John Allen Paulos in Scholar Commons at the University of South Florida website:

Lawyers, journalists, economists, novelists, and “public intellectuals,” among others, are all frequent commentators on both contemporary social issues and our personal lives and predicaments. And as someone who majored at one time or another in English, classics, and philosophy, I say rightly so, but I still bemoan the fact that scientists and especially mathematicians are not on this list.

People often pay lip service, of course, to the importance of mathematics and sometimes even express an undue reverence for mathematicians, but these attitudes are usually accompanied by a casual dismissal of the subject and its practitioners as irrelevant to matters of real importance. Mathematics is deemed esoteric and outside the ongoing public and private narratives and conversations that surround us. If mentioned in a general context, it is usually used to provide decoration, rather than information.

As I’ve tried to argue in several of my books, these attitudes are profoundly wrong. They seem compelling, however, because of still rampant innumeracy, which prompts people with little or no mathematical background to view mathematicians’ remarks and insights as always either completely trivial or forbiddingly abstract or else beside the point. Of course, these traits characterize many of the remarks of more traditional commentators, but here the remarks’ familiarity disguises their irrelevant banality. How many times do painfully fatuous points get repeated day after day by TV and newspaper pundits?

Sometimes, however, mathematicians’ habits of searching for abstraction lead them to make trenchant observations about, say, survival bias, Simpson’s paradox, or the unpredictability of nonlinear systems that are unlikely to be made by more traditional commentators. Periodically their deployment of basic arithmetic, even simply about the relative sizes of budget items or causes of death, leads to similarly revealing insights. So at times does an oblique and quirky approach to an issue such as a complexity-theoretic assessment of politicians’ speeches or an analysis of Gone with the Wind via systems of differential equations.

More here.

Leah Shaya in London Magazine:

Sue Hubbard’s Rainsongs has a unique and beautiful emotive quality that shines through its delicately constructed prose in a love-letter to Ireland, memory and parenthood, taking advantage of its mature narrator to speak with resonance and depth. In a contemporary world of instant connections, Rainsongs returns to an age just prior to the boom of social media – 2007 – in an exploration of what it means to be truly alone.

Rainsongs is a book filled with characters who are alone, by circumstance and by choice. Martha Cassidy has lost her husband and only son; twice-divorced Eugene Riordan and farm devotee Paddy O’Connell eschew relationships, finding they are happier living on their own. Accounts of community, large families, childhood friendships, are all recalled, dreamlike, from a distant past. Permanent loneliness haunts the narrative as a threat, but it is from solitude that the most beautifully haunting and thoughtful reflections in the book arise. Whenever Hubbard’s varyingly anthropophobic characters do enter a social setting, such as Eugene’s New Year’s Eve party, Brendan’s funeral, or the various local pubs, bars and restaurants, other people in the crowd are sketched accurately but unflatteringly, reduced to their worst.

However, as the supplies in Martha’s cupboard dwindle at the beginning of each chapter, the unsustainability of hermitage becomes clear.

More here. And here is a video of Sue Hubbard speaking about her book:

David Livingstone Smith at Philosophy Talk:

Happy New Year! Now that we’ve launched into 2018, many of us are wondering what the year ahead has in store. What might happen, to you, your loved ones, the nation or the world as a whole? There seem to be a lot of possibilities, some to be hoped for and others to be feared.

Philosophers are as much concerned about the possibilities that lie ahead as anyone else is. But philosophers are also interested in possibilities for a different reason—or rather, in a different way. When we consider possibilities, most of us are curious about what is possible, but a lot of philosophers are also curious about what possibility is. Put a little differently, a lot of philosophers are interested in the question of what it is that we’re talking about when we talk about possibility.

You might respond, “Well it’s obvious, isn’t it? When I say that it’s possible that it’s going to snow in Savannah tomorrow, I’m just talking about the fact that it might snow in Savannah tomorrow.” But this doesn’t really get us anywhere, because it’s just using different words to say the very same thing. It’s like saying “Wealthy people have lots of money.” Duh.

There’s been a whole industry in philosophy devoted to solving the puzzle of possibility. To describe this fully would require a book rather than a blog, so I’m going to confine myself to sketch just a tiny bit of it. There are plenty of great sources for those who want to learn more.

The most notorious, and most influential, way to address the problem of possibility was the brainchild of the philosopher David Lewis, and it’s really, really weird. The idea is that true counterfactual statements aren’t really counter to the facts because if that were the case there’s no way that they could be true. So there simply must be facts that make these statements true. These are obviously not facts about our world (it didn’t snow in Savannah today), so they must be facts about other worlds—parallel universes or, in the philosophical jargon “possible worlds.” When I truly say it could have snowed in Savannah, this is true because there’s some world—some parallel universe—where it snowed in Savannah.

More here.

Katherine Rowland in Aeon:

Within weeks of conception, cells from both mother and foetus traffic back and forth across the placenta, resulting in one becoming a part of the other. During pregnancy, as much as 10 per cent of the free-floating DNA in the mother’s bloodstream comes from the foetus, and while these numbers drop precipitously after birth, some cells remain. Children, in turn, carry a population of cells acquired from their mothers that can persist well into adulthood, and in the case of females might inform the health of their own offspring. And the foetus need not come to full term to leave its lasting imprint on the mother: a woman who had a miscarriage or terminated a pregnancy will still harbour foetal cells. With each successive conception, the mother’s reservoir of foreign material grows deeper and more complex, with further opportunities to transfer cells from older siblings to younger children, or even across multiple generations.

Far from drifting at random, human and animal studies have found foetal origin cells in the mother’s bloodstream, skin and all major organs, even showing up as part of the beating heart. This passage means that women carry at least three unique cell populations in their bodies – their own, their mother’s, and their child’s – creating what biologists term a microchimera, named for the Greek fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent.

More here.

Beth Ann Bovino and Jason Gold at S&P Global:

S&P Global believes that a dual-pronged effort of increasing entry and retention of more women to the American workforce, particularly those professions traditionally filled by men, represents a substantial opportunity for growth of the world’s principal economy, with the potential to add 5%-10% to nominal GDP in just a few decades.

One option to consider is a Congressional Budget Office (CBO)- like “score” on the impact legislation would have on the economic feasibility and accessibility to the workforce for women. A simple, objective, nonpartisan measure that would equip lawmakers with the requisite tools to asses appropriate proposed legislation and its impact on women in the workforce. A score that evaluates the impact of a bill on how many female workers would choose to remain in the workforce, one that helps measure how the cost of working compares with the income from that job.

While gender plays a significant role in workers’ vulnerability, the biggest determinant is education—an area that S&P Global believes is the springboard for women’s progress. Specifically, promoting higher education in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields and other areas conducive to careers traditionally pursued by men is the key that could unlock the earning power of American women.

More here.

Samuel Matlack at The New Atlantis:

The question of whether and how physics can be rendered in ordinary speech is nowhere more important than in our assessment of writers who try to present a vision of the world that is wholly other than what our everyday experience would have us believe, a world that, many think, is more real. This is the spirit of the recent book Reality Is Not What It Seems by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, which promises to be a “magic journey out of our commonsense view of things, far from complete.”

There is something deeply paradoxical about this project. On the one hand, it is motivated by a desire to dispel everyday illusions about the physical world that contribute to our human-centeredness. “We are obsessed with ourselves,” writes Rovelli. “We study our history, our psychology, our philosophy, our gods. Much of our knowledge revolves around ourselves, as if we were the most important thing in the universe.” Physics, he thinks, can teach us better.

On the other hand, the only way to take a popular audience on this “journey out of our commonsense view of things” in writing is in commonsense language, which is intricately tied to our everyday experience of the world. Writers therefore try to make physics intelligible to the general reader by translating esoteric mathematical theories into plain terms, while at the same time trying to show how conventional descriptions of the world as it appears to us do not match up with physicists’ descriptions of actual reality. This is a vexing task.

more here.

Steven Knepper at Commonweal:

Rowan Williams argues that the “tragic imagination” is a moral imagination. Tragic drama teaches us that calamity can be narrated, that it can be drawn, at least to some degree, back into shared experience. There is a spare hope in this. It shows that “we have not been silenced forever by loss.” Furthermore, tragedy requires us to attend to the sufferings of others on stage. It presents us with “different kinds of witnessing to pain” and teaches us that “suffering calls out [for] recognition.” This is not a matter of straightforward empathy, which risks deluding us about our ability to identify with sufferers. Tragedy teaches us instead that “the suffering of others is not to be absorbed into our own feelings. But we also find that the suffering of others is already shared in human communication, recognized and named as loss or catastrophe.” Tragedy helps us recognize the limits of our own self-knowledge and the fragility of our condition.

Still, tragedy does not just dramatize individual fragility. Its representations of strife and cyclical violence, as in the paradigmatic Oresteia, dramatize the fragility of the political community as well. Indeed, in his opening chapter Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, claims that Athenian tragedy was a liturgical event.

more here.

Michael Burleigh at Literary Review:

Relations with Japan deteriorated when the Chinese discovered the possibilities of mobilising anti-Japanese sentiment, which became easier as Japanese nationalists began to baulk at the ‘cultural’ restraints the USA had placed upon them. It does not help that Japanese politics is frequently dynastic, so that the sons and grandsons of wartime figures have rotated through conservative cabinets. Some of these instantly forgettable figures have felt emboldened enough to pay their respects at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to those who have died for their emperor. In 1978 the chief priest enshrined fourteen Class-A war criminals there, adding them to the 2.46 million already commemorated at the site. Emperor Akihito has, as his father did, always given the shrine a wide berth, but not so some of Japan’s conservative politicians, notably Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzō Abe, the former and current prime ministers, who have stoked up nationalist feelings among Japanese incensed at how left-wing teachers’ unions have ensured that a masochistic version of the country’s history is fed to schoolchildren. Tempers worsened when Japanese academics began quibbling about the death toll in the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, the worst mass atrocity of the Sino-Japanese War. The fact that the Taiwanese tend to be nostalgic about the Japanese occupation (they still use Japanese administrative buildings, in contrast to the South Koreans, who tore them down in Seoul) adds to Chinese grievances.

more here.

From Lapham's Quarterly (St. Ogg's c. 1840):

Perhaps it was because teaching came naturally to Mr. Stelling that he set about it with that uniformity of method and independence of circumstances which distinguish the actions of animals understood to be under the immediate teaching of nature. With such unerring instinct, Mr. Stelling set to work at his natural method of instilling the Eton Grammar and Euclid into the mind of Tom Tulliver. This, he considered, was the only basis of solid instruction; all other means of education were mere charlatanism, and could produce nothing better than smatterers.

Fixed on this firm basis, a man might observe the display of various or special knowledge made by irregularly educated people with a pitying smile; all that sort of thing was very well, but it was impossible these people could form sound opinions. In holding this conviction, Mr. Stelling was not biased, as some tutors have been, by the excessive accuracy or extent of his own scholarship; and as to his views about Euclid, no opinion could have been freer from personal partiality. Mr. Stelling was very far from being led astray by enthusiasm, either religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had no secret belief that everything was humbug. He thought religion was a very excellent thing, and Aristotle a great authority, and deaneries and prebends useful institutions, and Great Britain the providential bulwark of Protestantism, and faith in the unseen a great support to afflicted minds; he believed in all these things, as a Swiss hotel keeper believes in the beauty of the scenery around him, and in the pleasure it gives to artistic visitors. And in the same way, Mr. Stelling believed in his method of education; he had no doubt that he was doing the very best thing for Mr. Tulliver’s boy. Of course, when the miller talked of “mapping” and “summing” in a vague and diffident manner, Mr. Stel­ling had set his mind at rest by an assurance that he understood what was wanted; for how was it possible the good man could form any reasonable judgment about the matter? Mr. Stelling’s duty was to teach the lad in the only right way—indeed he knew no other; he had not wasted his time in the acquirement of anything abnormal.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

The genomes of plants and animals are littered with the remains of viruses that integrated themselves into their DNA hundreds of millions of years ago. Most of these viral remnants are inactive, but the latest research suggests that some evolved into genes that let cells communicate. A pair of papers^1,2 published in Cell on 11 January suggest that the protein encoded by one such gene uses its virus-like structure to shuttle information between cells: a new form of cellular communication that may be key to long-term memory formation and other neurological functions. Two research groups came across the phenomenon independently while studying extracellular vesicles — pieces of cell membranes that pinch off into bubbles and float away from the cells. These vesicles circulate throughout the body, but little is known about their function. The teams, led by neuroscientist Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and cell biologist Vivian Budnik at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, looked at mice and flies (Drosophila melanogaster), respectively.

Protective shells

The researchers found that many of the extracellular vesicles released by neurons contain a gene called Arc, which helps neurons to build connections with one another. Mice engineered to lack Arc have problems forming long-term memories, and several human neurological disorders are linked to this gene. When Shepherd and Budnik analysed the genetic sequences of mouse and fly versions of Arc, they found that they were similar to that of a viral gene called gag. Retroviruses such as HIV use the Gag protein to assemble protective shells called capsids that transport the virus’s genetic material between cells during infection. When the researchers looked at the Arc protein under a high-resolution microscope, they found that it formed a similar capsid and carried the genetic instructions, or messenger RNA (mRNA), that encode Arc. The capsid was then wrapped in a piece of the cell membrane and released as an extracellular vesicle. No other non-viral protein has been shown to form capsids and shuttle mRNA between cells. “It’s groundbreaking,” says Clive Bramham, a neuroscientist at the University of Bergen in Norway.

More here.

Jennifer Finney Boylan in Signature:

One suggestion I have for writers of memoir is that you should use the same rule to structure your scenes that you would use to decide when to arrive at, and when to leave, a cocktail party. That rule might be summarized: Come in late, and get out early.

Let’s say you’re invited to a party that begins at 9PM. What time do you arrive? Some folks might say ten o’clock, others closer to midnight, but almost no one would say to arrive exactly at 9PM. I admit that I’ve had a few friends who can be regularly depended upon to do just this, but let’s be honest: their exactitude is embarrassing. It makes me like them less.

Plus, being the first person at a party is mortifying. You stand around, watching your host take cheese out of the refrigerator. As Jimmy Durante use to say, “It’s mortifyin’.”

And in just this way, you don’t want to start your first scene — or any scene, for that matter — from square one. Don’t write the narrative equivalent of people who arrive at a nine o’clock party at nine o’clock. Arrive late—not so late that your reader (or your host) is overly confused. Arrive precisely late enough to be interesting.

Example: What’s the most commonly used opening sentence in stories written by student writers? I can assure you it’s something like, “Ring! Ring! Ring! said the alarm clock.”

More here.

Kristin Houser in Futurism:

A pair of researchers have uncovered a potential bridge between general relativityand quantum mechanics — the two preeminent physics theories — and it could force physicists to rethink the very nature of space and time.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes gravity as a geometric property of space and time. The more massive an object, the greater its distortion of spacetime, and that distortion is felt as gravity.

In the 1970s, physicists Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein noted a link between the surface area of black holes and their microscopic quantum structure, which determines their entropy. This marked the first realization that a connection existed between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Less than three decades later, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena observed another link between between gravity and the quantum world. That connection led to the creation of a model that proposes that spacetime can be created or destroyed by changing the amount of entanglement between different surface regions of an object.

In other words, this implies that spacetime itself, at least as it is defined in models, is a product of the entanglement between objects.

To further explore this line of thinking, ChunJun Cao and Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) set out to see if they could actually derive the dynamical properties of gravity (as familiar from general relativity) using the framework in which spacetime arises out of quantum entanglement.

More here.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.

“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.

“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”

We tend to assume that the threat to democracies comes from coups or violent revolutions, but the authors say that in modern times, democracies are more likely to wither at the hands of insiders who gain power initially through elections. That’s what happened, to one degree or another, in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Poland and Peru.

More here.

Nathan Vanderklippe in The Globe and Mail:

In late 2013, he was arrested and accused of "fabricating and spreading rumours." Late in 2016, a court found him guilty of defamation and ordered him to apologize on his social-media account, which at the time had 740,000 followers. If he was unwilling to do that, the court said, he could pay $115 to publish the verdict on an authorized website. Mr. Liu paid the money.

Then, he said, the judge raised the fee to $2,900.

But in the midst of Mr. Liu's attempt to seek legal redress early in 2017, he discovered that his life had abruptly changed: Without any notice, he had been caught up in the early reaches of a social-credit system that China is developing as a pervasive new tool for social control – one expected to one day tighten the state's grip on its citizens. Critics have called it an Orwellian creation – a new kind of "thought police."

What it meant for Mr. Liu is that when he tried to buy a plane ticket, the booking system refused his purchase, saying he was "not qualified." Other restrictions soon became apparent: He has been barred from buying property, taking out a loan or travelling on the country's top-tier trains.

"There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he said. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."

More here.

William Corwin at artcritical:

Within the high walls of a cloistered garden, a young man falls in love with a rose, but seeking every possible avenue through which to attain his affection, it becomes increasingly clear he can never have it without destroying that aspect of it which he loves. With the general plot line of the original “Romance of the Rose” (1230 CE) in our minds, and its universal ramifications for all human relationships, we can follow the path that Anselm Kiefer weaves in his newest exhibition, “Transition from Cool to Warm,” rich with themes of sexuality, eroticism, femininity and longing. Though bookended with several massive paintings, the heart of the exhibition comprises watercolors and books. The exhibition has also been, to extend the metaphor, bookmarked by two events: an interview with Paul Holdengräber at The New York Public Library and an intimate demonstration of the plaster-soaked-cardboard books taken out of their vitrines at the gallery. These extra-curricular activities allowed the viewer into Kiefer’s thorny garden, and explicated a profound transition of the artist/author from his pulpit of philosopher and historian to a much more earthy place, looking up at the stars with the rest of us.

The exhibition has been laid out along the plan of a basilica, with a pair of rooms as aisles on either side of a main nave. The inner sanctum of the gallery contains a presentation of Kiefer’s newest one-off art books—hybrid objects that ensnare a dizzying number of references: to Wagner and Nordic mythology, Abrahamic traditions, Rodin, Picasso and the modern conception of data storage and presentation.

more here.

Tom Millay at Marginalia:

Kevin Hart is not one to boast. Nothing in this volume, which discusses religious poetry, would let one know that Hart is a major contemporary poet (as Harold Bloom amongst others has claimed), nor that some of his poems are religious. We do not find out that Hart is the one who has written the lines: “I want to live/Like a water spider over my own life/And touch again the month we fell in love/And feel its flesh,” nor that he has written “The Room,” which is said to have sustained a captured Chilean soldier who had memorized the poem through a period of intense mental and physical torture.

Perhaps Hart wanted the volume, one of a number of important theoretical works he penned, to stand on its own, and it certainly does; however, it is worth mentioning that this theoretical account of religious poetry is written by someone who is a practicing religious poet. The book is essentially an apologia for religious poetry accomplished through a novel mode of argumentation: phenomenology. As far as I am aware, this is the first major treatment of religious poetry in the field of phenomenology, and the result is a stirring defense of religious poetry against two major detractors of the very idea.

more here.

The Carpet Merchant

Wary as an animal she sniffs the air
enters the color of wounds, shadows
of crushed aubergine, the cedar dark
where fretted shutters jigsaw the blazing light.

Outside the cries of saffron vendors
fade, the clatter of the bazaar
where fair-haired English teachers
flirt with traders for Turkish delight.

Elegant he sits her on soft cushions
nods to the olive boy to bring her cayi
and limpid apple tea, clicks his fingers
to conduct the symphony of rugs.

which unroll like prayers, The knots
are looped and dropped, he explains,
for perfection belongs to Allah.
He offers her weaves of indigo,

faded of cochineal, where trellises
of butterflies symbolize the transience
of love, and corrugated arcs a nomad's
thirst for waves. he tells her this was

his father's house. How as children
they jumped naked to the sea from the carved
balcony, as he pushes to the shutter,
brushing a cool hand against her white shoulder.
.

by Sue Hubbard
from Everything Begins with the Skin
Enitharmon Press, 1994

Charlotte Shane at Bookforum:

Anesthesia has been around for over 170 years, and in spite of its inherent drama it’s impressively nonlethal. Current estimates place the death toll at about one in two hundred thousand or even one in three hundred thousand, which means—according to the earnest nonprofit the National Safety Council—that you or I are more likely to die from insect stings, “excessive natural heat,” or “contact with sharp objects” than either of us is from being put under. Properly supervised anesthesia is not only exceedingly safe but also ubiquitous, and necessary for a slew of lifesaving and life-improving procedures. Yet in these heady days of organic, “toxin”-free lifestyle goals, wariness of medical convention abounds. People rush to point out that we (“we” meaning doctors, which “we” usually aren’t) don’t really know how anesthesia works, thereby implying that it’s fundamentally suspect. There are movements in opposition to advances like vaccines and hormonal birth control, so it makes sense that anesthesia, too, with its murky chemical magic, would be a source of unease.

Because anesthesia is unlikely to cause death outright, the case against it goes more or less as follows: It’s mysterious and it’s scary. The former is posited as the reason for the latter, but even if there were a flawless explanation for how anesthesia works, we’d still be disconcerted—it strips us of our awareness, movement, speech, and senses.

more here.