Julia Felsenthal in Vanity Fair:

At the beginning of Future Sex, Emily Witt’s probing investigation into 21st-century female sexuality, the author is single, 30, and not thrilled about it. She occasionally has sex with men she knows, friends, and friends of friends, casual entanglements that she dismisses as distractions. She and her partners are “souls flitting through limbo, piling up against one another like dried leaves, awaiting the brass trumpets and wedding bells of the eschaton.” Witt feels keenly that she’s missing out on the kind of committed monogamous partnership that had always seemed part and parcel of adulthood, reward for a life of rules followed. “I nurtured my idea of the future,” she writes, “which I thought of as the default denouement of my sexuality, and a destiny rather than a choice. The vision remained suspended, jewel-like in my mind, impervious to the storms of actual experience, a crystalline point of arrival.”

By the book’s end, Witt is several years older and in a different headspace. “I now understood the fabrication of my sexuality,” she writes, “I saw the seams of its construction and the arbitrary nature of its myth.” Her circumstances aren’t markedly changed; the evolution is psychic and semantic. “I knew,” she writes, “that naming sexual freedom as an ideal put the story I told myself about my life in greater alignment with the choices I had already made. It offered continuity between my past and the future. It gave value to experiences that I had viewed with frustration or regret.”

It’s a subtle shift, but the experiences that catalyze it are not so subtle. Future Sex, as the title suggests, takes Witt to the furthest extremes of the erotic vanguard on a quest to establish the contours of her own sexuality, and of female sexuality more generally, in an age of Internet dating and abundant, diverse pornography, of delayed reproduction and more open relationships.

More here.

John Fabian Witt in the New York Times:

Once in every great while, nature and nurture combine in a single person the qualities of erratic genius, herculean work ethic and irrepressible ambition. Think of Picasso in art, Ali in boxing or Roth in literature. Add a penchant for provocation untethered to the constraints of conventional human interaction and you get, in the law, Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago.

In the past half-century there has been no figure more dominant or more controversial in American law than Posner. He has written more than 50 books, over 500 articles and nearly 3,000 majority opinions for his court. Not even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — to whom he is often compared — matches his productivity and range.

William Domnarski’s biography, the first such book on Posner, draws on extensive interviews and on access to Posner’s correspondence at the University of Chicago. “Richard Posner” portrays a man who aims self-­consciously to be (in his words) a “Promethean intellectual hero,” remaking the world of the law by sheer will. The questions Domnarski asks are, What makes this extraordinary character tick — and to what end?

More here.

The woman is about hair
gathering on the ground and between the breasts
that move up and down with each breath
in suffering.
In twenty years I will exist.
Even if i’m dead in twenty years I will exist
more than I do now.
I shave my legs in the shower
until my ass goes numb.
The water gathers all of me around
and says “that’s what you get”
the same way men say
“that’s just how the world works”
as if they’re happy about it.
I make a prayer for you in front of the closet mirror
where the light from inside moves
around the room to see itself reflected.
The woman sees herself in everything and nothing.
You can open the news and read
anything you want to.
That’s the magic of being alive here.
You can even read about yourself
long after you’re dead.
.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
from Feminist Wire, July 2015

Maria Konnikova in The New York Times:

In 1993, a few years after the success of his firm’s ad campaign that introduced the Apple Mac, the head of the Chiat/Day agency, Jay Chiat, decided that it was time to have a workplace that matched the verve of the agency’s advertising. In Los Angeles, he commissioned Frank Gehry to create a place that was “playful, zany and stylish”: no cubicles, no offices, no traditional desks. Space was filled with a four-story statue of a pair of binoculars and pods from old fairground rides where “people would sit together . . . and think creative thoughts.” In New York, Chiat tasked Gaetano Pesce with much the same vision, resulting in murals of red lips, chairs with springs for feet and a floor in front of a bathroom that would raise many an eyebrow in today’s trigger-warning culture (a picture of a man urinating). When Frank Duffy, an architect who is no stranger to innovation in office design himself (he is credited as a founder of Bürolandschaft, the office-landscaping movement), saw the project, he said, “Perhaps its gravest weakness is that it is a place where ‘play’ is enforced on everyone, all the time.”

That statement is at the heart of “Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives,” the latest book from the economist-turned-journalist Tim Harford. At first, it seems an odd comment to include. After all, isn’t the Chiat/Day approach the quintessence of mess — disrupting the staid old office style, pivoting in a new creative direction, or any of those other business clichés? But it’s actually perfect. Because the mess Harford has in mind is less physical than psychical. It’s not that disruption is inherently good, or that we should strive actually to be messy — unconstrained by desks or real work spaces, free to roam and think, surrounded by playful towers of stuff in stubborn defiance of Kondo-ization. It’s that rigid rules are bad, whether they err on the side of too much mess or too little. Rigidity disempowers people. In telling us to be messy, Harford urges us to recapture our autonomy. A less catchy, but perhaps more accurate, title for the book would be “Control: The Power of Autonomy and Flexibility.”

More here.

Roger Scruton in City Journal:

During the 1960s and 1970s, the consensus in Western academic and intellectual institutions was very much on the left. Writers like Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu shot to eminence by attacking the civilization they dismissed as “bourgeois.” The critical-theory writings of Jürgen Habermas achieved a dominant place in the curriculum in the social sciences, despite their stupefying tediousness. The rewriting of national history as a tale of “class struggle,” undertaken by Eric Hobsbawm in Britain and Howard Zinn in the United States, became a near-orthodoxy not only in university history departments but also in high schools. For us dissidents, it was a dispiriting time, and there was scarcely a morning when I did not wake up during those years, asking myself whether my teaching at the University of London was the right choice of career. Then came the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and I allowed myself to hope.

For a while, it looked as though an apology might be forthcoming from those who had devoted their intellectual and political efforts to whitewashing the crimes of the Soviet Union or praising the “people’s republics” of China and Vietnam. But the moment proved short-lived. Within a decade, the Left establishment was back in the driver’s seat, with Zinn and Noam Chomsky renewing their intemperate denunciations of America, the European Left regrouped against “neoliberalism” (the new name for the free economy) as though this had been the trouble all along, Habermas and Ronald Dworkin collecting prestigious prizes for their barely readable defenses of ruling leftist platitudes, and the veteran Marxist Hobsbawm rewarded for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union by his appointment as “Companion of Honour” to the Queen.

True, the enemy was no longer described as before: the Marxist template did not easily fit the new conditions, and it seemed a trifle foolish to champion the cause of the working class, when its last members were joining the ranks of the unemployable or the self-employed. But one thing remained unchanged in the wake of Communism’s collapse: the conviction that it was unacceptable to be on the “right.”

More here.

Jay A. Fernandez in Signature:

African Americans’ struggle for equality in America has taken on many shapes and strategies since the Thirteenth Amendment, which officially abolished slavery, was ratified in 1865. From the Niagara Movement and the formation of the NAACP through Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association to the powerful oratory and organization of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.; from the fiery poetry and literature of Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka to the Million Man March and Black Lives Matter, the great, ongoing effort has been a defining characteristic of the American identity, ever convulsing and changing, if never quickly or comprehensively enough.

Malcolm X was killed in early 1965, and King in April 1968. In between, fifty years ago on October 15 in Oakland, former college classmates Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, inspired by the forceful rhetoric of the former and disillusioned by the nonviolent approach of the latter, formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. While contentious from the start, and dogged by both internal criminal tendencies and outside government forces seeking to discredit the group as a threat to democracy, the Panthers undeniably hold a key place in the history of the black struggle, even if many of their ambitiously broad aims, which included standing up to police brutality and the unpunished killings of unarmed black civilians, remain sadly unrealized half a century later. (The group dissolved in 1982.)

More here.

From IIIIXIII Magazine:

The relationship between art and philosophy has a long and troubled history. In his Republic, Plato banished art from his ideal society and invited philosophy to become the sovereign ruler of the state. For Plato, art was a form of illusion, creating a representation of an empirical world that was already one step removed from the truth of his Platonic Ideas. It wasn’t until the the German Idealists, and the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in particular, that art and philosophy came closer to harmony. For Hegel, art too was an expression of truth, albeit in a sensuous and thereby imperfect form.

Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher, who has written works on thinkers from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to Immanuel Kant, René Descartes and Martin Heidegger. Throughout his work, he has challenged and questioned philosophy’s denigration of the sensuous and its privileging of the concept. He first came to prominence with The Inoperative Community (1991) and some of his other most well known work include, The Sense of the World (1993) and Being Singular Plural (2000), which highlights the question of our being together in contemporary society as one of the main themes in his prolific work. Nancy has also published books on film, literature and music, such as on the work of Abbas Kiarostami, On Kawara, Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Hölderlin.

We talked to Jean-Luc Nancy about the relations of philosophy, art, silence and the self.

More here.

Aatish Taseer in the New York Times:

It is one thing to have a theoretical knowledge of caste. It is quite another to see it in action. A few months ago, I was given a small, relatively benign glimpse into how this idea of spiritual purity actually affects people’s lives inIndia.

I was in Varanasi, India’s most sacred city, conducting research for a book about Brahmins, the priestly caste at the top of the Hindu hierarchy. I was speaking at length to a young student who, like his Brahmin ancestors, was steeped in the study of Sanskrit and the Veda. One day, we drove together to the village where he came from. Our driver on this five-hour journey was a voluble man from the neighboring state of Bihar. Along the way, the driver, the student and I chatted amicably, but as we neared the Brahmin village, our dynamics swiftly changed.

My father was Muslim, and since religion in India is patrilineal, my presence in the Brahmin household should have been an unspeakable defilement. But it wasn’t. I belong to India’s English-speaking upper class and, in the eyes of my host, I was exempt from the rules of caste. As we approached the village, he did make one small adjustment: He stopped calling me by my conspicuously Muslim name, and rechristened me Nitish, a Hindu name.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

Back in 1970, the social activist Irina Dunn scribbled a slogan on the back of a toilet cubicle door at the University of Sydney. It said: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” The phrase went viral and eventually became a famous refrain for the growing feminist movement of the time.

The phrase is also an example of sarcasm. The humor comes from the fact that a fish doesn’t need a bicycle. Most humans have little trouble spotting this. But while various advanced machine learning techniques have helped computers spot other forms of humor, sarcasm still largely eludes them.

These other forms of humor can be spotted by looking for, say, positive verbs associated with negative or undesirable situation. And some researchers have used this approach to look for sarcasm.

But sarcasm is often devoid of sentiment. The phrase above is a good example—it contains no sentiment-bearing words. So a new strategy is clearly needed if computers are ever to spot this kind of joke.

More here.

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name

You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.
.

by John Ashbery
from Houseboat Days
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987

.

Liz Thomson in New Statesman:

I was too young to appreciate the arrival of Bob Dylan. My generation screamed for the pop music pin-ups of the Seventies such as the Osmonds and David Cassidy. It wasn’t until 1976, when he released his bestselling album, Desire, that Dylan's growly tones first caught my imaginationI. His former girlfriend, the folk singer Joan Baez, was my entrée: I learned to play guitar from her records on which I first encountered such magisterial Dylan songs as “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” and “With God on Our Side”, which I never did master. I knew “Blowin’ in the Wind” of course: written in 1963 and a hit for the group Peter, Paul and Mary first, it was already part of our cultural DNA, so too was the 1965 hit single “Mr Tambourine Man”. Soon I would discover songs such as “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Like a Rolling Stone” whose lyrics are now part of our lingua franca, paraphrased by headline writers around the world.

The man who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota was today awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some will carp (why not Philip Roth or Salman Rushdie, or Alice Waters?), but most will agree it is an honour long overdue —and perhaps fitting that it be awarded now, in his seventy-fifth year. That his best work is behind him matters not. His last truly great album was in 1975, Blood on the Tracks, its songs full of the pain of divorce. There have been flashes of brilliance since (Oh, Mercy, 1989; Time Out of Mind, 1997) but none compares to the genius (a word not used lightly) of the handful of albums Dylan made between his debut in 1962 and the motorcycle crash of July 1966 that allowed him to escape the drug-fuelled craziness and retreat to his lie low at his home in Woodstock.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Scientific American:

A groundbreaking treatment that arms immune cells called T cells to battle cancer is barrelling towards regulators, fuelled by unprecedented clinical success and investor exuberance. But progress of the therapy, called CAR-T, has been marred by its toxicity; several deaths have been reported in clinical trials. Even as the first company readies its application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—expected by the end of the year—researchers are hard at work to make the supercharged T cells safer. Doing so is crucial to expanding the use of the therapy to more people, says Anthony Walker, a managing partner at Alacrita, a consulting firm in London. “Right now it is heroic medicine,” he says—a gruelling treatment deployed only in people for whom all else has failed. “Patients are taken sometimes to within an inch of their lives.”

Most CAR-T procedures begin by harvesting a patient’s white blood cells and sifting out the T cells. Those T cells are engineered to recognize cancer cells, and then infused into the patient, ready to do battle. The approach has shown remarkable success against leukaemias and lymphomas: in one study, all traces of leukaemia disappeared in 90% of the patients who received the treatment (S. L. Maude et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 371, 1507–1517; 2014). Results such as those have fuelled an investor frenzy. “It set the field on fire,” says Walker. Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis invested in the technique in 2012. In 2014, CAR-T firm Kite Pharma of Santa Monica, California, raised US$128 million when it went public. A few months later, one of its competitors, Juno Therapeutics of Seattle, Washington, yielded $264 million in its initial public offering. Now Kite is racing to be the first to bring a CAR-T therapy to the market. On October 18, the company will update investors on its plans to manufacture and sell the complex therapy, which it hopes to launch in 2017. But the treatment’s toxicity has discouraged some investors. On September 26, Kite released interim clinical-trial results—widely seen as successful—in people with aggressive non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (see go.nature.com/2djdqen). Yet about one-third of the patients developed serious neurological side effects, and 18% developed a deadly condition called cytokine release syndrome, which can cause organ failure. Two of the 62 patients died as a result of the treatment.

More here.

George Soros in the New York Review of Books:

The world is witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. It is happening in Syria. It is being perpetrated by the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in support of his protégé, Bashar al-Assad. Russian planes are bombing the civilian population of Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, to assist Syrian government forces that are attempting to take control of rebel-held areas of the city.

The combined assault has, among other things, killed hundreds of people and wounded over a thousand, put the city’s remaining hospitals out of commission, and deprived the population of drinking water.

President Putin is moving aggressively to exploit the three months between now and the January 20 US presidential inauguration, based on a callous political calculation.

As The New York Times puts it:

Mr. Putin calculates that the departing President Obama will be unlikely to intervene in the escalating Syrian conflict and a new American president who might consider a tougher policy will not yet be in office. “Putin is in a hurry before the American elections,” said Nikolai V. Petrov, a political scientist in Moscow. “The next American president will face a new reality and will be forced to accept it.”

Other articles in The New York Times and elsewhere have vividly depicted the suffering of the people of Aleppo and the heroic efforts of the doctors and civilians like White Helmets who are risking their lives to help them. When the facts are fully established, Putin’s bombing of Aleppo will be viewed as among the modern world’s most egregious war crimes.

More here.

Acilius diving beetle male front tarsus (foot) 100x

Christopher Jobson in Colossal:

If you’ve ever wondered how a diving beetle swims through the water or manages to rest just on the surface, the answer is in part because its foot is infinitely more complicated than your own. As seen above, this microscopic image of a male Acilius sulcatus (diving beetle) by photographer Igor Siwanowicz reveals the extraordinary complexity of this aquatic insect’s tiny appendage. This is just one of many examples of Siwanowicz’s work as a neurobiologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

John Hewitt in Inference:

Current approaches to the neurosciences are naïve and often misguided. Contemporary researchers are hopelessly enthusiastic about computer simulations, wiring diagrams or connectomes, and brain activity maps. We may need software tools to visualize brains, but they will not provide any deep understanding of the brain itself.

I shall argue that the fundamental, discrete units of the nervous system are its mitochondria. The feature that we expect of an irreducible neural component is excitability. Mitochondria take excitability to an extreme. If mitochondria are the fundamental units of the nervous systems, then in any CAD model of the brain, they are precisely the parts to which the most care and attention should be applied.

More here.

Hermione Hoby at Vice:

When I met Emily Witt six years ago, I felt that touch of vertigo that comes when you realize you're in the presence of a highly sophisticated and committed mind. Witt is an alumnus of Brown, the Columbia School of Journalism, and Cambridge. So she did not strike me as the sort of person who would get high and have sex in the “orgy dome” of Burning Man with a person she'd just met. I'd made this assumption because I am, like most people, susceptible to normative narratives of what a hyper-educated, somewhat reserved young woman does and does not do. Nowhere are those narratives more fraught than in the realm of sex and dating.

In Future Sex, published this month by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Witt interrogates both our cultural myths around feminine sexuality and the vanguards of sexual experimentation seeking to dismantle them. Her serious, radical book places her in a lineage that started with writers like the late feminist critic Ellen Willis, and, yes, Joan Didion herself. Didion didn't do acid in Haight-Ashbury, but Witt, who, for example, details attending the live filming of a hardcore pornography series, is participant as well as observer. Her progressiveness is not just of politics, but of practice. The result is this wise, honest, and necessary book. We met for coffee last week in Brooklyn to talk about Future Sex and how to approach writing about female sexuality.

More here.

Sewell Chan in the New York Times:

The singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” in the words of the Swedish Academy.

He is the first American to win since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993. The announcement, in Stockholm, came as something of a surprise. Although Mr. Dylan, 75, has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized.

“Mr. Dylan’s work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience,” the former Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman wrote in a 2013 Op-Ed essay in The New York Times arguing for Mr. Dylan to get the award. “His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.”

Mr. Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minn., and grew up in Hibbing. He played in bands as a teenager, influenced by the folk musician Woody Guthrie, the authors of the Beat Generation and modernist poets.

More here.