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A Master Of Nostalgia

Tara Isabella Burton reviews The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, pronouncing the Austrian writer a master of psychological complexity who has “lapsed into an undeserved obscurity”:

His worlds are dream-like, their atmosphere colored by a memory that is, more often than not, unreliable. In the 22 stories that comprise Pushkin Press’s new Collected Stories, expertly and atmospherically translated by Anthea Bell, most are told through concentric circles of narrative — unobtrusive narrators meet the tale’s real raconteurs on board ships, trains from Dresden, and guest houses on the Riviera. Each level of narrative adds a degree of nostalgic uncertainty, a veil of emotions through which facts become ever more vague.

Zweig has sometimes been criticized for an excessive tendency to whitewash, to create a vision of pre-war Central Europe that is, as Robert S. Wistrich puts it, “gilded, sanitized [and] pure nostalgia.” But such a reading of Zweig fails to take in account his pronounced sense of tragedy. He treats the personal and the political with equal sensitivity: the atrocities of war are no more surprising than the atrocities of human nature from which they spring. While it’s easy to accuse Zweig of too-ready nostalgia — of falling in love with a world, a place, a time, that never really existed — such a reading is simplistic. The vanished world Zweig longs for is never really just the Vienna of 1900. It is the world of our childhoods, of our illusions, of the faith we have in human goodness that the world so often does not confirm.

Burton notes the author’s influence on Wes Anderson, remarking that the director’s latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, “does much to bring Zweig’s particular brand of elegiac to the screen”:

From Zweig’s almost cloying candy-colored atmospheres — virtually tailor-made for Anderson’s brand of visual whimsy — to the inevitability of global catastrophe, casting a pall over even the happiest moments of domestic comfort, The Grand Budapest Hotel manages to capture nearly all of Zweig’s most striking qualities.

Jason Diamond also picks up on Anderson’s inspiration, and hopes the filmmaker will bring Zweig’s work a bigger audience:

“It’s more or less plagiarism,” Anderson recently told the press about the huge influence Zweig’s work had on his latest film, Grand Budapest Hotel. Zweig, who Anderson pointed out was among the biggest writers in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, never attained the sort of popularity in America that he did on his own continent. …

Zweig’s story, unfortunately, will never quite have the rosy glow of most Anderson films no matter how many of his books sell, considering the tragic way his life ended. Constantly in exile beginning in the early 1930s, the Jewish author and his wife, Lotte Altmann, escaped his home country of Austria to avoid Nazi persecution. As the couple roamed from England to America before finally ending up in Brazil, Zweig felt more and more hopeless about the course humanity was taking, as well as his own constant running. In his suicide note, he explained, “to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom — the most precious of possessions on this earth.” Zweig and Lotte were found dead from a barbiturate overdose, holding hands in their bed.

(Video: Trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel)

Face Of The Day

A Gelada baboon is pictured at the zoo of the French eastern city of Amneville on April 11, 2014. By Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/Getty Images.

How Women “Choose” To Make Less Money

Monica Potts examines what critics of pay equity must ignore to make their case:

Some argue that the motherhood penalty can be explained by the fact that women are choosing to have children, and are often taking some amount of time off work to take care of them when they’re young. The question of why there’s no fatherhood gap, or why men rarely choose to take time off to care for young children, remains unexplained.

The other component is that women dominate in college majors leading to fields with relatively low salaries, like early childhood education, while men dominate in the high-paying ones, like engineering. All of these things, however, ignore the fact that choices aren’t made in a vacuum, and pretend as though the only real gender discrimination happens when a manager sits in his dark office poring over ledgers, dutifully subtracting 23 cents per dollar from every worker in the female column. Discrimination is more complicated and often internalized, in everything from little girls picking up subtle cues they’re bad at math or building things, to pregnant women seeing their hours cut at work even when they haven’t asked for such a change or don’t want it. It also doesn’t account for an odd distinction made between “women’s” and “men’s” fields. Call yourself a janitor, and you make about $3,000 more dollars a year than if you are a maid or a housekeeper.

Considering the “motherhood penalty”, Marjorie Romeyn-Sanabria advocates more parent-friendly work policies:

The fact that the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not offer paid parental leave punishes women who participate in the natural experience of having a child. With the rising costs of childcare, and without the security of regular wages, the message that employers are sending women is that they are no longer valuable once they become pregnant.

We don’t need to close the wage gap; we need to remove the stigma that treats pregnant women and new mothers like pariahs, and the economic structures that punish childbearing.

Meanwhile, Evan Soltas notices occupations like manufacturing reverting to their men-only status:

Economists explain away about a third of the pay gap according to workers’ choices of occupation and industry. Implicit in their framework, though, is the idea that men and women fully choose their career. A retrenchment of the “man’s job” world weighs against the view that much progress has been made. … Women made up 32 percent of manufacturing workers in 1990; as of last month, that figure had fallen to 27 percent, lower than in any year since 1971. In the information sector, which includes computer engineering, telecommunications and traditional publishing, women’s share of jobs has dropped to the lowest on record: 40 percent, down from 49 percent in 1990.

The social concept of a “man’s job” or a “woman’s job,” that is, has sharply reasserted itself over the last two decades. Industrial change — such as technology replacing workers in manufacturing — is pushing out women more so than men.

Recent Dish on pay equity, from both sides of the debate, here and here.

It’s Not Hard Getting Into College

Running down some common misconceptions about American college students, Libby Nelson points out that most colleges don’t have highly competitive admissions:

The competitive college admission process can seem like life or death for students who are going through it. But those students are a tiny slice of the next year’s college freshmen. Their experience isn’t representative: 84 percent of public colleges admit at least half of all students who apply.

That’s just four-year colleges — community colleges take virtually all students as part of their mission. Outside the public sector, for-profit colleges rarely have admissions criteria either. (A third of college students attend for-profit or community colleges.) Even the vast majority of private nonprofit colleges aren’t especially selective: Just 20 percent accept less than half of their applicants. Colleges with acceptance rates in the teens or single digits are overrepresented in the media, but they’re outliers in American higher education.

Lab-Grown Vaginas

A team of scientists has successfully implanted lady-parts cultivated from stem cells into four women born without them:

The women, who were between 13 and 18 at the time of the surgery, were all born with a rare genetic condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH) — a condition that causes about one in 4,500 girls to be born with either an underdeveloped or absent vagina and uterus. The traditional treatment for women with MRKH involves reconstructive surgery or painful dilation procedures. These interventions can be quite traumatic — they have a complication rate of 75 percent in pediatric patients — so researchers wanted to find a way to avoid them altogether. That’s why they set out to engineer vaginas, described in a study published in The Lancet today, that would be compatible with each patient.

How they did it:

The vaginal organs were engineered with muscle and epithelial cells from biopsies of the women’s genitals. The cells were taken from the tissues, grown, and put into a biodegradable material that is then formed into the shape of a vagina and fit to each patient. When the vagina is placed into the bodies of the patients, the nerves and blood vessels help expand it into tissue. The biodegradable material is absorbed into the body, and cells form a new structure and organ.

The cultured cells were grown on scaffolds like this one:

Jason Koebler celebrates this triumph for medical science:

Besides how awesome this obviously is for those four women, it represents a huge win for regenerative medicine and a look at what could be the future of transplantation. Researchers in the United Kingdom are working on making lab-grown noses, ears, and blood vessels, but so far, implanting them back into humans has proven difficult. With the success of this experiment, Anthony Atala, who worked on the transplantation team, says things like this could one be the norm for people who are born with disorders or otherwise need a new organ.

It’s certainly an improvement over the mouse method:

Mental Health Break

A strings smack-down:

(Hat tip: VideoSift)

Toward A Reckoning On Torture? Ctd

Another day, another leak from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the Bush-Cheney torture program. The picture that is emerging from the leaks  – and, of course, we need the full report to assess them adequately – is that the torture program was not at all narrowly targeted, that the torture techniques used were above and beyond even those authorized by the president, and that the CIA’s deceptions about what it was doing were legion. So legion, in fact, that even the legal shield created by Bush to protect war criminals may no longer be valid. The August 2002 rulings allowing torture may now be moot because they were based on false representations by the CIA:

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel found that the methods wouldn’t breach the law because those applying them didn’t have the specific intent of inflicting severe pain or suffering. The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality.

“The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” the report found. Several human rights experts said the conclusion called into question the program’s legal foundations.

These war crimes were always illegal. But the out-of-control sadism from out-of-control CIA agents may well turn out to be so egregious – waterboarding a prisoner 183 times after telling the Justice Department it would only ever be used a handful of times, for example – that even the rigged legal protections for thugs like Rodriguez may falter.

And you wondered why the CIA and Cheney have been waging such a scorched earth campaign to legitimize torture and throw dust in everyone’s eyes? They’re afraid. And they have every reason to be, if this country remains under the rule of law.

Map Of The Day

California’s epic drought hasn’t let up:

Nearly the entire Golden State – 99.81 percent to be exact — is in the grip of drought, according to the latest update from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Nearly 70 percent of the state is suffering from an “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, the two highest categories on the Monitor’s rating scale. The snowpack across the entire state is at a measly 35 percent of its normal level, according to figures released Monday, and water systems and residents are feeling the strain.

The drought has been building in California for the past three years, though it reached its worst point after this winter wet season failed to live up to its name. At this point last year, only a quarter of the state was in drought conditions; now, that much of the state is in exceptional drought alone — marking the first time the Monitor has used that rating in California since it’s inception in 1999, said one of the Monitor’s authors, Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center(NDMC) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Earlier Dish on the drought here, here, and here.

No, France Didn’t Ban After-Hours Emails

Moneybox debunks the viral story about the French banning work calls outside business hours:

Here’s what really happened.

Last week, two groups of employers signed an agreement with French unions outlining certain workers’ “obligation to disconnect.” The agreement followed several months of negotiation and serves as an update to one from 1999 that established the 35-hour workweek, among other things.

This “obligation to disconnect,” a vague-sounding phrase if we’ve ever heard one, would apply not to the 1 million people the companies involved represent, but to the roughly 25 percent of independent workers they employ. Unlike typical workers, these “forfait jour” contractors have flexible hours and are not governed by the 35-hour workweek or 10-hour-day limit. So, unlike other workers, they can end up putting in extremely long days. They are not, as the Guardian piece angrily suggests, “sipping sancerre and contemplating at least the second half of a cinq à sept” before clocking out.

Marie Telling notes that “French employees can still send professional emails after 6 p.m.”:

The text never specifies any precise time after which the employees are not to exchange work emails.

The Guardian may have based its assumption on the fact that many French workers working the traditional 35 hours a week get off work at 6 p.m. The only problem is that the employees affected by the deal work outside this time frame. They work longer hours and that’s precisely why this rule was made for them (they can work up to a maximum of 78 hours a week).

These employees won’t stop sending work emails after 6 p.m.

Where The Hard Left Says No, Ctd

A reader ties together two of the big stories from the week:

As I was reading your nightly wrap-up before heading out to work, something struck me that infuriated me (and for the first time in, like, a week, it wasn’t you, so progress!). I still disagree vehemently on your views on the Eich affair, and I think I also disagree with you on Ayaan Hirsi Ali as well. Both were casualties of social norms, and while they have the freedom to say whatever they want, that right only affords them protection from government interference in their views – not public shaming. You have essentially said as much when criticizing the whiny way some of your (and my) favorite Christian conservative writers (Dreher, Douthat) have approached the sea change of marriage equality opinion throughout the country.

We’re obviously not going to agree much on the distinction here. But I think I’ve found a place where we can find some common ground: what the hell have the organizing bodies been thinking?

I mean, take the Mozilla board, for example.

They had to practically beg Eich to take the job as CEO. If you’re a board member responsible for hiring the next public face of your company, wouldn’t you try to learn absolutely everything you could about the person you were promoting or hiring before giving him or her the job? Same goes for Brandeis and the Ali speech. Are we to honestly believe that no one in the Brandeis leadership thought that having Ayaan Hirsi Ali deliver a commencement speech would be controversial?

What pisses me off the most about this is that while Eich and Ali are roundly criticized for saying and doing things that are without a doubt intolerant, the governing bodies that are apparently so averse to any semblance of controversy pay absolutely no price whatsoever for making what apparently were, at least in their eyes, hideous mistakes. Brendan Eich resigned, but he wasn’t the one who was given the job in the first place. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was disinvited from Brandeis’s commencement, but none of the people who asked her to speak – and then withdrew the invitation – will pay any price for this. To me, that’s gutless.

Lastly, I want to say thank you. I haven’t thought you were as wrong about something as you are about the Eich affair in years. But you have forced me to think critically about my own position, and to see some of the inherent contradictions therein. By making statements (some of them unfairly directed towards some mythical morass of “liberals”) that get my blood boiling, you’ve caused me to think over my opinions and really flesh them out more broadly. That alone is absolutely worth paying for a subscription. There is no other site on the web that challenges me the way The Dish does.