Nick Ripatrazone in The Atlantic:

From Homer’s The Iliad to A.E. Housman’s poem about an athlete dying young, there’s no shortage of literary depictions of running. “Move, as the limbs / of a runner do,” writes W.H. Auden. “In orbit go / Round an endless track.” There’s also a long tradition of writers leaving their pens or screens behind to stride along roads, tracks, and trails. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson, would “run half a mile up and down a hill every two hours” during his 20s. Louisa May Alcott ran since her youth: “I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state,” she wrote in her journal, “because it was such a joy to run.” Despite this correlation, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz recently lamented how few books capture the mindset of the runner in descriptive terms, citing Thomas Gardner’s new collection of essays Poverty Creek Journal as the best exception.

Freedom, consciousness, and wildness: Running offers writers escape with purpose. When confronted with “structural problems” in her writing as the result of a “long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work,” Joyce Carol Oates would ease her writing blocks with afternoon runs. For Oates and many other writers, running is process and proves especially useful for the type of cloistered, intensive work they do. But in many ways running is a natural extension of writing. The steady accumulation of miles mirrors the accumulation of pages, and both forms of regimented exertion can yield a sense of completion and joy. Through running, writers deepen their ability to focus on a single, engrossing task and enter a new state of mind entirely—word after word, mile after mile.

More here.

Iona McLaren in The Telegraph:

'I come from two of the best Jewish families,” wrote Peggy Guggenheim when she was 25. “One of my grandfathers was born in a stable like Jesus Christ or, rather, over a stable in Bavaria, and my other grandfather was a peddler.” She broke this promising work off after only a few sentences, but her character in caricature is already there: Peggy Guggenheim was very Jewish, very rich and very amusing, but not quite convinced of her own worth. Her second try at a memoir was more fruitful. In 1946, the 48-year-old proprietress of New York’s most daring gallery brought forth a book: Out of This Century. It was a scandalous account of near-numberless romances, two Bohemian marriages and her equally passionate – but more successful – acquisition of abstract and surrealist art in London and wartime Paris, before escaping the Nazis in 1941 with her collection of “degenerate art” intact. The book was ill received, the critics discomfited by her flat revelations of marital abuse and abortions. Time called it “as witless as a harmonica rendition of the 'Liebestod’ ”; Chicago Tribune suggested that her “nymphomaniacal revelations” should be retitled “Out of My Head”.

They were missing the point: for all its flaws, Peggy Guggenheim’s midlife memoir is hysterically funny. Gore Vidal called her unaffected and efficient style “almost as good as Gertrude Stein… and a lot funnier”. But sympathetic readers like Vidal were, and had always been, few. The insecurity that gave her, Francine Prose argues in this generous biography, is a clue to the nervous promiscuity that she sustained into her grand old age in the Venetian Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

More here.

Pamela Druckerman in The New York Times:

Paris — IT is a perfectly normal dinner party until someone stands up, checks his phone, and says: I think there’s been an explosion, at the Stade de France. My husband is not at the dinner because he is at the Stade de France as a journalist. Everyone runs for their phones. I say something I’ve never said before at a Parisian dinner party: Could we turn on the TV? Soon people are staring at their phones and calling out the names of familiar places: Le Cambodge restaurant — the hipster noodle shop near the Canal St.-Martin. I passed near there on my way to dinner. (Later we’d hear that the shooting happened at Le Petit Cambodge, its annex.) Apparently there are hostages at Le Bataclan, the concert hall that I walked by at 5 p.m., to take my son to the eye doctor. There was a huge white concert bus out front. No one on French TV — or any TV channel we turn to — knows what’s happening. But dinner-party guests are scanning Twitter, and calling out various estimates of the number of people killed. How could anyone know? We can’t even find a camera showing images from Le Bataclan, where dozens of people are being held hostage.

…My hostess makes up some extra beds for the night. The couple from the dinner party are trying to figure out whether they can drive home, west of Paris. Their kids are fine, but now they’re home alone. My husband is still inside the stadium. The French president, who was also at the stadium for the France-Germany match, says France’s borders are closed. Apparently schools will be closed too. I learn the French word for curfew: couvre-feu. On the news they’re reporting that many people have died inside Le Bataclan. The numbers are unfathomable.

My kids are asleep. Their babysitter isn’t. All I keep thinking is: What will I tell them when they wake up?

More here.

To editorialize, I hope this is true. Jonathan Steele in the NYRB:

Anyone searching for a sliver of light in the darkness of the Syrian catastrophe has no better place to go than the country’s northeast. There some 2.2 million Kurds have created a quasi state that is astonishingly safe—and strangely unknown abroad. No barrel bombs are dropped by Bashar al-Assad’s warplanes. No ISIS executioners enforce the wearing of the niqab. No Turkish air strikes send civilians running, as Turkish attacks on Kurdish militia bases do across the border in Iraq.

Safety is of course a relative concept. Car bombs and suicide attacks by ISIS assassins regularly take lives in this predominantly Kurdish 250-mile-wide stretch of Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but by the standards of the rest of the country it is quiet.

The 2.2 million Kurds make up a tenth of the Syrian population. During the protests of 2011—the Arab Spring—they, like their Arab counterparts in other Syrian cities, publicly demonstrated for reform in Qamishli, the region’s largest city. But Assad was milder toward them than he was to other protesters elsewhere. He gave citizenship to 300,000 stateless Kurds and in July 2012 even withdrew most of his combat troops from the area on the grounds that they were needed more urgently in the Syrian heartland of Aleppo, Damascus, and the cities in between.

Kurdish militias known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG) quickly organized the support of much of the Kurdish adult population under thirty and took control of the region, which they divide into three “cantons” and which they call Rojava (i.e., West, meaning western Kurdistan, from roj, the Kurdish word for sun). The other Kurdish regions are in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.

Over the next three years the YPG trained and built a well-disciplined, though lightly armed, military force and set up an efficient system of local government. It is a measure of the Assads’ repression that, whereas in Turkey bans on the Kurdish language were lifted in 1991, they were kept in place for another two decades in Syria. As a result most adults in Rojava speak better Arabic than Kurdish. Now in charge of their own statelet, Kurdish leaders are reviving the use of the Kurdish language in schools and on TV and radio stations.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Gizmodo:

Physicists have uncovered a hidden connection between a famous 350-year-old mathematical formula for pi, everyone’s favorite irrational number, and quantum mechanics. At least one mathematician has pronounced the discovery“a cunning piece of magic.”

The English mathematician John Wallis published his formula for calculating pias the product of an infinite series of ratios in 1655. In a paper published this week in the Journal of Mathematical Physics, University of Rochester physicists announced they had discovered the same formula popping out of their calculations of a hydrogen atom’s energy levels.

Wallis isn’t well known today outside of academic circles, but he rubbed elbows with some of the the greatest names in science in his era. Initially he intended to become a doctor when he started university at the tender age of 13, but he was far more interested in mathematics, and showed a knack for cryptography in particular. It began as just a hobby, but years later, he applied his skills deciphering coded Royalist dispatches on behalf of their political rivals, the Parliamentarians. (The two parties were in the midst of a civil war at the time.) Eventually he became part of the group of scientists who founded the Royal Society of London. There, his love of math blossomed into a bona fide academic pursuit.

Among his peculiar skills: he could perform complicated mental calculations in his head — something he did frequently, given his tendency toward insomnia. One such feat was recorded in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1685: Wallis had calculated the square root of a 53-digits (27 digits in the square root) one sleepless night, and recorded it from memory the next morning.

More here.

Puja Sen in Muse India:

On 30 April 1979, feminists, writers and other New York intellectuals gathered at Town Hall to attend what turned out to be an explosive and combative event starring Germaine Greer, Norman Mailer, Jill Johnston, Jaqueline Cellabos and Diana Trilling. A documentary by D A Pennebaker, Town Bloody Hall records the evening complete with Mailer's characteristic pugilism, Greer's fiery rhetoric, Johnston and two women rolling, hugging and kissing on the floor of the stage, and loud heckling by the audience. The topic under discussion was women's liberation.

At the height of 'second-wave' feminism, one of the questions (not a new one) that took precedence was how the role and representation of women in popular culture squared to a feminist analysis of it. Greer begins her speech in this way:

I'm afraid I'm going to talk in a very different way possibly than you expected. I do not represent any organization in this country and I dare say the most powerful representation I can make is of myself as a writer for better or worse. I'm also a feminist and for me the significance of this moment is that I'm having to confront one of the most powerful figures in my own imagination, the being I think most privileged in male elitist society – namely the masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite.

The camera focuses on Mailer at this point, as he breaks into a grin and the audience laughs. “Bred as I have been and educated as I have been,” Greer continues, “most of my life has been most powerfully influenced by the culture for which he stands, so that I'm caught in a basic conflict between inculcated cultural values and my own deep conception of an injustice.”

This in some way goes to the heart of the question of representation in art and politics. Can culture be explained through the lens of gender? Are women, and men, writers confronted with the spectre of the 'masculine artist'? The answer is, obviously, yes, but it is so among other things. If we know gender to be one of the organizing principles of the world, along with caste, class and race, then it is inevitable that the production of culture should be a reflection of that.

As the evening in Town Bloody Hall proceeds, we see sitting amongst other feminist stalwarts such as Betty Freidan and Cynthia Oznick, Susan Sontag who asks Norman Mailer why he referred to Diana Trilling as a 'lady literary critic', the kind of question that has been significant in radical feminist debates on writing: “It seems like gallantry to you but it, it doesn't feel right to us. It's a little better to be called a woman writer. I don't know why but, you know, words count. We're all writers, we know that.”

Susan Sontag, the extraordinary writer and surveyor of culture, (“culture conserver” she called herself) was searching for a “new sensibility” all through the 1960s and 70s, mining art, films and literature to detect shifts in taste. In her essay for the New York Review of Books'Fascinating Fascism' published in 1975, just about three decades after the second world war, she writes of the gradual rehabilitation of Leni Riefenstahl — famous for the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will — into the critical canon, as a filmmaker who could now be judged for the beauty of her visual style and technical prowess alone, and not for the social reality it served:

Riefenstahl's current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful—as a film maker and, now, as a photographer—do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst. The force of her work is precisely in the continuity of its political and aesthetic ideas. What is interesting is that this was once seen so much more clearly than it seems to be now.

Sontag's breathtaking clarity, lucid prose and rigour of thought made her the standard bearer in American intellectual life in the post Eisenhower era, of the search for aesthetic shifts in taste.

More here.

Julian Baggini interviews Peter Singer (1998) in The Philosophers' Magazine Online:

Singer argues that the left’s utopianism has failed to take account of human nature, because it has denied there is such a thing as a human nature. For Marx, it is the “ensemble of social relations” which makes us the people we are, and so, as Singer points out, “It follows from this belief that if you can change the ‘ensemble of social relations’, you can totally change human nature.”

The corruption and authoritarianism of so-called Marxist and communist states in this century is testament to the naïveté of this view. As the anarchist Bakunin said, once even workers are given absolute power, “they represent not the people but themselves … Those who doubt this know nothing at all about human nature.”

But what then is this human nature? Singer believes the answer comes from Darwin. Human nature is an evolved human nature. To understand why we are the way we are and the origins of ethics, we have to understand how we have evolved not just physically, but mentally. Evolutionary psychology, as it is known, is the intellectual growth industry of the last decade of the millennium, though it is not without its detractors.

If the left takes account of evolutionary psychology, Singer argues, it will be better able to harness that understanding of human nature to implement policies which have a better chance of success. In doing so, two evolutionary fallacies have to be cleared up. First of all, we have evolved not to be ruthless proto-capitalists, but to “enter into mutually beneficial forms of co-operation.” It is the evolutionary psychologist’s work in explaining how ‘survival of the fittest’ translates into co-operative behaviour which has been, arguably, its greatest success. Secondly, there is the “is/ought” gap. To say a certain type of behaviour has evolved is not to say it is morally right. To accept a need to understand how our minds evolved is not to endorse every human trait with an evolutionary origin.

When I spoke to Peter Singer, I wanted to get clearer about what he thinks Darwinism can do to help us understand ethics. Singer is a preference utilitarian, which means he thinks the morally right action is that which has the consequences of satisfying the preferences of the greatest number of people. Singer seems now to be saying that the importance of Darwinism is that if we take it into account, we will be better at producing the greatest utility – the satisfaction of people’s preferences.

More here.

George Yancy talks tO Seyla Benhabib in the NYT's The Stone:

G.Y.: In “Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange,” you observe, “But in its deepest categories Western philosophy obliterates differences of gender as these shape and structure the experiences and subjectivity of the self.” Is it also true that Western philosophy obliterates differences of race and how this social category shapes the experiences of nonwhites?

S.B.: Western philosophy, as distinguished from myth, literature, drama and many other forms of human expression, speaks in the name of the universal. Philosophy emerges when Socrates and Plato show how we have to free ourselves from the “idols of the city,” and when the pre-Socratics ask about what constitutes matter and the universe, rejecting the answers provided by the Greek polytheistic myths. There is something subversive in this philosophical impulse and even when Plato reinscribes differences of natural talent and ability into the order of the city, he does so by subverting the established order of the Greek polis, in which only the free male heads of households, who were also slave-owners, were free citizens. According to “The Republic,” differences in the city will not be based on social and economic status but on talents and capabilities shown by children differentially at birth: Some are bronze, some are silver and only the very few are gold!

G.Y.: Yes, this is Plato’s Noble Lie.

S.B.: Yes. It is important to hold on to these moments in the birth of our discipline because rather than denouncing the Western philosophical tradition as the canon produced by “dead, white men,” we need to remember that moment of opening and closure, subversion and restoration, freedom and domination that are present in these texts that we love: from “The Republic” to Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.” From Aristotle’s “Politics” to Locke’s “Second Treatise of Civil Government” and Rousseau’s “Social Contract” and the “Emile,” this dynamic of opening and closure holds. And it is in the context of this dynamic of freedom for some and domination for others that we need to understand both gender and racialized difference.

More here.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in Foreign Affairs:

On one side of the debate are those who believe that new technologies are likely to replace workers. Karl Marx, writing during the age of steam, described the automation of the proletariat as a necessary feature of capitalism. In 1930, after electrification and the internal combustion engine had taken off, John Maynard Keynes predicted that such innovations would lead to an increase in material prosperity but also to widespread “technological unemployment.” At the dawn of the computer era, in 1964, a group of scientists and social theorists sent an open letter to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson warning that cybernation “results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity, which requires progressively less human labor.” Recently, we and others have argued that as digital technologies race ahead, they have the potential to leave many workers behind.

On the other side are those who say that workers will be just fine. They have history on their side: real wages and the number of jobs have increased relatively steadily throughout the industrialized world since the middle of the nineteenth century, even as technology advanced like never before. A 1987 National Academy of Sciences report explained why:

By reducing the costs of production and thereby lowering the price of a particular good in a competitive market, technological change frequently leads to increases in output demand: greater output demand results in increased production, which requires more labor.

This view has gained enough traction in mainstream economics that the contrary belief—that technological progress might reduce human employment—has been dismissed as the “lump of labor fallacy.” It’s a fallacy, the argument goes, because there is no static “lump of labor,” since the amount of work available to be done can increase without bound.

In 1983, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief brought the debate into sharp relief through a clever comparison of humans and horses. For many decades, horse labor appeared impervious to technological change. Even as the telegraph supplanted the Pony Express and railroads replaced the stagecoach and the Conestoga wagon, the U.S. equine population grew seemingly without end, increasing sixfold between 1840 and 1900 to more than 21 million horses and mules. The animals were vital not only on farms but also in the country’s rapidly growing urban centers, where they carried goods and people on hackney carriages and horse-drawn omnibuses.

More here.

Eugenia Williamson at The Baffler:

For a movement that famously proclaimed there was no future, punk rock has had a remarkably durable half-life. Forty years after Television’s legendary residency at CBGB, the world is awash in punk. In the last twenty months, former Village Voice rock critic and punk champion Robert Christgau wrote a memoir about his downtown New York youth, Kim Gordon published her memoirs, Viv Albertine published hers, Richard Hell released the paperback edition of his, Patti Smith released the follow-up to her National Book Award–winning memoir, and HarperCollins signed Lenny Kaye, Smith’s guitarist, to write a memoir of his own.[*] Ramones fans can look forward to a forthcoming Martin Scorsese–helmed biopic and a documentary promising new footage of the seminal band, whose last founding member perished in 2014.

Punk has cracked the upper echelons of the tech sphere too. Earlier this fall, in a pictorial called “The Stylish Men of Tumblr,” the New York Times introduced the world to Pau Santesmasses, a thirty-nine-year-old product manager whose own Tumblr account is devoted to “modern architecture, skateboarding, and punk rock”—thus apostrophizing a movement of self-professed anarchic rebellion as if it were a tasteful accessory. Photographed atop the grand, dramatically lit staircase in his employer’s Manhattan offices in a pristine gingham button-down, skinny khakis, and shockingly clean sneakers, Santesmasses described his shirt as a “punk-slash-mod thing.”

more here.

Alex Mar at The Believer:

LaVey became known as the “black pope” with good reason: his church, from a Christian perspective, is extravagantly blasphemous, using the format of Catholic high mass to create its own brand of gothic theater. If the substance of religious ritual is guilt-­inducing reactionary nonsense, Satanists believe, the form of ritual can still tap into some primal truths about man. And so Satanists use high-mass drama to get the blood flowing (though, as far as I know, not in the literal, open-wound sense). “Hail Satan!” they chant, over and over: Satanand evil and hell are trigger words to encourage members to embrace a freethinking, contrarian, wildly egocentric life outside the mainstream—​a life-affirming mantra. “When we say ‘Hail Satan,’” says Peter Gilmore, the church’s current high priest, “what we really mean is ‘Hail Ourselves.’”

These nuances, however, were lost on the media during the Panic years, when the stakes were high for associating with the Devil—even in name alone. Throughout the ’80s, major outlets fed the paranoia, from ABC’s 20/20 and NBC News to The Oprah Winfrey Show. The material covered ranged from the ridiculous—20/20 correspondent Tom Jarriel, after listening to “Stairway to Heaven” played backward, announced that Robert Plant was singing “My sweet Satan!”—to the unverifiable. What these high-­profile media reports all had in common was the insupportable logic that these “Satanic” networks were impossible to uncover, which only proved how wily they were. As Jarriel announced, in a bizarre call to action, “Nationwide, police are hearing strikingly similar horror stories—and not one has ever been proved!” Without proof, what exactly was anyone reporting?

more here.

Nathaniel Popkin at The Millions:

Blondel’s wink begs the reader to recall Graham Greene’s 1951 The End of the Affair, which opens ponderously, “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” Green’s book has the quality of a long, high-walled canal; you can’t see side to side, only front to back, future to past. As the book opens, the narrator is Maurice Bendrix; as in The 6:41 to Paris, the first person voice will switch between Maurice and his former lover Sarah Miles.

Like Greene himself, the character Maurice is a novelist of renowned “technical ability.” The closeness between Greene and his protagonist allows him likewise to signal the reader: this story is a construct meant to heighten feeling. “It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there,” winks Greene, speaking for himself and for Maurice, still in the opening paragraph. The novelist is talking about constructing the story as he’s writing it.

Blondel places his protagonists next to each other on the train. Greene places his on either side of Clapham Common, in London. Maurice gazes out his window when he spots Sarah’s husband Henry tromping across the common through slashing rain. This is the arbitrary moment. But why should he go out to speak to him? Two years earlier, Sarah had left Maurice without explanation. Hatred for her and for Henry won’t relent.

more here.

Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion:

Its admirers call it “the Quixote,” as if to say “the masterpiece” or even “the universe.”

Cervantes’s novel, completed exactly four hundred years ago, established him as one of the greatest writers in world literature. In his recent book, Quixote: The Novel and the World, Ilan Stavans is even “convinced that the Spanish language exists in order for this magisterial novel to inhabit it.”1 Some praise has been even more extravagant. Ivan Turgenev, otherwise a skeptic to the core, detected a mystical significance in the apparent coincidence that the first part of Don Quixote appeared (he supposed) in the same year as Hamlet. What’s more, Turgenev noted, Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same day—actually the same date, but England and Spain used different calendars—as if some angel had arranged to link them. In what is arguably the most famous essay in Russian literature, “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” Turgenev described these two masterpieces as representing opposite extremes of human nature, if not of nature itself. Together they define “the fundamental forces of all that exists. They explain the growth of flowers to us, and they even enable us to comprehend the development of the most powerful nations.”

In this reading, Hamlet incarnates inertia, Don Quixote progress. Shakespeare’s brooding hero proves relentlessly ironic, rational, and perceptive, but cannot act. Believing in nothing but his own judgment, he grows completely self-absorbed and unable to love. Don Quixote is just the reverse, all will and no sense. The man of faith, he credulously accepts an ideal of goodness without suspecting he mistakes desire for fact. To his own detriment, he lives entirely selflessly, “inherently incapable of betraying his convictions or transferring them from one object to another.” In Russian terms, Hamlet represented the aristocratic “superfluous man,” who was cultivated but lethargic, while Don Quixote recalled the idealist revolutionary, believing foolishly in an impossible, if noble, ideal.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in delanceyplace:

“I have mentioned kinship and reciprocation as the twin pillars of altruism in a Darwinian world, but there are secondary structures which rest atop those main pillars. Especially in human society, with language and gossip, reputation is important. One individual may have a reputation for kindness and generosity. Another individual may have a reputation for unreliability, for cheating and reneging on deals. Another may have a reputation for generosity when trust has been built up, but for ruthless punishment of cheating. The unadorned theory of reciprocal altruism expects animals of any species to base their behaviour upon unconscious responsiveness to such traits in their fellows. In human societies we add the power of language to spread reputations, usually in the form of gossip. You don't need to have suffered personally from X's failure to buy his round at the pub. You hear 'on the grapevine' that X is a tightwad, or — to add an ironic complication to the example — that Y is a terrible gossip. Reputation is important, and biologists can acknowledge a Darwinian survival value in not just being a good reciprocator but fostering a reputation as a good reciprocator too. Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue, as well as being a lucid account of the whole field of Darwinian morality, is especially good on reputation.

“The Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen and, in a rather different way, the Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi have added a further fascinating idea. Altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance or superiority. Anthropologists know it as the Potlatch Effect, named after the custom whereby rival chieftains of Pacific north-west tribes vie with each other in duels of ruinously generous feasts. In extreme cases, bouts of retaliatory entertaining continue until one side is reduced to penury, leaving the winner not much better off. Veblen's concept of 'conspicuous consumption' strikes a chord with many observers of the modern scene. Zahavi's contribution, unregarded by biologists for many years until vindicated by brilliant mathematical models from the evolutionary theorist Alan Grafen, has been to provide an evolutionary version of the potlatch idea. Zahavi studies Arabian babblers, little brown, birds who live in social groups and breed cooperatively. Like many small birds, babblers give warning cries, and they also donate food to each other. A standard Darwinian investigation of such altruistic acts would look, first, for reciprocation and kinship relationships among the birds. When a babbler feeds a companion, is it in the expectation of being fed at a later date?

More here.

The Fear is Real Poetry

like some wild horse chained
to his stall just ripped out
the post & chewed on the links
& got free & burned down the barn
so he could see
the moon dance
an irish amazing reel
& ran & ran & ran
until the sweat poured
like honey
& the wounds
cleaned the
tired Arabian
trail

that’s what this honesty
tells me rip out the post

& i never knew my father’s
loneliness & i never knew my mother’s
fear although i wore them like
hard saddles

there’s plenty of time
to die

stones on the road
shattered glass
.

by Jim Bell
from Crossing the Bar
Slate Roof: A Publishing Cooperative, 2005
.
.

Nilita Vachani in The Nation:

Das’s daughter-in-law hadn’t produced her own milk and the newborn had to be bottle-fed. The cost of Nestle’s formula had eaten into the money kept aside for the daily help who worked at the shack, so they had to let him go. Then the baby got dysentery and almost died. She was kept in the hospital on a drip for a week, and their savings went into “the bottles of life,” Das said, that were injected into her veins.

In their broadest contours, none of these struggles make Das’s story remarkable. Das is one of India’s 250 million poor, surviving on less than $1.90 a day, the international benchmark that defines extreme poverty. She lives life on the edge, without a safety net. But Das might have enjoyed a different fate. Not so long ago, she was a millionaire. And not the slumdog kind that’s the stuff of fiction. Until recently, she held subscriptions in the Galleon Group’s Captain’s fund and Buccaneer offshore fund in the Bermudas, and in Ambit in the Marshall Islands. From roughly 2003 till 2009, hundreds of thousands of dollars were deposited each year in her name. Quite possibly, Manju Das was once the richest housemaid in the world.

More here. [Thanks to Shan Manikkalingam.]

Alexander Vilenkin in Inference:

We live in the aftermath of a great explosion—the big bang—that occurred 13.7 billion years ago. At the time of the big bang, the universe was filled with a fireball, a dense mixture of energetic particles and radiation. For nearly a century, physicists have been studying how the fireball expanded and cooled, how particles combined to form atoms, and how galaxies and stars were gradually pulled together by gravity. This story is now understood in great quantitative detail and is supported by abundant observational data.

The question, however, remains whether the big bang was truly the beginning of the universe. A beginning in what? Caused by what? And determined by what, or whom? These questions have prompted physicists to make every attempt to avoid a cosmic beginning.

In this essay, I review where we now stand.

More here.

Adrianísima in Hippo Reads:

Esther Charabati, coordinator of the oldest café-philo in Mexico City, defines café-philo as a space built on ideas, opinions, and doubts of people who meet at a coffee shop—public space par excellence, she says—and who debate on subjects they consider important but who do not often discuss because of lack of time or a proper arena. It is neither a philosophy class nor a parade of philosophical ideas through history but “coffeshop philosophy,” guided by a philosopher who does not intend the participants to (only) “learn” but to dialogue and to make them come to conclusions by themselves. Her job is to induce “philosophical moments” in which participants go from just an opinion to an original thought, to elucidate concepts alongside them and to face them with their own prejudices. The café-philo is like a small democracy, says Charabati, in which everybody tries to get philosophical insights from each other.

Although catastrophists still sometimes use the idea as a sociological boogie man, we know that smartphones and social media haven’t ended with face to face relationships, and furthermore, culture is being shared now more than in any other age because of the internet. It is almost a truism already.

However, if Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or Youtube are environments where conversations, debate and deliberation take place, is the idea of a global cyber-café-philo possible? One may say that when we discuss politics, defend some cause or theorize on the nature of some relationship or artistic work, with no other intention than to understand and/or explain things, we are philosophizing on a sort of natural, maieutic fashion, right?

More here.