The New York Review (Continuación)

Julián López Escobar, Seville, Spain, 2002

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

There are no colors out there in the world, Galileo tells us. They only exist in our heads. In the first of our dialogues about the mind, Riccardo Manzotti and I established that by “consciousness” we mean the feeling that accompanies our being alive, the fact that we experience the world rather than simply interacting with it mechanically. We also touched on the problem that traditional science cannot explain this fact and does not include it in its account of reality. That said, there is a dominant understanding of where consciousness happens: in the brain. This “internalist,” or inside-the-head, approach shares Galileo’s view that color, smell, and sound do not exist in the outside world but only in the brain.…  Seguir leyendo »

Supporters of the Syrian regime carrying a poster of Bashar al-Assad and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, Ansar village, Lebanon, March 2, 2016. Ali Hashisho/Reuters

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Over the past few days, Syrian government forces, along with their Russian and Iranian allies, have been pounding rebel-held areas of Aleppo with the kind of destructive air power rarely seen since the bombing of Dresden. A third of the city has been held by a variety of Syrian opposition group since 2012, but they are rapidly losing ground under the onslaught, and now facing a humanitarian disaster that is shocking even by Syrian standards. On Wednesday, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting to deal with what French Ambassador François Delattre called “one of the biggest massacres of a civilian population since World War II.”…  Seguir leyendo »

Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum Photos

MundoOriente Próximo,

I first heard the name Ahmed Naji at a PEN dinner last spring. I looked up from my desert to a large projection of a young Egyptian man, rather handsome, slightly louche-looking, with a Burt Reynolds moustache, wearing a Nehru shirt in a dandyish print and the half smile of someone both amusing and easily amused. I learned that he was just thirty and had written a novel called Using Life for which he is currently serving a two-year prison sentence. I thought: good title. A facile thought to have at such a moment but it’s what came to mind. I liked the echo of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual—the coolness of that—and thought I recognized, in Naji’s author photo, something antic and wild, not unlike what you see when you look at pictures of Perec.…  Seguir leyendo »

Hu Fayun in Wuhan, 2016 / Sim Chi Yin/VII

MundoAsia

Over the summer I traveled to Wuhan to continue my series of talks with people about the challenges facing China. Coming here was part of an effort to break out of the black hole of Beijing politics and explore the view from China’s vast hinterland.

Wuhan seemed a logical place to start because it is one of the country’s great inland port cities—it has a population of more than 8 million and is a gateway to the interior. A conglomeration of what were once three cities, Wuhan is at the intersection of two of China’s most important rivers, the Yangtze and the Han.…  Seguir leyendo »

Scientists inspecting Iraq’s first nuclear reactor in Baghdad, supplied by the Soviets, February 1968

InternacionalOrden Mundial

For some years I have been puzzling over the question of why some countries that want nuclear weapons succeed in building them and others don’t. As we enter what could be a new age of proliferation, the question takes on considerable importance. The US has a president-elect who has said he would repeal the Iran deal, which among other things prevents substantial uranium enrichment by Tehran for ten years, and who openly suggested during the campaign that our allies in Asia, and even the Arabian peninsula, take responsibility for their own nuclear deterrence. If, say, South Korea or Saudi Arabia began to pursue a nuclear program, how likely might they be to succeed?…  Seguir leyendo »

Virna Haffer: Inside the Mind of Man, circa 1935-1942

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Is it possible to put some order into our thoughts about consciousness, memory, perception, and the like? Hardly a day goes by without some in-depth article wondering whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether mind is a unique quality of human beings or spread out across the universe like butter on bread. Many of us are not even sure what we believe in this department, or whether what we believe would bear much scrutiny from philosophers or neuroscientists.

For a number of years I have been talking about these matters almost daily with Riccardo Manzotti, the philosopher, psychologist, and robotics engineer.…  Seguir leyendo »

USA. NYC. November 9th, 2016. Early in the morning after Election Day. People watch the returns coming in at Times Square. Donald J. Trump won the election in a startling reversal of expectation. Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

MundoAmérica,

In late September, I ran into Newt Gingrich and, out of curiosity, I asked him how he thought the election would turn out. “There’ll be a surge for Trump at the end,” he said. “There’s only so far that Hillary can go; too many people don’t like her.” I dismissed this as spin, forgetting that for all his erratic nature Gingrich is a bit of a visionary. Until it happened in 1994, no one outside his small circle believed that he could turn the House of Representatives—in Democratic hands for forty years—into a Republican bastion; hardly anyone took seriously the idea that Gingrich, the rowdy back-bencher, could become speaker.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protesters outside Trump Tower the day after the election, New York City, November 9, 2016. Andrew Kelly TPX/Reuters

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“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday.…  Seguir leyendo »

Rota naval base, Spain, July 10, 2016. Niccolo Guasti/Getty Images

MundoAmérica,

One of the disturbing motifs of Donald Trump’s campaign for president of the United States was his penchant for attracting unwanted—or at least unhelpfully revealing—endorsements. In the final days, for example, the Crusader, the newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan, lent the Republican nominee its backing. That echoed the support that had been voiced already, and repeatedly, by America’s best-known former Klansman, David Duke, who positively brimmed over with enthusiasm for Trump—admiration that the candidate was slow to disavow.

The habit held even after Trump won his improbable victory on Tuesday. In Moscow, the Duma burst into applause as Russian parliamentarians celebrated Trump’s victory (and no less heartily, one suspects, Hillary Clinton’s defeat).…  Seguir leyendo »

Illustration from a French edition of The Decameron, fifteenth century. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

We live in a time of retranslation. New versions of the classics appear fairly regularly, and of course, as soon as the seventy years of copyright following an author’s death runs out, there is a spate of new translations. So Proust and Thomas Mann have recently been retranslated into English, while writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence are all reappearing in new versions in Europe.

The logic behind this phenomenon is clear enough. A translation inevitably reflects the language and style of its time. For later generations, a translation seems more reminiscent of our own past culture than the culture the work originated in.…  Seguir leyendo »

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I’ve never been enamored of the cliché about an “October surprise”; it’s an artificial construct for anything unexpected in the final weeks before an election. Actually, the only surprise in this turbulent election would have been if nothing out of the ordinary happened in the closing days. It felt a bit weird that—up until about 1:00 PM on Friday, October 28—we seemed to be drifting toward an inexorable and overwhelming victory for Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump was headed toward a humiliating defeat. The esteemed political analyst Charlie Cook predicted that the Democrats would win five to seven Senate seats and take over that body in the next session; even the highly gerrymandered House of Representatives was seen as possibly in play.…  Seguir leyendo »

Moscow, September 2008. Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

MundoAméricaEuropa, , ,

The second act of the Trump-Putin farce seems to be playing out faster than the first act, but following the same general trajectory: apparent revelations followed by exaggerated interpretation followed by a subdued debunking, all of it somehow giving weight to what, in the end, has never been much more than a matter of speculation. The theory is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is actively trying to bring Donald Trump to office and in fact has direct ties to the onsandidate. The evidence is scant, but the assumption is strong. The reality-based world view is further weakened and American political culture is the loser.…  Seguir leyendo »

FBI director James Comey, Washington, DC, July 7, 2016. Rex Features via AP Images/Shutterstock

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Is FBI Director James Comey “fiercely independent,” as President Barack Obama described him three years ago when nominating him for his current job, or fiercely self-serving? That’s the question that looms large in the wake of Comey’s unprecedented decision to wade into a presidential race eleven days before election day by announcing that he’d reopened an investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton concerning her private email server—an investigation that he had brought to close in a major press conference in July. The announcement, which came in a very short letter to members of Congress Friday, violated two long-established rules governing criminal investigations. …  Seguir leyendo »

NEW ZEALAND. Native forest near Whakahoro. 2008.

MundoOceanía

At the end of the street where I lived in Wellington, at the southern end of the North Island of New Zealand, a street of gracious two-story houses set in large gardens that were planted with oak and ash and maple, with English herbaceous borders and flowering fruit trees and shrubberies, was a park.

“A park?” you say.

A park, yes. But not a park as you know a park to be, not what you would call a park. It was the place where we went to play, at the end of our street.

This park was set with games areas for children as is the case with most parks, with railings around the green, and a swimming pool at the entrance.…  Seguir leyendo »

Julian Assange; drawing by John Springs

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After weeks of near-daily WikiLeaks releases of embarrassing emails plundered from the inbox of Hillary Clinton’s aides, her campaign team, and the wider Democratic Party, Julian Assange’s hosts at the Ecuadorian embassy in London have taken the ultimate step: like parents of a teenage child, driven so mad by their kid’s late night Snapchat habit that they finally turn off the wifi, the Ecuadorians have shut off the Internet to prevent their incorrigible long-term guest from doing any more leaking.

Were Julian Assange not confined to the embassy—he’s been living there since 2012, rather than succumb to a request from the Swedish authorities to interview him over an allegation of rape—you could imagine him suing his hosts for violating his human rights.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Death of British Business

EuropaUnión EuropeaUE a debate,

It is hard to exaggerate the scale of the disaster the British people have inflicted upon themselves with their decision to leave the European Union, taken in the referendum last June. More than three and a half months since the vote, some of this damage is difficult to quantify, including loss of influence with the US, Europe, and the wider world, the flourishing of insular nationalism, especially in England, and growing hostility toward immigrants—a tendency that had been already visible during the referendum campaign and was disgracefully exploited by the Leave campaigners. But in recent weeks, there have also been stark indications of a kind of damage that is readily quantifiable and severe: the damage that Brexit has and will continue to inflict on the UK economy—an economy that, after decades of mismanagement, is overwhelmingly dependent on foreign enterprise and foreign capital.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bob Dylan The Music Travels, the Poetry Stays Home

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia, ,

No one has been a fiercer critic of the Nobel Prize in Literature than I. It’s not the choices that are made, though some (Elfriede Jelinek, Dario Fo) have been truly bewildering; it’s just the silliness of the idea that a group of Swedish judges, always the same, could ever get their minds round literature coming from scores of different cultures and languages, or that anyone could ever sensibly pronounce on the best writers of our time. The best for whom? Where? Does every work cater to everybody? The Nobel for literature is an accident of history, dependent on the vast endowment that fuels its million-dollar award.…  Seguir leyendo »

Aleppo, Syria, October 5, 2016

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Since the beginning of Syria’s civilian uprising in 2011, the Syrian poet Rasha Omran has been a fearless critic of the Bashar al-Assad regime and the failure of Arab intellectuals to denounce its crimes. She lives in exile in Egypt, where she has continually spoken out against the war and in support of democratic reform. In her article “The Sect as Homeland,” Omran, who belongs to Syria’s ruling Alawi sect, described how the peaceful uprising was transformed into a violent conflict:

The regime mobilized to counter the challenge by besieging the revolution in specific areas and alienating it from others—stock divide-and-rule methods.…  Seguir leyendo »

Bob Dylan outside his Byrdcliff home, Woodstock, New York, 1968

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia, ,

The Swedish Academy’s mid-October announcement regarding literature seldom fails to occasion second-guessing, if not outrage. Whenever a foreign writer mostly unknown to English speakers is awarded the Nobel, a certain constituency will suggest that the Swedes are trolling us. Whenever someone who is already a household name across the world gets it, a different faction is crestfallen, because he or she did not need the publicity. This has presumably been going on since Sully Prudhomme took it away in 1901, his honeyed verses to dance forevermore on every child’s lips.

Bob Dylan was awarded the big prize this morning, and my social-media timeline has been alive with indignation ever since.…  Seguir leyendo »

Donald Trump during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, October 9, 2016. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

MundoAmérica,

Hands down, the nearly two-week span between the first two presidential debates culminated in probably the most disturbing and extraordinary weekend in all of presidential campaign history. What set it all off was the release Friday afternoon, October 7, via The Washington Post, of a tape, mainly audio, of the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States bragging about how he sexually assaulted women. “You grab ’em by the pussy,” he said in the 2005 recording—talking into a hot mic while on a bus supplied by Access Hollywood that was taken him to the taping of a soap opera, in which he was to make a brief appearance.…  Seguir leyendo »