Dylan's Time 3 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 5

202 Pages·2016·4.62 MB·English

by  Horacio Cárdenas Zardoni

Dylan’s Time 3
2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 5
Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump 7
Panama: The Hidden Trillions 15
'Just Let Charlotte Be Charlotte' 24
At the Centre Pompidou 30
The Terror of Kindness: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Overriding Cultural Conditioning and Living Beyond Fear 33
When We Loved Mussolini 37
Splashy (and Suspect) Swimming Pools Are the Hottest Design Trend of 2016 42
An Illustrated Serenade to the Art of Listening to One’s Inner Voice Amid the Noise of Modern Life 45
Trump at War 56
How the brain builds panoramic memory 63
Is Density a Question for the Courts to Decide? 66
The death of a planet nursery? 69
Measuring forces in the DNA molecule 72
How to Bike to Work Without Looking Like a Sweaty Mess 75
Reef fish see colors that humans cannot 78
What Makes a Hero and the True Measure of the Human Spirit 80
The People in Retreat: An Interview with Ai Xiaoming 84
Shaping sound waves in 3D: Tech and medical applications 89
Who Benefits in a Tech Hub? 92
The Difficult Art of Self-Compassion 95
Twin jets pinpoint the heart of an active galaxy 96
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Italy: Writing to Belong 99
The Complicated Task of Identifying Homeless Students 103
Study challenges widely held view about children's moral judgement 108
Summer brings crab feasts--and concerns for Chesapeake blue crabs 111
Hips might not lie but body fat tells more about female physical attractiveness 118
The Music of Blighted Dreams 120
Smoking has a very broad, long-lasting impact on the human genome 124
In Saudi Arabia, a Rare Tax on Wealthy Landowners 127
A New Refutation of Time: Borges on the Most Paradoxical Dimension of Existence 129
Youthful DNA in old age 135
America’s Lost Workers 138
Crime in America Is Going Down (Sort Of) 142
Tasmanian devils: Will rare infectious cancer lead to their extinction? 145
Soil will absorb less atmospheric carbon than expected this century, study finds 150
The inequality crisis is truly global, and while fixes aren’t easy, neither are present trends inevitable. 153
The U.S. High-Schoolers in Immigration Limbo 159
Swarms of magnetic bacteria could be used to deliver drugs to tumors 166
The scroll from En-Gedi: A high-tech recovery mission 169
Breakfast in the Ruins 172
Cosmology safe as universe has no sense of direction 200

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Dylan’s Time
Luc Sante
Elliott Landy/Magnum Photos
Bob Dylan outside his Byrdcliff home, Woodstock, New York, 1968
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. The Nobel did not go to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, did not go to Ursula K. LeGuin, did not
go to an overlooked novelist in a small country working in a seldom-translated language. But even more
people are upset that the prize went to a “songwriter.” Some of those same people are still grousing that last
year it was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich, a “journalist.” They have decided, for whatever reasons, that
song lyrics and non-fictional prose do not qualify as literature. Which would come as a surprise to most
writers before the mid-eighteenth century or so, although they have the disadvantage of being dead.

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And people are upset because Bob Dylan is the voice of some generation other than theirs, because he works
in a popular idiom, because he does not work in this minute’s popular idiom, because he appeared on a car
commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, because his songwriting skills dropped off after this record or
that one (the candidate albums are broadly varied)—because he was famous long ago. But note that phrase:
“famous long ago.” Although undoubtedly people used it in speech and writing before Dylan was even born,
it is nonetheless now tied to him: “…for playing the electric violin on Desolation Row.”
You may not think of Dylan as a poet, because his lyrics don’t always scan well on the page, but consider
how many lines of poetry he has embedded in common discourse: “But to live outside the law you must be
honest”; “She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all”; “Ah but I was so
much older then/I’m younger than that now”—those are just off the top of my head, and we could go on like
this all night.
Somebody will argue that “You’re the top, you’re the Colosseum” rolls off the tongue just as trippingly, and
nobody gave the big Swedish prize to Cole Porter. And somebody else will point out that “My smile is my
makeup I wear since my break-up with you” does likewise, and that Dylan himself allegedly once named
Smokey Robinson the greatest living poet in the nation, and where’s Smokey’s Nobel?
Song lyrics and poetry might have been interchangeable concepts for the Elizabethans, but two streams
divided later on. As great as Porter and Robinson were as songwriters, they were working in—and profiting
from—the air of frivolity that attended lyric-writing by the mid-twentieth century, an era that prized verbal
dexterity and rapid evaporation. Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down puzzles that continue
to echo and to generate interpretations, almost singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken
seriously. And Dylan accomplished something that few novelists or poets or for that matter songwriters
(pace Joni Mitchell) have managed to do in our era: he changed the time he inhabited. Through words, with
music as the fluid of their transmission, he affected the perception, outlook, opinions, ambitions, and
assumptions of hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
The Nobel Prize in Literature cannot ever be all things to all people, and while this year’s award failed to
accomplish various possible objectives, it was not in any way misapplied. Me, I just wish I’d had the foresight
to plunk down a fifty on Dylan at Ladbroke’s. “The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense/Take what
you have gathered from coincidence.”
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/13/bob-dylan-nobel-prize/

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2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
NSF director congratulates this year's laureates, both of whom have received NSF support

Oliver Hart (left) and Bengt Holmström (right) are the 2016 Prize in Economic Sciences laureates.
Credit and Larger Version

October 11, 2016
Statement from National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France Córdova regarding the news that Oliver
Hart and Bengt Holmström have been awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics. NSF has provided support to
both economists, with awards including eight grants funding Hart's work and two funding Holmström's over
several decades. NSF has the only program in the federal government with a broad mandate to strengthen
basic economic science and has supported 54 economists who received this prize since it was first awarded in
1969.
"The groundbreaking work by Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström in contract theory has created new tools to
help society understand how contracts determine real-world results in fields ranging from bankruptcy law to
health insurance, to manufacturing.

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"As the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted, these two laureates launched contract theory as a field of
basic research. NSF is proud to have supported the work they did laying that foundation with nearly a dozen
awards funding Holmström's studies of dynamic models of contracting and firm organization, and supporting
Hart's decades of research into incomplete contracts -- an important new way to look at ownership and control
of businesses.
"These economists demonstrate how fundamental theoretical research can have important practical impact on
the conduct and function of the business enterprise."
-NSF-

Media Contacts
Rob Margetta, NSF, [phone], [email protected]
https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=190016&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click

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Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump
Eliot Weinberger

African Americans
Trump is currently polling at 0-1 per cent among African Americans. (In some districts, they couldn’t find a
single supporter.) However, Trump has stated that when he runs for his second term as president, ‘I guarantee
you that I will get over 95 per cent of the African American vote. I promise you. Because I will produce.’
Women
Trump: ‘There’s nothing I love more than women, but they’re really a lot different than portrayed. They are
far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart!’
The Modest
Interviewer: ‘Who are you talking to consistently – since we have some dire foreign policy issues percolating
around the world right now – who are you consulting with consistently so that you’re ready on day one?’
Trump: ‘I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of
things.’
Peace Lovers
Trump: ‘I’m good at war. I’ve had a lot of wars of my own. I’m really good at war. I love war in a certain
way. But only when we win.’
Mexican Americans
Trump: ‘Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid, and the Mexican government is much smarter,
much sharper, much more cunning, and they send the bad ones over because they don’t want to pay for them,
they don’t want to take care of them. Why should they, when the stupid leaders of the United States will do it
for them? And that’s what’s happening, whether you like it or not.’ ‘They’re forcing people into our country
… And they are drug dealers and they are criminals of all kinds. We are taking Mexico’s problems.’
Women
Trump: ‘Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is a man who is certain about what he wants and sets out to get
it, no holds barred. Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.’
The Morally Concerned
Trump: ‘They asked me: “What do you think about waterboarding, Mr Trump?” I said I love it. I love it. I
think it’s great.’
Vietnam Veterans
Trump (on sexually transmitted diseases): ‘I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous
world out there – it’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a
great and very brave soldier.’ (Trump received a physical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War
because of a problem with his foot, although he can no longer remember which foot. He was a football,
squash and tennis player at the time.)

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African Americans
Trump: ‘I have a great relationship with the blacks.’
Muslim Americans
Trump: ‘They’re here. And I’ve been saying. This is going to be like the Trojan horse. We’re letting tens of
thousands of people flow into this country and they are bringing in, in many cases, this is cancer from within.
This is something that’s going to be so tough and you know they stay together, so nobody really knows who it
is, what’s happening. They are plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and
everybody knows it …’
Michael Bloomberg
After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a
sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit
this guy so hard, his head would spin, he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.’
The Reality-Based
Trump: ‘Isis is honouring President Obama. He is the founder of Isis. He is the founder of Isis, OK? He is the
founder. He founded Isis. And I would say the cofounder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.’
The Gastronomically Inclined
Trump on McDonald’s: ‘I’m a very clean person. I like cleanliness. I think you’re better off going there than
someplace you have no idea where the food is coming from. It’s a certain standard. The one thing about the
big franchises: one bad hamburger, you can destroy McDonald’s. One bad hamburger, you take Wendy’s and
all these other places and they’re out of business.’ He has tweeted photos of himself eating KFC chicken on
his private jet and something called a ‘taco bowl’, unknown in Latin America, with the caption ‘I love
Hispanics!’
Peace Lovers
Trump: ‘With nuclear, the power, the devastation is very important to me.’
The Logical
Interviewer: ‘They talk about the presidency and who has the finger on the button. The United States has not
used nuclear weapons since 1945. When should it?’ Trump: ‘Well, it is an absolute last stance. And, you
know, I use the word “unpredictable”. You want to be unpredictable. And somebody recently said – I made a
great business deal. And the person on the other side was interviewed by a newspaper. And how did Trump
do this? And they said: “He’s so unpredictable.” And I didn’t know if he meant it positively or negative. It
turned out he meant it positively.’
Mothers with Babies
Trump notoriously dislikes the usual campaign practices of shaking hands, kissing babies, mingling in small
crowds. He prefers to address large rallies and then fly to one of his homes at night. When a baby began
crying at a rally in Virginia, he responded: ‘I love babies. I hear that baby cry, I like it. What a baby. What a
beautiful baby. Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mom’s running around, like, don’t worry about it, you know.
It’s young and beautiful and healthy and that’s what we want.’ Two minutes later he said: ‘Actually I was
only kidding, you can get the baby out of here. I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying
while I’m speaking. That’s OK. People don’t understand. That’s OK.’
Scientists
Trump (tweets): ‘This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing,

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record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.’ ‘Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record-setting
freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!’
The Non-Violent
Trump: ‘I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools, and – you have to – and on military bases. My first day, it
gets signed, OK? My first day. There’s no more gun-free zones.’
The Historically Minded
Trump (on how he would deal with terrorists, invoking General ‘Black Jack’ Pershing in the Philippines,
1909-13): ‘They were having terrorism problems, just like we do. And he caught fifty terrorists who did
tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the fifty terrorists, and he took fifty men and he
dipped fifty bullets in pigs’ blood – you heard that, right? He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’
blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people.
And the fiftieth person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25
years, there wasn’t a problem. OK? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem.’ (The story is apparently the
invention of white supremacist websites.)
Peace Lovers
Trump: ‘When Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at
our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.’
The Educated
Trump (after winning the Nevada caucus): ‘We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.’
Peace Lovers
Trump: ‘I know more about Isis than the generals do, believe me … I would bomb the shit out of them.’
The Non-Violent
Trump (at a rally): ‘There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. If you see somebody getting
ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I
promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.’
Gold Star Mothers
Gold Star Mothers, since World War One, has honoured the parents of those who died in combat. (Now that
the Boy Scouts admit gays, it may be the last sacrosanct organisation in the USA.) The emotional highpoint of
the Democratic Convention was the appearance of the parents of US Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was
killed in 2004 by a car bomb in Iraq. Criticising Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims, Khizr Khan said:
‘Donald Trump, you are asking Americans to trust you with our future. Let me ask you: Have you even read
the US Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy … Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look
at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths,
genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.’ Trump struck back, and continued to
criticise the Khans for weeks. ‘I was viciously attacked on the stage, and I have a right to answer back.’ As
for sacrifices, he said: ‘I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and
thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve
done a lot.’ Humayun Khan’s grave at Arlington has become a tourist attraction.
Women
Trump: ‘If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?’

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Chinese Americans
Trump: ‘When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then
they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of
strength.’
The Humourless
Trump: ‘[Saudi Arabians] take such advantage of us with the oil … and they laugh at this country.’ ‘I know
many of the people in China, I know many of the big business people, and they’re laughing at us.’ ‘The world
is laughing at us.’ ‘After Syria, our enemies are laughing!’ ‘Mexican leadership has been laughing at us for
many years.’ ‘The Persians are great negotiators. They are laughing at the stupidity of the deal we’re making.’
‘We can’t afford to be so nice and so foolish anymore. Our country is in trouble. Isis is laughing at us.’
Veterans
Trump: ‘You know something very nice just happened to me. A man came up to me and he handed me his
Purple Heart. He said: “That’s my real Purple Heart. I have such confidence in you.” And I said: “Man, that’s
like big stuff. I’ve always wanted to get the real Purple Heart. This was much easier.”’ The Purple Heart is
awarded to members of the military wounded or killed in combat. After the rally, the man told reporters that it
was actually a copy of a Purple Heart.
Vietnam Veterans
Trump (on John McCain): ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that
weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK?’ (McCain has since
endorsed Trump.)
Scientists
Trump (tweet): ‘The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US
manufacturing non-competitive.’ Asked by an interviewer to explain, he said: ‘I know much about climate
change. I’d be – received environmental awards. And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China.
Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help
climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn’t care less. They have very – you know,
their standards are nothing. But they – in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on
our business.’
The Morally Concerned
Trump: ‘The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists,
you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t
care about their lives, you have to take out their families.’ Rand Paul (responding at a Republican debate): ‘If
you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realise that there’s something called the Geneva Convention
we’re going to have to pull out of.’
The Mathematically Precise
Trump has tweeted that homicide statistics show that 81 per cent of murdered whites are killed by blacks.
According to the FBI, 82 per cent of murdered whites are killed by whites.
Neocons
In August, fifty major Republican leaders and cheerleaders of the Contra War, the invasion of Afghanistan,
the War on Terror and the Iraq War signed an open letter unironically stating that Trump ‘would be a
dangerous president and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being … Mr Trump lacks
the character, values and experience to be president. He weakens US moral authority as the leader of the free

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