Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine:

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’

More here.

Danielle Trussoni in the New York Times Book Review:

If you believe you are by now immune to gory novels, here’s one with enough malevolence to give even the most hardened readers nightmares. “The Seven Days of Peter Crumb,” a chronicle of the final week in a psychopath’s life by the British actor and writer Jonny Glynn, is gruesome, obscene and utterly disturbing. It is also absorbing and well written. Reading it, I fought the urge to throw up. Needless to say, I was transfixed.

Mixed reactions are inevitable in the presence of one of the more repulsive characters in recent memory. Peter Crumb spends his days bludgeoning, raping and dismembering. He gets cranked on opium and horse tranquilizers and has a scatological obsession that requires him to give detailed descriptions of his bowel movements. In addition, his first-person account is interrupted by a second personality, egging him on. Crumb has little control over where his mind (and thus the novel) will veer at any given point. The result is an elegant contrapuntal stream of consciousness so brutally spiky and internal that the reader (like Crumb’s victims) wants to plead for reprieve.

More here.

Denise Grady in the New York Times:

If you have to come down with a strange disease, this town of 23,000 on the wide-open prairie in southeastern Minnesota is a pretty good place to be. The Mayo Clinic, famous for diagnosing exotic ailments, owns the local medical center and shares some staff with it. Mayo itself is just 40 miles east in Rochester. And when it comes to investigating mysterious outbreaks, Minnesota has one of the strongest health departments and best-equipped laboratories in the country.

And the disease that confronted doctors at the Austin Medical Center here last fall was strange indeed. Three patients had the same highly unusual set of symptoms: fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness and tingling in the legs and feet.

The patients had something else in common, too: all worked at Quality Pork Processors, a local meatpacking plant.

More here.  [Thanks to Daupo.]

From the Tate Modern website:

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others.

More here.

Black Americans made the songs, but not the myth of romantic ‘authenticity.’ If white tastes and obsessions distorted their music, can we ever hear each other?

David Gates in Newsweek:

Forbes’s book is a biography of Broadway’s first black star, for whom Dunbar once co-wrote songs: in context, the poem inevitably evokes an image of Williams, a light-skinned Bahamian who always performed (often to whites-only audiences) in a grinning mask of burnt cork. Hamilton, a University of London historian, argues that the blues as whites have imagined it—a pure and primal musical utterance originating in the deep backcountry of the South—is less a creation of black musicians than of white esthetes. Folklorists and record collectors, she suggests, preferred blues performers to be downtrodden, decrepit and obscure—much as Broadway audiences needed Bert Williams to black up and talk in plantation dialect. Hamilton’s reference to Dunbar suggests a barely suppressed resentment of white condescension; she quotes the singer-guitarist Lonnie Johnson, who asked an interviewer in the 1960s, “Are you another one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?”

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Fuchsia Dunlop, author of my new and beloved cookbook Land of Plenty, in the FT:

I had always believed that it would be easy to seduce a man with my cooking. My childhood role model was Zeralda, the heroine of a picture book by Tomi Ungerer, who saves a town from the menaces of an ogre by showing him that there are more delicious things to eat than children. From the age of seven I gazed at pictures of Zeralda devising recipes in her father’s kitchen, roasting suckling pigs, or icing a cake in a kitchen hung with hare and pheasants, and I longed to be like her. Especially because in the end she marries the ogre, who shaves his shaggy beard to reveal a handsome face, and they live happily ever after.

My own attempts to win men over with my cooking have been disastrous. It all began, I think, with the anorexic boyfriend at university. He was strikingly beautiful and great company but he had an uneasy relationship with food. He treated it like something dangerous, which he had to counter with long hours in the gym. Young and ignorant, I didn’t understand at the time why our dinners together always reminded me of those of Jack Sprat and his wife.

Later, while working in London, I cooked for another man I was beginning to like very much: a roast chicken, anointed with lemon juice and fine olive oil, sprinkled with herbs. It was one of the best roast fowl I’d ever cooked. But he, too, was neurotic about his weight, so he peeled off the crisp, golden skin, the most exquisite part of the bird, and left it at the side of his plate, where it slowly congealed. I think my feelings for him dimmed from that moment on.

Is Barak Obama turning into the liberal’s Bob Avakian? I kid of course, but a few friends have made  comments that are similar to an emerging “meme” in the blogosphere. There is a clear and rising chorus on the left-liberal side of the spectrum that expresses worry about a cult of personality around Barak Obama.  I’ve only ever really been a poputchik with any movement and personality, so I’ve never had to “recover” from anything. But I am intrigued by the fact of a chorus about this. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

I know this is going to sound strange, but it’s not you, Barack, it’s me. Really it always was me, but now it’s really, really about me. I don’t know when we started to feel weird supporting you, but: My friend Hanna thinks it started with that “Yes We Can,” video. I mean, last week I was totally crying watching it. Now just thinking about how choked up I got gives me the creeps. I think I felt something at the time, but even if I did, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to feel it anymore. Feeling inspired is soooo early-February.

Or maybe it started when everyone began madly posting last week about how you are not the Messiah. And that got me thinking. Then, when commentators started accusing me of being a venomous drone in a “cult of personality,” I just needed to get out. I mean cults are soooo 1970s. And cults of personality? So totally first century.

Cult or no cult, this week I just started getting really confused about you. I mean, when people start to say that your strengths are actually weaknesses? That just makes sense, if you really think about it. I mean, what’s the point of being such an inspirational speaker if all you can do is give inspirational speeches? Do better, Barack. I mean, do worse!

In Prospect (UK), a profile of Charles Taylor:

Charles Taylor’s new book A Secular Age is well timed. Begun long ago, it is now published in the middle of intense public discussion about religion. But though the book reads like an argument with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, it won’t be joining theirs at the front of the bookshops.

That is a pity, as Taylor is arguably the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today. It is also in some respects surprising. For Taylor has most of the attributes that the public look for in a philosopher. His work addresses the big issues. He is politically engaged—indeed, he is a leading public figure in his Canadian homeland. He writes appreciatively about thinkers—including Hegel, the French existentialists and Heidegger—whom most anglophone philosophers view as suspect, but whom many students and non-philosophers find attractive. He addresses himself not just to academics but to educated readers. Tall and handsome, he is a confident and charming public speaker. It has to be said, however, that at 850 pages, A Secular Age is not the Taylor book one would recommend to a novice.

What makes Taylor so important?

Maia Szalavitz in Psychology Today:

V. We Speed Up When We Put Our Seat belts On

We substitute one risk for another.

Insurers in the United Kingdom used to offer discounts to drivers who purchased cars with safer brakes. “They don’t anymore,” says John Adams, a risk analyst and emeritus professor of geography at University College. “There weren’t fewer accidents, just different accidents.”

Why? For the same reason that the vehicles most likely to go out of control in snowy conditions are those with four-wheel drive. Buoyed by a false sense of safety that comes with the increased control, drivers of four-wheel-drive vehicles take more risks. “These vehicles are bigger and heavier, which should keep them on the road,” says Ropeik. “But police report that these drivers go faster, even when roads are slippery.”

Judith Weingarten at her blog:

Why is Human Rights Watch petitioning King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to halt the execution by beheading of a witch who in 2006 was convicted of “witchcraft, recourse to jinn [supernatural beings], and slaughter of animals”? Fawza Falih Muhammad Ali is currently languishing in Quraiyat Prison having exhausted her appeals against the sentence. The illiterate defendant was arrested back in 2005, and allegedly beaten and obliged to fingerprint a confession that she couldn’t read.

More here.

Sokol: The word “pessimism” fits Schopenhauer, or today perhaps Mary Midgley, who preaches that man must reconcile himself with the world as it is and simply abandon responsibility for society and for the future. This is at best a sort of comfortable, and – forgive me – “Buddhist” way. But this is certainly not Nietzsche’s case. Wherever he attacks or assaults, it is always in the secret hope that somewhere he will find somebody who will bravely stand up for all those values and prove that they are not dead. Therefore, he was most depressed by those adherents, who rode after him and parroted his attacks, but without his deep anguish. For him, that is the worst expression of nihilism: Alles ist wert zu Grunde gehen, everything deserves to perish. Certainly Nietzsche considered the state of the world to be bad, but he never came to terms with this even slightly, and when his hopes were not fulfilled he fell into despair, and finally he broke down.

more from Eurozine here.

The iconic L.A. writer John Rechy has just published a memoir, “About My Life and the Kept Woman,” and he wants to make clear right away that he made stuff up.

“I consider writers a hierarchy of liars,” Rechy said on a recent afternoon, “and the autobiographer is the biggest liar of all.”

He was sitting in the dining room of the Beachwood Canyon home he shares with Michael Snyder, a movie producer and his partner of more than 20 years, surrounded by luminous black-and-white portraits of Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. Now 76, Rechy remains best known for the 1963 novel “City of Night,” a semiautobiographical window into the world of gay street hustling that has influenced artists as diverse as Jim Morrison, David Hockney and Gus Van Sant, who has long wanted to make it into a movie. (“Maybe I should talk to John about that again,” Van Sant wrote in an e-mail, calling the book “an American masterpiece.”)

more from the LA Times here.

On July 4, 1965, Jane Fonda and her husband-to-be, Roger Vadim, had a party in their oceanfront home in Malibu and brought together, probably for the first time, old Hollywood and what would come to be known as the new Hollywood. Henry Fonda roasted a pig on one side of the house while the Byrds, hired by his son, Peter, played on the other. The guest list ran from William Wyler and Sam Spiegel to the then barely employed Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper. Lucky attendees might have glimpsed Sidney Poitier and Gene Kelly instructing Vadim’s little girl in tap-dancing, or Darryl Zanuck and George Cukor staring dumbstruck at a barefoot hippie nursing her baby.

The surreal wonder of American culture at such a pivot point permeates Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood,” which focuses on the nominees for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967: “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “In the Heat of the Night” (the eventual winner) and “Doctor Dolittle.” Yes, you read that last title correctly. For Harris, a columnist at Entertainment Weekly, that array is not just a historical “collage of the American psyche” but also well beyond diverse, “almost self-contradictory”; a movie like “The Graduate” was seemingly designed to demolish the values on display in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” The generational divide could not have been starker, and the central issue was what an American movie was supposed to be.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

..
A Display of Mackerel
Mark Doty
 
They lie in parallel rows, 

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

……..

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

……

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soap-bubble sphere,

……

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

……

distinguished from the other

–nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

……

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfillment

……

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

……

at this enameling, the jewelers

made uncountable examples

each as intricate

……

in its oily fabulation

as the one before;

a cosmos of champleve.

……

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

……

of shimmer–would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

……

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even on ice

……

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

……

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

……

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

……

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

..

From Time:

Pops. Sweet Papa Dip. Satchmo. He had perfect pitch and perfect rhythm. His improvised melodies and singing could be as lofty as a moon flight or as low-down as the blood drops of a street thug dying in the gutter. Like most of the great innovators in jazz, he was a small man. But the extent of his influence across jazz, across American music and around the world has such continuing stature that he is one of the few who can easily be mentioned with Stravinsky, Picasso and Joyce. His life was the embodiment of one who moves from rags to riches, from anonymity to internationally imitated innovator. Louis Daniel Armstrong supplied revolutionary language that took on such pervasiveness that it became commonplace, like the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone.

Armstrong was born Aug. 4, 1901 in New Orleans. He grew up at the bottom, hustling and hustling, trying to bring something home to eat, sometimes searching garbage cans for food that might still be suitable for supper. The spirit of Armstrong’s world, however, was not dominated by the deprivation of poverty and the dangers of wild living. He had some knucklehead in his soul too. While a genial fountain of joy, Armstrong was a street boy, and he had a dirty mouth. It was his shooting off a pistol on New Year’s Eve that got him thrown into the Colored Waifs’ Home, an institution bent on refining ruffians. It was there that young Louis first put his lips to the mouthpiece of a cornet. Like any American boy, no matter his point of social origin, he had his dreams. At night he used to lie in bed, hearing the masterly Freddie Keppard out in the streets blowing that golden horn, and hope that he too would someday have command of a clarion sound.

The sound developed very quickly, and he was soon known around New Orleans as formidable. The places he played and the people he knew were sweet and innocent at one end of the spectrum and rough at the other. When he was called to New York City in 1924 by the big-time bandleader Fletcher Henderson, Armstrong looked exactly like what he was, a young man who was not to be fooled around with and might slap the taste out of your mouth if you went too far. His improvisations set the city on its head.

The melodic and rhythmic vistas Armstrong opened up solved the mind-body problem as the world witnessed how the brain and the muscles could work in perfect coordination on the aesthetic spot. Apollo and Dionysus met in the sweating container of a genius from New Orleans whose sensitivity and passion were epic in completely new terms. In his radical reinterpretations, Armstrong bent and twisted popular songs with his horn and his voice until they were shorn of sentimentality and elevated to serious art. He brought the change agent of swing to the world, the most revolutionary rhythm of his century. He learned how to dress and became a fashion plate. His slang was the lingua franca. Oh, he was something. Louis Armstrong was so much, in fact, that the big bands sounded like him, their featured improvisers took direction from him, and every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom — swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is the station of all great art.

Armstrong traveled the world constantly. One example of his charming brashness revealed itself when he concertized before the King of England in 1932 and introduced a number by saying, “This one’s for you, Rex: I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.” He had a great love for children, was always willing to help out fellow musicians and passed out laxatives to royalty and heads of state. However well he was received in Europe, the large public celebrations with which West Africans welcomed him during a tour in the late ’50s were far more appropriate for this sequoia of 20th century music.

He usually accepted human life as it came, and he shaped it his way. But he didn’t accept everything. By the middle ’50s, Armstrong had been dismissed by younger Negro musicians as some sort of minstrel figure, an embarrassment, too jovial and hot in a time when cool disdain was the new order. He was, they said, holding Negroes back because he smiled too much and wasn’t demanding a certain level of respect from white folks. But when Armstrong called out President Eisenhower for not standing behind those black children as school integration began in Little Rock, Ark., 40 years ago, there was not a peep heard from anyone else in the jazz world. His heroism remained singular. Such is the way of the truly great: they do what they do in conjunction or all by themselves. They get the job done. Louis Daniel Armstrong was that kind.

From The New York Times:

Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela by Bill Keller.

“I have witnessed countless election campaigns in the United States,” writes Keller, who traveled with Mandela and covered his historic 1994 run for president. “Although the exercise of democracy always moves me, the political campaigns often feel phony. Candidates try to avoid controversial positions. Slick television ads take the place of real debate. Most voters don’t even bother to show up and cast their ballot. South Africa’s first free election, by comparison, was thrilling. … I often felt that the entire frustrated history of black South Africa was exploding before my eyes.”

With its striking layout, bright graphics and photographs on almost every page, Keller’s biography of Mandela vibrates with the feeling of history come alive.

The author — now the executive editor of The New York Times — describes how he arrived in Johannesburg as bureau chief for the newspaper in 1992, just in time to witness the complete transformation of a society. The Mandela motorcade “would roll onto a barren soccer field surrounded by rickety bleachers, and the township would erupt in delirium. The throngs hung from lampposts and clung to the tops of fences. They filled the bleachers with a blaze of brightly colored sun umbrellas.”

More here.

..
Shapeshifter Poems
Lucille Clifton

1

the legend is whispered
in the women’s tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them

2

who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not the woman
she will become with her
scarred tongue who who who the owl
laments into the evening who
will protect her this prettylittlegirl

3

if the little girl lies
still enough
shut enough
hard enough
shapeshifter may not
walk tonight
the full moon may not
find him here
the hair on him
bristling
rising
up

4

the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world

..

From The Washington Post:

There are some things only the dead can get away with saying, and some deaths speak more powerfully than anything the living can write. This book, finished just before its author was assassinated in Pakistan in December, sends out an urgent warning to her fellow Muslims and to Western democratic powers — a warning one hopes may now find greater resonance with both audiences.

Benazir Bhutto, the elegant former Pakistani prime minister, hoped to return democratic rule to her native country and knew she stood a good chance of being killed in the process. She was rushing to complete “Reconciliation” when she was slain at a political rally, her death transforming this manifesto into a cry from the grave to save her faith, her homeland and East-West relations from looming catastrophe.

Her book argues that Islam is not incompatible with democracy, but that its credo of tolerance and freedom has been hijacked by purveyors of terror. The real “clash of civilizations” lies within Islam, she asserted, and the West should seek to bolster its moderate center as the best means of countering the radical extremes.

A poised public figure given to flowery speeches and cagey ambiguity, Bhutto wrote the book with uncharacteristic bluntness, suggesting an awareness that both she and her country had little time left. Pointing fingers and naming names — especially those of several chiefs of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service — she blamed a combination of autocratic rulers, manipulative religious leaders and meddling Western governments for sabotaging democracy’s chances in Pakistan and other parts of the Muslim world, and for pushing Islam in ever more radical directions.

“Islam was sent as a message of liberation. The challenge for modern-day Muslims is to rescue this message from the fanatics, the bigots, and the forces of dictatorship,” she wrote. Describing Pakistan as “ground zero” in the battle for the soul of Islam, she warned that unless religious extremism there is curbed, the consequences of having “the only nuclear-armed Muslim nation fall into chaos would be catastrophic.”

More here.

From PBS:

In writing INVISIBLE MAN in the late 1940s, Ralph Ellison brought onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate — the consequences of a society that oppressed them — Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware. Ellison’s view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in INVISIBLE MAN comes upon a yam seller (named Petie Wheatstraw, after the black folklore figure) on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation “I yam what I yam!” is Ellison’s expression of embracing one’s culture as the way to freedom.

(Picture above: The Ralph Ellison memorial on Riverside Drive at 150th Street, which was dedicated on May 1, 2004).

If Wright’s protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison’s more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A “frontier” state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the 1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were “among the poorest” in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those “who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day.”

Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the variegated culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in INVISIBLE MAN. The novel references African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz, and black traditions like playing the dozens — much as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical Western and Eastern civilization in THE WASTELAND and ULYSSES. An added difference for Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own and the black identity — as well as a roadmap for anyone experiencing themselves as “invisible,” unseen. “Time” magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”

For Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison’s view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence — including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to “tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.

In his own life, Ellison’s interests were as far ranging as his “integrative” imagination. He was expert at fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. His haberdasher in New York said that he “knew more about textiles than anyone I’ve ever met,” and his friend Saul Bellow called him a “thoroughgoing expert on the raising of African violets.” He was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, and photographer. The scope of Ellison’s mind and vision may have contributed to the growing unwieldiness of his much-awaited second novel, which he toiled over for forty years. He planned it as three books, a saga that would encompass the entire American experience. The book was still unfinished when Ellison died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty.

INVISIBLE MAN and the essays in SHADOW AND ACT and GOING TO THE TERRITORY were transformative in our thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be American. On the power of three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary project and helped define and clarify arguments about race in this country. Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. The universality and accomplishment of Ellison’s writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all of us.

Saul Austerlitz in the Moscow Times:

Szilard — a Hungarian refugee and “inventor of all things” who wrote science fiction and sketched out plans for electrified barbers’ chairs and magnetized stockings in his spare time — stood in confrontational counterpoint to warrior-scientists like Edward Teller and Herman Kahn, who sought to weaponize atomic research. Szilard advocated fruitlessly for the United States to restrict itself to an atomic-bomb demonstration in order to frighten Japan into submission in 1945, and was suitably horrified by misleading pronouncements like that in the 1951 public-information film “Atomic Alert” that “the chance of your being hurt by an atomic bomb is slight.” Unchecked by the ramifications of their research, scientists pressed on to the next generations of superweaponry — the hydrogen bomb and the proposed cobalt bomb, which would create a radioactive cloud potentially powerful enough to end all human life. “Gentlemen: You are mad!” shouted the title of an incendiary essay by the historian Lewis Mumford, but at the time, the righteous outrage of a Mumford or a Bertrand Russell seemed positively feeble next to the careful, calculating sophistry of Kahn, who proclaimed that nuclear war was winnable, or of Teller, who argued that “radiological warfare could be used in a humane manner.”

More here.