Jonathan Galassi in the New York Review of Books:

If you don’t count Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino (1923–1985) is the postwar Italian prose writer who has had the largest and most enduring impact outside his own country. (As a sign of this, it’s worth noting that this is the tenth consideration of his work to appear in these pages since 1970.) Calvino’s refined, gently pessimistic, humane irony rode the wave of the deconstruction of realistic fiction the way the more programmatic Frenchnouveau roman and OULIPO writers could not, gently unmasking narratorial trade secrets and reminding readers of the self-reflexive nature of the fictional game, while continuing to deliver appetizing fabulist delights.

Postwar Italian fiction offered an embarrassment of riches as substantial as that of any other European country, starting with Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s magisterial, posthumously published The Leopard (1958)—though it might arguably be considered the last great novel of the old school. Before the war, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese had been greatly influenced by Hemingway and American realism; they were followed by a generation that included Giorgio Bassani, Alberto Moravia and his wife Elsa Morante, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Natalia Ginzburg, Leonardo Sciascia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Primo Levi, to name only the most prominent—most of whom make appearances in this consistently absorbing and suggestive selection of Calvino’s letters, chosen by Michael Wood from the several thousand pages of his literary correspondence published in Italy.

More here.

Aiden Arnold in Scientific American:

Spatial cognition is the study of how the mind’s cognitive architecture perceives, organizes and interacts with physical space. It has long been of interest to philosophers and scientists, with perhaps the biggest historical step towards our modern ideas occurring within Immanuel Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason(1781/1787). Kant argued that space as we know it is a preconscious organizing feature of the human mind, a scaffold upon which we’re able to understand the physical world of objects, extension and motion. In a sense, space to Kant was a window into the world, rather than a thing to be perceived in it.

While philosophers following Kant have debated his theory on space perception, it served to lay the groundwork for the twentieth century empirical investigation into how the mind constructs the space that we experience. A key piece to how this happens was provided in 1948 by American psychologist Edward Tolman.

Tolman’s main interest was studying the behavior of rats in mazes – specifically, he was interested in whether a rat came to understand the layout of an environment through purely behavioral mechanisms, or if there was a cognitive process underlying their navigation ability.

More here.

Mustafa Akyol in Foreign Policy:

“Where they gather 100,000, I can bring together 1 million.”

That was not only one of the highlights of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's initial reaction to the massive protest against his government that shook Turkey in the past weekend. It was also the gist of his problem.

Erdogan, the most popular premier Turkey has seen in the past half-century, believes in what political scientists would call a “majoritarian democracy.” In other words, he believes that once he gets the majority of the votes — which he has done successfully throughout the past decade — he has the right to make every single political decision in the country. He disregards all opposing views, and, furthermore, employs an overbearing tone to shout them down.

The recent dispute over Istanbul's Taksim Square, which triggered the demonstrations, was a perfect example. Erdogan wants to rebuild the square according to his own vision, so the Istanbul municipality, which is controlled by his political party, initiated a reconstruction project. One of the details is the replacement of Gezi Park, a small green area, with a reconstructed Ottoman military barracks, which, as Erdogan said in passing, can also serve as a shopping mall.

But many Taksim residents want to keep their park as it is, and some founded a civil society initiative asking to be heard. But the prime minister never wanted to listen. Instead, when they launched the “Occupy Taksim” campaign last week, a movement with a similar spirit to the “Occupy” movements in Western countries, Erdogan's government responded in a way one should not see in any democracy — with a police attack on peaceful demonstrators with tear gas and water canons.

More here.

Elsewhere

I’d like to live Elsewhere.
In hand-embroidered towns.

To meet those
who are not born into the world.

At last we would be happily alone.
No stop would wait for us.

No arrival. No departure.
Evanescence in a museum.

No wars would fight for us.
No humanity. No army. No weapon.

Tipsy death. It would be fun.
In the library a multi-volume time.

Love. A mad chapter.
It would turn the pages of our hearts in a whisper
.
.
by Ewa Lipska
from Ja
publisher: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003
translation: Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska
from: The New Century
publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2009

Read more »

From Nature:

Couples in the United States who meet online seem to enjoy at least as much marital bliss as those who meet in more traditional venues, according to the results of an online survey of more than 19,000 people funded by online dating service eHarmony. The survey's participants consisted of people who married between 2005 and 2012. About 35% reported that they had met their spouse online, more than through introductions by friends, work and school combined. The study revealed that people who used this method to meet their spouses were slightly older, wealthier, more educated and more likely to be employed than those who went with tradition¹. Yet only about 45% of these online meetings took place on a dating site; the rest occurred through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as chat rooms, online communities, virtual worlds, multi-player games, blogs and discussion boards.

“Surprisingly, we found that marriages that started online were associated with better outcomes,” says psychologist and lead author John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, Illinois, who is also a scientific adviser to eHarmony.

More here.

Abigail Zuger in The New York Times:

At some point between George Washington and Colonel Sanders, white hair and a cane turned from symbols of elegance to suggestions of decrepitude, and an industry was born. Not that the fountain of youth wasn’t always sought after. But to look young, think young, feel young — those are distinctly modern goals.

Ms. Kessler, a no longer young but not quite old journalist who sneakily never does mention her chronological age, decided to test a host of popular techniques on herself. “I did everything,” she tells her readers, “so you don’t have to.” She starts with the cosmetics of aging, visiting a group of researchers at the University of North Carolina who specialize in digitally aging faces. Their work provides a detailed scientific analysis of the wreckage time’s chariot leaves behind: The face alone sustains almost two dozen separate assaults, from sunken cheeks to larger ears (the cartilage actually grows). With a rendition of her aged self in hand, Ms. Kessler investigates plastic surgery options, supplementing Internet window shopping with a few in-person visits. Everything she hears is light on the blood and gore, heavy on the appealing metaphors. Young skin is spandex; older is linen and needs loving attention. “I am seduced by this language,” she admits. Ultimately, though, she forgoes major procedures in favor of a little botulinum toxin to the forehead (“the change is subtle, like good lighting”) and a variety of potions and laser treatments to the rest of the face (it looks “brighter and more alive”). Surgery on the rest of the body she leaves to those with “more money than sense.” Then it is on to the body’s interior. Ms. Kessler’s first step is a complete evaluation of her risks for imminent collapse, with measurements of blood pressure, cholesterol, stamina, flexibility, oxygen-using ability. She even has a researcher check the health of her mitochondria, cell components whose vigor wanes with age. It turns out she has the mitochondria of a fit young woman, “way too much” body fat, fabulous blood pressure and iffy cholesterol. Time to embark on the cure. To eat herself younger, Ms. Kessler starves, diets, detoxes, cleanses, and supercharges her meals with berries, salmon and all the other good-fat-filled, antioxidant-rich edibles of current vogue. To sweat herself younger, she stretches, lifts weights, runs races, and signs up for not one but two classes featuring the repeated spurts of all-out exertion thought to optimize fitness. Ms. Kessler ingests a variety of vitamins and other compounds, suspending her otherwise reliable skepticism when it comes to several suspicious-sounding Eastern teas. She lies on a hypnotist’s couch to cultivate calm and optimism. It is this forward-looking spirit which, she suspects, kept her great-great-grandmother, known to all as “Old Oldie,” preparing the family breakfast well into her 10th decade.

After a year of all this activity comes Ms. Kessler’s big reveal, and indeed she has improved enough in some objective measures of biologic age to support current estimates that a full 70 percent of the disability of age may be caused by factors within our control. (The other 30 percent is genetic, and even the most energetic guinea pig can’t do a thing about it.)

More here.

Gregory Currie in The NYT's The Stone:

Here, quickly, is a reason we already have for thinking the idea of moral and social learning from literature may be misguided.

One reason people like Martha Nussbaum have argued for the benefits of literature is that literature, or fictional narrative of real quality, deals in complexity. Literature turns us away from the simple moral rules that so often prove unhelpful when we are confronted with messy real-life decision making, and gets us ready for the stormy voyage through the social world that sensitive, discriminating moral agents are supposed to undertake. Literature helps us, in other words, to be, or to come closer to being, moral “experts.”

The problem with this argument is that there’s long been evidence that much of what we take for expertise in complex and unpredictable domains – of which morality is surely one – is bogus. Beginning 50 years ago with work by the psychologist Paul Meehl, study after study has shown that following simple rules – rules that take account of many fewer factors than an expert would bother to consider – does at least as well and generally better than relying on an expert’s judgment. (Not that rules do particularly well either; but they do better than expert judgment.)

Some of the evidence for this view is convincingly presented in Daniel Kahneman’s recent book “Thinking Fast and Slow”: spectacular failures of expertise include predictions of the future value of wine, the performance of baseball players, the health of newborn babies and a couple’s prospects for marital stability.

Michel Rocard in Project Syndicate:

Despite the frequency with which the phrase “international community” is invoked, its precise meaning – like its origins – is difficult to discern. And, as France’s recent intervention in Mali has shown, this ambiguity lies at the root of many of today’s most urgent foreign-policy problems.

For some, an international community simply does not exist. For others, the term refers, more pragmatically, to all countries when they decide to act together. Still another, more accurate definition encompasses all countries with international influence – that is, any country whose identity and sovereignty is recognized, and that chooses to participate in global discussions and decision-making.

Beyond semantics lies the more consequential, but equally ambiguous, question of the international community’s role and responsibility. Just as too broad a definition could undermine a country’s sovereignty, too narrow a definition – like that which seems to predominate today – allows violence and instability to proliferate.

For centuries, sovereign states have regulated their relations – from ending wars and demarcating borders to establishing diplomatic privileges and conducting trade – with treaties. Together, these official agreements comprise international law, which compensates for its lack of specific penalties by establishing strict and unambiguous concepts and one overarching sanction – universal blame for its transgression – that matters to everybody.

And yet, throughout these centuries of treaty-making, violence between countries persisted. So countries began to deepen and develop international law by building shared institutions.

Katarzyna Gajewska. Miss Wind I.

Mixed media on newspaper.

More here and here.

Terry Eagleton in the Times Literary Supplement:

It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms. In fact, there is no reason why authors should have anything particularly striking to say about writing, let alone about Kashmir or the Continuity IRA. Their comments on their own work can be even more obtuse than those of their critics. If T. S. Eliot really did believe that The Waste Land was merely a piece of rhythmical grumbling, as he once claimed, he should never have been awarded the Order of Merit.

Coetzee’s comments on the current economic crisis are not only wrongheaded but fatuous. Nothing has really happened to the world economy, he writes airily to Auster, other than a change of statistics. It is unlikely that the Bank of England, not to speak of those who have had their homes or livelihoods snatched from them by financial gangsters, would be over-impressed by this argument. Neither, judging from his circumspect reply, is Paul Auster, though he is too respectful of his renowned colleague to say so outright. Mysteriously, Coetzee goes on to suggest that putting this right requires an entirely new economic system, a piece of logic that his correspondent wisely leaves untouched. The truth is that neither man knows anything about economics, and there is no reason why being skilled in handling a metaphor should grant you such insight.

More here.

Helen Epstein in The New Yorker:

In recent years, many victims of violence have written memoirs in which they seek out and confront the perpetrators who harmed them. The opposite is rare. Few perpetrators seek out their victims, let alone write books about them. But fifty years ago this month, Melita Maschmann, a former Nazi, published just such a book.

“Fazit,” which was translated as “Account Rendered” in 1964, is the memoir of a woman who, as a fifteen-year-old and against her family’s wishes, joined the Hitler Youth. Before and during the Second World War, Maschmann worked in the high echelons of press and propaganda of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ section of the Nazi youth organization, and, later, she supervised the eviction of Polish farmers and the resettlement of ethnic Germans on their farms. Arrested in 1945 at the age of twenty-seven, she completed a mandatory de-Nazification course and became a freelance journalist.

Soon after her release from internment in 1948, Maschmann wrote a letter to a Jewish former classmate with whom she had the kind of passionate friendship common among adolescent girls. She didn’t know if her friend had made it out of Berlin before the war, or if her mother (whose address she had obtained) would pass the letter on. “I don’t know if it reached you,” the author writes. “Since then I have often continued my conversation with you, awake and in dreams, but I have never tried to write any of it down. Now, today, I feel impelled to do so. I was prompted to this by a trivial incident. A woman spoke to me in the street and the way she held her head suddenly reminded me quite strikingly of you. But what is the real reason which made me sit down and write to you as soon as I came in? Perhaps in the intervening years I have, without being aware of it, prepared an account within me which must be presented.”

More here.

Afshin Shahi in Foreign Policy:

When someone mentions Iran, what images leap into your mind? Ayatollahs, religious fanaticism, veiled women? How about sexual revolution? That's right. Over the last 30 years, as the mainstream Western media has been preoccupied with the radical policies of the Islamic Republic, the country has undergone a fundamental social and cultural transformation.

While not necessarily positive or negative, Iran's sexual revolution is certainly unprecedented. Social attitudes have changed so much in the last few decades that many members of the Iranian diaspora are shellshocked when they visit the country: “These days Tehran makes London look like a conservative city,” a British-Iranian acquaintance recently told me upon returning from Tehran. When it comes to sexual mores, Iran is indeed moving in the direction of Britain and the United States — and fast.

Good data on Iranian sexual habits are, not surprisingly, tough to come by. But a considerable amount can be gleaned from the official statistics compiled by the Islamic Republic. Declining birth rates, for example, signal a wider acceptance of contraceptives and other forms of family planning — as well as a deterioration of the traditional role of the family. Over the last two decades, the country has experienced the fastest drop in fertility ever recorded in human history.

More here.

A blog that “imagines Beckham’s internal monologue as he collides with the Parisian intellectual tradition.”

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

I kept on coming back to that catchy opening line. Of The Outsider, I mean. ‘Mum died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.’ The thing is, Meursault, it’s like he’s injured, and then he’s brought back too soon. Which is when everything goes pear-shaped. The gaffer should have given him longer to get himself straight.

Your Mum dying and all, that’s got to hurt. Maybe, if she hadn’t died, Meursault would never have shot the guy on the beach. And then he might not have been handed the red card.

Funny how I was reading about Mrs Meursault kicking the bucket, and then it’s Maggie’s turn. La Dame de Fer as they call her here. Madame T. She was like a mother to the nation. And now she’s dead. The Iron Lady… it’s like in Terminator 2 when Arnie lowers himself down into the vat of molten metal. But with the thumbs up right at the end. He knows it’s the right thing to do. It had to be that way. No one goes on for ever.

It made me think of the novel I was reading in China, La Condition humaine. The bit where all prisoners are lined up by the locomotive. In chains. The train isn’t going anywhere. But they are firing up the engine anyway. And what are they using for fuel? The prisoners! One by one they’re chucked in the boiler. Then puffed up out of the funnel. Painful. But I could see what the author was getting at – we’re all going that way, aren’t we? Nothing but smoke in the end. Malraux, Camus, Thatcher, Bobby Moore – all gone. As Sartre said – how did it go? – everything is voué à l’échec. Doomed.

Charles S. Maier in Eurozine:

“The return of political economy to history” – this was the title of the Berlin Colloquium a few months ago. But had political economy ever really disappeared? Perhaps, relative to other specializations, it had claimed less attention from historians in recent decades; but of course it was hardly less relevant to developments in the world that historians were supposed to study. Why had it apparently ceased to serve as a methodology or approach? This little essay will try to suggest an answer. A related problem has bothered economists, who have taken note of the supposed disappearance of economic history and the history of economic thought as central concerns of their profession. The search for a remedy prompted a Cambridge, Massachusetts discussion two months after the Berlin meeting, as the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) summoned economists and economic historians to reflect on how economic history might claim a larger role in both economics and history departments.

The premise of both gatherings, in which this author participated – and no doubt of others as well, at which he was not present – was the same. Important approaches to analyzing society and economy, past and present, had fallen into disuse, even as they promised important and even necessary insight. From the viewpoint of the economists, “mainstream” analysis – the axiomatic “macro” and “micro” theory that culminated in general equilibrium theory expressed in partial differential equations – was thriving. From the viewpoint of the historians, social history, cultural history, the history of international and civil conflict, had claimed the efforts of young researchers, intellectuals, and the public in general for more than a decade. But somehow economic history, the history of economic thought and the history of political economy, had been eclipsed. But now, so the participants in both gatherings concluded, political economy was back or deserved to be back.

Deborah Solomon reviews Victor S. Navasky ‘The Art of Controversy,’ in The New York Times:

It has been eight years since a set of Danish cartoons portraying the prophet Muhammad incited rioting in much of the Muslim world. In the eyes of many Americans, the protests were incomprehensible, a collective temper tantrum spawned by dopey sketches. Muslims were accused, among much else, of lacking a sense of humor. But what if the outcry reflected less on Islamic culture than on cartoon culture, which has its own history of flare-ups and meltdowns? The question goes to the heart of Victor S. Navasky’s thoughtful and deftly illustrated book, “The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power.”

Navasky, a former editor of The Nation and the founding editor of the defunct humor magazine Monocle, has been described as a “word man,” but here he is eager to dwell among image people. He situates the Danish cartoons in exalted company, rubbing them up against the work of canonical masters of graphic satire like William Hogarth in 18th-century England and Honoré Daumier in 19th-­century France. In America, by contrast, political cartoonists are less recognized, perhaps because nothing grows stale faster than fresh newsprint, or perhaps because of the modernist bias that defines art as an elite affair from which any artist with a large following and a regular paycheck is disqualified.

Please Hold

This is the future, my wife says.
We are already there, and it’s the same
as the present. Your future, here, she says.
And I’m talking to a robot on the phone.
The robot is giving me countless options,
none of which answer to my needs.
Wonderful, says the robot
when I give him my telephone number.
And Great, says the robot
when I give him my account number.
I have a wonderful telephone number
and a great account number,
but I can find nothing to meet my needs
on the telephone, and into my account
(which is really the robot’s account)
goes money, my money, to pay for nothing.
I’m paying a robot for doing nothing.
This call is free of charge, says the mind-reading robot.
Yes but I'm paying for it, I shout,
out of my wonderful account
into my great telephone bill.
Wonderful, says the robot.
And my wife says, This is the future.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand, says the robot.
Please say Yes or No.
Or you can say Repeat or Menu.
You can say Yes, No, Repeat or Menu,
Or you can say Agent if you’d like to talk
to someone real, who is just as robotic.
I scream Agent! and am cut off,
and my wife says, This is the future.
We are already there and it’s the same
as the present. Your future, here, she says.
And I’m talking to a robot on the phone,
and he is giving me no options
in the guise of countless alternatives.
We appreciate your patience. Please hold.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please hold.
Eine fucking Kleine Nachtmusik.
And the robot transfers me to himself.
Your call is important to us, he says.
And my translator says, This means
your call is not important to them.
And my wife says, This is the future.
And my translator says, Please hold
means that, for all your accomplishments,
the only way you can now meet your needs
is by looting. Wonderful, says the robot

Please hold. Please grow old. Please grow cold.
Please do what you’re told. Grow old. Grow cold.
This is the future. Please hold.
.
.

From National Post:

In the last decades of communist power, Jews in the Soviet Union discovered that they had achieved a previously unimaginable advantage over Gentiles. Jews could get out of Russia and Gentiles couldn’t. Moscow, under pressure from the US, had agreed to give a limited number of Jews exit visas to Israel. Many non-Jews also wanted to leave and imagined escaping by claiming to be Jews. Some discovered that they had always felt Jewish and began advertising for Jewish grandmothers. For centuries Jews in Czarist Russia had been banned from many of the empire’s regions. Thousands were killed in pogroms that the government supported. After the 1917 revolution their religion was suppressed and the word JEW was printed on internal passports, their identity cards. Now Russian Gentiles were pretending to be Jews! It was an astounding reversal of fortune. Naturally, this situation cried out for Jewish comment. Sure enough, someone came up with the perfect joke: Certain resourceful Georgians (the story goes) forge passports that will prove them Jewish and win them visas. Alas, the authorities discover the scam. Their punishment? They aren’t jailed or killed but they must retain their Jewish identity forever. Both stories, the facts and the comic legend, appear in a richly absorbing new book, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton University Press), by one of the most interesting scholars Canada has produced, Ruth R. Wisse.

…Irony is central to Jewish humour and Wisse suggests that if irony were an Olympic event, Jews would bring home the gold.

More here.