From Phys.Org:

A 20-year demographic study of a large chimpanzee community in Uganda's Kibale National Park has revealed that, under the right ecological conditions, our close primate relatives can lead surprisingly long lives in the wild. The study, published March 19 in the Journal of Human Evolution, establishes an average life expectancy of about 33 years in its sample of 306 chimpanzees, nearly twice as high as that of other chimpanzee communities and within the 27- to 37-year range of life expectancy at birth of human hunter-gatherers. These findings are important for understanding the evolution of chimpanzee and hominin life histories, the researchers argue.

"Our findings show how ecological factors, including variation in food supplies and predation levels, drive variation in life expectancy among wild chimpanzee populations," said Brian Wood, assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University, the study's lead author. "They also inform the study of the evolution of human life history, helping us to imagine the conditions that could have changed mortality rates among our early hominin populations." The Ngogo chimpanzees reside in the center of Kibale National Park, in southwestern Uganda. The directors of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project—David Watts (Yale), John Mitani (University of Michigan), and Kevin Langergraber (Arizona State University)—have monitored births, deaths, immigrations, and emigrations in the unusually large Ngogo chimpanzee community since 1995, producing the largest demographic dataset available for any community of wild chimpanzees. This study reveals that Ngogo chimpanzees have the highest life expectancy on record for any group of wild chimpanzees. Favorable ecological conditions largely account for the Ngogo community's high life expectancy, according to the study. The forest in Ngogo provides a relatively consistent and abundant supply of high-energy and nutritious foods, including easily digestible figs.

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A review by Gerald Dworkin in The New Rambler:

One of the most risible of the false statements made by President Trump was his claim to “have studied the writings of the nominee closely.” The nominee was Judge Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. This from a man who says “Do me a favor: Don’t send me a report. Send me, like, three pages.”

Had Trump chosen to actually read some of Gorsuch’s writings he could have read the short speech that Gorsuch gave as a tribute to Scalia after his death.

Had he wanted to get a broader picture of Gorsuch as a thinker, Trump could not have done better that to read The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Published in 2006, this book was a version of Gorsuch’s D.Phil thesis written under the supervision of John Finnis at Oxford. Finnis is a well-known legal scholar whose views on what is sometimes called the new Natural Law have been influential in contemporary discussions of issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia. Although influenced by Catholic thought, Finnis attempts to give non-religious support to views that are commonly based on religious arguments.

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Ajay Singh Chaudhary in the LA Review of Books:

Games are machines for producing affect, and the affect the public most fears in games is rage. The moral panic that surrounds games always turns on the fear that games — steeped in an aesthetic and a comportment of aggression — will somehow seep into the “real world.” Although research into this question has proved consistently inconclusive (and replete with serious methodological issues) the fear is understandable in a year in which it seemed that the most ridiculous controversy of 2014 (the bizarre, nearly impenetrably hateful, stupid, and labyrinthine “Gamergate”) might become part of the body politic itself. But that idea — as slippery as the new obsession with “fake news” — generated through a thousand tweets but less convincing numbers on the ground, also misses what a game like DOOM can do. Unlike in, for example, Valve’s Counter-Strike (almost the Platonic ideal of a contemporary first-person shooter), the thickness and absurdity of the world — complete with its resonances with our own — is intimately interwoven with the gameplay itself. The demons and the UAC are driven with pitch-perfect intensity by Michael Gordon’s beyond-on-the-nose Nine Inch Nails for the 21st-century soundtrack. Instead of the world receding into abstractions of geometry and hit-boxes, as is often the case in especially competitive multiplayer shooters, DOOM’s rhythmic dynamic range keeps the plodding idiocy of a world working to build a brighter tomorrow through the endless squeezing of a (literally) hellish today in sharp focus.

DOOM’s rage is telegraphed from the very first moment of the game, but it is only when you are somewhere in the middle of one of its fully fleshed out scenarios, dancing from one platform to another, whirling through your array of weapons, prying the jaws of some Hell beast apart while cursing the utter inane idiocy of DOOM’s world — which is to say our world — that DOOMbegins its rage education in earnest. Games are machines for producing affect, but they are also pedagogical ones: DOOM is instructing us. Pankaj Mishra recently argued that ours is an age of anger. Doomguy occupies the subject position of the 21st-century rage agent par excellence: put-upon, yet powerful; crumpling like a fragile heap from just a few demonic projectiles but with a rage potential unmatched; disenfranchised but with so many tools of power at hand. Mishra wisely encourages his readers to turn to the social theorists of the 19th century who took irrationality seriously; to the Darwins, the Freuds, the Webers, and Nietzsches who saw in modern humanity sexual impulses, old Gods, churning natures, and ressentiment instead of simple, orderly, maximizing rationality. But DOOM already knows that. DOOM takes us as we are.

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Aaron Reeves in Nature:

Donald Trump's election to the US presidency and Brexit — Britain's impending divorce from the European Union — have both been read as populist rejections of rising inequality, driven by economic and political elites. But democracies do not necessarily reduce inequality. Nor is it clear that Trump or UK Prime Minister Theresa May (or French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen, for that matter) will disentangle elites, state power and money. Indeed, a number of Trump's Cabinet appointments — such as Wilbur Ross, commerce secretary and billionaire businessman — merely replaced Washington insiders with corporate insiders, whose vested interests have been vigorously questioned.

However much it is in the news, income inequality is an ancient and intractable social, economic and political condition. Now, five books examine its inevitability, in terms of both political economy and consequences. They take up the baton from social scientists Thomas Piketty, Tony Atkinson, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, whose books have reignited this global debate in the past decade. Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap, 2014) tries to hold economics and politics together. He argues that inequality is a product of fundamental laws of capitalism, and would be amenable to change through a global tax on financial transactions. Atkinson's Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2015), with Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level (Allen Lane, 2009), contends that inequality can be curtailed through greater government intervention in technological development and labour markets. What do the five new studies add?

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Eric Benson in Texas Monthly:

J.D. Salinger fled the Manhattan literary scene for a hillside cottage in Cornish, New Hampshire, and was more or less never heard from again. Howard Hughes spent many of his waning years holed up in the penthouse of Las Vegas’s Desert Inn, refusing public comment and shunning public appearances. Thomas Pynchon, America’s most successfully private artist since Emily Dickinson, has managed to go six decades without having so much as a clear picture taken of him. But in the era of social media and digital surveillance, such seclusion is increasingly difficult to maintain, so these days, anyone can go to YouTube and watch Terrence Malick dance.

In the video, Malick—the 73-year-old director of Badlands, The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life,and the forthcoming Song to Song—is at the Broken Spoke in Austin, the city he has called home for most of his life. The San Antonio–based band Two Tons of Steel is playing at full locomotive tilt on the honky-tonk’s stage, and we watch as Malick—bearded, balding, and smiling softly—shuffles along in his best approximation of the two-step. Malick, who in high school was known as the Dancing Bear, more for his husky frame than his nimble feet, looks unaware that anyone is filming him. He is holding hands with his wife, Alexandra, who goes by Ecky, and together they slowly circle the dance floor. The video is mundane in nearly every way—twelve seconds of poorly lit, slightly jittery, low-resolution footage that shows an older couple dancing happily but unremarkably. But within a day of surfacing, in late 2012, the video, “Terrence Dances,” was reposted and written about by the Huffington Post, Vulture, Slate, and IndieWire. To date, it has been watched more than 33,000 times.

More here. [Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

“Organisms are algorithms,” Yuval Noah Harari asserts in his provocative new book, “Homo Deus.” “Every animal — including Homo sapiens — is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution. . . . There is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that nonorganic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass.” In Harari’s telling, the human “algorithm” will soon be overrun and outpaced by other algorithms. It is not the specter of mass extinction that is hanging over us. It is the specter of mass obsolescence. To understand how Harari arrives at this conclusion, we might turn to his earlier book. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” was an attempt to write a genetic, anthropological, cultural, social and epistemological history of humans over the last 100,000-odd years. Historians, scientists and academic pedants carped about its audacity of scope — but the book, modeled after Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (a book that also received its share of carping and academic envy), presented a sweeping macrohistory, often marvelously. From the birth of a slight, sly, naked ape somewhere in the depths of Africa to the growth, spread and eventual dominance of that species over the world, “Sapiens” split the story of humankind into three broad “revolutions.” The first, the “cognitive revolution,” resulted in humans acquiring the capacity to think, learn and communicate information with a facility unprecedented in the animal kingdom. The second — the “agricultural revolution” — allowed humans to domesticate crops and animals, enabling us to form stable societies and intensifying the flow of information within them. The “scientific revolution” came last. Humans acquired the capacity to interrogate and manipulate the physical, chemical and biological worlds, resulting in even more potent technological advances that surround us today.

“Homo Deus” takes off where “Sapiens” left off; it is a “brief history of tomorrow.” What is the natural culmination of the scientific revolution, Harari asks. What will the future look like? “At the dawn of the third millennium,” he writes, “humanity wakes up, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. Remnants of some awful nightmare are still drifting across its mind. ‘There was something with barbed wire, and huge mushroom clouds. Oh well, it was just a bad dream.’ Going to the bathroom, humanity washes its face, examines its wrinkles in the mirror, makes a cup of coffee and opens the diary, ‘Let’s see what’s on the agenda today.’ ” This is the kind of breezy prose that has catapulted Harari into an international star — and it is equally evident in this book. I’ll return to that brushed-off nightmare — the barbed wire and mushroom clouds — but Harari continues apace: “Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.”

More here.

Aqdas Aftab in bitchmedia:

Last year, while working as a graduate student instructor for a composition course themed around gender justice, I asked my students to read Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival.” The last few lines of this poem—“So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive”—were of special interest to my students, most of whom were white cis women. One of them understood these lines to allude to the experience of all women who are silenced by a patriarchal system that makes women’s survival difficult. Another talked about how she was moved by Lorde’s poetics because she identified personally with the pain of the narrator because “she knew how terrible it was to be boxed by patriarchal expectations.” This discussion about Lorde—and her poetics about seemingly “universal” womanhood—took place much later in the semester, after I had already discussed a brief history of Black feminist critiques of second-wave feminism with my students; among their readings was The Combahee River Collective Statement, which outlines the history, exigency, and goals of Black feminist organizing. So why were they so keen to find something in Lorde’s poem that spoke to their personal experiences? These students were not averse to discussing race in general; in fact,they demonstrated an admirable honesty as they worked through their own white privilege. Yet they had this urge to identify with Audre Lorde’s narratives, making Lorde’s personal voice their own.

Their responses speak to a larger problem in the appropriation of Audre Lorde by white feminists (and also non-Black and non-indigenous feminists of color), who find resonance in Lorde’s feminist framework, but fail (or refuse) to recognize that Lorde’s politics revolve around the importance of staying cognizant of racial difference in feminist movements. A lot of Lorde’s writing is about her personal experience as a Black, lesbian, feminist, and hence captures the lived reality of a specific community who is racialized, sexualized, and gendered in a certain way. But in many of her speeches and essays such as “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Lorde is speaking to white women, asking them to explore how they contribute to the erasure, tokenization, and dehumanization of Black women.

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