The late anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously defined culture as an “ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves.” By that reckoning, the tales of “Entertainment Tonight” are as much a part of culture as a Shakespeare play, and potentially just as meaningful. It is not an altogether happy thought and one that, in minds less discerning than Geertz’s, helped license a parade of academic folly marching under the banner of “cultural studies.” From analyses of the power dynamics of Madonna to deconstructions of “Gilligan’s Island,” the field has produced work to make even the forgiving reader want to reach for a gun. “A Short History of Celebrity” is in part a work of cultural studies, written by Fred Inglis, an ardent Geertzian and a self-confessed backbencher in the “herbivorous old Labour Party” that continues to rue Margaret Thatcher’s ascendance and socialism’s demise. One will find in its pages predictable indictments of the shortcomings of contemporary democracy and rants against the “international rich.” Yet for all that, Mr. Inglis is more even-handed than many of his colleagues, and sager too, able to see beyond the ephemera of the moment to take a more expansive view. He asks not simply what the culture of celebrity means today, but where it came from.

more from Darrin M. McMahon at the WSJ here.

From Guernica:

Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile.

The baker sits cross-legged on the flour-dusted floor. His store-front bakery overlooks a narrow pitted street where taxi drivers sleep. Their sandaled feet stick out open car windows, before they rouse themselves and drive into downtown Islamabad seeking fares. Near the baker, a boy beats mounds of pasty dough into flat circles. Then he slaps the dough against the flame-seared walls of a clay-brick oven. He wipes his hands on stained aprons hanging on the wall. The aroma of baking bread rises invisibly around us lingering even as it must compete with odors already circulating on the awakening street: dew-damp garbage piles warming under the rising sun an hour past dawn, diesel exhaust from lumbering trucks jouncing down the pitted road, panicked chickens carried upside down by their legs and carried to a market by small barefoot boys. I lean against the wall and watch the increasing commotion of the street. I have been in Islamabad for nearly four weeks on a freelance reporting assignment covering the rise in violence from jihadi groups opposed to the government’s alliance with the U.S. and its war on terror.

But every morning before I begin making my rounds to the various ministries for news updates and press conferences, before I once again negotiate the countless bureaucratic hurdles required to see minister so and so, I walk one block from my guest house to this bakery for bread and a cup of tea. An hour or so later, I return to my guest house, check my email for messages from my Washington-based editor and then wait for my driver. I was pleased to see the bakery was open this morning. For the past few days it has been closed. I return to the states tomorrow morning. While I don’t pretend to know the baker well, he has been a steady morning companion. I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye. However, something is different today. The baker did not greet me with his usual hearty As Salaam Alaikum. He did not offer me tea, a custom here for “guests” visiting someone’s home or business.

More here.

From Nature:

In the latest exploration into the universe of organisms inhabiting our bodies, microbiologists have discovered new viral genes in faeces. They find that the composition of virus populations inhabiting the tail ends of healthy intestines (as represented in our stools) is unique to each individual and stable over time. Even identical twins — who share many of the same intestinal bacteria — differed in their gut's viral make-up. More than 80% of the viral genetic sequences found, which included sequences characteristic of both animal and bacterial viruses, have never been reported previously. “This is a largely unexplored world,” says Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and an author on the paper, which is published in Nature today¹. “We are truly distinct lifeforms — sums of microbial and human parts.”

More than 10 trillion bacteria normally inhabit the gastrointestinal tract, where they synthesize essential amino acids and vitamins, produce anti-inflammatory factors and help break down starches, sugars and proteins that people could not otherwise digest. Within and among these bacteria live bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages, which affect bacterial numbers and behaviour as they either prey on bacteria or co-exist with them, shuttling genes from one bacterium to another. This microscopic dynamic ecosystem affects our lives in ways we still do not fully understand. Indeed, the rise in the incidence of food allergies in Western societies has led to hypotheses that extreme hygiene disrupts the ability of microbes to colonize human guts, resulting in a lack of tolerance to usually harmless foods.

More here.

Beijing—Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Confucius’s grave in Qufu. My own university was a hotbed of extreme leftism. How times have changed. Today, the Chinese Communist Party approves a film about Confucius starring the handsome leading man Chow Yun-Fat. The master is depicted as an astute military commander and teacher of humane and progressive values, with a soft spot for female beauty. What does this say about China’s political future? Confucius bombed at the box office, leading many to think that the revival of Confucianism will go the same way as the anti-Confucius campaigns in the Cultural Revolution. But perhaps it’s just a bad movie. Confucius received the kiss of death when it went head-to-head against the blockbuster Avatar. A vote for Confucius was seen as a vote against the heroic blue creatures from outer space. In the long term, however, Confucian revivalists may be on the right side of history.

more from Daniel Bell at NPQ here.

Around 11 pm someone I’ve never met sitting at the next table pulls out a joint and offers me a hit. I’m working on my third glass of white wine and the proposal has an organic logic. I’m a little tired, having been awakened at dawn by the forlorn calls from Masuda’s peacock, Groundhog, from directly under my window. His mate had simply flown off one day and Masuda vows not to replace her. I locate Naser and his buddies, and find myself newly loquacious. The band is striving good-naturedly over Blondie and the Violent Femmes. A woman sitting between Naser and me announces that she’s called Drana, “like drama”! She heads for the dance floor; one of Naser’s friends claps me on the shoulder. “I want to see her and whiteboy dance!” Somehow I’ve acquired a nickname, perhaps in relation to this Afghan-American crowd. I’m not that ambitious, however. The boisterous talk goes on. Another Saturday night in Kabul.

more from Steve Mumford at Artnet here.

The Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs. As a sometime lecturer in Classics and translator of Aeschylus, Louis MacNeice would have needed no reminding of this, but the experience, in April 1939, of sitting down in New York on board the departing Queen Mary to write Eleanor Clark the longest letter of his life might nevertheless have seemed uncomfortably Greek in its symbolism. He had met Clark a few weeks before and fallen badly in love with her, but was returning to Britain amid much uncertainty. He had lectured at Birmingham University and Bedford College through the 1930s, but correctly sensed his future did not lie in the academy. Behind him lay an unsuccessful first marriage, and waiting for him in London a complex relationship with Nancy Coldstream, the “married friend” of his letters to Clark. His friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had crossed the Atlantic in the other direction in January 1939, but MacNeice sensed the coming conflict would be “his” war, and was reluctant to miss out on history.

more from David Wheatley at the TLS here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

I have a new hero — some guy named Jeff in Roselle, New Jersey. Dude just called in to WFAN sports radio in New York and laid the following on jabbering moron-hosts Sid Rosenberg and Marc Malusis:

“I just have one thing to say about George Steinbrenner,” he said. “We get it. He's dead. Enough.”

He hung up and there was dead air for about two beautiful seconds; the stunned Rosenberg and Malusis then recovered themselves and hurtled back into craven-bumlicker mode, taking offense that the station's round-the-clock Steinbrenner grovel-a-thon had been rudely interrupted. (“Oh, that's classy, Jeff,” snapped Rosenberg sarcastically).

Yesterday, when I first heard that Steinbrenner died, I figured his Slobituary (my term for the relentless slobbering that overtakes broadcast media outlets after the death of any Extremely Famous Person) would last about 24 hours nationally and 72 hours here in the New York area. You see enough of these, you can calculate their duration almost to the second, using something I call the Stalin Applause Index.

More here.

Sharon Astyk in Casaubon's Book:

Let us imagine human beings climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits – that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers. So right now we look like Tiggers high in the trees – we can climb up but we can't climb down. Is the problem our fears or that our tails (our structural addictions to energy) get in the way? It can be hard to tell. But what is not terribly hard to tell is that one way or another, we have to come down – and probably quite rapidly. The goal is to avoid a painful “thud” upon descent.

Why do we have to come down? Well, there are two compelling reasons, which will be entirely familiar to my regular readers, but perhaps are worth rehashing. The first is this. We can't keep burning fossil fuels – period. And we have very, very little time to make our choices not nearly as much time as we need to make a smooth, easy descent.

The problems we face have several names. Peak oil, which the Hirsch report suggests requires a 20 year lead time before we reach an oil peak – a peak that even optimistic sources suggest is much less than 20 years from now (the USGS, for example, uses 2023, many sources suggest much sooner – the US Army JOE report anticipates major constraints within 2-5 years).

But even if we had all the fossil fuels we wanted, we know we can't burn them.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

It’s a time-honored practice among medical residents, cramming undergrads, and anyone else burning the candle at both ends: get very little sleep for days, maybe even pull an all-nighter, and then crash for an extra-long night of shut-eye to catch up. Ten hours of sleep at once may indeed recharge us, and allow us to perform well for several hours after waking, according to research recently published in Science Translational Medicine. But “the brain literally keeps track of how long we’ve been asleep and awake—for weeks,” says Harvard Medical School (HMS) neurology instructor Daniel A. Cohen, M.D., lead author of the study. And that means that the bigger our aggregate sleep deficit, the faster our performance deteriorates, even after a good night’s rest.

Cohen and his coauthors monitored nine young men and women who spent three weeks on a challenging schedule: awake for 33 hours, asleep for 10—the equivalent of 5.6 hours of sleep a day. (This approximates the schedule of a medical resident, but many of us live under similar conditions; the National Sleep Foundation reports that 16 percent of Americans sleep six or fewer hours a night.) When the study participants were awake, they took a computer-based test of reaction time and sustained attention every four hours. The researchers were surprised to discover just how much an extended rest boosted test performance. “Even though people were staying awake for almost 33 hours, when they had the opportunity to sleep for 10 hours, their performance shortly after waking was back to normal,” Cohen says. “The really interesting finding here is that there’s a short-term aspect of sleep loss that can be made up relatively quickly, within a long night.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Up to 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside ­Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans. That conclusion comes from scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who pieced together the first draft of the Neandertal genome—which represents about 60 percent of the entire genome—using DNA obtained from three Neandertal bones that come from Vindija cave in Croatia and are more than 38,000 years old.

The evidence that Neandertals contributed DNA to modern humans came as a shock to the investigators, who published their findings in the May 7 Science. “First I thought it was some kind of statistical fluke,” Pääbo remarked during a press teleconference on May 5. The finding contrasts sharply with his previous work. In 1997 he and his colleagues sequenced the first Neandertal mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are the cell’s energy-generating organelles, and they have their own DNA, which is distinct from the much longer DNA sequence that resides in the cell’s nucleus. Their analysis revealed that Neandertals had not made any contributions to modern mitochondrial DNA. Yet because mitochondrial DNA represents only a tiny fraction of an individual’s genetic makeup, the possibility remained that Neandertal nuclear DNA might tell a different story. Still, additional genetic analyses have typically led researchers to conclude that Homo sapiens arose in Africa and replaced the archaic humans it encountered as it spread out from its birthplace without mingling with them—the Out of Africa replacement scenario, as it is known.

More here.

One hundred and fifty years ago the Swiss art lover and historian Jacob Burckhardt published his master work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. I believe this anniversary is as important as last year’s of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. These two great 19th-century books are still at the living heart of their subjects. The study of the Renaissance can no more forget Burckhardt than biology can leave Darwin behind. Both classics began in journeys. Darwin sailed to the Galápagos; Burckhardt merely went to Italy. His book drips with love of Italy and Italians. It is, among other things, one of the most passionate homages ever paid by a northern European to southern Europe, and yet herein lies its strangeness. Northerners, from Thomas Mann in Death in Venice to Martin Amis picturing the gilded English young on holiday in a southern castle in The Pregnant Widow, have tended to imagine Italy as a languorous, sleepy, timeless and archaic place – the slow, hot unconscious of the European continent, drooping out into the Mediterranean like a surrealist appendage. Burckhardt saw things very differently. The fascination of reading his book is its vision of Italy as the birthplace of modern individualism, political calculation, science and scepticism. In 1860 Burckhardt looked at Italy and saw the shock of the new, secreted in sleepy ruins.

more from Jonathan Jones at The Guardian here.

Reports of Gary Shteyngart’s hairiness have been greatly exaggerated. The first and best Russian-immigrant novelist out of the gate in his generation, Shteyngart has long perpetuated those ugly rumors. During interviews plugging his sprawling 2002 comic debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (which he now insists on calling “The Russian Debutante’s Handjob”) and its messier follow-up, Absurdistan, he said he’d grown up “small, furry, and poor” in Little Neck, Queens. In both profiles and fiction, he created a mythically sad upbringing to which he credited both his sense of humor and his flagrant displays of self-hatred. The truth about the hair, and the self-loathing, emerges at Spa Castle, a hard-to-reach five-story Korean spa emporium in College Point, Queens. Creepily modern and intensely relaxing, the destination has a few tenuous connections to his third book, a dystopian satire called Super Sad True Love Story. But the main reason we’ve come here to soak, sizzle, and float in saunas and whirlpools is that Shteyngart himself suggested it, in the following e-mail, reprinted in full: “we go to korean bathhouse in queens and catch new social disease …”

more from Boris Kachka at New York Magazine here.

The rubber toy balloon should here be distinguished from the wider category of reusable inflatable structures that include, among a vast miscellany of human inventiveness, buoyancy aids, dirigible vehicles, inflatable architecture, military decoys, gold-lined gastric balloons, and blow-up sex dolls. In contrast, the transient balloon inhabits a less stable dimension of the aerial imagination. Precariously thin-walled and thus prone to sudden permanent disintegration or slow entropic deflation, the balloon remains a colorful motif of celebratory frivolousness and enchanted vulnerability. In descriptors such as “depressed” and “deflated,” “buoyant” and “puffed-up,” we can perhaps detect an unconscious identification with the balloon, whose tactile and visual resemblance to the human body compels both fetishism (globophilia) and fear (globophobia) in not uncommon equal measure; it is perhaps unsurprising that Freud equated a flaccid balloon in a dream with a male sexual member of similar detumescence. Frustrated potency and balloons can be observed together elsewhere in the context of political protests, where balloon releases are used to articulate a diverse range of grievance. Black balloons, to take just one example of helium-assisted resistance, have been released skyward to variously highlight papal shame (St. Pölten, Austria, 1998), the Palestinian nakba (Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine, 2008), and carbon emissions (Adelaide, Australia, 2009).

more from Jonathan Allen at Cabinet here.

I must say I am disgusted by the Swiss government's refusal to extradite Roman Polanski. This is Johann Hari at his website:

So now we know. If you are a 44-year-old man, you can drug and anally rape a terrified 13-year-old girl as she sobs, says “no, no, no,” and pleads for her asthma medication, and face no punishment at all. You just have to meet two criteria: (a) You have to run away and stay away for a few decades, and (b) You need to direct some good films. If you manage this, not only will you walk free. There will be a huge campaign to protect you from the “witch-hunt” of the laws forbidding child-rape, and you will be lauded as a hero.

Polanski admitted his crime before he ran away, and for years afterwards, he boasted from exile that every man wants to do what he did. He chuckled to one interviewer in 1979: “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!”

But this is not enough, it seems, for the Swiss government to return him to the United States to face trial. They have found a legalistic loophole that enables them to let him go – while admitting “national interests” may be a factor in the release. This may be a reference to pressure from neighboring France to free their citizen. As a Swiss citizen, I think I can say without being offensive – we all remember the bargains Swiss governments have made in the past to preserve their “national interests.” This is in a long tradition of helping criminals and calling it Swiss hard-headedness.

The campaign to release Polanski has leeched into the open a slew of attitudes that I thought were defeated a generation ago. Whoopi Goldberg said it wasn't “rape-rape.” Others hinted darkly that she wasn't a virgin at the time of the rape. So if a 13 year old has been raped before, she's fair game for all future rapists?

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Tony Judt in the NYRB blog:

[Czeslaw] Milosz was born in 1911 in what was then Russian Lithuania. Indeed, like many great Polish literary figures, he was not strictly “Polish” by geographical measure. Adam Zagajewski, one of the country’s most important living poets, was born in Ukraine; Jerzy Giedroyc—a major figure in the twentieth-century literary exile—was born in Belarus, like Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century icon of the Polish literary revival. Lithuanian Vilna in particular was a cosmopolitan blend of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Jews, among others (Isaiah Berlin, like the Harvard political philosopher Judith Shklar, was born in nearby Riga).

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Milosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work, The Captive Mind. Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.

Milosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.” Two of his subjects—Jerzy Andrzejewski and Tadeusz Borowski—may be familiar to English readers, Andrzejewski as the author of Ashes and Diamonds (adapted for the cinema by Andrzej Wajda) and Borowski as the author of a searing memoir of Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.

But the book is most memorable for two images.