Martin Bell at Literary Review:

Hiroshima ran to 31,000 words. The original article filled the entire edition of the New Yorker on 31 August 1946, the first time in the magazine’s history that this had ever happened. It was serialised in full in eighty other publications around the world and eventually even in Japan. Subsequently republished in book form, it has been in print ever since and has sold more than three million copies. And yet, unusually for a work of journalism, it appeared more than a year after the events it described. There were reasons for the delay. One was the difficulty of accessing Hiroshima and the severity of postwar censorship. Another was the effect of the demonisation of the Japanese people in the American media after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It took an original mind and an eloquent pen to portray them as victims as well as aggressors. Hersey possessed both. Among his peers, in my view, he was rivalled only by the late and great James Cameron of the equally late and great News Chronicle.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

Few composers—in his time and in the centuries since—have been as deft as Purcell at marrying text and sound. His opera Dido and Aeneas is a seminal work, the most important of his compositions for the stage, and his songs, of which he wrote more than 100, are exemplary (such 20th-century English composers as Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett would pay brilliant homage to them in their own ways). Between 1692 and 1695, Purcell composed three settings of Colonel Heveningham’s poem, all of them beautiful. The first two are more or less similar, but the third is a different work altogether, more florid, more darkly evocative.

It opens with a brief, enigmatic figure in the bass line, after which the soloist sings in the style of a recitative. As if to highlight the departure from Shakespeare (the exhortation in the text here is to Sing on, not play on), Purcell repeats that particular phrase, Sing on, each repetition becoming more and more embellished. The entire song is characterized by its melismatic style—that is, its use of melisma: the assigning of many notes, often in the form of an ornate run, to the singing of a single syllable.

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Erica Wagner at The New Statesman:

Revising One Sentence” is the title of one of the essays in Lydia Davis’s masterful, lucid collection. No single piece could capture the essence of this extraordinary writer, but a new reader might wish to start here. This is the sentence in question, in its final version: “She walks around the house balancing on the balls of her feet, sometimes whistling and singing, sometimes talking to herself, sometimes stopping dead in a fencing position.” Nothing to see here, you might think. But think again.

The essay, a compact eight pages, distils Davis’s practice as she considers the choices she makes. We learn of the notebook she keeps beside her “official” work, a place for her thoughts about herself and the world to be set down freely. Everything she writes begins in this notebook, a habit that makes her “not afraid”, because there is no pressure, at the outset, to turn her work into a story. (How honest is that “not afraid”! So much truer than “bold” or “brave”.)

more here.

In Vienna [August 24]

If you have cigarettes prepare
to smoke them now
in the sunlight of this café in Vienna
where the woman at the table across from me
lets an ankle slip out of her glossy black pumps
and amid the general gasp I get a glimpse
of her pepper-and-salt pants and plain tan blouse
the liquefaction of her clothes
the distribution of her flesh
she knows I notice and she likes it
though no pass will be made it’s like being
a couple of extras in The Third Man
and the smile in her eyes when she pays
and leaves, looking back

David Lehman
from Plume Poetry

John Sutherland in Delanceyplace:

In 1940, Ernest Hemingway wrote of the Spanish Civil War and the Guadarrama Mountains of Spain: “The Guadarrama Mountains of Spain run from northeast to southwest across the central plains of Castille. They are ancient mountains, formed of pale granite and gneiss, their slopes densely wooded with pines of several species: black pines, maritime pines, sentry pines, Scots pines. To visit them is to be able to recall the scents of those days and nights, even years on: ‘the piney smell of … crushed needles’, as Ernest Hemingway puts it in for Whom the Bell Tolls, ‘and the sharper odour of … resinous sap’.

“Hemingway’s novel is set in the Guadarrama during the last May of the Spanish Civil War. Its hero is Robert Jordan, a young American fighting for the International Brigade. Jordan, an explosives expert with a profound dis­interest in his own fate, is tasked by his Soviet commander with destroying a bridge in the Fascist-held mountains. He joins forces with Republican par­tisans who have gone guerrilla. Their base for the operation is a cave in the ‘rim-rock’ at the ‘cup-shaped upper end’ of a ‘little valley’.

“In the book’s second paragraph, Jordan unfolds a photostatted map on the ‘pine-needle floor’ of the forest. That contrast between military percep­tion and natural presence preoccupies Hemingway throughout the novel. The landscapes of the Guadarrama are interpreted chiefly in terms of tactics: open ground is read for its lines of fire, ‘timber’ for its cover. Those with close knowledge of the range — like Jordan’s trusted guide Anselmo — are valuable because they can move discreetly through this hostile territory. Yet these tough men remain alert to the beauty of the mountains. When a two-day blizzard blows in, Jordan relishes its wildness, though he knows it will betray their position. Pilar, a fellow partisan, agrees: ‘What rotten stuff is the snow and how beautiful it looks.’ The hurry-up-and-wait aspects of war mean there is time to appreciate the ‘afternoon clouds … moving slowly in the high Spanish sky’. Maria, Jordan’s lover, speaks of her passion for the pine forest: ‘the feel of the needles under foot … the wind in the high trees and the creaking they make against each other: Even their target is assessed both aesthetically and militarily — it is a ‘steel bridge of a single span’, possessing a ‘solid-flung metal grace’,’ standing ‘dark against the steep emptiness of the gorge’.

More here.

Damian Garde in STAT Newss:

Scientists have come up with a drug, injected once a day, that appears to make children’s bones grow. To many, it’s a wondrous invention that could improve the lives of thousands of people with dwarfism. To others, it’s a profit-driven solution in search of a problem, one that could unravel decades of hard-won respect for an entire community. In the middle are families, doctors, and a pharmaceutical company, all dealing with a philosophically fraught question: Is it ethical to make a little person taller? The most common cause of dwarfism is known as achondroplasia. People with the condition, caused by a rare genetic mutation, have shorter limbs and shorter stature than those without it, and they deal with a lifetime of skeletal issues that often require a battery of corrective surgeries.

For years a U.S. company called BioMarin Pharmaceutical (BMRN) has been developing a drug that targets the genetic roots of achondroplasia, a mutation that stops cartilage from turning into bone. The goal, according to the company, is to prevent the medical complications associated with achondroplasia, which include sleep apnea, hearing loss, and spinal problems. But proving the drug’s long-term skeletal benefits would require a decades-long study, which is an expensive and, to BioMarin, impractical proposition. Instead, the company is measuring the the most immediate byproduct of bone growth: height. And that’s where the philosophical schism begins. For thousands of little people, the short stature that comes with achondroplasia is not a disability in need of treatment but a difference to be celebrated. Organizations like Little People of America have spent years dispelling stereotypes, advocating for fairness, and pointing out that having achondroplasia doesn’t preclude anyone from a fulfilling life. Dwarf pride means flourishing because of one’s body, not in spite of it.

Through that lens, the drug looks to some like a threat of erasure, a so-called cure for people who are not sick. Furthermore, about 80% of babies with achondroplasia are born to parents of average height. That means, if the drug goes on to win Food and Drug Administration approval, the decision of whether to give it to a child would often be made by people with no exposure to little people culture, who know nothing of dwarf pride. “People feel like this is an effort to eliminate the dwarfism community,” said Becky Curran Kekula, a disability advocate and motivational speaker who was born with achondroplasia.

More here.

Eric Schwitzgebel in Literary Hub:

The opposite of the jerk is the sweetheart. The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals, are worthy of attention and respect. The sweetheart yields his place in line to the hurried shopper, stops to help the person who has dropped her papers, calls an acquaintance with an embarrassed apology after having been unintentionally rude. In a debate, the sweetheart sees how he might be wrong and the other person right. 

The jerk’s moral and emotional failure is obvious. The intellectual failure is obvious, too: No one is as right about everything as the jerk thinks he is. He would learn by listening. And one of the things he might learn is the true scope of his jerkitude—a fact about which, as I will explain shortly, the all-out jerk is inevitably ignorant. This brings me to the other great benefit of a theory of jerks: It might help you figure out if you yourself are one.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Like cosmic hard drives, black holes pack troves of data into compact spaces. But ever since Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974 that these dense spheres of extreme gravity give off heat and fade away, the fate of their stored information has haunted physicists.

The problem is this: The laws of quantum mechanics insist that information about the past is never lost, including the record of whatever fell into a black hole. But Hawking’s calculation contradicted this. He applied both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to the space around a black hole and found that quantum jitters cause the black hole to emit radiation that’s perfectly random, carrying no information. As this happens the black hole shrinks and eventually disappears.

But does its information disappear with it, meaning quantum mechanics is wrong? Or does the problem lie with Einstein’s theory?

More here.

Nicole Hemmer in the Boston Review:

At his first official press conference in 2017, Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a telling choice. After giving the first question to the New York Post, he then called on Jennifer Wishon, who was sitting at the back, in the seventh row. He didn’t mention the news organization she represented, but it was no secret: since 2011 she had served as the White House correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network.

That President Trump’s press secretary chose to highlight CBN, the evangelical network started by Pat Robertson in 1960, may come as a surprise. After all, even the network’s top official, Gordon Robertson, laughs at the notion that Donald Trump is a devout Christian. But the Trump-CBN partnership dates to well before Spicer took the podium, back to 2011 when Trump was weighing a presidential bid. In the intervening years he has been interviewed on the network about twenty times, including several times as president.

Yet that relationship has received relatively little attention in the press, save a handful of articles a few years ago. While journalists have zeroed in on Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting and even the upstart network One America News, they have largely ignored CBN and the network of conservative evangelical radio and television stations that crisscross the nation.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

Vladimir Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence each wrote a major novel (“Lolita,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”) that was banned and unbanned and banned again before being cut free.

There are other similarities. Each was a great traveler, as if in perpetual self-exile, and drawn to America. Each disliked heavy, didactic fiction. Each was a sensualist on the page, his rods and cones consistently assaulted by the world’s beauty. Each recoiled from Freud. Each had a well-tended ego.

Each has stern and persuasive feminist critics. In Jeanette Winterson’s memoir “Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?” (2012) she traced her nascent political awakening to reading Nabokov when young and thinking, “He hates women.” Kate Millet, in “Sexual Politics” (1970), lowered the boom on the “liturgical pomp” of Lawrence’s sex writing. His reputation was punctured and will never fully reinflate.

The similarities stop there. Read side by side, they seem to conduct a mutual criticism.

More here.

The Problem With Describing Trees

The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.

by Robert Hass
from Ecco, 2007

Hephzibah Anderson in Prospect Magazine:

As a story-loving child more likely to be found playing detectives than the now-suspect doctors and nurses, I yearned for a family secret. My parents had both been raised with them: in my mother’s case, her dad’s Jewishness was kept hidden from her; in my father’s, paternity remained an unsolved mystery (Pétainist French Catholic priest or local milkman?).

But I wanted my own, preferably one that, hewing to the family theme, permitted a new and improved pa to step into the frame. Nowadays, I’d have done what every teenage sleuth is presumably doing and ordered a DNA testing kit online. Instead, I fired hopeful questions at my mum as I grew older: had there really been no passionate affair at the time of my conception? Even a tepid indiscretion would have sufficed—my parents met in a commune, after all.

Secrets are as synonymous with families as happiness, the murky flipside of everything that’s supposed to keep us close. Often, they fester in the deep disjuncture between the reality of family life and idealised visions of the same. They can arise from fear, shame, or tragedy, from the desire to protect another or to protect oneself. They can even be born of avoidance, as when the silence that is a family’s way of coping with conflicting values thickens over the years to become unbreachable, the topic unbroachable. When they eventually come to light, as most secrets have a way of doing, they can result in ruptured relationships and radically reconfigured family trees.

More here.

Tom McLeish in Aeon:

To riff on the opening lines of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution (1996), there is no such thing as a science-religion conflict, and this is an essay about it. It is not, however, another rebuttal of the ‘conflict narrative’ – there is already an abundance of good, recent writing in that vein from historians, sociologists and philosophers as well as scientists themselves. Readers still under the misapprehension that the history of science can be accurately characterised by a continuous struggle to escape from the shackles of religious oppression into a sunny secular upland of free thought (loudly expressed by a few scientists but no historians) can consult Peter Harrison’s masterly book The Territories of Science and Religion (2015), or dip into Ronald Numbers’s delightful edited volume Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009).

Likewise, assumptions that theological and scientific methodologies and truth-claims are necessarily in philosophical or rational conflict might be challenged by Alister McGrath’s book The Territories of Human Reason (2019) or Andrew Torrance and Thomas McCall’s edited Knowing Creation (2018). The late-Victorian origin of the ‘alternative history’ of unavoidable conflict is fascinating in its own right, but also damaging in that it has multiplied through so much public and educational discourse in the 20th century in both secular and religious communities. That is the topic of a new and fascinating study by the historian James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition (2019). Finally, the concomitant assumption that scientists must, by logical force, adopt non-theistic worldviews is roundly rebutted by recent and global social science, such as Elaine Eklund’s major survey, also published in a new book, Secularity and Science (2019).

All well and good – so the history, philosophy and sociology of science and religion are richer and more interesting than the media-tales and high-school stories of opposition we were all brought up on. It seems a good time to ask the ‘so what?’ questions, however, especially since there has been less work in that direction. If Islamic, Jewish and Christian theologies were demonstrably central in the construction of our current scientific methodologies, for example, then what might such a reassessment imply for fruitful development of the role that science plays in our modern world? In what ways might religious communities support science especially under the shadow of a ‘post-truth’ political order? What implications and resources might a rethink of science and religion offer for the anguished science-educational discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and for the emerging international discussions on ‘science-literacy’?

More here.

Christine Ro in JSTOR Daily:

Urban Dictionary, as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make fun of the comparatively staid Dictionary.com. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month.

Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends (uh, penis McFlurry?). This isn’t just a matter of trifling but ultimately harmless terms. Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. It’s clear from a quick browse through the trending terms that the users are particularly titillated by (or nervous about) women’s bodies (e.g., twatopotamus) and sex between men (e.g., vaginal intolerant).

With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries.

More here.

Christine Dell’Amore in National Geographic:

The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.

“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.

Moving in a straight line is crucial to dung beetles, which live in a rough-and-tumble world where competition for excrement is fierce.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated, but created a barrier to its creation. Nowadays computers are helping to reverse that trend, allowing casual users to create slick songs of their own. Not everyone is equally good at it, however; Grimes (who currently goes by c, the symbol for the speed of light) is a wildly successful electronic artist who writes, produces, performs, and sings her own songs. We dig into how music is made in the modern world, but also go well beyond that, into artificial intelligence and the nature of digital/virtual/online personae. We talk about the birth of a new digital avatar — who might be called “War Nymph”? — and how to navigate the boundaries of art, technology, fashion, and culture. Her new album Miss Anthropocene will be released in February 2020.

More here.

Cody Kommers in Quillette:

Republicans are traditionally hostile to what they call government “hand-outs.” This is not because they believe people shouldn’t get what they need. Rather, conservatives believe that people should get what they need in the most efficient way possible. Which, to the Republican mind, is almost certainly never going to be a program run by the federal government.

The basis for this argument is that big government has two major problems. The first is a knowledge problem. It doesn’t know exactly what is going on out there in the wider world, nor what the best solutions might be. The second is an execution problem. Whatever the government does set as a goal, it’s rarely in a position to enact this plan efficiently. The solution to the knowledge problem is decentralization: give more decision-making power to those closer to the ground where a policy is going to be implemented. The solution to the execution problem is the free market. Let businesses figure out what the best course of action is, because they’re actually incentivized to do so. This is, at least, the basic idea.

More here.

Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

Lawrence was a mystic, consumed with a vision of each person’s soul as utterly foreign to all others, and yet capable of finding a form of human connection that is so vast that it can contain, as he writes in The Rainbow, “bonds and constraints and labours” and still be “complete liberty.” There is no writer more keenly interested in how men and women relate to one another, or in relatedness as such: the tension between the self—inviolate, contained, individual, isolate—and the couple. He imagined the task of art is the same as the task of life—to be in true relationship to one’s surroundings, in a dynamic flow. He believed the novel was a worthwhile form because in it every part is related to every other. He was a mystic seeking absolute truth, which now seems passé, and precious. His voice is as heady and vague as it is pure and urgent, and even his “worst pages,” as his contemporary Catherine Carswell wrote, “dance with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s.”

more here.