Phyllis Korkki in The New York Times:

“Patience is a virtue,” we are taught. And when you think about it, much of our life is spent waiting for something rather than experiencing it, so that waiting becomes an experience in itself, filled with anticipation, annoyance, boredom or fear. Waiting is a ripe subject for business researchers, it turns out. One effect of waiting is that people place more value on what they are waiting for, says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago. “If you give people exactly what they want at the moment they want it, they might want it less,” she says.

…In E.R.’s, people are seen based on the severity of their medical condition. If you are otherwise going to die in the next half-hour, you get to jump to the front of the line. But fellow patients may not realize this, and seeing someone who only just arrived go first can upset people’s sense of fairness. Some may leave the waiting room because they feel cheated, Professor Terwiesch says. Typically, hospitals don’t tell patients how long they may have to wait, and patients waiting in the E.R. have no idea when they will be called: “Every time the door opens, your adrenaline goes up.” He found that people in E.R.’s are constantly seeking visual clues as to who might be treated next. But these clues can mislead. At peak hours, an E.R. at full capacity may be able to handle 10 people quickly, yet it may not initially look that way to the 10th person in the waiting room. Professor Terwiesch recommends that hospitals create multiple waiting rooms so that patients don’t try to monitor one another this way.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Jangfeldt’s research revealed a startling fact: Wallenberg had at least 15 kilograms of gold and jewelry in his car when the Red Army arrested him in 1945. Again, why? Jangfeldt suggests that this was the amassed fortune of many of the Jewish victims Wallenberg had helped, who had left their valuables with him for safekeeping. He wished to return them at the war’s end to help them rebuild their lives. It seems like a reckless risk, but perhaps he had gotten away with so much, so often, that he had begun to feel invulnerable. In any case, the decision may have been the fatal one.

In April 1945, Averell Harriman, acting on behalf of the U.S. State Department, offered the Swedish government American help in making inquiries about Wallenberg’s fate. His offer was declined. Jangfeldt called this “a symbol of Swedish passivity.” The Swedes persuaded themselves that Wallenberg had been killed in Hungary – “the assumption that he had been killed in Budapest was very cynical,” Jangfeldt said. We now know he was taken to the Soviet Union’s notorious prisons, Lefortovo and later the Lubyanka.

The Soviet foreign service reassured the Swedes that they had conducted an investigation, and that they knew of no one named Wallenberg in the Soviet prison system.

more here.

Greg Grandin at The Nation:

Exhausted migrants crawl into caves and die, their remains never recovered or their bones, picked clean by carrion birds and other animals, disappearing into the sand. A Texas rancher recently told a reporter that only one out of every four bodies is found, which would put the death toll at well over 20,000. Patrick Ball, a statistician who works with human rights groups to count the victims of mass atrocities—93,000 in Syria, 69,000 in Peru, 18,000 in Timor-Leste—says that in order to arrive at an accurate ratio of total dead migrants to known remains, one would need “several independent enumerations of people you can identify as having died in the way you’re studying.” Each list would have to survey roughly the same area of the desert and include the name of the victim and the approximate location and date of death.

But migrants often don’t travel with identification, and the reliable data that do exist are spread out over California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, fragmented among morgues, hospitals, police departments and the Border Patrol. Some of those who perish during the trek don’t do so until they are well into the United States or have staggered back into Mexico.

more here.

Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:

The nation really did get turned inside out when Kennedy was killed, as nations do at the death of kings. But what altered? In many ways, it was a time more past than present. Though it’s said that the event marked the decisive move from page to screen, newspaper to television, all the crucial information was channelled through the wire-service reporters, who, riding six cars back from the President’s, were the first to get and send the news of the shots, and were still thought of as the authoritative source. Walter Cronkite’s two most famous moments—breaking into “As the World Turns” to announce, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired”; and his later, holding-back-tears “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time”—were in both cases simply read from the wire-service copy. You can see the assistants ripping the copy from the teleprinter and rushing it to the anchorman.

Yet an imbalance between the flood of information and the uncertainty of our understanding—the sense that we know so much and grasp so little, and that reality becomes an image passing—does seem to have begun then: the postmodern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know. A compulsive “hyperperspicacity,” in the term of one assassination researcher—the tendency to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide—became the motif of the time.

more here.

Rashid Rana. Red Carpet 1, 2007.

Edition 1/5; C-print + DIASEC. H. 95 x W. 135 in. (241.3 x 317.5 cm). Collection of Pallak Seth. Image courtesy of Gallery Chemould and Chattertjee & Lal Mumbai.

“Red Carpet 1 when looked at from a distance is a beautiful deep red carpet. Upon closer inspection, it is revealed that the carpet is made up of images taken in a slaughterhouse. The work reflects the duel existence of Pakistan as a purveyor of beauty and violence.

More here and here.

It is Autumn

It is autumn
a plum is falling, apples,
the fruit falls
and the soul's engineer
is measuring the universe with a teaspoon
It snows in the snow, snows in the rain,
it snows in your back
Stars falling.
.

by Tone Hødnebø
from Mørkt kvadrat
publisher, Aventura forlag , Oslo, 1994
translation: Cecilie Dahl and Tone Hødnebø
First published on Poetry International, 2013
.
.

Stuart Kelly in The Guardian:

Friendship, like forgiveness, modesty and tolerance, is a concept which we all instinctively recognise but which buckles under the pressure of philosophical definition. In this little study, AC Grayling charts the history of attempts to understand what friendship is; how a friend differs from a lover, an acquaintance or an ally; and how friendship relates to wider moral and ethical propositions. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and progressing via Cicero and Augustine to Montaigne, Kant and Godwin, Grayling assesses a formidable array of sources before turning his attention to literary depictions of friendship: Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Nisus and Euryalus, Tennyson and Hallam. He concludes with his own insights into the idea of friendship, drawn from his own experience.

…Friendship does have a political dimension – Aristotle said: “When men are friends there is no need for justice.” This idea was taken up by Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship, a book absent from Grayling's bibliography. Derrida argues, to my mind convincingly, that the discourse around friendship has surreptitiously promoted it as a private, not public, virtue. There is a chasm between EM Forster's “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” and Carl Schmitt's notorious idea that “every totality of people looks for friends because it has already enemies”.

More here.

James Somers in The Atlantic:

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.” Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction—like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant—in fact have very little to do with intelligence. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think. Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself. Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves—and we’ll have made intelligent machines.

The idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. He was free to think about whatever he wanted; he chose to think about thinking itself. Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter. The father of psychology, William James, described this in 1890 as “the most mysterious thing in the world”: How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves? Roaming in his 1956 Mercury, Hofstadter thought he had found the answer—that it lived, of all places, in the kernel of a mathematical proof. In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” He sat down one afternoon to sketch his thinking in a letter to a friend. But after 30 handwritten pages, he decided not to send it; instead he’d let the ideas germinate a while. Seven years later, they had not so much germinated as metastasized into a 2.9‑pound, 777-page book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which would earn for Hofstadter—only 35 years old, and a first-time author—the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

More here.

Eric Rauchway on Joshua Freeman’s American Empire in Dissent:

Joshua Freeman’s American Empire is the second volume in Penguin’s History of the United States, after Alan Taylor’s American Colonies. If this publication schedule suggests a lack of chronological discipline, it makes for a pleasing set of bookends: the nation that emerged from imperialism became an empire of its own, as diverse and difficult to characterize as the colonies from which it developed. But the history of the modern United States, unlike the history of the colonial era, is not over. We do not know how or why it ends. We do not even know when it ends.

Until the 1980s it made sense to teach courses titled “The History of the United States Since 1945.” Normally, lecturers and professors taught such twentieth-century surveys as the history of “what happened to the New Deal?” In classrooms around the country, students heard that the limited program of social insurance adopted under Franklin Roosevelt expanded under presidents of both parties until it began to encompass the civil rights of African Americans in the mid-1960s. And then, or perhaps a little later, the program for social democracy became something called the “rights revolution”: not a series of rights at all, but a set of querulous demands that the nation could not afford to recognize. Once women, Hispanics, and gays began asking recognition for their particular rights, middle (also known as “straight, white, male”) America took a step back toward what textbooks call “The Age of Limits.” Suddenly the expansions of the New Deal became expensive and Americans had to learn to live more modestly (or so their white, southern president told them in the 1970s).

In this story, foreign relations mattered inasmuch as the Cold War was also terribly expensive.

More here.

Amia Srinivasan in the NYT's the Stone:

In 1971 John Rawls published “A Theory of Justice,” the most significant articulation and defense of political liberalism of the 20th century. Rawls proposed that the structure of a just society was the one that a group of rational actors would come up with if they were operating behind a “veil of ignorance” — that is, provided they had no prior knowledge what their gender, age, wealth, talents, ethnicity and education would be in the imagined society. Since no one would know in advance where in society they would end up, rational agents would select a society in which everyone was guaranteed basic rights, including equality of opportunity. Since genuine (rather than “on paper”) equality of opportunity requires substantial access to resources — shelter, medical care, education — Rawls’s rational actors would also make their society a redistributive one, ensuring a decent standard of life for everyone.

In 1974, Robert Nozick countered with “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” He argued that a just society was simply one that resulted from an unfettered free market — and that the only legitimate function of the state was to ensure the workings of the free market by enforcing contracts and protecting citizens against violence, theft and fraud. (The seemingly redistributive policy of making people pay for such a “night watchman” state, Nozick argued, was in fact non-redistributive, since such a state would arise naturally through free bargaining.) If one person — Nozick uses the example of Wilt Chamberlain, the great basketball player — is able to produce a good or service that is in high demand, and others freely pay him for that good or service, then he deserves to get rich.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The New York Times:

Mary McCarthy once described how Henry James had denuded the novel of its 19th-century attributes: “battles, riots, tempests, sunrises, the sewers of Paris, crime, hunger, the plague, the scaffold, the clergy, but also minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen — poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples.” James, she wrote, had “etherealized the novel beyond its wildest dreams and perhaps etherized it as well.” The catastrophe of World War I forced James to examine the confident assumptions of, in his words, “the whole fool’s paradise of our past” — the bourgeois faith in progress, above all — that had informed his work. “The subject matter of one’s effort,” he wrote in 1915, “has become itself utterly treacherous and false — its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed.”

Some prominent literary fictionists in Europe and America were plunged into a no less demoralizing sense of irrelevance by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which shattered what Reinhold Niebuhr once called “the paradise of our domestic security . . . suspended in a hell of global insecurity.” Many readers of fiction, too, found reportage and memoir better equipped to allay their bewilderment and sate their reality hunger. Americans may “think this was . . . the end of civilization. In the third world, this sort of thing happened every day,” Dexter Filkins wrote in “The Forever War,” one of the recent works of narrative nonfiction about geopolitical and economic disasters that appeared to suggest a sturdier relation to reality than etherealized literary fiction. But then, as Robert Musil pointed out in “The Man Without Qualities,” “most people” seeking “refuge from chaos” long for “narrative order, the simple order that enables one to say: ‘First this happened and then that happened.’ ”

More here.

I’ve posted this poem before, but think it deserves a periodic reading
because its one of the finest little poems I’ve ever read. —Jim

Ring of Bone

I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a

bell does
.

by Lew Welsh
from Ring of Bone
.
.

Julia Ioffe in Tablet:

Instead of defending his innocence at the final day of his trial on nebulous charges last November, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man and now imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp near a radioactive mine, read to the court a political manifesto that lambasted the stagnation and corruption into which contemporary Russia has sunk. “The obvious conclusion a thinking person can make is chilling in its stark simplicity,” he intoned in the tiny courtroom packed with reporters and the pensioners who’d come to show their support. “The silovikibureaucracy can do anything,” he said, referring to the powerful faction in the Russian government whose roots are in the security forces. “A person who collides with ‘the system’ has no rights whatsoever.” He added: “I am ashamed for my country.” It was a moving speech that laid out, powerfully and clearly, everything that is wrong with Russia today; it made even my sober male Russian friends tear up.

When the judge handed down the guilty verdict just before the New Year, hundreds protested outside the courtroom. German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the ruling, as did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The White House issued astatement condemning “abuse of the legal system for improper ends.”

Five months later, the case still hasn’t receded from Russian headlines. The press secretary of the court that heard Khodorkovsky’s case revealed to an opposition newspaper that the judge in the case didn’t write the verdict and that he was pressured from the outside. (She has since been made to take a lie detector test—she passed—and been forced out of her job.) Fifty-five “official” celebrities have signed a controversial open letter praising the verdict in the case, and 45 others signed one opposing it.

More here.

Julia Lovell in the LA Review of Books:

Journey to the West (c. 1580) is one of the masterworks of classical Chinese writing. It recounts a Tang Dynasty monk’s quest for Buddhist scriptures in the 7th century AD, accompanied by an omni-talented, kung fu-practicing Monkey King called Wukong (one of the most memorable reprobates of world literature); a rice-loving pig-spirit able to fly with its ears; and a depressive man-eating monster from a sand dune. It is a cornerstone text of Eastern fiction: its stature in Asian literary culture may be compared with that of The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote in European letters.

The novel commences with a spirited prologue — seven chapters long — recounting the Monkey King’s many attempts to achieve immortal sagehood, in the course of which he acquires knowledge and weapons that will serve him well through the book as a whole: the ability to perform “cloud somersaults” that carry him 30,000 miles in one leap, a gold-hooped staff (weighing almost 20,000 pounds) that can shrink to the size of a needle. He becomes a master of subterfuge by learning to transform himself into 72 different varieties of creature (though his human disguises lack perfect authenticity due to his inability to lose his tail). He studies demon-freezing spells and how to turn each of the 84,000 hairs on his body into other animals (including clones of himself) or objects. Yet time and again he is brought low by his irrepressible love of mischief. Finally, after taking up a bureaucratic sinecure in the heavenly government of the Jade Emperor, he commits the unforgivable crime of gorging himself on the peaches, wine, and elixirs of immortality.

More here.