Unlike men, all conceptualisms are not created equal. Some idea art—another dated term circa 1970—is so cliquishly abstruse as to celebrate, say, a man masturbating inside a gallery as a creative act (Vito Acconci’s 1971 Seedbed), or, more recently, a figure slithering around buffed cement in white pajamas (Terence Koh’s 2011 nothingtoodoo). Other examples, though, push open art’s closed doors: Consider Joseph Beuys’s 1980 founding of the German Green Party (he tagged it “social sculpture”) and the protest work that recently got Ai Weiwei arrested. Besides the obvious differences in generosity, crucial distinctions also appear when these artists address the mother of all art world MacGuffins—the “dematerialization of the art object.” A formula fetishized by legions of American artists, this “iron rule” has served Third World creators largely as a means to an end. And what end would that be? It varies, of course. In the case of the Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs—whose work has explored the demanding intersection between politics and poetics in Mexico for two decades—that artistic mission amounts to a set of pointed but open-ended reflections on the volatile nature of entropic societies. Not one to churn out additional in-house chatter about the global art market, Alÿs’s goal has been instead to produce work that questions, provokes, and engages, while in the process also expanding the reach of art and its audience.

more from Christian Viveros-Fauné at The Village Voice here.

At the heart of the matter is the question of what it means to be a man in the two cultures. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was a strong and effective leader of the IMF, a post that has always been occupied by a European male of a similar stripe. This means: successful and sexually commanding. Sexual aggression in France is a kind of accessory to success. Like a pair of supple Armani shoes, it completes the outfit. “I’m even proud of [his sexual escapades],” his wife is quoted to have said once. “It’s important to seduce for a politician.” The droit du seigneur (or right of the lord of an estate to have his way with any peasant on it) is a French phrase, not by accident. The difference is also enshrined in the literary canon. In the English tradition — and the Brits, as their refusal of the Euro tells us, are not really European but proto-American — the concentration is on courtship and marriage. In the French tradition, it is on adultery. As was explained to me when I lived in France some years back, a man with a mistress is normal—which is why no one in France batted an eyelash when, on the death of President and alleged Resistance hero Francois Mitterrand, a second wife and child showed up at the funeral. During the Clinton-Lewinski scandal, the French were bemused by American outrage. What was all the fuss about? Clinton’s indulging himself with an available young woman? C’est normal. That Lewinski happened to be the age of his daughter, something we Americans noted with disgust, didn’t seem to bother the French. The ethos of Father’s Day, one might conclude, was not as embedded in the cultural consciousness.

more from Paula Marantz Cohen at The Smart Set here.

From The New Yorker:

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The research team shows that the threat of shame and promise of honour each increased cooperation by as much as 50 per cent, providing insights into potential future strategies for tackling global issues such as overfishing and climate change. “Shame and honour might evoke images of The Scarlet Letter or The Three Musketeers, but as tactics to drive social cooperation, they are increasingly important in the digital age of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, where acts of shame and honour are being shared and propagated with unprecedented speed,” says lead author Jennifer Jacquet, a postdoctoral fellow in UBC's Fisheries Centre and the Dept. of Mathematics.

Jacquet says shame and honour are increasingly used to affect policy and cultural change. For example, to deter tax evasion, many U.S. states recently implementing policies to post names of tax delinquents online. Large-scale conservation programs use honour to encourage corporate and public involvement, such as labels that signal to consumers that products are sustainable, including Vancouver's Ocean Wise seafood program. The new study is part of a series to establish a scientific foundation that informs future strategies to encourage cooperation on global issues. “The study confirms that a shame tactic can be effective, but rather surprisingly, we've also found that apparently honour has an equally strong effect on encouraging people to cooperate for the common good,” says co-author Christoph Hauert, an assistant professor in UBC's Dept. of Mathematics and an expert on game theory.

More here.

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn't darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.

by Mary Oliver
from House of Light

by Angelo Nikolopoulos in Boston Review:

Maybe more’s not merrier but messier,
since you can be your own

object and taste of desire, both surrender
and control in one wet exchange,

intimacy’s frontbend: the torso strong-
armed against wall or swivel-chair

until the sex dips into the same body’s
mouth. It’s like watering

and being watered at the same time.
Fall seven times,

and you’ll stand up full. Slippery logic:
the snake who ate its tail.

Maybe it’s the true preservationism,
cutting out the middleman—

him or her—making it local and organic,
pleasure’s Trader Joe’s.

But sustainability’s never sexy,
canvas clad in its carbon-cock-blocking.

If you can’t save the penguins please yourself,
Objectivism’s golden rule.

To be volition and validation, lover and lovee,
a recipient handing himself money.

But a party of one’s no fun—
even auto-eroticism’s depressing.

Like a return to the wellspring of childhood,
where we confronted it face-first,

our awful club scout truth:
that we enter the valley unchartered and alone,

and we must leave it this way too.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. (((1/f))): A Sunday Afternoon Watching Symmetry Break
2. A Primate of Modern Aspect: Penis Spines, Pearly Papules, and Pope Benedict’s Balls
3. Aetiology: Pigs with Ebola Zaire: a whole new can o’ worms
4. Anthropology in Practice: Power, Confidence, and High-Heels
5. Babble: D-MER and the Breastfeeding Blues
6. Bad Astronomy: Most distant object ever seen… maybe
7. Bering in Mind: One Reason Why Humans Are Special and Unique: We Masturbate. A Lot
8. Biodiversity in Focus: The Fly Tree of Life – Big Science, Big Results?
9. Bishnu Marasini: Cholera in Haiti and Association to South Asia and Scientific Study to Reduce Recurrence
10. Body Horrors: Blood Money: Hookworm Economics in the Postbellum South
11. BoingBoing: Nuclear Energy 101: Inside the “Black Box” of Power Plants
12. Byte Size Biology: But did you correct your results using a dead salmon?
13. Centauri Dreams: ‘Blue Stragglers’ in the Galactic Bulge
14. Communicate Science: Is Féidir Linn: Obama was right
15. Convergence: Ocean Acidifi-WHAT?!
16. Cosmic Variance: Physics and the Immortality of the Soul
17. Cosmic Variance: The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant
18. Cosmology Science Blog: International Astronomical Union has no definition for Big Bang
19. Critical Twenties: How a college student can derive the RNA world hypothesis from scratch
20. Culturing Science: Can seabirds overfish a resource? The case of cormorants in Estonia
21. Culturing Science: Reflections on 2010: humans as biological machine and “love” (whatever!)
22. Culturing Science: When Adaptation Doesn’t Happen
23. Deep Sea News: Quantifying Outreach to the Cult of Science
24. Deep Sea News: This is clearly an important species we’re dealing with
25. Dinner Party Science: Is the World Real?
26. Dinner Party Science: Tycho’s drunken moose and other stories
27. Doctor Stu’s Blog: The Future of Nuclear Power after Fukushima: Thorium Reactors?
28. Dot.Physics: Where Does the Carbon Come From?
29. Dr. Carin Bondar: Sacrifice on the Serengeti
30. Edible Geography: Fueling Mexico City: A Grain Revolution
31. Empirical Zeal: Blind Fish in Dark Caves Shed Light on the Evolution of Sleep
32. Empirical Zeal: When Nice Guys Finish First: A Lesson From Tiny Robots
33. Empirical Zeal: Why Moths Lost Their Spots, and Cats Don’t Like Milk
34. ERV: Barnyard Week: White Chickens Are ERV Mutants
35. Furahan Biology and Allied Matters: Size matters, but so does gravity II
36. Georneys: Word of the Week: O is for Ophiolite
37. Highly Allochthonous: Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control
38. Hudson Valley Geologist: SuperMoon
39. In the Dark: No Cox please, we’re British
40. Is This Your Homework: A Plethora of Planets
41. Laelaps: The Pelican’s Beak – Success and Evolutionary Stasis
42. Lindau Nobel Community: Seeking Inspiration
43. Lounge of the Lab Lemming: Dear Hypothesis
44. Matt Soniak: Shell Games: The Social and Behavioral Aspects of Hermit Crab Real Estate
45. Matthew Herper: The First Child Saved By DNA Sequencing
46. Neuron Culture: Free Science, One Paper at a Time
47. Neuron Culture: The Tight Collar: The New Science of Choking Under Pressure
48. Neutrino Blog: Four Neutrinos? But You Said There Were Just Three!
49. Observations of a Nerd: How Do You ID a Dead Osama Anyway?
50. Observations of a Nerd: Reflections on the Gulf Oil Spill: Conversations With My Grandpa
51. Observations of a Nerd: Why do women cry? Obviously it’s so they don’t get laid
52. Oh, For the Love of Science: Bufotoxin Tolerance in Keelback Snakes: Recent Adaptation to a New Threat, or Preadaptation From An Ancient Foe?
53. Oh, For the Love of Science: Prehistoric Clues Provide Insight into Climate’s Future Impact on Oceans
54. Opinionator: Morals Withoud God?
55. Oscillatory Thoughts: Why we don’t need a brain
56. Past Horizons: The Bones of Martyrs?
57. Puff the Mutant Dragon: Bubonic Plague in America, Part I: LA Outbreak
58. Quantum Tantra: Fun With an Argon Atom
59. Ravindra Jadhav’s Blog: Graphene Wonder
60. Resonaances: Theorists vs. the CDF bump
61. Risk Science Blog: Finding My Tears For Japan: When 1 Is Worse Than 10,000
62. Scientific American Guest Blog: Seratonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?
63. Scientific American Observations: Circadian clock without DNA–History and the power of metaphor
64. Screeds and Quibbles: The performativity of epidemiology: how smoking bans could increase death rates
65. Smells Like Science: Field Notes From A Maya Ruin
66. Smells Like Science: The Psychology of Killing and the Origins of War
67. Southern Fried Science: Back from the Brink: Victories in Conservation
68. Starts With A Bang: Where Is Everybody?
69. Surprising Science: Rare Earth Elements Not Rare, Just Playing Hard to Get
70. Tetrapod Zoology: Heinrich’s digital Kentrosaurus: the SJG Stegosaur special, Part II
71. The Art in Science: Who the heck is The Vitruvian Man?
72. The Artful Amoeba: Bombardier Beetles, Bee Purple, and the Sirens of the Night
73. The Artful Amoeba: The Fungus and Virus that Rot Bee Brains
74. The Astronomist: The Universe and Life is Asymmetric: Chirality
75. The International NanoScience Community: At the Bleeding Edge: Benchmarking Next-Gen NanoTox Protocols
76. The Loom: The Human Lake
77. The Mother Geek: How “Boner” Is Misleading: The Science Behind an Erect Penis
78. The Mouse Trap: Dicotomies; or Psychology in a nutshell
79. The Physics arXiv Blog: First Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect
80. The Soft Anonymous: Book Review: Logicomix
81. The Thoughtful Animal: Defending Your Territory: Is Peeing on the Wall Just for the Dogs?
82. The Thoughtful Animal: Is Pedagogy Specific to Humans? Teaching in the Animal World
83. The Thoughtful Animal: Need A Date? Take a Cue From the Birds
84. The Thoughtful Animal: Perseverating on Perseverative Error: What does the “A-not-B” Error Really Tell Us About Infant Cognition?
85. Uncertain Principles: Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing
86. Urban Astronomer: Are the universal constants changing?
87. ViXra Log: New luminosity record for LHC + Injector Chain

Benjamin was not just young when he wrote the pieces in this book; as an activist in the German Youth Movement, he was, one might say, professionally young. The youth movement was a loosely organized phenomenon with many tendencies—its adherents were interested in curriculum reform, sexual liberation, and nationalist renewal, among other causes, and there is a definite flavor of the 1960s in its vague, tumultuous commitment to change. Benjamin was exposed to it starting at 13, when he began to attend the Free School Community—an experimental, progressive school founded by the prominent reformer Gustav Wyneken, who became his mentor. Until the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin was active in youth organizations—he was president of the Berlin University chapter of the Independent Students’ Association, and several of the essays in the book first appeared in movement journals. In these pieces, we sometimes find Benjamin writing as a muckraker, holding the German education system up to ridicule for its pedantry and mindless authoritarianism. In “Teaching and Valuation,” he complains of the “pious reiteration or regurgitation of unrelated or superficially related facts” and offers a “blacklist” of teacherly philistinism: “Apropos of Horace: ‘We have to read Horace in this class. It doesn’t matter whether we like it or not; it’s on the syllabus.’ ” When Benjamin quotes a teacher at a classical Gymnasium telling a student, “Please don’t think that anyone believes this enthusiasm of yours for the ancient world,” it’s hard to avoid suspecting that he himself was the student.

more from Adam Kirsch at Tablet here.

I have said this before: I do not possess a superior understanding of the world. In fact, I do not possess any understanding of this world, let alone a superior one. I do not understand the world. I do not understand. That is why I write, because I do not understand. As for the price, it was not worth anything. A person’s suffering, life itself, is the most precious thing there is. Nothing justifies the degradation of another, nothing justifies someone wanting to look at a zoo, to stand in front of a cage and think “I am more sensitive and have an extraordinary mind and I watch the common people to see how they behave.” I haven’t a clue. I belong among those in the cage, I am not standing outside the bars watching. I don’t even understand what I have done. When I was in Romania, if I started every night to think about what had happened during the day, I couldn’t get my head round it. I couldn’t even afford to think within a wider time span. The exact, tiny things which kept accumulating were enough for me. I couldn’t think, I had to cope, and this absorbed everything I could come up with in my head. I think literature too is a way of searching. What is this existence of ours? We are all a mystery, even in our own body: we do not know how long we will live, which body organs will fail us, when our mind will go. So this is enough. That is why it was so tragic, because alongside all these existential problems, which automatically concern us all, the dictatorship introduced the political surveillance that you had to fight against. I didn’t understand a thing. That’s why I keep trying to ask myself: what happened back then? All I have understood is that freedom is important.

more from an interview between Herta Müller and Gabriel Liiceanu at Eurozine here.

‘I belong to no tribe,’ says Alfred Brendel, taking tea at his home in Hampstead, surrounded by some of the books that constitute his vast library. ‘I follow no creed, subscribe to no ideology, and I despise nationalism. I have lived in many places but wherever I go I am a paying guest.’ If you wanted a single statement to do justice to this extraordinary man, that would do pretty well. It is the expression of a well-travelled, well-read, well-versed man in language that is by turns serious and playful. With his immense learning, worn lightly, and a highly developed sense of irony and absurdity, Brendel is every inch a central European. He may have lived in London for four of his eight decades, and be a honorary knight of the realm, but nobody has ever taken him for an Englishman. In the most important sense, though, Brendel does belong to a tribe: the kingdom of artists. Like Goethe, of whom it was said that he represented a culture in himself, Brendel takes nourishment from all aspects of European civilisation. One of the supreme pianists of the past century, who retired from the concert platform three years ago, he was a painter in his youth, ‘and I’m still looking at paintings, most gratefully’. He has written brilliantly around the subject of music in several collections of essays, and is an acclaimed poet. Harold Pinter read six poems at Brendel’s 70th birthday celebrations ten years ago, and last year saw the publication of his collected work, Playing the Human Game.

more from Michael Henderson at The Spectator here.

Joanna Scutts reviews Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef in Open Letters Monthly:

In B. R. Myers’ recent Atlantic article ‘The Moral Crusade Against Foodies,’ Gabrielle Hamilton – and her tough, vivid memoir – come in for a beating for belonging to the Anthony Bourdain school of macho food writing: ‘it’s quite something to go bare-handed up an animal’s ass… Its viscera came out with an easy tug; a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the yard.’ Driven by a passionate defense of animal rights, flavored with Catholic guilt and vegetarian revulsion, Myers eviscerates the foodie, that particular modern version of the gourmand of years past. He argues that for all the Michael Pollan sanctimony about looking an animal you’re going to eat right in the eye as a kind of atonement, this is just glorified gluttony – a deadly sin, if we hadn’t all forgotten? Furthermore, despite the hype about locavore sustainability as a social good, foodie-ism remains a marker of elite social status: “It has always been crucial to the gourmet’s pleasure that he eat in ways the mainstream cannot afford.” Foodies have the money and leisure to turn a bodily need into a sensual desire, and then, often, to write about it, for a community of like-minded, like-walleted readers.

At the other end of the moralizing spectrum, however, Eric Schlosser, author of the 2000 exposé Fast Food Nation, recently argued in the Washington Post that the elitist tag is a bait and switch. Dismissing those who pay a premium for organic-this and local-that as effete, arugula-munching liberals obscures the fact that the real elites are, as always, the billionaires: in this case, the owners of the massive agribusiness conglomerates that dominate America’s food production. The sinful elites are those currently pushing through a bill in Iowa to ban photographs of industrial farming operations, not Michelle Obama and her vegetable garden, or the diners at Brooklyn farm-to-table restaurants. The latter might be easier to satirize, but our moral outrage should be directed at those who keep fresh, healthy food out of the hands of the poor and poison the landscape while they’re at it.

In this fraught argument over the proper way to understand, appreciate, and write about food, the foodie memoir has a peculiar status. On the one hand, it participates in larger debates over food by advocating a particular way of eating – usually slowly, thoughtfully, with family and friends, using local ingredients, and if possible while watching the sunset over a Tuscan hillside. There are variations on this theme, and the occasional admission of a guilty pleasure in something mass-produced, but nobody has yet gotten rich writing My Life in Twinkies. On the other hand, the foodie memoir is necessarily personal – what is more intimate than a rumbling stomach, or tastebuds dancing in response to a perfect mouthful? The British food columnist Nigel Slater’s excellent Toast, for instance, is subtitled The Story of a Boy’s Hunger. How is that hunger, and its sating, to be shared? Foodie memoirs have long taken their cue from the lyrical Francophile M.F.K. Fisher, and tend to combine elements of the elegiac and the therapeutic. Often the writer is trying to recapture and recreate an idyllic, delicious childhood kitchen (Ruth Reichl), and sometimes to escape an upbringing of frozen dinners (Nigel Slater.) Healing journeys abound (Julie Powell) and more often than not there is some revelatory time spent absorbing the food and life lessons of different cultures, most often France or Italy, where the foodie memoir merges with the travelogue (Eat, Pray, Love.)

Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter combines plenty of these tropes on its journey from mythical childhood kitchen to thriving restaurant (she owns and runs Prune, in Manhattan’s East Village.)

Greg Tate in the Village Voice:

You know why Gil never had much love for that ill-conceived Godfather of Rap tag. If you're already your own genre, you don't need the weak currency offered by another. If you're a one-off, why would you want to bask in the reflected glory of knock-offs? If you're already Odin, being proclaimed the decrepit sire of Thor and Loki just ain't gonna rock your world.

Gil knew he wasn't bigger than hip-hop—he knew he was just better. Like Jimi was better than heavy metal, Coltrane better than bebop, Malcolm better than the Nation of Islam, Marley better than the King James Bible. Better as in deeper—emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, politically, ancestrally, hell, probably even genetically. Mama was a Harlem opera singer; papa was a Jamaican footballer (rendering rolling stone redundant); grandmama played the blues records in Kentucky. So grit shit and mother wit Gil had in abundance, and like any Aries Man worth his saltiness he capped it off with flavor, finesse and a funky gypsy attitude.

He was also better in the sense that any major brujo who can stand alone always impresses more than those who need an army in front of them to look bad, jump bad, and mostly have other people to do the killing. George Clinton once said Sly Stone's interviews were better than most cats' albums; Gil clearing his throat coughed up more gravitas than many gruff MCs' tuffest 16 bars. Being a bona fide griot and Orisha-ascendant will do that; being a truth-teller, soothsayer, word-magician, and acerbic musical op-ed columnist will do that. Gil is who and what Rakim was really talking about when he rhymed, “This is a lifetime mission: vision a prison.” Shouldering the task of carrying Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson and The Black Arts Movement's legacies into the 1970s world of African-American popular song will do that too. The Revolution came and went so fast on April 4, 1968, that even most Black people missed it.

From Salon:

It began when a professor forced him to read “Emma.” Balky at first, Deresiewicz was soon thunderstruck by the revelation that Austen had “not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are.” Each chapter in this fusion of memoir and literary criticism reflects on how one Austen novel helped Deresiewicz reach a fuller understanding of some important aspect of life: common courtesy, learning, the importance of character over charm, social status, friendship and love. He makes a good case; Austen is a profoundly moral novelist and surely meant her readers to glean some insights on how best to live from reading her books. I do not doubt that Deresiewicz improved a lot while reading them. It's the causal relationship between the two phenomena that I doubt.

Does reading great literature make you a better person? I've not seen much evidence for this common belief. Some of the best-read people I know are thoroughgoing jerks, and some of the kindest and noblest verge on the illiterate — which is admittedly an anecdotal argument, but then, when it comes to this topic, what isn't? There's a theory, vaguely associated with evolutionary psychology, maintaining that fiction builds empathy, and therefore morality, by inviting us into the minds, hearts and experiences of others. This is what the British children's book author Michael Morpurgo implied recently in the Observer newspaper, when he claimed that “developing in young children a love of poems and stories” might someday render the human-rights organization Amnesty International obsolete.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Each time you see a person that you know, your brain rapidly and seemingly effortlessly recognizes that person by his or her face. “Faces are among the most compelling visual stimulation that we encounter, and recognizing faces taxes our visual perception system to the hilt. Carnegie Mellon has a longstanding history for embracing a full-system account of the brain. We have the computational tools and technology to push further into looking past one single brain region. And, that is what we did here to discover that there are multiple cortical areas working together to recognize faces,” she said.

For the study, participants were shown images of faces while in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. Their task was to recognize different facial identities with varying facial expressions. Using dynamic multivariate mapping, the research team examined the functional MRI (fMRI) data and found a network of fusiform and anterior temporal regions that respond with distinct patterns to different identities. Furthermore, they found that the information is evenly distributed among the anterior regions and that the right fusiform region plays a central role within the network. “Not only do we have a more clearly defined architectural model of the brain, but we were able to determine the involvement of multiple brain areas in face recognition as well as in other types of processes, such as visual word recognition,” Behrmann said.

More here.

Lila Azam Zanganeh in The Daily Beast:

For three days and three nights, on a damp February weekend in Palm Beach, Florida, I read Nabokov to Nabokov. I had traveled from New York to Palm Beach with a manuscript in my suitcase to visit Dmitri Nabokov, the only son and literary executor of Vladimir Nabokov.

The manuscript, my first book, contained a number of Nabokov quotes for which I needed to obtain rights before I could approach an American publisher. I knew that, in 1999, Dmitri had threatened to sue an Italian author named Pia Pera over a book titled Lo’s Diary, a rewriting of Lolita from Lolita’s point of view. To avoid an infringement lawsuit, Pera’s American publisher had printed a scathing preface by Dmitri (“Pia Pera [henceforth PP], an Italian journalist and author of some stories that I have not read …”). Aside from this, Dmitri had built a forbidding reputation in the literary world for attacking the works of many a would-be Nabokovian. Fearing the worst, I had emailed Dmitri the manuscript, hoping he would read it before I made it to Florida, and that we might spend the evening discussing potential issues.

My book was a curious combination of fiction and essay, of invention and interpretation. It posited that Nabokov was the great writer of happiness. A notion that, over the years, almost invariably turned small talk into opinionated tirades. Happiness, evidently, did not keep good company with nymphets and nympholepts.

Palm Beach felt like a sort of grotesque inversion of Nabokov’s short story “Spring in Fialta”: gigantic pine trees; juniper shrubs; sorry-go-rounds of concrete high-rises. With a map and a bicycle, I’d made my way to Ocean Drive. I rehearsed with myself how I might parry various lines of attack: breathe, acquiesce, qualify. “Your father hated didactic writings, hence this book had to be extremely playful … I had to imagine him.” With an accelerated heart rate, I rang the bell of Dmitri’s apartment. A beaming nurse opened the door, and I stepped into a living room adorned with posters outlining, in 19th-century font, the casts of productions Dmitri had sung in during his operatic career. La Bohème stood out—a memorable performance, as Dmitri later recounted, at the Teatro di Reggio Emilia, where he had sung his debut role on the same night as Pavarotti, nearly half a century ago. On the door to his bedroom, to the left, a glossy poster of Kubrick’s Lolita displayed the famous pair of heart-shaped red glasses. Among mirrors and modern cream-white furniture, one could glimpse various miniature models of racing cars, another of his life’s passions.

Remy Debes reviews George Kateb's Human Dignity, Harvard University Press over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

You really should read this book. I think . . .

George Kateb's Human Dignity has the ring of popular philosophy. It isn't rigorously researched, especially with regard to the literature on human dignity. It overreaches, making substantive claims not just about the nature and basis of human dignity, but also human rights, liberty, morality, mind, consciousness, self-consciousness, identity, imagination, language, autonomy, and agency. And it defends more than a few contentious positions, including the central claim that human dignity is underwritten by human uniqueness in the strong sense that humans are partly divorced from the natural order — a claim, it must be added, which is on the one hand intended secularly and on the other hand defended unabashedly from the armchair. Still — you should probably read this book.

It is a rewarding book. Rewarding because of its scope — or more exactly, because of its enviable ability to be (generally) deep despite the incredible scope. Rewarding because of its style — its intentionally personal tone and scholastically unencumbered pace. And it is rewarding because it is so bold. Given the timid and hedge-prone state of recent work on human dignity, Kateb's confident viewpoint is refreshing and engaging even when it is frustrating, wildly speculative, and wrong. In short, Human Dignity is one of the more interesting contributions on the subject of human worth in the last few decades. It absorbed me when it succeeded. And it absorbed me when it failed.

Ironically, one of this book's more important successes may be one Kateb himself appreciates least: unlike most work on human dignity, Kateb uses the right method. Abstracting from his substantive and normative claims about the nature of dignity, claims which are the focus of the book, Kateb implicitly appears to appreciate the need to get clear on, and be led by, what I have recently called the form of dignity.

Rafia Zakaria in Guernica:

[L]ike so many other things—infrastructure and institutions, roads and rituals—the bomb too has failed Pakistan. In the past month, Pakistan’s borders have been casually ignored, security walls scaled and planes destroyed—all this despite the possession of the omnipotent trump card residing at the sacred altar of our national consciousness.

The bomb that was supposed to deter and defeat has been unable to frighten anyone into leaving us alone. It has revealed, instead, the flimsy remains of our national pride and a confused, conspiracy-infested mental landscape. Never united otherwise, Pakistanis can now share the heartbreak of knowing that they were never invincible after all, that a few men could easily outwit and outsmart, and that situating their self-worth in a bomb is exacting an infinitely bloody price.

No longer cosseted by the myth of a cure-all weapon, the bomb like an unveiled bride must be assessed in the fluorescence of a depressing and unwelcome day. It was widely known to have been procured through deception and disguise, lies and falsehoods. The man, who developed it, was chastised publicly and heroised privately, despite what some saw as his mendacity.

These sins we forgave, unwilling to recognise their potent if silent attack on national morality now poised to elevate someone accused of selling nuclear technology and promoting proliferation. It is poised to accept that it is entirely forgivable to sacrifice what is right for what is needed and most damningly that the power to destroy is more venerable than the power to befriend and create.

The losses brought by the bomb would likely be forgiven by Pakistanis if they were moral concerns alone. In the cold estimations of post-Soviet calculations, nuclear power was a deterrent, its possession meant that others would stay away, that possession alone equaled power, especially for small countries with few friends.

However, in the era of terrorism, where every living thing is a target and the propagation of fear is a means to control, a markedly different equation of nuclear power is in operation. Under its deductions, weak states with nuclear weapons attract rather than deter non-state enemies.

Antwerp is an unappreciated beauty with a dubious reputation. But the city, which has fallen into disrepute as a bastion of Flemish nationalism, surprises its visitors with its cultural cosmopolitanism. A top source of pride is the fashion scene, which showcases its creations in the hip neighbourhood surrounding Dries van Noten’s fashion temple and the Fashion Museum opened in 2002, which the Ghent architect Marie-José Van Hee furnished with a theatrically stepped foyer serving both as an ideal place to pose and a catwalk. As the city on the Schelde became a fashion mecca towards the end of the 1980s, thanks to the meteoric rise of the “Antwerp Six”, a small architectural miracle emerged. On the rundown waterfront along the Schelde, Bob van Reeth, the father of new Flemish architecture, built the eye-catching, striped Huis Van Roosmalen and also – as part of the restoration of the burned down riverbank terraces – the Zuiderterras Café that resembles the form of a ship, while Willem-Jan Neutelings erected an apartment building whose wooden facade was intended to recall Antwerp’s maritime tradition. Gradually, politicians began to realise that Antwerp, all too entrenched in its glorious past, needed an urban renewal initiative. Inspired by the revitalisation of decrepit ports in Barcelona, San Francisco, and Sydney, a competition was organised for rejuvenating the “stad aan de stroom” situated between the highway intersection to the south and Eilandje Docks to the north, now made redundant by the new container harbour – with awards going to big names, such as Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Bob van Reeth, and Manuel de Sola-Morales. But the ambitious projects ended up being shelved, and revitalisation – based on a new master plan – proceeded on an informal basis and haltingly.

more from Roman Hollenstein at Sign and Sight here.

In a 1970 Arts Magazine article, art critic Gregory Battcock said: “The new curator is more concerned with communication than with art.” In a 1958 essay on Jackson Pollock, Happenings artist Allan Kaprow said: “They will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness.” In a 1981 interview, poet John Giorno said: “I certainly won’t curl up in a chair with a book of poetry.” Dial-a-Poem, Giorno’s New York City–wide poetry installation instigated in 1968, used the technology of the telephone, a plastic handheld thing, to relay poetry as if it were simple information. The messages were poems recorded by poets and artists, from John Ashbery to Bobby Seale. For a period of about four years, anyone could dial 212.628.0400 on a rotary telephone and hear a poem. Art and writing at the end of the 1960s had expanded into new kinds of experience. Almost anything could suddenly be labeled “art”—a pile of tires, a conversation, the sound of rain outside a window. Turning away from the heroics associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement—the grand gesture—artists and writers suddenly understood the actions of an ordinary life as a type of poetry. In addition to art’s expansion, the poem on the page expanded, the definitions of “media” expanded, the frame of the picture expanded. Art and life, for a short time, became concomitant.

more from Katie Geha at Poetry here.

WHEN THE reactor at Unit 4 of the V. I. Lenin Atomic Power Station, Chernobyl, exploded twenty-five years ago, the people of Belarus were sacrificed by a secretive political system. Pilots such as Major Aleksei Grushin were sent into the air above Belarus to seed clouds with silver iodine so they would rain down what had spewed from the inner core of the reactor onto the fields below. That political decision kept Muscovites safe—but as a result, 60 percent of the disaster’s radiation fell on the hapless people of Belarus. It was a national catastrophe. As author Svetlana Alexievich points out in her masterful Voices from Chernobyl, the Nazis took three years to destroy 619 Belarusian villages during the Second World War; Chernobyl made 485 villages uninhabitable in hours. Today, 2,000,000 Belarussians, including 800,000 children, live in contaminated areas. To give an idea as to how contaminated this land is, 100,000 people live on land with a radiation level 1,480 times greater than the level typically found on a nuclear bomb test site. Between 1990 and 2000, the incidence of thyroid cancer in adolescents in the region increased by 1,600 percent.

more from Michael Harris at Dissent here.