shocked, and justifiably so. Research based on such false cell lines would undermine the understanding of different cancers and possible treatments, and clutter the scientific literature with bogus conclusions.

More here.

One of the Islamic State’s senior commanders reveals exclusive details of the terror group’s origins inside an Iraqi prison – right under the noses of their American jailers.

Martin Chulov in The Guardian:

In the summer of 2004, a young jihadist in shackles and chains was walked by his captors slowly into the Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq. He was nervous as two American soldiers led him through three brightly-lit buildings and then a maze of wire corridors, into an open yard, where men with middle-distance stares, wearing brightly-coloured prison uniforms, stood back warily, watching him.

“I knew some of them straight away,” he told me last month. “I had feared Bucca all the way down on the plane. But when I got there, it was much better than I thought. In every way.”

The jihadist, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Ahmed, entered Camp Bucca as a young man a decade ago, and is now a senior official within Islamic State (Isis) – having risen through its ranks with many of the men who served time alongside him in prison. Like him, the other detainees had been snatched by US soldiers from Iraq’s towns and cities and flown to a place that had already become infamous: a foreboding desert fortress that would shape the legacy of the US presence in Iraq.

More here.

Robin Yassin-Kassab in The National:

Meticulously researched and fluently written, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad’s The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War is the comprehensive guide to the neoconservatives and their works.

The book’s larger story is of the enormous influence wielded by unelected lobbyists and officials over the foreign policies of supposed democracies, their task facilitated by the privatisation and outsourcing of more and more governmental functions in the neoliberal era. (Similar questions are provoked by the state-controlled or corporate media in general, as it frames, highlights or ignores ­information.)

The more specific story is of how a small network of like-minded colleagues (Ahmad provides a list of 24 key figures), working against other unelected officials in the State Department, military and intelligence services, first conceived and then enabled America’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, a disaster that continues to overshadow regional and global relations today.

The first crop of neoconservatives emerged from a Trotsky­ist-tinged 1930s New York Jewish intellectual scene; they and their descendants operated across the political-cultural spectrum, in media and academia, think tanks and pressure groups. Hovering first around the Democratic Party, then around the Republicans, they moved steadily rightwards, and sought to form a shadow defence establishment. During the Cold War they were fiercely ­anti-Soviet. Under George W Bush they shifted from the lobbies into office.

The neoconservative worldview is characterised by militarism, unilateralism and a firm commitment to Zionism.

More here.

Kristen D. Burton in The Appendix:

During an evening of carousing and drinking at a Salisbury tavern, a soldier and his comrades were drinking to one another’s health. Then the soldier did the unthinkable: he drank to the health of the Devil. Boldly daring the Devil to appear, the soldier claimed that if the Devil did not, it was proof that neither the Devil, nor God, existed. The soldier’s drinking companions quickly fled the room out of fear, but they returned “after hearing a hideous noise, and smelling a stinking savour.” After returning to the room, the soldier had vanished, and all they found was a broken window, the iron bar within it bowed and covered in blood. The soldier was never heard from again.

This peculiar tale, told in 1682 by the Anglican minister Samuel Clarke, made up a part of his warning to all regarding the treacherous fates that awaited drunkards. The soldier made the fatal error of losing his wits and drinking to the health of the Devil, inviting the evil being into his world. This story, however, was only one of the terrifying possibilities outlined by Clarke. Illness, madness, bodily and spiritual destruction, and–ultimately–death comprised the tragic fates that awaited every drunkard.

Such critiques and warnings initially did little to sway daily drinking practices, but over time, the cries of those who stood in opposition to alcohol steadily grew louder. Murmurs in the mid-seventeenth century–shocked at the sudden increase of cheaply available spirituous liquors–increased to a roar of condemnation throughout the decades of the following century. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the damnations against alcohol had become a deafening clamor that came in the form of speeches, books, medical inquiries, and artwork. One aspect often featured in such anti-liquor declarations were the drunkards themselves–more specifically, the drunkard’s unsteady, untrustworthy body.

More here.

Delphine Strauss at the Financial Times:

Mohsin Hamid’s novels have always fused the personal and the political. First there was Moth Smoke (2000), a love story set in a Pakistan coloured by class and corruption, pot-smoking and power cuts. Next came The Reluctant Fundamentalist(2007), a pared-down parable charting the gradual disillusion of a young Pakistani with a high-flying career in corporate America.

First drafted just before the 9/11 attacks, it took years of rewriting before Hamid was content that his fictional world “would not be overwhelmed by an event that spoke so much more loudly than any individual’s story could”. Then, at the height of the emerging markets boom, came his subversive take on a self-help manual — How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013).

Discontent and its Civilizations, a disparate collection of non-fiction articles published since 2000, is split more explicitly into sections titled “life”, “art” and “politics” — but offers a similar blend of personal and political reflection, along with an insistence that the two are “inescapably intertwined”. Fifteen years living between New York, London and Lahore have made Hamid’s own experience — as he says in his introduction — that of a man caught in the middle of “what has been called ‘the war on terror’”.

more here.

Paul Muldoon at The New York Times:

The contradictory nature of Beckett is everywhere in evidence here. On one hand there’s the fastidiousness about the “leaves too many.” On the other is the fierce self-deprecation and disengagement, whereby “Watt” is “my regrettable novel,” ” ‘Godot’ was written either between ‘Molloy’ and ‘Malone’ or between ‘Malone’ and ‘L’Innommable,’ I can’t remember,” and, about his radio play “Embers,” “Hate the sight of it in both ­languages.”

This last occurs in a letter of Dec. 1, 1959, to Barbara Bray, the BBC drama producer who oversaw the 1958 version of “All That Fall,” Beckett’s first radio play. The editing of this third volume of “The Letters of Samuel Beckett” is no less exemplary than that with which we’ve come to be familiar from the first and second, but the entry on Bray in the “Profiles” section is a masterpiece of tact and tacitness:

“Few people can have come so close to SB. Lively, inventive and with a strong literary sensibility, she was the ideal person to help him through his characteristic lack of confidence about the new medium — not least because she saw at once that it was perhaps, of all the media, the one best suited to his gifts.

more here.

David Wheatley at The Guardian:

The atmosphere of grief and reverence that followed the death of Seamus Heaney was punctured recently when an Irish newspaper carried a spirited attack on his reputation by Kevin Kiely. For Kiely, Heaney was a peddler of nostalgia who owed his success to sponsorship by Faber and Faber, impressionable Americans and timid academics. As criticism, Kiely’s tirade was nugatory, but it did serve one useful purpose, offering a reminder that the words of the dead are modified in the guts of the living, as Auden said, that strange things can happen to the reputations of recently dead writers. The 20th century is full of poets whose reputations have collapsed posthumously like circus tents in a strong breeze: Vachel Lindsay, Archibald MacLeish, Edith Sitwell, Cecil Day-Lewis. Poets go out of fashion and come back (HD), suffer a temporary down-grading when the biography comes out (Philip Larkin), or get relaunched in new and unexpected forms (the “Radical Larkin” of John Osborne’s anti-revisionist critique).

The publication of Heaney’s New Selected Poems 1988–2013, and reprinting ofNew Selected 1966–1987, therefore marks an opportune moment for reassessment as well as celebration.

more here.

P.J. O'Rourke in The Daily Beast:

I had my 14-year-old daughter, Poppet, instruct me in how to watch an episode of Girls on my computer. (Turns out “content” is not completely “free.”)

Two seconds into the opening credits I was trying to get my daughter out of the room by any means possible. “Poppet! Look in the yard! The puppy’s on fire! Quick! Quick! Run outside and roll him in the snow!”

It turns out Girls is a serialized horror movie—more gruesome, frightening, grim, dark, and disturbing than anything that’s ever occurred to Stephen King.

I have two daughters, Poppet and her 17-year-old sister Muffin. “Girls” is about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters. These young people, portrayed as being representative of typical young people, reside in a dumpy, grubby, woeful part of New York called Brooklyn, where Ms. Dunham should put her clothes back on…

Then I had to buy a copy of Ms. Dunham’s book Not That Kind of Girl for $28.00. And it’s just the type of thing the IRS could nail me for, if I try to make it tax-deductable.

IRS Agent: “You mean to tell me that you are attempting to take a tax deduction for buying this… this… Sir, did you read page ___? And page ___? And —WHOO-EEE — pages _______? Did you receive your copy of the book through the mail? You do know, sir, that there are laws against distributing or receiving obscene material via the U.S. Postal Service.”

Not that I read it. Who can read a memoir by a 28-year-old? What’s to memorialize? The last 28-year-old who could have written a memoir worth reading was Alexander the Great in 328 B.C., after he’d conquered the known world, but he was too busy conquering the rest of the world to write it.

Read the full article here.