Jeffrey Frank in the NYT's The Stone:

For years, visitors to the Copenhagen City Museum wandered into a modest room that contains a few artifacts from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s life: portraits, meerschaum pipes, first editions and, best of all, the desk where he stood and produced with preternatural speed a series of original and difficult works, many of them written pseudonymously and published in editions that numbered in the hundreds — among them “Either-Or,” “Fear and Trembling,” “The Concept of Dread” and “Repetition.” The exhibit has been refreshed to mark Kierkegaard’s 200th birthday on May 5th. His belongings — a large library, furniture, paintings, and knickknacks —were pretty well dispersed after his death in 1855, but the expanded version will add an “outer circle” of relevant material. Manuscripts and papers from the Kierkegaard archives will be on display at the Royal Library.

The philosopher’s grave is fairly close by, in Assistens Kirkegaard—his forbidding name is a variation of the Danish word for cemetery — in the Norrebro district, which is also the burial ground of many other notable figures, including Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr and the American tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

Though in death he rests in this distinguished company, Kierkegaard was markedly less revered in life. His contemporaries saw him as a troublesome, quarrelsome figure. He was a familiar sight, strolling about the Old City, where he created the illusion that he was merely an underemployed gentleman. The satirical weekly Corsair published nasty caricatures of him and mocked his writing and pseudonymous disguises. He was gossiped about when he broke his engagement to the 18-year-old Regine Olsen, and was feared by his targets, among them, Hans Christian Andersen, whose early novels Kierkegaard eviscerated in his 1838 debut, “From the Papers of One Still Living.” Shortly before he died at age 42, he began a bitter ground war with the state Lutheran church. For his biographers and interpreters, his private life remains a nest of secrets.

Marina Petrova on Jim Holt's book, in the LA Review of Books:

JIM HOLT IS AN EXPERT AT NOTHING. He has gone on a world tour of modern philosophers, physicists, theologians, and writers, and asked them a question that is, he writes, “so profound it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Holt visited esteemed thinkers — Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, Adolf Grünbaum, and John Updike — in their natural habitats, places like Oxford or Café de Flore in Paris. Holt presents their theories in Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story in a manner a layperson could grasp, and with wit and dry humor a cynic can appreciate. A philosopher, author, and essayist, Holt gives these great minds physical bodies, allowing his readers a glimpse into the lives of our own endangered species — humans that think for a living.

Holt grew up in a religious family, but he “had begun to develop an interest in existentialism” in high school, he writes, because it was “a philosophy that seemed to hold out hope for resolving my adolescent insecurities, or at least elevating them to a grander plain.” His parents and the nuns in his elementary school initially taught him that the world existed because God created it out of nothing. That answer didn’t quite jive with him, but that the world might exist for no reason at all seemed a bit unnerving. So Holt decided to play detective and attempt to make the universe answer for its existence.

Thinking for a living is a luxury few have, and asking the big questions is rare once we leave college. How many of us regularly ponder the reasons for the world’s existence after a full day’s work, doing homework with the kids, paying bills, and arguing with the spouse over whose turn it is to buy groceries? At times, after a long day, nothingness doesn’t look so bad. While nothing is more human than to contemplate our own existence, we just often forget about it when we grow up, leaving it to the metaphysicians, philosophers, and children. To read Jim Holt’s book after our daily minutiae is to remember what it was like, when we were younger, to mull over the question of existence and nothingness.

In the Boston Review:

WA: Religion in South Asia has been characterized by extremism and intolerance: the Taliban in Pakistan, the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the continued prominence of Narendra Modi in India. What should the role of religion be in a purportedly democratic modern South Asia, and can religious extremism be removed from the political theater?

PM: I don’t think so. Your question assumes that religion in modern democracy is an anachronism, one that progressive secularization will eventually mitigate. But this is an idealized view of modern democracy and secularism, not even validated by the United States, where religion plays such a major role in politics. The problem is that religion becomes a basis for identity and community in electoral politics when other forms of association—trade unions, for instance, or peasant groups, or empowered local governments—are weak or nonexistent. So there will always be politicians making appeals to religious solidarity, and there will also be extremists seeking to channel militant disaffection, whether among the poor or, as in Modi’s case, among those in the middle class that consider the poor and religious minorities a nuisance.

The question is whether those opposed to extremists can creatively deploy South Asia’s religious and spiritual traditions in their quest for social and economic justice. The question arises because the old Western language of politics, too identified with the hypocrisy and venality of local elites, doesn’t seem persuasive anymore, even in the West itself. And the old binaries of secularism versus religion or democracy versus theocracy don’t clarify much. We need a fresh vocabulary to both describe our political dilemmas and to seek solutions to them.

More here.

Bruce Stone in Numéro Cinq:

On March 19, the literary marketplace welcomed a new title by the young Vladimir Nabokov, who hasn’t been greatly inconvenienced by his death in 1977. The Tragedy of Mister Morn, a verse drama written in Berlin in 1924 and never published during Nabokov’s lifetime, reads as a kind of retread of Othello, set among the Bolsheviks: the plot points to Leninism, but the artifice is all Shakespeare, and the play’s release is timely on both counts. Six days earlier (a near eclipse of Morn’s arrival), the Erarta Museum in St. Petersburg, then hosting a performance based on Nabokov’s Lolita, absorbed the latest attack by the Orthodox Cossacks, a band of Russian conservatives that has been campaigning against Nabokov, denouncing his masterwork, since the start of the new year. Among the more serious incursions, a theater producer was beaten in January, but perhaps the most emblematic gesture was the lobbing of a vodka bottle through a window of the Nabokov museum: tucked inside the bottle, a note condemned Nabokov as a pedophile and warned of the imminence of God’s wrath.

Viewed as domestic terrorism (even Cossacks have dreams), these acts seem comparatively tame, even quaint. As a more benign kind of vandalism (tell that to the producer), they make their point clearly enough, I suppose. But as literary criticism, they are an utter travesty, an intellectual obscenity that should make the Cossacks and their kin themselves the object of public and lasting derision (pillories and tomatoes or, at minimum, raspberries). A half century has passed since Lolita’s publication, yet here we are again—it seems inevitable—with the literal-minded and the simpletons, the well-meaning zealots and zombie mooncalves breaking out torches and pitchforks, vodka bottles and spray paint, to decry Lolita as the work of the devil.

More here.

Joseph S. Nye in Foreign Policy:

When Foreign Policy first published my essay “Soft Power” in 1990, who would have expected that someday the term would be used by the likes of Hu Jintao or Vladimir Putin? Yet Hu told the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 that China needed to increase its soft power, and Putin recently urged Russian diplomats to apply soft power more extensively. Neither leader, however, seems to have understood how to accomplish his goals.

Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes one wants, and that can be accomplished in three main ways — by coercion, payment, or attraction. If you can add the soft power of attraction to your toolkit, you can economize on carrots and sticks. For a rising power like China whose growing economic and military might frightens its neighbors into counter-balancing coalitions, a smart strategy includes soft power to make China look less frightening and the balancing coalitions less effective. For a declining power like Russia (or Britain before it), a residual soft power helps to cushion the fall.

The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority). But combining these resources is not always easy.

More here.

From Lucaleordini.com:

Slingshot, the book by Gabor George Burt, opens in Florence, in front of Michelangelo's David, with a brief but thorough analysis of the figure’s state of mind right before his duel with Goliath. Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was the site of an explosion of creativity unprecedented in human history – and a source of inspiration for me in illustrating two examples of meaningful innovation that took place just few hundred meters from Michelangelo's David. The protagonist in both examples is Roberto Benigni, the famous actor and director who won an Oscar for his 1998 film Life is Beautiful. In the first example, the scene is the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence, under the severe gaze of the statute of Dante mounted on the wall of the Basilica of Santa Croce. Here, Benigni explains, reads and recites the verses of the Divine Comedy. It is a singular, original, extraordinary event. His explanation is anything but academic: an interdisciplinary approach that relentlessly weaves together history, literature, theology, classical poetry, philosophy, morality, culture, and religion in an astonishing way that irresistibly engages the listener. His boundless passion for the subject brings his readings to elevated heights of spirituality, while at the same time entertaining with numerous reminders of and contextualizations into today’s Italy.

The second example follows in the footsteps of the first: this time Benigni presents, on television, the Constitution of the Italian Republic, the document that contains and inspires the principles upon which the democratic life of the country is founded, defining the rules and functioning of political life. In this case as well, Benigni's performance differs from the normal way of discussing legal matters. His visceral and uncontainable love for Italy, along with his gifts as an actor and comic, make such technical issues as law accessible, compelling, and fascinating. In both cases, the result was an extraordinary success in all respects, both as a televised event and for Benigni personally as an actor. In the first case, he reawakened in his audience the desire to re-read, to re-discover the Divine Comedy and become excited by the subject. In the second case, he reawakened patriotic pride in millions of people. He achieved success through stimulating and inspiring more engaging, interesting, and modern approaches to the teaching of the Divine Comedy and the Constitution.

…Dante, the opening of the Divine Comedy:

Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest, for the straightforward path had been lost.

In the course of our existence, many of us are forced to face the dark woods of our problems, and to find a guide who can show us the way out. It could help us to consider that, because of Virgil’s guidance, Dante “went out to gaze at the stars” only after having passed through the fires of hell.

More here. (Note: I heard Benigni recite (perform?) the XXXIII canto from Paradiso in 2003 and it inspired me to commit it to memory and to make my 9 year old daughter do the same. He is truly brilliant)

From The New York Times:

Kurzweil, author of “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” may be best known as a polymath inventor and futurist, but he’s really a cyborg sent back from the year 2029 to save humanity from the nature-nurture debate. His mission is not to provide a final score (nature 20 percent, nurture 80 percent!) but to reframe the dispute and the ancient anxieties that feed into it: What is the essence of identity? How do we slip the noose of determinism? Is our free will really free, and if it is free, is it really ours? These questions shift when you factor in technology and understand that the human future will be shaped by nature-­nurture-manufacture.

Kurzweil examines the human brain and makes a case for its artificial enhancement, if not total replacement. Apparently, the trick to reverse-engineering a brain is wrestling with “many billions of cells and trillions of connections” in order to extract the simple operating principles. He discusses how evolution expanded the human neocortex, and its current constraints. We can’t squeeze much more neocortex into our skulls, but we can augment our frontal lobes with technology. He walks readers through breathtaking experiments, like an artificial replacement for a rat hippocampus, and he proposes a few tweaks to the classic brain design, like a digital module to root out and resolve cognitive dissonance. Kurzweil’s vision of our super-enhanced future is completely sane and calmly reasoned, and his book should nicely smooth the path for the earth’s robot overlords, who, it turns out, will be us.

More here.

One Car Garage

Alexander Nazaryan in The New Yorker:

On August 6, 2010, a computer scientist named Vinay Deolalikar published a paper with a name as concise as it was audacious: “P ≠ NP.” If Deolalikar was right, he had cut one of mathematics’ most tightly tied Gordian knots. In 2000, the P = NP problem was designated by the Clay Mathematics Institute as one of seven Millennium Problems—“important classic questions that have resisted solution for many years”—only one of which has been solved since. (The Poincaré Conjecture was vanquished in 2003 by the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who refused the attached million-dollar prize.)

A few of the Clay problems are long-standing head-scratchers. The Reimann hypothesis, for example, made its debut in 1859. By contrast, P versus NP is relatively young, having been introduced by the University of Toronto mathematical theorist Stephen Cook in 1971, in a paper titled “The complexity of theorem-proving procedures,” though it had been touched upon two decades earlier in a letter by Kurt Gödel, whom David Foster Wallace branded “modern math’s absolute Prince of Darkness.” The question inherent in those three letters is a devilish one: Does P (problems that we can easily solve) equal NP (problems that we can easily check)?

Take your e-mail password as an analogy. Its veracity is checked within a nanosecond of your hitting the return key. But for someone to solve your password would probably be a fruitless pursuit, involving a near-infinite number of letter-number permutations—a trial and error lasting centuries upon centuries.

More here.

From The Talks:

Do you often have the feeling that people misunderstand you?

I feel that I am portrayed in the press as being this person who wears masks. But I feel that I am a completely transparent person and yet people seem to think that I am not. They are unable to deal with my candor and my honesty. I remember a girl, it was for this New York Magazine piece that came out a few months ago, that was very shocked when I talked about this cocaine mistake that I made.

That sounds interesting.

I tweeted drunkenly that I wanted some coke. And I said: I am going to tell you the whole story and you can print it. I don’t care. This is what really happened. She said: “I am really shocked that you are going to talk about this.” And I said, “What’s wrong about it? Why can’t you talk about it?” She thought I was playing a kind of game. Because I was so upfront in talking about it, that she was not able to believe that I was telling her the truth.

Well a lot of people wouldn’t be honest in a situation like that.

But those days are over. We don’t live in that world anymore. Some people still live in this shadow world of non-transparency and inauthenticity. I think that world is leaving us, because of – yawn! – technology, social media and the overabundance of sharing. You really can’t lie anymore.

More here.

Christian Parenti in The Nation:

It’s best not to dwell too much on Pakistan, or at least Ahmed Rashid’s description of it in Pakistan on the Brink, because the conclusions are so grim. Consider the variables: there are at least three civil wars being fought in the country, which has an arsenal of around 100 atomic weapons and is manufacturing more. Its military and intelligence services have cultivated religious extremists and terrorists as policy proxies for nearly sixty years, and have now lost control of some of them. The social capacities of the government’s civilian branches are minimal; its bureaucracies are largely unable or unwilling to do the economic planning and development necessary to meet the basic needs of the world’s sixth-most-populous nation. Its economic growth is only about half that of Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, and is generally well below half of the typical growth rates in India; consequently, its economy can’t create enough work for its “youth bulge” (35 percent of Pakistanis are below the age of 15). The country’s political class is composed mostly of reactionary landlords who steal from the public coffers and oppose meaningful social reform. In 2011, more than two-thirds of Pakistani lawmakers—rich men, mostly—did not even bother with the pretense of filing income taxes. The president, Asif Ali Zardari, was among them.

More here.

Present-day audiences know My Fair Lady best through George Cukor’s 1964 film adaptation, but these parodies were contemporary with the stage production and its unprecedentedly popular cast recording. Their central conceit will be obvious to anyone familiar with the originals: All three translate the struggle over linguistic difference, which is at the heart of the play and musical alike, into the dialects of their respective milieus. There is no doubt that Shaw’s intent was to present the political and cultural faces of such a struggle as well as the comic one; it is less evident that this intent survived Pygmalion’s own transformation into a glossy, tuneful Broadway property—or that it was recognized by My Fair Lady’s vast midcentury audience. Understanding what it meant for the Queen’s English of Shaw’s play to pass through Lerner and Loewe’s show tunes and emerge in Brooklynese, Yinglish, and Canadian requires learning the local vocabulary: Versions of once-standard songs must be compared, locations mapped, allusions glossed, and jokes explained.

more from Franklin Bruno at Triple Canopy here.

Slavery is America’s permanent Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which our country carries a cup it can never pass. The closest that white America has ever come to experiencing what James Baldwin described as “the Negro’s past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape … fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone” was in 1861, when the country tore itself in half over race and money. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s incredibly affecting “Photography and the American Civil War” is a shocking view of a pain so deep, destruction in blood and psyche, that seeing these 200 or so photographs installed in eleven galleries amounts to a silent scream. Viewers walk through this show—its galleries painted charcoal, its walls covered in canvas—in hushed silences, reverent, shaken, respectful of the ineffable suffering and almost mystical sickness depicted. D. H. Lawrence’s words come to mind: “Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark tress of America. Doom!” I do not remember experiencing a more poignant and pathos-filled photography exhibition at any museum.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

The lynching of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks’s resistance, Dr. King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (the peoples’ resistance), the bombing of  Dr. King’s home in Montgomery. The sit-ins, sclc, the Civil Rights Movement. The emergence of Robert F. Williams and his direct attack on the Klan. The emergence of Malcolm X. I went to Cuba on the first anniversary of the Cuban revolution. The rise and murder of Patrice Lumumba, the African Liberation Movement. I met poets like Askia M. Touré and Larry Neal in front of the un screaming our condemnation of the us, the un, Belgium, Rockefeller for murdering Lumumba and our support for Maya Angelou, Louise Meriwether, Rosa Guy, Abbey Lincoln (all great artists), running up into the un to defy Ralph Bunche. The March on Washington, the bombing 0f 16th St. Baptist Church and the murder of four little girls. JFK’s assassination, Watts, Malcolm’s assassination, Dr. King’s 
assassination, rebellions across America! All those major events we lived through. If we responded to them as conscious Black intellectuals, we had to try to become soldiers 
ourselves. That is why we wrote the way we did, because we wanted to. We wanted to get away from the faux English academic straitjackets 
passed down to us by the Anglo-American literary world.

more from Amiri Baraka at Poetry here.

Episode

We walk by the sea-shore
holding firmly in our hands
the two ends of an antique dialogue
—do you love me?
—I love you

with furrowed eyebrows
I summarize all wisdom
of the two testaments
astrologers prophets
philosophers of the gardens
and cloistered philosophers

and it sounds about like this:
—don’t cry
—be brave
—look how everybody

you pout your lips and say
—you should be a clergyman
and fed up you walk off
nobody loves moralists

what should I say on the shore of
a small dead sea

slowly the water fills
the shapes of feet which have vanished
.
.
by Zbigniew Herbert

From The Atlantic:

Why do governments fear literature? Wouldn't, say, the Chinese Communist Party be better off letting its writers write fiction without harassment?

I've always thought of it this way: Politicians and creative writers both try and shape visions of society, they both try and offer to their readers or to the public a view of the world, or a vision of the world, and these visions of the world are at odds with authoritarian regimes. Those regimes attempt to shut down the limits of the possible while fiction tries to push out the limits of the possible. So in effect their visions are in opposition to each other.

Last year, you criticized the Nobel laureate Mo Yan for being a “patsy”. Do writers living in regimes such as China's have a responsibility to oppose censorship? Or simply not to defend it?

I don't feel that writers should be pushed into corners, and there are many writers who aren't temperamentally suited to political engagement in whatever society they happen to be in, so you wouldn't want to make such a writer feel obliged to make a decision. But the reason that so many are upset with Mo Yan isn't that he didn't oppose censorship, but that he went out of his way to defend it. That was the problem.

Nearly a quarter century has passed since you were forced into hiding by the Ayatollah's fatwa. In the ensuing years, how would you assess the worldwide climate for censorship? Have things generally gotten better, or worse?

I'd say that, in general, they've gotten worse. But one of the things our report highlights is that people have more tools to resist censorship using new media. For instance, in China, while there's increased repression in the form of arbitrary arrests, artists held incommunicado and put under house arrest, and increasing hostility towards literature and free expression, there is at the same time a growing willingness of Chinese citizens to find ways to express themselves. In spite of all the repression, there's been a growth of independent, non-state publishers to print things that wouldn't be approved by state houses, and people have shown the willingness to post things online even if they're not to the liking of the state.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The report says that a complex combination of causes is behind colony collapse disorder, or CCD, a term that applies to the difficult-to-explain losses that have hit U.S. honeybee colonies since 2006. In the worst cases, entire colonies have disappeared within a few weeks. That's a big problem, because the government says an estimated one-third of all food and beverages are made possible by pollination, mainly by honeybees. Pollination is said to be worth more than $20 billion in agricultural production annually. The relatively light bee colony losses during the winter of 2011-2012 gave some experts reason to hope that the CCD situation was getting better, but experts say that last winter's losses look as if they were worse than ever.

“The decline in honeybee health is a complex problem caused by a combination of stressors, and at EPA we are committed to continuing our work with USDA, researchers, beekeepers, growers and the public to address this challenge,” acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe said in a statement. Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan promised that “key stakeholders will be engaged in addressing this challenge.” The report draws upon a gathering of officials and stakeholders that took place in Alexandria, Va., last October. It says that the parasitic Varroa mite is the “major factor” behind CCD in the United States and other countries. Varroa mites latch onto the bees and feed on their fluids, weakening the insects. The mites have developed widespread resistance to the chemicals that have been used to control them. The report says more attention should be given to breeding bees that can weather the mites, and notes that gene-sequencing projects focusing on honeybees as well as Varroa mites may provide fresh insights. Beekeepers have long known about the mite problem, as well as the other causes listed in the EPA-USDA report: poor nutrition, reduced genetic diversity, the Nosema gut parasite, emerging viruses and a bacterial disease called European foulbrood. But figuring out the role played by pesticides has posed the biggest challenge for researchers as well as policymakers.

Picture: A worker bee carries a Varroa mite, visible in this close-up view

More here.

Steve Danziger in Open Letters Monthly:

Richard Hell changed the world with a t-shirt and a haircut. The legend goes that Malcolm McLaren, hanging around New York after managing the New York Dolls in their waning days, saw Hell, his hair chopped and spiky, wearing a torn t-shirt with “Please Kill Me” scrawled on it. McLaren, who knew an icon for ruined youth when he saw one, returned to England, and one day in 1976, Chris Stein of Blondie showed Hell a picture in a European rock magazine:

Everybody in the band had short, hacked-up hair and torn clothes and there were safety pins and shredded suit jackets and wacked-out T-shirts and contorted defiant facial expressions. The lead singer had changed this name to something ugly…. I thought, “This thing is really breaking out.”

The band was the Sex Pistols, the “thing” was Punk, and in any history of the music written since, Hell has as much claim to starting the movement as anyone else. He’s that breed of celebrity revered in certain sub-cultures and utterly unknown otherwise, but for those whose lives were changed by the punk/new wave movement in mid-1970s New York City, he’s a bit of a legend. In a five year period, he defined the look and attitude for a new international youth culture, was instrumental in turning the Bowery dive bar CBGB’s into a breeding ground for groups like Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith Group, and the Ramones, and with his band the Voidoids, produced Blank Generation, one of the seminal, and most enduring, albums of the new wave zeitgeist. Then, alas, came heroin. I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp is Hell’s memoir of his rise and fall, an eccentric testament to the powers and limitations of self-invention, and like his career, a hodgepodge of singular achievement and dwindled potential.

More here.