Brandon M. Terry at The Point:

“Ferguson,” Cornel West declared in the wake of the November unrest, “signifies the end of the Age of Obama.” This, at least from the vantage point of African-American politics, appears appropriate. Though not many wanted to say it at the time, a notable chill fell over progressive and radical black politics from 2007 until roughly 2012, the year of Trayvon Martin’s slaying. This deep freeze stemmed from strategic concerns about Obama’s reelection prospects and political standing, genuine outrage at the intransigence and hostility he has faced from some Republicans, broadly shared affective investments in his and his family’s symbolic import, and an optimism born of the improbable fact of his electoral success.

The Ferguson eruption and the movement that arose in its aftermath are only the most spectacular evidence that these factors appear to be less constraining on African-American politics than at any time since Obama’s ascendancy. For a rising number of African-Americans and their racially egalitarian allies, the reactions to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner—and the non-indictments of those responsible—dramatized the need for another path. That the protestors in Ferguson were met with such an enthusiastic and imitative response across the country signals the thawing out of the black protest tradition and a rejection of more conciliatory and consensus-oriented conceptions of black politics. Once again, extraordinary effort is being devoted to building militant, independent social movements with organized African-American participation, capable of transcending the limits of conventional electoral politics and effectively channeling black rage and resentment.

more here.

John Travis in Science:

Last month, millions of people watching ABC’s prime-time television show Shark Tank learned what Christopher Sakezles says his wife already knew—that he can sweat a lot when nervous. Despite a perspiration-drenched presentation on 8 May in front of the show’s five celebrity investors—he ignored his wife’s suggestion to spray his face with antiperspirant—the polymer scientist landed the biggest deal in Shark Tank’s history. With a life-size synthetic cadaver as a prop, Sakezles persuaded technology entrepreneur Robert Herjavec to pay $3 million for a 25% stake in SynDaver Labs, a firm that Sakezles founded a decade ago to create realistic artificial tissues, organs, and whole bodies for surgical training and other purposes. But as fans of Shark Tank know well, not every deal struck on the show lasts once the cameras turn off. After Sakezles and Herjavec traded further information and initial terms, the partnership fell apart. One sticking point was obvious on the show, as the investors challenged Sakezles’s plan to invest SynDaver’s immediate profits back into the company for further product development. “They wanted to replace me as CEO and this is not something I will allow at this point,” Sakezles says. (Herjavec doesn’t comment on deals that aren’t completed, one of his publicists says.) Don’t feel sorry for Sakezles, however. SynDaver is on track to make $10 million this year, he says, adding that the company has lined up investors who place an even higher valuation on the company than Herjavec did. Sakezles predicts SynDaver will expand from its current 100 employees to 500 within 3 years. “We’re growing like wildfire.”

The company’s history traces back to the 1990s, when Sakezles, a graduate student at University of Florida, set out to evaluate a new endotracheal tube his lab had designed. The team couldn’t afford to test it on animals, so they bought an artificial trachea from an outside company. Sakezles recalls it as being little more than a plastic tube. “It was a pure piece of crap. I took one look and threw it in the circular file. I had to essentially build my own model.” So he and colleagues crafted a trachea from multiple polymers, realistically simulating cartilage rings, muscles, and a mucosal layer. After getting his Ph.D. in 1998, Sakezles eventually began consulting for medical device firms. He found they were interested in his experience building realistic models of tissues and organs. “The company grew out of that. It wasn’t a burst of lightning. It was a gradual thing. I never thought of it as a standalone business.”

More here.

The voting round of our arts & literature prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 21 (there was a tie for the last four places), in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. The Millions: One Long Country Song: What Friday Night Lights Taught Me About Storytelling
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Transmutations of the Qasida Form and Ghalib’s Qasida for Queen Victoria
3. The Millions: Dance to the Music of Time
4. Vapour Trails: Miss Lonelyhearts
5. The Art of Future Warfare: War in Heaven
6. The Millions: The Last English Teacher
7. Literary Kicks: First There Is A Mountain
8. The Quarterly Conversation: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan
9. The Philosopher's Beard: The Case for Subsidising Art (and Taxing Junk Entertainment)
10. Anatomy of Norbiton: Spatial
11. Terrain: The Good, the Bad, and the White Man's Mexico Novel
12. Los Angeles Review of Books: 18 Hours Before the Mast
13. The Homing Pigeon Experience: Skin in the Game: Two Versions of Cheap Meat
14. 3 Quarks Daily: Eight Decades of Indian Contemporary Art
15. Novel Readings: “A life entirely through objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
16. A Wine Dark Sea: On Smoking Whale Vomit
17. 3 Quarks Daily: A Place Called Home
18. Avidly: Editing as carework: the gendered labor of public intellectuals
19. Avidly: Weird Sex
20. Granta: Ventimiglia
21. The Millions: Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Jonathan Kramnick for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists tomorrow.

Porochista Khakpour in Bookforum:

“IF YOU CANNOT GET RID OF the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance,” goes the only George Bernard Shaw quote I’ve ever bothered to fling around. Its best use may be for describing Alison C. Rose’s 2004 memoir, Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, where family—including, but not limited to, actual blood relatives—is a sort of game, and there is frankly little choice but to dance. The impossibly resilient, delightfully lunatic Rose was one of the less buzzed-about writers of William Shawn’s sunset years at the New Yorker—a bit by her own design, we come to realize in these pages. Better Than Sane is the most radical anti-memoir I’ve read: no answers, no questions even, but instead a sort of anti-tribute to the art of finding one’s people, or thriving in the failure to do so. We begin with Rose’s real family: Here is the brash psychiatrist father who threatens to have her committed, who calls all the women in the family a variation of “Babs” (no clues about why); a detached problem mother with an Oriental-object fetish who purrs, “Miss Jones, I presume,” when her daughters are at the door, a joke the sisters don’t get (neither do we). Everyone crushes on everyone else—boundaries? why?—mother’s friends on father, mother on sister’s boyfriends, sister’s boyfriends on Rose, Rose on them all. It somehow makes sense, then, that Rose’s first friendships come in the form of three mops (literally) and colored pencils (also literally).

Objects are safe, whereas humans are not, and the only thing that tethers Rose to her family is a desire for knowledge: “There was a total education right there in our house if anybody wanted it. Largely, this education consisted of men . . . and books.” And this paves the way for the central obsessions of the memoir: As she says, her father “was a bully and a tyrant and some kind of handsome star and completely depressed and droll. It stands to some kind of reason, then, that I might think a perfect boyfriend was a bully and tyrant and some kind of handsome star and completely depressed and droll.” Enter Harold Brodkey and George W. S. Trow, each embodying every NYC lit kid’s holy trinity of mentor, friend, and lover.

More here.

Colin Eatock in Wolfgangs Tonic:

There are many pianists, but there is only one Valentina Lisitsa. She’s classical music’s first “YouTube sensation,” who famously became famous by posting clips of her performances on the popular video-sharing website. Since 2007 the 41-year-old musician with flowing blonde hair has posted about 200 clips online, receiving about 80 million views worldwide. Today, she has an international career and a recording contract with the Decca label.

In retrospect, it almost sounds easy – all she needed was a piano, a camera, a microphone, and some technical know-how. But scratch below the surface, and it’s clear that this particular kind of success could only have been achieved by a particular kind of artist. Lisitsa has always refused to play by the rules of the classical music industry, or to accept the decisions of its gate-keepers. She’s determined, opinionated, street-smart and not afraid of a fight. (And she certainly found herself in the midst of a fight in Toronto, in April. We’ll get to “Lisitsa vs. the Toronto Symphony Orchestra” a little farther down.)

She proudly acknowledges her outsider status in the music business. “Yes, definitely yes!” she declares, in her thick East European accent. “I am an outsider. The music establishment looks at me that way. Sometimes critics may something like, ‘For a YouTube pianist, she’s not so bad.’ I try to take it in stride, but I know where I stand.”

More here.

More here.

Thanassis Cambanis at The Boston Globe:

EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS AGO this summer, King John and a group of feudal barons gathered at Runnymede on the banks of the Thames River. There he agreed to the Magna Carta, which for the first time limited the absolute power of the monarch and established a contract between ruler and ruled. The mother of modern treaties and law, the Magna Carta began a global conversation about the responsibility of the powerful toward people under their control.

A scant four decades ago, also this summer, another gathering in the Finnish capital of Helsinki produced a second series of accords. While far less well known, the signing of the Helsinki Accords was a critical juncture in the long struggle of the individual against state authority. Building on some of the same ideas that undergirded the Magna Carta, the Helsinki Accords codified a broad set of individual liberties, human rights, and state responsibilities, which remain strikingly relevant today, whether the subject is China’s Internet policy, the Islamic State’s latest outrage, or the American “war on terror.” The language of human rights has become the lingua franca for criticizing misbehavior by states or quasi-governments.

more here.

Willie Osterweil at The Paris Review:

If you’re feeling polemical, you might argue that all Hollywood cinema is anticommunist: as the central commodity of the culture industry, big studio movies are designed for nothing so much as circulating and producing capital. But if we want to talk Communist with a capital C—you know, where the C stands for USSR—then Hollywood’s anticommunist films are a special and specific genre of flops and farces, a cinematic tradition featuring such classics as I Married a Communist, The Red Menace,Assignment: Paris, and My Son John. (Spoiler: John’s a goddamned Bolshie!)

The fifties saw the heyday of anticommie popcorn flicks. True, the silent era had itsBolshevism on Trial and Red Russia Revealed, and the eighties met with Soviet invasion inRed Dawn and some serious anti-Vietcong violence in the later Rambo movies. But when you wanna see a square-jawed U.S. American call a sweaty creep a commie and slug him in the mouth, it’s the postwar period you turn to. Though most of the era’s anticommunist films were too vulgar and outlandish to survive as anything other than hilarious artifacts—or as evidence of the ever-imperialist, state-serving agenda of the Hollywood apparatus, depending on which side of the bed you woke up on—a few, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street among them, are truly great works of cinema. (Granted, 1982’s Rambo: First Blood—if you excise the last four minutes, when Sly gives a speech crying about how hippies, those “maggots at the airport,” spit on him—is also pretty great.) Both are tense, pulpy noirs, both center around the sale of nuclear secrets, and both take anticommunism more as a genre then a narrative drive. But only one, Pickup on South Street (1953), is being revived this week at Film Forum, in New York.

more here.

Calvin Tomkins at The New Yorker:

Bradford had recently installed a major sculpture at the Los Angeles International Airport, and we went to see it the next morning. On the way, he told me that he used to get his mother to drive him to LAX so that they could have dinner there and watch the planes take off and land. Later, as a teen-ager, he’d skip school and take the bus. “I loved the old Pan Am terminal, the international one,” he said. “I’d see a plane land from Switzerland or Ghana or someplace, and I’d run to where the passengers were getting off and pretend to be getting off with them. First time I ever heard foreign languages. I’d push the Smarte Cartes back into the terminal and collect a dollar each for my lunch money.”

His sculpture was clearly visible from the main entrance to one of the international terminals—a four-sided wooden structure, suspended from the skylight at the far end of the departure hall. Bradford called Sarah Cifarelli, the airport’s art manager, on his mobile phone; while we waited for her to arrive, he said that he’d wanted to make something that felt both ancient and modern—a cross between a medieval bell tower and “that thing for sports events, the Jumbotron.” The sculpture, called “Bell Tower,” was made of aluminum, paper, and weathered plywood sheets, stained and graffitied from years of being used as barricades. (He’d salvaged them from construction sites.)

more here.

Thomas Piketty in the New York Review of Books:

Anthony Atkinson occupies a unique place among economists. During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, he managed to place the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science. In his new book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?—more personal than his previous ones and wholly focused on a plan of action—he provides us with the broad outlines of a new radical reformism.

There’s something reminiscent of the progressive British social reformer William Beveridge in Atkinson’s reformism, and the reader ought to enjoy his way of presenting his ideas. The legendarily cautious English scholar reveals a more human side, plunges into controversy, and sets forth a list of concrete, innovative, and persuasive proposals meant to show that alternatives still exist, that the battle for social progress and equality must reclaim its legitimacy, here and now. He proposes universal family benefits financed by a return to progressive taxation—together, they are intended to reduce British inequality and poverty from American levels to European ones.

He also argues for guaranteed public-sector jobs at a minimum wage for the unemployed, and democratization of access to property ownership via an innovative national savings system, with guaranteed returns for the depositors. There will be inheritance for all, achieved by a capital endowment at age eighteen, financed by a more robust estate tax; an end to the English poll tax—a flat-rate tax for local governments—and the effective abandonment of Thatcherism. The effect is exhilarating. Witty, elegant, profound, this book should be read: it brings us the finest blend of what political economy and British progressivism have to offer.

More here.

Erika Check Hayden in Nature:

Doctors and scientists want drug regulators and research funding agencies to consider medicines that delay ageing-related disease as legitimate drugs. Such treatments have a physiological basis, researchers say, and could extend a person’s healthy years by slowing down the processes that underlie common diseases of ageing — making them worthy of government approval. On 24 June, researchers will meet with regulators from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make the case for a clinical trial designed to show the validity of the approach.

Current treatments for diseases related to ageing “just exchange one disease for another”, says physician Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. That is because people treated for one age-related disease often go on to die from another relatively soon thereafter. “What we want to show is that if we delay ageing, that’s the best way to delay disease.” Barzilai and other researchers plan to test that notion in a clinical trial called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME. They will give the drug metformin to thousands of people who already have one or two of three conditions — cancer, heart disease or cognitive impairment — or are at risk of them. People with type 2 diabetes cannot be enrolled because metformin is already used to treat that disease. The participants will then be monitored to see whether the medication forestalls the illnesses they do not already have, as well as diabetes and death.

More here.

The First Man on the Moon
.

now i’ve been here a week. a year, a day –
seen all there is to be seen: dust, dust, dust –
eyes now only for the blue balloon of the earth
hanging above me, teeming with living life,
strangely enough, i don’t often think of my wife,
but could cry again and again
over that robot in denmark
who said to journalists:
i don’t think it’d be at all a bad thing
to be a human being
.

by C. Buddingh'
from Gedichten 1938-1978
publisher: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 1971
.

Read more »

Stephen Burt in The New Yorker:

The name we’ve been using for this stuff is anachronistic. Here’s a better name.

Truth-claims from our discipline cannot be properly judged without expertise that almost no one in our discipline has.

Our discipline should study its own disciplinary formation; that study proves that our discipline shouldn’t exist.

An old, prestigious thing still deserves its prestige, but for a heretofore undiscovered reason.

This feature of modern life began slightly earlier than you thought, and my single text proves it.

Please adopt my buzzword.

This author, normally seen as opposed to certain bad things, in fact supported them without realizing it.

This author, normally seen as naïve or untrained, is in fact very self-aware, and hence more like us.

That obscure, élite thing once had a popular audience.

This short text, seen rightly, reveals the contradictions of a whole culture.

A supposedly fanatical, militant movement that readers have been taught to fear makes perfect sense to those who support it.

The true meaning of a famous work can be recovered only through juxtaposition with this long obscure historical moment or artifact.

I found a very small thing in an archive, but I can relate it to a big thing.

Read the full post here.

Joshua Knobe in the New York Times:

Back in 2007, Viacom filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. It alleged that the defendants had created a website that was hosting copyrighted Viacom videos, including everything from the “The Colbert Report” to “SpongeBob SquarePants.” But that was not all. Viacom made a series of allegations about the defendants’ mental states. It alleged that they specifically “intended” to host these illegal videos, that they were doing so “knowingly” and with “brazen disregard” for the law.

So far, all of this may seem perfectly straightforward. But here is the surprising part. The defendants in the suit were not individual human beings. They were YouTube and its parent company, Google. In other words, the entities that were alleged to have all of these intentions and attitudes were actually corporations.

Cases like this one have long puzzled philosophers. In everyday speech, it seems perfectly correct to say that a corporation can “intend,” “know,” “believe,” “want” or “decide.” Yet, when we begin thinking the matter over from a more theoretical standpoint, it may seem that there is something deeply puzzling here. What could people possibly mean when they talk about corporations in this way?

More here.

Robert Roper at The American Scholar:

The slender Russian man is on vacation. He has an arrogantly beautiful face and is accompanied by an oddly tall little boy, as he stalks up and down a trout stream in the Wasatch Range, a few miles east of Sandy, Utah. They deploy butterfly nets. “I walk from 12 to 18 miles a day,” he writes in a letter mailed in July of 1943, “wearing only shorts and tennis shoes … always a cold wind blowing in this particular cañon.”

The eccentric Russian novelist chasing butterflies—the signature image of Vladimir Nabokov in America—came to beguile millions. “A man without pants and shirt” was how a local teenager, John Downey, saw him when encountering Nabokov on the Little Cottonwood Canyon road. He was “dang near nude,” Downey recalled, and when he asked Nabokov what he was up to, the stranger would not explain at first.

Nabokov was 44. That November he would have his two front teeth removed, all the rest soon following. (“My tongue is like someone who comes home and finds all his furniture gone.”) He smoked five packs of cigarettes a day and had a tubercular look. For the previous 20 years he had lived on an edge—he was an artist, after all, and deprivation went with the territory. His wife worked odd jobs to support them, and neither of them had ever been much for cooking or packing on the pounds.

more here.

J.C. Hallman at The Baffler:

The phenomenon of Philip Roth’s “retirement”—and that seems to be what it is now, a phenomenon—is not about a writer’s vanity, an ego grown so massive it’s like a publicity black hole sucking up limelight that might have shined warmly on other equally deserving authors. Nor is it about an inability to shut up, even though Roth admitted that his decision to quit writing, announced abruptly in 2012, had triggered in him an impulse to “chatter.” (Almost everyone has taken this quotation out of context, and I have too, which means that “chatter” may be on its way to becoming one of those offhand remarks that gets used to make a famous person appear to mean the opposite of what he probably did mean.)

No, Roth’s announcement that he would leave the literary stage, followed by his conspicuous failure to do so in favor of a series of curtain calls, is about us—Roth’s audience, a community of readers. We’re the ones endlessly fascinated by Roth’s penchant to pontificate about himself in public, from an interview with the BBC aired last spring (titled “Philip Roth Unleashed”) to a promised appearance on The Colbert Report (reportedly scheduled for last summer, but apparently scrapped). Through it all, Roth continues to insist that he’s retreating into full Garbo mode. “You can write it down,” he told a reporter last May after a star turn at the 92nd Street Y. “This was absolutely the last public appearance I will make on any public stage, anywhere”—this just a week before collecting an award from the Yaddo writer’s retreat and two weeks before accepting an honorary doctorate at the conservative Jewish Theological Seminary.

more here.

Patricia Fara at Literary Review:

The Greek origins of the word 'meteorology' indicate that trying to foretell the weather is nothing new. In Aristotle's model, the universe was divided, like a two-tiered gobstopper, into the heavens – where the planets serenely rotated in orderly circles – and the central chaotic terrestrial sphere, the skies of which extended out as far as the moon's orbit, home not only to birds, clouds and rainbows, but also to meteors. Like other transient phenomena, such as comets, meteors were often interpreted as messages from God. Only gradually were they relegated from terrestrial to astronomical science.

Following the invention of thermometers, barometers and other measuring instruments, Enlightenment gentlemen attempted to rationalise the cosmos, faithfully recording everything and anything that might help establish regular patterns of behaviour. To their humiliation, despite investing in the latest equipment, these meticulous observers were outperformed by illiterate farmers and sailors drawing on decades of experience. Even frogs and farm animals seemed more prescient, apparently possessing a sixth sense about trouble lying ahead. Self-styled experts remained fallible, especially when viewed in hindsight: in 1938, a British steam engineer correctly calculated that industrially generated carbon dioxide would cause the earth's temperature to rise, but concluded that the extra few degrees would help ward off an impending ice age.

more here.