Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books:

The three books under review describe space activities belonging to the Big Space and Little Space cultures that are now competing for money and public attention. Each book gives a partial view of a small piece of history. Each tells a story within the narrow setting of present-day economics and politics. None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species.

Julian Guthrie’s How to Make a Spaceship describes the life and work of Peter Diamandis, a brilliant Greek-American entrepreneur. Diamandis cofounded the International Space University, bringing together each year an international crowd of students and professors to its campus in Strasbourg, and providing a meeting place where academic thinkers and industrial doers exchange ideas. He founded the ISUwhen he was twenty-seven years old, less than half the age at which Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The ISU has been growing smoothly for twenty-eight years. It is successful not only as an educational institution but as a job market where young people interested in space can find employers.

Diamandis also encourages competitive space projects by offering substantial prizes for clearly specified achievements. The latest and biggest of his prizes was $10 million for a privately funded spacecraft to reach an altitude of one hundred kilometers and land safely on the ground twice with a human pilot. The money came from Anousheh Ansari, a young Iranian-American computer engineer who had founded with her husband and brother-in-law the company Telecom Technologies. They sold the company for $440 million, of which they donated a small piece to Diamandis. The winner of the Ansari Prize was Burt Rutan, a legendary designer of weird-looking airplanes. He designed and built the SpaceShipOne vehicle that won the prize in 2004. Many other competitors made plans and built rocket ships. The total amount of money invested, by the winner and the losers, was many times the value of the prize.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

For the most part, we read a work of nonfiction for two intertwined reasons — to learn about a particular subject and to enjoy the intellectual company of the book’s author. I started “Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School” because I’d long wanted to know more about the careers and thought of social theorists Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and their loosely affiliated fellow thinker, the literary critic Walter Benjamin. I steeled myself for a hard slog — these were, after all, German theorists — but almost immediately discovered that British journalist Stuart Jeffries could summarize complex arguments so clearly that even a bear of little brain could grasp them. He was, moreover, witty, skeptical and an active presence on the page, questioning and probing each of the Frankfurt School’s various hypotheses, assertions and insights. As a result, this seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner.

The Institute for Social Research, as the Frankfurt School was formally called, initially came into existence in 1923 to explore why Germany failed to produce a successful socialist revolution in the years immediately following World War I. Its members were virtually all Jewish, the sons of well-off bourgeois families, and they viewed themselves as analysts rather than activists or revolutionaries. Nonetheless, they relied on Marx’s ideas about class, alienation and capitalism for the tools they needed to interpret and understand contemporary society.

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Kathleen Rooney at Poetry Magazine:

Many poets have recognized the connection between urban walking and poetry, but perhaps the first to do so in any kind of systematic way was Charles Baudelaire. He posited in both his nonfiction and his poems, particularly those in Paris Spleen(posthumously published in 1869), that such close observation and curiosity ought to be among the governing emotions of the urban walker and artist. In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire lays out much of his theory of flânerie, or aimless walking through a city; he writes of the titular painter and archetypal flâneur Constantin Guys that “to begin to understand M. G., the first thing to note is this: that curiosity may be considered the starting point of his genius.”

To be curious can mean to be eager to learn or know something, or it can mean strange or unusual, and Baudelaire’s literary output offers examples of both definitions. Etymologically, the word derives from the Latin curiosus, meaning “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly”; it is also related to cura or “care.” In other words, paying attention to the city outside you and what it evokes within you can be a form of care.

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Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

In 1980, the philosopher Peter Singer published a short book on Marx in which he listed some of Marx’s predictions: the income gap between workers and owners would increase, independent producers would be forced down into the ranks of the proletariat, wages would remain at subsistence levels, the rate of profit would fall, capitalism would collapse, and there would be revolutions in the advanced countries. Singer thought that most of these predictions were “so plainly mistaken” that it was difficult to understand how anyone sympathetic to Marx could defend them. In 2016, it is harder to be dismissive.

“Economists today would do well to take inspiration from his example,” Thomas Piketty says about Marx, in the best-seller he published in 2013, “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.” The book did for many twenty-first-century readers what Marx hoped “Capital” might do for nineteenth-century ones. It uses data to show us the real nature of social relations and, by doing that, forces us to rethink concepts that have come to seem natural and inevitable. One of these is the concept of the market, which is often imagined as a self-optimizing mechanism it is a mistake to interfere with, but which in fact, left to itself, continually increases inequality. Another concept, closely related, is meritocracy, which is often imagined as a guarantor of social mobility but which, Piketty argues, serves mainly to make economic winners feel virtuous.

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From Avidly:

This week in Ferrante, all men should stop talking forever. Or, at least for this week. Stop talking for a week, all men. This week, do not talk. Whatever you have to say, wait until next week. If it still seems important after being quiet about it for a week, next week we will listen to you. Perhaps you would like to talk this week about Ferrante. No! Especially, men, do not talk about Ferrante. Perhaps there are some other men who would like to hear what you have to say about Ferrante. Do not tell them, though. This week, men have said all they get to say about Ferrante. Men are done now. We cannot listen to any more men say anything else about Ferrante, forever. Or definitely not for this week. We see from your silent expression that you are concerned that, if you do not talk, about Ferrante, no one will understand how wrong it is for other people to talk about Ferrante, or her identity. Don’t worry. Everyone actually understands exactly how wrong it is, without you saying anything. You can look at each other mutely, but ask yourself: is my mute expression, the aggressive twitching of my eyebrows, in fact a form of talking? Men: bring your faces down like 30%. Eyebrows: shhh.

Isn’t it, you ask, okay to talk, or at least talk about Ferrante, if you are saying nice things about Ferrante? Aren’t men supposed to be allies, especially about Ferrante? Aren’t men supposed to amplify women, like Ferrante? These are reasonable questions and we would like to discuss them with you. Next week. Next week is also a good time to discuss any other reasonable questions about gender, anonymity, and the print public sphere. Not this week, though.

More here.

Lee Billings in Scientific American:

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 was split, with one half going to David J. Thouless at the University of Washington, and the other half going to F. Duncan M. Haldane at Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz at Brown University. The Prize was awarded for the theorists’ research in condensed matter physics, particularly their work on topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter, phenomena underlying exotic states of matter such as superconductors, superfluids and thin magnetic films. Their work has given new insights into the behavior of matter at low temperatures, and has laid the foundations for the creation of new materials called topological insulators, which could allow the construction of more sophisticated quantum computers.

Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies properties that only change incrementally, in integer steps, rather than continuously. Thors Hans Hansson, a physicist at Stockholm University who served on this year’s Nobel Committee, explained the core concept of topology during the awards announcement by pulling a cinnamon bun, a bagel, and a Swedish pretzel from a bag. “I brought my lunch,” he joked, then explained that, to a topologist, the only difference between the three foods was the number of holes in them, rather than their taste. A cinnamon bun has no holes, while a bagel has one and a pretzel has two. To a topologist, then, the bun would fall in the same category as a saucer, while the bagel would be paired with a cup, and a pretzel with a pair of spectacles. Thouless, Kosterlitz and Haldane’s prize-winning insights revolve around the idea that these same sorts of “topological invariants” could also explain phase changes in matter, albeit not familiar ones such as a liquid freezing to a solid or sublimating to gas. Instead, the phase changes the theorists studied took place chiefly in thin two-dimensional films cooled to cryogenic temperatures.

More here.

From The Economist:

The phrases “ethic of conviction” and “ethic of responsibility” mean little to most English-speakers. In Germany the equivalent terms—Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik—are household words. Pundits drop them casually during television talk shows. Hosts use them as conversation-starters at dinner parties. The concepts draw on the opposition between idealism and pragmatism that runs through politics everywhere. But they also capture a specific moral tension that is “very German”, says Manfred Güllner, a sociologist and pollster. Anyone interested in understanding German politics, on anything from the euro to refugees, would do well to get a handle on them.

The terms come from the sociologist Max Weber, who used them in a speech he gave in January 1919 to a group of leftist students at a Munich bookstore. Germany had just lost the first world war. The Kaiser had abdicated, the country was in the throes of revolution and Munich was about to become the capital of a short-lived “Bavarian Soviet Republic”. Armed with only eight index cards, Weber gave a talk that would become a classic of political science. (“Politics as a Vocation” was published in English only after the second world war.) The lecture ranged broadly through history, but its main purpose was to curb the Utopian romanticism then gripping the ideologues fighting over the direction of the new Germany, including those sitting in front of him.

Weber described an “abysmal opposition” between two types of ethics.

More here.

Researchers have developed a device that can track the mysterious organ in real time, and may help unlock the key to a healthy pregnancy.

Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic:

Placentas get kind of a bum rap.

This is possibly because of all the hoopla about the mothers who blend their placentas into smoothies and eat them, which is not a thing most women do. Even beyond the organ’s ritualistic associations, the way people talk about the placenta is implicitly dismissive.

“It is described as the ‘afterbirth,’” said Catherine Spong, an obstetrician/gynecologist and the acting director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). “Like it’s just a thing that comes out afterward. It is an underappreciated organ, and has been understudied.”

To appreciate the placenta, you have to recognize that it’s responsible for sustaining a fetus as it grows into a baby, which is tethered by the umbilical cord to the placenta embedded in a pregnant woman’s uterine wall. Through this arrangement, the placenta provides nutrients and oxygen to the fetus, eliminates waste, regulates fetal temperature, produces hormones, and performs other crucial pregnancy tasks. For one organ to perform so many jobs—duties that would otherwise be handled by separate organs—is extraordinary.

Just as remarkable is the fact that doctors and scientists know so little about the placenta, relative to its importance.

More here.

As New Delhi and Islamabad trade nuclear threats and deadly attacks, a brewing war over shared water resources threatens to turn up the violence.

Michael Kugelman in Foreign Policy:

Early on the morning of Sept. 29, according to India’s Defense Ministryand military, Indian forces staged a “surgical strike” in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that targeted seven terrorist camps and killed multiple militants. Pakistan angrily denied that the daring raid took place, though it did state that two of its soldiers were killed in clashes with Indian troops along their disputed border. New Delhi’s announcement of its strike plunged already tense India-Pakistan relations into deep crisis. It came 11 days after militants identified by India as members of the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 18 soldiers on a military base in the town of Uri, in India-administered Kashmir.

Amid all the shrill rhetoric and saber rattling emanating from India and Pakistan in recent days — including India’s home minister branding Pakistan a “terrorist state” and Pakistan’s defense minister threatening to wage nuclear war on India — one subtle threat issued by India may have sounded relatively innocuous to the casual listener.

More here.

Alex Palmer in Smithsonian:

Those who encounter a piece by Jennifer Trask are likely first struck by its elegance: a baroque gold-coated necklace or an intricate floral broach. But a closer look reveals much more happening below the gilt surface: antlers woven into the necklace; snake vertebrae used as the “petals” of the broach’s flower, giraffe femurs, chicken ribs, cow and camel bones, even teeth. Despite her occasional morbid humor—such as calling one of her works of keys made of cast iron, pearls and bone, Skeleton Keys—Trask emphasizes that she does not see death in the remains that she employs, but rather a rich backstory.

Trask uses this dichotomy of nature and artifice, glamour and decay, to explore complex, seemingly contradictory ideas—and create some extraordinarily cool looking sculptures in the process. Her artworks are now on view as part of the exhibition Visions and Revisions: Renwick Invitational 2016 at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. The works span a 20-year career, and include the 1998 Poison Elixir Bracelet—a gold bracelet of 22-karat capsules containing poinsettia petals and dried blood—and the 2014 Caliper—a turkey wishbone fashioned into a gold-inflected compass. “Bones are not morbid to me, they represent a life lived,” she says. “There is a history in the remnants of a plant or animal.” Trask sees her role as drawing out that history buried in the materials, letting the “material itself dictate what it will become.” This is true in a physical sense—how far can she bend a particular horn or how careful must she be to carve antique frame fragments. It depends on the material’s density or grain. But it is true also in her pursuit of the more spiritual aspects of the material, allowing it to form its own shape and following its lead.

More here.

Gina Kolata and Seawell Chan in The New York Times:

Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries on how cells recycle their content, a process known as autophagy, a Greek term for “self-eating.” It is a crucial process. During starvation, cells break down proteins and nonessential components and reuse them for energy. Cells also use autophagy to destroy invading viruses and bacteria, sending them off for recycling. And cells use autophagy to get rid of damaged structures. The process is thought to go awry in cancer, infectious diseases, immunological diseases and neurodegenerative disorders. Disruptions in autophagy are also thought to play a role in aging. But little was known about how autophagy happens, what genes were involved, or its role in disease and normal development until Dr. Ohsumi began studying the process in baker’s yeast.

Why Did He Win?

The process he studies is critical for cells to survive and to stay healthy. The autophagy genes and the metabolic pathways he discovered in yeast are used by higher organisms, including humans. And mutations in those genes can cause disease. His work led to a new field and inspired hundreds of researchers around the world to study the process and opened a new area of inquiry. “Without him, the whole field doesn’t exist,” said Seungmin Hwang, an assistant professor in the department of pathology at the University of Chicago. “He set up the field.”

More here.

Amos Kenan at The Nation (originally published in 1982):

The Russians once invented a translating machine. To test it they inserted the English phrase, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” The result, in Russian, came out, “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.”

Shimon Peres is this kind of distorted reproduction, just as his Labor Party is a distorted reproduction.

Shimon Peres is an apparatchik—of an apparat that does not function anymore because its motor is dead. The motor was once fueled by the original spirit of Zionism, in its socialist version, a dream of two generations of humble prophets and naive visionaries: Zionism not just as another national liberation movement but as an experience in humanity, not only to create a new Jew in a new homeland but to create a new specimen of humankind. That dream has been turned into a nightmare by the experience of statehood and the needs of Realpolitik, and it is the Israeli Labor Party that is responsible. It is the Labor Party that is to blame for the face that Israel is now wearing, the face of Menachem Begin and Arid Sharon, of military oppression and moral decline.

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Maya Jasanoff at the New York Review of Books:

Americans learn about slavery as an “original sin” that tempted the better angels of our nation’s egalitarian nature. But “the thing about American slavery,” writes Greg Grandin in his 2014 book The Empire of Necessity, about an uprising on a slave ship off the coast of Chile and the successful effort to end it, is that “it never was just about slavery.” It was about an idea of freedom that depended on owning and protecting personal property. As more and more settlers arrived in the English colonies, the property they owned increasingly took the human form of African slaves. Edmund Morgan captured the paradox in the title of his classic American Slavery, American Freedom: “Freedom for some required the enslavement of others.” When the patriots protested British taxation as a form of “slavery,” they weren’t being hypocrites. They were defending what they believed to be the essence of freedom: the right to preserve their property.

The Empire of Necessity explores “the fullness of the paradox of freedom and slavery” in the America of the early 1800s. Yet to understand the chokehold of slavery on American ideas of freedom, it helps to go back to the beginning. At the time of the Revolution, slavery had been a fixture of the thirteen colonies for as long as the US today has been without it. “Slavery was in England’s American colonies, even its New England colonies, from the very beginning,” explains Princeton historian Wendy Warren in her deeply thoughtful, elegantly written New England Bound, an exploration of captivity in seventeenth-century New England.

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Matteo Pericoli at The Paris Review:

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s mystery novel The Judge and His Hangman revolves around a sudden nighttime encounter between chief detective Bärlach, an inspector with the Bern police, and his eternal rival, Gastmann.

During the encounter, we learn that the two men had met forty years earlier at a dive bar in the Bosporus where, inebriated, they made a bet that will bind them for the rest of their lives. Bärlach maintained that committing a crime is an “act of stupidity”: human imperfection, the unpredictable actions of others, and the inability of taking chance into account are the reasons why most crimes are inevitably solved. His rival, “more for the sake of argument than out of conviction,” instead maintained that it was exactly becauseof “the entanglement of human relationships” that he could commit unsolvable crimes, crimes that Bärlach would never be able to prove. From that day on, the detective vowed to spend his life trying to nail his rival.

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Joe Gillon Hypnotizes his Son

For my father

When you wake up, in your fourteenth year,
I’m forty, the attrition of muscle fiber
in me will (energy cannot be, etc.) appear
in you as a new flex. You’ll write vers libre,
none of this constraint, hold what molests
you in your palm, swill whole decanters.
You’ll understand the jokes about women’s breasts
had something reverential at their centers.
A distance, thin as silver foil, will hiss
once, hover, then drop in the space between us.
Now: how I dandle you, wipe the comma of piss
where it collects at your rim, promise you’re a genus
better than I was, my cribside pace, my kiss…
You won’t remember any of this.

Albert Goldbarth
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986
.