Emma Brockes interviews Jane Fonda for The Guardian:

Her memoir, My Life So Far, has been seized on in pre-publicity for its chapter about her marriage to Roger Vadim, the French film director, who, she reveals, coerced her into having threesomes with prostitutes when they lived in Paris in the 1960s. It was not her intention to be salacious. The book is honest and humorous, but the memories are couched in a language you don’t hear much these days. The reason she went along with Vadim’s demands, she says, is that “when I met him, I was on a search for womanhood. I was terrified of being a woman because it meant being a victim and being destroyed like my mother was.”

Fonda’s discursive style was forged in the late 60s and early 70s, during those huge waves of activism when “paradigms of hierarchical patriarchy” were all the rage. Although she wryly observes in the book that she might have toned it down a bit – that she made herself unlikeable by banging her drum so loudly – there is nevertheless something affecting about her refusal to soften, to flirt with neo-feminism’s more digestible language. When I suggest that the word patriarchy is an anachronism – that, while no one would deny inequality exists, lots of women would bridle at the suggestion they are victims of a patriarchal system – she fires back: “Part of what my book delineates is how misogyny is internalised: the need to be perfect, to please, to be malleable. And that this is true for otherwise strong, successful women like me. No, Emma, patriarchy is very much alive and well, and we have to do something about that.”

Read more here.

“In modern America, an amazing number of people have thrown themselves into the work of researching and writing the history of the American Left—many more than are justified by the relative importance of the topic. These scholars have taken up the subject in order to understand something about their own lives—to explain how and why they came to feel so alienated from the mainstream of American politics, and what their alienation was like, and what uses might be drawn from their experiences. Books on these themes—on the history of the Communist Party USA, on the old Socialists, on the New Left, and so on—make up a main current of the modern historical literature. Yet none of these books has ever managed to eclipse Marxian Socialism in the United States—the classic of classics in this particular field. In any case, as I glance back at Bell’s book today, I see in it one of the inspirations for my own adult life and work.

My transition from once-born to twice-born turned me into someone who was curious and eager to write about the history of the Left—sometimes in order to promote a political agenda, but mostly for another reason: I wanted to discover truths, if I possibly could—about America and other parts of the world; about political movements; about social theory; about human nature. This is a gloomier project than merely advancing a political agenda. Agendas tend to be hopeful; truths, not so hopeful. A triumphal spirit runs through a great deal of American history, but not through the particular subset of American history that contains the political Left.

A shadow fell across my dinner with Dan when we reminisced about the strike of 1968—the shadow of what had happened to him at Columbia; what had happened to the left-wing movement that emerged from the strike; and what had happened to our common friend, his fondly remembered student and my SDS “brother,” who had concentrated in his own person all the disasters of the era. But it is in the nature of the second-born to live in the shadows. The blue sky, in Emerson’s phrase, belongs to the first-born, and afterward comes the lifting of the veil and the gazing at Medusa’s face.”

From Bookforum.

“Until the 19th century, mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry: the Euclidean plane and the sphere. It was therefore a deep shock to their community to find that there existed in principle a completely other spatial structure whose existence was discerned only by overturning a 2000-year-old prejudice about “parallel” lines. The discovery of hyperbolic space in the 1820s and 1830s by the Hungarian mathematician Janos Bolyai and the Russian mathematician Nicholay Lobatchevsky marked a turning point in mathematics and initiated the formal field of non-Euclidean geometry. For more than a century, mathematicians searched in vain for a physical surface with hyperbolic geometry. Starting in the 1950s, they began to suggest possibilities for constructing such surfaces. Eventually, in 1997, Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, made the first useable physical model of the hyperbolic — a feat many mathematicians had believed was impossible — using, of all things, crochet. Taimina and her husband, David Henderson, a geometer at Cornell, are the co-authors of Experiencing Geometry, a widely used textbook on both Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces. Margaret Wertheim, founder of the Institute for Figuring and a new regular contributor to Cabinet, spoke to them about crocheting and non-Euclidean geometry.”

More here.

Carolyn Y. Johnson in The Boston Globe:

IN HER NEW BOOK, ”Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel,” Rebecca Goldstein, a novelist and currently visiting professor of philosophy at Trinity College, brings all her skills to bear on a difficult man and his difficult math. As she explained in a recent interview at her Cambridge apartment, she set out to correct misinterpretations of Gödel’s work, which transformed the philosophical underpinnings of mathematics, but ended up ”inhabiting his mind.”

When Gödel, born in 1906 in what is now the Czech Republic, was formulating his ideas in Vienna in the 1920s, mathematicians across the world theorized that arithmetic was a human construction. They were sure that math arose from a set of man-made rules (like a modern-day computer program), or was ”like a higher form of chess.”

That went against everything Gödel believed: For him, math was a description of an abstract reality, transcending human rules and inventions. In 1930, the 23-year-old Gödel thought he had proved that such an abstract world did exist. With his first Incompleteness theorem, he demonstrated that in a mathematical system there are things that are true that cannot be proved. He followed with a second Incompleteness theorem, which said it was impossible to prove the consistency of a mathematical system when you are working within that system.

The proofs transformed logic and branches of math, but Gödel was tragically misunderstood. Far from what he intended, many took ”incompleteness” to mean that philosophical uncertainty had spread from the humanities and arts to the most logical human enterprise – math.

Gödel immigrated to the United States in 1940 and took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, where he found a conversation partner and confidant in Albert Einstein, but felt increasingly alienated by a world that did not understand his breakthrough. After Einstein’s death, Gödel descended into ever deeper paranoia and madness.

Read more here.

Kenneth L. Woodward in Newsweek:

  John Paul II held the chair of Saint Peter for more than 26 years—leading his flock longer than almost any other pope. For nearly a decade, he persevered in office despite a slow and painfully public deterioration from Parkinson’s disease. This avid outdoor athlete who spent many a papal vacation skiing and hiking in the mountains, this former actor who made all the world his stage, this relentless global traveler who bent and kissed the tarmac in tiny countries never before visited by a pope, aged, suffered and physically declined before our eyes. And so we watched as he lost the ability to walk, as he slurred when he tried to talk, as his head dropped and saliva fell from his lips during church ceremonies. Those who follow Christ must welcome suffering, he firmly believed, and he would not hide his own from public view.

Future historians seem certain to record that John Paul personalized the papacy in ways that none of the cardinals who elected him (with 103 of 109 votes after 10 ballots) could have foreseen. He transformed the See of Peter into a fulcrum of world politics—his politics. The papal voice—his voice—was heard and often heeded in major capitals like Moscow and Washington. Above all, he took the papacy—which only a century earlier was locked inside the ecclesiastical confines of Vatican City—on the road. He visited Africa four times, Latin America five, managing altogether an astounding 104 pilgrimages to 129 countries around the globe. In doing so, he transformed the figure of the pope from distant icon to familiar face. His face.

Read more here.

Adam Cohen in the New York Times:

When a young person visits, you should throw him off balance by saying, “You want a wash, I expect,” in a way that suggests he has not quite mastered personal hygiene. An older man should be told how fine it is that his wife is still “moving very briskly about.” And visitors of all ages should be encouraged to talk about their friends, after which you should say that you “wished B. was here” because you never tell “stories behind people’s backs.”

These pointers come from “Lifemanship,” one of a series of acerbic life guides written by Stephen Potter in the 1940’s and 1950’s. “Lifemanship,” which has just been reissued by Moyer Bell, wryly mocked Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and other self-help manuals of its day. Potter’s books do not focus on friendship or success, but on less exalted goals: “winning without actually cheating” (“Gamesmanship”); “creative intimidation” (“One-Upmanship”); and making “the other man feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly” (“Lifemanship”).

The absurdist “Monty Python’s Spamalot” may be the toast of Broadway, but it is Potter’s caustic brand of British humor that is especially in step with our times. His targets – wine snobs, literary poseurs and weekend athletes – are more numerous today than a half-century ago. His major themes – the drive for self-improvement, competitiveness, faking it and sheer malice – are a virtual checklist of modern culture.

More here.

David Whitehouse at the BBC News:

The Vikings could have been using a telescope hundreds of years before Dutch spectacle makers supposedly invented the device in the late 16th century.

This remarkable possibility has emerged from a study of sophisticated lenses just recognised from a Viking site on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. They were initially thought to be merely ornaments.

“It seems that the elliptical lens design was invented much earlier that we thought and then the knowledge was lost,” says Dr Olaf Schmidt, of Aalen University in Germany.

More here.

David Mehegan writes about Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing, in The Boston Globe:

Downing, a 46-year-old novelist and writing teacher at Tufts University, had never given daylight saving much thought, until one recent October. ”I was turning back my clock,” he said, ”and for the first time in my life, I thought, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’ I asked friends: ‘Why do we do it?’ And the more I asked, the more preposterous it seemed — believing that I was actually getting rid of an hour, or adding an hour, to a day.”

He looked into it and, to his delight and amazement, discovered that while ”most people have an immediate answer or two about who did it and why, almost to a person we are wrong.”

More here.

Tanya Gold in The Guardian:

Elizabeth Gaskell is a literary criminal, who, in 1857, perpetrated a heinous act of grave-robbing. Gaskell took Charlotte Brontë, the author of Jane Eyre, the dirtiest, darkest, most depraved fantasy of all time, and, like an angel murdering a succubus, trod on her. In a “biography” called The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the author’s death, Gaskell stripped Charlotte of her genius and transformed her into a sexless, death-stalked saint.

As the 150th anniversary of her death on March 31 1855 approaches, it is time to rescue Charlotte Brontë. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of Gaskell’s fake miserabilia. Enough of the Brontë industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte – filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

More here.

From the UC Berkeley News:

“Hello. My name is David Byrne, and I’m going to do an introduction to PowerPoint.”

The roar of applause and cheers that greeted this deadpan statement was undoubtedly the most enthusiasm ever exhibited before a lecture held in UC Berkeley’s Dwinelle Hall. Byrne, best known as the front man for the Talking Heads, proceeded to do exactly what he said he would. But while he poked fun at the popular Microsoft presentation software’s bullet-point tyranny and Autocontent Wizard inanity, Byrne also defended its appeal as more than just a business tool — as a medium for art and theater. His talk was titled “I ♥ PowerPoint,” and he confessed that he loves the program not in spite of, but in some ways because of, its shortcomings.

“I love not having an unlimited palette. In that sense it’s like a pencil. You don’t expect to have other typefaces or fonts; you have fun with what’s there,” Byrne said. “Freedom — who needs it?”

“PowerPoint is the Rodney Dangerfield of software: it gets no respect,” summarized Ken Goldberg, the Berkeley engineering professor and artist who invited Byrne to speak as part of the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium series he started in 1997. “It’s easy to ridicule it for its corporate nature, but the real story is about how participatory and democratic it is. High school kids use it, rabbis use it, people even use it for wedding toasts.”

Byrne discovered the software a few years ago and, excited by how easy it was to integrate visuals and music, began to create art pieces with it. He collected them into a book, “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information,” which came with a DVD of about 20 minutes of his “PowerPointillism,” as Goldberg calls it. Those slides — among them images of Dolly the cloned sheep, simple drawings, and arrows jostling each other like a confused school of fish (below right) — cycled across the screen before the lecture began.

More here.  Byrne also writes an award-winning journal on the web (don’t call it a blog!) which you can look at on his website here.

Alice Calaprice in The Guardian:

Although Albert Einstein was a prolific writer, he did not think of himself as one. “In the past, it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell,” he wrote in a fit of frustration to his biographer, Carl Seelig, in 1953. By this time, two years before his death, his archive contained more than 20,000 items, thousands of which were written by him personally. Today, the archive has more than doubled in size.

A physicist, philosopher, humanitarian, pacifist, political agitator and cultural Zionist, Einstein was also a formidable writer, and very quotable. Because he wrote almost exclusively in German, his words have been translated into dozens of languages – though, as everyone knows, much can be lost in translation.

Translators have difficulty reproducing his sentences faithfully because they inevitably need to move the words around, causing them to lose their rhythm. Moreover, some of Einstein’s words have been so miserably mistranslated that one can’t recognise the original. Different versions can also lead to confusion about what he actually said. Einstein, as is the case with most writers, is best read in his mother tongue.

More here.

From the Technology Review at MIT:

“Global village” was always an idealistic oxymoron. Politically, culturally, and economically, the differences among nations loom far larger than any differences that might exist among neighborhoods made up of small clutches of homes and shops.

In the following collection of stories, Technology Review brings you the view from seven countries. They are a sampling of the world: Northern Hemisphere and Southern, nations developed and developing, with traditions democratic, autocratic, and Communist. In four cases (China, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States), the writers are editors of Technology Review or of one of its foreign-language editions. For reports on technology in the other three countries (South Africa, Chile, and Brazil), we turned to journalists who cover those countries. We asked these writers to report on which emerging technologies are the most important for their nations’ societies and economies, and to explain what makes these technolo­gies uniquely characteristic of their countries.

Each country reveals its own preoccupations, usually born out of its peculiar history and current circumstances. Leave it to the Dutch, for example, to pour computer modeling resources into the management of water and soil—endeavors without which the Netherlands’ very existence would be imperiled. The United States has measured the value of R&D projects largely by their potential for adding to the nervous nation’s power to fight wars and defend against terrorist attack. In Germany, home of the world’s first superhighways and some of its most storied carmakers, it’s no surprise to see projects aimed at making driving safer and smarter.

In all, our reporters identified more than two dozen emerging technologies or ideas about innovation as vital to the futures of these seven countries. But even those innovations that most directly address urgent regional needs prove to have application for the entire planet.

More here.

Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times:

Last spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali took her ”Dutch mother” — the woman who taught her the language and cared for her after she arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in 1992 — to lunch at the Dudok brasserie, near the Parliament in The Hague. As always, Hirsi Ali’s armed security detail was there. They have been her companions since she started receiving death threats in September 2002. Hirsi Ali, who was born in Somalia and has been a member of the Dutch Parliament since January 2003, had endorsed the view that Islam is a backward religion, condemned the way women live under it and said that by today’s standards, the prophet Muhammad would be considered a perverse tyrant. She had also announced that she was no longer a believing Muslim. The punishment for such apostasy is, according to strict interpretations of Islam, death. That day at the Dudok, several dozen vocational students were taking up the main restaurant, so she and her guards parked at two tables near the bar. Hirsi Ali had her back to the restaurant when one of the students, apparently a Dutch convert to Islam, tapped her on the shoulder. ”I turned around,” she recalls in her elegant English, ”and saw this sweet, young Dutch guy, about 24 years old. With freckles! And he was like, ‘Madam, I hope the mujahedeen get you and kill you.’ ” Hirsi Ali handed him her knife and told him, ”Why don’t you do it yourself?”

The story is, like much in Hirsi Ali’s life, an inseparable mix of the terrifying and the tender.

Read on here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

A few years ago, it seemed quite probable that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston would have to face trial for his appalling collusion in the child-rape racket that his diocese had been running. The man had knowingly reassigned dangerous and sadistic criminals to positions where they would be able to exploit the defenseless. He had withheld evidence and made himself an accomplice, before and after the fact, in the one offense that people of all faiths and of none have most united in condemning. (Since I have more than once criticized Maureen Dowd in this space, I should say now that I think she put it best of all. A church that has allowed no latitude in its teachings on masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, and divorce suddenly asks for understanding and “wiggle room” for the most revolting crime on the books.)

Anyway, Cardinal Law isn’t going to face a court, now. He has fled the jurisdiction and lives in Rome, where a sinecure at the Vatican has been found for him. (Actually not that much of a sinecure: As archpriest of the Rome Basilica of St. Mary Major, he also sits on two boards supervising priestly discipline—yes!—and the appointment of diocesan bishops.) Even before this, he visited Rome on at least one occasion to discuss whether or not the church should obey American law. And it has been conclusively established that the Vatican itself—including his holiness—was a part of the coverup and obstruction of justice that allowed the child-rape scandal to continue for so long.

More here.

Reported in the Economist:

MOST people would not object to living a few years longer than normal, as long as it meant they could live those years in good health. Sadly, the only proven way to extend the lifespan of an animal in this way is to reduce its calorie intake. Studies going back to the 1930s have shown that a considerable reduction in consumption (about 50%) can extend the lifespan of everything from dogs to nematode worms by between 30% and 70%. Although humans are neither dogs nor worms, a few people are willing to give the calorie-restricted diet a try in the hope that it might work for them, too. But not many—as the old joke has it, give up the things you enjoy and you may not live longer, but it will sure seem as if you did.

Now, though, work done by Marc Hellerstein and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that it may be possible to have, as it were, your cake and eat it too. Or, at least, to eat 95% of it. Their study, to be published in the American Journal of Physiology—Endocrinology and Metabolism, suggests that significant gains in longevity might be made by a mere 5% reduction in calorie intake. The study was done on mice rather than people. But the ubiquity of previous calorie-restriction results suggests the same outcome might well occur in other species, possibly including humans. However, you would have to fast on alternate days.

Why caloric restriction extends the lifespan of any animal is unclear, but much of the smart money backs the idea that it slows down cell division by denying cells the resources they need to grow and proliferate. One consequence of that slow-down would be to stymie the development of cancerous tumours.

Read more here.

Deepa Kandaswamy / K. Deepa report in Ms. Magazine:

Tamil Nadu has always been progressive regarding women, electing the first female chief minister (a state chief minister holds the power of a U.S. state governor). It boasts the first women’s university, first women’s engineering college, first female-staffed police station, first all-female police commando company, and now the first women’s special-forces police battalion. This didn’t happen overnight. The idea began with All Women Police Stations (AWPS), a brainchild of India’s first elected female chief minister, J. Jayalalitha, who started the first AWPS in 1992. Today, there are 188 AWPS, one in each Tamil Nadu district, along with two toll-free help lines — Woman in Distress and Child in Distress — through which anonymous complaints are pursued at the same priority level as regular complaints. The result: a 23 percent increase in reporting of crimes against women and children — and a higher conviction rate. Several other states have started pilot AWPS.
Their academic training includes such topics as psychology, terrorism and guerrilla tactics; gender-sensitizing programs are emphasized, plus counseling and investigative techniques. The training concludes with a 440-mile, three-day footrace — and no sleep for 72 hours. While police commandos are similar to SWAT teams used in special operations, they can also be deployed swiftly as part of the reserve police force, along with defense forces, in counterterrorist operations.
Undoubtedly, it helps to have a woman at the political helm promoting female empowerment. Considering anxious security situations in other countries, with slightly more than half the world’s population being female, Tamil women believe women everywhere can learn to maintain security — and have a say in politics.

Read more here.

Celeste Biever in The New Scientist International:

The idea that specialisation leads to greater success was first used in the 18^th century to explain why some nations were wealthier than others. But this is the first time it has been applied to the Neanderthal extinction puzzle, says Jason Shogren, an economist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, US,.

He cites archaeological evidence that suggests that humans, who joined Neanderthals in Europe about 40,000 years ago, specialised and traded both within and between regions. The evidence includes complex living quarters with different sections partitioned for different functions. Neanderthals, in contrast, lived in “largely unorganised” living spaces.

There is also evidence that the early humans, mainly one population called the Gravettians, imported materials. Ivory, stones, fossils, seashells and crafted tools were found dispersed through many regions. This greater pool of resources led to increased innovation, says Shogren.

Simulated circumstances

Shogren tested his theory with simulations of population growth. He even gave the Neanderthals, who were larger than Homo sapiens, a head start by assuming they were better hunters and individually brought home more meat – which may or may be true.

But because humans were allowed to trade, in two of three similar simulations, they overcame this initial handicap and ousted the Neanderthals within 7000 years. In the third simulation, the two ended up co-existing.

Read more here.

From The Guardian: Cristina Odone analyses the conflicting forces behind John Paul’s papacy and compares his ability to shock with his power to inspire awe:

  The frail octogenarian, riddled with ailments – by the end, these included Parkinson’s, kidney failure, septic shock and heart failure – fought ferociously to lend moral dignity to his last moments. For the two months following his admission to hospital with a respiratory infection, John Paul II turned his suffering into an act of faith – and a humbling reminder to the rest of us of the invincibility of spiritual strength. The Vatican supported John Paul in his dying mission.

During his last hours, as millions around the world held spontaneous vigils, Vatican spokesmen issued regular bulletins about the 84-year-old pontiff’s condition. Gone were the secrecy and obfuscation long associated with the curia: here instead were detailed reports about tracheotomies, urinary tracts, septicaemia.

The effect was to ensure the world’s participation in this personal Calvary. From Goa to Guadeloupe, from Manila to Manchester, people – many of them non-Catholic – waited anxiously for the latest news from St Peter’s. News networks around the world turned their lenses on the Vatican apartments, and to the square where 70,000 well-wishers thronged. Continuous live coverage took over radio stations – leading one Five Live broadcaster to joke to me that he felt as if he were working on Vatican Radio.

The Pope had taught his followers that life – whether it be of the unborn, the infirm, the poor or the outcast – was always precious. Now, his own seemed the most precious of all.

Shock and awe: the hallmark doctrine of the war he so vehemently opposed perfectly described the emotions John Paul II generated during the 27 years of his papacy. To be a Catholic with Karol Wojtyla at the helm was to bounce from the shock of hearing the reiteration of some of the Church’s most anachronistic doctrines, to the awe of watching a frail octogenarian attack the world’s superpower for its human rights record.

Read more here.

Meera Syal writes in The London Times:

When I was a teenager, there was only one beauty publication available and affordable, and that was Jackie. Jackie, with its pull-out posters, romantic photo-love strips and Cathy and Claire problem page, where any dilemma could be answered by one of three generic responses: 1) “Remember, yellow highlighter on the browbone, green shadow on the socket”; 2) “Just be yourself. Remember, a winning smile wins the day”; and 3) “You should discuss this further with a trusted adult or a qualified nurse.” The prototype Jackie heroine was always a doe-eyed, slim beauty, almost invariably blonde. This was not good news for a plump 13-year-old Indian girl with fuzzy hair, one eyebrow and — the curse of every Indian woman — luxuriant facial hair. Girls who looked like me were not even cast as the ugly best friend. We were invisible. Trawling the counters at Boots confirmed this: eye shadows in “pearly hues” that looked like snot trails on dark skin; foundations that left not so much tide marks as tidal waves of pinky wash on my face; blusher that changed from fresh rose to lurid orange when applied; and as for anything in flesh tone, er, whose flesh? The only universal product that worked was Immac, and boy, I went through truckloads of that. If I can’t be blonde and fair-skinned, I reckoned, I can at least be beard-free.

But this was pre-Bobbi Brown, Ruby & Millie, and black and Asian models and role models, such as Iman. We Indian girls had our mothers and their home beauty remedies, a near culinary experience as they incorporated various foodstuffs from around the house. Logical, really, as for many women of my mother’s generation, beauty products were hard to get and expensive. So they made do with what they found in the larder.

Read more here.

Manohla Dargis in The New York Times:

Think of it as the intelligent woman’s guide to how not to have sex. You go on a blind date. The guy has a shaved head and beady eyes, and within seconds tells you that you are not as thin as he imagined. Most women – check that, most sensible, sane women – would tell baldy to take a very short hike off a very long pier. You know better. Even Bridget Jones, with her trembling jowls and insecurities, knows better and would cuddle up with a pound of toffee rather than subject herself to such outrage. The woman in the film “Primo Amore” is not made of such sternly self-reliant stuff.

Set in northern Italy and in the darkest recesses of a woman’s heart, “Primo Amore” is a horror movie about desire and the toxic pursuit of perfection. Sonia (Michela Cescon) hooks up with Vittorio (Vitaliano Trevisan) at a bus stop during an arranged meeting. At first she is overly eager, he is altogether aloof; given how Venusians and Martians usually align, that should mean they were made for each other. While stung by his comment – whippet-thin, her jowls don’t shake and her thighs don’t swish – she still goes out with him for a friendly drink. From her anxious gaze it seems clear she very much wants, even needs to forgive the man, either for her sake or his. Within a strangely short time the two are dating, house-hunting and living together, a postcard-perfect couple.

Sonia, as it turns out, is a woman who loves men too much and herself too little; Vittorio, in turn, is a man who would love Sonia more if there were much less of her to love. One day while out swimming with Vittorio, Sonia catches sight of a rangy blonde in a bikini. As the blonde settles next to the couple and stretches her long, model-thin limbs, Sonia shifts uncomfortably, her eyes nervously shuttling toward the other woman. The director, Matteo Garrone, captures the scene with cool detachment, letting us register Sonia’s discomfort from an easy distance. This not only keeps us outside Sonia’s head, for better and eventually for worse, but also lets us see that Vittorio appears oblivious to what is happening right next to him.

First comes love, then come the scales. Soon after the leggy blonde makes her unwelcome appearance, Sonia goes on a diet with Vittorio’s enthusiastic support. But what first seems like a foolish whim, a matter of vanity and the usual female neurosis, grows progressively perverse. As Sonia sheds weight, Vittorio starts to swell in size, not literally but in terms of power, taking increased control over her every bite and gesture. As in many domestic monster movies (“The Stepfather,” among others), the boogeyman appears to have crawled from beneath the bed and slipped under the covers.

Read more here.