Seven experts discuss Alexander Cooley’s Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, over at The National Bureau of Asian Research. S. Enders Wimbush:

Every great contest needs some great contestants. Yet the triangular contest for power in Central Asia among Russia, China, and the United States is very unequal, more scalene than equilateral. Of these, Russia strikes me as the least able to compete effectively for the long haul. Spiraling down across virtually all measures of power, authority, and influence, Russia is a dying state tempting debilitating crises at multiple levels. Cooley’s discussion of Russia’s seeming indifference to the fate of Central Asia after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 is spot on, as is his assessment that “the main challenge in analyzing Russian policy toward Central Asia is that it lacks a single overriding strategic goal” (p. 51). This begs the question: how can a state compete effectively if its objectives are unclear and its competitive resources are being quickly depleted? Nearly all Russian initiatives to regain prestige and stature in the region have failed to impress the Central Asians, much less the Chinese. Writing in 2011, I concluded that “Russia is not one of Asia’s rising powers but the opposite.” [2] I see nothing today suggesting otherwise.

Can we say that the United States also lacks an overriding strategic goal in Central Asia? When Central Asia was suddenly released from Soviet control in 1991, Americans were even more indifferent to the region than the Russians because few of them knew anything about it. I am unaware of Central Asia ever figuring in U.S. strategy at more than a transactional level. Cooley’s account strengthens this conclusion.

President Obama underlined the transactional basis of U.S. involvement by fixing the date for the transaction to end in 2014. This decision was apparently made without regard for the longer-term strategic implications of the United States’ virtual disappearance from this contest—not just for China and Russia but for all of Eurasia’s key actors. Consider that Central Asia today is arguably the world’s most contested geography. Powerful regional states—Russia, China, India, Iran, and Turkey—all seek a competitive advantage in the Central Asian space. This list includes four nuclear powers, with a fifth (Iran) close at hand and possibly a sixth (Turkey) further over the horizon. Outside contestants—for example, the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia—increase the density of this strategic soup. Is this an arena where the United States can afford strategic fatigue?

Name an African artist. Name two more. It’s a struggle: African art still has the most minor presence in the world’s museums, biennales, galleries. And when we do see it, too often it lacks the context for us to make sense of it. Tate Modern’s double show of Sudan-born Ibrahim el-Salahi, who lives in Oxford, and Meschac Gaba, based between Benin and the Netherlands, acknowledges this. An exhibition of muted, introverted visionary painting is set against a loud, bright deconstruction of social currency – the same contrast, as it happens, that Tate Britain negotiates in its summer shows devoted to L.S. Lowry versus Patrick Caulfield. But while Millbank luxuriates in familiar-name blockbusters, Bankside sets out to break preconceptions and clichés, for the first time according two Africans the large-scale singular exhibitions customarily devoted to western artists. In the 1960s el-Salahi was shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art alongside Picasso and Mark Rothko but he is unfamiliar on today’s art circuit.

more from Jackie Wullschlager at the FT here.

Berlin’s emergence as one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals occurred alongside the intensification of the Cold War. Given his wartime work and continuing contacts with British, American and Israeli diplomats and politicians, it was perhaps only to be expected that he should be seen by some as enjoying too close a connection with power. In later years he became for his more imaginative detractors a faintly sinister figure, a donnish Machiavelli moving events secretly from behind the scenes. David Caute’s Isaac and Isaiah may have been written to support this view, but in many ways it can be read as a defence of Berlin’s consistent integrity. As Caute writes, ‘Whereas Isaiah Berlin tended to be consistent in his prime values whatever platform he chose – book, essay, lecture, broadcast, newspaper article – there were several Isaac Deutschers.’ It is a comment that captures the paradoxes of his well-balanced, informative and vivid book, which makes interesting use of Caute’s memories of conversations he had with Berlin when they were both fellows of All Souls in the early 1960s (Caute resigned his fellowship in 1965). The short last chapter reproduces letters between Berlin, the University of Sussex and others which, Caute thinks, tend to support the accusation that Berlin vetoed the application of Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher for a position in Soviet studies at the university, where Berlin served as external member on the academic advisory board.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

Richard Gunderman in The Atlantic:

Earlier this week data published in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that the life expectancy of people in the United States has increased over the past two decades by three years, to 78.2. This means that the average American today enjoys an extra 1,100 days of life.

…Suppose through some wonder of modern biomedical science we could suddenly double our life expectancy by staying in bed 20 hours per day, or giving up all solid foods, or never again reading a book. Would we do it? To say that we are willing to pay any price in order to increase the length of our lives is to say that we have forgotten what it really means to live. The Struldbruggs in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels are immortal specimens, but they are also miserable human beings, whose unending lives prove to be not blessing but curse. Before we spill too much ink bemoaning the U.S.'s declining standings in the world life expectancy race, we should devote a bit more time to reflection and conversation around what really makes a good life. Though Wolfgang Mozart and Martin Luther King died before the age of 40, they managed to lead extraordinarily productive and admirable lives that enriched the rest of mankind. By contrast, many of us may realize our ambition to become nonagenarians or even centenarians and yet contribute too little that really makes a difference. By this standard, our fiercest competitor is right here at home.

The real measure of a life is not how long it lasts. The real measure of a life is what we make of each and every day. We have exactly the same number of minutes per day as the Gateses and Buffetts of the world. How effectively are we making use of this time? I suspect that the best way to lead a truly full life is not by straining every sinew to keep our hearts beating to the last possible moment, but instead by bringing ourselves and others as fully to life as possible. And I won't be surprised to learn someday that living deeply also does far more than diet and exercise to keep us going as well.

More here.

From HowStuffWorks:

Genes appear to have a big role in our intelligence and talents. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a specific gene that may help manage our skill level for organizing things logically. And although this is just one part of the mystery between our genes and intelligence, the discovery certainly warrants some thought. This type of discovery may help explain why early studies in regard to intelligence seem to favor genetics over environment when it comes to IQ. Those studies showed that even though some adoptive children grew up in an environment completely separate from their biological parents, their IQs were more aligned with theirs than that of the adoptive parents [source: Dryden]. However, that's not the end of the story. As mentioned, the possible gene linked to organizing things logically is a piece of a much larger puzzle. That goes for intelligence and other talents, as well. Most of the time, when society claims someone as a genius, it's for multiple traits — personality, cognitive capacity, motivation — working together. As it turns out, these traits and others like them have been linked to strong hereditary underpinnings [source: Kaufman].

Even though these beloved traits have a basis in genetics, that doesn't mean they're set in stone. After all, one trait may require collaboration of multiple genes. According to cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, a hereditary advantage for a trait that might lead us to great things isn't a sure thing. Genes develop on their own, on their own timeline. That means that someone could be a child prodigy if everything comes together early on, but genius might not emerge until later in life — and it can even wane. This is where genetics and environment collide. While we might be able to thank our moms and dads for a genetic propensity for genius, their hard work creating a nurturing environment might deserve more applause than handing over their DNA should get.

More here.

Creation Myth

This is a story handed down.
It is about the old days when Bill
and Florence and a lot of their kin
lived in the little tin-roofed house
beside the woods, below the hill.
Mornings, they went up the hill to work,
Florence to the house,
the men and boys to the field.
Evenings, they all came home again.
There would be talk then and laughter
and taking of ease around the porch
while the summer night closed.
But one night, McKinley, Bill's young brother,
stayed away late, and it was dark
when he started down the hill.
Not a star shone, not a window.
What he was going down into was the dark,
only his footsteps sounding
to prove he trod the ground. And Bill
who had got up to cool himself,
thinking and smoking, leaning on
the jamb of the open front door,
heard McKinley coming down,
and heard his steps beat faster
as he came, for McKinley felt the pasture's
darkess joined to all the rest
of darkness everywhere. It touched
the depths of the woods and sky and grave.
In that huge dark, things that usually
stayed put might get around, as fish
in pond or slue get loose in flood.
Oh, the things could be coming close
that never had come close before.
He missed the house and went on down
and crossed the draw and pounded on
where the pasture widened on the other side,
lost then for sure. Propped in the door,
Bill heard him circling, a dark star
in the dark, breathing hard, his feet
blind on the little reality
that was left. Amused, Bill smoked
his smoke, and listened. He knew where
McKinley was, though McKinley didn't.
Bill smiled in the darkness to himself,
and let McKinley run until his steps
approached something really to fear:
the quarry pool. Bill quit his pipe
then, opened the screen, and stepped out,
barefoot, on the warm boards. “McKinley!”
he said, and laid the field out clear
under McKinley's feet, and placed
the map of it in his head.
.

by Wendell Berry
from Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
Counterpoint Books, 1998

Tom Streithorst in the LA Review of Books:

WE LIVE LIKE GODS, and we don’t even know it.

We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures of Mars. Much the total accumulated knowledge of our species can fit on a hard drive that fits in our pocket. Even the poorest among us own electronic toys that millionaires and kings would have lusted for a decade ago. Our ancestors would be amazed. For most of our time on the planet, humans lived on the knife-edge of survival. A crop failure could mean starvation and even in good times, we worked from sun up to sundown to earn our daily bread. In 1600, a typical workman spent almost half his income on nourishment, and that food wasn’t crème brûlée with passion fruit or organically raised filet mignon, it was gruel and the occasional turnip. Send us back to ancient Greece with an AK-47, a home brewing kit, or a battery-powered vibrator, and startled peasants would worship at our feet.

And yet we are not happy, we expected more, we were promised better. Our economy is a shambles, millions are out of work, and few of us think things are going to get better soon. When I graduated high school, in 1975, I assumed that whatever I did, I would end up somewhere in the great American middle class, and that I would live better than my father, who lived better than his. Today, my son doesn’t have nearly the same confidence. Back in those days, you could go off to India for seven years, sit around in an ashram, smoke pot and seek spiritual fulfilment, and still come home and get a good job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. Today kids need a spectacular resume just to get an unpaid internship at IBM. Our children fear any moment not on a career path could ruin their prospects for a successful future. Back in the 1970s, pop stars sang songs about of the tedium and anomie of factory work. Today the sons of laid-off autoworkers would trade anything for that security and steady wage.

On the one hand, technology has made us all much more productive than we were 30 years ago. On the other, jobs have evaporated.

Alex Worsnip in Prospect:

It is a near-truism that philosophy operates at a remove from the “real world.” Many philosophers suppose that the answers to questions in logic, epistemology and metaphysics are independent of particular empirical facts about how human society happens to be set up. But what about ethics and political philosophy? How far should philosophers concerned with these areas take into account the messy reality of everyday life?

Not far at all, says one venerable tradition that dates back at least to Kant in the 18th century, and probably as far as Plato. From this perspective, the job of ethics and political philosophy is to work out how things ought to be. This need not be closely related to how things actually are. For the philosopher trying to imagine the ideal society or specify the nature of virtue, engaging in detail with the world in its current state (or in its historical forms) may be unnecessary or even unhelpful.

This traditional picture, however, has always had its detractors. In recent years the attack has been led by a group identifying themselves as “political realists,” counting amongst their number philosophers such as Raymond Geuss and the late Bernard Williams. According to the realists, the traditional picture risks making political philosophy both irrelevant and falsely universalistic, mistakenly supposing that the same abstract principles are applicable to societies of radically different kinds. Realists have singled out many of the most prominent political philosophers of the 20th century—John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin and GA Cohen—for particular scorn.

The realist critique of these philosophers—let’s call them, by contrast, the “idealists”— encompasses a number of distinct charges, not all of which sit well together. One criticism is that the idealists’ abstract theories of justice are insufficiently engaged with real politics. Another related accusation is that their demands are unrealistic, standing no chance of being implemented. Another common charge, although a very different line of attack, is that idealists—Rawls in particular—are apologists for the political status quo, cooking up a convenient justification for the US’s particular brand of liberal democracy. Finally, the realists sometimes seem sceptical about the whole project of formulating theories of justice, suspecting that such theories are merely ideological devices that obscure power relations, or that there is in fact no universal theory of justice independent of particular societies and their convictions.

Enda O'Doherty in Eurozine:

The Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, in a chapter she contributed to a book published in 1992, stated with some confidence her view that there was no such thing as European culture. There was certainly, she wrote, Italian and German music, and Florentine and Venetian painting, “but there is no European music and no European painting”.

It is true that the history of art and culture was not really Heller's field, but it would seem that those who, in the same year as she wrote her essay, framed the Maastricht Treaty, signalling the transition from European Community to European Union, at least partially agreed with her. The treaty was the first time the community had taken for itself significant powers in the cultural field. European cultures (note the plural), the relevant article stated, were to be understood as requiring “respect” – by which one understands freedom from too much supranational interference (“The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the member states, while respecting their national and regional diversity”). At the same time however, the Community was to be entrusted with the task of “[b]ringing the common cultural heritage to the fore”.

As with most negotiated texts, there is a compromise lurking here, or possibly a contradiction. First, cultures are to be understood as national (and grudgingly, just a little bit regional); they are even perhaps what define nations, the particular set of practices and inheritances which the Dutch, or the Germans, or the Portuguese have by virtue of their nationality, the thing that they have and no other nation has – that Dutch, that Portuguese thing. And yet it seems, according to Maastricht, that there is also a common cultural heritage which belongs equally to the Dutch and the Germans and the Portuguese. But what is this heritage? Is it something made up of a little bit of everywhere sort of tacked together (“the Europe of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe” perhaps, to which statesmen like to pay obeisance in their speeches before quickly passing on to more important matters)? Or could it be something more mysterious, something actually European?

Maya Gonzalez interviews Irene Lusztig The New Inquiry:

What has making the film revealed, and what are the things that surprised you?

The history of Lamaze surprised me. Lamaze is a very clear case study of how childbirth is propagandized. It exposes how it’s so clearly spoken about in a completely different way as it moves from Soviet Russia to France to the U.S. I was amazed to learn that there was this whole Marxist discourse of labor pain, which I hadn’t known about. And as Lamaze leaves this kind of Socialist-Marxist labor system and moves to the U.S., that language is completely erased—but it’s still the same techniques. It lays bare the way that these things are undergirded by nationalist ideologies, state ideologies.

I guess the most important discoveries I found were histories of obstetrics and obstetrical anesthesia. I was trying to think through how we’ve thought about pain at different points in time because that’s a ­really fraught space.

And twilight sleep was probably the most interesting discovery of the project. Twilight sleep is a moment in the teens where internationally, wealthy women began traveling to Germany to a clinic where there’s a drug protocol given to laboring women, an almost homeopathic dose of morphine that doesn’t really take the pain away in any significant way, coupled with scopolamine which induces amnesia. So the experience of laboring in twilight sleep may be intensely painful, but the women forget it as they’re experiencing it. The interesting thing historically about twilight sleep is that it became a real activist cause in the U.S., and the activists who were supporting and trying to bring it to the U.S. were all feminists and suffragettes. So the early 20th century history of women being really strong advocates for medicalized childbirth, for hospital birth, for drugs, for anesthesia, is an interesting forgotten history.

Gary Olson in Dissident Voice:

It’s unarguable that human nature reveals a continuum of behaviors ranging from the most wretched to the sublime, at times bordering on the saintly. At a minimum, this means acknowledging, in the words of Amin Maalouf that “There is a Mr. Hyde inside each of us. What we have to do is prevent the conditions that will bring the monster forth.”

At the righteous end of the spectrum is our propensity for empathy, a trait deeply rooted in our primate heritage. Empathy — putting oneself in another’s emotional and cognitive shoes and then acting appropriately — is now an incandescently hot topic, virtually a cottage industry of books, articles, and YouTube videos.

Whereas the evolutionary process has given rise to a hard-wired neural system that equips us to connect with one another, many experts believe that our empathically-impaired society needs nothing less than an “empathy epidemic.” Among the factors frequently cited as interfering with constructing an empathic culture we find everything from parenting, education, and economic inequality to early childhood programs, meaningful social connections, and misplaced emphasis on achieving social status.

Dr. Marco Iacaboni, one of the world’s recognized authorities on the neuroscience of empathy, argues that the discovery of mirror neurons, the neurons responsible for empathy, is “so radical that we should be talking about a revolution, the mirror neuron revolution.” Why? Because of the profound implications for how we think about both individuals and the future of our endangered planet.

More here.

The Hardys’ deep, bleak despair at the First World War runs through the collection, “its sinister shadow defiling everything”, Hardy lamented in 1916; six years later Florence remarked, “we feel now that nothing can be the same as it was before the war”. Hardy observed in his autobiography, “nobody was more amazed than he at the German incursion into Belgium, and the contemplation of it led him to despair of the world’s history thenceforward”. But for the sake of the defenceless Belgians he rallied to the public campaign of recruitment, and in November 1914, we see in Further letters, he wrote to Kitchener, now Secretary of State for War, on how music (“‘beating up’ through the streets of towns, with a band of fifes and side-drums”) might rouse the spirit to valour as it had in centuries past. In another new letter, Florence records that when “three delightful young American soldiers” made their way to Max Gate in the final months of conflict, “[Hardy] was much struck by their high ideals & the lofty view they took of their participation in the war”. The volume also provides late letters on the barbarity of cruel sports, on singing birds, on the meaning of Dorset words (for a Japanese translator), on Hardy’s support for a multi-volume English translation of Tolstoy’s works, and (to the pioneering electrical engineer Colonel Crompton), his sense that “Electricity & all its strange phenomena” were beyond him; “what it may bring about in the future I have no idea of”.

more from Angelique Richardson at the TLS here.

Numerous applications of the displacement model of secularization are current, but here I will point to just one. It concerns philosophical anthropology. The argument is that certain post-Enlightenment concepts of the human (or of “man”) remain Christian in their deep structures. Of these, the most important is the philosophical anthropology of negation (to use Marcel Gauchet’s term), according to which human nature is not just appetitive but necessarily incomplete, that is to say, inadequate to its various ecologies and conditions, and for that reason beset by fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and so on. For those who accept the displacement model, this anthropology, even in its modern forms, remains dependent on the revealed doctrine that human nature as such is fallen. Philosophical anthropology is important for thinking about secularization because the secularization thesis often becomes a proxy for the argument that secularity places human nature at risk. The displacement model also makes it difficult for theorists of secularization to suppose that total secularization will ever be achieved. But this argument—the incomplete secularization argument, as we could call it—is of especial significance because it is here that the interests that stand behind and motivate particular articulations of the secularization thesis are most clearly revealed. To show this more clearly, let me present just one version of the incomplete secularization argument—Carl Schmitt’s essay “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitizierungen” (1932).

more from Simon During at Immanent Frame here.

One can imagine how Kippenberger, a notoriously bad pupil, would have been particularly tortured as a child by the strictures of postwar pedagogy—and the accompanying threat of being sent home from school for breaking the rules. And so, as it is in the work of Hanne Darboven and Mike Kelley, school became something of an omnipresent theme in his oeuvre. School is likewise the literal site evoked in his well-known series of sculptures “Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich” (Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself), 1989. These mannequins (one made of resin was on view here) are styled as the artist would typically dress himself. Installed as suggested by the title, they effectively turn the phenomenological space of Robert Morris’s 1964 Corner Piece into the disciplinary space of a common juvenile punishment. With Kippenberger, the personal always contains social and political dimensions, too. This is certainly true of Bitte nicht nach Hause schicken, its title a line that evinces Kippenberger’s phobic resistance to the private sphere. Of course, Kippenberger was not alone: His circle of artists in ’80s Cologne famously tended to favor a life in public—specifically, the public life of the bar, where they would keep on drinking. Indeed, the work’s skewed alignment even suggests that the image’s maker (if not its viewer) was (or is still) drunk.

more from Isabelle Graw at Artforum here.

From The Paris Review:

It’s a gray day in April and after nine hours on a crowded BoltBus I arrive in Philadelphia to see my old friend from college, Nicole, a fellow writer and veritable one-woman repository of Philadelphian history. I’m here to celebrate her birthday, to drink wine, and to comb through the detritus of a difficult past year for both of us. Really, I’m not here for research. So, of course it makes perfect sense that within five minutes of picking me up she turns her car toward 4100 Pine Street, an address I’ve seen scrawled on the front of numerous letters, in nineteenth-century directories, in the chicken-scratch handwriting of an 1870 Philadelphian census worker, and in journal after journal of Amy Ella Blanchard. I first encountered Blanchard’s work as a sullen adolescent, forced to go to an island in Maine every other weekend with my father and soon-to-be stepmother. The house where we stayed was built by Blanchard in the early twentieth century and her books lined the shelves, but I was too busy reading classics like Salem’s Lot to be bothered with these dusty old tomes. The fact that she was a relative of my father’s girlfriend made Blanchard’s novels even less attractive to me.

Not many readers these days know who Blanchard was, but just barely a century ago she published at least a book a year, sometimes more, for girls and about girls. During her lifetime she wrote over eighty books, a play in 1896 about the importance of exercise for women, and even a couple of small booklets flouting such morals as “fritterings” and being “pound foolish.” A self-described late bloomer, Blanchard’s writing career started, and sputtered, with a story she published in a Salem, Massachusetts newspaper when she was in her teens, but it wasn’t until she was well into her thirties that her novels became an indispensable part of every young girl’s library.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In the pageant of life, we are genetically bloated. The human genome contains around 20,000 protein-coding genes. Many other species get by with a lot less. The gut microbe Escherichia coli, for example, has just 4,100 genes.

Scientists have long wondered how much further life can be stripped down and still remain alive. Is there a genetic essence of life? The answer seems to be that the true essence of life is not some handful of genes, but coexistence. E. coli has fewer genes than we do, in part because it has a lot fewer things to do. It doesn’t have to build a brain or a stomach, for example. But E. coli is a versatile organism in its own right, with genes allowing it to feed on many different kinds of sugar, as well as to withstand stresses like starvation and heat. In recent years, scientists have systematically shut down each of E. coli’s genes to see which it can live without. Most of its genes turn out to be dispensable. Only 302 have proved to be absolutely essential. Those essential genes carry out the same fundamental tasks that take place in our own cells, like copying DNA and building proteins from genes. And yet the 302 genes that are essential to E. coli turn out not to be life’s minimal genome. Scientists have come up with lists of essential genes in other microbes, and while the lists overlap, they are not identical.

More here.

The Furies

Banished from sin and the sacred
Now they inhabit the humble intimacy
Of daily life. They are
The leaky faucet the late bus
The soup that boils over
The lost pen the vacuum that doesn’t vacuum
The taxi that doesn’t come the mislaid receipt
Shoving pushing waiting
Bureaucratic madness

Without shouting or staring
Without bristly serpent hair
With the meticulous hands of the day-to-day
They undo us

They’re the peculiar wonder of the modern world
Faceless and maskless
Nameless and breathless
The thousand-headed hydras of efficiency gone haywire

They no longer pursue desecrators and parricides
They prefer innocent victims
Who did nothing to provoke them
Thanks to them the day loses its smooth expanses
Its juice of ripe fruits
Its fragrance of flowers
Its high-sea passion
And time is transformed
Into toil and the rush
Against time

.
by Sophia de Mello Breyner
from Obra Poética III
publisher: Caminho, Lisboa, 1991
translation: 2004, Richard Zenith
.
Original Portuguese after the jump

Read more »

From Jam and Idleness:

What is the one book you love so much that you can’t be objective about other people not loving it as well?

I know you’re expecting me to say Middlemarch, but actually I have worked with it so often professionally that—while of course I love it profoundly—I have had to develop a thick skin for dealing with haters. The books I absolutely cannot be objective about are all six volumes in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. This amazing series captured my imagination utterly the first time I read it, decades ago now, and I have only to flip through a few pages to find myself once again under its spell—and especially under Lymond’s. If you have tried them and not loved them, I have nothing to say to you! Well, OK, I’d still talk to you, but I’d always quietly count it against you as a character flaw.

What is your favourite either unknown or underappreciated book?

I hardly ever run into anyone else who has read Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, which is one of my very favorite contemporary novels. It is beautifully written and structured, and exceptionally smart. It’s a novel about women’s friendships and about families, but more than that it’s a novel about the examined life and the myriad ways our hearts perplex our heads. It contains some of the best writing I know about music—and about loss.

More here.

Steven Rosenfeld in AlterNet:

Prehistoric cave paintings across the continents have similar geometric patterns not because early humans were learning to draw like Paleolithic pre-schoolers, but because they were high on drugs, and their brains—like ours—have a biological predisposition to “see” certain patterns, especially during consciousness altering states.

This thesis—that humanity’s earliest artists were not just reeling due to mind-altering activities, but deliberately sought those elevated states and gave greater meaning to those common visions—is the contention of a new paper by an international research team.

Their thesis intriguingly explores the “biologically embodied mind,” which they contend gave rise to similarities in Paleolithic art across the continents dating back 40,000 years, and can also be seen in the body painting patterns dating back even further, according to recent archelogical discoveries.

At its core, this theory challenges the long-held notion that the earliest art and atrists were merely trying to draw the external world. Instead, it sees cave art as a deliberate mix of rituals inducing altered states for participants, coupled with brain chemistry that elicits certain visual patterns for humanity’s early chroniclers.

More here.