Mike Konczal in The New Inquiry:

Finance can go beyond bringing the future of raw commodities into cash value in the present. A wave of mathematical modeling and computer simulations allows investors to predict the likely value of everything from apartment rentals to sovereign crises to human beings, and a elaborate contractual infrastructure lets them lock down their bets. These fruits of financial engineering will increasingly play a role in our economic lives.

But are these fruits poison? Where will this sort of predictive financial engineering lead, and can anything be done to alter the path? This system of buying and selling the future requires a level of control over far beyond the normal standardization and commodification that comes with capitalist societies. To specify the future in the ways that futures contracts demand means locking down its forms in advance, with an abstract conception suitable to financial exchange positing what will become lived reality. Knowledge of the future breaks down, while financial markets overwhelms areas of everyday life once fully separate from what has been traditionally seen as finance. The consequences of this domination by finance have already begun to unfold and may only intensify as finance’s realms expand.

It might be useful to start with an old philosophical debate: about the relationship between universals and specific objects. As Marco d’Eramo notes in his book The Pig and the Skyscraper: Chicago: A History of Our Future, that back during the medieval period, philosophers fought over whether the names of things resulted from social conventions and the everyday reality of their existence, or whether the names of things existed in a reality independent of the actual objects that represent them in everyday lives. Are there only particular, individual, material things out there, with generic names arising only from social conventions? Or are there ideal Platonic universal entities, which exist separately from individual iterations of them?

More here.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation (commenters pushback in the comments section):

Right now on the New Inquiry website, for example, you can take a satirical quiz called “Are You Being Sex Trafficked?” Of course, if you are reading the New Inquiry, chances are you’re not being sex trafficked; if you’re a sex worker, chances are you’re a grad student or a writer or maybe an activist—a highly educated woman who has other options and prefers this one. And that is where things get tricky. Because in what other area of labor would leftists look to the elite craftsman to speak for the rank and file? You might as well ask a pastry chef what it’s like to ladle out mashed potatoes in a school cafeteria. In the discourse of sex work, it seems, the subaltern does not get to speak.

Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore, published by Verso and co-edited by Jacobin, is a good example of this phenomenon. It’s got a lot of Marxist bells and whistles—OK, OK, sex work is work, I get the point!—and is much concerned with the academically fashionable domains of language and representation, the portrayal of sex workers in movies and ads. “Sex workers should not be expected to defend the existence of sex work,” Grant writes, “in order to have the right to do it free from harm”—whether arrest or violence or the stigma of a fixed identity that can never be escaped. School teacher Melissa Petro discovered that when she lost her job after the New York Post got hold of an essay she had written about her time as an escort.

All fair enough, but the real world is more complicated. Grant has a great time beating the dead gray mare of 1980s anti-porn feminism but doesn’t seem to notice any difference between those vanished crusaders against smut—was any cause ever so decisively defeated?—and today’s campaigners against commercial sexual exploitation, who include former sex workers. Supporters of the “Swedish model” of outlawing the purchase but not the sale of sex—arrest johns, not sex workers—are “carceral feminists.” Women who fight sex trafficking are in it to build nonprofit empires, “jobs for the girls,” and are indistinguishable from paternalistic rescuers like Kristof.

Tellingly, Grant says barely a word about the women at the heart of this debate: those who are enslaved and coerced—illegal immigrants, young girls, runaways and throwaways, many of them survivors of sexual trauma, as well as transwomen and others cast out of mainstream society.

More here.

Over at Edge:

[John Brockman] Daniel Kahneman turned 80 on March 5th and Edge noted the occasion with a reprise of a number of his contributions to our pages. (See “Kahneman Turns 80”).

At that time, Kahneman's longtime colleague, behavioural economist Richard Thaler, suggested that Edge follow up the birthday announcement by doing what it does best, asking Edgies who work in fields including, but not limited to, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, law, medicine, a question.

For their responses to Thaler's question—”How has Kahneman's work influenced your own? What step did it make possible?”—we asked a selected group of Edgeis to include inspired leaps off of Kahneman's shoulders, not just applications of his ideas. We used a comment made by research psychologist Steven Pinker in the Q&A following Kahneman's talk at the 2011 Edge Master Class, as an example. Pinker said:

“If somebody were to ask me what are the most important contributions to human life from psychology, I would identify this work [by Kahneman & Tversky] as maybe number one, and certainly in the top two or three. In fact, I would identify the work on reasoning as one of the most important things that we've learned about anywhere. When we were trying to identify what any educated person should know in the entire expanse of knowledge, I argued unsuccessfully that the work on human cognition and probabilistic reason should be up there as one of the first things any educated person should know.”

One way to consider the long and illustrious career of a great thinker such as Kahneman is not as a summation, but as a commission, one that gives us permission to move forward in certain ways. (Think Newton's “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”) As social psychologist Richard Nisbett noted, “It's not just a celebration of Danny. It's a celebration of behavioral science.”.

More here.

Michael E. Mann in Scientific American:

If the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise 2 degrees Celsius by 2036, crossing a threshold that many scientists think will hurt all aspects of human civilization: food, water, health, energy, economy and national security. In my article “False Hope” in the April 2014 Scientific American, I reveal dramatic curves that show why the world will reach this temperature limit so quickly, and also why the recent slowdown in the rate of temperature increase, if it continues, will only buy us another 10 years.

These numbers come from calculations made by me and several colleagues. We plugged values of Earth’s “equilibrium climate sensitivity”—a common measure of the heating effect of greenhouse gases—into a so-called energy balance model. Scientists use the model to investigate possible climate scenarios.

You can try this exercise yourself. The text below explains the variables and steps involved. You can download the climate data here and the model code here. And you can compare your results with mine, which are here. You can also change the variables to see what other future scenarios are possible. One note: the model runs on MatLab software, which can be obtained here.

More here.

Oliver Sacks in the NYRB:

Charles Darwin’s last book, published in 1881, was a study of the humble earthworm. His main theme—expressed in the title, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms—was the immense power of worms, in vast numbers and over millions of years, to till the soil and change the face of the earth. But his opening chapters are devoted more simply to the “habits” of worms.

Worms can distinguish between light and dark, and they generally stay underground, safe from predators, during daylight hours. They have no ears, but if they are deaf to aerial vibration, they are exceedingly sensitive to vibrations conducted through the earth, as might be generated by the footsteps of approaching animals. All of these sensations, Darwin noted, are transmitted to collections of nerve cells (he called them “the cerebral ganglia”) in the worm’s head.

“When a worm is suddenly illuminated,” Darwin wrote, it “dashes like a rabbit into its burrow.” He noted that he was “at first led to look at the action as a reflex one,” but then observed that this behavior could be modified—for instance, when a worm was otherwise engaged, it showed no withdrawal with sudden exposure to light.

For Darwin, the ability to modulate responses indicated “the presence of a mind of some kind.” He also wrote of the “mental qualities” of worms in relation to their plugging up their burrows, noting that “if worms are able to judge…having drawn an object close to the mouths of their burrows, how best to drag it in, they must acquire some notion of its general shape.” This moved him to argue that worms “deserve to be called intelligent, for they then act in nearly the same manner as a man under similar circumstances.”

More here.

Michele Roberts in The Independent:

Pink may be the colour of an Empire's territories shown on a map of the world, while for modern shoppers trawling that world it denotes gifts suitable for girls. Kamila Shamsie's passionate new novel, set in the early twentieth century, intertwining themes of war, colonialism and gender, works at one level through sensual image, giving us also the pink flesh inside split figs, the pink of slaughtered men's blood dissolving into the water of streams, the pink of the sweaty faces of sahibs sipping sundowners in their clubs. Individual characters, drawn together by historical imperatives, change each other, like tints laid side by side in a watercolour. At the heart of the novel lies the fabled city of Peshawar, site of ancient civilization, spilling with exquisite streets, houses and fruit orchards, now under British rule. Buried somewhere near the city is a lost, legendary silver circlet, which seems to stand for the enduring power of myth and memory, the heroic capacity of human beings to struggle and endure. The circlet finally turns up again amid scenes of resistance and carnage.

Shamsie keeps her symbolism firmly under control, deploying a clear, plain narrative style and a traditional realist form. These work well, given how much of the novel is necessarily expository, packed with names and historical facts. Its publication neatly timed to coincide with the anniversary of the First World War, A God in Every Stone concerns itself with stories left out of official accounts. Opening in the summer of 1914, it shows us first Vivian Rose Spencer, ardent young English archaeologist falling in love with the sites of the Ottoman Empire, falling in love also with Tahsin Bey, the Turkish scholar who, as a friend of her father's, has taught her Greek, encouraged her to study at UCL and invited her to join him on a dig. We are given little sense of the actual work involved, but strongly sense Viv's scholarly enthusiasm. When war is declared, Viv's parents summon her home to London.

More here.

Scott A. Sandage in The New York Times:

Books about failure put both their authors and their readers in awkward positions. Writers are at pains to abase themselves somewhat, to show that they know the terrain by sacrificing some dignity without losing all credibility. Many readers, meanwhile, may be willing to ponder how they fail or why they fear it, but few will pick up a book for people who think of themselves as “failures.” Add to this the fact that all books fail to be everything their authors hoped and that almost all books fail to sell, and it becomes clear why books more unusual, especially two that fail (which about failure remain few and far between.

Two at once is even I mean in the nicest possible way) in different ways and take such different approaches to essentially the same question: How do we learn to stop worrying and love it when we bomb? Both authors appear to have worried about failure more than they have experienced it. Sarah Lewis, an art historian and curator who was named to O, the Oprah Magazine’s 2010 “O Power List,” celebrated her past and future failures in her college application essay (she went to Harvard) and alludes to life lessons from a janitor grandfather. Lewis invites us to think deeply about failure as a “gift” that is essential to creativity. Megan McArdle earned her M.B.A. but graduated after the dot-com bust, moving back into her parents’ New York City co-op and working part-time in her father’s firm. Eventually, she blogged her way into a journalism career at The Economist and an array of impressive print and online outlets. In “The Up Side of Down” McArdle wants to teach us how to “fail well” by changing how we react to inevitable setbacks. Chatty and digressive (six pages on her breakup in a chapter about the General Motors bailout), McArdle’s book remixes some of her magazine writing into small, easy doses.

More here.

Performance

I starred that night, I shone:
I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot
darkness with a parasol of brilliants
and a peewee descant on a flung bit;
I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding
to mantle and aurora from a crown,
I was fouettés, falls of blazing paint,
para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,
loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,
a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:
that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was
of course, inconsolable.
.

by Les Murray
from Subhuman Redneck Poems, 1996
Carcanet Press
.
.

Mallika Rao in the Huffington Post:

Karachi, Pakistan is one of the world’s most violent cities. And yet some of the music coming out of it would fit right in at a garden party on Cape Cod.

The disconnect is emblematic of a new cultural era for the world’s seventh largest city, characterized by variety. Outsiders are noticing, from Rolling Stone to Pakistan's neighbors in India. A writer for the Delhi-based magazine Caravan recently dove into the city’s secret clubs and concluded that a “shift” aided by the internet is producing an unprecedented range of sounds, “reflecting [Karachi's] frenzied character.”

Even the band names seem designed to stir things up, with an almost overwrought indie sensibility: Mole, //orangenoise, Dynoman, Basheer & the Pied Pipers, Alien Panda Jury, and DALT WISNEY are a few of the current hottest indie acts. Because Pakistani hits historically come from the classical world or the movies — meaning Bollywood, or the Lahore analog, Lollywood — these independent artists are forming collectives that act as labels, helping bands put out albums and promoting each other.

The best-known collective is Forever South (FXS), inspired in name by one of the first albums put out by the Karachi-based band Mole. FXS members — most of them young men — tend to self-identify with Electronic Dance Music, which generally emanates from a single deejay’s computer. The bare-bones production of EDM is a natural fit in a country where independent studios are a rarity.

But the sounds embraced by Karachi's young musicians also recall two traditional Sufi forms that reign in the Muslim country. The ghazal, which translates to “ score the spins of whirling dervishes, as they twirl their way to enlightenment.

More here.

Stephen Bezruchka in the Boston Review:

In answering this question, the distinction between health and health care is a critical one, but something that seems not to be well understood by the lay public, health care professionals, or policy makers. Every time we hear the word health, we should ask ourselves whether that term refers to health itself, or to the much more limited concept of health care.

If the culprit of the decline in health is not health care, are individual health-related behaviors, often blamed for the high death rates in some groups, causing our low ranking in health? Apparently not. Americans smoke less than both men and women in the healthier countries, so tobacco, though important, is not a significant cause for our higher mortality. Diet and other similar individual behaviors prevalent in the United States also don’t account for our health disadvantage compared to other rich nations. When asked to identify solutions to our poor health status as a nation, many respond that we need more education. Many see education as the solution to a wide range of problems. But on average the U.S. population has more years of schooling than in any other country in the world. And while we spend a great deal of money on education, we don’t get much bang for those bucks.

In 2013, the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a book called U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. The IOM report points out that reading, science, and mathematics outcomes for U.S. fifteen-year-olds are poor compared to other countries. Just as with health care, we spend a great deal on education and have little to show for it. The IOM report presents appalling information about violence and firearm deaths in the United States. But although we have very high rates of violent deaths for young people compared to other rich nations, that risk is a sideshow, too. The violent deaths of children are terrible events, but if we count up, for example, all the school shootings, they average out to about ten deaths a year. However tragic for the individual families, youth violence is an insignificant cause of our relatively limited life spans.

More here.

Ken Roth in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Edward Snowden has done us all a service by revealing how extensively our private communications are being monitored – not because of any targeted inquiry into criminality, but as part of a broad quest for intelligence.

The conversation he launched has already yielded some modest improvements in the protection of our privacy. But to understand how much more remains to be done, we must examine the rationales the US government uses to claim that its mass snooping is legal.

Given Australia's close intelligence partnership with the United States as part of the “Five Eyes” program (which also includes Britain, Canada, and New Zealand), we have reason to believe that Canberra applies similar logic.

First, Washington claims we have no privacy interest in the so-called metadata about our communications – the highly personal and revealing information about whom we call or email, what we search for on the web, which websites we browse, and even where we go physically (because our phones serve as electronic tracking devices).

The rationale? We are said to have waived our privacy when we “share” this information with a third party like a phone or internet company.

More here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

“[W]hat do you do with something like this — an experience so anomalous, so disconnected from the normal life you share with other people,” Ehrenreich asks in the foreword to the book, “that you can't even figure out how to talk about it?” Such a conundrum drives “Living With a Wild God,” which is part personal history and part spiritual inquiry.

That's a surprising turn for Ehrenreich, who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists. She is perhaps best known for the 2001 bestseller “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” which traces her journey through the world of low-income workers, but she has written about everything from gender politics to healthcare to the mechanics of joy, and contributed to publications including Mother Jones, the Nation and the Los Angeles Times. Her 1989 book “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class” was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

And yet, she says simply of the revelation or epiphany she underwent as a high school student, “I couldn't put it out of my life.” In the book, she explains in more detail: “[T]he world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with 'the All,' as promised by the Eastern mystics.

more here.

Jerry Stahl in BookForum:

One of my favorite moments in Cubed, Nikil Saval’s lush, funny, and unexpectedly fascinating history of the workplace, comes in a chapter called “The Birth of the Office,” in which the author describes the insane yet rampant “efficiency” craze that began to sweep the nation in 1900. One of its outgrowths was a periodical called System, subtitled A Monthly Magazine for the Man of Affairs. “Each volume,” Saval writes, “had articles proposing new models for the minutiae of office life, whether a new system of filing or a more efficient mode of envelope licking.” (In 1929, the magazine changed to a weekly—and called itself BusinessWeek.) By sheer coincidence, I was perusing System’s less-than-colorful history on my way to a gig at City Lights Bookstore, where preparations were in full throttle for the celebration of William Burroughs’s one hundredth birthday. At that legendary Beat Generation mecca, I was surrounded by posters of Burroughs’s face, staring grimly in my direction, looking every bit like the midwestern Bürgermeister he by rights should have been, given his legacy as grandson of the original William S. Burroughs, founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.

The juxtaposition felt perfect, somehow, given that the great delights of Saval’s opus are the segments he lifts from modern management literature. Saval deserves a lifetime supply of Advil, not just for the almost perverse depth of his headache-inducing research—the Proceedings of the 1935 Conference of the National Office Management Association! the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair! the Secret History of the Aeron Chair!—but also for the heroic effort he undertakes in successfully weaving his disparate dry-as-toast sources into genuine entertainment.

More here.

Susie Boyt at The Financial Times:

Peter Ackroyd’s compact new life of Charlie Chaplin opens magnificently in the heart of south London in the last decade of the 19th century. This is a London rife with the “suspect pleasures” of gin and music halls; a London crammed with factories making biscuits, glue and pickles; a London of timber warehouses and slaughterhouses; a London reeking of smoke, beer and poverty. Young Chaplin’s existence in this world was never stable. No birth or baptismal certificates relating to him have ever been found. He was not even certain of the identity of his biological father, taking the name of a successful music hall singer who was, for a spell, married to his mother – herself a music hall artiste and later a mender of old clothes.

Chaplin’s childhood was perilous and often frightening, with disturbances and deprivation to rival Oliver Twist. Frequent flits from a series of rented rooms with a mattress on his back were a fact of his boyhood. There were periods spent in the Southwark workhouse, nights sleeping rough with his half-brother Sydney, a time at a school for the destitute.

more here.

Zaheer Kazmi reviews two new books on the Middle East and Islam, one by Tariq Ramadan and another by Bassam Tibi, in the LA Review of Books:

As at the end of the Cold War, the recent tumult in the Arab world was not anticipated by weathered analysts. Neither was it foreseen by Muslim liberals who have staked their reputations on elucidating the Arab and Muslim “mindset” to Western audiences. Nevertheless, Bassam Tibi and Tariq Ramadan have both recently published books on the Arab Spring, which they believe has vindicated their respective bodies of work even as they concede they had not anticipated it. A Syrian-born German-based academic, Tibi came out of self-imposed retirement from public life, these events making him feel compelled to write his latest book, The Shari’a State. With several axes to grind — not only against his critics, but also against the whole enterprise of Islamic studies in the West — the light of his missionary zeal shines so brightly on the perils of his pet hate, the “double-speaking” Islamists, that at times it is difficult to discern anything other than the white heat of rage in his words.

As has become clear since the ouster of President Morsi in Egypt, far from “hijacking the Arab Spring,” as Tibi warns incessantly in the core message of his book, Islamists may now be set to be among its biggest losers, especially in the medium-term as the military, of which Tibi says next to nothing, reasserts its control. But this is only one of several profound misjudgments that plague the work, written with unapologetic emotion (“I do not claim to be detached,” he states early on), which, unsurprisingly, does not translate into analytical clarity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tibi’s odd assertions about his ancestral homeland, where, he insists, speaking as a “Sunni Syrian,” the threat of jihadism is a specter of Assad’s imagination, and the atrocities committed have been, more or less, one-sided. That he would prefer to live under the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood than Assad, despite viewing Islamists as an amorphous mass tied, in some vague way, to jihadists, only adds to the muddled thinking.

Most relevant for the latest US initiative in religious diplomacy, perhaps, is Tibi’s mantra of dealing with Islamists through a strategy of “engagement without empowerment.”

More here.

Jaroslaw Kuisz and Karolina Wigura in Eurozine:

Among scholars, gender studies are seen as supporting a wide-ranging and on-going discussion on the social roles of men and women, on the time they devote to housework and childcare, on the perception of equality and independence in marriage, and on gender equality policies, among others. It therefore came as a great surprise to university teachers and feminist and LGBT activists when senior and highly respected representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland issued a series of controversial statements concerning gender. The clergy compared what they considered a harmful “gender ideology” to communist or totalitarian ideologies, drawing attention, for example, to the idea that a child is “not born, but produced”, an idea that they perceive this gender ideology to endorse.

Whenever the ensuing row seemed to have blown over, yet another pretext emerged for stoking it up again. After a series of controversial statements from representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, the media devoted its attention to the decision of Anna Grodzka, the first openly transgender MP in Poland, to join the parliamentary committee formed to put an end to “gender ideology”. The committee's chairwoman, Beata Kempa of the rightwing conservative party United Poland, announced that it was Grodzka's intention to “make a fuss”. And so the gender dispute blew up again.

The direction that the row over gender has taken so far is baffling, not least in terms of how sharply it diverges from the broader discussion outlined above. Neither does it seem to have taken into account in any genuine way the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. Further, the more rational and moderate arguments of centrist and liberal milieus have received little attention in the wake of numerous jokes, some more appropriate than others. At the same time as playing with a foreign-sounding word, tabloid newspapers printed scare pictures of hairy creatures intended as representations of the kind of demons that the word “gender” now supposedly summoned in the public's imagination, accompanied by captions along the lines of “this is the face of gender”.

More here.