Peter Strothard at the Times Literary Supplement:

In the seventh century BC, before there was a new city called Naples, there was an old city on more or less the same site called Parthenope. Both were Greek, both founded by Greeks who were occupying many other coastal parts of southern Italy at the time. Exactly which Greeks and when? That is a question which still exercises scholars, including Lorenzo Miletti at the beginning of this book. Were these occupiers invaders or colonists? As a general rule of historiography Romans “invade” and Greeks “colonize”, but any distinction made by the locals has not survived. The story of one of the Western world’s oldest continuously occupied cities begins with Parthenope.

The city name was a part of that first occupying process. Parthenope was one of the local Sirens who in Book XII of the Odyssey, and many variant versions of the story, sang songs to lure the Greek hero Odysseus to his doom, not anticipating that he would block the seductive sound by filling his sailors’ ears with wax. In shame at her poor defensive performance she hurled herself from her cliff, akatapontismos that made her “tomb” a fine foundation stone for a new Greek city. All occupiers wanted their own link to the Trojan War, known to all Greeks as part of their defining narrative of themselves. Parthenope was perfect and her name, though lasting only a hundred years or so on the ground, has long resounded through literature and scholarship, and as far as this fascinating collection of essays in OUP’s series, Classical Presences.

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Martin Filler at the New York Review of Books:

Frei Paul Otto was born in 1925 and grew up in Berlin. His uncommon first name—which means “free” in German—reflected the values of his idealistic parents, members of the Deutscher Werkbund, which promoted public education in good design and collaboration between craftsmen and industry. Otto developed an early passion for sail gliding, which shaped his fascination for lightweight structures. Soon after he began his studies in 1943 at what is now the Technical University of Berlin, he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe. Captured by the Allies, he was incarcerated for two years, during which he served as a prison-camp architect, a position that forced him to address the most basic function of architecture—shelter.

After the war Otto completed his education and confronted the central challenge of his generation of German architects: how to create large-scale buildings that avoided the taint of Nazi design. Otto’s familiarity with aeronautic engineering led him to devise ultra-lightweight forms that derived from thin-membrane airplane parts made from reinforced fabric, the antithesis of the ponderous, stone-clad Stripped Classicism favored by Hitler. One of his earliest public successes was the gossamer-light dance pavilion he designed in 1957 for the Federal Garden Exhibition in Cologne, a five-peaked, mast-supported, white-fabric canopy in the shape of an exotic bloom that evoked the botanical theme of the event.

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David Foster Wallace in Vulture:

David Letterman retires next Wednesday, which means for about a month now, the internet has been awash in a deluge of valentines. But for our money, the best tribute to Letterman's mind-bending cultural legacy might just be David Foster Wallace's “My Appearance,” a short story about a panicked guest waiting to step in front of the cameras, and remarkable now (among other reasons) for the way it showcases Dave at peak irony — when he hadn't mellowed yet or gotten lovably grandpa-grumpy, but was still so militantly ironic that a guest could be legitimately terrified of speaking a single earnest word in his presence. The story was first published in Playboy in 1988 (as “Late Night,” Wallace's first story in a major national magazine), and then again a year later in the collection Girl With Curious Hair. It appears here with the generous permission of that collection's publisher, W.W. Norton, and might just be the best thing ever written about television in America, period — by a writer who was famously obsessed with both.

I am a woman who appeared in public on “Late Night with David Letterman” on March 22, 1989. In the words of my husband Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. And whose heart’s heart is invisible, and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied. The week that surrounded March 22, 1989 was also the week David Letterman’s variety-and-talk show featured a series of videotaped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband, whose name is better known inside the entertainment industry than out of it, was anxious: he knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist. It was on Sunday that he told me to handle and be handled by Letterman. March 22 was to be Wednesday. On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC’s News Division. The executive, whom my husband had met and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands. “He’s waiting for the poor old bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel,” Rudy grimaced, smoking. On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC’s chief of Creative Development’s huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said: “Is this entertainment ladies and gentleman? Or what?”

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Matthew Hutson in Scientific American:

In the past two years the study of narcissism has gotten a face-lift. The trait is now considered to have two distinct dimensions: admiration seeking and rivalry. Subsequent studies, including a recent look at actors, revealed a more nuanced picture of personality than did past work. The actors, for instance, want admiration more than most people but tend to be less competitive than the average Joe—they may crave the spotlight, but they will not necessarily push others out of the way to get it.

The new understanding of narcissism started with a 2013 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that identified narcissism's two dimensions. “Previous theories and measures of narcissism dealt with this trait as a unitary construct, mixing up agentic aspects—assertiveness, dominance, charm—with antagonistic aspects—aggressiveness and devaluation of others,” says Mitja Back of the University of Münster in Germany, the study's primary author. Lumping both aspects together made narcissistic behavior confounding. Studying hundreds of healthy subjects, Back's team found that traits related to narcissism clustered into two categories, with both facets of narcissism serving to maintain a positive self-image. Self-promotion draws praise, whereas self-defense demeans others to fend off criticism. Admiration seeking and rivalry each have different effects on body language, relationship health and personality.

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William Rosen in Lapham's Quarterly (image Gabrielle D’Estrées and One of Her Sisters, c. 1594. Louvre Museum, Paris, France.):

On Sunday, January 18, 532, the sun rose fairly late over Constantinople—had one been available, a modern watch would have read 7:29 a.m.—but no one in the world’s most populous city saw it through the smoke. The city, which had been the center of the Roman Empire ever since Constantine had founded it as his eponymous capital two centuries before, was on fire. Five days earlier, what had begun in the city’s chariot-racing stadium as a protest against two planned hangings had turned into the biggest civil insurrection in the empire’s history. Tens of thousands of rioters had vandalized and burned the imperial senate, the city’s most important church, the enormous public Baths of Zeuxippus, and dozens of other buildings. By Sunday, the riot had escalated into a rebellion. The insurgents demanded the abdication of the current emperor, whose own bodyguards had him and his empress besieged in their own palace.

The trapped ruler had traveled a long and indirect route to the pinnacle of the empire founded by Augustus six centuries before. Christened Flavius Petrus Sabbatius in the last years of the fifth century, he had come to Constantinople as the protégé of his uncle, a successful officer in the palace guard. There, he took advantage of the capital’s substantial educational opportunities and his own even more substantial intelligence to place his uncle on the imperial throne, and to succeed him, under the name he gave himself: Justinian.

He was already first in line for the crown when he met his future empress, Theodora, whose path to the palace was even more improbable than Justinian’s own. His father was a Balkan peasant; hers was an animal trainer for Constantinople’s circuses. He had spent his early years as a student of theological dogma and an undistinguished soldier. She had been a high-priced prostitute and Constantinople’s most famous erotic actress: a petite, wavy-haired beauty with enormous dark eyes and a stage act that was three parts Mae West, two parts Jenna Jameson.

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Susan Price in The Atlantic:

In his first work, published in 1747, Immanuel Kant cites the ideas of another philosopher: a scholar of Newton, religion, science, and mathematics. The philosopher, whose work had been translated into several languages, is Émilie Du Châtelet.

Yet despite her powerhouse accomplishments—and the shout-out from no less a luminary than Kant—her work won’t be found in the 1,000-plus pages of the new edition of The Norton Introduction to Philosophy. In the anthology, which claims to trace 2,400 years of philosophy, the first female philosopher doesn’t appear until the section on writing from the mid-20th century. Or in any of the other leading anthologies used in university classrooms, scholars say.

Also absent are these 17th-century English thinkers: Margaret Cavendish, a prolific writer and natural philosopher; Anne Conway, who discusses the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (which is influenced by the Kabbalah); and “Lady” Damaris Masham—the daughter of a Cambridge Platonist and a close friend of John Locke who published several works and debated ideas in letters she exchanged with the German mathematician and philosopher G.W. Leibniz.

Despite the spread of feminism and multiculturalism, and their impact on fields from literature to anthropology, it is possible to major in philosophy without hearing anything about the historical contributions of women philosophers. The canon remains dominated by white males—the discipline that some say still hews to the myth that genius is tied to gender.

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Jonathan Hopkin in The Conversation (image EPA/Richard Lewis):

Ed Miliband’s failure to win the 2015 election, or even to increase Labour’s share of seats, has been seized upon by the Blairite wing of the party to push its own centrist agenda. Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour, accused Miliband of making a “terrible mistake” in abandoning Blair’s focus on aspirational John Lewis voters.

Chuka Ummuna, who is running for party leadership, claimedthat Labour was punished by voters for running a budget deficit before the financial crisis. Tony Blair weighed in too, claiming that a more “left-wing” or “Scottish” approach would not help win back the voters lost north of the border.

There is no doubt that Labour’s failure to win over enough voters in Middle England marginal constituencies cost it the election, and it is equally true that Tony Blair’s New Labour project was successful in this regard in the 1990s and 2000s. But a similar centrist strategy would not work again for Labour. Another look at the reasons for Labour’s defeat shows why.

There is strong evidence that Labour is still carrying the burden of being in office when the financial crisis struck, fatally damaging its hard won reputation for economic competence. IPSOS Mori data shows that Labour held a substantial advantage over the Conservatives on economic policy throughout its period of government until 2008.

This advantage was lost when the financial crisis began, and has not yet been recovered: coming into the election, the Conservatives led by 41% to 23% when voters were asked which party had the best policies for the economy. Labour took the blame for the crisis, just in the same way the Conservatives lost their reputation for economic competence on Black Wednesday in 1992, when the pound was ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In key constituencies, the perceived risks of a Labour government to economic stability undoubtedly shored up the Conservative vote.

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Amy Klein in Aeon:

For a woman over 42, there’s only a 3.9 per cent chance that a live birth will result from an IVF cycle using her own, fresh eggs, according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). A woman over 44 has just a 1.8 per cent chance of a live birth under the same scenario, according to the US National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Women using fresh donor eggs have about a 56.6 per cent chance of success per round for all ages. Indeed, according to research from the Fertility Authority in New York, 51 per cent of women aged between 35 and 40 wait a year or more before consulting a specialist, in hopes of conceiving naturally first. ‘It’s ironic, considering that the wait of two years will coincide with diminished fertility,’ the group says. Stories of celebrities and other older women having babies have led to misunderstanding precisely because they fly in the face of long-held beliefs: for many years, all women heard was that fertility takes a dive at 30-35. But when you see plenty of people having no trouble having babies until 40, you think it’s just a scare tactic. That’s what happened to me, anyway. Raised in a traditional Jewish, family-oriented community that emphasises early marriage and plenty of children, I was constantly warned about waiting too long to get married and have kids. But when I left that community, I saw so many women who had kids at 37, 38, that I thought it was all bubbe meises, old wives’ tales.

It’s not. There is a declining rate of fertility strongly tied to age – but the exact numbers have recently come up for debate. In a piece for The Atlantic in 2013 headlined ‘How Long Can you Wait to Have a Baby’, the psychologist Jean Twenge showed that much of the research cited by articles and studies (such as how one in three women aged 35-39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying) was based on ancient figures, such as French birth records from 1670 to 1830. She also cites a 2004 Obstetrics and Gynecology study examining chances of pregnancy among 782 European women. With sex at least twice a week, the study found, 82 per cent of 35-to-39-year-old women conceived within a year, compared with 86 per cent of 27-to-34-year-olds.

Moe here.

Emily DeMarco in Science:

In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine announced that it was no longer “experimental” for a woman to freeze her eggs simply because she wanted to wait to have a child. Since then, demand for the procedure has skyrocketed, even though its costs remain high. Now, scientists say they have figured out—taking economic and biological considerations into account—the best age for women to freeze their eggs if they want to get pregnant as late in life as possible. Two main factors determine when it’s best to freeze human eggs: how viable those eggs will be when thawed and how much it’s going to cost. The longer a woman waits to freeze her eggs, the less likely they are to result in a live birth. Yet, older women get more bang for their buck by freezing their eggs, because the procedure benefits them most; young women potentially waste money freezing their eggs because they’ll still likely be quite fertile a few years down the line.

…Fertility rates, however, are most strongly influenced by the age of a woman’s eggs. As a result, the nearly 52% probability of a successful pregnancy using those eggs frozen in time at age 37 is lower than what many women and their doctors consider acceptable. According to the study, most women would have to freeze their eggs by age 34 to have at least a 70% chance of live birth. Considering the researchers found that egg freezing provided the most improvement in live birth rates over not freezing after age 30, “we feel the sweet spot for those electing to freeze is age 31 to 33,” says co-author Tolga Mesen, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Fertility Clinic at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

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Corey Robin in The Nation (Photo via AP):

Hannah Arendt’s five articles on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by the state of Israel appeared in The New Yorker in February and March 1963. They were published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evillater that year. The book immediately set off a controversy that a half-century later shows no signs of abating. Just this past fall, the intellectual historian Richard Wolin (a colleague of mine at the CUNY Graduate Center) and the Yale political theorist Seyla Benhabib fought bitterly over Eichmann in the pages of The New York Times and the Jewish Review of Books. The book has become the event, eclipsing the trial itself.

The Eichmann fires are always smoldering, but what reignited them last fall was the appearance in English of Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem, first published in Germany in 2011. Eichmann Before Jerusalem aims to reveal a depth of anti-Semitism in Eichmann that Arendt never quite grasped. Stangneth bases her argument on the so-called Sassen transcripts, a voluminous record of conversations between Eichmann and a group of unreconstructed Nazis in Argentina in the 1950s (only a portion of the transcripts were available to Arendt, who read and discussed them in Eichmann). Yet Stangneth’s is merely the latest in a series of books—including Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial, published in 2011, and David Cesarani’s Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer,” which appeared in 2004—arguing that Eichmann was more of an anti-Semite than Arendt had realized.

There’s a history to the conflict over Eichmann in Jerusalem, and like all such histories, the changes in how we read and argue about the book tell us as much about ourselves, and our shifting preoccupations and politics, as they do about Eichmann or Arendt. What has remained constant, however, is the wrath and the rage that Eichmann has aroused. Other books are read, reviled, cast off, passed on. Eichmann is different. Its errors and flaws, real and imagined, have not consigned it to the dustbin of history; they are perennially retrieved and held up as evidence of the book’s viciousness and its author’s vice. An “evil book,” the Anti-Defamation League said upon its publication, and so it remains. Friends and enemies, defenders and detractors—all have compared Arendt and her book to a criminal in the dock, her critics to prosecutors set on conviction.

Like so many Jewish texts throughout the ages, Eichmann in Jerusalem is an invitation to an auto-da-fé. Only in this case, almost all of the inquisitors are Jews.

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Ransom Stephens in Nautilus (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images):

Antonio Ereditato insists that our interview be carried out through Skype with both cameras on. Just the other side of middle age, his salt-and-pepper hair frames wide open eyes and a chiseled chin. He smiles easily and his gaze captures your attention like a spotlight. An Italian accent adds extra vowels to the end of his words.

We talk for 15 minutes before he agrees to an on-the-record interview. He tells me he has no desire to engage journalists who might subvert his words into a sensational, insincere story. The reason he agreed to Skype with me is because I am not a journalist, but a physicist and writer who spent 13 years in the trenches of experimental particle physics. And he has no tolerance for entering another debate about behavior rather than science. But finally, he says, “Okay. I’ve looked in your eyes. I trust you. Maybe that is my problem. Maybe I trust too easily, but I trust you.” He laughs and leans back in his chair with his arms out and open.

Ereditato is the former leader of the 160 physicists from 13 countries that compose the OPERA collaboration, whose goal is to study neutrino physics. It was first proposed in 2000, and Ereditato led it from 2008 to 2012. Then in late winter of 2011, the impossible seemed to happen. “The guy who is looking at the data calls me,” Ereditato tells me from my computer screen. “He says, ‘I see something strange.’ ” What he saw was evidence that neutrinos traveled through 454 miles of Earth’s crust, from Switzerland to Italy—which they are supposed to do—at such a high speed that they arrived 60.7 nanoseconds faster than light could travel that distance in outer space—which should have been impossible.

Over the last century, Einstein’s observation that no massive object can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, enshrined in his theory of special relativity, has become a keystone of how we understand the universe. If the OPERA measurement was correct, it would mark the first-ever violation of that theory: An atom bomb in the heart of our understanding of the universe.

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Anat Biletzki in the NYT's The Stone:

Twenty years ago, the philosopher Robert Brandom, in his momentous book, “Making It Explicit,” presented us with a new way of looking at language and meaning. Using the work of a number of philosophers — from Kant and Hegel, to 20^th-century thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, W.V. Quine, Michael Dummett and many others — he showed us how to move the fulcrum of our attention from representation to inference, from the molecular to the holistic, from the individual to the social, and from the factual-descriptive to the normative. In short: Brandom explained that it is through social, communal norms that we give meaning to our words.

According to Brandom, we, as rational beings looking for reasons, make assertions that commit us to the connections (through inference) between the things we say, yet this is actually part of a game of making explicit what is already there, in our social, moral and political norms.

In Israel, the unambiguous move to explicitness began in July 2014 — more exactly between July 8 and August 27 of last year — when Israel engaged in the military operation called Tsuk Eitan. That means “Firm Cliff,” not “Protective Edge,” as translated by the army spokesperson, a phrase expressing implicit defensiveness. The precise goals of the operation were never clearly articulated, moving from the reported objective of stopping Hamas rockets from falling on Israeli territory to that of destroying the tunnels to weakening Hamas to returning quiet and security for Israeli communities in the South to achieving a responsible, militarily weakened sovereign in Gaza.

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Tim Williamson interviewed over at Philosophy Bites:

Relativism has popular appeal. But why? Tim Williamson Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University, (and also @tetralogue on Twitter), discusses this question, and attempts to immunise us against sloppy thinking in this area.

Listen to Tim Williamson on the Appeal of Relativism

Antti Kauppinen reviews J. David Velleman, Foundations for Moral Relativism, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

It comes as no surprise that David Velleman's brief but dense new book is original, provocative, erudite, and seductive. Drawing on a characteristically broad range of non-philosophical sources — such as game studies, anthropology, and ethnomethodology — he presents novel arguments in defense of moral relativism. In this review, I will examine some of his central arguments.

What is moral relativism? It is not the view that different things are morally right or wrong in different circumstances. Non-relativists agree that whether it is wrong to let a child play alone in the park or dance at a funeral depends on whether there is a risk of significant harm or whether the behavior is disrespectful in context. What they insist on is that context-dependent truths about right and wrong can be derived from the conjunction of non-moral facts of the situation and basic moral principles that are universal in the sense that they apply to everyone regardless of their moral or other beliefs or community membership. This is what relativism denies. Positively, relativism says that there are a variety of communities whose norms are genuinely authoritative for their members.

One way to put the relativist claim is semantic. Velleman says that “it makes no sense to ask whether an action or practice is wrong simpliciter” (45), any more than it makes sense to ask whether someone is tall simpliciter. Just like someone can only be tall-for-X, something can only be wrong-for-members-of-X (or perhaps wrong-by-the-standards-of-X). In each case, the variable may be left implicit to be supplied by the context. Famously, such views have difficulty accommodating the intuition that it's possible for people in different communities (or just people subscribing to different moral standards) to disagree with each other without linguistic confusion. The Catholic from Peru who says that abortion is always wrong and the atheist from Sweden who says it is not always wrong appear to hold conflicting views on the morality of abortion, rather than just making claims about what their own standards or communal norms prohibit or allow.

I suspect Velleman would say that such disagreement is only genuine insofar as the parties are members of the same community (in spite of their differences). Otherwise, they will be speaking past each other after all — their only disagreement can be in attitude, in what to do. (Velleman has no patience for recently trendy forms of relativism, according to which it is possible for people to disagree faultlessly.) Were they to confusedly maintain that abortion is wrong or not wrong simpliciter, they would be mistaken. Why? According to Velleman, the main argument against universalism is simple: there are communities with different moral norms, and “no one has ever succeeded in showing any one set of norms to be universally valid” (45).

More here.

Jeremy Adelman in Foreign Affairs:

Once upon a time, smart people thought the world was flat. As globalization took off, economists pointed to spreading market forces that allowed consumers to buy similar things for the same prices around the world. Others invoked the expansion of liberalism and democracy after the Cold War. For a while, it seemed as if the West’s political and economic ways really had won out.

But the euphoric days of flat talk now seem like a bygone era, replaced by gloom and anxiety. The economic shock of 2008, the United States’ political paralysis, Europe’s financial quagmires, the dashed dreams of the Arab Spring, and the specter of competition from illiberal capitalist countries such as China have doused enthusiasm about the West’s destiny. Once seen as a model for “the rest,” the West is now in question. Even the erstwhile booster Francis Fukuyama has seen the dark, warning in his recent two-volume history of political order that the future may not lie with the places that brought the world liberalism and democracy in the past. Recent bestsellers, such as Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Failand Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, capture the pessimistic Zeitgeist. So does a map produced in 2012 by the McKinsey Global Institute, which plots the movement of the world’s economic center of gravity out of China in the year 1, barely reaching Greenland by 1950 (the closest it ever got to New York), and now veering back to where it began.

It was only a matter of time before this Sturm und Drang affected the genteel world of historians. Since the future seems up for grabs, so is the past. Chances are, if a historian’s narrative of the European miracle and the rise of capitalism is upbeat, the prognosis for the West will be good, whereas if the tale is not so triumphal, the forecast will be more ominous. A recent spate of books about the history of global capitalism gives readers the spectrum.

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From Mosaic:

Sean: At what point did you know enough as a scientist, or had travelled enough, that you perceived a threat to nature?

Ed: I knew it when I started going into the tropics in the early 1950s, but it’s the sort of thing you see and you don’t grasp at first. I saw ruined environments in Mexico and parts of the South Pacific, and I used to say, “Oh well, they messed that one up. That makes it a lot harder to go to the rainforest; I have to go way over the mountain range.”

We only began to put the big picture together in the 1970s and 1980s, which allowed us to think in terms of what could be preserved and how we might be able to do it.

Sean: You’ve looked at this picture globally – you’re far more experienced than almost any biologist in this – and looked at how large a task this is. Let me make sure I have an understanding of where we would start. Would we start with habitat protection? Is the first job, before we lose anything else, to protect the ecosystem?

Ed: Absolutely.

Sean: And that’s something people can do.

Ed: Absolutely. That’s what the best global conservation organisations and our government (and other environmentally inclined governments, such as Sweden and the Netherlands) are doing: protecting the remaining wild environment. This is the equivalent of getting a patient to the emergency room – keep them alive and then figure out how to save them.

The global conservation organisations are doing everything they can on modest budgets. They essentially promote setting aside reserves and parks around the world. Recently, in the book Half Earth (due out in March 2016), I’ve made the case for global reserves that collectively cover half the surface of Earth’s land and sea.

More here.