the Coming Age of Longevity

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In Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Gulliver encounters a small group of immortals, the struldbrugs. “Those excellent struldbrugs,” exclaims Gulliver, “who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!” But the fate of these immortals wasn’t so simple, as Swift goes on to report. They were still subject to aging and disease, so that by 80, they were “opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative,” as well as “incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.” At 90, they lost their teeth and hair and couldn’t carry on conversations. For as long as human beings have searched for the fountain of youth, they have also feared the consequences of extended life. Today we are on the cusp of a revolution that may finally resolve that tension: Advances in medicine and biotechnology will radically increase not just our life spans but also, crucially, our health spans. The number of people living to advanced old age is already on the rise. There are some 5.7 million Americans age 85 and older, amounting to about 1.8% of the population, according to the Census Bureau. That is projected to rise to 19 million, or 4.34% of the population, by 2050, based on current trends. The percentage of Americans 100 and older is projected to rise from 0.03% today to 0.14% of the population in 2050. That’s a total of 601,000 centenarians. But many scientists think that this is just the beginning; they are working furiously to make it possible for human beings to achieve Methuselah-like life spans.

more from Sonia Arrison at the WSJ here.

Believing Is Seeing

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In the brutally hot summer of 1936, Arthur Rothstein, a young photographer working for a branch of the Farm Security Administration, made a series of images that soon took on a bizarre life of their own. They were photos of a sun-bleached cow skull resting in a bone-dry corner of South Dakota, one of several drought-decimated states during the Dust Bowl era. The wider reality they alluded to, of a natural catastrophe wreaking havoc on America’s farmers and tearing at the nation’s social fabric, was undeniably, frighteningly real. But within days of their publication in newspapers across the country, the photos’ “authenticity” was being mocked and challenged by skeptics who claimed that Rothstein had repeatedly posed the skull, like a stage prop, possibly to drum up support for Franklin Roosevelt’s big government spending programs. To learn how this political, journalistic and aesthetic brouhaha played out, and whether Rothstein himself or those claiming “fake” were in fact twisting the visual evidence, you’ll want to read Errol Morris’ brain-teasing, occasionally unsettling new book, “Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography).”

more from Reed Johnson at the LA Times here.

Oh victorious cow!

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Oh victorious cow! In its bid for world domination this cunning ungulate has succeeded in training a great army of apes to do its bidding. These slavish primates, so reliant on the gifts of the udder, first killed off the cows’ predators, such as wolves and bears, and even exterminated those other large herbivores, mastodons and mammoths, that once offered competition for the best grasslands. Now the apes are clearing the world’s ancient forests and turning them over to pasture where their bovine masters might graze. They act as if mesmerised by those big wet eyes. In return for these services a certain sacrifice is made: some cows must be willing to die for the good of their kin. This is the price of power over the primates, who have become addicted to the meat and milk the cows provide. Thanks to this blood pact, the world cattle population has risen to well over a billion, and their dominion is rapidly spreading. But for those pesky vegetarians, their victory would be secure. So might the relationship between humans and cows look were it not for our tendency to put ourselves at the centre of every story. Where biologists come across relationships like the one between us and our cattle elsewhere in nature, they describe them as “mutualist”, meaning that through their mutual interaction both species benefit. So we provide protection and pasture for cows in return for milk and meat, just as some species of ants provide protection and pasture for aphids in return for the sweet liquid they secrete.

more from Stephen Cave at the FT here.

The Arab Awakening

Rami G. Khouri in The Nation:

Images When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in rural Tunisia on December 17, 2010, he set in motion a dynamic that goes far beyond the overthrow of individual dictators. We are witnessing nothing less than the awakening, throughout the Arab world, of several phenomena that are critical for stable statehood: the citizen, the citizenry, legitimacy of authority, a commitment to social justice, genuine politics, national self-determination and, ultimately, true sovereignty. It took hundreds of years for the United States and Western Europe to develop governance and civil society systems that affirmed those principles, even if incompletely or erratically, so we should be realistic in our expectations of how long it will take Arab societies to do so.

The countries where citizens are more actively agitating or fighting for their rights—Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen are the most advanced to date—have very different local conditions and forms of governance, with ruling elites displaying a wide range of legitimacy in the eyes of their people. Governments have responded to the challenge in a variety of ways, from the flight of the Tunisian and Egyptian leaderships to violent military repression in Syria, Libya and Bahrain, to the attempt to negotiate limited constitutional transformations in Jordan, Morocco and Oman. A few countries that have not experienced major demonstrations—Algeria and Sudan are the most significant—are likely to experience domestic effervescence in due course. Only the handful of wealthy oil producers (like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) seem largely exempt, for now, from this wave of citizen demands.

More here.

Adolf & Eva

Richard J. Evans in The National Interest:

ScreenHunter_08 Aug. 27 18.17 It was a marriage solemnized in the shadow of death. Shortly before, Hitler had dictated his “political testament” to one of the secretaries in the bunker. In it he declared that since his life was now almost over, he had decided “to take as my wife the woman who, after many long years of loyal friendship, came to the already besieged city. . . . It is my wish that she go with me into death as my wife.” On the afternoon of April 30, the pair retired into Hitler’s private quarters, where Eva Hitler, as she now was, sat down on a sofa. She bit a cyanide capsule and died instantly. Hitler, wanting to make doubly certain of his own death, did the same, while simultaneously firing a bullet through his right temple. Upon hearing the noise, some of the others present in the bunker entered the room and organized the removal of the bodies to the garden, where, acting on instructions, they poured petrol over them and burned them until they were unrecognizable. The still-functioning Nazi propaganda machine issued a statement claiming Hitler had died fighting to the end. No mention was made of his new wife. She died as she had lived, invisible to all but a handful of the Führer’s intimates.

Who was Eva Braun? Why did she link her fate so inextricably to that of the German dictator? Why was her existence kept so secret for so long? Was she just a simple, apolitical, naive young woman captivated by Hitler’s charisma? Was her relationship with the dictator merely platonic? In this new book, the first serious, scholarly biography of the girl who after her death became one of the world’s best-known women, the historian Heike Görtemaker sifts thoroughly and cautiously through the available documentation to try and find an answer to these perplexing human questions.

More here.

At 10 he built his first bomb. At 14 he made a nuclear reactor. Now he’s 17…

Judy Dutton in Mental Floss:

ScreenHunter_07 Aug. 27 18.09 Taylor Wilson makes people nervous. While his beanpole frame and Justin Bieber–esque haircut suggest he’s just a harmless kid, his after-school activities paint a far more ominous picture. At age 10, he built his first bomb out of a pill bottle and household chemicals. At 11, he started mining for uranium and buying vials of plutonium on the Internet. At 14, he became the youngest person in the world to build a nuclear fusion reactor. “I’m obsessed with radioactivity. I don’t know why,” says Wilson in his laid-back drawl. “Possibly because there’s power in atoms that you can’t see, an unlocked power.”

Shouldn’t teams in hazmat suits descend on Wilson and shut down his operations before someone gets hurt? On the contrary, there are people in the government who think that Wilson is key to keeping this country safe. “The Cold War is really when nuclear physicists got their shot, and those people are all retiring,” points out one of Wilson’s mentors, Ron Phaneuf, a professor of physics at the University of Nevada in Reno. “I think the U.S. Department of Energy is a little concerned that the motivation of young people to get interested in that kind of science has waned. I think that’s one of the reasons doors have been opened to Taylor. He’s a phenomenon, probably the most brilliant person I’ve met in my life, and I’ve met Nobel laureates.”

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security heard about Wilson two years ago, officials invited him to their offices to hear more about his research and determine whether or not it could be applied toward their counter-terrorism efforts.

More here.

3QD Readers Patrick and Scott get married

John Hoel, the videographer:

Marriage equality is something that I'm passionate about and so I couldn't have been more thrilled when Patrick and Scott asked me to film their wedding day. When thinking about what to write here, maybe a political statement, a witty argument, and so on, I quickly realized that nothing I could say comes close to what is communicated through watching Patrick and Scott get married while surrounded by the love and support of their friends and family. Their day was absolutely stunning and every detail was packed with signifigance and meaning, right down to the wedding cake wrapped in vintage postage stamps in honor of Patricks Grandfather who was an avid collector…

“When our law lags behind, people continue to live their truth and create their own version of a family, and this is what Patrick and Scott are deciding to do today.” In lieu of wedding gifts they asked guests to contact their members of congress in support of repealing the defense of marriage act – and if you could do the same that would be amazing. contactingthecongress.org/​

Patrick + Scott from John Hoel on Vimeo.

Congratulations, Patrick and Scott, from all of us at 3QD!

The Artist of Disappearance

From Guardian:

Artist-of-Disappearance Anita Desai's new book is her best since Fasting, Feasting and shares the apocalyptic vision of her extraordinary Fire on the Mountain. India's greatest living writer has always hidden devastating criticisms of the status quo just beneath the jewelled seduction of her surfaces. Her new volume, a trio of linked novellas about the art world, is also a sequence of underground detonations, culminating in a physical explosion that tears apart a mountain – and at a stroke demolishes the 21st-century's corrupt linkage between art and celebrity. These stories about art are also stories about ourselves. The characters, sketched in with Desai's usual blend of irony and tender sympathy, are people who look at pictures and read books: the rich who collect and neglect art, the civil servants who fail to support it, the adapters and critics and publishers who cluster round the edges, their restless jostling muddying and blurring its outlines. Last of all, but most beautifully, in her final story Desai writes about the secret part of all human beings that can create no matter how wretched our circumstances, a precious gift she suggests must at all costs flee the roaring, vacuous maw of 21st-century media.

All three novellas feature different forms of disappearance. The first, “The Museum of Final Journeys”, is narrated by a failed writer and junior Indian administrative officer, the privately educated inheritor of British imperial traditions: irritable, hierarchical and bored.

More here.

The Eerie Aftermath of a Mass Exit

From The New York Times:

King Perrotta has delivered a troubling disquisition on how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the unobtrusive ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism. “The Leftovers” is, simply put, the best “Twilight Zone” episode you never saw — not “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” but “The Monsters Are Us in Mapleton.” That they are quiet monsters only makes them more eerie. The Garvey family — Kevin, Laurie and their two children, Tom and Jill — are the Mapleton residents at the center of Perrotta’s novel, which opens three years after a rapturelike event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth. Just how many millions Perrotta doesn’t specify, but it can’t have been too many, because the phones still work and Starbucks still dispenses coffee by the grande. Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd alcoholic. When Tom Garvey pledges a fraternity at Syracuse, one of the brothers tells him about a rapturee from Alpha Tau Omega: “He kept a hidden camera in his bedroom . . . used to tape the girls, . . . then show the videos down in the TV room. One girl was so humiliated she had to leave school. Good old Chip didn’t care.”

The rapture’s failure to conform to biblical prophecy has driven some people plumb over the edge. The Rev. Matt Jamison becomes chief among the rapture deniers of the remaining Mapleton population: “He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about . . . how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.” The minister’s response to this unfairness is to insist this wasn’t the real rapture, and to prove it with a news­letter full of scurrilous tittle-­tattle about the disappeared. Other survivors go over the edge in different ways. The Barefoot People (young Tom Garvey eventually becomes one) believe the proper response to the mass disappearances is to party down pretty much 24/7. There’s a Healing Hug movement, led by a guru named Holy Wayne whom Perrotta memorably characterizes as “that age-old scoundrel, the Horny Man of God.” The Huggers are waiting for one of Holy Wayne’s teenage “brides” to deliver the “miracle child” who will, presumably, usher in a new age of cosmic grooviness.

More here.

The Selfish Gene: The Musical

Selfish-Gene Mairi Macleod in New Scientist:

I couldn't imagine how Richard Dawkins's iconic book The Selfish Gene could be turned into an Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, billed as the world's first “biomusical”. But you know what? Bex Productions has managed to pull it off.

Jonathan Salway has a background in theatre, not biology, but when he read Dawkins's book, the clarity of writing, the fascinating subject matter and even the humour so inspired him that he felt compelled to transform it into musical comedy and set about dissecting the book to write script and songs with the help of fellow writer Dino Kazamia and music by Richard Macklin.

In the show a fusty Oxford professor, played by Salway, tries to lecture the audience on the fundamentals of evolutionary theory. Meanwhile, the Adamson family share the stage, going about their daily trials of life, unwittingly providing examples of the points he's making. He frequently interrupts and explains to them why they're feeling and behaving the way they are, and sporadically gets involved in their lives along the way.

The family is played by four fresh and enthusiastic youngsters, all former drama students of Salway himself, and they helpfully wear T-shirts announcing who they are: Mum (Emma Seigell), Dad (James Barnes), Son (Olly Towner) and Daughter (Heather Pegley), but later swap for other roles, and even the live musicians contribute the odd line.

The show opens with the song We Are Machines Made By Our Genes, and the prof tries to push the idea that our genes make us selfish – look at how female praying mantises eat the heads of their copulating mates and gulls eat their neighbours' chicks, given the chance.

Very Deep in America

Moore_1-081811_jpg_470x422_q85 Lorrie Moore on Friday Night Lights, in the NYRB:

On my way to a Manhattan book party recently my mind was wandering to cultural guilty pleasures: sprightly but inane movies, or half-baked television programs no sophisticated person would admit to watching, as well as other aesthetic uncoolnesses, such as, say, Josh Groban, whose precariously belted tenor, crossover repertoire, and passable Italian have made him a secret darling of vulgarians like me. When he sings “The Prayer” with Celine Dion, is the listener not in the private ocular mists of kitsch heaven? Is not one of those pearly gates real pearl? And might one pay for admission to this slum-paradise with a parterre ticket stub from Wozzeck?

So it was, then, with great and satisfying surprise that almost immediately upon arriving at the party, I found myself locked in enthusiastic conversation in a corner with two other writers, all three of us, we discovered, solitary, isolated viewers of the NBC series Friday Night Lights. We spewed forth excitedly, like addicts—this was no longer a secret habit but a legitimately brilliant drama. Though the title might make the uninitiated think of shabbat candles, the show is actually about football in Texas, a state that I felt just then had not been this far east since the Bush administration.

“Rooting is in our blood,” Janet Malcolm has written, and when traveling around this country one would be hard-pressed not to notice that sports stadiums have become to the United States what opera houses are to Germany. Every community has one, even ones without much money. Friday Night Lights, whose final season has just come to a close, is a weekly hour-long dramatic series (forty-three minutes without commercials) whose focus is a high school football team and its place in a particular Texas town by the fictional name of Dillon—inspired by the real-life town of Odessa.

On the Future of the World Service

Bbc_world_service Jo Glanville in the LRB:

The World Service, originally the Empire Service when it was founded in 1932, is today one of the last remaining traces of imperial reach. It is the largest international public service broadcaster: over the past ten years, its audience has reached 184 million. The Foreign Office’s readiness to take money away from the World Service and then shrug off financial responsibility for it appears short-sighted, especially at a time when international broadcasting is entering a new period of expansion: the Chinese are investing £2 billion a year in overseas broadcasting, eight times as much as the World Service, while the US spends twice as much. But it should be borne in mind that the Foreign Office is itself embattled. Hated by the Treasury and caricatured in Whitehall as a home for cocktail-drinking loafers, it was sidelined under Labour and received a significant blow in 2007, when the Treasury abolished the overseas price mechanism, which had protected overseas spending against currency fluctuation. In a bid to rebuild its status under a new government and a strong foreign secretary, the Foreign Office has shown little compunction in slashing the World Service and the British Council (a 25 per cent cut), while giving itself a comparatively light trim at 6 per cent. As part of the deal with the BBC, the Foreign Office will continue to have a say in setting the priorities, objectives and targets for the World Service even after it comes under the licence fee in 2014, and the BBC will need the foreign secretary’s consent to open and close language services. These conditions were, a senior insider tells me, a potential deal breaker in the negotiations in which the BBC secured the licence fee – frozen at the current level – for the next six years.

am I a pet?

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In the gorgeous and stupidly fun Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, a chimpanzee, has an oh-so-poignant identity crisis during a walk in the Muir Woods near San Francisco. Thanks to an experimental gene therapy for Alzheimer’s that a biotech firm tested on Caesar’s mother, the CGI-created chimp has inherited a brain with extraordinary wiring. He lives with the drug’s developer, Will Rodman (James Franco), who occasionally takes Caesar on strolls through the giant redwoods and unleashes him, letting him express his inner ape. This day, they startle a woman walking a German shepherd on a leash. Caesar looks at his own collar and, in American Sign Language, plaintively asks Rodman, “Am I a pet?” Leaving aside the spectacularly implausible scientific scenario that made Caesar a few marbles short of a human, Rise of the Planet of the Apes flirts with an idea that has beguiled researchers for more than a century. What if we could speak with one of our ape cousins? What would they tell us about their views of the world, their disappointments and dreams, their spirituality and existential angst?

more from Jon Cohen at Slate here.

the civilization behind wire

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The idea that the concentration camp was a defining institution of Hitler’s Third Reich became a commonplace of the 1930s. So too did the idea that the German camps were more brutal instruments for breaking the spirit and body of their human cargo than any other form of internment. In 1940 the Hungarian writer and journalist Arthur Koestler published an account of his experiences as a communist and a Jew in a French concentration camp for enemy aliens, set up at Le Vernet, near the frontier with Spain, in September 1939, from which he had been fortunate to emerge before the Germans arrived. He compared the camp, a grim work camp with little food or medical help, with the most notorious German camp at Dachau: The scale of sufferings and humiliations was distorted, the measure of what a man can bear was lost. In Liberal-Centigrade, Vernet was the zero-point of infamy; measured in Dachau-Fahrenheit it was still 32 degrees above zero. In Vernet beating up was a daily occurrence; in Dachau it was prolonged until death ensued.[1] Like Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, other books which focused on German terror were best sellers. Stefan Lorant’s I Was Hitler’s Prisoner, published as a cheap Penguin Special in January 1939 was reprinted every month that year and sold around 100,000 copies.[2] The idea of the camp as a unique arena for ‘Nazi’ terror became embedded in the cultural discourses of the democratic West. The novel by the South African writer John Coetzee, The Life and Times of Michael K, first published in 1971 as a commentary on the terror of apartheid, is based on the cultural idea of the camp, but it mentions only one, Dachau.

more from Richard Overy at Eurozine here.

Death is everywhere at Dulwich

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The gallery is showing a short film by Tacita Dean of Twombly a year or so ago, puffy and slow and sly, fumbling round his studio in Virginia. The film moves (rather in the same way as Dean’s tremendous portrait of old Michael Hamburger fondling his apples) from a world of light and vitality, glimpsed through the studio blinds, towards a final montage of grey trees against a storm-warning sky. Halfway through the exhibition one turns off into Soane’s strange shrunken mausoleum for the gallery’s founders, and in the half-light among the sarcophagi is a Twombly sculpture: a black rose resting on a marble pebble resting on a box covered in faded velvet. The label on the box reads: THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE, I DID NOT DO. Nicholas Cullinan, whose great idea this exhibition was, makes the connection to Poussin’s contrary (though not, as I hear it, self-vaunting) ‘Je n’ai rien négligé.’ But the rose on the unlovely pebble also reminds me of Poussin’s habit of bringing back bits of wood, stones, moss, lumps of earth from his rambles by the Tiber; and the story of him reaching down among the ruins for a handful of marble and porphyry chips and saying to a tourist: ‘Here’s ancient Rome.’ Both artists are humorists as well as death-haunted. (Richard Wollheim once said to me, apropos The Triumph of Pan, which is in the exhibition, that he did not feel Poussin ever managed the difficult business of laughter in paint. Maybe not: but he was good at showing human beings trying to be funny. He was interested in the proximity of a laugh to a rictus.) ‘Witty and funereal’ was how Frank O’Hara described Twombly’s sculptures early on.

more from T.J. Clark at the LRB here.

The Schools We Need

From Orion:

Class It’s been a tough three months. I had been away from full-time teaching for a few years, and away from eighteen-year-olds for longer. From 1995 to 2005, I taught four, sometimes five, sections of Freshman Comp each semester. I read roughly 8,000 essays during that decade—200,000 pages, 50,000,000 words. After all that, I took a little time off to do some writing of my own. But when my book was finished, the department chair ordered me back to the front line.

And Freshman Comp is the front line. All incoming college students take it, and their numbers are on the rise. Consequently, we are legion as well, we writing teachers, we circlers of the comma splice, we well-intentioned, underpaid masses. Despite what you may have heard, we are not covert operatives, Maoist holdovers who have infiltrated the ranks of higher education. While I do have major concerns about the predatory nature of corporate capitalism, as I imagine many of us do by now, my motives, like those of my colleagues, are mostly pure. Our goals can be simply stated if not easily achieved. Namely, we want to teach your children to think for themselves and to communicate those thoughts through effective use of language. Of course, unless you are a Dadaist poet, you have to write about something. But after reading thousands of essays (a noun I much prefer to “arguments”) about abortion, gun control, and gay rights—all important issues—I decided that, on my return to Freshman Comp, I would ask my freshmen to essay (a verb I prefer to “argue”) on a topic they all presumably knew something about: high school. I began with a simple prompt for the first essay: evaluate the education you received over the last four years.

More here.

How sex with Neanderthals made us stronger

From MSNBC:

NeanderthalPhoto-hmed-0130p_grid-6x2 Mating with Neanderthals and another group of extinct hominids, Denisovans, strengthened the human immune system and left behind evidence in the DNA of people today, according to new research. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that modern humans who left Africa around 65,000 years ago mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans — two archaic species that lived in Europe and Asia. The study, which appears in this week's Science, is among the first to show how the interbreeding shaped modern human genes and the attributes they pass to us.

Peter Parham, a professor of cell biology, microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and his team focused their analysis on “HLA” genes, which are fast-evolving vital components of the human immune system. “The modern human populations who left Africa to colonize other continents were likely to have been small groups who started off with limited HLA diversity and suffered further reduction of HLA diversity due to disease,” Parham told Discovery News. “Interbreeding with archaic humans introduced additional HLA variants into the modern human population that increased their genetic viability and capacity to resist infection.”

More here.

Culinary Elitism

Bruni_new-articleInline-v2 The latest sightings of classism in food politics and gourmandizers from Frank Bruni in the NYT:

Anthony Bourdain, the part-time chef and full-time celebrity, has a tongue on him. It’s the sharpest knife in his set. He has used it to carve up vegans, whom he called the “Hezbollah-like splinter faction” of vegetarians, and the culinary moralist Alice Waters, whose rigidity is “very Khmer Rouge.”

The latest to be slashed: Paula Deen. For the uninitiated, she’s the deep-fried doyenne of a fatty, buttery subgenre of putatively Southern cooking. And Bourdain, in an interview with TV Guide published last week, branded her an outright menace to America, scolding her for “telling an already obese nation that it’s O.K. to eat food that is killing us.”

To this he added a gratuitous schoolyard-crass putdown of Deen cuisine.

Which certainly isn’t my cup of lard. But it bothers me no more than his ill-timed elitism, which Deen nailed in her response.

“Not everybody can afford to pay $58 for prime rib or $650 for a bottle of wine,” she told The New York Post. “My friends and I cook for regular families who worry about feeding their kids and paying the bills.”

Put aside her one-with-the-masses pose, ludicrous in light of the millions she has made from television shows, cookbooks, cookware, mattresses and more. She’s otherwise 100 percent justified in assailing the culinary aristocracy, to which even a self-styled bad boy like Bourdain belongs, for an often selective, judgmental and unforgiving worldview.

Approach and Avoid

Scott McLemee on humiliation, in Inside Higher Ed:

In 1939, the French anthropologist Michel Leiris published a memoir called Manhood in which he undertook an inventory of his own failures, incapacities, physical defects, bad habits, and psychosexual quirks. It is a triumph of abject self-consciousness. And the subtitle, “A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility,” seems to heighten the cruelty of the author’s self-mockery. Leiris portrays himself as a wretched specimen: machismo’s negation.

But in fact the title was not ironic, or at least not merely ironic. It was a claim to victory. “Whoever despises himself, still respects himself as one who despises,” as Nietzsche put it. In an essay Leiris wrote when the book was reissued after World War II, he described it as an effort to turn writing into a sort of bullfight: “To expose certain obsessions of an emotional or sexual nature, to admit publicly to certain deficiencies or dismays was, for the author, the means – crude, no doubt, but which he entrusts to others, hoping to see it improved – of introducing even the shadow of the bull’s horn into a literary work.”

By that standard, Leiris made the most broodingly taciturn character in Hemingway look like a total wuss.

The comment about passing along a technique to others — “hoping to see it improved” — now seems cringe-making in its own way. Leiris was addressing a small audience consisting mainly of other writers. The prospect of reality TV, online confessionals, or the industrialized production of memoirs would never have crossed his mind. He hoped his literary method — a kind of systematic violation of the author's own privacy — would develop as others experimented with it. Instead, the delivery systems have improved. They form part of the landscape Wayne Koestenbaum surveys in Humiliation, the latest volume in Picador’s Big Ideas/Small Books series.

Koestenbaum, a poet and essayist, is a professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a visiting professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art. The book is an assemblage of aphoristic fragments, notes on American popular culture and its cult of celebrity, and reflections on the psychological and social dynamics of humiliation – with a few glances at how writing, or even language itself, can expose the self to disgrace. It’s unsystematic, but in a good way.

Affirmative Action: The U.S. Experience in Comparative Perspective

Daniel Sabbagh in Daedelus:

Contested as it is today, affirmative action originally emerged as a strategy for conflict management in deeply divided societies. The important exceptions are Brazil and India; in the latter, “reservations” for lower caste members in government office and higher education and the extension of benefits to a broader group of recipients have, in fact, triggered some violent resistance by urban upper caste youth in northern states. In most cases, however, countries that believed themselves to be on the brink of civil war, or that had experienced at least some serious unrest, set up affirmative action policies to alleviate an empirically substantiated risk of mass violence. Affirmative action, then, has been understood in part as a last-resort device meant to deal with or prevent a major crisis in which the preservation of the social compact was or would have been at stake. As Justice Albie Sachs of South Africa's Constitutional Court explains, countries that introduce affirmative action “do so not to meet widely proclaimed human rights standards but, sadly, because the social and economic costs of change are outweighed by the social and economic costs of policing the status quo. Put bluntIy, affirmative action has frequently come about as a rushed and forced response to what have been called race riots.”

The United States is a case in point. Sociologist John David Skrentny has shown that direct affirmative action programs were the somewhat paradoxical outcome of a reversal in law and policy that took place in a remarkably short time frame: the second half of the 1960s. Indeed, not only did Congress fail to provide such programs with a constitutional foundation, in contrast with the pattern observed in India, Malaysia, and South Africa; it also had enacted a statute, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that seemed to preclude their coming into existence…The factor most directly accounting for this dramatic policy innovation was the bureaucratic rationalization of antidiscrimination law enforcement by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc). This development, in turn, was made possible by a highly unstable political atmosphere. Between 1964 and 1968, an unprecedented wave of race riots afflicted American cities, resulting in several hundred deaths.