Reviews and News:
David Garrow’s biography of Obama is the most detailed portrait of the former president to date. So why do the critics hate it? “Garrow compares his research to Obama’s recollections of his own life, which are continually exposed as incomplete, exaggerated or inaccurate. In Dreams and in other retrospective accounts of his past, Garrow finds, Obama overstated his facility in learning Indonesian, misrecalled a disturbing magazine article he read as a kid about a black man bleaching his skin, inflated his own importance to the Punahou basketball team, wrongly described himself as a bad boy during his teens, mischaracterized his post-collegiate work for the New York Public Interest Research Group and fudged or misstated the record in countless other ways. Garrow seems to take pleasure in catching Obama in these mistakes, and I suspect that Rising Star’s critics were put off by his manifest skepticism about the Obama legend. Obama, after all, still has his cheering gallery. In the last year of his presidency, media coverage displayed much of the same solicitous protectiveness toward him that was rampant during the 2008 campaign and never quite disappeared, a sense that this phenom was somehow… different from all other politicians...If Rising Star comes off at times as captious, it’s because, I think, Garrow is so doggedly determined to get to the real Barack Obama, to peel away the layers of mythology—including self-mythologizing—that surround his now-familiar story.”
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The iPhone is ten years old. It wasn’t fun to create: “‘You created a pressure cooker of a bunch of really smart people with an impossible deadline, an impossible mission, and then you hear that the future of the entire company is resting on it,’ Andy Grignon, one of the iPhone’s key engineers, has said. ‘It was just like this soup of misery.’”
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Italy’s enduring love affair with Emilio Salgari: “Born in Verona in 1862, Salgari led a sad and quietly dramatic life. Although he was prodigious—writing more than 200 novels and stories in his short life—and popular, Salgari struggled with poverty. He was also crippled by personal tragedy: his wife was sent to an asylum, and his father committed suicide. Salgari eventually took his own life, disembowelling himself in the style of a Japanese samurai. ‘You have kept me and my family in semi-penury,’ he wrote to his publisher. ‘I salute you as I break my pen.’ Far removed from his bleak personal circumstances, Salgari’s stories pant with life. He never travelled far, but deployed his frantic imagination to render faraway places like the American West or the golden beaches of the Caribbean. Whatever the setting, Salgari filled his stories with swordfights, hidden treasure and beautiful maidens.”
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Herman Melville’s gnostic poem.
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A history of al-Qaida after September 11: “For more than a decade, these ‘guests’, all connected to the world’s pre-eminent Sunni Islamic extremist group, remained in the capital of the world’s leading Shia Muslim power, under the control of Iran’s most ideologically committed faction, the Quds force. Analysts have long known that some al-Qaida militants and their families stayed in Iran between 2002 and recent years, but the account in The Exile is the only authoritative description of their time there.”
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John Stuart Mill’s intolerant faith.
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Essay of the Day:
New research on the effects of power shows that it really does corrupt...your brain. Jerry Useem in The Atlantic:
“The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as ‘a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.’ But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.
“Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.”
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Photo: Camping outside Hong Kong
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Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Prayer Concerning the New, More ‘Accurate’ Translation of Certain Prayers”
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