Monte Cristo, it turns out, was more than just the little Mediterranean islet of the book title. Looking much further westwards in the atlas, we find it marked as a port on the island of Hispaniola, which nowadays is partitioned into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The future general was born in 1762 in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, in the western half of the island. He was the son of a black slave, Marie-Cessette, and a renegade Norman aristocrat, Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, who, having paid a high price for Marie-Cessette’s beauty, fathered three more children before selling her off to a merchant from Nantes. French Enlightenment values meant that young Thomas-Alexandre (known as Alex), brought to France in servitude by his father, was free once he stepped ashore. The pair moved into the smart suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the fifteen-year-old boy found himself addressed as ‘Monsieur le Comte’.

more from Jonathan Keates at Literary Review here.

From Standpoint:

One of the distinguishing marks of a gentleman was that he did things because he knew they were the right thing to do, not because they would bring him personal advantage. Captain Oates was a very gallant gentleman. The idea of a gentleman was a more inclusive one than it sounds to modern ears. One of its greatest advantages was that you could define it so as to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman, without possessing any of the social attributes which a gentleman might have: there was no need to possess a coat of arms, or a country estate, or engage in field sports, or wear evening dress. At least since Chaucer's time, there had been a distinction between the social meaning of the word, and the moral. It was evident that well-born people, who ought to know how to behave like gentlemen, did not always do so, while others sometimes did.

Philip Mason, whose perceptive study, The English Gentleman, was published in 1982, argues that “the desire to be a gentleman” runs through and illuminates English history from the time of Chaucer until the early 20th century. He suggests that “for most of the 19th century and until the Second World War” the idea of the gentleman “provided the English with a second religion, one less demanding than Christianity. It influenced their politics. It influenced their system of education; it made them endow new public schools and raise the status of old grammar schools. It inspired the lesser landed gentry as well as the professional and middle classes to give their children an upbringing of which the object was to make them ladies and gentlemen, even if only a few of them also became scholars.” This was a subject that interested so great a man as Cardinal Newman. In The Idea of a University he said that a liberal education makes “not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman”, and went on: It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life; these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University . . . but they are no guarantees for sanctity or even for conscientiousness; they may attach to the man of the world, the profligate, the heartless.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The birdman of Alcatraz became famous. But the frogmen of Cedar Creek are still anonymous beyond the tiny cult world of amphibian science. For now, they say. Mat Henson, 25, serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence for robbery and assault, and his research partner, Taylor Davis, 29, who landed in the Cedar Creek Corrections Center here in central Washington for stealing cars, raised about 250 Oregon spotted frogs in the prison yard this summer.

Working with biologists, Mr. Henson is now helping write a scientific curriculum for other frog-raisers, in prison or out. A previous inmate in the program, released some years ago, is finishing his Ph.D. in molecular biology. When asked about his plans after he is released from prison in 2014, Mr. Henson paused only a moment. “Bioengineering,” he said. The state program that connected the dots — or rather the felons and the frogs — is called Sustainability in Prisons. Nationally, it is unique in enlisting inmates to help rescue imperiled species like the Oregon spotted frog, which is threatened across much of its range.

More here.

Adam Wilson in the LA Review of Books:

LOUIS C.K. EMERGES from the subway station: sullen, sweating. His balding crown of carrot colored hair is slightly brighter than his ruddy, freckled skin. The man is overweight but solid, like a fullback long past glory, in love with French fries, who still hits the gym. He’s got broad shoulders, thick arms, A-cup man breasts, and a sizable gut that hangs over his beltline. His black t-shirt is half a size too small, constricting his movements, and adding to the general impression of physical discomfort.

C.K. makes it up the subway steps and arrives at street level, exhaling as if he’s crested some unprecedented summit. He marches into a pizza joint, scarfs most of a giant slice in three bites, then disgusted, throws what remains in the garbage. To watch him eat is akin to watching a junkie shoot heroin; one can trace the convergence of shame and sublimity. All the while there’s music playing, the syncopated up beat of seventies funk. The singer repeats: “Louie, Louie, you’re gonna die.” The camera cuts to another set of stairs, this time a declension, C.K. hustling down to a door marked “Comedy Cellar.” The juxtaposition is stark: here lies humor, at the intersection of pathos and indigestion. We must armor ourselves with laughter.

So begins each episode of Louie, C.K.’s brainchild, currently in its third season on the cable channel FX. Cicero said that to be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Flaubert thought an artist must have a religion of despair. Accordingly, C.K. may be television’s true first in both categories.

William Hogeland in Boston Review:

Liberals have become originalists too. Recent books by progressive thinkers as varied as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, journalist Roger Hodge, and political commentator Rachel Maddow decry a national failure to live up to the founders’ purposes in creating the Constitution. Maddow means by her title, Drift, an unfortunate movement away from founding-era anti-militarism into the modern military-industrial complex. In Lessig’s Republic, Lost, the loss has come about thanks to a money influence in politics that Lessig says the founders condemned as corrupt. Hodge, in The Mendacity of Hope, frames a criticism of President Obama in terms of the founding political battle over finance between Hamilton and Madison.

All of the liberal originalists’ books run into political and historical trouble over some unedifying realities of our founding period. Similar difficulties plague a new right-wing constitutional history, Tea Party leader Michael P. Leahy’s Covenant of Liberty, which takes the betrayal of founding values as its theme, too. Leahy’s book represents classic originalism, the right-wing kind. It therefore serves as a mirror of the new liberal originalism: American-history fantasies of the left stand sharply in relation to those of the right.

One of Leahy’s strengths is that unlike so many others in the Tea Party movement—and unlike some of the liberal originalists—he doesn’t rope all the founders into one group and set them rolling in their graves over today’s America. Leahy admires particular founders and knows they had enemies in other founders. To him, a disastrous betrayal of the Constitution occurred in its first moments of operation. The betrayal was carried out by Hamilton.

Colin Jager in The Immanent Frame:

Aided by social networking sites, blogs, and popular YouTube videos (found here and here), Pussy Riot’s plight became something of an international media sensation. Amnesty International and Madonna took up the cause, and British Prime Minister David Cameron questioned Putin about it in a face-to-face meeting. Indeed, as some commentators noted there did seem something almost pre-packaged about the whole event, as though it were designed for western consumption.

Fascinatingly, however, religion played a central role within this media event. Many orthodox clergy were quick to label the performance blasphemous, noting its “sacrilegious humiliation of the age-old principles aimed at inflicting even deeper wounds to Orthodox Christians”; claiming that the women’s “chaotically waving arms and legs, dancing and hopping…cause[ed] a negative, even more insulting resonance in the feelings and souls of the believers”; and describing the performance as “desecrating the cathedral, and offending the feelings of believers.”

The Orthodox Church occupies an odd space in relationship to the secular power of the state. Historically aligned with the czars, it was driven largely underground during the Soviet era, thus becoming one site of opposition to politics as usual. In recent years it has emerged as a potent political force in Russia, one largely aligned with Putin’s hold on power. In her closing statement, Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, positioned their performance in precisely this way. The cozy relationship between church and state in contemporary Russia, she claimed, “has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national television for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would…help the faithful make the correct political choice during a difficult time for Putin preceding the election….Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity.”

Samantha Weinberg in More Intelligent Life:

When David Attenborough joined the BBC, 60 years ago this September, Britain had only one television channel. Cameras had to be wound up like a clock and could only film live or in 20-second bursts. There was no way to capture sound and vision at the same time, or to broadcast from anywhere but the studio. Attenborough, like most people, did not own a television set; he thinks he had seen only one programme in his life. He had applied for a job in radio, as a talks producer, and been turned down, and it was only by chance that his CV was seen by a television executive, the head of factual broadcasting, Mary Adams. She gave him a chance—but when he first went in front of the camera, she said his teeth were too big.

By 1956, Attenborough had persuaded the BBC to let him try a new way of filming—from and of the natural world. With only a cameraman and animal expert for company, he would go off for months to remote lands in search of rare beasts. In Borneo, some days’ walk from civilisation, he was on the trail of orangutan when he spied a man paddling up the river, wearing only a sarong and bearing a message tucked in a cleft stick. It was from the BBC, giving instructions on how to use their new toy: colour film. What started in a makeshift fashion with “Zoo Quest” matured over the decades into “Life on Earth”, “The Private Life of Plants”, “Life in Cold Blood”, “Frozen Planet” and many more. With Attenborough, the phenomenon of natural-history film-making was born.

A Clockwork Orange sits awkwardly in this schema. It is a cusp novel. Chronologically it belongs to Early Burgess, but stylistically it resembles the middle novels. In this sense it was an important departure. (Inside Mr Enderby (1963), Burgess’s best-loved comic novel, occupies a liminal position similar to A Clockwork Orange. Both share an animating fascination with excess of all kinds, and both find the perfect stylistic expression for this in obsessive wordplay. And both are very funny.) The novels of the middle period are Burgess’s most vital because it was in these that he forged what we might now recognize as the Burgessian – the antic puns and wordplay, the etymological digressions, the opacity, the glamorous pedantry, the tympanic repetitions, and an alliterative, assonantal musicality that makes every sentence seem vivid and extrovert: “Seafood salt with savour of seabrine thwacking throat with thriving wine-thirst”; “the lucent flawlessness of the skin, of the long fleshly languor that flowered into visibility”; “he was in a manner tricked, coney-caught, a court-dor to a cozening cotquean”. This is Burgess’s description of an Elizabethan brothel: “He entered darkness that smelled of musk and dust, the tang of sweating oxters, and, somehow, the ancient stale reek of egg after egg cracked in waste, the musty hold-smell of seamen’s garments, seamen’s semen spattered, a ghost procession of dead sailors lusting till the crack of doom”.

more from Ben Masters at the TLS here.

The crisis of secularism goes much deeper than a deficit of personal meaning. The separation of church and state is so entrenched in the Western mind that it can be difficult to see the capitalist nation-state as a theological and political whole. Secularism is not strictly speaking a religion, but it represents an orientation toward religion that serves the theological purpose of establishing a hierarchy of legitimate social values. Religion must be “privatized” in liberal societies to keep it out of the way of economic functioning. In this view, legitimate politics is about making the trains run on time and reducing the federal deficit; everything else is radicalism. A surprising number of American intellectuals are able to persuade themselves that this vision of politics is sufficient, even though the train tracks are crumbling, the deficit continues to gain on the GDP, and millions of citizens are sinking into the dark mire of debt and permanent unemployment.

more from David Sessions at Religion and Politics here.

From The Telegraph:

From Science:

Giving a whole new meaning to “pregnancy brain,” a new study shows that male DNA—likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus—can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease—hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say. During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mother's blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism. The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mother's health—by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system—but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions.

One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain. Researchers have shown that fetal microchimerism occurs in mouse brains, but they had not shown this in humans. So a team led by autoimmunity researcher and rheumatologist J. Lee Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, took samples from autopsied brains of 59 women who died between the ages of 32 and 101. By testing for a gene specific to the Y chromosome, they found evidence of male DNA in the brains of 63% of the women. Because some studies have suggested that the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) increases with an increasing number of pregnancies, the team also examined the brains for signs of the disease, allowing them to determine whether AD correlated with the observed microchimerism. Of the 59 women, 33 had AD—but contrary to the team's expectation, the women with AD had significantly less male DNA in their brains than did the 26 women who did not have AD.

More here.

The Clock

With only one story to tell, the clock strikes
a monotonous note, irrespective of how
musical the bell, how gilded the chimes
its timely conclusions report through.
Time literally on hands, it informs you
to your face exactly where you stand
in relation to your aspirations, stacks up
the odds against your long-term prospects,
leaves your hopes and expectations checked.
Keeping track of time to the last second, it gives
the lie to all small talk about your reputedly
youthful looks, sees through the subterfuge
of dyed hair, exposes the stark truth beneath
the massaged evidence of smooth skin.

by Dennis O'Driscoll
from Reality Check
Copper Canyon Press, 2008

Nina Chestney at Reuters:

More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.

As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.

It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

More than 90 percent of those deaths will occur in developing countries, said the report that calculated the human and economic impact of climate change on 184 countries in 2010 and 2030. It was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of 20 developing countries threatened by climate change.

“A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade,” the report said.

It said the effects of climate change had lowered global output by 1.6 percent of world GDP, or by about $1.2 trillion a year, and losses could double to 3.2 percent of global GDP by 2030 if global temperatures are allowed to rise, surpassing 10 percent before 2100.

More here.

High-profile cases show the importance of questioning academic research — especially when it has a corporate tie.

David Sirota in Salon:

As any P.R. hack worth his weight in press releases knows, the most persuasive content is that which doesn’t look like propaganda at all.

If you want to influence a mass audience, for instance, you can try to do what the Pentagon does and subtly bake slanted information into entertainment products such as movies and television shows. If, on the other hand, you are looking to influence a slightly higher-brow audience, you can embed disinformation in newspapers’ news andopinion pages. And if you are looking to brainwash politicians, think tanks, columnists and the rest of the political elite in order to rig an esoteric debate over public policy, you can attempt to shroud your agitprop in the veneer of science.

While these are all diabolically effective methods of manipulating political discourse, the latter, which involves corporate funding of academic research, is the most insidious of all. But the good news is that the last few weeks provided important reminders about the problem — and why scrutiny of sources is so important.

At the national level, media organizations frothed with news about Stanford University researchers supposedly determining that organic food food is no more healthy than conventionally produced food. In the rush to generate audience-grabbing headlines, most of these news outlets simply regurgitated the Stanford press release, which deliberately stressed that researchers ”did not find strong evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives.”

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

A vitally important and thoroughly documented new report on the impact of Obama's drone campaign has just been released by researchers at NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School. Entitled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan”, the report details the terrorizing effects of Obama's drone assaults as well as the numerous, highly misleading public statements from administration officials about that campaign. The study's purpose was to conduct an “independent investigations into whether, and to what extent, drone strikes in Pakistan conformed to international law and caused harm and/or injury to civilians”.

The report is “based on over 130 detailed interviews with victims and witnesses of drone activity, their family members, current and former Pakistani government officials, representatives from five major Pakistani political parties, subject matter experts, lawyers, medical professionals, development and humanitarian workers, members of civil society, academics, and journalists.” Witnesses “provided first-hand
accounts of drone strikes, and provided testimony about a range of issues, including the missile strikes themselves, the strike sites, the victims' bodies, or a family member or members killed or injured in the strike”.

Here is the powerful first three paragraphs of the report, summarizing its main findings:

Whilte noting that it is difficult to obtain precise information on the number of civilian deaths “because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability”, the report nonetheless concludes: “while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians.”

But beyond body counts, there's the fact that “US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury”:

In other words, the people in the areas targeted by Obama's drone campaign are being systematically terrorized. There's just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror – highly effective terror – regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it. And that's precisely why the report, to its great credit, uses that term to describe the Obama policy: the drone campaign “terrorizes men, women, and children”.

More here.

As elsewhere, one of my guides here is W. G. Sebald, who performed this task with a kind of relentlessness that is as stunning as it is deeply sad. The unnamed subject of each of Sebald’s books is, by his own admission, the concentration camps, and yet, with a few exceptions, he touches on them so lightly that you could be lulled, by his long, languorous sentences, into thinking the books were about something else: herring, say, or the rise of the Dowager Empress. That they are not is a function of a very Sebaldian principle: atrocity needs no exaggeration. If you look closely enough you see how it saturates all that surrounds it, drawing the energy of the world into its deep and abhorrent abyss. But lightness, in Sebald and elsewhere, provides more than a cover. Lightness is a strategy, much as I distrust that word. It is a method for dealing with and channeling other energies.

more from Erik Anderson at the LA Review of Books here.

We have coffee with almond milk and agave syrup rather than buffalo curd and strong tea and decide to take a long morning walk to integrate back into New York society. The Harlem apartment is right on Central Park. Living in Brooklyn, we don’t often get a chance to stroll through this famous place. It is raining just a little, which makes the city feel that much more surreal. Right away I notice how many ducks there are — big fat American ducks, they are so wonderful, trailing along in a row along the algae-topped lake. I notice all the bird sounds and look at the trees in a new way. Even the pigeons look beautiful. Two people behind us speak Spanish and I think it’s nice to hear people speaking Spanish. I like this language. There are people wearing expensive shoes picking up their dog’s poop with little blue baggies on their hands. I try to picture Sri Lankans doing this and cannot, no matter what kind of shoes they wear. A young woman in a button down shirt and tall rubber boots paces past us. She listens to music on her iPod and has her nose down, reading a daily paper. She does all this without falling, without slowing. It is like a circus act.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

It has been more than 70 years since Walter Benjamin, in his classic essay “The Storyteller,” declared that telling stories was obsolete. “Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly,” Benjamin complained. “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” For most of us in the western world, our first experience of our culture’s classic stories—Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood—does not come through a wise man or woman sitting before an audience, spellbinding us with words. It is in print or through images that we learn our culture’s foundational stories. This development has led to a certain nostalgia about the mere act of telling a story. In his novel The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa writes lovingly about the raconteurs of the Machiguenga people, a remote Amazonian tribe that has had almost no contact with modern Peruvian civilisation. By reciting their people’s cosmogonies and myths, by bringing news from one far-flung group to another, the storyteller “remind[ed] each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs.”

more from Adam Kirsch at Prospect Magazine here.