Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

More here.

Tariq Ali in Guernica:

Ever since the beginning of the Arab Spring there has been much talk of revolutions. Not from me. I’ve argued against the position that mass uprisings on their own constitute a revolution, i.e., a transfer of power from one social class (or even a layer) to another that leads to fundamental change. The actual size of the crowd is not a determinant—members of a crowd become a revolution only when they have, in their majority, a clear set of social and political aims. If they do not, they will always be outflanked by those who do, or by the state that will recapture lost ground very rapidly.

Egypt is the clearest example in recent years. No organs of autonomous power ever emerged. The Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative social force, one that belatedly joined the struggle to overthrow Mubarak, emerged as the strongest political player in the conflict and, as such, won the elections that followed. The Brotherhood’s factionalism, stupidity, and a desire to reassure both Washington and the local security apparatuses that it would be business as usual led it to make several strategic and tactical errors from its own point of view. New mass mobilizations erupted, even larger than those that had led to the toppling of Mubarak. Once again they were devoid of politics, seeing the army as their savior and, in many cases, applauding the military’s brutality against the Muslim Brothers. The result was obvious. The ancient régime is back in charge with mass support. If the original was not a revolution, the latter is hardly a counter-revolution. Simply the military reasserting its role in politics. It was they who decided to dump Mubarak and Morsi. Who will dump them? Another mass mobilization? I doubt it very much. Social movements incapable of developing an independent politics are fated to disappear.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

If the Brothers Grimm were not trying to tell charming bedtime stories, what were they trying to do? Why are the original versions of their stories so often violent and disturbing? The first answer to these questions is that the Brothers Grimm were simply being true to the stories as they existed in the early 19th century. The Brothers saw themselves as faithful recorders of a living German tradition. They wanted to preserve these stories in their true and exact form. The second answer is this: The violence of the folktales is part of their power. The Brothers Grimm understood this fact. They wanted to tap into that power. They thought that the tales would revitalize a German people fallen on hard times. But we leap ahead of ourselves.

The story of the Brothers Grimm begins in a small town, Henau, in what is now the western part of Germany. But Germany was not yet a country in 1785, the year when little Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was born. Germany was a disorganized collection of principalities and fiefdoms. And Germans were still recovering from the Thirty Years’ War, which had wreaked much havoc in the middle of the 17th century. It is impossible to explain the Thirty Years War briefly or clearly. Let’s just say that the War left many regions of Germany devastated, depopulated, divided and unstable. It was a condition that would continue through the 18th century.

In the early 19th century, just when it seemed that Germans might be coming out of their funk, Napoleon came along. Young Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were to see their region turned into a French satellite state in 1806. At the time of the initial publication ofGrimm’s Fairy Tales, the Brothers Grimm were living under a kind of military occupation.

More here.

Adam Kirsch at Poetry Magazine:

The type of writer who falls prey to the “not quite,” who thinks deeply about it and makes it a major theme of her work, tends to be at the same time sentimental and ironic. The sentiment comes from her longing for the ordinary, for un-self-conscious emotion and experience; her irony comes from her secret feeling of superiority to that kind of simplicity. (Mann, again, is the classic example of this kind of artist—Tonio Kröger says just about everything there is to say on the subject.) For of course, if you were to offer the artist the chance to stop writing and start living, she would never take it; she is too deeply defined by her own distance from life to dare to close it.

Rachel Wetzsteon, who died in 2009 at the age of 42, was her generation’s best poet of the “not quite.” During her tragically brief career, Wetzsteon earned her share of the small honors that are in the poetry world’s gift: her debut collection, The Other Stars (1994), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by John Hollander; she won prizes, and was the poetry editor of the New Republic (where I was proud to be her colleague). But she had produced only three books of poetry before she died—a fourth, Silver Roses, came out posthumously—and she had not yet reached the level of seniority or acclaim where her work was much reviewed.

more here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker:

Last week, Marshall played the Bowery Ballroom with his current band, made up of bass, guitar, and drums. He emerged in a suit jacket that looked three sizes too big, as most clothing does on him, and carrying a Fender Telecaster guitar. When playing it, he looked slightly hemmed in, as if he sensed that the band might be getting too close to a familiar entity. When he put down the guitar and just sang, gripping the microphone and doubling over as he yelled, the sound came into focus. He introduced each of the musicians in the band, as if it were a genuine jazz ensemble, but that’s not what has drawn people to King Krule. Though Marshall sounds as if he had stumbled into a recording studio by accident (and confesses that he likes many of his demos better than the final studio versions), he manages to be a confirmed, dedicated romantic. His voice curls around his lyrics as if he were disgusted with everything, but the words fight his delivery. In “Borderline,” which features one of his loveliest choruses over a swift series of chord changes, he sang, “And the soul chokes to cause the tide to enforce divide—this whole devotion has morphed in time. I’ll escort her mind to solve my crimes, reach slow motion to con the mind.”

more here.

Casey N. Cep at The Paris Review:

Gaudí wanted the interior of Sagrada Família to look like a forest. The columns of the nave stretch like tree trunks from the floor to the ceiling, branching to support the heavy weight of the ceiling, but also sprawling, reaching like tendrils for the sky. The church is beautiful because of its continual incompletion, its revelation that human construction is not so unlike natural construction: you plant a sapling as a child, then years later it is still growing into something taller, something more; your grandparents planted daffodils that decades later you see still returning every spring; you sit reading the newspaper on a bench in a park that your father tells you was once under water, the river having receded miles from its ancient reaches.

Cathedrals reveal human construction for what it is. In “The Cathedral,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “Their birth and rise, / as our own life’s too great proximity / will mount beyond our vision and our sense / of other happenings.” The poet disdains the possibility that cathedrals eclipse their makers: “as though that were history, / piled up in their immeasurable masses / in petrifaction safe from circumstance.” Life, Rilke argued, was on the streets beneath the cathedral’s spires, while death was “in those towers that, full of resignation, / ceased all at once from climbing.”

more here.

Nicholas Lemann reviews Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, in the NYRB:

The New Deal, the apogee of liberal political power in American history and a story with a relatively happy ending—the Great Depression vanquished, World War II won—has usually had its history presented, except by conservatives who disapprove of the expansion of central government and taxation in the 1930s and 1940s, as an uplifting, inspiring one. That is not how Ira Katznelson presents it. There is only one very brief personal note in his long, scholarly book—a snip of memory about having to wear military-style dogtags and practice responses to a nuclear attack as a schoolchild in the early 1950s—but all of Fear Itself is suffused with the same sense of pure terror during the Roosevelt and Truman years as, say, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. It’s easy to forget not just how dangerous the situation was, at home and abroad, during the New Deal, but how palpable were outcomes far worse than what we got.

Another difference between Fear Itself and most of the familiar histories of the New Deal is that Katznelson thinks like a political scientist. That means that, although he defines the period presidentially, as the twenty years when Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were in the White House, Roosevelt and Truman themselves are spectral presences. They are not the primary determiners of the course of government, and Katznelson has no interest in their personal qualities or their methods of leadership. Instead his focus is on Congress and government agencies, and more broadly on political systems, voting, and interest groups. This gives Fear Itself the feeling of a fresh look at a familiar story; what Katznelson loses in ignoring the inherent force of the hero narrative, he gains in being able to make an argument that largely ignores the presidency.

The argument bears laying out in some detail. Katznelson begins, usefully, by placing the New Deal in a global setting: the severity of the Great Depression presented an existential threat to liberal democracy everywhere, both as an ideal and as a reality. In response to the same economic crisis that confronted the United States, Germany turned to National Socialism, Italy to Fascism, and the Soviet Union already had a form of communism that no liberals except willfully blind ones could believe in. During Roosevelt’s first term, these alternate systems were on the verge of imposing themselves by force on many other countries.

It was not at all clear that democracy would survive here.

More here.

From The Hindu:

Christophe Jaffrelot is a Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Visiting Professor at the King's India Institute (London) and Global Scholar at Princeton University. In this exclusive interview with The Hindu’s Vaiju Naravane he discusses his new book to be published in India under the title The Pakistan Paradox.

In what sense is your book, published in France this week by Fayard under the title Le Syndrome Pakistanais, an essay or a pamphlet, and what is the thesis or the central point of the book?

The book argues that Pakistan is facing three contradictions since 1947 — and even, sometimes, since its very project emerged during the Raj. Primarily, there is the tension between a unitary notion of the Muslim nation state that is Pakistan and the diversity of the country in ethno-linguistic terms. This tension was there before Partition and it has remained after Partition with at least three provinces that never reconciled themselves fully with the Pakistani project: Bengal — Bengalis went in 1971, and the Baluchistan, which has been repeatedly on the warpath vis-à-vis the centre, and the Pashtuns, who have a very peculiar trajectory. There's been a demand for Pashtunistan, even a kind of irredentism with the Afghan Pashtuns for years, but the Pashtun trajectory has been more complicated since sections of the Pashtun elite — especially among the military — have rallied around the Pakistani project.

More here.

From Science:

The Formosan subterranean termite (Coptotermes formosanus) is native to southern China, but the aggressive little chompers have set up huge destructive colonies worldwide, including in the southeastern United States and Hawaii. They build the inner structure of their underground nests with a blend of chewed-up wood that used to be your house with their own excrement. In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers in Florida studied that recipe, called carton material (in photo above), and found a good purpose for the poop: It hosts protective bacteria, which can fight a termite-killing fungus.

More here.

Magritte
.
I am a man in a black bowler hat,
showing my back to the world.
If I turn, an apple blocks my face.

My first glimpse of art was in a churchyard,
so close it is to death.
I listened to the silence of that place.

Sometimes, laid out, she elevates behind me
as I walk the towpath.
Stiff-necked, I do not look around.

My art has no laws of gravity,
but a woman’s chestnut hair falls to the ground
and bowler-hatted men are falling rain.

I have seen boulders floating in the sky,
and every day a cloud comes in my door.
Baguettes, instead of clouds, go drifting by.

In woods, between the horse’s head and rider,
a vista slips, slim as the trunk of a tree.
What’s visible hides what’s also visible.

The sea is one with what is not the sea.
.
by Ciaran O'Driscoll
from Surreal Man
Pighog Press, Brighton, 2006

Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books:

Speak to American Jews long enough about Israel and you begin to notice something. The conversation may begin with Israel, but it rarely ends there. It usually ends with “them.”

Express concern about Israeli subsidies for West Bank settlements and you’ll be told that the settlements don’t matter because “they” won’t accept Israel within any borders. Cite the recent warning by former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin that “over the past 10–15 years Israel has become more and more racist” and you’ll be told that whatever Israel’s imperfections, it is “they” who teach their children to hate and kill. Mention that former prime minister Ehud Olmert has called Mahmoud Abbas a partner for peace and you’ll be told that what “they” say in Arabic is different from what they say in English.

This spring I watched the documentary The Gatekeepers—in which six former heads of Shin Bet sharply criticize Israeli policy in the West Bank—with a mostly Jewish audience in New York. Afterward a man acknowledged that it was an interesting film. Then he asked why “they” don’t criticize their side like Israelis do.

I used to try, clumsily, to answer the assertions about Palestinians that so often consume the American Jewish conversation about Israel. But increasingly I give a terser reply: “Ask them.” That usually ends the conversation because in mainstream American Jewish circles, asking Palestinians to respond to the endless assertions that American Jews make about them is extremely rare.

More here.

Ralph Keyes in The American Scholar:

Soon after they arrived in America, British settlers got busy with an important task: reinventing their language. This called for repurposing old words and coining new ones. Colonists called the plump, smelly rodents they encountered in swamps muske rats. Other forms of wildlife were named katydids, bobcats, catfish, and whippoorwills. To these settlers, sleigh improved on sledge, and the help reflected their values better than servants. “The new circumstances under which we are placed,” observed Thomas Jefferson, “call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.”

“Necessity,” he concluded, “obliges us to neologize.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Jefferson is the first person known to have used the termneologize, in an 1813 letter. It is one of 110 words whose earliest use the OED credits to him. Others include indescribable, pedicure, and electioneer.

Once they caught wind of all the new words being coined across the Atlantic, self-appointed guardians of the King’s English were rather cross. When Jefferson used the new word belittle in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, a British critic exclaimed, “It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson!” Undaunted, the third president proceeded to coin Anglophobia.

More here.

Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast:

More here.

Erle C. Ellis in the New York Times:

Many scientists believe that by transforming the earth’s natural landscapes, we are undermining the very life support systems that sustain us. Like bacteria in a petri dish, our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite planet, with dire consequences. Disaster looms as humans exceed the earth’s natural carrying capacity. Clearly, this could not be sustainable.

This is nonsense. Even today, I hear some of my scientific colleagues repeat these and similar claims — often unchallenged. And once, I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.

The evidence from archaeology is clear. Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies and tools of stone and fire to extract more sustenance from landscapes than would otherwise be possible.

More here.

Henry Gould in The Critical Flame:

Lissa Wolsak is a major American poet, living in Vancouver; Squeezed Light is a comprehensive gathering of her published work, which includes seven poem-sequences, a prose piece titled “An Heuristic Prolusion”, an interview, and an extended introduction by George Quasha (with Charles Stein).

“Major” is a weighty word, not to be trifled with; yet I feel confident in this case. It has become a commonplace to note that American poetry is various, fractured, “balkanized”—but if we think of the distinctive American stream in English writing, we must reckon with a single, branching river. That is, we are dealing on the one hand with the brilliant, idiosyncratic, metaphysically-ambitious, transcendental Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson—and on the other with a darker channel: the melancholic, skeptical, ironic “power of blackness” (Harry Levin’s term) represented primarily by Poe and Melville. Lissa Wolsak floats her boat where both streams merge. She is an heir to their astringent, challenging, and problematic greatness.

put me on the dune
oval
sloping
this is,
she, made, undertaken…

T.S. Eliot once famously wrote, “poetry in our civilization, as it exists today, must be difficult.” In this regard, Lissa Wolsak demands the reader Walt Whitman required: an athlete—alert, engaged, willing to wrestle both angels and devils in order to grasp the poem.

More here. [Thanks to Daniel Pritchard.]

From Conservative Magazine:

The Chinese probably eat the world’s greatest diversity of wild beasts. As their national appetite grows, American biologists are wondering, where have all the turtles gone?

There is an often repeated Chinese joke that says, “In southern China people eat everything on four legs except tables, everything that flies except planes, and everything in the water except boats.” I had heard the saying before and already knew that China is arguably the world’s most adventurous culinary destination. Over the decade I had lived in China, I had learned that almost everything that moves is considered edible. I had been served snake soups and tiny pigeons roasted on long skewers. At a banquet in Sichuan province, the host had placed a heaping mound of fried bees in front of me. I once reluctantly joined two friends for a boiling hot pot meal that included the genitals of various animals. I had passed countless restaurants displaying a wide array of unusual food: in backwater towns, restaurants commonly displayed the skinned carcasses of cats and dogs, their muzzles frozen in permanent snarls; in wealthier cities, seafood was more common—giant shark fins, sometimes tied in red bows and always bearing outlandish price tags, held prominent space in front windows; turtles and fish peered with dull expressions from dirty glass tanks.

And I had seen more exotic fare. At the edge of a national park in Hunan province, a restaurant owner had shown me a thick black snake that she said was called the “three-step”: one bite, and the victim would take three steps before collapsing. Boiled, it cost a few hundred yuan. Outside a wildlife sanctuary in Sichuan province, an official happy to be hosting an American guest presented me with a plate of what he said was a wild local deer. He told me it had been killed in the park and was healthier than farm-raised animals. To maintain our friendship, I took a few bites of the tough, gamey meat. A Chinese friend described being served meat from wild pangolins and monkeys at an expensive restaurant in southern China.

More here.

Stephen Greenblatt on Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, in the NYRB:

In a curious way the central figure in the splendid new film of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers), is the house in which the events unfold. Not that the house—Whedon’s own—is particularly remarkable. It is a comfortable, sprawling Santa Monica McMansion, no doubt very expensive, with more than a touch of a suburb about it. But that is the point: we are not in faraway Sicily, where Shakespeare set the story, or in glorious, technicolor Tuscany, where Kenneth Branagh set his admirable film adaptation twenty years ago. We are rather on familiar ground, and, as if to conjure up the ordinary accoutrements of modern American upper-middle-class life, the camera dwells lovingly on the kitchen counter and the wine glasses and the piles of dishes and the stairs that lead up to the pleasant patio and, discreetly hidden, the video screens scanned by the bumbling employees of a security company—Whedon’s clever incarnation of Messina’s night watchmen.

All of this familiarity makes the circumstances that set the story in motion in Shakespeare and in his sources seem particularly discordant and weird. They were strange enough to begin with. Shakespeare followed his principal source, a story by the Italian monk Matteo Bandello, in having a Spanish army commander, Prince Don Pedro of Aragon, and several of his officers arrive in Messina, in the wake of a successful military campaign, for a month’s stay as the guests of the town’s governor, Leonato. The awkwardness such a stay would inevitably entail is heightened by the fact that Don Pedro brings with him his disgraced bastard brother, Don John, who is under a kind of uneasy house arrest. The situation calls for an elaborate exercise of courtesy: everyone knows that there is no choice about the visit, but everyone has to behave as if they were witnessing an act of unconstrained hospitality.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.” But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people. “There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “You would have just run against the wall.”

But a series of recent papers by Dr. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. “We now know it’s there,” Dr. Urban said. “Now we’re mapping this new continent.” Dr. James R. Lupski, a leading expert on the human genome at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in a recent review in the journal Science that the existence of multiple genomes in an individual could have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine. “It’s changed the way I think,” he said in an interview. Scientists are finding links from multiple genomes to certain rare diseases, and now they’re beginning to investigate genetic variations to shed light on more common disorders.

More here.