Sam Stephenson at The Paris Review:

“Trane” might as well have come from Krypton. The man “John Coltrane” is hard to locate in other people’s memories today, or in the existing studio or club recordings of his music, which document the known pinnacles, not the fits and starts and hours and years of rigor and anxieties. A list of facts doesn’t help much, either: his formative years in North Carolina are difficult to excavate and easy to summarize or skip over. Plus, the iconographic mid-century jazz photography makes Coltrane look seven feet tall (a 1947 Naval photograph shows him to be under five-foot-ten, a normal-size man). The legend is overwhelming.

Distance, distraction, and apathy make the devastating chaos of the 1960s and early seventies difficult to feel today, too. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The Vietnam War was going nowhere. The country was on fire, literally in some places, and reactionary forces clamped down, creating a weird climate of both chaos and torpor. In the 1972 presidential election, the sitting president, Nixon, carried forty-nine states.

more here.

Jonathan Gottschall in Seed:

Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t? In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Spent is about “display” consumerism. It leaves aside strictly utilitarian purchases like baloney or tampons. Understanding display consumerism, according to Miller, requires adding one part Thorstein Veblen to one part Darwin. From Veblen’s classic Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Miller appropriates the concept of “conspicuous consumption,” whereby people live and spend wastefully just to flaunt the fact that they can. From Darwin, Miller appropriates sexual selection theory—“costly signaling theory” in modern parlance—whereby animals compete by sending signals of their underlying genetic quality. As with the gaudy displays of peacocks, purchasing decisions frequently represent attempts to advertise “fundamental biological virtues” like “bodily traits of health, fitness, fertility, youth, and attractiveness, and mental traits of intelligence and personality.” Why spend $160,000 on a prestigious university degree? To make a “narcissistic self-display” of one’s intelligence and diligence. Why stuff yourself into a push-up bra and smear pigment across your lips and cheekbones? To try to enhance—or fake—your fertility signals.

More here.

Songbirds

There are songbirds
That live near-by
Whom I count as friends
& will sing goodbye
When I go down the road
And out of town

To this flock
This I ask
Sing high
Sing low
Continue to swoop, dart
Chase & play
Until you too, must go

No need to follow
My feathery friends
It is okay
This, my fate
Perhaps somewhere
Other songbirds wait.
.

by Terry McLarnan

H. A. Hellyer in Foreign Policy:

Egyptians moved their clocks forward an hour a couple of weeks ago following a decision by the country's new rulers to reinstitute daylight saving time, which had been eliminated following Hosni Mubarak's ouster in 2011. For the rather embattled group of revolutionaries who reject the domination of both the military and the Muslim Brotherhood, this inspired a joke: “They are taking away the revolution's only lasting achievement!” It's dark humor, to be sure, but humor in itself can be something quite potent — and to some in Cairo, quite threatening.

Egypt just got a rude wake-up call about that fact. On Monday, Bassem Youssef — the man described as Egypt's “Jon Stewart,” who ran a program gleefully satirizing the country's predominant political narrative —announced that his show was, at least for now, over. The program, calledEl-Bernameg, had already been forced to suspend shooting a few weeks ago, under the pretext that it would unduly influence Egyptian voters in the run-up to the Egyptian presidential election in late May. Of course, all other television shows — including those that unapologetically tried to politically influence viewers — were left untouched. The program was nevertheless due to return on Friday, May 30 — but didn't.

This is the second time Youssef has stopped airing his program.

More here.

Mike Rose in the Boston Review:

It is early in the morning on a hazy Southern California day, and students are walking or riding old bicycles into the community college campus, headed for 7:00 a.m. classes in English or math, nursing or automotive technology. The college is packed into twenty-five acres on the economically depressed periphery of the city’s thriving financial core, and it draws on one of the poorest populations in the area. Men sleep under newspapers and blankets in doorways right outside the school. One block away a line is already forming along the wall of a social service agency. The short, bare walkway into the campus is for many a luminous road into another world.

This college could serve as ground zero for Suzanne Mettler’s important new book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream, which analyzes diminishing postsecondary educational opportunity over the past thirty years, particularly for students in the lower half of the income distribution. If they are not deterred from attending college, students face soaring tuition, inadequate financial aid, and increased debt. To make matters worse, most states have been slashing higher education budgets, forcing colleges to offer fewer classes and services. That trend is beginning to reverse, though spending still is below what it was a decade ago.

Mettler explains how this came to be: how our extreme political partisanship and the increasing influence of big money have contributed to this mess.

More here.

The following was adapted from a commencement speech delivered to the Independent Concentrators of Brown University at their diploma ceremony on Sunday, May 25, 2014, in Providence, Rhode Island. Miriam Markowitz is deputy literary editor of The Nation.

Miriam Markowitz in The Nation:

Dear graduates,

Standing here, looking at you today, I am in awe. Not of your accomplishments, which I believe are many, or your character, which I’ve no doubt is stalwart and true, but at the thing I can see with my own eyes: your youth.

Seriously, I’m impressed. Which can only mean one thing: I’m old.

I mean, not that old, just a decade further along than you lot. But at 32, a few centuries ago I’d be middle-aged, or older. Maybe close to dead. Now that 30 is the new 20—or something like that, I don’t know—there’s a lot of confusion these days about whom we consider “adults” and who are “just kids.” So let’s say, for now, that because I am standing at this lectern, having been asked to dispense some words of wisdom about life going forward, that I am an adult. And I am going to do one of the things adults like doing best: I’m going to talk at you.

By that I mean I’m going to tell you a story, and I’m hoping that it won’t be a boring one. It isn’t supposed to be, according to conventional wisdom, because it’s a story about what many adults would say is your favorite subject: yourselves.

More here.

Stefano Evangelista at the Times Literary Supplement:

Again and again, Wilde writes amusingly but passionately against small-mindedness and chauvinism, and is supremely irritated by dullness. He is a gifted polemicist, as his spats with the American painter Whistler demonstrate, and he is skilled at using polemics as a means of self-promotion. He has a positive passion for picking out banal statements, which he enjoys quoting with minimal commentary, hanging his victims out to dry. Even more crucially for a reviewer who worked largely on commissions, Wilde can always be trusted to make something interesting out of unpromising subject matter. So, of a collection by the American poet and artist Atherton Furlong, he writes that it is “a form of poetry which cannot possibly harm anybody, even if translated into French”; while J. Sale Lloyd’s Scamp is dismissed as one of those novels that “are possibly more easy to write than they are to read”. When Wilde was given boring books to review, he did something daring and brilliant with them: he turned them into Oscar Wilde.

One of the most rewarding ways of reading Wilde’s journalism is therefore as a giant workshop for the making of the Wilde that readers know better from his more famous writings of the 1890s. It is in the journalism that Wilde comes up for the first time with many of the ideas and phrases that he would reuse in critical essays such as “The Decay of Lying” or “The Critic as Artist”.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

In Dubliners there are three kinds of people: old people, young people, and priests. The priests are mysterious, inaccessible, with yellow teeth or yellowing faces in photographs that hang on the wall. Priests are never main characters in Dubliners. They are peripheral figures, topics of conversation. They are also, generally, dead. The priests of Dublin have a special role, or once did, and almost no one seems to know what it is.

The first priest we meet, Father Flynn (in “The Sisters”), is the priest with the most clues. His life story is told in fragments, in hearsay, by his neighbors and by his sisters after Father Flynn has gone. Father Flynn used to be rather interesting, we learn, but had grown tiresome. Something queer about him, uncanny, one of those peculiar cases, wide awake and laughing to himself in the confession box. “I am not long for this world,” Father Flynn often told the boy, before Flynn had his series of strokes. Flynn’s epiphany in the confession box led him directly to paralysis and finally, to death.

James Joyce didn’t have much use for priests; he thought that priests like Father Flynn had lost their sight, their ability to focus their spiritual eye. Joyce’s characters often say things like, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter. … A priest-ridden Godforsaken race” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Like the rest of the Dubliners, Father Flynn experiences his epiphanies, but is unable to reflect upon them, to know them. This is a task for artists.

more here.

Jeremy Denk at the New York Review of Books:

If Ives’s music remains a source of doubt, doubt is also one of its great themes. The essential Ivesian gesture is an answer followed by a question. At a key juncture in the slow movement of the “Concord” Sonata, for instance, Ives builds to a climax on the famous four-note figure from the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In the wake of a thunderous C minor arrival, nearly inaudible wrong notes appear out of nowhere, “ruining” the achieved moment. They instill a double doubt, of understanding and perception; they represent harmonic uncertainty, but you also aren’t entirely sure that you heard them. The gesture feels almost comical at first, then acquires meaning: a delayed awareness of ambiguous overtones hiding in the clearest chords.

Many of Ives’s most important pieces are about blurred or doubtful perception. The beloved song “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” depicts a morning walk in haze and mist, while hearing a hymn from a church across the river. The loss of information, the disintegration of the tune, is essential to the beauty, like the crackle and hiss of old recordings: a failure that connotes authenticity.

more here.

Laura Miller in Salon:

When Maya Angelou published her memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1970, it was not the first first-person account of an African-American woman’s life, but it was the first of a new breed of unflinchingly honest ones. In addition to offering a powerful testimony to the effect of racism on her childhood (the first of six volumes of autobiography, the book covers Angelou’s life from age 3 to 17), “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” dared to speak of the particular hardships suffered by black women within their own community; Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend at age 7 and successfully testified against the man in court, although this trauma was followed by a five-year period of speechlessness. In the following decades, the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Angelou’s fearlessness helped pioneer a literary blossoming for African-American women that would encompass such figures as Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Toni Cade Bambara and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.

…As the years went by, Angelou’s poetry and public statements increasingly moved toward that most popular of all American literary forms, the uplifting and inspiring maxim. No doubt channeling the grandmother whose industry, self-reliance and ambition she admired so much, she licensed her name to a line of Hallmark cards. The poetry world might frown on such popularization, but the public adored her and found in her words both wisdom and comfort. Angelou’s is a style that lends itself well to the realm of social media, with its informal habit of sharing and passing along quotations and mottos, so it’s no surprise she maintained an active Twitter feed up until five days before her death. Her last message — “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God” — conveys the boundless warmth, hope and serenity that made her so beloved.

More here.

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the center of your room,
house, half acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.
.

by Margaret Atwood
from Eating Fire
Houghton Mifflin

Jyoti Madhusoodanan in Nature:

The mix of microbes in people's gut gets established early on in childhood and plays a large part in keeping kids healthy. But starvation disrupts the development of a healthy microbiome, according to a study comparing the gut microbiota of healthy and severely malnourished children from the same slum area of Dhaka, in Bangladesh, in the crucial two years after birth. This disruption persisted even after the malnutrition was treated with high-nutrient foods. The results suggest the mix of gut microbiota, which is known to contribute to immune function and nutrient extraction, could play a significant role in the pathology of malnutrition.

To determine the composition of normal microbiota and how they develop, a team of researchers from the United States and Bangladesh, led by Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, took monthly faecal samples from 12 healthy children from the slum over the first two years of life. Using DNA sequencing to distinguish the different bacteria present (the microbiome), the team compared the diversity and proportions of different species in the samples, and found that the relative abundances of 24 species in particular strongly correlated with the child's age when the sample was taken. Gordon and his colleagues found that the proportions of the 24 species changed as the children grew older, and that particular microbial compositions correlated with age across all the children. The team tested their model on 38 healthy, well-nourished children from the same area, and found that it accurately predicted these children's ages. When the researchers analysed the gut microbiota of starving children from the same part of Dhaka, however, they found that the microbial composition did not correspond to the children's actual age. Instead, it was that expected in a younger child.

More here.

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

A while back I published an article titled “The Rich, the Right, and the Facts,” in which I described politically motivated efforts to deny the obvious — the sharp rise in U.S. inequality, especially at the very top of the income scale. It probably won’t surprise you to hear that I found a lot of statistical malpractice in high places.

Nor will it surprise you to learn that nothing much has changed. Not only do the usual suspects continue to deny the obvious, but they keep rolling out the same discredited arguments: Inequality isn’t really rising; O.K., it’s rising, but it doesn’t matter because we have so much social mobility; anyway, it’s a good thing, and anyone who suggests that it’s a problem is a Marxist.

What may surprise you is the year in which I published that article: 1992.

Which brings me to the latest intellectual scuffle, set off by an article by Chris Giles, the economics editor of The Financial Times, attacking the credibility of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Mr. Giles claimed that Mr. Piketty’s work made “a series of errors that skew his findings,” and that there is in fact no clear evidence of rising concentration of wealth. And like just about everyone who has followed such controversies over the years, I thought, “Here we go again.”

More here.

Ed Yong in Aeon:

When microbes aren’t killing us, we are largely oblivious to them. So, we construct narratives of hosts and pathogens, heroes and villains, us and them. Those that cause disease exist to reproduce at our expense, and we need new ways of resisting them. And so we study how they evolve to outfox our immune system or to spread more easily from one person to another. We identify genes that allow them to cause disease and we label those genes as ‘virulence factors’. We place ourselves at the centre of their world. We make it all about us.

But a growing number of studies show that our anthropocentric view is sometimes unjustified. The adaptations that allow bacteria, fungi and other pathogens to cause us harm can easily evolve outside the context of human disease. They are part of a microbial narrative that affects us, and can even kill us, but that isn’t about us. This concept is known as the coincidental evolution hypothesis or, as the Emory University microbiologist Bruce Levin described it in 2008, the ‘shit happens’ hypothesis.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

If I Did It is an extremely confusing book written by an extremely confused man. That man is O. J. Simpson. He wrote the book as an act of confession. Or, maybe not, since the entire book is hypothetical. O. J. Simpson didn’t even write the book. He told his hypothetical account to a ghostwriter named Pablo F. Fenjves. In fact, the name O. J. Simpson is nowhere to be found on the cover of If I Did It. There is only the phrase “Confessions of The Killer.”

The book refers to that now-infamous night twenty years ago, June 12, 1994, when O.J.’s wife Nicole Brown Simpson was killed along with Ronald Goldman. Ron Goldman was, most likely, a man at the wrong place at the wrong time, a waiter returning a pair of glasses left at a restaurant by Nicole’s mother. Or maybe he was romantically involved with Nicole. Either way, it doesn’t matter anymore. Ron Goldman was caught up in the events of that night and was killed. After O. J. Simpson’s trial ended in a not-guilty verdict in 1995, there was another trial. This was a civil trial, brought by Ronald Goldman’s family. That trial reached verdict in 2007. O. J. Simpson was found liable for the wrongful death of Ronald Goldman. The Goldman family was awarded $33.5 million dollars in damages. They also received the publishing rights of If I Did It. The Goldmans were ordered by the judge of the civil trial to publish the book as a way to collect damages, (O. J. having nowhere near $33.5 million dollars readily to hand), and to prevent O. J. from profiting from the “wrongful death.” It was the members of the Goldman family who decided to call the author of If I Did It “The Killer.”

If I Did It includes an introduction by the Goldman family, a prologue by Pablo Fenjves explaining how the book was written, a history of the trial, an afterword by the journalist Dominick Dunne, and an epilogue by the Goldman’s lawyer Peter T. Haven. The sheer polyphony is enough to confuse anyone.

More here.

Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic:

Surely, you've seen our recent work on anthropodermic bibliopegy, the early modern practice of binding books in human skin?

No? Well, a quick refresher: some books, since the 16th century but before our own time, were bound in human skin. Why? “The confessions of criminals were occasionally bound in the skin of the convicted,” Harvard librarian Heather Cole explained, “or an individual might request to be memorialized for family or lovers in the form of a book.”

Qué romantico!

Anyway, we know it happened because people refer to it happening in the literature of the time, and also because some books bore inscriptions that literally said that they were bound in skin.

But such tomes are suspect. You can't just trust anyone who says they've bound a book in human skin. For example, one had this inscription, but turned out to bestupid sheepskin:

The bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it.

And so, I am happy to report, the Houghton Library's copy of Arsène Houssaye’s Des destinées de l’ame “is without a doubt bound in human skin,” Cole, who is the assistant curator of modern nooks and manuscripts at the library, reports in a new blog post.

More here.

John Washington in Terrain:

If you’re a white American male looking to write a “Mexico novel,” you probably think you have a lot of material to work with. You might be inspired, for example, by the ostentatious cartel violence of the past decade, or perhaps the exhibitionistic political corruption of the past century, or the harrowing migration stories of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans crossing Mexico every year, or you might even want to latch on to the guerrilla uprising of the Zapatistas in the 90s, or the surge in auto-defense and vigilantism in Michoacan and Guerrero today, or you might find inspiration in the crowded megalopolis of Mexico City or the guitar-lonely streets of colonial ghost towns or the cockfights in the Sierras or the bullfights in Tijuana or the explosion of kidnappings plaguing much of the country, or maybe, like Cormac McCarthy’s characters, you might be simply starstruck by a girl, or a horse, or a wolf. The material—Mexico (also the title of a Michener novel)—seems ready, ripe, nearly moaning for novelization.

But rather than spend your lucubratory late nights pencil-tapping, muse-channeling, or violence-gazing as you craft your masterpiece, you might just come to the country with a recorder. Because the story, let’s call it “your” story—of kidnappings, hunger, jungle uprisings, street shootouts, or Holy Death—is being lived right now probably better than you can plot it out. And the stories aren’t exoticized or eroticized. That’s to say, Studs Turkel would probably do better here than Thomas Pynchon; Upton Sinclair better than Stephen King.

More here.

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian:

Vincent van Gogh's ear has returned from the grave – or rather, the ditch or dump where the grisly piece of flesh he severed from the side of his head in December 1888 probably ended up. Van Gogh left it at a brothel in Arles. Presumably the prostitutes chucked it out with the rubbish.

Now it has been regrown from genetic material supplied by the great-great-grandson of Vincent's brother Theo. It is on display at a museum in Germany and Diemut Strebe, the artist behind this resurrection of art's most famous missing body part, hopes to tour it to New York. Will the ear get its own seat on the plane? Will it become an art world star?

Van Gogh's ear is one of the great icons of modern culture. When Allen Ginsberg called a poem Death to Van Gogh's ear! the severed ear of this painter and letter-writer of compulsive beauty and melancholy was already such a totem of popular culture that Ginsberg was sick of it. In the 1956 film Lust for Life, the harrowing ear removal is acted out by Kirk Douglas. This artistic gesture of self-harm has since then become a cliche of extreme creative behaviour.

More here.