Jonathan Glancey at 1843:

In a workshop south-east of Stuttgart’s city centre, builders can fly. Here, programmed by students at Stuttgart University’s Institute for Computational Design (ICD), drones buzz around like purposeful bees, fetching and carrying long threads of carbon fibre spun by a robot in the middle of the room. Bit by bit, and without the help of a single human hand, the drones shape these strands into a structure.

The workshop is run by Achim Menges, a German architect and the founder of the ICD. He is at the forefront of the rapidly evolving field of robotic architecture, in which robots make not only the components of buildings but also assemble the buildings themselves. This approach offers two advantages. The first is that it saves money and time. This year in Vienna, Coop Himmelblau, an Austrian architectural firm, will use robots to help build a new hotel tower, the machines lifting and welding the panels that form the building’s exterior into place. Wolf D. Prix, the architect behind the project, estimates that robots could reduce construction times and manpower by as much as 90%, which gives architects more freedom to create.

In California, Ron Culver and Joseph Sarafian have developed an unlikely method of making intricate structures out of concrete using robots and Lycra. Traditionally, concrete is formed using hard moulds; for each different shape you want to generate you need a different mould.

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Catherine Fletcher at Literary Review:

Be Like the Fox tells Machiavelli’s life story. Its title refers to his advice that by being like the fox one can avoid snares. In a rather breathless historical present, Benner organises Machiavelli’s own words into dialogue and commentary as her protagonist makes his way through the religious drama of Savonarola’s regime, encounters with Cesare Borgia, torture and exile, and finally his later years of writing. Machiavelli’s wonderful turns of phrase make for a creative, lively and very readable book with more than a little contemporary resonance. ‘Victories are never so clear’, he writes, ‘that the winner does not have to have some respect, especially for justice.’

Benner is a political philosopher whose previous works on Machiavelli have explored his ethics and, most recently, proposed a new reading ofThe Prince. In answer to that favourite question of seminar tutors, ‘Was The Prince a satire?’, she made a clever but controversial case for a third way, an ironic reading of Machiavelli, suggesting that his true views were often hidden for reasons of political caution and that a prince who actually followed The Prince’s advice was doomed to failure. Be Like the Fox continues her argument that (as its subtitle suggests) Machiavelli was a man on a ‘lifelong quest for freedom’, even during those years of work for the Medici, when many of Florence’s citizens were resigning themselves to the unpleasant reality that the dynasty was the only viable alternative to foreign domination.

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Matthew Bown at the Times Literary Supplement:

The recent Bernard Buffet retrospective at the Paris Museum of Modern Art was of no interest to the contemporary art world. This is presumably because Buffet is not a terribly good artist. His surfaces are worked mechanically, his colour is diagrammatic. His stylizations – thick-trunked, skinny-limbed figures forced into angular shapes, like the square-cropped winter trees around the Place des Vosges – are banal. Such limitations, coupled with the artist’s ambitions of subject and scale, make for queasy viewing. But in the post-war decade Buffet was extolled by Louis Aragon, Jean Cocteau, Claude Roger-Marx; in 1955, Connaissance des Artsnamed him as one of the top ten post-war painters; in 1956 he had a room of his own at the Venice Biennale. His success in the 1950s raises interesting questions. Should histories of twentieth-century art acknowledge and explain his former prominence, or should they ignore it in favour of hindsight? Perhaps we accept that to write Buffet out of art history is reasonable; but what, then, is the value of Aragon’s celebrated two-volume appreciation of Matisse if he also thought Buffet was top-notch? Is it all just phrase-making from someone who didn’t actually have a clue?

There was a whole generation of figurative painters whose work may be discussed in relation to Buffet’s, including socialist realists such as André Fougeron, Renato Guttuso or even Peter de Francia, Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1972 to 86. All, like Buffet, now more-or-less excluded from mainstream art history.

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Herbert Sauro in Nature:

In 2000, two landmark papers started a revolution in our ability to design entirely new functions inside cells. The authors took two electronic circuits — an oscillator and a switch — and built the equivalent from living matter (M. B. Elowitz and S. Leibler Nature 403, 335–338 (2000); T. S. Gardner et al. Nature 403, 339–342; 2000). Life became a machine. To many, including me, this was a profound moment: the beginning of the field of synthetic biology. Now an international enterprise with the potential to transform our lives, synthetic biology crosses age and organizational boundaries, and involves large corporations, small start-ups, academics and tinkerers. In Synthetic, talented science historian Sophia Roosth describes her observations of the field's early evolution — the fruit of embedding herself in the working lives of synthetic biologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. She chronicles the adventures of players such as bioengineer Drew Endy and computer engineer Tom Knight, who championed the field. She covers highlights including whether we can patent new life and how automation is changing the way we do biology. She looks at biologist George Church's dream of resurrecting the woolly mammoth. And she examines the start of the do-it-yourself synthbio scene, in which amateurs set up labs in garages and bedrooms.

Roosth conducted some interviews at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and Amyris Biotechnologies in nearby Emeryville, where metabolic engineering is the primary interest. One surprising insight that she gathered was the difference in scientific cultures. The east-coast scene, as one interviewee notes, is “super all positive, group love”. The west is more corporate — a reversal of expectations. Roosth's approach sparks deep questions about the nature of life. At Berkeley, she and bioengineer Adam Arkin discussed what makes a pig gene a pig gene. He said that this isn't a meaningful question: out of context, the gene has no “pigness”. Thus, Roosth asks, how do we define species in the synthetic world, and what does it mean to move genes from one organism to another? More profoundly, what does 'synthetic' even mean?

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Brian Resnick in Vox:

In just a few years, scientists will unveil a creature whose every letter of DNA was written by a human being. It will be a yeast cell will a fully designer genome, with biological capabilities seen nowhere else in nature.

Today, a global team of scientists has announced a major milestone in their decade-long quest to create a fully synthetic yeast genome. As described in the journal Science, the hundreds of scientists have completed work on six of the yeast’s 16 chromosomes (the individual stands of DNA that make up a genome). Meanwhile, the remaining 10 chromosomes (plus one extra, not found in nature) have been designed and are awaiting production.

The synthetic yeast will be a huge advancement in bioengineering. It will be a proof of concept that scientists can design and implement genome-wide changes, tailoring microorganisms in major ways for further engineering and study. It means we may be able to create whole new species of microorganisms for industrial or scientific purposes.

No, this isn’t “playing God,” the scientists behind the project say. In their view, rewriting the yeast genome is more like domestication. “No one created a dog; they adapted a wolf,” says Sarah Richardson, a synthetic biologist who is the lead author on one of the Science papers describing the project.

Right now, biologists have a lot of genetic engineering tools at their disposal. CRISPR/Cas9 allows biologists to neatly snip out one single gene and replace it with another. Recombinant DNA is how we’ve coaxed bacteria to create human insulin — a treatment for diabetics. But those techniques are for tiny edits. This yeast project is a rewriting and reorganization of the whole genetic book.

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Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic:

Angus Deaton studies the grand questions not just of economics but of life. What makes people happy? How should we measure well-being? Should countries give foreign aid? What can and should experiments do? Is inequality increasing or decreasing? Is the world getting better or worse?

Better, he believes, truly better. But not everywhere or for everyone. This week, in a speech at a conference held by the National Association for Business Economics, Deaton, the Nobel laureate and emeritus Princeton economist, pointed out that inequality among countries is decreasing, while inequality within countries is increasing. China and India are making dramatic economic improvements, while parts of sub-Saharan Africa are seeing much more modest gains. In developed countries, the rich have gotten much richer while the middle class has shriveled. A study he coauthored with the famed Princeton economist Anne Case highlights one particularly dire outcome: Mortality is actually increasing for middle-aged white Americans, due in no small part to overdoses and suicides—so-called “deaths of despair.” (Case also happens to be Deaton’s wife. More on that later.)

Deaton sat down with me after his speech. We talked about whether poor people are better off here or in low-income countries, the moral ambiguities of companies making money off of Medicaid-financed OxyContin prescriptions, which is the nicest conservative think tank in Washington, what is going on with white people and mortality, and the charms of former-President Obama.

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From Phys.org:

Time crystals may sound like something from science fiction, having more to do with time travel or Dr. Who. These strange materials—in which atoms and molecules are arranged across space and time—are in fact quite real, and are opening up entirely new ways to think about the nature of matter. They also eventually may help protect information in futuristic devices known as quantum computers.

Two groups of researchers based at Harvard University and the University of Maryland report March 9 in the journal Nature that they have successfully created time crystals using theories developed at Princeton University. The Harvard-based team included scientists from Princeton who played fundamental roles in working out the theoretical understanding that led to the creation of these exotic crystals.

"Our work discovered the essential physics of how time crystals function," said Shivaji Sondhi, a Princeton professor of physics. "What is more, this discovery builds on a set of developments at Princeton that gets at the issue of how we understand complex systems in and out of equilibrium, which is centrally important to how physicists explain the nature of the everyday world."

In 2015, Sondhi and colleagues including then-graduate student Vedika Khemani, who earned her Ph.D. at Princeton in 2016 and is now a junior fellow at Harvard, as well as collaborators Achilleas Lazarides and Roderich Moessner at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany, published the theoretical basis for how time crystals—at first considered impossible—could actually exist. Published in the journal Physics Review Letters in June 2016, the paper spurred conversations about how to build such crystals.

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Brian Boutwell in Quillette:

Emile Durkheim is the father of modern sociology; he is a titan. Over a century ago the great man issued an edict that would forever alter — or you could say, forever derail — the course of the discipline that he established. His proclamation, paraphrased loosely, was that any social occurrence was a product of other social occurrences that came before it. Society and culture were “prime movers”, an ultimate cause of things in the world that, for its own part, had no cause. Social facts orbited in their own solar system, untethered from the psychology and biology of individual humans. It’s almost as if this idea originated from a burning bush, high on some ancient mountain, as it would to this day steer the direction of much social science thought. Durkheim’s insight would be a hall pass for social scientists to spend decades ignoring certain uncomfortable realities. Let me try and give you an idea of just how fetid the waters really are.

In 1990 (over two decades ago) the sociologist Pierre van den Berghe wrote an article entitled Why Most Sociologists Don’t (and Won’t) Think Evolutionarily. I had to read this article as a graduate student in 2007. For context, that means that when my eyes first scanned the pages the essay was already 17 years old. I remember being struck by the venom that dripped off the page. The author seemed angry, he seemed frustrated. He railed against so many things, but his ire was focused particularly in the traditional sociological way of doing business:

Sociologists, on the other hand, deal mostly with abstract categories like classes and ethnic groups; engage in statistical massage of aggregated data; do secondary analysis of public opinion surveys; speculate about the impact of religious beliefs and political ideologies; project, manipulate, and interpret statistical trends; and generally pontificate about the state of society. They do not watch people being bumped over the head; they feed the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports to their computers. They do not observe women having babies; they speculate about fluctuations in birth rates provided by the Bureau of the Census. They do not attend political conventions and follow people into polling stations; they read public opinion surveys.

Mind you, I’m guilty of all of the sins described by van den Berghe. I’m a product of the system that he is eviscerating. This is not my attempt to sit in the stands and jeer the coaches’ play calling from a distance. Rather, this is an attempt to change the game plan from inside the locker room.

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Stephen Ingle at Prospect Magazine:

Significantly, Orwell didn’t leave us with only a picture of a northern working-class managing to survive the ordeals of poverty through a value system based on egalitarianism and common decency. He had in mind something far more ambitious and controversial: the conscious adaptation of these values, with the support of “all right-thinking people” to the public sphere as a form of politics. This is a massive leap of faith but Orwell was unapologetic, writing “all over England, in every industrial town, there are men by scores thousands whose attitude to life, if only they could express it…would change the consciousness of our race.” This was democratic socialism.

So what would Orwell’s democratic socialism amount to? He took for granted that retention of the basic structure of working-class culture would be a prime objective (family, pub, football, betting)—how else could their values be sustained?—and that consequently utopianism and any form of scientific or indeed ideological socialism would be inappropriate. “The working-class Socialist, like the working-class Catholic, is weak on doctrine and can hardly open his mouth without uttering a heresy, but he has the heart of the matter in him.” Orwell’s democratic socialism—no more and no less than the public endorsement of what he called “common decency”—couldn’t be elaborated into a programme of action any more than it could be formulated into a systematic ideology because it represented the way of life of a community. It would be quite wrong to think that Orwell’s rejection of ideology was based upon lack of understanding or knowledge of ideological debate.

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Jeremy Kearney at The Dublin Review of Books:

Following his enthusiastic reception the previous year, it was not surprising that Dylan was the star attraction at Newport in 1964 and had become the idol of the folk community. Such was the extent of his fame at that time that Ronnie Gilbert, a long-time member of the radical folk group The Weavers, felt confident enough to end her introduction to his set by saying to the audience: “And here he is, you know him, he’s yours – Bob Dylan.” But what she and the fans didn’t realise was that Dylan had moved on at great speed since his 1963 appearance. He had been on a revelatory road trip across the United States and made a drug-fuelled visit to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans that led to the writing of “Mr Tambourine Man”, the song which signalled the new artistic path he was on. By then he had also noticed the chart-based success of the Beatles electric guitar-backed harmonies and heard the Animals’ rock version of “House of the Rising Sun”, a song he had recorded on his first album. His artistic vision was now directed towards a different kind of music rather than the protest songs his fans expected. At the time of Ronnie Gilbert’s gushing introduction Dylan was only able to hint at his changed position by leaving some coded messages in the new songs he played from his yet unreleased Another Side of Bob Dylan – “All I really want to do / Is baby be friends with you” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe / It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for”. Even though the festival audiences were still delighted with his performances, the folk establishment was considerably less impressed and he received plenty of criticism in Sing Out, the main magazine of the folk movement, for having lost the political “edge” in his songwriting.

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Jared Marcel Pollen in 3:AM Magazine:

The question of identity politics in literature is one that has been written about increasingly over recent years, but has seldom been discussed honestly and with an eye to many of its ironies. Writing about this brand of politics can be a perilous task, requiring an anxious level of delicacy and tact. Thus, many choose to ignore, or else silently brood about the subject, which now colors much of our thinking as readers, writers and critics, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We can hardly help it: we belong to an age not of politics, but of politicization––not a country, but a set of “cultures” constantly in conflict with one another. Such that something as basically ethical as being vegetarian has been deemed Liberal. The twenty-four hour news cycle means that every second of life that is being lived is also being reported, debated, narrated. Indeed, between social justice movements like, “Black Lives Matter” and struggles of the LGBTQ, a GOP that obsessively tries to regulate women’s reproductive rights, a crotch-grabbing President who has threatened to deport millions of Mexican immigrants and place all Muslims on a national register, it is hard to be as apolitical as one would like. Our consciousness is inundated with reminders of injustice against any group, and one can’t help but feel forced to takes sides, or join in the fight.

George Orwell, in writing about the politics of his age––one of concentration camps, war and totalitarianism––observed that it was impossible to banish these thoughts from one’s mind, let alone one’s writing: “When you’re on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships.” A sinking ship is not a bad metaphor for contemporary culture, or at least, the view from the present, which is that things are always getting worse. Indeed, the word “culture” itself, wherever it is applied (pop culture, gun culture, rape culture, culture war, etc.) seems intrinsically bound to decadence and decline. And in a climate of such hyperawareness, the infusion of identity politics into the products of that culture feels like more and more of an inevitability.

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Mary Beard at the London Review of Books:

It is happily the case that in 2017 there are more women in what we would all probably agree are ‘powerful’ positions than there were ten, let alone fifty years ago. Whether that is as politicians, police commissioners, CEOs, judges or whatever, it’s still a clear minority – but there are more. (If you want some figures, around 4 per cent of UK MPs were women in the 1970s; around 30 per cent are now.) But my basic premise is that our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. If we close our eyes and try to conjure up the image of a president or (to move into the knowledge economy) a professor, what most of us see isn’t a woman. And that’s just as true even if you are a woman professor: the cultural stereotype is so strong that, at the level of those close-your-eyes fantasies, it is still hard for me to imagine me, or someone like me, in my role. I put the phrase ‘cartoon professor’ into Google Images – ‘cartoon professor’ to make sure that I was targeting the imaginary ones, the cultural template, not the real ones. Out of the first hundred that came up, only one, Professor Holly from Pokémon Farm, was female.

To put this the other way round, we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man. The regulation trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic – like lowering the timbre of the voice – to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power.

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Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

Throughout last Friday’s daylong conference at the Radcliffe Institute on slavery and its historical ties to Harvard and other universities, the conversation kept coming back to something that writer Ta-Nehisi Coates had said during the morning’s keynote address. “We talk about enslavement as if it were a bump in the road. And I tell people: it’s the road. It’s the actual road.” Coates was talking about slavery’s colossal formative influence on American history, from the founding to the present; but universities, too, have been finding out in recent years just how deep their own roots are sunk into, as Harvard historian Sven Beckert phrased it Friday, “the violence of the slave trader, the Middle Passage, the auction block, and the whip.” Researchers at Yale, Princeton, Brown, William & Mary, the University of Virginia, Rutgers, Georgetown—and Harvard—as well as other schools, have uncovered sometimes extensive historical connections to slavery: slave owners among the faculty and administration; significant gifts from slave-owning donors; endowment money and investments in the slave trade; campuses built and subsidized in part by slave labor. University scholars authored many of the racist scientific theories that legitimized slavery’s existence. One reminder of that scholarship on Friday was the shirtless man staring out from the conference program. Radcliffe dean Lizabeth Cohen explained that his name was Renty, a Congolese-born slave whose daguerreotype image was taken in 1850 on a South Carolina plantation and commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz. A biologist and geologist and a student of Earth’s history, Agassiz developed the theory of polygenesis, which denied the existence of a common human ancestor and held that blacks were inferior to whites. The Renty daguerreotype, along with others from Agassiz’s tour of Southern plantations, was lost for decades, until archivists at the Peabody Museum rediscovered it in 1976.

In his keynote, Coates was unequivocal about what he believes should happen next. “I think every single one of these universities needs to make reparations,” he said, as the auditorium broke into loud applause. “I don’t know how you get around that, I just don’t. I don’t know how you conduct research that shows that your very existence is rooted in a great crime, and just say ‘Well,’ shrug—and maybe at best say ‘I’m sorry,’ and you walk away. And I think you need to use the language of reparation, I think you need to say that word.”

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Neanderthal dental plaque is a precious commodity, so it’s a little embarrassing when you’re trying to dislodge a piece and it goes flying across the room. “We just stood still, and everyone’s like: Where is it? Where is it?” recalls Laura Weyrich from the University of Adelaide. “Usually, we try to wrap the skull in foil and work underneath it, but that time, the foil didn’t happen to cover a small area.” Weyrich and her team of unorthodox dentists eventually found the wayward plaque, and recovered similar samples from the skulls of five Neanderthals. Each was once a colony of microbes, growing on a tooth. But over tens of thousands of years, they had hardened into small, brittle pieces of rock. Still, each nugget contained DNA—from the microbes, and also from whatever the Neanderthals had eaten. By harvesting and sequencing that DNA, Weyrich has shown that there was no such thing as a typical Neanderthal diet. One individual from Spy cave in Belgium mostly ate meat like woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, as well as some edible mushrooms. But two individuals who lived in El Sidrón cave in Spain seemed to be entirely vegetarian. The team couldn’t find any traces of meat in their diet, which consisted of mushrooms, pine nuts, tree bark, and moss. The Belgian Neanderthals hunted; the Spanish ones foraged

“When people talk about the Paleo diet, that’s not paleo, that’s just non-carb,” Weyrich says. “The true paleo diet is eating whatever’s out there in the environment.” One of the El Sidron Neanderthals even seemed to be self-medicating with edible plants. One of his teeth had an abscess, and his plaque contained a parasite that causes diarrhea. But the plaque also contained Penicillium, the mould that produces the antibiotic penicillin, and poplar bark, a natural source of the aspirin-like painkiller, salicylic acid. The Neanderthal’s medical history—both diseases and treatments—were written in his plaque.

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Terry Eagleton in Commonweal:

The “form of life” is a crucial concept in the late philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is more an anthropological notion than a political one. Forms of life consist of practices such as rubbing noses, burying the dead, imagining the future as lying ahead of you, or marking in one’s language a distinction between various forms of laughter (chortling, braying, tittering, and so on), but not between an adolescent and pre-adolescent nephew, as some tribal society might feel it appropriate to do. None of these practices is immune to change; but here and now they constitute the context within which our discourse makes sense, and are thus in some provisional sense foundational. A foundation is not necessarily less of a foundation because it might not exist tomorrow or somewhere else in the world. As Wittgenstein remarks in his homespun style, don’t claim that there isn’t a last house in the road on the grounds that one could always build another. Indeed one could; but right now this is the last one.

Wittgenstein insisted that forms of life are simply “given.” When asked why one does things in a certain way, one can only respond, “This is simply what I do.” Answers, he maintains, must come to an end somewhere. It is no wonder, then, that Wittgenstein has gained a reputation for conservatism. Yet though he is indeed in some ways a conservative thinker, it is not on this account. To acknowledge the givenness of a form of life is not necessarily to endorse its ethical or political values. “This is just what we do” is a reasonable enough response when asked why one measures distances in miles rather than kilometers, but not when asked why one administers lethal injections to citizens who are no longer able to work.

Morally and politically speaking, Wittgenstein was certainly no apologist for the form of life known as twentieth-century Western civilization.

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Amna Akbar and Keanne Theorharis offer the lead piece in a forum over at The Boston Review, with responses by Wadie Said, Sudha Setty, Lisa Stampnitzky, Tarek Z. Ismail, Sahar F. Aziz, and Su'ad Abdul Khabeer:

Focused largely on the domestic War on Terror (and only briefly touching on the interconnected global dimension), this forum examines the paradigms and legal infrastructure of U.S. domestic counterterrorism policy. The essays look at the impact of surveillance and the lack of First Amendment protections for American Muslims; the deference of federal courts to government assertions of national security; the rights-abusing paradigms of preventive prosecution, radicalization, and extremist networks; and the intersectional realities of American Muslims as (predominantly) communities of color in the United States.

These essays highlight the public silences and racialized assumptions that constitute some of the devastating legacies of 9/11 in law and culture. They show us the dangerous paradigms that have built and nourished anti-Muslim policy and law enforcement. Taken together, they reveal six key misapprehensions—even more dangerous now under a Trump presidency —that we must understand and challenge if we do not wish to see a world defined by bans and registrations.

One: Framing a defense of Muslims based solely on innocence, thereby leaving in place the idea of the “dangerous” Muslim who might deserve special measures.

In the days after the ban was announced and the first immigrants were detained, tens of thousands of people packed airports across the country: “Not in our name, not on our watch,” the protestors said. But much of this public outcry rested on a particularized notion of Muslim innocence, emphasizing the children and elderly detained at airports in inhumane conditions. But the airport has long been a place of peril for Muslims—for those Muslims whose actions, travel patterns, or social media posts are deemed questionable and who are then held for extra screening (devices searched, associations questioned, more and more information required to be allowed to pass through) and for those who are placed on the No Fly List—with almost no public challenge. The No Fly List is a secret list, expanded considerably after 2009, routinely updated without transparency about who is on it or why, and with no clear pathway for getting off the list. In 2013 civil rights groups sued on behalf of clients who were pressured to become informants under the threat of being left on the No Fly List. Democrats have celebrated the No Fly List; for instance, John Lewis’s sit-in to limit access to guns for those on the No Fly List garnered widespread liberal praise.

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William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar:

Let us eschew the familiar examples: the disinvited speakers, the Title IX tribunals, the safe zones stocked with Play-Doh, the crusades against banh mi. The flesh-eating bacterium of political correctness, which feeds preferentially on brain tissue, and which has become endemic on elite college campuses, reveals its true virulence not in the sorts of high-profile outbreaks that reach the national consciousness, but in the myriad of ordinary cases—the everyday business-as-usual at institutions around the country—that are rarely even talked about.

A clarification, before I continue (since deliberate misconstrual is itself a tactic of the phenomenon in question). By political correctness, I do not mean the term as it has come to be employed on the right—that is, the expectation of adherence to the norms of basic decency, like refraining from derogatory epithets. I mean its older, intramural denotation: the persistent attempt to suppress the expression of unwelcome beliefs and ideas.

I recently spent a semester at Scripps, a selective women’s college in Southern California. I had one student, from a Chinese-American family, who informed me that the first thing she learned when she got to college was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her non-feminist views about marriage. I had another student, a self-described “strong feminist,” who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might say something that you’re not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

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Paul Halpern in Forbes:

Confronted with a theoretical question, such as whether or not gravitational waves exist, Richard Feynman never trusted authorities. Rather, he tried to develop and convince himself of a solution in the simplest way possible, constructing an argument from first principles. Once he managed to build a case for a particular point of view in his own mind, he felt equipped to persuade others. At the first American conference on general relativity, GR1, held in Chapel Hill in January 1957, Feynman offered a brilliant argument that gravitational waves must carry energy. The argument anticipated by almost sixty years the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) discovery, announced in February 2016, that confirmed the reality of gravitational waves.