Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

When Günter Grass died earlier this year, it brought back memories of 1991, my first year in New York City. I sometimes think of this period in New York as its last dangerous days, when the city still had that anxious, patched-together sensibility, which is just another way of saying that once I lived in a New York City different than the New York City of today, a New York City that was romantic because I was young then. I lived that first year alone, in a single room on the upper floors of the 92nd Street Y. The 92nd Street Y was better known as a point of call for Manhattan sophisticates, who likely had little idea that, as they listened to the wisdom of celebrities in the great lecture hall, dozens of men and women were residing, like me, in tiny rented rooms on the floors above them.

I hardly saw another person during my time at the Y. When I first arrived in the fall of 1991, I would leave my room at what I thought would be sociable hours, walking through the linoleum halls to the communal kitchen or the communal bathroom, looking for company. Most other tenants did not live at the 92nd Street Y as I did; they were in New York to sightsee, staying a few weeks or so and spending most of their time on the town. Not long after I moved into the 92nd Street Y, I started eating in my room, leaving only at odd hours, to make the loneliness seem less unusual.

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Claire Bishop at Artforum:

THE ART WORLD’S FASCINATION with relocating dance into the gallery has been gathering steam for well over a decade—and as of this spring it shows no signs of abating, despite the numerous conundrums that encumber the transition from theater to white cube. Of all the stage-to-gallery transpositions I’ve seen, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s recent exhibition at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels resolved these dilemmas most impressively. This one-work show was based on the Belgian choreographer’s sixty-minute dance Vortex Temporum, first performed by her company Rosas in 2013. As a theatrical production, the piece opens with six musicians from the avant-garde ensemble Ictus seated onstage with their instruments. Seven dancers appear and gradually begin to move in circles or swing their limbs in spiral formations while following white chalk lines mapped on the floor in a mandala-like arrangement. The musicians also move around, following the same chalked paths, as they play Gérard Grisey’s eponymous 1996 composition, a challenging work by the late French composer and cofounder of “spectral music.”

Extremely difficult, somber, European-style high culture, then—and this was certainly how Vortex Temporum was received when first performed: The New York Times described it as “terribly hard work. . . . It is utterly dry and no fun at all,” while the London Telegraph called it “narcolepsy-inducing.” There was every reason to fear that the piece would be just as grueling at Wiels. Its new title, Work/Travail/Arbeid, did not bode well. But what made the production first endurable and then rapidly hypnotic was precisely its removal from the economy of evening entertainment and its invitation to watch over the course of the day, or week, or month.

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Werner Herzog at Bookforum:

In Schramberg, things seemed to be still in order: fried goose at the tavern, card players playing skat. One of them would get up when he lost, pacing back and forth among the tables with extreme agitation. A climb up to the fortress instead of down, then along the chain of hills to the Lauterbach Valley. Black Forest farms come into view without warning, and a completely different dialect, also without warning. I’ve probably made several wrong decisions in a row concerning my route and, in hindsight, this has led me to the right course. What’s really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don’t have the nerve to turn back, since I’d rather correct myself with another wrong decision. But I’m following a direct imaginary line, anyway, which is, however, not always possible, and so the detours are not very great . . . The forest opened into an elevated valley, then past the last farmhouse it climbed steeply through wet snow to the Gedächtnishaus, reaching the road again beyond the height. An elderly woman gathering wood, plump and impoverished, tells me about her children one by one, when they were born, when they died. When she becomes aware that I want to go on, she talks three times as fast, shortening destinies, skipping the deaths of three children although adding them later on, unwilling to let even one fate slip away—and this in a dialect that makes it hard for me to follow what she is saying. After the demise of an entire generation of offspring, she would speak no more about herself except to say that she gathers wood, every day; I should have stayed longer.

more here.

Katie Ward Beim-Esche in The Christian Science Monitor:

“You are cordially invited to the marriage of Khalid, Caliph of Khorasan & Shahrzad al-Khayzuran…. Funeral to follow at dawn.” With an invitation like that, there was no way I could say no to The Wrath & The Dawn by Renée Ahdieh, a sumptuous retelling of the classic “One Thousand and One Nights.” Fade in on a drought-ravaged Arabian kingdom, ruled by a young caliph who takes a new bride every night and executes her at dawn.

…“Murderer of my best friend, and a soulless monster who must die by my own hand,” cries Shahrzad al-Khayzuran, our gutsy protagonist. When we meet her, Shahrzad has volunteered to be the caliph’s next bride, horrifying her family and enraging her childhood sweetheart. She plans to assassinate the caliph to avenge her best friend. Whether or not she succeeds, she has signed her own death warrant. Lucky for us, Shazi is no one’s damsel in distress or princess in an ivory tower. Instead, girlfriend has plans to kick butt and exact revenge till the camels come home. Our gal’s plan is to tell the caliph a tale so engrossing that when dawn arrives and she has not finished the story, he will stay her execution by a day to hear the conclusion. Lather, rinse, repeat. It works – but fate has other plans. The more Shahrzad grows to know Khalid, the less she can maintain her vengeful fury. She begins to care for the man she calls a monster. In turn, Khalid’s fascination for his enchanting and smart-mouthed queen evolves into a deep respect, and then love. But Shazi’s gamble sets off a deadly chain of events for the men in her life, all of whom race to rescue her by any means. Her father, Jahandar, strengthens the book's mild magical touch into something stronger, darker, deadlier. Her childhood love, Tariq, enlists his friends to foment a revolution and overthrow the caliph. It will all coalesce in one explosive confrontation … in the sequel. Despite a rough start, there’s much to love in this book. The first 20 pages are a whirlwind of names and grievances, but once Shahrzad enters the palace and launches into her first story, Ahdieh hits her stride. Much like Shazi and Khalid’s relationship, “Wrath” and I had a rocky beginning that deepened in a lovely way. I also grew fond of Ahdieh’s unorthodox style. The flowery strings of similes, barrage of one-sentence paragraphs, and narrative caesuras for luscious descriptive interludes would bother me elsewhere, but they felt so appropriate for an Arabian legend.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

New technology called VirScan developed by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers makes it possible to test for current and past infections with any known human virus by analyzing a single drop of a person’s blood. With VirScan, scientists can run a single test to determine which viruses have infected an individual, rather than limiting their analysis to particular viruses. That unbiased approach could uncover unexpected factors affecting individual patients’ health, and also expands opportunities to analyze and compare viral infections in large populations.

The comprehensive analysis can be performed for about $25 per blood sample, but the test is currently being used only as a research tool and is not yet commercially available. Stephen J. Elledge, an HHMI investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, led the development of VirScan. He and his colleagues have already used VirScan to screen the blood of 569 people in the United States, South Africa, Thailand, and Peru. The scientists described the new technology and reported their findings in the June 5, 2015, issue of the journal Science. VirScan works by screening the blood for antibodies against any of the 206 species of viruses known to infect humans*. The immune system ramps up production of pathogen-specific antibodies when it encounters a virus for the first time, and it can continue to produce those antibodies for years or decades after it clears an infection. That means VirScan not only identifies viral infections that the immune system is actively fighting, but also provides a history of an individual’s past infections.

More here.

Michael Erard in Aeon:

If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery. Their readers might have said the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical. But neither poets nor readers would have said the metaphors were designed. That is, the metaphors didn’t target people’s cognitive processes. They weren’t engineered to affect us in a specific way.

Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing…

Metaphor designers create these pseudo-mistakes deliberately. Sometimes the metaphors end up in op-eds or public-service announcements. Sometimes they’re useful for helping people conceive of solutions to problems, or for internal communications in organisations. The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around. For someone like me who is reflexively metaphorical (my wedding invite was built around the idea of a labyrinth), these are satisfying tasks, and, as a writer, I have no problem leaving material on the cutting room floor. But it’s when we start testing our metaphors for their social and cognitive usability that design can become really powerful.

Read the rest here.

The Introduction from Justin E. H. Smith's new book, over at Princeton University Press:

In 1782, in the journal of an obscure Dutch scientific society, we find a relation of the voyage of a European seafarer to the Gold Coast of Africa some decades earlier. In the town of Axim in present-day Ghana, we learn, at some point in the late 1750s, David Henri Gallandat met a man he describes as a “hermit” and a “soothsayer.” “His father and a sister were still alive,” Gallandat relates, “and lived a four-days’ journey inland. He had a brother who was a slave in the colony of Suriname.” So far, there is nothing exceptional in this relation: countless families were broken up by the slave trade in just this way. But we also learn that the hermit’s soothsaying practice was deeply informed by “philosophy.” Gallandat is not using this term in a loose sense, either. The man he meets, we are told, “spoke various languages—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, High and Low German; he was very knowledgeable in astrology and astronomy, and a great philosopher.” In fact, this man, we learn, “had been sent to study at Halle and in Wittenberg, where in 1727 he was promoted to Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Liberal Arts.” On a certain understanding, there have been countless philosophers in Africa, whose status as such required no recognition by European institutions, no conferral of rank. On a narrower understanding, however, Anton Wilhelm Amo may rightly be held up as the first African philosopher in modern history. Gallandat tells us that after the death of Amo’s “master,” Duke August Wilhelm of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the philosopher slave grew “melancholy,” and “decided to return to his home country.”

What Gallandat fails to mention is that between the time of August Wilhelm’s death and Amo’s departure from Germany, a scurrilous Spottgedicht, a satirical and libelous poem, was published in 1747 by a certain Johann Ernst Philippi. It is not clear whether the events described in the poem ever took place, but this is a question of secondary importance. Amo is accused in the poem of falling in love with a certain Mademoiselle Astrine, a German brunette. At some point the goddess Venus comes to resolve the problematic case, judging unsympathetically that “a Moor is something foreign to German maidens.” She then condemns him to a life of sorrow:

You, Amo, are mistaken; with your vile nature

Your heart will never be content.

More here.

Alan McIntyre in The Scottish Review:

In 2012, Historic Scotland decided that it would follow the lead of English Heritage and start commemorating notable Scots through a 'Blue Plaque' scheme to identify buildings closely associated with them. With an admirable eclecticism, the initial set of 12 honourees ranged from Dudley Watkins, the creator of 'Oor Wullie', to John Logie Baird, the man ultimately responsible for the scourge that is Ant and Dec.

Walk the streets of Germany and you’ll see a very different type of link to the past. In 1995 the German artist Gunter Demnig laid the first 'stolperstein’ stones in the city of Cologne. Twenty years later, there are now 50,000 of these four-inch brass-covered cubes of concrete embedded in the streets of 18 European countries. In their day, some of the people commemorated by these stones may have been considered great men and women, but the purpose of these stones is the exact opposite of singling out the few over the many. Instead, the project seeks to be comprehensive in remembering the displacement of huge swathes of the European population by the Nazis.

Originally planned to just focus on the 1,000 gypsies deported from Cologne in the 1930s, the vast majority of the stones now identify Jews who ultimately died in the Nazi death camps. Not all who are commemorated underfoot died, but all were displaced and all were discriminated against.

These 'stumbling blocks’ are intended as a permanent reminder to the German population of the horror of those years; a visual stimulus to always think about the lives disrupted, scarred and prematurely ended during that dark period in their history. As the brass covers catch and reflect the sunlight against a generally grey background, they’re a conduit that brings the past into the present in an unobtrusive but persistent fashion. The biographical information on each stone is scant; name, date of birth, date of deportation and date of death if known. This lack of biography gives them a stark eloquence and allows the observer standing in front of a nondescript house or office block to conjure their own backstory for the victim.

America has its own historic markers. Get off the interstate highways and the verges of the USA are festooned with reminders of the revolutionary war, the war of 1812, the opening of the west, and the various other facets of what is now nearly a 250-year history.

More here.

Willy C. Shih in the Harvard Business Review:

We are in the midst of a technological revolution that is every bit as profound as the impact of cheap computing power, but it’s subtler and harder to notice. It will ease the way for companies launching and updating digital products, but it presents steep new learning curves that companies will have to master if they are to be successful.

What I’m referring to is the migration of functionality from hardware to software. In more and more businesses, physical objects are no longer the primary basis for innovation and differentiation. They come second to innovations in computer code.

Managers are well aware that Moore’s Law, the idea that the number of transistors on a practical-sized chip doubles every 18 months, has brought us a bounty of cheap computing power, leading to smartphones, tablets, fitness trackers, cloud-based services like Facebook and Uber, and on and on. But I’ve found that they’re less cognizant of how software has transformed other fields that we traditionally think of as hardware-based.

Consider, for example, how we convert and control electrical power. Think of the cubes we plug our iPhones into, the sensors that control our heating and lighting, and the motors used in tiny disk drives and the giant traction motors in locomotives. Modern solid-state power electronics got started in the 1950s, but rapid recent progress in power semiconductors, new power conversion topologies, and methods for controlling electric motors has brought us a plethora of small, high-efficiency, low-cost, and long-lived electronics subsystems for motion control. For a few dollars, designers can easily connect a computer to remember the seat position in your car. They can also replace the hydraulic power steering with a more-efficient electric power-steering system, or for that matter control everything needed to make that car autonomous — all it takes is software.

More here.

Neil Badmington at the Times Literary Supplement:

In an abandoned autobiographical fragment written on July 17, 1974, Roland Barthes described the year of his birth as “insignificant”: 1915, he explained, had the misfortune of being “lost in the war”, with no event to make it stand out.

The same could hardly be said of 2015. As Michael Sheringham observed recently at a conference in Leeds, we are in the whirling middle of a centenary “Barthes-athon”. By the end of the year, celebratory events will have taken place in Paris, Bordeaux, Orthez, London, Providence, Lisbon, Tartu, Leeds, Cardiff, La Paz, Londrina, São Paulo, Bucharest, Bayonne, Kaslik, St Petersburg, Buenos Aires and Zagreb. In May, meanwhile, the fashion house Hermès unveiled a silk scarf inspired by A Lover’s Discourse – a garment which could come in handy for keeping the Parisian chill at bay during the “Nuit Roland Barthes” at the city’s Maison de la Poésie on November 12 (the day on which the author would have reached his century).

Then there are the publications: a large, elegant volume of previously unpublished writings entitledAlbum: Inédits, correspondances et varia, along with new editions of La Préparation du roman andL’Empire des signes; Fanny Lorent’s Barthes et Robbe-Grillet: Un dialogue critique; Magali Nachtergael’s lavishly illustrated Roland Barthes contemporain; Chantal Thomas’s Pour Roland Barthes; and Philippe Sollers’s L’Amitié de Roland Barthes.

more here.

Slavenka Drakulic at Eurozine:

I did survive communism and even laughed. But I've stopped laughing many times since. First of all, of course, because in the former Yugoslavia, the collapse of the old system brought wars. What used to be our advantage over the countries in the Soviet block, a kind of “soft totalitarianism”, turned out to be a disadvantage. It meant that there was no democratic political opposition, except nationalists, ready to take over after the collapse of communism.

Elsewhere in eastern Europe, many people stopped laughing simply because post-communism turned out to be something other than what they had dreamed. It depends on the country, of course – Poland can't be compared to Albania – but many people in eastern Europe have found themselves in a situation of growing poverty and insecurity. While poverty was nothing new, the growing gap between rich and poor was. Our world today might look like a supermarket full of goodies, but most of us are left looking through the shop window.

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Frank Dikötter at Literary Review:

Deng was himself denounced during the Cultural Revolution, a decade of willed chaos ably and critically covered by the authors. Even so, they underplay just how complicit Deng was in creating the very campaign that engulfed him and his family. They never mention his active participation in vicious denunciation meetings against the former minister of public security Luo Ruiqing, who eventually jumped through a window in an unsuccessful bid to commit suicide ('He dived like a popsicle,' Deng scoffed). Likewise missing is even a cursory reference to Deng's leading role in persecuting Ulanfu, the head of Inner Mongolia, whom Deng harshly accused in July 1966 of every conceivable crime, from 'taking the capitalist road' to 'opposing Chairman Mao'. A few months later Deng's own turn came, with accusations that he was the 'Number Two Capitalist Roader'.

But the Chairman protected Deng. Unlike many of his colleagues, he rarely endured struggle sessions with Red Guards, but spent many years in the countryside, sheltered from the vagaries of the Cultural Revolution. As the third and final part, 'The Pragmatist', demonstrates, the Chairman even brought him back twice, using him to counterbalance the growing influence of Zhou Enlai. Here, too, there are curious omissions. It is well known, for instance, that as chief-of-staff of the People's Liberation Army, Deng ordered a military crackdown on a Muslim-dominated county in Yunnan in 1975, prompting the massacre of over 1,600 people, some of them children.

more here.

Tosin Thompson in New Statesman:

So, what is exactly is boredom?

The Oxford dictionary describes it as: “Feeling weary and impatient because one is unoccupied or lacks interest in one’s current activity”. For a feeling so common, it's surprising that the word first appeared written down in 1852, in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. In it, Lady Dedlock says she is “bored to death” with her marriage. The late Robert Plutchik, a Professor Emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, created a “Wheel of Emotions” (extended in order of intensity) in 1980, and placed boredom after disgust, as a milder form of disgust:

Although boredom is essential for human development it’s been given a bad rap. “Boredom has traditionally been associated with a range of negative outcomes, both within the workplace and outside it,” Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman of the University of Central Lancashire write in their 2014 paper. Mann and Cadman examined the relationship between boredom and creative potential on a range of tasks in two studies. In the first study, 80 eager volunteers visited their lab only to be given the dull, monotonous chore of copying out lengthy lists of telephone numbers, or to be excluded from it (this was the control group), followed by the creative task of thinking of as many possible uses for a pair of plastic cups. In the second study, a further 90 volunteers were split into three groups, each group being assigned to various types of boring activities (copying numbers, reading the numbers, or being excused from the whole thing – again, a control), followed by a creative task. “Results suggested that boring activities resulted in increased creativity and that boring reading activities lead to more creativity in some circumstances,” the authors write.

More here.

Diana W. Bianchi in Nature:

A healthy pregnant woman has a blood test to rule out the possibility that her baby has certain abnormalities, such as Down's syndrome. One week later, a genetic counsellor calls her and recommends a follow-up test such as amniocentesis. When the counsellor calls again, she says that the baby is healthy but that the mother needs to be screened for cancer. Since 2011, clinicians have been able to analyse the genome of a fetus by sequencing DNA fragments found floating in the mother's blood. With the use of these non-invasive prenatal tests soaring (see 'Test scores'), mothers are increasingly facing unexpected, 'incidental' findings about their own health. As of late 2014, at least 26 pregnant women with abnormal blood-test results later learned that they had cancer¹. In 10 of them, the prenatal tests prompted the medical assessments that revealed this; in the other 16, the cancers were not discovered until the mothers developed symptoms.

Parents, obstetricians and physicians have been taken by surprise. Consent forms used by test providers rarely mention the possibility of findings concerning the mother's health. And caregivers have little guidance on what to do when such findings arise. Test providers need to rethink their consent forms to prevent unwarranted confusion and anxiety — not least, women deciding to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of wrong interpretations of test results². And professional societies, such as the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM), need to take the lead on providing education and clinical guidance.

More here.

Suzanne Joinson in Aeon (image Western Motel by Edward Hopper. 1957):

A person is not supposed to be in both Asia and Africa in the same week on a regular basis; the world should not be traversed at that speed. It was scrambling, discombobulating; worse, it was damaging – some central element of my subjective self was being ebbed away. Yet, I still said yes. I was the go-to girl for a last-minute flight to anywhere, and whenever I returned home, lightly tethered to a house-share in Brixton, south London, I plotted to be away again.

When I climbed out of a taxi on my way home, or dragged my suitcase towards my front door, I would think of Jean Rhys, writing in Good Morning, Midnight (1939): ‘Walking back in the night. Back to the hotel. Always the same hotel … You go up the stairs. Always the same stairs, always the same room.’ My life on a loop, searching for the new, but in reality going round in circles.

There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus that is shaped just like a seahorse. It is in many ways still an unconquered mystery, but it is believed to act as an internal sat-nav. It provides a crossroads between memory and the processing of location, and not just locations of geography and place – although it does deal in those, contextualising landmark objects and images to understand landscapes, interiors and scenes – but also the mapping of an emotional geography such as future goals and aspirations and how to reach them, or memory sequences, or the systemisation of our own personal narratives. It is how we understand where we are and how we put ourselves into the points of view of others. Depression has been found to have a dampening and distorting effect on the hippocampus, so that we become, in many layers of the word, lost.

I don’t know if my hippocampus navigator was suppressed by too much travel or if I was simply exhausted from a decade of avoiding intimate relationships and any semblance of a stable home. Whatever it was, the suicidal impulse triggered by the architecture of hotels and all the signifiers connected to them – key cards, long corridors, the ting of a service bell – kept growing stronger.

More here.

A section Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in Slate:

Sucharita Mukherjee in Logos:

India’s extraordinary heterogeneities have long attracted, dismayed and befuddled visitors and researchers alike but what is often obscured in discussions of the usual divides of religion, caste, gender, region and language is the burgeoning of income inequality. While India’s poor have been hard to ignore since the colonial era, the persistent deprivation of these masses of humanity seem all the starker in modern India when juxtaposed with the ever growing opulence of the rich.

Class and other inequalities combine to impose multiple vicious circles upon those scraping by at the most disadvantaged end of the social spectrum. Dreze and Sen identify this “resilient division” between the privileged and the rest in Indian society as India’s biggest challenge, yet one seldom highlighted in all the recent hype about Indian prosperity. Making a strong case for equality and social justice amid economic progress, An Uncertain Glory becomes an almost indispensable economic, social and political reader to understand India’s checkered development story.

The distinction between a narrow concept of economic growth, defined in terms of rising aggregate income levels, and a broad notion of economic development, defined as improvement in the average person’s standard of living. is often obscured in political and economic logics based on faith in the eventual trickle-down of growth from the top to propel a broader based development. Admittedly, many of India’s challenges such as poverty, economic and gender inequality or illiteracy are lasting vestiges of a colonial past which either aggravated them or left them unaddressed. Immediate post-independence policies also did little to address them adequately.

More here.