From The New York Times:

This spring, Ibis published one of its most controversial books yet, the first English translation of “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella by S. Yizhar, the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, a noted Israeli writer and longtime Knesset member. Originally published in 1949, one year after the founding of Israel, the book tells of the violent evacuation of Palestinian village by a Jewish unit in the 1948 war of independence. Yizhar, who died in 2006, was born in 1916 and served as an intelligence officer in the 1948 war. Although the novella was a best-seller in Israel when it first appeared and has been on the Israeli high school curriculum since 1964, “Khirbet Khizeh” has never been well known outside Israel. The new Ibis edition was translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck.

Set in and around a quiet Palestinian village, the fictional Khirbet Khizeh of the title, the novella is written in a slow, meditative style that weaves together biblical allusions with contemporary slang. At first, the soldiers wait for a command. “No one knows how to wait like soldiers,” Yizhar writes. “There is the ruthlessly long waiting, the nervous anxious waiting, … the tedious waiting, that consumes and burns everything.” When the order comes, the unit begins shelling. The villagers flee. The book ends with the cri de coeur of the young soldier narrator. “This was what exile looked like,” he thinks out loud, watching the Palestinians leaving. “I had never been in the diaspora. I had never known what it was like, but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction … exile. … What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today?”

More here.

Speaking of filmmakers on filmmakers, one of my favorite film essays:

`Power and freedom’. Coupled together, these two words are repeated three times inVertigo. First, at the twelfth minute by Gavin Elster (‘freedom’ under-lined by a move to close-up) who, looking at a picture of Old San Francisco, expresses his nostalgia to Scottie (‘San Francisco has changed. The things that spelled San Francisco to me are disappearing fast’), a nostalgia for a time when men – some men at least – had `power and freedom’. Second, at the thirty-fifth minute, in the bookstore, where `Pop’ Liebel explains how Carlotta Valdes’s rich lover threw her out yet kept her child: `Men could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom … ‘ And finally at the hundred and twenty-fifth minute – and fifty-first second to be precise – but in reverse order (which is logical, given we are now in the second part, on the other side of the mirror) by Scottie himself when, realizing the workings of the trap laid by the now free and powerful Elster, he says, a few seconds before Judy’s fall – which, for him, will be Madeleine’s second death -‘with all his wife’s money and all that freedom and power … ‘.Just try telling me these are coincidences.

Such precise signs must have a meaning. Could it be psychological, an explanation of the criminal’s motives? If so, the effort seems a little wasted on what is, after all, a secondary character. This strategic triad gave me the first inkling of a possible reading of Vertigo. The vertigo the film deals with isn’t to do with space and falling; it is a clear, understandable and spectacular metaphor for yet another kind of vertigo, much more difficult to represent – the vertigo of time. Elster’s `perfect’ crime almost achieves the impossible: reinventing a time when men and women and San Francisco were different to what they are now. And its perfection, as with all perfection in Hitchcock, exists in duality. Scottie will absorb the folly of time with which Elster infuses him through Madeleine/Judy. But where Elster reduces the fantasy to mediocre manifestations (wealth, power, etc), Scottie transmutes it into its most utopian form: he overcomes the most irreparable damage caused by time and resurrects a love that is dead.

Peter Bergmann, Teodor Münz, Frantisek Novosád, Paul Patton, Richard Rorty, Jan Sokol, and Leslie Paul Thiele discuss (trans. in eurozine):

Kritika&Kontext: What do you take to be the morally and politically most offensive passages in Nietzsche’s writings? How do you interpret them? Do you think they are representative of his general attitude toward morality and politics?

Richard Rorty: I am most offended by the passages in which Nietzsche expresses contempt for weakness, and especially by the passages which argue that there is something wrong with Christianity because it originated among slaves. So it did, but those slaves had a good idea: namely, that the ideal human community would be one in which love is the only law. So it would. One can separate this Christian ideal from the ressentiment characteristic of the ascetic priests, but Nietzsche never made that distinction.

Paul Patton: Some of his remarks about women are among the most offensive of Nietzsche’s writings. I take these to be indications of the extent to which he was a man of his time who could not see beyond the existing cultural forms of the sexual division of humankind. Like the vast majority of nineteenth century European men, Nietzsche could not divorce female affect, intelligence and corporeal capacities from a supposed “essential’ relation to child-bearing. His views on women are representative of his attitude toward morality and politics in the sense that they are in tension with possibilities otherwise opened up by his historical conception of human nature. For example, at times he recognizes that supposedly natural qualities of women or men are really products of particular social arrangements. We can conclude from this, even if he could not, that these qualities are not natural but open to change. In this domain as in other of his social and political views, he was not able to foresee some of the ways in which the very dynamics of human cultural evolution that he identified could lead us into a very different future.

Over at the Jerome T. Levy Economics Institute:

The focus of this year’s conference was the current economic and financial crisis in the United States and its effects on the world economy. Topics included the causes and consequences of the “Minsky moment”; the impact of the credit crunch on the economic and financial market outlook; dislocations and policy options; margins of safety, systemic risk, and the American subprime mortgage market; financial markets regulation-reregulation; the inefficiency of computer-driven markets; currency market fluctuations; and exchange rate misalignment.

The conference was held April 17–18, 2008, at the Levy Institute’s research and conference center at Blithewood, on the campus of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Audio: Welcome and Session 1  Speaker: Paul McCulley Session 2  Session 3      Speaker: Edward Chancellor   Speaker: James K. Galbraith  Speaker: Robert Barbera Session 4 Speaker: Maurice Hinchey

                                         

All Conference Audio

In Outlook India:

Take this lesson titled  Mathamillaatha Jeevan (Jeevan, the casteless):    

The headmaster asked the parents, who had come with their ward, to sit in the chairs before him, and began to fill the application form.    

“What’s your name, son?”    

“Jeevan”    

“Good. Nice name. Father’s name?”    

“Anvar Rashid.”    

“Mother’s name?”    

“Lakshmi Devi.”    

The headmaster raised his head, looked at the parents and asked:     “Which religion should we write?”    

“None. Write there is no religion.”    

“Caste?”    

“The same.”    

The headmaster leaned back in his chair and asked a little gravely:     “What if he feels the need for a religion when he grows up?”    

“Let him choose his religion when he feels so.”

This is the passage that has been singled out by the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), the Church and Muslim organisations. They are demanding immediate withdrawal of the Class VII social studies book, being taught under the Kerala board, from which this passage has been taken.

The reason? Large portions of the book, they allege, is an an attempt to teach atheism to impressionable schoolchildren. They say that such lessons and others which illustrate caste cruelties will sow sectarian discontent.

In the Telegraph, Julian Schnabel explains to Sheila Johnston why he loves Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev:

He explains that he used to like to watch his chosen film with his children (he has five) when they were very small. Bedtime viewing chez Schnabel was unusually demanding, however. No Kung Fu Panda for his kids. Andrei Rublev is more than three hours long, in black and white, and in Russian.

“I would read the subtitles to them, as if I was reading a book,” he says.

“It’s like a fairytale – there are all these battles and things in it. And I think it affected them and informed the way they see things now.”

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film is set in medieval Russia, a country drowning in waves of invasion, plague and famine. There is much grist here for the imagination of the curious six-year-old. Boiling oil is poured down a man’s throat, a horse falls down a flight of stairs, a man’s eyes are gouged out, then the perpetrator looks around distractedly for his whip.

“He has no concern at all for what he’s done,” says Schnabel.

“The casualness of how death comes to people in the film is hauntingly real. Another moment, when a guy gets shot by an arrow and falls into the water, in slow motion, is incredibly powerful.”

It will come as no surprise that Andrei Rublev is another tale of a troubled artist: a great icon painter, and his struggles with his libido, his faith and his vocation.

Leigh Eric Schmidt in The Immanent Frame:

Not long ago, researchers wired up the atheist Richard Dawkins with a helmet that would create magnetic fields partially simulating the brain activity of temporal lobe epilepsy, which they linked to dramatic visionary religious experiences and to less dramatic feelings of sensed presences. It turns out, though, that hooking up a hardboiled atheist to a machine, known as the transcranial magnetic stimulator, produced no such experiences. “It was a great disappointment,” Dawkins related after 40 minutes on the machine. “Though I joked about the possibility, I of course never expected to end up believing in anything supernatural. But I did hope to share some of the feelings experienced by religious mystics when contemplating the mysteries of life and the cosmos.”

As my own mind was being massaged with images of Richard Dawkins having his temporal lobes stimulated, an odd notion popped into my head: namely, when it comes to religion, history and culture trump neurology. I quickly noticed that the same neuroscientists who were experimenting on Dawkins, among other more amenable test subjects, were also enfolding American religious history into their neurotheological data. One of the neurologists involved in the Dawkins stunt suggested in an interview, for example, that Ellen G. White, nineteenth-century prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist movement, suffered a childhood head injury that affected her temporal lobes in such a way as to produce her subsequent religious visions.

That example immediately struck me as a curious incursion of history into the laboratory. To be sure, even as an outsider, I was aware that a thriving set of conversations exists on the borders of neuroscience and religion. There are the theological questions, the God-spot questions: can the places of divine-human encounter, or, at least, the places of the felt-experiences of divine-human encounter be scanned and visualized? There are the ethical questions: for example, can the lying brain be mapped, detected, and exposed? Or, can compassionate affects be imaged and reproduced—in effect, is altruism a mental skill that can be trained? There are also, of course, innumerable psychotherapeutic questions; prominent among them is whether prayer and meditation are effective allies in the healing arts and medical sciences. But, here was the prolific visionary, Ellen G. White, suddenly thrust into the speculations of a pediatric neurologist studying temporal lobe epilepsy, all because she had been hit in the face by a rock when she was nine years old. Perhaps there is, indeed, a conversation to be had not only between religion and neuroscience, but also, more specifically, between American religious history and American neuroscience.

In this week’s TPM Book Club, a discussion of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure. Gourevitch:

A hundred years ago in Boston, the Congo Reform Association published a pamphlet by Mark Twain called “King Leopold’s Soliloquy, A Defense of His Congo Rule.” The text takes the form of a monologue by the Belgian monarch, as he reads through a stack of protest literature, describing crimes perpetrated by his colonial agents against his Congolese subjects: torture, abduction, enslavement, starvation, mutilation, extermination. “Blister the meddlesome missionaries!” the king fulminates. “They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witnessing the happenings; and everything they see they commit to paper.” But, even as he rails, Leopold comforts himself with the boast that he has never come across a critic (however truthful) whom he could not discredit, stifle, or convert by the application of force or cash. Then he comes upon a pamphlet that contains photographs of mutilated Congolese, and he quakes before the evidence of this “most powerful enemy” – “the incorruptible Kodak”:

The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe… the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little Kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!

But even as he frets about the dangers of photography, and sees himself exposed in the grisly images of his mutilated subjects, the old Belgian discovers the true consolation of the political criminal. After all, he tells himself, the world’s response to the pictures will surely be to shudder and turn away. With that thought he bucks himself up, defiant as ever. “Why certainly,” he says. “That is my protection… I know the human race.”

Shuddering and turning away. We did it again at Abu Ghraib.

Emily Mitchell reviews the memoir of the poet Sarah Manguso, in the NYT Book review:

In her sharp, affecting new memoir, “The Two Kinds of Decay,” Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission. “For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember,” she writes. From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like “heavenly bodies” that “fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.” Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.

The author of two books of poetry, Manguso brings the virtues of that form to the task of writing memoir. Her book is divided mostly into one- and two-page chapters titled like poems. She mixes high and low language, the crass and the scientific, with a lyric poet’s sure-handedness. The chapters themselves — among them “The Hematologist,” “The Forgetful Nurse,” “Corroboration” — resemble her own poetry, broken into aphoristic, discrete sections on the page. This disjointedness gives the prose a rhythm that mirrors the confusion and fragmentation of illness.

It also clears space for one of the book’s most remarkable aspects: its dark humor. What makes this account both bearable and moving is Manguso’s keen sense of the absurdities that accompany severe illness.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.

Zadie Smith reviews Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, in the NYRB:

[I]f we’re not to read Kafka too [Max] Brodly, how are we to read him? We might do worse than read him Begley. Gently skeptical of the biographical legend, Begley yet believes in the “metaphysical smile” of the work, the possibility that it expresses our modern alienation—here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka are not in conflict. He deals first, and most successfully, with the quotidian. The Kafka who, like other diarists, indulged a relentless dramaturgy of the self; the compulsive letter-writer who once asked a correspondent, “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague is “a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.” A brief visit to his fiancée “couldn’t have been worse. The next thing will be impalement.”

The diaries are the same, only more so: few people, even in that solipsistic form, can have written “I” as frequently as he. People and events appear rarely; the beginning of the First World War is a matter to be weighed equally with the fact that he went swimming that day. The Kafka who wrote the fictions was a man of many stories; the private Kafka sang the song of himself:

I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea…. I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

I am the end or the beginning.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time— I doubt that I am a human being.

One could quote pages of similar sentiments: Kafka scholars usually do. Thankfully, Begley has more of a comic sense than most Kafka scholars, tending to find Kafka in quite other moods; at times whiny, occasionally wheedling, often slyly disingenuous, and, every now and then, frankly mendacious. The result is something we don’t expect. It’s a little funny:

It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and then you do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps….

I appear to have missed this event a few months ago.  James Ferguson in The Guardian:

Aimé Césaire, the Martinican intellectual and politician who has died aged 94, left his mark in two separate, seemingly contradictory, fields. As a poet, dramatist and essayist, he coined the term “négritude” to define the revolutionary black aesthetic that rallied French-speaking intellectuals in the Caribbean and Africa in the 1930s. His Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land), first published in 1939, is considered the undisputed masterpiece of négritude and a poetic milestone of militant anti-colonialism and metaphorical inventiveness.

At the same time, Césaire was a leading architect of departmentalisation, the process that transformed four French colonies – Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane (French Guiana) and Réunion – into fully fledged departments of France. While Césaire the poet inveighed against the cultural arrogance of Europe and celebrated a mythic African identity, Césaire the politician tied the mostly African-descended people of Martinique to the assimilationist structure of the French republic.

Jessica Ferri on the exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, in More Intelligent Life:

A few weeks ago I went to the Centre Pompidou in Paris to see the Louise Bourgeois retrospective (which is travelling to New York’s Guggenheim this summer). I’ll admit that I didn’t really know what to expect from the 96-year-old (and still kicking) artist. Upon entering the show, I was confronted with a replica of the artist’s childhood home in a metal cage, with a guillotine hanging above the entry. A chilling introduction.

Bourgeois works in an array of media–ceramic, canvas, wood, metal, iron, cloth, paint, bronze and more. She is best known for her public-space pieces, grand-scale sculptures of spiders so large they must rest outside. These are compelling, haunting sights. It is as if Bourgeois is taking our darkest and most shame-filled secrets, and then blowing them up into monsters that prey the earth.

She has a habit of prying out private thoughts and shoving them into the glare of the sun. She tends towards sexualised, organic shapes, and then lines them up on wooden blocks the size of coffee tables.

The spider, weaving her web, stands as the gatekeeper to her work. She reappears frequently; the ultimate domestic power-house, the spider’s web is both home and weapon.

Via bookforum, Kenzaburo Oe and Orhan Pamuk discuss in New Perspectives Quarterly:

Kenzaburo Oe: The modernization of Japan began about 180 years ago, influenced by U.S. political forces and European culture. Both Japan and Turkey began this process using Western countries as a model almost at the same time. But when I read Mr. Pamuk’s “Istanbul,” I found Turkey’s relationship with Europe to be very complicated. Japan tried to learn about Western culture from a great geographic distance. Mr. Pamuk said in his speech when he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature that everyone knows there’s always a shade of humiliation and contempt in other people when someone has acted proudly, and his novel was written using such emotions as humiliation, pride, suppression and anger.

The degree of another person’s humiliation and contempt may have been one way for the political elite in the Ottoman Empire to understand the people. That reminds me of what has been brought about by the incorporation of Okinawa into Japan, at a time when Okinawa was under the influence of the more advanced culture of China. People who focus on Okinawa’s original culture in the future will provide another perspective on the Japan-China relationship.

Orhan Pamuk: I was moved by the fact that Mr. Oe read my work so deeply. I first met Mr. Oe in New York in 1991 at a party of writers. Mr. Edward Said was among them. Almost all of Mr. Oe’s works can be read in Turkish. I was greatly encouraged by his writings when I was in a difficult situation after criticizing the Turkish military for its past mass killings of Armenians. If writers say something controversial about others, their movements could be severely restricted. Nevertheless, writers must write their works and express their opinions.

Currently, Westernization and secularization are promoted in Turkey with respect to lifestyle and religion. Under the circumstances, I’m aware how Westerners regard us and how they speak for us (in order) to dominate us.

Andrew J. Bacevich in The Boston Review:

Setting aside combat memoirs, of which there are a growing number, the literature of the Iraq War divides neatly into two categories. The first category, dominated by journalistic observers, indicts. The second category, accounts authored by insider participants, acquits. The two books reviewed here fall into the second category: They are exercises in self-exculpation. Pretending to explain, their actual purpose is to deflect responsibility.

Douglas Feith and Ricardo Sanchez are not exactly marquee figures. Yet each for a time played an important role in America’s Mesopotamian misadventure. From 2001 to 2005 Feith served in the Pentagon as the third-ranking figure in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy. From 2003 to 2004 Lieutenant General Sanchez, now retired, served in Baghdad, commanding all coalition forces in Iraq.

Of the two accounts, Feith’s qualifies as the more sophisticated. It is also far and away the more dishonest. Feith trained as a lawyer, and War and Decision qualifies as a masterpiece of lawyerly, even Nixonian, obfuscation.

Like a shrewd defense attorney, Feith poses only those questions that will advance his case. As a result, his very long account confines itself to a very narrow range of issues. Although Feith styles himself a strategist, conscientious readers will learn nothing here about, say, the strategic significance of Persian Gulf oil. In War and Decision, oil just does not come up. Readers will be instructed in great detail about Saddam Hussein’s record as a vile and cruel dictator. They will remain oblivious to the record of U. S. support for the Iraqi tyrant during the Reagan era, despite the fact that Feith himself served in the Reagan administration. They will be reminded of the many intelligence failures attributable to the CIA. They will look in vain for any reference to allegations, substantiated at the highest level of the British government, that the Bush administration engaged in “fixing” intelligence to support precooked policy decisions.

///
Sonnet XXXIII: Methought I Saw my
Late Espoused Saint
John Milton

Methought I saw my late espoused saint

       Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,

       Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,

       Rescu’d from death by force, though pale and faint.

Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint

       Purification in the old Law did save,

       And such as yet once more I trust to have

       Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,

Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;

       Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight

       Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin’d

So clear as in no face with more delight.

       But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d,

       I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

//

From Harvard Magazine:

The “Pillars of Creation” may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. “Located in the Eagle Nebula, the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being born,” says Aguilar. “However, recent discoveries indicate these pillars were destroyed by a massive nearby super­nova some 6,000 years ago. This is a ghost image of a past cosmic disaster that we won’t see here on Earth for another thousand years or so—and a perfect example of the fact that everything we see in the universe is history.” It was in the Eagle Nebula that proplyds, dusty protoplanetary disks that only the Hubble telescope’s high-resolution optics can detect, were observed for the first time. (This photograph was stitched together from shots taken by four cameras. One of the cameras takes a magnified view of its quadrant, which—when shrunk to fit the scale of the other three—leaves dark space in the upper right corner.)

More here.

From The Washington Post:

If you don’t belong to a book club, Darin Strauss’s bitter and brilliant new novel is reason enough to start one. You can always disband afterward, and in any case your discussion of More Than It Hurts You may be so heated that you’ll never talk to those people again. Strauss has packed this gripping story with the whole radio dial of divisive, hot-button issues, chief among them a form of child abuse labeled Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). Identified 30 years ago by a controversial British pediatrician named Roy Meadow, MSBP describes a monstrous set of mothers who rush their children to the hospital after injecting feces into their bloodstream, sickening them with tiny doses of poison or smothering them until they pass out. They perpetrate these and other covert acts of abuse on their own children to experience the vicarious thrill of solicitous medical attention. In the decades since he first raised the alarm about MSBP, Meadow has been censored for professional misconduct and questions have been raised about the prevalence and even the existence of this syndrome, but some doctors and social workers continue to consider it a viable explanation for mysterious, hard-to-diagnose illness when certain warning signs are present.

Dori Goldin, the mother in More Than It Hurts You, presents a textbook case of all those warning signs, and what she and her husband, Josh, endure at the St. Joseph’s Medical Center is a nightmare most loving parents don’t even know is possible. The novel bursts into action with the words that “snapped Josh’s life into before and after.” He gets a message at work that his 8-month-old son has been rushed to the emergency room. When he arrives a few minutes later, he hears that Dori had noticed blood in the baby’s vomit and taken him to the hospital. The staff had checked him over, assured her that he was fine and sent them home, but in the parking lot the baby lost consciousness and needed to have his heart restarted.

The edges of this chronology are fuzzy and the doctors seem a little confused, but Dori remains amazingly calm. As a phlebotomist, a nurse trained in handling blood, “Dori spoke fluent hospital.” She challenges the doctors’ treatment of her son, objects to what she claims are unnecessary tests and finally stages a confrontation with the staff that requires the police to intervene. All this makes for a tremendously exciting story, eerily similar to the recent case of the Georgetown parents who took one of their 8-month-old twins to Children’s Hospital only to endure accusations of child abuse and to temporarily lose custody of both twins. But Strauss has something more ambitious in mind than merely beating Jodi Picoult to the next ripped-from-the-headlines controversy. The case of this baby’s mysterious and recurring illness serves as the starting point from which to examine the health of American culture, which to Strauss looks alarmingly ill.

More here.

A story about Igor Tamm, the father of tokamak method of controlled thermonuclear fusion:

During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukranian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.

Asked what he did for a living he said that he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang-leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung around his neck. “All right”, he said, “calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation of a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free; fail and you will be shot”.  Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.