Jhumpa Lahiri in Paris Review:

For over half my life, I have returned repeatedly to Light Years. It was the first of James Salter’s books I discovered; it has since led me to all his others. Light Years is the one I know best. The first copy was borrowed. It belonged to my college roommate and was among the handful of books she’d brought with her from home, having nothing to do with our classes. It was a beautiful paperback published by North Point Press: yellow border, rough edges, thickly woven pages, a Bonnard painting on the cover. It was 1985. The book was ten years old; I was eighteen. I was new to New York, a freshman at Barnard College. I was unsophisticated, unmoored, bewildered by college and by the city. Reading the novel was like opening a window for the first time in spring, after a long winter has passed. Something worn out was set aside, something invigorating ushered in. At the time I had not read much contemporary literature. I had certainly never read sentences so precise, so clean, so fervent and yet so calm. I reacted to the novel as I did to the books of my childhood: it cast a spell in the same way, provoking a reaction that was visceral and dreamlike and whole. But here was a book that was about adulthood, the undiscovered country that lay on the other side of a bridge I was only beginning to cross.

I loved the mood of the book, which was sober and sophisticated, but also casual, playful. I loved its structure, restrained and orderly, while at the same time loose and unspooling. I loved its intimate texture and its images: Nedra’s hands flat on a table, her oat-colored sweater. Pigeons crowding into the R of a furniture store, a martini that is like a change in the weather. I loved the devotional rendering of meals, peoples’ faces, rooms and the objects they contained. Though it felt startlingly modern, I recognized certain ancient forms of literature I was studying in my classes: myth, elegy, ode. The five acts of Shakespeare. Long passages of conversation, as unadorned but as revelatory as dialogue in a classical play.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

New research at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, may help scientists understand empathy, the mechanism thought to underlie contagious yawning, in both chimpanzees and humans. The research also may help show how social biases strengthen or weaken empathy. Scientists at Yerkes discovered chimpanzees yawn more after watching familiar chimpanzees yawn than after watching strangers yawn. The Public Library of Science One (PLoS ONE) is publishing the study online on Wednesday, April 6, 2011. Yerkes researchers Matthew Campbell, PhD, and Frans de Waal, PhD, propose that when yawning spreads between chimpanzees, it reflects an underlying empathy between them.

“The idea is that yawns are contagious for the same reason that smiles, frowns and other facial expressions are contagious,” they write. “Our results support the idea that contagious yawning can be used as a measure of empathy, because the biases we observed were similar to empathy biases previously seen in humans.” Campbell is a FIRST postdoctoral fellow at Yerkes and Emory (Fellowship in Research and Science Teaching). De Waal is director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes and C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory. They studied 23 adult chimpanzees that were housed in two separate groups. The chimpanzees viewed several nine-second video clips of other chimpanzees, in both groups, either yawning or doing something else. They yawned 50 percent more frequently in response to seeing members of their group yawn compared to seeing others yawn.

More here.

Jonathan Bruno and Jason Swadley in The Art of Theory:

Art of Theory: What features of our political life most puzzle you?

Sandel: I would say the largely arid terms of political discourse, the thinness of public discourse in the world’s leading democracies. That’s the single most striking and worrisome thing.

It’s partly the tendency, over the past three decades, of economics to crowd out politics. This has been an age of market triumphalism. We’ve come to the assumption that markets are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. I think that is a mistaken notion and people are now beginning to question that.

It also has led to political discourse being preoccupied with technocratic, managerial, economic concerns. The broader public questions and ethical questions have been crowded to the side.

I think that this has been reinforced by a certain idea of toleration, a well-intentioned idea of toleration that says, “Given the disagreements we have on moral and spiritual questions, we should try to conduct our political debate without reference to them.” I think that’s also contributed to an emptying out of substantive moral discourse in politics, an emptiness people are eager to fill.

Such emptiness often provokes a backlash, so that narrow, intolerant and sometimes fundamentalist voices fill that void and have a persuasive force they wouldn’t otherwise have, if public discourse included open and direct engagement with rival moral views and moral conceptions.

More here.

Matthew Kevin Clair in 365 (a blog devoted to presenting 365-word-or-less stories written daily for 365 days):

In fourth grade when he got the lead in Mozart, the school musical, he promised himself he would do everything in his power to become famous by the age of 18.

This promise lead to little changes, at first. He asked his mom to sign him up for voice lessons in addition to his already twice-weekly piano lessons. He never missed a lesson, and his mother was often overheard at club dinners gushing over her son's many accomplishments: lead pianist in this, lead vocals in that.

But by sixth grade, something changed, his voice wasn’t quite the same, and he didn’t get the lead in Aladdin, that year’s school production.

This forced other changes. After watching the world cup with his father one summer, he asked to start taking soccer lessons. But after a few weeks, he realized the other boys had been playing for years and he was too far behind to be a star. He tried painting and debate and basketball and came to the same realization: it was too late to be exemplary.

By the time high school came around, he started wearing black clothes and eye-liner. He dyed his hair. He didn’t have any friends, but his classmates were always staring at him and he read rumors about himself on bathroom stalls and in the back of math textbooks. This was fame, he thought at first, until he read The Scarlet Letter junior year and understood the meaning of infamy.

And so, on his eighteenth birthday, all other options exhausted, he set up a Youtube account and streamed himself live for the whole internet to see as he opened his college dorm room window, kicked out the screen and let his bare feet dangle over the courtyard fifty feet below as he readied himself to fulfill his promise.

More stories here.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Food prices become intolerable for the poor. Protests against corruption paralyse the national parliament for weeks on end. Then a series of American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks exposes a brazenly mendacious and venal ruling class; the head of government adored by foreign business people and journalists loses his moral authority, turning into a lame duck.

This sounds like Tunisia or Egypt before their uprisings, countries long deprived of representative politics and pillaged by the local agents of neoliberal capitalism. But it is India, where in recent days WikiLeaks has highlighted how national democratic institutions are no defence against the rapacity and selfishness of globalised elites.

Most of the cables – being published by the Hindu, the country's most respected newspaper in English – offer nothing new to those who haven't drunk the “Rising India” Kool-Aid vended by business people, politicians and their journalist groupies. The evidence of economic liberalisation providing cover for a wholesale plunder of the country's resources has been steadily mounting over recent months. The loss in particular of a staggering $39bn in the government's sale of the telecom spectrum has alerted many Indians to the corrupt nexuses between corporate and political power.

Even the western financial press, unwaveringly gung-ho about the money to be made in India, is getting restless. Early this year, the Economist asked: “Is Indian capitalism becoming oligarchic?” – a question to which the only correct response is “Hell-ooo”.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in naturenews:

A retina made in a laboratory in Japan could pave the way for treatments for human eye diseases, including some forms of blindness.

Created by coaxing mouse embryonic stem cells into a precise three-dimensional assembly, the 'retina in a dish' is by far and away the most complex biological tissue engineered yet, scientists say.

“There's nothing like it,” says Robin Ali, a human molecular geneticist at the Institute of Ophthalmology in London who was not involved in the study. “When I received the manuscript, I was stunned, I really was. I never though I'd see the day where you have recapitulation of development in a dish.”

If the technique, published today in Nature1, can be adapted to human cells and proved safe for transplantation — which will take years — it could offer an unlimited well of tissue to replace damaged retinas. More immediately, the synthetic retinal tissue could help scientists in the study of eye disease and in identifying therapies.

The work may also guide the assembly of other organs and tissues, says Bruce Conklin, a stem-cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, who was not involved in the work. “I think it really reveals a larger discovery that's coming upon all of us: that these cells have instructions that allow them to self-organize.”

Maria Bustillos in The Awl:

Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong.

Wallace committed suicide in 2008. There has been a natural reluctance to broach questions surrounding the tragedy with his family and friends, just as there was reluctance to ask him directly about his personal history when he was alive. But there are indications—particularly in the markings of his books—of Wallace's own ideas about the sources of his depression, some of which seem as though they ought to be the privileged communications of a priest or a psychiatrist. But these things are in a public archive and are therefore going to be discussed and so I will tell you about them.

One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace's library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

More here.

Eric Goldwyn in New York Magazine:

Revolutions remain a tricky business. Even as social-­networking sites have changed the way insurrections are built, the daily headlines from the Middle East are a reminder that a robust Twitter following and a widely followed Facebook group are only half the battle. At some point, an uprising, to truly be one, needs a physical staging ground. And what’s gone underappreciated this Arab Spring is just how much hangs on what happens as protests make the jump from virtual to actual, old-fashioned public spaces.

The Internet is great at facilitating bonds among compatriots who wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable communicating openly and assembling a critical mass. But this concentration of like-minded people still exists in a silo, and the uninitiated might never find the hyperlink that leads them in. It takes physical space to connect revolutionary passions with daily life and, more important, the broader population. When citizens unite in a square, a park, or along a scenic beachfront to demand reform, it creates an impossible-to-ignore spectacle that draws the attention of anyone nearby, not to mention those watching at home. Rather than containing them within its geographical boundaries, the patch of land where the protesters come together becomes the spot from which their passions radiate out to the country at large.

More here.

For both believers and nonbelievers, the pageantry of religion can sometimes feel like a whole lot of extraneous fuss. The stained glass, the snakes, the evocation of languages long dead — up, down, up, down, up again, down again. Shouldn’t you just be able to close your eyes and stand alone on a mountaintop wearing a simple shift to commune with the spirits? Even that, though, is a kind of ritual. The externalization of faith, whatever form it takes, is unavoidable. But it is also meaningful to and necessary for religion. All religions share a common attempt to communicate something that is, by all accounts, inexpressible: belief. Religion itself isn’t belief but razzamattazz, and all the glorious rituals and songs and handicrafts are in the service of communication, and thus, community. Years ago, during my youthful days in theater school, a teacher summed up this process quite nicely. “But Stefany,” she exhaled, “no one cares what you are feeling. An audience only knows what you are feeling through what you are doing.” As religious expressions go, I’ve always been particularly attracted to the river baptism though, like most, I’ve only seen them performed in movies and television (and now the internet). River baptisms are inextricably associated with the American South, and with the first few decades of the 20th century, when many of the rituals that made the South alternately special or wretched were in their waning days. On display now in a single room at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City is a wonderful exhibit of picture postcards documenting the practice in the South and Midwest between the late 19th and early 20th centuries called “Take Me to the Water: Photographs of River Baptisms.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you resort to a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expression, signaling cascades, and mitotic cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.” You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.” This charge reflects a certain longstanding sensitivity among biologists — one that deserves to be taken seriously. It was recently given very thoughtful and respectful expression by a first-rank molecular biologist in response to a draft book chapter I had sent him. After describing my views as “very interesting, provocative, and necessary,” and before offering his support for much of what I had to say, he voiced this concern: “You very explicitly dispense with vitalism. Nevertheless, your piece is permeated by an atmosphere that says ‘There is something special about living things.’” So I believe there is. Animals and plants are a long way from rocks and clouds, and also from automobiles and computers. The need to point this out today is one of the startling aspects of the current scientific landscape. It is true that the concept of “vitalism” has been problematic in the history of biology, but no less so than “mechanism.”

more from Steve Talbott at The New Atlantis here.

Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon in Foreign Affairs:

U.S. policymakers have long struggled to reconcile their support for friendly authoritarian regimes with their preference for political liberalization abroad. The ongoing upheavals in the Middle East, like so many developments before them, shine a bright light on this inconsistency. In Egypt, the Obama administration struggled to calibrate its message on the protests that toppled longtime ally Hosni Mubarak; in Libya, it leads a multinational coalition intent on using airpower to help bring down Muammar al-Qaddafi; and in Bahrain, the United States stands mostly silent as Saudi troops put down popular protests against the ruling al-Khalifa family.

Washington's balancing act reflects more than the enduring tensions between pragmatism and idealism in U.S. foreign policy. It highlights the specific strains faced by defense planners as they attempt to maintain the integrity of the United States' worldwide network of military bases, many of which are hosted in authoritarian, politically unstable, and corrupt countries. Now, with the “Arab Spring” unfolding, even U.S. basing agreements with some of its closest allies are vulnerable.

More here.

Things Shouldn't Be So hard

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn out place;
beneath her hand,
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space
—however small—
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn't
be so hard.

by Kay Ryan, 2001

From The Smithsonian:

“Virtuosic.” “A prodigy.” “Genius.” These words were written in the 1760s about Mozart—Maria Anna Mozart. When she toured Europe as a pianist, young Maria Anna wowed audiences in Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Hague, Germany and Switzerland. “My little girl plays the most difficult works which we have … with incredible precision and so excellently,” her father, Leopold, wrote in a letter in 1764. “What it all amounts to is this, that my little girl, although she is only 12 years old, is one of the most skillful players in Europe.” The young virtuoso, nicknamed Nannerl, was quickly overshadowed by her brother, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, five years her junior. But as one of Wolfgang’s earliest musical role models, does history owe her some measure of credit for his genius?

“That’s a very interesting question,” says Eva Rieger, retired professor of music history at the University of Bremen and author of the German-language biography Nannerl Mozart: Life of an Artist in the 1800s. “I’ve never really considered that possibility, and I don’t know of anyone who has before.” Such a suggestion may seem far-fetched to Mozart fans and scholars. “To answer the question of how much Nannerl influenced Wolfgang musically, I would say not at all,” says Cliff Eisen, professor of music at King’s College in London and editor of the Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. “I’m not sure there is evidence that the dynamic was in any way exceptional beyond what you might think between one relatively talented musician and one who far outshines the other.”

More here.

Mark Blyth over at Triple Crisis:

A week or so ago the FT published a piece that asked why, if social democracies are so nice, their crime fiction is so dark? It’s a fair point, and anyone sitting through the middle section of ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ has probably asked the same question. I didn’t read the FT’s answer, but my own answer comes from being in Iceland last week; a trip that gave me an insight into intellectual capture that I didn’t really appreciate before: that some truths are harder to shake than others.

While in Reykjavik I asked the locals what they thought was the biggest problem facing Iceland post-bubble. Interestingly, they didn’t say ‘the banks,’ or even ‘the debt’ – they said ‘the consensus.’ That is, being a consensus democracy, like most Scandinavian social democracies, its really hard to talk openly about what happened. The consensus is what makes equalitarian redistribution possible: we can all agree without debating it. But it also limits the ability to question the foundations of the system itself. In such an environment post-crisis discussions become ‘passive-aggressive.’ Like an old couple that should have divorced years ago, they displace the event itself and focus instead on anything else while personalizing everything. In Iceland’s case this means hunting down ‘the greedy few’ rather than questioning the system as a whole: a system that allowed the banks to grow to, at their height, 1000 percent of GDP. To do so would be to question “the consensus.” That is, the truth as they saw it.

I mention this because while political capture gets a lot of the post-crisis press, rightly– with my favorite recent slip being Spencer Bachus (R-Al) cracker that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks”– it’s intellectual capture that, in my opinion, really does the damage (hence my last blog piece on Cowboys and Indians). Indeed, once you start to look for this, you begin to see its effects everywhere.

For example, my reliably ‘sound’ FT last Wednesday had a column by Alan Greenspan that wrote the crisis out of the history books in a most interesting way. Rather than deal with the crisis as it happened, or even address what it cost, Greenspan dealt with the crisis on a purely rhetorical level.

I mean rhetorical in the sense that Albert Hirschman identified twenty years ago in his fabulous book The Rhetoric of Reaction. (Really, if you haven’t read it, read it now – it’s like a Dan Brown crypex for crisis-newspeak). Hirschman pointed out that conservative arguments come in three distinct theses.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today.

More here.

Tom Pietrasik at his website:

My good friend and fellow-journalist Dilip D’Souza wrote to me a few days ago with the sad news that a man called Dhanga Baiga, whom we both met a year ago, died last Monday.

I was introduced to Dhanga while photographing the work of a group of doctors called the JSS who run a hospital in the small, dusty town of Ganiyari in Chhattisgarh, central India. The JSS stands for Jan Swasthya Sahyog which means People’s Health Support Group.

It was while photographing Dr Yogesh Jain as he ran an outreach clinic in the village of Bamhni that the wizened figure of Dhanga Baiga entered the consultation room.

Moving with a caution that was in keeping with his fragile state, Dhanga, a member of India’s indigenous Baiga community, eased himself onto a plastic stool in front of Yogesh. It was clear that Dhanga knew and trusted Yogesh. Indeed, he owed his life to the intervention of the JSS medical team who had temporarily slowed the advancing tuberculosis that was gripping his hunger-ravaged body.

More here.