Pankaj Mishra reviews Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, and Randy Boyagoda's Beggar’s Feast in the NYRB (photo by Jillian Edelstein):

“Let some people get rich first,” the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping proclaimed a generation ago, inaugurating a strange new phase in his country’s—and the world’s—history. It now seems clear that nowhere has capitalism’s promise to create wealth been affirmed more forcefully than in post–World War II Asia. By now we have all heard about the rise of China and India as economic powers. But as early as the late 1960s, the rates of economic growth in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and even Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia were double the rate in European and American countries.

In most of these nations, collaborations between the military or authoritarian-minded governments and businessmen ensured the rise of big, often monopoly, conglomerates, such as the South Korean chaebols. Most ordinary people suffered from a long denial of democracy and then, following free elections, the subversion of democratic institutions; after decades of uneven economic growth they now try to cope with the irreversible contamination of air, soil, and water. Long working hours, low wages, limited mobility, and perennial job insecurity are the lot of most toilers in Asian economies, especially women. Nevertheless, some people have gotten extremely rich in Asia’s own Gilded Age: for instance, in “rising” India, the number of malnourished children, nearly 50 percent, has barely altered while a handful of Indian billionaires increased their share of national income from less than 1 percent in 1996 to 22 percent in 2008.

Such concentrations of private wealth are now common across Asia, which accordingly has produced several Horatio Alger–type legends of its own. Born in 1928, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, today Asia’s richest man with an estimated wealth of $31 billion, started out as a poor immigrant from China hawking plastic combs. Another kind of morality tale is illuminated by the career of the Indonesian Mochtar Riady, who worked in a bicycle shop before he turned his modest enterprise, with the help of the Indonesian strongman Suharto and the “bamboo network” of overseas Chinese businessmen—the greatest Asian economic power outside of Japan—into a family business empire drawing on global resources.

Michael Colson over at Truth Tableaux (via the NYT's The Stone):

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is considered to be a great European intellectual and a preeminent Portuguese modernist. Born in Lisbon, he grew up in South Africa and had an English education at St. Joseph’s, a Dominican convent school, in Durban. In 1901, he passed the Cape School Higher Examination with distinction, and in 1903, he won Queen Victoria’s Memorial Prize for the best essay in English. After returning to Portugal in 1906-1907, Pessoa enrolled in philosophy classes at the University of Lisbon. He wrote poetry, fiction, and essays on topics ranging from politics and economics to mysticism and astrology. Importantly, Pessoa wrote several essays in English on philosophy.

For the first time Pessoa’s philosophical writings in English have been published. His Philosophical Essays: Critical Edition (First Contra Mundum Press, 2012), edited by Nuno Ribeiro, collects hitherto unpublished philosophical essays and fragments transcribed from material in the Fernando Pessoa Archive at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal. The archive holds more than 27,000 manuscript sheets in labeled envelopes, and 14 envelopes contain 1,428 sheets on philosophy.

If writing is a form of autobiography, as composition teacher Donald Murray says, then much of the paradox surrounding Pessoa’s writings involve the ambiguity of his “factless autobiography” and the many personalities that are attributed to him. Pessoa created complicated sets and subsets of authorial voices: heteronyms, semi-heteronyms, pre-heteronyms, and sub-heteronyms. The heteronym is a personality that allows a writer to explore ideas and feelings outside his own person—it’s like a public mask. Pessoa’s heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campo—offer different ideas, feelings, and writing styles than his own.

In 1915, Pessoa employed the first heteronym Alvaro de Campos in a modernist Portuguese review Orpheu. Some scholars believe that the plurality of heteronyms demonstrates a conception of self based on the multiplicity of Nietzsche’s ‘decentered self.’

Liam Heneghan in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When I first brought a group of my undergraduate students to meet William Jordan III at Cafe Mozart in Evanston, Illinois, he told them that each year we should ritualistically destroy a small plot of virgin prairie, of which there is virtually none left in this state, in order to dramatize its importance to us. I assured them that he did not mean this sacrifice literally; he assured them that he did.

At that time, around the turn of the new millennium, William (Bill) Jordan was working on The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the New Communion with Nature, which came out in 2003 (reissued in paperback 2012). More than any other writer I know, Bill rehearses his arguments in countless conversations and prepared talks before commuting them to the written word. I can trace remarks he made at a Christmas gathering years ago through several iterations until they became the fully formed ideas that made up his most recent book Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration, written with George M. Lubick (2011). So, when Bill assured us he was serious about the ritualistic sacrifice of prairie a decade ago, it anticipated a theme that would emerge sometime later in The Sunflower Forest.

Several ecological restorationists with whom I have spoken over the years confess bewilderment with The Sunflower Forest; they read it hoping to get insights into the “how” of restoration, whereas the book focuses primarily on its performance, ritual and the creation of meaning. However, The Sunflower Forest and its companion Making Nature Whole were not written to appeal to the most immediate pragmatic needs of restoration. They were written to address questions about our troubling relationship with nature.

More here.

Ed Yong over at National Geographic's Not Exactly Rocket Science:

In a lab at Harvard Medical School, a man is using his mind to wag a rat’s tail. To send his command, he merely glances at a strobe light flickering on a computer screen, and a set of electrodes stuck to his scalp detects the activity triggered in his brain. A computer processes and relays the electrodes’ signal to an ultrasound machine poised over the rat’s head. The machine delivers a train of low-energy ultrasound pulses into the rat’s brain, stimulating its motor cortex – the area that governs its movements. The pulses are aimed purposely at a rice-grain-sized area that controls the rat’s tail. It starts to wag.

This link-up is the brainchild of Seung-Schik Yoo, and it works more than 94% of the time. Whenever a human looks at the flickering lights, the rat’s tail almost always starts to wag just over a second later. The connection between them is undeniably simple. The volunteer is basically flicking a switch in the rat’s brain between two positions – move tail, and don’t move tail. But it is still an impressive early example of something we will see more of in coming years – a way to connect between two living brains.

Science-fiction is full of similar (if more flamboyant) brain-to-brain links. From the Jedi knights of Star Wars to various characters in the X-Men comics, popular culture abounds with telepathic characters that can read minds and transmit their thoughts without any direct physical contact or the use of their senses. There’s no evidence that any of us mere mortals share the same ability, but as Yoo’s study shows, technology is edging us closer in that direction. The question is: how far can we recreate telepathy using electronics? A human wagging a rat’s tail is one thing. Will we ever get to the point where we can share speech or emotions or memories?

Eugene over at Critical Theory:

While other philosophers deconstruct the metaphysical tradition and replace it with their own project, Ranciere’s philosophy can be summed up by “meh, people will figure it out.” And thus we present: the thought of Jacques Ranciere.

#1 “Fuck the Police” is Pretty Much his Definition of Politics

This counts.

In his “Ten Theses on Politics”, Ranciere makes a simple claim. There are two kinds of politics in the status quo, fake poser bullshit masquerading as politics and the real thing. Ranciere calls the poser politics the “politics of the police”. Ranciere calls “real” politics “dissensus.”

What the Fuck is Dissensus?

Dissensus is the process by which actors disrupt the politics of the police.

You see, the police are all about telling you what to do and where to do it. Remember that time that cop got all up in your grill for skateboarding in front of 7-11? Or, if you’re a person of color, remember that time a cop arrested you and planted drugs on you for skateboarding in front of 7-11? That’s the police order; the partitions that the police put in place for what can be seen, said and done, and where they can be done. When that cop drove away and you kept skateboarding, you totally disrupted the police partitioning of that space (sort of).

The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein. It is the established litigation of the perceptible. – Ten Theses on Politics

We can see how these police partitions work in the events of Occupy Wall Street.

You see, some bankers made this park on stolen native land for them to eat lunch in while they rested from robbing the world of millions of dollars with complicated derivatives and other bullshit nobody understands. When some hipsters decided they wanted to camp out on Wall Street, the police were like “GTFO bro”.

James Gorman in the NYT:

Scientists at Stanford Universityreported on Wednesday that they have made a whole mouse brain, and part of a human brain, transparent so that networks of neurons that receive and send information can be highlighted in stunning color and viewed in all their three-dimensional complexity without slicing up the organ.

Even more important, experts say, is that unlike earlier methods for making the tissue of brains and other organs transparent, the new process, called Clarity by its inventors, preserves the biochemistry of the brain so well that researchers can test it over and over again with chemicals that highlight specific structures and provide clues to past activity. The researchers say this process may help uncover the physical underpinnings of devastating mental disorders like schizophrenia, autism,post-traumatic stress disorder and others.

The work, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is not part of the Obama administration’s recently announced initiative to probe the secrets of the brain, although the senior author on the paper, Dr. Karl Deisseroth at Stanford, was one of those involved in creating the initiative and is involved in planning its future.

Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided some of the financing for the research, described the new work as helping to build an anatomical “foundation” for the Obama initiative, which is meant to look at activity in the brain.

Dr. Insel added that the technique works in a human brain that has been in formalin, a preservative, for years, which means that long-saved human brains may be studied. “Frankly,” he said, “that is spectacular.”

Kwanghun Chung, the primary author on the paper, and Dr. Deisseroth worked with a team at Stanford for years to get the technique right. Dr. Deisseroth, known for developing another powerful technique, called optogenetics, that allows the use of light to switch specific brain activity on and off, said Clarity could have a broader impact than optogenetics. “It’s really one of the most exciting things we’ve done,” he said, with potential applications in neuroscience and beyond.

But my little dream of a fling with the polite world of publishing was not what happened to me. Instead I was introduced to a process that involved a lot of fear and pain. Jacques Barzun, then holding the position of literary adviser to Charles Scribner’s Sons, wrote and asked if I could write a book. Not only did he

wonder whether you would think it possible to make a short book of the ideas you broached in your essay, each of which I can see implying others in the domains of life and literature that you so adroitly shuttled between … [but] alternatively … is there some other topic on which you have meditated writing a book? Without wanting to be ranked suddenly as an art-for-art’s sake promoter, I must confess it is your writing I should like to see more of, on any subject.

Had I been an aspiring writer, I would have slumped to the floor and wept. But I wasn’t; I was an aspiring dabbler, and the only thing that happened was that my mind stopped functioning. This was not part of my plan. I had welcomed a diversion, not a crisis in my life. I milled around, looking at myself for a few days, trying to reconcile my version of me with the words in the letter, and I didn’t succeed.

more from Helen Hazen at The American Scholar here.

Other than “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning,” it’s possible that the greatest epitaphic language I have encountered is that of Sir Thomas Browne who, in the midst of a meditation on urn-burial, suddenly situates himself on the brink of death and declares himself: “Ready to be anything…. ” It’s a line that would make a breathtakingly bold and accurate sign-off for any of us whose molecules will become a little bit of everything. Or, at the very least, what Eliot would call “significant soil.” The first time I read “The Waste Land,” I experienced the same elation that I felt on reading Browne’s epitaph—a conviction that the catalyzing proximity (and yet resilient apartness) of those two words was central to the recombinant possibilities of the poem. In other words, it was because the “waste” was a temporal, impermanent modifier—and not an enduring quality of the land—that the land was redeemable and open to (what Eliot called in a different landscape, that of “Burnt Norton”) “perpetual possibility.”

more from Christina Davis at Poetry here.

The growing fascination with Thatcher as a historical figure is very evident at Churchill College, Cambridge, where her papers are kept and where last year no fewer than 629 files of material were requested by researchers into such esoteric student dissertation subjects as “The Fashioning of Margaret Thatcher 1974-79” and “The German Social Market Economy and Economic Social Development in the Conservative Party 1975-79.” Almost every week there are visits to her archive from undergraduate history groups, summer schools, business organisations and others such as the Friends of the Imperial War Museum and the National Churchill Museum of the United States. Perhaps surprisingly for so doughty an anti-communist, she for some reason enjoys a huge following in China, and several Chinese delegations—including the ambassador—have visited her papers in Cambridge. The decision to decommission Britain’s two aircraft carriers in 2020 casts doubt on whether another operation to relieve the Falkland Islands could be successful, and in that sense Thatcher’s shadow falls over the present defence cuts of the coalition government.

more from Andrew Roberts at Prospect Magazine here.

From Smithsonian:

I’m traveling with Mikael Knip, a short, energetic Finnish physician and University of Helsinki researcher with a perpetual smile under his bushy mustache. He has come to Petrozavodsk—an impoverished Russian city of 270,000 on the shores of Lake Onega and the capital of the Republic of Karelia—to solve a medical mystery, and perhaps help explain a scourge increasingly afflicting the developed world, the United States included. For reasons that no one has been able to identify, Finland has the world’s highest rate of Type 1 diabetes among children. Out of every 100,000 Finnish kids, 64 are diagnosed annually with the disease, in which the body’s immune system declares war on the cells that produce insulin. Type 1 diabetes is usually diagnosed in children, adolescents and young adults. The disease rate wasn’t always so high. In the 1950s, Finland had less than a quarter of the Type 1 diabetes it has today. Over the past half-century, much of the industrialized world has also seen a proliferation of the once rare disease, along with other autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and celiac disease. Meanwhile, such afflictions remain relatively rare in poorer, less-developed nations.

Why?

Petrozavodsk, only about 175 miles from the Finland border, may be the perfect place to investigate the question: The rate of childhood Type 1 diabetes in Russian Karelia is one-sixth that of Finland. That stark difference intrigues Knip and others because the two populations for the most part are genetically similar, even sharing risk factors for Type 1 diabetes. They also live in the same subarctic environment of pine forests and pristine lakes, dark, bitter winters and long summer days. Still, the 500-mile boundary between Finland and this Russian republic marks one of the steepest standard-of-living gradients in the world: Finns are seven times richer than their neighbors across the border. “The difference is even greater than between Mexico and the U.S.,” Knip tells me.

More here.

Blue Line Incident
.
He was just some coked-out,

From Nature:

When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. “His calculation, only zeroing in on 10% of voters, is a risky proposition,” he says. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people’s political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden’s 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. The team's work is published today in PLoS ONE¹. Hall’s group polled 162 voters on the streets of Malmö and Lund during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for, and how strongly they felt about their decision. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 political wedge issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp (see video above). The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for.

No more than 22% of the manipulated answers were detected, and 92% of the study participants accepted the manipulated summary score as their own. This did not surprise Hall, who has previously demonstrated similar reversal effects, known as choice blindness, in people’s aesthetic preferences² and moral attitudes³. What is interesting about the latest study is that, on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time.

More here.

Snow has rarely been photographed so well. You feel the icy cold that toughened the lives of fishermen pulling their catch from a frozen lagoon. You can hear the wind blowing through the snow-covered roofs of the coastal village in Akita. Many of these photographs were taken long after the war ended. Hamaya had quickly lost his enthusiasm for gunfire as the war progressed ever more disastrously for Japan. Along with many Japanese, disillusioned by the consequences of their earlier chauvinism, Hamaya embraced postwar pacifism. Some of his most striking postwar photographs are of the 1960 demonstrations in Tokyo, when large numbers of students and ordinary citizens protested against the conservative government’s renewal of a security treaty with the US, perpetuating Japan’s status as a US military base for wars in Asia.

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

I do not remember Things Fall Apart as particularly life-changing at that age, I simply loved the story, this recreation of a world that seemed entirely familiar, that echoed the stories that my grandparents told. A few years later, I read No Longer at Ease, a I realised what an extraordinary gift he had given to us, creating a space for us in the world, allowing us the chance to say: We too are here. battered early edition, missing a cover, illustrated by Bruce Onobrakpeya, the famed Nigerian artist some of whose etchings hung on the walls of our living room. I was unimpressed then by the non-realistic etchings with their stylized depictions of human beings but was utterly captivated by the story of Obi Okonkwo, who could easily have stepped out of one of my parents’ photograph albums. I imagined him in a fedora hat and suit, being met at the port on his return from England by his town union, the way my parents and many of their friends had been. Along the way I also read his books for children, first Chike and the River, then the allegory of abuse of power How the Leopard Got Its Claws, co-written with John Iroaganachi and his collection of short stories Girls at War, which again resounded with familiar stories from my parents and their friends of their experiences during and just after the Biafran war.

more from Ike Anya at Granta here.

I am intrigued by Mortality for one main reason, which is this: Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics. He famously mocked religious folk for their faith in supernatural entities and survival of the soul after bodily death, yet the views expressed in Mortality are just as wishful and magical. “The oncology bargain [oncology is that branch of medicine which deals with the treatment of cancer],” writes Hitchens, “is that in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery.” Years? I must now confess to a professional interest. I am a gastroenterologist in a large acute hospital, and I have diagnosed many patients with oesophageal cancer. “Years” is a word not generally used when discussing prognosis in Stage Four oesophageal cancer, “months”, in my experience, being a more useful one.

more from Seamus O’Mahony at the Dublin Review of Books here.

From Scientific American:

A little blast from the past to puzzle over while your head spins from chocolate overload this weekend.

Two centuries before M.C. Escher confounded us with his optical illusions and play on perspective, William Hogarth (1697-1764) created Satire on False Perspective. Hogarth was a British painter and engraver sometimes credited with beginning the tradition of sequential art in Western culture due to his series of paintings depicting the rise and fall of a dandy, A Rake’s Progress. Complicated methods of using perspective to create an illusion of 3-dimensions in 2-dimensional art had been mastered (again) in Renaissance art a few centuries earlier. As well as a painter, Hogarth was something like a political cartoonist and satirist in his day. Here, in his engraving Satire on False Perspective are a number of errors. Can you spot them all?

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In 1963, eight women crossed the Charles River to crack a barrier that had stood for more than half a century at Harvard, becoming the first of their gender to enroll in the Business School’s two-year M.B.A. program. Fifty years and 11,000 female graduates later, women make up about 40 percent of today’s incoming M.B.A. classes. An equal number of men and women graduate with honors, and their current dean, Nitin Nohria, considers himself a feminist. Yet when Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95—the keynote speaker at the recent W50 Summit, a two-day conference celebrating 50 years of women in the M.B.A. program—asked a group of about 800 alumnae gathered in Burden Hall to stand if they had ever vocalized wanting to become CEO of their own companies, almost no one did. “I’m here today to do one thing: to give every woman in this audience not just the permission, but the encouragement to stand up next time that question is asked,” said Sandberg, author of the New York Times best-selling book Lean In. “Not just to be CEO of the company you are in, but to do anything you might not think you can do…anything you might be afraid to do. I want to do that for the men in this room today as well, but I want to do it especially for the women, because the blunt truth is, men still rule the world.”

Throughout the two-day conference, alumnae gathered in small groups to discuss topics like “Negotiate What You Need to Succeed: A Workshop for Women,” “Getting onto Boards Bootcamp,” and “Using Business Acumen to Effect Social Change.” They heard from such business-world leaders as former Time Inc. chief Ann Moore, M.B.A. ’78, and Gail McGovern, the president and CEO of the American Red Cross, as well as from prominent faculty members, including Arbuckle professor of business administration Rosabeth Moss Kanter. A Women’s Place, a new film on the history of women at HBS, was screened on Thursday evening.

More here.

A Ghazal: Intimations of Ghalib

آہ کو چاہیے اک عمر اثر ہوتے تک

کون جیتا ہے تری زلف کے سر ہوتے تک

It takes a lifetime for sighs to sway hearts.
Shall I live to pick lilacs for your hair?

The soul’s slow sea journey is perilous.
It is a rough ride from a drop to a pearl.

Love practices poise: ardor abhors time.
Can I keep my heart cooking in this fire?

I grant you will hurry when I ask for you.
I will be dust when my cry reaches you.

A sun glance lifts a dewdrop to extinction.
I too shall wait for a ray of light from you.

This life is over before you even know it.
We are in the world like sparks in the night.
.
. .
translated by M. Shahid Alam
from Notre Dame Review, Winter/Spring 2013

Kevin Young in VQR:

Memoir is a form under siege. In the small-print preface to Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (2008), Kerry Cohen inadvertently indicates what’s wrong with the memoir today: This book is a work of nonfiction. I have changed most names and identifying details. I have also, at times, combined certain characters to allow for narrative sense. I have tried to recount the circumstances as best I remember them, but memory can be a faulty device. Facts are important but I believe that even more important than the facts is truth. I trusted truth to guide me as I wrote. Jack Kerouac once said, “Every-thing I wrote as true because I believed what I saw.” So it is for this book.

Such prefatory notes, indicating the degree of fiction found in its pages, have become necessary in the wake of James Frey’s best-selling blowout, his come-to-Oprah moment when he revealed what careful readers suspected: Much of his so-called nonfiction was made up. If Frey’s televised admission in 2006 was a kind of religious confession, then the real penance has been paid ever since by the memoirists who followed, for whom fact-checking has become a ritual purification—and the disclaimer a Hail Mary pass resulting, they hope, in brisk sales, the modern measure of success.

Truth is the goal of the memoir—or at least of its preface. Such authenticating devices are ways of gaining trust in a distrustful world. And yet such a disclaimer comes up against the problem encountered by a fabricator coming clean: “To tell you the truth, I am a liar.” The liar’s paradox has become the memoirist’s mantra, indicated by Loose Girl’s strategic separation of facts from truth; and its declared reliance on memory as recreated facsimile rather than on a strict recounting of verifiable events. Like Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club (1995) and Geoffrey Wolff’s Duke of Deception (1990), two books that helped jump-start the memoir form, even the titleLoose Girl seems to play with the notion of truth interrupted. This is not to say that these three memoirs are false. Rather, as indicated by their very titles, books such asThe Liars’ Club and The Duke of Deception discuss family members who are con artists in ways large and small that the memoir form has proven well suited for.

You could say the memoir is a promiscuous form. The novel, the memoir’s direct antecedent, is omnivorous—it is a form that cannibalizes other forms, from letters to hymnals to confessions themselves. The confusion the memoir has caused is actually one over form—for despite what its recent practitioners seem to think, the memoir is a form, not a genre. In trying to expand the memoir from a form into a genre rather like the broader field of nonfiction, the authors of memoir often mistake its strengths—hard facts ennobled by the fluid, specific act of memory—as something not to be championed but chiefly ignored. As a result, instead of flirting with fiction, as almost all writing does, the memoir flirts with the truth.

Jessa Gamble in Aeon:

Human sleep comprises several 90-minute cycles of brain activity. In a person who is awake, electroencephalogram (EEG) readings are very complex, but as sleep sets in, the brain waves get slower, descending through Stage 1 (relaxation) and Stage 2 (light sleep) down to Stage 3 and slow-wave deep sleep. After this restorative phase, the brain has a spurt of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which in many ways resembles the waking brain. Woken from this phase, sleepers are likely to report dreaming.

One of the most valuable outcomes of work on sleep deprivation is the emergence of clear individual differences — groups of people who reliably perform better after sleepless nights, as well as those who suffer disproportionately. The division is quite stark and seems based on a few gene variants that code for neurotransmitter receptors, opening the possibility that it will soon be possible to tailor stimulant variety and dosage to genetic type.

Around the turn of this millennium, the biological imperative to sleep for a third of every 24-hour period began to seem quaint and unnecessary. Just as the birth control pill had uncoupled sex from reproduction, designer stimulants seemed poised to remove us yet further from the archaic requirements of the animal kingdom.

Any remedy for sleepiness must target the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The executive functions of the brain are particularly vulnerable to sleep deprivation, and people who are sleep-deprived are both more likely to take risks, and less likely to be able to make novel or imaginative decisions, or to plan a course of action. Designer stimulants such as modafinil and armodafinil (marketed as Provigil and Nuvigil) bring these areas back online and are highly effective at countering the negative effects of sleep loss. Over the course of 60 hours awake, a 400mg dose of modafinil every eight hours reinstates rested performance levels in everything from stamina for boring tasks to originality for complex ones. It staves off the risk propensity that accompanies sleepiness and brings both declarative memory (facts or personal experiences) and non-declarative memory (learned skills or unconscious associations) back up to snuff.