R.J.W. Evans in the NYRB:

[A]ll sides moved to a more balanced attribution of responsibility for 1914. There seemed to be a wealth of evidence that all sides had taken risks and been complicit in decisions that made war likelier. Moreover, literary witnesses, such as Robert Graves, encouraged the conclusion that the whole story was one of monstrous stupidness and futility. The first phase of reflection culminated in a long work of scholarship, published in 1942–1943, by the Italian politician and journalist Luigi Albertini. Silenced by the Fascist regime, Albertini immersed himself in all the sources, and added more of his own by arranging interviews with survivors. That lent an immediacy to his wonderfully nuanced presentation of the individuals who actually made (or ducked) the fateful decisions. Albertini’s magnum opus eventually made its mark in the 1950s, when it appeared in English translation. As the fiftieth anniversary of Sarajevo approached, the verdict seemed clear: the road to war, an immensely complex and protracted process, was paved with shared culpability.

At that point the learned consensus was shattered, and earlier assumptions seemed corroborated in a new perspective. The Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer issued a series of works incriminating the German side in a premeditated “bid for world power.” By the time of his closest examination of pre-war diplomacy, in Krieg der Illusionen (1969), he argued that Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers more or less single-mindedly provoked the conflict out of a combination of expansionist ambition and a desire to distract and discipline socialists and other increasingly insubordinate elements in domestic German society. The resultant “Fischer controversy” had its roots in intellectual instabilities of the then Federal Republic of Germany, including ambivalent attitudes toward the recent National Socialist past, in its relation to the course of German history as a whole, and in a vogue for socioeconomic explanations of political behavior. In any event, it brought influential confirmation that the much-maligned drafters of the Versailles settlement might not have been so far wrong after all.

Decades of contention followed, akin to a rerun of the interwarKriegsschuldfrage, or war guilt question; but like the Versailles diktat before it, the Fischer thesis has not worn well. In fact, to judge by the crop of books reviewed here, it is almost dead (lingering on in a qualified way only with Max Hastings). As we approach the centenary of Sarajevo, Albertini has triumphed. And so fully that—with one partial exception—there is a notable absence of polemic in these texts. Indeed they have much in common.

More here.

Maria Popova in Brain Pickings:

Given my voracious appetite for unusual cookbooks — especially ones at the intersection of food and the arts, including little-known gems from the likes of Andy Warhol, Liberace,Lewis Carroll, and Alice B. Toklas — I was delighted to discover The Futurist Cookbook(public library; AbeBooks) by Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, originally published in 1932 and reprinted in 1989, translated into English by Suzanne Brill.

At the time of its release, the cookbook became somewhat of a sensation, thanks to Marinetti’s shrewdness as a publicist. But while major newspapers like the Chicago Tribuneproclaimed it a bold manifesto to revitalize culture by revolutionizing how people ate, what the media missed at first was that the cookbook was arguably the greatest artistic prank of the twentieth century — it wasn’t a populist effort to upgrade mass cuisine but, rather, a highbrow quest to raise the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, collective artistic consciousness.

In the introduction to the 1989 edition, British journalist, historian and travel writer Lesley Chamberlain calls it “a provocative work of art disguised as easy-to-read cookbook” and writes:

The Futurist Cookbook was a serious joke, revolutionary in the first instance because it overturned with ribald laughter everything “food” and “cookbooks” held sacred: the family table, great “recipes,” established notions of goodness and taste.

What made Futurist “cooking” so revolutionary was that it drew on food as a raw material for art and cultural commentary reflecting the Futurist idea that human experience is empowered and liberated by the presence of art in everyday life, that osmosis ofarte-vita.

More here.

Phil Plait in Slate:

Zeno’s paradox says that we’ll never actually get to 1, but from a limit point of view, we can get as close as we want. That is the definition of “sum” that mathematicians usually mean when they talk about infinite series, and it basically agrees with our intuitive definition of the words “sum” and “equal.”

But not every series is convergent in this sense (we call non-convergent series divergent). Some, like 1-1+1-1…, might bounce around between different values as we keep adding more terms, and some, like 1+2+3+4… might get arbitrarily large. It’s pretty clear, then, that using the limit definition of convergence for a series, the sum 1+2+3… does not converge. If I said, “I think the limit of this series is some finite number L,” I could easily figure out how many terms to add to get as far above the number L as I wanted.

There are meaningful ways to associate the number -1/12 to the series 1+2+3…, but I prefer not to call -1/12 the “sum” of the positive integers. One way to tackle the problem is with the idea of analytic continuation in complex analysis.

More here.

Olivia Laing at Granta:

I’d taken the room because it was cheap and because of a photograph I’d grown obsessed with that spring. It was shot a single block away in the summer of 1979 and shows a man standing outside the 7th Avenue exit of the Times Square   –   42nd Street subway. He’s wearing a sleeveless denim jacket, a white T-shirt and a paper mask of Arthur Rimbaud, a life-sized photocopy of the famous portrait on the cover of Illuminations. Behind him a man with an Afro is jaywalking in a billowing white shirt and flared black pants. The shutter has caught him mid-bounce, one shoe still in the air. Both sides of the street are lined with big old-timey cars and cinemas. Moonraker is on at the New Amsterdam, Amityville Horror at the Harris, while the sign at the Victory, just above Rimbaud’s head, promises in big black letters rated x.

It’s The Deuce, of course: the old name for that stretch of 42nd Street which runs between 6th and 8th Avenue, and which was at the time one of the vice capitals of the world. In the 1970s the city of New York was almost bankrupt and beset by violence and crime. Times Square was populated by prostitutes, dealers, pimps and hustlers, and the old Beaux-Arts theatres had been turned into porn cinemas and cruising grounds.

more here.

James Conlon at The Hudson Review:

The evolution of Peter Grimes’s character through the course of Britten’s collaboration with Peter Pears, Montagu Slater and Ronald Duncan (the librettist of his subsequent opera The Rape of Lucretia), can be traced, to some degree, from various extant earlier versions of the libretto. Floating in the background of the genesis of Britten’s first great opera were the influences of E. M. Forster (whose article on George Crabbe’s “The Borough” first attracted the attention of Britten and Pears during their stay in southern California), W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It reveals the gradual transition from the specific homosexual orientation of its protagonist to a broader context.

Consider the following statements: Pears, having heard some of the new score, wrote to Britten, “The more I hear of it, the more I feel the queerness is unimportant and doesn’t really exist in the music (or at any rate obtrude) so it mustn’t do so in words. P.G. is an introspective, an artist, a neurotic, his real problem is expression, self-expression.” This can be compared with Britten’s own statement about the focus of the work: “[A] central feeling for us was that of the individual against the crowd, with ironic overtones for our own [Pears and Britten’s] situation.” Musicologist Philip Brett writes, “The remark was addressed to the social situation in which the two found themselves—pacifism, in this instance as on other occasions in Britten’s life, doing double duty as a controversial but mentionable position for still unspeakable homosexuality.”

more here.

Mark and Paul Angler at Dissent:

Few are aware that Martin Luther King, Jr. once applied for a permit to carry a concealed handgun.

In his 2011 book Gunfight, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes that, after King’s house was bombed in 1956, the clergyman applied in Alabama for a concealed carry permit. Local police, loathe to grant such permits to African Americans, deemed him “unsuitable” and denied his application. Consequently, King would end up leaving the firearms at home.

The lesson from this incident is not, as some NRA members have tried to suggest in recent years, that King should be remembered as a gun-toting Republican. (Among many other problems, this portrayal neglects to acknowledge how Republicans used conservative anger about civil rights advances to win over the Dixiecrat South to their side of the aisle). Rather, the fact that King would request a license to wear a gun in 1956, just as he was being catapulted onto the national stage, illustrates the profundity of the transformation that he underwent over the course of his public career.

more here.

Irving Finkel in The Telegraph:

In the year 1872 one George Smith, a bank­note engraver turned assistant in the British Museum, astounded the world by discovering the story of the Flood – much the same as that in the Book of Genesis – inscribed on a cuneiform tablet made of clay that had recently been excavated at far-distant Nineveh (in present-day Iraq). Human behaviour, according to this new discovery, prompted the gods of Babylon to wipe out mankind through death by water, and, as in the Bible, the survival of all living things was effected at the last minute by a single man.

…Smith announced his discoveries at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, on December 3, 1872. August dignitaries were present, including the Archbishop of Canterbury – since Smith’s findings had serious implications for church authority – and the classically-disposed prime minister, WE Gladstone. For Smith’s audience, as it had been for the man himself, the news was electrifying. In 1872 everyone knew their Bible backwards, and the announcement that the iconic story of the Ark and the Flood existed on a barbaric-looking document of clay in the British Museum that pre-dated the Bible and had been dug up somewhere in the East was indigestible. A hundred and thirteen years after Smith’s breakthrough, a similar episode of British-Museum-curator-meets-amazing-cuneiform-flood-story befell me.

More here.

Greg Grandin in the NYTimes:

“Benito Cereno” tells the story of Amasa Delano, a New England sea captain who, in the South Pacific, spends all day on a distressed Spanish ship carrying scores of West Africans who he thinks are slaves. They aren’t. Unbeknown to Delano, they had earlier risen up, slaughtered most of the crew and demanded that the captain, Benito Cereno, return them home to Senegal. After Delano boards the ship (to offer his assistance), the West Africans keep their rebellion a secret by acting as if they are still slaves. Their leader, a man named Babo, pretends to be Cereno’s loyal servant, while actually keeping a close eye on him.

Melville narrates the events from the perspective of the clueless Delano, who for most of the novella thinks Cereno is in charge. As the day progresses, Delano grows increasingly obsessed with Babo and the seeming affection with which the West African cares for the Spanish captain. The New Englander, liberal in his sentiments and opposed to slavery as a matter of course, fantasizes about being waited on by such a devoted and cheerful body servant.

Delano believes himself a free man, and he defines his freedom in opposition to the smiling, open-faced Babo, who he presumes has no interior life, no ideas or interests of his own. Delano sees what he wants to see. But when Delano ultimately discovers the truth — that Babo, in fact, is the one exercising masterly discipline over his inner thoughts, and that it is Delano who is enslaved to his illusions — he responds with savage violence.

Barack Obama may have avoided the fate of the protagonist of “Invisible Man,” but he hasn’t been able to escape the shadow of Babo. He is Babo, or at least he is to a significant part of the American population — including many of the white rank and file of the Republican Party and the Tea Party politicians they help elect.

Read the rest here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

The term “X chromosome” has an air of mystery to it, and rightly so. It got its name in 1891 from a baffled biologist named Hermann Henking. To investigate the nature of chromosomes, Henking examined cells under a simple microscope. All the chromosomes in the cells came in pairs. All except one. Henking labeled this outlier chromosome the “X element.” No one knows for sure what he meant by the letter. Maybe he saw it as an extra chromosome. Or perhaps he thought it was an ex-chromosome. Maybe he used X the way mathematicians do, to refer to something unknown. Today, scientists know the X chromosome much better. It’s part of the system that determines whether we become male or female. If an egg inherits an X chromosome from both parents, it becomes female. If it gets an X from its mother and a Y from its father, it becomes male.But the X chromosome remains mysterious. For one thing, females shut down an X chromosome in every cell, leaving only one active. That’s a drastic step to take, given that the X chromosome has more than 1,000 genes. In some cells, the father’s goes dormant, and in others, the mother’s does. While scientists have known about this so-called X-chromosome inactivation for more than five decades, they still know little about the rules it follows, or even how it evolved. In the journal Neuron, a team of scientists has unveiled an unprecedented view of X-chromosome inactivation in the body. They found a remarkable complexity to the pattern in which the chromosomes were switched on and off.

More here.

John

He (please don’t tell) is the one man in my life
(almost 70 now?) I’ve ever wanted to grab by the belt buckle
and ride so fast the bed would take off.
But I’d just sit there all those interminable nights
at the Center for the Arts, my thigh grazing his—
through high school, Lucy and I drove to Cambridge
in my mother’s car, hid a few houses from his,
and followed him to the clinic where he worked,
then to all his Saturday afternoon chores.
We’d haunt Café Algiers.
When Lucy died he called me.
When I met my husband, I called him.
I can tell he has come to New York.
I can feel him walking in New York,
I can feel him walking up my block
and stopping to buy water
and looking up my building
up the 40 floors up through my floor
up between my legs
up through my head

by Martha Rhodes
from Mother Quiet
Zoo Press, 2004

Seong Tae Hun. Plum Blossoms Don't Give Away Their Scent Despite the Coldness of Life. 2008.

Ink and color on Korean paper.

More here and here.

by Charlie Huenemann

Battle of Lowestoft, June 1665 (artist unknown)

In the summer and autumn of 1665, a German expatriate in London exchanged a series of fascinating letters with a renegade Dutch Jew. The expatriate was Henry Oldenburg, who was serving as secretary of the newly-formed Royal Society of London. The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge – which, if formed today, probably would be styled far less handsomely as “RS-LINK” – was a science club of sorts. It provided gentlemen with the occasion to assemble and share their discoveries, puzzlements, and wonders – without their conversation degenerating into disputes over politics and religion. In the earliest history of the Society, Thomas Sprat described it as a respite from insanity: “Their first purpose was no more, then onely the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet one with another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age”.

It was Henry Oldenburg's job to chronicle the Society's discussions and discoveries and publish them in the Transactions. He served also as their PR man, promoting the Society to scientists and intellectuals across Europe. This latter service he did perform with dedication: in the year 1665 alone, he sent out 49 letters and received 66, and these numbers doubled over the following years. Curiously, the letters he received were addressed not to him, but to “Monsieur Grubendol”. More about that in a minute.

Read more »

Kenneth Roth in the New York Review of Books:

What are we to make of the fact that in its eleven-year history, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has prosecuted only Africans? Should the court be condemned for discrimination—for taking advantage of Africa’s weak global position—as some African leaders contend? Or should it be applauded for giving long-overdue attention to atrocities in Africa—a sign that finally someone is concerned about the countless ignored African victims, as many African activists contend? This debate is at the heart of one of the most serious challenges the ICC has ever faced. If the current attack on it succeeds, the court’s future may be in doubt.

The ICC was founded in 2002, under a treaty negotiated at a global conference in Rome, as an independent judicial body that would challenge impunity for the gravest international crimes—genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Unlike the International Court of Justice, which is also based in The Hague but settles legal disputes between states, the International Criminal Court addresses mass atrocities committed by individuals. To avoid prosecution, ruthless national leaders too often threaten, corrupt, or compromise judges and prosecutors at home, but those in The Hague should be beyond the reach of such obstructionism. The ICC is meant as a court of last resort for victims and survivors who cannot find justice in their own country and as a deterrent to leaders who have little to fear from domestic prosecution. The court has now been accepted by 122 states. The United States has not joined it out of fear that Americans might be prosecuted.

More here.

From The Economist:

Technology’s impact will feel like a tornado, hitting the rich world first, but eventually sweeping through poorer countries too. No government is prepared for it.

Why be worried? It is partly just a matter of history repeating itself. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution the rewards of increasing productivity went disproportionately to capital; later on, labour reaped most of the benefits. The pattern today is similar. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Over the past three decades, labour’s share of output has shrunk globally from 64% to 59%. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1% in America has risen from around 9% in the 1970s to 22% today. Unemployment is at alarming levels in much of the rich world, and not just for cyclical reasons. In 2000, 65% of working-age Americans were in work; since then the proportion has fallen, during good years as well as bad, to the current level of 59%.

Worse, it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

More here.

Phil Plait in Slate:

Yesterday, I posted an article about a math video that showed how you can sum up an infinite series of numbers to get a result of, weirdly enough, -1/12.

A lot of stuff happened after I posted it. Some people were blown away by it, and others… not so much. A handful of mathematicians were less than happy with what I wrote, and even more were less than happy with the video. I got a few emails, a lot of tweets, and some very interesting conversations out of it.

I decided to write a follow-up post because I try to correct errors when I make them, and shine more light on a problem if it needs it. There are multiple pathways to take here (which is ironic because that’s actually part of the problem with the math). Therefore this post is part 1) update, 2) correction, 3) and mea culpa, with a defense (hopefully without being defensive).

Let me take a moment to explain right away. No, there is too much. Let me sum up*:

1) The infinite series in the video (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 …) can in fact be tackled using a rigorous mathematical method, and can in fact be assigned a value of -1/12! This method is quite real, and very useful. And yes, the weirdness of it is brain melting.

2) The method used in the video to write out some series and manipulate them algebraically is actually not a great way to figure this problem out. It uses a trick that’s against the rules, so strictly speaking it doesn’t work. It’s a nice demo to show some fun things, but its utility is questionable at best.

3) I had my suspicions about the method used in the video, but suppressed them. That was a mistake.

More here.

Nicola Davis in The Observer:

Professor Lewis Wolpert, the eminent developmental biologist and author, has admitted incorporating unattributed text from a variety of sources in his recent popular science books.

Published by Faber and Faber in 2011, You're Looking Very Well was described as exploring “the scientific and social implications of ourageing population in an engaging, witty and frank investigation tackling every aspect, from ageism to euthanasia to anti-ageing cream”.

It has been found, however, to contain more than 20 passages that have been taken directly from academic papers, websites and Wikipedia with no indication that they were penned by any author other than Wolpert himself. The book has now been withdrawn from sale.

A champion of the popularisation of science, Wolpert, a fellow of the Royal Society, is a former chairman of the society's committee on the public understanding of science. He has written on issues such as the origins of belief, embryonic development and depression, from which he himself has suffered.

Wolpert has faced a previous claim of lifting paragraphs from other people's work. An investigation last April into a review copy of his forthcoming book Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man? also found passages taken from uncredited sources, leading to publication being suspended shortly before its release date. The book was rescheduled for release in May this year.

More here.