“When thinking about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream,” Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote 30 years ago. A Polish journalist, Kapuscinski was ostensibly reporting on the fall of the shah of Iran, but his devoted Polish readers knew that everything he said applied to their part of the world as well. “A dictatorship . . . leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding.” Far more than peoples who’ve weathered revolutions and counterrevolutions, Americans too often assume that once a tyranny has collapsed and elections follow — whether in the Soviet Union, Iraq or Egypt — whatever comes next will be far better. Things are more complicated, of course, and this is the timely theme of Marci Shore’s “Taste of Ashes,” a book by turns insightful and exasperating.

more from Adam Hochschild at the NY Times here.

David Wolpe in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“I am a poor lost woof from the kennel of Fate looking for a dog to belong to.” The Bellow tone: This phrase from his letters gives us the winsome Bellow, seeking succor for his battered heart. This is Herzog the mess, trod upon by life; reading the letters (Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor, 2012) we regularly come upon the Bellovian combination of demotic and exalted, Schopenhauer and sauerkraut, as if a teenage driver got hold of a high speed test car. Bellow’s style is street sophisticate, ornate and slangy, a tough dressed in tails, guided by a supernally shrewd intelligence that scoops up an entire character in a passing metaphor.

Bellow knew all this before we did, of course; each effect was written and rewritten, and his almost formless books are the messy, canny reflection of a remarkable mind. Still, he hides less than other authors, giving himself to his readers with both hands; this is not Joyce’s artist, like God beyond creation, paring his nails. This is the author as courtesan, beguiling us not only into reading, but loving him.

So what reader of Bellow does not wonder about the man? After James Atlas’s 2002 biography, widely panned, with its portrayal of an altogether unappealing philanderer, is there balm in Gilead?

“Our father was always easily angered, prone to argument, acutely sensitive, and palpably vulnerable to criticism.” Reading this sentence in Greg Bellow’s new memoir, Saul Bellow’s Heart, one remembers the saying attributed to a French King, “I would rather be killed by my enemies than by my children.” Maybe we should have stuck with Atlas.

More here.

Admirers of the late WG Sebald’s inimitable blend of essay, memoir, novel and found images, deployed in books such as Vertigo (1990) and The Rings of Saturn (1999), will be grateful for A Place in the Country. The first of Sebald’s prose works to be translated into English since 2005 (he died in 2001) offers welcome glimpses into his stylistic and thematic preoccupations. The volume collects six pieces of writing about artists for whom Sebald declares an “unwavering affection”. These “extended marginal notes and glosses”, as the author modestly calls them, connect and overlap through shared allusions, recurring subjects and a common tone. Sebald’s fascination with written and visual ephemera is vividly displayed in the first essay, about the German-Swiss writer of almanacs Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826).

more from Ángel Gurría-Quintana at the FT here.

But just who was Herschel Grynszpan, the young man whose “short, strange life” Kirsch sets out to unlock with his handy tool kit of talents? In the author’s telling, he emerges as a contradictory character: small in stature, sickly, a mediocre student, yet at the same time a tough and cunning scrapper who, seeing all the abuses visited upon his people by the Nazis, began while still quite young to dream of exacting revenge upon the Germans. He did much of this dreaming not in Germany, where he was born into a family of poor Jewish émigrés from Poland, but in France, where his parents sent him at age 15 to escape the growing persecution at home. Of course, France itself was hardly free of anti-Semitism, especially in the year of Grynszpan’s arrival, 1936, when local racists were protesting the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, France’s first Jewish prime minister. The phrase “Better Hitler Than Blum” echoed through the streets of Paris. What prompted Grynszpan to strike out against the Germans, however, was not what he was witnessing in France, but a brutal action by Hitler’s government: the deportation of 12,000 Ostjuden (Eastern Jews), including Grynszpan’s parents, to a no-man’s land on the German-Polish border.

more from David Clay Large at the LA Times here.

You might think the speed-of-light is the absolute limit that things can travel through the Universe, and you'd be right, “in theory”. But in practice, the limit's actually a little bit lower! Want to find out what it is, and why? (Yes, you do!!)

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang!:

If you’ve been around the block once or twice, you know that the speed of light in a vacuum — 299,792,458 meters-per-second — is the absolute maximum speed that any form of energy in the Universe can travel at. In shorthand, this speed is known as c to physicists.

But you or I, no matter how hard we try, will never attain that speed. There’s a simple reason for this: we have mass. And for an object with mass, you can accelerate it all you want, but it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach c, and I’m sorry, folks, there’s only a finite amount of energy in the Universe.

But that doesn’t mean we settle for 90% of c, or 99%, or 99.9999%. We always strive for that extra fraction of speed, that extra bit of energy, that extra push ever-closer to the unattainable limit. You may be most familiar with our latest attempts to do this at CERN, where we’ve recently discovered the Higgs Boson.

By smashing two protons into one another, one moving at 299,792,447 meters per second (just 11 m/s shy of the speed of light) in one direction and the other moving at the same speed in the opposite direction, we can produce incredibly energetic particles, bounded only by the energy available via Einstein’s E=mc². After the LHC’s upgrade is complete, that speed will increase to 299,792,455 m/s, which will make these the fastest protons ever created on Earth.

More here.

Bored
.
All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.
.

by Margaret Atwood
from Morning in the Burned House
Houghton Mifflin, 1996

From The Guardian:

We are in the middle of a debate about the status of neuroscience. Against the deceptive allure of neuroimaging and reported sightings of “brain centres” for everything from sarcasm to religious experience, there are stern reassurances that, if we were ever to work out the scientific basis of consciousness, it would be too complicated for us to understand. Is neuroscience really changing the way we comprehend ourselves?

If tracing behaviour and experience to its neural underpinnings really offers a new understanding of humanity, aren't novelists bound to draw on it in revealing how their characters understand themselves? In one sense, neuro-explanations seem to challenge the mechanisms by which novels work. Neuroscientists warn us that we may have no freewill, no “self” at the helm; their work shows that our memories are leaky reconstructions and that even our visual perception of the world is a system of illusions. How do these messages change what we do, how we feel, how we decide to live? Fiction is a perfect medium for exploring these questions. A 2009 article by Marco Roth in n+1 magazine pointed out that neuroscience in fiction is often connected with atypical and pathological behaviour. For example, Gary Lambert's depression in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections gives a central role to his screwy neurotransmitters, but we don't get neuro-explanations for the (debatably) more sane members of the Lambert family. Richard Powers's The Echo Maker is more interested in the brain-damaged patient, Mark Schluter, than with the science-inflected self-descriptions of his neuropsychologist, Gerald Weber.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A group of students at Cornell, born in Asia but raised in the United States by immigrant parents, were instructed to keep a diary. They struggled to recall the events of their own daily lives when they were later quizzed about them, remembering fewer details about their experiences than their Euro-American counterparts. Qi Wang, the Cornell scholar of “cross-cultural” cognition who conducted the experiment, speculated that Asians were not more forgetful but that they had, perhaps, filtered out the contents of their own stories, deeming them unworthy of being encoded as memories in the first place.

The novelist Gish Jen cites these findings in her curious new book about Asian and Asian-American narratives, “Tiger Writing,” as an explanation for the “notably un-self-centered” approach of her father’s memoir. The account, which he started writing when he was 85 years old, offered few details of his own grandfather’s “appearance or personality or tastes — the sorts of things we in the West might include as a way of conveying both his uniqueness and his importance as a figure in the narrative.” It instead described at great length the number of doors in the house where her father grew up and whether they were open or shut — concentrating not on his individual self, but on the context within which that self was situated, and by which it was constrained. The world he describes is not, as Jen puts it, “a modern, linear world of conflict and rising action, but rather one of harmony and eternal, cyclical action, in which order, ritual and peace are beauty, and events spell, not excitement or progress, but disruption.”

More here.

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff respond to the controversy over their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” in the NYT:

Last week, three economists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, released a paper criticizing our findings. They correctly identified a spreadsheet coding error that led us to miscalculate the growth rates of highly indebted countries since World War II. But they also accused us of “serious errors” stemming from “selective exclusion” of relevant data and “unconventional weighting” of statistics — charges that we vehemently dispute. (In an online-only appendix accompanying this essay, we explain the methodological and technical issues that are in dispute.)

Our research, and even our credentials and integrity, have been furiously attacked innewspapers and on television. Each of us has received hate-filled, even threatening, e-mail messages, some of them blaming us for layoffs of public employees, cutbacks in government services and tax increases. As career academic economists (our only senior public service has been in the research department at the International Monetary Fund) we find these attacks a sad commentary on the politicization of social science research. But our feelings are not what’s important here.

The authors of the paper released last week — Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin — say our “findings have served as an intellectual bulwark in support of austerity politics” and urge policy makers to “reassess the austerity agenda itself in both Europe and the United States.”

A sober reassessment of austerity is the responsible course for policy makers, but not for the reasons these authors suggest. Their conclusions are less dramatic than they would have you believe. Our 2010 paper found that, over the long term, growth is about 1 percentage point lower when debt is 90 percent or more of gross domestic product. The University of Massachusetts researchers do not overturn this fundamental finding, which several researchers have elaborated upon.

The academic literature on debt and growth has for some time been focused on identifying causality. Does high debt merely reflect weaker tax revenues and slower growth? Or does high debt undermine growth?

But the true catastrophe (and here we come to the second proposition of Calasso’s Something Big) occurred in the eighteenth century. Calasso puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of Enlightenment philosophers who sought to banish the luminous world of the gods and replace it with science and technology. But any attempt to banish the gods ‑ or, less poetically, to fail to recognise that the irrational side of human consciousness needs outlets ‑ necessarily diminishes what it means to be human. Fortunately, and here we come to the third and final proposition of Calasso’s Something Big, a group of modern writers (among them Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Kafka) sacrificed their lives in order to create “absolute literature”. It is absolute for two reasons. First, it serves as a means to regain access to that zone of secret knowledge or consciousness ‑ the absolute of pure Being ‑ that has disappeared from the soulless wasteland of rational modernity. Second, this literature is self-contained, devoid of aspirations to societal usefulness or functionality.

more from Michael McDonald at the Dublin Review of Books here.

From the depths of the postwar period’s most rigorous critique of art, in the midst of its most relentless exposure of every actual and imaginable artwork as “pseudo art,” Thomas Bernhard looks around at the assembled cultural elite of Vienna and finds them guilty of “pretense,” “social climbing,” “lies,” “desperate” bids for “social recognition.”9 This Austrian writer, who began life under the nazis, devoted his late work to exposing the experience of absorption in a work of art as a form of social domination, and the creation and consumption of artworks as concealed pleas for social distinction.10 And yet, this dismissal of every artwork that passes before him is not only compatible with a commitment to art as the highest human value, that commitment motivates the critique. His most damning attack on his contemporaries is that “they’ve quite simply failed to achieve the highest, and as I see it only the highest can bring real satisfaction” (W, 54). Written in the 1980’s, Bernhard’s Woodcutters is not unusual in its insistence that the audience’s relation to art works is a disguised way of relating to others. It is unusual in taking this condition as a challenge to art to realize its pretensions. The urgency of this challenge is not purely or merely artistic.

more from Michael W. Clune at nonsite here.

What does the poetry of Szymborska, marked as it is by such a lightness of touch, skeptically smiling, playful, have to do with the history of the twentieth, or any other, century? In its beginnings, it had much to do with it, but its mature phase moves away from images of linear time rushing toward utopia or an apocalyptic catastrophe, as the just-ending century liked to believe. Her dimension is personal, of one person who reflects on the human condition. It is true that her reflection goes together with a remarkable reticence, as if the poet found herself on a stage with the decor for a preceding play, a play which changed the individual into nothing, an anonymous cipher, and in such circumstances to talk about oneself is not indicated. Szymborska’s poems explore private situations, yet they are sufficiently generalized, so that she is able to avoid confessions. In her well-known poem about a cat in an empty apartment, instead of complaint about the loss of the husband of a friend, we hear: “To die/one does not do that to a cat.”

more from Czeslaw Milosz’s 1996 essay at the NYRB here.

Charles Isherwood in the New York Times:

Watching the fierce clash over the salad course during a dinner party in “Disgraced,” the rollicking new play by Ayad Akhtar, feels at times like observing a hotly contested game of Twister. As two couples exchange observations about faith and politics in the modern world, the intellectual thickets they find themselves in become increasingly tangled. The language grows more testy, tempers begin to flare, and you have the unsettling sense that someone is going to lose his or her balance and take a hard fall. You’re just not sure who it’s going to be.

The players are a quartet of accomplished New Yorkers of differing races, creeds and, yes, colors, although they have all arrived at the same high plateau of worldly achievement and can agree on the important things, like the tastiness of the fennel and anchovy salad and the banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery. What they cannot agree on — and what will ultimately tear apart at least one of the relationships in the play — is who they really are and what they stand for, once the veneer of civilized achievement has been scraped away to reveal more atavistic urges.

“Disgraced,” which opened on Monday night at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater in a sleek production directed by Kimberly Senior, is a continuously engaging, vitally engaged play about thorny questions of identity and religion in the contemporary world, with an accent on the incendiary topic of how radical Islam and the terrorism it inspires have affected the public discourse. In dialogue that bristles with wit and intelligence, Mr. Akhtar, a novelist and screenwriter, puts contemporary attitudes toward religion under a microscope, revealing how tenuous self-image can be for people born into one way of being who have embraced another.

More here.

Frank Wilczek in Big Questions Online:

The first inkling of its existence came in the 1960s. By that time physicists had devised especially beautiful equations for describing elementary particles with zero mass. Nature likes those equations, too. The photons responsible for electromagnetism, the gravitons responsible for gravity, and the color gluons responsible for the strong force are all zero mass particles. Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force are three of the four fundamental interactions known to physics. The other is the weak force.

A problem arose, however, for the W and Z bosons, which are responsible for the weak force. Though they have many properties in common with photons and color gluons, W and Z bosons have non-zero mass. So it appeared that one could not use the beautiful equations for zero mass particles to describe them. The situation grew desperate: The equations for particles with the properties of W and Z, when forced to accommodate non-zero mass, led to mathematical inconsistencies.

The right kind of cosmic medium could rescue the situation, however. Such a medium could slow down the motion of W and Z particles, and make them appear to have non-zero mass, even though their fundamental mass––that is, the mass they would exhibit in ideally empty space––is zero. Using that idea, theorists built a wonderfully successful account of all the phenomena of the weak interaction, fully worthy to stand beside our successful theories of the electromagnetic, strong, and gravitational interactions. Our laws of fundamental physics reached a qualitatively new level of completeness and economy.

More here.

A very short story by Randa Jarrar in Guernica:

She fucks a Sailor, a Turkish sailor, the summer she spends in Istanbul. When she comes home to Wisconsin, it takes her three days to come clean about it to her husband.

He says this doesn’t bother him, and she tells him that it bothers her that it doesn’t bother him. He asks if she prefers him to be the kind of man who is bothered by fleeting moments, and she tells him that yes, she prefers that he be that kind of man. He tells her he thinks she married him because he is precisely the kind of man who doesn’t dwell on fleeting moments, because he is the kind of man who does not hold a grudge. She tells him that holding a grudge and working up some anger about one’s wife fucking a sailor is not the same thing. He agrees that holding a grudge isn’t the same as working up some anger about one’s wife fucking a sailor, but, he adds, one’s wife, specifically his own, would never leave him for a sailor, and not a Turkish sailor. In fact, he says, she did not leave him for the Turkish sailor. She is here. So why should he be angry?

Now, she becomes angry, and asks him why he assumes she did not consider leaving him for the sailor. Besides, she says, she and the sailor shared a Muslim cultural identity, something she does not share with her husband. She asks him if he thought of that.

He says he had not thought of it, and that even if she had considered leaving him for the Turkish sailor, she must have decided not to.

More here.

The Conductor

From Guardian:

In Tom Campbell's pleasing novel Fold there's a character who is fond of the aspirational sporting slogan most often attributed to Gary Player: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” It is one of the more dispiriting slogans of our times (and indeed, the character who lives by it is a most unpleasant person); we also have Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, whose core message is that the more work you put into something, the more successful you'll be. This may sound like a statement of the obvious. But there is more to success than hard work and application, and we should be grateful to Ed Smith for pointing it out in this brief but elegant and resonant book.

Smith's first career was as a cricketer; he applied himself, we learn here, to becoming the best. It was as if he had inhaled Gladwell's book before it had even been written. From the age of four, by his account, he would spend hours in front of the television, watching his hero, Geoffrey Boycott. For those who know little or nothing of cricket, Boycott was an unlikely hero for a child: a batsman who would devote himself single-mindedly to amassing his own score through the application of dry and rigorous technique. Smith could spend hours studying his technique because Boycott stayed in for hours, often to the exasperation even of his team-mates. No bars at cricket grounds ever emptied when the news went round that Boycott had arrived at the crease. He was the archetypal sporting figure who refused to believe in luck. It was all down to technique. Smith's technique was good enough for him to get picked for England. But after a promising start, he never flourished, and was dropped after only a few games, his final innings closing thanks to a poor umpiring decision. Five years later, he broke his ankle in a freak accident (his physios didn't realise it was broken for some time, and the punishing regime of exercise they imposed makes for uncomfortable reading) and had time to think about the luck he had hitherto disdained.

More here.

From Nature:

Birds of a feather may flock together, but do birds that flock together develop distinct cultures? Two studies published today in Science^{1, 2} find strong evidence that, at the very least, monkeys that troop together and whales that pod together do just that. And they manage it in the same way that humans do: by copying and learning from each other. A team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, created two distinct cultures — 'blue' and 'pink' — among groups of wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) in South Africa¹. The researchers trained two sets of monkeys to eat maize (corn) dyed one of those two colours but eschew maize dyed the other colour. The scientists then waited to see how the groups behaved when newcomers — babies and migrating males — arrived.

Both sets of newcomers seemed to follow social cues when selecting their snacks. Baby monkeys ate the same colour maize as their mothers. Seven of the ten males that migrated from one colour culture to another adopted the local colour preference the first time that they ate any maize. The trend was even stronger when they first fed with no higher-ranking monkey around, with nine of the ten males choosing the locally preferred variety. The only immigrant to buck this trend was a monkey who assumed the top rank in his new group as soon as he got there — and he may not have given a fig what anyone else ate. “The take-home message is that social learning — learning from others rather than through individual trial and error — is a more potent force in shaping wild animals’ behaviour than has been recognized so far,” says Andrew Whiten, an evolutionary and developmental psychologist at St Andrews and co-author of the paper.

More here.