That narrative is a juicy one. As with most nineteenth-century operas, it is about forbidden love, but one that is as inevitable as destiny. The duet in Act II between Aïda and Amneris explores how the dynamics of power try to subvert the natural paths of love. Princess Amneris (sung by Marilyn Horne) is determined to find out if her slave Aïda (sung by Leontyne Price) loves the country’s warrior-hero Radamès, and all manner of overwrought cattiness ensues. Amneris lies that Radamès is dead. Aïda despairs and then explodes with relief when she learns the truth. Amneris vows retribution; Aïda begs for mercy. Even if you know nothing of opera, the turns, revelations, and emotions of this scenario call out for some kind of accompaniment: slow, lyric melodies in a modest range for Aïda’s supplication, orchestral explosions for her relief, marching horns and high notes for Amneris’ arrogance, quickened pace and leaping melodies for their agitation. If you didn’t know that Verdi was such a great composer, you would think that the duet had written itself.

more from Jayme Stayer at Hudson Review here.

Tastes will shift again, no doubt, but right now, and on the evidence of the Met’s exhibit, this is what we value in the Cameron inheritance: the shock, and the privilege, of being looked at by persons from another time. They are clusters and nebulae—physically faded now, yet no less dazzling to the imagination than when they were first observed. The young woman photographed by Cameron in 1866, and boosted with a caption from Milton (“The Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty”), should by rights be a ghost, peering from the depths of her damaged gloom; and yet, as Herschel said, in awe, “she is absolutely alive and thrusting out her head from the paper into the air.” That mixture of romance and mug shot is threaded through Cameron’s portraits, and her concocted scenes of myth and legend are, similarly, suffused with sincerity and play alike. To that extent, she upheld the peculiar standards of her era, but in other ways she kept them at bay. Contrary to the promises of her daughter, the camera did not amuse her, in ladylike ease, as a fitting diversion for an amateur; it consumed her, firing a career and a faith. She neither resented nor ever relinquished her duties as a wife and mother, and was, in Woolf’s words, “like a tigress where her children were concerned”; she threatened to colonize other people like a one-woman empire. But the fact remains that, when her vocation arrived, in middle age, all her zest and enterprise, far from being frittered away, was driven to a concentrated point. Julia Margaret Cameron found her focus.

more from Anthony Lane at The New Yorker here.

Liz Bury in The Guardian:

Seamus Heaney, Ireland's first Nobel prize-winning poet since WB Yeats, has died aged 74 in hospital in Dublin after a short illness, his publisher announced this morning.

Heaney won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995 and was celebrated for his many collections of poetry during his lifetime. He won the TS Eliot Prize in 2006 for his collection District and Circle. In 2010 he won the Forward poetry prize for Human Chain, a volume of verse inspired by his experiences after a stroke; his earlier collection The Spirit Level was shortlisted in 1996, as was District and Circle in 2006.

Heaney was born on a small farm near Toomebridge in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, “the eldest child of an ever-growing family”. In his Nobel address in Stockholm he spoke lovingly of his childhood in a three-roomed thatched farmhouse at Mossbawn where, in their early years, he and his siblings passed “a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world”.

After attending boarding school at St Columb's College in Derry city as a scholarship boy – a transition, as he has said, “from the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education” – Heaney went on to study at Queen's University Belfast, where he joined a generation of “Northern poets” that included Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. He published his first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966.

More here.

From The Independent:

The Cern laboratory will generate a unique collision between comedy and science when the particle physics research centre in Switzerland hosts its first night of stand-up. Six scientists will test their comedy routines at a special performance staged at the Geneva home of the Large Hadron Collider on Friday night. The stand-up show will be broadcast live on the web. Sam Gregson, a University of Cambridge PhD student and Cern affiliated particle physicist who organised the Large Hadron Comedy night, said: “The evening is a great opportunity to enthuse people worldwide about the fantastic work going on at arguably the world's most important scientific facility through an exciting, vibrant and upcoming medium. The use of stand-up comedy allows scientists to engage with audiences that may not attend the usual lectures and exhibitions and helps bring cutting-edge science more into the mainstream spotlight.”

Funny (peculiar?): Jokes for scientists

From Nature:

With the right mix of nutrients and a little bit of coaxing, human stem cells derived from skin can assemble spontaneously into brain-like chunks of tissue. Researchers provide the first description and application of these ‘mini-brains’ today in Nature¹. “It’s a seminal study to making a brain in a dish,” says Clive Svendsen, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. “That’s phenomenal.” A fully formed artificial brain might still be years away, he notes, but the pea-sized neural clumps developed in this work could prove useful for researching human neurological diseases. Researchers have previously used human stem cells to grow structures resembling the eye² and even tissue layers similar to the brain's cortex³. But in the latest advance, scientists developed bigger and more complex neural-tissue clumps by first growing the stem cells on a synthetic gel that resembled natural connective tissues found in the brain and elsewhere in the body. Then, they plopped the nascent clumps into a spinning bath to infuse the tissue with nutrients and oxygen.

“The big surprise was that it worked,” says study co-author Juergen Knoblich, a developmental biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. The blobs grew to resemble the brains of fetuses in the ninth week of development. Under a microscope, researchers saw discrete brain regions that seemed to interact with one another. But the overall arrangement of the different proto-brain areas varied randomly across tissue samples — amounting to no recognizable physiological structure.

More here.

Ben Orlin in Math With Bad Drawings:

In each square of their tic-tac-toe board, they’d drawn a smaller board:

As I watched, the basic rules emerged quickly.

Each turn, you mark one of the small squares.

When you get three in a row on a small board, you’ve won that board.

To win the game, you need to win three small boards in a row.

More here.

Nicholas Clairmont in Big Think:

Ours is a cultural and linguistic moment obsessed with irony.

For just that reason, people need to stop using the word 'literally' to mean 'figuratively'. I am not the first to say this. Yet the point failed to sink in. Worse, prompted by the addition of the non-literal sense of 'literal' to several dictionaries, including the Oxford Enflish Dictionary Online, the usage is getting even more accepted.

The situation is also getting worse because the flames are being fanned by several reactionary articles which claim that the usage which means 'figuratively' is perfectly legitimate. They make this claim based on three lines of reasoning: That the usage is very old, that nobody actually gets confused by the two meanings, and that language evolves naturally and we must simply describe it and conform to it, rather than judge it or make prescriptions for it.

I will describe precisely why this usage is a bad thing for the language. But first, because all of the above arguments are faulty, I want to take the time to point out why:

Bad Reason 1: “Aha!” they point out. “The usage is not some horrible new invention of the millennials, it has been around for a very long time, in the dictionary since 1903, and first used in 1759!”

This point tends to be the primary data used to make the non-literal use of 'literally' look legitimate to detractors. Why the hell does this matter to anyone?

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

It remains to be seen whether this latest lurch into war will pay off or not, and whether the United States and its allies will have saved lives or squandered them. But the real question we should be asking is: Why does this keep happening? Why do such different presidents keep doing such similar things? How can an electorate that seemed sick of war in 2008 watch passively while one war escalates in 2009 and another one gets launched in 2011? How can two political parties that are locked in a nasty partisan fight over every nickel in the government budget sit blithely by and watch a president start running up a $100 million per day tab in this latest adventure? What is going on here?

Here are my Top 5 Reasons Why America Keeps Fighting Foolish Wars:

1. Because We Can.
The most obvious reason that the United States keeps doing these things is the fact that it has a remarkably powerful military, especially when facing a minor power like Libya. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when you've got hundreds of planes, smart bombs, and cruise missiles, the whole world looks like a target set. So when some thorny problem arises somewhere in the world, it's hard to resist the temptation to “do something!”

More here.

Soniah Kamal at her website:

Can you tell us a little about your writing/revision process?

I write on an empty stomach. The first draft is hand-written in a slim notebook that I keep with me. I like to take a break before revising, so I have some distance from the work and I can be super-critical. I revise on the computer and I revise multiple times, typically with tea and almonds.

Any advice for a beginning writer?

Read a rich variety of works. Don’t ignore the voices in your head—they’ll never say anything unimportant to an artist. Be kind to yourself when writing and harsh when editing. I believe that “there is no great writing, only great rewriting.”

A favorite essay/memoir/short story on the topic of identity and borders?

Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh” is a classic. NovelsAli and Nino by Kurban Said and People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks explore identity in poignant ways. I find Ibtisam Barakat’sTasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood to be one of the most moving, beautiful memoirs dealing with identity and borders.

Your favorite social media tool?

Facebook

More here.

Berlin’s image as an outpost of America within Germany was established long before the 1920s. Mass spectator sport in the form of six-day cycle races antedated the war; the first such event was held in New York in 1896, and they were introduced into Berlin in 1909. In Georg Kaiser’s Expressionist drama Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight, probably written in 1912), the mass excitement aroused by a cycle race leads the protagonist briefly to hope that such collective feeling can form the basis for a new society. The editors take a gloomier view, seeing in such large-scale sporting events the prototype for the mass spectacles organized under the Third Reich; the Berlin Olympics of 1936 come readily to mind. The narrative that emerges from the extracts assembled by Frisby and Boyd Whyte inevitably terminates in the Third Reich. Hitler’s state did not reject the modernity typified by Berlin, but adapted and redirected it. For example, the factory of the Borsig engineering company in Tegel was used to produce anti-aircraft guns instead of locomotives. Light effects like those at Karstadt were further developed so that Mussolini, paying a state visit in 1937, was greeted as he drove along Unter den Linden by the semblance of hundreds of golden eagles.

more from Ritchie Robertson at the TLS here.

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 1990. A lady named Clara lies dying in a nursing home. As she declines, she has strange dreams and hallucinations. Fragments of her life come back to her in snatches. She sees herself in her old house in Omaha, Nebraska. All the furniture is gone. She sees rain falling through a hatch in the ceiling and freezing into icicles. One day she sees a newspaper unroll on a screen above her, and all the news is of tiny fleeting moments—someone finding a penny, or doing the dishes, or picking up a coaster from a table. “I thought there was something so strangely beautiful about that,” Chris Ware says. “There’s no telling what one will remember. It makes no sense, but there will be these moments that glow in our memories.” Clara was his grandmother, and he has been thinking about this ever since. Ware is America’s most subtle and original graphic novelist, but for the sake of simplicity he often calls himself a cartoonist.

more from Simon Willis at More Intelligent Life here.

What will become of the EU countries outside a more tightly co-ordinated Eurozone? In Au Revoir, Europe: What if Britain Left the EU? David Charter, a Times journalist, argues that the combined dynamics of growing Euroscepticism in the UK and increasing integration in the Eurozone mean that London will either have to negotiate a form of second-tier membership – some have proposed making a virtue of a looser outer ring, which could include Turkey and the Balkan states as well as Britain – or quit the EU altogether. One can see why many in Europe might welcome that possibility. Britain has loyally fulfilled De Gaulle’s prediction that it would serve as a Trojan horse for US interests in Europe. Cameron has lately spared no efforts in defending London’s derivative traders – mostly subsidiaries of US banks – from EU regulation, let alone taxes, while backing savage austerity programmes and urging Germany to step up to the mark. Charter’s history of the UK’s relationship with Europe is a useful reminder that much of what people loathe about the EU has been the result of British intervention. Polls say a majority would favour a single market – Thatcher’s dream – without the mass of EU regulations, but the latter are a precondition for the former. By the 1980s, every advanced industrial economy had built up its own web of health and safety rules, not without reason: specifications for product labelling; safety requirements for electrical appliances; protocols for food standards and abattoir inspection agencies; restrictions on toxic substances, such as lead paint on children’s toys.

more from Susan Watkins at the LRB here.

Shinnosuke Nakayama in Scientific American:

In humans, leaders generally show higher scores in certain personality traits, notably extraversion. Similarly, in animals, bolder and more active individuals tend to be found as leaders. Evolutionary theories suggest that boldness and leadership can coevolve through positive feedback. Individuals who force their preferences on others are more likely to be followed, which in turn encourages these individuals to initiate more often. This feedback results in distinct social roles for leaders and followers within a group, as shown by several experimental studies. It would therefore seem that leaders and followers are born through natural selection, and that you have no chance of becoming a leader if you are born a follower. But our work with stickleback fish suggests that while followers may not have what it takes to lead, leaders can learn to follow. In our paper, we tested the nature of leaders and followers using pairs of fish. Sticklebacks are well known for showing individual differences in boldness, such as when foraging. When they emerge from safe cover to a risky foraging area, the bolder fish are more likely to initiate collective movement, while the shyer animals tend to follow.

We forced the pairs of fish to take opposite roles to see if they could switch with a little training. The shy fish was rewarded with a small amount of food every time it initiated collective movement, regardless of whether it was followed by the bolder partner or not. The bolder fish was also rewarded every time it followed the shyer member, but not when it emerged from safe cover by itself. In this way, we trained pairs to swap their natural roles and compared their behavior to the pairs that assume their natural roles. Our prediction was that bold individuals would perform poorly when forced to become followers, because they are less responsive to the behavior of others in their natural role, while shy individuals would adopt the role of leader more easily. However, the results were completely opposite: for both bold and shy individuals, the tendency to lead is much less flexible than the tendency to follow. The bold fish readily adapted to following but the shy fish could not be trained to lead, even when it learnt to stop following the other fish.

More here.

White Spine

Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,
how can He love me and hate what I am?
The dome of St. Peter's shone yellowish
gold, like butter and eggs. My God, I prayed
anyhow, as if made in the image
and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome
priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back,
not desiring to go it alone.
The college of cardinals wore punitive red.
The white spine waved to me from his white throne.
Being in a place not my own, much less
myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib.
Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette.
Reason, not faith, would change him.

by Henri Cole
from The Visible Man
Knopf, 1998

Over at the NYRB, recording of the five panels of the following event:

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review held a free conference to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams. Cosponsored by The New York Review of Books Foundation, Fritt Ord, All Souls College, The Europaeum, Wadham College, and Wolfson College, the conference included remarks by Avishai Margalit, Alan Ryan, Mary Warnock, John Gray, Helena Kennedy, Mark Lilla, Naomi Eilan, Edward Skidelsky, Jerome Bruner, Samuel Scheffler, Jeremy Waldron, Timothy Garton Ash, and Marc Stears. The sessions were chaired by Robert Silvers, John Vickers, Hermione Lee, and Ken Macdonald.

Teju Cole over at the New Yorker's blog Page Turner:

In 1913, a compilation of Gustave Flaubert’s satirical definitions was posthumously published as “Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues” (“The Dictionary of Received Ideas”). Flaubert hated cliché, a hatred that expressed itself not only in the pristine prose of “Madame Bovary” but also in his letters and notes on the thoughtless platitudes of the day. “The Dictionary of Received Ideas” is a complaint against automatic thinking. What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.

Flaubert’s “Dictionary” inspired me to try something similar, over the course of a few hours, on Twitter. I think, also, there was the influence of Ambrose Bierce and his cynical “Devil’s Dictionary,” Samuel Johnson’s mostly serious but occasionally coruscating “Dictionary of the English Language,” and Gelett Burgess’s now-forgotten send-up of platitudes, “Are You a Bromide?” What the entries in these books have in common, in addition to compression and wit, is an intolerance of stupidity. As I wrote my modern cognates, I was struck at how close some of them came to the uninterrogated platitudes in my own head. Stupidity stalks us all.