George Packer at the New York Times:

The best letters — and there are many — come from the typewriter of the public Schlesinger, the fighting liberal, especially when he’s jousting with a provocative antagonist like William F. Buckley (“You remind me of my other favorite correspondent, Noam Chomsky”) or, even better, arguing a matter of principle with a friend at the breaking point. The Vietnam War, which shattered the New Deal coalition, produced unsparing letters between Schlesinger, who became a vehement opponent of the war, and old friends like Alsop and Henry Kissinger, as well as a remarkable exchange with Schlesinger’s longtime liberal ally, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, during the 1968 campaign. “Don’t overrate yourself, Arthur,” Humphrey wrote in July, shortly before the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago. “No one’s trying to blackmail you or anyone else into coming over to support my candidacy. On the basis of your earlier and more mature liberal convictions, you ought to be supporting me, but undoubtedly something has happened in your life that has made you angry and bitter.”

more here.

Simon Schama at the Financial Times:

There is a passage in Theodor Herzl’s 1902 romance of a reborn Jewish commonwealth, Altneuland, in which he wheels on a Haifa Arab, Rashid Bey, who is asked whether “the older inhabitants of Palestine are not ruined by Jewish immigration?” The reply, painfully poignant now, testifies to the wishful thinking of the founders of Zionism. Bey and his family have not only stayed; they have prospered alongside the Jews, equal citizens in the New Society, as Herzl calls it.

Orhan Pamuk in The New York Times:

Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, to a Greek family of wealthy drapers and cloth merchants. (The word kavaf, now forgotten even by Turks themselves, is Ottoman Turkish for a maker of cheap shoes.) The Cavafys were originally from Istanbul’s Fener neighborhood, where the city’s rich and politically influential Greek families lived. Later, they moved to Samatya, a fishermen’s neighborhood, and then immigrated to Alexandria, where they lived as members of the Orthodox Christian minority among the Muslim majority. At first, their business activities in Alexandria proved successful, and they lived in a large mansion staffed with English nannies, cooks and servants. In the 1870s, after the death of Cavafy’s father, they moved to England, but then returned to Alexandria following the collapse of the family business. After the Arab nationalist uprisings of 1882, they left Alexandria again, this time for Istanbul, and it was in this city, where he was to spend the next three years, that Cavafy wrote his first significant poems and felt the first stirrings of homoerotic desire. In 1885 the family, now impoverished, returned to Alexandria once more, to the very city he wanted to leave behind.

The return: It is the saddest part. It is the source of the sorrow that permeates his unforgettable poem “The City,” which I have read again and again in Turkish and in English translation. There is no other city to go to: The city that makes us is the one within us. Reading Cavafy’s “The City” has changed the way I look at my own Istanbul. For those who lead a provincial life, life and happiness are always to be found elsewhere, in another city, in another country. But for us provincials, this other place is perpetually out of reach. Cavafy’s wisdom is in the dignity and introspective sensibility with which he approaches this sad truth. And finally, with the same linguistic restraint and philosophical simplicity, he concludes by revealing that we have wasted our lives in that city. We come to realize that we have all been wasting our lives, and that the problem lies not in being provincial, but in the very nature of life itself. Great poets can tell their own stories without once saying “I,” and in doing so, lend their voice to all of humanity.

More here.

“The fourth installment in a 10-year documentary film-in-the-making about the 21st century race to understand the human brain, focusing on Henry Markram and the Human Brain Project, which seeks to build a full simulation of a human brain on supercomputers over the course of the next decade.”

Lori Wallach in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Imagine what would happen if foreign companies could sue governments directly for cash compensation over earnings lost because of strict labour or environmental legislation. This may sound far-fetched, but it was a provision of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a projected treaty negotiated in secret between 1995 and 1997 by the then 29 member states of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). News about it got out just in time, causing an unprecedented wave of protests and derailing negotiations.

Now the agenda is back. Since July the European Union and the United States have been negotiating the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) or Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), a modified version of the MAI under which existing legislation on both sides of the Atlantic will have to conform to the free trade norms established by and for large US and EU corporations, with failure to do so punishable by trade sanctions or the payment of millions of dollars in compensation to corporations.

Negotiations are expected to last another two years. The TTIP/TAFTA incorporates the most damaging elements of past agreements and expands on them. If it came into force, privileges enjoyed by foreign companies would become law and governments would have their hands tied for good. The agreement would be binding and permanent: even if public opinion or governments were to change, it could only be altered by consensus of all signatory nations. In Europe it would mirror the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) due to be adopted by 12 Pacific Rim countries, which has been fiercely promoted by US business interests. Together, the TTIP/TAFTA and the TPP would form an economic empire capable of dictating conditions outside its own frontiers: any country seeking trade relations with the US or EU would be required to adopt the rules prevailing within the agreements as they stood.

The TTIP/TAFTA negotiations are taking place behind closed doors. The US delegations have more than 600 corporate trade advisers, who have unlimited access to the preparatory documents and to representatives of the US administration. Draft texts will not be released, and instructions have been given to keep the public and press in the dark until a final deal is signed. By then, it will be too late to change.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Eurozine:

There has recently been built in Merton in south London a “mega mosque” that has inevitably become the focus of much controversy. In his book The British Dream, David Goodhart takes the mosque as symbolic of the unacceptable change that immigration has wrought upon the nation. The mosque, he writes, “replaced an Express Dairies bottling plant which provided a few hundred jobs for local people and lots of milk bottles – an icon of an earlier, more homogenized age.”

There was, in fact, a seven-year gap between the closing of the dairy in 1992 and building work beginning on the mosque. In those seven years the abandoned dairy was, according to local accounts, turned into a crack den. So, one story we could tell is that of economic forces closing down an unprofitable dairy, with the loss of several hundred jobs, and of local Muslims subsequently rescuing the abandoned, crime-infested site, creating new jobs and in the process transforming Merton for the better. Critics of immigration want, however, to tell a different story. The mosque, in their eyes, is symbolic not of the rescue of a site from abandonment and crime, but of the original closure of the dairy and of the transformation of Merton's old way of life.

The story of the Merton mosque, and the retelling of that story as a narrative of cultural loss, gets to the heart of the contemporary debate about immigration. Immigration is clearly one of the most fiercely debated and toxic issues of today. The debate is, however, less about the facts than about the existential impact. Immigration has become symbolic of the disruption of communities, the undermining of identities, the fraying of the sense of belongingness, the promotion of unacceptable change. For Goodhart, “large-scale immigration” has created “an England that is increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds”. He quotes one man from Merton: “We've lost this place to other cultures. It's not English any more.”

The roots of The British Dream lie in Goodhart's 2004 essay in Prospectmagazine, of which he was then editor, called “Too Diverse?”. Liberals, he suggested, had to face up to a “progressive dilemma”. Too much immigration undermined social solidarity, particularly in a welfare state. We had to choose between the two. The essay caused considerable controversy, but the idea that too much immigration undermines social solidarity has over the past decade become almost common sense.

More here.

Peter Brown reviews Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity in the NYRB:

One of the most lasting delights and challenges of the study of the ancient world, and of the Roman Empire in particular, is the tension between familiarity and strangeness that characterizes our many approaches to it. It is like a great building, visible from far away, at the end of a straight road that cuts across what seems to be a level plain. Only when we draw near are we brought up sharp, on the edge of a great canyon, invisible from the road, that cuts its way between us and the monument we seek. We realize that we are looking at this world from across a sheer, silent drop of two thousand years.

Antiquity is always stranger than we think. Nowhere does it prove to be more strange than where we once assumed that it was most familiar to us. We always knew that the Romans had a lot of sex. Indeed, in the opinion of our elders, they probably had a lot more than was quite good for them. We also always knew that the early Christians had an acute sense of sin. We tend to think that they had a lot more sense of sin than they should have had. Otherwise they were very like ourselves. Until recently, studies of sex in Rome and of Christianity in the Roman world were wrapped in a cocoon of false familiarity.

Only in the last generation have we realized the sheer, tingling drop of the canyon that lies between us and a world that we had previously tended to take for granted as directly available to our own categories of understanding. “Revealing Antiquity,” the Harvard University Press series edited by Glen Bowersock, has played its part in instilling in us all a healthy sense of dizziness as we peer over the edge into a fascinating but deeply strange world. Kyle Harper’s book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity is a scintillating contribution to this series. Not only does it measure the exact nature of the tension between the familiar and the deeply unfamiliar that lies behind our image of the sexual morality of Greeks and Romans of the Roman Empire of the classical period. It also goes on to evoke the sheer, unexpected strangeness of the very different sexual code elaborated in early Christian circles, and its sudden, largely unforeseen undermining of a very ancient social equilibrium in the two centuries that followed the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 312.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Dickens-lover John Hennessy (also known as Stanford University’s president) told us some time ago that he reread A Christmas Carol at this time of year. Perhaps we’ll join him – certainly it’s short enough. My little facsimile of the first edition is a double-spaced 166 pages long (at right).

It was the first book Charles Dickens took to the road for his famous readings, which made a killing in the U.S. His second American tour raked in the equivalent of $2.3 million in today’s dollars. People camped out in the snow the night before to hear it – it was the 19th-century version of Black Friday sales at Walmart.

During that 1867 tour, the 32-year-old Mark Twain was in the audience, and was distinctly unimpressed. Here’s how he described the “old” (55 years old) writer’s entrance:

Promptly at 8 P.M., unannounced, and without waiting for any stamping or clapping of hands to call him out, a tall, “spry,” (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds, with a bright red flower in his button-hole, gray beard and moustache, bald head, and with side hair brushed fiercely and tempestuously forward, as if its owner were sweeping down before a gale of wind, the very Dickens came!

more here.

Mark Shiffman at Front Porch Republic:

Born in 1909 to secular Jewish Parisians, at age 10 Simone Weil was memorizing Racine and marching in labor union protests. She attended the École Normale and then briefly taught philosophy to lycée girls, serving on weekends as a volunteer educator for members of the working class. Observing first-hand the rise of totalitarianism in Germany, she recognized early its similarity to Stalin’s Russia (leading to her break with the ideologically-blinded Communist Party). She worked in factories and on farms to understand firsthand the conditions of contemporary laborers and the spiritual dimension of work. In 1942, after escorting her parents to New York, she obtained a position with the Gaullists in London. There, before her death in 1943, she wrote her most famous book, The Need for Roots (L’Enracinement) as a contribution to the discussion of principles that ought to guide and animate the Fourth Republic. She wrote many brilliant short works, publishing very little and entrusting the manuscripts to friends.

Weil might be described as an Augustinian Platonist, enriched by Nietzsche, Marx, tragic and Vedic literature and John of the Cross, and sometimes narrowed by Descartes, Pascal, Kant and her own intense antipathies (e.g. for Aristotle). Like Augustine, her lifelong quest is for liberation from self-enclosure.

more here.

Brandon Harris at n+1:

“This is Bed-Stuy, bitch.” That’s not what everyone else was saying.

It’s difficult to say exactly how long I’ve lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s not for lack of trying. For some time I believed I first moved to the neighborhood in summer 2008, but by any honest accounting of the neighborhood’s actual geography, I first moved there in summer 2004, into a stuffy two-bedroom apartment on Throop Avenue, just south of the Flushing Avenue border with “East” Williamsburg, across the street from the notoriously shoddy Woodhull Medical Center. I only lived there for four months before a year-and-a-half-long tour of quasi-illegal Manhattan dwellings (Battery Park City! Inwood!), but then I came back. I now believe I have resided in what is geographically Bedford-Stuyvesant, the most historically African American of all Brooklyn neighborhoods, and now the fastest-gentrifying, for fifty-seven months over the past nine years.

When I moved into the apartment on Taaffe in summer 2006, I thought, and my roommate thought, that we were moving to Clinton Hill. This had been one of my roommate’s stipulations when we started our search. My wealthy childhood friend, the type who was awkward, bookish, and intense in middle school, the type who somewhat iconoclastically befriended the Star Trek–obsessed, nerdy, overweight child of black middle-class Cincinnati strivers, simply rebuffed the idea of living in Bed-Stuy.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

Mitochondria are often referred to as the cell’s “powerhouse,” generating chemical energy to carry out essential biological functions. These self-contained organelles, which live inside our cells and house their own small genomes, have long been identified as key biological players in aging. But as they become increasingly dysfunctional over time, many age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes gradually set in.

…As Gomes and her colleagues investigated potential causes for this, they discovered an intricate cascade of events that begins with a chemical called NAD and concludes with a key molecule that shuttles information and coordinates activities between the cell’s nuclear genome and the mitochondrial genome. Cells stay healthy as long as coordination between the genomes remains fluid. SIRT1’s role is intermediary, akin to a security guard; it assures that a meddlesome molecule called HIF-1 does not interfere with communication. For reasons still unclear, as we age, levels of the initial chemical NAD decline. Without sufficient NAD, SIRT1 loses its ability to keep tabs on HIF-1. Levels of HIF-1 escalate and begin wreaking havoc on the otherwise smooth cross-genome communication. Over time, the research team found, this loss of communication reduces the cell’s ability to make energy, and signs of aging and disease become apparent. “This particular component of the aging process had never before been described,” said Gomes. While the breakdown of this process causes a rapid decline in mitochondrial function, other signs of aging take longer to occur. Gomes found that by administering an endogenous compound that cells transform into NAD, she could repair the broken network and rapidly restore communication and mitochondrial function. If the compound was given early enough — prior to excessive mutation accumulation — within days, some aspects of the aging process could be reversed.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

HIV infection causes a mass suicide of immune cells — a process that can be halted by an experimental drug that blocks cellular self-destruction, studies in cell cultures suggest. Researchers are now proposing a clinical trial of the drug in people with HIV. Current HIV therapies act by targeting key proteins made by the virus. But findings from cell cultures, published today in Science¹ and Nature², suggest that targeting proteins in host cells might be an alternative approach to preserving the immune system in the face of an HIV infection. The papers also address a decades-old mystery: why infection-fighting immune cells die off in people with HIV. A 2010 study³ showed that HIV does not directly kill most of these cells, called CD4 cells. Instead, the cells often self-destruct. “It’s much more a suicide than it is a murder,” says Warner Greene, a molecular virologist at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco, California, and a co-author of both the latest works.

In the latest studies, Greene’s team investigated these ‘abortive’ infections. They identified a sensor that detects viral DNA in the cell and activates the suicide response¹. And they found that most of the cellular suicide occurs via a process called pyroptosis, in which the dying cells unleash a ferocious inflammatory response². A key protein involved in pyroptosis is caspase 1, and an experimental caspase-1 inhibitor made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had already been tested in humans as a potential treatment for epilepsy. The drug, VX-765, failed to help epileptics, but six-week-long studies suggested that it was safe. Greene and his colleagues tested VX-765 in HIV-infected cells cultured from human tonsils and spleens, and found that it blocked pyroptosis, prevented CD4 cell death, and suppressed inflammation. Greene hopes that the approach could one day provide an alternative or embellishment to the antiretroviral drugs currently used by 9.7 million people worldwide to manage HIV infection.

More here.

God or No God

.
Deer not clacking through snow crust
after apples, crows thankfully asleep,
coyotes whispering to young
not yet ready to test their pipes—
midnight is broken by my sump-pump
disgorging the day’s melt-seep. Yes.
What can I do without?

The first time I rode the ambulance
there was a hole in someone’s head.
Because all matter crumbles, because
chunk and mouth, bone of skull,
because this guy knew where to point.
That my hands did all the right things;
that he died as he meant to; that he made me
wildly alive—all true.

Ten years on, cumin seeds scorching in the pan
are my children, my slipknot, my go-to.
Because I believe myself fragrant
I am spitting me back out.
I renounce dog-eared and dog tired and even
dogged—no, dogged is good.
Because God or no god are both monstrous.
Because wrists don’t age. Because kisses
or memories of kisses. Because
hulland grave equally ravish.

The first time I gave myself an eyelash of a chance
to change, it will be tomorrow, and luckily
I’m watching. Because let the tenses be scrambled.
The world happens momentarily.

by Elle Dore Watson

Joseph Luzzi in the New York Times:

“In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”

So begins one of the most celebrated and difficult poems ever written, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a more than 14,000-line epic on the soul’s journey through the afterlife. The tension between the pronouns says it all: Although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day, the lines suggest.

That day came six years ago for me, when my pregnant wife, Katherine, died suddenly in a car accident. Forty-five minutes before her death, she delivered our daughter, Isabel, a miracle of health rescued by emergency cesarean. I had left the house that morning at 8:30 to teach a class; by noon, I was a father and a widower.

A few days later, I found myself standing in a cemetery outside Detroit in the cold rain, watching as my wife’s body was returned to the earth close to where she was born. The words for the emotions I had known till then — pain, sadness, suffering — no longer made sense, as a feeling of cosmic, paralyzing sorrow washed over me. My personal loss felt almost beside the point: A young woman who had been bursting with life was now no more.

More here.

From My Underwood Typewriter:

1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.

And Now, The Honorable Mentions:

2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.

4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

More here. [Thanks to Frans de Waal.]

James Campbell at The Times Literary Supplement:

By the end of his life, in a paradox that itself seems to have come from the pages of fiction, Salinger, on the run from celebrity, not there but always there, was as prominent as any of his intermittently missing characters. What made him a fascinating presence in the minds of his predators, of which Shields and Salerno are perfect examples, was precisely his desire for self-effacement, his wish to go “underground” in Cornish, New Hampshire, just as Holden needed to do the same thing in New York City in order to straighten himself out after boarding school. For long periods, Salinger appeared to have satisfied his own wishes, but then there would be a snooper, a doorstepper, a photographer waiting to snap him as he exited the post office, a reporter on assignment for Time or Life, a woman pretending to be stranded at night after her car had broken down, a former lover eager to confess (Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World, 1998), even a daughter, Margaret, who felt that Daddy had been a disappointment (Dream Catcher, 2001) and that everyone ought to know.

All turn up, in one shape or another, in Salinger, “The official book of the acclaimed documentary film” that was released in the US earlier this year to various reactions, the least of which, it is fair to say, was acclaim. One contributor describes the pursuit of the shy author in terms that, under healthy scrutiny, would be regarded as perverse: “There was a bounty on Salinger’s head. Everyone wanted a photograph of this guy, and no one could get it”.

more here.

James Wood at The London Review of Books:

For someone growing up with the music of Benjamin Britten, it was sometimes hard to recall that his last name was not ‘Britain’. The race that Nietzsche had deemed heavy-hoofed and unmusical, whose last truly great composer had been Purcell, a nation that had been doing nothing very much, musically, but warbling in cathedrals for a couple of centuries, had somehow managed to produce a 20th-century composer of international stature, whose last name was that of the nation itself. We’d done it! Here was Benjamin Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestrawas as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk songs sounded a bit old and a bit new, or a bit English and a bit Continental. Palatable modernity: a good postwar flag under which to assemble. No wonder the school system flew it so often, in those countless ‘musical appreciation’ classes.

by Nico Muhly in The Talkhouse:

At first I was anxious about the description of it as a “visual album,” because these days, which albums aren’t? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Lady Gaga video, but I know that her appeal — even to me, not ever having beheld her on purpose — is partially to do with her Visual Presentation. Beyoncé’s songs, on this album, connect to one another not just musically, but via a seemingly personal, almost Forrest Gump-like time-traveling woman’s journey through various eras and — I shudder to say the word — styles. It’s unbelievably ambitious and through-composed; where the music can feel unrelated from one song to the next, the video is especially and carefully elided, and where the video is stylistically at variance from one song to the next, the music itself creates an emulsion between all the various incarnations of Beyoncé, our tour-guide through heaven and hell. Her voice feels, here, stretched in all the best ways, and she is experimenting with various modes of vocal production, vibrato, enunciation, and textual stylization. She is relishing the individual words of her lyrics, and savoring the shapes of the phrases the songs demand of her. When she freaks, as is her wont, a bridge or a second chorus, it is an insane and welcome delight.

Can we start with the statement that I basically loved this album? And then I will go song by song and talk about what, for me, felt like a reinforcement of this love, and where, in places, my love was challenged? I am going to talk, interchangeably, about the music and the videos, as that is how this thing was presented to me, as well as to the poor taxed wi-fi of the rural hotel and its staff. So if you’ve only heard the music, you should probably watch the videos, and if you’ve only watched the videos, you’re probably fine?

More here.

Luc Sante at the New York Review of Books:

Then again, it could be said that historical fiction, like science fiction, is really always about the present. Llewyn Davis is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961. He has none of the communitarian goodwill, the erudite passion, or the optimistic idealism that marked the period. He is a confused, irascible striver who isn’t sure what he is striving for, apparently seeking a career when folk music was about the last place you’d look for one. It is suggested that he has been flopping on friends’ floors for months, when, at the time, people generally only did that when they first hit town, since it wasn’t hard to scratch up the twenty or thirty bucks a month it took to rent a tenement flat fifty years ago.

But if you excise the period details, he makes sense. Whereas in a better time he would spend five or ten years woodshedding and developing a soul, he has no choice but to enter some kind of race right away or die on the vine. He is consistently crass because he feels threatened by people and ideas he can’t dominate—and he can’t dominate very much because he feels threatened. (How else to explain his heckling an Appalachian singer, complete with autoharp and authentically awkward?) Somehow he has made a connection to something that is genuine and profound—the haunting music—but circumstances force him to treat it as a card to play rather than as a path to explore.

more here.