Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Suicide is written mostly in the second person. Sometimes, though, the narrator refers to himself, and Suicide toggles back and forth between these two pronouns: the “I” of the narrator and “you,” the friend who committed suicide. This makes it feel like a letter, a letter from one childhood friend to another, regarding the latter’s suicide at the age of 25, twenty years ago. The separation between “I” and “you” often blurs. Each friend becomes a double, is defined by the other and, in turn, reflects the other. We learn that “you” died young. You studied economics; your childhood home was a chateau. You took photographs and read the dictionary. You were a virtuoso on the drums, playing solos in your basement for hours. You felt yourself ill adapted to the world, surprised that the world had produced a being who lives in it as a foreigner. You traveled to “taste the pleasures of being a stranger in a strange town.” You liked to be anonymous, a silent listener, a mobile voyeur. Eventually, you stopped traveling, preferring to be at home.

You were fascinated by the destitute and the morbidly old. Perhaps this is what you feared — to become the living dead, to commit suicide in slow motion. “You were a perfectionist,” the narrator writes.

You were such a perfectionist that you wanted to perfect perfecting. But how can one judge whether perfection has been attained? … Your taste for the perfect bordered on madness…

more here.

James Longenbach at The Nation:

In 1946, a precocious student at the University of Toronto wanted to read the library’s copy of James Joyce’sUlysses. He was informed that he needed first to submit two letters, one from a clergyman and the other from a doctor. The Canadian ban on Ulysses would not be lifted until 1949, so the young man headed south, to Yale University, where after some wrangling he was permitted to write his PhD dissertation on Joyce, and in 1956 it was published as Dublin’s Joyce, one of the first large-scale examinations of Joyce’s career. Even then, twenty-three years after the US ban against Ulysses had been lifted, Joyce’s book was more often talked about than read—it was dirty, immoral, impossible. Today, Ulysses is still more often talked about than read. What’s the most overrated book you’ve never finished? “Joyce’s Ulysses,” says the novelist Richard Ford in the pages of The New York Times Book Review. “Hands down.”

The author of Dublin’s Joyce was the inimitable Hugh Kenner, who had no patience for such literary chatter. When I heard him lecture on Joyce in the mid-1980s, he spoke without a prepared text, producing sentences that were small syntactical dramas, as suspenseful as they were incisive. Every century produces its signature epic, Kenner began. The seventeenth century had Milton’s Paradise Lost, the eighteenth century had Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the nineteenth century had—dramatic pause—theOxford English Dictionary. The OED’s entry on the word “and” is longer than Paradise Lost, said Kenner. Who would read it?

more here.

Daniel Mendelsohn at The New York Review of Books:

In The Broken Road, we get many of the things we love in Leigh Fermor. Here again, he goggles and zigzags, flirts and pontificates. There are the vivid descriptions and the donnish asides; a touching near romance with a Greek girl—his first exposure to the people who would capture his imagination later—and a fantastical encounter with dancing fishermen in a cave, which affords the elderly author a chance to discourse on Greek folk choreography in a way his younger self couldn’t possibly have done. (“The other great dancers of the hasapiko and the tzeibekiko, as the two forms of rebetiko dances are severally called…”)

Still, one of the most interesting revelations afforded by the new book is that the high style of later years was already more or less fully formed by the end of his great walking tour. This is clear from reading the latter part of the book—the original entries from the journal he was keeping during his voyage to Mount Athos after he left Istanbul. (Ironically, all we have of the long-awaited sojourn in the historic capital city are terse and colorless notes.)

more here.

From Edge.org:

Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It's a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. The medium by which we share complex ideas, namely language, has been studied intensively for more than half a century. And so if all that work is of any use it ought to be of use in crafting more stylish and transparent prose. From a scientific perspective, the starting point must be different from that of traditional manuals, which are lists of dos and don'ts that are presented mechanically and often followed robotically. Many writers have been the victims of inept copyeditors who follow guidelines from style manuals unthinkingly, never understanding their rationale. For example, everyone knows that scientists overuse the passive voice. It's one of the signatures of academese: “the experiment was performed” instead of “I performed the experiment.” But if you follow the guideline, “Change every passive sentence into an active sentence,” you don't improve the prose, because there's no way the passive construction could have survived in the English language for millennia if it hadn't served some purpose.

The problem with any given construction, like the passive voice, isn't that people use it, but that they use it too much or in the wrong circumstances. Active and passive sentences express the same underlying content (who did what to whom) while varying the topic, focus, and linear order of the participants, all of which have cognitive ramifications. The passive is a better construction than the active when the affected entity (the thing that has moved or changed) is the topic of the preceding discourse, and should therefore come early in the sentence to connect with what came before; when the affected entity is shorter or grammatically simpler than the agent of the action, so expressing it early relieves the reader's memory load; and when the agent is irrelevant to the story, and is best omitted altogether (which the passive, but not the active, allows you to do). To give good advice on how to write, you have to understand what the passive can accomplish, and therefore you should not blue-pencil every passive sentence into an active one (as one of my copyeditors once did).

More here.

Kate Murphy in The New York Times:

PITTSBURGH — Trauma patients arriving at an emergency room here after sustaining a gunshot or knife wound may find themselves enrolled in a startling medical experiment. Surgeons will drain their blood and replace it with freezing saltwater. Without heartbeat and brain activity, the patients will be clinically dead. And then the surgeons will try to save their lives. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have begun a clinical trial that pushes the boundaries of conventional surgery — and, some say, medical ethics. By inducing hypothermia and slowing metabolism in dying patients, doctors hope to buy valuable time in which to mend the victims’ wounds.

But scientists have never tried anything like this in humans, and the unconscious patients will not be able to consent to the procedure. Indeed, the medical center has been providing free bracelets to be worn by skittish citizens here who do not want to participate should they somehow wind up in the E.R. “This is ‘Star Wars’ stuff,” said Dr. Thomas M. Scalea, a trauma specialist at the University of Maryland. “If you told people we would be doing this a few years ago, they’d tell you to stop smoking whatever you’re smoking, because you’ve clearly lost your mind.”

More here.

Rebecca Morales. Eco Lux. 2006.

Gouache, watercolor, ink & pastel on calf vellum.

More here, here, and here.

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books:

If we are what we eat—a notion that seems irrefutable in today’s food-fixated United States—then another corollary, at a time when personal identity often derives more from professional pursuits than private matters, would be that we are where we work. Whether that means a mahogany-paneled corner suite atop a high-rise corporate banking headquarters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, or a Silicon Valley campus designed to feed the infantile appetites of tech geeks, or a hipster freelancer coworking facility recycled from an abandoned architectural relic of some long-ago economic boom, there has never been more diversity in the settings where American office employees spend their workdays.

In Cubed, his impressive but substantially flawed study of the modern office over the past two hundred years, Nikil Saval—an editor at n+1, where this, his first book, began as an essay—develops two subthemes with particular clarity and power. The first and more important is the increasing participation of women in the office workplace beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a development that entailed a methodical limitation of tasks, pay, and prospects for advancement of women generally. The resulting disparity was not accidental, but began with, and ever since has followed remarkably closely, a standard established for federal employees as early as 1866, when legislators put an annual salary cap of $900 on female government employees, as opposed to a maximum of $1,200 to $1,800 for men.

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Sonali Kolhatkar in TruthDig:

The stoning to death of a pregnant woman named Farzana Iqbal by members of her family in broad daylight in Lahore, Pakistan, last week has prompted protests in that nation by human rights activists. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has announced an inquiry into the slaying that was apparently spurred by the 25-year-old woman marrying a man of whom her family did not approve. The man himself openly admitted to killing his first wife in order to marry Iqbal.

Just days after the horrific Pakistani incident, in neighboring India, two young girls were found raped and lynched in a village in Uttar Pradesh, shocking a nation already reeling from several high-profile rapes and killings of women.

In the wake of such sexual assaults in the Global South, American conservatives and liberals alike naively ask the question of what is it about the “cultures” of countries such as Pakistan, India and Afghanistan that generates such misogyny. Having been on the receiving end of such questions myself many times, I know how infuriating it is to have to explain patiently to well-meaning people that misogyny is not the unique purview of certain foreign cultures; rather, it is sadly universal. Furthermore, it is often U.S.-backed militarism that fosters it at home and abroad.

More here.

Jon Butterworth in The Guardian:

Many explanations of the Higgs talk about wine bottles or Mexican hats. The idea is that the universe is rolling around in the lowest bit of an energy surface – in the dip in the brim of the hat, or at the outer edge of the base of the wine bottle, depending on your preferred analogy. The dip is the place where the energy is minimised. This makes the universe stable, since to go anywhere else on the surface would require an enormous amount of energy.

The masses of the fundamental particles, especially of the top quark and the Higgs boson, play a role in determining the shape of this surface. For some values of those masses, the brim of the hat is the lowest possible energy value and the universe is completely stable. For other values, the brim is the wrong shape and the universe is completely unstable. Since the universe seems to have lasted for 13.8 billion years, those values are in quite extreme contradiction with observation, even before you consider the particle masses.

There is a third possibility however, which is that the brim of the hat turns down again and there is another wiggle, another dip, which is even lower than the one the universe currently occupies. To get to this lower state, the universe has to go over a bump, which classically would require lots of energy, so the universe remains stable. But in quantum mechanics, there is a small possibility of “tunneling” through the bump, and finding the new, lower energy region. On a smaller scale, this tunneling effect is seen in radioactive decays and elsewhere.

More here.

Chris Hall in AlterNet:

More and more, the strongest atheist voices are talking about nonbelief less as an end in itself, but as part of a larger conversation about social justice. It could hardly be any other way: atheism is growing not only in numbers, but in diversity. When Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens were at their most prominent, a frequent (and credible) criticism was that the faces of atheism were all white, male and affluent. To make the same claim now is to deliberately ignore some of the most vital atheist and skeptic voices that have emerged in the last 10 years.

Greta Christina, the author of Coming Out Atheist describes the changes in organized atheism: “[T]he movement has become much more diverse — not just in the obvious ways of gender, race, and so on, but simply in terms of how many viewpoints are coming to the table. The sheer number of people who are seen in some way as leaders… has gone up significantly…. And the increasing diversity in gender, race, class, and so on are important. We have a long way to go in this regard, but we're doing much, much better than we were. And that's showing up in our leadership. It's absurd to see Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris as representing all organized atheism — it always was a little absurd, but it's seriously absurd now.”

More here.

Julia Lovell in The Guardian:

Leftover Women should carry a health warning: this book will severely raise your blood pressure. Leta Hong Fincher's subject – researched through statistical analysis, sociological surveys and extensive first-hand interviewing – is the toxic vitality of sexism in China today.

The book's title is drawn from a vile state-sponsored media campaign of the same name, which is designed to browbeat educated, professional women into early marriages in the interests of safeguarding social stability. Since at least 2007, newspapers, magazines, websites and – perhaps most troublingly of all – the All-China Women's Federation (a government organisation founded in 1949 supposedly to defend women's rights) have aggressively pushed the idea that unmarried urban females over 27 are “leftover women”. These women may have university degrees and thriving careers but in the eyes of much of the state-controlled media they are essentially worthless without husbands and children. “Do leftover women really deserve our sympathy?” asked one article on the Women's Federation website. “Girls with an average or ugly appearance … hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is they don't realise that, as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old, like yellowed pearls.

More here.

Kathryn Schulz in Vulture:

Con Brio

—i.m. Dolly Sayers

She blew in, a big noise from Odessa, turned
cradle, nursery, parlour, house into ever larger auditoria,
swelling with her belter alto through contralto
figure flowing from violin, viola via cello to double bass
twirled and slapped by dance hall players;
marriage jumped to the rhythm of her castanets,
percussionist in the kitchen, entire brass section
at social events, trumpeting achievements, major,
minor, of children, grandchildren, swung towards
you, a bell, the great clapper of her tongue, ringing
with amusement, indignation; youth’s smart glissandi
eventually slowing in age to adagio, notes lengthening,
diminishing until at last she sat, a breve upon a stave,
great mute bird on a wire feeling only its hum.

by John Sayers
from Magma Poetry

Via Aeon Magazine:

NATURE BY NUMBERS from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

Amanda Marcotte in The Daily Beast (photo by Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters):

My first instinct, as a deliberately childless person myself, upon reading Pope Francis’s remarks was to think, “If you think having children is so important, then why don’t you go first?” But while sarcasm is a satisfying hobby, it’s perhaps better to look to empirical science to answer the question of whether or not it’s actually true that childless people will be punished with loveless marriages and age into loneliness.

Luckily, there’s been a lot of research into both those questions. In fact, the question of whether or not having kids makes marriages happier or not is one that has been looked at again and again, to the point where you start to wonder if they’re trying to get a different result this time. The answer keeps coming back the same: Childless couples have happier marriages, on average.

Or, to be more specific, studies that measure the day-to-day satisfaction of parents shows that satisfaction with your marriage starts to decline rapidly when you have your first baby, goes up and down with the stresses of child-rearing (with a particular low point around adolescence), but it stays relatively low, only rising again after the kids move out of the house. The daily grind of child-rearing and the stress of sharing responsibility seem to be a big part of it. That may explain why mothers are less happy than fathers. After all,they spend more of their time with the children.

Nor is it true that childless people are doomed, as the pope warned, to be lonely and sad in their old age. A 2003 study that looked specifically at this question found that having children was no guarantee against loneliness in old age. After surveying nearly 4,000 people ages 50 to 84, researchers found no difference in the loneliness rates of people with children and people without children. Common sense should suggest the same. Relying on a phone call a week from your kids is hardly a panacea for loneliness. Non-lonely seniors are usually the ones with plenty of friends, and being able to make friends isn’t dependent on your status as a parent or not.

More here.

Zoë Heller reviews Jennifer Senior's All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, in the LRB:

The reputation of parenthood has not fared well in the modern era. Social science has concluded that parents are either no happier than people without children, or decidedly unhappier. Parents themselves have grown competitively garrulous on the subject of their dissatisfactions. Confessions of child-rearing misery are by now so unremarkable that the parent who doesn’t merrily cop to the odd infanticidal urge is considered a rather suspect figure. And yet, the American journalist Jennifer Senior argues in her earnest book about modern parenthood, it would be wrong to conclude that children only spoil their parents’ fun. Most parents, she writes, reject the findings of social science as a violation of their ‘deepest intuitions’. In fact, most parents – even the dedicated whingers – will say that the benefits of raising children ultimately outweigh the hardships.

Senior’s characterisation of parenthood as a wondrous ‘paradox’ – a nightmare slog that in spite of everything delivers transcendent joy – has gone down very well in America, where parents seem reassured to find a cheerful, pro-kids message being snatched from the jaws of sleep deprivation and despondency. The book spent six weeks on the bestseller list and has earned Senior the ultimate imprimatur of a lecturing gig at the TED conference. ‘All Joy and No Fun inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent,’ Andrew Solomon observed in his New York Times review. ‘Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: how many times can we read Angelina Ballerina or watch a Bob the Builder video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate shared moments, snuggling close, provide the ultimate meaning of life.’

It is possible, of course, that some parents are lying, or at least sentimentalising the truth, when they offer up this sort of rosy ‘end-of-the-day’ verdict on parenthood. (There are strong social and emotional incentives for not publicly expressing remorse about one’s reproductive choices.) But Senior rejects this surmise as unduly bleak. Having children, she contends, has always been a ‘high cost/high reward’ activity. If today’s parents appear to be having a horrible time, it is not because they aren’t getting the rewards, but because various aspects of modern life have conspired to make them feel the costs more acutely.

More here.