Nina Eliasoph in Open Democracy:

After living in the coastal cities of America for all of my life, I met rural white people for the first time in 1995. They were my sociology students at the University of Wisconsin, and I had assigned them the usual fare, heavy on the causes and consequences of urban poverty and racism. These students bristled, saying that their problems were just as bad. I was sure they must be wrong, of course: even if they were poor, they still had white privilege.

But they persisted. They described empty towns without jobs from which everyone tried to leave as soon as they could; small farmers who worked so hard to compete against agro-businesses that they had to pass up on sleep; and small communities with big drug problems.

By the middle of my first semester, hearing enough of their tales, and smelling their resentment, my emotional, moral, and political alarm bells finally went off. I realized that something big was missing from the story that urban elites, progressive journalists, politicians, media producers, and academics like me had been telling about rural white Americans for decades: we talked about everyone else’s plight except their own.

Katherine Cramer’s book, The Politics of Resentment, argues that part of the reason rural whites resent urban elites is that they think that we know nothing about them—that they and their hard work and intelligence are invisible to us and that we scorn them anyway. We eat the cheese from Wisconsin farms but we don’t think about the lives of the people who produce it.

More here.

Jacqueline Banerjee at The Times Literary Supplement:

The more we live online in a disembodied present, the more fascinated we seem to be by the physical minutiae of the past. When not zipping through the ether, scholars are busy turning over the silt of centuries like latter-day mudlarks. Kathryn Hughes, for one, tells us in the introduction to Victorians Undone that she has been hard at work for a whole decade, if not in estuarial sediment, then, as she puts it, “in the richest parts of the archive, where material has gathered in the deepest drifts”. We can well believe it, since she has fished up a haul of extraordinarily intimate details about some of the most high profile Victorian figures.

Life-writing as a discipline owes much to family history, and Hughes’s main object is to lift our Victorian forebears off the page for us, particularly by reminding us that even the most highly placed or high-minded of them had solid presences – sometimes all too solid. Her dismissal of the prematurely aged Coleridge on her first page as a “dollop of slop” proves prophetic, not only of her sometimes startling style, but of her iconoclasm. A twenty-first- century Lytton Strachey, she ignores politically correct strictures against Lookism, and instead employs it with relish. Queen Victoria is her first target. We all know that the monarch soon lost her youthful bloom and acquired “pouchy jowls, oyster eyes, and a chin that became a neck without you quite noticing how”.

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Crispin Sartwell at The Millions:

It’s hard to imagine two more different temperaments than those of Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, contemporaries who, even in their own lifetimes, were conceived in opposite terms: darkness and light, illness and health, extreme depression and unbridled optimism, self-destruction and self-affirmation. Emerson was thought to be an emblem of America the Symbol: America the new birth of freedom, the unlimited frontier of possibility. But Poe’s surreal, claustrophobic, and weirdly rationalistic American Gothic, his world of vice, madness, and murder somehow put into motion by dark applications of reason, depicts an America that is no less real than Emerson’s, though also no more real.

Poe was a well-known literary critic, but not so well-known that Emerson — the most famous and beloved American literary figure of his day — couldn’t afford to ignore him. He did take enough time out to dismiss Poe — no doubt on the basis of “The Raven” — as a “jingle man.” Like many of the literary lights of the time, he probably regarded Poe as tasteless. For his part, Poe regarded Emerson, with “reverence,” as extremely tasteful, and boring in his tastefulness: “It is Taste on her death-bed — Taste kicking in articulo mortis.” Poe portrayed himself as an enemy of the Transcendentalists at least to the extent of often sneering at them. He called Emerson “over-rated” and remarked on the lack of basic logic and rationality in his philosophy.

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Alec Wilkinson at The New Yorker:

White used to be exclusively a rock star—he was half of the White Stripes—but his interests are diverse, and he has lately stopped touring and writing to dispose of them. His company, Third Man Records, which is based in Nashville and Detroit, produces vinyl records and sells them from stores at its offices. Third Man’s catalogue includes roughly four hundred titles. Some are reissues (old blues songs, Detroit garage bands such as the Gories, and early Motown recordings), some are original records that White produced (Loretta Lynn, Neil Young, Wanda Jackson, and Karen Elson, White’s second wife, from whom he is now divorced), and some are recordings of concerts held at the Nashville offices (Willie Nelson, Pearl Jam, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Detroit hip-hop artist Black Milk). White’s “Lazaretto,” a Third Man record from 2014, sold forty thousand copies in one week, more than any other record since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan began following vinyl sales.

White’s most recent record, released in September, is “Jack White Acoustic Recordings 1998–2016,” which is a retrospective, mainly of White Stripes songs. It quickly became the No. 1 vinyl record in the U.S. and the No. 8 album over all, but it’s only one project among several. White wrote the song “Don’t Hurt Yourself ” with Beyoncé, and sang it with her on her album “Lemonade.” He plays guitar in the Raconteurs, a band that started in Detroit in 2004, and drums in Dead Weather, which started in Nashville in 2009; he sings in both. In these bands, he collaborates, but he still sounds like Jack White.

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Charlie McCann in The Economist:

“There is nothing in this world as invisible as a public monument,” said Robert Musil, an Austrian writer. Britain’s first memorial to the victims of the Holocaust is a case in point. Designed by Richard Siefert and Derek Lovejoy, it is a humble garden of boulders and birch trees tucked away in Hyde Park. Many people aren’t even aware it exists. In 2015, the Holocaust Commission decided it wasn’t good enough and recommended that a new memorial be built. A shortlist of ten designs has been published, including entries by some of the biggest names in architecture: Zaha Hadid, David Adjaye, Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind. Could they prove Musil wrong?

It’s been done before. In 1983, the same year that Siefert and Lovejoy planted their garden, a young Asian-American grad student called Maya Lin created a memorial in Washington, DC, for the American victims of the Vietnam war. It is composed of two long, slanting panels of black granite, which join at a wide angle. At its deepest, the wall sinks ten feet into the ground, resembling, as Lin put it, “a cut into the earth”. Inscribed are the names of 58,000 American soldiers, listed in the order that they died. As visitors walk through the memorial, they see the years pass, the death toll rise – and themselves, reflected in the polished stone. By building an experience and not an object, like the triumphant arches or statues of old, Lin reinvented the memorial for the modern age. Others have tried to replicate the emotional force of her wall. The Holocaust memorial in Berlin, an undulating field of large concrete slabs, makes visitors feel as if they are wandering through a strange cemetery. Passing through the six illuminated glass towers of Boston’s Holocaust memorial, each etched with “prisoner numbers” to represent the six million Jews who died, is similarly haunting.

Picture: Evoking the death camps

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

It sounds like a crazy way to improve your health—spend some time on a platform that vibrates at about the same frequency as the lowest string on a double bass. But recent research indicates that the procedure, known as whole-body vibration, may be helpful in illnesses from cerebral palsy to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Now, a new study of obese mice reveals that whole-body vibration provides similar metabolic benefits as walking on a treadmill, suggesting it may be useful for treating obesity and type II diabetes. “I think it’s very promising,” says exercise physiologist Lee Brown of the California State University in Fullerton, who wasn’t connected to the study. Although the effects are small, he says, researchers should follow-up to determine whether they can duplicate them in humans. Plenty of gyms feature whole-body vibration machines, and many athletes swear the activity improves their performance. The jiggling does seem to spur muscles to work harder, possibly triggering some of the same effects as exercise. But researchers still don’t know how the two compare, especially when it comes to people who are ill. So biomedical engineer Meghan McGee-Lawrence of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and colleagues decided to perform a head-to-head comparison of exercise and whole-body vibration.

The researchers tested mutant mice resistant to the appetite-controlling hormone leptin, resulting in obesity and diabetes. McGee-Lawrence and colleagues divided their animals into three groups. One group lived in cages on a platform that shook gently for 20 minutes each day, subjecting the animals to whole-body vibration. The second group scurried on a treadmill for 45 minutes per day, whereas animals in the control group could laze about to their hearts’ content. After 12 weeks, the researchers found that exercise and whole-body vibration provided comparable health benefits. All three groups of mice gained weight during the study, but those in the exercising and shaken groups put on slightly less than the indolent rodents. They also had less fat and thicker leg muscles.

What’s more, mice in the two “active” groups showed signs of a healthier metabolism.

More here.

Gary Shteyngart in The New Yorker:

At the start of 2016, I had a bad feeling. Time was not working right. Some weeks were as snappy as days, others were as elastic as months, and the months felt as if they were either bleeding into one another three at a time—Jabruarch—or segmenting into Gregorian-calendar city-states. Feb. Rue. Airy. Something was wrong with the world.

One day in February, I took a ride on the subway. This was a rare occurrence. Since turning forty, I’d started to suffer from a heightened sense of claustrophobia. A few years ago, I was stuck for an hour in an elevator with a man who weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds and his two grocery carts crammed with bags of Tostitos and bottles of Canada Dry, an experience both frightening and lonely. The elevator had simply given up. What if a subway train also refused to move? I began walking seventy blocks at a time or splurging on taxis. But on this day I had taken the N train. Somewhere between Forty-ninth Street and Forty-second Street, a signal failed and we ground to a halt. For forty minutes, we stood still. An old man yelled at the conductor at full volume in English and Spanish. Time and space began to collapse around me. The orange seats began to march toward each other. I was no longer breathing with any regularity. This is not going to end well. None of this will end well. We will never leave here. We will always be underground. This, right here, is the rest of my life. I walked over to the conductor’s silver cabin. He was calmly explaining to the incensed passenger the scope of his duties as an M.T.A. employee. “Sir,” I said to him, “I feel like I’m dying.”

“City Hall, City Hall, we got a sick passenger,” he said into the radio. “I repeat, a sick passenger. Can you send a rescue train?”

A rescue train. My whole life I have been waiting for one. Sensing the excitement of someone suffering more than they were, the other passengers moved to my end of the car to offer advice, crowding in on me and making me panic all the more. One man was particularly insistent. “I’m a retired firefighter,” he said. “I’ve been doing this twenty years, folks. Seen it all. This man here is hyperventilating. That’s what he’s doing. Twenty years a firefighter, now retired.”

“I’m going to take an Ativan now,” I said, fishing a pill out of my breast pocket.

“Do not do that,” the retired firefighter said. “It will only make you hyperventilate more. Trust me, I know what I’m doing.”

More here.

Ben Medlock in Aeon:

It’s tempting to think of the mind as a layer that sits on top of more primitive cognitive structures. We experience ourselves as conscious beings, after all, in a way that feels different to the rhythm of our heartbeat or the rumblings of our stomach. If the operations of the brain can be separated out and stratified, then perhaps we can construct something akin to just the top layer, and achieve human-like artificial intelligence (AI) while bypassing the messy flesh that characterises organic life.

I understand the appeal of this view, because I co-founded SwiftKey, a predictive-language software company that was bought by Microsoft. Our goal is to emulate the remarkable processes by which human beings can understand and manipulate language. We’ve made some decent progress: I was pretty proud of the elegant new communication system we built for the physicist Stephen Hawking between 2012 and 2014. But despite encouraging results, most of the time I’m reminded that we’re nowhere near achieving human-like AI. Why? Because the layered model of cognition is wrong. Most AI researchers are currently missing a central piece of the puzzle: embodiment.

Things took a wrong turn at the beginning of modern AI, back in the 1950s. Computer scientists decided to try to imitate conscious reasoning by building logical systems based on symbols. The method involves associating real-world entities with digital codes to create virtual models of the environment, which could then be projected back onto the world itself. For instance, using symbolic logic, you could instruct a machine to ‘learn’ that a cat is an animal by encoding a specific piece of knowledge using a mathematical formula such as ‘cat > is > animal’. Such formulae can be rolled up into more complex statements that allow the system to manipulate and test propositions – such as whether your average cat is as big as a horse, or likely to chase a mouse.

More here.

Ryan Ruby in The Paris Review:

Hans Abendroth was the eldest of three children born to an upper-middle class family in Frankfurt in 1909. Against the wishes of his parents, who hoped he would go into law, he studied classical philology at the University of Freiburg. There he was among the students of Martin Heidegger, a famous cohort that included Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, and Hans Jonas. Written under Heidegger’s supervision, Abendroth’s “Habilitation Thesis,” which analyzed the developing conception of the psyche in the literature and philosophy of classical and Hellenistic Greece, is regarded as a seminal document in the field. In 1935, Abendroth moved to Berlin, where, as a member of a research group at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he was responsible for translating and preparing a German edition of the Akhmim Codex, a recently discovered Gnostic manuscript dating to the fifth century A.D. Until his early retirement in 1949, he taught courses on Greek philosophy, early Christian theology, and Hellenistic literature at the University of Berlin.

After his retirement, Abendroth began work on The Zero and the One (Null und Eins), the only book he would publish in his lifetime. An unsystematic collection of aphorisms in the style of Nietzsche, Cioran, and the later Wittgenstein, Null und Eins contains reflections on a diverse number of subjects, from the philosophy of mathematics to the ethics of suicide.

More here.

Louise McCune at the LARB:

During a psycholinguistics lecture on diacritics, our narrator marvels that, in Europe, “even the alphabet [emits] exuberant sparks” (see: a, â, á, and à). One could apply a similar assessment to Batuman’s prose style: her wit is like a firecracker. In passages like this one, Batuman shows us that she can fill daydreams and “empty” days with exuberant sparks:

The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet — and this was ironic — there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours.

These moments of cunning wordplay, subtle humor, and deft imagery are frequent, but alone they do not fuel this novel. While the pyrotechnics delight, there is a fire smoldering beneath that can burn. This is a coming-of-age novel: at the gravitational center of Selin’s reveries is the question of how to be: How to be a writer? How to be a lover? How to be a person?

more here.

Samuel Freeman at The NYRB:

Walter Benjamin is regarded by many (including Jeffries) as the most original thinker associated with the Frankfurt School. His literary criticism on Kafka, Proust, Baudelaire, and others has been enormously influential, as have his essays on modern art and on the philosophy of history.² Despite Frankfurt School members’ efforts to help him, he was unable to find an academic position or escape from Europe in the late 1930s. Jeffries describes Benjamin’s tragic life, including his suicide in Port Bou, Spain, near the French border, as he was trying to escape the Gestapo and to embark for America via Portugal.³

Benjamin famously said in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “there is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”⁴Equally renowned is his metaphor in the same essay that the Angel of History looks backward and witnesses the constantly accumulating wreckage of history as a single catastrophe. This concept of the inseparability of civilization and barbarism, a recurring theme in Benjamin, deeply influenced the Frankfurt School. Jeffries cites the “Theses” as the basis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the most prominent single work of the Frankfurt School. In that book’s preface, the authors say they set out to do “nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.” They argue that Nazi totalitarianism was not a historical aberration. It was rooted in capitalism, in the Enlightenment, and in Western civilization.

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Alice Kaplan at The Nation:

The War of Liberation has dominated Algerian history so unequivocally that it has relegated all other eras and influences to the shadows. But today, the Algerians who were 20 or 30 years old in 1962 are dying, and their children and grandchildren will have to invent a future for the country without them. Toumi and his editors at Éditions Barzakh, Sofiane Hadjadj and Selma Hellal, hope readers will see the reflection of a new Algeria in the writing and publishing of books open to all imaginative possibilities.

Editing and publishing were not in the life plan of either Hadjadj or Hellal, who are a couple. Hadjadj, who is 46 years old, is secular, but his background is deeply religious. His father came to Algiers from the oasis farming community of El Goléa, in the Sahara, and the family owned small businesses before moving to the city and making a fortune in the building trade. Hadjadj, who is dark-skinned, describes his father as black. His mother, who wears the veil, grew up in the Casbah of Algiers, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants. In high school, and with the encouragement of his family, Hadjadj spent six years in Tunis studying the Quran to prepare for a future as an imam. Then he decided to study architecture instead.

more here.

Holland Cotter in The New York Times:

New York is catching up on Africa’s modern art history, though our big museums aren’t much in the picture. Two of that continent’s leading 20th-century painters are having first major solos here, not at the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim, but at small downtown galleries. And a remarkable contemporary artist collective from the Democratic Republic of Congo is making its New York debut at an alternative space in Queens. The Senegalese artist Mor Faye (1947-1984) made a vivid impression two decades ago in a group show at the now-defunct Museum for African Art, then in SoHo. His work, all but absent since, is being reintroduced by Skoto Gallery in one of the most stimulating painting shows in Chelsea this season.

Born in Dakar, Faye was a prodigy. At 14, he studied with the great modernist Iba N’Diaye, and within a few years was a teacher himself. His career coincided with a high postcolonial moment. Senegal’s poet-president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, gave art a leading role in shaping a national culture aligned with the literary movement called Négritude. In 1966, Faye was a star of the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. And he was able, thanks to Senghor’s importing of European shows to Africa, to absorb first hand a wide range of Western art history. But problems developed. A restless experimenter, Faye came to resent a state-dictated aesthetic that he viewed as too simplistic in its demand that art combine a recognizably African content and a European look. Adding to the tension was his history of psychiatric illness. His behavior grew unpredictable. In 1976, he stopped exhibiting, and spent time in mental hospitals until his death, at 37, from cerebral malaria.

More here.

Ariel Conn in KurzweilAI:

Just about everyone found something to dislike about 2016, from wars to politics and celebrity deaths. But hidden within this year’s news feeds were some really exciting news stories. And some of them can even give us hope for the future.

Climate Change

With recent news from climate scientists indicating that climate change may be coming on faster and stronger than previously anticipated and with limited political action on the issue, 2016 may not have made climate activists happy. But even here, there was some hopeful news. Among the biggest news was the ratification of the Paris Climate Agreement. But more generally, countries, communities and businesses came together on various issues of global warming, and Voices of America offers five examples of how this was a year of incredible, global progress. But there was also news of technological advancements that could soon help us address climate issues more effectively. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered a way to convert CO2 into ethanol. A researcher from UC Berkeley has developed a method for artificial photosynthesis, which could help us more effectively harness the energy of the sun. And a multi-disciplinary team has genetically engineered bacteria that could be used to help combat global warming.

In the course of about two years, CRISPR-cas9 went from a new development to what could become one of the world’s greatest advances in biology. Results of studies early in the year were promising, but as the year progressed, the news just got better. CRISPR was used to successfully remove HIV from human immune cells. A team in China used CRISPR on a patient for the first time in an attempt to treat lung cancer (treatments are still ongoing), and researchers in the US have also received approval to test CRISPR cancer treatment in patients. And CRISPR was also used to partially restore sight to blind animals.

More here.

Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Guardian:

Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor was impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense ancient population”. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.

Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.

But Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”, which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.

Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind.

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From the website of The New School:

Elise Burchard: How important is the element of sound to your reading and writing process? What do you see or hear? You begin At the Foundling Hospital with “Instrument,”—a poem that evokes the sounds of strings and plucking. How does your experience with music, sound, and translation inspire your work and perhaps this work, in particular?

Robert Pinsky: The sentence-melodies are at the heart of poetry for me. In a way, “writing” isn’t the right word for what I do—composing might be more accurate. I can do it with both hands on the steering wheel, or in the shower. The actual sound of the lines is primary. I may have ideas and feelings for months or years— but they don’t become a poem until I have the tune of a sentence and hear how the sentence-melody might play with and against the lines.

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Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

I am not crazy for saying that drugs are cheap. They are in fact in almost all cases cheap to manufacture.

To take one example that has frequently been in the news in the United States, the Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi has a list price of $84,000 for a three-month course of treatment. By all accounts, the drug is genuine breakthrough in the treatment of the Hepatitis C, in most cases curing a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease. There has been an extensive public debate as to whether insurers or government health care programs should be forced to pay for this expensive drug. The issue is complicated further by the fact that many people suffering from Hepatitis C might have contracted it through intravenous drug use.

The United States is estimated to have 3 million people suffering from Hepatitis C. This implies a bill of well over one hundred billion dollar if everyone were to be treated, even if its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, provided substantial discounts.

But it doesn’t cost $84,000 or anything close to that figure to manufacture Sovaldi. In fact, in India a high quality generic version of the drug is available for $200 for a three month course of treatment, less than 0.3 percent of the list price in the United States.1 We wouldn’t need a major debate to decide whether we would spend $200 for a drug that would hugely improve a patient’s health and would possibly save their life. The reason we have this debate is that the drug has a list price that is more than 400 times higher.

More here.