Joseph Gregory in the NYT:

Tall, athletic, handsome and charismatic, Mr. Ben Bella was known for his quick mind, courage and political cunning, traits that became tools of survival in a turbulent life. He faced heavy combat in wartime France and Italy, escaped French assassination attempts as well as a prison, then survived the murderous intrigues of political rivals as he struggled to impose socialism on his sprawling, divided country in the anarchy that followed independence in 1962.

On June 19, 1965, after less than three years as prime minister and president, he was ousted in a coup led by an old ally. He spent the next 14 years in confinement and never again held power. But he remained a powerful voice for the third world amid the conflicts of the cold war and the unrest within the Arab world over Israel, Iraq and radical Islam.

“My life is a life of combat,” he told an interviewer in his last years. “It is a combat that started for me at the age of 16. I’m 90 years old now, and my motivation hasn’t changed; it’s the same fervor that drives me.”

Ahmed Ben Bella was born on Dec. 25, 1918, in Marnia, a small town in the mountains of western Algeria, to a family with Moroccan roots. His father, a Sufi Muslim, supported his five sons and two daughters by farming and small-time trade. The oldest brother died from wounds received in World War I; two other brothers died from illness, and another went to France and disappeared in the mayhem of the Nazi victory in 1940.

Mr. Ben Bella chafed at colonialism from an early age — he recalled a run-in with a racist secondary school teacher — and complained of France’s cultural influence. “We think in Arabic, but we talk in French,” he said.

His education was truncated when his father officially changed the year of Ahmed’s birth to 1916 so that he could return to work on the farm. The move had unintended consequences: Ahmed was conscripted in 1937, two years ahead of his class.

He took to soldiering as readily as he had taken to soccer back home. He was promoted to sergeant and won celebrity as a soccer star in Marseille, France, where his regiment was based. In command of an antiaircraft section during the German invasion of 1940, he kept to his post, firing away as others fled, as waves of Stuka dive bombers pounded the city’s port. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

Also here, Alistair Horne revisits Savage War for Peace, his study of the Algerian war of independence.

Maya Jaggi on Orhan Pamuk's museum of innocence’, in the FT Magazine:

In a dark-red Ottoman town house in Istanbul’s antiques district, a fast-gentrifying quarter where brassware spills on to steep, cobbled lanes, an idiosyncratic museum has been taking shape. The first display as you enter is an entire wall spiked with evenly spaced cigarette butts – testament to the prolonged agony of a man who furtively saved 4,213 of his beloved’s fag ends after she married someone else. Yet “the word ‘obsession’ is discouraged”, says the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, as he supervises the final touches to his Museum of Innocence.

Pamuk, an artist manqué, studied architecture but switched to novel writing aged 23. His “sentimental museum” was conceived in the mid-1990s as a counterpart to his eighth novel, The Museum of Innocence (2008) – published after he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. Like the author, its hero Kemal is born into Istanbul’s well-heeled bourgeoisie. But after an affair with Fusun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant poor relation, Kemal breaks off a society engagement to try to win her back. The story has the contours of Turkish television melodrama (Pamuk had a stint writing scripts in the 1980s). But the pain is real in a novel that, like much of Pamuk’s fiction, probes the anxieties and inauthenticity of living in what feels like a backwater while imitating a westernised modernity. Kemal’s beloved dies, and – unable to find peace – he builds a museum from the objects she touched, as Pamuk gathered memorabilia to inspire the narrative.

Neil Easterbrook on China Miéville's fiction and his philosophy of language, in the LA Review of Books:

The most recent example of science fiction’s aesthetic power is the extraordinary new novel by China Miéville, whose tenth book demonstrates that fiction can be both serious and fun, a light fancy of the imagination and a deep investigation into what makes us human. Miéville is widely known for a string of bestselling and prize-winning novels that splice together elements of fantasy, horror, noir, and science fiction Embassytown is his first unequivocally science fiction text, his least hybridized book yet.

Part space opera and part planetary romance, set in our distant future, Embassytown is the tale of a young woman born and raised in the human enclave on the planet Arieka. Avice Brenner Cho leaves home to become an interstellar sailor, one of the few people capable of negotiating the “immer,” the subspace or hyperspace “altreality” that permits faster-than-light travel. Having met and married Scile, an academic linguist fascinated by the language of the indigenous Ariekei, whom the Embassytowners call “Hosts,” Avice agrees to indulge his curiosity and return to Arieka. The Hosts’ language, always called “Language,” is a very curious phenomenon. Their speech comes in the form of two words spoken simultaneously, something possible because the Ariekei have two mouths. To inscribe Language, the humans present a graphic image, rather like a mathematical fraction, with a numerator (the “cut”) and a denominator (the “turn”), as in the case of the Host named Surl Tesh-echer, which is written as:

surl

______

tesh-echer.

While this sort of inscription initially seems a precious affectation, it proves central to Miéville’s thematics.

Host Language has two features. First, the Hosts only recognize it when it is generated by living beings — by conscious minds — so Language generated by a computer, however semantically and syntactically perfect, isn’t even heard, though a broadcast recording of a conscious being is. Second, Language is exclusively literal; only things that are empirically true can be said. Since Language contains no figurative dimension — no irony, no metaphor, no oxymoron — the Ariekei cannot lie. While the Hosts always have polyphony, they do not have polysemy — the two words always have one meaning.

Embassytown is a novel of ideas — a novel about the philosophy of language, about how language is linked to ethics, and about our “biopolis,” the structure of the links between individual humans and the larger human community.

In his 48 years on planet Earth, Beck has been a teenage misfit; an amateur magician; an alcoholic and a pothead; a Catholic turned nonbeliever turned Mormon; a twice-married father of four; a top-rated radio talk-show host; a New York Times best-selling author in four genres; a polarizing, tearful television talking head; and a multi-media, multi-millionaire entrepreneur, now with his own online magazine and Web TV show. Just because he may have fallen off your radar since he left Fox News, last summer, doesn’t mean that millions of faithful listeners don’t still harken to his every dog-whistle warning. They do, and their views—and their votes—carry weight. For public consumption Beck styles himself as a performer, but this is pretense. He aspires to something greater. Beck is like Andy Griffith’s Lonesome Rhodes, the faux-bumpkin demagogue in A Face in the Crowd, who shouts, “I’m not just an entertainer. I’m an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force … a force!” And he is—a force and, as he sometimes suggests, a seer. Trying to parse his every utterance leads to madness. He’s more readily comprehensible as a vortex. Glenn Beck is a full-time pre-millennial prophet predicting, if not the end of days, at least something like a new Dark Age, with a collapsing global financial and political system and an onslaught of Evil Forces that will require an every-man-for-himself mind-set to survive. If he had lived in the first century A.D., Beck could well have displaced John of Patmos as the author of the biblical book of Revelation, that bizarre, brooding, apocalyptic amalgam of seven seals, seven stars, and a lamb with seven horns.

more from Todd S. Purdum at Vanity Fair here.

Popular commentators on evolution, such as Richard Dawkins, have become overly enamoured with the idea of the gene. Genetics is certainly the most powerful mechanism of evolution and was unknown in Charles Darwin’s time but although we have learned much from sequencing DNA, the idea of the gene does not explain everything about the living world and certainly not about the human world. However, just as Herbert Spencer used the notion of the “survival of the fittest” to explain why some people are rich and others are poor, so Dawkins argues that culture has genes, too – self-replicating particles of information that he calls “memes” (think of the dumb jokes and “viral” videos that proliferate on the internet). If all evolution happens for the sake of proliferating selfish genes, then everything we see in living creatures has to be useful and practical. But that’s not at all how Darwin saw it. He envisioned as at least two distinct processes: natural selection and sexual selection. The former concerns the survival of the fittest. The latter, however, is an aspect of evolution that is too often overlooked today.

more from David Rothenberg at The New Statesman here.

Even those people who claim to know little of Africa have heard of Rwanda. Like Auschwitz and Srebrenica, the name is forever linked to one of the 20th century’s defining acts of depravity. Possibly more than 1m people, predominantly Tutsi, were hacked to death with hoes, machetes and whatever came to hand; the international community failed to take action and a United Nations mission was left floundering in the chaos. Some may have watched Hotel Rwanda, a film which tries to capture the brutality of what happened in 1994. More recently, President Paul Kagame has been credited with turning Rwanda into an African success story, although his growing number of critics cite the suppression of public debate, the murky handling of the 2010 election (all the opposition parties pulled out of the contest alleging fraud and vote rigging) and the worry that, as with previous African “big men,” he will fail to stand down at the 2017 election as the constitution requires. But few will have heard of Rwanda’s “evil twin.”

more from Will Paxton at Prospect Magazine here.

From Edge:

THE FOREWORD
By Charles Simonyi

AN EXCEPTIONAL BOOK SUCH AS THIS could have been created only under exceptional circumstances. My father was a working physicist and a beloved university professor who taught a whole generation of Hungarian electrical engineers. His textbooks on the foundations of electrical engineering have been translated into many languages. Yet, in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s in Hungary, his quasi-apolitical personal conduct, based on the age-old virtues of hard work, good character, and charity, was interpreted as political defiance that could not be countenanced by the state. Hence, he progressively lost his directorship at the Physics Research Institute, his post as department head, and finally his teaching position altogether. I was still a minor when I left the country—and my parents—in search of a better life. It was understood by all that my doing so—a political act in a totalitarian era—would make my father’s situation even more difficult.

Besides being a scientist, my father was a great humanist, not only in terms of his concern for his fellow man but also in the sense of a scholar of the humanities: he was extremely well read in the classics as well as in contemporary literature and history. The break in his career at midlife did not drive him to despair; his humanism instead commanded him to work on the subject he had perhaps always wanted to work on: the history of the interplay of science and the humanities. His first notes became a lecture series, first given off campus, in the evenings at the invitation of student organizations. Much later, when I was able to return to Hungary, I was privileged to listen to one of these lectures, still filled to more than capacity with students and young intellectuals, hearing my father convey the excitement and wonder of scientific development—how difficult it was to make progress in science, not simply because of ignorance but because the arguments were complex and the evidence was often ambiguous, and how the scientists gained courage or were otherwise influenced by the humanities. The success of these lectures gave rise to the present book that he continued to revise and extend almost until his death in 2001.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have come up with a way to help prevent recovering drug addicts from relapsing — without using other pharmaceuticals to help. The approach involves modifying addicts' behaviour by weakening their memory of drug taking, which relieves their cravings and might help to prevent relapse. Addicts tend to associate a drug's effects with drug-taking equipment and a certain environment, which can make them vulnerable to relapse if they encounter those conditions. The technique, studied by Lin Lu of the National Institute of Drug Dependence at Peking University in Beijing and his colleagues, aims to break that link by briefly reactivating the memory of drug taking and following it with an 'extinction session' of repeated exposure to the same memory cues. The short reminder of drug-taking seems to take the memory out of storage and make it easier to overwrite.

Existing therapies try to help addicts to unlearn their habit by, for example, showing them videos of people injecting, and having them handle syringes while not under the influence of the drug. This reduces cravings in the clinic, but not when addicts return to their usual surroundings. Other approaches tested in rats involved using memory-blocking drugs to change memories of past drug use, but these are not approved for use in humans. To boost the technique's effectiveness, Lu and his team combined the approach with a process called memory reconsolidation. During reconsolidation, information is retrieved from long-term storage and reactivated to strengthen the memory. After retrieval, however, the information becomes temporarily unstable and thus prone to alteration.

More here.

It is often said by scientists that our understanding of the neural basis of empathy is in its infancy, the suggestion being that it is only a matter of time before problems will be solved, as if the difficulties facing the research field are merely technical. But the implication of my paper is that the issues confronting empathy theorists are as much theoretical or, say, philosophical, as they are technical or scientific. Adam Smith’s name is today routinely evoked in introductory remarks on the nature of empathy. But how many people realize that for Smith empathy (or sympathy) was not a natural phenomenon or an automatic process of resonance with the feelings of another? Rather, according to him sympathy was conditioned by an inherent theatricality that, by making persons into actors and spectators who distance themselves from each other and even from themselves, forestalls the possibility (the dream) of complete sympathetic merger or identification.43 Freud expressed the same difficulty, indeed impossibility, in his own way when he made psychical ambivalence—the constitutive impossibility of separating Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, immersion and distance—central to his understanding of the sympathetic-identificatory phenomenon. According to Freud, rivalry with the other is as inherent in human nature as is love, and indeed is inseparable from love: the taming of these emotions is the necessary but endless task of civilization.44 For such thinkers, then, our knowledge of other minds cannot be explained by an appeal to a simple mechanism of mutual resonance or mutual attunement of the sort I have analyzed here. A further implication of my paper is that the problem of emotional empathy can only be rendered the more intractable if investigators persist in adopting the theoretical assumptions and experimental methods associated with the Basic Emotions View and the mirror neuron hypothesis.

more from Ruth Leys at nonsite here.

If poetry is going to be tortured, agonized, and morbidly introspective, it might as well be funny too. John Berryman’s The Dream Songs are all that and more. Half elegiac lyricism and half lowdown buffoonery, they’re like nothing else in American literature, though they owe a debt to Saul Bellow’s breakthrough mixture of high and low in The Adventures of Auggie March. (The two men shared an office at the University of Minnesota in the 1950s. Can you imagine being an undergraduate there and making a routine appointment to discuss your C+ with Mr. Bellow or Mr. Berryman?) Although I can’t claim to understand The Dream Songs fully, I’m not required to. No one said it better than Berryman himself: “These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand./They are only meant to terrify & comfort.” Reading all 385 of them at a stretch (not recommended), I sometimes find myself bored as well as baffled.

more from Stephen Ackey at The Millions here.

As chief film critic for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, sometimes alternating for six months of the year with Penelope Gilliatt, Kael had one of the best pulpits in the world during some of the greatest decades of international film. Phenomenally productive, she published twelve books of film criticism, many of them bestsellers, and one, Deeper into Movies, the winner of the National Book Award in 1974. Over her career, she wrote over 11,000 reviews, most of them reprinted in 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982). Her career coincided with the rise of film studies, and she received honorary degrees from Haverford, Reed, Smith and Kalamazoo colleges, Columbia University, and Berkeley. The archive of her manuscripts and letters is held at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. It’s difficult to imagine another film critic with both such a popular audience and such high-culture respect – at least in America. British readers, I think, have not been as much in her thrall. Although she was an early admirer of British cinema, a perceptive and bold critic of British acting (see her candid review of Laurence Olivier as Othello in 1966: “What Negro actor at this stage in the world’s history could dare bring to the role the effrontery that Olivier does?”), and a devoted follower of British film criticism in both newspapers and journals, she was not as widely read outside the US, or as significant.

more from Elaine Showalter at the TLS here.

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:

Barring infertility or other complications—and despite the best efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Senate Republicans—couples today, at least in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, can determine how many children they will have—five, four, three, two, one, or zero. Several recent books look at this decision from different vantage points, and come to surprising—some might say even alarming—conclusions.

In “Why Have Children?: The Ethical Debate” (M.I.T. Press), Christine Overall tries to subject that decision to morally rigorous analysis. Overall, who teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, in Ontario, dismisses the notion that childbearing is “natural” and therefore needs no justification. “There are many urges apparently arising from our biological nature that we nonetheless should choose not to act upon,” she observes. If we’re going to keep having kids, we ought to be able to come up with a reason.

Of course, people do give reasons for having children, and Overall takes them up one by one. Consider the claim that having a child benefits the child. This might seem self-evident. After all, a child deprived, through some Knowltonian means, of coming into existence, loses everything. She can never experience any of the pleasures life has to offer—eating ice cream, say, or riding a bike, or, for the more forward-thinking parents among us, having sex.

More here.

Hot Late Summer

What to do with the rose in my garden,
this remaining rose?

I ended up looking at the abandoned garden.
My old mother, senile, asleep,
carelessly showed it
because of the unusually humid heat past noon
with no autumn wind to stir the blinds.
The withered gate that couldn’t possibly have
anyone to wait for or to visit
was not so much obscene
as openly, casually, innocent.
Having hurried past the verandah outside her chamber,
I wipe the sweat that covers my skin.
The heat of this year, this crazy heat.

What to do with the rose in my garden,
this private rose?
,

by Kazue Shinkawa
from Hiyu dewa naku
Publisher: Chikyusha, Tokyo, 1968

translation: Hiroaki Sato
from Not a Metaphor
P.S., A Press, Middletown Springs, VT, USA, 1999

From Salon:

The Brooklyn Book Festival’s website debuts a new feature this year called OnePage. Every week from March through September, OnePage will post part of a previously unpublished work — chunks of correspondence, scenes from books in progress — by authors such as Darcey Steinke, Martha Southgate, Paula Fox and Stefan Merrill Block. There will also be mini-profiles of participating small presses, including indie mainstays McSweeney’s and Akashic. That a Brooklyn book festival would promote small presses and their authors isn’t surprising. But the sponsor of OnePage has raised a few eyebrows. As the festival’s press release noted, “The project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com.” Yes, much of the literary world is in full-throated revolt against Amazon’s dominance — bookstores fear Amazon will push them out of business, authors worry about deep discounting, and the Department of Justice is considering the major publishers’ challenge over the price of e-books. But amid the public and private rancor, the massive e-retailer is very quietly trying to make friends in the book world. Its strategy is simple and employs a weapon Amazon has in overwhelming supply: Money.

The Brooklyn Book Festival is just one of many recent beneficiaries of Amazon’s largess. According to a list on Amazon’s site, prestigious groups such as the PEN American Center, journals like the Los Angeles Review of Books, One Story, Poets & Writers and Kenyon Review, mentorship programs such as 826 Seattle and Girls Write Now, and associations including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Voice of Witness and Words Without Borders have all received grants. While the dollar figures are not always announced, according to interviews and press reports, many recipients said they have received between $20,000 and $25,000. With the more than 40 current grants listed on Amazon’s site, this suggests the company distributes approximately $1 million annually to small presses and other literary-minded nonprofits. (Publishing sources confirmed that number, but Amazon would not.)

More here.

From Scientific American:

Homophobes should consider a little self-reflection, suggests a new study finding those individuals who are most hostile toward gays and hold strong anti-gay views may themselves have same-sex desires, albeit undercover ones. The prejudice of homophobia may also stem from authoritarian parents, particularly those with homophobic views as well, the researchers added.

“This study shows that if you are feeling that kind of visceral reaction to an out-group, ask yourself, 'Why?'” co-author Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, said in a statement. “Those intense emotions should serve as a call to self-reflection.” The research, published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reveals the nuances of prejudices like homophobia, which can ultimately have dire consequences. [The 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors] “Sometimes people are threatened by gays and lesbians because they are fearing their own impulses, in a sense they 'doth protest too much,'” Ryan told LiveScience. “In addition, it appears that sometimes those who would oppress others have been oppressed themselves, and we can have some compassion for them too, they may be unaccepting of others because they cannot be accepting of themselves.” Ryan cautioned, however, that this link is only one source of anti-gay sentiments.

More here.

Jimmy So in The Daily Beast:

Start at the end. My advice, if you were to find yourself with a copy of Eric Kandel's new book, The Age of Insight—and I recommend that you do—is to first read the acknowledgments, on page 511. For at the end of this handsome chunk of text come the most personal memories: “I was born in Vienna on November 7, 1929 … Near our house were three museums that I never visited as a child, but whose subject matter later came to fascinate me and that now assumed a significant role in this book.”

The first is the Vienna Medical Museum celebrating, among others, the pioneering work of medical doctor Carl von Rokitansky. The second is the Sigmund Freud Museum, which used to be the great man’s apartment. The third is the Upper Belvedere Museum, which houses the world’s greatest collection of the paintings of Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. So arrives, in the autumn of a long and decorated life, The Age of Insight, which really is one continuous and loving acknowledgment—of the debt that Kandel owes to the ghosts of great figures.

Kandel, the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University, always has a lab coat that drapes over his body. He wears a bow tie, and holds court in a spectacular corner office overlooking the Hudson River. I walked in thinking these were signs of authority and tradition, of an outer protective layer. But I was mistaken. Kandel laughs so very easily, and when he does his mouth opens like a Muppet’s. He points to a small painting on his wall, a Bruegel-like scene of town folks punching one another. “That? That is Columbia academics,” and bursts into giggles.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in the New York Times:

Superstition is typically a pejorative term. Belief in things like magic and miracles is thought to be irrational and scientifically retrograde. But as studies have repeatedly shown, some level of belief in the supernatural — often a subtle and unconscious belief — appears to be unavoidable, even among skeptics. One study found that a group of seemingly rational Princeton students nonetheless believed that they had influenced the Super Bowl just by watching it on TV. We are all mystics, to a degree.

The good news is that superstitious thought, or “magical thinking,” even as it misrepresents reality, has its advantages. It offers psychological benefits that logic and science can’t always provide: namely, a sense of control and a sense of meaning.

Consider one “law of magic” that people tend to put stock in: the idea that “luck is in your hands,” that you can affect your fate via superstitious rituals like knocking on wood or carrying a lucky charm. We often rely on such rituals when we are anxious or want to perform well, and though they may not directly have their intended magical effects, these rituals produce an illusion of control and enhance self-confidence, which in turn can improve our performance and thus indirectly affect our fate.

More here. Buy Matthew Hutson's book here.