JoAnn Wypijewski in AlterNet:

These are ripe times to read Baldwin. Not just the essays on racist policing; those are, in a way, too easy. “A Report From Occupied Territory,” which appeared in The Nation, burns hot a half-century after it was published. That its depiction of black vulnerability and police volatility could describe the contemporary scene; that its central metaphor of occupation is not too hyperbolic to have been echoed by Eric Holder last year, nor its concern with personal disintegration too dated to anticipate Ismaaiyl Brinsley; that even its particulars (“If one is carried back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is likely to confess anything”) feel gruesomely fresh in light of known CIA torture regimens—all of these, enraging as they are, only confirm what we already tell ourselves in weaker words.

The police are brutal, the government is brutal, the populace is aroused (taking to the streets) or accommodating (switching from CNN to Homeland to football), brutalized or brutal too. America, cauldron of damaged life.

Baldwin wrote “Report” in 1966, about Harlem, not Staten Island; during the war in Vietnam, not the “global war on terror”; amid the dim promises of the Great Society and a Top 40 soundtrack playing “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” We may study that past, track today’s news and shout the louder, but that is not why Baldwin is the most important American writer of the twentieth century, or why we should read him now.

More here.

Amanda Gefter in Nautilus (Illustration by Julia Breckenried):

In 1923, the year that Walter Pitts was born, a 25-year-old Warren McCulloch was also digesting the Principia. But that is where the similarities ended—McCulloch could not have come from a more different world. Born into a well-to-do East Coast family of lawyers, doctors, theologians, and engineers, McCulloch attended a private boys academy in New Jersey, then studied mathematics at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, then philosophy and psychology at Yale. In 1923 he was at Columbia, where he was studying “experimental aesthetics” and was about to earn his medical degree in neurophysiology. But McCulloch was a philosopher at heart. He wanted to know what it means to know. Freud had just published The Ego and the Id, and psychoanalysis was all the rage. McCulloch didn’t buy it—he felt certain that somehow the mysterious workings and failings of the mind were rooted in the purely mechanical firings of neurons in the brain.

Though they started at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, McCulloch and Pitts were destined to live, work, and die together. Along the way, they would create the first mechanistic theory of the mind, the first computational approach to neuroscience, the logical design of modern computers, and the pillars of artificial intelligence. But this is more than a story about a fruitful research collaboration. It is also about the bonds of friendship, the fragility of the mind, and the limits of logic’s ability to redeem a messy and imperfect world.

tanding face to face, they were an unlikely pair. McCulloch, 42 years old when he met Pitts, was a confident, gray-eyed, wild-bearded, chain-smoking philosopher-poet who lived on whiskey and ice cream and never went to bed before 4 a.m. Pitts, 18, was small and shy, with a long forehead that prematurely aged him, and a squat, duck-like, bespectacled face. McCulloch was a respected scientist. Pitts was a homeless runaway. He’d been hanging around the University of Chicago, working a menial job and sneaking into Russell’s lectures, where he met a young medical student named Jerome Lettvin. It was Lettvin who introduced the two men. The moment they spoke, they realized they shared a hero in common: Gottfried Leibniz.

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Elatia Harris in In Search of Taste:

On the night of March 6, 1983, I travelled by boat from Naples to Palermo. Not only had Goethe done the same 200 years earlier, but it seemed the safest way. In the beginning, airplanes did badly at Palermo. The almost new airport, then open to international carriers of every size, had short runways, which in turn lead to flawed landings. One wanted to give it a few years.

It was my second trip to Sicily, and there were things I wanted to eat.

The season would open in 10 days’ time, the weather would warm, and the Northern Europeans would come, legs covered with bright hair, uncapped camera lenses glinting. Americans did not yet come to Sicily in high numbers, but everyone else did. I hoped to get my licks in ahead of all that.

I do not know what it would have taken, remotely, to prepare me for the 2nd Mafia War, then raging in Palermo. It was apparently not much of an off-island affair. Years would go by before I, or anyone, could read its true history or know whom to call the victors. Meanwhile, at first light on March 7, my companion and I left cabin number 37 on the Nomentana, the flagship of the Tirennia Navigazioneline, debarked, and cabbed to the Grand Hotel et des Palmes in downtown Palermo. A fancier place than usual for either of us, but Wagner had written a big chunk of Parsifal there, and that was worth money – was it not?

More here.

Peter Forbes in The Independent:

Leon Neyfakh in Slate:

Criminal justice reform is a contentious political issue, but there’s one point on which pretty much everyone agrees: America’s prison population is way too high. It’s possible that a decline has already begun, with the number of state and federal inmates dropping for three years straight starting in 2010, from an all-time high of 1.62 million in 2009 to about 1.57 million in 2012. But change has been slow: Even if the downward trend continues, which is far from guaranteed, it could take almost 90 years for the country’s prison population to get down to where it was in 1980 unless the rate of decline speeds up significantly.

What can be done to make the population drop faster? Many reformers, operating under the assumption that mass incarceration is first and foremost the result of the war on drugs, have focused on making drug laws less punitive and getting rid of draconian sentencing laws that require judges to impose impossibly harsh punishments on people who have committed relatively minor crimes. But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.* Having analyzed statistics on who goes to prison, why, and for how long, Pfaff has emerged with a new and provocative account of how the problem of mass incarceration came to be. If he’s right, the implications for the prison reform movement are huge and suggest the work needed to achieve real progress will be much harder than most people realize.

More here.

Ida B. Wells (1909) from infoplease.com:

During the last ten years, from 1899 to 1908 inclusive, the number lynched was 959. Of this number, 102 were white, while the colored victims numbered 857. No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization-the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.

Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation? What is the cause of this awful slaughter? This question is answered almost daily: always the same shameless falsehood that “Negroes are lynched to protect womanhood.” Standing before a Chautauqua assemblage, John Temple Graves, al once champion of lynching and apologist for lynchers, said, “The mob stand! today as the most potential bulwark between the women of the South and such a carnival of crime as would infuriate the world and precipitate the annihilation of the Negro race.” This is the never-varying answer of lyncher! and their apologists. All know that it is untrue. The cowardly lyncher revels it murder, then seeks to shield himself from public execration by claiming devotion to woman. But truth is mighty and the lynching record discloses thehypocrisy of the lyncher as well as his crime. The Springfield, Illinois, mob rioted for two days, the militia of the entire state was called out, two men were lynched, hundreds of people driver from their homes, all because a white woman said a Negro assaulted her. f mad mob went to the jail, tried to lynch the victim of her charge, and, no being able to find him, proceeded to pillage and burn the town and to lynch two innocent men. Later, after the police had found that the woman's charge was false, she published a retraction, the indictment was dismissed, and the intended victim discharged. But the lynched victims were dead, hundreds were homeless, and Illinois was disgraced.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Caspar Henderson in The Guardian:

In March 1955, about a month before his own death, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the family of his recently deceased friend Michele Besso. “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me,” he wrote. “That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however stubbornly persistent.” I do not know whether Besso’s family was comforted by this claim, but most of those who have a solid grasp of the issues say that Einstein was right about the science. A debate going back at least to Heraclitus (535-475BCE), who said that the primary feature of the universe is that it is always changing, and Parmenides (who said that there is no such thing as change) appears to have been settled. Indeed in 1949, on the occasion of Einstein’s 70th birthday, Kurt Gödel presented him with a mathematical proof of the nonexistence of time. Nature, it appears, is governed by eternal laws that stand outside time.

Not so fast. Notable among those who disagree is Lee Smolin, from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Smolin is one of the bad boys of contemporary physics and cosmology; a generator of radical ideas and an iconoclast. In the mid 90s he proposed that black holes spawn baby universes. In the middle of the last decade he published a searing attack on string theory which, he said, had failed to create a single testable prediction. And in his 2013 bestseller, Time Reborn, he argued that time is real and nothing transcends it, not even the laws of nature. Such laws are, like everything else, features of the present, and can evolve. I’ve heard it said that many physicists in the academy groan at the very mention of Smolin’s name. But if he is wrong, he may at least be wrong in an interesting way. Strikingly, Smolin believes the reinstatement of time has implications for our daily lives. “If the flow of time is not an illusion, it makes our lives more precious and valuable,” he says. This might not seem as consoling as Einstein’s view that death does not have the finality we think it does. But if the laws of physics can change and evolve, so too can the space of possible futures. “The impression that we have that we can create novelty is true,” says Smolin. “This makes the universe much more hospitable. We can have free will. We have choices. I find that a much more comforting idea.”

More here.

Kevin Poulsen in Wired:

Hobbyist man flies a DJI Phantom 2 drone.

If you want to understand why the government freaked out when a $400 remote-controlled quadcopter landed on the White House grounds last week, you need to look four miles away, to a small briefing room in Arlington, Virginia. There, just 10 days earlier, officials from the US military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA gathered for a DHS “summit” on a danger that had been consuming them privately for years: the potential use of hobbyist drones as weapons of terror or assassination.

The conference was open to civilians, but explicitly closed to the press. One attendee described it as an eye-opener. The officials played videos of low-cost drones firing semi-automatic weapons, revealed that Syrian rebels are importing consumer-grade drones to launch attacks, and flashed photos from an exercise that pitted $5,000 worth of drones against a convoy of armored vehicles. (The drones won.) But the most striking visual aid was on an exhibit table outside the auditorium, where a buffet of low-cost drones had been converted into simulated flying bombs. One quadcopter, strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive, was a DJI Phantom 2, a newer version of the very drone that would land at the White House the next week.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Quanta:

On a November evening last year, Jennifer Doudna put on a stylish black evening gown and headed to Hangar One, a building at NASA’s Ames Research Center that was constructed in 1932 to house dirigibles. Under the looming arches of the hangar, Doudna mingled with celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch, Cameron Diaz and Jon Hamm before receiving the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in life sciences, an award sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentierof the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany, each received $3 million for their invention of a potentially revolutionary tool for editing DNA known as CRISPR.

Doudna was not a gray-haired emerita being celebrated for work she did back when dirigibles ruled the sky. It was only in 2012 that Doudna, Charpentier and their colleagues offered the first demonstration of CRISPR’s potential. They crafted molecules that could enter a microbe and precisely snip its DNA at a location of the researchers’ choosing. In January 2013, the scientists went one step further: They cut out a particular piece of DNA in human cells and replaced it with another one.

In the same month, separate teams of scientists at Harvard University and the Broad Institute reported similar success with the gene-editing tool. A scientific stampede commenced, and in just the past two years, researchers have performed hundreds of experiments on CRISPR. Their results hint that the technique may fundamentally change both medicine and agriculture.

More here.

Daniel Brook in The Baffler:

In a speech to the financial elite of India delivered in Mumbai in 2010, president Barack Obama opted for an unusual form of flattery. He saluted “all the Mumbaikars who get up every day in this City of Dreams to forge a better life for their children—from the boardrooms of world-class Indian companies to the shops in the winding alleys of Dharavi.” It was a notable name-check. Despite the president’s mangled pronunciation, his audience of well-heeled Mumbaikars all knew what Obama was talking about. Dharavi is their metropolis’s most famous slum.

Were Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to come to America and do the same—hail the impoverished workfare mothers of Anacostia while on a state visit to Washington, say, or give a shout-out to the tenants of Harlem’s housing projects during a speech on Wall Street—it would be an uncomfortable moment. But, of course, it would never happen. If Modi’s speechwriters tried to throw in a mention of a famous impoverished neighborhood, higher-ups would surely excise it. The American myth of equal opportunity is greatly cherished, they would inform the prime minister, so in the interest of being a gracious guest, let’s not mention the places that call it into question.

But Obama’s tribute to Dharavi went over remarkably well. Those present at the tony U.S.-India Business Council summit seem to have taken it as the compliment he intended it to be. By the time the president sang the praises of Asia’s largest slum, as it’s known (although these days Karachi’s Orangi neighborhood is challenging it for that dubious distinction), the ideological precedent for this sort of thing was well established. Through a decade of academic apologetics and media mythologizing, Dharavi had been transmuted from India’s most shameful urban space—the warren of exploitation, filth, and disease that it plainly is—to the pride of Mumbai.

Read the rest here.

Lewis H. Lapham in The New York Times:

The portraits here are of men and women in their 80s and 90s, rich in the rewards of substantial and celebrated careers, and although I know none of them except by name and reputation, I’m asked why their love’s labor is not lost but still to be found. Why do they persist, the old masters? To what end the unceasing effort to discover or create something new? Why not rest on the laurels and the oars? The short answer is Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, in a letter to James Boswell in 1777: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” A longer answer is that of the 19th-century Japanese artist Hokusai, who at 75 added a postscript to the first printing of his “One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji”: “From the time that I was 6 years old I had the mania of drawing the form of objects. As I came to be 50 I had published an infinity of designs; but all that I have produced before the age of 70 is not worth being counted. It is at the age of 73 that I have somewhat begun to understand the structure of true nature, of animals and grasses, and trees and birds, and fishes and insects; consequently at 80 years of age I shall have made still more progress; at 90 I hope to have penetrated into the mystery of things; at 100 years of age I should have reached decidedly a marvelous degree, and when I shall be 110, all that I do, every point and every line, shall be instinct with life — and I ask all those who shall live as long as I do to see if I have not kept my word.”

…Now I am 79. I’ve written many hundreds of essays, 10 times that number of misbegotten drafts both early and late, and I begin to understand that failure is its own reward. It is in the effort to close the distance between the work imagined and the work achieved wherein it is to be found that the ceaseless labor is the freedom of play, that what’s at stake isn’t a reflection in the mirror of fame but the escape from the prison of the self. T. H. White, the British naturalist turned novelist to write “The Once and Future King,” calls upon the druid Merlyn to teach the lesson to the young prince Arthur: “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

Picture: Carmen Herrera, painter, 99, in her Manhattan studio. Herrera sold her first painting at age 89. Today her work is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern.

More here.

John Thornhill at the Financial Times:

The portrait of Putin that Dawisha and Browder paint is so damning that one wonders how any sane Russian voter could possibly support him. Yet even if Russian opinion polls are to be partly discounted, Putin evidently remains popular among many voters for restoring a sense of national pride.

Peter Pomerantsev helps explain this phenomenon in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, his mesmerising account of the nine years he spent in Russia as a television producer. During that time, Pomerantsev recorded some remarkable human stories about life in modern Russia as well as observing first-hand the brilliant but cynical way that state television cast its spells over the population. The goal, as he put it, was to “synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment”, turning Russia into a country of canned laughter.

Along the way, Pomerantsev recounts his meetings with retired gangsters put out of business by the predatory state, a successful businesswoman sucked into the criminal quicksand, glamorous models who fall prey to scary sects, and nationalist bikers called Night Wolves, who style themselves on the Hell’s Angels.

more here.