What is wrong with playing god?

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

God-adam-handsThe British Parliament can be an archaic, backward-looking institution, wedded to tradition, and not known for taking a revolutionary stance. Yet its members have just made a groundbreaking decision, one that no other legislature has so far been willing to contemplate. They approved legislation that makes Britain the first country formally to allow the creation of what many call ‘three-parent babies’. Supporters say the procedure will enable women to avoid passing on certain severe and even deadly genetically inherited diseases. But many regard the new law as an unwise, even immoral, move — the first step toward the creation of ‘designer babies’. Some even see it as a new experiment in eugenics.

‘Three-parent babies’ is a sensationalized term to describe a special form of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, that is better labeled ‘mitochondrial transfer’ or ‘mitochondrial donation’. Every human cell comprises two main parts: the nucleus and the cytoplasm. The nucleus contains the DNA, the genetic code that helps shape inherited traits. The cytoplasm is the workshop of the cell, where most day-to-day functions occur. Among its constituent parts are mitochondria, tiny organelles whose job it is to provide energy. Each mitochondrion contains tiny amounts of its own DNA, some 37 genes compared with the 20,000 or so in the nucleus. (It is thought that way back in evolutionary history, a free living bacterium became trapped in a host cell, where it boosted the cell’s capacity to produce energy; over time, it evolved into an organelle, an intimate part of the cell, but retained its own DNA.)

Mitochondrial DNA plays no part in determining an individual’s inherited traits, such as those that shape appearance or talents. But if it malfunctions, it can cause terrible conditions like muscle weakness, seizures, blindness, deafness, organ failure and even death.

More here.

Israel: The Stark Truth

David Shulman in the New York Review of Books:

ScreenHunter_1099 Mar. 24 13.13Benjamin Netanyahu has won again. He will have no difficulty putting together a solid right-wing coalition. But the naked numbers may be deceptive. What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is in no way inclined to make peace. It has given a clear mandate for policies that preclude any possibility of moving toward a settlement with the Palestinians and that will further deepen Israel’s colonial venture in the Palestinian territories, probably irreversibly.

Netanyahu’s shrill public statements during the last two or three days before the vote may account in part for Likud’s startling margin of victory. For the first time since his Bar Ilan speech in 2009, he explicitly renounced a two-state solution and swore that no Palestinian state would come into existence on his watch. He promised vast new building projects in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. He made it clear that Israel would make no further territorial concessions, anywhere, since any land that would be relinquished would, in his view, immediately be taken over by Muslim terrorists.

And then there was his truly astonishing, by now notorious statement on election day itself, in which he urged Jewish voters to rush to the polls because “the Arabs are voting in droves.”

More here.

This is how Fox News spreads hate

Paul Rosenberg in Salon:

Hannity_jindal_maherIt may be hard to fathom or remember, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the American public responded with an increased level of acceptance and support for Muslims. President Bush—who had successfully courted the Muslim vote in 2000—went out of his way to praise American Muslims on numerous occasions in 2001 and 2002. However, the seeds were already being planted that would change that drastically over time. Within a few short years, a small handful of fringe anti-Muslim organizations—almost entirely devoid of any real knowledge or expertise, some drawing on age-old ethno-religious conflicts—managed to hijack the public discourse about Islam, first by stoking fears, grabbing attention with their emotional messaging, then by consolidating their newfound social capital, forging ties with established elite organizations, and ultimately building their own organizational and media infrastructure.

How this all happened is the subject of a fascinating new book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream,” by sociologist Christopher Bail, of the University of North Carolina. The book not only lays bare the behind-the-scenes story of a momentous shift in public opinion, it employs cutting-edge computer analysis techniques applied to large archives of data to develop a new theoretical outlook, capable of making sense of the whole field of competing organizations struggling to shape public opinion, not just studying one or two the most successful ones. The result is not only a detailed account of a specific, significant, and also very pernicious example of cultural evolution, but also a case study in how to more rigorously study cultural evolution more generally in the future. In the process, it sheds considerable light on the struggles involved, and the difficulties faced by those trying to fight back against this rising tide of misdirected fear, anger and hatred.

More here.

Diary of a Surgery

Angelina Jolie Pitt in The New York Times:

AngelinaLOS ANGELES — TWO years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy. A simple blood test had revealed that I carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene. It gave me an estimated 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. I lost my mother, grandmother and aunt to cancer. I wanted other women at risk to know about the options. I promised to follow up with any information that could be useful, including about my next preventive surgery, the removal of my ovaries and fallopian tubes. I had been planning this for some time. It is a less complex surgery than the mastectomy, but its effects are more severe. It puts a woman into forced menopause. So I was readying myself physically and emotionally, discussing options with doctors, researching alternative medicine, and mapping my hormones for estrogen or progesterone replacement. But I felt I still had months to make the date. Then two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor with blood-test results. “Your CA-125 is normal,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief. That test measures the amount of the protein CA-125 in the blood, and is used to monitor ovarian cancer. I have it every year because of my family history. But that wasn’t all. He went on. “There are a number of inflammatory markers that are elevated, and taken together they could be a sign of early cancer.” I took a pause. “CA-125 has a 50 to 75 percent chance of missing ovarian cancer at early stages,” he said. He wanted me to see the surgeon immediately to check my ovaries. I went through what I imagine thousands of other women have felt. I told myself to stay calm, to be strong, and that I had no reason to think I wouldn’t live to see my children grow up and to meet my grandchildren.

I called my husband in France, who was on a plane within hours. The beautiful thing about such moments in life is that there is so much clarity. You know what you live for and what matters. It is polarizing, and it is peaceful.

More here.

The Winners of the 3QD Politics & Social Science Prize 2015

PolWinner2015 Strange 2015 P SSc Politics Charme Quark 2015

Kenneth Roth has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

  1. Top Quark, $500: Kenan Malik, Assimilation vs. Multiculturism
  2. Strange Quark, $200: Xavier Marquez, The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
  3. Charm Quark, $100: Omar Ali, Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…

Here is what Ken had to say about them:

It was a pleasure to read an extraordinary group of essays, but it was difficult to rank them, since all deserve recognition. Still, in my view, three essays stand out, and even suggest an ordering:

I give the top prize to Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism. It takes on a timely, important and difficult topic—how should European nations adjust to their increasingly diverse societies, particularly their growing numbers of Muslims? The essay elegantly contrasts British multiculturism and French assimlationism, but instead of finding one superior, it sees each as flawed, though in different ways. Its critiques are clear and astute, and instead of stopping there, it goes on to prescribe an approach of “lived diversity” rather than treating people by rigid categories, and encourages a revival of civil society organizations that cross ethnic and religious boundaries. European (and other) leaders would do well to read the article and learn from it.

The second prize goes to Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm. After placing the Saudi monarchy in a global perspective of other monarchies and family dynasties, it insightfully analyzes the workings of this complex family business: how it chooses the CEO aka king, how it curtails any penchant to excessive reform or divisive politicking, how it keeps in touch with popular sentiments without such dangerous institutions as elections or a free press, and how it manages to keep the vast number of competing princes feeling they have more to gain from upholding the family business than from the fratricide common to other monarchies. I left with a far better understanding of how this remarkably resilient institution has managed to weather the difficult political currents shaking the region.

The third prize goes to Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…. It focuses mainly on Pakistan's blasphemy laws, which have been the source of executions, lynching, and long jail sentences, often against seemingly arbitrary victims, usually religious minorities. The article begins by placing these laws in context: far worse than both the relatively constrained laws left by British colonialists and the superficially comparable laws maintained elsewhere to defend other religions. The article is at its most perceptive in explaining why, despite the increasingly global conversation permitted by the Internet, which would seem to make acceptance of “blasphemous” statements an unavoidable necessity, powerful interests in Pakistan are pushing to maintain the blasphemy prohibition, whether as a tool to suppress “uppity” minorities or as a way to discourage possible secularist rapprochement with India that might threaten the rationale for the military's budget and prerogatives.

My thanks to 3QD for giving me the honor of serving as judge. And, foremost, my gratitude to these and the many other writers who make 3QD such an essential stop for any serious reader on the Web.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today—just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Many thanks also, of course, to Ken Roth for doing the final judging and for his liking of 3QD.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me, Sughra Raza, and Carla Goller. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Information: the Measure of All Things? Part II: The Genius in the Gene

170px-DNA_orbit_animated_static_thumbby Yohan J. John

In Part I of this series, we looked at how the concept of information brought communication and computation together. Claude Shannon and the other pioneers of information theory showed that discrete symbols could be used to encode and transmit almost any sort of message, and that binary digits were the simplest possible symbols. Meanwhile Alan Turing and the computer scientists demonstrated that strings of symbols could serve as the inputs to simple machines that could transform them into new and useful output strings.

Information theory arose from the question of how best to transmit discrete signals from point A to point B, with little to say about the purpose of the signals. Computability theory was born of a complementary quest: the study of how to transform and manipulate symbols in the service of some purpose. The birth of modern genetics reveals a similar complementary relationship. Two broad research questions arose in the tumult of 19th century biology: the question of how hereditary information was communicated from one generation to the next, and the question of how an organism develops, starting from the moment of conception. The first question gave rise to transmission genetics, while the second gave rise to developmental biology. These questions proved to be intimately related: progress in answering one was often contingent on developments in answering the other. The overlap between the answers to these questions was recognized in the twin roles of the DNA molecule: it has been described as both the vector of hereditary transmission, and the bearer of a developmental program that 'specifies' or even 'computes' the organism. We will now follow the path that led to the DNA molecule, a path that emerged from the confluence of evolutionary theory, cell biology, and biochemistry. [1]

The nature of heredity

An awareness of hereditary inheritance must have arisen very early in human culture. It can't have been very difficult to realize that the properties of an organism — its traits — tend to reappear in its offspring. Children typically share many features with their parents. Ancient peoples clearly recognized inheritance of characteristics in plants and animals too. Humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals since prehistoric times, gradually amplifying useful traits with every generation. The dog is believed to have been domesticated from a wolf-like ancestor between 11 and 16 thousand years ago. And rice and wheat were domesticated between 8 and 13 thousand years ago. The ability to make use of hereditary inheritance precedes the dawn of civilization.

Read more »

A Chronicle of the Minutiae

by Namit Arora

A review of Odysseus Abroad, a novel by Amit Chaudhuri.

Odysseus_AbroadAnanda Sen, the young Bengali protagonist in Amit Chaudhuri’s sixth novel, Odysseus Abroad, is an aspiring poet, singer of ragas, and seeker of the romantic spark in London, 1985. Raised in Bombay but with ancestral roots in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Ananda has been studying English literature for over two years at a university in London—all details that also describe Chaudhuri’s own past. Ananda’s maternal uncle, Radhesh Majumdar—a character based on Chaudhuri’s own uncle—is in London too, in a Belsize Park bedsit for 24 years. Odysseus Abroad is a portrait of Ananda, Radhesh, and their relationship, rendered through their memories, everyday experiences, and responses to contemporary British culture.

Odysseus Abroad is not a traditional novel. It has no plot, no existential crisis, no darkness lurking in any soul; nor does it abound in moral conflicts or messy heartbreaks. In a recent interview, Chaudhuri, professor of contemporary literature at a British university, claimed to have ‘rejected the monumental superstructure of the novel in favour of the everyday rhythms of the day.’ Sadly, in Odysseus Abroad, this feels like the author taking away the cake and not offering any pudding either.

The novel opens with Ananda, 22, who dreams of getting published in Poetry Review, practices singing twice a day, and frets about his noisy Indian neighbors above and below his flat. From the daily rhythm of noises—creaking floorboards, kitchen sounds, a new kind of ‘angry, insistent’ music called ‘rap’—he has figured out the patterns of life of the young Gujaratis upstairs. Though ‘disengaged from Indian politics’, he is ‘dilettantishly addicted to British politicians—the debates; the mock outrage; the amazing menu of accents’ on TV. We learn that his privileged class status in India—marked by a ‘cursory but proud knowledge of Bengali literature’, ‘lettuce sandwiches as a teatime snack’, speaking English at home, ‘a diet of Agatha Christie and Earl Stanley Gardner’ in his early teens—meant that he remained largely oblivious to class until he came to England.

Read more »

Monday Poem

I’m still dwelling on how ironic all the feverish proclamations
of capitalism are going to look someday.
…………………… —Justin E.H. Smith

Gabriels horn 2

Gabriel’s Mad Ave. Apocalyptic Horn

I’m through with dumpster dinners
at the corner of Wall Street and New

I’m so unsold by the Coke sign’s faded blush
that thrusts from desiccated dollar dunes
—an embarrassment

a crass embellishment
stuffed in the cleavage of a spent whore
who promised lasting bliss but ended a hag
with smeared lips and hellish scent

The cyclone’s gone that slew the sacred cow
when gangs of suited crooks blew through
with milking stools to sit beside her tits of gold
with digits itching to draw her dry
with lips pursed to suck her blood
with that singular sort of lust,
twisted as a rusty screw,
that drills down and down
until nothing’s left to suck or bust

I’m done— we’ve lurched too long through
spoiled earth as Gabriel’s Mad Ave. apocalyptic horn
more croaked than blew
.

by Jim Culleny
9/13/14

Reviewed: The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being; Grandmother Fish

by Paul Braterman

In my last post, I said that the right way to undermine creationism is to promote appreciation of the science of evolution, by presenting it in ways that are engaging, enjoyable, and above all personal. In this post, I review two more books that succeed in doing this; Alice Roberts' The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being and Jonathan Tweet's Grandmother Fish.

UnnamedGrandmother Fish is a book like no other I have seen. It is an introduction to evolution, for adults to read to their pre-school children. It is also much more than that, and comes with well-earned commendations from Stephen Pinker, David Sloan Wilson, and Daniel Dennett.

We start with a delightfully drawn Grandmother Fish, who lived a long, long, long, long, long time ago and could wiggle and swim fast and had jaws to chomp with. At once, this is made personally relevant: “Can you wiggle? … Can you chomp?” We proceed by way of Grandmother Reptile, Grandmother Mammal and Grandmother Ape, to Grandmother Human, who lived a long time ago, could walk on two feet and talk and tell stories, and whose many different grandchildren

could wiggle and chomp and crawl and breathe and squeak and cuddle and grab and hoot and

walk and talk, and I see one of them … right here!

Each stage has its own little phylogenetic tree, with the various descendants of each successive “grandmother” shown as each other's cousins, and there is an overall tree, covering all living things, that anyone (of any age) will find interesting to browse on. Finally, after some 20 pages of simple text and lavish illustration, there are around 4 pages of more detailed information, directed at the adult reading the book, but to which I expect children to return, as they mature, remembering the book with affection, as they surely will, years or even decades later.

Read more »

Fatwas and fundamental truths

by Mandy de Waal

A South African literary event called 'The Time of the Writer' was to have been a moment of celebration for local writer Zainub Priya Dala. The author's debut novel, called What About Meera, was due to have been launched at the Durban festival.

Instead Dala was nursing injuries after being attacked at knifepoint with a brick and called [Salman] “Rushdie's Bitch!” The attack – which shocked and outraged SA's literary community – happened one day after Dala had expressed an appreciation of Rushdie's work.

Priya3-1

ZP Dala – Photo courtesy of BooksLive

“Dala was followed from the festival hotel and was harassed by three men in a vehicle who pushed her car off the road,” a statement by Dala's publishers read. “When she stopped, two of the men advanced to her car, one holding a knife to her throat and the other hitting her in the face with a brick while calling her ‘Rushdie's bitch'. She has been treated by her doctor for soft-tissue trauma, and has reported the incident to the police.”

The author – who is also a therapist who counsels autistic children – said through her publishers that she believed the attack stemmed from her voicing support for Rushdie's writing style. Dala was at a school's writing forum and was asked which writers she admired. She offered a list of writers including Arundhati Roy, and said that she “liked Salman Rushdie's literary style.” After saying she appreciated Rushdie, a number of teachers and students stood up and walked out in protest. The next day Dala was attacked.

After discovering what happened to Dala, Rushdie Tweeted: “I'm so sorry to hear this. I hope you're recovering well. All good wishes.” Dala's response? “Thank you. I have my family and children around me and am recovering.”

SA literary site, www.bookslive.co.za stated that “the assault counts as an extension of Rushdie's complicated history with South Africa.” BooksLive explained that Rushdie “was famously ‘disinvited' from a literary festival in 1988, after the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa was issued against him and his novel, The Satanic Verses.”

Read more »

All The Wrong Places

by Lisa Lieberman

Walden Lodge

Hollywood, California, Summer 1941

I believe that the person you are when you're eight years old is the person you really are.

I was creeping up on Geoffrey as he sat meditating on the lawn—not that I could be invisible, my girl's body draped in my mother's mink coat—but Geoffrey was in one of his trances. I could have danced naked in front of him and he'd have continued to stare into the void.

Sometimes I did go naked; lots of people did AllTheWrongPlacesFrontat Walden Lodge in those days. My father was known as a bohemian and bathing suits were optional around the pool, although you had to dress for dinner in the lodge. Winters could be chilly even in Southern California, but there were always a few diehards who went skinny dipping regardless of the weather. Starlets who'd do anything to get a part in one of Father's pictures. Englishmen, like Geoffrey, who'd gone to boarding schools where they made you bathe in cold water, year-round. He got used to it, found it invigorating. “Manly,” as my brother Gray put it, the arch tone in his voice laced with affection.

“Gray, darling. How would you know?” said Vivien, my mother, in the same tone, minus the affection.

I paused to kick off Vivien's high heels, which kept sinking into the earth. Barefoot, I moved stealthily over the silky grass, stalking my prey. The air smelled of citrus, the overripe sweetness of oranges that had fallen on the ground and were beginning to rot in the sun. We picked as many as we could, but there were always fruits we couldn't reach.

Years later, when I was in Sicily filming a B-movie with Adrian, beautiful, wounding Adrian, we stayed in a pensione in Taormina. Three months with my love in Italia! The movie was forgettable but I finagled a print from the director, mostly because of my scenes with Adrian. The Italian actress they got to dub my dialogue had this wonderful, husky voice. It's a treat watching us in Italian, where you don't have to pretend to follow the plot.

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So you want to launch a Startup?

by Ahmed Humayun

SeedlingConventional wisdom has it that if you don't like your job or want to pursue your passion or just have a great idea, you should just go ahead and launch a startup, because the barriers to launching a for-profit company or social venture are lower today than they have ever been.

People will cite different reasons to bolster this claim, but the revolutionary impact of the Internet on connectivity is a big one. The Internet makes it easier to identify, access, and sell to potential customers or users. This has all kind of effects, such as increasing the pace of product iteration and the potential to scale quickly. Increased access to local or global labor, and a robust culture and infrastructure of venture capital investment, especially in technology centers such as Silicon Valley, are other reasons cited by those who encourage people to launch companies.

I don't know if it is a good idea for some or even most people to launch a startup- it is easy to get sucked into the hype while significantly understating the risks, effort, skills, and time involved in constructing a successful organization with a working, scalable business model from scratch. This true of any organization, let alone the multi-million or billion dollar entity we all might fantasize about retiring on. It can take many years to build a successful business – some estimates are, perhaps a decade. It all depends on the level of your interest and commitment (Do you really care about an idea?), personal goals (Do you want to build the next Amazon or a company you can sell after a few years?), skills (Do you have the wherewithal to realize your vision, or identify and attract people who do?), your appetite and ability to incur risk, and so on.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Silicon Valley juggernauts such as PayPal and Palantir, and venture capitalist, says in his book Zero to One, that even if you excel in what you do, it could be much better to join a great, fast growing company than launching one yourself. There is a vast disparity in returns between the tiny minority of the most successful, fast growing companies and the rest of the lot. This matters because:

'differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully find your own venture but if you fail you'll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable.' [1]

There are rare circumstances, in other words, that it would make sense for most people to choose an alternative to early-stage Google.

Read more »

You’re on the Air!

by Carol A. Westbrook

The excitement of a live TV broadcast…a breaking news story…a presidential announcement…anFamily_watching_television_1958 appearance of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. These words conjure up a time when all America would tune in to the same show, and families would gather round their TV set to watch it together.

This is not how we watch TV anymore. It is watched at different times and on different devices, from mobile phones, computers, mobile devices, from previously recorded shows on you DVR, or via streaming service such as Netflix and, soon, Apple. Live news can be viewed on the web, via cell phone apps, or as tweets. An increasing number of people are foregoing TV completely to get news and entertainment from other sources, with content that is never “on the air.” (see the chart,below, from the Nov 24, 2013 Business Insider). Many Americans don't even own a television set!
Business Insider
We take it for granted that we will have instant access to video content–whether digital or analog, television, cell phone or iPad. But video itself has its roots in television; the word itself means, “to view over a distance.” The story of TV broadcasting is a fascinating one about technology development, entrepreneurship, engineering, and even space exploration. It is an American story, and it is a story worth telling.

At first, America was tuned in to radio. From the early 20's through the 1940s, people would gather around their radios to listen to music and variety shows, serial dramas, news, and special announcements. Yet they dreamed of seeing moving pictures over the airwaves, like they did in newsreels and movies. A series of technical breakthroughs were needed to make this happen.

The first important breakthrough was the invention in 1938 of a way to send and view moving images electronically–Farnsworth's “television.” Thus followed a series of patent wars, but at the end of the day, we had television sets which could be used to view moving pictures transmitted by the airwaves. In 1939, RCA televised the opening of the New York Worlds Fair, including a speech by the first President to appear on TV, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were few televisions to watch it on, though, until after the end of World War II, when America's demand for commercial television rapidly increased.

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This Is the World Calling

by Tom Jacobs

The ants are my friends, the ants are my friends, the ants are just blowing in the wind.
—Lorrie Moore

Life is hard and nothing makes any sense. That is a problem. I don’t know everything there is to know, and that is also a problem. These are the bare facts. Impossible to ignore but things that must be ignored if I’m to go about my daily business. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I’m also happy most of the time. Or at least content.

What I’m trying to say or at least think about is the role of love in understanding. Love is something that is not to be understood but rather just felt and expressed. Understanding, on the other hand, well, that’s a whole other deal. It requires the assemblage of evidence and critical analysis and narrative-building and seeing the pattern in what might seem to be a relatively random collection of things that are of some small interest. Why are these things and not others interesting to me, to you? That’s a tough one, and probably there is no answer. There’s a pattern in the rug, but where is it?

I read somewhere that there was a woman minding her own business somewhere in the Midwest somewhere in the mid-eighties who was watching television in her living room when a small meteor plummeted through her roof and hit her in the arm. A celestial body just intervened into her life and hit her in the arm, producing some fair amount of trauma. Sometimes I feel like this is a good metaphor for what it’s like to be alive. Meteors strike you unexpectedly and you are left to figure out what that means. Was it meant for you? Or did it just happen? Does it matter to even draw the distinction? Probably it doesn’t.

When I think about what I really want in life, about what really matters, I often think of Emerson and Whitman. They are in some subtle ways, very different thinkers. Emerson is the thinker who gives us lines like, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” or “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” That sort of thing.

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Mel Brooks: The comic genius and legend of stage, film and TV, for whom it’s still springtime

Tim Walker in The Independent:

Mel-Brooks-Lauren-CrowIt sounds like the set-up for a joke: what does Mel Brooks have in common with Audrey Hepburn, Whoopi Goldberg and Sir John Gielgud? But the punchline is deadly serious: they’re all among just a dozen show-business professionals ever to have achieved Egot status, single-handedly winning all four major American entertainment awards: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Brooks – actor, director, writer, producer, songwriter – is perhaps best known for the run of classic comedies he made between the 1960s and 1980s, from The Producers to Spaceballs. With his 1974 spoof Western, Blazing Saddles, he perfected the parody genre. The following year, Playboy magazine heralded a new boom in movie comedy, and described Brooks as “one of the very few movie-makers since Charlie Chaplin who is unarguably a comic genius”.

He has also produced several straight-faced features, including The Elephant Man, which was awarded the Bafta for Best Film in 1981. (Does that make him a “Begot”?) Yet he started his comedy career in stand-up, and now, at 88, it is the stage to which he has returned. On Sunday, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, Brooks will perform his first, and probably his last, UK one-man show, an “introspective retrospective” reflecting on his life and career, with jokes. Theatre promoter Delfont Mackintosh has been criticised for charging more than £500 for stalls seats at Brooks’s show, the most expensive ticket ever for a West End performance. Several US stars, such as Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta, have similarly waxed nostalgic on the British stage in recent years. But Brooks has a longer and more varied history than any of them, which is perhaps why he can command such a high price to hear it.

More here.

The Legacies of Idealism

S200_terry.pinkard

Richard Marshall interviews Terry Pinkard in 3:AM magazine:

3:AM: You’re a leading expert on German Idealism, Hegel and their legacies. You think the context out of which all this happened is important don’t you – the fact that that there wasn’t really a Germany when it all started, the aftermath of the Seven Year War was something that shaped the development of this movement (and earlier, the Thirty Years War and the treaty of Westphalia etc). Could you perhaps sketch out what was most salient about the situation out of which these philosophical ideas emerged.

TP: Well, there’s lots going on there, but here are some highlights. Germany after 1648 was highly fragmented, and it was a place where, although the grip of the old regime was firmly in place, the mores of the people were changing rapidly, so there was a real and obvious gap between theory and practice. The way some began to think of it, “Germany” seemed to resemble more the plurality of ancient Greek states united only by a common culture, unlike its big neighbor, France. Furthermore, one of the very few all-German institutions in fragmented and still highly localized Germany was the German professor, since the professors went to wherever the jobs were. You thus had conceptually ambitious people armed with a certain authority with some of them thinking of themselves, however vaguely, as the new Greeks in a situation in which the gap between subjective life and social rules was deeply felt. That was a combustible mixture. Once you stirred the Scottish Enlightenment into the mix, as Kant did, the octane level of the coming conceptual explosion got raised even higher. Likewise, for those growing up in Württemberg, with its leanings toward France, the Kantian philosophy’s obvious debt to Rousseau was a plus. The arrival of the young Goethe on the scene with the Sorrows of Young Werther was a sign to those younger Germans that the times, they were indeed changing. The mixture created by all of these things managed to form an ignitable background for philosophy, especially Kant’s, to take the lead. With the French Revolution in 1789, the combustible mixture in German intellectual life exploded. Those things coming together set the stage for a certain discovery, as we could call it, of spontaneity and self-determination. And here we are, still living in that backwash.

More here.

Lukacs’s Theory of the Novel: Centenary Reflections

Luckas

Franco Moretti in NLR:

When György Lukács is still mentioned nowadays in connection with the study of the novel, it is either for The Theory of the Novel, composed between 1914 and 1916, or for The Historical Novel, written exactly twenty years later. Either, or: because the two books couldn’t be more different. The Historical Novel is a very good book—a very useful book—written by a serious Marxist professor. The Theory is not useful at all. It is an ‘attempt’ [ein Versuch], declares the subtitle; but ‘Essay’ would be more to the point. The essay: the ‘ironic’ form, where ‘the critic is always talking about the ultimate questions of life’, Lukács had already written in Soul and Forms (1911), but ‘in such a tone, as if it were just a matter of paintings or books’. And in fact, whenever the Theorytalks about the ‘novel’, the reader senses that—through the oblique refraction of ‘books’—something much more momentous is at stake. But what? What is the ‘ultimate question’ that the Theory is trying to address?

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An initial answer could be: it is the transformation of social existence—at some unspecified moment between Dante and Cervantes—into a ‘world of convention’ whose abnormality Lukács tries to capture through the metaphor of the ‘second nature’. Nature, because the ‘all-embracing power’ of convention subjects the social world to ‘laws’ whose ‘regularity’ can only be compared to that of physical nature: ‘strict’ laws, ‘without exception or choice’, that are—this is the decisive passage—‘the embodiment of recognized but meaningless necessities’.

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Meaningless necessities. That is to say: in second nature, ‘meaning’ is present only in the recollection of its loss. It’s the disenchantment of the world first diagnosed by German culture around 1800. When the earth was still ‘the abode of the Gods’, wrote Novalis in the fifth Hymn to the Night:

Rivers and trees,
Flowers and beasts
Had human meaning

But now ‘the Gods have vanished’—they live ‘in another world’, echoes Hölderlin’s Bread and Wine, written in the same years—and ‘human meaning’ has vanished with them. ‘Lonely and lifeless / Stood nature’, continues Novalis:

Deprived of its soul by the violent number
And the iron chain
Laws had come into being
And in concepts
As in dust and draught
Disintegrated the unmeasurable flowering
Of manysided life.

More here.