Colin Robinson in The Guardian:

A great deal has been written recently about the frustrations ofpublishing a book with Julian Assange, mainly in a widely discussed, marathon article for the London Review of Books by Andrew O'Hagan.O'Hagan relates his experiences when working as a ghostwriter on an autobiography of the WikiLeaks leader that ended up being published in opposition to its subject's wishes. I'm the co-publisher of Assange's most recent book (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet) and I, too, have found the experience frequently exasperating.

Let me give an illustration. It's June of last year and I'm at a party in New York when a friendly, youngish man with a beard and a beer engages me in conversation. He tells me he is a journalist on one of the city's listings magazines and asks what I do for a job. I reply that I'm a publisher and he asks whose books I'm working on. I pick the one writer of whom I'm pretty certain he will have heard. “Well,” I say, shouting to make myself heard above the music, “I've just published Julian Assange.” The young man's demeanour changes abruptly and he fixes me with a sneer. “Assange,” he echoes, “he's a bit of a cunt isn't he?”

I've become wearily accustomed to this over my time working with Assange: the vituperation heaped on my author, the scorn directed at me for giving him a platform. I know the general script that will follow. And, sure enough, here it so often comes, as if read from the page: “I mean, he's a weirdo isn't he? That massive ego. And the sex offences in Sweden.”

It's almost impossible to counter this kind of attitude, with its shallow presumptions about the character of someone never met and the guilt of someone never tried.

More here.

Oliver Burkeman at CNN:

At first glance Pinker's implacable optimism, though in keeping with his sunny demeanour and stereotypically Canadian friendliness, presents a puzzle. His stellar career — which includes two Pulitzer Prize nominations for his books How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature (2002) — has been defined, above all, by support for the fraught notion of human nature: the contention that genetic predispositions account in hugely significant ways for how we think, feel and act, why we behave towards others as we do, and why we excel in certain areas rather than others.

This has frequently drawn Pinker into controversy — as in 2005, when he offered a defense of Larry Summers, then Harvard's President, who had suggested that the under-representation of women in science and maths careers might be down to innate sex differences.

“The possibility that men and women might differ for reasons other than socialization, expectations, hidden biases and barriers is very close to an absolute taboo,” Pinker tells me. He faults books such as Lean In, by Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for not entertaining the notion that men and women might not have “identical life desires.” But he also insists that taking the possibility of such differences seriously need not lend any justification to policies or prejudices that exclude women from positions of expertise or power.

More here.

Jan Morris in The Telegraph:

This tremendous book puts me in mind of a huge murky kaleidoscope, an ever-shifting display through which one image remains ambiguously constant. The scene is the tumultuous world of the Arabs during the last stages of the First World War; the enigmatic central figure is that of Thomas Edward Lawrence, a small Anglo-Irish archaeologist in his late twenties, later to be known as Lawrence of Arabia. It was a populist, even patronising epithet, because there was nothing Arabian about him. This hefty volume, though, by a scholarly American journalist, demonstrates how central he was to the infinitely convoluted, deceptive and contradictory goings-on that were eventually to bring into being the Middle East as we know it now.

Dexter Filkins:

War is too weird a thing to make sense of when it’s actually happening. It’s not just the combat, which by its nature is unintelligible. Armed conflict so fundamentally alters the environment it takes hold of that no aspect of life escapes undistorted: not love, not friendship, not sleep, not trust, not conversation. In war, even boredom is strange. The war in Iraq is finally over, at least for Americans, which means, in a way, that we may finally begin to comprehend it. I don’t mean in a historical sense: A multitude of books have already dissected the war’s origins, costs and wider implications. I mean in a human sense: what the war felt like, what it did to people’s brains, how it changed the lives it did not consume. This is not, strictly speaking, the realm of journalism or history, but of fiction and memoir. The best literature of the Vietnam War, like Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” captured the ways the conflict splintered the psyches of the men who fought it and how it rattled around in their minds, and in the minds of the people who loved them, long after the fighting ended. All wars do that, but O’Brien, drawing on his experience as a foot soldier, connected those dislocations to the very particular milieu that formed the American experience in Vietnam: the moral ambiguity, the invisible enemy, the jungle, the waste.

In “Redeployment,” Phil Klay, a former Marine who served in Iraq, grapples with a different war but aims for a similar effect: showing us the myriad human manifestations that result from the collision of young, heavily armed Americans with a fractured and deeply foreign country that very few of them even remotely understand. Klay succeeds brilliantly, capturing on an intimate scale the ways in which the war in Iraq evoked a unique array of emotion, predicament and heartbreak. In Klay’s hands, Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis. “Redeployment” is hilarious, biting, whipsawing and sad. It’s the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.

More here.

Hector Tobar in the Los Angeles Times:

Walter Kirn's new profile of the serial liar and convicted murderer known as “Clark Rockefeller” is no ordinary work of true crime and literary journalism.

“Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade” is the chronicle of Kirn's ill-fated friendship with the con man. And it's surely one of most honest, compelling and strangest books about the relationship between a writer and his subject ever penned by an American scribe.

Kirn is a magazine writer and author of novels such as “Up in the Air” and “Thumbsucker.” But he was an insecure and not especially successful writer when he first met “Clark” in 1998. The faux Rockefeller was a preppy bon vivant who claimed to be estranged from his famous family. A mutual friend asked Kirn to do Clark a favor — deliver a semi-paralyzed dog from Montana, where Kirn was living, to Clark's home in Manhattan.

Unbeknownst to Kirn, “Clark Rockefeller” was the latest in a series of identities adopted by the German immigrant Christian Gerhartsreiter. As Clark, Gerhartsreiter hid his Bavarian roots behind a genteel, patrician accent and stories of his jet-setting lifestyle. Kirn, a son of working-class Midwesterners, was smitten. Like many an ambitious writer, he thought the charismatic and odd Clark might make a good character for a magazine article or even a novel.

More here.

Chris Mooney in Mother Jones:

Who are you?

The question may seem simple to answer: You are the citizen of a country, the resident of a city, the child of particular parents, the sibling (or not) of brothers and sisters, the parent (or not) of children, and so on. And you might further answer the question by invoking a personality, an identity: You're outgoing. You're politically liberal. You're Catholic. Going further still, you might bring up your history, your memories: You came from a place, where events happened to you. And those helped make you who you are.

Such are some of the off-the-cuff ways in which we explain ourselves. The scientific answer to the question above, however, is starting to look radically different. Last year, New Scientistmagazine even ran a cover article titled, “The Great Illusion of the Self,” drawing on the findings of modern neuroscience to challenge the very idea that we have seamless, continuous, consistent identities. “Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel,” declared the magazine. “Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.”

What's going on here? When it comes to understanding this new and very personal field of science, it's hard to think of a more apt guide than Jennifer Ouellette, author of the new bookMe, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Not only is Ouellette a celebrated science writer; she also happens to have been adopted, a fact that makes her life a kind of natural experiment in the relative roles of genes and the environment in determining our identities.

More here.

Jill Godmilow in IndieWire [via Chapati Mystery]:

Throughout the film, Oppenheimer encourages his collaborators to produce ostentatiously surreal and violent dramatic film reconstructions of their death squad activities. Ever since Robert Flaherty asked his Inuit collaborator, Nanook the Bear, (his real name was “Allakariallak”) to fake the capture of a seal in 1922 – at the very beginning of ethnographic film tourism – we have seen hundreds of social actors perform “real” re-enactments of their lives for the cameras of documentary filmmakers. There is nothing new in “The Act of Killing” but carnage, and the special, cozy relationship we are urged to enjoy with the killers. Perhaps this is exactly what the critics are avoiding with their raves – that they have been duped into admiring, for an hour or two, the cool Rat Pack killers of Medan.

Collaboration is a way to share, with the social actors represented, responsibility for a film’s acts of description, strategies and arguments…a way to “keep it clean.” Some of the most useful films I’ve seen in the last twenty years – non-fiction and otherwise – have been the products of collaboration with the social actors represented, in unique and disparate ways. Carolyn Strachan and Allessandro Cavadini’s “Two Laws,” Kent MacKenzie’s “The Exiles,” and Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr’s “Ten Canoes” come quickly to mind.

First on this list should be Rithy Pahn’s “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” – the perfect counter model to “The Act of Killing.” In S-21, the two survivors of the infamous Cambodian prison and their Khmer Rouge prison guards are brought together in a patient re-enactment of their crimes, which the traumatized guards cannot otherwise recollect.”The Act of Killing” is also a collaboration of sorts, but for me a non-productive, uncomfortable, even unclean one.

More here.

Amanda Little in Bookforum:

LAST SPRING, A THIRTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE DROPOUT–TURNED–ENERGY EXECUTIVE named Billy Parish came to talk to my journalism class at Vanderbilt University. The course focused on climate reporting, and Parish had recently been profiled in Fortune magazine as a young virtuoso in the solar industry. Students wanted to hear his perspective as an innovator: What did he consider the most important untold story on climate change? “Easy,” he said, “it’s the story of our victory in progress, the story that we’re winning—not losing—the climate battle.” Most progressive journalists hate to talk about actual progress, Parish went on to argue, so they spend their time mewling about what’s not getting done on the climate-legislation front. Science writers, meanwhile, nitpick about important but arcane details of atmospheric warming in parts per million and other mind-numbing measurements. The skeptics, for their part, continue to chant, like skipping records, their groundless but vehement doubts about the problem’s very existence. Little wonder that Americans turn a deaf ear to this issue.

Maybe they wouldn’t, Parish argued, if they could read more climate literature that matters—stories about how America is actually innovating and adapting in response to this crisis, even as global treaties have languished and climate legislation collects dust on the shelves of Congress. Parish waxed technophilic, telling stories about new carbon-cutting innovations on the horizon: wind turbines designed like jet engines, not propellers; fuels made from algae and batteries made from viruses; nanotech solar cells that are smaller than gnats and can be integrated into paints, shingles, and glass. He explained that the cost of solar energy has come down 80 percent in the last five years, and solar production has grown more than 50 percent a year. “We’ve got to stop acting helpless,” he said. “We’ve got to start telling the stories of why we’re winning.” As a budding entrepreneur, Parish is notably prone to enthusiasm. But his argument stayed with me, and after his visit I began to see climate literature a bit differently, dividing it into two categories: The first, and overwhelmingly the largest, includes stories of conjecture about climate change itself—about whether it’s happening at all; whether humans are to blame; how severe the problem is or isn’t; how catastrophic the impacts may become. The second, and much more intriguing, category focuses on the tangible, practical ways we’re beginning to adapt: stories about innovators who are trying, against vertiginous odds, to get technologies and strategies in place that can make our transition to a low-carbon economy not just possible but seamless.

More here.

Andrew Pollack in The New York Times:

J. Craig Venter is the latest wealthy entrepreneur to think he can cheat aging and death. And he hopes to do so by resorting to his first love: sequencing genomes. On Tuesday, Dr. Venter announced that he was starting a new company, Human Longevity, which will focus on figuring out how people can live longer and healthier lives.

To do that, the company will build what Dr. Venter says will be the largest human DNA sequencing operation in the world, capable of processing 40,000 human genomes a year. The huge amount of DNA data will be combined with huge amounts of other data on the health and body composition of the people whose DNA is sequenced, in the hope of gleaning insights into the molecular causes of aging and age-related illnesses like cancer and heart disease. Slowing aging, if it can be done, could be a way to prevent many diseases, an alternative to treating one disease a time. “Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it’s not a disease itself,” Dr. Venter said in an interview. Still, his company will also work on treating individual diseases of aging.

More here.

Song of a Woman

With no friends of your own
you are looking only at me
and you accuse me.
You accuse me of being inconsiderate
No, not enough
No, not enough
not enough proof of loving you
how insolent of me not to look happy all the time
how impudent of me not to be able to forecast today’s weather for you
you always tell me to do things I can’t

I want to start learning magic.
I want to stop your criticism with a single glance.
I want to put your heart to sleep with one finger.
I want to go out every night riding a broom.
I want to jump over the mountain ridge
trailing my hair like smoke.
I want to fly into the sparkling moonlight
laughing away your beratings down there.

You, so simple,
give no thought to the pain that is almost killing me.
Yet, you will calmly go to heaven by and by.
And I, having wished for witchcraft, will fall to hell
Ah, that will create ten billion years of separation.
.

by Nao Inoue
from Honoo ni tsuite
publisher: Chiyoda Shoin, Tokyo, 1950
translation: 2009, Takako Lento

Continue for original Japanese

Read more »

The Editors at n+1:

What role has the American intellectual community played in this saga, if any? Certainly we failed to prevent it. But there is more. For the past two years, since Putin re-assigned himself to the Russian presidency, we have indulged ourselves in a bacchanalia of anti-Putinism, shading over into anti-Russianism. We turned Pussy Riot into mass media stars. We wrote endless articles (and books) about how Putin was a mystery man, a terrible man, a KGB ghoul who lived under your bed. It got to the point where, arriving in Sochi for Putin’s overpriced Olympics, Western journalists were greeted like heroes for tweeting about how the curtains in their hotel rooms were falling down. It was funny, but it was also not funny. Should Putin, the president of a country with inadequate hospitals, schools, and housing for its 150-million population, have spent $50 billion on hosting the Olympics? Absolutely not—especially when a third of the money was apparently expropriated by various officials. But the gleeful complaints about Olympic conditions seemed mostly bent on humiliating Russia in toto.

It’s hard to know how much of what gets written in various places leads to American policies in actual fact. Does it matter what’s in the Nation? What about the New York Review of Books? The New Yorker? It’s impossible to say. And the media or publishing game has its own rules, irrespective of politics. Evil Putin is just going to get more airtime than Complicated Putin or Putin Who is Running a Country in a Complex Geopolitical Situation.

Perhaps the way to put it is that an intellectual mistake was turned into a political mistake. The intellectual mistake was to fixate on Putin as the bad man who came along and suddenly undid the good work of Boris Yeltsin. (Bill Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott the other day tweeted an inadvertent reductio ad absurdum of this position, “Putin has for years been systematically reversing reforms of Yeltsin, Gorbachev & Khrushchev, whose gift of Crimea to Ukraine he’s nullified.”) But as the Russian left has been telling us for years, Putin has not gone back on the Yeltsin-era reforms. In most spheres of Russian life, he has continued them—undoing the Soviet safety net, and replacing it with nothing. That he has become an authoritarian ruler while doing so is a result of the fact that these reforms are cruel and unpopular.

More here.

Carlin Romano in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Did Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger ever meet? If so, they could have compared notes on how to bamboozle de-Nazification officials after, well, one’s side loses.

No matter. Now de Man has joined that august cultural club that includes Caravaggio, Wagner, Céline, Pound, Heidegger, and a slew of other accomplished artists, thinkers, and intellectuals who were also no-goodniks. The nasty ethics in the personal lives of those cultural heavies force us to ask two tough questions that are simpler than many pretend:

(1) Is there an inevitable link between a person’s ethics and his creative and intellectual work?

(2) Is it morally acceptable to honor or enjoy the work of artists and intellectuals whom we condemn for their nonprofessional, unethical actions?

Even when a cultural figure simply bears accusations of ethical misdeeds—as in the case of Woody Allen over the years, a matter reopened after Hollywood’s Golden Globes tribute and an Academy Awards nomination—the questions, when retriggered, produce frenzied media meditations. Now, with the long-awaited publication of Evelyn Barish’s The Double Life of Paul de Man (Liveright), a two-decades-in-the-making investigative biography of the Yale literary theorist whose version of “deconstruction” shook up English and comp-lit departments in the 1970s and 80s, the high literary and intellectual worlds face their own revisiting.

According to Barish, de Man (1919-83) committed fraud, forgery (16 separate acts), swindling, embezzlement, and theft as a postwar Belgian book publisher. For his sins as head of the Hermes publishing house, he was, in 1951, “found guilty in absentia and sentenced to six years in prison with heavy fines.” Apparently de Man played fast and loose with more than a million Belgian francs to fuel his lifelong luxury spending. Cornered, he skipped out to the United States on a visa probably obtained illegally by his father.

More here.

Virginia Hughes in Nature:

Biologists first observed this 'transgenerational epigenetic inheritance' in plants. Tomatoes, for example, pass along chemical markings that control an important ripening gene². But, over the past few years, evidence has been accumulating that the phenomenon occurs in rodents and humans as well. The subject remains controversial, in part because it harks back to the discredited theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a nineteenth-century French biologist who proposed that organisms pass down acquired traits to future generations. To many modern biologists, that's “scary-sounding”, says Oliver Rando, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, whose work suggests that such inheritance does indeed happen in animals³. If it is true, he says, “Why hasn't this been obvious to all the brilliant researchers in the past hundred years of genetics?”.

One reason why many remain sceptical is that the mechanism by which such inheritance might work is mysterious. Explaining it will require a deep dive into reproductive biology to demonstrate how the relevant signals might be formed in the germ line, the cells that develop into sperm and eggs and carry on, at a minimum, a person's genetic legacy.

A mother might pass on effects of environmental exposures to a fetus during pregnancy. So, to study the phenomenon of transgenerational epigenetics cleanly, biologists are focusing on fathers, and have been looking at how sperm might gain and lose epigenetic marks. “In the past two to three years there's been a lot of new information,” says Michelle Lane, a reproductive biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But proposals for how it all works are themselves embryonic. “It's a huge black box,” Lane says.

More here.

Jonathan Freedland on Scotland's future, in the NYRB:

[I]t is, paradoxically, Scotland that has been clinging to an idea of Britain, one that has been abandoned by the rest of the UK—at least if that idea is defined in part as the collectivist spirit of 1945. As Macwhirter writes, “Scots have arguably been more committed to the idea of Britain than the English over the last 200 years. What Scotland didn’t buy into was the abandonment of what used to be called the post-war consensus: universalism and the welfare state.”

Which is why the Yes campaign’s offer, set out in Scotland’s Future, consists as much of social policy as constitutional change. The document contains few abstractions about democracy, but promises instead “a transformational change in childcare,” the scrapping of London-imposed changes to welfare benefits, and, in the move most likely to attract international attention, the removal of the UK’s Trident nuclear weapon system from Scotland. “We’re half an hour away from the biggest collection of weapons of mass destruction in western Europe,” Jenkins told me. “There’s no version of devolution that allows us to get rid of that.” In other words, only independence allows Scotland to fully realize the distinct political culture that has arisen there.

Some on the left of the No campaign warn that it will be a cruel irony if, by breaking away, Scotland ensures the isolation of its more social democratic ethos. For once Scotland no longer sends fifty-nine MPs to Westminster, many of whom represent safe Labour seats, then Labour’s chances of forming a UK government diminish sharply. If independence happens in 2016, then an England-dominated UK could be the land that is forever Tory. Some electoral analysts dispute that arithmetic; nevertheless it will be this country to which an independent, left-leaning Scotland might be bound in monetary, fiscal, and political union, with the UK Treasury and Bank of England together making major decisions affecting Scotland’s economy. Scottish social democracy could discover it was able to flourish more easily inside Britain than out.

It will be a greater irony still if the ultimate consequence of the program pursued by the great patriot and would-be latter-day Britannia, Margaret Thatcher, was to be the unraveling of the United Kingdom.

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the NYT:

[Simon] Kuznets’s research into the relationship between inequality and growth laid the foundation for modern thinking about what has become a critical question: Has inequality in this country reached a tipping point at which it no longer provides an incentive to strive and to innovate, but has instead created a permanently disadvantaged class, as well as an ongoing threat of social instability?

One of the most articulate contemporary proponents of the “optimal inequality” thesis is Richard Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard. In a 2011 paper, Freeman wrote: “Is there a level of inequality that optimizes economic growth, stability, and shared prosperity? My answer is yes. The relation between inequality and economic outcomes follows an inverted-U shape, so that increases in inequality improve economic performance up to the optimum and then reduce it.”

Freeman argues that the costs of excessive inequality are high: “Inequality that results from monopoly power, rent-seeking or activities with negative externalities that enrich their owners while lowering societal income (think pollution or crime), adversely affect economic performance. High inequality reinforces corruption by allowing a few ‘crony capitalists’ to lobby politicians or regulators to protect their economic advantages. When national income goes mostly to those at the top, there is little left to motivate people lower down. The 2007 collapse of Wall Street and bailout of banks-too-big-to-fail showed that inequality in income and power can threaten economic stability and give the few a stranglehold on the economy.”

Conservative economists look at the issue of equality from the opposite vantage point: when do government efforts to remedy inequality and to redistribute income worsen conditions by serving as a deterrent to work and productive activity?

More here.

Robert Irwin at The Times Literary Supplement:

The title Reading Darwin in Arabicnotwithstanding, most of the men discussed in this book did not read Charles Darwin in Arabic. Instead they read Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Gustave Le Bon, Henri Bergson and George Bernard Shaw in European or Arabic versions. They also read popularizing accounts of various aspects of Darwinism in the scientific and literary journal al-Muqtataf (“The Digest”, 1876–1952). The notion of evolution that Arab readers took away from their reading was often heavily infected by Lamarckism and by the social Darwinism of Spencer. Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selectionwas published in 1859, but Isma‘il Mazhar’s translation of the first five chapters of Darwin’s book into Arabic only appeared in 1918.

For a long time, the reception of Darwinism was bedevilled by the need to find either neologisms or new twists to old words. As Marwa Elshakry points out, there was at first no specific word in Arabic for “species”, distinct from “variety” or “kind”.

more here.

Hilton Als at The New Yorker:

Ibsen starts off by telling us something about who Nora is—or, rather, the conditions she lives under. It’s Christmastime in Norway, and the Helmer household is filled with excitement. A sweet-tempered maid, Helene (Mabel Clements), scurries about the Helmers’ tidy house; she opens the front door, and our fair-haired heroine enters Ian MacNeil’s ingenious set, which sometimes revolves, like a dancer in a music box, as the actors move from room to room, trailed by Stuart Earl’s lovely score. Nora is carrying a number of packages; they’re gifts for her three children. As she sets her packages down and takes off her coat, Helene tells her that her husband, Torvald (Dominic Rowan), is in his study. After years of struggle, he’s about to be made the manager of a local bank. Things are on the upswing in the Helmer household, but something’s wrong.

Before Nora can alert Torvald or the children to her presence, she devours a chocolate that she’s secreted away. But why is her pleasure a secret?

more here.

George O'Brien at The Dublin Review of Books:

In the beginning was Newark. Everything that Philip Roth turned to such rich account in his great final spate of works inaugurated by American Pastoral is not only set in his native place but from the start derived its moral energy and edge from it. The city of Newark and especially the Weequahic neighbourhood, the local spaces that reflect the intricate geography of class and ethnicity, the mentalities of old Jews and their superannuated ways and of new Jews with their suburban affluence and unacknowledged assimilation anxieties, men’s moral crossroads and the unreasonable and irrational women who supply the materials for them – that repertoire of essential Roth concerns and interests is as central to Goodbye, Columbus (1959), his first book, whose eponymous novella made his name, as to the novels that crown his achievement forty years later. But instead of devoting himself to that repertoire’s potential, Roth wandered far and wide, following in Henry James’s footsteps in the long, slow, rather airless Letting Go (1962), doing a Mark Twain in Our Gang (1971), and in general trying a lot of modes and tones without ever seeming quite to satisfy the demands of harnessing his talent’s restless fluency to his smarts, his savvy, his wit and his ideas. He was out of Newark, but what did that mean? – See more at: http://www.drb.ie/essays/american-berserk#sthash.85WAOJMj.dpuf

more here.