Legacy

The spear thrust in front of the pavilion
announced that the Khan was seriously ill.
First, and most importantly, among his four sons
he divided his far-flung territories,
the continent he had conquered in twenty years.

Then he called his sons to his bedside.
He gave them a single arrow. Break it, he said.
It was easily broken. Next, he gave them five arrows each.
Break them, he said. They couldn’t be broken. So you’ll
stick together, he said. He who’s on his own will be broken.

He dismissed his sons; his last task too was finished.
The great Khan turned over slowly in his bed,
brought before his eyes the world he had built,
the Caspian at one end, the Great Wall of China at the other.
I can die at last, he said. My forefathers await me

my grandsons will dress up in golden robes,
ride horses swifter than the wind
embrace the prettiest of women.

And, alas, they will forget
in whose debt they are for all that,
I haven’t the slightest doubt.
.

by Roni Margulies
publisher: PIW, 2008
translation: 2008, Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne

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Ian Hacking in the London Review of Books:

The new edition of the DSM replaces DSM-IV, which appeared in 1994. The DSM is the standard – and standardising – work of reference issued by the American Psychiatric Association, but its influence reaches into every nook and cranny of psychiatry, everywhere. Hence its publication has been greeted by a flurry of discussion, hype and hostility across all media, both traditional and social. Most of it has concerned individual diagnoses and the ways they have changed, or haven’t. To invoke the cliché for the first time in my life, most critics attended to the trees (the kinds of disorder recognised in the manual), but few thought about the wood. I want to talk about the object as a whole – about the wood – and will seldom mention particular diagnoses, except when I need an example.

Many worries have already been aired. In mid-May an onslaught was delivered by the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychology Society, which is sceptical about the very project of standardised diagnosis, especially of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. More generally, it opposes the biomedical model of mental illness, to the exclusion of social conditions and life-course events. On a quite different score, Allen Frances, the chief editor of DSM-IV, has for years been blogging his criticisms of the modifications leading to DSM-5. More and more kinds of behaviour are now being filed as disorders, opening up vast fields of profit for drug companies. I shall discuss none of these important issues, and will try to be informative and even supportive until the very end of this piece, where I address a fundamental flaw in the enterprise.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

There are three reasons Lawrence Osborne’s new book, “The Wet and the Dry,” is instantly among the best nonfiction volumes about drinking that we have, and why, if you have a bar, it should be tucked into its corner, near the bitters.

The first reason is that Mr. Osborne is a terrific writer, hardheaded and searching, and he’s getting better as he gets older. His novel from last year,“The Forgiven,” was a bite-size piece of poison candy — a persuasively creepy mix of Ian McEwan and Paul Bowles.

“The Wet and the Dry” is a book in which cocktails are said to be “entered, like bodies of water or locales.” Thus a vodka martini with its bobbing olive, imbibed while in Beirut, is to the author “salty like cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster” and “sinister and cool and satisfying.” The author gets bonus points for not being a snob about vodka martinis.

The second reason this book is so good is that Mr. Osborne, who is English, is a world citizen, a committed travel writer as well as a novelist. Like a Google map, he brings wide-angle context with simple clicks. Like a latter-day Evelyn Waugh, he can size up a locale almost at a glance. In the ancient Roman city of Baalbek, in Lebanon, he declares it “the kind of place where you might be kidnapped for an hour or two just to satisfy someone’s curiosity.”

More here.

Ayça Çubukçu in Jadaliyya:

Ayça Çubukçu (AÇ): First of all, I would like to thank you for agreeing to have this open conversation, which we hope to share with our readers at Jadaliyya. After the military intervention on 3 July in Egypt, some commentators have claimed that what we have witnessed on 3 July is a strategic effort on the part of the Egyptian army to contain revolutionary forces within Egypt—more specifically, that the army was forced to intervene by a popular uprising which it wanted to contain. Others have claimed that the Egyptian army was supporting the uprising against President Mohamad Morsi in some sincere fashion, or that what we have seen in early July is a continuation of the 2011 revolution. Yet others have insisted that what we have witnessed is an outright coup d'état against a democratically elected president. What is your interpretation of this debate?

Talal Asad (TA): Well, there has been quite a lot of talk of course about whether or not this is a coup, or whether it is essentially a response by the army to the people’s revolutionary demands. I would have no hesitation in calling it a coup, but this may not be the most important thing to determine at the very beginning. The point I want to stress is that the opposition has been made up of a number of disparate elements–perhaps not too disparate–including most importantly, what are known as the fuloul—that is, the beneficiaries of the old Mubarak regime—as well as the movement calling itself Tamarod that includes many of the younger pro-democracy people who have been determined at any cost to get rid of President Morsi. I myself am not too concerned about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of removing a nationally elected president. It is true that this president did not win by a vast margin, but there is no requirement in a liberal democracy that that be a condition of electoral success. And even if, as the protesters have also insisted, he has been acting largely on behalf of his Freedom and Justice Party rather than the country as a whole, that by and large is how politics works in liberal democracies. There is much rhetoric about “the nation” and “the people,” but electoral democracies work not in favor of all citizens but rather of special interests represented by the party that wins in the elections.

But I am much more concerned here about the fact that a particular kind of alliance has been constructed in which some people (that is, the beneficiaries of the Mubarak regime, including the army) are much clearer about what they want, and others (the pro-democracy movement) who are not so clear. At any rate, to the extent that they are clear about what they want, they are certainly not very clear about how to achieve it. They remain largely at the level of slogans because their efforts are invested largely in the media.

More here.

Less than a month before his 30th birthday, Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. A summer storm overtook his sailboat, and the poet never made it from Livorno, where he had been visiting Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt, to Lerici, where his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, waited. Shelley’s body washed ashore weeks later, ravaged by the sea and scarcely recognizable. The bright beauty of Edward Onslow Ford’s marble monument for the poet, completed in 1892, did its best to obscure this ravaging. Fixed in irenic composure, Shelley now rests on a bronze plinth above a weeping muse flanked by two winged lions at University College Oxford. His cold marble eyes are forever closed; his right arm stretches across his slender, supine body to meet his left; one of his sublunary legs is folded beneath the other. The monument became one of the high altars of the cult that developed around the Romantic. Rival accounts of Shelley’s shipwreck and drowning circulated for decades, including one persistent legend that his heart resisted crematory fire, only to be removed and preserved by a friend.

more from Casey N. Cep at Poetry here.

Publius Ovidius Naso invented exile the way Charles Dickens invented Christmas. Of course, the institution was there before, but it had not been given a definitive literary and cultural codification, a reference point for all subsequent experience. Exile in the ancient world was bound up in the identity of what we would call the individual with his or her community—not so much “family” in the ancestral sense of Native Americans and East Asians, but what we’ve come to think of as “the polity,” the city. The power of exile as punishment is a construct of urban life. Exile is always exile from—and the community left behind has to remain a powerful element in the exile’s life, or else the dispossessed suffers only emigration. When an ancient was thrust into exile, he or she (yes—think of Dido) carried the City on his or her back; and the foundations of “daughter” cities traced back to the laborious expulsion from parents. But all this was in the realm of legend, mythology, history. With Ovid, for the first time, we hear the voice of an exile in psychological and social depth—exulis hæc vox est: præbet mihi littera linguam, / et si non liceat scribere, mutus ero—“This is the voice of an exile: a letter serves as my tongue, / and if not permitted to write, I will be dumb.” [1] Ovid would have appreciated the pun available in English translation but not to him: In Latin, littera, a letter of the alphabet, is a different word from epistula, a missive.

more from J. Kates at Harvard Review here.

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”.

more from Enda O’Doherty at Dublin Review of Books here.

From The Telegraph:

'I’m very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.' (Woody Allen was a stand up comedian between 1964-1968, saying later that there was nothing about the lifestyle he liked.)

'My brain: It`s my second favorite organ.'

'Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.' (What Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer says to Annie Hall (1977) in an Oscar-winning screenplay Allen co-wrote with Marshall Brickman. In the full speech, Singer says: 'Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.')

'I failed to make the chess team because of my height.'

More here.

From HowStuffWorks:

The Scout motto is “be prepared,” but it's hard to be prepared for death, be it our own or a loved one's. Too much is unknown about what dying feels like or what, if anything, happens after you die to ever feel truly ready. However, we do know a bit about the process that occurs in the days and hours leading up to a natural death, and knowing what's going on may be helpful in a loved one's last moments.

During the dying process, the body's systems shut down. The dying person has less energy and begins to sleep more and more. The body is conserving the little energy it has, and as a result, needs less nourishment and sustenance. In the days (or sometimes weeks) before death, people eat and drink less. They may lose all interest in food and drink, and you shouldn't force them to eat. In fact, pushing food or drink on a dying person could cause him or her to choke — at this point, it has become difficult to swallow and the mouth is very dry. As the person takes in less food and drink, he or she will urinate less frequently and have fewer bowel movements. The person may also experience loss of bladder and bowel control. People who are dying may become confused, agitated or restless, which could be a result of the brain receiving less oxygen. It can be disconcerting and painful to hear a loved one so confused in his or her last days.

More here.

Hip

I have to drag you
Id b totally kewl with it​

​to come away with me
if u were nicer 2 me​

​You keep me off-balance
Say pls sometimes like u care​

​like I just got off a cruise
But u always favor the other 1

​I have more than just you to think about
Not like I asked 2 b born​

​The point is, all you do is cause me pain
Ugh do u know how hard it is​

​Can’t you just straighten up
2 b perf all the time​

​instead of poking me and poking me
Y dont u just replace me, k​

​when if you would just make an effort
Ive got ** on speed dial​

​I could get on with my life
Its always abt u isn’t it​

​Its always abt u​

​Its always
.

by Jen Karetnik
from Gravel

In this picture, Grandpa is lying on his back on a green slope, with his hands behind his head for a pillow and his hat pulled halfway down over his eyes. It’s hard to tell whether he’s dozing or not. It seems that he’s in that blessed peace between a light nap and the calm refreshment of gazing up into the clear sky. A spray of scraggly birch leaves hangs over him from above. The boy, meanwhile, is lost in another kind of contemplation. He’s sitting in front, right next to Grandpa’s side. His straw hat is set back to reveal his whole face. The legs of his patched trousers are rolled almost up to his knees, which are tucked up, while his bare feet – big bony feet, scuffed and dirty with life, brace against the hillside. His she-dog beagle nestles under one of the knees, as she sniffs at one of the three yellow-paper butterflies flitting about. But the boy isn’t thinking of the dog or the butterflies, or even Grandpa. He has a wild daisy in his hand – there are a few of them on the slope – and he’s picking the petals off, one by one. “She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me,” that is evidently what is in his mind, as he looks at the flower, with the slightest trace of a smile on his lips, and his eyebrows raised just a little, in wonder.

more from Anthony Esolen at Front Porch Republic here.

Mikhail Bulgakov, most readers and critics would concur, is the most widely loved and perhaps the greatest Russian writer in the Soviet period of fictional prose and drama. Some might be more deeply affected by Andrei Platonov’s harrowing prose, others impressed by the elegance of Vladimir Nabokov or the prophetic fantasy of Yevgeny Zamyatin, but nobody could render the intervention of the demonic into a corrupt and degraded world so comically and so frighteningly as Bulgakov did in his two major novels (Black Snow and The Master and Margarita) and his short stories and plays. Like many great writers, Bulgakov has his flaws: not all readers feel the saccharine love affair between the Master and Margarita belongs in the same novel as the apocalyptic progress of the satanic Professor Woland; he also liked to hound his oppressors (officials, theatre directors, ideologists) with disproportionate satirical force. Other readers are disconcerted by Bulgakov’s implicit ideology: loyal to the values of the pre-revolutionary educated classes, he seems to have had little hesitation in making a pact with Stalin – the great demon, by destroying lesser demons, protects Bulgakov as an artist, just as Louis XIV shielded Molière and Tsar Nicholas I did for Pushkin.

more from Donald Rayfield at Literary Review here.

What sparks Ratmansky’s imagination is music. This may seem obvious, but there are plenty of choreographers who take their cues from nonmusical sources and ideas. In Shostakovich, he has an ideal partner. The composer’s sound world offers a vibrant spectrum, from cartoonish chases to crashing dissonances and swooning melodies, often spliced together with very little transition from one mood to the next. Without being programmatic, the music seems to suggest images and stories, though usually discontinuous and jumpy, or layered one on top of the other, and full of mischievous play. As the musicologist Simon Morrison told me not long ago, “The phrases are sometimes misaligned, and cut in different ways. If you listen to his music and think about silent-film technique, it’s the musical equivalent of that.” The technique of cutting and splicing—shot, countershot—is one Shostakovich picked up on early. After the Russian Revolution, the young composer earned his keep by improvising on the piano during silent movies—as did George Balanchine—and later wrote scores for modernist Soviet films such as New Babylon (1929). His music sometimes has the feel of several films spliced together, with a Tom and Jerry chase perhaps followed by a moonlit ride down the Elbe, a passionate kiss, a witch’s dance, a soccer match and a close-up of laughing faces.

more from Marina Harss at The Nation here.

Max Nisen in the Business Insider:

The “prisoner’s dilemma” is a familiar concept to just about anybody that took Econ 101.

The basic version goes like this. Two criminals are arrested, but police can’t convict either on the primary charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in jail on a lesser charge. Each of the prisoners, who can’t communicate with each other, are given the option of testifying against their partner. If they testify, and their partner remains silent, the partner gets 3 years and they go free. If they both testify, both get two. If both remain silent, they each get one.

In game theory, betraying your partner, or “defecting” is always the dominant strategy as it always has a slightly higher payoff in a simultaneous game. It’s what’s known as a “Nash Equilibrium,” after Nobel Prize winning mathematician and A Beautiful Mind subject John Nash.

In sequential games, where players know each other’s previous behaviour and have the opportunity to punish each other, defection is the dominant strategy as well.

However, on a Pareto basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.

Yet no one’s ever actually run the experiment on real prisoners before, until two University of Hamburg economists tried it out in a recent study comparing the behaviour of inmates and students.

Surprisingly, for the classic version of the game, prisoners were far more cooperative than expected.

More here.

Jamelle Bouie in The Daily Beast:

The idea that “black-on-black” crime is the real story in Martin’s killing isn’t a novel one. In addition to Shapiro, you’ll hear the argument from conservative African-American activists like Crystal White, as well as people outside the media, like Zimmerman defense attorney Mark O’Mara, who said that his client “never would have been charged with a crime” if he were black.

(It’s worth noting, here, that Zimmerman wasn’t charged with a crime. At least, not at first. It took six weeks of protest and pressure for Sanford police to revisit the killing and bring charges against him. Indeed, in the beginning, Martin’s cause had less to do with the identity of the shooter and everything to do with the appalling disinterest of the local police department.)

But there’s a huge problem with attempt to shift the conversation: There’s no suchthing as “black-on-black” crime. Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders. Indeed, for the large majority of crimes, you’ll find that victims and offenders share a racial identity, or have some prior relationship to each other.

What Shapiro and others miss about crime, in general, is that it’s driven byopportunism and proximity; If African-Americans are more likely to be robbed, or injured, or killed by other African-Americans, it’s because they tend to live in the same neighborhoods as each other. Residential statistics bear this out (PDF); blacks are still more likely to live near each other or other minority groups than they are to whites. And of course, the reverse holds as well—whites are much more likely to live near other whites than they are to minorities and African-Americans in particular.

More here.

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

Did the spread of anesthesia and antisepsis differ for economic reasons? Actually, the incentives for both ran in the right direction. If painless surgery attracted paying patients, so would a noticeably lower death rate. Besides, live patients were more likely to make good on their surgery bill. Maybe ideas that violate prior beliefs are harder to embrace. To nineteenth-century surgeons, germ theory seemed as illogical as, say, Darwin’s theory that human beings evolved from primates. Then again, so did the idea that you could inhale a gas and enter a pain-free state of suspended animation. Proponents of anesthesia overcame belief by encouraging surgeons to try ether on a patient and witness the results for themselves—to take a test drive. When Lister tried this strategy, however, he made little progress.

The technical complexity might have been part of the difficulty. Giving Lister’s methods “a try” required painstaking attention to detail. Surgeons had to be scrupulous about soaking their hands, their instruments, and even their catgut sutures in antiseptic solution. Lister also set up a device that continuously sprayed a mist of antiseptic over the surgical field.

But anesthesia was no easier. Obtaining ether and constructing the inhaler could be difficult. You had to make sure that the device delivered an adequate dosage, and the mechanism required constant tinkering. Yet most surgeons stuck with it—or else they switched to chloroform, which was found to be an even more powerful anesthetic, but posed its own problems. (An imprecise dosage killed people.) Faced with the complexities, they didn’t give up; instead, they formed an entire new medical specialty—anesthesiology.

So what were the key differences?

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Do you talk to yourself? If so, researcher Mark Scott of the University of British Columbia can help. He’s found evidence that a brain signal called corollary discharge plays an important role in these experiences of internal speech. This is a signal that helps us distinguish the sensory experiences we produce ourselves from those produced by external stimuli. It’s a kind of predictive signal generated by the brain that helps to explain, for example, why other people can tickle us but we can’t tickle ourselves. The signal predicts our own movements and effectively cancels out the tickle sensation.

This explains why we don’t overload our brain when we speak. “By attenuating the impact our own voice has on our hearing — using the ‘corollary discharge’ prediction — our hearing can remain sensitive to other sounds,” Scott said. But Scott also speculated that the internal copy of our voice produced by corollary discharge can be generated even when there isn’t any external sound, meaning that the sound we hear when we talk inside our heads is actually the internal prediction of the sound of our own voice. Curiously, Scott found that the impact of an external sound was significantly reduced when participants said a syllable in their heads that matched the external sound. Their performance was not significantly affected, however, when the syllable they said in their head didn’t match the one they heard. These findings provide evidence that internal speech makes use of a system that is primarily involved in processing external speech, and may help shed light on certain pathological conditions.

Picture: Inner voices, by James Tissot

More here.

David Stipp in The New York Times:

How fast are you aging?

…In a 2010 study, Dr. Miller and colleagues analyzed medical records of 4,097 women, collected over two decades beginning when they were in their 60s, to sift out 13 factors that best predicted future mortality from different causes. Oddly, contrast sensitivity — as measured by a test of the eye’s ability to pick out very lightly shaded images on white backgrounds — was among the most predictive of the 377 factors evaluated, as was the number of rapid step-ups on a low platform that the subjects could complete in 10 seconds. Taken together, the 13 factors “characterize the clinical presentation of healthy aging” in older women, the study concluded. More recently, novel technologies that can detect thousands of age-associated molecular changes in cells have come to the fore in the biomarker hunt.

Earlier this year Dr. Zhang and his colleagues in San Diego reported that a kind of molecular aging clock is embedded in our genomes whose speed can be measured via blood testing. The moving parts of the clock consist of chemical tags on DNA molecules that control whether genes are active in cells. The researchers found that the patterns of the tags, called epigenetic markers, predictably change with age. In a study published in January in Molecular Cell, the scientists scrutinized around 485,000 of these tags in blood cells of 656 people aged 19 to 101. Some 70,387 tags were predictive of chronological age, the scientists found. Collectively these tags spell out a “signature for age” that is “largely not changed by disease or ethnic background,” said Ronald Kohanski, an expert on biomarkers of aging at the National Institute on Aging. That means these markers may be less muddied by confounders than other factors tied to aging. Of the markers, 71 most indicative of chronological age were selected to measure the speed at which people are growing old. That was calculated by comparing a subject’s epigenetic tags to the norm for his or her age — a 40-year-old whose pattern closely resembled the typical one for 50-year-olds, for example, would apparently be aging 25 percent faster than normal.

Already the molecular clock has yielded interesting findings. Men appear to age on average 4 percent faster than women, the scientists have found, which may largely explain why women’s life expectancy exceeds men’s by about 6 percent worldwide. And the research has shed intriguing light on cancer: The clock indicated that tumor cells have aged, on average, 40 percent more than normal cells taken from the same patients.

More here.