Dan Haybron in Salon:

What exactly does happiness involve? When people think about happiness in emotional terms, they tend to picture a specific emotion: feeling happy. So powerful is this association that happiness frequently gets reduced to nothing more than cheery feelings or ‘smiley-face’ feelings. This is a radically impoverished understanding of happiness: there’s much more to being happy than just feeling happy. Think about those periods in your life when you were happiest. Not so much that day when you were elated over a special event, like the birth of a child. Rather, those times of relatively sustained happiness. Not everyone experiences such periods, but if you have, I suspect they looked something like our picture of Big Joe Fletcher, or the photograph of my father and me in [the picture above]: good stretches of time wholly absorbed in something you love doing, feeling fully yourself and in your element. Energized, alive, and yet also, deeply settled and at peace—no doubts, no fretting, no hesitation. And yes, feelings of joy here and there, perhaps a good dose of laughter. But those feelings are not the most important part of the story.

We can usefully break happiness down into three broad dimensions. Arguably, each dimension corresponds to a different function emotional states play in our lives. But in this book I will skip the argument and simply present the view. We can think of happiness as a kind of emotional evaluation of your life. Some parts of this evaluation are more fundamental than others. At the most basic level will be responses concerning your safety and security: letting your defences down, making yourself fully at home in your life, as opposed to taking up a defensive stance. I will call this a state of attunement with your life. Next come responses relating to your engagement with your situation: is it worth investing much effort in your activities, or would it be wiser to withdraw or disengage from them? Finally, some emotional states serve as endorsements, signifying that your life is positively good. People often make the mistake of thinking all emotional states are like that.

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Adam Kirsch in The New York Times:

Few controversial books remain controversial 50 years after they were published. But the storm of indignation that greeted “Eichmann in Jerusalem” when it appeared in the pages of The New Yorker, and then in book form, has not fully died down even now. Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the trial of Adolf Eichmann remains a classic, a touchstone in the 20th century’s thinking about morality and politics. But it is a classic constantly targeted for revision: David Cesarani challenged Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann in his biography of the Nazi bureaucrat, as did Deborah Lipstadt in her study “The Eichmann Trial.” It’s no secret that reaction to “Eichmann in Jerusalem” has often divided along religious lines. Mary McCarthy, Arendt’s close friend, noted this fact in a Partisan Review symposium: “A gentile, once the topic is raised in Jewish company (and it always is), feels like a child with a reading defect in a class of normal readers — or the reverse. It is as if ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ had required a special pair of Jewish spectacles to make its ‘true purport’ visible.” To illustrate McCarthy’s point, compare her own characterization of the book — “a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of ‘Figaro’ or the ‘Messiah’ ” — with Saul Bellow’s acerbic take in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”: “making use of a tragic history to promote the foolish ideas of Weimar intellectuals.”

What made, and still makes, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” so inflammatory to some readers is in large part Arendt’s tone; but tone, in this case, is closely connected to substance. Arendt, who fled the Nazis in 1933 and again after they conquered France in 1940, was reckoning in this book with the evil that had claimed the lives of millions of her fellow Jews, and damaged her own life as well. To counter this injury with a display of pride was for her a moral imperative, a way of showing her utter contempt for Nazism. Indeed, the whole idea of the “banality of evil” is at bottom a way of denying Nazism any glamour or substance, of relegating it to the realm of nonbeing.

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Sophie Pinkham in The Nation:

In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge describes a 1927 visit to Grigory Zinoviev, a high-ranking Soviet official who had just been expelled from the Communist Party’s Central Committee. With his novelist’s eye for detail, Serge writes:

Zinoviev, in his small apartment in the Kremlin, feigned a supreme tranquility. At his side, covered by glass, lay a death mask: Lenin’s head lying abandoned on a cushion. Why, I asked, had not copies of so poignant a mask been widely distributed? Because its expression held too much in the way of grief and mortality; considerations of propaganda compelled a preference for bronzes with uplifted hands.

Stalin’s Soviet Union had no room for sadness or ambiguity. It chose bronze: hard, unyielding and triumphant, public rather than private.

A novelist, poet and journalist, Victor Serge was born in Belgium in 1890, the child of impoverished Russian revolutionaries. He began his political life as an anarchist, but in 1919 he joined the Bolsheviks in Russia, where his international connections and knowledge of French, Spanish, German and English made him an important asset for the Comintern, the organization meant to facilitate a worldwide revolution. An outspoken member of the Communist Party’s left opposition to Stalin, Serge was expelled from the party in 1928, jailed briefly, then arrested and deported to the Kazakh border in 1933. Thanks to energetic protests from French intellectuals, his life was spared, and he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936. In France, he started corresponding with the exiled Trotsky, even though he believed that the Trotskyist movement offered no hope for a “renewal of the ideology, morals, and institutions of Socialism.”

With his literary gifts, psychological insight and proximity to key players, Serge is one of the greatest chroniclers of Europe’s socialist revolutions, and he offers a unique perspective.

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Carlo Strenger in Haaretz:

Two events should wake up Benjamin Netanyahu from his illusion that he can dictate the Free World’s policies on crucial matters. Firstly, Israel almost lost participation in Horizon 2020, the most important research cooperation with the EU in recent Israeli history because Netanyahu’s government at first refused to comply with the EU’s guidelines of not funding institutions or projects beyond the Green Line.

Secondly, the world powers have signed an interim deal with Iran that Netanyahu has ferociously opposed. His demand had been that no deal was acceptable that doesn’t completely dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity, and the agreement signed tacitly accepts Iran’s right to enrich uranium to a low level.
These two incidents have something in common. They raise the question to what extent Israel can expect to force its views onto its closest and most important strategic allies, the U.S. and Western Europe, and what the price is of trying to do so.

There is growing tension between Netanyahu and his hardline coalition partners who subscribe to the Biblical description of the people of Israel as “a people dwelling alone, not reckoned among the nations.”

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Steven Philip Kramer at Hedgehog Review:

In November of last year, Spain's government announced its intention to make amends for one of the greatest injustices in the nation’s history. The ministers of justice and foreign affairs promised an easing of naturalization requirements for descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. (Portugal, which banished its Jewish population in 1497, followed suit by speedily passing a law that granted the same right to members of the Portuguese Jewish diaspora.) Slight though it might have seemed, Spain’s proposed act of restitution signaled a real commitment to righting an old and grievous wrong.

For centuries before King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile acceded to the request of the Spanish Inquisition to expel all Jews who had not converted to Christianity, the Iberian Peninsula had been home to one of the largest and most dynamic Jewish communities in the world. First under a succession of Muslim caliphs who ruled what was known as Al Andalus (the present-day region of Andalusia), then in regions slowly reconquered by Christian forces, Jews played a vital role in the intellectual, cultural, administrative, and commercial life of Spain, not least as intermediaries between the frequently antagonistic Christians and Muslims.

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Slavenka Drakulic at Eurozine:

It is late November. The day is grey and chilly but people on Zagreb's main square are patiently queuing up in front of a stand where a few men are collecting signatures. Another appeal to the government to save shipyards or factories? A union calling for another strike? Another plea to the state by impoverished pensioners? No, these people are waiting to sign a petition – the latest fashion in Croatia. This particular one is demanding a referendum to forbid the use of a minority alphabet and language, unless that minority makes up 50 per cent (!) of the population. It is aimed at Serbs and the use of the Cyrillic alphabet in Vukovar, the town on the border with Serbia. Over 30 per cent of Vukovar's population are Serbs and it is their constitutional right to use the Serbian language. But the town suffered more than any other at the hands of the Serbian military and paramilitary during the war over twenty years ago, and today it is still divided – plaques and signs in Cyrillic are destroyed and the divide manipulated for political purposes.As of last week, these petitioners – war veterans calling themselves the “Council for Defence of Croatian Vukovar” – have gained in strength and confidence. On Monday, 18 November, their members, some of them dressed in some kind of paramilitary uniform, prevented the entire Croatian government, along with the diplomatic corps, from joining tens of thousand of people honouring the dead in Vukovar.

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Geoffrey O'Brien at Bookforum:

The career is well known, or at least available for inspection. The life was, deliberately, more opaque. Some actors disport or destroy themselves in spectacular ways; some go to war; some go into politics. Stanwyck just worked. While she drew some tabloid attention with the breakup of her marriages to Frank Fay and Robert Taylor, by Hollywood standards her life lacked scandal. It did not lack suffering, however, least of all in its earliest phases. The most absorbing chapters of Victoria Wilson’s A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907–1940, the first volume of what will be a two-part biography, lay out the retrievable details of that early life, and the process by which Ruby Stevens of Flatbush, Brooklyn, established herself by the age of twenty-four as “a new sensation in the world of pictures.” These first episodes can be taken as a key to later performances, as if in acting Stanwyck had replayed, with multiple variants and alternative outcomes, the circumstances that shaped her. She found something better than acting school to inform her work. As Wilson writes, “She was able to use her shoals of loss and regret, her feelings of being an orphan, the outsider . . . and focus these things, adapt them, to create women on the screen whom audiences admired and knew to be true.”

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Rebecca Burns in In These Times:

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley has a problem with sexism and racism, but the revelation in October, as Twitter prepared for its initial public stock offering (IPO), that the company didn’t have a single woman or person of color on its board, rekindled a long-running debate on how to challenge these exclusions from the tech industry. The debate had another twist earlier this year with the arrival of Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, which calls on women to stop lowering their own career expectations. Some celebrated Sandberg’s book as a new feminist manifesto, while others panned it as placing all the onus on women. “At last, a feminism the patriarchy can get behind,” writes tech blogger Shanley Kane. Sandberg’s call for individual women to “lean in” and work harder in the service of their employer also dovetails with tech’s disdain for collective action in the workplace, exemplified by Silicon Valley’s hostility toward the October BART strike. (One CEO of a San Francisco-based tech company suggested this solution to the strike: “Figure out how to automate [BART drivers’] jobs so this doesn’t happen again.”) Is the “tech feminism” embodied by a few white executives incompatible with a movement for workers’ rights in a sector that makes up a growing share of the economy? In These Times talked about the ways that racism, sexism and classism are coded in the tech sector with Kat Calvin, founder of Blerdology, a network for African Americans in tech; Ashe Dryden, a tech diversity educator and consultant; Kate Losse, author of The Boy Kings, a memoir about working at Facebook; and Telle Whitney, president and CEO of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

Kate: Silicon Valley thinks that the gender/race composition of the board doesn’t matter until there is public attention. And that’s part of the problem. Tech won’t be a truly progressive industry until tech companies care about inclusivity from an early stage.

Ashe: Statistically, women tend not to get promoted much higher than mid-level management and are driven out of the industry at an earlier point in their careers, which makes it much harder for them to attain these types of positions. For instance, 56 percent of women leave tech within 10 years, which is twice the attrition rate of men.

More here.

Alexandra Sifferlin in Time:

2 slices of pumpkin pie (632 calories)

• 1 hour of running at 5 m.p.h.
• 2 hours of skiing
• 1 hour and 26 minutes of rowing
• 2 hours of walking at 3.5 m.p.h.
• 1 hour of football
• 1 hour and 43 minutes of resistance weight training

3 scoops of gravy (150 calories)

• 15 minutes of running
• 29 minutes of skiing
• 20 minutes of rowing
• 29 minutes of walking at 3.5 m.p.h.
• 16 minutes of football
• 25 minutes of resistance weight training

More here.

The leaker says the source was a mysterious eBay auction, and Salinger scholar Kenneth Slawenski has confirmed for BuzzFeed that they are truly Salinger’s unpublished stories.Three unpublished stories by J.D. Salinger — “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” “Paula,” and “Birthday Boy” — have been available to read at research libraries, but have never been seen in print or online before today.

Summer Anne Burton in BuzzFeed:

It’s hard to determine the origin of the “book” pictured in the photos that were leaked onto invite-only bittorrent website what.CD today (and later reposted on Reddit) — the ISBN doesn’t lead anywhere, and a book of these three stories was certainly never printed legally.

The first story is “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” widely thought of as Salinger’s greatest unpublished work and is a prequel of sorts to the author’s most popular book, Catcher In The Rye.

The short story has been available to read at the Princeton library, under supervision, in a special reading room. PJ Vogt, a producer at On The Media, read the Princeton manuscript a few years ago and is fairly certain this is the same story. In an email tonight, he wrote “I definitely remember that first line: ‘His shoes turned up.’ And I remember the detail about the India ink on the catcher’s mitt. And that Holden has a cameo from camp.” The story concerns the death of Kenneth Caulfield, a character who was developed into Holden’s brother Allie in Catcher. The story was written for Harper’s Bazaar, but Salinger withdrew it before it was published.

More here.

Lauren Collins in The New Yorker:

“Chili pepper” is a confusing term, another of Christopher Columbus’s deathless misnomers. (Columbus and his men classified the spicy plant they had heard being referred to in Hispaniola as aji—farther north, in Mexico, it was known by the Nahuatl word chilli—as a relative of black pepper.) Chilis belong to Capsicum, a genus of the nightshade family. Horticulturists consider them fruits, and grocers stock them near the limes and cilantro. Most chilis contain capsaicin, an alkaloid compound that binds to pain receptors on the tongue, producing a sensation of burning. Sweet banana peppers are usually neutral. Pepperoncini (approximately 300 SHU) produce just a flicker of heat, while cayennes (40,000) are to Scotch bonnets (200,000) as matches are to blowtorches. Capsaicin is meant to deter predators, but for humans it can be too little of a bad thing. Because capsaicin causes the body to release endorphins, acting as a sort of neural fire hose, many people experience chilis as the ideal fulcrum of pain and pleasure.

In recent years, “superhots”—chilis that score above 500,000 on the Scoville scale—have consumed the attention of chiliheads, who debate grow lights on Facebook (“You can overwinter with a few well-placed T-8s”), swap seeds in flat-rate boxes (Australian customs is their nemesis), and show up in droves at fiery-foods events (wares range from Kiss My Bhut hot sauce to Vanilla Heat coffee creamer). Chilis, in general, are beautiful. There is a reason no one makes Christmas lights in the shape of rutabagas. Superhots come in the brightest colors and the craziest shapes.

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Frederic Raphael at the Times Literary Supplement:

We begin, as film treatments so often say, in a screening room in Berlin in 1933.

“At the front of the room was Dr. Ernst Seeger, the chief censor from long before Hitler came to power. Next to Seeger were his assistants: a conductor, a philosopher, an architect and a pastor. Further back were the representatives of a film distribution company and two expert witnesses. The movie they were about to watch came all the way from America, and it was called King Kong.”

After the projection of the film, Dr Seeger asked Professor Zeiss, from the German Health Office, “In your expert opinion could this picture be expected to damage the health of normal spectators?”. Zeiss inquired whether the company trying to sell the film was German or American. When told that it was German, “Zeiss erupted. ‘I am astounded and shocked,’ he yelled, ‘that a German company would dare to seek permission for a film that can only be damaging to the health of its viewers . . . this film is NOTHING LESS THAN AN ATTACK ON THE NERVES OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE! . . . It provokes our racial instincts to show a blonde woman of the Germanic type in the hands of an ape. Itharms the healthy racial feelings of the German people’”.

more here.

In the New York Review of Books:

Already as a young, ascendant boxer in his mid-teens Mike Tyson was drawing attention for the rapid-fire, nonstop aggression of his ring style even in amateur boxing matches in which points are scored by hits, as in fencing, without respect to the power of punches. He’d been trained—at first during weekend passes from his upstate reform school—to fight like a professional by Cus D’Amato, a revered if controversial and contentious trainer whose previous world champions were Floyd Patterson and José Torres. “The whole amateur boxing establishment hated me…. And if they didn’t like me, they despised Cus.” Typically, Tyson terrified his opponents by his very size and manner. At the Olympic trials in 1983 the Tyson legend was beginning:

On the first day, I achieved a forty-two-second KO. On the second day, I punched out the front two teeth of my opponent and left him out cold for ten minutes. Then on the third day, the reigning tournament champ withdrew from the fight.

To see Tyson’s early fights, both amateur and professional, is to see young boxers stalked, cornered, and swiftly beaten into submission by a younger boxer who pursues them across the ring with the savagery and determination of Dempsey, whose nonstop, combative, and punitive ring style Tyson imitated under D’Amato’s guidance. To see these fights in quick succession, the shared incredulity of the boxers who have found themselves in the ring with the relatively short, short-armed Tyson, their disbelief and astonishment at the sheer force of their opponent as he swarms upon them, is to witness a kind of Theater of the Absurd, which is perhaps the most helpful way to understanding boxing.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Poor Fernand Léger. He is a man trapped in sociology. His paintings aren’t looked at for their own sake anymore but for what they show us about city life in the early 20th century.

You can see why Léger’s art is approached sociologically when you look at his most famous painting “The City,” painted in 1919. “The City” is owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The current exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum, “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” features “The City” as its central work. It is because of this painting that Léger is often called “the painter of the modern city.”

In “The City” we see, well, the city. We see the jumble of shapes and colors, the snatches of advertisements, the confusion of content that had already become, by the early decades of the 20th century, characteristic of the urban environment. In paintings like “The City,” and in any number of canvases Léger painted in following years, we find a painter coming to terms visually with the new and startling aspects of that urban environment. It makes sense that Léger was startled. He’d been sent off to fight WWI in 1914, like so many other young Frenchmen. The sights and sounds of the Great War pulverized his sensibilities. When he got back to Paris a few years later, his sensibilities were pulverized some more. The city was being lit up and mechanized with all sorts of new fangled devices, just like the battlefields.

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Miriam Markowitz in The Nation:

A few years ago, the literary world was beset by a bogeywoman who came bearing bad news and the numbers to prove it; her name was VIDA. Some assumed this moniker was an acronym or a misspelled allusion to Virginia Woolf’s famous literary paramour, Vita Sackville-West, but it wasn’t. VIDA was an all-caps neologism that would come to haunt the dreams of editors of magazines large and small, eminent and less so, with your author, dear reader, included among those unsound sleepers.

“Veedah. Veeedaahh….”

If you are an accredited member of the magazine world or else a vigilant fellow traveler, chances are that you already know about VIDA. You have heard of the Count, which tallies bylines by gender at publications that “are widely recognized as prominent critical and/or commercial literary venues.” You have opinions about what the numbers mean and how magazines should or will respond to them. If you are a partisan of the Count, or a feminist, or a woman writer, there is a good chance that, having read the opening paragraph of this essay, you are puzzled or angry. If you are a reactionary, an embattled editor or a plain old contrarian, you may already be cheering: Look, here we go, a woman writer and editor socking it to those sourpuss byline-counters! It is easy to incite, in the small community that cares about such things, indignation or delight, because the battle lines have been drawn, it seems—demands issued, sops and reassurances offered—and little has changed.

More here.