https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFroMQlKiag

V S Naipaul in The New Yorker:

Nadira was living in Bahawalpur, in Pakistan. One day, she saw a cat on the window ledge of her room. It was looking into the room in a disquieting way, and she told the servant to get rid of the cat. He misunderstood and killed the poor creature. Not long after this, in a laundry basket near the window, Nadira found a tiny kitten who was so young that its eyes were still closed. She understood then that the poor creature that had been so casually killed was the mother of the little kitten, who was probably the last of the litter. She thought she should adopt him. The kitten slept in her bed, with Nadira and her two children. He received every attention that Nadira could think of. She knew very little about animals, and almost nothing about cats. She must have made mistakes, but the kitten, later the cat, repaid the devotion with extraordinary love. The cat appeared to know when Nadira was going to come back to the house. It just turned up, and it was an infallible sign that in a day or two Nadira herself would return. This happy relationship lasted for seven or eight years. Nadira decided then to leave the city and go and live in the desert. She took the cat with her, not knowing that a cat cannot easily change where it lives: all the extraordinary knowledge in its head, of friends and enemies and hiding places, built up over time, has to do with a particular place. A cat in a new setting is half helpless. So it turned out here.

She came back one day to her desert village and found the people agitated. They had a terrible story. A pack of wild desert dogs had dragged away the unfortunate cat into a cane field. Nadira looked, fruitlessly, and was almost glad that she couldn’t find her cat. It would have been an awful sight: the wild dogs of the desert would have torn the cat to pieces. The cat was big, but the desert dogs were bigger, and the cat would have had no chance against a ravening pack. If it had got to know the area better, the cat might have known how to hide and protect itself. The dogs were later shot dead, but that revenge couldn’t bring back the cat whom she had known as the tiniest kitten, motherless, in the laundry basket. Grief for that particular cat, whose ways she knew so well, almost like the ways of a person, never left her.

And it was only when she came to live with me in Wiltshire—a domesticated landscape, the downs seemingly swept every day: no desert here, no wild dogs—that she thought she could risk having another cat, to undo the sorrow connected with the last. She went to the Battersea rescue home. In one cage she saw a very small black-and-white kitten, of no great beauty. Its nose was bruised and it was crying. It was being bullied by the bigger cats in the cage. It was the runt of its litter and had been found in a rubbish bin, where it had been thrown away. Everything about this kitten appealed to Nadira. And this was the kitten that, after the Battersea formalities, two friends, Nancy Sladek and Farrukh Dhondy, brought to us.

More here. (Note: This is what good writing is all about. A sublime piece!)

Jeremy Bernstein in Inference:

MEITNER SPENT HER first Christmas in exile in Kungälv, a small town near Gothenburg. She was joined there by her nephew, Otto Frisch, a physicist who had taken refuge at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. In his biography, Frisch described their famous walk in the woods and their discussion about the nature of nuclear fission. Before recounting this conversation, a few background details may prove useful.

In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron. It was immediately clear that this new particle could penetrate and transform nuclei due to its electrical neutrality. Experimental studies were subsequently undertaken by Enrico Fermi and his group in Rome. They examined a number of elements before they turned their attention to uranium and began bombarding it with neutrons. But Fermi already knew what he was going to find before any experiments had taken place: neutron absorption would transform the uranium nuclei. As we now know, uranium becomes neptunium, which in turn becomes plutonium. Fermi was certain that his team had created these transuranic elements. Before she left Germany, Meitner, along with Hahn and a young collaborator named Fritz Strassmann, were engaged in repeating these experiments. After her departure, Hahn and Meitner had managed to maintain communication. It was Hahn and Strassmann’s latest experimental results that Meitner and Frisch were discussing when they took a walk in the woods.

More here.

Colin Marshall over at Open Culture:

Where did art begin? In a cave, most of us would say — especially those of us who’ve seen Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams — and specifically on the walls of caves, where early humans drew the first representations of landscapes, animals, and themselves. But when did art begin? The answer to that question has proven more subject to revision. The well-known paintings of the Lascaux cave complex in France go back 17,000 years, but the paintings of that same country’s Chauvet cave, the ones Herzog captured in 3D, go back 32,000 years. And just two years ago, Griffith University researchers discovered artwork on a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi that turns out to be about 44,000 years old.

Here on Open Culture we’ve featured the argument that ancient rock-wall art constitutes the earliest form of cinema, to the extent that its unknown painters sought to evoke movement. But cave paintings like the one in Sulawesi’s cave Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, which you can see in the video above, also shed light on the nature of the earliest known forms of storytelling.

More here.

Adam Shatz over at the NYRB:

When Driss Chraïbi’s The Simple Past (Le Passé simple) was published in 1954, it was as if an explosion had gone off in the small, old-fashioned mansion of North African literature. Everything that had been written about the Maghreb seemed to lie in ruins—not just exoticizing Western novels and travelers’ accounts, but also the few novels in French by North African writers. Even The Pillar of Salt (1953), Albert Memmi’s remarkable Bildungsroman about a Jewish boy growing up in Tunisia, looked quaint by comparison. Published two years before the end of France’s protectorate in Morocco, The Simple Past was a journey to the end of the colonial night, written with an intransigence and fury that Louis-Ferdinand Céline might have admired.

Chraïbi’s title was suggestive on several registers. The passé simple is a French verb tense used almost exclusively in formal writing, referring to actions that have been definitively completed, residing entirely in the past. In Chraïbi’s novel, the idea of a past entirely cut off from the present is held up to merciless critique. For Driss Ferdi, the young Moroccan who is the hero and narrator of the book, the past is an unbearable weight and an inescapable burden; it is a force of oppression and, sometimes, of evil.

More here.

Abby Aguirre in The Atlantic:

Charlize theron received the script for Bombshell, the new drama about the women who exposed sexual harassment at Fox News and brought down Roger Ailes, in the summer of 2017. Two months later, the first Harvey Weinstein story broke. In certain Hollywood circles, people had been aware that a Weinstein investigation might finally make it into print, but nobody could have foreseen the magnitude of the fallout or the movement it would ignite. “There was something in the air,” Theron recalled one morning in October, tucked into a corner table at a Hollywood restaurant. “I didn’t have an inkling of how big it was going to be or how long it was going to last.”

Among the things that ultimately drew Theron to the Ailes story—what led her to sign on to star and produce Bombshell—were the women at the center of it: the formidable blond protagonists of Fox News. There was Gretchen Carlson (played by Nicole Kidman), the former Miss America and longtime anchor who filed the initial lawsuit against Ailes, accusing the Fox News chairman of making sexual advances and then retaliating against her after she rebuffed them. There was Megyn Kelly (Theron), the network’s biggest star, who came forward with allegations against Ailes in the weeks that followed. And there was a young female producer (a composite character played by Margot Robbie) who seeks out Ailes in hopes of landing an on-air position, only to be cowed into showing him her underwear during a one-on-one meeting, among other indignities.

“Nothing is black-and-white in this,” Theron said of the film, which was directed by Jay Roach and written by Charles Randolph. She noted that Kelly had moved past her uncomfortable encounters with Ailes and managed to have a professional relationship with him for a decade. What’s more, Theron pointed out, Kelly knew Carlson’s allegations were likely true, because Ailes had harassed her, too. The gray area includes Ailes’s secretary, played by Holland Taylor, who ferries young women in and out of Ailes’s office and presumably notices his habit of locking the door behind him.

More here.

Daniel Kahneman et al in Harvard Business Review (2016):

At a global financial services firm we worked with, a longtime customer accidentally submitted the same application file to two offices. Though the employees who reviewed the file were supposed to follow the same guidelines—and thus arrive at similar outcomes—the separate offices returned very different quotes. Taken aback, the customer gave the business to a competitor. From the point of view of the firm, employees in the same role should have been interchangeable, but in this case they were not. Unfortunately, this is a common problem.

Professionals in many organizations are assigned arbitrarily to cases: appraisers in credit-rating agencies, physicians in emergency rooms, underwriters of loans and insurance, and others. Organizations expect consistency from these professionals: Identical cases should be treated similarly, if not identically. The problem is that humans are unreliable decision makers; their judgments are strongly influenced by irrelevant factors, such as their current mood, the time since their last meal, and the weather. We call the chance variability of judgments noise. It is an invisible tax on the bottom line of many companies.

Some jobs are noise-free. Clerks at a bank or a post office perform complex tasks, but they must follow strict rules that limit subjective judgment and guarantee, by design, that identical cases will be treated identically. In contrast, medical professionals, loan officers, project managers, judges, and executives all make judgment calls, which are guided by informal experience and general principles rather than by rigid rules. And if they don’t reach precisely the same answer that every other person in their role would, that’s acceptable; this is what we mean when we say that a decision is “a matter of judgment.” A firm whose employees exercise judgment does not expect decisions to be entirely free of noise. But often noise is far above the level that executives would consider tolerable—and they are completely unaware of it.

More here.

Antonia Malchik in Aeon:

One evening in 1992, my parents, younger sister and I sat on the fold-out futon on the living room floor, petting our cats and watching fires consume buildings in Los Angeles. The images that spilled from the screen are only vague memories now: a dark night, broken windows, police sirens echoing, people rampaging across the city and leaving destruction in their wake. I was 16 years old. Having mostly grown up in small-town Montana without access to cable television, this was one of my first experiences watching a national news story on live TV.

The event we were watching, often called the LA riots, was triggered by the acquittal of police officers who had been filmed beating a construction worker named Rodney King. The eruption took its place in a long line of other violent uprisings against racial and gender injustice – the Watts riots, the Stonewall riots, and the 12th Street riot in Detroit. In my little hometown, TV viewers were prompted to view such riots through the lens of irrational ‘crowd contagion’ – a long-debunked perspective that nonetheless pervaded the media coverage in the first days of the LA event, until deeper analysis reflected on the searing racial tensions, inequality and poverty that triggered the uprising.

More here.

Chloe Wyma at Bookforum:

A “VISIONARY,” A “PROPHET,” A “MODERN-DAY LEONARDO”: Writers often resort to panegyrics when confronted with the eccentric, daunting intellect of Agnes Denes. Given the ambition of the octogenarian artist’s career, which spans fifty years and emerges from deep research into philosophy, mathematics, symbolic logic, and environmental science, it’s hard to fault them.

And yet, as important as she has been to Conceptual and Land art, Denes, by her own reckoning, has been “marginalized” within these movements. That’s finally beginning to change, with a major retrospective this fall at The Shed in New York. As curator Emma Enderby notes in the exhibition’s catalogue, Denes’s neglect was due, in no small part, to gender bias at a time when “working with land, with science, [and] with technology was perceived as quintessentially male.”

more here.

Owen Hatherley at The Guardian:

If you rummage through boxes of postcards in Polish secondhand shops, they reveal an unexpected geography – places few Poles would now go. They’re not just from Soviet cities such as Tashkent or Novosibirsk, but Baghdad, Havana, Tripoli. The UK-based Polish architectural historian Łukasz Stanek’s book explains why this is so. A generation of eastern Europeans travelled across the “non-aligned” countries between the 1950s and the 80s – and they were there to build. In the process, the urbanisation of what was then called the “third world” was carried out by architects, planners, engineers and workers from the “second world” of eastern Europe. While they were there, they promised to do things differently. “I remember well these eastern European architects,” recalls a Ghanaian at the start of this book, “because it was the first and the last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana.”

This is one of those books that turns a discipline upside down – the cold war, state socialism, eastern Europe and 20th-century architecture all look different in the light of its findings.

more here.

“Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere…”
…………………………—Bob Dylan, Mississippi

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body has been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

by Mark Strand
from The Norton Anthology, 2003

Steven Knepper in Commonweal:

Gordon Marino teaches philosophy at St. Olaf College and curates the Hong Kierkegaard Library. He has spent decades writing about the existentialists. His passion for them did not begin in the classroom, though. After a failed relationship, with derailed careers in both boxing and academic philosophy, a young Marino strugged with suicidal thoughts. While waiting for a counseling session, he spotted a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love on a coffee-shop bookshelf. He opened it to a passage in which Kierkegaard criticizes a “conceited sagacity” that refuses to believe in love. Intrigued, Marino hid Works of Love under his coat on the way out the door. He credits the book with saving his life. “At the risk of seeming histrionic,” Marino writes, “there was a time when Kierkegaard grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back from the crossbeam and the rope.” In Kierkegaard and other existentialists, Marino found philosophers who wrote in the first person, took moods and emotions seriously, and kept up a staring contest with despair. While these eclectic thinkers often had qualms about the professoriate, they led Marino back to academic philosophy. He returned with an older conception of philosophy as a way of life and a pursuit of wisdom, a conception the existentialists helped renew and one that animates this compelling study of them.

More here.

Hannah B. Higgins in The MIT Press Reader:

Called shikaakwa by the Miami-Illinois tribe for the skunky smell of the wild-onion that grew on the banks of Lake Michigan, “Chicago” is a French transcription of the earlier name for the area. Founded in 1833, with an initial population of 350, before the fire, it is said, Chicago’s streets curved around the Lake Michigan waterfront and followed the course of the Chicago River and a network of cattle paths lain over Native American migration routes. In contrast to the organic form of the city associated with the early settlers, modern Chicago would be organized as a grid, with address numbers (beginning in 1909) that could tell any pedestrian where they were in relationship to the central point (0,0) of State and Madison streets. According to plan, the modules of this new grid, great skyscrapers, grew up from the rubble like gigantic, up-stretched skeletons of cast iron and, later, steel. The grid, “a framework of spaced parallel bars” according to the Oxford American Dictionary, appears here as the image of an emerging modernity.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in The Fulcrum:

Democracy is hard work. If it is to function well, citizens must do a lot of thinking and talking about politics. But democracy is demanding in another way as well. It requires us to maintain a peculiar moral posture toward our fellow citizens. We must acknowledge that they’re our equals and thus entitled to an equal say, even when their views are severely misguided. It seems a lot to ask.

To appreciate the demand’s weight, consider that a citizen’s duty is to promote justice. Accordingly, we tend to regard our political opposition as being not merely on the wrong side of the issues, but on an unjust side. Citizens of a democracy must pursue justice while also affirming that their fellow citizens are entitled to equal power even when they favor injustice. What’s more, citizens are obligated to acknowledge that, under certain conditions, it is right for government to enact their opposition’s will. This looks like a requirement to be complicit with injustice. That’s quite a burden.

To be sure, the demand is not altogether unconstrained. For one thing, citizens need not respect every kind of political opponent. Although the boundaries are contested, there are limits to what counts as a valid political opinion. For example, citizens aren’t required to respect those who call for the absolute subordination of one portion of the citizenry to another. Furthermore, no citizen is ever required simply to submit to the popular will. In the wake of electoral defeat, we need not quietly resign; we are constitutionally entitled to criticize and protest the outcome.

Although these consolations may make the moral demand of citizenship more bearable, it remains onerous.

More here.

Nikil Saval at The Nation:

To search for Polanyi’s intellectual and political roots means coming into contact with a bewilderingly febrile left-wing intellectual milieu that appears to have little bearing on our present. However promising the current moment may seem with a self-described “democratic socialist” coming tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Gareth Dale’s new biography offers us a bracing reminder of a far richer world of socialist activity that once existed in much of the West. Debates over early-20th-century Hungarian socialism; the strategic plans of “Red Vienna”; the reformist 1961 platform of the Soviet Communist Party: These questions obsessed Polanyi and his contemporaries to a degree that seems almost inconceivable now and certainly residing in a sobering distance to our own immediate lives. Polanyi’s political activism and intellectual work were implicated in the widest questions debated on the left. The son of wealthy Hungarian Jews, he emerged as part of the “Great Generation” of Hungarian artists and intellectuals in Budapest at around the turn of the 20th century. John von Neumann, the mathematician, and Béla Bartók, the composer, were his contemporaries; so were the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the Marxist theoretician and literary critic György Lukács. Polanyi’s brother, Michael, became a philosopher of science, who for many years was better known than Karl.

more here.

Samuel Graydon at the TLS:

Enter Lee Smolin, a significant theoretical physicist who has made important contributions to the search for quantum gravity. He has bravely attempted to supply such a theory in his new book Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. His argument is framed in terms of the divide between “realist” and “anti-realist” interpretations of nature. Realists argue that “matter [has] a stable set of properties in and of itself, without regard to our perceptions and knowledge”, and that “those properties can be comprehended and described by us”. Anti-realists, like the Copenhagenists, do not believe this, as quantum mechanics has features that “preclude realism” (such as the measurement problem). “Einstein was a realist. I am also a realist”, says Smolin, and this, he admits, rather backs him into a corner. If you are to go about asserting such madness as “there is a real world and we can understand it”, then you are forced to believe that quantum mechanics as it stands is false. “It may be temporarily successful, but it cannot be the fully correct description of nature at an atomic scale.”

more here.

Lina Mounzer at The Paris Review:

These texts are frustrating to be sure, but they are more or less straightforward. See, every translator of garbage ends up with their particular niche, and mine is the art text. Literature-adjacent, one might say, but only in the sense that the majority of such texts ooze with the self-satisfaction of the worst literature. They put on airs, use words they don’t seem to fully understand, name-drop incessantly, and try to gaslight you at every turn of phrase into thinking that your inability to grasp their point is due to some lack on your part instead of theirs.

Nothing drives home the vacuousness of an art text like having to dissect its every hollow carapace of a sentence. I once translated nearly thirty pages of an artist’s manifesto and still for the life of me was unable to picture not only what his work looked like but of what it consisted. Was it a video? An installation? Fluxus performance? (It ended up being found-object sculpture.) The text was so far up its own abstract ass it had entirely lost sight of the actual work (which I have come to understand is the entire point of an art text).

more here.