Adam Shatz reviews Stanley Crouch's Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, in the NYRB:

“Bird was kind of like the sun, giving off the energy we drew from him,” Max Roach said of the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. The sun set early for Parker, who died at thirty-four of pneumonia on March 12, 1955. He spent his last few days in a suite at the Stanhope Hotel owned by the Baronness Nica de Koenigswarter, a Rothschild heiress who was well known for her patronage of jazz musicians. He’d been watching a juggler on the Tommy Dorsey show when he collapsed. A baseless rumor spread that the baroness’s lover, the drummer Art Blakey, either shot or knocked him out in the middle of a quarrel, but Parker, who had been shooting heroin since he was seventeen, hardly needed help killing himself. He was a world-class musician, but he was also a world-class addict. His body was so haggard that the doctor who examined him estimated his age at fifty-three.

Kansas City Lightning, the first volume of Stanley Crouch’s Parker biography, never gets to the Stanhope. It covers only the first twenty-one years of Parker’s life. But each page is haunted by the demons that brought down the man known as Bird. In the richly evocative set piece that opens the book, Parker turns up late for a gig at the Savoy Ballroom with the Jay McShann Orchestra. Crouch imagines the musicians on stage asking themselves, “Why did this guy have to be the guy with all the talent?… Why did his private life have to mess up everybody’s plans so often?” This is, of course, conjecture, but it’s not unreasonable to think that Parker’s bandmates might have wished that he was more like the courtly and punctual Duke Ellington. Parker often nodded off during concerts, or vanished midway through a set. When he wasn’t playing, he was copping for heroin. He stole from his family and friends. His most lasting relationship was with his horn, which he often pawned when he was in need of a fix. Miles Davis, who worshiped Parker, called him “one of the slimiest and greediest mother fuckers who ever lived.”

More here.

Ullrich Fichtner in Spiegel Online:

Today, 68 years after the end of the war and 24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we Germans are respected, admired and sometimes even loved. The fact that we generally don't know what to do with all this admiration, because we collectively still seem to assume that we are not likeable and therefore must be unpopular, is a problem that very quickly becomes political. It's obvious that Germans' perception of themselves and the way we are perceived by others differ dramatically.

Even if some would not consider a travel guide to be the most credible basis for political reflections, it's easy to find other sources of praise for Germany and the Germans. The BBC conducts an annual poll to name the “most popular country in the world.” Germany came in a clear first in the latest poll, and it wasn't the first time. Some 59 percent of 26,000 respondents in 25 countries said that the Germans exert a “positive influence” in the world (and not surprisingly, the only country in which the view of Germany is overwhelmingly negative at the moment is Greece).

In the “Nation Brands Index” prepared by the American market research company GfK, which surveys more than 20,000 people in 20 countries about the image of various nations, Germany is currently in second place, behind the United States. This index is not some idle exercise, but is used as a decision-making tool by corporate strategists and other investors. GfK asks questions in six categories, including the quality of the administration and the condition of the export economy, and Germany is at the top of each category. But when Germans do acknowledge their current standing in the world, they always seem to be somewhat coy or even amused.

The rest of the world doesn't understand this (anymore). The rest of the world is waiting for Germany. But instead of feeling pleased about Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski's historic statement that he fears Germany's power less than its inactivity, we cringe anxiously over such sentiments. When US President Barack Obama calls Germany a leading global power, we hope that he doesn't really mean it. And when politicians in Israel say that Germany should wield its power more actively, we don't interpret it as a mandate to become more committed, but are puzzled instead.

We Germans? Exercise power? Take action? Lead?

More here.

Alice Béja in Eurozine:

Reading Hanna Rosin's End of Men, one would think Friedan completely obsolete. For Rosin, women are very close to taking over the world: they do better than men at school, and will benefit from the end of blue-collar jobs and the rise of the service industry. For Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, women have to “lean in” in order to make it in the workplace; they can succeed without giving up on having a family. The success of the few will benefit all; for Sandberg, the “trickle down” theory of wealth is applicable to the cause of women. In fact, according to Kate Bolick, women should relish the independence they gain through work, and enjoy their lives without succumbing to the fetters of marriage and children.

The debate about the place of women in the professional world has gained momentum in the United States mainstream media over the past two years, and has reignited the 1980s “mommy wars”, which, at the time, pitted housewives against working women, and were one of the legacy of the feminist movement led by Betty Friedan. Should women be more confident? Have they already won the struggle for professional emancipation? Or is it time to question the focus on work and career, and to reappraise the value of family life?

These issues are particularly sensitive in the United States, where women's social protection largely depends on their employer. For a while, they were sidelined by the struggle for reproductive rights, especially the fight to defend women's right to choose, Roe v. Wade being under threat in many states. The media's focus in this debate on women who are white, rich and have high-profile jobs has had two consequences on the national conversation around women and feminism: on the one hand, it has revived the language of “responsibility”, the “when there's a will there's a way” logic which is also applied to the poor and the unemployed, on the principle that if they're not making it, it means they don't want it enough. In this perspective, individual initiative alone is the key to success and if women are to make it in the professional world, they should simply “lean in”. On the other hand however, there has been a reaction against this paternalistic approach to women's place in society. Dissent published an issue on “the new feminism”, that stressed social issues and the fact that women, far from “having it all”, seldom have a choice between work and family; most of them have to work in order to be able to support their family.

More here.

Thomas Nagel in TNR:

Joshua Greene… asks how our moral beliefs and attitudes should be affected by these psychological findings. Greene began his training and research as a doctoral student in philosophy, so he is familiar from the inside with the enterprise of ethical theory conceived not as a part of empirical psychology but as a direct first-order investigation of moral questions, and a quest for systematic answers to them. His book is intended as a radical challenge to the assumptions of that philosophical enterprise. It benefits from his familiarity with the field, even if his grasp of the views that he discusses is not always accurate.

The book is framed as the search for a solution to a global problem that cannot be solved by the kinds of moral standards that command intuitive assent and work well within particular communities. Greene calls this problem the “tragedy of commonsense morality.” In a nutshell, it is the tragedy that moralities that help members of particular communities to cooperate peacefully do not foster a comparable harmony among members of different communities.

Morality evolved to enable cooperation, but this conclusion comes with an important caveat. Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only with some people. Our moral brains evolved for cooperation within groups, and perhaps only within the context of personal relationships. Our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups)…. As with the evolution of faster carnivores, competition is essential for the evolution of cooperation.

The tragedy of commonsense morality is conceived by analogy with the familiar tragedy of the commons, to which commonsense morality does provide a solution. In the tragedy of the commons, the pursuit of private self-interest leads a collection of individuals to a result that is contrary to the interest of all of them (like over-grazing the commons or over-fishing the ocean). If they learn to limit their individual self-interest by agreeing to follow certain rules and sticking to them, the commons will not be destroyed and they will all do well. As Greene puts it, commonsense morality requires that we sometimes put Us ahead of Me; but the same disposition also leads us to put Us ahead of Them.

More here.

From lensculture:

Six months of daily shooting of over 250 skeletons at the Museum of Natural History in Paris as well as 4 other locations in France. From the smallest to the biggest vertebrate, isolated in front of a black background, Patrick Gries presents these skeletons as sculptures. This series of stark black-and-white photographs offers an atypical approach to viewing natural science and forces us to reconsider the boundaries between artistic and scientific objects. Spectacular, mysterious, elegant, or grotesque, vertebrate skeletons are objects of art, while they carry within them the traces of several billion years of evolution.

The book Evolution from Editions Xavier Barral/Paris, in which more than two hundred fifty of Patrick Gries' photographs are accompanied with text written by scientist and documentarian Dr Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu. The result is a powerful pairing that profoundly illustrates how we came to be what we are. Evolution steps beyond the debate and presents the undeniable truth of Darwin's theory, showing through skeletons both obscure and commonplace, but always intriguing, the process by which life has transformed itself, again and again.

More here.

Jane Mulkerrins in The Telegraph:

Paul Krugman reviews The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World, by William D. Nordhaus, in the New York Review of Books:

Forty years ago a brilliant young Yale economist named William Nordhaus published a landmark paper, “The Allocation of Energy Resources,” that opened new frontiers in economic analysis.1 Nordhaus argued that to think clearly about the economics of exhaustible resources like oil and coal, it was necessary to look far into the future, to assess their value as they become more scarce—and that this look into the future necessarily involved considering not just available resources and expected future economic growth, but likely future technologies as well. Moreover, he developed a method for incorporating all of this information—resource estimates, long-run economic forecasts, and engineers’ best guesses about the costs of future technologies—into a quantitative model of energy prices over the long term.

The resource and engineering data for Nordhaus’s paper were for the most part compiled by his research assistant, a twenty-year-old undergraduate, who spent long hours immured in Yale’s Geology Library, poring over Bureau of Mines circulars and the like. It was an invaluable apprenticeship. My reasons for bringing up this bit of intellectual history, however, go beyond personal disclosure—although readers of this review should know that Bill Nordhaus was my first professional mentor. For if one looks back at “The Allocation of Energy Resources,” one learns two crucial lessons. First, predictions are hard, especially about the distant future. Second, sometimes such predictions must be made nonetheless.

More here.

Ben Yagoda in Slate:

In the first episode of the Showtime series Masters of Sex, William Masters is talking to a prostitute named Betty, and notes that she faked an orgasm during sex. “Is that a common practice among prostitutes?” he asks her. “It’s a common practice amongst anyone with a twat,” replies Betty.

Clearly, two words contribute to the humor of Betty’s comeback, and the second isamongst. The show takes place in America in the 1950s, which is relevant because in that time and place virtually nobody said amongst. For the past few centuries,amongst has been a distinctly British word, though even there among is more popular. In the United States, according to the Google Books database, the last timeamongst was about as common as among was in 1720.

Curiously, however, amongst appears to be on the upswing.

More here.

Our own Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse at the website of their book Why We Argue (And How We Should):

Why We Argue (And How We Should) is a book about logic and politics. The jokes write themselves. As one person put it to us, “The book's about logic and politics? It'll be a mighty short book!” We appreciate the humor. Nevertheless, there's something disconcerting about the underlying premise that it's ridiculous to expect our politics to be logical. In fact, those who joke about the irrationality in our politics most often exempt themselves and their political allies from the charge. That is, the jokes are driven not by the claim that we humans are fundamentally lacking in logical ability; rather the claim is that politics is illogical because only some of usare properly rational. Conveniently, in most cases, the logical/illogical divide tracks the joker's own political views: it is those with whom she politically disagrees that are failing at logic. Accordingly, for many of those who joke in this way, the task of making politics more logical is the task of removing from politics all opposition to their own favored political views. And that thought is no joke.

In Why We Argue, we affirm the idea that politics ought to be rational. Indeed, we hold that our current politics reflects the aspiration to have our collective lives governed by reason. Why We Argue is a book about logic and politics because our politics already attempts to be logical. The trouble, of course, is that it is so difficult to make good on our shared aspiration.

More here.

Fatima Bhutto in The Guardian:

Though feted around the globe for her eloquence, intelligence and bravery, Malala is much maligned in Pakistan. The haters and conspiracy theorists would do well to read this book. Malala is certainly an ardent critic of the Taliban, but she also speaks passionately against America's drone warfare, the CIA's policy of funding jihadi movements, the violence and abductions carried out by the Pakistani military, feudalism, the barbarous Hudood laws, and even Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who caused a diplomatic meltdown between America and Pakistan when he killed two Pakistanis in broad daylight in Lahore – “Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don't drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.” I Am Malala is as much Malala's father's story as it is his daughter's, and is a touching tribute to his quest to be educated and to build a model school. Malala writes of her father sitting late into the night, cooking and bagging popcorn to sell so that he would have extra income for his project. She quotes him on all matters – from the ban on The Satanic Verses to the environmental problems facing the Swat Valley – and teases him for his long-winded speeches.

Yet, even as Malala says she does not hate the man who shot her, here in Pakistan anger towards this ambitious young campaigner is as strong as ever. Amid the bile, there is a genuine concern that this extraordinary girl's courageous and articulate message will be colonised by one power or other for its own insidious agendas. She is young and the forces around her are strong and often sinister when it comes to their designs on the global south. There is a reason we know Malala's story but not that of Noor Aziz, eight years old when killed by a drone strike in Pakistan; Zayda Ali Mohammed Nasser, dead at seven from a drone strike in Yemen; or Abeer Qassim Hamza al Janabi, the 14-year-old girl raped and set on fire by US troops in Mahmudiyah, Iraq. “I wasn't thinking these people were humans,” one of the soldiers involved, Steven Green, said of his Iraqi victims. It will always be more convenient for the west to paint itself as more righteous, more civilised, than the people they occupy and kill. But now, Malala's fight should be ours too – more inclusion of women, remembrance of the many voiceless and unsung Malalas, and education for all.

More here.

Walter Isaacson in The New York Times:

When the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten in 1997 by Deep Blue, an I.B.M. supercomputer, it was considered to be a major milestone in the march toward artificial intelligence. It probably shouldn’t have been. As complex as chess is, it’s easy to see that its rules can be translated into algorithms so that computers, when they eventually got enough processing power, could crunch through billions of possible moves and past games. Deep Blue’s calculations were a fundamentally different process, most people would say, from the “real” thinking and intuition a human player would use. Clive Thompson, a Brooklyn-based technology journalist, uses this tale to open “Smarter Than You Think,” his judicious and insightful book on human and machine intelligence. But he takes it to a more interesting level. The year after his defeat by Deep Blue, Kasparov set out to see what would happen if he paired a machine and a human chess player in a collaboration. Like a centaur, the hybrid would have the strength of each of its components: the processing power of a large logic circuit and the intuition of a human brain’s wetware. The result: human-machine teams, even when they didn’t include the best grandmasters or most powerful computers, consistently beat teams composed solely of human grandmasters or superfast machines.

Thompson’s point is that “artificial intelligence” — defined as machines that can think on their own just like or better than humans — is not yet (and may never be) as powerful as “intelligence amplification,” the symbiotic smarts that occur when human cognition is augmented by a close interaction with computers. When he played in collaboration with a computer, Kasparov said, it freed him to focus on the “creative texture” of the game. In the future, Thompson writes, we should not fear being beaten in chess by Deep Blue or in “Jeopardy!” by Watson. Instead, humans will find themselves working in partnership with the progeny of these supercomputers to diagnose diseases, solve crimes, write poetry and become (as the clever double meaning of the book’s title puts it) smarter than we think.

More here.

Realization

I am a different man
One who died
and was reborn
A boy man
Haunted by childhood
A survivor
A wiry man
Full of rage
One with little choice
Wrestling demons
Welded to irony
A kid minus a father
A guy without dreams
A hermit
A hobbit
A hungry man
Cornered, imprisoned, beaten
A fearful man
A lost soul
Plagued by personalities
A living blank
Humiliated but stubborn
A disregarded man
A walker, a dancer, a runner
An impatient man
A merciless victim
A religious man
A singer of the heart
An indignant man labeled man
Buried alive
A Neanderthal
An android
A metaphorical man
A disabled man
A violent man
A dictator at war with wisdom
A man condemned to victory
.

by Robert Boates
from The Afterlife
Toronto, Seraphim Editions. 1998.

Alain de Botton at The Wall Street Journal:

When Henri Matisse shows us an ideal image of women linking hands in solidarity and joy in “The Dance,” he doesn't wish to deny the troubles of the planet. He wants to encourage our optimism, knowing that it is hard to nurture and maintain.

A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because we are so aware of how rarely life goes as we would like it to. We should be able to enjoy Matisse's dancers without fear that we are thereby complicit in a dangerous delusion. If the world were a kinder place, perhaps we would be less impressed by, and in need of, pretty works of art.

One of the strangest features of experiencing art is its power, occasionally, to move us to tears, not when we are presented with a harrowing or terrifying image, but when we see a work of particular grace and loveliness. Matisse's dancers might do this to us.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The Los Angeles Times:

The assassination was never, for me, about history as much as it was about a way to see the world. It was impossible to imagine a lone gunman not because the evidence didn't match up (magic bullet theory, anyone?) but because I needed a bigger explanation for the killing to make sense.

As it turns out, I was not alone; even before the Warren report was released in September 1964, critics had started lining up. They claimed the commission had moved too fast and drew conclusions without sufficient cause.

In his 1965 book “The Unanswered Questions AboutPresident Kennedy's Assassination,” New York World-Telegram & Sun city editor Sylvan Fox lays out the case for conspiracy. For one thing, he writes, “[t]here is considerable doubt about the number of shots fired and the direction of at least one of the shots”; for another, “[Jack] Ruby managed to enter tightly guarded Dallas Police Headquarters building unseen and to shoot [Lee Harvey] Oswald in the presence of more than 70 policemen.”

more here.

John Paul Rathbone at the Financial Times:

Borders are evocative and often dangerous places, and few more so than the US-Mexico border. At almost 2,000 miles, it is not the longest in the world – that record goes to its northern sister, the US-Canada international boundary. But it is among the busiest – $500bn of goods and more than 60m vehicles cross every year – and certainly one of the most heavily policed.

Most of the US border patrol’s 21,000 agents are deployed there; 10 predator drones watch from the skies while infrared cameras and ground sensors monitor movement on land. The border itself, a third of it fenced, has in places become a near-impregnable fortress that is supposed to stop drugs, violence and migrants heading north, and US arms and narco-dollars heading south. No wonder that President Barack Obama has described the US-Mexico relationship as “like no other in the world”.

Of course, how you feel about the border depends in large part on which side you stand.

more here.

Katie Ryder at Bookforum:

“So deeply embedded is patriarchy,” Millett wrote, “that the character structure it creates in both sexes is perhaps even more a habit of mind and a way of life than a political system.” Thus she saw the First Wave’s failure to sufficiently challenge social-sexual identity as a main cause of its dissipation. With sexual “temperament” and “role” still in tact, “more insidious ‘soft line’” approaches—the “glorification of ‘femininity’” alongside chivalry, “the family, female submission, and above all, motherhood”—worked to reaffirm the woman’s place. As the rule of religion was waning, the “soft line” found robust support in literary culture and the claims of the new social sciences: psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Even when women were not explicitly deemed inferior, they were still declared “different”: no less damning a sentence of circumscription.

Millett wrote during the rising Second Wave, a time in which feminists and their allies—driven in part by the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, and spurred by the sexism of the New Left—built upon the legal successes of the First Wave, and, critically, sought to dismantle accepted psycho-sexual identities. To this end, Sexual Politics dissected the beliefs, the cultural language, that supported sexual hierarchy.

more here.