Joshua Rothman profiles Franco Moretti's efforts at 'distant reading' in the New Yorker (via Andrew Sullivan):

Franco Moretti, a professor at Stanford, whose essay collection “Distant Reading” just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, fascinates critics in large part because he does want to answer the question definitively. He thinks that literary criticism ought to be a science. In 2005, in a book called “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History,” he used computer-generated visualizations to map, among other things, the emergence of new genres. In 2010, he founded the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to analyzing literature with software. The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over (“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, and analyzing that data, you can discover facts about literature in general—facts that are true not just about a small number of canonized works but about what the critic Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.” At the Literary Lab, for example, Moretti is involved in a project to map the relationships between characters in hundreds of plays, from the time of ancient Greece through the nineteenth century. These maps—which look like spiderwebs, rather than org charts—can then be compared; in theory, the comparisons could reveal something about how character relationships have changed through time, or how they differ from genre to genre. Moretti believes that these types of analyses can highlight what he calls “the regularity of the literary field. Its patterns, its slowness.” They can show us the forest rather than the trees.

Moretti’s work has helped to make “computational criticism,” and the digital humanities more generally, into a real intellectual movement. When, the week before last, Stanford announced that undergraduates would be able to enroll in “joint majors” combining computer science with either English or music, it was hard not to see it as a sign of Moretti’s influence. Yet Moretti has critics. They point out that, so far, the results of his investigations have been either wrong or underwhelming. (A typical Moretti finding is that, in eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, the titles of novels grew shorter as the market for novels grew larger—a fact that is “interesting” only in quotes.) And yet these sorts of objections haven’t dimmed the enthusiasm for Moretti’s work.

More here. Also see this pushback from Micah Mattix in The American Conservative.

Doug Henwood reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in Bookforum:

The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point.

In more technical terms, the central argument of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that as long as the rate of return on capital, r, exceeds the rate of broad growth in national income, g—that is, r > g—capital will concentrate. It is an empirical fact that the rate of return on capital—income in the form of profits, dividends, rents, and the like, divided by the value of the assets that produce the income—has averaged 4–5 percent over the last two centuries or so. It is also an empirical fact that the growth rate in GDP per capita has averaged 1–2 percent. There are periods and places where growth is faster, of course: the United States in younger days, Japan from the 1950s through the 1980s, China over the last thirty years. But these are exceptions—and the two earlier examples have reverted to the mean. So if that 4–5 percent return is largely saved rather than being bombed, taxed, or dissipated away, it will accumulate into an ever-greater mass relative to average incomes. That may seem like common sense to anyone who’s lived through the last few decades, but it’s always nice to have evidence back up common sense, which isn’t always reliable.

There’s another trend that intensifies the upward concentration of wealth: Fortunes themselves are ratcheting upward; within the proverbial 1 percent, the 0.1 percent are doing better than the remaining 0.9 percent, and the 0.01 percent are doing better than the remaining 0.09 percent, and so on. The bigger the fortune, the higher the return.

More here. Also see these reviews of the book by Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, Heather Boushey, and Branko Milanovic.

Lowry Pressly in The LA Review of Books:

It’s funny — and quite telling — that now that von Trier has made an unmistakably Sadean film, the majority of critical attention is focused not on the sadistic but on the allegedly pornographic aspects of the film. Though there is plenty of sex in Nymphomaniac — just not as much in the pared down version distributed here in the US as many expected or hoped for — as in the more transgressive works of Sade, the site of the film’s eroticism is in its discourse, in the telling of the story and not intermittent montages of T&A. Thus, from Juliette: “You have killed me with voluptuousness. Let’s sit down and discuss.” If he could hear the film press titter, surely the Marquis would be rolling (with mordant laughter) in his grave. And given that he was given a full Christian burial against his express wishes, that’s probably not all he’d be doing.

The term “nymphomania” comes to us (or persists, rather) as the result of a Victorian renaming of an ancient construction of female sexuality as psychopathology, which survived even as far as a few editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (It was finally abandoned in 1987.) As a diagnosis, nymphomania was applied to displays of female sexuality that were considered “excessive,” which could mean anything from the harboring of sexual fantasies to being attracted to men other than one’s husband. Like most diagnoses that infer a disfigurement of the subject from observations of her behavior, it tells us more about the society that came up with it than about nymphomaniacs themselves. Nymphomania reminds us that what we recognize as deviant in others unsettles us. We often find it easier, or at least psychologically safer, to posit a pathological source for the behavior rather than confront it in ourselves.

More here.

Nadia Urbanati in Eurozine:

Democracy is undergoing a series of metamorphoses, even though its fundamental norms are not subject to legal and formal changes. From Italy comes my third example. In the 1990s, Beppe Grillo, already known to the wider public as a comedian, gave up national television and re-invented his career in theatres and public demonstrations as tangentopoli (the nationwide political corruption that public prosecutors brought to light in 1992) directed the broader public's attention toward just how corrupt and corruptible politicians had become. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Grillo came to the fore of a movement that reacted against the proliferation of political corruption with satirical condemnation. By 2005, he had transformed himself from a soapbox speaker into a real political agitator. This was in no small part thanks to the creation of a personal blog, beppegrillo.it, designed and sponsored by Gianroberto Casaleggio's Internet and publishing firm, an operation at the forefront of communications management and digital marketing. (The blog attracted the interest of the international press, which rated it one of the best of its kind and earned the admiration and support of Joseph Stiglitz). Thus Grillo integrated two kinds of forum, the physical piazza and the virtual piazza, and made participation through the expression of opinions the engine of a new movement of contestation and participation. However, Grillo did not merely want to lead a movement of protest and opinion. He used his experience of technological innovation in a truly original way: to create a brand new and unique political actor. In just a few years, Grillo's blog became an arena of opinion formation, communication, propaganda and mobilization: it conveyed information on and criticism of local and national politics, global capitalism and consumerism, speculation related to pharmaceutical patents and the destructive exploitation of the environment, among others. Thus Grillo broached issues that were traditionally the concern of the Greens in a country that, in contrast to protestant European countries, has never had an ecological party capable of influencing national politics. Indeed, Grillo's blog was exceptional for the way in which it married ecological and political criticism and made environmental themes central to the charge that democracy as practised in capitalist societies, and especially in Italy and Europe, had suffered a loss of legitimacy.

Within a few years, Grillo's initiative transformed itself from an opinion-based movement into a political movement without losing its original non-party and increasingly anti-party character. Going by the name “Movimento 5 Stelle” (Five-star Movement or “M5S”), Grillo's group first scored well in administrative elections, and won control of the borough council and the position of mayor in Parma, one of the richest industrial cities of the North; finally, it reached parliament with the equivalent of 25 per cent of the vote in the elections of 24 and 25 February 2013. Although it didn't formally rewrite the constitution, M5S did effect the revision of political practice as organized and run by political parties. That is, M5S introduced an element of “directness” into representative democracy, giving birth to what I shall use an oxymoron to describe: direct representative democracy. Since “directness” pertains here to the visual and communicative, we may also refer to this as the birth of a live broadcasting representative democracy, as distinct from direct participation in the sense of the classical meaning of political autonomy.

More here.

Over at Guernica:

Guernica: You said a moment ago that some people thought your first novel was “just a Southern book.” Does Southern literature get treated as a niche genre, with a limited audience, in your experience?

Jesmyn Ward: Publishing companies put labels on these books. For me, the labels are Southern and black and woman. For some reason, they think an audience depends on the author’s identity, and every time they add another box, the audience gets smaller in their minds. You know those numbers showing that in the workplace, a person of color has to work ten times harder or more efficiently than a white colleague? I hate to say this, but I feel like that’s the case with literature, too. I’m not saying I have to write a book that’s ten times better than my counterparts, but I do think that I have to concentrate my efforts on writing something that will really engage people’s humanity and will tie readers to my characters regardless of race. I have to prove that I can connect with a wider audience. I think I accomplished that with Salvage. I went to Mystic, Connecticut, for example, to a wonderful bookstore there, full of people who couldn’t have been further from the place I come from, but they really responded to my work and saw my characters as human beings and loved them that way.

Guernica: You’ve been more willing than many novelists to engage with bigger political and social issues. Do you regret there aren’t more out there with you?

Jesmyn Ward: I understand why some writers resist it. They fear being boxed in, relegated to a category of political or socially conscious fiction. But I just don’t think I have a choice. I’m writing about the things I see all around me. Growing up in Mississippi, I’ve seen how these backward ideas about class and race and healthcare and education and housing and racism impact everyday lives. For example, my mother wouldn’t let me go to my homecoming dance because the yacht club where they were having the dance threw a fundraiser for David Duke, an ex-Klan member, when he was running for governor of Louisiana. So I grew up seeing how personal politics could be. It’s something I can’t avoid if I’m telling the truth about this place and writing about this community and Mississippi honestly.

More here.

Over at Philosphy Bites:

Are we more biased than we imagine? In this episode of the Philosophy Bitespodcast Jennifer Saul investigates a range of ways in which we are prone to implict bias and the philosophical implications of these biases.

Listen to Jennifer Saul on Implicit Bias

Emily McManus in TED:

Surgeon, author and speaker Sherwin Nuland died on March 3, 2014, at age 83. The author of a dozen books — including the award-winning How We Die, a clear-eyed look at life’s last chapter — Nuland came to TED in 2001 to tell a story he’d never told before. The world-renowned surgeon, clinical professor of surgery at Yale and best-selling author began his talk with a history of mental health and mental illness … and gradually began to weave in his own story, of a depression so crippling, so impossible to shift, that in his 40s he was in line for a lobotomy. But his young doctor made a bold suggestion, and then stuck to it in the face of widespread doubt: Nuland would try electric shock therapy.

It’s a stunning talk. TED’s own Tom Rielly, who saw the talk live, remembers:

“Sherwin’s talk took us on a journey into the hell of his darkest depression and his improbable journey back. From literally sleeping in the gutter to recovering his life via a caring young doctor who kept him from being lobotomized, Nuland’s powerful storytelling nearly stopped the Monterey conference room from breathing, and then ultimately allowed a tearful catharsis. Nuland affected me more powerfully than any talk before or since. Having lived with the illness for more than 30 years I know how easily it could have been I who was prostrate on the street. I will always be grateful to him for showing me the power of honesty even about the things that terrify.”

More here.

Nigel Lendon in HimalSouthAsian:

In late 1989 the last troops of the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan had left after a decade of resistance by the various factions of the mujahideen. During this period one finds an extraordinary profusion of visual media opposing the Soviet occupation. Contradictions abound in the visual record of this unhappy decade, and the non-traditional narrative carpets of this period constitute a form of indigenous modernism which occurred independently of other modes of contemporary visual art elsewhere in the world.

The rugs produced as a consequence of the Pakistani diaspora are more radically non-traditional than those which emerged from Iran. From the early 1980s a wide range of anti-Soviet propaganda was produced in Islamabad, and smuggled into Afghanistan. Therefore it is not surprising to find examples of imagery in war rugs reflecting a common propagandistic intent. In this rug,President Najibullah, who ruled until 1992, is represented as a puppet of the Soviet Union. In examples such as this one finds quite complex pictorial fields combined in the one image. The upper register is organised as patterned militaria, from which emerges the giant hand of the Soviet puppeteer (marked with the distorted hammer and sickle) holding the figure of the Afghan President. The central register is taken up by the map of Afghanistan, and Najibullah is shown as under attack from all sides by mujahideen. In contrast, in the lower register (representing Baluchistan), one sees the peaceful past, represented as an idyllic scene of Kuchi nomads.

More here.

Drinking Alone

I take my wine jug out among the flowers
to drink alone, without friends.

I raise my cup to entice the moon.
That, and my shadow, makes us three.

But the moon doesn't drink,
and my shadow silently follows.

I will travel with moon and shadow,
happy to the end of spring.

When I sing, the moon dances.
When I dance, my shadow dances, too.

We share life's joys when sober.
Drunk, each goes a separate way.

Constant friends, although we wander,
we'll meet again in the Milky Way.
.
by Li-Po

Tariq Ali in The Guardian:

Once again, it seems that Russia and the United States are finding it difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions. This clash of interests is highlighted by the Ukrainian crisis. The provocation in this particular instance, as the leaked recording of a US diplomat, Victoria Nuland, saying “Fuck the EU” suggests, came from Washington.

Several decades ago, at the height of the cold war, George Kennan, a leading American foreign policy strategist invited to give the Reith Lectures, informed his audience: “There is, let me assure you, nothing in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision … Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue.”

And so it continues. Washington knows that Ukraine has always been a delicate issue for Moscow. The ultra-nationalists who fought with the Third Reich during the second world war killed 30,000 Russian soldiers and communists. They were still conducting a covert war with CIA backing as late as 1951. Pavel Sudoplatov, a Soviet intelligence chief, wrote in 1994: “The origins of the cold war are closely interwoven with western support for nationalist unrest in the Baltic areas and western Ukraine.”

When Gorbachev agreed the deal on German reunification, the cornerstone of which was that united Germany could remain in Nato, US secretary of state Baker assured him that “there would be no extension of Nato's jurisdiction one inch to the east”.

More here.

Doctors will try to save the lives of 10 patients with knife or gunshot wounds by placing them in suspended animation, buying time to fix their injuries.

Helen Thompson in New Scientist:

Neither dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.

Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.

“We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,” says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. “So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.”

The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. “If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,” says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.

More here.

Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times:

Most of the book celebrates Schama’s main thesis: that Jews were not the rigidly pious and self-segregating people Christian invective as well as the theologically dominated research of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made them out to be. On the contrary. From the beginning of their known history and for centuries thereafter, Jews commingled with Canaanites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, pre-Muslim Arabs, Muslim Arabs and Christian Europeans. It was only when the Christians and Muslims turned on the Jews, singling them out for humiliation and, in the case of the Christians, grotesque insult and slaughter, that Jews began to withdraw or be pushed into their own separate spheres.

During the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., for instance, Jewish colonists on Elephantine flourished in the company of their Egyptian neighbors. The Elephantine Jews built their temple of Yahu across the street from the Egyptian temple of ­Khnum — even though, technically, the Bible forbade Jews to build a temple outside Jerusalem. The Jewish soldiers and their families were chided by their betters in Jerusalem, who disapproved of the Elephantines’ high rate of intermarriage and their lax standards of Passover observance, but Schama is charmed by their easy­going urbanity.

more here.

Florian Duijsens at The Quarterly Conversation:

Imagine a literary genre much like a diary but composed for immediate consumption. A genre part commonplace book, part Blue Octavo Notebooks, part Twitter stream. Imagine something like a blog but written by public intellectuals and printed in major newspapers, or read out on national radio or television. Imagine a column in a newspaper that is too short to make a rigorous political argument, but that isn’t necessarily aiming to either. Imagine its strong social-democratic values, often only implied and somehow still rooted in the country’s liberation from the Nazi occupation in 1945.

This kind of writing is observational, street sketching really, and even though it isn’t beholden to any significant journalistic accountability, it still affects through the instant recognizability of the moments it relates. It works cumulatively, layering these observations to create something more, something bigger. Reading these small pieces day in day out, they slowly give you a glimpse into the mind of the author, plus a better sense of just what your country is. Or rather, what it could be.

This is the best way I can describe the Dutch genre that has found a home for people like Simon Carmiggelt (man-on-the-street portraiture), Arnon Grunberg (political footnotes), and A.L. Snijders (autobiographical fables). The country has many more such writers, each with their own twist, some more comical (Sylvia Witteman), others provocatively philosophical (Maxime Februari).

more here.

Frances Spalding at The Guardian:

“The moment when a man comes to paint himself – he may do it only two or three times in a lifetime, perhaps never – has in the nature of things a special significance.” So Lawrence Gowing wrote, in an introduction to a 1962 exhibition of British self-portraits. And he is right: self-portraits, whether of men or women, have a particular call on our attention. Take Käthe Kollwitz's etching Self-portrait with Hand to her Forehead, reproduced in James Hall's new book. The head and hand fill the entire plate, leaving no room for anything else. The heavy, repeated lines form dark shadows on and around the head, while the eye under the hand is obliterated by darkness. Yet her face presses forward, as if she were leaning on the kitchen table, offering us, with inescapable intimacy, a memory of the suffering and sadness she witnessed in the poor quarter of Berlin where her husband worked as a doctor. The viewer need know nothing of this: it is all there in her look.

more here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

It is easy to feel sorry for the gastrotrich. This invertebrate animal, the size of a poppy seed and the shape of a bowling pin, swarms by the millions in rivers and lakes. After it hatches, it takes only three days to develop a complicated body, complete with a mouth, a gut, sensory organs, and a brain. Having reached maturity in just seventy-two hours, the gastrotrich starts laying eggs. And after a few more days, it becomes enfeebled and dies of old age.

To squeeze a whole life into a week seems like one of nature’s more cruel tricks. But that’s only because we are accustomed to measure our lives in decades. If the ancient animals and plants featured in this book could look upon us, they might feel sorry for us as well. We humans marvel at the longest-living human on record, Jean Calment, who lived from 1875 to 1997. But for a 13,000-year-old Palmer’s oak tree, Calment’s 122 years rushed by as quickly as a summer vacation.

Palmer’s oaks, gastrotrichs, and all the species in between are the products of evolution. The head-swimming diversity of life is joined in an evolutionary tree made up of tens of millions of branches. And one of the most spectacular of that diversity’s dimensions is longevity. If natural selection provides Palmer’s oaks with millennia, why does it only spare a gastrotrich a week of existence?

More here.