David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

“The 9/11 Commission Report” is one of the documents discovered on Bin Laden’s bookshelf — no surprise there. What better way to understand one’s enemy than to understand the narratives we hold dear?

Something similar might be said about the dozens of other federal reports in his possession, which range from the practical (applications for both new and reissued passports, instructions on how to register the birth of a U.S. citizen abroad) to the analytical (a 2009 Senate assessment of “the Evolving Al-Qaeda Threat to the Homeland,” a 2005 National Security Council “Strategy for Victory in Iraq”). It makes sense that Bin Laden would find such materials useful, for the insights they offer into our way of thinking, of strategizing, if nothing else.

And yet, I find myself compelled — and in a perverse way, cheered — by another aspect of these holdings, which is what they have to say about American transparency.

more here.

Talitha Stevenson at The Financial Times:

The Good Story is a fizzing collection of exchanges, begun in 2008, between JM Coetzee and the psycho­therapist Arabella Kurtz. The authors are well matched, able to draw one another out and to nudge each other in moments of complacency. What emerges is a Platonic dialogue with a postmodern twist. Rather than presenting a series of conclusions, the two retain their differences and their uncertainties: “Does this clarify something of the matter or just add to the confusion?” Coetzee writes at one point. At another, he admits: “So, as you can see, I am still stuck”.

Coetzee and Kurtz don’t confine themselves to a single issue. Instead, the book is a freewheeling conversation about psychotherapy, fiction, fantasy, repression and, in a sense that can draw these ideas together, the relationship between subjectivity and truth. It’s because of the authors’ modest intentions — they aim to discuss, not to conclude — that their minds can roam so freely. After discussing the individual’s capacity to repress, for example, they begin a loose but fascinating debate about the way in which groups or nations do the same. Coetzee refers to Australia and apartheid South Africa, Kurtz to her observations of staff in the NHS.

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Jessica Michalofsky at The Quarterly Conversation:

In 2012, in a global game of Chinese Whispers, a single message traveled through seven languages and across six continents, starting in St. Kilda, Melbourne as “Life must be lived as play” (a commonly paraphrased quote from Plato), and ending in Homer, Alaska as “He bites snails.”

According to a Wikipedia entry, the now–politically incorrect name of the popular children’s game (alternately played as Gossip, Broken Telephone, Pass the Message, Operator, andDon’t Drink the Milk), derives from

Westerners’ use of the word Chinese to denote “confusion” and “incomprehensibility” to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 1600s, and attribute[s] it to Europeans’ inability to understand China’s culture and worldview.

Chinese, it was assumed, like other “foreign” languages, was an incomprehensible one. Common phrases like it’s all Greek to me, mumbo jumbo, gibberish, and double Dutchdemonstrate our apprehension of certain foreign languages as impenetrable glossolalia.

It is this assumption of the otherness and obscurity of the foreign in language that Eduard Stoklosinski examines in Another View: Tracing the Foreign in Literary Translation.

more here.

Lost Things, Found Hopes
.

For Nietzsche, hope was the beginning of loss.

But we can be even more radical:
the beginning of anything is the beginning of loss.

We all lose, but some lose more slowly
than others.

‘How’s it going?’ we ask mercilessly.

‘Slowly’, we answer, without really knowing.

Losing slowly is what we call winning.

But I, who do not love losing, love to lose myself in the forest.

Especially in forests
of music and breath,
skin and bark.
.
.
by Harkaitz Cano
from Malgu da gaua / Flexible is the night
publisher: Etxepare Institutua, San Sebastián, 2014

Julian Barnes in The Guardian:

Some years ago, a journalist friend, posted to Paris by his magazine, became in quick succession the father of two children. As soon as their eyes were able to focus properly, he would take them round the Louvre, tenderly pointing their infant retinas at some of the world’s greatest paintings. I don’t know if he also played classical music to them while they were in their mother’s womb, as some prospective parents do; but I have occasionally found myself wondering how those children will turn out: as potential directors of MoMA – or, perhaps, as adults with no visual sense at all, and a horror of art galleries. My own parents never tried feeding me culture at an early (or any other) age; neither did they seek to dissuade me from it. They were both schoolteachers, and so the arts – or perhaps, more precisely, the idea of the arts – were respected in the house. There were proper books on the shelves; and there was even a piano in the sitting room – though at no point in my childhood was it actually played. My mother had been given it by her doting father when she was a young, capable and hopeful pianist. Her playing, however, came to a halt in her early 20s when she found herself faced with a difficult piece of Scriabin. She realised, as she repeatedly failed to master it, that she had reached a certain level, which she could never go beyond. She stopped playing, abruptly and finally. Even so, the piano could not be got rid of; it moved house with her, following her loyally into marriage, and maternity, and old age and widowhood. On its regularly dusted top was a pile of sheet music, including that Scriabin piece she had abandoned decades previously. As for art, there were three oil paintings in the house. Two were of country scenes in Finistère, painted by one of my father’s French assistants. They were, in a way, as misleading as the piano, since “Uncle Paul”, as he was known, hadn’t exactly painted them en plein air; rather, he had copied – and aggrandised – them from picture postcards. I still have the originals he worked from (one smeared with real paint) on my desk. The third picture, which hung in our hall, was somewhat more authentic. An oil of a female nude, in a gilt frame, it was probably an obscure 19th-century copy of an equally obscure original. My parents had bought it at an auction sale in the outer London suburb where we lived. I remember it mainly because I found it completely unerotic. This seemed very strange, because most other depictions of unclad women had an invigorating effect on me. Perhaps this was what art did: by being solemn, it took the excitement out of life.

…I first began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in my novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). Since then, I have never followed any particular plan. But the period from 1850 to 1920 continues to fascinate me, as a time of great truth-speaking combined with a fundamental reexamination of the forms of art. I think we still have a lot to learn from that time. And if I was right as a boy about the dullness of that nude we had at home, I was wrong in my deductions about art’s solemnity. Art doesn’t just capture and convey the excitement, the thrill of life. Sometimes, it does even more: it is that thrill.

More here.

Matt Jakubowski in Truce:

Before we discuss your work at Harper’s and The Nation, I’d like to ask about the early years of your career. Were there specific experiences that drew you toward a life in letters, as they say? What convinced you that this was the kind of work you wanted to pursue when you were first starting out?

I had a pretty happy childhood that was clearly divided into Life and Books, the latter being as vivid and immersive for me as the former. My mother is a huge reader and took me to the library every week when I was little; at a certain point she decided to have the bus drop me and my sister off at the local branch after school, because libraries are not just repositories of knowledge but also some of the only places you can stick a latchkey kid without people calling the police.

There were no restrictions on what I could read. My upbringing in a hippied-out racially integrated neighborhood in Philadelphia wasn’t very structured, and I was terrible at sports. I liked to play with the neighborhood kids, dress up, and produce ridiculous plays with my sister. My mother worked a lot but she took us to museums and festivals and children’s concerts on weekends, so I was actively engaged with the world outside of home and school and extremely curious about it.

By the time I finished high school I was pretty done with “being taught.” I went to college to read primary sources and not textbooks. I wasn’t a specialist, and didn’t think learning specific types of methodologies was all that useful. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life studying minutiae and writing boring papers with colons in their titles, but I did want to continue to learn.

After college most of my friends went to grad school and I went on an adventure, traveling and working abroad. I was a cook and housekeeper in Mallorca and a newspaper editor in Hanoi.

More here.

Emily Greenhouse in The Nation:

When Stephen Gaskin passed away last July, his local paper eulogized him as a “tie-dye-clad hippie philosopher, a proud ‘freethinker’” with “crystalline blue eyes.” Those of my generation who are familiar with Gaskin know him as the founder of the Farm, the 44-year-old intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee, where Gaskin’s wife, Ina May, started a movement of authentic midwifery and female body-empowerment. The Farm has 180 residents today—in the early 1970s, between 200 and 300 people traveled to Summertown in a caravan of painted school buses to create it—and maintains a focus on green community. Beyond its Ecovillage Training Center, the collective’s furthest-reaching project is a “woman-centered” approach to childbirth. Last year, a doula in Santa Cruz who runs the blog Yogini Momma posted a TEDx Talk by Ina May and praised her as midwifery’s “grandmother guru.”

I e-mailed the news of Gaskin’s death to a friend from college, a professional nurse-midwife. She replied, “When I was training at the Farm it was fascinating to see how everyone treated him with such deference.” Gaskin, the commune’s patriarch and source of “spiritual revelation,” had been in a flexible group marriage when both he and a partner began to be sexually involved with Ina May, who was still married to her first husband. Gaskin would later institutionalize monogamy on the Farm. “We think of Ina May as such a powerhouse, but really Stephen was the cult leader!” my friend noted. “When we would eat dinner he would always be served first.”

What to make of a man whose lessons as well as beliefs, it would seem, were unabashedly feminist, but who lived a life that clashed with them? This is the question posed by Jill Lepore’s invigorating and perplexing The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Quanta:

In March 2011, the Tara, a 36-meter schooner, sailed from Chile to Easter Island — a three-week leg of a five-year global scientific expedition. All but one of the seven scientists aboard the ship spent much of their time on the sun-drenched deck hauling up wondrous creatures such as luminous blue jellyfish and insects known as sea-skaters, which spend their entire lives skimming the surface of the ocean far from land.

At the stern of the Tara, a shipping container was bolted to the deck, with a door and a tiny window cut through the metal walls. One of the scientists, Melissa Duhaime, spent most of the voyage inside the dark, tiny cell, where she fought off an endless bout of seasickness.

“People would come in to see what I was doing and leave pretty quickly,” Duhaime said.

Inside her cell, Duhaime sat next to a hose as wide as an outstretched hand. A pump drew water through the hose from several meters below the boat and then pushed it through a series of filters. Each filter was finer than the last, blocking smaller and smaller life forms. The setup stopped animals first, then zooplankton and algae. The last filter in the hose, with pores just 220 nanometers wide, was fine enough to block bacteria. Scrubbed of all these living things, the water finally flowed into three 30-liter vats.

To the untrained eye, these vats might seem to be full of sterile water. But they were seething with ocean life — or life-like things, at the very least. The three vats held up to 1 trillion viruses.

More here.

Lindsay Soladz at New York Magazine:

In Tokyo, in 1964, the 31-year-old conceptual artist Yoko Ono organized a happening in which she screened a Hollywood film and gave the audience a simple instruction: Do not look at Rock Hudson, look only at Doris Day.

Like most of the countercultural riddles that appear in Grapefruit,Ono’s book from the same year, the instruction — titled Film Script 5 — was at once facile and mischievously impossible. (Other variations on the piece include asking the audience not to look at any round objects in a film, or to see only red.) It was also, in its way, autobiographical: As one of the few women associated with New York’s avant-garde music scene and the “neo-Dada” Fluxus movement, Ono was by then used to being overshadowed by the more powerful and self-serious men around her. (“I wonder why men can get serious at all,” she mused in Grapefruit. “They have this delicate long thing hanging outside their bodies, which goes up and down by its own will.”) The year she first staged Film Script 5, she’d already extricated herself from one failed marriage and her second was unraveling. She was still two years away from meeting the man with whom she would realize her dream of a completely egalitarian partnership — to symbolize this, they both wore white during their wedding ceremony — but the rest of the world wouldn’t see it that way. They would, of course, see only the towering, superior Him — what could he have possibly seen inHer?

more here.

David Pryce-Jones at The New Criterion:

My book, Unity Mitford: An Enquiry into Her Life and the Frivolity of Evil, became a nine-day-wonder, I can only suppose, because it brought out into the open collaboration with Hitler and the outlines of a British Vichy regime in the event of a successful Nazi invasion. The British flatter themselves that they had united to defeat a totalitarian enemy, and this was Our Finest Hour. Here I was pointing a finger at people whose beliefs and activities undermined this cozy national myth. I was to hear that I was “a traitor to my class,” a charge which concedes that England really did have its Quislings and Vichyites in waiting. Intending to analyze the social significance of my book, Bernard Levin, then the leading columnist on The Times, interviewed me over a period of several days. However many drafts he wrote, he finally told me, he couldn’t make sense of the storm, and gave up on the idea. It was left to Rebecca West to say what had to be said. She had known Meidling before the war and could remember seeing me there when I was a few days old. She had also studied the subject of treason. In a review she likened the moral atmosphere of my book to that of a burnt-out fairground.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

Kahlo’s gardening was of a piece with her art, in asserting a nationalist mythos that extended even to her menagerie of pets: monkeys, parrots, turkeys, an eagle, and a pack of dogs that included Mexican hairless Xoloitzcuintles. What Rivera did on a monumental public scale, in murals picturing Mexico’s storied past and hoped-for future, Kahlo performed—and lived—privately. Even some of the nonnative plants in her garden told apposite stories. Calla lilies came to Mexico with slaves from Africa, and Chinese chrysanthemums arrived aboard Spanish galleons. By today’s gardening standards, not much of the show’s flora is particularly exotic. Even less is what you could call understated. Like everything else about Kahlo, her horticulture commands attention and rewards it with jolts of vicarious, insatiable ardor, if you open your eyes, mind, and heart to her.

Kahlo today inhabits international culture at variable points on a sliding scale between sainthood and a brand. The Botanical Garden show, besides being beautiful, can seem either reverential or exploitative. It’s really both, to a degree beyond the institution’s previous star-powered exhibitions devoted to the gardens of Charles Darwin, Claude Monet, and Emily Dickinson.

more here.

Dana Stevens in Slate:

Esther Landhuis in Scientific American:

For a long time researchers figured the body had a tidy way of dealing with immune cells that might trigger diabetes, lupus or other autoimmune diseases—it must kill off these rogue cells early in life, before the immune system matures. New research published on May 19 in Immunity challenges this age-old thinking. Instead, the body seems to keep these so-called self-reactive T cells in benign form to fight potential invaders later. That conclusion comes from a comprehensive set of immune analyses in mice and people, in which a team at Stanford University has found surprisingly large numbers of self-reactive T cells lurking in the bloodstream through adulthood. The cells are not easily activated, though, suggesting the presence of “a built-in brake,” says immunologist Mark Davis, the paper’s senior author. The findings renew debate about how the immune system manages to marshal its forces against myriad foreign invaders all the while leaving our own tissues alone.

The controversy emerged decades ago when researchers learned the secret to the immune system’s incredible versatility. They discovered that a special gene-shuffling process makes millions of antibodies and receptors. Their sheer number and variety allow our immune cells to recognize any conceivable pathogen, in principle. But the explanation also posed a puzzle: Those random gene rearrangements also produce T cells that could attack the body’s own tissues. As a solution, some scientists proposed that the body wipes out those self-reactive cells while the immune system is developing. Subsequent experiments by several labs supported this proposal.

More here.

Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

For a long time, we’ve been having a pretty confused discussion about the relationship between religious beliefs and the rejection of science — and especially its two most prominent U.S. incarnations, evolution denial and climate change denial.

At one extreme is the position that science denial is somehow deeply or fundamentally religion’s fault. But this neglects the wide diversity of views about science across faiths and denominations — and even across individuals of the same faith or denomination — not all of which are anti-climate science, or anti-evolution.

At the other extreme, meanwhile, is the view that religion has no conflict with science at all. But that can’t be right either: Though the conflict between the two may not be fundamental or necessary in all cases, it is pretty clear that the main motive for evolution denial is, indeed, a perceived conflict with faith (not to mention various aspects of human cognition that just make accepting evolution very hard for many people).

The main driver of climate science rejection, however, appears to be a free market ideology — which is tough to characterize as religious in nature. Nonetheless, it has often been observed (including by me) that evolution denial and climate science rejection often seem to overlap, at least to an extent.

More here.

Richard Hamblyn at The Times Literary Supplement:

“When two Englishmen meet”, wrote Samuel Johnson in 1758, “their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.” It remains an insightful observation, not for what it says about the British obsession with weather – that was a truism even then – but for what it says about the value of natural knowledge. Talking about the weather in the present tense is a more or less futile undertaking, but it was as far as the science of meteorology had advanced in the millennium and a half since the appearance of Aristotle’s influential treatise, theMeteorologica, in the fourth century BC. Since then, the sky had remained an unknowable blue wilderness, populated by meteors (“any bodies in the air or sky that are of a flux and transitory nature”, according to Johnson’s Dictionary: hence “meteorology”), but as the nineteenth century dawned, things began to change. In 1802, Luke Howard gave clouds the names we still use today (cirrus, stratus, cumulus), and in 1804, Francis Beaufort devised the standardized wind-scale that now bears his name. “People were looking at the skies in new ways”, as Peter Moore observes at the outset of The Weather Experiment, his gripping account of nineteenth-century weather science, and by the middle of the century the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade (better known today as the Met Office) was ready to issue the world’s first official weather forecast.

more here.

Dan Piepenbring at The Paris Review:

Walter Russell (May 19, 1871–May 19, 1963) was the progenitor of a “new world-thought” centered on light; in books such as The Electrifying Power of Man-Woman Balance, The Book of Early Whisperings, and The Dawn of a New Day in Human Relations, he foresaw “a marriage between religion and science” in which the laws of physics would be rewritten. He believed that weight “should be measured dually as temperature is,” with “an above and below zero,” and that “the sunlight we feel upon our bodies is not actual light from the sun.” (Russell’s Wikipedia entry notes gingerly that his ideology “has not been accepted by mainstream scientists.”)

In what’s ostensibly his seminal text, The Secret of Light, he outlines a philosophy rife with capitalized Nouns and portentous pseudo erudition:

Man lives in a bewildering complex world of EFFECT of which he knows not the CAUSE. Because of its seemingly infinite multiplicity and complexity, he fails to vision the simple underlying principle of Balance in all things. He, therefore, complexes Truth until its many angles, sides and facets have lost balance with each other and with him.

more here.

Jonathan Russell Clark at The Millions:

This book, which manages to be even slimmer than How Fiction Works, also manages to be even better. The Nearest Thing to Life is as close as we’ll ever get to a manifesto from the British-born New Yorker critic. Contained in the book’s 134 pages is a passionate defense of criticism, a memoir of Wood’s early life and influences, and an insightful study of the meaning of fiction.

This should all be old hat by now. Every year, new books arrive promising some meditation on fiction’s quintessence, and though many of them are useful and even well written, they rarely offer truly fresh observations. All of which makes The Nearest Thing to Life that much more remarkable. Wood succeeds so well because of his knack for recognizing defining contradictions. Consider the way he unpacks the duality of fiction through the lens of religion:

The idea that anything can be thought and said inside the novel –– a garden where the greatWhy? hangs unpicked, gloating in the free air –– had, for me, an ironically symmetrical connection with the actual fears of official Christianity outside the novel: that without God, asDostoyevsky put it, “everything is permitted.” Take away God, and chaos and confusion reign; people will commit all kinds of crimes, think all kinds of thoughts. You need God to keep a lid on things. This is the usual conservative Christian line. By contrast, the novel seems, commonsensically, to say: ‘Everything has always been permitted, even when God was around. God has nothing to do with it.’

more here.