Franklin Lamb in CounterPunch:

I confess to having recently purchased four children near Ramlet el Baida beach from a stressed-out Syrian woman. I am not sure if she was what she said or if she was a member of one of the human trafficking gangs that operate widely these days in Lebanon selling Syrian children or vulnerable adult women. The vendor-woman claimed to have been a neighbor of the four children in Aleppo and that they lost their parents in the war. They appear in the photo above, sitting on this observer’s motorbike a few days after the sale: two five year old twin girls, a boy about one year and several months, and his eight-year old bigger brother.

She and the children had ended up in Lebanon but she explained to me that she was afraid to register with the UNHCR because she is an illegal and has no ID. The woman told me that she could no longer take care of the shivering children but did not want to just leave them on the street. She would give them all to me for $ 1000 (or I could pick and choose from among the siblings at $ 250 each).

More here.

Scott Santens in the Boston Globe:

On Dec. 2, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words.

Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. Like a whispered word in a foreign language, you may have heard it but couldn’t fully understand.

The language is something called deep learning. And the whispered word was a computer’s use of it to defeat one of the world’s top players in a game called Go. Go is a board game so complex that it can be likened to playing 10 chess matches simultaneously on the same table.

This may sound like a small accomplishment, another feather in the cap of machines as they continue to prove themselves superior in parlor games that humans invented to fill their idle hours. But this feat is about far more than bragging rights. This was considered a “holy grail” level of achievement, and it’s a clear signal that advances in technology are now so exponential that milestones we once thought far away will start arriving rapidly.

More here.

Georg Diez in Der Spiegel:

Jürgen Habermas is angry. He's really angry. He is nothing short of furious — because he takes it all personally.

He leans forward. He leans backward. He arranges his fidgety hands to illustrate his tirades before allowing them to fall back to his lap. He bangs on the table and yells: “Enough already!” He simply has no desire to see Europe consigned to the dustbin of world history.

“I'm speaking here as a citizen,” he says. “I would rather be sitting back home at my desk, believe me. But this is too important. Everyone has to understand that we have critical decisions facing us. That's why I'm so involved in this debate. TheEuropean project can no longer continue in elite modus.”

Enough already! Europe is his project. It is the project of his generation.

Jürgen Habermas, 82, wants to get the word out. He's sitting on stage at the Goethe Institute in Paris. Next to him sits a good-natured professor who asks six or seven questions in just under two hours — answers that take fewer than 15 minutes are not Habermas' style.

Usually he says clever things like: “In this crisis, functional and systematic imperatives collide” — referring to sovereign debts and the pressure of the markets.

Sometimes he shakes his head in consternation and says: “It's simply unacceptable, simply unacceptable” — referring to the EU diktat and Greece's loss of national sovereignty.

More here.

Cédric Gouverneur in Le Monde Diplomatique:

In October 2015 PiS [Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc)] won the parliamentary elections in both the lower house (Sejm) and the Senate, with 37.6% of the vote, against 24.1% for the neoliberals and 8.8% for the populist Kukiz 15. The progressive camp failed to clear the threshold (5% for parties, 8% for coalitions) and have no parliamentary representation. The left — which is divided between United Poland and Poland Together — has had its welfare ideas co-opted by the reactionary right and won no seats. The presidential election was a foretaste of this groundswell of support for the right: the incumbent, Bronislaw Komorowski, was beaten in the second round by the virtually unknown Duda

Despite many attempts, no PiS representative agreed to be interviewed. But there is an insight into the party’s ideology in what foreign minister Witold Waszczykowski told the German tabloid Bild in January: “Who says the world had to evolve according to a Marxist model in a single direction — towards a mixing of cultures and races; a world of cyclists and vegetarians who only use renewable energy and fight all forms of religion? None of this has anything to do with traditional Polish values. It goes against what the majority of Poles hold dear: tradition, a sense of their history, a love of their country, faith in God and normal family life with a man and a woman”.

Conservative values are not the only motivation for PiS voters. The party has found recruits in the Poland of job insecurity and falling living standards concealed behind strong macro-economic indicators; the Poland specialised in manufacturing low-end goods for big European companies, especially German ones; the Poland of pensions of less than $330 a month. Ordinary Poles, like Kalabis and his family, have suffered under neoliberal reforms and often have to choose between a $250-a-month junk contract and emigrating. The nationalist, pro-religion, protectionist, xenophobic PiS has attracted these disappointed people with an ambitious welfare programme: a family allowance of 500 zloty ($130) a month per child, funded through a tax on banks and big business; a minimum wage; and a return to a retirement age of 60 for women and 65 for men (PO had planned to raise it to 67 for both).

Professor Radoslaw Markowski, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, has studied PiS’s evolution: “When they were in power between 2005 and 2007, they were conservative, but economically neoliberal. They have become increasingly populist, xenophobic and Eurosceptic: it’s a form of Catholic nationalism, sweetened with a welfare package.” He identifies three groups of PiS voters: “First, there’s what I call the Smolensk sect, the people who’re convinced that the April 2010 crash was the result of a plot by Donald Tusk and Vladimir Putin. Then there are the practising Catholics, whose knowledge of the world is often limited to what their priest tells them. A third of Poland’s practising Catholics have had experience of the Church’s political propaganda.” Lastly, there are the poor, who are attracted by the party’s welfare programme: “PiS has successfully worked out what workers and peasants want.” The low turnout at the polls — nearly 50% did not vote — did the rest.

More here.

Allison Eck in Nautilus:

Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority.

His caution is understandable. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaption,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned England a somewhat unwelcome nickname: the next Charles Darwin. But England’s story is just as much about language as it is about biology.

There are some 6,800 unique languages in use today. Not every word translates perfectly, and meaning sometimes falls through the cracks. For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods.

Different fields of science, too, are languages unto themselves, and scientific explanations are sometimes just translations. “Red,” for instance, is a translation of the phrase “620-750 nanometer wavelength.” “Temperature” is a translation of “the average speed of a group of particles.” The more complex a translation, the more meaning it imparts. “Gravity” means “the geometry of spacetime.”

What about life? We think we know life when we see it. Darwin’s theory even explains how one form of life evolves into another. But what is the difference between a robin and a rock, when both obey the same physical laws? In other words, how do you say “life” in physics? Some have argued that the word is untranslatable. But maybe it simply needed the right translator.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Michael Strevens in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Are social systems understandable from this point of view using the same probability tools as the natural sciences involving the laws of large numbers? So can we use the same approach with, say, statistical physics and population genetics and areas of economics?

MS: That is a great unsolved question. In the nineteenth century, scientists and government statisticians began to find fairly stable social trends: rates of marriage, suicide, undeliverable letters and other unfortunate events tended to stay much the same from year to year (though the rates differed from place to place). Further, these patterns could be captured quite well using the mathematics of probability, which was fast maturing at the time. There was great hope for a science of society that would replicate the success of the science of inert matter—a “social physics”.

That hope turned out to be premature. Pinning down social and economic trends in the detail we’d like has turned out to be incredibly difficult. Maybe that’s in part because we want more detail from our theories of people than from our theories of molecules. Maybe because social trends change too fast or depend in too complicated a way on environmental factors. Or maybe there are, in some cases at least, no statistical trends at all. Maybe we need another kind of mathematics, different from probability mathematics, to understand these systems. It’s a wonderful topic. I don’t know if I will ever contribute substantially to it myself—time is running out!—but I hope at the very least to make it a more central topic of philosophical discussion.

3:AM: How does this approach to complex systems relate to chaos? Is it kind of what chaos is?

MS: In a sequence of coin tosses, you have short term unpredictability—you never know whether the next toss is going to be heads or tails—and long term predictability—if you toss the coin for long enough, you can be pretty sure that you will get about one half of each side. It’s the same story for all the complex systems whose behavior can be represented using probabilities. You can’t predict, for example, which rabbit will be eaten by which fox the day after tomorrow, but you can predict the approximate rate of rabbit predation (and this number plays a crucial role in ecological and evolutionary models). Here’s an interesting thought: might short-term unpredictability and long-term stability be linked? Might the source of the unpredictability also be a source of the stability? In my book, I show that the answer is yes.

More here.

Todd Gitlin in The Washington Post:

In the past few decades, plutocracy, globalization and compliant governments have betrayed workers, most of whom are white. Their decline began long before NAFTA, with the rise of low-wage foreign economies and a crushing, decades-long assault on the unions that had kept their wages up and their jobs in place. If Trump enters the White House, he cannot solve these problems. However often he fulminates against trade deals, he cannot conjure secure jobs for his fans. His “beautiful wall,” whether built or unbuilt, offers symbolic pleasures, but it would not make them walk taller or elevate their paychecks. Neither would tariffs, for which the price would be high. Then there are the cultural furies that fuel the Trump campaign: As a hefty share of white Americans see it, they’ve been forced to suffer the depredations of a black president whose middle name is Hussein — at this late date, 43 percent of Republicans still think he is a Muslim. What Trump holds out to his thwarted followers are the joys of instant, long-deferred gratification. When his supporters say “he says what he thinks,” they mean what they think and, even more, feel. How thrilling that, at last, a big shot, a winner, stands up for them, promises to wall off the bad guys, or punch them in the face, or both.

Most of all, though, there’s no respectable version of Trump — no Nixon — waiting in the wings to deliver on promises and contain the free-floating hatred. There’s no one to placate the enraged white working class, especially the men, and it’s hard to imagine policies that would make a re-greatened America “take the country away from you guys.” Neither Trump nor his GOP rivals can create that America — not soon, at any rate. Merely having a white president again is unlikely to mollify the angriest white voters. They want more than walls and nastiness; they want a viable, reliable economic life. They want a world where whites have secure, dignified jobs (better jobs, by the way, than immigrants and other upstarts who used to know their place). There’s every reason to believe that they’ll continue to feel victimized by malevolent interlopers: Barack Obama, China, immigrants, Muslims. Their frustration will have no outlet; no deliverance is in sight.

More here.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in Aeon:

So what is a habit? There is consistent agreement throughout this long tradition that a habit is a learned behaviour repeated so often that it becomes involuntary. When it is a repeated behaviour that comports with ideals of health, righteousness, and wisdom, it can go by other names such as ‘spiritual practice’, ‘ritual’, and ‘routine’.

…If we are looking for the origin of the voracious American appetite for self-improvement, however, we have to go back two centuries before Covey, to Benjamin Franklin. For Franklin, cultivating wholesome habits was as crucial as discarding bad ones for the ‘bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection’. Franklin warned that those very behaviours that cunningly ‘took advantage of [our] inattention’ would keep us from ethical improvement. In his Autobiography, the 79-year-old Franklin recalled his youth when church services seemed to hold no promise for his moral perfection. So he took matters into his own hands. He developed a hierarchy of 12 virtues he wanted to become second nature: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity. When a Quaker friend gently reminded him that he had left out one virtue he could use a little more of – humility – Franklin conceded and added it to the list to bring it up to 13. He then figured out the habits that would help ingrain these virtues. For temperance: ‘Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation.’ For tranquillity: ‘Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.’ And for the elusive humility he pulled out the big guns: ‘Imitate Jesus and Socrates.’ Franklin invented what he described as a ‘method’, and what the French philosopher Michel Foucault two centuries later would characterise as a ‘technology of the self’, to track his habits. Today’s habits writers would simply call it a chart. He put the days of the week along the X-axis, the virtues he sought to habituate on the Y-axis; a black dot meant he had slipped up on that day in that virtue, while a column of clear blocks meant a virtuous day – a clear conscience. He included mottos from Cato, Cicero, and the Proverbs of Solomon to inspire him and encourage his practice of particular virtues.

More here.

Matt Phillips in Quartz:

Branko Milanovic looks at the big picture.

During his dozen years as chief economist of the World Bank’s Research Department, he focused on making sense of the all-important economic question that many economists, paradoxically, seem uninterested in: How are people doing?

It’s a deceptively difficult question. To answer it you must determine what you mean by “people.” The average person? The median household? The poorest of the poor? The 1%?

Much also depends on the economic state of various countries and how living costs can be compared across nations. Determining how any one group of people is doing depends on how they rank among neighbors and rivals.

Set to be published next month (April 2016) Milanovic’s new book, Global Inequality, goes well beyond the narrative of rising inequality captured by French economist Thomas Piketty’s surprise 2014 best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In his highly readable account, Milanovic puts that development into the context of the centuries-long ebbs and flows of inequality driven by economic changes, such as the Industrial Revolution, as well epidemics, mass migrations, revolutions, wars and other political upheavals.

More here.

I was interviewed about my cookbook by Shadab Zeest Hashmi for Modern Salt, a new British food magazine:

Shadab: Your book was written with homesick students in mind; you have to have been one yourself as a young Pakistani student in the US. What was the first thing your learnt to cook as a student?

Abbas: I can’t remember. What I do remember is that my roommate in college could cook and I could not, so he made me this offer that I foolishly accepted: “I will cook for both of us if you wash all the dishes and pots afterwards and clean up.” So, for some time, he got to do the fun part while I was stuck with the thankless, joyless, and universally loathed job of dishwashing. Such are the traumas that have shaped my worldview! But I caught on to the grave injustice of our arrangement eventually, and I probably learned to cook qeema (spicy ground beef) before anything else.

Shadab: What’s the childhood food that still haunts you? Have you replicated it successfully?

Abbas: The childhood food the memory of which haunts me to this day (and not in a good way) is papaya, which is unanimously considered to be the most vile fruit in the world by experts (such as myself!). For some reason my mother thought it would be great for my health if I were to consume a plateful of it after lunch one time. I tried and retched my way through a few bites but then refused to eat more. She decided in that moment that she had had enough of my finicky eating and told me that I was not allowed to get up from the dining table until I finished that plate of putrid pulp. An hour later, I was still sitting alone at the dining table with the papaya untouched when she came in and told me, “Get out,” and probably ate the papaya herself. I did not stick around to see.

More here. And one can buy the book here.