From Radio Silence:

We sat down with New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick to discuss the career and unique genius of one of his favorite artists—Bob Dylan. Here’s the first installment of the Radio Silence podcast series, complete with historical audio and plenty of music.

Written and hosted by Benjamin Hedin
Produced by Adam Kampe
Cover Art by Casey Burns

More good stuff here.

In some cases Master Frantz had to arrange for the offender to be dragged to the scaffold through the streets while he pulled out parts of his flesh with red-hot tongs on the way; and before that, he frequently had to administer the tortures that brought the accused to confess. The process began with a display of the instruments to the accused, to whom the executioner’s assistant described their function while playing up the skill and ruthlessness of his master. Most people gave in at this point, but those who did not (mostly hardened robbers) would be subjected to the thumbscrews or leg splints, or have fires lit under their armpits, or be put in the “crown”, a leather or metal band progressively tightened around their head, or be drawn up a ladder with weights applied to their feet in a torture known as the strappado. All this was carefully regulated. Master Frantz stopped the torture if it reached a stage where it threatened the life of the accused. He tended the wounds he had inflicted until, if necessary, the accused was ready to undergo the procedure all over again. We know all these details because, most unusually, Master Frantz Schmidt kept a diary, which the American historian Joel F. Harrington has unearthed in a manuscript copy from 1634, the year of the executioner’s death, that is more accurate and more detailed than the versions that appeared in print in 1801 and 1913.

more from Richard J. Evans at the TLS here.

In 1975 Dr. David Rosen conducted a psychiatric study among six people who were known to have survived jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge. His analysis was the first to utilize this specific control group—an exotic breed considering a plunge from the Golden Gate is 99 percent fatal. Rosen had gathered a minority that had somehow emerged from a widely accepted point-of-no-return, gems in the world of suicidology, where opportunity for follow-up is as frequent as immortality. Through a set of private interviews, Rosen discovered that each subject had specific suicide plans that involved only the Golden Gate Bridge. They collectively described the location as romantic, notorious, accessible, and effective—the perfect combination of myth and practicality. One subject imagined a sort-of love triangle between himself, the Golden Gate, and death. “There is a kind of form to it,” he said. “A certain grace and beauty.” Another denied even attempting suicide; he believed the Bridge was a set of “golden doors” leading from the material into the spiritual world. “It was the Golden Gate Bridge or nothing.” The group’s recollections assume a tone synonymous with people who have been there and back, a pitch the rest of us cannot quite perceive. They were thankful for their lives, but also for having experienced the once-in-a-lifetime sensation of jumping to one’s own death. “I felt like a bird flying,” one subject remembered.

more from Candace Opper at Guernica here.

Almost a quarter-century after the collapse of communism, and four years after his own death at the age of 81, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski remains a prisoner of the Cold War. He has been lionized in the West for Main Currents of Marxism, the indispensable three-volume history of Marxist ideas first published in Paris (in Polish) in 1976, and also for the essays he wrote a decade earlier that inspired advocates of “socialism with a human face.” Yet travel across the old Iron Curtain to Warsaw or Wroclaw, and one will encounter a different Kolakowski: not the Marxologist or dissident socialist, but the religious thinker and elusive cultural critic who found wisdom and solace in the works of Spinoza, Erasmus, the Dutch heretics and the Catholic skeptic Blaise Pascal. Highly esteemed in Polish Catholic circles, Kolakowski was a frequent guest of John Paul II’s at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence. But even in Poland, opinion about this other Kolakowski is mixed. Marek Edelman, a leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was among the mourners at his graveside in July 2009, and upon hearing the blessings being spoken as the casket was lowered into the pit, he whispered audibly, “Why are you making a Catholic out of him, that man was a decent atheist!”

more from John Connelly at The Nation here.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air,
and to every beast of the field … GEN. 2:20
.
Adam's Task

Joseph Epstein in Commentary Magazine:

I have met six Nobel Prize winners, and none has come close, in my view, to qualifying as a genius. Three won the prize for economics. They were all supremely confident and no doubt highly intelligent, but, I thought, insufficiently impressed by the mysteries of life. Another won his for physics, but in my company he wished to talk only about Shakespeare, on which he was commonplace and extremely boring. Another was a laureate for biology; he seemed to me, outside the laboratory, a man without the least subtlety. The last won his Nobel Prize for literature, and the most profound thing about him was the extent to which he had screwed up his personal life. Somehow it is always sensible to remember that in 1949 the Nobel Prize in medicine was given to Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese surgeon, for developing the procedure known as the lobotomy.

Genius is rare. Schopenhauer thought a genius was one in a hundred million. In this realm if in no other, that most pessimistic of philosophers may have been optimistic. Distinguishing between a man of learning and a genius, Schopenhauer wrote: “A man of learning is a man who has learned a great deal; a man of genius, one from whom we learn something which the genius has learned from nobody.” A genius is not merely brilliant, skillful, masterly, sometimes dazzling; he is miraculous, in the sense that his presence cannot be predicted, explained, or accounted for (at least thus far) by natural laws or scientific study. The definitions for genius may be greater than the actual number of true geniuses who have walked the earth. My own definition is as follows: Be he a genius of thought, art, science, or politics, a genius changes the way the rest of us hear or see or think about the world.

More here.

From Nature:

Gut bacteria from lean mice can invade the guts of obesity-prone cage-mates and help their new hosts to fight weight gain. Researchers led by Jeffrey Gordon, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, set out to find direct evidence that gut bacteria have a role in obesity. The team took gut bacteria from four sets of human twins in which one of each pair was lean and one was obese, and introduced the microbes into mice bred to be germ-free. Mice given bacteria from a lean twin stayed slim, whereas those given bacteria from an obese twin quickly gained weight, even though all the mice ate about the same amount of food. The team wondered whether the gut microbiota of either group of mice would be influenced by mice with one type living in close quarters with animals harbouring the other type. So the scientists took mice with the ‘lean’ microbiota and placed them in a cage with mice with the ‘obese’ type before those mice had a chance to start putting on weight. “We knew the mice would readily exchange their microbes,” Gordon says — that is, eat each other’s faeces. Sure enough, the populations of bacteria in the obese-type mice changed to match those of their lean cage-mates, and their bodies remained lean, the team writes today in Science¹. The bacterial invasion travelled only in that direction, however: the bacteria of the obese mice could not colonize the lean neighbour. This makes sense, says Gordon, who found in earlier work that the population of gut bacteria in obese people is less diverse than that in lean people², leaving unfilled niches in the microbiota. The bacteria from the lean mice seem to be able to find those vacancies, he says.

But this left him wondering: if the bacteria of lean people are so good at setting up shop in the guts of the obese, “why don’t we have an epidemic of leanness in America?” So the team fed the mice a more human diet, turning foods such as breakfast cereal and pizza into pellets for the mice. When the animals were fed a diet low in saturated fat and high in fruit and vegetables, the transfer of gut microbes from mice with the lean type to those with the obese type still occurred; however, when the mice were given a high-fat, low-vegetable diet this did not happen, and mice with the obese-type bacteria gained weight. “There’s an intricate relationship between our diet and how our gut bugs work,” says Gordon. “You have to have the right ingredients.”

More here.

Taimur Khan in Foreign Policy:

As night fell on Saturday, Nov. 24, the deputy superintendent of police, Zameer Abbasi, was out making the rounds. He had decided to take one last patrol when he received a phone call around 9:20 p.m. about a small explosion at a nearby apartment building. “My first thought was that this might be a high-value target, a terrorist who had planned to target the procession but had made a mistake with the bomb,” Abbasi later told me. When he arrived at the scene, smoke was pouring from a third-floor apartment window.

Abbasi didn't wait for the bomb squad to arrive. He quickly cordoned off the street and raced inside, fearing that there might be more explosives or a suicide bomber. When he got to the apartment, however, the scene was unlike anything he had seen before. A red chemical had been sprayed across the white walls. There was what seemed to be a laboratory: conical flasks connected by rubber tubing, sacks and boxes labeled with the names of chemicals, a small centrifuge. A silvery blue powder was spilled across the bathroom floor, and blood-red footprints crisscrossed the living room. “I thought this might not be the kind of blast I thought it was,” Abbasi said. “It looked like some kind of chemical reaction had happened.” He didn't know it at the time, but he had just made the first bust of a Pakistani meth lab.

It's hard for an outsider to understand the pace of change in Karachi these days. Statistics don't really do it justice. But here's one: From 2000 to 2010, Karachi's population grew more than 80 percent. That's roughly equivalent to adding more than New York City's entire population in just a decade. (For all the talk of the staggering boom of Chinese metropolises, the world's next fastest-growing city — Shenzhen — grew only 56 percent, adding fewer than 5 million people.)

More here.

From The Paris Review:

John was a true poet-critic, in whose work poem and essay inform one another and sometimes change places. One mark of their fellow traveling is a shared commitment to the art of explanation. The basic principles of the sugar-cube story are everywhere in his prose, especially in his perpetual delight at the precision and elegance of a good definition. His virtuoso guide to poetic form, Rhyme’s Reason, begins by telling us that “The study of rhetoric distinguishes between tropes, or figures of meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.” Could it be said in fewer words? Another Hollanderian impulse is expressed here too, his love of taxonomy, dividing a subject into molecular simples. Many of his great essays make their sense of fundamental topics—like the making of refrains, or asking questions in poetry, or answering them—by counting the possibilities. In “Poetic Answers,” an answer can be a fact, a promise, an imperative; it can bring closure, or refuse it; and on and on, with examples drawn from anywhere and everywhere in English poetry.

If you read “Blue Wine,” you’ll see the same mind at work, or at play. (John loved to consider and confuse the two.) The poem got its start on a visit to Saul Steinberg’s house, where he saw a line of curiously labeled, clear bottles arrayed on a window sill, all filled with the same blue liquid. The poem’s root question is, What is that stuff? and each of its eleven sections offers a hypothesis, indeed, several hypotheses. Some “wise old wine people” speculate that it is red in the cask, blue in the light, the opposite of blood; or that it is no particular blue, but the cosmic blue of generality itself. Then again, it may have been made by vintners after a recipe in Plutarch’s lost essay “On Blue Wine.” Or again, perhaps it turned blue in the cask at the laugh of a Zen master, who posed its surprising color to his students as a koan. Or it is German, Das Rheinblau; or French, Château la Tour d’Eau; or Romanian, “the funny old / Half-forgotten Vin Albastru.” And so on: the poem is giddy with is own answers, its self-begetting explanations.

Of course, as Wittgenstein reminds us, in one of John’s favorite aphorisms, all explanations come to an end somewhere. It was important to how he understood his own career that somewhere along the line he turned away from “essayistic speculation” and began to write “less discursively, more puzzlingly”—so he told The Paris Review in 1985. The explanations, like many in “Blue Wine,” become as likely to be questions of their own.

More here. (Note: My co-author Sara Suleri and I greatly benefited from Rhyme's Reason during our attempts to translate Ghalib. We are deeply saddened by this loss.)

Toby Ash interviews Mark Blyth at Five Books:

The title of this interview is nothing if not ambitious. So, in a nutshell, can you tell us how the world’s political economy does actually work?

Well, it doesn’t work according to the textbooks. If you look at economic textbooks, the whole world is meant to work according to the logic of differential calculus; there are these reciprocal relationships – one side goes up and one side goes down. But deep within it there’s a paradox. On the one side you have Adam Smith, where everyone is pursuing their own self-interest leading to an outcome which is better than any of them could have intended. On the other, you have John Maynard Keynes. Today Keynes is thought of as someone who just talks about deficit spending and so on, but that’s just complete rubbish. Keynes’s central message is that individual rational action can be collectively disastrous. So, if you have a series of economic models in a text book where everything balances out, it’s much more attuned to the world working the way that Smith would like to tell us.

But what if it works the other way? That basically there are fallacies of composition and collective action problems at the base of everything, which means that your own individual best first strategy can lead to everybody having a second best outcome. That’s how I think about the world. Take climate change, for example. Everybody agrees that it’s a problem – unless you’re a crank. Why is it then so difficult to do something about it? Because everybody pursuing their own self-interest can be a really good thing, and it can lead to lots of innovation. But it can also lead to the fragilities that brought us the financial crisis and our inability to solve climate change. So where’s the space between Smith and Keynes? To me, that is where you should look for how the world works.

More here.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad at Al Jazeera:

It was inevitable that any conversation in Britain on foreign intervention would take place in the shadow of the Iraq War. To sell that war to a reluctant public, Tony Blair’s government fabricated a threat, presented it as imminent and prescribed urgent action. Humanitarian rationales were added afterward. The threat, as many had suspected, proved false, and the war, as everyone feared, created a human catastrophe. The British public, which had opposed the war, felt betrayed. A lesson was learned.

Both sides invoked Iraq in last week’s parliamentary debate. But the only lessons that were drawn were politically serviceable ones. In insisting that Britain must not get involved in “another Middle Eastern war,” the Labour Party implied that Iraq was a disaster due less to Labour’s mistakes than to the intractability of the Middle East. In blaming Blair’s “dodgy dossier,” the Conservatives ignored their own party’s complicity in sanctioning an unnecessary war. Both overlooked the fact that just two years ago, with near unanimity, the House of Commons approved the use of force against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. The lessons of Iraq were no less valid then and the current situation in Syria is direr.

With the exception of some fringe figures, neither side in the debate denies that the regime’s atrocities are ongoing. This wasn’t the case in Iraq: in 2003, Saddam Hussein’s worst atrocities were more than a decade behind him. But last week’s debate in parliament wasn’t concerned with human rights — it couldn’t have been, since the British government was selling chemical agents to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as late as January 2012. The focus was narrower: on the use of chemical weapons in defiance of the “red line” that President Obama claimed the Assad regime could not cross. The evidence for their use, past and present, is substantial, but parliament showed greater caution than it had in the case of Iraq, where only possession was alleged. Because of “Blair's trickery,” writes journalist Brian Whitaker, “the level of proof required for military intervention is not merely high (as it should be) but unrealistically high.”

More here.

Night Psalm

it’s a honky tonk that illumines the night
it’s the keyboard of a honky tonk
down at the feet of things
at the feet of the lampposts
at the acrid feet of the olive trees
it’s a metronome
at the sweeter feet of the lemongrove
at the vlei’s little slippers of water
down at the bottom of the reeds
where the lilies lilt on stilettos
it’s a rickety old honky tonk
maybe a loom
the spool and the shuttle
of a cranky old loom
or a smithy’s tinker and tilt
down in the sump of the night
or a sowing machine with a tapping heel
that jig-jigs yonder in the quag
it’s cheeky jazz on bell tongues
it’s in the hoof of every culm
sans a tune
without amen
it’s a honky tonk
it’s a clapper key
it’s a speckling under the dewclaw
it echoes from under the lavender
they’re foot spoons
they’re foot raps
of crickets and of toads
they’re the ones that are a-tappin’ and a-tickin’
unceasing in the mottle of the grass
to this I hum
to this I strum
to this I swingle
my night psalm
.

by Marlene van Niekerk
from Poetry International, 2013
translation by author

István Aranyosi in the Boston Review:

Richard Dawkins is under attack—at least if the recent tide of opinion pieces targeting him is any measure. Accusers allege that Dawkins’s recent tweets exhibit anti-Muslim bigotry.

Now, I am not a fan or follower of Dawkins qua religious or theological thinker, for the simple reason that his writings fall short of the kind of argumentative sophistication that we analytic philosophers are trained for. If I want to read careful atheist thinkers, I read people like Michael Tooley, Graham Oppy, Quentin Smith, or Adolf Grünbaum.

Yet in spite of this and of the fact that some of Dawkins’s tweets are insensitive and crude, the accusation that he promotes anti-Muslim bigotry or xenophobia is misplaced. In fact, I think that a significant part of what such bigotry usually involves—namely, viewing Muslims as a uniform, monolithic block, coupled with an attempt at racializing Islam—is more characteristic of Dawkins’s accusers.

Here is one of Dawkins’s tweets: “Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.” It is obvious what is wrong with Dawkins’s claim: Hasan’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to his journalistic activities. It is what we call a “fallacy of relevance” in informal logic. Why do some commentators feel the need to also add that it is racist, or Islamophobic, or anti-Muslim? Just because Hasan is Muslim? That would be another instance of the same fallacy, at least if Dawkins were ready to say something similar of a Christian journalist who happens to believe in, say, the Immaculate Conception. And he is. Do the accusers know he is? I assume they should, given that Dawkins has for a long time been a fierce critic especially of the Christian faith.

More here.

Jeffrey Gettleman in the NYT Magazine:

Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country. Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.

Kagame may be the most complicated leader in Africa. The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo. At least, that is what a growing number of critics say, including high-ranking United Nations officials and Western diplomats, not to mention the countless Rwandan dissidents who have recently fled. They argue that Kagame’s tidy, up-and-coming little country, sometimes described as the Singapore of Africa, is now one of the most straitjacketed in the world. Few people inside Rwanda feel comfortable speaking freely about the president, and many aspects of life are dictated by the government — Kagame’s administration recently embarked on an “eradication campaign” of all grass-roofed huts, which the government meticulously counted (in 2009 there were 124,671). In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

Brad Plumer in the Washington Post:

3) Elite opinion on war plays a huge role in shaping public opinion. Intervention in Syria is pretty unpopular with the wider American public right now. But it won’t necessarily stay that way. A lot could depend on the words and actions of lawmakers and other elites.

At least, that’s one implication of a 2007 paper by Adam Berinsky of MIT: “When political elites disagree as to the wisdom of intervention, the public divides as well. But when elites come to a common interpretation of a political reality, the public gives them great latitude to wage war.” (See also Berinsky’s book on this topic.)

4) Broadly speaking, military interventions have a poor track record in achieving humanitarian goals. True, the Obama administration isn’t framing a strike on Syria as a humanitarian endeavor (their stated goal is to enforce norms against the use of chemical weapons). Still, Erica Chenoweth of the University of Denver has been highlighting a couple of striking papers on the consequences of intervention:

–A 2002 paper by Patrick Ragan found that outside military interventions don’t typically shorten the duration of civil conflicts. “Regardless of how the intervention is conceived – or empirically operationalized—there seems to be no mix of strategies that lead to shorter expected durations.”

–A 2012 paper by Reed Wood, Jason Kathman and Stephen Gent found that outside military interventions on behalf of rebel factions can actually increase government killings of civilians:

Daniel Bosch in The Daily Beast:

Robert Pinsky’s new anthology with commentary, Singing School, argues that the medium of the poet is the reader’s body, that words and punctuation and tonal manipulations are means to ends felt not in mind but in the mouth, ears, lungs, and trunk of the oral performer of a poem. What good is served, Pinsky would ask, by so much talk about whether or not we have “understood” a work of art, if what we mean by “understanding” largely ignores our embodied experience of that work? Every word of Singing School is pitched against the decapitation of poetry’s head from its body.

Singing School is so lean and mean, any précis calls for a spoiler alert. Its title is lifted from William Butler Yeats’ 1926 poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” and the infamously negative couplet: “Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence.” A brief preface orients the reader to the kinds of attention Pinsky will advocate, and he divides the book into four sections or “courses” of 17 to 25 poems, each deftly-curated to tease out the complexity of an important on artistic theme: “Freedom,” “Listening,” “Form,” and “Dreaming Things Up.”

As you will see below, Pinsky spins his picks concisely: the total pedagogical apparatus amounts to just 35 of 222 pages (and many of these pages are full of verse). A lot of the poems in Singing School are canonical, and this fact will make the book a powerful choice for teachers of any high school or early college survey of principal literary genres. Middle school students would love it, too, but most middle school teachers would wrongly assume the poems too difficult. They are only difficult to explain, not to love.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in Slate:

A study published last week in the journal Science shows that the stress of worrying about finances can impair cognitive functions in a meaningful way. The authors gathered evidence from both low-income Americans (at a New Jersey shopping mall) and the global poor (looking at farmers in Tamil Nadu, India) and found that just contemplating a projected financial decision impacted performance on spatial and reasoning tests.

Among Americans, they found that low-income people asked to ponder an expensive car repair did worse on cognitive-function tests than low-income people asked to consider cheaper repairs or than higher-income people faced with either scenario. To study the global poor, the researchers looked at performance on cognitive tests before and after the harvest among sugarcane farmers. Since it’s a cash crop rather than a food one, the harvest signals a change in financial security but not a nutritional one. They found that the more secure postharvest farmers performed better than the more anxious preharvest ones.

These findings complement the already extensive literature of the negative physical impacts of low socioeconomic status, reinforcing the point that the harms of poverty extend beyond the direct consequences of material deprivation.

More here.

Terrance Tomkow at Tomkow.com:

…the question, What are the laws of nature? may be stated thus: What are the fewest and simplest assumptions, which being granted, the whole existing order of nature would result? Another mode of stating it would be thus: What are the fewest general propositions from which all the uniformities which exist in the universe might be deductively inferred? J.S.Mill, 1843•

… if we knew everything, we should still want to systematize our knowledge as a deductive system, and the general axioms in that system would be the fundamental laws of nature” Frank Ramsey, 1928•

“a contingent generalization is a law of nature if and only if it appears as a theorem (or axiom) in each of the true deductive systems that achieves a best combination of simplicity and strength” David Lewis 1973 •

Vereshchagin & Vitányi,2004•

The quotes from Mill, Ramsey and Lewis above express the what philosphers call the “ Best System Analysis” of Laws.

BSA is probably the most widely accepted answer we have to the question, “What is it to be a Law of nature?” Even so, it is notoriously fraught with unanswered questions. A short list:

Can the account properly distinguish accidental from nomological regularities?

Can it explain the connection between the laws of nature, counterfactuals and dispositions?

Why should we count only generalizations as laws, given that many scientific principles do not obviously take this form? Can't singular statements describing, say, fundamental constants be laws too?

What is the connection between this deductive account of laws and our inductive methods of discovering them?

How does BSA accommodate the existence of probabilistic laws?

What do Mill and Lewis mean when they speak of “simplicity”? Isn't simplicity in the eye of the beholder? If so how can it be a subjective matter what the laws of nature are? Or, if simplicity is just a measure of shortness of our sentences, doesn't that make law-hood a matter of what language we happen to speak?

And, anyway, why should we think that the laws of nature must be simple in any sense?

In this post I want to raise different and, I think, more fundamental problems for BSA and provide an alternative theory of lawhood based on Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT). This new theory is precisely captured in the theorem of AIT that appears above. Don't worry if you don't understand it just now. AIT is a recent development and a novelty to most philosophers. Before we are done, I hope to have explained to you what this equation means and to have convinced you of its deep significance.

More here.