James Wood at the LRB:

Hardy can be awkward, but at the same time astonishing beauty is sowed into every scene and stanza of his work. Herons, in Tess, which arrive ‘with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters’. Winter winds, in the poem ‘The Prospect’: ‘Iced airs wheeze through the skeletoned hedge from the north.’ Hares, in ‘The Haunter’: ‘Where the shy hares print long paces’. ‘Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time’ in ‘At Day-Close in November’. The rain, in ‘Childhood among the Ferns’: ‘The rain gained strength, and damped each lopping frond.’ This is the writer who meant so much to D.H. Lawrence, to Auden, to Larkin. But all my examples are pastoral, drawn from Hardy’s uncanny noticing of the natural world. Using notebooks, diaries and unfamiliar poems and novels, Ford demonstrates how Hardy also trained his eye, as Baudelaire desired, by looking at the city, by gazing at ‘landscapes of stone’. Ford brings out a modern impressionist, who brilliantly sketched urban interiors and exteriors; this writer is more concise, more direct, more imagistic than the writer we know from the Wessex fiction. From March 1878, the Hardys lived in an end of terrace house in Tooting, not far from Wandsworth Common railway station, and here they remained for a little more than three years. South London inspired several poems (‘A January Night,’ ‘Snow in the Suburbs’, ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’), and several notebook entries. In one of these Tooting passages, Hardy does nothing more than describe his study, and the glow of the fire:

Firebrick back red hot … underside of mantel reddened: also a shine on the leg of the table, & the ashes under the grate, lit from above like a torrid clime. Faint daylight of a lilac colour almost powerless in the room. Candle behind a screen is reflected in the glass of the window, falling whitely on book …

more here.

Nora Caplan-Bricker in Slate:

It’s a familiar adage that black Americans have to work twice as hard to get half as far as their white counterparts—and that black women, oppressed by the intersecting forces of sexism and racism, have to struggle even more. Now, a sweeping new report from the nonprofit Institute for Women’s Policy Research, funded by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, provides the data to back this up. Released Wednesday, the report shows black women working more and getting less in return across all areas of American life. Black women voted at higher rates than any other group in 2008 and 2012 (and in 2014, more than any other group except white men and women)—but they remain drastically underrepresented in both state and national politics. The share of black women with a college degree has increased by almost 24 percent since the early 2000s, but they graduated with more debt and worse prospects than white students. And black women participate in the workforce at higher rates than other women, yet they're among the most likely to live in poverty, second only to indigenous women.

In part, this is because black women have remained trapped in the worst-paying sectors of the economy—caretaking and service jobs—while white women have ascended to better-compensated professions. This is no coincidence, as Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and the special projects director at the NDWA, writes in the forward to the report. “Without Black women’s labor inside of white households, white women would not have been able to break (some) of the barriers of sexism that relegated the value of women’s contributions to the sphere of the home,” she writes. “The result is a racialized economy where Black women are losing ground.”

More here.

Daniel Clery in Science:

Two teams of researchers report today that they have detected a prebiotic molecule—a potential building block of life—around newly formed sun-like stars. The molecule, methyl isocyanate, has a structure that is chemically similar to a peptide bond, which is what holds amino acids together in proteins. The finding suggests that quite complex organic molecules may be created very early in the evolution of star systems. “It shows the level of complexity you can get to before planets form is pretty high,” says astrochemist Karin Oberg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the studies. “A lot of [spectral] lines were detected which gives confidence that it’s real. It’s a safe detection.” Methyl isocyanate has become a target for astrochemists ever since the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission detected the molecule on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko 2 years ago. Comets are thought to have survived unchanged since the early days of the solar system, so the discovery of methyl isocyanate suggested it had been present on the comet since then and didn’t form on a planet. Although the detection on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is now questioned by some, methyl isocyanate was also detected in two star-forming clouds, Orion KL and Sagittarius B2(N), in 2015 and 2016, but these are hot environments full of very massive stars, very unlike the situation of the early Sun.

Undaunted, researchers began to study more sun-like sources. One group was already surveying a clutch of very young stars known as IRAS 16293-2422. “We thought, why not look [for methyl isocyanate] in our source,” says team member Niels Ligterink of Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. The instrument of choice for such studies is the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 dishes high in the Chilean Andes. ALMA focuses on the region of the spectrum between radio waves and infrared light, the range of frequencies at which complex molecules emit light when they undergo various transitions. Because the molecules are so complex, there are many possible transitions, each emitting photons of a specific frequency. So a molecule such as methyl isocyanate will emit a characteristic fingerprint of photons that will appear as spikes or lines in the spectrum detected from the gas cloud. The challenge for astronomers is to identify that fingerprint among the forest of spectral lines from all the other chemicals in the cloud. Ligterink’s team combed through data they had collected from IRAS 16293-2422 using ALMA in 2014 and 2015 and found 43 clearly identifiable lines from methyl isocyanate. The other team, led by Rafael Martín-Doménech of the Center for Astrobiology (INTA-CSIC) in Madrid, Spain, used new and archived data to find another eight lines in a different frequency range. The two teams report their results in the latest issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

More here.

Mark M. Synnott in National Geographic:

Renowned rock climber Alex Honnold on Saturday became the first person to scale the iconic nearly 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using ropes or other safety gear, completing what may be the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport.

He ascended the peak in 3 hours, 56 minutes, taking the final moderate pitch at a near run. At 9:28 a.m. PDT, under a blue sky and few wisps of cloud, he pulled his body over the rocky lip of summit and stood on a sandy ledge the size of a child’s bedroom.

Honnold began his historic rope-less climb—a style known as “free soloing”—in the pink light of dawn at 5:32 a.m. He had spent the night in the customized van that serves as his mobile base camp, risen in the dark, dressed in his favorite red t-shirt and cutoff nylon pants, and eaten his standard breakfast of oats, flax, chia seeds, and blueberries, before driving to El Capitan Meadow.

He parked the van and hiked up the boulder-strewn path to the base of the cliff. There, he pulled on a pair of sticky soled climbing shoes, fastened a small bag of chalk around his waist to keep his hands dry, found his first toehold, and began inching his way up toward climbing history.

More here.

Oliver Roeder in FiveThirtyEight:

Ten years ago, Jeffrey Adams, a mathematician at the University of Maryland, made an appearance in The New York Times that prompted a series of angry emails. His correspondents all wanted to know one thing: “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Who Adams is is the leader of a cutting-edge mathematical research project called the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations. Lie groups are named after Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie (rhymes with “free,” not “fry”), who studied these crucial mathematical objects. Lie groups are used to map the inner machinery of multidimensional symmetrical objects, and they’re important because symmetry underpins far-flung mathematical concepts, from a third-grade number line to many-dimensional string theory. The Atlas project is a bona fide atlas of these objects, an exhaustive compendium of Lie group information, including tables of data about what they “look” like and what makes them tick. You’d think that cracking the code on these fundamental mathematical ideas would be a big deal. It is, but Adams would rather not dwell on it.

The success of the atlas project poses a tough math problem of a different kind: What should math’s relationship be with the broader, non-expert public? On the one hand, mathematicians in particular and scientists in general relish publicity. It allows them to trumpet good work, lobby for funding and inspire the next generation. On the other, in an ultra-specialized field such as math, publicity can twist finely constructed theorems, proofs and calculations beyond recognition.

More here.

Daniel N. Robinson at The New Atlantis:

In attempts to account for distinctly human endeavors, explanations have a narrative quality. Thus, Jane’s aspiration to be a concert violinist accounts for — that is, explains — the many hours of practice expended over a course of years. Henry wishes to understand the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. The story — the explanation — runs along these lines: Wellington, after the battle of Quatre Bras, moved his forces to Waterloo. The allied Prussians moved to positions drawing a large portion of the French forces away from Waterloo to Wavre. With Prussians attacking Napoleon’s right flank and Wellington attacking the center, Napoleon’s fate was sealed.

Try to translate these two explanations — for why Jane practices the violin, and for why Napoleon was defeated — into terms faithful to evolutionary biology or neuroscience or the concentration of potassium in the human body. Try again. Alas, the thing just doesn’t work. Now adopt the empirical stance and see if you can come up with a theory of any sort that, even if not complete, would still be adequate for explaining these events. This won’t do much for us either, for events of historical moment express the beliefs, skills, powers, and plans of specific persons who, if removed from the narrative, leave us with an entirely different set of events. No doubt, absent a properly functioning nervous system, Jane can’t even hold the bow of a violin. Absent the evolutionary roots and branches, there are neither armies nor nations. We might agree with all of this and, at the same time, acknowledge the unique, personal, individuated character of those responsible for the events in question. There could not be War and Peace had there not been a developed language. But there could not have been War and Peace had there not been Tolstoy.

more here.

Bécquer Seguín at Public Books:

Baseball has Roger Angell. Boxing has A. J. Liebling. Yet soccer, puzzlingly, has no writer of such caliber, no one who has managed to find in the sport a comparably inexhaustible source of literary writing and intellectual inquiry. And it’s not for lack of suitors. Rafael Alberti, Günter Grass, Charles Simic, Nelson Rodrigues, and Ted Hughes all wrote about the beautiful game. In the oeuvres of these writers, however, their momentary musings on soccer—football to most of the world—are a curiosity more than anything else. Others have tried their hand, but few have managed more than the occasional essay or short opinion piece. The difference may have something to do with the sports themselves.

Baseball and boxing are tailor-made for narrative. They rely heavily on protagonists and concentrated moments of action. Any baseball or boxing narrative can be easily embodied, like Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, in the momentary struggle between two individuals. Soccer, on the other hand, isn’t wedded to the fate of individuals. Its beauty is most often in the battle between two ideas, two philosophies, two tactical approaches to how to play the game. Hence the difficulty in narrating soccer in a way that is at once compelling and steers clear of clichés. The Spanish-language world of literary soccer writing, the one I know best, has produced admittedly mixed results. The Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano is one of the more intellectually creative and emotionally insightful of literary soccer writers. In Soccer in Sun and Shadow, he dedicates one- and two-page-long chapters with titles like “Cruyff” or “The 1966 World Cup” to a single metaphorical moment.

more here.

Daphne Merkin at Bookforum:

IN THE ANNALS OF EROTIC LITERATURE, a subject that consistently draws women writers of a certain ilk—smart, literate, and tough-minded—is sexual submission. (The Germans, leave it to them, have a word for this kind of abjection: Hörigkeit.) There is something about the theme of a relational power imbalance, of inequality in the bedroom, that seems to exert a fascination in quarters that one wouldn’t ordinarily expect. I am thinking, of course, of Story of O, but also of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, the pseudonymously penned Nine and a Half Weeks (a spare and inexorable account that bears little resemblance to the movie based on it), Edith Templeton’s Gordon, and Toni Bentley’s The Surrender.

One of the most memorable novels I have read in this genre came out in 1986, to no great attention or acclaim except from those of us who were instantly captivated by the author’s intelligence and writing skill. It was called Nothing Natural, and it was in fact the first book by the English writer Jenny Diski, who would go on before she died in 2016 to achieve literary renown for her other books and particularly for her essays in the London Review of Books. I noticed the novel because it was published in the same year as my own first novel, Enchantment, and, I would assume, because I read a review of it somewhere—perhaps in a British publication. I was instantly drawn to its tawdry and subversive doings because they spoke to my own erotic tastes at the time.

more here.

Carrie Arnold in Nature:

Leaning back in his chair, Jonathan Mattingly swings his legs up onto his desk, presses a key on his laptop and changes the results of the 2012 elections in North Carolina. On the screen, flickering lines and dots outline a map of the state’s 13 congressional districts, each of which chooses one person to send to the US House of Representatives. By tweaking the borders of those election districts, but not changing a single vote, Mattingly’s maps show candidates from the Democratic Party winning six, seven or even eight seats in the race. In reality, they won only four — despite earning a majority of votes overall. Mattingly’s election simulations can’t rewrite history, but he hopes they will help to support democracy in the future — in his state and the nation as a whole. The mathematician, at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has designed an algorithm that pumps out random alternative versions of the state’s election maps — he’s created more than 24,000 so far — as part of an attempt to quantify the extent and impact of gerrymandering: when voting districts are drawn to favour or disfavour certain candidates or political parties.

Gerrymandering has a long and unpopular history in the United States. It is the main reason that the country ranked 55th of 158 nations — last among Western democracies — in a 2017 index of voting fairness run by the Electoral Integrity Project, an academic collaboration between the University of Sydney, Australia, and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although gerrymandering played no part in the tumultuous 2016 presidential election, it seems to have influenced who won seats in the US House of Representatives that year. “Even if gerrymandering affected just 5 seats out of 435, that’s often enough to sway crucial votes,” Mattingly says. The courts intervene when gerrymandering is driven by race. Last month, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a verdict that two North Carolina districts were drawn with racial composition in mind (see ‘Battleground state’). But the courts have been much less keen to weigh in on partisan gerrymandering — when one political party is favoured over another. One reason is that there has never been a clear and reliable metric to determine when this type of gerrymandering crosses the line from acceptable politicking to a violation of the US Constitution.

More here.

Lawrence Summers in the Washington Post:

In economics, as in life, things often take longer to happen than you think they will and then happen faster than you thought they could. So it may turn out with the catastrophic international economic policies of President Trump. It is possible that last week will be remembered as a hinge in history — a moment when the United States and the world started moving on a path away from the peace, prosperity and stability that have defined the past 75 years.

For all that has gone wrong in the past three-quarters of a century, this period has witnessed more human betterment than any time. The rate of fatalities in war has steadily declined, while growing integration has driven global growth and improvement in life expectancy and living standards. Progress is too slow, and not well enough shared, but Americans have never lived so well. This has been driven by remarkable developments in human thought, especially in science and technology, and a relatively stable global order that has been underwritten by the United States.

Will these trends continue? Optimists have suggested that despite the revanchist and often anti-rationalist rhetoric of his campaign, Trump has in the international sphere surrounded himself with rational establishment advisers and has either retreated or been stymied by Congress on proposals such as launching trade wars and building walls.

Until last week, they had a reasonable argument. No longer. We may have our first post-rational president.

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in New Scientist:

“Time is a road without any bifurcations, intersections, exits, or turnarounds.” With that, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano sets up the meat of his new book, Your Brain is a Time Machine – and an intriguing difference between the way we animals navigate time as opposed to space.

Not that contrasting time and space makes the task of understanding time any easier, as Buonomano illustrates later: “The physicist’s talk on the nature of time ended on time, but it seemed to drag on for a long time.” This captures various notions of time: natural time, clock time and subjective time.

Natural time is what physicists fuss about. Is time real? Or is the passage of time an illusion, and do all moments in time exist in much the same way that all coordinates of space exist? Neuroscientists, on the other hand, fuss about clock time and subjective time.

To explain natural time, physicists and philosophers back eternalism, according to which the past, present and future are all equally real. “There is absolutely nothing particularly special about the present: under eternalism now is to time as here is to space,” writes Buonomano.

The other main explanation of natural time is presentism, according to which only the present moment is real – a view that tallies with our sense of subjective time. The past is gone, the future hasn’t happened yet. “Neuroscientists are implicitly presentists,” says Buonomano. “But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog… in physics and philosophy.”

More here.

Daniel Luban in Dissent:

Karl Polanyi had thought of calling his magnum opus Origins of the Cataclysm, or The Liberal Utopia, or Freedom from Economics. His publisher, worried about the book’s marketability, instead gave it the title by which it eventually became famous: The Great Transformation. It was an ambiguous phrase. Readers might imagine that “the great transformation” refers to the history the book traces: the imposition, equally utopian and violent, of the market economy upon a recalcitrant society, spreading from England to encompass the globe and ultimately bringing on the collapse of world order in the twentieth century. But for Polanyi the great transformation lay not in the past but in the future. It referred not to the coming of market liberalism but of socialism, understood as “the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” And this transformation would be the culmination of the dynamic that he famously called the “double movement,” in which the ravages of the market inevitably lead society to “protect itself” against depredation.

The more optimistic title did not make the work a rousing success upon its publication in 1944. As the book went to press, its itinerant author returned to London from the United States and promptly failed once again in his attempts to secure permanent academic employment. By the time he finally landed at Columbia a few years later, he was over sixty years old and approaching retirement. Upon Polanyi’s death in 1964, his brief New York Times obituary identified him simply as “an economist and former Hungarian political leader”—the indefinite article as revealing as the misleading choice of labels.

More here.

Stuart Walton in Aeon:

One wants to break free of the past,’ Theodor Adorno, one of the Frankfurt School’s leading luminaries, wrote in an essay in 1959. ‘Rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.’ In an age when the meanings of the past and the functions they are called upon to serve are so hotly contested, Adorno’s insight reminds us, in a typically double-edged way, that humanity is both composed of and trapped inside its history. This view of history underpinned the work of the boldest and bravest philosophers of the past century: the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Their arguments lacked for nothing in theoretical aspiration, and have scarcely begun to be assimilated, even today.

A key point of disputation for this generation of thinkers arose from the notion that society, in its progress from barbarism to civilisation according to the narrative of the European Enlightenment, had been increasingly founded on the principle of reason. Where mythology once held sway, the rationalistic sciences now reigned supreme. Among the Frankfurt School’s most provocative contentions was that Western civilisation had unwittingly executed a reversal of this narrative. The heroic phase of the 18th-century Enlightenment purported to have freed humankind of antique superstition and the demons of the irrational, but the horrors of the 20th century gave the lie to that triumphalism. Far from humane liberation, 20th-century Europeans had plunged into decades of savage barbarism. Why? The Frankfurt School theorists argued that universal rationality had been raised to the status of an idol. At the heart of this was what they called ‘instrumental reason’, the mechanism by which everything in human affairs was ground up.

More here.

Scott Esposito at Literary Hub:

There are hits, and then there are smash hits, and then there are rocket ships to Mars—One Hundred Years of Solitude would qualify as the last. Estimates of its sales are around 50 million worldwide, which would put it in the range of books like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Lolita, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. College syllabi can certainly account for some of this figure, but when one considers by just how much García Márquez’s sales dwarf his fellow Boom greats—Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortázar—something more than higher education must be called to account. Nor is it easy to explain One Hundred Years of Solitude’s global diffusion: published in at least 44 languages, it is the most translated Spanish-language literary work after Don Quixote.

I think what can be said of this book is that it captured something vital about the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people, not only in Latin America but in other colonized lands as well. Nii Ayikwei Parkes, the award-winning British novelist born to Ghanaian immigrants, has said of the book: “[It] taught the West how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-Western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia.” He added that, “Apart from the fact that it’s an amazing book, it taught Western readers tolerance for other perspectives.”

more here.

Andrew Cockburn and Michael Hudson at Harper's Magazine:

So are we heading for another explosion comparable to 2008?

I’m not sure it’ll be an explosion. It’s more like a slow crash. It’s more like people are getting desperate. They’re having to live off their credit cards, not to buy luxuries but just simply to break even. They’re falling further and further behind, and as they fall behind the interest rate rises, the penalties rise, so people are getting more and more squeezed.

That’s why where I live in New York City, on all the big shopping streets there are more and more storefronts for rent. The stores are going out of business, especially the stores that are either mom and pops, or small well-known stores like art supply stores that have been there for a generation. Only the big chains are surviving, and even the chains are closing down, Sears and others. Entire shopping malls are going into default.

But we keep being told that this is because people are shifting to online shopping. Is that not the case?

Certainly many people are shopping online, but that’s not the real cause. The real cause is that overall retail sales are going down, because the average wage earner is only able to spend between a quarter and a third of their income on goods and services, after what’s left over from housing and taxes. The Federal Housing Authority now guarantees government mortgages up to 42 percent of your income. In New York City it’s normal to pay 40 percent of your income for rent.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

A great work of art from 1875 never seen in any museum, almost never seen at all, and all but lost to history, sat radioactive on the wall of a small gallery at the recent Frieze New York art fair. A simple depiction in prismatic hues — pencil and lustrous color — somehow expressed a thousand anxieties, lost freedom, emotions secreted away, omens of anger, empty worlds, tears, and the life of a captive. We see a canary yellow locomotive pulling a decorated red coal car and an invisible payload moving in an 1875 landscape of fields of corn, front yards, wooden fences, towns, buildings, and tracks, all running through the back of America’s memory. This is the end of the journey of 72 Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Kiowa prisoners of war found guilty without trial and all taken south and east away from their native lands of eastern Colorado, western Kansas, northern New Mexico, Oklahoma, and the Texas panhandle. Removed from a region that once teemed with herds of wild horses and bison and the traditional Plains way of life, they were piled on horse carts, ships, and train and brought to a prison camp at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida.

The artist is Bear’s Heart, one of the 72 prisoners on that fateful forgotten train. Once the captives reached Fort Marion they were subjected to rigorous military discipline and forced labor. However, to please visiting tourists the prisoners were also encouraged to draw. Thus, like prisoners everywhere, these artists found coded ways to depict their captivity.

more here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

The brain has an amazing capacity for recognizing faces. It can identify a face in a few thousandths of a second, form a first impression of its owner and retain the memory for decades. Central to these abilities is a longstanding puzzle: how the image of a face is encoded by the brain. Two Caltech biologists, Le Chang and Doris Y. Tsao, reported in Thursday’s issue of Cell that they have deciphered the code of how faces are recognized. Their experiments were based on electrical recordings from face cells, the name given to neurons that respond with a burst of electric signals when an image of a face is presented to the retina. By noting how face cells in macaque monkeys responded to manipulated photos of some 2,000 human faces, the Caltech team figured out exactly what aspects of the faces triggered the cells and how the features of the face were being encoded. The monkey face recognition system seems to be very similar to that of humans.

Just 200 face cells are required to identify a face, the biologists say. After discovering how its features are encoded, the biologists were able to reconstruct the faces a monkey was looking at just by monitoring the pattern in which its face cells were firing. The finding needs to be confirmed in other laboratories. But, if correct, it could help understand how the brain encodes all seen objects, as well as suggesting new approaches to artificial vision. “Cracking the code for faces would definitely be a big deal,” said Brad Duchaine, an expert on face recognition at Dartmouth. It is a remarkable advance to have identified the dimensions used by the primate brain to decode faces, he added — and impressive that the researchers were able to reconstruct from neural signals the face a monkey is looking at. Human and monkey brains have evolved dedicated systems for recognizing faces, presumably because, as social animals, survival depends on identifying members of one’s own social group and distinguishing them from strangers.

More here.