Walter Isaacson in Scientific American:

The general theory of relativity began with a sudden thought. It was late 1907, two years after the “miracle year” in which Albert Einstein had produced his special theory of relativity and his theory of light quanta, but he was still an examiner in the Swiss patent office. The physics world had not yet caught up with his genius. While sitting in his office in Bern, a thought “startled” him, he recalled: “If a person falls freely, he will not feel his own weight.” He would later call it “the happiest thought in my life.”

The tale of the falling man has become an iconic one, and in some accounts it actually involves a painter who fell from the roof of an apartment building near the patent office. Like other great tales of gravitational discovery—Galileo dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the apple falling on Isaac Newton's head—it was embellished in popular lore. Despite Einstein's propensity to focus on science rather than the “merely personal,” even he was not likely to watch a real human plunging off a roof and think of gravitational theory, much less call it the happiest thought in his life.

Einstein soon refined his thought experiment so that the falling man was in an enclosed chamber, such as an elevator, in free fall. In the chamber, he would feel weightless. Any objects he dropped would float alongside him. There would be no way for him to tell—no experiment he could do to determine—if the chamber was falling at an accelerated rate or was floating in a gravity-free region of outer space.

More here.

Lawrence M. Krauss in The New Yorker:

As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?

I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.

The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it?

More here.

Lidija Haas at The Times Literary Supplement:

At rush hour on public transport, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everyone around you has resorted to the same sort of bland escapism. There’s a flurry of fat paperbacks, each boasting a sentimental family snapshot complete with a seascape, seen through a slight haze of baby blue or green or pink. It’s not only the covers that make Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (really one vast novel, chopped into four) look approachable: built around a central friendship between two women growing up in post-war Italy, they are seemingly realist tales full of family intrigues and love affairs and rivalries. Yet the whiff of soap hasn’t fooled the critics, who for several years now have been spilling superlatives all over Ferrante. Her name (a pseudonym) is fast becoming a Bolaño-style talisman.

The Story of the Lost Child is the fourth and final instalment in a series the author says originated in “the most daring, the most risk-taking” of her previous books, La figlia oscura (2006; The Lost Daughter). That book does indeed contain many elements of the Neapolitan novels in microcosm: vivid evocations of heat and dirt and bodies; fraught, ambivalent intimacies between women; families in which the possibility of violence feels routine; a runaway wife and mother; a lost doll; a lost child. There’s even a narrator who, having escaped her impoverished Neapolitan origins in favour of “bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective”, constantly fears that she or her daughters might “slowly sink into the black well I came from” – Naples itself “seemed a wave that would drown me”.

more here.

Hannah Proctor at Eurozine:

Edouard Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1882. Contemporary reviewers expressed conflicting opinions on the painting's merits but seemed to agree on one thing: this was a painting of modern life.

At the centre of a display of commodities stands a saleswoman, who, it has been historically assumed, is herself on sale. She is engaged in a transaction with a male customer from whose skewed perspective we view the scene. Her expression is detached, vacant, distracted – her stillness at odds with the bustling crowd in the background. Fashion fashions the modern female subject-object – she dresses according to an ideal, a type.^[3] The world that appears reflected in the mirror behind her is all wrong. It presents a counterfeit version of reality – dazzling, ephemeral, off-kilter. It is a painting of surfaces that also draws attention to the surface of the painting itself.^[4]

“This gaudy blue dress, surmounted by a cardboard head like those one used to see in milliners' shop windows, represents a woman… this mannequin of uncertain form whose face is slashed in with three brushstrokes represents a man”,^[5] sneered one reviewer. The painting evokes window displays; it is governed by the emergent logics of mass consumption. Women and men are replaced by artificial substitutes. Relations between people become relations between things. And this painting of commodities emphasizes the commodity form of the painting itself.

more here.

Gary Indiana at The London Review of Books:

The travails of the Tsarnaev clan are almost too numerous and tangled to itemise. The new life in America started with the thorny process of asylum-seeking, scrambling for housing and off-the-books work (asylum applicants are prohibited from employment or collecting benefits for a year), finding schools for the children, and trying to decipher local conditions. The Tsarnaevs landed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was a mixed blessing: a liberal enclave of top-notch universities and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods, its contiguous working-class areas a Hogarthian reminder of the destiny awaiting failure. A well-educated, Russian-speaking, guardian angel landlady, Joanna Herlihy, entered their lives at a propitious moment. Herlihy, who ‘for most of her adult life … had been trying to save the world’, can be viewed retrospectively as a mixed blessing too. Untiringly helpful in practical matters, she sheltered her new tenants behind a baffle of contentious idealism, ratifying their feelings of persecution when wishes didn’t come true. The stellar expectations of the Tsarnaevs eroded in increments. Within a few years, they collected grievances like baseball cards.

Gessen writes that kids in newly arrived families ‘stop being kids, because the adults have lost their bearings … they go through a period of intense suffering and dislocation made all the more painful for being forced and unexpected. But at the other end of the pain, they locate their roles and settle into them, claiming their places in the new world.’ Most of the Tsarnaev children, however, did less and less well as time went on. The family pattern had been set by their parents: when troubles piled up after every fresh start, they just moved somewhere else.

more here.

Kristina Shevory in The Believer:

It took Ron Capps all morning, but he was finally ready. He finished his reports, borrowed a pistol, and drove out of town into the Sudanese desert. When he found a low-rise with a commanding view of the red-tinged sand dunes, he parked and opened a beer. For an hour, he sat drinking and staring at the sand, thinking about what to do next. He was back in Darfur on a nine-month contract, this time with the State Department, documenting the genocide in the western part of Sudan. The Sudanese government rebels had agreed to a cease-fire after millions had fled their homes, after thousands had been murdered, and after hundreds of villages had been destroyed, but the peace was tenuous and the fighting kept going. It was Capps’s second time in Darfur, and he’d thought he’d be OK with all this death again. He had whiskey, and some leftover Prozac that an army psychiatrist had given him a few years before. But his nightmares had come back, more intense than ever, and he’d started drinking to get his mind off all the massacres and misery he had seen. It seemed so pointless, writing reports that would be read by only a few people before they were filed away. What good are they if they can’t even protect anyone? he asked himself again and again. It had gotten so bad that he couldn’t sleep: he was always on edge, always in fear that he would be haunted by all the people he couldn’t save in all the combat zones he had visited. It got to the point where he thought it’d be better if he called it quits.

He cocked the 9 mm and moved the selector switch off SAFE to SEMI.

This wasn’t supposed to happen to a guy like Capps. He was a career State Department officer and an army reservist working intelligence. He was the guy everyone envied—or at least those who didn’t know any better. He had been to Kosovo for the ethnic cleansing, Eastern Congo for the so-called cease-fire, Afghanistan, and then Iraq. He had been attached to military special-operations units and picked up a couple Bronze Stars along the way. Any god-awful place, he’d visit. He loved the rush, loved getting the call and getting sent into the mix before it even hit the papers.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

A new origami “zippered tube” design that makes paper-based (or other thin materials) structures stiff enough to hold weight, yet can fold flat for easy shipping and storage could transform structures ranging from microscopic robots to furniture and even buildings. That’s what researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo suggest in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. Such origami structures could include a robotic arm that reaches out and scrunches up, a construction crane that folds to pick up or deliver a load, furniture, and quick-assembling emergency shelters, bridges — and other infrastructure used in the wake of a natural disaster.

Pop-up buildings?

The researchers use a particular origami technique called Miura-ori folding: They make precise, zigzag-folded strips of paper, then glue two strips together to make a tube. While the single strip of paper is highly flexible, the tube is stiffer and does not fold in as many directions. Interlocking two tubes in zipper-like fashion made them much stiffer and harder to twist or bend, they found. The structure folds up flat, yet rapidly and easily expands to the rigid tube configuration. The zipper configuration works even with tubes that have different angles of folding. By combining tubes with different geometries, the researchers can make many different three-dimensional structures, such as a bridge, a canopy, or a tower.

More here.

After Aquinas

Try making a man with no soul, you who can do all things. Not quite all.  Is it you or your end that’s manifest in forms fixed before you, or in the first sums  the schoolchild learns, likewise unalterable. The triangle makes its dark refusal  of all you might be, great indefinite. Spared a body and this staggered mind, you cannot know the joy  our weariness embraces—what made you go without the saving play of memory. Yes, to forget and invent  is denied you. Though you transcend time you too cannot change what was. The sad dream  seizing you most of all, still you cannot feel sadness, only—who knows. Maybe you feel less and less  the rumored maker, more like one who simply sees himself reflected, unforgiving, in a foreignness…  Bound by such laws. A singular. You cannot make another of what you are, be less than yourself, disappear.

by Thomas Unger
from EcoTheo Review, July 15, 2015

Corinne Segal at PBS:

When Michael Derrick Hudson had his poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” rejected 40 times, he decided to try a different approach. He submitted it under the name “Yi-Fen Chou.”

The poem was rejected nine more times. But then it ended up in front of Native American writer Sherman Alexie, the editor of this year’s “The Best American Poetry” anthology. Among the hundreds of poems Alexie read, Hudson’s poem stood out to him for its unique title and the fact that a Chinese poet had written a poem with “affectionate European classical and Christian imagery,” he wrote.

When Hudson received word that his poem had been chosen, he contacted Alexie to tell him he is not, in fact, the Chinese woman that his pseudonym seemed to suggest. Instead, he is a white poet based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, working at the Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library.

At this point, Alexie faced a difficult choice, he wrote in a lengthy blog post. On one hand, the poem was submitted under false pretenses; Alexie could have left it out of the anthology and avoided embarrassment and criticism.

But to do so would have implied that Alexie “only chose poems based on identity,” he wrote. Ultimately, he considered it the most “honest” choice to include the poem with a full disclosure of what had happened.

More here.

Lucinda Ramberg in The Wire:

One day the jogatis took me to the river for a puja. Mahadevi came to our door early in the morning, saying: “Today we are taking the devi to the river – will you come along?” My research assistant Jyoti and I had gone roaming with the jogatis before, traveling from farmhouse to farmhouse for household rites on auspicious occasions such as the birth of a female buffalo calf or the successful drilling of a new bore well. This time, for the festival of the river goddess, we climbed in a flat bed truck trailing a big green tractor. The two traveling devis – Yellamma and Matangi – had been placed in the front of the truck. Along the way, a bumpy ride over the pock marked roads characteristic of this sugar cane-rich and infrastructure-poor district in Northern Karnataka, I asked Mahadevi whose tractor we were traveling in. She pointed to the landlord farmer swaying in the tractor seat next to the driver and explained that he and his wife were without children, despite several years of marriage, so he had decided to sponsor the bringing of the devi to the river.

I recognized in this account the making of a harake in which devotees seek to secure blessings of fertility and prosperity from the devi through acts of propitiation towards her. Devotees make material or bodily offerings such as grain, saris, silver ornaments, pilgrimages, prostrations, renunciations, or ecstatic performances. As persons who are given, or who give themselves to the devi in fulfillment of harake, jogatis themselves take the form of such offerings. Their dedication to the devi is conducted as a rite of marriage to her. This marriage authorizes them to perform rites in her name, such as the one in which we were brought to participate that day at the river Krishna.

More here.

Maya Gurantz in the LA Review of Books' Avidly:

Magic, the epigram goes, requires much preparation but little effort. I have been thinking about magic, about beauty, about creating a space in which one can be entirely present—because I’ve been thinking about Sasha Petraske, who passed away last week at the heartbreakingly young age of 42. His first bar, Milk & Honey, opened on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of New York in December 1999. I spent much of the following year and a half there.

My friend Zoe first took me to Milk & Honey. You could only go if you had the phone number and called in advance. Zoe advised me that if Sasha thought I was cool, he might give me the number—an intimidating proposition. But when Sasha, all handsome and dapper, came over to say hi he put me instantly at ease. I wasn’t cool. Nor was I beautiful or stylish—my mien in those days could best be described as Neurotic Ragamuffin. But I was friendly and lived in the neighborhood and was clearly enraptured with his place. He gave me the number and I quickly became a regular. Every time they buzzed me in and I parted the purple velvet curtains to enter the tiny bar, I felt a thrill. Candlelight flickered off the pressed tin ceilings and small leather booths. The bar glowed like a beacon in the center of the dark space, the throbbing heart, all cut fruits and freshly squeezed juices and perfect olives and beautiful bottles of liquor. It managed to be both an overflowing bounty and neat and tidy at the same time.

Sasha reintroduced some goddamn manners into drinking society. His house rules, were posted in the bathrooms. Number one? “No name dropping, no star fucking.” Now that’s a strong opener in New York. But access to Milk & Honey was not meant to be used as that kind of currency—instead, you were directed to “not bring anyone unless you would leave that person alone in your home.” Sasha changed the number regularly to weed out the assholes. He called out macho bullshit—“no fighting, no play fighting, no talking about fighting.”

More here.

Rachel Wetzler in Art News:

As Foster describes, one of the primary themes of the book [Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency] is an acknowledgment that the preoccupations of postmodernism—whose critical language Foster and his colleagues at October were instrumental in defining—are no longer sufficient for considering contemporary art. In lieu of the critique of representation that was the hallmark of art and criticism of the 1980s, the practices that we might consider avant-garde today—the work of artists like Thomas Hirschhorn, Isa Genzken, Tacita Dean, and Robert Gober—are oriented around a “probing of the real and the historical.”

Another central theme is Foster’s insistence on the value of criticism itself. In his chapter on the post-critical, he cites a number of recent challenges to the idea of criticism and criticality from both the right and the left: its putative irrelevance at a moment when artistic worth and literal market value are treated as one and the same; the neoconservative culture of affirmation that returned with particular force after 9/11; the elitist privilege that gives the critic’s judgment more weight than that of the public.

Most of these objections are swiftly dismissed, but Foster does take up arguments by the philosophers Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière—both of whom have become popular in art circles in recent years—who reject the critic’s “arrogant posture of demystification” as its own form of fetishism; ultimately, Foster maintains that the two fall back on their own circuitous logic in their condemnation of the critic’s aspiration to defetishize or demystify and that the alternatives they propose are noble but naive. (Foster makes clear that he thinks art is no match for governmental and corporate bodies when it comes to Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible.”) “Critique,” he acknowledges, “is never enough: one must intervene in the given, turn it somehow, and take it somewhere else. But this somewhere else is opened up through critique; without critique alternatives do not become readily manifest, let alone strongly motivated.”

More here.

Sarah Juliet Lauro in Avidly:

Graham Greene’s 1966 novel The Comedians, is the focal point of this class trip: we are there to gather material for a set of multi-media annotations that we hope to make available for free online. Greene wrote the book while living at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince during the Duvalier regime, and the narrative wrestles— if only in the corner of its eye, seen in flittering references to the USA’s propping up of Papa Doc — with the larger issue of foreign involvement in Haiti.

Greene’s novel offers a unique perspective on outsiders in Haiti, particularly in the book’s searing depiction of the American couple Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a well-meaning but ridiculous pair who have come in the hopes of building a center for vegetarianism. Brown, the narrator, points out that, too poor to buy meat, the majority of the population are de facto herbivores, but this does not dissuade the Smiths in their mission to bring their brand of help to Haiti, believing as they do that carnivorous consumption leads to violence. In one of the most painful moments in the book, the reader is subjected to a bit of dramatic irony: Mr. Smith, glowing with self-satisfaction after giving a wad of cash to a legless beggar, fails to notice that he may just as well have painted the man with a bull’s-eye. As another begins to close in on this new prey, the imminent beating is obvious to the reader while Mr. Smith remains blissfully ignorant. This is also an apt parable for what many felt was happening to the aid pouring into Haiti from the US (not without strings attached) during the Duvalier regime: it never made it into the right hands. So, you’re damned if, like Smith, you do try to help. But you’re probably also a heartless asshole, like Brown, the callous European hotelier, if you don’t even care to try. The most succinct and telling characterization of this type of self-interested foreigner is Brown’s horribly unmoving one-line eulogy when he sees that his longtime servant, Joseph, has died fighting the dictatorship: “He used to make good rum-punches.”

More here.

Patrick Ellis at n+1:

HOW MUCH MONEY is the Eiffel Tower worth? It is an answerless question, but one that many have nevertheless posed, and a few have tried to resolve. One recent estimate claimed €435 billion—but the price of air travel and entry tickets, evidently, cannot encompass the tower’s worth in the cultural imagination, so why would anyone ever bother? One possible reason: the Eiffel Tower is the great survivor of the 1889 World’s Fair and stands as a barometer, however unrealistic, of the future potential of all such expositions.

World’s fairs bring together participating nations into architecturally elaborate pavilions that display whatever each guest nation wishes to broadcast, in theory according to the fair’s topical theme du jour. These connections can be tenuous. At San Francisco’s fair of 1915, you might learn of agricultural practices in New Zealand, forest products in Honduras, or the palatial architectural of Japan. Architecture has always been a heavily promoted feature of the fairs, and they have helped to introduce Beaux-Arts, art deco, and Brazilian modernism (among other styles) to new audiences. Critics have routinely met such architectural novelties with disdain, given that the common palette is surfeit, expense, and transience. Apart from the handful of structures that have legs, and outlive the fair—organizers never know when they might wind up with another Ferris wheel (Chicago) or Space Needle (Seattle)—a world’s fair is an ephemeral event, never built to last.

more here.

Thomas Jessen Adams at nonsite:

It is of course a complete accident that the same year that marks the tenth anniversary of the failure of federally maintained levees, incompetent disaster relief, and rampant profiteering in the face of a relatively pedestrian hurricane known as Katrina should also mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication by an obscure Assistant Secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. History is littered with such coincidences and in general, they are simply that, coincidences. Had a similar storm occurred instead in late August of 2006, hitting an increasingly privatized New Orleans run by the soon to be convicted felon Ray Nagin, in a nation governed by the unconvicted but decidedly more felonious George W. Bush, the results would have in all likelihood been all too similar and the accident of their anniversaries would not exist. Still, such coincidences can prove analytically fortuitous. The chance of history that brought the anniversaries of the Moynihan Report and Hurricane Katrina together helps elucidate both the long-term implications of Moynihan’s dominance over a large portion of American discourse regarding inequality—a discourse that bears a great deal of responsibility for the effects of that fairly mundane storm—and the long historical temporalities that produced Katrina as a storm of unthinkable tragedy. Indeed, Katrina did not form to the southeast of the Bahamas on August 22, 2005. It formed when Moynihan helped consolidate the culture of poverty thesis in 1965. It formed when a conception of freedom grounded in contract, work-discipline, and various versions of moral economy defeated its multiple historical alternatives. It formed when American politics ceased to effectively challenge these defeats. In fact, if we further widen our lens, we can see its beginnings in the monumental transition from slavery to freedom that is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

more here.

Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

Coates’s two books show how twinned fears of crime and punishment can be mutually reinforcing: how the historic failure of the police to keep African-Americans safe from violence can make police excesses all the more appalling. The police killing of Prince Jones was, surely, that much more disturbing to a man who remembered that when he was a boy the police had failed to protect his friend Craig. For some reformers, the key is retraining police officers to minimize violence. But Coates and Alexander warn against this kind of meliorist thinking. “A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all,” Coates has written. To many Black Lives Matter activists, the phrase “state monopoly on violence” probably sounds more like a threat than like a reassurance.

Crime statistics in Baltimore are complicated: in the decades since Coates was a boy, murders declined, but so did the city’s population. In general, though, American crime rates have fallen since the early nineteen-nineties, and the nation’s imprisoned population—while extraordinarily high, by global standards—seems to have stopped increasing. As for police killings, each one is tragic, and each unjustified one is outrageous; police departments in Europe, for instance, are vastly less likely to kill. But there is no evidence that we are living through a modern epidemic.

more here.

Nobody
.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish — you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
.

by Emily Dickinson
published 1891, Series 2

Musical arrangement by Jim Culleny and Joe Podlesny
Copyright 8/9/15 by Jim Culleny

Enrique and Gullans in delanceyplace:

“The human virome includes trillions of viruses that live in and on our cells, plus even more that inhabit the bacteria in our microbiome. The virome is poorly understood and could be considered the 'dark matter of nature' and humanity; we know it is there but have a very hard time describing it or knowing what it is doing. The human virome is essentially our fourth genome; it interacts directly and indirectly with our other three genomes. Moreover, like your genome, epigenome, and microbiome, your virome is absolutely unique. Viruses live in our intestines, mouths, lungs, skin, and even in our blood, the latter being only discovered recently. But fret not; given that people are generally healthy day-to-day, the virome overall must be benign, and given the millennia of mutual coexistence, our viromes must provide benefits that we don't yet appreciate.

“Viruses are champions of DNA mutation. A 2013 study of the human gut virome tracked the identities, abundance, and mutations of native viruses in one person over two and a half years. There were 478 relatively abundant viruses, most of which had not been previously identified. A majority of the viruses were bacteriophage, the type that infects bacteria. Eighty percent of the viruses persisted for the entire 2.5 years, but they all mutated, some slowly, some very quickly. In some cases they mutated so fast that the virus would be deemed a new species within the 2.5 years. What came out of the body after symbiosis was very different from what went in. “So viruses, our ubiquitous interlopers, are an important part of our rapid evolution; they carry, exchange, and modify the DNA between cells or from one species to another. They drive evolution at all scales, in bacteria, plants, animals, and humans. The best example of this is the spread of antibacterial-resistance genes from one bacterial organism to its fellow species, and then to other bacteria of all types, in all geographies. Once a beneficial mutation arises in a microbe, viruses help spread it quickly throughout the microbiome and beyond.

More here.

From Granta:

Jenni Fagan

The health of a society can be judged by how well it cares for its most vulnerable citizens. The current refuges are children, women and men who desperately need the rest of the world to understand that this can happen to anyone – and it won’t go away.

The refugee and migrant crisis in Europe is an opportunity to reach out, engage politically, act humanely and do the only decent thing anyone can do – imagine how it would feel if you were unsafe and your children’s lives and family’s future depended upon the understanding of strangers?

All populations are historically transient. Humans are a migrant race full stop. These people could easily be us, it’s time to get our priorities straight and offer our collective resolve to continue to challenge brutality and its effects on ordinary citizens in countries all across the world.

Tim Finch

They gave themselves away with the words on their T-shirts.

Invaders. Mystery space riders.

Army life. XVI Soldier 4. Spec. Mil.

Yes, they were an army of invading aliens

So we built a fortress to repel them.

More here.