Dawn Chan at Bookforum:

Strangers Drowning offers a portrait of a dozen-odd saints, but it also paints the picture of an individual hidden in the wings: the average reader, to whom all this extreme altruism might seem like a load of hooey. At the book’s outset, MacFarquhar notes that her focus is specifically on the “do-gooder” (emphasizing the phrase’s distasteful connotations), whom she calls “perverse”—“a foul-weather friend, a kind of virtuous ambulance chaser.” Her subjects are chosen accordingly. Absent are philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, or spur-of-the-moment heroes like Wesley Autrey (who in 2007 jumped in front of an oncoming subway train to save the life of a young film student who’d fallen onto the rails during a seizure). MacFarquhar also intentionally omits the do-gooders of wartime: the world’s Oskar Schindlers. All these people are venerated by society, but MacFarquhar would rather focus on the sort who embodies virtue but inspires scorn—or at least ambivalence. (Given that the book specifically seeks to profile the do-gooder who, as she writes, “plans his good deeds in cold blood,” it’s no surprise that several protagonists said they were galvanized by Singer’s polarizing version of greatest-good-to-greatest-number ethics.)

Here is the crux of what’s both knotty and intriguing about the book. It assumes that these saints seem odious to the rest of us sinners—an assumption about the readership that excludes those of us who read the book and felt nothing but admiration for everyone portrayed. And it raises an urgent question: Why do they seem slightly odious to so many of us? Surely, these relentless altruists ought to serve as models, not sources of annoyance.

more here.

From Africa is a Country:

Bound at once to a contract with the state and simultaneously to a public sphere, the university has had to reinvent its object of study, abiding by duration and commitments to the formation of students in respect of its reigning ideas. It is in the interstice of these seemingly opposing social demands that the inventiveness of the university as an institution is most discernable. Rather than being given to the dominant interests of the day, whether state, capital or public, the university ought by virtue of its idealism to be true to its commitment to name the question that defines the present in relation to which it sets to work, especially when that question of the present may not appear obvious to society at large. Yet, in naming this question the university is ethically required to make clear that it does not stand above society.

Today there is growing concern that the university has lost sight of its reigning idea – the demands of radical critique and timeliness – and all the contests that ensue from claims made on that idea. In the process its sense of inventiveness has been threatened by an encroaching sense of the de-schooling of society, instrumental reason and the effects of the changes in the technological resources of society that have altered the span of attention, retentional abilities, memory and recall, and at times, the very desire to think and reason. Scholars around the world bemoan the extent of plagiarism and lack of attention on the part of their students; features that they suggest have much to do with the changes wrought by the growth and expansion of new technological resources. What binds the university as a coherent system is now threatened by the waning of attention and the changes in processes of retention and memory. In these times, retention has been consigned to digital recording devices. Students and faculty are now compelled to labor under the illusion that the more that we store and the more we have stored, the more we presumably know.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Stem-cell scientists led by Dr. John Dick have discovered a completely new view of how human blood is made, upending conventional dogma from the 1960s. The findings, published online today in the journal Science, prove “that the whole classic 'textbook' view we thought we knew doesn't actually even exist,” says principal investigator John Dick, Senior Scientist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network (UHN), and Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto. “Instead, through a series of experiments we have been able to finally resolve how different kinds of blood cells form quickly from the stem cell – the most potent blood cell in the system – and not further downstream as has been traditionally thought,” says Dr. Dick, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Stem Cell Biology and is also Director of the Cancer Stem Cell Program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

…”Four years ago, when we isolated the pure stem cell, we realized we had also uncovered populations of stem-cell like 'daughter' cells that we thought at the time were other types of stem cells,” says Dr. Dick. “When we burrowed further to study these 'daughters', we discovered they were actually already mature blood lineages. In other words, lineages that had broken off almost immediately from the stem cell compartment and had not developed downstream through the slow, gradual 'textbook' process. “So in human blood formation, everything begins with the stem cell, which is the executive decision-maker quickly driving the process that replenishes blood at a daily rate that exceeds 300 billion cells.”

More here.

Twenty-year Love Poem

I want to remember, but not too clearly.
More like remembering falling in love
than falling in love—the past spread
out behind us in a comfortable distance,
the hardships forgotten. The truth is
we were starving and lived on loose
change and vending machine pretzels.
The excitement of finding a quarter
in the hallway would sustain us all day
and sometimes into the night. Surviving
was learning how to jump when the elevator
refused to stop at the right floor, then prying
the doors open until the darkened space
of the shaft lay revealed in front of us,
emptiness below and above, the very hungry
could get through that small opening between
floors. I remember your face in the darkness
of that small box, smiling like the shine
on a new coin. The richness. Wanting
to stay there with you forever.
.

by Christine Klocek-Lim
from How to Photograph the Heart
The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009
.

Cynthia Haven in Stanford News:

René Girard was one of the leading thinkers of our era – a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies and “isms” to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history and human destiny.

The renowned Stanford French professor, one of the 40 immortels of the prestigious Académie Française, died at his Stanford home on Nov. 4 at the age of 91, after long illness.

Fellow immortel and Stanford Professor Michel Serres once dubbed him “the new Darwin of the human sciences.” The author who began as a literary theorist was fascinated by everything. History, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion, psychology and theology all figured in his oeuvre.

International leaders read him, the French media quoted him. Girard influenced such writers as Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and Czech writer Milan Kundera – yet he never had the fashionable (and often fleeting) cachet enjoyed by his peers among the structuralists, poststructuralists, deconstructionists and other camps. His concerns were not trendy, but they were always timeless.

In particular, Girard was interested in the causes of conflict and violence and the role of imitation in human behavior. Our desires, he wrote, are not our own; we want what others want. These duplicated desires lead to rivalry and violence. He argued that human conflict was not caused by our differences, but rather by our sameness. Individuals and societies offload blame and culpability onto an outsider, a scapegoat, whose elimination reconciles antagonists and restores unity.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The New Yorker:

A few pages into Robert Harbison’s “Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery,” I had to stop, catch my breath, and laugh. Harbison opens the book by reflecting on a chunk of the Pergamon frieze, which was part of a second-century B.C. altar and which depicts, among other things, the mythical battle between the Greek gods and giants. The chunk somehow ended up in the “decayed industrial town” of Worksop, in Nottinghamshire, England. Meditations on the frieze lead Harbison to Peter Weiss’s “immense historico-political novel ‘The Aesthetics of Resistance,’ ” a book composed of “unwieldy blocks” of prose, not unlike the unwieldy fragments of stone that the Pergamon frieze has become over time. From Weiss we move on to Bernardino de Sahagún and Guaman Poma, “two preservers of the native cultures of Mexico and Peru.” Sahagún’s “General History of the Artifacts of New Spain” (1575-7) interests Harbison primarily because it was suppressed in Spain and “disappeared for two centuries until the hand-coloured original was discovered in the national library of Florence in the eighteenth century.” A paragraph or two about Poma and Sahagún and Harbison is off to a garbage dump in “the vanished Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus,” where fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus have been discovered. We are eight pages into the book.

Robert Harbison is a hard figure to pin down. He’s an expert on architecture—at least, he lectures about architecture here and there, though he doesn’t hold a position at any institution. He wrote a book called “Eccentric Spaces,” which was first published in 1977, and in 2000 was reissued by M.I.T. Press. On its website, M.I.T. Press explains that the book concerns “the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in.” Richard Todd, in a review of the book for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote that “Eccentric Spaces” “awakens the reader to the space around him” and described the book as “a reminder of how much we want from the world.” Reading these descriptions and others, one gets the sense that many smart people like Robert Harbison’s writing and aren’t entirely sure what it’s about.

More here.

Tenzan Eaghll in Bulletin for the Study of Religion:

Today I read my 500th article on why the humanities are failing. Since I began working in religious studies these articles have been published with abandon, all of them claiming that the humanities are devalued, underfunded, and destined to be fully eclipsed by science, neoliberalism―or some other boogey monster―and all of them suggesting some sort of reasonable solution to this crisis. Now, I do not want to detract from the value of these articles, or to deny the grave threat the academy faces from current austerity practices, but simply want to point out that this threat of obscurity and rejection has always been the horizon of critical theory in the humanities.

In the article I read today the author’s position was that the humanities have been eclipsed by scientific research and that this shadow of oblivion is not necessary. The author points to numerous scientific-like studies produced within the humanities that could revive it in a science driven world, or at least save it from irrelevance. “The humanities,” the author suggests, “are producing very scientifically relevant material,” and this should not be ignored. The article concludes, in a somewhat familiar tone, by calling for humanities scholars to make this evident, and to make their work accessible to the masses by engaging in “more public scholarship.”

What this article forgets, like all others I have ever read on this subject, is that critical work in the humanities has always been ignored, at least initially, and no amount of pandering (scientific or literary) will change this. Why? Because the fields of study that cultivate critical thinking and encourage the critique of dominant ideologies will always be marginalized.

More here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Caravan:

Two weeks after Ikhlaq’s murder by a lynch mob, Prime Minister Modi broke his controversial silence over the incident, only to call it “unfortunate.” It was a statement in keeping with Modi’s habitual reluctance to criticise acts and statements that contradict the narrative of development-oriented governance that he has worked so hard to put in place.

The reason for Modi’s abdication of responsibility may not lie in endorsement, but in fear. His BJP and its influential supporting organisations, including the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, now run the serious risk of being outflanked from the right by Hindutva outfits they can no longer control. The last six months have made it evident that the cultural agenda of the RSS, relegated to the background of Modi’s election campaign last year, is now at least as important to his government as attempts to deliver “good governance.” But several recent incidents suggest that the RSS cannot keep control of the forces it has unleashed. Ikhlaq’s murder is one of them. Many of those arrested for the crime have links with a local BJP leader. In the aftermath of the murder, party men such as Mahesh Sharma, the union minister for culture, and the BJP MLA Sangeet Som, who is under investigation for his role in the Muzaffarnagar violence of 2013, visited the village and sought to justify the actions of the mob.

This mob did not emerge spontaneously. Reports suggest that an organisation called the Samadhan Sena had been active in the area for a few months. When The Caravan’s reporter Atul Dev met the head of the Samadhan Sena, five days after the murder, the leader claimed an association with the RSS, and went on to say “Kitna gambhir vishay hai ye? Gau hatya—par koi baat nahi kar raha. Baat kiski kar rahe hain? Ki ek Musalman mar gaya. Matlab, behenchod, desh badal jana chahiye?” (Cow slaughter is such a serious issue, but no one is talking about it. What are they talking about? That one Muslim has died. And so, sisterfuckers, the country should change itself?)

More here.

Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times:

Which is more important in determining the policy positions of economists, ideology or evidence? Is economics, as some assert, little more than a means of dressing up ideological arguments in scientific clothing?

This certainly happens, especially among economists connected to politically driven think tanks – places like the Heritage Foundation come to mind. Economists who work for businesses also have a tendency to present evidence more like a lawyer advocating a particular position than a scientist trying to find out how the economy really works. But what about academic economists who are supposed to be searching for the truth no matter the political implications? Can we detect the same degree of bias in their research and policy positions?

Once again, it is certainly possible to find examples where this has occurred. But the vast majority of academic economists appear willing to abandon ideology when the evidence is clear. Take, for example, the highly charged political issue of whether deficit spending helps to stimulate the economy in recessions. A survey of top economists from both political parties asked, “Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.”

It produced a remarkable 97 percent agreement (only one economist disagreed). When asked in a follow up question if the costs exceeded the benefits, the disagreement rose to 6 percent, but even in this case an overwhelming number agreed (75 percent) or had no opinion (19 percent). A question on the use of dynamic scoring to evaluate legislative proposals, another highly contentious political issue, was supported by 100 percent of the respondents. Similarly, support for infrastructure spending was 98 percent, no disagreement, and 2 percent uncertain.

The panel does not always agree. Take another politically charged question, “If the federal minimum wage is raised gradually to $15-per-hour by 2020, the employment rate for low-wage US workers will be substantially lower than it would be under the status quo.” In this case, 34 percent agree, 29 percent disagree, and 37 percent are uncertain. Does ideology explain the different outcome in this case?

More here.

Marjorie Perloff at The Times Literary Supplement:

What makes the Pound story so fascinating is that it was in the prison camp at Pisa that he wrote what many consider his greatest book of poetry, the Pisan Cantos, which won the first Bollingen Prize (1948), setting off a firestorm in literary circles that continues to this day. Again, it was at St Elizabeths that Pound produced the Rock-Drill and Thrones sections of the Cantos, as well as his Confucian translations and commentaries. St Elizabeths was where he held court to many of America’s then rising poets, from Charles Olson to Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Back in Italy in the 1960s, he found himself a cult figure, sought out by poets from around the world who considered him, in the words of (the Jewish) Allen Ginsberg, “the greatest poet of the age”.

Volume Three also brings Pound’s personal story to its climax. The forced wartime ménage-à-trois with his wife Dorothy and mistress Olga Rudge (the mother of his daughter Mary) ended abruptly with Pound’s arrest. For the moment, Dorothy had won: she moved to Washington, visited her husband every day and was given control of his financial affairs. Documents make clear that after the first year or two, she was quite satisfied to have her husband remain at St Elizabeths, where he was safe from Olga and had none of his usual financial worries. Pound himself was resigned: at St Elizabeths he developed new friendships as well as love affairs – first with the bohemian, drug-addicted Sheri Martinelli and then with a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher, Marcella Spann, who accompanied the Pounds on their return to Italy, only to have Dorothy and Mary conspire to ship her back to her native Texas.

more here.

Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis:

As Hager’s description of Pauling’s guiding insight suggests, genuine scientific understanding can be visceral, the rightness of a line of thought confirmed by some transcendent sensation. What Hager does not mention is that the natural resistance of established authority to an intellectual usurper can rage within as well. In science, tradition packs more authority than one might expect from the lovely modern fable that attributes unrelenting progress to vocational purity unequalled by any other profession: scientists, we are told, are endlessly open to the latest ideas, consumed by the need for the truth, undisturbed by the roiling petty ambitions that infect politicians and poets and all such lesser beings.

Patrick Coffey in Cathedrals of Science shows how the rare scientist who is “willing to be distracted from one line of research to pursue an unexpected observation,” and who thereby opens a new line of research, can be met with disbelief shot through with enmity and contempt. Svante Arrhenius, a doctoral student in the early 1880s at Sweden’s Uppsala University, was seeking entry to the guild of chemists devoted at the time to the unending project of synthesizing every possible compound, the work propelled by the synthesis of splendid dyes for the textile industry, which “changed the way the Western world dressed and decorated,” and which made certain industrialists and their technological swamis very rich. The prevailing rigmarole failed to interest Arrhenius, who was thinking about “something on the borderline between chemistry and physics that would extend chemical theory.”

more here.

Amanda Kolson Hurley at The American Scholar:

When the first suburbs were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was architects and landscape architects who shaped them. The English architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin designed proto-suburban “garden cities” in the Arts and Crafts style, on the utopian model set forth by the reformist thinker Ebenezer Howard. In America, Frederick Law Olmsted planned the early suburb of Riverside, Illinois, its curving, leafy streets becoming a defining suburban feature. When it comes to buildings themselves, arguably the most influential house of the 20th century, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, is in Poissy, a suburb of Paris. The largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright houses is in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Wright also dreamed up Broadacre City, a suburban Jeffersonian paradise where every man could have a car and a whole acre to himself—the better to avoid his fellow Americans.

After the Second World War, U.S. government housing subsidies for returning veterans combined with new highway construction to fuel a massive wave of suburban sprawl. But architects were left out of the building boom. Commercial homebuilders shaped the new suburbs instead, bulldozing large tracts of land and framing up house after house with assembly-line speed, rarely deviating from the same few floor plans. To make sure their buyers could get government mortgages, the builders followed strict guidelines from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Established vernacular styles such as Cape Cod and colonial revival were favored; the FHA frowned on modern design as too novel for the home-buying public and a risky investment.

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Victoria Law in BitchMedia:

No official organization keeps track of how many police officers commit sexual assault on the job. So the Associated Press spent a year collecting their own numbers. Their just-published investigation into sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement found that, during a six-year period, roughly 1,000 officers lost their badges for rape, sodomy, misconduct such as propositioning people or having consensual sex while on duty, and sex crimes such as possession of child pornography. That means a police officer loses their badge for sexual misconduct nearly every other day. It’s a horrifying read, detailing specific instances in which law enforcement used their authority to sexually assault people—and then keep them quiet. What should also frighten every person is what the AP concluded about their findings:

The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records. “It's happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country,” said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “It's so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them.”

In other words, we know about these 1,000 officers only because they lost their badges.

More here.

Jo Lennan in More Intelligent Life:

Before this – before cancer – I had never spent a night in hospital. I made it to 30 without so much as a broken bone. Then, in February 2013, I noticed something, a certain discomfort of the stomach. I thought I’d overdone the black coffee in the morning, or the dried mango a houseguest had brought from Darwin. I began to dislike having the weight of my boyfriend’s leg across my body. These didn’t seem like symptoms. They were easy to dismiss, even when things got worse. I saw a GP, then a specialist, in Sydney, where I live. I was given the all-clear, and for a time I did get better. Then, in mid-2014, came several bouts of what felt like food poisoning. In August, instead of eating the Ottolenghi-style cod cakes a friend had carefully prepared, I threw up in her bathroom. I was about to take a work trip to London via Hong Kong, but my GP said not to go anywhere. The specialist rang my mobile to say the same thing, and her voice had a different note, something like alarm. Even so, I didn’t believe it would turn out to be anything serious. I was perpetually ready to assume that things were fine. From there things happened quickly. A surgeon said I had an obstruction in my small intestine that had to be cut out. I cancelled my trip. I bought pyjamas for hospital, because who under the age of 60 actually owns any, apart from old track pants and skimpy camisoles? I put my passwords in a file, which I jokingly labelled, “For if Jo croaks”. Instead of drinks with an editor at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, it was into hospital and under anaesthetic. The two weeks after that are hazy now; a cocktail of painkillers does tend to dull the memory. I remember the news, which showed Scotland voting No. I remember the visits from family and friends, the flowers and gifts. At first I kept quiet about being in hospital, but my parents came to Sydney, a six-hour drive from where they live, and looked bewildered when they saw me. My younger sister, a physiotherapist, flew in from Perth and took me for turns about the ward. I was still feeble and full of tubes, and for a few days I kept my phone off, while my boyfriend acted as gatekeeper and giver of updates. On the Saturday morning, instead of enjoying the warm weekend, the surgeon stopped by. He said the biopsy results were in, and they showed I had cancer.

…But why and how does cancer form, apparently for no reason? Medicine’s answers to these questions have changed dramatically through the ages, as have its methods for treating sufferers. One thing I do read is “The Emperor of All Maladies”, a remarkable book from 2010 by an American oncologist, Siddhartha Mukherjee, who recounts how, in the second century AD, Galen of Pergamon argued that cancer, like melancholia, was caused by an excess of black bile. His approach favoured bleeding and purging of humours, while surgery was used only in extreme cases.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

A tapeworm that infected a Colombian man deposited malignant cells inside his body that spread much like an aggressive cancer, researchers have reported in a bizarre, but not unprecedented, case. “We have a situation where a foreign organism is developing as a tumour rather than developing as an organism,” says Peter Olson, a developmental parasitologist at the Natural History Museum in London. He is part of a team that describes the case in a 4 November report in the New England Journal of Medicine¹. The apparently cancerous cells were first examined in 2013 by investigators at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. They came from a 41-year-old Colombian man with HIV, who had been ill for months when he sought medical attention in January 2013. Colombian doctors found that he had a compromised immune system, had been infected by the dwarf tapeworm (Hymenolepis nana), and had small tumour-like growths in his lungs and lymph nodes. They sent tissue samples to the CDC. Under a microscope, those samples revealed small odd-shaped cells that, like a cancer, appeared to be invading nearby healthy tissue, the CDC team found. Yet the cells tested negative for human proteins. That was a conundrum: although the US investigators knew about the man's tapeworm infection, the invading cells did not look like they should belong to a complex, multicellular organism such as a tapeworm.Tragically, in May 2013, the patient experienced kidney failure and died. A team led by CDC pathologist Atis Muehlenbachs examined the DNA of the invading cells and determined that they did belong to a tapeworm. And genome sequencing showed that the tapeworm cells carried particular mutations that, in human cells, are associated with tumours.

…Olson believes that the tumorous tapeworm cells are rogue larvae that burrowed from the stomach into the lymph nodes of immunocompromised people (a healthy immune system would stop this invasion). The larvae are loaded with regenerative stem cells, so instead of turning into an adult tapeworm, they proliferate. “Those stem cells that would normally give rise to a segmented worm don’t, because they’re in the wrong place and have the wrong environmental cues,” says Olson.

More here.

Over at MIT Technology Review:

Marvin Minsky is one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, and over the past 60 years he has made key contributions in mathematics, robotics, computer graphics, machine perception, and machine learning. I was lucky enough to be invited to meet recently with Minsky at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I took a videographer to capture the conversation.

It was a charming, slightly surreal experience. After all, it’s unusual to meet someone who was on a first-name basis with John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Albert Einstein. And despite being unwell for the past couple of years, Minsky, 88, hasn’t lost his playful sense of humor.

It was also fascinating because artificial intelligence has had a remarkable renaissance in recent years, thanks especially to progress in simulating the process by which neurons and synapses enable a brain to learn. Minsky has had a huge influence on the field’s progress toward this new dawn.

In 1951, while studying mathematics at Princeton, he built the first learning machine, an artificial neural network built from vacuum tubes called the Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator, or SNARC. Shortly after that, he turned his attention toward the manipulation of logic and symbols using computers, which guided his later work on artificial intelligence.

More here.

James Garvey talks to Martha Nussbaum in The Philosophers' Magazine Online:

“We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance. No, I do not mean the global economic crisis….I mean a crisis that goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government: a world-wide crisis in education.” That’s the opening blast from Martha Nussbaum’s new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

She starts by identifying a global trend. Policy-makers, universities, and even entire nations are discarding the humanities and focusing instead on academic subjects linked to economic growth. She then makes a case for a connection between liberal arts education, free-thinking citizens, and healthy democracy. Pull the plug on the liberal arts, and you no longer have the sort of people able to do the things required for democratic citizenship. Barely a page into the book and we’re warned that “nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticise tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.” Strong stuff. Are things really that bad?

“I don’t write in this alarmist way usually,” she says, “in fact in my book Cultivating Humanity the whole point was to say that insofar as higher education is concerned the changes that we’re seeing are on balance very positive. We’re confronting the new complexity of the world better. We’re educating ourselves about women, about race, about non-western cultures much better. But now, I feel, it’s not true any longer.”

She talks about some American universities which have closed their philosophy departments. “If it’s happening in the US – where the liberal arts system is deeply entrenched, where you have a system of private philanthropy which is also deeply entrenched, and where the tax system gives you strong incentives for that kind of philanthropy – it’s happening all the more in other countries. All over Europe people are reporting big cuts in the humanities.”

She’s aware of plans in the UK to distribute funding in higher education based in part on the economic impact of research. The very idea makes philosophers wince.

More here.

Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books:

Primo Levi was born in 1919 on the fourth floor of an “undistinguished” apartment block in Turin and aside from “involuntary interruptions” continued to live there in the company of his mother until in 1987 he threw himself down the stairwell to his death. The longest interruption was from September 1943 to October 1945 and would provide Levi with the core material for his writing career: it involved three months on the fringe of the partisan resistance to the German occupation, two months in a Fascist internment camp, eleven months in Auschwitz, and a further nine in various Russian refugee camps.

In 1946, aged twenty-seven, despite working full-time as a chemist, Levi completed his account of his time in a concentration camp. Now widely considered a masterpiece, If This Is a Man was turned down by Turin’s main publishing house, Einaudi, in the person of Natalia Ginzburg, herself a Jew whose husband had died in a Fascist prison. It was also rejected by five other publishers. Why?

Even before his return, Levi had been overwhelmed by the need to tell what had happened. Prior to Auschwitz he had not felt that Jewishness was central to his identity. Like most Italian Jews, the Levis had long been assimilated with little to distinguish them from other Italians. The introduction of the Race Laws in 1938, which discriminated against Jews in public education and excluded them from regular employment, thus created a predicament for Levi that went far beyond the problem of completing his degree in chemistry and finding a job. It was a threat to his identity. Who was he if not an ordinary Italian like his fellow students? The question “what is a man?” that would echo throughout his work was never an abstract consideration but a matter of personal urgency.

More here.

Alysaa Pelish in The Smart Set:

In the very last volume of Proust’s very long novel, the narrator attends an afternoon party where everyone seems to be wearing a mask. He can recognize the voices of his long-ago friends and acquaintances, but their words issue from faces that are all strangely slackened and faded, or hardened and rigidified. They seem to be wearing powdered wigs. Even his host, having disguised himself in the same manner as his guests, appears to have taken on the role of one of the very last stages of the Ages of Man.

What has happened, of course, is the passage of time. These people have aged.

This quality of the aging face, in so many respects like a living mask, was something I had hardly considered until I began to notice the fine crosshatching beneath my own eyes and the first tracing of lines across my forehead. It was disconcerting, these creeping forerunners of age — of aging. The only face I had ever known as my own — a face resolutely unwrinkled for over three decades — was somehow being impinged upon, irreversibly. I knew that, unlike a spate of pimples or the red peel of sunburn, these new lines and creases were here to stay, and they would only grow more pronounced.

As I considered the changes in my own face, my eyes were soon drawn to the lines in other people’s faces, as if searching for a benchmark of normalcy, a point of comparison. What I discovered, though, was the variability of a phenomenon I had never before bothered to notice. Some brows, I now saw, were entirely furrowed, really ploughed-in deep parallel lines that never even began to fade when the eyebrows lowered, as if that fairy Queen Mab who hectors sleepers had driven a team of oxen back and forth over the course of many nights.

More here.

Polina Aronson in Aeon:

By analysing the language of popular magazines, TV shows and self-help books and by conducting interviews with men and women in different countries, scholars including Eva Illouz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have demonstrated clearly that our ideas about love are dominated by powerful political, economic and social forces. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we can call romantic regimes: systems of emotional conduct that affect how we speak about how we feel, determine ‘normal’ behaviours, and establish who is eligible for love – and who is not.

The clash of romantic regimes was precisely what I was experiencing on that day in the school library. The Seventeen girl was trained for making decisions about whom to get intimate with. She rationalised her emotions in terms of ‘needs’ and ‘rights’, and rejected commitments that did not seem compatible with them. She was raised in the Regime of Choice. By contrast, classic Russian literature (which, when I was coming of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country), described succumbing to love as if it were a supernatural power, even when it was detrimental to comfort, sanity or life itself. In other words, I grew up in the Regime of Fate.

These two regimes are based on opposing principles. Both of them turn love into an ordeal in their own ways. Nevertheless, in most middle-class, Westernised cultures (including contemporary Russia), the Regime of Choice is asserting itself over all other forms of romance. The reasons for this appear to lie in the ethical principles of neo-liberal, democratic societies, which regard freedom as the ultimate good. However, there is strong evidence that we need to re-consider our convictions, in order to see how they might, in fact, be hurting us in invisible ways.

More here.