metamaus

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When the German translation of Maus was published in 1987, an aggressive reporter asked Art Spiegelman: “Don’t you think that a comic book about Auschwitz is in bad taste?” He replied: “No, I thought Auschwitz was in bad taste.” Nothing could be further from the abysmal genre of “Holokitsch”, as Spiegelman calls it, than his comic-strip history of his parents’ survival in the place he calls “Mauschwitz”. If you don’t believe that a comic, by definition, can deliver the full load of tragic truth, by representing Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, and Poles as pigs then it may be time, 25 years on from its original publication, for you to read Maus yourself. MetaMaus, Spiegelman’s retrospective reflections in textual and graphic form on how he came to write Maus, is a wonderfully obsessional book in its own right, and may be a perfect point of entry for the uninitiated. You get a CD containing the two-volume original strip and you get a trip, and I use the word advisedly, around the fabulously and curiously stocked attic that is Spiegelman’s brain.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

the prague cemetery

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Napoleonic imperialists, Jesuits, Freemasons: where are the nefarious Jews? It was Barruel who first introduced them into the mix, a few years after his anti-­Masonic book, when he received a letter from a retired army officer named J. B. Simonini warning of a “Judaic sect” that was the world’s most formidable and demonic power. This irresistible Semitic gloss to the theory of a conspiracy behind all despised social trends was expanded upon by, among others, a novelist named Hermann Goedsche, who was also a Prussian agent provocateur specializing in the forging of documents to incriminate democratic leaders. Goedsche’s 1868 novel ­“Biarritz” had a chapter called “In the Jewish Cemetery of Prague,” which, detached from the novel, was widely circulated, especially after its translation into Russian, and became a source for the “Protocols.” (The chief of the Russian secret service helped advance the fraud.)

more from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein at the NY Times here.

Why Only Germany Can Fix the Euro

Blyth_411Matthias Matthijs and Mark Blyth in Foreign Affairs [h/t: Jonathan Hopkin]:

What, we must ask, has driven Europe to this point? Since the beginning of the current economic crisis, analysts have offered multiple explanations. American economists call it a “crisis of design,” arguing that Europe had it coming. Fiscal hawks the world over prefer the budgetary explanation, focusing on Greece's underreported public spending, bloated state, and generous pension system. They then generalize these problems to all of Europe (never mind that Italian private debt is relatively low, as is its public spending in comparison to most other developed countries). For their part, elites in Germany blame lagging competitiveness and “too-high” real wages in the Mediterranean countries. Still others point to intra-European macroeconomic imbalances. There is probably something to all of these explanations. But the depth and duration of this crisis call for a more complex, systemic, and historical account. After all, when explaining the collapse of a bridge, there is little point in blaming the last vehicle that crossed it.

This complex of causes does however have a common root: Germany's failure to act as a responsible hegemon in Europe. It is not that Germany should be unseating democracies and enforcing deflation, as it has attempted to do by installing Papademos in Greece and Monti in Italy. Rather, it should be stabilizing the eurozone by providing a set of public goods that the institutions and policies of the region have singularly failed to supply. To solve the European crisis and avoid repeating the mistakes of the late 1920s and the 1930s, those sitting in Berlin and Brussels should put down their Andrew Mellon and read Charles Kindleberger.

In The World in Depression: 1929-1939, Kindleberger argued that “the 1929 depression was so wide, so deep, and so long because the international economic system was rendered unstable by British inability and U.S. unwillingness to assume responsibility for stabilizing it.” Indeed, Kindleberger's critique of the United States' role in that era's crisis summitry might well have been written about Germany today: “The World Economic conference of 1933 did not lack ideas … [but] the one country capable of leadership was bemused by domestic concerns and stood aside.”

Behind Murakami’s Mirror

Baxter_1-120811_jpg_230x787_q85Charles Baxter in the NYRB:

Early in Haruki Murakami’s new novel, a character describes to an editor at a Japanese publishing house a manuscript of a novel that has come to his attention, and what he says sounds like a preview of the book we are about to read:

You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. The overall plot is a fantasy, but the descriptive detail is incredibly real. The balance between the two is excellent. I don’t know if words like “originality” or “inevitability” fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it’s not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression—it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.

After arriving at page 925 of 1Q84, the reader is likely to see an analogue. In this book, Murakami, who is nothing if not ambitious, has created a kind of alternative world, a mirror of ours, reversed. Even the book’s design emphasizes that mirroring: as you turn the pages, the page numbers climb or drop in succession along the margins, with the sequential numerals on one side in normal display type but mirror-reversed on the facing page. At one point, a character argues against the existence of a parallel world, but the two main characters in 1Q84 (Q=”a world that bears a question”) are absolutely convinced that they live not in a parallel world but in a replica one, where they do not want to be. The world we had is gone, and all we have now is a simulacrum, a fake, of the world we once had. “At some point in time,” a character muses, “the world I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.”

The De-politicization of Politics

Taylor_200x232Slawomir Sierakowski and Charles Taylor over at Eurozine:

Slawomir Sierakowski: Don't you have the impression that liberal democracy is dead? Dead, I mean, in the same way that God is dead in the writings of Nietzsche. The realization has dawned that it was always just a myth. Not only do we now know that there has never been a time when democracy existed – democracy defined not only as an act of voting, but also as genuine participation, as a situation in which the demos truly organizes around a political community – but we have also learned to accept this fact.

Charles Taylor: I definitely think that democracy, liberal democracy, is more alive when it's establishing itself. When there's such a thing as demos that is taking power from the elites or former rulers – what we might call the Tahrir Square phase. Then we have high participation and a very good understanding what the problems are. But, as we can see in American history and that of several Western European countries, this moment can go on for long. These countries had higher participation during periods when a sort of class war was being fought: Labour and Conservatives in Britain; Socialists and Gaullists in France, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany, and so on. So there was a struggle of a people, a demos: peasants and workers against the others, and these others mobilized themselves too. This led to the posing of clear alternatives, a high level of participation. The same thing is happening in India today. Among the Dalits – the lowest strata of the Indian caste system – there's this tremendous sense that democracy is a chance for them to make this very inegalitarian society less so. In the West, the more rich and educated you are, the more you vote; in India, the less you have, the less educated you are, the more you vote: Dalits and women vote more than other social groups. So the challenge for liberal democracy is to remain liberal democracy – particularly with regard to participation – when it has passed beyond the phase of struggle against the various kinds of structures that benefit the elites. Most Western democracies are at this stage and the level of participation is falling.

Brian Leiter on Nietzsche

Friedrich-NietzscheA FiveBooks Interview:

It seems like Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers whom lots of people who have never studied philosophy still enjoy reading. Why do you think he’s so appealing in this way?

I think the most important reason to start with is that he’s a great writer, and that is not the norm in philosophy. He’s a great stylist, he’s funny, he’s interesting, he’s a bit wicked, he’s rude. And he touches on almost every aspect of human life and he has something to say about it that’s usually somewhat provocative and intriguing. I think that’s the crucial reason why Nietzsche is so popular. Indeed, he’s probably more popular outside academic philosophy because he’s so hostile to the main traditions in Western philosophy.

Do you think people who haven’t studied philosophy can get quite a lot out of him? You might not really enjoy Spinoza’s Ethics, for instance, if you just picked it up randomly in a bookshop or in the library. Would you say that’s the case with Nieztsche?

I think people without that philosophical background do miss quite a lot – because a lot of what is going on in Nietzsche is reaction to and sometimes implicit dialogue with earlier philosophers. If you don’t know any Kant or Plato or the pre-Socratics, you’re not going to understand a lot of what’s motivating Nietzsche, what he’s reacting against. You get a much richer appreciation of Nietzsche if you are reading him against the background of certain parts of the history of philosophy.

Nietzsche himself was not trained in philosophy, he was trained in classics. But that included a great deal of study of ancient Greek philosophy. And then he taught himself a lot of other philosophy. Kant and Schopenhauer were particularly important to him.

An Interview With Raymond Geuss

GeussOver at the Opinionator, an interesting video:

Raymond Geuss is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, who works in the general areas of political philosophy and the history of continental philosophy. We interviewed Geuss on Oct. 7, 2010, at Ascension Parish Burial Ground in Cambridge, where Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, is buried. We included Geuss for historical perspective on the themes of our project, his unconventional and often critical views and his preference for pre-modern and ancient Greek categories of thinking. As Guess rejected most of the premises of our questions, the interview was one of the more agonistic we filmed. His unique humor and mannerisms made it one of the more enjoyable.

The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right

From Smithsonian:

SimpsonIn an episode of “The Simpsons,” mad scientist Professor Frink demonstrates his latest creation: a sarcasm detector. “Sarcasm detector? That’s a really useful invention,” says another character, the Comic Book Guy, causing the machine to explode. Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease. Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”

Sarcasm so saturates 21st-century America that according to one study of a database of telephone conversations, 23 percent of the time that the phrase “yeah, right” was used, it was uttered sarcastically. Entire phrases have almost lost their literal meanings because they are so frequently said with a sneer. “Big deal,” for example. When’s the last time someone said that to you and meant it sincerely? “My heart bleeds for you” almost always equals “Tell it to someone who cares,” and “Aren’t you special” means you aren’t.

More here.

Quantum theorem shakes foundations: The wavefunction is a real physical object

From Nature:

AwaveAt the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real.

“I don't like to sound hyperbolic, but I think the word 'seismic' is likely to apply to this paper,” says Antony Valentini, a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum foundations at Clemson University in South Carolina. Valentini believes that this result may be the most important general theorem relating to the foundations of quantum mechanics since Bell’s theorem, the 1964 result in which Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that if quantum mechanics describes real entities, it has to include mysterious “action at a distance”. Action at a distance occurs when pairs of quantum particles interact in such a way that they become entangled. But the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Imperial College London, presents a theorem showing that if a quantum wavefunction were purely a statistical tool, then even quantum states that are unconnected across space and time would be able to communicate with each other. As that seems very unlikely to be true, the researchers conclude that the wavefunction must be physically real after all. David Wallace, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford, UK, says that the theorem is the most important result in the foundations of quantum mechanics that he has seen in his 15-year professional career. “This strips away obscurity and shows you can’t have an interpretation of a quantum state as probabilistic,” he says.

More here.

The Beastly Péter Nádas

Our own Morgan Meis in Slate:

ScreenHunter_08 Nov. 18 11.45“One can't urinate with an erect prick.” This is a true statement, and one that is not often brought to light in serious works of literature. To Péter Nádas, though, it's a central insight. In his latest, epic novel, observations about pricks, pudenda, asses, mouths, and other orifices abound. The book is called Parallel Stories and it treats of all the monumental things that have happened in Central Europe from World War II until not so long ago. The impressive scope of the novel has led some breathless commentators to proclaim the novel a 21st-century War and Peace.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. You, after all, have never really heard of Péter Nádas. He is not exactly a household name in Bohemia, as of yet. Be careful though. It is getting less and less respectable not to know about Nádas. Susan Sontag proclaimed his previous novel A Book of Memories, “the greatest novel written in our time, and one of the great books of the century.” Granted, Sontag always had a soft spot for Hungarians, but one ignores that kind of effusiveness at one's own intellectual peril.

More here.

What Obama should have said about the OWS eviction from Zuccotti Park

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

ScreenHunter_07 Nov. 18 11.41If Obama had wanted to comment on the breaking up of a protest that has drawn worldwide attention (and why wouldn’t he?), … he could have ambled back to the pool reporters who fly in the rear of Air Force One. And what might he have said? How about something like this:

Hi everybody. Before we arrive, I just wanted to say that I saw what happened in New York this morning and give you my reaction. As I said shortly after the Occupy Wall Street protest began, I think it expresses the frustrations that many ordinary Americans feel. The demonstrators in New York and other cities are giving voice to a broad-based anger and frustration. We had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, with huge collateral damage throughout the country, and yet some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly are still fighting efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this mess in the first place.

Second, I think the protestors have performed a valuable public service by raising two issues we have neglected for too long: the sharp rise in income and wealth inequality, and the corrosive role that money plays in American politics. When the protestors say that rich people need to pay their fair share of taxes, and that we in Washington often pay too much attention to the wishes of Wall Street and other powerful interest groups, and too little attention to the interests of middle-class families, they are only stating what most Americans know to be true. Indeed, the money problem is getting worse. Under a recent ruling from the Supreme Court, corporations and billionaires can make unlimited contributions to political parties. Some of them, as you know, are already financing ads aimed at me and my policies.

Third, as a former lecturer on Constitutional Law, I have a great appreciation for the rights afforded Americans under the First Amendment, which includes freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but also the right to peaceably assemble.

More here.

So Much Aid, So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan

Sakuntala Narasimhan reviews Samia Altaf's book in Dawn:

ScreenHunter_06 Nov. 18 11.10Poverty persists in the developing regions; the gap between the haves and the have-nots has in fact widened in the wake of globalisation over the last two decades. Despite substantial growth in GDP, those on the lower economic rungs in these nations (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and many countries of Africa and South America) have seen their lifestyle parameters worsen.

Maternal mortality is still unacceptably high in these regions (the Asian subcontinent accounts for a quarter of global maternal deaths). Infants are dying in unacceptably large numbers, of illnesses that are preventable. So why haven’t the massive doses of aid from overseas succeeded in delivering what they set out to address?

A candid answer to that question can be found in a new publication, titled So Much Aid, So Little Development written by Samia Waheed Altaf, a Pakistani specialist in public health who was a member of an international team that oversaw the Social Action Programme (SAP) in Pakistan during the 1990s. She has observed and chronicled the way decisions are made, in disbursing aid from multilateral agencies.

Using real life stories of aid recipients and beneficiaries, the book describes how giving and receiving aid has become an end in itself — the donor agencies have the satisfaction of putting on record that so many millions were spent on such-and-such projects, while the receiving country pats itself on its back on the inflow.

Invariably, however, the American or European ‘experts’ who fly in to devise, and advise on, health projects, have no idea of the local constraints, and come up with strategies that guarantee failure in terms of real improvements in ground realities.

More here.

After the Eviction

ImageAstra Taylor in n+1:

Last night, in what seems to be part of a coordinated crackdown on occupations across the country, Zuccotti Park was raided. Thousands of us who had subscribed to the text alert system, or who got emails or phone calls or panicked Twitter messages, went to Wall Street. But we could not get near the camp. Two blocks south of Liberty Plaza on Broadway, blocked by a police barricade that circled the whole area, I found myself part of a small crowd straining to see what was happening. In the distance, Zuccotti Park was lit like a sports field, glaring eerily, and I could make out a loud speaker, blasting announcements and threats. Sounds of people chanting and screaming floated towards us. While we paced the street, seething and sorrowful, tents were trampled, people’s possessions piled up, and occupiers arrested. Later I would come across a camper I had met earlier in the day sobbing on the sidewalk. A few blocks west, maybe thirty minutes after I arrived, the police line broke so two huge dump trucks could pass through. So that was it: we, and everything we had made and were trying to make, were trash.

The authorities must be ashamed, because they so badly did not want anyone to see what happened last night. First they attacked the senses, flooding the park with bright light and using sound cannons. Then they corralled the press into pens, arrested reporters, and shut down airspace over lower Manhattan, so that no news stations could broadcast from above. As we strained our necks over their barricades they kept telling us that there was nothing to see. But clearly there was! We knew they were lying. And when we told them so, they, with batons in hand, forced us away. We were herded like sheep, and I felt like one, meekly following orders, a terrible coward. Those who resisted—those who stood their ground on a public sidewalk we all have a right to stand on—got maced in the face, right in the eyes. The authorities so badly did not want anyone to see what happened last night they were willing to temporarily blind us.

Occupy vs Tea Party: What Their Twitter Networks Reveal

Occupy_larger-thumb-600x429-147397Peter Aldhous in New Scientist:

According to some political commentators, Occupy Wall Street is the left's answer to the Tea Party – driven by a similar anger towards elites. But the social networks of people tweeting about the two movements suggest that they have rather different dynamics.

Those tweeting about the Tea Party emerge as a tight-knit “in crowd”, following one another's tweets. By contrast, the network of people tweeting about Occupy consists of a looser series of clusters, in which the output of a few key people is being vigorously retweeted.

The Occupy network also has many casual unconnected tweeters, shown to the bottom right of the diagram below. Whether Occupy takes off as a coherent movement may depend on its success in bringing these potential recruits into the fold.

This view of how the two movements are impacting the Twitterverse comes from Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation in Belmont, California. “These are very differently organised groups,” he says. “Occupy is much more diffuse and diverse.”

Smith has analysed tweets containing “occupywallstreet” or “teaparty”, drawing connections between the Twitter users involved if one follows one other (shown in grey), or if they retweeted, replied or mentioned one another (shown in blue).

The Occupy network above visualises almost 1400 tweets posted in less than 30 minutes on 15 November. The size of each user depends on their number of followers. The clusters, with users shown in different colours, are defined by an algorithm that looks for “islands” after subtracting the influence of people who “bridge” different parts of the network.

Occupy's clusters look like a series of firework explosions, as supporters retweet the posts of a few key individuals and organisations.

Social Networks Matter: Friends Increase the Size of Your Brain

The-Social-NetworkEric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

In the 1990s the British evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar championed an idea known as the Social Brain Hypothesis. He found that mammals who lived in the largest social groups often had the largest neocortex to brain ratio. Since the neocortex — composed chiefly of gray matter that forms the outermost “rind” of our cantaloupe-sized stuff of thought — is associated with sensory perception and abstract reasoning, Dunbar hypothesized that the demands of group living resulted in a selection pressure that promoted the expansion of neocortical growth.

In 2009 I co-authored a study in the Journal of Human Evolution with colleagues Evan MacLean, Nancy Barrickman, and Christine Wall of Duke University that found no relationship between relative brain size and group size in lemurs (a clade of strepsirrhine primates that last shared a common ancestor with the haplorhine monkeys and apes about 75 million years ago). However, where it comes to these more recently evolved haplorhines, the data is remarkably consistent with Dunbar’s interpretation (see Figure 1 below).

Primates, and humans in particular, are such good social cooperators because we can empathize with others and coordinate our activities to build consensus. It is what also makes us so remarkably deceitful, allowing us to manipulate other members of our group by intentionally making them think we will behave one way when our actual plans are quite different. A successful primate is therefore one who can keep track of these subtle details in behavior and anticipate their potential outcome.

But therein lies a chicken-and-egg problem. How do we know whether it’s the social networks that have promoted an increase in neocortical growth or whether that same expansion of gray matter simply allowed these social networks to expand? A new study published in the November 4th edition of Science addressed this question by housing monkeys in different sized groups to find out if their neocortical gray matter increased as the number of individuals grew.

An Adventure in the Nth Dimension

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

SphereThe area enclosed by a circle is πr2. The volume inside a sphere is 4/3πr3. These are formulas I learned too early in life. Having committed them to memory as a schoolboy, I ceased to ask questions about their origin or meaning. In particular, it never occurred to me to wonder how the two formulas are related, or whether they could be extended beyond the familiar world of two- and three-dimensional objects to the geometry of higher-dimensional spaces. What’s the volume bounded by a four-dimensional sphere? Is there some master formula that gives the measure of a round object in n dimensions?

Some 50 years after my first exposure to the formulas for area and volume, I have finally had occasion to look into these broader questions. Finding the master formula for n-dimensional volumes was easy; a few minutes with Google and Wikipedia was all it took. But I’ve had many a brow-furrowing moment since then trying to make sense of what the formula is telling me. The relation between volume and dimension is not at all what I expected; indeed, it’s one of the zaniest things I’ve ever come upon in mathematics. I’m appalled to realize that I have passed so much of my life in ignorance of this curious phenomenon. I write about it here in case anyone else also missed school on the day the class learned n-dimensional geometry.

More here.

Has a Harvard Professor Mapped Out the Next Step for Occupy Wall Street?

Lawrence Lessig's call for state-based activism on behalf of a Constitutional Convention could provide the uprooted movement with a political project for winter.

Alesh Houdek in The Atlantic:

ScreenHunter_05 Nov. 17 13.28The banking system that's brought us the current crisis remains in power, barely chastened. “Why?” ask the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Lawrence Lessig has an answer. In his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It, he spends 20 pages reviewing the the 30 years of deregulation that led up to the financial crisis and outlining our present circumstances. In fact, this book, published just before Occupy Wall Street began, is perfectly positioned to become the movement's handbook. While few protesters will need convincing that the government is corrupted by money, the book lays out the case in a such a comprehensive and persuasive manner — and proposes such specific and radical solutions — that it seems tailor-made for the Occupy movement. And it's ambitious proposal for state-based activism on behalf of a Constitutional Convention could provide the movement with a next organizing step as it nears its two-month anniversary Thursday — and faces such questions as how to ride out the winter and how to respond to police crackdowns.

Lessig, director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a professor at Harvard Law School, spent 10 years fighting to reform the nation's copyright laws. The effort produced a half-dozen books, led to the creation of the Creative Commons licensing system and a case before the Supreme Court, which ultimately failed. Rather than dissuading him, Lessig concluded four years ago that this failure perfectly situated him to take on an infinitely harder challenge — the reform of Congress itself. The shift in focus led him to leave Stanford University and relocate his family to the east coast to teach at Harvard in 2008, where he began the research and activity that gave rise to his latest book.

More here.