Our own Morgan Meis at The Smart Set:

H.L. Mencken was a bastard. He had a core meanness that showed itself in his writing and in his personal life. Without that meanness, though, his writing might never have gotten so startlingly good. Lots of people need lots of things to do what they do. Mencken simply needed to be hard.

In the early part of the 20th century, America needed Mencken. We needed him to wash away some of the Emersonian/Whitmanian enthusiasm that had started to clog up the collective joint. Not that Emerson and Whitman didn’t have their place. As Mencken himself notes in his essay “The National Letters,” it took Emerson and then Whitman, among others, to stand up and defend the possibility of an American Mind and an American Voice. They did so with boldness and with prose falling over itself in its excitement about itself. Sometimes with Whitman it seems that we’re but one or two orgasms away from the final utopia of ecstatic democracy. This newfound confidence, speaking out, proclaims that America has finally figured out what it is. An American literature of the late 19th century was coming out of the Wilderness with something to say.

Mencken wasn’t so sure.

More here. See also this article about Menken, also at The Smart Set. And also read their very funny Ombudsman’s piece here.

Joseph Epstein in The New Criterion:

My essay of twenty-five years ago featured the attenuation, the thinning out, of literary culture. Criticism had become professionalized in the universities, with French theory beginning to make heavy incursions into the old common-sense American tradition, not at all to criticism’s gain. Poets continued solemnly to scribble away under the ever-diminishing illusion that they had an audience. Through the agency of interviews and television appearances flogging their books, writers came to seem to be making larger contributions to the history of publicity than to that of literature. Politics in literature—which Stendhal likened to “a gunshot in the middle of a concert, something uncivilized to which, however, it is not possible to turn your back”—had begun to play a larger and more divisive role in literary culture. Europe, as a place American writers could look to in the hope of discovering models of literary courage and pertinence, was no longer supplying them in impressive numbers, if at all. Such, such, were among my grim findings of a quarter century ago.

Has much changed over the past twenty-five years? Many things have, and in ways whose consequences cannot be known. For example, theory in academic literary criticism seems to be playing itself out by the sheer force of its deep inner uselessness.

More here.

For all his efforts to know the world, Kapuscinski seems not to have known many people, at least in the literary sense. I can think of only a handful of memorable characters in all his books. The fawning attendants of Haile Selassie, in awe of the emperor’s power. Carlotta, a daring, doomed soldier who escorts Kapuscinski to the front in Angola. Mahmud Azari, an Iranian translator who returns home from London in the last days of the Shah and ends up participating in the revolution, though not before being forced into superficial collaboration by some sinister men from the ruling party. As Colin Thubron pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, Azari’s experience of authoritarianism could be taken to stand for Kapuscinski’s own. And it seems to me that, in fact, all of his characters–whether or not they really existed–could be seen the same way, as reflections of the author’s personality. His true journey may have been an inward one.

But what a fascinating trip it was.

more from The Nation here.

Scott Saul in the Boston Review:

I’m drawn to ponder the singular music of the cuíca, the drum that is no mere drum, as I reflect on the expansive career of Chico Buarque, an intellectual who is no mere intellectual. Arguably Brazil’s most cherished living artist—in 1999 he was voted the country’s “musician of the century” by a Brazilian newsweekly—Buarque remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, perhaps because our culture has too little imagination to accommodate a composer-lyricist who is also a playwright and novelist of note, no frame of reference for an artist who has learned equally from Carnival and Kafka, bossa nova and Brecht. In Brazil, his first name is synonymous with works that offer an improbable amalgam of wit and integrity—with a body of music that ranges between self-questioning sambas, lushly melodic love songs, and topical songs circling around the fate of the working poor; with plays that rewrite the Western repertory (Medea, The Threepenny Opera) in a Brazilian key; and with novels that, drawing upon Kafka’s parables of entrapment, marry existential seriousness with a playful affection for exposing the devices of narrative. Faced with an oeuvre that encompasses over 300 songs, four plays, four novels, and a few films to boot, the aspiring Chico-ologist in the United States would do well, ironically, to begin with his fiction, which not only is easier to find in translation but also offers revealing clues about the unforgiving yet dream-like world his art evokes.

More here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

There have been Leica cameras since 1925, when the Leica I was introduced at a trade fair in Leipzig. From then on, as the camera has evolved over eight decades, generations of users have turned to it in their hour of need, or their millisecond of inspiration. Aleksandr Rodchenko, André Kertész, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Sebastião Salgado: these are some of the major-league names that are associated with the Leica brand—or, in the case of Cartier-Bresson, stuck to it with everlasting glue.

Even if you don’t follow photography, your mind’s eye will still be full of Leica photographs. The famous head shot of Che Guevara, reproduced on millions of rebellious T-shirts and student walls: that was taken on a Leica with a portrait lens—a short telephoto of 90 mm.—by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Korda, in 1960. How about the pearl-gray smile-cum-kiss reflected in the wing mirror of a car, taken by Elliott Erwitt in 1955? Leica again, as is the even more celebrated smooch caught in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945—a sailor craned over a nurse, bending her backward, her hand raised against his chest in polite half-protestation.

More here.

Zwirner & Wirth’s “Old School” explores a tantalizing mega-generational gap: the divide between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and our postmodernist counterparts. Nearly thirty landscapes, still lifes and figure paintings by old masters and contemporary artists make for a fascinating mix, telling us a little about traditions of art and a great deal about current uses for them.

The paintings have been paired according to theme and style, on walls painted a rich shade of red. A 1630 panel of a wedding procession by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (son of the great painter) depicts self-absorbed throngs with the same busyness of detail as Hilary Harkness’s “Flipwreck” (2004)—though the latter’s shipwrecked women, in sexually masochistic poses and clothes, set an entirely different tone. Anj Smith’s small canvas from 2007 boasts much thicker textures than the adjacent painting of Saint Anthony by Jacob van Swanenburgh (c. 1571-1638), but both feature fanciful monsters in compositions of torn, turbulent forms. Michael Borremans’ conventionally skillful likeness of a young man from 2006 hangs next to an impressive, if facile, portrait from c. 1664 by Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen.

more from artcritical here.

An exclusive excerpt from O.J.’s next book.

Timothy Noah in Slate:

Here’s how we did it:

“Don’t let nobody out this room,” I shouted as my buddies pulled out their heaters. “Motherf__kers! Think you can steal my s__t and sell it?”

Beardsley (or was it Fromong?) said, “No” and looked scared.

“Don’t let nobody out of here,” I said. “Motherf__ker, you think you can steal my s__t?”

Then somebody said, “F__k you. Mind your own business.”

Then one of my homeys said, “Look at this s__t.” Then one of them told Fromong (or was it Beardsley?) “Get over there.”

“You think you can steal my s__t?” I repeated, because I really felt this was the central point these two collectors needed to grasp.

More here.

Jonathan Fildes at the BBC:

Intel has shown off what it says are the world’s first working chips which contain transistors with features just 32 billionths of a metre wide.

Their production means the industry axiom that has underpinned all chip development for the last 40 years, known as Moore’s Law, remains intact.

Speaking to BBC News, Dr Gordon Moore said that he expected the proposition that bears his name should continue “for at least another decade”.

More here.  [Thanks to P.D. Smith.]

Karma Nabulsi in The Guardian:

No people, territory or issue on earth have had more international attention devoted to them than Palestine and its people. Yet no conflict looks further from resolution, and no people further from achieving the freedom promised them. More Palestinians lack more basic freedoms today than they did 60 years ago. While an expensive and extensive peace process was in full swing, Israel managed to illegally expropriate most of the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, install hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers, kill more Palestinian families, arrest more young men, destroy more crops, homes and businesses, build a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice, and set forth, unchecked, a policy of aggressive expansionism in Palestine that continues until this moment.

Citizens of this country may wish to ask why this is so, and what on earth their government has been doing all this time with their money. Yesterday the government attempted to answer this question with the launch of a report on the Economic Aspects of the Peace Process. What the report doesn’t explain is the direct link between throwing economics at this conflict and the repeated failures to solve it.

More here.  And here is our own Saifedean Ammous’s take on this.

NELL FREUDENBERGER in The New York Times:

“The Indian Clerk” by David Leavitt is loosely structured around a lecture given by the brilliant English mathematician and Cambridge don G. H. Hardy. In 1913, as Hardy is engaged in trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis — a mathematical problem involving prime numbers that Leavitt (the author of a brief biography of the mathematician Alan Turing) seems to understand deeply and that I won’t embarrass myself by attempting to summarize — he receives a letter from one S. Ramanujan, a poor clerk working in a colonial accounts office in Madras. Without the benefit of any formal training, Ramanujan claims to have come close to a solution to the famous problem. What little Hardy knows about India is derived from a grammar school drama pageant — a “paste and colored-paper facsimile of the exotic East, in which brave Englishmen battled natives for the cause of empire” — but on the basis of the letter, he and his collaborator, J. E. Littlewood, invite Ramanujan to come to Cambridge. While Ramanujan is living in England, war breaks out, and the young mathematician is not able to return to India for another five years.

Once Ramanujan arrives in England, he becomes a Cambridge celebrity: there is competition among the dons for proximity to the “Hindoo calculator,” as he’s called in the press. Another mathematician, Eric Neville, takes Ramanujan into his home; his wife, Alice, becomes obsessed with their guest’s comfort, catering to his dietary restrictions, albeit in a very British fashion (a “vegetable goose” is one of the more appealing attempts). There are various justifications for the impulse to save Ramanujan: Alice claims to be easing his culture shock, while Hardy hopes to develop his mind. In both cases, however, their fascination has a sexually predatory edge: Hardy “cannot deny that it excites him, the prospect of rescuing a young genius from poverty and obscurity and watching him flourish. … Or perhaps what excites him is the vision he has conjured up, in spite of himself, of Ramanujan: a young Gurkha, brandishing a sword.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

When people talk about a moment being burned into memory, they usually mean it in a negative way: President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Princess Diana’s fatal car crash, 9/11. The launch of Sputnik 50 years ago this month was different. It certainly had its negative side: no one likes to wake up to find that your nuclear adversary has thrown a shiny ball over your head and that you can’t do a thing about it. But the dawn of the Space Age was also a hopeful event. Visionaries celebrated humanity’s long-awaited climb out of its cradle, and pragmatists soon savored the benefits of communications and weather satellites. Many of today’s scientists and engineers trace their life’s passions to that fast-moving dot in the night sky.

“In his millennia of looking at the stars, man has never faced so exciting a challenge as the year 1957 has suddenly thrust upon him,” astronomers Fred L. Whipple and J. Allen Hynek wrote in the December 1957 issue of Scientific American.

The evolution of the space program continues to be dramatic. In a decade or so, it will be hardly recognizable.

More here.

Maya Khankhoje in Rabble Book Reviews:

Guerrilla gardening can be summarily defined as gardening in public urban spaces with or without permission. Gardening by the citizens, that is, by urban guerrillas intent, not on destroying the status quo as such but on restoring the web of life that the status quo has been destroying so wantonly. Why do these citizens feel such a sense of urgency? Consider the following:

The earth is cultivated more than ever before…swamps are drying up and cities are springing up at an unprecedented scale. We have become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.

This pressing concern was voiced by Quintus Septimus Tertullian more than 2,200 years ago. This is the very same concern that has spurred urban guerrillas of a gentler, albeit no less radical bend of mind than armed guerrillas, to engage in urban gardening tactics, risking fines and imprisonment. These include fly-by-night plantings in urban wastelands, lobbing “seed grenades” into fenced-off empty lots, planting trees in the middle of nowhere, covering traffic circles with native ground cover, sowing edible plants in school-yards, draping lamp posts with decorative creepers, developing community gardens and empowering disaffected youth by reintroducing them to the joys of dirtying one’s hands in the soil. The list is as boundless as any warrior’s imagination.

More here.

Courtney Angela Brkic in Dissent:

Before the war, you worked in an office. You took care of your parents, who were getting older but still managed to tend their vegetable garden and read the newspaper every day. For your daughter’s ninth birthday, you bought her a bicycle. Your teenage son played soccer for a local team, and when you could, you went to cheer him on.

When the war started, you could not believe that such a thing was possible in this day and age. “It’s the twentieth century,” you told your husband in disbelief. You did not understand how people could kill their neighbors. You blamed their politicians for this sudden contagion of nationalism. People will come to their senses, you reasoned, even as things got worse.

Finally, you sought refuge in the town—the one the United Nations had disarmed and subsequently declared “safe.” You reasoned that if UN troops had disarmed it, they intended to protect it. It is only logical, you thought. And eventually several hundred Dutch troops were deployed there. You did not speak their language, and they did not speak yours, but they stood between you and those who wanted you dead.

Almost overnight, the old life slipped away.

More here.

Carol Grisanti of NBC News:

The austere, red-brick “fortress-like” exterior grabs one immediately. But the real attention-getter is just off to the side of the main entrance – a “sentry” of six 10-feet tall burqa clad women made out of black fiberglass.

The message from the sculptor, Jamil Baloch, seemed to be that though westerners may view the burqa as a form of incarceration for women, in eastern cultures – regardless of how they dress – women are strong and play a larger-than-life role in society.

And that role is certainly evident at the National Art Gallery. Sixty percent of the artists on exhibit are women.

“Pakistan’s art world is overwhelmingly female-dominated,” said Pasha.

“Parents didn’t send their sons to art school; they sent their daughters,” he told me. “Art school was considered a sissy thing to do.”

But the art inside is far from sissy. It is contemporary and edgy and defies Pakistan’s image as a deeply conservative country of religious extremists.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

Ghada Karmi in Le Monde Diplomatique:

In July two Arab League envoys visited Jerusalem to press the Arab case, and plans led by the United States are afoot for an Arab-Israeli peace conference in September. Though Israel may still not respond, this is a giant step for the Arabs, reversing decades of hostility.

The West viewed the plan as no more than a proper Arab response to Israel’s existence, revealing a profound ignorance of what the plan means for Arabs. Westerners regard Israel as a natural part of the Middle Eastern landscape and dismiss what Arabs feel about it. Yet an understanding of Israel’s impact on the Arab world has always been crucial to the search for a resolution to the conflict, and helps explain why none has yet been found.

The damage done to the Arabs by Israel’s creation is an untold story in the West. To understand it, you have to set aside the Israeli narrative and the idea of Arabs as fanatical, backward warmongers irrationally bent on destroying a modern, democratic and peaceable state.

More here.  [Thanks to Elatia Harris.]

Not since the 18th century has there been so much argument about the mind. In that era, philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant argued about the relationships between thought and speech, and between sensation and knowledge, in terms that we still mull over today. Are human beings born with innate ideas, or are we just blank slates, filled up by experience as we grow up? Is language something that uniquely makes us human? Do words really represent things in the world or are they markers of ideas inside our brains? Is there a language of thought itself, or do different languages embrace and shape the world in different ways?

Such questions have been asked afresh in recent years, not only by philosophers and linguists, but also by cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists seeking the origins of human sensibility. Among the most prolific and most public of the current generation of inquirers into human understanding is the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In a veritable bookshelf of recently published volumes, he has argued for what might be called a soft innatism: a theory of mind that holds that certain concepts or ways of thinking are hardwired into our brains at birth.

more from the NY Sun here.

There’s often a significant flaw in Ken Burns’s documentaries. In “The Civil War” (1990), it was an ending that emphasized the healing of whites in the North and South without making clear that, at the war’s end, the situation of most blacks in this country would not change for decades. In “Baseball” (1994), it was the director’s failure to accommodate the when-it-was-a-game nostalgia with the hard realities of the players’ revolution in the 1970s. And in “The West” (1996), it was an inability to reconcile the 19th-century belief in manifest destiny with the 20th-century notion of imperialism. But then, Mr. Burns isn’t a historian, he’s a storyteller with an uncanny — let’s face it, unprecedented — ability to weave a vast array of threads into a single cohesive narrative.

more from the NY Sun here.

“It used to be that people would only talk about intelligence in terms of primates,” says Nicola Clayton, a professor of comparative psychology at the University of Cambridge. “But now I think that birds have achieved a sort of honorary ape status, just with a few feathers attached.”

The intelligence of birds, which sit far from man on the evolutionary tree, has also forced a reappraisal of where intelligence comes from. Scientists once assumed that intelligence evolved out of physical need – animals got smart in order to exploit natural resources. But the brainpower of birds suggests that intelligence is actually a byproduct of complex social interactions. Living in a group requires an animal to juggle lots of information about its peers. So it’s not a coincidence that the smartest creatures are also the most social.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

John Crace in The Guardian:

As a child I went to church in Wales. Then I stopped. The end. I could never quite square away the compassionate God – the man who had turned me into a household name – with the cruel God – the man who was always punishing me by making me jump on to a band-wagon as everyone else was getting off. First I was well behind Lynne Truss on proper English and now I’m well behind Dawkins and Hitchens on religion.

It was to reconcile these contradictions that I broadcast my now famous series of groundbreaking interviews, God in Search of Humphrys, on Radio 4. Who better to ask for proof of my existence than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, and the leading Muslim academic, Tariq Ramadan?

I could rewrite these encounters, but that would take too much effort so I’m just going to reprint a transcript.

JH: Does God exist?

RW: Um, er, it’s not that easy.

TR: Yes.

JS: Deffo.

JH: Prove it.

RW: Um, er, it’s not that easy.

TR: I don’t need to.

JS: Neither do I, though the others do.

So the three wise men did not convince me.

More here.