crytical

”There are known knowns. 
There are things we know we know. 
We also know 
there are known unknowns. 
That is to say
 we know there are some things 
we do not know. 
But there are also unknown unknowns. 
The ones we don’t know 
we don’t know. ”
Donald Rumsfeld

Troy, N.Y. –Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled “Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities.”
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks. One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network. The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders. The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders. Each of these individuals held a view, but were also, importantly, open minded to other views.
Once the networks were built, the scientists then “sprinkled” in some true believers throughout each of the networks. These people were completely set in their views and unflappable in modifying those beliefs. As those true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.
“In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus. We set up this dynamic in each of our models,” said SCNARC Research Associate and corresponding paper author Sameet Sreenivasan. To accomplish this, each of the individuals in the models “talked” to each other about their opinion. If the listener held the same opinions as the speaker, it reinforced the listener’s belief. If the opinion was different, the listener considered it and moved on to talk to another person. If that person also held this new belief, the listener then adopted that belief.
“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan said. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further. If the true believers just influenced their neighbors, that wouldn’t change anything within the larger system, as we saw with percentages less than 10.”
The research has broad implications for understanding how opinion spreads. “There are clearly situations in which it helps to know how to efficiently spread some opinion or how to suppress a developing opinion,” said Associate Professor of Physics and co-author of the paper Gyorgy Korniss. “Some examples might be the need to quickly convince a town to move before a hurricane or spread new information on the prevention of disease in a rural village.”
The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.

The research was funded by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) through SCNARC, part of the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
The research is part of a much larger body of work taking place under SCNARC at Rensselaer. The center joins researchers from a broad spectrum of fields – including sociology, physics, computer science, and engineering – in exploring social cognitive networks. The center studies the fundamentals of network structures and how those structures are altered by technology. The goal of the center is to develop a deeper understanding of networks and a firm scientific basis for the newly arising field of network science. More information on the launch of SCNARC can be found at http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2721&setappvar=page(1)
Szymanski, Sreenivasan, and Korniss were joined in the research by Professor of Mathematics Chjan Lim, and graduate students Jierui Xie (first author) and Weituo Zhang.
eurekalert.org 25.7.2011

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Wall of water warriors … a group of boys in wet suits take on the rough seas lashing Wollongong Harbour’s breakwall. It has been the wettest July in more than 60 years. Photo: Adam McLean
smh.com.au 23.7.2011

“ONE ERROR into which Princes, unless very prudent or very fortunate in their choice of friends, are apt to fall, is of so great importance that I must not pass it over. I mean in respect of flatterers. These abound in Courts, because men take such pleasure in their own concerns, and so deceive themselves with regard to them, that they can hardly escape this plague; while even in the effort to escape it there is risk of their incurring contempt.
For there is no way to guard against flattery but by letting it be seen that you take no offence in hearing the truth: but when every one is free to tell you the truth respect falls short…”
The Prince, Nicola Machiavelli

Boredom is not just a state of mind
Boredom is an integral part of the human condition that has vexed philosophers since the Enlightenment. But why is Britain one of Europe’s most bored nations, and has boredom been given a bad press? Yes, says a new book, which argues that lying around staring at the ceiling can be a vital spur to creativity
It may not be the most heart-pounding news of the moment, but boredom is coming back into fashion. Not boredom in the sense of lying around blank-faced in a brown study, a practice which in my experience has never really gone out of style, but boredom as a subject (rather than a product) of academic study. In recent years several scholarly books have reanimated a topic that had fallen into analytical torpor, the latest being Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey, an Australian professor of classics who now lives and works in Canada – a country, alas, that bears an unfortunate reputation for being boring.
What is boredom? Is it a mood, an emotion, an affliction, a form of social protection, a gateway to the essence of the self, the human condition, or a modern affectation? These are questions that have concerned philosophers and thinkers dating back to the Enlightenment, not least because boredom occupies territory that overlaps with capital letter concepts like Being and Time.
I can’t pretend that my own interest in the matter has always been quite so elevated. Mostly when I think about boredom it is out of base self-interest, as a state that I’m very keen to avoid. Ever since I was a child, I have held an extreme aversion to situations that have the potential to be boring.
Those interminable summer Sunday afternoons that seemed to lead from the end of The Big Match all the way to still-bright bedtime haunt my memory with Proustian insistence. The dead-end evenings of adolescence, the dutiful visits to relations, the no less dreary work meetings that came later, the awful social obligations of adulthood and all the many non-event events: I can’t help thinking of them as bits of lifetime that have been irreplaceably stolen, interludes or premonitions of death.
My apprehension, therefore, has been focused on what has been called by the German psychologist Martin Doehlemann “situational boredom”. This is the kind of boredom associated with watching paint dry, and it’s as old as paint. There is graffiti from the first century at Pompeii that refers to boredom with the ironic sensibility of an ancient Banksy: “Wall!” it exclaims in Latin. “I wonder that you haven’t fallen down in ruin, when you have to support all the boredom of your inscribers.”
Doehlemann drew a distinction between this long-standing situational boredom and its newer intellectual cousin, “existential boredom”, the type that goes to the very core of post-Enlightenment modernity (incidentally, the verb “to bore” didn’t arrive in English until the second half of the 18th century). It refers to the affectless despondency resulting from the death of God, the Romantic search for personal meaning, and the metaphysical encounter with nothingness over which legions of writers from Flaubert to Ballard have wept buckets of ink.
Although existential boredom is not tied to a temporary situation, such as a wearisome domestic chore, it is no less the fruit of circumstance, insofar as it stems from a certain degree of wealth and leisure. By and large, illiterate peasants working all day in the field don’t have the luxury to despair at the ceaseless collapse of culturally generated meaning in a godless universe.
Leaving aside these classifications for a moment, it’s reasonable to say that boredom is no simple issue. For a start, is there a straightforward relationship between the bored and the boring? It’s perhaps telling that we have a name for the latter – a “bore” – but none for the former.
Of course it’s not possible to identify a bore without in some sense being bored, yet being bored is hardly more acceptable these days than being a bore. Traditionally boredom, as Kierkegaard noted, was an expression of nobility, and that doesn’t sit well in our democratic age. To show that you are bored suggests rudeness, superiority, even contempt, none of which are endearing qualities.
In a sense, then, boredom is a secret or solitary vice, yet the bored are clearly not alone. The average Briton, according to a 2009 online survey, endures six hours of boredom a week. This curiously precise yet ill-defined piece of information prompts two questions: is there anything more boring – apart from waiting three hours at Gatwick for a delayed easyJet flight; conspiracy theorists; cookery programmes; articles about Glastonbury; health spas; book festivals; car boot sales; homeopathy; insomnia; Thought for the Day; tattoos; jogging; county cricket; neo-conceptual art; contemporary pop music; marijuana; 95% of theatre(including all of Beckett); and Twitter – than a survey about boredom? And, second, only six hours?
What about the 30 hours of TV viewing the same average Briton is supposed to run up in a week? As someone who moonlights as a TV critic, I find it hard to accept that there is at least 24 hours of non-boring scheduling that I miss. Which brings us to another vexed question: is there any greater virtue in being exposed to an experience and not perceiving it as boring than knowing that you are bored and complaining of the boredom?
Yet another report – this time by the New Economics Foundation thinktank(a phrase that comes pre-packed with a stifled yawn) – found that Britain is the fourth most bored nation in Europe. On the surface, it’s an unenviable statistic. Who wants to be among one of the most bored nations in the western world? But then who wants to be among the least bored? Surely rarely being bored demonstrates a fatal lack of discrimination or at least a limited appreciation of life’s pleasures. For how can one scale the heights of exhilaration without at least catching sight of the deserts of dullness.
I came across the aforementioned surveys on the British in Boredom: A Lively History. Toohey also includes a test devised by two psychologists, Norman D Sundberg and Richard F Farmer (can I quickly add here to my earlier list of boring things the use of middle initials by American academics?), known as the Boredom Proneness Scale, which is made up of 28 statements, such as “I have projects in mind all the time, things to do” and “Much of the time I just sit around doing nothing”.
The respondent is asked to number the statements using a seven-point scale: 1 signifying strong disagreement; 4 neutrality; and 7 strong agreement. The average range of scores is 81-117. Above 117 on the Boredom Proneness Scale, you are practically lying prone with boredom. Below 81 and you barely know the meaning of the word. I completed the test and got a score in the 90s – ie utterly average.
Normally with personality tests, the participant has some idea of a preferred result– one that shows you are outgoing, for example, or intelligent. In this case I was struck by the fact that none of the options seemed appealing. I didn’t want to be easily bored or never bored or averagely bored.
Regarding the statement “Much of the time I just sit around doing nothing”, I found that I could respond with all numbers from one to seven. The fact is that much of the time I do just sit around doing nothing. It’s called writing or, what it mostly comes down to, not writing. Just now, for instance, while awaiting the next sentence, I was looking out the window at workmen unloading bags of cement from a truck. They were not sitting around doing nothing. But I wouldn’t like to say which activity – thinking in lieu of writing or unloading cement – is most susceptible to boredom.
In any case, although I hate the prospect of being bored, I’m no stranger to boredom, be it of desperation or satiation, tedium, ennui, apathy, monotony, lassitude, restlessness, dreariness or aching dissatisfaction – I’ve known them all. And in this instance familiarity does indeed breed contempt. As a consequence, I approach the threat of boredom much like a claustrophobe greets a cramped lift.
The analogy is not entirely fanciful. One definition of boredom is a kind of confinement. As Lars Svendsen writes in his slim but essential volume A Philosophy of Boredom: “Boredom always contains an awareness of being trapped, either in a particular situation or in the world as a whole.” Reading those words instantly transports me to a boxed-in chair at an insufferable dinner party or the middle of the stalls at an excruciating play.
All phobias are at root a fear of death, and the fear of boredom is the fear of being, in the familiar phrase, bored to death. Each of us probably has a vision of what that particular fate would entail. At the end of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, for example, the hapless hero, Tony Last, is condemned to spend the rest of his life deep in the Amazon jungle endlessly reading Dickens to his sinister bore of a captor, Mr Todd (Tod is the German for death).
I once lived through my own version of that ending. When I was 18, I worked two floors beneath the ground making cardboard boxes eight hours a day while being force-fed Radio 1 in all its 1980s banality. I was stationed in a tight alcove with my co-worker, a devoted plane spotter who felt about his Heathrow logbook, from which he’d often quote aircraft serial numbers to me, the way Mr Todd felt about Dickens. The clock didn’t move for hours at a time.
Waugh took his title from a line in TS Eliot’s signature text of modernism The Waste Land: “I’ll show you fear in a handful of dust”. Although Eliot’s poetry is notoriously open to interpretation, one reading of that line might be an image of existential boredom, the sense that the world is random and therefore frighteningly meaningless. This is the sentiment that Jean-Paul Sartre explored in his novel Nausea, wherein the anti-hero, Antoine Roquentin, finds reality turning to dust as he realises that he is imprisoned by freedom, that everything is futile because existence is arbitrary.
The novel rehearses many of the ideas of existentialism that Sartre would later enlarge upon in his philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness. It also romanticised the idea of total alienation, the lone individual at war with the stultifying complacency of bourgeois society. Svendsen describes boredom as an absence of meaning, and in this sense Nausea made being bored an act of rebellion. To be stupefied by the meaninglessness of it all seemed suddenly cool, if only to bookish adolescents.
No one can match the capacity for boredom of the adolescent, although in my memory the lack that the bored teenager feels so powerfully and personally is that of experience, not meaning. I vividly recall the stretched waiting during those years, made more unbearable by not knowing what I was waiting for. If existential boredom is the knowledge that anything can happen, and therefore nothing has meaning, adolescent boredom is the awareness that anything can happen and the conviction that nothing ever does.
To break this feeling of impotence, it’s typical for adolescents to enact small defiances – smoking pot or hanging out with the wrong crowd. Nowadays it’s often said that adults themselves have become marooned in an arrested adolescence. We – by which obviously I mean “I” – can often find ourselves caught in a cycle of transgression or the socialised alternative, consumption, in which each new experience swiftly loses its appeal and demands replacing by the next distraction.
Boredom, in other words, is inflationary; it begets itself. Svendsen argues that we are becoming rapidly more bored. “While there are reasons for believing that joy and anger have remained fairly constant throughout history,” he writes, “the amount of boredom seems to have increased dramatically.”
It’s a claim that sounds convincing – how else to explain the success of Coldplay or Come Dine With Me? – but can we know that we’re more bored than the Pompeii graffitists or, come to that, a peasant in a field? Presumably only if it can be established that the nebulous malaise diagnosed by so many writers is a genuinely distinctive and widespread feature of western modernity.
But Toohey doubts the existence of existential boredom – a condition, he writes with an Australian’s suspicion of pretension, that’s “more read about and discussed than actually experienced”, a literary myth or a malady that should rightly be recognised as depression.
There are nonetheless several things to be said in defence of the idea of a boredom that goes beyond a situation, but is overwhelming rather than depressing. In its most trying incarnation, situational boredom has the potential to develop into something like existential boredom, in which one is forced to question not just the point of an event but of life itself. I’m thinking here of a particular dinner party– the crucible of boredom as Heideggeracknowledged – where the first hour was spent discussing the various road routes the guests had taken to get there. In the midst of such an ordeal neither time nor space can contain the numbing void that attacks the soul. And no amount of grilled monkfish or chilled sauvignon can fill it.
Furthermore, if there is a crisis of modernity, it encompasses not just ontology but also aesthetics. Throughout the course of the 20th century it grew progressively more difficult to make value judgments about art and sustain them with anything more substantial than personal opinion. “Good” and “bad” became discredited categories and were supplanted, as Svendsen notes, by “interesting” and “boring”. Who knew or cared whether something was good; what mattered was that it was interesting.
The problem, as has been well documented, is that the shocks of the new delivered diminishing returns. What was fresh and provocative soon became tired and commonplace. Boredom reasserted itself with entropic inevitability. In 1997, I attended the first night of Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition, which featured the works of the feted group of Young British Artists, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers. I remember the disconnected sensation I felt, of a future that had already passed, an immediacy fast fading into the distance.
It would be too severe to say that I was bored – for one thing there were far too many interesting people to look at – but I did experience a vertiginous sense of insignificance, of cultural meaning collapsing before my very eyes. Toohey’s book contains a number of illustrations of artworks in which characters appear in various displays of boredom – yawning, stretching, and so on. What it doesn’t include is the glazed-eyed expression worn by so many gallery visitors when called upon to appreciate an artwork in a context not unlike that of a supermarket shopper standing in front of an aisle full of brightly packaged washing detergents.Despite their own struggles with boredom, both Toohey and Svendsen present positive sides of the argument, suggesting that we might, so to speak, be bored to life. For Toohey, boredom is an adaptive characteristic in the Darwinian sense. The ability to be bored, which he describes as a form of mild disgust, is beneficial to humanity. Just as it’s been shown that disgust enables us to steer clear of disease-bearing environments, so does boredom guide us away from situations that might be detrimental to our mental health. Toohey goes on to argue that boredom is not merely a negative function. It’s often, he says, the precondition for creativity.
Svendsen elegantly outlines, and then dismisses, Heidegger’s dense and some might say boring thesis on boredom, which is not easily condensed into brief summary. But here goes. In the normal run of events, time kills us; in boredom, we kill time. Needless to say, that’s not quite how Svendsen or the great German philosopher put it, but Heidegger did believe that what he termed “profound boredom” was a radical means of accessing the essence of being. He also believed, or so he once wrote, in the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi party. Boredom in its political guise – apathy – has a tendency to incubate extremism.
Ultimately boredom, whether it’s inspiring, disheartening, annihilating or transcendent, just is. Perhaps like the weather, it’s something that we have little choice but to live with. Svendsen reaches a similar stoical conclusion. “To become mature,” he writes, “is to accept that life cannot remain in the enchanted realm of childhood, that life to a certain extent is boring, but at the same time to realise that this does not make life unliveable.”
This more evolved understanding is unlikely to curb my own fear of boredom but it may help stiffen my resolve when it arrives. And in that same spirit of forbearance, I feel obliged to recall an uncomfortable memory.
Some years ago, I attended a friend’s party, where I was reintroduced to the sharp-tongued Scottish TV presenter, Muriel Gray, whom I’d helped in some minor way a few months previously. She thanked me for whatever inconsequential action I’d performed and I began to explain, too fully as it turned out, that it was really nothing. She stopped me after a few seconds. “Och,” she said, her face contorted in existential pain, “you’re so boring.” And with that she abruptly turned and walked off to look for more entertaining company. I wasn’t boring, by the way. Honestly. No, really, let me explain…

Andrew Anthony

guardian.co.uk 16.7.2011

A Look Into the Ocean’s Future

READ LATER
Editorial
There is simply no exaggerating the importance of the oceans to earth’s overall ecological balance. Their health affects the health of all terrestrial life. A new report by an international coalition of marine scientists makes for grim reading. It concludes that the oceans are approaching irreversible, potentially catastrophic change.
The experts, convened by the International Program on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, found that marine “degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted.” The oceans have warmed and become more acidic as they absorbed human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are also more oxygen-deprived, because of agricultural runoff and other anthropogenic causes. This deadly trio of conditions was present in previous mass extinctions, according to the report.
The oceans’ natural resilience has been seriously compromised. Pollution, habitat loss and overfishing are dangerous threats on their own. But when these factors converge, they can destroy marine ecosystems.
The severity of human impact was reinforced last week when scientists concluded that seven commercially important species, including marlin, mackerel and three tuna species, were either vulnerable to extinction, endangered or critically endangered according to I.U.C.N. standards. The solutions that might help slow further degradation include immediate reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, a system of marine conservation areas and a way to protect ocean life that goes beyond national jurisdictions.
This is the work of nations, but such goals require pressure from ordinary citizens if there is to be any hope of bringing them about in the face of opposing political and economic interests. As the new study notes, changes in the oceans, caused by carbon emissions, are perhaps “the most significant to the earth system,” particularly because they will further accelerate climate change.
nytimes.com 15.7.2011

The News of the World closes as media’s tectonic plates shift

Big Brother auditions … ‘Underlying such programmes lies the unspoken assumptions that anyone can be famous’ . Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian
If the events of the past week seem on the surface to be about systemic corruption in British public life then there is also an ulterior process at work. Strange as it may be to state this, the unholy triple alliance between media, the political class and the police may be characterised as a merely epiphenomenal imbroglio. It’s been widely noted that the News of the World, despite being Britain’s largest circulation newspaper, was nonetheless something of a loss leader for News International in an era when not just hard news but also the kind of malicious tittle-tattle that was its stock in trade has been speedily uploaded on to the web.
A tectonic shift is taking place in our culture, namely the transition from a print/broadcast era in which information, opinion and entertainment is transmitted down a pyramidal social structure, to a pro forma egalitarian web culture in which there is no longer the mediation of a class of editors and opinion-formers, but instead everyone swims about in a protoplasmic gloop of titillating supposition. Marshall McLuhan‘s equation of the medium with the message has become a shibboleth to be lisped on a thousand thousand message boards, but less widely understood is that the “glocal” phenomenon of the web plus the internet has yet to crystallise into a definable medium – we live in an interregnum between cultural hegemonies, and in such times, as Marx observed of political interregnums, the strangest forms will arise.
I would argue that the emergence of reality television and the so-called “democratisation” of celebrity in the early 2000s is key to an understanding of how this interregnum is eating holes in the British social fabric. Underlying such programmes as Big Brother and the domination of TV schedules by talent shows featuring ordinary people, and other competitive formats that bowdlerise the abilities of people already in the public eye – Strictly This, I’m a That – lies the unspoken assumptions not only that anyone no matter how talentless can be famous – Warhol’s prophecy – but that even those who have talents can be forced to abandon them if they’re not fungible in the media marketplace. If you can make a living reading the news you must – must! – be able to ice dance, or else your news-reading is of no account.
These developments are the ructions in the informational crust resulting from the underlying tectonic shifts; and it is nowise unexpected that on this delusory levelled media playing field the following equation follows: if anyone can be a celebrity then anyone can be exposed. The hacking into the 7/7 victims’ phones, or the relatives of servicemen killed in Afghanistan, or even the phone of a murdered schoolgirl is only logical continuation of this process, it represented the final evolution of the print-based groupthink before it atomises into the flash-hatreds of the web.
The web – like any other emergent medium – is still inchoate. The claims of Mumsnet, Twitter etc to be intrinsically “democratic” forces for good that have helped to bring down evil empires in Tehran, across the Middle East and now in Wapping are wholly specious. We will remain in this interregnum only for as long as media organisations remain unable to make web-based content – whether editorial, entertainment or social media – generate genuinely self-sustaining revenue. When it does begin to do so new hierarchies will be erected very speedily to exploit it, and my suspicion is that these new hierarchies will look very much like the old.
As for the public appetite for prurient gossip – and in particular the appetite of the English, Wilde’s “nation of hypocrites” sans pareil – that remains greater than ever. Moreover, the web, by creating a sense of insulation from consequences in its users, allows for still more savage monstering. Just a casual glance at social networking threads exposes you to a bewildering array of digs, slights and innuendos. For now the exposures of the web are at the “villagey” level of the pogroms enacted during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but once the new hierarchies emerge so will the old forms of media control and media scapegoating. The Chinese analogy isn’t facile – and has a further dimension: it’s often said of the Chinese Communist party that it has bribed its people with consumer goods in exchange for political conformity, arguably we here in the “liberal” west have been bribed with the cultural freedoms of unlimited malicious gossip, porn and other transgressive experiences in return for swallowing the bitter pill of economic neoliberalism with its ever widening gap between rich and poor.
In the last analysis, you don’t have to be a Marxist to grasp that at root, issues of media influence are good old-fashioned questions about who owns the means of production and dissemination – but it probably helps.

by WILL SELF  •  JULY 11, 2011
guardian.co.uk

Chekhov Museum, Badenweiler
Anton Chekhov, reading “The Seagull” to the ensemble of the Moscow Art Theater, May, 1899

Memories of Chekhov, from which this excerpt is drawn, is the first documentary biography of Anton Chekhov to be based on primary sources: the letters, diaries, essays, and memories of Chekhov’s family, friends, and contemporaries that I collected from Chekhov archives in Yalta and Moscow, as well as the New York Public Library, the Russian State Library, and the Library of Congress. All of this material appears in English translation for the first time. My favorite discovery was a rare editorial by Chekhov dedicated to the life of Nikolai Przhevalsky, a famous Russian geographer. At the very end of the nineteenth century Chekhov wrote, “Reading this biography, we do not ask: ‘Why did he do this?’ or ‘What did he accomplish?’ but we say, ‘He was right!’” These words also describe Chekhov’s own life.
—Peter Sekirin, Editor, Memories of Chekhov

*
Ivan Bunin, “Chekhov,” from The Russian Word (1904)
I got to know Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. I remember a few specifically Chekhovian phrases that he often said to me back then.
“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.
I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”
“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”
And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.”
Sometimes Chekhov would tell me about Tolstoy: “I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it’s because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child’s play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare… For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does.”

*
Peter Gnedich, “Memories,” from The Book of Life (1922)
Lev Tolstoy sincerely loved Chekhov, but did not like his plays. He told Chekhov once, “A playwright should take the theater-goer by the hand, and lead him in the direction he wants him to go. And where can I follow your character? To the couch in the living-room and back—because your character has no other place to go.” They both—Tolstoy and Chekhov—laughed at these words.
Chekhov told me later, “When I am writing a new play, and I want my character to exit the stage, I remember those words of Lev Nikolaevich, and I think ‘Where will my character go?’ I feel both funny and angry.” Chekhov’s only consolation was that Tolstoy also did not like the plays of Shakespeare.
Chekhov told me once, “You know, I recently visited Tolstoy in Gaspra. He was bedridden due to illness. Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, ‘Kiss me goodbye.’ While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man’s voice, ‘You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.’”

*
Ivan Belousov, “About A.P. Chekhov,” from Thirty Days (1929)
Anton Pavlovich sat in front of a fire-place, looking at the flames. From time to time, he tore a piece of bark from the birch log in front of him, and threw it in the fireplace, obviously thinking intently about something.
His maid called him from outside. He left for some time. Finally, he returned, and when we asked him why he was delayed, he reluctantly replied, “I had a medical patient waiting for me.”
I was surprised, “So late? Was it a friend?”
Chekhov replied, “Not at all. I saw her for the first time in my life. She needed a prescription for a medicine that can be poisonous. They can only dispense it from a pharmacy with a prescription.”
“You did not write it, did you?”
Anton Pavlovich did not answer anything. He sat at the fire-place, and threw in some more fire-wood. Then, after a long silence, he said quietly, “Maybe this is better for her. I looked into her eyes, and understood that she had made a decision. There is a big river not far from here, and the Stone Bridge. If she jumps, she would be in great pain before she died. With the poison, she would be better off.”
He was silent. We grew silent as well. Then, to change the subject, we began a conversation about literature.

*
Nikolai Panov “About the Chekhov’s Portrait,” from Art Review (1904)
“Please come tomorrow. I’ll spend the day thinking over my future work, and you can paint my portrait,” Anton Pavlovich told me.
It was a hot and suffocating day. The windows were all flung open, but there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze, not even the slightest wind coming in from outside.
Chekhov sat at his writing desk, immersed in his thoughts.
I gazed at his tired, mournful eyes, trying to make a sketch of his head tilting to one side.
His mind was on his work, but his face looked drawn, and his features—it seemed to me— were dissolving into the air. He had a kind of curve in his spine, and his entire posture indicated that he was exhausted. He had lost a lot of weight, and he looked gaunt.
His posture, including his tilted head, his tired face, the tense movements of his thick hands – all this asserted that this was a person listening to his inner voice, to a voice which a strong, healthy man would never hear, due to the process of the illness going on inside of him.
It was very difficult for me to look upon the features of a person so very sick. Yet, at the same time, the experience was invaluable for the entire country.
“Have you found anything worth painting?” he asked me about his portrait.
I looked at his somber face and replied, “No. It does not look anything like what I wanted to depict. You seem too sad and tired in this portrait.”
“Then let us leave it as it is. Please, do not change anything. The first impression is always the most truthful.”
Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) was a prominent Russian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933. He and Chekhov were close friends in the years 1900 to 1904; Peter Gnedich (1855-1925) was a novelist, playwright, translator, and historian of literature who knew many Russian writers of the 1900s-1920s and left lengthy accounts of the lives of his contemporaries; Ivan Belousov (1870-1953) was a poet and children’s book writer. He gave Chekhov his book with the inscription “To the writer Colossus, from a pigmy writer: To Chekhov from Belousov.” In March 1903 Chekhov replied “I read your book with great pleasure”; Nikolai Panov (1871-1916) was a Russian painter who lived in Yalta. On August 10, 1903, he sketched a portrait of Checkhov and wrote down his impressions that day. The portrait was given to Chekhov as a gift.
Memories of Chekhov, edited by Peter Sekirin, will be published this summer.
nyrb.com 7.7.2011

Listen, there is no courage or any extra courage that I know of to find
out the right thing to do. Now, it is not only necessary to do the right
thing, but to do it in the right way and the only problem you have is
what is the right thing to do and what is the right way to do it. That is
the problem. But this economy of ours is not so simple that it obeys to
the opinion of bias or the pronouncements of any particular individual,
even to the President. This is an economy that is made up of 173 million
people and it reflects their desires, they’re ready to buy, they’re
to spend, it is a thing that is too complex and too big to be affected
adversely or advantageously just by a few words or any particular – say
a little this and that, or even a panacea so alleged.
        Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) in response
        to the question: “Has government been lacking
        in courage and boldness in facing up to the recession?”
        Verbatim transcript from a press conference.

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes.
Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.
theconversation.edu.au 14. 6.2011

This photo was the world’s first view of Earth taken near the moon. It was snapped by the U.S. Lunar Orbiter I on August 23, 1966, when the spacecraft was just about to pass behind the moon on its 16th orbit. NASA