Gary J. Bass in the New York Times Book Review:

“It was like the sound of rain, the sound of firebombs dropping,” Keiko Utsumi remembers. She is an elderly, dignified Japanese woman, retired as a nurse and a midwife, impeccably dressed in a beige linen blazer in the sweltering Tokyo summer heat. Late in World War II, during the spring of 1945, she was 16 years old, put to work at a military factory in the port city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. During one of the United States’ incendiary bombing raids, she recalls huddling in a bomb shelter all night, terrified, watching the inferno of wooden houses all around. When she emerged into a scorched wasteland the next morning, with the ground so hot it melted her shoes, she saw the dead: “They were all black, all burned.”

Seventy years after the end of the war, Utsumi met me in central Tokyo last August to tell her story. Remarkably, she had never discussed her terrible experiences with anyone. “When I was leaving the house this morning,” she said, “and told my son I’d be in an interview about the war, my son asked, ‘You were in the war?’ ”

This kind of stoic quietude may seem odd, even unhealthy, to Americans, accustomed to ventilating the most mundane experiences, with no incident too banal to be rehashed. But respect for such forbearance is at the heart of David Rieff’s insightful and humane new book.

More here.

The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.

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Cara Cannella in Signature:

Sometimes when I learn about a book about a book, as in Lesley M. M. Blume’s new release Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, I hesitate to pick up the bigger (i.e., more recent) of the two matryoshkadolls. If I have yet to read – or have read but can’t remember details of – the one it contains, there’s a FOMO factor: Will I spend time with Mama Book wishing I was better acquainted with Baby Book?

Since schlepping around a combined 1,800 pages of Ulysses and Ulysses Annotated as an undergrad, I don’t think I’ve read two related books in such tandem. For anyone else who might be in this boat, I’m here to assure you that Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly can live squarely on its own as a commentary on Hemingway’s post-war, expatriate psychology of creativity and its cost to his personal relationships. Standing on a recent reading of his square-shouldered breakthrough 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, it could only be emboldened.

Like The Paris Wife, Paula McLain’s bestselling 2011 novel narrated by the first of Hemingway’s four wives, Hadley Richardson, Badly focuses on the period of their 1920-1927 union. Its hook lies in the Hemingways’ 1925 trip with friends (or, more accurately, frenemies) from Paris to Pamplona to catch the running of the bulls, and the novel it inspired. Written within six weeks immediately following their adventure in Spain, the novel about “youth, sex, love, and excess,” as Blume describes it, is as much a work of reportage as it is “fiction.”

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Nautilus:

Many people cheat on taxes—no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught—now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. You might think that we should just be grateful for it. But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts, perhaps we could encourage more of them. It’s not as though people haven’t been trying to fathom our moral instincts; it is one of the oldest concerns of philosophy and theology. But what distinguishes the project today is the sheer variety of academic disciplines it brings together: not just moral philosophy and psychology, but also biology, economics, mathematics, and computer science. They do not merely contemplate the rationale for moral beliefs, but study how morality operates in the real world, or fails to. David Rand of Yale University epitomizes the breadth of this science, ranging from abstract equations to large-scale societal interventions. “I’m a weird person,” he says, “who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building.”

In 2012 he and two similarly broad-minded Harvard professors, Martin Nowak and Joshua Greene, tackled a question that exercised the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Which is our default mode, selfishness or selflessness? Do we all have craven instincts we must restrain by force of will? Or are we basically good, even if we slip up sometimes? They collected data from 10 experiments, most of them using a standard economics scenario called a public-goods game.¹ Groups of four people, either American college students or American adults participating online, were given some money. They were allowed to place some of it into a pool, which was then multiplied and distributed evenly. A participant could maximize his or her income by contributing nothing and just sharing in the gains, but people usually gave something. Despite the temptation to be selfish, most people showed selflessness. This finding was old news, but Rand and his colleagues wanted to know how much deliberation went into such acts of generosity. So in two of the experiments, subjects were prodded to think intuitively or deliberately; in two others, half of the subjects were forced to make their decision under time pressure and half were not; and in the rest, subjects could go at their own pace and some naturally made their decisions faster than others. If your morning commute is any evidence, people in a hurry would be extra selfish. But the opposite was true: Those who responded quickly gave more. Conversely, when people took their time to deliberate or were encouraged to contemplate their choice, they gave less.

More here.

The Traveler

I
Among the quiet people of the frost,
I remember an Eskimo
walking one evening
on the road to Fairbanks.

II
A lamp full of shadows burned
on the table before us;
the light came as though from far off
through the yellow skin of a tent.

III
Thousands of years passed.
People were camped on the bank
of a river, drying fish
in the sun. Women bent over
stretched hides, scraping
in a kind of furry patience.
There were long hints through
the wet autumn grass,
meat piled high in caches –
a red memory against whiteness.

IV
We were away for a long time.
The footsteps of a man walking alone
on the frozen road from Asia
crunched in the darkness
and were gone.
.

by John Haines
from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer
Graywolf Press, 1993
.

Noah Smith in Bloomberg View:

There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused.

The first is what I call “coffee-house macro,” and it’s what you hear in a lot of casual discussions. It often revolves around the ideas of dead sages — Friedrich Hayek, Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes. It doesn’t involve formal models, but it does usually contain a hefty dose of political ideology.

The second is finance macro. This consists of private-sector economists and consultants who try to read the tea leaves on interest rates, unemployment, inflation and other indicators in order to predict the future of asset prices (usually bond prices). It mostly uses simple math, though advanced forecasting models are sometimes employed. It always includes a hefty dose of personal guesswork.

The third is academic macro. This traditionally involves professors making toy models of the economy — since the early ’80s, these have almost exclusively been DSGE models (if you must ask, DSGE stands for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium). Though academics soberly insist that the models describe the deep structure of the economy, based on the behavior of individual consumers and businesses, most people outside the discipline who take one look at these models immediately think they’re kind of a joke. They contain so many unrealistic assumptions that they probably have little chance of capturing reality. Their forecasting performance is abysmal. Some of their core elements are clearly broken. Any rigorous statistical tests tend to reject these models instantly, because they always include a hefty dose of fantasy.

The fourth type I call Fed macro. The Federal Reserve uses an eclectic approach, involving both data and models. Sometimes the models are of the DSGE type, sometimes not. Fed macro involves taking data from many different sources, instead of the few familiar numbers like unemployment and inflation, and analyzing the information in a bunch of different ways. And it inevitably contains a hefty dose of judgment, because the Fed is responsible for making policy.

How can there be four very different activities that all go by the same name, and all claim to study and understand the same phenomena?

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews David Estlund in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’ve defended democracy from the attack that it is the rule of the know-nothings with what you call ‘epistemic proceduralism.’ Before we look at your defence could you say something about the attack. On the face of it it does seem mad that experts aren’t the people we go to to govern. After all, we wouldn’t want a non-expert dentist, so why not use the same approach to dealing with problems of government? What’s the problem with just ensuring that decisions being made are good decisions by handing power over to the experts?

DE: That’s exactly the question that motivated my work on democracy (as you know), and of course it’s the ancient challenge to democracy stemming from Plato. I didn’t find the modern idea very satisfying—that we could answer that challenge by pointing to a right of the people to rule themselves. That would have the advantage of explaining why the people get to rule even if they aren’t good at it. The right to rule oneself individually doesn’t seem (to us moderns) to depend on whether we’d be good at it, so this might seem like an extension. But the analogy with a (say, Millian) right to self-rule, interpreted as individual immunity from interference in self-regarding choices, is very weak. When you “rule” as a member of the democratic people you contribute to coercing others, not just yourself. That’s precisely the limit on the Millian idea of individual self-rule. So, I didn’t see that broad approach as an adequate answer to the ancient question: if your political decisions will affect (and even coerce) the prospects and choices of others, why should you get to do that even if you’re not good at it? Plato’s challenge is powerful.

So, we have to confront the possibility that ruling ought to be done by those who can actually do it well (though I reject it in the end). I find that students, at least, squirm at the very idea that some might be able to rule better than others, and yet they nod happily at the suggestion that some are much worse than others. So, since the stakes of political decision are so very high, why shouldn’t rule be by the much-less-bad? I came to think that an important key lies in the fact that, even if we agree that some would be better and some worse at ruling justly and well, we are very unlikely to agree on who is in which category. It would be one thing if all decent points of view did agree, but that’s just not plausible. The problem here is a moral one, not one about how to keep the dissidents in line. So, on one hand, it’s not plausible that the people simply have a right to collective self-rule even though their acts will momentously affect and interfere with others against their will. On the other hand, and here we push back against Plato, there is no strong reason to think that someone’s being correct about what should be done is enough to justify their having the power to impose it on others. What’s driving things, on this telling, is not a positive right of self-rule but some sort of right (hopefully defeasible!) not to be ruled, wisely or otherwise, by others. While the ancient puzzle is first raised by pointing to ignorance of the masses, it turns out that the moral problem might not mainly be about their ignorance. After all, there is still a problem for rule by the non-ignorant. So, at this point, an initial answer—err, question—to your question why we shouldn’t be ruled by the experts, is roughly: they might be correct, but what makes them boss?

More here.

Elena Holodny in Business Insider:

Elena Holodny: What's interesting in chaos theory right now?

Steven Strogatz: I'm often very interested in whatever my students get interested in. I primarily think of myself as a teacher and a guide. I try to help them – especially my Ph.D. students – become the mathematicians they're trying to become. The answer often depends on what they want to do.

In broad terms, the question of how order emerges out of chaos. Even though we talk about it as “chaos theory,” I'm really more interested in the orderly side of nature than the chaotic side. And I love the idea that things can organize themselves. Whether those things are our system of morality or our universe or our bodies as we grow from a single cell to the people we eventually become. All this kind of unfolding of structure and organization all around us and inside of us, to me, is inspiring and baffling. I live for that kind of thing, to try to understand where these patterns come from.

More here.

Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times:

The physical world is “largely ­illusory,” an editorial in The New York Times announced on Nov. 25, 1944. Wishful thinking on a depressing day? No. Had The Times gone mad? Not quite. It was endorsing the ideas of Sir Arthur Eddington, an eminent British astronomer and popularizer of science, who had just died.

Eddington began his best-known book, “The Nature of the Physical World,” by explaining that he had written it at two tables, sitting on two chairs and with two pens. The first table was the familiar kind: It was colored, substantial and relatively long-lasting. The second was what he called a “scientific table,” a colorless cloud of evanescent electric charges that is “mostly emptiness.” Likewise the two chairs and two pens. Only the scientific objects were really there, according to ­Eddington. Hence the idea that our familiar world is a deception on a grand scale.

Coming to terms with science is not getting any easier. Today’s popularizers face two challenges, both of which are admirably met by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, in his new book, “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.” First, there is more to explain than ever before, as the sci­ences extend their embrace to a widening range of phenomena. Fortunately, Carroll is something of a polymath. His accounts of the latest thinking about microbiology or information theory are as adroit as his exploration of the links between entropy and time or his elucidation of Bayesian statistics.

The second challenge for today’s explainers is that the theories are getting weirder. Einstein used to worry that, according to quantum mechanics, God seems to be playing dice with the universe. Now it appears that he has put a stage magician in charge of the casino.

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Lorraine Berry at The Guardian:

In 19th-century America, a number of utopian communities, oblivious to the defeatist etymology of the word utopia (Greek for “not” plus “place”, or “no-place”), were established, mostly throughout the north-east. Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), Robert Owen and a group of transcendentalists all tried their hands at creating separate communities of peace and understanding. All of these efforts failed fairly quickly.

The exception was the Oneida community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes, in the Leatherstocking region of central New York state. The region had already surrendered its secrets to the young Joseph Smith when he discovered the gold books of the angel Moroni buried in a drumlin near Palmyra, and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Oneida, which is located 80 miles to the east, provided a home for Noyes’s nascent Society of Inquiry when its members fled from Putney, Vermont in the 1840s after Noyes’ doctrine of “complex marriage” offended the local townspeople.

more here.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf at The LA Times:

The way to the spring…is blocked. At least that’s the case for the Palestinians of Nabi Saleh, a small village northwest of Ramallah. The expansion-minded residents of a nearby Jewish settlement, with the aid of the Israeli army that occupies the West Bank, have taken over the town’s water source, which Palestinian farmers depended on to irrigate their fields.

Ben Ehrenreich, an award-winning writer based in Los Angeles, discovered as much when he moved to the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in a war with its Arab neighbors in 1967. Ehrenreich, who lived in that troubled land intermittently between 2011 and 2014 (in part, reporting for Harper’s and the New York Times Magazine), demonstrates that Nabi Saleh is no anomaly. “The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine” emerges as a sobering, iconoclastic “collection of stories about resistance, and about people who resist,” marred slightly by the author’s unwillingness to subject Palestinian militant activity, which has often included terrorism, to moral scrutiny.

“The spring is the face of the occupation,” Bassem Tamimi of Nabi Saleh tells the author. Every Friday, the villagers, joined by international and Israeli solidarity activists, march toward it in a regularized act of protest. “And every Friday Israeli soldiers beat them back with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber-coated bullets,” observes the author. Afterward, groups of male youths situated some distance away hurl stones at the soldiers, who are generally beyond their reach.

more here.

Andrew Martin at The Financial Times:

Travis Elborough is the affectionate chronicler of faded Englishness. He has been described as “the hipster Bill Bryson”, and it is a mystery to some of us why he is not as well-known as Bryson. His books have so far covered the Routemaster bus, the long-playing record, and the sale of London Bridge (“the world’s largest antique”, as he put it) to a Texan millionaire.

His writing combines subtle drollery with a fantastical, Monty Python-ish strain. Early in his narrative, he takes an excursion to Versailles, an important site in the aforementioned evolution. Louis XIV, the Sun King — a “control freak in modern parlance” — arranged the planting around a central axis whose focal point was his own bedroom, and the gardens were micromanaged according to his whim: “The fountains were magnificent features. But there was only enough water to keep the ones closest to the palace at a constant spurt. The others were switched off and on as the king approached and departed, his movements closely monitored and signalled to staff, with flags waved and whistles blown in a complex system of field telegraph.”

more here.

Peter Wehner in The New York Times:

Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

Mr. Trump knows his target audience, which explains why, beginning the morning of the Indiana primary on May 3 (the day he became the de facto nominee), he has — among other in-the-gutter moments — implied that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy; insinuated that Vince Foster, a friend of the Clintons who was White House deputy counsel, was murdered (five official investigations determined that Mr. Foster committed suicide); engaged in a racially tinged attack on Gonzalo Curiel, a district court judge presiding over a fraud lawsuit against Trump University; and expressed doubt that a Muslim judge could remain neutral in the case. This is conspiratorial craziness and rank racism — and all of it has happened after we were told Mr. Trump would raise his game. The surprise is that so many Republicans are now expressing consternation at what Mr. Trump is doing. Has any recent presidential candidate ever advertised quite as openly as Mr. Trump the kind of vicious attacks he’d engage in? We were warned in neon lights what was coming. The idea that he will now engage in a “course correction” — that he will flip a switch and transform himself into a decent and dignified man — is laughable. Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that he won’t change his approach. (“You win the pennant and now you’re in the World Series — you gonna change?”) In this one area, Republicans should take him at his word.

When a narcissist like Mr. Trump is victorious, as he was in the Republican primary, and when he has done it on his terms, he’s not going to listen to outside counsel from people who think they can change the patterns of a lifetime. Republicans have not changed Mr. Trump for the better; he has changed them for the worse. So here we are, with Republicans who lined up behind Mr. Trump now afraid of being led off a high cliff. If the prospect of a November shellacking isn’t enough to unnerve these Republicans, there’s also this to factor in: What we are talking about is potential generational damage to the Republican Party. Consider this historical comparison: In 1956 the Republican nominee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, won nearly 40 percent of the black vote. In 1960, Richard Nixon won nearly a third. Yet in 1964, in large part because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater (who was no racist) won only 6 percent. More than a half-century later, that figure has remained low. Mr. Trump — through his attacks against Hispanics that began the day he announced his candidacy — is doing with Hispanics today what Senator Goldwater did with black voters in the early 1960s. The less resistance there is to Mr. Trump now, the more political damage there will be later. The stain of Trump will last long after his campaign. His insults, cruelty and bigotry will sear themselves into the memory of Americans for a long time to come, especially those who are the targets of his invective.

Mr. Trump is what he is — a malicious, malignant figure on the American political landscape. But Republican primary voters, in selecting him to represent their party, and Republican leaders now rallying to his side, have made his moral offenses their own.

More here.

John A. Schuster in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This work extends and expands James A. Marcum's Thomas Kuhn's Revolution: An Historical Philosophy of Science (2005). Scholarship and debate about Kuhn have continued apace since then, chiefly conducted by philosophers and mainly concerned with Kuhn's later thought and its relation to Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970) [SSR]. Marcum takes up the theme that Kuhn's later work — scattered in occasional papers, talks and manuscript sources — constituted a second Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science, this time being an 'evolutionary' [EPS] as opposed to his earlier 'historical' philosophy of science.

Marcum's 2005 volume was essentially a history of a book, SSR, its genesis, content and reception in HPS and other fields. The present work preserves virtually all of that material while expanding in two ways: an account of the genesis and content of Kuhn's second philosophy of science, and a much more detailed examination than previously of what we might term, in succinct but outdated history-of -ideas lingo, the 'influence' of Kuhn. Thus, in the opening two Parts of the new work, Marcum stays close to the corresponding Parts of the earlier work. Part III, which concluded the earlier work and was titled 'The path following Structure', is now titled 'Kuhn's paradigm shift' [that is toward EPS] and Chapter 5 within it is still concerned mainly with 'What was Kuhn up to after Structure', while Chapter 6 deals explicitly with Kuhn's EPS, replacing the old Chapter 6 dealing with 'Kuhn's legacy'. The latter issue now takes up its own Part IV, in two full chapters, the first dealing with Kuhn's 'impact' on HPS and the natural sciences, the latter with his 'impact' on behavioural, social and political sciences.

Returning to the Kuhn debates after a decade, Marcum now has a work at least 30% longer than the original, girded by a bibliography at least three times as voluminous and featuring not only works published since 2005, but also quite a few earlier works not treated in his original volume.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

Just a few years ago, Crispr was a cipher — something that sounded to most ears like a device for keeping lettuce fresh. Today, Crispr-Cas9 is widely known as a powerful way to edit genes. Scientists are deploying it in promising experiments, and a number of companies are already using it to develop drugs to treat conditions ranging from cancer to sickle-cell anemia.

Yet there is still a lot of misunderstanding around it. Crispr describes a series of DNA sequences discovered in microbes, part of a system to defend against attacking viruses. Microbes make thousands of forms of Crispr, most of which are just starting to be investigated by scientists. If they can be harnessed, some may bring changes to medicine that we can barely imagine.

On Thursday, in the journal Science, researchers demonstrated just how much is left to discover. They found that an ordinary mouth bacterium makes a form of Crispr that breaks apart not DNA, but RNA — the molecular messenger used by cells to turn genes into proteins.

If scientists can get this process to work in human cells, they may open up a new front in gene engineering, gaining the ability to precisely adjust the proteins in cells, for instance, or to target cancer cells.

More here.