A discussion with Amitava Kumar on The Leonard Lopate Show:

Amitava Kumar looks at the global repercussions of the war on terror. His book A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb tells the story of two men convicted in U.S. courts on terrorism-related charges: Hemant Lakhani, a 70-year-old tried for attempting to sell a fake missile to an FBI informant, and Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was accused of being involved in a conspiracy to bomb a subway. Kumar explores the experiences of ordinary people caught up in the war on terror and the growing suspicions about foreigners in post-9/11 America.

Colin Marshall in The Millions:

I laughed loud and long after coming across a retired schoolteacher’s self-published book of poetry with the wildly unappealing title Meanderings of an Aged Mind. Yet it now occurs to me that the late avant-garde novelist David Markson’s literary output eventually assumed exactly that form. And though he never quite reached the depth of being forced into self-publication, his fame seems to have peaked around 1970. Quasi-praise such as “undeserved obscurity” and “smartest novelist you’ve never heard of” would thereafter accumulate like barnacles on his hull.

Markson wrote two novels that look just about like traditional novels, one that could pass for a traditional novel’s second cousin, and four that invent, develop, and refine the aggressively non-novelistic shape that would become his very own genre. Line them up, and you’ve never seen such clear stylistic progress. Final destination: books made of evenly-spaced, meticulously arranged facts from the lives of notable artists, writers, philosophers, and other intellectuals. No, not historical fiction. Not narratives of any lives in particular. Not tracings of any currents of thought. Just textual accretions, really, but textual accretions of the highest erudition and artistry.

If you’re looking for grand statements about David Markson’s career, you might say the same thing that makes his novels so fascinating — and, to his fans, so endlessly engaging — also makes them so little-known. Not just steeped in but crafted from the West’s achievements in thought and aesthetics, they pay off in excitement to the extent that you know your Yeatses from your Keatses, your Kierkegaards from your Spinozas. Truly meriting the label of sui generis that otherwise gets thrown around so carelessly, his novels are fiendishly tricky to contextualize. What might you have already read that suggests you’ll like David Markson? Tough call, since, for good or ill, nothing’s like David Markson.

Zeeya Merali in Discover:

[Jeff] Tollaksen and [Yakir] Aharonov proposed analyzing changes in a quantum property called spin, roughly analogous to the spin of a ball but with some important differences. In the quantum world, a particle can spin only two ways, up or down, with each direction assigned a fixed value (for instance, 1 or –1). First the physicists would measure spin in a set of particles at 2 p.m. and again at 2:30 p.m. Then on another day they would repeat the two tests, but also measure a subset of the particles a third time, at 3 p.m. If the predictions of backward causality were correct, then for this last subset, the spin measurement conducted at 2:30 p.m. (the intermediate time) would be dramatically amplified. In other words, the spin measurements carried out at 2 p.m. and those carried out at 3 p.m. together would appear to cause an unexpected increase in the intensity of spins measured in between, at 2:30 p.m. The predictions seemed absurd, as ridiculous as claiming that you could measure the position of a dolphin off the Atlantic coast at 2 p.m. and again at 3 p.m., but that if you checked on its position at 2:30 p.m., you would find it in the middle of the Mediterranean.

And the amplification would not be restricted to spin; other quantum properties would be dramatically increased to bizarrely high levels too. The idea was that ripples of the measurements carried out in the future could beat back to the present and combine with effects from the past, like waves combining and peaking below a boat, setting it rocking on the rough sea. The smaller the subsample chosen for the last measurement, the more dramatic the effects at intermediate times should be, according to Aharonov’s math. It would be hard to account for such huge amplifications in conventional physics.

For years this prediction was more philosophical than physical because it did not seem possible to perform the suggested experiments. All the team’s proposed tests hinged on being able to make measurements of the quantum system at some intermediate time; but the physics books said that doing so would destroy the quantum properties of the system before the final, postselection step could be carried out. Any attempt to measure the system would collapse its delicate quantum state, just as chasing dolphins in a boat would affect their behavior. Use this kind of invasive, or strong, measurement to check on your system at an intermediate time, and you might as well take a hammer to your apparatus.

By the late 1980s, Aharonov had seen a way out: He could study the system using so-called weak measurements. (Weak measurements involve the same equipment and techniques as traditional ones, but the “knob” controlling the power of the observer’s apparatus is turned way down so as not to disturb the quantum properties in play.) In quantum physics, the weaker the measurement, the less precise it can be. Perform just one weak measurement on one particle and your results are next to useless. You may think that you have seen the required amplification, but you could just as easily dismiss it as noise or an error in your apparatus.

The way to get credible results, Tollaksen realized, was with persistence, not intensity. By 2002 physicists attuned to the potential of weak measurements were repeating their experiments thousands of times, hoping to build up a bank of data persuasively showing evidence of backward causality through the amplification effect.

Just last year, physicist John Howell and his team from the University of Rochester reported success.

Jesus Felipe, Utsav Kumar, and Arnelyn Abdon argue that the now criticized Indian and Chinese industrial policies of the 1960s through the 1970s (and later for India) are responsible for the high growth rates of the 1990s and the 2000s in Vox.

The emergence of China and India on the world stage has aroused much interest. As in many other areas of (policy) economics, just how these countries “did it” and the lessons for other countries is something economists either do not know, do not agree on, or both.

In the case of China, the literature seems to agree that capital accumulation, industrialisation, and export-led growth were key factors after 1979. Economists like Gregory Chow (1993) or World Bank chief economist Justin Lin, argue that, before 1979, Chinese central planning was a failure, economic performance was poor, and “haste made waste” (Lin 2010).

In the case of India, its poor performance during the 1960s and 1970s, referred to as “Hindu growth”, has often been attributed to, among other things, poor planning, and the license-permit Raj (Bhagwati and Desai 1970). Yet economists such as Bardhan (2006) and Nagaraj (2010) argue that infrastructure bottlenecks and demand–side constraints have been neglected in the discussion of India’s industrial performance.

Built-up capability.

In two recent papers and using a data set covering almost 800 products (Felipe et al 2010a and 2010b), we examine the evolution of the export basket of the two countries. We argue that the capabilities that both China and India accumulated before reforms started are vital to understanding their growth later on. While we agree that planning led to mistakes, inefficiencies, and to the misallocation of resources in both countries, we argue that, given their income per capita, China’s and India’s export baskets are more sophisticated – as measured by the income content of the export basket – and diversified – as measured by the number of products exported with revealed comparative advantage – than might otherwise be expected. Both are far ahead of countries at similar levels of development. This could have been achieved only through planning, industrial policy, and sector targeting.

Guy Deutscher in the NYT Magazine:

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away?

From The Telegraph:

One of the many pleasures of reading Believe in People, a collection of Capek’s journalism and letters translated here for the first time, is to gain the acquaintance of a sensibility as universal and relevant as Kafka’s, and yet bracingly unfamiliar. As John Carey suggests in his excellent preface: “There is no English writer like him”. Here’s how the inventor of the word “robot” typically saw things: “Sometimes it can make your hair stand on end to see what can raise a laugh.” “Imagine the silence if people said only what they know!” “Only little people fight for prestige; great people have it.” A freer spirit than the Catholic writer G K Chesterton, whom he met on a visit to London in 1924, and more optimistic than George Orwell, Capek closer resembles a Czech Montaigne. “I like scepticism as inordinately as enthusiasm,” he writes playfully. “I take care to learn from anything that I stumble on.”

The son of a country doctor, Capek viewed himself as a physician who helps others, but with words. “In my own way I also try to do doctoring.” In the daily practice of journalism, he spins unfading pieces out of the important issues of the day and also out of ephemera. Flowers, dogs, cats – “because they truly exist” – are no less worthy of his curiosity than New Year’s resolutions or toothache; or, come to that, “the fanatical dopiness of our times”. What his critics describe as relativism, he prefers to call “an anxious attentiveness to everything that exists”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” like his previous one, “The Corrections,” is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two books have much in common. Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life. Franzen knows that college freshmen are today called “first years,” like tender shoots in an overplanted garden; that a high-minded mom, however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors’ ethical lapses, will condemn them with no epithet harsher than “weird”; that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are “almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity.”

These are not gratuitous observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate “Freedom,” beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power.” That twinning is where the trouble begins. As each of us seeks to assert his “personal liberties” — a phrase Franzen uses with full command of its ideological implications — we helplessly collide with others in equal pursuit of their sacred freedoms, which, more often than not, seem to threaten our own. It is no surprise, then, that “the personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage,” as Franzen remarks. And the dream will always sour; for it is seldom enough simply to follow one’s creed; others must embrace it too. They alone can validate it.

More here.

Jesús and the Snowman

It’s a west–Texas thing:
three Delco car batteries strapped to a switch lighting a line of icicles.
Draped from barbed wire.

As far north or south as a man can walk in a night,
a clutter of jackrabbit holes and arroyos,
cactus and yucca,
sand too coarse to be good,
too dry to be dirt.

A plastic snowman guards the south end of the illuminated line.
Cheerful in its green tie and top hat, its buttons and broom, carrot nose.
Ridiculously round.
The balls of its head and chest light up the sage
like St. Elmo’s fire.

Decoration for the chiggers and toads, fire ants and lizards.
For the ones who cross at night,
taught by word of mouth to know it as a beacon,
a place to meet at 3 a.m.,
where, after fanning out for 10 miles or more,
they can regroup, drink some water, fan out again.

It’s 5 am when Jesús finds the snowman.
It should be cold, but it’s warm.
He huddles against it, stone eyed and afraid,
trying to look past the snowman’s lasso of light.

There are three figures moving toward him,
silhouettes in wide-brimmed hats against a pale horizon.
Hearing them before he sees, knowing he will want to be erect,
Jesús stands, tries to button up a smile.

by Joel F. Johnson
from Blackbird, Spring 2010 Vol. 9 No. 1

Over at Philosophy Bites:

You'd help a drowning child. Why then aren't you doing more to help the children you know are starving and sick in various parts of the world? Peter Singer discusses the issue of the life you can save with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Listen to Peter Singer on the Life You Can Save

Listen to a previous discussion with Peter Singer on Using Animals

Visit The Life You Can Save website

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow in the NYRB blog:

A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) provides grim reaffirmation of something we already knew: sexual violence is epidemic within our country’s prisons and jails. According to the report, 64,500 of the inmates who were in a state or federal prison on the day the latest BJS survey was administered had been sexually abused at their current facility within the previous year, as had 24,000 of those who were in a county jail that day—a total of 88,500 people.

In fact, as we’ve explained before, the true national total is much higher. The BJS numbers don’t include thousands who we know are sexually abused in juvenile detention and other kinds of corrections facilities every year, nor do they account for the constant turnover among jailed detainees. Stays in jail are typically short, and several times as many people pass through jail in a year as are held there on any given day. Overall, we can confidently say that well over 100,000 people are sexually abused in American detention facilities every year.

As appalling as this figure is, mere numbers can obscure what is at issue here. So consider the case of Scott Howard. Scott was a gay, non-violent, first-time inmate in a Colorado prison when he was targeted by members of the “2-11 crew,” a white supremacist gang with over 1,000 members in prisons throughout the state. For two years he was forced into prostitution by the gang’s leaders, repeatedly raped and made to perform oral sex. Even after he told prison staff that he was being raped and needed protection from the gang, Scott was told that nothing could be done unless he named his abusers—even though they had threatened to kill him if he did. Because Scott is openly gay, some officials blamed him for the attacks, saying that as a homosexual he should expect to be targeted by one gang or another. And by his account, even those officers who were not hostile didn’t know how to respond to his reports, because appropriate procedures were not in place. They failed to take even the most basic measures to protect him.

The letters of the Iranian exile Fatemeh Shams to her imprisoned husband Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour in Virginia Quarterly Review:

My love!

In these thirty days, I have written letters to whomever I can think of. When I tired of appealing to the closed doors of law and (in)justice, where nobody heard my cries, I consulted your three martyred uncles. I told them that these days our youth are charged with defending the honor of our country—the same goal that they, your uncles, sacrificed their lives for—and now our youth are being imprisoned. I told them that your father named you after them so that the memory of their sacrifices and bravery would not escape our minds.

The dead were the first and last place of authority to which I took my complaints. In the visits that the families of the detained had with the authorities, your name was ever present. That day when they visited our dear Khatami, and I was exile-bound, I wrote him and asked him to bow his head on his pure prayer mat and pray for your safe return. I heard back that he is worried from the depths of his heart and will not stop at anything to free you and the others.

But it was not just these letters my lovely! Our families tried numerous times to exercise the fundamental right of obtaining an attorney. But each time, they were met with obstacles. They took away your right to visit with an attorney. Our calls have gone unanswered, and this is my share: no news of you, my own vagrancy, and this worry about your state.

The days that you have been in prison, with no news, have been historic. But the bitterest of these events was the grief of Sohrab’s mother.2 You were not present, you did not see how young Sohrab’s mother wept by his graveside. With every ounce of my being, I feel her twenty-six days worth of unknowing, uncertainty, and with each tear, I wish to wash away the blood that she has witnessed. This earth is once again being watered by the blood of its fallen youth, and the green sapling of freedom is growing from its core.

Two nights ago I said a prayer of gratitude because a friend brought word that your singing fills the nights in the solitary cells of Evin, though she had not been to see your face. But just knowing that the songbird of Evin still has his voice calmed my heart. As another friend said, your song tells us of your health and breath and aliveness. I know your heart is strong. I know you are standing strong and that the lack of news is due to your continual resistance. I know that if they had broken you and you had told them what they wanted to hear, I would have heard your voice by now, or even seen you. When at night the grief, stronger and many-rooted, attacks my body and soul, I cry for the weak constitution of your interrogators. Staring into your green, lively eyes and forcing you to write and confess to that which you do not believe. This act must require such a hardened heart. I cry for the repression of those who keep you from sleep for long stretches of time trying to make you give in to their dirty, false confessions, and I ask God to guide them and to give you strength.

Dmitry Babich and Peter Taaffe discuss Trotsky in The Moscow News. Babich:

Leon Trotsky is a unique figure in recent Russian history who is despised by all of Russia’s major political currents.

Gennady Zyuganov’s communists hate him because he was made into Bolshevism’s anti-Pope during most of the Soviet period. Russian liberals hate him because he had no respect for private property and for human lives, which he destroyed in the millions during his tenure at the top of Soviet power in 1917-24.

The “party of power” hates him because he was a revolutionary and every revolution is an anathema to United Russia. Nationalists hate him because he had no love or pity for Russia, viewing it merely as “fuel for world revolution” – and not the best, for that matter.

Unlike Nikolai Bukharin and other Bolshevist leaders, Trotsky never had his “moment of glory” in post-Stalinist Russia. Despite his books being published and his family’s tragic fate enjoying some sympathy (Trotsky survived all his four children and only one grandson out of five escaped Stalin’s epic ire), this country’s public opinion did not rehabilitate his ideas. It can be said that Russia once and forever rejected Trotskyism, firing at it on all cylinders.

Trotsky, however, returns the fire. Not via tiny groups of his followers in Russia, which are usually reduced to the third roles in the already not-too-strong anti-Putin protest movement. Just as he did during most of his life, Trotsky – even after his death – is damaging Russia from abroad.

“Western publications headed by former or acting Trotskyites tend to be post-Soviet Russia’s most acerbic critics,” explains Yury Rubinsky, the head of the department for French studies at the Moscow-based Institute of Europe. “To these people, Russia is not just a traitor, but a double and triple traitor.”

Seher Shah in Newsweek:

“Why have there been no great women artists?” asked American art historian Linda Nochlin in a landmark 1971 essay.

Four decades later, her question still stands: while a handful of Western female painters, sculptors, and performance artists—Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic—have achieved the same level of fame as their male counterparts, the West’s elite art world continues to be dominated by male artists, curators, dealers, and collectors.

Look elsewhere around the globe, however, and women are thriving in some of the most dynamic up-and-coming art scenes. They’re even achieving widespread success in a country not exactly known for women’s rights: Pakistan. Female artists from the developing Muslim nation have been recently feted in exhibits like last year’s Hanging Fire at New York’s Asia Society and the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in Japan.

Women also hold prime positions of influence in Pakistan’s art system, running prestigious galleries such as Karachi’s Canvas and Poppy Seed, and heading key art institutes such as the School of Visual Arts at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore (under the direction of Salima Hashmi), and Lahore’s National College of Arts, which is overseen by Naazish Ataullah.

One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South Asian art historian Savita Apte, who administers the internationally renowned Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Until very recently, creatively inclined males tended to focus on fields such as advertising or illustration, leaving the art field wide open for some very talented women.

Graham Greene hated interviews. He granted one in 1968 to BBC television (his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene, was then director-general) but made two stipulations: the interview should take place on the Orient Express, thundering across borders to Istanbul; and his face should not be shown on screen during the hour-long conversation, only his hands. They titled the programme The Hunted Man. Greene was always easier to hunt than to catch. Norman Sherry notes in the preface to his monumental biography: “A man who would write two versions of his diary is not a man who gives up his secrets easily.” Sherry’s attitude is baffled but deferential. Had he not worshipped Greene, he would never have spent the best (30!) years of his scholarly life on his project only to receive a cascade of scorn from critics when, in 2004, his third and final volume appeared.

more from John Sutherland at the FT here.

Reporting from Maui — We’ve been batting our way through W.S. Merwin’s yard for a couple hours, swatting mosquitoes in the streambed under the dark wet canopy of towering, philodendron-draped mangoes and looking at some 700 species of palm trees, every one of which he has planted by hand. He stops to touch them, saying things like, “Oh, this is Carpoxylon macrocarpa; they were thought to be extinct on Madagascar, but here it is.” Many of these trees are exceptionally rare. Then he pulls up in front of a short broad palm, rather unimpressive next to the other trees on his property on Maui’s northern shore, but he smiles as he fondles the leaf. “We think this Pritchardia minor is from the Kalalau Valley,” he says, referring to a spot in the rugged Na Pali cliffs on Kauai, also a key setting in Merwin’s epic narrative poem about Hawaii, “The Folding Cliffs.” “It gives me gooseflesh to think of it being here.”

more from Dean Kuipers at the LAT here.

The Czech novelist Milan ­Kundera’s new essayistic book, “Encounter,” his fourth, is alternatingly elegiac and celebratory. An émigré from the Communist horror of what was then Czechoslovakia, he settled in Paris and proceeded to write in French. But he discovered in France “the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.” Still, there remain the particular artists whom Kundera celebrates — novelists, poets, composers, painters — who keep beauty alive. There are 26 essays, some of only a couple of pages, some rather longer. Let us examine a characteristic one, “What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?” It begins by making reference to a 1999 article in a Paris weekly, “one of the more serious ones.” (Frequently Kundera will refer to a person or a piece of writing without identification, unclear whether for universalizing or diplomatic reasons.) It contained a special section on 18 “geniuses of the century,” featuring, among others, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Bill Gates, Le Corbusier, Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent and the little-known astronomy professor Robert Noyes.

more from John Simon at the NYT here.