What distinguished the Hohe Carlsschule from other European military academies was its founder’s deep fascination with the progressive pedagogical ideas of the French Enlightenment. From a young age, the students learned Greek, Latin, French, philosophy, and were set on a professional path as doctors, lawyers, or civil servants—all extremely enviable positions. They studied rhetoric and contemporary literature and learned, through style exercises, to write poetry. The teachers were scarcely older than the students, and instead of lecturing held informal chats in which the students were invited to participate. The Carlsschulers were encouraged to look on them as their friends and confidants, to whom closely guarded secrets could be trusted. Schiller enjoyed a particularly close relationship with Jakob Friedrich Abel, a philosophy teacher only seven years his senior. He credited Abel with the deep moral and aesthetic convictions that would run through his plays and his poetry, even as Abel reported on Schiller to the duke.

more from Michael Lipkin at Paris Review here.

“I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.” The repetitions and played-up quaintness here give the sense of a consciousness that has been lulled into congeniality. But as the story unfolds, and the imprecisions come into focus, the narrator comes to see that depression is not “just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi’s mother gets killed in Bambi”. Rather, it’s a kind of auto-immune deficiency of the self…

more from Thomas Meaney at the TLS here.

The current level of interest in Bowie reflects a larger theme in pop-music culture. While the long view of musical history suggests the obvious—that the greats remain great while a few fade out—in the near term, some acts seize the imagination of the moment. The Beatles have a flawless catalogue, but their aesthetic has left them on the outside for now: cartoons, granny glasses, and French horns don’t fit into 2013. Conversely, the ennui of present versions of punk and disco and rap—rooted in a young adult’s curt dismissal rather than a child’s open acceptance—has reinforced a common taste for darker acts such as Bowie. We no longer believe that all you need is love (or embroidered bell-bottoms), but we do believe in androgyny and world-weary dance parties buoyed by cocaine and artificially sour exchanges that mask a deep romantic streak. Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke of “Station to Station,” one of Bowie’s best albums, were always coming on aloof and imperious, then begging you to stay. His catalogue, though not as fault-free as that of the Beatles, or even that of Led Zeppelin, provides grist for today’s music-making cohort. Bowie has lasted, and he has found a place in the twenty-first century as an idea and a musician and a series of haircuts.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Richard Marshall interviews Colin McGinn in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You are a famous exponent of mysterianism, ‘a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness.’ I remember reading your book The Mysterious Flame when it was published in 1999 and being impressed by a really smart philosopher ‘fessing up to the futilitarian idea that something was just too hard to solve. But I wonder whether you still think that we’ll never understand the nature of consciousness. Do you think there’ll never be a time when we get machines smarter than us? So I gues my general question is about philosophers changing their minds. Is there anything that could make you change your mind?

CM: I think we know the nature of consciousness better than anything else. What we don’t know is how it springs bright-eyed from the heaving of matter. Many machines are already smarter than us—at dumb things. My mind could easily be changed: by seeing consciousness leaking from the atomic nucleus, say. I also think physics is a hotbed of mystery (see my book Basic Structures of Reality).

3:AM: One of the cool things in your autobiography was the detail about you playing endless games of pushball. Your approach to philosophy seems very enamored with an American, hip sense of style. Philosophy in the UK seemed drab by contrast. Is that right?

CM: I don’t know what pushball is and have never knowingly played it. I have played quite a good deal of pinball, as well as old video games like Galaga and Defender. My sense of style is not American-inspired: it is a combination of Steve Marriott and Vladimir Nabokov. I never found philosophy in the UK drab, just underpaid.

Hospital Parking Lot, April

Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke.

Rashid Khalidi in The New York Times:

WHAT should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever.

When the most recent iteration of this process began with high hopes at the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which led to the Oslo accords two years later, there were 200,000 Israelis illegally settled in the occupied Palestinian territories: today, there are more than twice as many. During this time, under four successive presidents, the United States, purportedly acting as an honest broker, did nothing to prevent Israel from gradually gobbling up the very land the two-state solution was to be based on. Until 1991 most Palestinians, although under Israeli military occupation, could nonetheless travel freely. Today, an entire generation of Palestinians has never been allowed to visit Jerusalem, enter Israel or cross between the West Bank and Gaza. This ghettoization of the Palestinians, along with the unrest of the second intifada of 2000-5 and the construction of seemingly permanent settlements and of an apartheid-style wall, are the tragic fruits of the so-called peace process the United States has led. The “peace process” has consisted of indulging Israeli intransigence over Palestine in exchange for foreign-policy goals unrelated to the advancement of peace and Palestinian freedom. In the late 1970s this involved the strategic cold war prize of moving Egypt from the Soviet column to the American column.

More here.

From Scientific American:

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found what it went to Mars to look for: evidence of an environment that could have once supported life. Chemical analyses show that a greyish powder taken from the rover’s first drilled rock sample contains clay minerals formed in water that was slightly salty, and neither too acidic nor too alkaline for life.

“If this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,” says Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger, a planetary geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He and other NASA researchers announced the findings today at a news briefing in Washington DC. Previous missions to Mars have spotted clay minerals. And Curiosity itself had already found signs that liquid water once flowed across the surface. But the pinch of powder tested by Curiosity, from a rock nicknamed John Klein, is the first hard evidence of water-borne clays in a benign pH environment. “This is the only definitive habitable environment that we’ve described and recorded,” says David Blake, principal investigator for the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. An X-ray analysis by CheMin showed that the ground-up rock comprised mostly igneous minerals such as feldspar, pyroxene, olivine and magnetite. But at least 20% of the rock was made up of clay minerals, such as smectite, that form in the presence of water. The salts in the rock, such as halite, are of the sort that life tolerates, Blake says, unlike the iron salts found elsewhere on Mars by the rover Opportunity, which indicate an acidic environment. A second instrument on Curiosity, known as the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), heated a fraction of a gram of powder and analyzed the gases released. Water was released from the sample at relatively high temperatures, which is characteristic of clay minerals and a good confirmation of CheMin’s findings, says Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for SAM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

More here.

Scott Lemieux reviews my old advisor Ira Katznelson's new book Fear Itself, in The American Prospect:

In 1942, Congress passed legislation attempting to facilitate voting by soldiers stationed overseas. Passed too close to the date of the general election (and after the primary election season) and creating a cumbersome process, the bill was ineffective. As the number of American soliders overseas continued to increase, the lack of practical access to the ballot was intolerable to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He sent a bill to Congress in 1944 that would have created a simple federal ballot made it much easier for soldiers to make their voices heard. Despite having the authority of a wartime president, however, the bill failed. Congress instead passed a much weaker version, more similar to the 1942 statute, that did not send out a uniform federal ballot and left administration in the hands of the states. Fewer than 33 percent of eligible soldiers were able to vote in the 1944 elections. How, during the height of wartime, could such a basic democratic right be denied many soldiers risking their lives for their country?

The answer, as Ira Katznelson details in his brilliant new book Fear Itself, is that a coalition of Republicans (who believed that soldiers largely represented a pro-FDR demographic) and Southern Democrats (who feared that even this limited form of federal intervention would threaten Jim Crow) wanted to limit ballot access for soldiers. The clash between the imperatives of war and the constraints of congressional politics makes the failure of FDR's 1944 bill a paradigmatic New Deal story. Eighty years ago yesterday, FDR famously said during his First Inaugural Address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The New Deal—which Katznelson argues should be seen as encompassing the period between the election of FDR in 1932 and the election of Eisenhower 20 years later—was, according to Fear Itself, conducted in the shadow of three major fears. First, there was the fear about whether democracy could survive the Great Depression as countries such as Germany, Italy, and Japan turned to authoritarian responses. Second, there was the fear protecting national security respresented, first by World War II and then by the Cold War and the atomic age. And third, and crucially, was the Southern fear that its system of white supremacy would not survive. The first two fears created an impetus for unprecedented federal action, but this federal action was, throughout the New Deal, shaped and constrained by the third fear.

One of the many strengths of Fear Itself is that it brings Congress back to center stage in the New Deal era.

You can go vote over at The Prospect:

Who is on the list?

As a starting point, we have drawn up a list of 65 people, based on recommendations from our ten-strong panel. Candidates have to be alive and still active in public life. They must be distinguished in their field and have influence on international debate. We gave credit for the currency of the candidates’ work—their influence over the past 12 months and their continuing significance to this year’s biggest questions.

The panel: Anne Applebaum, Philip Campbell, Amy Chua, James Fallows, Stephanie Flanders, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Bronwen Maddox, David Miliband, Anna Maria-Misra and Strobe Talbott. Judges were not permitted to vote for themselves.

Paul Voosen in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Let's make one thing clear: Jim Collins won't grow you a house any time soon.

More than a decade ago, Collins, a decorated scientist at Boston University, helped give birth to synthetic biology, which soon grew into arguably the world's hottest and most poorly defined scientific discipline. Its practitioners made big promises: that by harnessing the ideas of engineering and applying them to genetics, they would create cheap, abundant biofuels, customized medicine, even self-growing houses, as one scientist predicted.

The potential for mastering life was so exciting that scientists ­talked about applications decades away as if they were around the bend. Scholars from the Bay Area and Boston issued forth into industry, promising to reinvent life from the inside out, evolution be damned. Drawing inspiration from electrical circuits and computing, they'd create standardized biological parts. The notion drew easy comparisons to Legos: Snap them together, and soon enough you'd have control of life.

Since 2004 investors have poured at least $1.84-billion into synthetic-biology start-ups; the government has added many more millions in research dollars. But more recently, the hype has died down. Most of those companies have made grinding progress, not breakthroughs. Much potential remains to reinvent manufacturing and medicine, but the road is far longer than some imagined.

There's a simple reason for this problem: The tools have outpaced the knowledge. The cost of genetic sequencing and synthesis continues to plunge, but the functions of many genes in even the simplest forms of life, like bacteria and yeast, stubbornly hold on to their secrets. Genetic networks interact in complex, mysterious ways. Engineered parts take wild, unexpected turns when inserted into genomes. And then evolution, a system that would drive any electrical engineer mad, tiptoes in.

As synthetic biology passes from precocious youth toward maturity, it is returning home to academe. Collins sees an upside to that retrenchment: The science, once a domain of biological amateurs and outsiders, can now inform basic research into life's unending complexity.

Steven Shapin reviews Eating the Enlightenment : Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760, in the LA Review of Books:

AFTER SAN FRANCISCO POLITICIANS Harvey Milk and George Moscone were gunned down in City Hall by their colleague Dan White in 1978, the murder trial launched a pre-Internet meme about moral accountability. White’s lawyers claimed that his capacity for judgment was diminished at the time of the killings. A sign of White’s mental impairment was his abnormal diet, especially an increased consumption of Coca-Cola and the sickly sweet, cream-filled cakes known as Twinkies: an American edible icon, concocted of not much more than sugar, calories and commercial ingenuity. The precise legal claims were, first, that Twinkie-eating was an indication of the defendant’s pathological mental state, not its cause, and second, that “there is a minority opinion in psychiatric fields that sugar-rich diets might exacerbate existing mood-swings.” But excitable journalists preferred a simpler version: Twinkies were the snack that drove men mad. “The Twinkie defense” entered American pop culture — and eventually the Oxford English Dictionary — as a tag for any number of obviously ridiculous but expert-endorsed claims about dietary causes of disturbed psychic states.

The Twinkie defense is just tenable enough to be offered up as an accountability waiver — a seriously pathological version of its more benign kin, the “sugar rush” or “sugar high” — but also ludicrous enough to be officially disallowed. It’s a modern absurdity, but one that has a long and sinuous cultural history. Go back several hundred years and one finds that the general form of the Twinkie defense was central to medical thought and practice. The idea that diet might shape mental states was commonly accepted; the open question concerned what foods had what effects on the mind.

Evgeny Morozov over at Slate:

The idea—or, perhaps, hope—behind Fuzz is that human curators can still deliver something that algorithms cannot; it aspires to be the opposite of Pandora, in which the algorithms do all the heavy lifting. As its founder, Jeff Yasuda, told Bloomberg News last September, “there’s a big need for a curated type of experience and just getting back to the belief that the most compelling recommendations come from a human being.”

But while Fuzz's launch attracted little attention, the growing role of algorithms in all stages of artistic production is becoming impossible to ignore. Most recently, this role was highlighted by Andrew Leonard, the technology critic for Salon, in an intriguing article about House of Cards, Netflix's first foray into original programming. The series' origin myth is by now well-known: Having studied its user logs, Netflix discovered that a remake of the British series of the same name could be a huge hit, especially if it also featured Kevin Spacey and was directed by David Fincher.

“Can the auteur survive in an age when computer algorithms are the ultimate focus group?” asked Leonard. He wondered how the massive amounts of data that Netflix has gathered while users were streaming the first season of the series—how many times did they click the pause button?—would affect future episodes.

Sanjay Kak in The Caravan:

A young Kashmiri man is working in his father’s paddy field, bare-chested in the humid late summer, his strong body glistening with exertion. His mother and sisters work alongside, knee-deep in water. Let’s just imagine that they’re humming a tune off a nearby transistor radio.

That’s how the story, which I first heard almost exactly ten years back, begins—Soon an army jeep, closely followed by a truck, pulls up on the road next to their fields. The men inside appear to watch for some time. Then half a dozen armed soldiers step out briskly, and walk towards the family. There may have been an exchange of words, though later no one can confirm what was said.

The soldiers quickly grab the young man, and drag him off into the waiting truck. His muscular torso did not suggest strength any more, it was quietly noted afterwards, but great vulnerability. The women ran after the soldiers, shouting and screaming. One of them pulled off her headscarf, tossing it at the feet of the departing soldiers, in a final gesture of abject surrender. But there was no space for mercy here: these were men from the Rashtriya Rifles of the Indian Army, the much feared RR, trained for counter-insurgency, and said to be “psychologically strong”. They were not known to relent. As the olive-green truck rolled away, it was as if its engine were sucking away the very air from this landscape. For a little while longer the women could still be seen, flailing their arms in muffled, incoherent despair, and then, a heaving heap of exhausted bodies on the ground.

A week later, the young man’s father was still doing the rounds of army outposts in the area, trying to find his missing son. Dense concentric webs of barbed wire girdle these camps, with a second impenetrable ring of sandbags and metal sheets, which together buttress the nervous, edgy authority of the soldiers. Over several days the elderly man was passed on from camp to camp; after craven postures of servility and submission had been struck before soldiers and Subedars, in front of boyish Captains and Majors, he was finally ushered into the presence of “C.O. sahib”, the Commanding Officer of the unit.

Ah, that was your son, the Colonel is said to have remarked, sharp in his mint-fresh camouflage fatigues and his polished combat boots. The Colonel was almost smiling now—good-looking boy, handsome, nice strong body. He was with us, he said, but he’s gone now.

More here

Tom Vanderbilt in Slate:

On July 22, 1851, on a day when a visitor to London had any number of amusements at his disposal—from M. Gompertz’s Giant Panorama (“including a new diorama of intense interest”) at the Parthenium Rooms on St. Martin’s Lane, to the “Real Darkies from the South” (replete with “the Sayings and Doings and Lights and Shadows of the Ethiopian race”) appearing at Gothic Hall—a group of men assembled in a small room in Westminster.

They were drawn by a curious invitation: “To witness an attempt to open a lock throwing three bolts, and having six tumblers, affixed to the iron door of a strong room.” The men gathered around the door to a vault, once the repository of records for the South-Eastern Railway. At their center was an unassuming figure, an American named Alfred C. Hobbs, clad in waistcoat and collar. At 11:35 a.m., Hobbs produced a few small tools from his pocket—“a description of which, for obvious reasons, we fear to give” a correspondent for the Times wrote—and turned his attention to the vault’s lock. His heavy brows knitted, Hobbs’ hands flitted about the lock with a faint metallic scratching. Twenty-five minutes later, it opened with a sharp click. Amid the excited murmur, the witnesses asked Hobbs to repeat the task. Having relocked the vault, he once again set upon it with deft economy. The vault opened “in the short space of seven minutes,” as the witnesses would testify, “without the slightest injury to the lock or the door.”

The lock was known as the “Detector,” and it needed no introduction. Indeed, since its patenting in 1818 by Jeremiah Chubb, a Portsmouth ironmonger, it had become one of the country’s most popular locks, advertised in the Bleak House serials and enshrined in magazine doggerel: “My name is Chubb, that makes the Patent Locks; Look on my works, ye burglars, and despair.”

More here, including more articles on lock picking.

Go here to watch the video.

So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable to a contemporary leftoid sensibility than either a similarly cartoonish one about black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincoln’s effort to push the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.” Wiener’s juxtapositions reflect the political common sense that gives pride of place to demonstrations of respect for the “voices” of the oppressed and recognition of their suffering, agency, and accomplishments. That common sense informs the proposition that providing inspiration has social or political significance. But it equally shapes the generic human-interest “message” of films like The Help that represent injustice as an issue of human relations—the alchemy that promises to reconcile social justice and capitalist class power as a win/win for everyone by means of attitude adjustments and deepened mutual understanding.

more from Adolph Reed, Jr. at nonsite here.

ARISTIDE IS A FLAWED and complicated figure, but his presidencies remain the symbol of the historic democratic mobilization that put an ecstatic end to more than thirty years of US-backed military dictatorships. And while his legislative achievements have been criticized by the Left and the Right, Haitians today celebrate one remarkable political triumph—that he disbanded the reviled Armed Forces of Haiti, which had been trained by US Marines during the American occupation from 1915 to 1934 and had never known an enemy but the country’s own citizens.3 This presented a problem for Aristide’s enemies in the business class: Unable to call on the military, they were without means to force him from office and suppress the protests of his Lavalas base. Which goes a long way toward explaining why Aristide’s second term in office lasted so much longer than his first and why UN soldiers were required on the ground after the second coup took place.

more from Aba Okipasyon at Triple Canopy here.

Jaynes began inspecting the world’s earliest literature for the first signs of human consciousness. “I started off like in a detective story,” he told a reporter for the Princeton radio station. As he moved backward through the centuries, he saw that consciousness, as he had defined it, disappeared somewhere between the Odyssey and the Iliad. Odysseus is a modern hero, introspective and deceptive. In the Iliad, the writing of which scholars date some three hundred years earlier, the characters are passive and mentally inert. They have no concept of a private mental space. The word “psyche” referred only to actual substances in the body, breath, and blood, which leave the warrior’s body as soon as he dies. The gods, emerging from mists or clouds or the sea, handle the warrior’s decisions. When Achilles accuses Agamemnon of stealing his mistress, Agamemnon insists he had no agency. “Not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus,” he explains. “So what could I do? Gods always have their way.” Critics have interpreted the meddling presence of the god as poetic devices, but Jaynes accused translators of imputing a modern mentality to people with subjectivities foreign to us. “The gods were in no sense ‘figments of the imagination,’” he wrote.

more from Rachel Aviv at n+1 here.