Garret Keizer at Lapham's Quarterly:

Nineteen hundred and sixty-six years after the birth of Jesus Christ and one year prior to the execution of Che Guevara, a thirty-seven-year-old Colombian Catholic priest and sociologist named Camilo Torres Restrepo was killed while taking part in a botched ambush of government troops. He had joined a band of guerrillas only a few months before. “I have taken off my cassock,” he said, “to be a truer priest.”

Born into an upper-class secular family—his mother was furious about his decision to be ordained—Torres served as a college chaplain, a parish priest, and a founding leader of the opposition United Front before conflict with his ecclesiastical superiors and a growing conviction that, in his country at least, “the Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin” led him to apply for release from his priesthood. Shortly after laicization was granted, he left for the jungle.

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Richard Hornby at The Hudson Review:

Othello is clearly the protagonist of Shakespeare’s most problematic tragedy, yet it is Iago who incites the tragic action and pushes it through to conclusion. He has more lines than Othello, including more soliloquies. Othello’s murder of Desdemona is appalling, but his jealous motivation for it is clear enough; even though his jealousy has been triggered by Iago’s lies and innuendos, they do not mitigate Othello’s guilt, although they do raise the question as to why he is so gullible. (“This may be a lesson to Husbands, that before their Jealousie be Tragical, the proofs may be Mathematical,” wrote a late seventeenth-century wag.) It is Iago’s motivation that is troublesome. Even if he hates the Moor, why does he go to so much trouble to destroy him? Why not just kill him and be done with it? And why does Iago also have to wound Cassio, bring on the deaths of Roderigo and Desdemona, and kill his own wife? What have they ever done to him?

It is not that Iago gives no reasons for what he does. In fact, he gives several: he resents Othello promoting Cassio over him; he loves Desdemona himself; he fears that “the lusty Moor” (II.ii.292) has cuckolded him with his wife Emilia; he even fears that hapless Cassio has cuckolded him as well.

more here.

The Chinese micro-carver Chen Zhongen
can inscribe poems on a single strand of hair

The Stylist

I asked for a headful of sonnets
(Petrarchan) from scalp to split end.
Short-haired one, said he,
the most I can do for you
is a crop of haiku.

A bit miffed, I looked round the room
at enormous close-ups of women
with sestinas twirled through their ringlets,
thousands of Möbius strips
curled round recidivist words.

A man with a brylled-black mullet
sported tercets over his ears,
and a thicket of octets ending in knots:
floccinaucinihilipilification,
sesquipedalian,
hyperfecund,
the days of the week in Old Norse.

Poems with upbeat conclusions
on the flick-ups of nymphet models.
Bawdy love-lyrics from the 1700s
hidden inside dense dark shag perms,
and rhyming couplets at the outer tips
of a blonde boy’s barely-there eyebrows.

No fair, I thought; oh, to be Rapunzel
with space for the lost Latin epics
of Valerius Flaccus cascading
down past my backside.

But no; I got Ezra Pound’s petals
above my wet and blackening brow.
Some highlights from Japanese wisdom.
And one of the stylist’s own:
What hard work this is,
blinded by flurries of snow:
your psoriasis.

by Mary O'Donoghue
from Among These Winters
publishe, Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2007

Pauline Kael in a 1966 peice for The New Republic:

It’s as if a French poet took an ordinary banal American crime novel and told it to us in terms of the romance and beauty he read between the lines; that is to say, Godard gives it his imagination, recreating the gangsters and the moll with his world of associations—seeing them as people in a Paris cafe, mixing them with Rimbaud, Kafka, Alice in Wonderland. Silly? But we know how alien to our lives were those movies that fed our imaginations and have now become part of us. And don’t we—as children and perhaps even later—romanticize cheap movie stereotypes, endowing them with the attributes of those figures in the other arts who touch us imaginatively? Don’t all our experiences in the arts and popular arts that have more intensity than our ordinary lives, tend to merge in another imaginative world? And movies, because they are such an encompassing, eclectic art, are an ideal medium for combining our experiences and fantasies from life, from all the arts, and from our jumbled memories of both. The men who made the stereotypes drew them from their own scrambled experience of history and art—as Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht drew Scarfacefrom the Capone family “as if they were the Borgias set down in Chicago.”

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Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker:

Do people enjoy “Weird Al” Yankovic because he’s funny or because he’s not that funny? The comedian, who specializes in song parodies, just released his fourteenth studio album, “Mandatory Fun,” which features his class-clown mangling of hits by Lorde, Iggy Azalea, and Pharrell Williams, among others. It débuted at No. 1, selling more than a hundred thousand copies in its first week. Considering the post-digital slump in music sales—a hit album a decade ago could sell as many as a million copies in a week; this year, Sia’s “1000 Forms of Fear” entered the charts at No. 1 by selling only fifty-two thousand copies—this might be the biggest first week for a comedy album ever. But what is it that Weird Al actually does? I don’t laugh at his songs, yet I’m delighted by his presence in the world of pop culture. With his parodic versions of hit songs, this somehow ageless fifty-four-year-old has become popular not because he is immensely clever—though he can be—but because he embodies how many people feel when confronted with pop music: slightly too old and slightly too square. That feeling never goes away, and neither has Al, who has sold more than twelve million albums since 1979.

more here.

Joshua Keating in Slate (photo: Photo by MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images):

Sam Kean in Salon (image: Eugene Thirion's “Jeanne d’Arc” (1876)):

[S]ome physicians had always had a different perspective on where the mind came from. They’d simply seen too many patients get beaned in the head and lose some higher faculty to think it all a coincidence. Doctors therefore began to promote a brain-centric view of human nature. And despite some heated debates over the centuries—especially about whether the brain had specialized regions or not—by the 1600s most learned men had enthroned the mind within the brain. A few brave scientists even began to search for that anatomical El Dorado: the exact seat of the soul within the brain.

One such explorer was Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, one of the oddest ducks to ever waddle across the stage of history. Swedenborg’s family had made a fortune in mining in the late 1600s, and although he was raised in a pious household — his father wrote hymns for his daily bread and later became a bishop — Swedenborg devoted his life to physics, astronomy, and geology. He was the first person to suggest that the solar system formed when a giant cloud of space dust collapsed in upon itself, and much like Leonardo he sketched out plans for airplanes, submarines, and machine guns in his diaries. Contemporaries called him “the Swedish Aristotle.”

In the 1730s, just after turning forty, Swedenborg took up neuroanatomy. Instead of actually dissecting brains, though, he got himself a comfy armchair and began leafing through a mountain of books. Based solely on this inquiry, he developed some remarkably prescient ideas. His theory about the brain containing millions of small, independent bits connected by fibers anticipated the neuron doctrine; he correctly deduced that the corpus callosum allows the left and right hemispheres to communicate; and he determined that the pituitary gland serves as “a chymical laboratory.” In each case Swedenborg claimed that he’d merely drawn some obvious conclusions from other people’s research. In reality, he radically reinterpreted the neuroscience of the time, and most everyone he cited would have condemned him as a luna- and/or heretic.

More here.

David Weigel in Slate:

More here.

Neil Irwin in the NYT's Upshot on the new report by 3QD friend and former writer Beth Ann Bovino (photo: Greg Gibson/Bipartisan Policy Center):

Is income inequality holding back the United States economy? A new report argues that it is, that an unequal distribution in incomes is making it harder for the nation to recover from the recession and achieve the kind of growth that was commonplace in decades past.

The report is interesting not because it offers some novel analytical approach or crunches previously unknown data. Rather, it has to do with who produced it, which says a lot about how the discussion over inequality is evolving.

Economists at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services are the authors of the straightforwardly titled “How Increasing Inequality is Dampening U.S. Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide.” The fact that S&P, an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political circles is becoming more mainstream.

More here. From the report:

Though the share of income from labor and capital, excluding capital gains, has decreased, the share coming from capital gains and business income has increased over time. In particular, inherited wealth has increased since the World Wars and the Great Depression, as Thomas Piketty has shown (14), and with it the earnings from that wealth. This trend is important because labor income tends to be distributed across income levels more evenly than capital gains–so a shift in income composition can significantly affect inequality.

While labor income accounted for nearly three-fourths of market income from 1979-2007, that figure had dropped to two-thirds by 2007. Capital income (excluding capital gains) is the next largest source, but even at its 1981 peak, it represented only 14% of market income before falling to about 10% of total income in 2007. Conversely, income from capital gains rose, doubling to approximately 8% of market income in 2007 from about 4% in 1979. Business income and income from other sources (primarily private pensions) each accounted for about 7% of total income in 2007, up from about 4% each.

In addition, capital income has become increasingly concentrated since the early 1990s–and, despite declines in 2001 and 2002, concentration spiked from 2003 through 2007, with more than 80% of the capital gains realized by the top 5% of earners going to the top 1% alone (15). Capital gains also have become increasingly concentrated and are tied with business income as the most concentrated income source.

More here.

185

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

by Emily Dickinson

Alison Abbott:

All roads lead from Rome, according to a visual history of human culture built entirely from the birth and death places of notable people. The 5-minute animation provides a fresh view of the movements of humanity over the last 2,600 years.

Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues used the Google-owned knowledge base, Freebase, to find 120,000 individuals who were notable enough in their life-times that the dates and locations of their births and deaths were recorded. The list includes people ranging from Solon, the Greek lawmaker and poet, who was born in 637 bc in Athens, and died in 557 bc in Cyprus, to Jett Travolta — son of the actor John Travolta — who was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, California, and died in 2009 in the Bahamas. The team used those data to create a movie that starts in 600 bc and ends in 2012. Each person’s birth place appears on a map of the world as a blue dot and their death as a red dot. The result is a way to visualize cultural history — as a city becomes more important, more notable people die there. The work that the animated map is basedon was reported on 31 July in Science¹. The animation reflects some of what was known already. Rome gave way to Paris as a cultural centre, which was eventually overtaken by Los Angeles and New York. But it also puts figures and dates on these shifts — and allows for precise comparisons. For example, the data suggest that Paris overtook Rome as a cultural hub in 1789.

More here.

Jascha Hoffman in The New York Times:

Scientists are logical, making observations and running experiments, then building theories that explain the data. Artists are emotional, working in solitude and by intuition. Or so we are told. In “Colliding Worlds,” the historian and philosopher Arthur I. Miller argues that artists and scientists have always had the same mission: to “fathom the reality beyond appearances, the world invisible to our eyes.” And he argues that after drifting apart during the Enlightenment, the twin branches of understanding have been coming back together over the last century, a reunification that is accelerating in the digital age.

Dr. Miller’s encyclopedic survey begins at the dawn of the 20th century, when physicists as well as painters were testing radical new models of space and time. In the vein of his previous book “Einstein, Picasso,” Dr. Miller shows how the discovery of quantum mechanics inspired a generation of avant-garde artists, including Picasso, Kandinsky and Dalí, who said, “It is with pi-mesons and the most gelatinous and indeterminate neutrinos that I want to paint the beauty of the angels and of reality.” Starting in the 1980s, Dr. Miller began to spend time with artists who have found their muse in science, and has watched as the scene grew. He knows the field like few others, interviewing many of the artists for hours at a stretch and visiting museums, galleries, media labs, and corporate behemoths like Pixar and Google. Inventors and engineers make up a large share of his subjects, among them Neri Oxman, who is using her knowledge of bone formation to design better buildings from concrete, and David Edwards, the founder of Le Laboratoire in Paris, who has come up with methods for inhaling food and beverages and transmitting odors using cellphones.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Be-Unvaan. March 2014.

Digital photograph.

Nathan Thrall in the London Review of Books:

The current war in Gaza was not one Israel or Hamas sought. But both had no doubt that a new confrontation would come. The 21 November 2012 ceasefire that ended an eight-day-long exchange of Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial bombardment was never implemented. It stipulated that all Palestinian factions in Gaza would stop hostilities against Israel, that Israel would end attacks against Gaza by land, sea and air – including the ‘targeting of individuals’ (assassinations, typically by drone-fired missile) – and that the closure of Gaza would essentially end as a result of Israel’s ‘opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas’. An additional clause noted that ‘other matters as may be requested shall be addressed,’ a reference to private commitments by Egypt and the US to help thwart weapons smuggling into Gaza, though Hamas has denied this interpretation of the clause.

During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet recorded only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012. Israeli officials were impressed. But they convinced themselves that the quiet on Gaza’s border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.

The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones – agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn’t enter without being fired on – were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.

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Daron Acemoglu, Suresh Naidu, James A Robinson and Pascual Restrepo in Vox EU:

A belief that democracy is bad for economic growth is common in both academic political economy as well as the popular press. Robert Barro’s seminal research in this area concluded that “More political rights do not have an effect on growth…The first lesson is that democracy is not the key to economic growth” (Barro 1997, pp. 1 and 11). Meanwhile, reacting to the rise of China, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman argues:

“One-party nondemocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century […]”

In “Democracy Does Cause Growth”, we present evidence from a panel of countries between 1960 and 2010 challenging this view. Our results show a robust and sizable effect of democracy on economic growth. Our central estimates suggest that a country that switches from nondemocracy to democracy achieves about 20% higher GDP per capita in the long run (over roughly the next 30 years). These are large but not implausible effects, and suggest that the global rise in democracy over the past 50 years (of over 30 percentage points) has yielded roughly 6% higher world GDP.

There are several challenges in estimating the impact of democracy on growth. First, existing democracy indices are typically subject to considerable measurement error, leading to spurious changes in the democracy score of a country even though its democratic institutions do not truly change.

More here.

Kevin Birmingham in Harper's blog (James Joyce © Photo Researchers/Getty Images):

In 1917, while walking down a street in Zurich, James Joyce suffered an “eye attack” and remained frozen in agony for twenty minutes. Lingering pain left him unable to read or write for weeks. Joyce had endured at least two previous attacks, and after the third he allowed a surgeon to cut away a piece of his right iris in order to relieve ocular pressure. Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s partner, wrote to Ezra Pound that following the procedure Joyce’s right eye bled for days.

Joyce was suffering from a case of glaucoma brought on by acute anterior uveitis, an inflammation of his iris. It was, unfortunately, nothing new. Joyce’s first recorded bout of uveitis was in 1907, when he was twenty-five years old, and the attacks recurred for more than twenty years. To save his vision, Joyce had about a dozen eye surgeries (iridectomies, sphincterectomies, capsulectomies) — every one of them performed without general anesthetic. He lay in dark rooms for days or weeks at a time, and his post-surgical eye patches became his trademark. Doctors applied leeches to siphon blood from his eyes. They gave him atropine and scopolamine, which cause hallucinations and anxiety, to dilate his pupils. They administered vapor baths, sweating powders, cold and hot compresses, endocrine treatment and iodine injections. They prescribed special diets (oatmeal and leafy vegetables) and warmer climates. They disinfected his eyes with silver nitrate, salicylic acid, and boric acid; instilled them with dionine to dissipate nebulae; and doused them with cocaine to numb the pain. Nothing really helped.

More here.