Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:

Sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch. Eat Snickers, pray for end of dire film about Julia Roberts's emotional growth, love the fact it can't last for ever. Wince, daydream, frown. Resent script, resent acting, resent dinky tripartite structure. Grit teeth, clench fists, focus on plot. Troubled traveller Julia finds fulfilment through exotic foreign cuisine, exotic foreign religion, sex with exotic foreign Javier Bardem. Film patronises Italians, Indians, Indonesians. Julia finds spirituality, rejects rat race, gives Balinese therapist 16 grand to buy house. Balinese therapist is grateful, thankful, humble. Sigh, blink, sniff. Check watch, groan, slump.

Film continues, persists, drags on. Wonder about Julia Roberts's hair, wonder about Julia Roberts's teeth, wonder about permanence of Julia Roberts's reported conversion to Hinduism. Click light-pen on, click light-pen off, click light-pen on. Eat crisps noisily, pray for more crisps, love crisps. Munch, munch, munch. Munch, munch, suddenly stop munching when fellow critic hisses “Sshhh!” Eat crisps by sucking them, pray that this will be quiet, love the salty tang. This, incidentally, makes me plump, heavy, fat. Yet Julia's life-affirming pasta somehow makes her slim, slender, svelte. She is emoting, sobbing, empathising. She has encounters, meetings, learning-experiences. Meets wise old Texan, sweet Indian girl, dynamic Italian-speaking Swede who thinks “Vaffanculo” means “screw you”.

More here.

From the website of Fix Congress First:

On Thursday, the House Committee on Administration will take a vote on the Fair Elections Now Act — the bill that we, along with many others, have been pushing for the past two years. The Committee will pass the bill. With a bit of luck, and a lot more pressure, the managers of the bill believe it could have the votes to pass the House as well. If they're right, and if the Speaker allows the bill to come to the floor, then for the first time in a generation, the House will have ratified fundamental and effective campaign finance reform.

This optimism will surprise many of you. As I've travelled to talk about this issue, the overwhelming attitude of people who want better from our government is that our government is incapable of giving us better. The House ratifying Fair Elections would be the first, and best evidence, this skepticism might be wrong. It would also be a testament to the extraordinary work of organizations like Public Campaign and Common Cause (especially the campaign director, David Donnelly), as well as many others, including MoveOn, the Coffee Party, You Street (as in “not K Street”) and many of you. This victory would give American voters an idea worth fighting for. It would be a critical victory, at least if we can gather the final few votes needed in the House. (You can help in that by using our Whip Tool).

But we should recognize that this victory would also be just a first step. I don't believe the Senate will pass this bill this session, which means the fight must begin again in January. So as we've been at this now for almost two years, I wanted to give you a sense of where we are and where we're going. I also want to begin to share with you my own sense of how to get there.

This isn't a short letter. But I hope you'll take the time to read it. (Here's a PDF if you want to print it). We all need to understand the kind of fight this will be. And after many sleepless nights thinking it through, I believe I have a sense of what victory will require.

More here.

From Edge:

“We misunderstand cancer by making it a noun”, Hillis says. “Instead of saying, 'My house has water', w' say, 'My plumbing is leaking.' Instead of saying, 'I have cance'”, we should say, “I am cancering.' The truth of the matter is we're probably cancering all the time, and our body is checking it in various ways, so we're not cancering out of control. Probably every house has a few leaky faucets, but it doesn't matter much because there are processes that are mitigating that by draining the leaks. Cancer is probably something like that.

“In order to understand what's actually going on, we have to look at the level of the things that are actually happening, and that level is proteomics. Now that we can actually measure that conversation between the parts, we're going to start building up a model that's a cause-and-effect model: This signal causes this to happen, that causes that to happen. Maybe we will not understand to the level of the molecular mechanism but we can have a kind of cause-and-effect picture of the process. More like we do in sociology or economics.”

More here.

State Witness
………………….
As state witness
I told the court
that the ones saying
they had been beaten
had done the beating
in Uzumba.
I have never been
to Uzumba.
They said if I didn’t
say what they told me
I would get more than
broken ribs.
Don’t call me a coward.
One held my hand,
the other held my other hand,
a third crushed a log into my ribs,
a fourth crushed my testicles for good measure.
As state witness
I told the court
that the ones saying
their buttocks had been burnt,
their homes torched
and their wives raped,
were the ones
who had had actually done those
horrible things.

by Mgcini Nyoni
publisher: Poetry International Web; 2010

From Science:

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, a clock on the floor ought to run very slightly slower than an identical one on top of a step stool because the lower clock nestles deeper into Earth's gravitational field. Now, physicists have demonstrated this effect using two super-accurate clocks and hoisting one several centimeters above the other. It's the first time scientists have used clocks to show that time flies faster for your nose than for your navel. “The demonstration of the gravitational shift by elevating a clock about one foot is quite stunning,” says Daniel Kleppner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. He adds, however, that the demonstration “does not change anyone's view on relativity.”

Einstein realized that time passes at different rates depending on the circumstances. For example, suppose you stand on a train platform with a Rolex on your wrist while a friend wearing an identical watch zooms by in a train. Your friend's watch runs slower than yours simply because he is moving relative to you, Einstein predicted in his theory of special relativity. And according to his theory of general relativity, gravity comes about because massive things like Earth stretch the fabric of space and time. As a result, a clock at lower altitude and, hence, lower gravitational energy, should run slower than one at higher altitude—by about 3 microseconds per year per kilometer of elevation.

More here.

Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous. This hidden carnage provided one ground for the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer, who contended that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.” The continuous, incalculable suffering of animals is also an important though largely neglected element in the traditional theological “problem of evil” ─ the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent god. The suffering of animals is particularly challenging because it is not amenable to the familiar palliative explanations of human suffering. Animals are assumed not to have free will and thus to be unable either to choose evil or deserve to suffer it. Neither are they assumed to have immortal souls; hence there can be no expectation that they will be compensated for their suffering in a celestial afterlife. Nor do they appear to be conspicuously elevated or ennobled by the final suffering they endure in a predator’s jaws. Theologians have had enough trouble explaining to their human flocks why a loving god permits them to suffer; but their labors will not be over even if they are finally able to justify the ways of God to man. For God must answer to animals as well.

more from Jeff McMahan at The Opinionater here.

From Aesop’s fables to those of La Fontaine, talking animals—monkeys, wolves in sheep’s clothing, grasshoppers, ants—have exposed human foibles and vices and occasional virtues. In so doing, they challenge all rigid boundaries between humans and other species as well as the common view of human wrong­­­­­­­doing as “bestial” in nature—a term Erasmus de­clared deeply unfair to animals, given the scale of violence and deceit practiced by human beings. Charles Darwin’s words, near the end of The Descent of Man, might have echoed Erasmus: “I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”

more from Sissela Bok at The American Scholar here.

In April 1922, D.W. Griffith traveled to London to promote Orphans of the Storm, his epic of the French Revolution. To a skeptical Times interviewer he described the literary origin of his signature contribution to film technique: the “‘break’ in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group.” As Sergei Eisenstein observed on discovering the exchange, “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of parallel action”—cross-cutting—“and he was led to the idea of parallel action by—Dickens!” Motion Picture Studio, to which the young Alfred Hitchcock was a contributor, thought Griffith’s visit had made plain “for the first time the all-importance of the director to the films for which he is responsible.” Soon after, the Manchester Guardian’s Caroline Lejeune, later part of Hitchcock’s circle, noted the cults that had gathered around certain directors on the basis of a few films “built on the same lines.” Once canonized, she wrote, “every little gleam of beauty is magnified a hundredfold,” and their work, “even in embryo, will be enwrapped in a legend of quality which it would take a very serious blunder to destroy.” Three decades before it was given a name, Lejeune had identified the politique des auteurs by which the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma made their magazine’s reputation, beginning in 1953 when Jacques Rivette proclaimed “The Genius of Howard Hawks” on the release of his screwball-throwback, Monkey Business.

more from Henry K. Miller at n+1 here.

Steve Luxenberg in the Washington Post:

Obama is shown at odds with his uniformed military commanders, particularly Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command during the 2009 strategy review and now the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Woodward reveals their conflicts through detailed accounts of two dozen closed-door secret strategy sessions and nearly 40 private conversations between Obama and Cabinet officers, key aides and intelligence officials.

Tensions often turned personal. National security adviser James L. Jones privately referred to Obama's political aides as “the water bugs,” the “Politburo,” the “Mafia,” or the “campaign set.” Petraeus, who felt shut out by the new administration, told an aide that he considered the president's senior adviser David Axelrod to be “a complete spin doctor.”

During a flight in May, after a glass of wine, Petraeus told his own staffers that the administration was “[expletive] with the wrong guy.”

More here.

Lesley McDowell in The Guardian:

Is this really what writers think of critics? That they spend their time typing up vicious reviews of authors because they're jealous, or to defend their friends? Or because it's the closest their talentless, deluded minds can get to literary immortality? The thing is, having been on the “other side” for so long, I know better. I know that the majority of reviews are not personal, and are not written by people who can't master the craft hitting out at those who can.

But you don't have to be a critic to know this. A cursory glance at the majority of broadsheet books pages would show that most reviewers are not “wannabes” – most of them are also published writers. Gone are the days when the critic was in one corner and the author in the other, two different species eyeballing each other before the fight to the finish. It's a strange hybrid, this author-critic creature. I can't think of another art form where the “practitioner” and the critic overlap like this. Where are the dancers who are also dance critics? Where are the playwrights who also write theatre reviews? Where are musicians who critique bands? Only in literature does this overlap occur, although writers, it would seem, would prefer to believe that it doesn't. Writers would prefer to believe that critics are separate, and that their separation means they're the enemy, and out to get them.

The irony is that writers are generally meaner to other writers than critics are. Few critics have anything to gain by penning a bad review. (Writers like to believe Michiko Kakutani achieved the status she has by writing bad reviews of the big boys, but if that were true, we'd all be doing it).

More here.

David Weisman in Seed Magazine:

There is a common idea: because the mind seems unified, it really is. Many go only a bit further and call that unified mind a “soul.” This step, from self to soul, is an ancient assumption which now forms a bedrock in many religions: a basis for life after death, for religious morality, and a little god within us, a support for a bigger God outside us.

For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake. Often, the way things feel has nothing to do with how they are.

There are historical parallels. An 18th-century scientist believed a substance called “caloric” made hot materials hot and flowed into colder materials to make them warmer. It seemed to be true, but subsequent investigation showed mechanical vibration equates to heat. Science is littered with similarly discredited theories; the soul is one of them.

The evidence supports another view: Our brains create an illusion of unity and control where there really isn’t any.

More here.

Lindsay Johns in Prospect:

In 2007 a home affairs select committee produced a report about young black boys in the criminal justice system, calling for the department for education and schools to consult with black community groups to make the curriculum more relevant—and to find “content which interests and empowers young black people.” We can safely assume they were not talking about Ovid, Chaucer or Shakespeare.

Sadly, the canon has a serious image problem amongst black people, too. Many see it as the preserve of white public schoolboys, taught in fusty classrooms by doddery Oxbridge tutors. We have been led to see it as whitey’s birthright, not ours. Meanwhile anti-racist educationalists and black community leaders rail against a racist curriculum which does not meet the cultural needs of their students, with some calling for “black schools” in which black culture—rather than an elite white culture—can be taught.

But the literary canon should not be the preserve of any one race. As both a writer of colour and an ardent (but not uncritical) devotee of the canon, I have little time for people who say that black people cannot relate to books written 2,000 years ago by a bunch of dead white guys, or that Maya Angelou is better than Shakespeare. This denies us our shared humanity across racial divides.

More here.

Somewhat old but interesting take:

[Thanks to Atiya B. Khan.]

From The Guardian:

For some time now, David Grossman has been describing his writing as a means of survival, as a way of no longer feeling a victim in the “disaster zone” of the seemingly eternal conflict that is Israel-Palestine. At moments he has talked of the risk of dispassion, of being paralysed with fear and despair. With the publication of this extraordinary, impassioned novel, such purpose or hope acquires a new meaning and intensity. It now seems that the life to be saved by writing, even though the struggle may be doomed, could only be – perhaps always has been – the life of a child.

To the End of the Land tells the story of Ora, who leaves her home in Jerusalem to walk across Israel to Galilee, in order to avoid the “notifiers” who might arrive at any moment to inform her of the death of her son. It is the trip they had planned together to celebrate his discharge from military service. Instead, he volunteers to rejoin the army in a high-intensity offensive – “a kick-ass operation” – against the Palestinians at the start of the second intifada. Ofer has been lost to his mother “forever from the moment he was nationalised”. Her husband, Ilan, has left her, taking her other son, Adam, with him to South America, after she failed to support Ofer when he was investigated over an incident in Hebron which left a Palestinian trapped in a meat-locker for two days. Ora is, among many other things, her son's failed conscience, a voice of caution for him and for her country which neither wishes to hear. Her love for him is limitless, but when he justifies the recourse to violence against the Palestinians, her sole focus is on saving “her child from the barbarian standing opposite her”.

More here.

From Nature:

You are tense and wary, alert to every rustle and snapped twig. A predator is near, you can sense it. Your heart races; you sweat. Quietly, you reach for a doughnut. Stress speeds up the metabolism of grasshoppers, making them seek out easily digested sugars and carbohydrates for a quick energy boost. This and other results, published in three journals in the past month, could have big implications — not just for prospective prey, but also for the ecosystems they live in.

In more relaxed conditions, many animals opt for high-protein foods that help them to grow and reproduce. But with a predator lurking, they need fuel to quickly feed their amped-up bodies — and to bolt, if needs be. Dror Hawlena, an ecologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been teasing out the ecological ramifications of this predation stress in meadows.

More here.

Jonathan Franzen is, by his own account, a divided soul. “It turns out,” he once wrote, “that I subscribe to two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience.” One was the Status model: high art, genius, Flaubert; the other was the Contract model: accessibility, pleasure, the community of readers. Of the two things for which Franzen is most famous (other, of course, than The Corrections, his 2001 National Book Award–winning best seller), both were public controversies that erupted from this very self-division. The first was his 1996 Harper’s essay that renounced the novel of cultural critique in favor of “writ[ing] fiction for the fun and entertainment of it,” yet contrived to do so in a way that left him looking like exactly the kind of ideologue he didn’t want to be mistaken for. The second may be dubbed l’affaire Oprah—Franzen’s disinvitation by that redoubtable figure on a charge of aggravated elitism, in the course of which he came across as both a snob to the masses and a philistine to the literati. He couldn’t seem to figure out where he wanted to the stand, and so, renouncing both the highbrow and the low, pleasing no one by trying to please everyone, he managed, in the most sincere and well-intentioned way, to strand himself inside a one-man DMZ that perfectly embodied his ambivalence.

more from William Deresiewicz at Bookforum here.

I try to get away from the damn thing, but it keeps coming at me. A friend visiting announced he had finished it on the airplane — did I want a look? There were emails, blog posts, multiple reviews in the same venue. And then, on vacation, in another country and in another language, there it was, in the Viennese bookstore window where I stopped to tie my shoe: FREIHEIT von Jonathan Franzen. It appears that everyone in the world is being stalked by Jonathan Franzen right now. My proclamation that I was not going to read Freedom was beginning to make me look like a dick. Just read it already. What’s the big deal? It’ll take a few days, and then you will be a participant in the cultural zeitgeist, the document of our era, the book that made books relevant again. (At least, the book since Twilight. Or Harry Potter. Or the last Franzen, Corrections.) After all, the Guardian called it the book of the century. Surely you have to read that. But no.

more from Jessa Crispin at The Smart Set here.

Franzen is at his best when zooming in on details of the material world, depicting youthfully exclusive advances in telephoning, texting and emailing etiquette, for example: “You don’t understand that your phone is very, very different from your e-mail”, Walter’s exasperated daughter scolds him. “I have friends who hardly even check their e-mail anymore.” He is a brilliant and funny observer of physical movement, facial nuance, hand signals, tones of voice that register the opposite of what the speaker is trying to convey. Freedom contains many virtuoso passages, so many, indeed, that one is subject to the ungrateful suspicion that Franzen can weave the stuff by the yard. Conversations which ought to have concluded business with a snappy exchange are allowed to wander over three or four pages – another form of “American sprawl”. Some readers will be drawn by the naturalism, which has been promoted as a relief from the more arduous approach of writers such as Don DeLillo, others may be attracted by the new-fangled scientific expertise, while yet others will respond to the darkness of Joey thanking Connie “for fucking somebody else”, even as they contemplate marriage.

more from James Campbell at the TLS here.

In the Economist:

“I HATE studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution,” says Marina Abramovic, America’s most famous performance artist. She is in her kitchen, which occupies one prong of a star-shaped house with walls that are full of windows but free of art. “Nothing new happens. You don’t surprise yourself. You don’t put yourself in situations to risk,” she adds in a rapid, whispering monotone with a Serbian accent. The artist was born in Belgrade and lived all over the world before settling in Manhattan and then Maldon Bridge, New York.

Ms Abramovic’s milestone performance, “The Artist is Present”, had her sitting silently all day, every day from mid-March to the end of May in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To preserve her energy for the marathon of one-on-one encounters with members of the public, she rarely spoke to anyone after hours other than museum staff. Now that the speechless blockbuster is over, Ms Abramovic seems to find particular joy in talking, with no diminution of her powerful presence.

“Ideas can come anytime, anywhere, while I am making this gazpacho or going to the bathroom,” she says as she chops tomatoes from her garden. “I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I’m afraid of.”