Richard Marshall interviews McKenzie Wark in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You have an interesting take on globalization – it’s not as clean or stable as it is sometimes presented and it’s something that seems to frame a deal of your thinking. It’s also an idea that is recently beginning to look less obviously definitive of what the future and the near present may look like – I was reading about how some economists are beginning to talk about nationalist economics again – so first can you give us a sketch of where your thinking is about what globalization and its media space is today and how it may have changed since you started writing about it in the 90’s. Has the nature of its chaos changed?

MW: What makes ‘globalization’ even possible in the first place? One answer would be that it requires the regularization of some kind of media and communication infrastructure. When you have that, you might get globalized economic trade within some political or imperial framework, but it is likely you’ll get transnational cultural flows as well.

This was clear when I was in China in the late eighties. Deng Xiaoping had mandated, at one and the same time, the ‘open door policy’ on trade and a campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’ on culture. It turned out that when you open the door to one you’re likely to get the other whether you want it or not.

So it might be best to think about both kinds of border-crossing vector – economic and cultural – at the same time, and as dependent on the same media and communication form. Then you find that they can interact in all sorts of interesting ways. Globalizing trade can lead to a cosmopolitan culture, but also to all sorts of nationalistic or racist or patriarchal reactions to those as breaches of imaginary communities. And the relation can be reversed. A reaction against the free flow of culture can contribute to a nationalistic turn in political-economy.

More here.

Mira Jacob in Electric Lit profiles her Boerum Hill bodega in this graphic essay:

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Last Wednesday, a spider fell onto Jamie Lomax’s laptop. Two days later, it happened again. Soon enough, several spiders were crawling across the ceiling of her office. “It was a little unnerving,” says Lomax, who’s an astronomer at the University of Washington. “I’m not scared of spiders but if someone else wants to take care of the spider in a room, I’ll gladly let them do it over me. And I don’t really want them raining down on my head.”

Lomax identified the abseiling arachnids as zebra jumping spiders, and tweeted about her experiences with the hashtag #ItIsRainingSpidersNotMen. And after considering options including “nukes and fire,” she settled for notifying her university. They sent over an exterminator, who failed to find any lingering spiders within the ceiling. He figured that a nest had probably hatched, and the newborn spiders had scattered. “But a couple of hours later, there were still spiders everywhere,” she tells me. “As of yesterday, there still were.”

Meanwhile, fellow astronomer Alex Parker had read Lomax’s tweets. “Have you tried lasers?” he replied. “Seriously though, some jumping spiders will chase laser pointers like cats do.”

There are, indeed, many Youtube videos of them doing exactly that. But Emily Levesque—Lomax’s colleague, with an office two doors down—wanted to see it for herself. “She has a laser pointer and she happens to be the only other person with spiders in her office,” says Lomax. “She ran down to me and said: You have to see this.”

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

There is a sickeningly familiar routine to terrorist attacks in Pakistan. If one happens in your city, you get a text message or a phone call asking if you are O.K. What happened? you ask. From that, the caller concludes that you are O.K.. Then you turn on the TV and watch the screen zoom in on a Google map or an animated blast before cameras reach the scene and start beaming images of bloodied slippers.

Last Saturday, I went through the same routine during a stay in London. It was a friend in Pakistan who alerted me by text message about the attacks here. As I looked for the TV remote, I got another message from him. “Did you ever think you’d hear about London from Pakistan?”

I found the observation slightly upsetting. I wanted to write back: “You are sitting peacefully in your home in Islamabad. This is not the time to be ironic. There is no irony in carnage.” I didn’t reply, and instead got busy trying to track down my son, who happened to be in the area near where the attack happened. Last year, I sent him off to university in London, calculating this was a safer place than home in Karachi.

After I found out that my son was all right, I had time for ironic reflection.

In the weeks during which a concert in Manchester and a lively neighborhood of London were struck by terrorists, a dozen people were killed at two sites in Tehran, an ice cream parlor was blown up in Baghdad, a single bombing killed some 90 people in Kabul, then more Afghans died during protests about that attack and then still more Afghans died in another attack at a funeral for people killed during the protests.

More here.

JP O'Malley in New Humanist:

Caperton in Feministe:

I saw Wonder Woman last night, and here’s the completely spoiler-free part of my review: You should go see it. We saw it in IMAX 3D, and I would pay IMAX 3D money to see it that way again. The Boy said he would just as happily have watched it at home after it hits Redbox, but he still liked it and thought it was cool. The important thing is that the action was great, the story was believable and touching, the characters were three-dimensional, the character arcs were compelling, and there were some parts where I teared up. (I also teared up at the commercial where the parents put the lion’s mane on the dog, so take that as you will.) It’s really good. You should see it. I’m serious, you should. Thus ends my completely spoiler-free review. The next section might get mildly spoilery, and the last part extremely so, so be warned.

Wonder Woman was a really good movie.

Patty Jenkins had a lot on her plate. She didn’t have to just make a good movie. She had to make the Wonder Woman movie that so many have called for and so few have had the guts to take on. She had to do justice to a character who has inspired countless girls and women. And on top of that, she had to create the Platonic ideal of a superhero movie, because of course if a woman-led movie gets even marginally bad response, it’s taken as proof that studios shouldn’t waste their money on women at all. So no pressure there. Wonder Woman did it. Jenkins and her cast and crew have made a movie that has broken box-office records, gotten rave reviews, and was loved by Wonder Woman’s longtime fans. Heretofore unrevealed Wonder Woman fans have been popping up on my social media feeds like mushrooms in well-loved Wonder Woman t-shirts. So I guess it’s pretty good, or something. People seem to think so. It’s not a perfect movie. There are some glaring faults. Despite obvious efforts, diversity remains a problem. The island of the Amazons has women of every age and ethnicity taking roles in the army, the senate, and the town. That said, women of color are still underutilized in featured roles — Florence Kasumba’s turn as Senator Acantha was disappointingly brief — and prominent visibility. Plans are already in the works for a Wonder Woman 2, with Jenkins again at the helm, to be set in the modern-day U.S., so hopefully that’s something that will be improved upon in the next go-round. The other thing that bugged me (and I don’t consider this a spoiler, because come on, you knew it was coming) was the huge super-on-super battle at the end. It suffered from the same problem as Man of Steel‘s five-hour Let’s Wreck Metropolis final battle: At some point, when you’ve punched each other through enough walls and thrown enough trucks at each other, throwing a truck at someone no longer seems like a big deal. “An armored van? Meh. Come back when you’ve hit him with a 747.” I need to see consequences for the dueling supers and not just the 1.38 million casualties of the Battle of Metropolis.

Wow. If that’s how much I had to say about the negative stuff, you might want to grab a snack and a pillow before we start in on the stuff I liked.

More here.

Fredric Jameson in the London Review of Books:

The first centennial of the Soviet revolution, indeed the fifth centennial of Luther’s, risk distracting us from a literary earthquake which happened just fifty years ago and marked the cultural emergence of Latin America onto that new and larger stage we call globalisation – itself a space that ultimately proves to be well beyond the separate categories of the cultural or the political, the economic or the national. I mean the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, which not only unleashed a Latin American ‘boom’ on an unsuspecting outside world but also introduced a host of distinct national literary publics to a new kind of novelising. Influence is not a kind of copying, it is permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you were allowed to use. What is it, then, that García Márquez did to the readers and writers of a still relatively conventional postwar world?

He began his productive life as a movie reviewer and a writer of movie scenarios nobody wanted to film. Is it so outrageous to consider One Hundred Years of Solitude as a mingling, an intertwining and shuffling together of failed movie scripts, so many fantastic episodes that could never be filmed and so must be consigned to Melquíades’s Sanskrit manuscript (from which the novel has been ‘translated’)? Or perhaps it may be permitted to note the astonishing simultaneity of the beginning of his literary career with the so-called Bogotazo, the assassination in 1948 of the great populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (and the beginning of the seventy-year long Violencia in Colombia), just as García Márquez was having lunch down the street and, not much further away, the 21-year-old Fidel Castro was waiting in his hotel room for an afternoon meeting with Gaitán about the youth conference he had been sent to organise in Bogota that summer.

The solitude of the title should not at first be taken to mean the affective pathos it becomes at the end of the book: first and foremost, in the novel’s founding or refounding of the world itself, it signifies autonomy.

More here.

Davide Lerner in Haaretz:

Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a Manchester pop concert this week, started life advantageously enough: to parents who had fled Gadhafi’s Libya for a new life in Britain. But actually it was that kind of dislocation that would send him off kilter two decades later, says Olivier Roy, one of France’s top experts on Islamic terrorism.

“An estimated 60 percent of those who espouse violent jihadism in Europe are second-generation Muslims who have lost their connection with their country of origin and have failed to integrate into Western societies,” Roy says.

They are subject to a “process of deculturation” that leaves them ignorant of and detached from both the European society and the one of their origins. The result, Roy argues, is a dangerous “identity vacuum” in which “violent extremism thrives.”

More here.

Michael Patrick Lynch in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

One way the internet distorts our picture of ourselves is by feeding the human tendency to overestimate our knowledge of how the world works. Most of us know what it’s like to think we remember more from high-school physics or history than we actually do. As the cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have detailed recently, such overestimation extends farther than you might think: Ask yourself whether you can really explain how a toilet or a zipper works, and you may find yourself surprisingly stumped. You assume you know how things work when you often don’t know at all.

This sort of ignorance is partly due to the fact that human beings aren’t isolated knowing machines. We live in an economy of knowledge that distributes cognitive and epistemic labor among specialists. That’s a good thing — no one person can know everything, or even very much. But put all the doctors, scientists, mechanics, and plumbers together, and we collectively know quite a bit.

Yet this often means we blur the line between what’s inside our heads and what’s not. Some philosophers have argued that this blurring is actually justified because knowing itself is often an extended process, distributed in space. When I know something because of your expert testimony — say, that my car’s alternator is broken — what I know is partly in your head and partly in mine. If that’s right, then living in a knowledge economy literally increases my knowledge because knowing is not just an individual phenomenon.

Suppose this extended, distributed picture of knowledge is right. Add the personalized internet, with its carefully curated social-media feeds and individualized search results, and you get not one knowledge economy, but many different ones, each bounded by different assumptions of which sources you can trust and what counts as evidence and what doesn’t. The result is not only an explosion of overconfidence in what you individually understand but an active encouragement of epistemic arrogance.

More here.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in National Geographic:

The ubiquity of lying was first documented systematically by Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Two decades ago DePaulo and her colleagues asked 147 adults to jot down for a week every instance they tried to mislead someone. The researchers found that the subjects lied on average one or two times a day. Most of these untruths were innocuous, intended to hide one’s inadequacies or to protect the feelings of others. Some lies were excuses—one subject blamed the failure to take out the garbage on not knowing where it needed to go. Yet other lies—such as a claim of being a diplomat’s son—were aimed at presenting a false image. While these were minor transgressions, a later study by DePaulo and other colleagues involving a similar sample indicated that most people have, at some point, told one or more “serious lies”—hiding an affair from a spouse, for example, or making false claims on a college application.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

During the first half of his writing career, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) imagined a machine that would travel through time, the fearsome tripods of Martian invaders, a moon rocket powered by Cavorite, the military tank (in the short story “The Land Ironclads”) and other engineering marvels. But, as Jeremy Withers’s “The War of the Wheels” reminds us, the father of science fiction was also fascinated by the bicycle.

If you look through Wells’s bibliography, you’ll notice that he was never strictly a writer of what he called “fantasias of possibility.” Yes, he found his first success in “The Time Machine,” published in 1895, but that same year he also brought out a collection of slight fictional pieces titled “Selected Conversations With an Uncle ,” a satirical fantasy called “The Wonderful Visit” — about an angel who is mistaken for a bird and shot by a clergyman — and “The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents,” a volume of his early science fictional short stories. In the following year, the industrious Wells then published his terrifying, Swiftian nightmare, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” but also “The Wheels of Chance,” his first realistic, mildly comic novel in which a young draper’s apprentice goes off on a two-week bicycle holiday.

Obviously somewhat autobiographical — Wells had been a draper’s apprentice — that book reflects its author’s early passion for the bicycle. Throughout the 1890s, as Withers notes, England was crazy about cycling. What was called the “safety bicycle” — essentially the basic clunker we still know today — had supplanted those elegant big-and-small-wheeled marvels of earlier years. Pneumatic tires had improved ease of pedaling. Cycling clubs and specialty shops flourished. Hotshots, who sped along hunched over their handlebars, were called “scorchers.” Moralists worried that ladies might find sitting on a bike saddle sexually stimulating.

more here.

Thomas Laqueur at The Guardian:

His radically innovative, embarrassingly voluptuous, riveting – or, some will say, boring – music is at the heart of the controversy, and of Callow’s attraction to his subject. He says he has been a Wagnerian since early adolescence: he knew all about leitmotiven and the “Tristan chord”. But pointing to his music is only to push the question one step back: why? Lots of composers before Wagner used the same notes in a chord but he managed to keep it unresolved from the beginning of a work to orgasmic ending – five hours of Tantric harmonic deferral. That got the naming rights, one supposes.

Beethoven, the only composer who comes close to Wagner in his daring breaks from the past and who was met initially with a similarly uncomprehending and hostile reaction, was well on his way to being the assimilated prototypical genius of the 19th century within 20 years of his death. In fact, Wagner’s Dresden performances of Beethoven’s Ninth in the 1840s played an important role in inserting a wild and unruly symphony into the heart of the musical canon. Wagner’s operas are unquestionably canonical but they still generate the sort of hostility they did when they were first performed. None of the great 20th-century masters – not Stravinsky, not Schoenberg, not Boulez – is as divisive today as this composer born more than 200 years ago.

more here.