Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

The art that flourished in Italy in that period has come to be known as Mannerism, and from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries it was considered of no intrinsic interest, merely (as one art historian summarized it) “a servile, uncritical imitation of the manners of the great masters, and especially of the anatomical exaggerations of Michelangelo’s figure style.” In the twentieth century, parallels with aspects of modernism—those expressive distortions of the figure that, as Matisse would have it, turned the image of a woman into a painting—breathed new life into an art that had lain neglected for centuries. To eyes liberated from the old canons of realism, the Mannerists could be seen not as weak imitators but as true originals whose disproportionate emotional and intellectual demands on their own art made them seem uncannily contemporary: the American kids on their Fulbrights are crazy for them, Roberto Longhi was to note, with some condescension, in the 1950s. And yet even then, and still today, it would have been hard to argue that the great Italian art of the sixteenth century was Florentine Mannerism—not when the likes of Titian, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese were flourishing in Venice, which despite certain setbacks was largely insulated from the warfare and religious upheaval common elsewhere in Italy. The Venetians, and especially Tintoretto, may at times show mild affinities with their central Italian contemporaries, but they never betray the anxiety and inner conflict we find among the Mannerists.

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From EurekAlert:

A study published in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience by Yves De Koninck and Robert Bonin, two researchers at Université Laval, reveals that it is possible to relieve pain hypersensitivity using a new method that involves rekindling pain so that it can subsequently be erased. This discovery could lead to novel means to alleviate chronic pain. The researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec (IUSMQ) were inspired by previous work on memory conducted some fifteen years ago. These studies had revealed that when a memory is reactivated during recall, its neurochemical encoding is temporarily unlocked. Simultaneous administration of a drug that blocks neurochemical reconsolidation of the memory results in its erasure.

The investigators wanted to see whether a similar mechanism was at play during neurochemical encoding of pain sensitization. To this end, they injected capsaicin in the foot of mice. Capsaicin, the pungent chemical in chili pepper, triggers a burning sensation. The procedure, which causes no physical damage, triggers pain hypersensitivity through a process of protein synthesis in the spinal cord. After capsaicin injections, the mechanical pressure at which mice would flinch was about a third of that in the normal situation. Three hours later, the researchers administered a second dose of capsaicin and, at the same time, a drug that blocks protein synthesis. The hypersensitivity then vanished rapidly. Within less than 2 hours, the pressure tolerated by the mice was back to 70% of normal.

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Samira Shackle in The New Humanist:

Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast:

One has to believe that Brazil was at the receiving end of some great celestial wrath. In the days before the game, there was talk of nothing else but Neymar, Brazil’s key striker and talisman, who was to miss the semifinal due to an injury inflicted on him in the quarters. The team and its management wallowed in self-pity, dwelling more on his loss—and the loss, also, of captain Thiago Silva, owing to an accumulation of yellow cards—than on the Germans. In being so wrapped in resentment over the absent Neymar, they paid the Germans scant respect. There has been a palpable hubris in Brazil these last weeks, hubris as thick as the local feijoada. Brazilians have felt entitled to this World Cup, forgetting the truth that this Brazil team is probably the worst to have taken the field for the country.

Brazilian strategy, from the start of the cup, was four-pronged: Make teams play you on reputation, not on true ability; let Neymar score the goals (since nobody else can); let Thiago Silva marshal a semblance of defense; and let the crowd do the rest. That strategy unraveled completely Tuesday night, in the face of a massacre.

More here.

Also see this (thanks to Brooks Riley): If Milton Did Post-Match Analysis for Germany-Brazil.

Daisy Rockwell in Bookslut:

In his new book A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna, author Amitava Kumar writes about his hometown, Patna, in Bihar, India. Not meant to be a comprehensive history, it's a slim volume that attempts to capture not just the spirit of a city, but also Kumar's ambivalent relationship to Patna, as an emigré with pangs of guilt for having left. I found the book was witty, thought-provoking, and eminently readable, but I still had many questions for the author, and so I contacted him for an interview, and he graciously accepted.

Your hometown of Patna, in India, is the kind of place that people want to leave, if they can, and have trouble feeling proud of. Is there an equivalent city or region in the United States that would help American readers get an idea of what Patna is like?

You remember what James Carville said about Pennsylvania? It has Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle. When I heard that remark, I was living in State College, PA. At first I chuckled, and then I stopped. I began to wonder, if he's saying this about State College, PA, what would he say about Patna.

They say that rats desert a sinking ship, but in A Matter of Rats, the actual rodents are happy to remain in Patna. In the book, you wonder if it's people like you that are the real rats, the people who have left and not stuck around to “make a difference”? If Patna is the central Pennsylvania-Alabama (but worse!) of India, it's easy to understand why people leave, but what makes them stay, or even return?

It is home. I think that is what it is. My parents would have felt out of place anywhere else. I had doubts about those of my friends who never left Patna, but I have seen what some of them have accomplished over these years. In limited circumstances, they have built something special. What they have made appears especially startling because it is rooted. I sometimes envy their sense of belonging.

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Santiago Zabala in the Columbia University Press blog:

Anyone who questions or raises doubts over analytic philosophy’s role or significance today indirectly pulls a fire alarm in our framed democracies, our culture, and our universities. The doubter will immediately be attacked theoretically, academically, and probably also personally. This has happened to me (and many other continental philosophers) on several occasions. It does not bother me at all. It’s just a pity things are this way. The books, essays, and articles that set off the alarm are not meant to dismiss analytic philosophy but simply to remind everyone it’s not the only way to philosophize. My concern is educational (given the prevalence of analytic programs in universities), political (given its imperialistic approach), and also professional (for the little space given to continental philosophers in academia). The point is that we are not even allowed to generalize or be ironic, an essential component of philosophy as Gianni Vattimo andSlavoj Zizek show in their practice.

The problem is not that John Searle was honored by George W. Bush in 2004 (with a National Humanities Medal) or that the research of other analytic philosophers is often funded by government grants but rather that these grants are not always distributed among other traditions. After all, philosophers are not supposed to simply analyze concepts in their university offices but also to engage with the political, economic, and cultural environments that surrounds them, as Judith Butler, Peter Sloterdijk, and Simon Critchley have done so well for years.

Sure, one must defend one’s philosophical position, but it’s not a matter of truth or honor. In philosophy and the humanities in general it has never been about being correct or on the right side of history but rather interpreting differently in order for the “conversation to continue,” as Richard Rorty used to say. This conversation is probably also what drove another great American philosopher, Arthur Danto, to stress the “value of letting go.” After all, “philosophical disagreement,” he said, “is not so important” because the “important thing is to be able to start over again someplace else.”

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Clifford Thompson at Vox Populi:

It should not be necessary to say that slavery, by its very nature, in its mere existence, is evil; that the gentlest slave owner is at best a morally compromised individual and at worst a sick one; and that we must never lose sight of these facts. But I say it, first, because there are still those who would de-emphasize the evil of slavery if not actually sing its praises (hello, Cliven Bundy), and second, I want no one to misinterpret what I feel moved to write.

Which is: that a (somewhat random) survey of well-known Holocaust memoirs and black American slave narratives would suggest that slavery is to the Holocaust as the darkest, most dispiriting and heart-sickening music is to a continuous, ear-splitting shriek. To experience life in a concentration camp — if it could be called life — was to undergo a uniform process of person-grinding that varied only to the extent that some took longer than others to be ground to nothing. (This leaves out the few who were able to maneuver into positions of relative privilege and the millions who were murdered outright). The world portrayed by Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz, by Elie Wiesel inNight, by many of those interviewed by Lyn Smith for Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust is one where escape was neither possible nor hoped for, where one survived outwardly by dying inwardly — cutting oneself off from human psychological need, from humanness itself. Levi wrote that he and those around him in Auschwitz became less than men. (The exceptions here were those few who, like Viktor Frankl, resisted the outer horror through strong inner lives, as Frankl recounted in Man’s Search for Meaning.)

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Chris Bray at Bookforum:

A WARRIOR WITHOUT WAR, William Tecumseh Sherman was an ambitious West Point graduate who stood at the periphery while other men went into combat: garrisoned in coastal Florida at the edge of the fighting during the Second Seminole War, sent first to Pittsburgh as a recruiting officer and later to California as an administrator during the war with Mexico.

The disappointed soldier eventually resigned his commission and turned to business, with mixed results and little happiness. He was a reasonably capable banker for a bit, a bad lawyer for a bit less, and the enthusiastic superintendent of a Louisiana military academy right up until the moment Southern states began to secede. Marooned during an intermediate period on a farm in the remote precincts of Kansas, Sherman took a dark view of his prospects. “I look upon myself as a dead cock in the pit, not worthy of further notice,” he wrote to his absent wife. The Civil War—arriving in his early forties—came as a kind of gift, delivering him from professional death.

Endlessly frustrated in his martial ambitions, he sulked. Sherman has always been known as an odd duck: depressive, erratic, prone to fits of mania and abiding personal grudges.

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James Heffernan at The Modernist Lab:

In early October 1922, more than four years after her first exposure to Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf wrote the following to the art critic and philosopher Roger Fry:

My great adventure is really Proust. Well– what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped–and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical–like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses; to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished– My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for £4.10.^[3]

This passage clearly suggests that Woolf not only read all ofUlysses but loathed it quite as much as she adored A La Recherche. But the truth is much more complicated– and just about as fascinating as any episode of literary history can be.

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Owen Clayton at The New Statesman:

The most prominent European war poet was Guillaume Apollinaire, a naturalised Frenchman of Polish descent who died of influenza at the end of the war. His collection Calligrammes stands as a landmark achievement in the development of literary modernism. The book’s title refers to Apollinaire’s visual poetry, which attempted to achieve with words what Picasso and others had been doing in fine art. His poem “Du coton dans les oreilles” (“Cotton in Your Ears”) begins by re-creating the explosion of artillery shells typographically, the words tumbling upwards on the page.

Apollinaire felt that the war represented a new era, one that would require an original language. As he writes in “Victoire”: “. . . the old languages are so close to death/It’s really from habit and cowardice/That we still use them for poetry”. His visual style was an attempt at a new language, and one could argue that this experimentation has had a more lasting literary influence than the conventional, ornate poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Laurence Binyon or Robert Graves.

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Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Which would you prefer: pain or boredom? Given the choice, many people would rather give themselves mild electric shocks than sit idly in a room for 15 minutes, according to a study published today in Science¹. The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in. “We lack a comfort in just being alone with our thoughts,” says Malia Mason, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the study. “We’re constantly looking to the external world for some sort of entertainment.” It was this observation that led social psychologist Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and his team to embark on the study. Wilson and his colleagues began by asking undergraduate students to stash their mobile phones and other distractions, and to sit in a sparsely furnished room for up to 15 minutes. Afterwards, nearly half of the 409 participants said that they did not enjoy the experience. The researchers were surprised. “We have this huge brain that’s full of pleasant memories and has the ability to tell stories and construct fantasies,” says Wilson, who says he often entertains himself as he falls asleep at night by imagining that he is a castaway on an unpopulated island. “It shouldn’t be that hard.” Wilson’s team tried to make it easier. They decided that a more comfortable setting might make the experience more pleasant, so they repeated the experiment, this time allowing participants to perform the exercise at home. Nearly one-third of the study subjects later admitted to cheating.

Perhaps, the researchers reasoned, it was too difficult for participants to settle on a topic to think about. But advising participants to select a topic before the experiment also did not help.Just how uncomfortable was the experience? In the next experiment, participants were given a small electric shock — akin to a jolt of static electricity — that was so unpleasant that three-quarters of them said they would be willing to pay not to experience the shock again. Yet when they were placed in the room to sit alone with their thoughts, 67% of male participants and 25% of female subjects were so eager to find something to do that they shocked themselves voluntarily.

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William J. Broad in The New York Times:

James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math. But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings. He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.” After that, he was fired. His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you. Down one floor from his office complex is Math for America, a foundation he set up to promote math teaching in public schools. Nearby, on Madison Square Park, is the National Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, an educational center he helped finance. It opened in 2012 and has had a quarter million visitors. Dr. Simons, 76, laughs a lot. He talks of “the fun” of his many careers, as well as his failings and setbacks. In a recent interview, he recounted a life full of remarkable twists, including the deaths of two adult children, all of which seem to have left him eager to explore what he calls the mysteries of the universe.

…Dr. Simons received his doctorate at 23; advanced code breaking for the National Security Agency at 26; led a university math department at 30; won geometry’s top prize at 37; founded Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, at 44; and began setting up charitable foundations at 56. This year, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, an elite body that Congress founded during Lincoln’s presidency to advise the federal government. With a fortune estimated at $12.5 billion, Dr. Simons now runs a tidy universe of science endeavors, financing not only math teachers but hundreds of the world’s best investigators, even as Washington has reduced its support for scientific research. His favorite topics include gene puzzles, the origins of life, the roots of autism, math and computer frontiers, basic physics and the structure of the early cosmos.

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Michelle Lougee. Dinoflagellate. 2014.

Plastic bags, 55” x 34” x 30”

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