From Kapuscinski to Knausgaard, from Mantel to Macfarlane, more and more writers are challenging the border between fiction and nonfiction. Here Geoff Dyer – longtime master of the space between, in books such as But Beautiful and Out of Sheer Rage – argues that there is no single path to ‘truth’ while, below, writers on both sides of the divide share their thoughts…

Geoff Dyer and others in The Guardian:

Frontiers are always changing, advancing. Borders are fixed, man-made, squabbled about and jealously fought over. The frontier is an exciting, demanding – and frequently lawless – place to be. Borders are policed, often tense; if they become too porous then they’re not doing the job for which they were intended. Occasionally, though, the border is the frontier. That’s the situation now with regard to fiction and nonfiction.

For many years this was a peaceful, uncontested and pretty deserted space. On one side sat the Samuel Johnson prize, on the other the Booker. On one side of the fence, to put it metonymically, we had Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. On the other, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Basically, you went to nonfiction for the content, the subject. You read Beevor’s book because you were interested in the second world war, the eastern front. Interest in India or Kerala, however, was no more a precondition for reading Roy’s novel than a fondness for underage girls was a necessary starting point for enjoying Lolita. In a realm where style was often functional, nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”, as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a reliable car. Whether the subject matter was alluring or off-putting, fiction was the arena where style was more obviously expected, sometimes conspicuously displayed and occasionally rewarded. And so, for a sizeable chunk of my reading life, novels provided pretty much all the nutrition and flavour I needed. They were fun, they taught me about psychology, behaviour and ethics. And then, gradually, increasing numbers of them failed to deliver – or delivered only decreasing amounts of what I went to them for. Nonfiction began taking up more of the slack and, as it did, so the drift away from fiction accelerated.

More here.

A recent claim that tardigrades got a sixth of their DNA from microbes is starting to unravel.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Last Monday, a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published the first ever genome of a tardigrade—a group of endearing microscopic animals with a reputation for being nigh-invincible. Astonishingly, as we reported last week, they found that around 6,600 of the animal’s genes—a full sixth of its genome—had jumped in from bacteria and other foreign sources. And perhaps, they speculated, this massive horizontal gene transfer (HGT) explained the tardigrade’s famed ability to withstand extreme conditions.

Just one week later, those claims are starting to unravel. A second team from the University of Edinburgh had also been sequencing the genome of the same species of tardigrade, ordered from the same supplier. And their results, released on Tuesday as a preprint paper, are totally different.

They found very few horizontally transferred genes—as few as 36, and just 500 at the very most. They concluded that their rivals had sequenced DNA from bacteria that were living alongside the tardigrades and, despite their best efforts, had mistaken the genes of those microbes for genuine tardigrade genes.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Only in America, as the song says—only in America are there enough mass shootings in a single week to allow pundits and philosophers to make complicated points about the nature of responsibility and guilt that elsewhere might exist only in the realm of gruesome thought experiments. Having instructed us that the first of this week’s mass shootings was free from any ideological taint at all—that the Planned Parenthood killings were the work of a lone nut, completely uninfluenced by their rhetoric—the Republican candidates then ordered us to understand that the next mass shooting was nothing but ideology, that the horrific killings in San Bernardino were, as Ted Cruz instantly insisted, an act of Islamic terrorism that should place us in a “time of war.” (That phrase either means nothing at all, since in some sense we have been in “a time of war” since at least 9/11, or else means something so doomed and horrific—full-scale permanent warfare in the Middle East—that, as the historian Andrew Bacevich has explained, it could be achieved only by changing everything once admirable about American life.)

So God bless an American tabloid for doing the work that their headlines have long done (“Ford To City: Drop Dead” comes to mind from the past)—putting a complicated point into simple language. In this case, the headline is on the cover of this morning’s New York Daily News, announcing that Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino killers, and a Muslim-American, is a terrorist—and that all the other mass murderers of recent memory are terrorists, too, and (many bonus points for courage here) that Wayne LaPierre, of the N.R.A., ought to be thought as one as well.

More here.

Uri Friedman in The Atlantic:

The deadpan reaction of one BBC presenter to the shooting rampage in San Bernardino on Wednesday—“Just another day in the United States in America, another day of gunfire, panic, and fear”—got a lot of attention this week as a window of sorts into the world’s despair over the mundanity of American gun violence. But the response was quite tame compared with that of Australia’s former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, who on Thursday urged the Australian government to issue more dire warnings about travel to the United States. (The current Australian advisory notes, among other things, that there is “a heightened threat of terrorist attack in the United States” stemming from the conflicts in Syria and Iraq; that there has been civil unrest in places like Ferguson, Missouri; and that “the United States has a generally higher incidence of violent crime, including incidences where a firearm (gun) is involved, compared to Australia.”)

“You are 15 times more likely to be shot dead in the U.S.A. than in Australia per capita,” Fischer told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, adding that he was therefore “sick and tired” of the U.S. government advising American travelers about potential terrorist attacks in Australia. Some context for his numbers: There are .15 fatalities in mass shootings per 100,000 people in the United States, and .01 in Australia, according to one study; the rate of homicide by firearm yields an even greater divide between the two countries. Noting that there have been more than 350 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, Fischer said that “all [are] unacceptable because the U.S. is not stepping up on the public-policy reform front.” “It’s time to call out the U.S.A,” he argued. He also had words for the National Rifle Association: “The NRA in particular needs to be called out for their unacceptable blockage of any sensible reform, including [ammunition] magazine limitation.”

More here.

.
There are two modes of awareness
one of light, one of patience.
One pierces the sea
a little with light
the other calls for penance
—with a pole or net you wait
like a fisherman for fish.
Tell me which is better,
visionary consciousness
that sees fugitive fish alive
in the ocean deep
that will not be caught,
or this tiresome job
or pulling fish from a net
and laying them dead
upon sand?

by Antonio Machado
from Times Alone
Wesleyan University Press, 1983

Hay dos modos de conciencia
una es luz, y otra, paciencia.
Una estriba en alumbrar
un poquito el hondo mar;
otra, en hacier penitencia
con caña o red, y esperar
el pez, como pescador.
Dime tü: ¿Cuál es major?
¿Conciencia de visionario
que mira en el hondo acuario
peces vivos,
fugitivos,
que no se pueden pescar,
o esa maldita faena
de ir arrojando a la arena,
muertos, las peces del mar?

Maria Konnikova in The New York Times:

THERE’S an adage you hear most any time you mention con artists: You can’t cheat an honest man. It’s a comforting defense against vulnerability, but is it actually true? No, as it turns out; honesty has precious little to do with it. Equally blameless is greed, at least in the traditional sense. What matters instead is greed of a different sort: a deep need to believe in a version of the world where everything really is for the best — at least when it comes to us.

…Take love. Joan (not her actual name; why will be clear soon enough), a savvy New Yorker, found out after not only dating but living with her boyfriend, Greg (also not his real name), that she had fallen for an impostor. “He was wonderful, funny, kind and generous,” she recalled. “He was kind of improbable, like where you would mention almost anything, like deep-sea diving, he’d be like, ‘Oh, here’s how to do this.’ And then it would turn out that he’s either done it or manufactured a suit for someone else who did,” she says. “He knew how to set bones — he’d been a paramedic. He built me a kitchen — he knew how to make stuff. He knew how to cure things and take care of sick people.” That, and he had created an entire persona for her benefit, complete with a false background, a fake position at a lab at a prestigious research university and an apocryphal family history. Everything he’d ever told her about himself was a lie.

…Stories are one of the most powerful forces of persuasion available to us, especially stories that fit in with our view of what the world should be like. Facts can be contested. Stories are far trickier. I can dismiss someone’s logic, but dismissing how I feel is harder. And the stories the grifter tells aren’t real-world narratives — reality-as-is is dispiriting and boring. They are tales that seem true, but are actually a manipulation of reality. The best confidence artist makes us feel not as if we’re being taken for a ride but as if we are genuinely wonderful human beings who are acting the way wonderful human beings act and getting what we deserve. We like to feel that we are exceptional, and exceptional individuals are not chumps.

More here.

Barbara Ehrenreich in In These Times:

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity—5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women—though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

More here.

Katherine Rowland in Aeon:

Julie still loves her husband. What’s more, her life – from the dog, to the kids, to the mortgaged house – is built around their partnership. She doesn’t want to end her marriage, but in the absence of desire she feels like a ‘miserable fraud’.

‘I never imagined I would ever be in the self-help section in the book store,’ she says, but now her bedside table heaves with such titles as Sex Again (2012) by Jill Blakeway: ‘Despite what you see on movies and TV, Americans have less sex than people in any other country’; Rekindling Desire (2014) by Barry and Emily McCarthy: ‘Is sex more work than play in your marriage? Do you schedule it in like a dentist appointment?’; Wanting Sex Again (2012) by Laurie Watson: ‘If you feel like sex just isn’t worth the effort, you’re not alone’; and No More Headaches (2009) by Juli Slattery.

‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says. ‘There’s this expectation to be hot all the time – even for a 40-year-old woman – and then this reality where you’re bored and tired and don’t want to do it.’

Survey upon survey confirms Julie’s impressions, delivering up the conclusion that for many women sex tends toward numbed complacency rather than a hunger to be sated. The generalised loss of sexual interest, known in medical terms as hypoactive sexual desire, is the most common sexual complaint among women of all ages. To believe some of the numbers – 16 per cent of British women experience a lack of sexual desire; 43 per cent of American women are affected by female sexual dysfunction; 10 to 50 per cent of women globally report having too little desire – is to confront the idea that we are in the midst of a veritable crisis of libido.

Today a boisterous debate exists over whether this is merely a product of high – perhaps over-reaching – expectations. Never has the public sphere been so saturated in women’s sexual potential. Billboards, magazines, television all proclaim that healthy women are readily climactic, amorously creative and hungry for sex. What might strike us as liberating, a welcome change from earlier visions of apron-clad passivity, can also become an unnerving source of pressure. ‘Women are coming forward talking about wanting their desire back to the way it was, or better than it was,’ says Cynthia Graham, a psychologist at the University of Southampton and the editor of The Journal of Sex Research. ‘But they are often encouraged to aim for unrealistic expectations and to believe their desire should be unchanging regardless of age or life circumstances.’

Others contend that we are, indeed, in the midst of a creeping epidemic.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Allan Gibbard in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re well known in philosophical circles for developing a theory of meaning. You claim that linguistic meaning is normative. Before discussing what this claim is, can you first say something about the competing theories that you found wanting?

AG: The view in my book isn’t precisely that “linguistic meaning is normative”. Rather, the thesis I explore is that claims as to what something means are normative claims. This is a view about the meaning of ‘meaning’, about the concept of meaning rather than the nature of meaning. For the most part, so far as I can think, there aren’t competitors around to my metatheory of meaning, because writers on meaning don’t generally talk about what the things they say about meaning mean. The issue they address is what a word’s meaning such-and-such consists in.

Metaethics, in contrast, in the wake of G. E. Moore, is a field that explicitly treats the meanings of terms. “Analytic” philosophy more generally for a long time followed Moore and centered on analyses of meanings. From standard taxonomies in metaethics, we can, if we like, devise corresponding views one might take on the meaning of meaning claims: theories that are versions of analytical naturalism, a non-naturalism that says that a term’s meaning is a non-natural property of the term, and perhaps some form of non-cognitivism for meaning claims. The obvious approach to the meaning of meaning claims, though, is to try to define the concept of meaning in naturalistic terms, in terms that can fit into a purely empirical science. A central question for me, then, is why I reject treating meaning as a concept within a purely empirical science.

More here.

Roberto A. Ferdman in the Washington Post:

Words can be inspiring, even when they're arranged into vague, fancy-sounding sequences that seem deep but say nothing.

Take the sentence “wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.” It's complete and utter nonsense. In fact, it was randomly generated by a Web site. And many might have seen this immediately, or realized it after thinking it through.

But the truth is that a surprising number of people would likely have called the bogus statement profound.

“A lot of people are prone to what I call pseudo-profound bulls***,” said Gordon Pennycook, a doctorate student at the University of Waterloo who studies why some people are more easily duped than others.

“Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” was one of many randomly generated sentences Pennycook, along with a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo, used in a new four-part study put together to gauge how receptive people are to nonsense. Pennycook used a Web site — which refers to itself with an expletive for the sentences it produces — to generate the language samples.

More here.

Ingrid Daubechies in Quanta:

At a dinner I attended some years ago, the distinguished differential geometer Eugenio Calabi volunteered to me his tongue-in-cheek distinction between pure and applied mathematicians. A pure mathematician, when stuck on the problem under study, often decides to narrow the problem further and so avoid the obstruction. An applied mathematician interprets being stuck as an indication that it is time to learn more mathematics and find better tools.

I have always loved this point of view; it explains how applied mathematicians will always need to make use of the new concepts and structures that are constantly being developed in more foundational mathematics. This is particularly evident today in the ongoing effort to understand “big data” — data sets that are too large or complex to be understood using traditional data-processing techniques.

Our current mathematical understanding of many techniques that are central to the ongoing big-data revolution is inadequate, at best. Consider the simplest case, that of supervised learning, which has been used by companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple to create voice- or image-recognition technologies with a near-human level of accuracy. These systems start with a massive corpus of training samples — millions or billions of images or voice recordings — which are used to train a deep neural network to spot statistical regularities. As in other areas of machine learning, the hope is that computers can churn through enough data to “learn” the task: Instead of being programmed with the detailed steps necessary for the decision process, the computers follow algorithms that gradually lead them to focus on the relevant patterns.

More here.

Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books:

Strategists will tell you that it is a mistake to fight the battle your enemies want you to fight. You should impose your strategy on them, not let them impose theirs on you. These lessons apply to the struggle with the leaders of ISIS. We have applied pressure upon them in Syria; they have replied with atrocious attacks in Ankara, Beirut, and now Paris. They are trying to provoke an apocalyptic confrontation with the Crusader infidels. We should deny them this opportunity.

ISIS wants to convince the world of the West’s indifference to the suffering of Muslims; so we should demonstrate the opposite. ISIS wants to drag Syria ever further into the inferno; so ending the Syrian war should become the first priority of the Obama administration’s final year in office. Already Secretary of State John Kerry has brought together the Russians, Iranians, and Saudis to develop the outlines of a transition in Syria. Sooner rather than later, no matter how difficult this may prove, the meetings in Vienna will have to include representatives of the Syrian regime and non-ISIS Syrian fighters. The goal would be to establish a cease-fire between the regime and its opponents, so that the fight against ISIS can be waged to a conclusion and displaced Syrians can return home. Destroying the ISIS project to establish a caliphate will not put an end to jihadi nihilism, but it will decisively erode ISIS’s ideological allure.

A successful campaign against nihilism will have to resist nihilism itself. If, as Gilles Kepel, a French specialist on Islam, has argued, ISIS is trying to provoke civil war in France, then the French state must not deploy tactics that will lose it the loyalty of its most vulnerable and susceptible citizens.

More here.