Ali Davis in Bitter Empire:

14. Ted Cruz

Let’s be clear here: Ted Cruz is not just the worst presidential candidate to have on your side in a bar fight. He is the worst possible human being to have on your side in a bar fight. And it’s not only because when he speaks he sounds like Eddie Murphy doing his nerd character. It’s that everyone hates Ted Cruz, and they hate him for a reason. Not just Democrats, everyone. Ted Cruz is famously and vigorously loathed by everyone in his own party. Fellow Republican Bob Dole has been out of politics for like 20 years and even he takes the time to hate Ted Cruz.

That is because Ted Cruz is on nobody’s side in any fight but that of Ted Cruz, and he’s more than happy to tank the side he’s supposed to be on if it will win him even the tiniest personal gain. Elderly moneyed relatives of Cruz must get distinctly jumpy when he comes to visit.

This isn’t just a warning about having Cruz on your side in a bar fight; don’t even enter the same bar as Cruz. As Cruz’s government shutdown stunt illustrates, he’s the guy who will goad, insult, and posture until you’re suddenly in a brawl you never wanted or needed to have. Once the fists start flying, he scoops the tips off the tables and weasels out the back.

Do not have Ted Cruz on your side in a bar fight.

More here. [Thanks to Kaitlin Solomine.]

As a kid, I enrolled in a study whose results were never published—meaning I'll live the rest of my life with a heart implant, but may never know how well it actually works.

Emma Yasinski in The Atlantic:

I was 7 years old when my doctor told my parents that watching and waiting was no longer an option.

I’d been diagnosed in the first year of my life with an atrial-septal defect, a hole in the heart that sends blood flowing the wrong way, forcing the right side of the heart to work harder than it should. In some cases the hole closes on its own during early childhood, but mine hadn’t shown any change, and now my heart was beginning to grow unevenly. Without surgery, I would face an adulthood characterized by fatigue, shortness of breath, and possibly heart failure. To prevent these things, a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia would have to slice open my chest, crack my sternum, and stitch the hole in my heart together.

But there was another option, the doctor explained: He’d heard of a clinical trial that was recruiting pediatric patients with my condition. If I were placed in the experimental group, a cardiologist would insert a catheter into my upper thigh and direct it toward the hole in my heart. The catheter would deliver a tiny, metal mesh umbrella, which would cover the hole in my heart until my cells grew over it, making the umbrella a permanent part of my body. I would be in the hospital for just a weekend, with no broken ribs, no cardio-bypass machine, and no huge scar on my chest.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Quanta:

Eight decades have passed since physicists realized that the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity don’t fit together, and the puzzle of how to combine the two remains unsolved. In the last few decades, researchers have pursued the problem in two separate programs—string theory and loop quantum gravity—that are widely considered incompatible by their practitioners. But now some scientists argue that joining forces is the way forward.

Among the attempts to unify quantum theory and gravity, string theory has attracted the most attention. Its premise is simple: Everything is made of tiny strings. The strings may be closed unto themselves or have loose ends; they can vibrate, stretch, join or split. And in these manifold appearances lie the explanations for all phenomena we observe, both matter and space-time included.

Loop quantum gravity, by contrast, is concerned less with the matter that inhabits space-time than with the quantum properties of space-time itself. In loop quantum gravity, or LQG, space-time is a network. The smooth background of Einstein’s theory of gravity is replaced by nodes and links to which quantum properties are assigned. In this way, space is built up of discrete chunks. LQG is in large part a study of these chunks.

This approach has long been thought incompatible with string theory.

More here.

Julia Medew in The Age:

For as long as the blue-eyed Shaw sisters can remember, they knew that their parents planned to one day take their own lives.

It was often a topic of conversation. Patricia and Peter Shaw would discuss with their three daughters their determination to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, palliative care units – any institution that would threaten their independence in old age.

Having watched siblings and elderly friends decline, Pat and Peter spoke of their desire to choose the time and manner of their deaths.

To this end, the Brighton couple became members of Exit International, the pro-euthanasia group run by Philip Nitschke that teaches people peaceful methods to end their own lives.

The family had a good line in black humour. The three sisters recall telephone conversations with their mother in which she would joke about the equipment their father had bought after attending Exit workshops. “He’s in the bedroom testing it,” Pat would quip.

More here.

W.D. Snodgrass in Paris Review:

From “Dabbling in Corruption,” an essay by W. D. Snodgrass, in our Spring 1994 issue. Snodgrass was born on this day in 1926; he died in 2009. Here, he recalls seeing Robert Frost read at a Washington D.C. poetry conference in October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at full tilt. Frost was eighty-eight then, and, as Snodgrass writes, “obviously in his last months”; he died the following January.

Our luncheon with Jacqueline Kennedy that day was suddenly canceled—rumor had it she was in a cave somewhere in a western state. Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles were steaming toward Cuba; American war ships were steaming toward them. If they met in mid-Atlantic, World War III would almost certainly begin; Washington would be wiped out in hours …

By the time [of Frost’s reading], I was even more drunk and … did not dare register what was happening until a day or so later. Frost began, as he almost never did, by reading someone else’s poem: “Shine, Perishing Republic” by Robinson Jeffers. The title alone might have outraged his audience but they were so preconditioned to reverence that nothing else could reach them. Moving to his own poem, “October,” he drew special attention to its relevance for the current autumnal crisis:

O hushed October morning mild.
The leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind if it be wild,
Should waste them all.

His next poem, “November,” developed that figure:

We saw leaves go to glory, …
And then to end the story
Get beaten down and pasted
In one wild day of rain.
We heard “’Tis Over” roaring.
A year of leaves was wasted.
Oh, we make a boast of storing,
Of saving up and keeping
But only by ignoring …
By denying and ignoring
The waste of nations warring.

He said that this was no waste “if it’s toward some meaning. But you can call it waste you can call it expense. Just for this evening.”

More here.

Look Not to Memories

wear your colors
like a present person
today is
here & now

let the innocent past
be
in dignity:
broken wing
wilted lily
shroud

don’t look back
the goodbook
advises
lest you become
a pillar of salt

…and I’m a fool
for not discarding
my worn-out
bags of guilt

by Angela de Hoyos
from After Atzlan, Latino Poets of the Nineties
publisher David R. Godine, Boston

Ed Yong in National Geographic:

“If you ask people what animal eyes are used for, they’ll say: same thing as human eyes. But that’s not true. It’s not true at all.”

In his lab at Lund University in Sweden, Dan-Eric Nilsson is contemplating the eyes of a box jellyfish. Nilsson’s eyes, of which he has two, are ice blue and forward facing. In contrast, the box jelly boasts 24 eyes, which are dark brown and grouped into four clusters called rhopalia. Nilsson shows me a model of one in his office: It looks like a golf ball that has sprouted tumors. A flexible stalk anchors it to the jellyfish.

“When I first saw them, I didn’t believe my own eyes,” says Nilsson. “They just look weird.”

Four of the six eyes in each rhopalium are simple light-detecting slits and pits. But the other two are surprisingly sophisticated; like Nilsson’s eyes, they have light-focusing lenses and can see images, albeit at lower resolution.

Nilsson uses his eyes to, among other things, gather information about the diversity of animal vision. But what about the box jelly? It is among the simplest of animals, just a gelatinous, pulsating blob with four trailing bundles of stinging tentacles. It doesn’t even have a proper brain—merely a ring of neurons running around its bell. What information could it possibly need?

More here.

Nakul Krishna in The Point:

I was summoned to my tutor’s office a day or so after I’d arrived in Oxford. It was the last day of summer. A bumpkin from the tropics, I’d never seen an autumn before. I watched the first leaves falling outside his window and heard the eighteenth-century staircase creaking with the weight of suitcases being heaved into new rooms. He told me I was to study moral philosophy that term and that if I wanted a head start on the reading I could get going on—he reached for his bookshelf with the air of someone going through a practiced routine—this book:Morality: An Introduction to Ethics by Bernard Williams.

My parents were part of the educated Indian middle class who approved of books only as long as they were called, say, Advanced Statistics; when they caught me with a copy of Middlemarch they told me I oughtn’t to be reading storybooks at my age. My adolescent rebellion consisted in spending my pocket money on dog-eared paperbacks with titles like The Logic of the Hydrogen Bomb or Trade Unionism and the Woman Question, and the opinions I acquired from them had somehow got me through my scholarship interview for Oxford. The blue-and-black Pelican before me belonged to the same reassuring aesthetic universe as these other books.

More here.

Robert Greenleaf Brice in his blog:

One topic that President Obama did not discuss during his final State of the Union address was his use of drone strikes in the so-called “War on Terror.” Perhaps this is not surprising, as the President and the CIA have permitted drone strikes to occur under an unknown set of rules, supported with an unknown set of reasons. But as someone who works in epistemology, I find the level of uncertainty here reckless, and as a citizen, I find it terrifying.

One year ago, on January 14, 2015, a U.S. drone strike inadvertently killed two hostages, a 73-year-old American, Warren Weinstein, and a 37-year-old Italian, Giovanni Lo Porto. While President Obama said that he grieves “when any innocent life is taken,” he also said that preliminary assessments indicate that this particular strike “was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct our counterterrorism efforts.” Included among these guidelines is a strict policy—mentioned briefly in a speech at the National Defense University and more fully articulated in the President’s Counterterrorism Policy and Procedure Directive—which requires “near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” But what does it mean to be “nearly certain”? Is such a level of assessment even attainable?

Philosophers have been evaluating the requirements that must be met for a person to claim that they “know something” at least since Plato first raised the issue in his dialogue the Theaetetus. Here, knowledge was defined as “true belief combined with a logos,” or “justification. That is, knowledge is justified true belief. A person’s belief may or may not be true, but their claim of belief doesn’t require any additional proof. It is enough that they say they believe it.

More here.

Mist

Low-anchored cloud,
Newfoundland air,
Fountain-head and source of rivers,
Dew-cloth, dream-drapery,
And napkin spread by fays;
Drifting meadow of the air,
Where bloom the daisied banks and violets,
And in whose fenny labyrinth
The bittern booms and heron wades;
Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers,—
Bear only perfumes and the scent
Of healing herbs to just men’s fields.
.

by Henry David Thoreau
.
.

Ian Morris at The New York Times:

Afonso de Albuquerque died 500 years ago, after spending a dozen years terrorizing coastal cities from Yemen to Malaysia. He enriched thousands of men and killed tens of thousands more. Despite never commanding more than a few dozen ships, he built one of the first modern intercontinental empires. And this was just the beginning: The next step, he said, was to sail up the Red Sea, destroy Mecca, Medina and the Prophet Muhammad’s body and liberate the Holy Land. Perhaps, he mused, he could destroy Islam altogether.

The 18 years between December 1497, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and December 1515, when Albuquerque died off the Indian coast, were a pivotal point in history, and in “Conquerors” Roger Crowley tells the story with style. It is a classic ripping yarn, packed with excitement, violence and cliffhangers. Its larger-than-life characters are at once extraordinary and repulsive, at one moment imagining the world in entirely new ways and at the next braying with delight over massacring entire cities.

Crowley’s craftsmanship comes through most clearly in telling this story of relentless, one-sided slaughter without glutting the reader with gore.

more here.

Dustin Illingworth at The Quarterly Conversation:

Early on in Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, the narrator offers this bit of difficult wisdom: “Any one of us, over the course of our lives, can know many different existences. . . . Not many, however, are given the opportunity to wear a different skin.” It’s an implied celebration of literature, one that weaves itself into the fabric of Oblivion. Locked as we are within a given body, temperament, and time, literature can transport us, can transmute textual experience into an expansion of inwardness, an amplification of consciousness. The best books—which Agualusa’s charmingly melancholic novel approaches—haunt us and, indeed, cover us like “a different skin.” Here, however, writing is even more than that: for Ludo, the agoraphobic and mysteriously damaged protagonist, writing is a matter of life and death, a story she scrawls on the walls of her home with charcoal. Fragmented and densely layered, Oblivion unfolds within the possibility—and the tension—inherent between writing and identity, text and meaning, story and life.

Set in the immediate aftermath of the Angolan revolution that overthrew Portugal’s dictatorship, Oblivion traces Ludo’s quietly evocative life as “a foreign body” in a new city, her fear of the outside world such that she must wear a box to water her balcony garden. After moving from Portugal to Angola with her sister and brother-in-law, Ludo’s existence is dismantled when neither return from a farewell party of fleeing Portuguese on the eve of Angolan independence. Trapped by her agoraphobia, her only lifelines to the outside world severed, Ludo literally walls herself into her modest apartment, beginning a magical, tragic, decades-long story abounding with a positively Dickensian cast of military men, street urchins, reporters, entertainers, assassins, and animals (wild and domestic).

more here.

John Cornwell at the Financial Times:

Here is his bid. Francis has written a book, The Name of God is Mercy, with a powerful message for the world’s 1.2bn Roman Catholics. We are all sinners, he is saying, all guilty; but God’s mercy is infinite and so is the mercy of God’s Church.

Published this week in more than 80 countries, the book may console Catholics who have struggled to keep within the Church’s rules. But it will anger those for whom the rules are everything. It is also likely to puzzle lay and clerical Catholics with sensitive consciences. Is the pope saying that the rules can be broken? Is he saying, for example, that the ban on contraception has ended? That it is all right to be a practising homosexual? The answer to these questions is not straightforward. His critics may well accuse him of having over-reached himself.

Francis has only one fully functioning lung and suffers from chronic sciatica. He rises at 4:30, starting his day with two hours’ prayer. He takes no holidays. Last year was a helter-skelter. There were back-to-back meetings with recalcitrant church committees. In October he chaired the second of two contentious synods on the family — high-level clerical talking-shops in which elderly celibate prelates squabbled heatedly over the status of Catholic divorcees who remarry.

more here.

Terry Eagleton in The Guardian:

Christopher Hitchens was the ultimate champagne socialist, though as his career progressed the champagne gradually took over from the socialism. Known in his student days as Hypocritchens for his habit of marching for the poor and dining with the rich, he was a public school renegade in a long English tradition of well-bred bohemians and upper-class dissenters. Had he been born a little earlier, he might well have been a raffish spy propping up the bar of a Pall Mall club. Like a querulous infant, he wanted everything and he wanted enormous helpings of it. He moved with aplomb from squatting in Afghan caves to holding forth about Saul Bellow at New York dinner parties, and endured a number of forms of torture, from being experimentally waterboarded to being thwacked on the backside by Margaret Thatcher. (He once actually voted for her, though whether this was out of masochistic gratitude for the walloping or because she sank the Belgrano is hard to say.) He also spent his life courting anybody who was anybody. It wasn’t easy to do this while maintaining his public image as a scourge of the governing powers, but the Great Contrarian had long experience of such duplicity. His desire to belabour the establishment was matched only by his eagerness to belong to it. Fearless, self-admiring, effortlessly eloquent and assiduously self-promoting, he combined the pugnacity of a Norman Mailer with the wit of an Oscar Wilde.

For the most part, however, Hitchens was a ferociously partisan thinker. Few journalists, for example, have written with such passion and rancour about corrupt Arab regimes. It is just that his polemics against the Arabs would have sounded a lot more convincing had he not also dismissed the concept of Islamophobia as a liberal fantasy and compared the burqa to the Ku Klux Klan hood.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The New York Times:

The sentimental title of “The Lovers” suggests a hopeful tale of youthful romance, of passion and perseverance against the backdrop of a war-ravaged Afghanistan. Zakia and Ali, the journalist Rod Nordland’s Afghan Romeo and Juliet, are Tajik and Hazara, Sunni and Shia, disparate ethnicities and rived sects. They live in Bamiyan, where the Taliban destroyed two famed sandstone Buddhas in 2001. They fall in love as teenagers, exchanging flirty glances in the fields of their village, skirting elders and convention. Soon their parents find out; marriage is deemed impossible, and Zakia runs away to a shelter. The two elope but remain sentenced to a life on the run, with Ali facing criminal charges after Zakia’s family lodges a kidnapping case against him. Zakia and Ali’s tale is, however, only the epidermal layer of “The Lovers”; underneath is an insight into the architecture of Western saviordom and the choices it imposes on those on whom it bestows its benevolence. “I would become their best hope to survive, entangling myself in their lives in ways that threatened my own values and professional ethics,” ­Nordland writes, admitting that his articles on the couple in The New York Times exposed them to danger. But words and deeds rarely match, and if Nordland, who is The Times’s Kabul bureau chief, perceived threats in pursuing the story, his account does not betray such sensitivity.

…The episode poses vexing questions about the disparities in power between storyteller and subject, American and Afghan; but ­Nordland never unpacks the complications of making the couple so notorious. It is a pity, for his skills as a journalist are evident in his rendering of this love blossoming against all odds. It is in his efforts to mold the story into an example of the righteousness of Western intervention — and of their ultimately feminist intentions — that he falters, as indeed have those efforts. Violence against women in Afghanistan increased 25 percent from 2012 to 2013. In the crude illogic of Afghan anti-­imperial resistance, the subjugation of women is being reified as some reclamation of cultural authenticity, where women who run off to shelters funded by the occupying American enemy are seen as less loyally Afghan.

More here.