PD Smith is gripped by Deadly Companions, Dorothy H Crawford’s fascinating study of man’s mortal combat with microbes.
From The Guardian:
Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, is named after the Swiss microbiologist Alexander Yersin, who first identified it just over a hundred years ago. A relatively recent microbe in evolutionary terms, it spreads to humans via fleas that have gorged themselves on the infected blood of rats. Unless they have the universally fatal pneumonic version, plague victims themselves are not contagious. However, many people who experienced the Black Death in the 14th century were convinced it spread person-to-person. And strangely for a disease that also kills rats, not one eyewitness mentions seeing dead rats.
In a chapter of her fascinating study of the microbes that plague and sometimes aid us, microbiologist Dorothy Crawford asks whether the Eyam villagers really did die of bubonic plague. Records suggest that their disease was contagious. There is also the question of why isolation worked; after all, rats don’t obey quarantine. Some even doubt whether the black rats that carried the microbe could have survived in the cold climate of northern Europe. Indeed, rat fleas require a minimum temperature of 18C for their breeding cycles. Furthermore, the Black Death killed between 30% and 70% of the population, which far exceeds recent outbreaks that killed only 2%.
So which microbe did cause the Black Death, a disease that wiped out a third of England’s population in three years and killed 25 million people worldwide?
We live in a world without heroes. The one exception is Nelson Mandela, and his canonisation testifies to the void which he helps to fill. The middle of the last century saw men such as Churchill, Mao and De Gaulle who, for better or worse, were big figures. Two decades ago there were leaders like Thatcher, Gorbachev and again Mandela. Today, on the other hand, it appears that not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality. Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age that calls for technocrats rather than titans, but something has been lost.
We lack cultural heroes, too. Isaiah Berlin used to say in his last years that there were no geniuses left in the world: no great novelists, poets, painters or composers. That judgement may or may not be true, but it surely expresses a general perception. On the surface there is a good deal of chatter about young British artists or brilliant novelists and filmmakers, but deep down we feel that nothing very large is coming to birth. Architecture is the main counter-example: Santiago Calatrava seems to me clearly a genius, Frank Gehry may be, and perhaps there are others. But architects are less crushed by the burden of the past than artists in other fields: modern technology opens up to them forms of expressive possibility unknown to earlier generations. Writers and painters do not share this advantage. I remember in the 1970s a distinguished person passing the Listener to me and saying, about The Old Fools, “There is a poem that will last for 500 years”: it was Philip Larkin’s latest. It is a sentence that one cannot easily imagine being spoken today. The present standard of musical performance, by contrast, is astonishingly high, but it is significant, again, that the best interpreters of our time receive the kind of veneration that used to go to composers: it reveals an absence.
I have called this lecture ‘A DNA-Driven World’, because I believe that the future of our society relies at least in part on our understanding of biology and the molecules of life – DNA. Every era is defined by its technologies. The last century could be termed the nuclear age, and I propose that the century ahead will be fundamentally shaped by advances in biology and my field of genomics, which is the study of the complete genetic make-up of a species. Our planet is facing almost insurmountable problems, problems that governments on their own clearly can’t fix. In order to survive, we need a scientifically literate society willing and able to embrace change – because our ability to provide life’s essentials of food, water, shelter and energy for an expanding human population will require major advances in science and technology.
In this lecture I will argue that the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence. To some this may be troubling, but part of the problem we face with scientific advancement, is the fear of the unknown – fear that often leads to rejection.
Finding something cool to do in Moscow at no cost is a near impossible feat. But on the fourth floor of a dingy house, one of the several buildings that make up the Moscow State Conservatory, something awe-inspiring and magical happens every Friday: theremin-playing lessons are given for free, and last up to three hours at a time.
Yes, you read the name right. Invented by and named after the prodigious Leon Theremin, the thereminvox consists of a flat box containing layers of transistors and chips, and two antennas: one shaped like a hoop, protruding from the left with its openings facing the ceiling and floor, and the other a slim metal rod, pointing up. To produce sound, physical contact with the instrument isn’t required. The antennas act as sensors, detecting positioning of the hands: the hoop controls volume (the hand glides up and down an imaginary vertical axis. The lower, the quieter), and the rod is in charge of the pitch (here the imaginary path becomes a horizontal plane – the further back the hand moves, the lower the pitch becomes).
Here’s the Theremin substituting for Gnarls Barkley on a cover of Crazy.
Revolutions in the cinema seldom need the masses. Four or five names usually suffice; they come together when the benevolent film god focusses on a particular place at a particular time and in a blinking of an eye the screen world is a new one. In the late fifties of the last century a few prominent French film critics decided to try out things behind the camera and bada bing, the Nouvelle Vague was born. In the mid-nineties a few boisterous Danes wrote a seemingly ascetic manifesto and suddenly all other films looked like they were under a thick layer of dust compared with the Dogma productions. For a decade now the clear, stringent language of a handful of German directors has challenged the ubiquitous noise cinema and by now they are happy to be counted as part of the prestigious “Berlin School”, a name they didn’t coin for themselves.
Sometimes it is a central aesthetic concept which unites these small groups of extreme individualists; sometimes it’s the weight of historical circumstance. The handful of Romanian directors who are now causing a stir in international auteur cinema, belong to a generation of 30 and 40-somethings who grew up under Ceaucescu but were not broken by him.
Herbert has been celebrated as “a conscience and spokesman for the Polish nation” (Robert Hass), “a moral authority” (A. Alvarez), and “a complete poet” (Marius Kociejowski). By and large, his ironic, erudite, parabolic verse, with its allegorical insistence on historical recurrence and its self-conscious sublimation of private experience to public idea, continues to define our imagination of Polish poetry.
This was already the case well over twenty years ago, when readers in the United States and Britain could still believe that only governments on the other side of the Iron Curtain would eavesdrop on telephone calls, censor the media, flout international law, or torture political prisoners. Back then, the consensus also seemed to be that capitalist democracy, despite its attendant freedoms, leached the relevance from intellectual and artistic work. Consequently, many writers in the West came to look with curiosity, if not envy, toward their counterparts, who were presumed to have it better spiritually and morally. True, the Eastern European poets demonstrated clarity of voice and vision in the face of calamity and decrepitude. And in the ’60s, when their work first started to appear in English, readers here were justifiably excited, not only because they now had access to otherwise barricaded realities, but because this newly translated work—with its lucid perspectives and political relevance—marked a welcome reinvigoration of the lyric.
According to my calculations, if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.
This finding is striking. These results may not be the final and definitive explanation for the origins of Africa’s severe underdevelopment, but they do provide very strong evidence that much of Africa’s poor performance can be explained by its history, which is characterised by over 400 years of slave raiding.
Malcolm Lowry wrote one great book; the rest was miscellany. Before we get to the (freshly collected) miscellany, a word about the one great book. Single-masterpiece authors tend to divide into two camps: the Eternals (Cervantes, Sterne, Melville), or the world-historical quacks who pack everything into a single, unyielding wallop; and the Eternal Adolescents (De Quincey, Kerouac, Exley), or burnout cases who pull it together to manufacture a cult classic. It was Lowry’s fate to fall right in between the two. Coming of age a half-generation after “Ulysses,” the British-born, Cambridge-educated Lowry wanted to produce not just a novel but a cosmos-surfing, cosmos-swallowing book of books. “Under the Volcano” takes place in a demi-Joycean 12 hours, on the feast of the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and took Lowry a Joycean 10 years to fully emit. No one would ever call it underdone. Following the last hours in the life of a British dipsomaniac, “Under the Volcano” embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.
Taylor hints obligingly at a time in which secularism’s “hegemony of the mainstream master narrative” could be over (a great elucidator of Hegel, Taylor doesn’t so much turn a phrase as let it curdle in philosophical jargon). They will also no doubt like the fact that Taylor is highly critical of so-called “subtraction stories”, those Whig versions of secularism’s history, whereby human nature steadily casts off its shackles of ignorance and superstition, finally emerging from a Bastille of the mind into the bright morning of truth.
Taylor’s account is much more complicated. There is chronology, but hardly a straightforward narrative that might explain why the only recent bestseller about religion was written by a vituperative atheist. One might think that the cumulative impact of the Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment and myriad scientific revolutions was to make it possible to think about the material world without reference to any transcendent power (Taylor calls this the “immanent frame”), but that is not the whole story. He argues that the west has been changed by what he calls a “nova effect”: once a humanistic alternative to the transcendent frame established itself, it spawned an ever-widening variety of moral and spiritual positions, in the professor’s words, “across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond”.
Over at Live at the NYPL, videos of the NYPL’s conference on language, politics, and propaganda with Konstanty Gebert, Masha Gessen, Jack Miles and George Soros (Orville Schell moderates).
On the 60th anniversary of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting “largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.
Part II, on the Science of Manipulation, features George Lakoff, Frank Luntz, and Drew Westen. Part III, on The Future Political Landscape, features Michael J. Copps, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Josh Marshall, and Alessandra Stanley.
Art Basel Miami bills itself as the “most important art show in the United States.” You can read in The Art Newspaper, Art Basel’s daily rag, that Sam Keller, Director of Art Basel “has recreated what we used to call the World’s Fairs, at their height of success between 1850 and 1940.” This is an interesting point, if unintentionally so. The great era of the World’s Fairs was an era of populism and the celebration of the democratization of technology and the fruits of industry. But there was a certain blindness to this celebration, as there is, perhaps, in every celebration. The democratization of technology in the World’s Fair era was also its domestication and, inevitably, the beginning of its disenchantment. That is the thing with democratization. Everything gets opened up. Everything becomes available. But then we aren’t sure if we really want it anymore. The same ambivalence surely applies to art fairs.
And yet you wouldn’t want to close it up again. You wouldn’t want to de-democratize anything. The art world, the art market, is too big with too many people doing too many things. Miami embodies that right now. Too much — too much money, too much desire, too much art. But the alternative to “too much” is rarely, if ever, “just enough.” It is usually “too little.” The trick in Miami during Art Basel, I suspect, is to learn to swim around in the terrible current and find a few things among the chaos of toomuchness.
Most people tend to learn from their mistakes and avoid making the same blunder twice. Now research reveals a genetic mutation that helps to determine the extent to which certain people are doomed to repeat history.
Drug addicts, alcoholics and compulsive gamblers are known to be more likely than other people to have this genetic mutation, which leaves them with fewer receptors of a certain type in the brain. These receptors — called D2 receptors — are activated when levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine drop. Dopamine is responsible for signalling fun and pleasure in the brain. But dopamine also helps us learn. When we make a pleasurable decision, dopamine is a chemical treat, urging the brain to repeat the choice. Being deprived of such a treat should theoretically activate D2 receptors and encourage people not to make that same decision again.
So it had been theorized that people with fewer D2 receptors might be less capable of learning from negative reinforcement.
A curious passage occurs in “My Father Is a Book,” Janna Malamud Smith’s tender, touching 2006 memoir of her father, Bernard Malamud. In the spring of 1978, when the novelist was in his mid-60s, he and his wife, Ann, had dinner with Philip Roth and Claire Bloom in the latter couple’s London apartment. In a letter to his daughter describing the visit, Malamud affectionately characterizes Claire Bloom — “absolutely unpretentious” — and then, in parentheses, adds this detail about greeting Roth: “We kissed on the lips when I came in. He couldn’t have done that two years ago.” Now wait a minute.
Is this the Philip Roth who by then had put the id into Yid, the writer who had turned Freud’s three elements of the psyche into the Flying Karamazov Brothers? And is the letter writer the Bernard Malamud known for his themes of redemption through suffering, of the burden of conscience that weighs down even the artist-hero? Is it this Bernard Malamud, the creator of the Christlike Jewish store owner, Morris Bober, and also of Arthur Fidelman, a hapless painter forced to choose between the gross imperfection of his life and the complete bollixing of his work, between Fidelman’s mostly fruitless attempts to make a woman and his mostly futile efforts to make art?
By presenting himself as liberated and Roth as repressed, Malamud — who died in 1986 — may well have been taking imaginative revenge on a younger rival. Roth, after all, had at one time publicly scolded Malamud for being narrowly moral and uptight. As Philip Davis recalls in his wise, scrupulous, resolutely admiring biography, “Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life,” in 1974 Roth had contributed a long reflection called “Imagining Jews” to The New York Review of Books in which he disparaged what he regarded as the “stern morality” of Malamud’s second novel, “The Assistant.” In the letter to his daughter, Malamud goes on to surmise that Roth “sought” the kiss “to signify I had forgiven him for the foolish egoistic essay he had written about my work.”
A new study shows that male dolphins carry pieces of plants and twigs to impress females, rather than simply playful behaviour as previously believed.
Object-carrying as part of sexual display is rare in the animal kingdom, with only humans and chimpanzees doing anything similar.
The fact that the habit has been observed in isolated populations of dolphins in river dolphins in Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia suggests it has either been passed on through generations or evolved separately in different groups.
The discovery could provide proof of the existence of dolphin culture – defined as a non-hereditary, complex skill taught to some members of a population by others and passed down through generations.
Culture was until recently seen as a defining human characteristic not shared by other species.
THE entree, long the undisputed centerpiece of an American restaurant meal, is dead.
O.K., so maybe it’s not quite time to write the entree’s obituary. But in many major dining cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago, the main course is under attack.
Although the entree’s ills were first diagnosed in the late 1990s, when the rise of small plates kicked off the tapafication of American menus, the attacks have become more serious lately.
Upstarts like the snack menu, with its little offerings of polpettine and deviled eggs, are encroaching from the flank. Crudi, salumi plates and cheese boards have piled on. The appetizer, once a loyal lieutenant, is demanding more attention on menus. Side dishes and salads, fortified by seasonal ingredients and innovative preparations, are announcing their presence with new authority.
But the gravest threat may be the dining public, which seems to have lost interest in big, protein-laden main dishes.
“I think the entree has been in trouble for a long time,” said the chef Tom Colicchio. “Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it’s boring.”
John Lanchester reviews Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (trans. by Robert Chandler) in the LRB:
In Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – a difficult book, but, it seems increasingly clear, the most important critical work of the last twenty years – Fredric Jameson observes that ‘the disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.’ This thought-provoking assertion captures a truth about the shift from the modern to the postmodern: there is something pastiche-like about a great many contemporary writers, not least those who write in a personal voice which is in itself a variety of pastiche. Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is fascinating for many reasons, and one of them is the way in that it is both a pastiche and a personal statement; a conscious, cold-blooded attempt to sum up everything Grossman knew about the Great Patriotic War, and at the same time to rewrite War and Peace. Tolstoy’s novel was the only book Grossman read during the war, and he read it twice; War and Peace hangs over Grossman’s book as a template and a lodestar, and the measure of Grossman’s achievement is that a comparison between the two books is not grotesque.
Part of what Tolstoy’s example did for Grossman was to give him a place on which to stand, a vantage point. We can see this by considering what some English-language writers did with the war. The two British novelists who went off to the war in mid-career in their mid-thirties, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both wrote books about what they had seen at first hand, Waugh’s war being more overtly interesting (the Commandos, Crete, parachute training, Yugoslavia) but Powell’s more typical (garrison duties, staff work, office politics).
In the tortured process of creating the film – Tom Stoppard’s treatment dropped in favour of Chris Weitz’s unsolicited one, Wetitz being fired, another director coming on and being fired, Weitz’ return, New Line’s insistence on dropping the voice actor for Iorek Byrnison in favour of a marquis name in fantasy film, Ian McKellen – the one continuous theme is the rationalization by the creatives of studio power. Weitz says he “grew” a lot between being the first and third director of the film. Presumably the creative differences just stopped bothering him. And public atheist Pullman says he isn’t perturbed at all by the complete excision of theocratic corruption in the film because all forms of totalitarianism are the same.
Except they’re not. Life in a theocracy means everyone – not just members of the Communist party or the military junta – must live out the philosophy of the rulers every day of their lives. There is a peculiarity to a complete absence of the separation of church and state that doesn’t prevail in a communist or a fascist state. When there is no distinction between religious and secular power, it’s not enough to obey the rules, you have to believe in them, too. Theocracies are obsessed with sexuality in a way that common or garden totalitarianism is not. Women get a spectacularly raw deal in a theocratic state, which is what makes Mrs. Coulter such a notable character; she plays the religious hierarchy at their own game and wins, albeit at a terrible cost.
Cutting out the special viciousness of theocratic totalitarianism from His Dark Materials is its own form of intercision, the books’ term for an operation that separates children from their daemons and cleanses them of original sin.
Over at the NYT’s Tierney Lab, “Richard Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago and one of the organizers of Saturday’s debate on this topic at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting” responds to the issues raised is Tierney’s post:
[I]n recent years there have been two major scientific reviews of the medical literature and an exemplary Gambia-based research study, which have raised serious doubts about the supposed effects on mortality, morbidity and sexuality that are so often attributed to these customary surgeries; yet, as far as I know, there has been absolutely no mention of these reviews and studies in any American newspaper or on NPR, although one might have thought they were sufficiently eye-opening and significant to warrant media coverage.
Any reasonably objective assessment of the risks and consequences of female genital surgeries should begin with the epidemiologist and medical anthropologist Carla Obermeyer’s comprehensive and critical reviews of the medical and demographic evidence on the topic (published in the journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly). Her first publication reviews and critiques the available literature on female genital surgeries through 1996; her second publication reviews the subsequent literature from 1997-2002. The third key source is a research report by Linda Morison and her Medical Research Council team published in 2001 in the journal Tropical Medicine and International Health. That research, conducted in the Gambia, is the most systematic, comprehensive and controlled investigation of the health consequences of female genital modifications yet to be conducted.
Here is a link to the WHO-Lancet study on female ‘circumcision’.
A month after he had fled Nazi-occupied Vienna and settled safely in London, Sigmund Freud had an unwelcome encounter with Salvador Dali. Escorted by Freud’s friend Stefan Zweig, Dali visited the frail psychoanalyst in his new home and harangued him on the subject of ‘an ambitiously scientific article’ that he – Dali – had written on paranoia. At first stonily indifferent, Freud muttered to Zweig: ‘What a fanatic!’ But then Freud made a characteristically double-edged observation: ‘In classic paintings I look for the subconscious, in surrealist paintings for the conscious.’ Probably correctly, Dali interpreted this dictum as ‘a death-sentence on surrealism’.
However Freud may have meant it at the time, it is a comment that illustrates a neglected side of him. While he is rightly remembered for revealing the power of the unconscious in human life, Freud was always on the side of the conscious self.
I can’t remember there ever being more hope and goodwill toward an art institution than there is right now for the New Museum, as it moves into its new $64 million building on the Bowery. Partly this is because the New Museum, despite having been something of a local mascot over the 30 years since its founding, has never quite hit its stride; it has usually bounced between being audacious and being annoying. Partly it’s because other New York museums have been so uneven about contemporary art. MoMA is adrift, the Guggenheim’s leaders continue to make terrible decisions, and the Brooklyn Museum is a giant wasted opportunity. The general feeling is, this is the New Museum’s last best chance to get it right.
Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague, is named after the Swiss microbiologist Alexander Yersin, who first identified it just over a hundred years ago. A relatively recent microbe in evolutionary terms, it spreads to humans via fleas that have gorged themselves on the infected blood of rats. Unless they have the universally fatal pneumonic version, plague victims themselves are not contagious. However, many people who experienced the Black Death in the 14th century were convinced it spread person-to-person. And strangely for a disease that also kills rats, not one eyewitness mentions seeing dead rats.
