Aram Rosten in Newsweek:

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

David Foster Wallace's final book is boring. On that, everyone seems to agree. We understand, too, that Wallace intended it to be boring. In the years before he killed himself, David Foster Wallace was writing, after all, a long novel about the IRS. He hadn't finished the book when he died. So, we are left with the incomplete remnants of what he was still in the process of creating. But it is easy to see, in reading The Pale King, published from all the material that DFW was working on before his death, that he fully intended to write a book that would produce long stretches of boredom for the reader. He wanted to produce boredom, he wanted to reflect on boredom, and he wanted, finally, to love boredom.

The most important piece of writing to come out about David Foster Wallace in some time was written by Maria Bustillos for The Awl in early April of this year. Maria is an unabashed fan of David Foster Wallace and wrote a book (Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork) that includes the chapter, “David Foster Wallace: The Dork Lord of American Letters.” Being both a writer and a fan, Bustillos wanted to know. After the suicide, she wanted to know. She wanted what many of us who admired the writer wanted: more of the man. She hoped, as we all hoped, that secrets would be revealed and that the secrets of the interior David Foster Wallace might also shed some light on his terrible, impressive, and depressing final act, the taking of his own life.

Maria Bustillos decided to go to the source. She had the strength to go to his papers and to read them. The papers exist. His books exist, too, the books from DFW's private library, many of which are heavily annotated. There are notes and jottings and lists and letters. It can all be found at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Maria Bustillos went there and she started to read, she started to look through all that material. What she found surprised her.

More here.

From Guardian:

Last year Ledbury poetry festival asked poets to name their most hated words. For this year's festival – running from 1 to 10 July – they've asked for the expressions that have become such cliches that they have lost all meaning. Here are their responses: please add your own.

Adam Horovitz

Word or phrase: “Thinking outside the box”

Why? This phrase came and bit me whilst I was considering a number of words and phrases. A friend asked if I was unwell. I told them I was thinking about defunct, soiled and spoiled words and phrases and was having trouble settling on the worst one. “Try thinking outside the box!” said my friend with a twinkle in her eye, which I missed because I became so suddenly agitated by her use of this appalling phrase. I believe that I may have wished loudly for everyone who continued to encourage people to “think outside the box” to be sellotaped inside a cardboard box while philosophers ignored their muffled cries and considered whether the prisoners were thinking or not thinking, sealed within their cardboard tombs. “Chill out!” my friend said, laughing, knowing all too well what she was doing and stepping away so she didn't have to listen to the grinding squeak of my teeth.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

It’s just after dawn at the Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where the ambition for the morning is to resurrect an Egyptian ale whose recipe dates back thousands of years. But will the za’atar—a potent Middle Eastern spice mixture redolent of oregano—clobber the soft, floral flavor of the chamomile? And what about the dried doum-palm fruit, which has been giving off a worrisome fungusy scent ever since it was dropped in a brandy snifter of hot water and sampled as a tea? “I want Dr. Pat to try this,” says Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder, frowning into his glass. At last, Patrick McGovern, a 66-year-old archaeologist, wanders into the little pub, an oddity among the hip young brewers in their sweat shirts and flannel. Proper to the point of primness, the University of Pennsylvania adjunct professor sports a crisp polo shirt, pressed khakis and well-tended loafers; his wire spectacles peek out from a blizzard of white hair and beard. But Calagione, grinning broadly, greets the dignified visitor like a treasured drinking buddy. Which, in a sense, he is.

The truest alcohol enthusiasts will try almost anything to conjure the libations of old. They’ll slaughter goats to fashion fresh wineskins, so the vintage takes on an authentically gamey taste. They’ll brew beer in dung-tempered pottery or boil it by dropping in hot rocks. The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.

More here.

Liz Mermin, also in Caravan:

In October 2009, two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested David Headley at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport as he was about to board a flight to Philadelphia. His intention, he later told interrogators, was to go from there to Pakistan and then on to Copenhagen to attack the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. At the time, investigators had no idea Headley had been involved in the Mumbai attacks (a detail he offered up after he was in custody), but he had been fixated on the Denmark plan following the “success” of 26/11, and intended to carry it out on his own, if necessary.

Although he had been trained to use AK-47s and grenades, Headley had never killed anyone with his own hand. His contribution to the 26/11 attack was intelligence from Mumbai: he provided his LeT handlers with hours and hours of video footage and offered strategic suggestions based on his time living in and scouting out the city. He was impatient for more action, and now wanted to attack the West. But LeT was under intense scrutiny after the Mumbai attacks, and his handler—though initially enthusiastic—had told him to back off. So he turned to al Qaeda. And when the men in Europe whom al Qaeda said would carry out the Copenhagen job were unwilling to do so, he offered to do it himself.

The plan was to enter the newspaper’s heavily secured office building with guns and knives, take hostages, shoot them, and then cut off their heads and throw them out the window into King’s New Square. As in Mumbai, the attackers were not supposed to survive. So it seems that the FBI might have saved David Headley’s life by arresting him—a courtesy they would extend again when he agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the US government in exchange for a promise that he would avoid the death penalty and extradition to Denmark, Pakistan or India. The latter was something Headley wanted to avoid at all costs.

I had been following the Headley saga since November 2009, when I happened to see a MiD DAY gossip column headlined “Did Headley Date Starlet?” The piece began: “Lashkar-e-Taiba mastermind David Coleman Headley (49), whose reputation as a strikingly handsome charmer almost matches that of his terror history, may have dated starlet Aarti Chhabria.” My first thought—reading the paper online from London—was “who the hell is David Headley?”

Amitava Kumar in Caravan (photo from Wikipedia):

I was recently invited to dinner at the home of a Pakistani doctor in New York City. There was desi food. Biryani, qeema, baigan bharta, dal cooked to such perfection that one could taste even its fragrance, and rotis replenished as soon as they were gone from the plate. Nusrat was singing on the stereo. From the large glass windows of the thirtieth-floor apartment, I could see Central Park, a splash of green treetops. Inside, the walls were lined with bookcases filled with titles in Urdu and English.

There were ten guests. One of them was a tall, goateed man with his long hair held in a ponytail. He was wearing a maroon cap on his head and necklaces with gems around his neck. I recognised him from the photographs I had seen of him. He was Salman Ahmad from the Pakistani Sufi-rock music group, Junoon.

When we were seated for dinner, it was announced that we needed to reflect on the crisis in Pakistan. Just a few days earlier, Pakistani Taliban militants had made a daring attack on Naval Station Mehran, destroying two surveillance aircraft and killing at least 10 security personnel. An older gentleman raised the issue of rampant corruption and asked what was to be done. Our host, the doctor, dressed in a red shalwaar-kameez, her dark hair falling down to her shoulders, said to Salman Ahmad: “Darling, share your ideas. You have a passionate idea.”

Ahmad said he had recently sent out an email saying that Pakistan needed a revolution. Looking around at everyone at the table, he said that Pakistan “requires a massive social change. It requires a non-violent change.” He began talking of his early days as a singer, when he had been a student at King Edward Medical College in Lahore, and what had shifted in Pakistan since then. “There was a frustration we felt… What we experienced in college, I’d now multiply it to the nth level.” When he was a kid, “everyone wore their art as a badge of courage.” But now it was as if the country were on “a different planet”. Pakistan was standing at the brink. “Out of 180 million, a full 100 million are under 20. They can become suicide bombers or we can build on their potential.”

Sam Bowles in Philosophy and Public Affairs (slightly technical):

The parasitic liberalism thesis, advanced in many variants over the past two centuries, holds that the proper functioning of markets and other institutions endorsed by liberals depends on family-based, religious, and other traditional social norms that are endangered by these very institutions. Liberal society thus is said to fail Rawls’s test of stability: it does not “generate its own supportive moral attitudes.”

Consistent with the thesis, market-like incentives are sometimes counterproductive, apparently because they displace preexisting ethical commitments in favor of a self-interested strategic mode of reasoning, as Richard Titmuss claimed is the case when monetary incentives are deployed to encourage blood donations. Until recently, skeptics of the parasitic liberalism thesis could point to the paucity of hard evidence that market-like incentives compromise ethical motives. However, recent experimental studies show that while the “moral sentiments” underpinning the workings of markets and other institutions endorsed by liberals are common in most human populations,3 the same experiments also indicated that incentives that appeal to material self-interest often undermine interpersonal trust, reciprocity, fairness, and public generosity.

Ha-Joon Chang debates Jagdish Bhagwati in the Economist. [H/t: Mona Ali.] Ha-Joon Chang:

There is truth in the argument that above a certain level of development, countries become “post-industrial”, or “deindustrialised”. But that is only in terms of employment—the falling proportion of the workforce in engaged in manufacturing. Even the richest economies have not really become post-industrial in terms of their production and consumption.

From expenditure data in current (rather than constant) prices, it may appear that people in rich countries are consuming ever more services, but that is mainly because services are becoming ever more expensive in relative terms, thanks to structurally faster productivity growth in manufacturing.

By their very nature, many service activities are inherently impervious to productivity increases. In some cases, the very increase in productivity will destroy the product itself. If a string quartet trots through a 27-minute piece in nine minutes, would you say that its productivity has trebled? For some other services, the apparently higher productivity may be due to the debasement of the product. A lot of the increases in retail service productivity in countries like America and Britain have been a result of lowering the quality of the retail service itself—fewer shop assistants, longer drives to the supermarket, lengthier waits for deliveries, etc.

Bhagwati:

Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist, is reputed to have remarked wittily about the “manufactures fetish” that most people think that unless one makes things that can be dropped on one's foot, they are not worth making. He would have been wittier if he had changed it to dropping them on one's foe's foot.

As is often the case, this fetish has the highest pedigree: no less than Adam Smith himself. We know of course that Smith is often misunderstood, as when he is condemned by liberals (in the American, not the Manchester School, sense) as an unqualified proponent of laissez-faire, whereas he qualified his support for the division of labour by arguing that specialisation on the narrowest of tasks and endless repetition of them would turn workers into morons and that good governance supplying education to offset this was necessary.

Jean Bollack in Sign and Sight:

The correspondence between the young Sigmund Freud and his fiancee Martha Bernays stretched over 52 months, from June 1882 until their marriage in September 1886. When Freud met the 20-year-old Martha, a friend of his sisters, in the spring of 1882, he had just finished studying medicine. And since external circumstances made it impossible for him to continue his university career, he was now aspiring to become an established neurologist at the Viennese General Hospital. Soon after their engagement, which was initially kept secret, Martha's widowed mother decided to move with her two daughters to Wandsbek near Hamburg. During what was to be almost four years of separation the engaged couple wrote letters to each other on an almost daily basis, a vast bundle of correspondence.

At the time, 1882, no one was happier than he. This is his underlying tone. Freud does not write to convince himself; there is no need of that. From the outset their relationship had been affirmed as leading to the union of marriage, a bond based on rationality. The becoming of the romantic relationship was in and of itself as problematic as it is for every other person. But Freud had solved the problem on two fronts. He was able to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to his further scientific and medical education and find himself at the same time. Without having to roam afar. There was a social relationship between the two Jewish families, the Freuds and the Bernays, during his period of emancipation. The couple also took on the role of matchmaker. Anna, one of Freud's five sisters, became engaged a year later to Martha's brother Eli.

Freud was much taken with Martha and accurately gauged her abilities. For her part, everything about him was significant, not only as the persona of the “man” as the girl calls him, but also the position in society that awaited her and the role that she would thereby play. The existence of countless engagement letters written throughout the years before their marriage can be explained by the dictates of convention, which Sigmund Freud generally respected. These were the usual obligations; and good middle class families kept a close watch that they were observed. The aim of love was marriage and this was fulfilled by the birth of children, which required a regular income. Freud was still unable to provide this, which prescribed the duration of their correspondence. However, this period can be interpreted very differently from the perspective of the aspiring mate. Convention acquires its true meaning somewhere else.

1. agent of goodness & light: a.) In a YouTube interview, a lawyer and author of several books about English usage asks David Foster Wallace what he thinks of genteelisms—those multisyllablic, latinate, important-sounding words like “prior to” and “subsequent to” that substitute for shorter, often Anglo-Saxon, down-to-earth-sounding ones like “before.” Revealingly, the guy who majored in English and philosophy at Amherst College, whose father was a philosophy professor, doesn’t answer at first. Instead, he reflexively makes a sour face. Only then does he suggest “genteelism” is an “overly charitable way to characterize” such “puff words,” and concludes: “This is the downside of starting to pay attention. You start noticing all the people who say ‘at this time’ instead of ‘now.’ Why did they just take up one-third of a second of my lifetime?” 2. agent of goodness & light: b.) The upside to grammatical awakenings, Wallace continues, is that “you get to be more careful and attentive in your own writing, so you become an agent of light and goodness rather than the evil that’s all around.” Such remarkable precision and forethought is what Wallace’s writing is all about—but only in the sense that it’s emblematic of a larger determined noticing. Get that, and in many ways you get it all.

more from Lance Olson at The Quarterly Conversation here.

A sea of smeared and dripped white is weighed down by undertones of grey. The overall effect is misty and eerie. But what wrenches this painting by Cy Twombly into violent grandeur is the eruption of red, like a slaughtered whale’s exploding blood, in the lower left part of the canvas. The painting, from 1985, is called Hero and Leandro (To Christopher Marlowe). Hero and Leandro (or Leander in English usage) were lovers in ancient Greek mythology who both drowned. When you discover that, it is easy to see that Twombly’s apparently abstract painting is a brilliant response to the tragic essence of these doomed lovers’ watery fate: it is an evocation of death at sea, and its smoky ambiguities suggest a heady cocktail of death and desire. The title invokes the Elizabethan writer Christopher Marlowe, who wrote about Hero and Leander and who was himself murdered close to the river Thames in Deptford; so this is also about the death of Marlowe. The mythical lovers drowned. Marlowe was stabbed. The blood in the painting is surely his. It is a cliche that abstract art is distant from real life, impenetrable and remote. Twombly is an abstract painter who tells stories of love, longing and loss. His art is always tangy with experience – it drips life.

more from Jonathan Jones at The Guardian here.

Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted. Human digestion had become visible. Beaumont took over St Martin’s care when charity support ran out, and over the next ten years the patient lived intermittently with the doctor, as both his domestic servant and a contractually paid experimental object. St Martin’s fistula was soon to become one of the modern world’s most celebrated peepshows.

more from Steven Shapin at the LRB here.

From Harvard Magazine:

More than 2,000 years ago, a Roman named Titus Lucretius Carus set down his thoughts on topics ranging from creation to religion to death. The format for his observations, many of them highly technical and uncannily modern, was a single elegant poem: readers would stomach such material more easily if it was presented artfully, he suggested, just as a child would drink bitter medicine more readily out of a cup with a honeyed rim.

He was right. In later centuries, when that poem, De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), came under siege for its subversive potential, the work’s captivating beauty would be key to its survival. Still, it barely weathered the incursions of time and hostile authorities, which conspired to put it out of view for nearly a millennium. The improbable story of how it re-emerged, and how the mindset it advocated informs our present, is the subject of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction is packed with memorable dialogue — 'Le Big Mac', say, or Samuel L. Jackson's biblical quotations. But remember this exchange between the two hitmen, played by Jackson and John Travolta? Vincent (Travolta): “Antwan probably didn't expect Marsellus to react like he did, but he had to expect a reaction”. Jules: “It was a foot massage, a foot massage is nothing, I give my mother a foot massage.”

Computer scientists Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Lillian Lee of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, see the way Jules repeats the word 'a' used by Vincent as a key example of 'convergence' in language. “Jules could have just as naturally not used an article,” says Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. “For instance, he could have said: 'He just massaged her feet, massaging someone's feet is nothing, I massage my mother's feet.'” The duo show in a new study that such convergence, which is thought to arise from an unconscious urge to gain social approval and to negotiate status, is common in movie dialogue. It “has become so deeply embedded into our ideas of what conversations 'sound like' that the phenomenon occurs even when the person generating the dialogue [the scriptwriter] is not the recipient of the social benefits”, they say.

More here.

From The Owls:

“Author’s Note: Since 2007 I have been corresponding with the war reporter Paul Watson, as he traveled around the world, from southeast Asia to Afghanistan and Iraq. Paul is most well known for winning the Pulitzer Prize for Spot Photography in 1994 for his photograph of a fallen American soldier in the streets of Mogadishu. He claims that when he took this picture he heard a voice, a voice that he believes belonged to the dead soldier, telling him, “If you do this, I will own you forever.” The play we are writing, The Body of an American, is concerned with Paul’s life and career, and specifically the story of this haunting. In February of 2010 we finally met in person in Ulukhaktok, in the High Arctic of the Northwest Territories in Canada, where Paul was enjoying a brief stint as the reporter for the 'Arctic and Aboriginal Beat' for the Toronto Star. He is currently back in Afghanistan now.”

Paul Watson Watches TV

I like John Mayer. You like John Mayer?
I like Ryan Adams also. And Queen
Latifah. Her sound’s hot. I like to watch
TV with the sound off and just listen
to my iPod. That okay with you? This
sucks. This sucks. There’s nothing good on TV!
I usually watch just sports, like hockey
or football? sometimes entertainment news
because it’s stupid and I love it when
celebrities do stupid things. It helps
me to relax. Also I like curling
as an Olympic sport. I love hearing
the women’s curling team screaming, Harder!
Faster! All of these women with their brooms
that look more like Swiffer WetJets rubbing
some kind of path in the ice for the weight
or pot or stone or whatever it is
screaming, Harder! Faster! As if that does
anything, really! What about this show,
The Bachelor? Have you seen The Bachelor? Look,
she’s pretending to cry. She’s pretending
to cry! What are all these people, actors?
Strippers? She’s trying so damn hard to cry
real tears! Harder! Faster! How’s it look
out there? You can’t tell if the snow’s falling
down from the sky or blowing off the ice
in the wind. Must be gusting up to what
65 miles an hour? Why don’t you make
a TV show out of this place? You could
pitch it back home in Hollywood: Newhart
meets Nanook of the North. All the crazies
you run into at a so-called hotel
that’s really more of a youth hostel or
low-budget rehab somewhere far away
above the tree line. Want another glass
of Bordeaux? Is that your mug? You look bored,
I can tell. You think I’m wasting your time
here, watching TV. When I’m on the phone
with my brothers and sisters, they’re talking
about, you know, problems at work. I say,
How long have we been talking? Ten minutes.
I tell them: Now you’re ten minutes closer
to dying. Which annoys them. It bugs me
to the core though, that people just don’t see
how quickly we die. Whether you’re driving
home from work, or suntanning on a beach
in Phuket and this wave comes out of nowhere
and that’s it, the end. Unmute this. I love
this movie. Look at those legs! Meryl Streep
is on the run, or she’s on the river
actually, ha ha, in a rafting boat
trying to get away from this psycho
killer Kevin Bacon. Is this movie
good? Or shit? No it’s shit. But God, Meryl
Streep is so gorgeous.

by Dan O'Brien

Venkatesh Rao in Ribbon Farm:

On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout. The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. By January, the terms of a comprehensive bailout were worked out, and the British government inserted its czars into the Company’s management to ensure compliance with its terms.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline — hopefully gracefully — into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Some people get a thrill from getting their genome sequenced and poring through the details of their genes. I’m a bit off-kilter, I guess, because I’m more curious about the genomes of the things living in my belly button. And let me tell you: it’s a jungle in there.

I first became curious about my navel in January. I was in Durham, North Carolina, to attend a meeting, and as I walked out of a conference room I noticed a cluster of people in the lobby handing out swabs. They were asking volunteers to stick the swabs in their belly button for the sake of science. Our bodies are covered with microbes, and scientists are discovering weirdly complex patterns to their biodiversity. From fingers to elbows to chin to forehead, different regions of our skin are dominated by different combinations of species. But the bellybutton remained terra incognita.

I happily donated my microbiome to the study, which is being conducted by Jiri Hulcr and Andrea Lucky, two post-doctoral researchers in the laboratory of Rob Dunn at North Carolina State University. After a few weeks, Hulcr sent me a photo of a Petri dish in which some of the bacteria from my bellybutton were thriving. Then Hulcr and Lucky got down to the serious work of identifying the species in the navels of their volunteers (90 and counting).

Yesterday, Dunn sent me a spreadsheet detailing my own results. “You, my friend, are a wonderland,” he wrote.

More here.

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the New York Review of Books:

Suppose we describe the following situation: major US financial institutions have badly overreached. They created and sold new financial instruments without understanding the risk. They poured money into dubious loans in pursuit of short-term profits, dismissing clear warnings that the borrowers might not be able to repay those loans. When things went bad, they turned to the government for help, relying on emergency aid and federal guarantees—thereby putting large amounts of taxpayer money at risk—in order to get by. And then, once the crisis was past, they went right back to denouncing big government, and resumed the very practices that created the crisis.

What year are we talking about?

We could, of course, be talking about 2008–2009, when Citigroup, Bank of America, and other institutions teetered on the brink of collapse, and were saved only by huge infusions of taxpayer cash. The bankers have repaid that support by declaring piously that it’s time to stop “banker-bashing,” and complaining that President Obama’s (very) occasional mentions of Wall Street’s role in the crisis are hurting their feelings.

But we could also be talking about 1991, when the consequences of vast, loan-financed overbuilding of commercial real estate in the 1980s came home to roost, helping to cause the collapse of the junk-bond market and putting many banks—Citibank, in particular—at risk. Only the fact that bank deposits were federally insured averted a major crisis. Or we could be talking about 1982–1983, when reckless lending to Latin America ended in a severe debt crisis that put major banks such as, well, Citibank at risk, and only huge official lending to Mexico, Brazil, and other debtors held an even deeper crisis at bay. Or we could be talking about the near crisis caused by the bankruptcy of Penn Central in 1970, which put its lead banker, First National City—later renamed Citibank—on the edge; only emergency lending from the Federal Reserve averted disaster.

More here.