David Remnick in The New Yorker:

On the Sunday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Barack Obama sat in the office cabin of Air Force One wearing a look of heavy-lidded annoyance. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement and, for all its limitations, the most ambitious social legislation since the Great Society, half a century ago, was in jeopardy. His approval rating was down to forty per cent—lower than George W. Bush’s in December of 2005, when Bush admitted that the decision to invade Iraq had been based on intelligence that “turned out to be wrong.” Also, Obama said thickly, “I’ve got a fat lip.”

That morning, while playing basketball at F.B.I. headquarters, Obama went up for a rebound and came down empty-handed; he got, instead, the sort of humbling reserved for middle-aged men who stubbornly refuse the transition to the elliptical machine and Gentle Healing Yoga. This had happened before. In 2010, after taking a self-described “shellacking” in the midterm elections, Obama caught an elbow in the mouth while playing ball at Fort McNair. He wound up with a dozen stitches. The culprit then was one Reynaldo Decerega, a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Decerega wasn’t invited to play again, though Obama sent him a photograph inscribed “For Rey, the only guy that ever hit the President and didn’t get arrested. Barack.”

More here.

Amitava Kumar in The Indian Express:

I am writing these words during a 14-hour flight from New York to Delhi. After landing in Delhi, I will catch another flight, this one to Patna. I am going to Patna to cremate my mother. Ten years ago, almost to the day, I was on a highway outside Washington DC and I thought that my mother had died. She was visiting us from India because my first child had been born. That morning I was driving with Ma to my sister’s home. I was to take a plane later that day to Atlanta, where I was going to interview the actor Manoj Bajpai. Only a few miles from my sister’s house, as I was driving, I looked at Ma, who was on the seat beside me. Her eyes were open but her gaze was unfocused. She certainly didn’t appear to hear me. Her body had gone rigid. Ma, I said softly, and then Ma again, louder and louder. We must have been driving at 120 kmph and I began to change lanes, getting to the slower lanes, and then exiting till I came to a stop on a suburban street. Did I sprinkle water on her? I cannot say. But my mother seemed to awaken from a sleep. She remembered nothing. And soon she was fine. Before I said goodbye to her at my sister’s house, Ma asked me if she should prepare some suji ka halwa for Manoj Bajpai. This is how one can think of many women in our society: they are survivors. They have endured so much, they have carried such burdens, weathered so many storms. And we, who are their children, are the beneficiaries because, at the end, we are asked if we want some mango, or milk, or suji ka halwa.

More here.

Mari Ruti at The Chronicle Review:

If all of that isn't enough to make you suspicious of the cultural injunction to be happy, consider this basic psychoanalytic insight: Human beings may not be designed for happy, balanced lives. The irony of happiness is that it's precisely when we manage to feel happy that we are also most keenly aware that the feeling might not last. Insofar as each passing moment of happiness brings us closer to its imminent collapse, happiness is merely a way of anticipating unhappiness; it's a deviously roundabout means of producing anxiety.

Take the notion that happiness entails a healthy lifestyle. Our society is hugely enthusiastic about the idea that we can keep illness at bay through a meticulous management of our bodies. The avoidance of risk factors such as smoking, drinking, and sexual promiscuity, along with a balanced diet and regular exercise, is supposed to guarantee our longevity. To a degree, that is obviously true. But the insistence on healthy habits is also a way to moralize illness, to cast judgment on those who fail to adhere to the right regimen. Ultimately, as the queer theorist Tim Dean has illustrated, we are dealing with a regulation of pleasure—a process of medicalization that tells us which kinds of pleasures are acceptable and which are not.

more here.

Yusuf, however, will say, “I’m just a Khoja businessman.” The Khojas are a tight-knit, mostly mercantile community who populate cities from South Asia to East Africa and Canada. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the urbane founder of Pakistan, was one. Yusuf’s trajectory was rather more traditional: he got into the textile business after graduating from university, manufacturing cones used in spinning units, before venturing into construction. He built one of the first malls in Karachi in the mid 1980s. By the late 1980s, he had become a successful self-made businessman—“Whenever I take up something, I like to do a thorough job,” he said—and middle-aged.

And in the late 1980s, Karachi had become unsettled.

more here.

Jason Burke in The Guardian:

Decade after decade, Pakistan waxes and wanes as a news story. The early and late 70s, the end of the 80s, the beginning and end of the last decade have all seen spikes of interest in this complicated, troubled nation. In 2007 and 2008, two events in particular focused attention on the country: the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in the northern city of Rawalpindi and the terrorist operation launched by Pakistan-based Islamic militants on the Indian commercial capital of Mumbai, which left 166 dead. Together with new violence along the Afghan-Pakistani frontier as Pakistani troops tried to roll back resurgent extremists and bombings across Pakistan itself, these two attacks signalled the return of the “strategic centre of gravity” of the post-9/11 battle against extremist violence to south-west Asia after the shift to the Middle East following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Heraldo Muñoz is a UN assistant secretary general who led the investigation into the assassination of Bhutto. He tells his story in Getting Away With Murder: Benazir Bhutto's Assassination and the Politics of Pakistan, a short book which, though oversold by publishers' claims of a “gripping” narrative that goes “further than anyone else to unravel the mystery” of the two-time prime minister's death, nonetheless makes some interesting points.

Central to the narrative is Bhutto herself. I spent much time with this impressive but deeply flawed woman in Pakistan in the late 90s, spoke to her regularly throughout her exile and accompanied her on several days' campaigning close to the Afghan border only a week or so before she died. She was charming, intelligent, moderate and extraordinarily brave. On one occasion, I joined her after she impulsively halted her motorcade and headed off into a market in a violence-prone conservative town to mix with stallholders and shoppers. But Bhutto was also intolerant of dissent, wilfully blind to the faults of key associates and, by the time she returned to Pakistan, in 2007, out of touch with her homeland.

More here.

Esther Dyson in Project Syndicate:

According to Taleb, things that are anti-fragile – mostly living things – not only resist being broken; they actually grow stronger under stress. When coddled too much, they grow weaker. Evolution is an anti-fragile process…

What are the equivalent terms for health? Most dictionaries define health as the “absence of disease.” But, in those terms, it is not a compelling proposition for people to “invest in health.” How can you invest in a vacuum?

Of course, we do invest in health care. But that is like investing in auto repair – allocating resources to repairing damage, rather than to improving safety technology or brightening traffic lights. Health care is what we wield when inactive “health” has failed to keep us healthy: the immune system has been overcome by a pathogen, or too much (bad) food, alcohol, smoking, recreational drugs, or stress – perhaps compounded by too little sleep and exercise – have compromised the body’s normal operation. Even if we are unlucky and suffer from a genetic condition that cannot be prevented, it often will still be easier to address in an otherwise healthy person.

Health itself is the capacity to undergo stress and react positively to it – anti-fragility in a specific context. For example, without exposure to infectious agents, the human immune system will never learn how to ward off invaders and may even turn inward, as in auto-immune diseases. Muscles need to work (and be stressed) to grow strong. The discomfort of hunger impels us to eat.

At first, the notion of producing health sounds a bit pompous, like “ideating solutions” or listing “legal intervention” (by a policeman’s bullet) as a cause of death. But it is a concept worth exploring and promoting.

Read the rest here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

The idea that anxiety is central to the human condition can also mean that our mental life is characterized by psychic conflict, and anxiety is the symptom of that conflict. This is, roughly, the psychoanalytic view. It’s what Freud meant when, in 1917 (not, as Stossel has it, 1933), he called anxiety “a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence.” Anxiety is the common feature of all neuroses. Feeling anxious is what makes people seek psychiatric help. It’s a signal that unconscious drives are in conflict—that (as Freud believed in 1917) the ego is repressing a libidinal impulse. We’re not aware of the conflict itself—we’re not aware that we have a repressed desire—but we are aware of our anxiety. That’s what makes it the key to understanding what’s going on inside our heads.

Anxiety plays a big role in other accounts of the human condition, too. In theology, anxiety has been associated with the concepts of conscience, guilt, and original sin. Reinhold Niebuhr called anxiety “the inevitable spiritual state of man.” In evolutionary psychology, anxiety is usually explained as part of the “fight or flight” reflex that gets triggered in the presence of danger. The reflex is naturally selected for: organisms that lack it might fall off a cliff or get crushed by a mastodon, because their physiologies failed to warn them of a threat to their survival. And, in some schools of sociology and cultural theory, anxiety is interpreted as a reaction to the stress and uncertainty of modern life. It’s a natural response to unnatural conditions. It’s how we know that the world is headed in a bad direction.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

To help people with diabetes as they try to keep their blood sugar levels under control, Google is testing a smart contact lens designed to measure glucose levels in tears. It uses a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material, according to Google Official Blog. People with diabetes must still prick their finger and test drops of blood throughout the day. It’s disruptive, and it’s painful. And, as a result, many people with diabetes check their blood glucose less often than they should. This should help. “We’re testing prototypes that can generate a reading once per second. We’re also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we’re exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds.

More here.

Term of Office

For 15 years I served as a child until removed from my post
in this kingdom where the land was once trustworthy
and trees glittered in the rain.
Now the almond grove is dry, the bread fish have turned brown,
the tented sky collapses on Mount Leviathan, and love,
once on the tip of my tongue, sticks to the roof of my mouth.
.

by Isreal Bar Kohave
from Beh-karov ahava
publisher: Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 2005
Translation: Lisa Katz

Gunnar Ekelof, from The Tale of Fatumeh (translated by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjoberg)–for Morgan Meis:

To suffer is difficult
To suffer without loving is difficult
To love without suffering is impossible
To love is difficult

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.