Judith Thurman in The New Yorker:

In Rachel Cusk’s most recent novels, “Outline” and “Transit,” a British writer named Faye encounters a series of friends and strangers as she goes about her daily life. She is recently divorced, and while her new flat is being renovated her two sons are living with their father. There is something catlike about Faye—an elusiveness that makes people want to detain her, and a curiosity about their pungent secrets. They tell her their histories, and she listens intently. As these soliloquies unspool, a common thread emerges. The speakers suffer from feeling unseen, and in the absence of a reflection they are not real to themselves. Faye shares their dilemma. “It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions,” she says. But she lends herself as a filter to her confidants, and from the murk of their griefs and sorrows, most of which have to do with love, she extracts something clear—a sense of both her own outline and theirs. Critics have hailed these books, which are the first volumes of a trilogy, as a “reinvention” of the novel, and they are certainly a point of departure for it, one at which fiction merges with oral history. Each witness has suffered and survived a version of the same experience, but uniquely, and the events that are retold don’t build toward a revelation. The structure of the text, a mosaic of fragments, mirrors the unstable nature of memory. It is worth noting that “Outline” was published in 2014, a year before Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature. (“Transit” was published two years later.) Alexievich interviews women and men who have lived through cataclysms—the Second World War, Chernobyl, the Soviet gulags—and she distills their testimony into what the Swedish Academy cited as a “history of emotions.” Cusk has been chastised for ignoring politics and social inequities, and the central catastrophe in her fiction is family life. But her imaginary oral histories are exquisitely attuned to the ways in which humans victimize one another.

Late in “Transit,” Faye listens to a palaver about clothes and sex by a friend named Amanda, who works in fashion and has “a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied.” “No one ever tells you the truth about what you look like,” Amanda says of her profession, to which Faye responds, “Perhaps none of us could ever know what was true and what wasn’t.” At the end of their conversation, which is mostly about Amanda’s affair with her contractor, she stands up to leave the café, “darting frequent glances at me,” Faye observes. “It was as if she was trying to intercept my vision of her before I could read anything into what I saw.”

More here.

Georgina Wilson Powell in Prospect Magazine:

Lan Samantha Chang in Literary Hub:

While chatting with a dear non-writer friend of mine, I mentioned that I had been thinking a lot about the significance of the inner life. My friend, a medical doctor married to an Ivy League professor and the proud mother of two perfect children, looked puzzled. “What do you mean by an ‘inner life?’” she asked. “When we say a person has a ‘rich inner life,’ isn’t that a way of saying that they look like a mess from the outside?” To her, describing someone as having a rich inner life is a backhanded complement similar to the dodge in Mao’s China where, when trying to describe a young woman who was not physically attractive, people would say, “She is very patriotic.”

My friend’s question illustrates the considerable pressure on people in this society to have a strong and well-defended outer life. In New York, this might include real estate and private schools. In Iowa, this might include regular family dinners made from personally gathered, wild edibles. This pressure began way back with our country’s founders, many of whom believed in the existence of the elect—in the idea that some of us are predestined to salvation. This idea can be logically extended to mean that some of us are not. Because we have no way, when we’re alive, of knowing which of us is predestined, it is important to behave as if.

I’m not trying to blame anyone for wanting or having nice real estate, good-looking children, or a glossy pet. I’m only pointing out that people live in anxiety or even fear about whether their outer lives are enough. It’s easy to believe that if we look good enough, perhaps it might be true that our lives are meaningful or even blessed. Everywhere we go, we can see evidence of this. Walking along the Seine, one sees dozens of people from all over the world standing with their backs to the view, smiling hopefully up at their iPhones. Millions of selfie sticks are purchased out of hope and fear.

More here.

From the editors of Scientific American:

In just five minutes an American president could put all of humanity in jeopardy. Most nuclear security experts believe that's how long it would take for as many as 400 land-based nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal to be loosed on enemy targets after an initial “go” order. Ten minutes later a battalion of underwater nukes could join them.

That unbridled power is a frightening prospect no matter who is president. Donald Trump, the current occupant of the Oval Office, highlights this point. He said he aspires to be “unpredictable” in how he might use nuclear weapons. There is no way to recall these missiles when they have launched, and there is no self-destruct switch. The act would likely set off a lethal cascade of retaliatory attacks, which is why strategists call this scenario mutually assured destruction.

With the exception of the president, every link in the U.S. nuclear decision chain has protections against poor judgments, deliberate misuse or accidental deployment. The “two-person rule,” in place since World War II, requires that the actual order to launch be sent to two separate people. Each one has to decode and authenticate the message before taking action. In addition, anyone with nuclear weapons duties, in any branch of service, must routinely pass a Pentagon-mandated evaluation called the Personnel Reliability Program—a battery of tests that assess several areas, including mental fitness, financial history, and physical and emotional well-being.

There is no comparable restraint on the president. He or she can decide to trigger a thermonuclear Armageddon without consulting anyone at all and never has to demonstrate mental fitness. This must change.

More here.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times:

The message is straightforward. Only a few decades ago, the middle class and the poor weren’t just receiving healthy raises. Their take-home pay was rising even more rapidly, in percentage terms, than the pay of the rich.

The post-inflation, after-tax raises that were typical for the middle class during the pre-1980 period — about 2 percent a year — translate into rapid gains in living standards. At that rate, a household’s income almost doubles every 34 years. (The economists used 34-year windows to stay consistent with their original chart, which covered 1980 through 2014.)

In recent decades, by contrast, only very affluent families — those in roughly the top 1/40th of the income distribution — have received such large raises. Yes, the upper-middle class has done better than the middle class or the poor, but the huge gaps are between the super-rich and everyone else.

The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.

More here.

Audio length: 59:49

Paul Russell in Aeon:

Throughout the Western world, the political ‘Left’ is in disarray. It is fragmented, rudderless and lacks a coherent plan to stem the tide of ‘populism’, nationalism and xenophobia. Identity politics and questions of religion have done much to fuel both the Right’s xenophobic tendencies, and the Left’s fragmentation. The ‘Old Left’ embraced a simple Manichean worldview of good versus evil: the enemy was easily identified (the rich and powerful, who oppressed the poor and the weak), and its agenda was simple and clear (redistribution of wealth and greater economic equality).

In contrast, the ‘New Left’ has introduced multiple new agendas – and enemies. The ‘Old Left’, it is said, was insensitive about issues affecting a range of marginalised groups, who identify themselves along lines of race, gender and sexual orientation. The three-legged stool of the Old Left – ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ – was never very secure, but when fraternity was replaced by the demands of group identity, little stability remained.

Among other things, the core Old-Left liberal value of religious tolerance has now come into confrontation with the identity politics of the New Left. Indeed, one central strand of New Left thinking regards all talk of (liberal) ‘religious tolerance’ as mere camouflage concealing deep and systematic disrespect and unequal treatment of religious minorities. From this perspective, what needs priority is not so much the right of individuals to choose their religion as they see fit and without interference, but the rights of religious groups to secure and preserve their standing and identity in a society that would otherwise marginalise them.

How should the Left understand and practise religious tolerance in the face of the emphasis that various groups now place on the value of their religious identities? This is a question that has, of course, become tangled up with overlapping issues, such as racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and various forms of nationalist xenophobia. But we should keep these issues separate and focus on the difficult enough question of the relationship between religious toleration and identity politics. Much of the (New) Left analysis, which concentrates on the language and agendas of identity politics, has paid too little attention to a very significant distinction that falls within the various identities that have been proposed as a basis for rectifying various forms of social injustice and unequal treatment: the distinction between ideological and non-ideological identity commitments.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Volker Halbach in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: From the beginning you have been investigating the nature of truth. One of the big distinctions that you’ve been working with is approaches to truth that are axiomatic and approaches that are semantic. So can we begin by asking you to sketch what the distinction is, and what is at stake?

VH: The axiomatic approach is very simple: We stipulate axioms for the truth predicate that look plausible and that avoid the paradoxes. Truth is taken to be a primitive notion. The axiomatic approach differs from traditional definitional approaches such as the correspondence or coherence theory of truth that it is not assumed from the outset that truth is definable.

Semantic theories of truth provide methods for defining semantics or models for a language with a truth predicate. The semantic definition of a model is usually carried out in set theory for a language that is essentially weaker. Semantic theories cannot provide models for the language in which the model is defined. In philosophical logic this is a standard approach that has been applied to many other notions: Toy languages with symbols for necessity, knowledge, or the like are given a suitable semantics. In semantic theories of truth the same strategy is applied to the truth predicate. Kripke’s theory and the revision semantics of truth by Gupta and Herzberger belong into this category, but also Tarski’s extremely successful model-theoretic account of truth that is the starting point for all later accounts.

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Amie Wilkinson in The New York Times:

The mathematics section of the National Academy of Sciences lists 104 members. Just four are women. As recently as June, that number was six. Marina Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani could not have been more different, in personality and in background. Dr. Ratner was a Soviet Union-born Jew who ended up at the University of California, Berkeley, by way of Israel. She had a heart attack at 78 at her home in early July. Success came relatively late in her career, in her 50s, when she produced her most famous results, known as Ratner’s Theorems. They turned out to be surprisingly and broadly applicable, with many elegant uses. In the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, a professor tried to persuade Dr. Ratner to be my thesis adviser. She wouldn’t consider it: She believed that, years earlier, she had failed her first and only doctoral student and didn’t want another

Dr. Mirzakhani was a young superstar from Iran who worked nearby at Stanford University. Just 40 when she died of cancer in July, she was the first woman to receive the prestigious Fields Medal. I first heard about Dr. Mirzakhani when, as a graduate student, she proved a new formula describing the curves on certain abstract surfaces, an insight that turned out to have profound consequences — offering, for example, a new proof of a famous conjecture in physics about quantum gravity. I was inspired by both women and their patient assaults on deeply difficult problems. Their work was closely related and is connected to some of the oldest questions in mathematics.

…Dr. Ratner and Dr. Mirzakhani studied shapes that are preserved under more sophisticated types of motions, and in higher dimensional spaces. In Dr. Ratner’s case, that motion was of a shearing type, similar to a strong wind high in the atmosphere. Dr. Mirzakhani, with my colleague Alex Eskin, focused on shearing, stretching and compressing. These mathematicians proved that the only possible preserved shapes in this case are, unlike the snowflake, very regular and smooth, like the surface of a ball. The consequences are far-reaching: Dr. Ratner’s results yielded a tool that researchers have turned to a wide variety of uses, like illumining properties in sequences of numbers and describing the essential building blocks in algebraic geometry. The work of Dr. Mirzakhani and Dr. Eskin has similarly been called the “magic wand theorem” for its multitude of uses, including an application to something called the wind-tree model.

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The Nobel Prize winning animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz once said about philosophers and scientists, “Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” Lorenz had good reason to say this since he worked in both science and philosophy. Along with two others, he remains the only zoologist to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. His major work was in investigating aggression in animals, work that was found to be strikingly applicable to human behavior. But Lorenz’s quote can also said to be an indictment of both philosophy and science. Philosophers are the ultimate generalists, scientists are the ultimate specialists.

Specialization in science has been a logical outgrowth of its great progress over the last five centuries. At the beginning, most people who called themselves natural philosophers – the word scientist was only coined in the 19^th century – were generalists and amateurs. The Royal Society which was established in 1660 was a bastion of generalist amateurs. It gathered together a motley crew of brilliant tinkerers like Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Henry Cavendish and Isaac Newton. These men would not recognize the hyperspecialized scientists of today; between them they were lawyers, architects, writers and philosophers. Today we would call them polymaths.

These polymaths helped lay the foundations of modern science. Their discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany and physiology were unmatched. They cracked open the structure of cells, figured out the constitution of air and discovered the universal laws governing motion. Many of them were supported by substantial hereditary wealth, and most of them did all this on the side, while they were still working their day jobs and spending time with their families. The reasons these gentlemen (sadly, there were no ladies then) of the Royal Society could achieve significant scientific feats were many fold. Firstly, the fundamental laws of science still lay undiscovered, so the so-called “low hanging fruit” of science was ripe and plenty. Secondly, doing science was cheap then; all Newton needed to figure out the composition of light was a prism.

But thirdly and most importantly, these men saw science as a seamless whole. They did not distinguish much between physics, chemistry and biology, and even when they did they did so for the sake of convenience. In fact their generalist view of the world was so widespread that they didn’t even have a problem reconciling science and religion. For Newton, the universe was a great puzzle built by God, to be deciphered by the hand of man, and the rest of them held similar views.

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by Elise Hempel

For many years I've loved to go antiquing, heading out with my partner on a Saturday afternoon to discover some quaint and hidden new antique shop, browsing through old pottery and glass, vintage knick-knacks and rusty railroad lamps, escaping the computer and TV for a while, the routine of daily life. Even better if the shop is slightly dim, with a certain mustiness to the air, if soft classical music surrounds me as I drift and imagine past the locked glass cases and open shelves. Even better if there's dust on those shelves.

I'm also a long-time enthusiast of antique glass bottles, having collected them and sold them on ebay, having bid in many online auctions and attended bottle shows in various states, having done much reading about them. I'm especially interested in the richly colored, glowing Midwestern pattern-molded bottles of the early 19^th Century (the height of glass-making in America), as well as the gracefully curved and wonderfully off-kilter freeblown New England chestnut bottles from the late 1700s and early 1800s. So, if I were to wish for a real return to the past, I suppose I'd want back what I imagine was a national appreciation of skill and craftsmanship, quality and beauty – a time in the world of glass-making "before progress," before the automatic bottle machine started giving uniformity to bottles in the early 1900s, before even the use of glass molds to create the standardized bodies of bottles, a time when the glassblower's breath, out of necessity, regularly created delicate, individual objects of art.

I would not, of course, wish for much else still untouched by progress between the years 1815 and 1830 (the specific time of the Midwestern bottles I love) – slavery, a lack of women's rights, lack of electricity, etc., etc., etc. And one can only imagine the working conditions of a glass factory back then: the long hours and work week; the heat of the furnaces and the danger of molten glass; the dirtiness of the sand, soda ash, and limestone needed to make the glass; the shards of continuously broken bottles.

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From The Guardian:

Salman Rushdie:

The country [India] is rapidly being pulled in the direction decreed by the proponents of “Hindutva”, Hindu nationalism, and away from the secular ideals of the founding fathers. To criticise this movement, in the age of the political Twitter troll, is to be branded “sickular,” or, even worse, a “sickular libtard”. Meanwhile, in the land of the sacred cow, people are being lynched for the “crime” of allegedly possessing or eating beef. History textbooks are being rewritten as Hindutva propaganda. The government’s control over a largely acquiescent news media (there are a couple of honourable exceptions) would be envied by the president of the United States, if he happened to concern himself with such faraway matters. The “world’s largest democracy” feels more authoritarian and less democratic than it should.

But the Modi government is popular. It’s very popular. This is the greatest difference between the India of Indira’s Emergency and the India of today. Back then, Mrs Gandhi called an election, wrongly believing she would win, and by doing so would legitimise the excesses of the Emergency years. But she was voted down resoundingly and driven from office. There is no sign that the Indian electorate will turn against the present government any time soon. Midnight’s grandchildren seem content with what’s happening. And that’s the pessimistic conclusion to volume two of the Indian story.

More here.

John Sides in The Washington Post's Monkey Cage:

A sense of victimhood among whites was ascendant even before Trump’s candidacy. As sociologist Arlie Hochschild documented in her extensive conversations with rural whites in Louisiana, there was a pervasive sense that the beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants and refugees were “stealing their place in line,” cutting ahead “at the expense of white men and their wives.” In Hochschild’s phrase, these people felt like “strangers in their own land.”

This sentiment showed up in polls as well. In 2011-2012, 38 percent of Republicans thought that there was at least a moderate amount of discrimination against whites, according to American National Election Study surveys. That figure jumped to 47 percent in the ANES study in January 2016. Similarly, an October 2015 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that nearly two-thirds of Republicans thought that “discrimination against whites has become as big of a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

These views were crucial to Trump’s rise. In March 2016, the political scientist Michael Tesler and I showedthe importance of “white identity” during the Republican primary. Trump did particularly well among whites who strongly identified as white, who thought whites suffered from discrimination, who thought whites were losing out on jobs to minorities, and who thought it was important for whites to work together to change laws that were unfair to whites.

Indeed, in further analysis that we’ve done, a strong sense of white identity has emerged as one of the most potent — if not the most potent — predictors of support for Trump in the primary. Support for Trump depended far less on personal economic anxiety — “I’m afraid of losing my job” — than on a distinctly racialized anxiety: “I think minorities are taking jobs from people like me.”

More here.