Sam Jordison in The Guardian:

Philip Roth once called Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce – usually published as one volume – “one of the century’s truly necessary books”. If you’ve read Levi, the only quibble you could make with Roth is that he’s too restrictive in only referring to the 20th century. It’s impossible to imagine a time when the two won’t be essential, both because of what they describe and the clarity and moral force of Levi’s writing. Reading him is not a passive process. It isn’t just that he makes us see and understand the terrible crimes that he himself saw in Monowitz-Buna. It’s that in doing so, he also makes us witnesses, passing us knowledge that gives us a moral and practical responsibility. We too must remember. We too must tell others. I write this article now in the hope that I can encourage more people to read Levi and understand his importance. If you’re hesitating now – and if I can possibly induce you – go read this book.

If I can’t persuade you, let me turn to Roth again, who described Levi’s achievement thus:

With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a 20th-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and the most contemptible.

The testimonies that commenters have shared in this month’s reading group have also been moving and impressive. BengalEuropean, for instance, recalled reading Levi’s 1982 novel If Not Now, When?: “I read it at one of those turning or decision points in life, and it helped me to find the courage to decide to do something that dramatically changed my future. Apart from his Holocaust memoir – which is every bit as profound and important as posters here are saying – he’ll always occupy a special place in my mind as a writer able to frame the right questions and to suggest ways to think and behave as a human.”

More here.

Lauren Gravitz in Nature:

Memories make us who we are. They shape our understanding of the world and help us to predict what’s coming. For more than a century, researchers have been working to understand how memories are formed and then fixed for recall in the days, weeks or even years that follow. But those scientists might have been looking at only half the picture. To understand how we remember, we must also understand how, and why, we forget.

Until about ten years ago, most researchers thought that forgetting was a passive process in which memories, unused, decay over time like a photograph left in the sunlight. But then a handful of researchers who were investigating memory began to bump up against findings that seemed to contradict that decades-old assumption. They began to put forward the radical idea that the brain is built to forget. A growing body of work, cultivated in the past decade, suggests that the loss of memories is not a passive process. Rather, forgetting seems to be an active mechanism that is constantly at work in the brain. In some — perhaps even all — animals, the brain’s standard state is not to remember, but to forget. And a better understanding of that state could lead to breakthroughs in treatments for conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and even Alzheimer’s disease.

“What is memory without forgetting?” asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “It’s impossible,” he says. “To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”

More here.

Sean Sheehan at the Dublin Review of Books:

Ruskin was twenty-six when, in 1845, on his third trip to Venice but seeing the paintings of Tintoretto there for the first time, he wrote excitedly to his father and urged him to put the artist he called Tintoret “at the top, top, top of everything”. On first walking into La Scuola Grande Di San Rocco, today’s visitor is still likely to feel some of the astonishment that gripped Ruskin. Tintoretto spent more than twenty years decorating the Sala Superiore (“Upper Hall”) and he was given free rein by his patrons. He could express himself freely and was less bound by the need to compete with his rival Veronese. Beginning with magnificent ceiling paintings and aware of the prestige he could achieve, Tintoretto offered to paint the sala’s walls for a modest annuity. The result, an astonishing torrent of exuberant inventiveness and extravagant theatricality, was a revelation for Ruskin and caused him to completely rethink the completion of his Modern Painters work: “I have been quite upset in all my calculations by that rascal Tintoret – he has shown me some totally new fields of art and altered my feelings in many respects.” His focus on landscape painting now shifted to the religious painters of the Old Masters and Emma Sdengo, in Looking at Tintoretto with John Ruskin, sees Turner – who had studied Tintoretto – as priming Ruskin’s discovery of “that rascal Tintoret”.

more here.

Max Nelson at the NYRB:

Cynthia Gleason, a weaver at a Rhode Island textile mill, went into her first trance in the fall of 1836. According to her mesmerist, a French sugar planter and amateur “animal magnetist” named Charles Poyen, she had been suffering for years from a mysterious illness; he called it “a very serious and troublesome complaint of the stomach” in one account and “a complicated nervous and functional disease” in another. For months Poyen had been giving lectures insisting that mesmerists like himself had mastered a technique for putting people in somnambulistic trances, curing their diseases, and managing their minds. When Gleason’s physician called him in to make magnetic “passes” over her body with his hands, Poyen wrote in his dubiously self-serving memoirs, she said she’d “defy anyone to put her to sleep in this manner.” But after twenty-five minutes, “her eyes grew dim and her lids fell heavily down.

more here.

Parul Sehgal in the New York Times:

At the 1994 reception for the prestigious Kyoto Prize, awarded for achievements that contribute to humanity, the French mathematician André Weil turned to his fellow honoree, the film director Akira Kurosawa, and said: “I have a great advantage over you. I can love and admire your work, but you cannot love and admire my work.”

This was a lament, not a boast. How austere advanced mathematics can seem to the layperson — a confluence of the intimidating and the irrelevant. It’s easy to forget that math has been vaunted as a source of pleasure, even consolation. In the Symposium, it is described as a source of the most sublime eros, second only to the Platonic ideal of beauty. Late in life, Thomas Jefferson reported that its contemplation was a balm against the despair of aging.

Karen Olsson’s beguiling new book, “The Weil Conjectures,” arrives as a corrective, describing mathematics — its focus, abstraction, odd hunches, blazing epiphanies — as a powerful intoxicant, a door to euphoria.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of trying to create living cells, or something approximating them, starting from entirely non-living ingredients. Impressive progress has already been made. Designing cells from scratch will have obvious uses is biology and medicine, but also allow us to build biological robots and computers, as well as helping us understand how life could have arisen in the first place, and what it might look like on other planets.

More here.

Naomi Klein in The Nation:

In August 1976, The Nation published an essay that rocked the US political establishment, both for what it said and for who was saying it. “The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic ‘Freedom’s’ Awful Toll” was written by Orlando Letelier, the former right-hand man of Chilean President Salvador Allende. Earlier in the decade, Allende had appointed Letelier to a series of top-level positions in his democratically elected socialist government: ambassador to the United States (where he negotiated the terms of nationalization for several US-owned firms operating in Chile), minister of foreign affairs, and, finally, minister of defense.

Then, on September 11, 1973, Chile’s government was overthrown in a bloody, CIA-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. This shattering event left Allende dead in the smoldering presidential palace and Letelier and other “VIP prisoners” banished to a remote labor camp in the Strait of Magellan.

After a powerful international campaign lobbied for Letelier’s release, the junta finally allowed him to go into exile. The 44-year-old former ambassador moved to Washington, DC; in 1976, when his Nation essay appeared, he was working at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-wing think tank.

More here.

Damian Flanagan at the TLS:

Star, the short novella Mishima published in November 1960, is little known in Japan, buried as it is under the weight of the grander achievements in the forty-two volumes of his Complete Works. But it is now open to rediscovery thanks to an adroit, colloquial translation into American English by Sam Bett. It offers us a snapshot of a twenty-three-year-old, up-and-coming movie star, Rikio “Richie” Mizuno. Paraded in a string of formulaic films, swooned over by his many female fans, Rikio and the studio who manage him carefully groom his image. When a fan intrudes on the set and disrupts a take to throw herself at “Richie”, the director is at first furious, then ponders whether her intervention couldn’t be built into the script. But she can’t act, so she is quickly cut again and promptly attempts suicide, before the studio spin the story as “Richie” intervening to save her life.

Rikio’s own attention is more caught up with hiding from the studio his affair with his silver-teethed, ugly personal assistant, or indulging his narcissistic longing for death, or observing how his star quality opens up a new field of morality. Watching an ordinary person being arrested for shoplifting in a fancy Ginza store, he reflects that if he was to steal something in a shop, it would be simply laughed off as a joke.

more here.

Benjamin Voigt at Poetry Magazine:

Now regarded as a towering figure of modern verse, Wallace Stevens was probably better known as an insurance man for much of his adult life. But during a long and comfortable career at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he also wrote poems that cut to the very heart of existence. Like his near contemporary (and sometimes rival) Robert Frost, in his poems, Stevens sought out “what will suffice” in a turbulent era of war and social upheaval. Combining absurd humor and philosophical heft, the ideas of the Romanticsand the French symbolists, he synthesized his own world of thought, a “planet on the table.” That world can sometimes feel esoteric, even obscure. As Stevens writes, “the poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” But this difficulty is inseparable from his myriad delights and innovations. “Stevens’s greatest originality,” critic Helen Vendler writes, “lay in his more hidden forms of utterance,” in his “strategies of concealment.” Despite these “secrecies,” his work has left a mark that’s lasted generations, influencing poets ranging from John Ashbery to Terrance Hayes. This brief selection from across his career introduces readers to his abiding concerns, to his forms of “originality” and “concealment.”

more here.

Jenny Price at The Believer:

More urgently, L.A. is the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature. In the past twenty-five years, the venerable American literature of nature writing has become distressingly marginal. Even my nature-loving and environmentalist friends tell me they never read it. Earnest, pious, and quite allergic to irony: none of these trademark qualities plays well in 2006. But to me, the core trouble is that nature writers have given us endless paeans to the wonders of wildness since Thoreau fled to Walden Pond, but need to tell us far more about our everyday lives in the places we actually live. Perhaps you’re not worrying about the failures of this literary genre as a serious problem. But in my own arm-waving manifesto about L.A. and America, I will proclaim that the crisis in nature writing is one of our most pressing national cultural catastrophes.

I love L.A. more than I hate it. I wasn’t supposed to. A nature lover from suburban St. Louis, I have enjoyed a fierce and enduring attachment to the wilds of the Southern Rockies. I was supposed to love Boulder, Colorado, where I settled after graduate school in the hope that it might be the perfect place—and it’s a town that every day adores itself in the mirror and confirms its perfection.

more here.

What is a clarinet but a straw through which the universe
draws lamentations and joy from a broken vessel? —Anonymous
.

Clarinet

She’s a voice, they say
but when did you hear a human voice
sing such grace

in baroque quintets and ragtime bands alike?

lilt through the ornaments
and lament with so much reason?
glow

like a low star
then slide on up and scatter notes
far and wide, a firework
under the blackwood skies of the Jazz Age?

This is the world as sung to you by a long-
serving, sensible
weary angel

compassionate after all she’s seen but
not deceived.

Her saddest song
has a whisper deep inside
of translunary laughter:

the sorrows of all the people of all the world
shadow the phrases
she makes dance.

And with such sweet tears
– you realise
when it’s too late – she sings

that same old song again
for you, distingué lovers
so newly met in the garden

by Judith Taylor
from The Open Mouse
12/12/217

Sarah Kasbeer in Dissent:

If Happy the elephant were allowed to live a natural life in the wild, she would likely spend her days roaming miles of tropical forest and plucking fruit and leaves from trees with the finger-like tip of her trunk. She would have grown up as part of a complex social system, in which elephant calves are doted on by older siblings, cousins, and aunts. By age forty-seven, Happy would likely have already raised multiple calves of her own. She would trumpet with excitement at the other members of her herd and call to potential mates using infrasonic rumbles that travel long distances, inaudible to the human ear.

But Happy does not do any of this. She currently lives alone at the Bronx Zoo. And recently, she has become the subject of an unusual custody battle that could result in her release. In 2018, an advocacy group called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a writ of habeas corpus (Latin for “produce the body”) on Happy’s behalf, and, for the first time, a court heard the case for an elephant’s legal personhood and subsequent right to bodily liberty. Previous habeas petitions by the NhRP, designed to challenge the captivity of chimps, have been unsuccessful. But the arguments have succeeded in furthering the debate around whether animals—especially those proven to have high levels of cognition—should qualify as more than just “things” under the law.

Elephants have a knack for demonstrating that they think, feel, and remember—in a way humans can easily understand. Famous for ritualized expressions of grief, they have been observed covering deceased family members with leaves and dirt, touching their bodies, and even visiting their gravesites.

More here.

Vazza and Feletti in Nautilus:

Christof Koch, a leading researcher on consciousness and the human brain, has famously called the brain “the most complex object in the known universe.” It’s not hard to see why this might be true. With a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion connections, the brain is a dizzyingly complex object. But there are plenty of other complicated objects in the universe. For example, galaxies can group into enormous structures (called clusters, superclusters, and filaments) that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years. The boundary between these structures and neighboring stretches of empty space called cosmic voids can be extremely complex.¹ Gravity accelerates matter at these boundaries to speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, creating shock waves and turbulence in intergalactic gases. We have predicted that the void-filament boundary is one of the most complex volumes of the universe, as measured by the number of bits of information it takes to describe it.

This got us to thinking: Is it more complex than the brain?

So we—an astrophysicist and a neuroscientist—joined forces to quantitatively compare the complexity of galaxy networks and neuronal networks. The first results from our comparison are truly surprising: Not only are the complexities of the brain and cosmic web actually similar, but so are their structures. The universe may be self-similar across scales that differ in size by a factor of a billion billion billion.

More here.

James Penner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Although Boyle is not in any way connected to the current Psychedelic Renaissance, he has a lot to say about the topic of psychedelic drugs because he experimented with a wide range of psychotropic drugs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his own words, he was a “hippie’s hippie.” In the early 1970s, he was “so blissed out and outrageously accoutred that people would stop me on the street and ask me I could sell them some acid.” However, at that time LSD was not actually the novelist’s drug of choice. Boyle preferred various downers and heroin. His first published short story, “The OD & Hepatitis RR or Bust,” is a visceral description of a heroin experience and its aftermath. This story, which was published in the North American Review, helped Boyle get into the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Boyle was certainly fortunate to escape his youth without overdosing. One of Boyle’s nonfictional essays, “This Monkey, My Back” describes how the experience of writing slowly became his habit of choice: “[W]riting is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arms. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea.” Boyle also believes that the “experience of creating art — in this case books — resembles a heroin experience. You have a tremendous rush to complete it. But like any habit you have to do it again.” At the moment, Boyle’s healthier form of addiction has produced nine collections of short stories and 17 novels.

More here.

Kate Becker at FQXi:

Our lives are full of experiences that, like cause and effect, only run one way. The irreversibility of time, and of life, is an essential part of the experience of being human. But, incongruously, it is not an essential part of physics. In fact, the laws of physics don’t care at all which way time goes. Spin the clock backward and the equations still work out just fine. “The laws of physics at the fundamental level don’t distinguish between the past and the future,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech. “So how do you reconcile the time symmetric laws of physics with the world in which we live?”

Moreover, we are not passively carried along by time’s river: We make decisions every day in an effort to actively cause the effects we want. Your neighbor’s kid chose to throw his ball recklessly close to your window, after all. Your toddler reasoned that his toy duck would enjoy a swim down the toilet. Deciding, then, is the living fulcrum of cause and effect. Yet physics has no language to describe this essentially human experience. “Physics and math departments, we write equations. And then there are humanities departments, where people talk about emotions and feelings,” says Carlo Rovelli, a theorist at the University of Aix-Marseille in France. “These things should not be separated. The world is one, and we should find the way to articulate the relationship between these fields.”

Now, with the support of two independent FQXi grants, Carroll and Rovelli are taking different approaches to untangling the messy knot that links the physics of cause and effect to our perceptions.

More here.

Arlie Hochschild in The Guardian:

In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were asked what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: “How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today?” Democrats guessed 50%. It’s actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe “most police are bad people”. Republicans estimated half; it’s really 15%.

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the study’s findings: the wilder a person’s guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

This much we might guess. But what’s startling is the further finding that higher education does not improve a person’s perceptions – and sometimes even hurts it. In their survey answers, highly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview.

More here.

How do we preserve what makes us human in this age of uncertainty? Broadcaster and author of PostCapitalism Paul Mason covers markets, algorithms, neuroscience and protest to put forward his new case for optimism, and how we can all be much more than cogs in a machine.

Sam Huber at Bookforum:

Though resisted by many queer activists, by 2015 marriage equality had become central to gay and lesbian public life. The post-Obergefell hangover was widespread: If the victory was as total as promised, what work could possibly follow it or be left to do in its wake? Walt Odets’s Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men’s Lives steps into this confusion with welcome insight and a shift in emphasis. “For gay lives,” Odets writes, “the granting of legal rights and authentic acceptance are two different issues in a society steeped in phobic aversion to real diversity.” To pro-marriage polemicists like Sullivan, gay particularity was attributable to our formal exclusion from mainstream institutions. When gays were no longer treated differently by law, he and others reasoned, we would cease to be different, compelling straights to finally welcome us into the social fold. Odets, a clinical psychologist with thirty years of private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area, airs what may look like dirty laundry to those who harbored such hopes. The overriding emphasis on marriage equality has pressured gays and lesbians to adopt a scrupulous regimen of self-love, turning any lingering shame into its own shameful secret. (One of Odets’s patients, Amado, confesses to having preempted a man’s rejection by telling him, “The more you get to know about me, the less you’ll probably want to know.”) Even among those of his patients—older, financially secure, monogamously partnered gay men—who might appear best positioned to reap its benefits, Obergefell has been no panacea for Sullivan’s “marginalization and pathology.”

more here.