Kevin Boylan in the NYT:

[T]he revisionist case rests largely on the assertion that our defeat in Vietnam was essentially psychological, and that victory would therefore have been possible if only our political leadership had sustained popular support for the war. But although psychological factors and popular support were crucial, it was Vietnamese, rather than American, attitudes that were decisive. In the United States, popular support for fighting Communism in South Vietnam started strong and then declined as the war dragged on. In South Vietnam itself, however, popular support for the war was always halfhearted, and a large segment (and in some regions, a majority) of the population favored the Communists.

The corrupt, undemocratic and faction-riven South Vietnamese government — both under President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated in a 1963 coup, and under the military cliques that followed him — proved incapable of providing its people and armed forces a cause worth fighting for. Unfortunately for the United States and the future happiness of the South Vietnamese people, the Communists were more successful: By whipping up anti-foreign nationalist sentiment against the “American imperialists” and promising to reform the corrupt socio-economic system that kept most of the country’s citizens trapped in perpetual poverty, they persuaded millions to fight and die for them.

More here.

Sam Wetherell in Jacobin:

The “creative classes” both diagnosed the present state of cities and offered recommendations for future action. Along with Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida has served as an inspiration for mayors, developers, and planners who pedestrianized streets, built bike lanes, and courted cultural attractions like art galleries and theaters.

Setting aside the rhetoric of innovation, economic growth, and entrepreneurship, we can locate something ironically Marxist about Florida’s ideas: human beings are fundamentally creative, which is the source of economic value, and people become alienated when they cannot control the fruits of their creativity.

But Florida’s writing narrows human potential. His theory of art and creativity only acknowledges its contribution to economic growth. The insistence on tolerance’s benefits has a similarly utilitarian purpose: we should celebrate diverse communities not for their own sake but because they spur innovation.

After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.

More here.

Harish C Menon in Quartz:

Long before the terms post-truth and alt-facts gained currency in the west, Indians were getting mass mails and text messages that often mixed myth with half-truths to glorify their past. It could be something as simple and patently false as the United Nations declaring India’s national anthem as the world’s best. Or bizarre achievements of ancient Indians.

Over the past few years, such trickery gained political legitimacy as senior leaders indulged in it using photoshopped images and administrative claims.

Now, with the full blessings of the powers that be, the phenomenon is seeping into Indian school textbooks, especially those used to teach history. For long a hotly-contested field among ideological rivals of the left, right, and centre of Indian politics, these textbooks have begun to peddle outright lies.

It may be still a trickle, but here is a glimpse of the false history that millions of Indian school students will be learning now on.

In the second half of 1962, a brief war with China along the Himalayas left India with a bloody nose. Despite individual acts of valour, India lost 4,000 soldiers. Though the country amply regained its military standing in subsequent standoffs with China, 1962 left a deep scar on the national psyche—a scar it has tried to efface ever since.

A section of Indians may have finally found a solution: Just lie.

A Sanskrit-language textbook meant for Class 8 students in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (MP) now says India won the war. “What famously came to be known as Sino-India war of 1962 was won by India against China,” The Times of India newspaper quoted the book, Sukritika, volume-3, on Aug. 10.

Published by the Lucknow-based Kriti Prakashan, the textbook is being used in several MP schools affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) of the government of India. The state itself is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Indian prime minister Narendra Modi belongs.

More here.

Tom Whipple in The Economist:

A few hundred thousand years before Jon Larsen, a jazz musician, carried a wooden broom onto a Norwegian roof, two asteroids bumped into each other. These asteroids were old when the sun was new. Never responsible for anything so exciting as a dinosaur extinction, for billions of years they remained cold and lifeless – time capsules from a more primitive solar system. But when they collided, they at last did something interesting: they shed some fragments. One of those fragments was as small as this full stop. For aeons, this particle was buffeted by solar winds, adrift in the cold of interplanetary space. Then one day it found itself in the path of a watery planet with a thick atmosphere. Travelling at 12,000 metres per second, melting in the intense heat, this tiny rock, once part of the oldest rocks in our solar system, dropped onto a Norwegian rooftop. According to the world’s micrometeorite experts, that should have been that. On every square metre of the planet, every year half a dozen such alien rocks land. You have most likely had one on your head. But every year so, too, does all the non-alien detritus: dust from construction, metal spherules from lorry brake pads, sand from the Sahara. These terrestrial particles outnumber the micrometeorites by a billion to one. Undeterred, standing on that Norwegian roof, Larsen swept it all up together and put it in a jiffy bag. Somewhere in those sweepings was the micrometeorite, and he was going to find it. When he began searching for stardust eight years ago, even Larsen thought he would probably be unsuccessful in separating these extraterrestrial needles from their dusty terrestrial haystacks. The scientists he contacted, from the small international community of micrometeorite experts, were certain he would be.

Until then, the only micrometeorites that had been identified were ones that had fallen to Earth aeons ago, and been locked into rock and ice or eroded by the sea. Scientists knew how important it was to understand these tiny rocks and the clues they gave us to our own planet’s formation. They also knew that there was a tantalising prospect that the complex molecules they contained might give us a hint as to how life started afterwards. Yet they had all failed to find fresh examples. In fact, so ludicrous such a search appeared that they hadn’t even tried.

They were the experts. How could a Norwegian jazz musician without a degree ever succeed?

More here.

Leila McNeill in Smithsonian:

Thomas E. Ricks in The Atlantic:

I had written five books for Scott Moyers, following him as he moved from editing jobs at Scribner’s to Random House and then to Penguin Press. We worked well together, and in part thanks to his strong editing hand, my last three books had been bestsellers.

So what happened when I finished years of work and sent him the manuscript of my sixth book stunned me. In fact, I was in for a series of surprises.

They began about 18 months ago, after I emailed to him that manuscript, a dual appreciation of Winston Churchill and George Orwell. When I had begun work on it, in 2013, some old friends of mine thought the subject was a bit obscure. Why would anyone care how two long-dead Englishmen, a conservative politician and a socialist journalist who never met, had dealt with the polarized political turmoil of the 1930s and the world war that followed? By 2016, as people on both the American left and right increasingly seemed to favor opinion over fact, the book had become more timely.

But two weeks after I sent him the manuscript, I received a most unhappy e-mail back from him. “I fear that the disconnect over what this book should be might be fundamental,” Scott wrote to me, clearly pained to do so. What I had sent him was exactly the book he had told me not to write. He had warned me, he reminded me, against writing an extended book review that leaned on the weak reed of themes rather than stood on a strong foundation of narrative. I had put the works before the two men, he told me, and that would not do.

There was more. But in short, he pissed all over it. It was not that he disliked it. It was that he fucking hated it.

More here.

Tom Griffiths at Edge.org:

I work on computational models of cognition, which means that I’m interested in understanding how people do the amazing things that we do, like learning from small amounts of data, figuring out causal relationships, identifying languages—things that computers have traditionally found hard to do. The way that I think about motivating that kind of research is in terms of making computers better at solving those kinds of problems.

Recently, I’ve also been thinking about a different way in which that’s a relevant enterprise. With all of the successes of AI over the last few years, we’ve got good models of things like images and text, but what we’re missing are good models of people. If we look at the kinds of AI systems that are being built and the kinds of data that people want to understand, often those data have to do with human behavior. We're trying to understand why people do what they do and what the cognitive processes are that underlie the data we find in the world that are a consequence of human behavior.

This enterprise is important for a couple of reasons. It gives us the tools to make sense of these data that are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. Also, having good models of how people think and behave is relevant to helping AI systems better understand what people want.

My approach is to try and understand the computational structure of the problems that people have to solve. If we’re trying to understand how people, say, learn a new causal relationship, how do we formalize that? How do we turn that into a math problem? That’s the kind of thing we can imagine getting a computer to solve.

More here.

Daniel Penny in The New Yorker:

On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists, Socialists, Irish dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged residents of London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash would eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters formed a blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts and six thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters exploded homemade bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and turned over a burning lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles on the marchers and the police attempting to protect them: rocks, brickbats, shaken-up lemonade bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. Mosley and his men were forced to retreat.

In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” published last week by Melville House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of Cable Street as a potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, unified coalition outnumbered and humiliated Fascists to such an extent that their movement fizzled. For many members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups, the incident remains central to their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the United States. According to Bray, antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism. The movement’s profile has surged since antifa activists engaged in a wave of property destruction during Donald Trump’s Inauguration—when one masked figure famously punched the white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face—and ahead of a planned appearance, in February, by Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, which was cancelled. At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a number of antifa activists, carrying sticks, blocked entrances to Emancipation Park, where white supremacists planned to gather. Fights broke out; some antifa activists reportedly sprayed chemicals and threw paint-filled balloons. Multiple clergy members credited activists with saving their lives. Fox News reported that a White House petition urging that antifa be labelled a terrorist organization had received more than a hundred thousand signatures.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

In 1944, a Columbia University doctoral student in genetics named Evelyn Witkin made a fortuitous mistake. During her first experiment in a laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, in New York, she accidentally irradiated millions of E. coli with a lethal dose of ultraviolet light. When she returned the following day to check on the samples, they were all dead — except for one, in which four bacterial cells had survived and continued to grow. Somehow, those cells were resistant to UV radiation. To Witkin, it seemed like a remarkably lucky coincidence that any cells in the culture had emerged with precisely the mutation they needed to survive — so much so that she questioned whether it was a coincidence at all.

For the next two decades, Witkin sought to understand how and why these mutants had emerged. Her research led her to what is now known as the SOS response, a DNA repair mechanism that bacteria employ when their genomes are damaged, during which dozens of genes become active and the rate of mutation goes up. Those extra mutations are more often detrimental than beneficial, but they enable adaptations, such as the development of resistance to UV or antibiotics.

The question that has tormented some evolutionary biologists ever since is whether nature favored this arrangement. Is the upsurge in mutations merely a secondary consequence of a repair process inherently prone to error?

More here.

Over at Brain Pickings:

[I]f the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm was correct, as I believe he was, in asserting that self-love is the foundation of a sane society, our responsibility to ourselves — and to our selves — is really a responsibility to one another: to know our interiority intimately and hold our darkest sides up to the light of awareness. But part of our human folly is that we do this far less readily than we shine the scorching beam of blameful attention on the darknesses of others.

That is what James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) explores in a magnificent 1964 piece titled “Nothing Personal,” found in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (public library) — the indispensable volume that gave us Baldwin on the creative process and his definition of love.

A year after he contemplated “the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” Baldwin writes:

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits.

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Jennifer Wilson in the NYT:

Moscow had not joined Paris and Berlin as havens for black American artists and writers seeking opportunities unimpeded by the color line. It had one advantage, however, over those other European capitals: In the Soviet Union, racial equality was not merely incidental but a state project. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, saw in the development of a black proletarian consciousness the greatest potential for revolution in America. And at that point, consciousness-raising in Soviet Russia was still — before Joseph Stalin’s rise to power — a matter left to artists.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that when the Soviets invited two representatives to speak on “the Negro question” years earlier (to mark the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution), one was a poet. The Jamaican-born Claude McKay had just published “Harlem Shadows,” a book of verses many considered the literary spark that had ignited the Harlem Renaissance. In Soviet Russia, McKay traveled to Red Army camps to read poetry from the volume, including his famous sonnet “If We Must Die.” McKay, though there as a political representative, devoted much of his speech, which he titled “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” to the role of the arts in racial progress. He talked about what he considered tired white expectations for black art, writing that Europeans were only familiar with “the Negro minstrel and vaudevillian, the boxer, the black mammy and butler of the cinematograph, the caricatures of the romances and the lynched savage who has violated a beautiful white girl.”

More here.

A report by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler over at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard:

In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election. We document that the majority of mainstream media coverage was negative for both candidates, but largely followed Donald Trump’s agenda: when reporting on Hillary Clinton, coverage primarily focused on the various scandals related to the Clinton Foundation and emails. When focused on Trump, major substantive issues, primarily immigration, were prominent. Indeed, immigration emerged as a central issue in the campaign and served as a defining issue for the Trump campaign.

We find that the structure and composition of media on the right and left are quite different. The leading media on the right and left are rooted in different traditions and journalistic practices. On the conservative side, more attention was paid to pro-Trump, highly partisan media outlets. On the liberal side, by contrast, the center of gravity was made up largely of long-standing media organizations steeped in the traditions and practices of objective journalism.

Our data supports lines of research on polarization in American politics that focus on the asymmetric patterns between the left and the right, rather than studies that see polarization as a general historical phenomenon, driven by technology or other mechanisms that apply across the partisan divide. The analysis includes the evaluation and mapping of the media landscape from several perspectives and is based on large-scale data collection of media stories published on the web and shared on Twitter.

More here.

Marina Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine:

Decades of research have shown that calorie restriction extends lifespan and delays morbidity in many small, short-lived species: yeast, spiders, and various fish and rodents. In humans, though, the benefits of calorie restriction are still unproven, and probably less straightforward. And how calorie restriction slows the aging process is still not well understood. “The interesting thing about calorie restriction is that we used to think the body was in some way slowing down, maybe in the number of heartbeats or production of free radicals,” says professor of genetics David Sinclair. “But it turns out that’s wrong….When we’re calorie restricting, what we’re really doing is telling the body that now is not the time to go forth and multiply. It’s time to conserve your resources, repair things better, fight free radicals, and repair broken DNA.”

Sinclair believes that a compound found in all living cells, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD), could be used to mimic these effects in humans without the starvation or decreased reproductive capacity associated with calorie restriction; his human trials of a therapy that could increase NAD levels are due to begin this month. Meanwhile, a similar compound is already being marketed as a supplement by a health start-up with several distinguished scientists (including three Harvard faculty members) on its advisory board—even though there’s still no evidence that the substance works. Sinclair’s approach is based on a broad view that links diseases of age such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and heart failure to common cellular processes. His lab aims to understand these processes and then use that understanding to develop medical therapies. Underlying the wide-ranging benefits of calorie restriction, Sinclair explains, are sirtuins—a group of seven genes that appear to be very important in regulating the aging process. “These longevity-gene pathways are turned on by changes in lifestyle” such as exercise and calorie restriction, he says.

More here.

Ray Kurzweil in KurzweilAI:

Dear readers,

As you might have seen in the news, entrepreneur and renowned Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a commencement speech at Harvard University. He said in his talk:

“To keep our society moving forward, we have a generational challenge — to create new jobs, a renewed sense of purpose, and to take on big meaningful projects. Our generation will have to deal with tens of millions of jobs replaced by automation like self-driving cars & trucks. But we have the potential to do so much more together. More than 300,000 people worked to put a man on the moon — including that janitor. Millions of volunteers immunized children around the world against polio. Millions of people built the Hoover dam and other great projects. We should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income — to give everyone a cushion to try new things. We’re going to change jobs many times, so we need affordable child care — to get to work and health care that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all going to make mistakes, so we need a society that focuses less on locking us up or stigmatizing us. And as tech keeps changing, we need to focus more on continuous education throughout our lives. Giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too. That’s why my wife Priscilla Chan and I started the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed our wealth to promoting equal opportunity. These are the values of our generation.“

A universal basic income is a form of security for a society’s citizens in which all residents of a country regularly unconditionally receive a sum of money, either from a government or public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. I support something along these lines. We want to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy incentives to contribute to society. So the question is how we get there. We already have a muddle approximating UBI * in the form of food stamps, social security, Medicaid, Medicare, emergency rooms and other programs.

More here.

Justin Taylor in the Los Angeles Times:

Criticism is parasitic literature,” writes Michael Robbins, the poet and critic, in his new book, “Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music,” a collection of his recent criticism, which I in turn have been tasked with criticizing. Where to start?

Maybe best to begin with Robbins himself. An English PhD who mostly eschews traditional academic scholarship, he’s the author of two collections of poems, “Alien vs. Predator” and “The Second Sex.” You may have noticed that both titles are borrowed. The original “Alien vs. Predator” was a movie, the first installment in what became a very bad and successful franchise, though the word “original” is a bit fraught here since the film is itself a mash-up of two older sci-fi franchises that each started strong then devolved into badness. Before “The Second Sex” was Robbins’ book of cantankerous, hilarious and densely allusive poems (with titles cadged from Warren Zevon and the Grateful Dead), it was a foundational piece of feminist criticism published by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949.

This should give you a sense of the sweep of Robbins’ interests and of his investment in sampling, mash-up and parody — all parasitic creative forms — as central elements of his practice. “Originality, fetish object of the young and naive, is no virtue in itself,” he writes in an essay called “Rhyme Is a Drug.” “If it were, every free jazz collective, no matter how inept, would be superior to the Rolling Stones.”

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Around 717 million years ago, the Earth turned into a snowball. Most of the ocean, if not all of it, was frozen at its surface. The land, which was aggregated into one big supercontinent, was also covered in mile-thick ice. And then, everything changed. Volcanoes released enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to trap the sun’s heat and trigger global warming. The ice melted, and the surface of the sea reached temperatures of 120 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. By 659 million years ago, the world had transformed from snowball to greenhouse. And just 14 million years later, the ice returned and the planet became a snowball for the second time.

This song of ice and fire was a momentous period for life on Earth. According to Jochen Brocks from the Australian National University, it liberated a flood of nutrients that permanently transformed the oceans, from a world that was dominated by bacteria to one where algae were ascendant. The algae, in turn, revolutionized the food webs in the sea, paving the way for the evolution of larger and increasingly complex organisms—like the first animals. If the Age of Algae had never dawned, we wouldn’t be here.

More here.

Scott Atran in The Guardian:

The values of liberal and open democracy increasingly appear to be losing ground around the world to those of narrow, xenophobic ethno-nationalisms and radical Islam. This is not a “clash of civilisations”, but a collapse of communities, for ethno-nationalist violent extremism and transnational jihadi terrorism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their unravelling.

This is the dark side of globalisation. The western nation-state and relatively open markets that dominate the global political and economic order have largely supplanted age-old forms of governance and social life. People across the planet have been transformed into competitive players seeking fulfilment through material accumulation and its symbols. But the forced participation and gamble in the rush of market-driven change often fails, especially among communities that have had little time to adapt. When it does, redemptive violence is prone to erupt.

The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski deems “the search for significance”, are the personal sentiments most readily elicited in my research team’s interviews with violent jihadists and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements.

More here.