Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:

In the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.

Keynes delivered an early version of “Economic Possibilities” as a lecture at a boys’ school in Hampshire. He was still at work revising and refining the essay when, in the fall of 1929, the stock market crashed. Some might have taken this as a bad sign; Keynes was undeterred. Though he quickly recognized the gravity of the situation—the crash, he wrote in early 1930, had produced a “slump which will take its place in history amongst the most acute ever experienced”—over the long run this would prove to be just a minor interruption in a much larger, more munificent trend. In the final version of “Economic Possibilities,” published in 1931, Keynes urged readers to look beyond this “temporary phase of maladjustment” and into the rosy beyond.

According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.

More here.

Jack Devine in Foreign Affairs:

On September 9, 1973, I was eating lunch at Da Carla, an Italian restaurant in Santiago, Chile, when a colleague joined my table and whispered in my ear: “Call home immediately; it’s urgent.” At the time, I was serving as a clandestine CIA officer. Chile was my first overseas assignment, and for an eager young spymaster, it was a plum job. Rumors of a military coup against the socialist Chilean president, Salvador Allende, had been swirling for months. There had already been one attempt. Allende’s opponents were taking to the streets. Labor strikes and economic disarray made basic necessities difficult to find. Occasionally, bombs rocked the capital. The whole country seemed exhausted and tense. In other words, it was exactly the kind of place that every newly minted CIA operative wants to be.

I ducked out of the restaurant as discreetly as I could and headed to the CIA station to place a secure call to my wife. She was caring for our five young children, and it was our first time living abroad as a family, so she could have been calling about any number of things. But I had a hunch that her call was very important and related to my work, and it was.

“Your friend called from the airport,” my wife said. “He’s leaving the country. He told me to tell you, ‘The military has decided to move. It’s going to happen on September 11. The navy will lead it off.’”

This call from my “friend”—a businessman and former officer in the Chilean navy who was also a source for the CIA—was the first indication the agency’s station in Santiago had received that the Chilean military had set a coup in motion.

More here.

G. Randolph Mayes in The Dance of Reason:

If I could take one word back from the English language, change its common meaning without anyone noticing, it would be: rationalize.

Don't get me wrong. I think its cool that English words evolve over time, even when it's due to error. (Hey, that's how evolution works, right?) I don't mind that it's now OK to say literally when you mean figuratively or nonplussed when you mean unperturbed. I don't even really care about the plundering of philosophical terms like begs the question, which now means something completely different in the vernacular (raises the question) than it does when we use it in informal logic (takes for granted the point at issue).

But rationalize? Come on. Certainly the obvious and intuitive meaning of rationalize is: to make more rational. But today the term has come to mean almost exclusively the opposite: to make something appear rational, when it is not. Dude, you know this is bullshit, you're just rationalizing.

Well, before I explain why I really find this meaning irritating, I have to admit that it isn't quite as perverse as I make out. The suffix 'ize' means 'to cause to be or be like'. And, of course, once you dance into the semantic cloud of similarity and appearance, it is a small step from 'be like' to 'seem like.' Still, while the word rational isn't the only term to suffer izing in this way (moralize, criminalize, glamorize), it's worth noting that the vast majority of words that endinize do not experience this reversal of meaning.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What was the last truly great book you read?

Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift.” It’s such a generous, unsettling, chimerical work that the word “book” almost feels inadequate. The first time I read it, the project spread over two full years. I kept having to pause, my finger marking the page, in order to think. Or just to lift my head and breathe. I read it again last year and was stirred by connections I’d missed the first time around. I expect on the next reading it’ll enter more deeply still. (Like that beautiful, alarming James Merrill line: “Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.”)

Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.

Why, oh why, is Nancy Willard’s “Things Invisible to See” out of print? The novel, set in Ann Arbor in the 1930s and ’40s, manages to be about life, death, love, hate, innocence, experience and baseball. It begins with casual verve: “In Paradise, on the banks of the River of Time, the Lord of the Universe is playing ball with His archangels.” Willard is well known as a children’s book author, but her 1985 adult novel remains very wrongly obscure.

What was the last book to make you laugh?

“This Is How You Lose Her.” Junot Díaz, you slay. (On so many levels.)

The last book that made you cry?

Really incapacitating sobs: “A Lesson Before Dying,” by Ernest J. Gaines. I stayed up until dawn to finish it in one ragged gulp, and toward the end my face was streaming so messily it was literally a struggle to see the words on the page. Slow-rolling, aquifer tears: Marilynne Robinson’s “Home.”

The last book that made you furious?

“The Da Vinci Code.” Although for a while there it seemed all anyone could talk about, I had no intention of reading it. I have kind of an allergic reaction to water-cooler books, plus it didn’t sound remotely like my cup of tea. But it slipped past my fortifications when a friend insisted on lending me the special illustrated edition. It was a sweltering summer night, my boyfriend was watching something boring on TV and there lay the book, deceptively decorous-looking on the coffee table. “Oh,” I thought, “I’ll just crack it open and look at the pictures.” The next thing I knew, some vortex, some literary Bermuda Triangle, had sucked me in. It was like demonic possession. At the end of every chapter I’d glance up and announce in increasingly disgusted tones: “What schlock! This is unbelievably bad.” My boyfriend would good-naturedly start to respond, only to have me violently shush him: “Can’t talk — busy — got to see what happens next.”

More here.

Breaking Pitch

My father raises his hand to signal “enough,”
but I’m still pitching, and the ball spins
off my fingertips—a breaking pitch
with so much stuff on it my imaginary batter
is too baffled to swing, so much stuff
the angels whistle, the crows near
the garbage cans take off in a flurry
of caws, and the mosquitoes burst in midair,
so much stuff my father, fear
in his eyes, hits the pavement,
behind him glass shattering.

Above the garage, Mrs. Golub, who runs
a vacuum cleaner over her wood floors every two hours,
yells out the window,“I told you something
bad would happen if you let that kid play here.”
And Miss Lamar pushes her long
nose into the screen, “See if my car
has any glass on it,” and Mr. Gorelick,
who sells silk ties to posh men’s shops,
shouts, “Clean up the mess, boy.”

I hear the cars on Clayton Road,
their tinny horns, the wind shaking
down leaves, the sound of the breaking
pitch trembling the wires that cross
from neighborhood to neighborhood, echoing
in shells strung from my best friend’s
doorway, the white horsehide glinting
in the sun, a flash of light,
a prophecy of greatness.

Shaking his head, my father comes toward me,
his tightened fists warning me that I’ll be sorry.
“Helluva curve,” he mutters, “helluva curve.”
.

by Jeff Friedman
from Working in Flour
Carnegie University Press

From The Philosopher's Mail: (I think it is Alain de Botton writing but am not sure)

You are introduced to someone at a conference. They look nice and you have a brief chat about the theme of the keynote speaker. But already, partly because of the slope of their neck and a lilt in their accent, you have reached an overwhelming conclusion. Or, you sit down in the carriage – and there, diagonally opposite you – is someone you cannot stop looking at for the rest of a journey across miles of darkening countryside. You know nothing concrete about them. You are going only by what their appearance suggests. You note that they have slipped a finger into a book (The Food of the Middle East), that their nails are bitten raw, that they have a thin leather strap around their left wrist and that they are squinting a touch short-sightedly at the map above the door. And that is enough to convince you. Another day, coming out of the supermarket, amidst a throng of people, you catch sight of a face for no longer than eight seconds and yet here too, you feel the same overwhelming certainty – and, subsequently, a bittersweet sadness at their disappearance in the anonymous crowd.

Crushes: they happen to some people often and to almost everyone sometimes. Airports, trains, streets, conferences – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from amongst whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but more powerfully, the solution to our lives. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, essentially comic and occasionally farcical. It may look like a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the romantic revolve.

A crush represents in pure and perfect form the dynamics of romantic philosophy: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery – and boundless hope.

The crush reveals how willing we are to allow details to suggest a whole. We allow the arch of someone’s eyebrow to suggest a personality. We take the way a person puts more weight on their right leg as they stand listening to a colleague as an indication of a witty independence of mind. Or their way of lowering their head seems proof of a complex shyness and sensitivity. From a few cues only, you anticipate years of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The New Yorker:

Frank Lloyd Wright hated cities. He thought that they were cramped and crowded, stupidly designed, or, more often, built without any sense of design at all. He once wrote, “To look at the plan of a great City is to look at something like the cross-section of a fibrous tumor.” Wright was always looking for a way to cure the cancer of the city. For him, the central problem was that cities lacked essential elements like space, air, light, and silence. Looking at the congestion and overcrowding of New York City, he lamented, “The whole city is in agony.”

A show currently at the Museum of Modern Art—“Frank Lloyd Wright and the City: Density vs. Dispersal”—documents Wright’s attempts to fix the problem of the city. As it turns out, Wright wavered on the matter. Sometimes he favored urban density. Other times he dreamed a suburban or rural fantasy.

The exhibit at MOMA is a single room. Entering it, you are confronted by a model and drawings, from 1913, for the San Francisco Call Building, which wouldn’t have been out of place in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The drawings use heightened perspective and exaggerated angles, and they make the building look futuristic and imposing, even today. The show also features the plans, including an eight-foot model, for Wright’s famous mile-high skyscraper, known as the Illinois, which would have been five hundred and forty-eight stories high and would have housed a hundred thousand people.

More here.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith at his blog:

Les Murray has compellingly described religion as poetry spoken 'in loving repetition'. When I was 13 I was baptized in the Catholic church. I had been the only unbaptized student in a Catholic elementary school, and it was judged at some point that I might fit in better if I were to become a member of the flock. I acquiesced, happily, and for a year or so I muttered the rosary with deep inward yearning, an obsessive-compulsive freak: in loving repetition.

This experience overlaps in my memory with a period of intense, ridiculous, adolescent Beatlemania. I knew all their birthdays, all their parents' birthdays, the precise layouts of the streets of Liverpool, of Hamburg, the bra size of May Pang. I knew, most of all, the precise contours of every available recording of every Beatles song, whether canonical or bootleg.

I do not remember whether the Beatles came before, or after, the Catholicism. What I remember is that they blended perfectly into one another in my fantasy life.

Now the recordings, though I played them back in loving repetition, were not, strictly speaking, repeated. They were each performed only once, in a studio, at some point in the 1960s, before I was born.

more here.

Jacob Hodes at Cabinet:

There are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the United States.¹ They are in the holds of tractor-trailers, transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of: sweaters, copper wire, lab mice, and so on. They are piled up behind supermarkets, out back, near the loading dock. They are at construction sites, on sidewalks, in the trash, in your neighbor’s basement. They are stacked in warehouses and coursing their way through the bowels of factories.

The magic of these pallets is the magic of abstraction. Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century. Studies have estimated that pallets consume 12 to 15 percent of all lumber produced in the US, more than any other industry except home construction.²

Some pallets also carry an aesthetic charge. It’s mostly about geometry: parallel lines and negative space, slats and air.

more here.

Benjamin Moser at Bookforum:

Perhaps the most famous exile, certainly in his day, was Stefan Zweig. Born in 1881 into the first rank of the Viennese Jewish bourgeoisie (his father owned a large textile corporation; his mother descended from an Austrian-Italian banking family), Zweig was subjected to the chilly upbringing and the rigorous classical training of a man of his time and rank. He studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1904. His interest in art prevailed over this unsentimental education, and he declined to enter the family business, though he showed himself, while still very young, a worthy heir to his rich, energetic father. His first book, a volume of poetry called Silberne Saiten (Silver Chords), was published when he was just nineteen. Though he never allowed it to be reprinted in his lifetime, the little book heralded the beginning of a great career that included poetry and drama and journalism but is best remembered for biographies and novellas. His work—particularly novellas such as Fear (1920), Amok (1922), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922)—earned the praise of many of the leading figures in Europe, from Auguste Rodin to Sigmund Freud, who was also a friend and a subject (Zweig devoted an essay to the psychoanalyst in his 1932 book Mental Healers). By the 1920s, millions of copies of his books had been published in Europe and America, and he became the most translated author in the world. His books are charming, in the best sense of the word: They cast a spell. And though his subjects are never less than lofty, what one feels, when picking up his books, is only secondarily the interest of their subjects: The charm of the author himself comes first, and explains his enduring popularity. I have seen his books alongside the celebrity magazines and diet books in provincial French train stations, and in dozens of countries he is still, more than seven decades after his death, more popular than perhaps any writer of his generation. In the United States, his works have most recently been revived by the New York Review Books Classics series.

more here.

Eric Michael Johnson reviews Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance, over at Scientific American:

Wade seeks further support for his hypothesis that Europeans evolved to be more peaceable and tolerant in the experiments of Soviet biologist Dmitriy Belyaev. By breeding wild foxes, Belyaev showed that selecting for tameness could produce animals that were just as doting as domestic dogs in only 30 to 35 generations. Wade calculates that there have been 24 human generations between the year 1200 and today, “plenty of time for a significant change in social behavior if the pressure of natural selection were sufficiently intense.”

This selection pressure, Wade says, was an agrarian economy and the Industrial Revolution. Individuals who were more productive, and delayed their gratification by saving instead of spending, gained wealth at a faster rate and had larger families. (Wade cites one estimate from England suggesting that those with £1,000 or more at death had an average of 4 children while those with less than £25 had only 2). But, because there were a limited number of upper class families, most wealthy children had to marry beneath their station. These genetic entrepreneurs carried with them their industrious DNA down to the commoners.

Their social descent had the far-reaching genetic consequence that they carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class—nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience—were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society.

This argument suffers multiple problems, two of which are particularly crippling. First, artificial selection, such as Belyaev used in his fox experiments, can produce novel forms much faster than natural selection can. Belyaev’s fox breeding experiment identified the tamest individuals in each generation and mated them together. But, according to a genetic analysis carried out earlier this year by UCLA biologist Adam Freedman and colleagues, it took about 2,000 years for the evolution of dogs from wolves to result in distinct populations (from 14.9 thousand years ago to 12.8 thousand years ago). At an average breeding age of 3 years, this means it took around 670 generations for the split to take place — far longer than the 35 generations Belyaev’s experiment required. Even then, these dogs would not have been as tame as domestic dogs today. Dogs became fully domesticated only through artificial selection within the last few hundred years, as dog breeders selected the traits they wanted in different varieties. Therefore, it is a huge mistake to assume that Belyaev’s breeding experiment can be directly translated to recent human history in Europe.

The second problem with Wade’s argument about the gentility of the English is more central to his thesis. Even if we assume that genetics is primarily responsible for “nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience” (which it is not), there would still need to be evidence of a clear reproductive benefit in order for these behaviors to be “infused into lower economic classes” by having sex with the rich. Wade’s evidence for larger families among the wealthy in England (the only data Wade cites) comes from the 2008 book A Farewell to Alms by economic historian Gregory Clark. However, while Wade highlights how the richest 1% had twice as many children as the poor majority, he conveniently omits what Clark determines just three pages later, which is that this relative increase lasted only a very short time. This omission says a great deal about Wade’s commitment to both science and journalism.

More here. Also see reviews by Andrew Gelman, Agustin Fuentes, and Arthur Allen.

Saskia Sassen in Salon:

There was a time when the environmental damage we produced remained somewhat localized, confined to specific places. That time is gone. Today, nonindustrial areas, such as Greenland and the Antarctic, experience the industrial pollution generated in the United States and in Russia, to mention just two countries. Damage produced in particular sites now scales up, driven by the vastness of destruction, and becomes a planetary problem that drifts back down to hit even those places that did not contribute to the damage. Greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and particulate matter such as black carbon) are key causes of climate change. Diverse measures arrive at an estimate that human activity has generated 350 billion tonnes of carbon since 1959; 55 percent of this has been taken up by the oceans and land, and the rest has been left in the atmosphere. In 2009 alone, global carbon dioxide emissions totaled 30 billion tonnes. By 2011, annual emissions had increased by 5.3 percent to 31.6 billion tonnes. And by early 2013, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed the critical level of 400 parts per million. This is a level not seen on earth since the Pliocene era 3 million years ago.

Under current conditions, global CO2 emissions (including emissions related to deforestation) will reach 41 billion tonnes per year in 2020. The EPA estimates that industrial emissions account for 50 percent of greenhouse gases emitted in the United States, and industry is almost certainly responsible for an even higher proportion of China’s huge and growing emissions. At this scale, and with the relationship of carbon dioxide to climate change, industrial pollution is a driver of massive global problems.

More here.

Jerry Adler in Smithsonian:

Water gave birth to life, and guarded it jealously. For billions of years, the land was barren, while life proliferated in the buoyant, nurturing bath of the seas, ignorant of such terrestrial concerns as falling down. The first invaders were plants, which began creeping upland from the streams and swamps some 450 million years ago, followed by arthropods and a few brave mollusks, which became the land snails. But waiting in the shallows was a nine-foot-long, crocodile-headed fish with both gills and, on the top of its head, air-breathing nostrils called spiracles. With a fateful lunge landward, it changed the course of life on earth forever. In 2004, when the fossil bones of Tiktaalik roseae were dug from the ground of Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian Arctic, the discovery was hailed as a breakthrough not just for paleontology, but for beleaguered science teachers trying to keep creationism out of their classrooms. A fish (with scales and gills) clearly resembling a tetrapod (with a flat head, a neck and prototypes of terrestrial limb bones in its lobelike fins), it precisely filled one of the gaps in the fossil record that creationists cited as evidence against Darwinian evolution. Scientists can’t say whether Tiktaalik itself is the ancestor of any species alive today; there were likely several related genera making the same transition around the same time. But the marvelously preserved fossil sheds new light on how the vertebrate invasion of land took place, some 375 million years ago.

Until this year, Tiktaalik was known only from its front half, but in January, evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and his colleagues reported excavating the posterior skeleton of their original specimen. The hip and pelvis were surprisingly robust, suggesting more powerful rear limbs than previously believed. Although almost certainly still encased in fleshy lobes, appendages could have helped support or even propel the animal in shallow water or mud flats. If so, it changes our view of the evolution of tetrapods, whose ancestors were believed to drag themselves by their forefins, only developing useful hind legs once ensconced on land. As for what drove this epochal migration, “it’s extremely bloody obvious: There were resources on land, plants and insects, and sooner or later something would evolve to exploit them,” says vertebrate paleontologist Mike Benton of the University of Bristol.

More here.

Hero

On a cold winter night in 78
he drank two liters of Russian tea,
went to Red Square before light
and wrote on snow: “Brezhnev is an idiot!”

He was my god, my hero, my model world.
I imagined him struggling with his fly
when, busted by police, he had managed
to end the sentence with an exclamation mark.

Imagine doing something like this nowadays.
Imagine a hero dressed in a short sheepskin coat
standing in the piercing wind, his pants pulled down.
“Gross!” you’ll say and will be wrong.

Sometimes truth necessitates madness, and beauty is hidden
behind obscure details. To tell you the truth,
I’m still jealous of him who shed his urine
in the imperial garden of snow and laughed in the face

of the guards. Nothing beats in my eyes
a jester, his smile full of broken teeth.
When times in the yard are full of lies,
why sing like a nightingale in the emperor’s cage?
.

by Katia Kapovich
from Cossacks and Bandits
Salt Publishing, London 2008

Slavoj Žižek in The Guardian (image 2014 Prix Pictet: Hong Hao) [h/t:Nadia Guessous]:

During a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor's house with a Slovene friend, a heavy smoker. Late in the evening, my friend became desperate and politely asked the host if he could step out on the veranda for a smoke. When the host (no less politely) said no, my friend suggested that he step out on to the street, and even this was rejected by the host, who claimed such a public display of smoking might hurt his status with his neighbours … But what really surprised me was that, after dinner, the host offered us (not so) soft drugs, and this kind of smoking went on without any problem – as if drugs are not more dangerous than cigarettes.

This weird incident is a sign of the impasses of today's consumerism. To account for it, one should introduce the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment elaborated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: what Lacan calls jouissance (enjoyment) is a deadly excess beyond pleasure, which is by definition moderate. We thus have two extremes: on the one hand the enlightened hedonist who carefully calculates his pleasures to prolong his fun and avoid getting hurt, on the other the jouisseur propre, ready to consummate his very existence in the deadly excess of enjoyment – or, in the terms of our society, on the one hand the consumerist calculating his pleasures, well protected from all kinds of harassments and other health threats, on the other the drug addict or smoker bent on self-destruction. Enjoyment is what serves nothing, and the great effort of today's hedonist-utilitarian “permissive” society is to tame and exploit this un(ac)countable excess into the field of (ac)counting.

Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn't threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate, yes, but fat-free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol; mayonnaise, yes, but without cholesterol; sex, yes, but safe sex …

More here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic (photo Carly Mydans/Library of Congress):

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. “You didn’t talk about it or tell nobody,” Earvin said. “You had to sneak away.”

More here.

Joseph Mazur in The Guardian:

A few years ago friends and I were talking about the origins of written music. When the conversation turned to the origins of math symbols, I was surprised to learn that few people knew that almost all maths was written rhetorically before the 16th century, often in metered poetry. Most people think symbols for addition, subtraction or equality had been around long before Euclid wrote his Elements in the first century BCE. No! The original Elements is rhetorical. There are no symbols in Euclid’s works, aside from the letters marking the ends of lines and corners of geometric objects. There are no symbols in any early Arab algebra books. Nor do we find any in early European printed algebra books.

Even our wonderful symbol for equality – you know, those two parallel lines – was not used in print before 1575, when the Welsh mathematician and physician Robert Recorde wrote an algebra book that he called the Whetstone of Witte. (We can only guess that the title is a pun on sharpening mathematical wit.) In it he wrote “is equal to” almost two hundred times for the first two hundred pages before finally declaring that he could easily “avoid the tedious repetition” of those three words by designing the symbol “=====” to represent them.

More here.

Henry A. Giroux in AlterNet:

Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned academic best known not only for his pioneering work in linguistics but also for his ongoing work as a public intellectual in which he has addressed a number of important social issues that include and often connect oppressive foreign and domestic policies, a fact well illustrated in his numerous pathbreaking books. Chomsky’s oeuvre includes too many exceptionally important books to single out any one of them from his extraordinary and voluminous archive of work. Moreover, as political interventions, his many books often reflect both a decisive contribution and an engagement with a number of issues that have and continue to dominate a series of specific historical moments over the course of 50 years. His political interventions have been historically specific while continually building on the power relations he has engaged critically. For instance, his initial ideas about the responsibility of intellectuals cannot be separated from his early criticisms of the Vietnam War and the complicity of intellectuals in brokering and legitimating that horrendous act of military intervention. Hence, it becomes difficult to compare his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, coauthored with Edward S. Herman, with his 2002 bestseller, 9/11. Yet, what all of these texts share is a luminous theoretical, political, and forensic analysis of the functioning of the current global power structure, new and old modes of oppressive authority, and the ways in which neoliberal economic and social policies have produced more savage forms of global domination and corporate sovereignty.

More here.