Jeremy Lewis at Literary Review:

Between the Woods and the Water, the second volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's dazzling account of his 'Great Trudge' from Rotterdam to Istanbul, was published in 1986. His frustrated admirers have been wondering ever since why he never published the concluding part, taking him on from the Iron Gates to the city he preferred to think of as Constantinople. Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set out on his epic walk in 1933, and it was rumoured that he was so upset by the ruined churches and concrete tower blocks he encountered on postwar trips to communist Bulgaria and Romania that they somehow obliterated happier memories; that his loyal and ever-patient publisher, Jock Murray, published Three Letters from the Andes – far and away his least impressive book – in the vain hope that this might somehow break the blockage; that old age was taking its toll (he was over seventy when Between the Woods and the Water was published) and that he had been somehow unnerved by the rhapsodic reception given to the first two volumes and was worried that the third might not live up to expectations. Murray died in 1993 and his wife, Joan, ten years later: they had been his two great props and catalysts, and without them he was bereft.

And yet, by a strange irony, he had written a good deal of the third volume long before publication of the first book, A Time of Gifts, in 1977.

more here.

James Davidson reviews Nijinsky by Lucy Moore at The London Review of Books:

In 1910, the god of the dance returned to Paris. This time he starred in Schéhérazade. The fun-loving Queen Zobéide, played by the extraordinary-looking Ida Rubinstein, cajoles the chief eunuch to open the doors of the harem ‘to admit the hordes of black slaves’. Nijinsky, the queen’s favourite slave, is brought on in a golden cage wearing gold harem pants and covered in bracelets and jewels: ‘The whiteness of his gleaming teeth was accentuated by his strange blueish-grey make-up.’ The eunuch is terrorised into unlocking the cage: ‘His bare torso twisted in the fervour and excitement of his new-found freedom, like a cobra about to strike.’ He leaps on Zobéide like a wild panther: the sight of ‘his half-snake, half-panther movements, winding himself around the dancing Zobéide without ever touching her was breathtaking’, Nijinska wrote. But the orgy is discovered and ends in a massacre: ‘The dark slave falls, and in his last spasm his legs shoot upwards; he stands on his head and rotates his lifeless body – Nijinsky made a full pirouette standing on his head – before dropping to the ground with a heavy thud.’ Schéhérazade was the sensation of the 1910 season; soon ‘peacock tail’ colours and chiffons influenced by the Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst were appearing in all the collections of the maisons de couture and fashionable ladies started wearing turbans.

more here.

Matt Domino at The Paris Review:

Joe Walsh should be taken more seriously because between 1972 and 1979, Joe Walsh released five solo albums, three of which are bona fide classics: Barnstorm, The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get, and But Seriously, Folks. He produced much of this output while also being a part of the biggest and most dysfunctional rock group in the world not named Fleetwood Mac—the Eagles. He was largely responsible for bulking up that group’s sound and allowing them to thrive and fill stadiums across the globe. It is unfortunate, then, that for many, Joe Walsh has been reduced to merely a drawling “rock ’n‘ roll survivor.” Because he is so much more than that hasty definition.

In late August and early September, I listen to Joe Walsh’s first solo album, Barnstorm. I’ve been doing this since 2007, when I first discovered the record while working in a summer teaching program at a New England prep school. Barnstorm is my favorite Joe Walsh solo album. It captures, perhaps better than any record in the rock ’n‘ roll canon, the slow, sad melancholy of late summer mixed with the excitement that the fresh, crisp start of autumn seems to promise.

more here.

Christof Koch in Scientific American:

Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of the unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbors thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious deliberation. Because this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate. Today the domain of the unconscious—described more generally in the realm of cognitive neuroscience as any processing that does not give rise to conscious awareness—is routinely studied in hundreds of laboratories using objective psychophysical techniques amenable to statistical analysis. Let me tell you about two experiments that reveal some of the capabilities of the unconscious mind. Both depend on “masking,” as it is called in the jargon, or hiding things from view. Subjects look but don’t see.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Lung cancer is not the same as breast cancer, which is not the same as pancreatic cancer — but at the molecular level they can have much in common, two studies published today have found. A ‘pan-cancer’ analysis of more than 3,000 genomes across 12 different kinds of tumours has looked for the commonalities that cross tissue boundaries. The earliest results, published in Nature Genetics^{1, 2}, reveal more than 100 regions of the genome that may contain previously undiscovered drug targets, and that could provide the foundation for a new classification of tumours that better matches individual patients to the treatment most likely to drive their cancer into remission.

Lumping together cancers of different organs can provide insight into common pathways that give rise to the disease. It also allows researchers to boost the number of samples in their data set. More samples often means greater statistical power to find genomic changes associated with cancer. “It’s the next wave of cancer genome analysis,” says Tom Hudson, director of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, who was not involved with the work. “This gives us a lot more power to detect commonalities that could have been missed analysing a single tumour type at a time.” The approach also adds fuel to the growing movement to stratify tumours on the basis not only of their organ of origin, but also of molecular characteristics — an approach that is gaining importance as pharmaceutical companies roll out a new generation of cancer therapies targeted to treat tumours that have specific genetic mutations.

More here.

.
I’m walking and wondering
why I leave no footprints.
I went this way yesterday.
I’ve gone this way all my life.

I won’t look back.
I’m afraid I won’t find my shadow.

‘Are you alive?’
a drunken gentleman suddenly asks me.

‘Yes, yes,’ I answer quickly.
‘Yes, yes,’ I answer
as fast as I can.
.

by Janis Elsbergs
from Rita kafija
publisher: Apgads Daugava
translation: Peteris Cedrinš

Richard Marshall interviews Susanna Siegel in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You talk about cases where prior mental states interfere with perception. Can you talk about this idea and why this might lead to what you call an epistemic downgrade?

SS: Suppose you are afraid that I am angry at you, and your fear makes me look angry to you when you see me. Do you get any reason from your experience to believe that I’m angry at you? There’s something fishy and even perverse about the idea that your fears can get confirmed by fear-induced experience. I focus on the general notion of rationality. I am interested in the epistemic status of the type of “top-down” influences on perception from fears and desires. If you could confirm your fears through such fear-influenced experiences, rational confirmation of fears would be too cheap.

Here’s another example. In the early days of microscopes, the true theory of mammalian reproduction was still unknown. Some early users of microscopes were preformationists: they believed that mammals including people grew like plants, from seeds that were placed in a nutritive environment. Suppose their preformationism made them experience an embryo in a spermcell when they looked under the microscope. (It is probably apocryphal, but this was reported to have happened and is discussed in histories of embryology, such as Pinto- Correira’s excellent book The Ovary of Eve, Chicago, 1998). If favoring preformationism influenced your perceptual experience, that experience could not turn around and provide support for preformationism.

More here.

Roy F Baumeister in Aeon:

The difference between meaningfulness and happiness was the focus of an investigation I worked on with my fellow social psychologists Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, published in theJournal of Positive Psychology this August. We carried out a survey of nearly 400 US citizens, ranging in age from 18 to 78. The survey posed questions about the extent to which people thought their lives were happy and the extent to which they thought they were meaningful. We did not supply a definition of happiness or meaning, so our subjects responded using their own understanding of those words. By asking a large number of other questions, we were able to see which factors went with happiness and which went with meaningfulness.

As you might expect, the two states turned out to overlap substantially. Almost half of the variation in meaningfulness was explained by happiness, and vice versa. Nevertheless, using statistical controls we were able to tease two apart, isolating the ‘pure’ effects of each one that were not based on the other. We narrowed our search to look for factors that had opposite effects on happiness and meaning, or at least, factors that had a positive correlation with one and not even a hint of a positive correlation with the other (negative or zero correlations were fine). Using this method, we found five sets of major differences between happiness and meaningfulness, five areas where different versions of the good life parted company.

The first had to do with getting what you want and need. Not surprisingly, satisfaction of desires was a reliable source of happiness. But it had nothing — maybe even less than nothing ­— to add to a sense of meaning. People are happier to the extent that they find their lives easy rather than difficult. Happy people say they have enough money to buy the things they want and the things they need. Good health is a factor that contributes to happiness but not to meaningfulness. Healthy people are happier than sick people, but the lives of sick people do not lack meaning. The more often people feel good — a feeling that can arise from getting what one wants or needs — the happier they are. The less often they feel bad, the happier they are. But the frequency of good and bad feelings turns out to be irrelevant to meaning, which can flourish even in very forbidding conditions.

The second set of differences involved time frame. Meaning and happiness are apparently experienced quite differently in time. Happiness is about the present; meaning is about the future, or, more precisely, about linking past, present and future. The more time people spent thinking about the future or the past, the more meaningful, and less happy, their lives were.

More here.

Jonathan Raban in the New York Review of Books:

William Gaddis was nineteen in 1942, when he wrote to his mother, Edith Gaddis, saying that the “section man” in his Harvard English class had recommended a book to him:

I got it and turns out to be history of Communism and Socialism—Marxism—enough to make me actively ill—so don’t care about mark in this test but am going to tell him what I think of his lousy piggish socialism &c—sometimes I think he’s turned that way—he recommends many such books—so I’m going to tell him how stinking I think it is and not worry about an E.

One might think this simply callow, a snobbish reflex of class and family, but it does expose the bedrock on which Gaddis later built his idiosyncratic conservatism, just as it points to his unusually candid relationship with his mother.

His parents had separated when he was three and he didn’t see his father again for twenty years. William Gaddis Sr. worked on Wall Street and was mainly prized by his son for bequeathing him his name (“a family as fine and as noble as I feel the name of Gaddis to represent”). Edith Gaddis eventually became the chief purchasing agent of the New York Steam Corporation, a subsidiary of Consolidated Edison. She brought up her only child in her Manhattan apartment and a house in Massapequa on Long Island, and when he was away from home, at boarding school and Harvard, or traveling in the southwestern states and Central America, then in Europe, Gaddis wrote her frequent, often copious letters.

More here.

“Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said. The future belongs to the machine, the robots.” —Henry Miller

Joel Whitney in the Boston Review:

In June 2011, Guernica, an online magazine that I helped to found, received an ominous letter from Google.

“During a recent review of your account, we found that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program policies,” the letter read. Google cited an essay Guernica published in February of that year, Clancy Martin’s “Early Sexual Experiences.” We were given just three working days to change our site or else—the threat was clear—we could lose the income we were making from Google’s AdSense program, which served advertisements on our pages.

We stood by our violation, and our author. In the process we learned the workings of GoogleSpeak, how it can be used to stand arbitrarily with government despots, and how it serves as the Web’s unofficial censor.

Born in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, Guernica is an engaged literary magazine. Politics and art, we believe, are never separate but part of the same cultural cloth. This became particularly clear as the U.S. media collectively failed to stand up to the Bush administration over its shifting rationale for the Iraq war. From the outset we covered feminism and sexual politics in what we have always taken to be a thoughtful, if frequently provocative, way.

More here.

Nicholas Popper at The Times Literary Supplement:

Alchemy’s significance has altered radically in the three centuries since this heyday, Principe argues, after professionalizing Enlightenment scholars rejected the suitability of Decknamen, pseudonyms and dreams of transmutation to a properly rigorous, public science. Denied knowledge of their physical references, Victorian occultists and Jungian psychologists mythologized the arcana of alchemical texts as autonomous allegories, as symbols for occult forces or a psychological manifestation of the collective unconscious. Meanwhile, historians of science dismissed its practitioners as gullible fools. Many recognized that the quest for the Stone involved work at the forge, but alchemists were still frequently portrayed as credulous dupes who begged God’s favour as they wishfully tossed arbitrary heaps of plants and metals into their fires.

For Principe, such flawed interpretations stem from projecting post-Enlightenment meanings of alchemy onto the earlier period and assuming that earlier alchemists’ spiritual declarations wholly governed their coded recipes. Scholars now equipped with revelatory chemical expertise, he insists, will recognize that these reflected a context in which all knowledge was described as a divine gift – a claim strengthened by his lucid deciphering of esoteric images and fascinating replications of experiments purporting to transmute silver into gold, revivify dead bodies, and grow trees of gold.

more here.

Arnon Grunberg at The Believer:

In One Step Ahead, Dimitris Athyridis’s documentary on the 2010 municipal elections in Thessaloniki, the then–mayoral candidate, Yiannis Boutaris, talks frankly about his alcohol dependency, his marital problems, and his conflict with Anthimos, the archbishop of the city, whom he accuses of hate-mongering because of Anthimos’s outspokenly nationalistic speeches. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Boutaris after watching the documentary, even though it’s clear that the mayor, after the electoral close call, has not been able to solve all the problems before him. Garbage continues to pile up on street corners.

The mayor is not a career politician; he’s a vintner. He got his first diploma in chemistry in 1965 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and another—in oenology—in 1969 from the Athens Wine Institute. I recognize the tattoos on his fingers from other articles I’ve read about him.

Boutaris is now seventy-one, his voice smoky.

more here.

Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

The Arkansas incident, in 1980, is well chosen as an illustration of Schlosser’s point. Objects fall inside silos all the time, he says. The chance that a falling socket would puncture the skin of a Titan II missile was extremely remote—but not impossible. When it happened, it triggered a set of mechanical and human responses that quickly led to a nightmare of confusion and misdirection. Once enough oxidizer leaked out and the air pressure inside the tank dropped, the missile would collapse, the remaining oxidizer would come into contact with the rocket fuel, and the missile would explode. Because a nineteen-year-old airman performing regular maintenance accidentally let a socket slip out of his wrench, a Titan II missile became a time bomb, and there was no way to turn off the timer. And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out.

more here.

A Tender Agony of Parting
.

A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed,
cut holes in it, and called it a human being.

Since then, it has been wailing
a tender agony of parting,
never mentioning the skill
that gave it life as a flute.
.
.
by Rumi
from A Year with Rumi
Harper-Collins 2006

From Esquire:

I never, ever try to weasel upgrades. I'm one of those people who feel really embarrassed about wheedling. I never haggle over price. I sort of wander away out of shame when someone does that. I'm socially nonfunctional in those situations.

I don't get jet lag as long as I get my sleep. As tempting as it is to get really drunk on the plane, I avoid that. If you take a long flight and get off hungover and dehydrated, it's a bad way to be. I'll usually get on the plane, take a sleeping pill, and sleep through the whole flight. Then I'll land and whatever's necessary for me to sleep at bedtime in the new time zone, I'll do that.

There's almost never a good reason to eat on a plane. You'll never feel better after airplane food than before it. I don't understand people who will accept every single meal on a long flight. I'm convinced it's about breaking up the boredom. You're much better off avoiding it. Much better to show up in a new place and be hungry and eat at even a little street stall than arrive gassy and bloated, full, flatulent, hungover. So I just avoid airplane food. It's in no way helpful.

More here.

Economics is inextricably tied to moral behavior, though few economists will say that. It’s time someone did.

Eric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

In every financial transaction–whether you’re selling a car, paying employees, or repackaging commodity futures as financial derivatives–there are ethical calculations that influence economic activity beyond the price. Sure, you can cheat a potential buyer and not mention that your 1996 Ford Mustang GT has a cracked engine block, in the same way that your boss can stiff you on overtime. If you get away with it you will succeed in making a short-term gain or see a bump in the next quarterly earnings report. But, if you eventually develop the reputation as someone who consistently defrauds the people you do business with, there is a good chance that the value of your net worth will be as negative as the moral values you embraced.

But why is it that businesses that are “too big to fail” don’t seem bound by the same moral economy as the rest of us? It turns out that anthropologists may have some insight, not only on this question, but also how we might integrate our economic and moral values that so often appear at odds. Researchers have found that the interconnection between economics and morality is seen most clearly in small communities where everybody knows each other, everyone has a free choice in who they deal with, and gossip can make or break reputations. This is even the case forsocieties that look very different from our own.

More here.

Tim Doody in The Morning News:

At 9:30 in the morning, an architect and three senior scientists—two from Stanford, the other from Hewlett-Packard—donned eyeshades and earphones, sank into comfy couches, and waited for their government-approved dose of LSD to kick in. From across the suite and with no small amount of anticipation, Dr. James Fadiman spun the knobs of an impeccable sound system and unleashed Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68.” Then he stood by, ready to ease any concerns or discomfort.

For this particular experiment, the couched volunteers had each brought along three highly technical problems from their respective fields that they’d been unable to solve for at least several months. In approximately two hours, when the LSD became fully active, they were going to remove the eyeshades and earphones, and attempt to find some solutions. Fadiman and his team would monitor their efforts, insights, and output to determine if a relatively low dose of acid—100 micrograms to be exact—enhanced their creativity.

It was the summer of ’66. And the morning was beginning like many others at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, an inconspicuously named, privately funded facility dedicated to psychedelic drug research, which was located, even less conspicuously, on the second floor of a shopping plaza in Menlo Park, Calif.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

George Orwell was not a political thinker, exactly. Sure, he wrote books like 1984 andAnimal Farm. Those books are political. Or better put, they are political thought experiments in novel form. Orwell liked to think about totalitarianism. He created fictional scenarios like 1984 in order to think through the logic of totalitarianism, to find out how it works. Orwell’s essays, too, are often about politics. He wondered if it was possible to create a decent Socialism in the aftermath of the debacle of real-life Socialism, as it existed in the Soviet Union.

The power of Orwell’s writing came from his honesty about the actions and motivations of human beings making decisions in a messy world. So maybe it is best to say that Orwell was thinking about politics without being a political scientist. He wasn’t good at looking at politics from a distanced, objective point of view in order to suss out general laws. That’s why one of his best political essays is a story about shooting an elephant in Burma. It is a story of Orwell himself.

As a young man, Orwell got a job as an imperial policeman in Burma. He was working for the British crown. This was the 1920s. The British Empire still lorded over many parts of East Asia. Orwell realized quickly that he was a symbol of oppression to most Burmese. He was harassed in the streets, especially by the young Buddhist priests who seemed to have nothing to do, “except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.” This bothered Orwell, a sensitive chap with little taste for flexing his authority as a policeman. In short, Orwell felt immensely guilty about his role as a tiny cog in the British imperial machine. The guilt made him angry and the anger tore him in two. He wrote that he was “stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.”

Then, one day, an elephant went berserk and started smashing things up in the village.

More here.