It’s Time to Don Your Salt Gown, and Other News

Sigalit Landau’s salt gown emerging from the Dead Sea. Photo: Matanya Tausig.

Today in occasions for self-satisfaction: a new study suggests that readers of literary fiction have an improved understanding of other people’s emotions, which doesn’t explain why that guy reading Shalimar the Clown on the train was such a jerk to me. “Academics David Kidd and Emanuele Castano, from the New School for Social Research in New York, put more than 1,000 participants through the ‘author recognition test,’ which measured exposure to fiction by asking respondents to identify writers they recognized from a list … Those who had recognized more literary fiction authors in the list were better at inferring others’ feelings, a faculty known as theory of mind.” (People have gotten very excited about this on Twitter, but no one seems to have reached the article’s devastating conclusion: “ ‘It doesn’t mean you can give Don DeLillo to an autistic child and they’ll be fine.’ ”)

The tech writers of the nineties said a lot of dumb things about the Internet, and now we can laugh at them. No one predicted the truth: that the World Wide Web would become a miasma of hate speech, groupthink, self-promotion, and videos of octopuses being devious. Instead they wrote shit like this: “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” “I’m looking forward to the day when my daughter finds a rolled-up 1,000-pixel-by-1,000-pixel color screen in her cereal packet, with a magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge.”

Way to go, Jacob Neusner! He published upward of a thousand books, and on top of that a heap of essays, op-eds, and letters. No one was more prolific, maybe ever. And yet no one really knows who he was, and those who do seldom take him seriously. Shaul Magid writes, “The sad irony about Jacob Neusner is that he is arguably one of the most influential voices in American Jewish intellectual life in the past half-century—yet outside of the academy, and more specifically outside the academic study of Judaism, while many people know his name, few are actually familiar with his work. He is perhaps most widely known for his irascible, sometimes quite nasty, and often pugnacious personality, his famous excoriating reviews, sometimes book-length critiques, and his fallings-out with almost every institution he worked in, almost every teacher who taught him, many of his students—as well as the errors that scar his many translations and publications. He sued institutions he worked for and individuals who attacked his work … There is a joke that in 200 years when scholars study Neusner they will think Neusner was a ‘school’ and not a person.”

Fashion, even high fashion, is typically a low-sodium enterprise. And that’s a shame, because many of our clothes, especially our formal wear, would be more attractive caked in salt. Sigalit Landau understood this—her work Salt Bride, on display at Marlborough Gallery in London this week, “starts with a work of natural alchemy: a sort of time-lapse sculpture, in which a severe black gown submerged in the waters of the Dead Sea gradually turns sparkling white as crystals saltier than tears build across its surface … Photographed through the murky, shimmering water of the Dead Sea, the floating dress has a fairy-tale, weightless appearance that belies the challenges Landau faced working in so extreme an environment … The dress was stitched with a netlike weave ‘that the sea would respond to,’ and held underwater in a structure that could support the gown as it accrued hundreds of pounds of extra weight.”

Tired of the humanities? Looking for a thrilling, lucrative new line of work? Try space mining. Shit’s gonna be huge. Shannon Stirone explains: “The precious minerals and metals in asteroids may be worth billions of dollars to galactic prospectors, and NASA’s mission is paving the way for an outer-space gold rush. Asteroid mining hasn’t even begun, and it’s already being privatized: Several for-profit companies are currently jockeying for position in the fledgling industry … ‘In the same way we moved into the frontiers of this planet and lived off of the land, fished and hunted, and built log cabins and all kinds of things using local resources, that is really what we are looking to repeat in space,’ says Chris Lewicki, the CEO of Planetary Resources.”

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