György Dragomán’s debut novel, “The White King” (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24), could be called the best of all fictional worlds. A memoir of communist oppression, it is also an of-the-moment contribution to world literature, representing the childlike combination of wonder and irony currently in vogue across the globe. Authors as geographically diverse as Haruki Murakami, Jenny Erpenbeck, and César Aira have been using childlike voices to navigate sinister terrain with varying degrees of success. There is always the risk that what should seem horrible will only become precious, a species of fairy tale awkwardly bearing the badge of politics. But unlike most such authors, Mr. Dragomán captures a childhood that feels less like a fairy tale than like a real childhood — perhaps because he actually lived it.

more from the NY Sun here.

I’d meant to note this piece of sad news a few days ago; John Wheeler has died. In the NYT:

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

As a professor at Princeton and then at the University of Texas in Austin, Dr. Wheeler set the agenda for generations of theoretical physicists, using metaphor as effectively as calculus to capture the imaginations of his students and colleagues and to pose questions that would send them, minds blazing, to the barricades to confront nature.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Daniel Holz over at Cosmic Variance remembers his teacher:

One beautiful Fall day seventeen years ago I wandered into an office and my life profoundly changed. I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.

One office door was always open. As you walked by you could peek in, and see its occupant hard at work. Hunched over his notebook, scribbling away. Or standing by his bookcase, deep in thought. Most often at the blackboard, chalk in hand. This was John Archibald Wheeler, one of the legends of modern physics. He did foundational work on quantum mechanics, collaborating with Niels Bohr on some of the earliest work in nuclear fission. He invented the S-matrix. He played important roles in both the Manhattan project (atomic bomb) and the Matterhorn project (Hydrogen bomb). He made major contributions to general relativity, co-authoring with Charlie Misner and Kip Thorne the bible of the field. He was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the Universe (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation). He trained generations of students; one of his first was Richard Feynman.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

In 1974, Richard Easterlin, then an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction.

People in poor countries, not surprisingly, did become happier once they could afford basic necessities. But beyond that, further gains simply seemed to reset the bar. To put it in today’s terms, owning an iPod doesn’t make you happier, because you then want an iPod Touch. Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income, Mr. Easterlin wrote.

The paradox quickly became a social science classic, cited in academic journals and the popular media. It tapped into a near-spiritual human instinct to believe that money can’t buy happiness. As a 2006 headline in The Financial Times said, “The Hippies Were Right All Along About Happiness.”

But now the Easterlin paradox is under attack.

Last week, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, two young economists — from the University of Pennsylvania, as it happens — presented a rebuttal of the paradox. Their paper has quickly captured the attention of top economists around the world.

More here.

;;;

Seventh Avenue
Muriel Rukeyser

…………………………………………………………………………..
This is the cripple’s hour on Seventh Avenue
when they emerge, the two o’clock night-walkers,
the cane, the crutch, and the black suit.
Oblique early mirages send the eyes:
night dramatized in puddles, the animal glare
that makes indignity, makes the brute.
Not enough effort in the sky for morning.
No color, pantomime of blackness, landscape
where the third layer black is always phantom

Here comes the fat man, the attractive dog-chested
legless—and the wounded infirm king
with nobody to use him as a saint.

Now they parade in the dark, the cripples’ hour
to the drugstore, the bar, the newspaper-stand,
past kissing shadows on a window-shade to
colors of alcohol, reflectors, light.
Wishing for trial to prove their innocence
with one straight simple look:

the look to set this avenue in its colors—
two o’clock on a black street instead of
wounds, mysteries, fables, kings
in a kingdom of cripples.

///

From The Jerusalem Post:

It’s the story of a Palestinian couple who flee in panic from Haifa, leaving behind their infant son. Twenty years later they return to their former home, now occupied by Holocaust survivors and their son. Or is he theirs? And if the Jews adopted this Arab baby, to whom does he really belong?  The play is a parable which asks to whom does this country belong: to the people who have lived in it for generations or those who see in it their ancestral home which they have reclaimed to build anew?

Kanafani was a Palestinian author who was born in Acre and fled with his parents in 1948. He was also the spokesperson for George Habash’s PFLP and was assassinated in Beirut via a car-bomb in July 1973. The attack was attributed to the Mossad, in revenge for the murder of the Israeli athletes by Black September at the Munich Olympics the year before. Kanafani is considered an important literary figure whose work is taught in Israeli high schools to help students better understand “how Israeli-Arab authors express their cultural and national identity,” as the educational authorities put it.

More here.

From Bitch:

Contrary to the cliché, ignorance is not bliss; it breeds destruction and despair — a fact that is amply proved in Iraqi journalist Haifa Zangana’s incisive look at women in Iraq, City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance. Zangana, who is now based in London, and whose analysis regularly appears in numerous publications in the UK, was imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib for her political activities during Saddam Hussein’s reign. In this slim volume, she covers the rise of the modern Iraqi state, life under Hussein, the years of sanctions and occupation, and the status of women throughout.The book’s title reflects the plight of women in today’s Iraq. According to one report cited, each day 90 women become widows. Zangana recounts many of the horror stories of the occupation, like the rape and murder by U.S. soldiers of 14-year-old A’beer Qassim Hamza al-Janaby, whose family was also murdered and their bodies burned in an attempt to cover up the terrible crime. In discussing various aspects of the occupation — such as how deadly it’s been for media professionals as well as Iraqi citizens — she reveals how women’s experiences in particular have been buried and misunderstood.

The author lays a large part of that confusion at the feet of those she calls “imperialist feminists.” Leading up to the invasion, the Bush administration adopted sudden concern for the plight of Iraqi women as one of its reasons for wanting to “liberate” the country. To convey this idea to the U.S. media, several U.S.-funded Iraqi women’s organizations were founded, staffed largely by Iraqi exiles and Iraqi-Americans. Their job was to convince the U.S. public that Iraqi women were desperate for “regime change”; after the invasion, their role was to promote democracy.

More here.

Jia-Rui Chong in the Los Angeles Times:

Forty feet underground, secured in a temperature- and humidity-controlled vault here, lies Kilogram No. 20.

It’s an espresso-shot-sized, platinum-iridium cylinder that is the perfect embodiment of the kilogram — almost perfect.

In the more than a century since No. 20 and dozens of other exact copies were crafted in France to serve as the world’s standards of the kilogram, their masses have been mysteriously drifting apart.

The difference is on average about 50 micrograms — about the weight of a grain of fine salt. But the ramifications have rippled through the world of precision physics, which uses the kilogram as the basis for a host of standard measures, including force of gravity, the ampere and Planck’s constant — the omnipresent figure of quantum mechanics.

In essence, no one really knows today what a kilogram is.

“How do I trust what I have?” asked Zeina Jabbour, the physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, in charge of maintaining No. 20, the official U.S. kilogram.

The kilogram crisis has kicked off an international race to redefine the measure. Instead of using an object, scientists are searching for some property of nature or scientific constant, such as the vibrations of a cesium atom now used to define a second.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

As we puttered along in the bumper-to-bumper Port-au-Prince traffic, rolling over occasional streams of raw sewage, Saíntil explained to us that his favorite actor was Shaquille O’Neal. He particularly liked Shaq in the movie Steel.

Saíntil made a quick shortcut through a dodgy alley and we passed a mangy, rabid dog fighting with an enormous pig — literally paw and snout — over the right to eat a pile of garbage. After the shortcut, we were back to a standstill, surrounded by the vibrant reds and blues and yellows of the crazy tap-taps carrying sardined passengers in the overcrowded streets, windshields emblazoned with “Christ Is The Big Captain,” “Lamentations 3:26,” and “Sylvester Stallone.”

As we pondered Shaquille O’Neal’s thespian work, Saíntil surprised again us by saying he often longed for a day when Papa Doc Duvalier — with his voodoo mysticism and his dreaded secret police, the murderous Tontons Macoutes — would be returned to power and end the utter chaos and lawlessness. Saíntil said this even though, at 49, he was certainly old enough to remember first-hand the violence of the Duvalier regime. “Many people believe that Papa Doc is still alive,” he said. “No one actually saw him buried in his coffin. People say they’ve seen him, late at night, walking the streets of Port-au-Prince.”

More here.

Jenny Anderson in the New York Times:

Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street’s rarefied realms.

One manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year. He reaped that bounty, probably the richest in Wall Street history, by betting against certain mortgages and complex financial products that held them.

Mr. Paulson, the founder of Paulson & Company, was not the only big winner. The hedge fund managers James H. Simons and George Soros each earned almost $3 billion last year, according to an annual ranking of top hedge fund earners by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, which comes out Wednesday.

Hedge fund managers have redefined notions of wealth in recent years. And the richest among them are redefining those notions once again.

More here.

Patricia Sullivan in the Washington Post:

Edward N. Lorenz, 90, a meteorologist who laid the groundwork for chaos theory, memorably asking whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas, died of cancer April 16 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At MIT, Dr. Lorenz accidentally discovered how small differences in the early stages of a dynamic system, such as the weather, can trigger such huge changes in later stages that the result is unpredictable and essentially random.

At the time, Dr. Lorenz was studying why it’s so hard to accurately forecast the weather, but the implications of his work go far beyond meteorology.

The new science of chaos fundamentally changed the way researchers address topics from the geometry of snowflakes to the predictability of which movies will become blockbusters. The butterfly effect became a popular way of describing unpredictability, most recently in “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), the Academy Award-winning documentary with former Vice President Al Gore.

It also “brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said the committee that awarded Dr. Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences.

More here.

“Mankind will not be free until the last capitalist has been hung with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.” This slogan, allegedly a 1968-er modification of Voltaire’s famous statement (with “monarchs” and “priests” being replaced with “capitalists” and “bureaucrats”), seems at once quaint, maniacal, noble and deranged. Next month will mark the 40th anniversary of the general strike in France sparked by the confrontation between police and students. This year also marks the 40th anniversary of the hot autumn in Italy, the uprising in Mexico City, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion, student protests in Germany and the Chicago Democratic convention. The movement, or era, or spirit, I suspect, only really ended with the foreign ministership of Joschka Fischer and the election of Daniel Cohn-Bendit to the European parliament. Euro|topics looks back at 1968 with a few articles on the protests in Western Europe. Over at Cafebabel, an interview with Daniel (“Dany Le Rouge”) Cohn-Bendit:

What do you think is the aim of today’s ‘revolt’? Has your generation already implemented the large reversal in personal freedom, which still continues for today’s youth?

There is the revolt against globalisation, the aim of which is clear. The G8 demonstration has shown that it is against injustice. There is a revolt against the ecological destruction of the planet. There is also simply the effort to safeguard against a very achievement-orientated society, which basically only offers a slump career-wise or unemployment.

The pressure of the working sphere for those who have a high standard of living is so high that some find it hard to endure. For this reason, many youngsters simply avoid achievement. More and more people are accused of this. The fact that they do not like to be political articulate has a socio-political effect.

But nothing like forty years ago?

We need to stop the comparisons with the situation forty years ago. It has gone, finished, is over the hill. It was nice for those who experienced it but it is over now. We have a different world, a different society. 1968 changed the world and now we have to deal with the current world and not look back.

From The London Times:

It would be hard to find someone better qualified than John Hemming to evoke both the natural splendour and biological complexity of Amazonia and the impact of the white man and his technology, from the knife blades that so entranced the Indians, to the chains that linked them as slaves under the horrified eyes of Roger Casement and others, to the D-9 bulldozers of today chewing up the rainforest for soya bean plantations. With a shelf full of distinguished books and papers on the Amazon, this former director of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) reassures his readers, without conceit, that he really knows what he is talking about. Describing the great English mid-19th century botanist Richard Spruce’s terror of getting lost, “even when not far from salvation”, Hemming comments, “Getting lost is one of the few fatal dangers in this environment. I have also experienced the panic of finding myself alone and disoriented in unexplored forests, far further from help than Spruce was at that time, knowing that if I continued in the wrong direction I would never survive.”

More here.

Rushdie agrees with Akbar: ‘Of course, the novel enormously heightens and increases that porosity — but actually the border between the world of dreams and the waking world is porous. We all dream things into being, you imagine yourself having a child and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world. It is much harder to do it the other way round!’

The staple Rushdie theme of multiple identities is here, too. The Emperor reflects that we are ‘bags of selves, bursting with plurality’. Yet the deeper preoccupation in the book is the emergence of humanism and of the self as distinct from the group, not only in Renaissance Florence, but in Akbar’s musings. ‘Were there such naked, solitary “I’s” buried beneath the overcrowded “we’s” of the earth?’ the Emperor asks himself.

more from The Spectator here.

Murakami has often argued that there is no indigenous tradition of distinguishing between high and low cultural products in Japan, where art is routinely exhibited in department stores and luxury merchandise can be seen in museums. In the 1990s, he coined the term Superflat to describe this condition of nonhierarchical flatness, linking it to the formal tendency toward two-dimensionality in Japanese art, from Edo screens to anime to his own depthless paintings, such as this DOB variation. For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—Murakami’s radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.

more from Slate here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”

“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”

Audience: “Right here!”

Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.

“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal …

More here.

….

Operations
Tony Hoagland

In autumn, Operation Enduring Freedom commenced,
which some party-poopers wanted to nickname
Operation……….Infinite Self-Indulgence.
We tied flags to the antennae of our cars
that snapped like fire when we drove.

In winter there was Operation Gentle Sledge-Hammer,
which seemed linguistically a little underdigested,
but we lined up squads of second-graders
……..to stand at attention while we beat a drum.

Let me make it clear that I was
as doubtful as anyone about Operation Racial
Provocation
But I loved Operation Religious Suspicion,

which led to Operation Eye For An Eye,
which was succeeded by Operation Helping Hand;
—Let me tell you that was a scary-looking hand!
But that was also a very successful operation.

Someday you will required to perform a terrible
deed
in order to save yourself,
……………….but save yourself for what?

That would be a question for Operation
Self-Examination to answer,
which is a very painful operation
performed without anesthesia
in a naked room full of shadows and light.

Perhaps I might suggest, instead,
Operation Self-Medication, or Operation Endless
Mindless……..Distraction?
In the meantime Operation Collateral Amnesia
is running very smoothly.
When it is over we want to cal it Operation One Big
Happy………..family.€”
Is that okay with you?

..

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

We tend to love anecdotes about apples and eurekas because they make scientific genius seem more human and more random, but that other great Cambridge denizen Sir Leslie Stephen was closer to the mark when he claimed genius was “the capacity for taking trouble.” Isaac Newton was one of the great workaholics of all time, as well as one of the great insomniacs. His industry and application made Bertrand Russell look like a slacker (and, like Russell, he was morbidly afraid of fire among his papers and books—fire which did, in fact, more than once break out). When he decided that a reflecting telescope would be a better instrument than the conventional refracting model, he also decided to construct it himself. When asked where he had obtained the tools for this difficult task, he responded with a laugh that he had made the tools himself, as well. He fashioned a parabolic mirror out of an alloy of tin and copper that he had himself evolved, smoothed, and polished to a glass-like finish, and built a tube and mounting to house it. This six-inch telescope had the same effectiveness as a six-foot refracting version, because it removed the distortions of light that were caused by the use of lenses.

In contrast with this clarity and purity, however, Newton spent much of his time dwelling in a self-generated fog of superstition and crankery. He believed in the lost art of alchemy, whereby base metals can be transmuted into gold, and the surviving locks of his hair show heavy traces of lead and mercury in his system, suggesting that he experimented upon himself in this fashion, too. (That would also help explain the fires in his room, since alchemists had to keep a furnace going at all times for their mad schemes.) Not content with the narrow views of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, he thought that there was a kind of universal semen in the cosmos, and that the glowing tails of the comets he tracked through the sky contained replenishing matter vital for life on Earth. He was a religious crackpot who, according to Ackroyd, considered Catholics to be “offspring of the Whore of Rome.”

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

The next time you come face to face with a dog wagging its tail, you can make a quick determination on whether to reach out and pet it or step back in deference: check the tail-wag bias. If the wagging tail leans to the dog’s right, you’re safe; if the tail leans to the dog’s left, don’t move.

This tail-wagging bias was documented in a 2007 article in the journal Current Biology by Italian neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara and his veterinarian colleagues at the University of Bari. In an experiment, 30 mixed-breed dogs were each placed in a cage equipped with cameras that measured the asymmetrical bias (left or right) of tail wagging while the pooches were exposed to four stimuli: their owner, an unfamiliar human, a cat and an unfamiliar dominant dog. Owners elicited a strong right bias in tail wagging, and unfamiliar humans and the cat triggered a slight right bias. But the unfamiliar dominant dog (a large Belgian Shepherd Malinois) elicited a strong left bias in tail wagging. Why?

According to the researchers, because the left brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa, the nerve signals cross the midline of the body and cause the dog’s tail to wag more to the right when its left brain is experiencing a positive emotion.

More here.

From CNN:

Some prominent New York divorce lawyers couldn’t think of another case where a spouse — in this instance, the wife of a major Broadway theater operator — had taken to YouTube to spill the secrets of a marriage in an apparent effort to gain leverage and humiliate the other side.

“This is absolutely a new step, and I think it’s scary,” said Bonnie Rabin, a divorce lawyer who has handled high-profile cases. “People used to worry about getting on Page Six [the gossip page of the New York Post]. But this? It brings the concept of humiliation to a whole new level.”

In a tearful and furious YouTube video with close to 150,000 hits to date, former actress and playwright (“Bonkers”) Tricia Walsh-Smith lashes out against her husband, Philip Smith, president of the Shubert Organization, the largest theater owner on Broadway.

More here.  And here’s the lovely video: