Sughra Raza. Reed Reflections. March, 2015.

Digital photograph.

Christie Aschwanden in FiveThirtyEight:

As the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, nutritious/indulgent, slimming/fattening — but which foods belong where depends on whom you ask.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently released its latest guidelines, which define a healthy diet as one that emphasizes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or nonfat dairy products, seafood, legumes and nuts while reducing red and processed meat, refined grains, and sugary foods and beverages.¹ Some cardiologists recommend a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, the American Diabetes Association gives the nod to bothlow-carbohydrate and low-fat diets, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine promotes a vegetarian diet. Ask a hard-bodied CrossFit aficionado, and she may champion a “Paleo” diet based on foods our Paleolithic ancestors (supposedly) ate. My colleague Walt Hickey swears by the keto diet.

Who’s right? It’s hard to say. When it comes to nutrition, everyone has an opinion. What no one has is an airtight case. The problem begins with a lack of consensus on what makes a diet healthy. Is the aim to make you slender? To build muscles? To keep your bones strong? Or to prevent heart attacks or cancer or keep dementia at bay? Whatever you’re worried about, there’s no shortage of diets or foods purported to help you. Linking dietary habits and individual foods to health factors is easy — ridiculously so — as you’ll soon see from the little experiment we conducted.

More here.

David Edmonds reviews The Stone Reader edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, in The Philosophers' Magazine:

Many newspapers have regular columns on science. But few of these columns are dedicated to a discussion of the nature or purpose of science. Almost all newspapers have regular pages devoted to sport. But it would be unusual to have an article that grappled with the meaning of sport. Yet in various ways several philosophers in The Stone Reader—a collection of short, philosophy essays from the New York Times’s philosophy blog The Stone—seek to address the existential questions, “What Is Philosophy?” and “What Is A Philosopher?”

What is a Philosopher? is the title of the first essay in this volume, written by Professor Simon Critchley who also acts as The Stone Reader’s co-editor (alongside Peter Catapano of The New York Times). Critchley’s academic career began in the UK, where he developed an interest in thinkers from the continental tradition, such as Heidegger and Derrida. Just over a decade ago he moved to the New School for Social Research where he has continued to write prolifically, on a wide variety of subjects – a recent book was on suicide – with an essayistic style that again owes more to a European than an anglo-American tradition of philosophy.

The What is Philosophy? questions hits a vulnerable spot not because philosophy has fuzzy borders. All disciplines have fuzzy borders. Science has fuzzy borders. Even activities like sport have fuzzy borders.. The International Olympic Committee classifies the card-game bridge as a sport. A recent High Court decision in the UK has determined that it is not (a decision that matters, because bridge clubs and bridge tournaments cannot now appeal for funding from a pot of money reserved for sport). Still, philosophy is notoriously difficult to define. A few years ago, on the philosophy podcast I co-run with Nigel Warburton (www.philosophybites.com) we put the ‘What Is Philosophy?’ question to 50 different philosophers and received 50 different answers. There isn’t quite the same difficulty in demarcating the rough edges of maths or French literature.

Part of the problem is historical. The meaning of philosophy has been in a state of perpetual evolution. There was a time when the sciences were situated within philosophy. Aristotle wrote about biology and in his day, Sir Isaac Newton was described as a “natural philosopher”. Since then, bit by bit, chunks of academic territory have split off, leaving the original land mass in danger of appearing like a shrunken and barren island. Physics went, then, in the 19th century, so did biology. Psychology made a successful bid for independence in the early 20th century as too did linguistics. Broadly, philosophy has become the analysis of a set of issues that cannot be resolved empirically.

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Richard Marshall interviews Torbjörn Tännsjö in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Why are you a moral realist and what difference does this make to how you go about investigating morals from, for example, a non-realist?

TT: I am indeed a moral realist. In particular, I believe that one basic question, what we ought to do, period (the moral question), is a genuine one. There exists a true answer to it, which is independent of our thought and conceptualisation. My main argument in defence of the position is this. It is true (independently of our conceptualisation) that it is wrong to inflict pain on a sentient creature for no reason (she doesn’t deserve it, I haven’t promised to do it, it is not helpful to this creature or to anyone else if I do it, and so forth). But if this is a truth, existing independently of our conceptualisation, then at least one moral fact (this one) exists and moral realism is true. We have to accept this, I submit, unless we can find strong reasons to think otherwise. Moral nihilism comes with a price we can now see. It implies that it is not wrong (independently of our conceptualisation) to do what I describe above; this does not mean that it is all right to do it either, of course, but yet, for all this, I find this implication from nihilism hard to digest. It is not difficult to accept for moral reasons. If it is false both that it is wrong to perform this action and that it is right to perform it, then we need to engage in difficult issues in deontic logic as well. So we should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so. So are there any good arguments in defence of moral nihilism? I think not and I try to defend this claim in my From Reasons to Norms. On the Basic Question in Ethics (2010). It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy. What initiated the interest in moral realism was the fact that, in 1977, two authors, John Mackie and Gilbert Harman, independently of one another, put forward arguments in defence of the nihilist position. This triggered an interest in what had up to then been a non-issue. When thinking carefully about their arguments for nihilism I didn’t find them convincing. I was not alone. At first there was a trend towards moral realism in its “Cornell”, i.e naturalist, style. In my book Moral Realism (1990) I didn’t take a stand on the naturalist/non-naturalist issue. I am now a decided non-naturalist realist. And today we may even speak of a trend towards non-naturalist moral realism (for example Derek Parfit, David Enoch, apart from myself).

Being a moral realist I see normative ethics as a search of the truth about our obligations and a search of explanation; the idea is that moral principles can help us to a moral explanation of our particular obligations.

More here.

Janelle Harris in The Root:

Elizabeth Winkler in The New Republic:

As France marks the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, French officials are stepping up efforts to counter violent extremism. One measure involves widening police powers to conduct raids and detain suspected terrorists. The Supreme Court is reviewing a draft bill that would make these temporary, state-of-emergency tools, implemented after the November 2015 attacks on multiple sites in Paris, permanent. The state-backed Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (French Council of Islam) has also announced its intention to issue certificates to imams who acknowledge French values and demonstrate their non-radical credentials.

Some worry that such measures will play into the hands of the Islamic State and other extremist groups. Increasing police powers could endanger respect for civil liberties, while imposing governmental control of Islam in France could drive more Muslims to radical sects. It would arguably be more effective to focus efforts on improving the integration of Muslims, many of whom feel alienated in French society. This would involve examining educational and career opportunities for immigrants and their families—paths that will offer them upward mobility and a better chance to assimilate into the workforce. But it would also mean revisiting a pillar of France’s political and cultural identity: the policy of laïcité.

Laïcité is France’s principle of secularism in public affairs, aimed at fostering a post-religious society. It developed during the French Revolution, which sought to dismantle the Catholic Church in France along with the monarchy, and was enshrined in the 1905 law on the Separation of the Churches and the State. Broadly, the idea refers to the freedom of citizens and of public institutions from the influence of organized religion. (“Laïcité” derives from the French term for laity—non-clergy or lay people.)

It goes further than the separation of church and state in other nations, however, by prohibiting religious expression in the public sphere. In early 20th-century France—a fairly homogenous, Christian nation—this was a straightforward attempt to protect government from the sway of the Catholic Church. But in modern France—a decidedly more heterogeneous and multi-religious society—this insistence on secularism is thorny. As a critic argued in Le Figaro, laïcité is unintelligible and even shocking to many Muslims, who view it as “an injunction to abandon their religion.” Instead of enhancing social harmony, it may actually be exacerbating religious and racial tensions.

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Kamran Matin in The Conversation:

Ever since Saudi Arabia’s execution of Shia dissident Nimr al-Nimr was met with violent protests at the Saudi embassy in Iran, the two already hostile countries have been at diplomatic loggerheads. But while Saudi Arabia’s actions suggest a unity of purpose at the highest level, the Iranian reaction has not been uniform.

The Iranian government has severely criticised the attacks on Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic missions. President Hasan Rouhani attributed the attacks to “rogue elements” who “want to damage the dignity of the Islamic Republic”.

By contrast, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and officials close to his office such as Tehran’s leader of Friday prayers, have tacitly or openly supported the protesters.

The official media, meanwhile, is similarly divided with reformist and pro-government newspapers and websites taking a critical but more measured line while conservative media and those close to the security and intelligence establishments have adopted a more aggressive tone.

These conflicting reactions stem from the deep ambivalence at the core of the Iranian state, which combines centres of power both popular and divine.

That contradiction is reflected in the country’s official name: the ‘Islamic Republic’ of Iran. This means that different and often competing ideological factions are constantly trying to dominate the state and its vast economic resources, and to shape Iran’s strategic direction both internally and externally.

Such rivalries can become particularly intense at critical domestic junctures and produce unintended consequences.

More here.

Lewis Dartnell in The Telegraph:

Dark matter is one of the most intensely studied subjects in particle physics and cosmology today. It’s certainly curious stuff, behaving in ways unlike anything in our everyday experience. Indeed, dark matter has never actually been isolated or studied in the lab. Its very existence has only been inferred indirectly by its influence on things we can see. But what is dark matter? When astronomers look at a rotating galaxy, they can work out the mass of the stars and gas clouds within it, and thus the strength of that galaxy’s gravity, as well as how fast it is spinning and so how much gravitational force is required to hold it all together. The problem is that the two figures don’t match. Galaxies like our own apparently contain far more mass than the visible matter of stars and nebulae, or else they would have flung themselves apart in their rapid twirl. The implication is that there must also be something unseen, dark matter, the gravity of which holds it all together. We infer dark matter, as Lisa Randall puts it rather wonderfully in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, in the same way we would deduce the invisible presence of a celebrity in the midst of an excited, jostling crowd.

…The history of life on Earth is punctuated by mass extinctions, including that notorious asteroid or comet collision 65 million years ago. Various studies over recent decades have looked for a periodicity in the impact rate – the possibility that impacts on the Earth come in regular waves – and have hypothesised triggers, such as the elongated orbit of an unseen Planet X or perhaps a companion star to the Sun, dubbed Nemesis. A huge swarm of icy bodies encircle the Sun on the very outer edges of the solar system, known as the Oort cloud; if some of these were to have their orbit disturbed by an external gravitational influence, they could swoop down into the inner solar system as comets, and potentially slam into the Earth. But none of these proposed triggers have stood up to further study. Could there be a link, Randall posits, between the rate of impacts on the Earth and dark matter in the galaxy? Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a great rotating spiral of stars, and as our sun orbits the centre, it also bobs up and down through the flat plane of the galaxy: our solar system’s overall motion around the galaxy is like that of a fairground carousel horse. It is this motion, claims Randall, that could cause regular waves of impacts on Earth.

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Frank Bruni in The New York Times:

Making light of so much bloodshed, Cruz told Iowans the story of a Texas woman who was pulled over by a police officer. She supposedly informed the officer that she had a Glock affixed to her hip, a .38 revolver in one boot, a single-shot derringer in the other and a double-barrel shotgun under the seat. “Goodness gracious,” the officer said. “What on earth are you afraid of?” “Not a dang thing,” the woman responded. Cruz is unsettling enough in isolation, but it’s the combination of him and Trump that really galls. And it galls not just Democrats but other Republicans. “At some point, we have to deal with the fact that there are at least two candidates who could utterly destroy the Republican bench for a generation if they became the nominee,” Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told Politico’s Alex Isenstadt recently. In the current issue of Time magazine, David Von Drehle put it this way: “The G.O.P. has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikaze.” It’s a king-size bed, and they’re all under an eiderdown of obnoxiousness. From the moment Trump announced his candidacy, he chose a potty mouth over a silver tongue, and a shocking number of Americans thrilled to that, regarding crudeness as the greatest form of candor. From the moment Cruz arrived in the United States Senate, he chose tirades over teamwork, becoming “so unpopular that at one point not a single Republican senator would support his demand for a roll-call vote,” The Times’s Jennifer Steinhauer wrote last month, adding that he was left “standing on the Senate floor like a man with bird flu, everyone scattering to avoid him.”

But what repelled Republican senators is somehow beckoning Republican voters: In a Gallup survey released on Friday, 61 percent of them said that they had a favorable impression of him, while only 16 percent said that they had an unfavorable one, giving him a “net favorable” rating of plus 45, the best in the Republican field. I guess bird flu is the new catnip. Many analysts explain all of this in terms of a potent anger among Americans. They say Trump and Cruz lend voice to it. But that’s not exactly right. Anger can have a noble dimension — as a response to injustice, as the grist for change — and neither Trump nor Cruz projects much nobility or tries to, for that matter. They’re not so much angry as petulant, impudent. When Trump tells rivals on the debate stage that they’re ugly or unpopular and when he ridicules a journalist’s disability, he’s not being angry. He’s just being a jerk. And when he crows incessantly about his deal-making genius, his billions and his poll numbers, he’s not stoking constructive passions. He’s just stroking himself.

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I Called God

I called God but there's no
God. But there was
God because I called
God. And if there wasn't
God what
did I call? And I called, I called
God. And there was, for a split
second, and there will be. He won’t
die. As long as
I keep calling

God.
.

by Adi Assis
from Haneshek Haham (Firearms)
publisher: Helicon, Tel Aviv, 2009
translation: 2015, Shelly Marder

Claire Chambers in Dawn:

Shakespeare’s 1603 tragedy Othello has long been ripe for adaptation and postcolonial rewritings. As the Pakistani novelist Zulfikar Ghose observes in his book This Mortal Knowledge, Othello is a truly noble man, in contrast to the calumny of “lascivious Moor” with which Iago taints him. In fact, if Othello has a fault, Ghose suggests that it is his “sexual frugality”, which leads him to make too great a distinction between body and spirit. This enables Iago to work on both Othello’s jealousy about his wife and on the “base racial instinct” Iago shares with his fellow white Venetians. The consequence is that a “beast with two backs” is created — not through sexual union but the conjoining of Desdemona and Othello in death. With its Molotov cocktail of false friendship, racism, military careers, and extreme sexual possessiveness, Othello proves irresistible to many artists from postcolonial backgrounds.

In 1966, the Sudanese author Tayeb Salih published an Arabic-language novel Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal. It was translated into the English title Season of Migration to the North in 1969 and is now a Penguin Modern Classic. In this cornerstone text for postcolonialism, Salih depicts the cultural conflict that ensues when two rural Sudanese Muslims move to Britain and then return to Africa.

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Neil Irwin in the NYT's The Upshot:

Did unemployment get better or worse during Ronald Reagan’s presidency? In a 1988 survey, some 80 percent of dedicated Republicans accurately said it had improved, compared with 30 percent of loyal Democrats. In the 1990s, the pattern reversed on a range of factual questions about economic and fiscal issues. In a 1997 survey, for example, Republicans were far less likely than Democrats to acknowledge that the budget deficit had declined during the Bill Clinton administration.

As an economics writer, I see the same thing anecdotally. When I wrote articles recently about the unemployment rate’s dip to 5 percent, I received vehement responses from conservatives convinced that the Obama administration was cooking the numbers. They were not so different from responses I received from liberals when the jobless rate was at that level in 2005, during the George W. Bush administration.

In other words, when you ask people about the economy, the answers are less a statement of objectivity and more like what they’d say if you’d asked which pro football team was the best. That has important implications for democracy. How can people judge whether a party is effective if there is no sense of objective truth? And it could even have implications for the economy itself if, for example, conservative-leaning business executives freeze hiring or investment when the president doesn’t share their politics.

But new research from two teams of political scientists adds a wrinkle to these findings. It turns out that the partisan bias in how people answer factual questions about the economy is diminished by this one weird trick: Pay people.

That is a conclusion reached in two new papers in The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, one from four scholars led by John G. Bullock at the University of Texas at Austin, the other by Markus Prior of Princeton and two colleagues.

When survey respondents were offered a small cash reward — a dollar or two — for producing a correct answer about the unemployment rate and other economic conditions, they were more likely to be accurate and less likely to produce an answer that fit their partisan biases.

More here.