From Spicezee Bureau:

‘Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese’ by Sidin Vadukut is nothing less than delightful. The incredible adventures of the protagonist – Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese is sure to keep you in splits.

A stupendously naïve but academically gifted young man, Robin graduates from one of India’s best business schools with a Day-Zero job at the Mumbai office of Dufresne Partners, a mediocre mid-market management consulting firm largely run by complete morons.

Through a stunning series of blunders, mishaps and inadvertent errors, Robin begins to make his superiors rue the day they were driven by desperation into hiring him. To make matters worse, Robin realises that his mad, passionate, one-sided relationship with batchmate Gouri Kalbag might be over before it even started. With things going spectacularly wrong, will he manage to achieve his short-term goal of being promoted to Associate in under a year, and beat the record set by Boris Nguyen at Dufresne’s Vietnam office?

Published by Penguin, the book is the hilarious story of Robin, super-dork and unlikely corporate hero, for all of those who’ve ever sat depressed in cubicles and wanted to kill themselves with office stationery.

[Okay, so I modified the actual cover of the book—shown here in the 2nd picture—just a little! I think it looks better with Robin's real face on it. No?]

From The Guardian:

In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called “Absolut No ­Label”. The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that “For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters.”

A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This “stealth Starbucks” (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with “one-of-a-kind” fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes – all to help develop what the company called “a community personality.” Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: “inspired by Starbucks”. Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the same piece of retail space, “This one is definitely a little neighbourhood coffee shop.” After spending two decades blasting its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best story­tellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to direct our own actions has a visceral appeal, one exploited by Shankar Vedantam in “The Hidden Brain,” his exploration of the unconscious mind.

Most previous popular treatments of subliminal forces haven’t been data driven. Vedantam, who until recently wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for The Washington Post, hopes to fill that gap. His entertaining romp through covert influences on human behavior began as a series of columns, and true to its genesis, it reads as vivid reportage overlaid with a sampling of science. Ranging widely from the role of social conformity in violence to snapshots of racial and gender prejudice, Vedantam draws expansive arcs between findings from social psychology and the nation’s sensibilities and voting patterns. “Unconscious bias reaches into every corner of your life,” he writes, thanks to a “hidden brain” generally inaccessible through introspection. As with crop circles, all we see are the traces left by covert attitudes, never the perp at the scene of the crime.

More here.

A few decades ago, philosophers, economists and scientists didn’t pay much attention to happiness. They left that to the likes of comedian Ken Dodd, who famously sang that it was “the greatest gift that I possess”. Today, however, the lyrics of that chirpy ditty are virtually indistinguishable from the key claims of positive psychology – the flourishing “new science of happiness”. “Don’t count my money, count my happiness,” sang Dodd, explaining that “Happiness is nothing but a frame of mind,” something he “thanks the Lord” for. His lyrics may be folksy in style but the content encapsulates the essence of positive psychology. In 1998, the discipline was more or less unknown, until Martin Seligman, the then president of the American Psychological Association, began promoting the message that psychology needed to get over its historic obsession with what made people feel bad and start thinking about what made them feel good instead. His 2002 book, Authentic Happiness, became an international bestseller. But perhaps more significant, politically, was Lord Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005). Layard is not a psychologist but an economist, and his service as the the British government’s “happiness tsar” has taken positive psychology beyond influence to the heart of power. Its prescriptions lie behind a range of measures, from the huge increase in NHS-funded cognitive behavioural therapists to the forthcoming provision of mental health co-ordinators in Job Centres.

more from Julian Baggini at the FT here.

On a Saturday last August just outside the nation’s capital, Dr. Robert Zubrin saw his ambitions come crashing back to Earth—or, more accurately, back to the moon. Chris McKay, a NASA astrobiologist, had just delivered a speech to the Mars Society in which he proposed a human space exploration program based around a permanent lunar base. A trip to Mars, he said, should be delayed for several decades as humanity learns to live on our closest celestial body. “I grew up with Star Trek—the original series,” McKay said, “and the slogan was ‘to boldly go.’ Going is easy… we need to boldly stay.” As soon as McKay finished, a dozen livid conference-goers—most wearing “Mars or Bust” pins—stormed the two audience microphones at the front of the hall. First in line was Zubrin, the Mars Society’s founder and president. “The reason we didn’t stay on the moon is because there was nothing worth staying for!” howled Zubrin, whose unkempt comb-over, baggy eyelids, and impatient bark give the impression that he rarely gets more than three hours of sleep. “The prospect for agriculture on Mars is vastly superior. After we learn to live on Mars, we can use that as practice for living on the moon!”

more from Eric Benson and Justin Nobel at Guernica here.

Aspiring fiction writers have been reading E. M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel” since it was first published in 1927. I can remember devouring it in 1960 or soon after; here was one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, the author of “A Passage to India,” divulging the secrets of the trade — or rather, expressing strong but always courteous opinions about the rival merits and methods of the important novelists of the past. Here we first learned of “flat” (quickly sketched in) versus “round” (fully developed) characters and how every book needs some of both. Here we were told that Henry James’s decision in “The Ambassadors” to make his two chief male characters reverse positions by the end of the novel was a bad idea, a shoehorning of human vagaries into the rigors of unbending “pattern,” whereas Proust’s far better principle of composition was subject to a more fluid and spontaneous sense of “rhythm.” Forster gives as an example of rhythm Proust’s constant but never systematic or insistent return to the theme of the “little phrase,” a melody that the fictional composer Vinteuil serves up in various forms and that the characters hear at strategic moments. Forster writes of the melody, “There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.”

more from Edmund White at the NYT here.

Lesson In A Language I Can’t Speak Yet

The jellyfish lies naked on the sand,
a circle I can see through to the bright harvest
of stones. On one side of it is white foam,
on the other black seagrass.
A gold line of sunlight circles the bay.
I don’t know how the life of a jellyfish begins,
I don’t know where its sex is,
or why the circle is its shape among
all the shapes in the world. The flesh-colored
armor of crabs dries on wet sand.
The snail retreats when I touch it.
The footprints I leave here are full of the vanished
weight of the body.
The heart of the jellyfish is clear,
I was born deaf to the sounds it makes, its cells that shine
next to the rough arms of the starfish,
the starfish that can regenerate
its severed limbs. I have entered
another country, where lost parts of myself re-form;
hatred from the same salty center as love,
desire that had been torn from me.
I have to be open to powers
I know nothing about.
Identity in small things,
the jellyfish that smells like the sea,
the sea that touches all corners of the earth at once,
holes in the sand where mussels breathe.

by Rita Gabis

from The Wild Field;
Alice James Books, 1994

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

There's been a lot of griping, of late, about the decade just passed. That seems appropriate for a decade that began in terrorism and war, and ended in economic turmoil (never having gotten the terrorism and war out of its system along the way). It was crap. TIME magazine, a reasonably polite rag most of the time, called it the “Decade from Hell.” Gallup polls over the last 10 years recorded all-time lows in the collective low. Those inclined to dabble in the marketing of stocks have collectively labeled the last decade, “the worst ever.” And so on.

Whenever people get to the business of condemning decades, I think of W.H. Auden. That's because of his famous poem “September 1, 1939”, which opens with the following lines:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade

Auden tries to pick things up at the end of the poem, with a showing of his “affirming flame.” Still, it is a poem thick with dread. It's all the more powerful in retrospect since we know that Auden's fears were to be fully realized and then some. The ’30s were heady with the anticipation of doom. The ’40s were wrecked in the confirmation of that doom and the resultant hangover.

So what it is that we're feeling today, really? Are we scared as Auden was? Do we experience “waves of anger and fear?” Are our September nights offended by the “unmentionable odour of death?” I think not. I very much think not.

More here.

Anis Shivani in The Brooklyn Rail:

Anis Shivani (Rail): The voice in the novel is exceptionally energetic, recalling Nabokov. Was this strong voice always with you? Does it compensate for the loss of American freedom since 9/11?

H. M. Naqvi: Since the novel was born at a slam venue as slam poetry, Home Boy is suffused with the vim and cadence of the spoken word. There is also a conscious attempt to fuse lowbrow and highbrow discourse, employ text and lyric, and summon hip hop and Yiddish, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi, to create a voice that feels native to New York City. Home Boy can be thought of as dark comedy, comedy set in the shadow of a tragedy. And comedy has unique resonance; it’s powerful stuff.

Rail: Your novel creates certain archetypes of Pakistanis. Khan Sahib (Jimbo’s father), the three main protagonists—Shehzad (Chuck), Jamshed Khan (Jimbo), and Ali Chaudhry (AC)—Mini Auntie, and to a lesser extent Amo (Jimbo’s sister), appear with unprecedented clarity. There is also the archetype of the Pakistani mother—Shehzad’s mother—done better than I’ve seen before. How did you sharpen these characters?

Naqvi: That’s very nice to hear. One of the ambitions of Home Boy is to depict the Pakistani diaspora, from foreman to pediatrician, banker to cabbie, especially because immigrant fiction, recent immigrant fiction in particular, seems sequestered to a certain class, a certain variety of character and experience. Moreover, I wanted to feature other sociocultural experiences within the American purview—the upper-middle-class African-American, the secular Jew, the working-class Arab, the Jersey City Pathan, as well as constituents of East Coast aristocracy—because without them, the attempt to locate the novel in the tradition of immigrant fiction—a tradition that stretches back more than a century to the likes of Henry Roth, and in some ways, Willa Cather—is incomplete, if not entirely false.

More here.

Tom Bissell in The New Republic:

The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations. It is to her book’s credit—and, it must be said, to Playboy’s—that one closes her book largely convinced that she is right.

The collapse of the U.S. Postal System’s de facto censorship apparatus? Playboy had a hand in that. Changing attitudes about sex outside of marriage? Playboy was part of this, too. The specious notion that a high-earning, free-spending bachelor is some kind of epicurean rebel? Playboy yet again. The feminist movement? Playboy “was partly responsible” for it, as Gloria Steinem once admitted. The now common glossy-magazine practice of advertising luxuries that readers cannot possibly afford? Thank you, Playboy. The idea that a man could have fine clothes, a sweet smell, an uncorked Bordeaux, and remain masculine? Yes, believe it or not, Playboy paved the way for metrosexuality, too.

More here.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

Beginning in our late teenage years and early 20s, we develop and internalize a broad, autobiographical narrative about our lives, spelling out who we were, are, and might be in the future, says Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. The story is peppered with key scenes—high points, low points, and turning points—and a first experience can be any of these. “These experiences give us natural ways to divide up the stories of our lives—episodic markers that help us make sense of how our life has developed over time,” McAdams explains.

Part of why firsts affect us so powerfully is that they're seared into our psyches with a vividness and clarity that doesn't fade as other memories do. You may not remember the 4th real kiss you ever had, or the 20th—but you almost certainly remember your first. This is known as the primacy effect.

When people are asked to recall memories from college, 25 percent of what they come up with draws from the first two or three months of their freshman year, says David Pillemer, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire. What people remember most vividly are events like saying goodbye to their parents, meeting their roommates for the first time, and their first college class. In fact, when psychologists ask older people to recall the events of their lives, the ones they most often name are those that occurred in their late teens and early 20s.

More here.

Our own Asad Raza spent the last year producing this exhibition of an artwork by Tino Sehgal. Arthur Lubow writes about it in the New York Times Magazine:

Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.

If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its Conceptualist cadre, you may feel a whirring sensation beneath your eyelids starting up right about now. Your skepticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of “Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?” Later this month, when Sehgal’s one-man show takes over the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda for a six-week run, thousands of noninitiates, many no doubt having come to see the Frank Lloyd Wright building without any advance notification of what art exhibitions are on, will be able to decide for themselves.

If the overall response to “This Situation” at the Marian Goodman Gallery is any guide, even some who expect to hate Sehgal’s work will leave enthralled. “I often see shows I don’t like, but this was the only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t like me,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, judging “This Situation” to be the best exhibition he encountered in 2008.

Much more here.

Most readers interested in Jewish history know something about the conversos, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries. In recent decades, historians have come to see their story not just as a tragic or heroic one—an affair of Jews forced to give up their faith, or contriving to remain faithful in secret—but as an important episode in the evolution of the modern world. Yirmiyahu Yovel argued last year in The Other Within: The Marranos that these “New Christians” were the first large group in European history to be effectively post-religious—free to define the world and its meaning for themselves, instead of accepting the definitions of rabbinic Judaism or medieval Catholicism. That Spinoza and Montaigne, those skeptical modern minds, were both descendants of conversos, and that New Christians played a major role in the economy of the New World, is seen as evidence that these Jewish converts helped to invent the secular world we live in. Much less is known, however, about a later, smaller, but perhaps even more intriguing group of Jewish converts, who emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century.

more from Adam Kirsch at Tablet here.

Amanda Taub over at Wrong on Rights:

[I]f you can’t give as much as you would like, or find yourself wanting to do more, then I have one further suggestion: contact the White House and tell them that you support granting Haitians Temporary Protected Status (TPS) immediately.

TPS is a form of temporary humanitarian immigration relief given to nationals of countries that have suffered severe disasters, natural or man-made. (For example, El Salvador got TPS was after the country was hit by a terrible earthquake in 2001, Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1999, and Burundi, Liberia, Sudan, and Somalia were designated because of ongoing armed conflicts.)

Once a country has been given TPS, its nationals who are in the United States can apply for work authorization (a very useful thing to have if, say, one needs to send money home to family members in need of medical care or a house that has not been reduced to rubble), can’t be deported or put into immigration detention (also quite handy if you’re trying to work and send money home), and can apply for travel authorization, which allows them to visit their home country and return to the US, even if they wouldn’t otherwise have a visa that would allow them back into the country (incredibly important if you have loved ones who have been badly hurt and need to visit them, or if you need to go home to attend funerals).

Designating Haiti for TPS status would provide an immediate, tremendously valuable benefit to Haitian immigrants in the United States. But, more importantly it would benefit their loved ones who remain in Haiti and are in desperate need of their assistance. TPS would increase and stabilize remittances at a time when they are absolutely vital.

[H/t: Jenny Davidson]

Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in the NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man – Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Béla Kun – who had tracked down Orwell’s NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public. Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him?

more from DJ Taylor at The Times here.

Peter Lopatin in Commentary:

Arguments on the subject of religious faith come variously and abundantly these days, from theist and atheist alike. From the former, they range from the oracular hectoring of slick televangelists concerning the rewards that await the believer—both in this life and the next—to the carefully wrought arguments of the more intellectually rigorous Christian and Jewish clergy as they confidently and earnestly assert the rationality of faith, its cognitive inevitability, and its ethical necessity.

Not to be outdone, however, come the New Atheists, fierce conscientious objectors to what they regard as the hollow temptations of religion. These acolytes of pure reason assert, as against their religious counterparts (and with no less self-assurance), the manifest irrationality of religious faith, its logical incoherence, and its ethical superfluousness.

This is all a terribly disheartening spectacle for the beleaguered agnostic, moved as he is by the felt need for the transcendent yet unable to yield fully to the allure of faith or to any of the particular creeds of the conventionally religious, aware as he is of the power of science to explain the hitherto mysterious, and struck as he is by the discordant irony in the fact that the atheists share with their theist adversaries what is, to the agnostic, a strangely apodictic certainty concerning that matter about which certainty is surely not possible.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein enters this fray armed with a sophisticated grasp of philosophy (Ph.D., Princeton, 1977) and religion (raised in an Orthodox family, she is the author of a short biography of Spinoza). In previous works of fiction, (The Mind-Body Problem, Mazel, Properties of Light, among others) she has examined the rich territory that lies at the intersection of fact and intimation, thought and passion. In her latest, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, she explores the conflict between faith and reason, and the result of that engagement is a captivating, original, and at times riotously funny novel.

More here.

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

The Green Movement is a revolt against theocracy. Most of its adherents are young Iranians with little or no religious motivation. Yet, an iconic figure of the revolt was the nation’s highest-ranking cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri; and, last month, Ashura, a holy day celebrating martyrdom, occasioned some of the movement’s most massive protests.

Perhaps the fact that the movement has acquired a Shia veneer shouldn’t be terribly surprising. During the past century, no social movement in Iran has succeeded without draping itself in religion or without a strong Shia contingent in its leadership.

But to limit the discussion of the Green Movement’s religiosity to rhetoric and political maneuverings is to diminish the significance of the happening. The Green Movement (and the Ayatollah Khamenei’s clumsy response to it) has exacerbated a split with Shiism. It has accelerated the development of profound and potentially far-reaching doctrinal innovations. The course of the coming months will determine the extent to which these innovations will transform Shiism and Iran.

More here.