Robin Kimmerer in Orion:

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. Names, names, names: the stones seem to say, “I am. You are. He was.” Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to each other and to the natural world.

Matthew Hutson in Science:

Ornan Rotem in BOMB:

I sat at the bar of the Zwiebelfisch in Berlin together with David Bell, the renowned Kant scholar; it happened to be one of his regular haunts and it was the only spot where we could have an undisturbed meeting whenever he was in Berlin. As usual, we sat in silence for a long time, inhaling the stale, timeless atmosphere of the bar, heavy with a characteristic blend of tobacco smoke and food smells. Subsequently I broke the silence and recounted how, to my greatest surprise, I had lately developed an interest in Melville, and had come across a curious connection between Melville and Malcolm Lowry. David took a sip of his beer, reflected for a moment, and came up with an old anecdote about Lowry. When he first arrived in New York, that is, when, dead drunk as usual, he disembarked from the ship at the East River pier, and confronted the customs official, he was carrying a huge old suitcase with remarkable ease. They asked him, what is in the suitcase, Mr Lowry? Lowry replied that well, he wasn't quite sure, why don't they take a look together. They had him open the suitcase, which, to the astonishment of even these seasoned customs officials, proved to be almost empty, save for a single rugby shoe and a tattered paperback edition of Moby-Dick rattling around in it. You get it, said David, his eyes twinkling, one lousy shoe, not a pair, but a single rugby shoe and a well-thumbed copy of Moby-Dick. You know, he went on, the way I see it, there was Lowry sitting at home by an open closet, the open suitcase lying on the bed, and he removes a shirt from the closet, a shirt, he eyes it mockingly, shakes his head and tosses it aside, then he pulls out a pair of pants, shakes his head again and throws them aside, and so on, same with the socks and neckties and underwear and toothbrushes and umbrellas, and all of them, for some reason comprehensible only to himself, prove to be unworthy, or not important enough, to make it into the suitcase, and only when he gets to that orphaned rugby shoe does he nod, yes, this must come, and throws it into the suitcase, and the same with the tattered edition of Moby-Dick, a rugby shoe and Moby-Dick, and he shuts the suitcase, and you know what, David said laughing, this Lowry must have been quite a guy, you can read about it in Gordon Bowker, Douglas Day, in any Lowry biography, they all mention this story, but there is one big problem, and I want to make this clear to you, before you get even more immersed in this whole thing, considering that, and here he looked at me gravely, some speak of a baseball shoe, and others of a rugby shoe, and there is even talk of this ominous object being an American football shoe, but you must keep in mind that it was without any doubt a rugby shoe and nothing else. David's look was on the point of being stern, as though for him this were no joking matter; his look said: there can be no two ways about this. He raised his tankard of beer, and as he took another swig I could see him give me a slightly mocking look over the rim. In the course of the many years of our friendship I had never once asked him whether he was the only scholar in the English-speaking world who had devoted his career to Kant's philosophy.

More here.

Kate Yoder in Grist:

One night, it came to me in my dreams, dripping juice and melted cheddar, the crisp lettuce a mere afterthought. I held it in my hands and took a bite.

Instant horror: I stared at the burger like it was an alien object as the realization that I’m a vegetarian stopped me cold. I woke up deeply disturbed. The mere unconscious thought of taking an eager bite of red meat felt like a personal failure.

I had just had a meatmare. Yes, I found out with just a bit of online research, that’s a real thing. The internet is crawling with accounts of vegans and vegetarians who dream of eating bloody steaks, burgers, bacon, tuna, and pepperoni-tainted pizza.

Although you can find these tales sprinkled across our collective social media consciousness, I couldn’t find any good answer for why they occur. Some people ascribe it to guilt at clean-eating imperfection; others to deeply buried carnivorous cravings.

What, I wondered, would make me dream of eating flesh again after a decade of vegetarianism? I set out to solve this meaty mystery and determine whether there’s a deeper meaning behind it.

No psychologist has clinically studied meatmares, according to a spokesperson at the American Psychological Association. But from what I’ve found, there’s clearly a lot to untangle.

More here.

Kenan Malik in the New York Times:

It is just as well that I’m a writer, not an editor. Were I editing a newspaper or magazine, I might soon be out of a job. For this is an essay in defense of cultural appropriation.

In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense.

The controversy began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write, the magazine of the Canadian Writers’ Union, penned an editorial defending the right of white authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. Within days, a social media backlash forced him to resign. The Writers’ Union issued an apology for an article that its Equity Task Force claimed “re-entrenches the deeply racist assumptions” held about art.

Another editor, Jonathan Kay, of The Walrus magazine, was also compelled to step down after tweeting his support for Mr. Niedzviecki. Meanwhile, the broadcaster CBC moved Steve Ladurantaye, managing editor of its flagship news program The National, to a different post, similarly for an “unacceptable tweet” about the controversy.

It’s not just editors who have to tread carefully. Last year, the novelist Lionel Shriver generated a worldwide storm after defending cultural appropriation in an address to the Brisbane Writers Festival. Earlier this year, controversy erupted when New York’s Whitney Museum picked for its Biennial Exhibition Dana Schutz’s painting of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Many objected to a white painter like Ms. Schutz depicting such a traumatic moment in black history. The British artist Hannah Black organized a petition to have the work destroyed.

More here.

Rachel Bowlby at the Times Literary Supplement:

Now that she has attained this extraordinary status, there is no reason to think that the volume of books on her – her life, her works, her connections with just about anything – is likely to diminish. Of this recent batch, Ira Nadel’s Virginia Woolf, a mini-biography, is the oddest. It begins with the bright idea of telling the Woolf story by way of the houses she lived in, but in practice that angle is not so visible. What we get instead is an often incoherent rehash of well-known elements, interspersed with partial descriptions of some of her works. Bad writing is a constant source of confusion. At the start of one chapter: “Monk’s House, purchased for £700 by the Woolfs in 1919 and owned until 1969, was constantly improved by the Woolfs as monies permitted”. As well as the uncanny suggestion of posthumous property management (one of them having died in 1941), the repeated “by the Woolfs” makes the sentence even stranger. Throughout the book there are paragraphs harbouring phrases or sentences that seem to have been cut and pasted in without subsequent checking, so that you have to keep going back to try to work out what might have been meant. Did no one read the thing through?

A second Virginia Woolf, edited by James Acheson, is announced on its cover as “A collection of all new critical essays by contem­porary scholars”, almost as if the writing might have been run through an online plagiarism checker to be sure, with the scholars meanwhile being put through a quick and secure validation process. In fact, though there isn’t a subtitle to say so, the book’s essays are focused on Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, the two novels most often assigned for study. So the collection essentially looks like an up-to-date textbook, one of those periodic upgradings of the Woolfian wheels to fit the current critical vehicles. But it is a fine book.

more here.

John Wilmes at The Millions:

From the late 1930s until his death in 1972—and certainly as much of his behemoth bibliography has come to light in the decades since—Kenneth Patchen perplexed and enchanted readers with “novels” that refused to do what’s allowed on the page. A sometime collaborator of John Cage and Charles Mingus and lifelong friend of E.E. Cummings, his smashing together of the visual and written and bold negotiation with narrative landed his pacifist mysticism at a singular aesthetic—one that the whole of literature seems to have forgotten less than it has processed it.

In The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Patchen’s overwhelming and seminal 1941 literary mess recently reissued by New Directions, time, space, sequence, and subtlety don’t seem to exist. Patchen’s sprawling poetic exposition is hard after the heart of American story and microscoped in on the blurriness of the border between human love and human hate, with little regard for logic in its hunt of these themes. It’s Patchen’s ambition to make us all look like animals, and disarming the semblance of any known structure of narrative is an essential part of this dizzying quest. “What we did not know was how near madness we would be,” the titular Moonlight warns on the second page.

What follows is 313 pages that vacillate between an almost impossible to follow narrative, long detached passages about the general nature of everything, and graphic art eruptions. “Why the large, messy rebellion against form?” Moonlight at one point asks of himself. Patchen’s jumbled and relentless poetics make for an awesome authorial assault, even if he can’t always hold the line between text and reader taut throughout his unflinching frontier into the possibilities of the page.

more here.

Martin Filler at the NYRB:

How odd that the towering genius of architecture during the third quarter of the twentieth century—when his most conventionally successful colleagues prized innovation over tradition, analysis over intuition, and logic over emotion—was a mystically inclined savant who sought to reconnect his medium with its spiritual roots. Indeed, he ran wholly counter to prevailing images of the modern architect. Rather than casting himself as a technocratic superman along the lines of the young Le Corbusier, or a conduit between man and nature like the twinkling Frank Lloyd Wright, he made his name with an architectural gran rifiuto, rejecting the commercial blandishments of an increasingly corporate culture in favor of a quixotic quest to recapture the archaic power of shelter at its most elemental.

This charismatic anachronism was Louis Kahn, who by the time he died in 1974 at the age of seventy-three was widely and correctly considered America’s foremost master builder, even though his mature career spanned little more than two decades and he executed only about a dozen important buildings. In recent years Kahn’s messy personal history has threatened to overshadow his immense professional accomplishments, yet his aura has grown steadily, not just for what he achieved but also because of what has taken place in the built environment since his death. After he almost single-handedly restored architecture’s age-old status as an art form, his legacy was quickly squandered by younger coprofessionals. From the mid-1970s onward they have careened from one extreme, short-lived stylistic fad to the next—Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, Blobitecture—and lost sight of the profound values Kahn wanted to convey: timelessness, solidity, nobility, and repose.

more here.

Dan Rosenheck in The Economist:

Randall Fuller in Nature:

One night in 1851, Henry David Thoreau woke from a dream. In it, astride two ungovernable horses — literal nightmares — he galloped through the woods, “but the horses bit each other and occasioned endless trouble and anxiety, and it was my employment to hold their heads apart”. At that time, the 34-year-old naturalist–writer was trying to reconcile two contending forces in his life: the transcendentalism he had long espoused and the rigours of science he had recently discovered. Transcendentalism emerged in the mid-1830s as an intoxicating set of philosophical, literary and spiritual tendencies unified by discontent with American life. Its core tenet, derived from Romantic philosophy, was that God permeated everything. As the movement's best-known spokesperson, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, put it, “behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present”. Transcendent divinity could be perceived only through intuition and inspiration — not through reason — and was best found in nature. This set of beliefs fuelled the experiment in self-reliance and simple living on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid-1840s that led to Thoreau's masterpiece, Walden, published in 1854. But something happened to Thoreau before his best-known book was finished, subtly changing its final form, making it more empirical, and thus scientific. Always fascinated by the natural world, he began to ponder more on its physical processes. Every day, rain or shine and usually for at least four hours, he tramped through the woods and fields surrounding his native Concord, collecting specimens and writing down what he observed in a series of small notebooks. He measured and weighed, pressing the leaves of red currant, poison sumac and many other species for his herbarium. In the evening, he transferred his observations into larger journals. Occasionally he worried about this new tendency. “I fear,” he wrote on 19 August 1851, “that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific — that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven's cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope.” He tried to fit the data he gathered into a larger, transcendentalist vision of the cosmos, but his focus was inexorably drawn to the material world.

In 1860, he encountered Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published the previous year. He was already familiar with Darwin, having devoured The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) almost a decade earlier. Thoreau first learnt of Origin at a dinner party on New Year's Day 1860, a gathering that included radical abolitionist Franklin Sanborn, child-welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace and transcendental philosopher Bronson Alcott. This quartet of progressive intellectuals discussed the book at length, and Thoreau was immediately captivated.

More here.

Bernie Sanders in the New York Times:

In 2016, the Democratic Party lost the presidency to possibly the least popular candidate in American history. In recent years, Democrats have also lost the Senate and House to right-wing Republicans whose extremist agenda is far removed from where most Americans are politically. Republicans now control almost two-thirds of governor’s offices and have gained about 1,000 seats in state legislatures in the past nine years. In 24 states, Democrats have almost no political influence at all.

If these results are not a clear manifestation of a failed political strategy, I don’t know what is. For the sake of our country and the world, the Democratic Party, in a very fundamental way, must change direction. It has got to open its doors wide to working people and young people. It must become less dependent on wealthy contributors, and it must make clear to the working families of this country that, in these difficult times, it is prepared to stand up and fight for their rights. Without hesitation, it must take on the powerful corporate interests that dominate the economic and political life of the country.

There are lessons to be learned from the recent campaign in Britain. The Conservatives there called the snap election with the full expectation that they would win a landslide. They didn’t. Against all predictions they lost 13 seats in Parliament while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party won 32. There is never one reason elections are won or lost, but there is widespread agreement that momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers. One of the most interesting aspects of the election was the soaring turnout among voters 34 or younger.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Machine learning, the field that's driving a revolution in artificial intelligence, has cemented its role in modern technology. Its tools and techniques have led to rapid improvements in everything from self-driving cars and speech recognition to the digital mastery of an ancient board game.

Now, physicists are beginning to use machine learning tools to tackle a different kind of problem, one at the heart of quantum physics. In a paper published recently in Physical Review X, researchers from JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center (CMTC) at the University of Maryland showed that certain neural networks—abstract webs that pass information from node to node like neurons in the brain—can succinctly describe wide swathes of quantum systems .

Dongling Deng, a JQI Postdoctoral Fellow who is a member of CMTC and the paper's first author, says that researchers who use computers to study quantum systems might benefit from the simple descriptions that neural networks provide. "If we want to numerically tackle some quantum problem," Deng says, "we first need to find an efficient representation."

On paper and, more importantly, on computers, physicists have many ways of representing quantum systems. Typically these representations comprise lists of numbers describing the likelihood that a system will be found in different quantum states. But it becomes difficult to extract properties or predictions from a digital description as the number of quantum particles grows, and the prevailing wisdom has been that entanglement—an exotic quantum connection between particles—plays a key role in thwarting simple representations.

The neural networks used by Deng and his collaborators—CMTC Director and JQI Fellow Sankar Das Sarma and Fudan University physicist and former JQI Postdoctoral Fellow Xiaopeng Li—can efficiently represent quantum systems that harbor lots of entanglement, a surprising improvement over prior methods.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Jacob Mchangama in Areo:

It’s a paradox: The ability to communicate, spread and access information freely across borders and barriers has never been more readily available to people around the globe. Yet the belief in freedom of thought and expression as fundamental values underpinning an uber-connected world seems to be eroding. Even in democracies. Whether its American college students protesting (sometimes violently) speakers they disagree with, European democracies panicking about fake news, populism and extremism, or the American president labelling the media an “enemy of the people.” Instead free speech has increasingly come to be viewed as an excuse and a vehicle for racism, bigotry, populism, disinformation and a general threat to social peace, harmony and order. This is backed up by data from Freedom House showing that global respect for press freedom reached a 13-year low in 2016 following constant decline since 2004. The message in Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) 2017 Press Freedom Index is hardly more uplifting:

“violations of the freedom to inform are less and less the prerogative of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. Once taken for granted, media freedom is proving to be increasingly fragile in democracies as well. In sickening statements, draconian laws, conflicts of interest, and even the use of physical violence, democratic governments are trampling on a freedom that should, in principle, be one of their leading performance indicators.”

Using RSF data from 2016 all but two of 28 democratic European countries experienced declines in press freedom compared to 2013. A 2017 survey on the attitudes of 15-21 year olds in 20 countries around the world found that around half believe people should have the right to non-violent free speech even when it is offensive to a religion (56%) or minority groups (49%). And while 93% of American millennials favour free speech in general, these figures drop to 62% and 57% when it comes to offensive speech regarding religion and minority groups respectively. These figures drop significantly among millennials in other democratic countries such as France and the United Kingdom.

If we take free speech for granted and have become apathetic about its value that would not be the first time in history.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith at berfrois:

It is hard to read about SETI and more recent related projects looking for intelligent life in the stars without discerning in them certain silent presuppositions about what counts or should count as intelligent life on earth. In particular, the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life is almost always taken to be the same thing as the search for technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. The search for other life that is intelligent in this respect is, in turn, almost always conceived as a search for any other intelligent life whatever, since it takes for granted that the search on earth has been exhaustive, and it has turned up no other species that are intelligent in any truly noteworthy way. The best candidates for intelligence among terrestrial species are taken to be the ones that have mastered some sort of modest technology: chimpanzees putting sticks down ant holes for example. On this scale, all other terrestrial species are bound to come in a distant second to homo sapiens. They use sticks, we use iPhones, etc., and thus no real comparison is possible.

Two considerations however compel us to question this approach to establishing a hierarchy.

First, it is not at all clear that tool-use, or a fortiori complex-tool-use, pertains to my own species essence in a significantly different way than it pertains to a chimpanzee’s species essence. If a chimpanzee and I were stranded on a desert island with only our wits to help us survive, I would not myself be able to build any tools, from available raw materials, that would be significantly more sophisticated than what the chimpanzee would come up with.

more here.

Natalia Zorkaya at Eurozine:

At the beginning of the 1990s, prospects for modernisation and democratic change in Russian society were linked to the younger generation. Sociologists identified the bearers of new values not only in the educated classes, or in the modern, more complex social environment of large cities and megacities, but first and foremost amongst the youth. At the beginning of the 1990s, young people stood out from other generations for their inclination towards liberal-democratic values, civil rights and freedom, their openness towards the West and their attitude towards social achievement and success. Even at the start of the economic reforms, when – after a short period of euphoric expectation that things would rapidly change for the better – the majority of the population was plunged into a state of frustration and confusion and increasingly took the view that any changes in the country were imposed from above, young people demonstrated a more positive attitude and were more content with their own lives.

Hopes that young people would be able to quickly adopt western ideas and democratic principles were also characteristic of the liberal and democratic parties and social movements of the 1990s. Ideas about how Russian society and its economy might be modernized emerged directly from the educated classes – primarily residents of large cities and youth – and involved complex ideas of justice, human rights, a democratic state, the independence of the judiciary, the protection of private property and so on. These social environments were expected to encourage the institutional consolidation of the values of democratic rule-of-law state, civil rights and freedoms and the displacement of former Soviet stereotypes and complexes.

more here.