Marina Koren in The Atlantic:

There is, at this very moment, a shiny red car floating around in our solar system.

The car, a 2008 Tesla Roadster, hitched a ride to space on what is now the most powerful rocket in operation, the Falcon Heavy, built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. The goal of the Falcon Heavy’s first flight—aside from not blowing up—was to put the Tesla into an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars, a car and two planets joined together in an endless loop around the sun. That kind of orbit would, at certain times, bring the Tesla near Mars.

The Tesla successfully reached orbit Tuesday afternoon, attached to the upper part of the rocket, and coasted for about six hours—a move meant to demonstrate a new capability for the U.S. Air Force, one of SpaceX’s customers. A livestreamfrom the payload showed surreal views of the car and its sole passenger, a mannequin stuffed into a SpaceX space suit, floating above Earth. Then SpaceX cut the feed, and the upper stage’s engine reignited one last time to give the Tesla a final push into its destined orbit.

After that final blast, Musk shared the Tesla’s location. The car was heading to the asteroid belt.

Wait, what?

More here.

Adam Rubenstein in the Weekly Standard:

Adam Rubenstein: If “reason” is to be “the currency of our discourse,” what’s the future of identity politics? Is identity politics based in reason? Your new book touches on the issue, but cursorily. Could you provide more of an explanation of identity politics, where it comes from, where it’s going, and how we should think about it?

Steven Pinker: Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership, which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really did have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League.

But when it spreads beyond the target of combatting discrimination and oppression, it is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic. As Chekhov said, there is no national multiplication table, and there is no racial or LGBT one either.

More here.

Vehicle: Violence

The way boxers postulate a feeling to label that with which they overcome
the body's vile fears,
its wish to flinch, to flee, break and run . . . they call it anger, pride,
the primal passion to prevail;
the way, before they start, they glare at one another, try to turn themselves
to snarling beasts . . .
so we first make up something in the soul we name and offer credence
to—"meaning," "purpose," "end"—
and then we cast ourselves into the conflict, turn upon our souls, snarl
like snarling beasts . . .
And the way the fighters fight, coolly until their strength fails, then desperately,
wildly, as in a dream,
and the way, done, they fall into one another's arms, almost sobbing with
relief, sobbing with relief:
so we contend so we wish to finish, wish to cry and end, but we never
cry, never end, as in a dream.

C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Harper Collins, 1994
.

Bill and Melinda Gates in Gates Notes:

Why don’t you give more in the United States?

Melinda: Our foundation spends about $500 million a year in the United States, most of it on education. That’s a lot, but it is less than the roughly $4 billion we spend to help developing countries.

We don’t compare different people’s suffering. All suffering is a terrible tragedy. We do, however, assess our ability to help prevent different kinds of suffering. When we studied the global health landscape, we realized that our resources could have a disproportionate impact. We knew we could help save literally millions of lives. So that’s what we’ve tried to do.

Take vaccines. We assumed that since it was possible to prevent disease for a few cents or a few dollars at most, it was being taken care of. But it turned out that we were wrong, and tens of millions of kids weren’t being immunized at all.

We’ve spent $15.3 billion on vaccines over the past 18 years. And it’s been a terrific investment. Better immunization is one reason why the number of children who die has gone down by so much, from almost 10 million in 2000 to 5 million last year. That’s 5 million families that didn’t have to suffer the trauma of losing a daughter or a son, a sister or a brother.

More here.

Jonathan Ellis and Eric Schwitzgebel in Imperfect Cognitions:

We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. You try to point it out, but they deny it, and dig in more.

More formally, in recent work we have defined rationalization as what occurs when a person favors a particular view as a result of some factor (such as self-interest) that is of little justificatory epistemic relevance, and then engages in a biased search for and evaluation of justifications that would seem to support that favored view.

You, of course, never rationalize in this way! Or, rather, it doesn’t usually feel like you do. Stepping back, you’ll probably admit you do it sometimes. But maybe less than average? After all, you’re a philosopher, a psychologist, an expert in reasoning – or at least someone who reads blog posts about philosophy, psychology, and reasoning. You're especially committed to the promotion of critical thinking and fair-minded reasoning. You know about all sorts of common fallacies, and especially rationalization, and are on guard for them in your own thinking. Don't these facts about you make you less susceptible to rationalization than people with less academic intelligence, vigilance, and expertise?

We argue that no. You’re probably just as susceptible to post-hoc rationalization, maybe even more, than the rest of the population, though the ways it manifests in your reasoning may be different.

More here.

Julian Baggini in The Guardian:

If the Illuminati is real, it’s got to be the least secret secret society in the universe. It’s so bad at keeping itself hidden that its existence is proclaimed all over the internet by people whose investigative toolkit consists entirely of Google and a lively imagination.

The most recent would-be whistleblower, however, is far from your usual ex-sports commentator. Paul Hellyer, a former Canadian minister of defence, has blamed the Illuminati for suppressing technology brought to Earth by aliens that could end our reliance on fossil fuels.

Why the possessors of such fantastic kit should prefer to cash in on the extraction of still abundant oil rather than on their incredible, exclusive alternative is mysterious. But since the whole point about secret all-powerful elites is that they are mysterious, maybe that’s to be expected. Perhaps the Illuminati is like that other great mystery, quantum theory: if you think you understand it, you don’t.

Mockery is easy, but it’s also reassuring. It’s good to know that we’re much more sensible and rational than these clearly deluded conspiracy theorists. The problem is that they differ from the rest of us only in degree, not kind.

The reasons why people believe in secret, controlling elites are rooted in basic human nature. We are constantly on the lookout for both patterns and agency. Pattern-seeking is essential for our survival, and the penalties for seeing patterns where none exist are lighter than those for missing patterns that really are there. If our ancestors had failed to notice that crops left to dry tended to die, they too would have expired through starvation. But if they thought they had noticed that sacrificing a goat increased the likelihood of rain, then at worst they wasted the odd bit of meat.

The assumption of agency is also extremely helpful.

More here.

You will need headphones for best results.

J.S. DeYoung at The Quarterly Conversation:

Quintan Ana Wikswo’s A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be demands to be read and lived with for a few days or weeks—as long as you like, it’s got enough spirit and thought and music and visual interest to hold you. A considerable and openhearted novel, it is at once wild and sophisticated, poetic and prosaic. Although it is Wikswo’s first novel, it shows her to be intrepid storyteller, as she confronts issues of race, sex, gender, religion, and desire with an appreciation toward their complexity and oft-chaotic natures.

A human rights worker since 1988, Quintan Ana Wikswo is also a frequently exhibited visual artist. Two years ago, Coffee House Press published her first book, a collection of short stories called The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far (evidently she has a unique and enchanting inclination for long titles). This collection carried its readers into new narrative territories, often to come face-to-face with the unknown. Her otherworldly and fantastical stories—a woman who lays eggs, two lover trapped in a double nautilus, an ancient creature called “mother” who lives in a Mason jar—illustrate those deeply human circumstances of loss of control, worlds turned upside down, and the things we often deny about ourselves but are inescapable.

more here.

Derek Attridge at Public Books:

I’m reading one of the great novels of our time. I’m doing so slowly because it’s in Afrikaans, and although I learned the language for many years in South African schools, that was a very long time ago. The novel is Agaat, its title both a proper name (Agatha) and the Afrikaans word for “agate”; the author, Marlene van Niekerk, is a leading Afrikaans poet as well as novelist and short-story writer. Luckily, I have at hand the superb translation by Michiel Heyns, the version in which I first encountered the novel. A film of Agaat is said to be in preproduction, but however successful it turns out to be, it will be able to convey only a glimmer of Van Niekerk’s achievement.

The origins of Afrikaans lie in the contact at the Cape of Good Hope among Dutch settlers, slaves from the Dutch territories in the East, and indigenous peoples, a creolization process that began in the late 17th century. A standard version of Afrikaans was established during the last third of the 19th century, partly in opposition to the dominance of English, and in 1925 it displaced Dutch as one of South Africa’s two official languages. With the triumph of the National Party in 1948, it became the language of government and thus of apartheid, a stigma that still attaches to it in many minds.

more here.

Emma Brockes at The Guardian:

Afterglow is described on the jacket as a “dog memoir”, and by Eileen Myles as “a weirdo, Kafka-type book” that is also a “screwy memoir of queerness”. For those familiar with Myles’s work, these descriptions shouldn’t surprise; for the past 40 years, Myles has lived in accordance with the principle, expressed in the 1991 poem “Peanut Butter”: “I am absolutely in opposition / to all kinds of / goals”. The book, like the life, defies categories. What is surprising, perhaps, is that at 68 Myles has been taken up by the mainstream, featuring in a New York Times magazine shoot last year, lauded byLena Dunham and Maggie Nelson, and providing the basis for a character in Transparent. The world of fringe poetry can be unforgiving and in previous years, on the basis of much milder success, Myles was accused by some peers of selling out. And now? The poet smiles, and says drily: “I think I would know if I had written Eat, Pray, Love.”

We are in the East Village, New York, where Myles has lived for the last four decades, in a rent controlled apartment that doesn’t cost much more than it did in the 70s. It is the writer’s preference to be referred to in the third person plural, “because I think it holds masculine and feminine and everything in between”. Using the pronoun “they”, although “it sounds a little funny”, is worth having a stab at, says Myles, because it confirms the poet’s view that men and women aren’t monoliths.

more here.

Racists

Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa! the butcher we used to patronize in the
Rue Cadet market,
beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the
import of which I missed
but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop
of definitely lower quality
until I convinced myself that probably I'd misunderstood that other thing
and could come back.
Today another black man stopped, asking something that again I didn't
catch, and the butcher,
who at the moment was unloading his rotisserie, slipping the chickens
off their heavy spit,
as he answered—how get this right?—casually but accurately brandished
the still-hot metal,
so the other, whatever he was there for, had subtly to lean away a little
so as not to flinch.

C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Harper Collins, 1994
.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Eve Watling in The Economist:

Meehan Crist in the London Review of Books:

After Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, I helped a friend in Brooklyn remove her car battery, put it in a backpack and lug it over to Wall Street. The subways were flooded, so we took a ferry across the East River to downtown Manhattan, where a muddy grey waterline cut across ground-floor walls and windows. The ocean had come and gone, and the mouldering streets were deserted. The air smelled of briny rot and the only sound was the industrial hum of generators pumping water from flooded basements. Orange accordion tubing snaked in and out of waterlogged buildings. We turned into the lobby of an apartment building where residents wandered in a commiserating daze and an exhausted man in uniform was laying out a plate of fresh fruit, presumably procured from somewhere far uptown, where people still had power and running water and the sudden absurdity of brunch. A paraplegic friend on an upper floor needed the car battery to help power her ventilator. The elevators were out of commission, so we walked up twenty narrow flights of stairs, lighting our way in the dark with torches. Inside the apartment, the friend and her roommate, also paraplegic, had abandoned their motorised wheelchairs and lay in their beds in a sunny front room, laughing and chatting. It wasn’t clear when the power would be back, but when things returned to normal they planned to have a party. I don’t think anyone in that room fully grasped, then, that the ocean would be coming back to stay.

Global sea level rise is hard for scientists to predict, but the trend is clear.

More here.

Jessica Hamzelou in New Scientist:

A 30-year-old transgender woman has become the first officially recorded to breastfeed her baby. An experimental three-and-a-half-month treatment regimen, which included hormones, a nausea drug and breast stimulation, enabled the woman to produce 227 grams of milk a day.

“This is a very big deal,” says Joshua Safer of Boston Medical Center, who was not involved with the treatment. “Many transgender women are looking to have as many of the experiences of non-transgender women as they can, so I can see this will be extremely popular.”

The transgender woman had been receiving feminising hormonal treatments for several years before she started the lactation treatment. These included spironolactone, which is thought to block the effects of testosterone, and progesterone and a type of oestrogen.

This regimen enabled her to develop breasts that looked fully grown, according to a medical scale that assesses breast development based on appearance. She had not had any breast augmentation surgery.

More here.

Max Fisher and Josh Keller in the New York Times:

When the world looks at the United States, it sees a land of exceptions: a time-tested if noisy democracy, a crusader in foreign policy, an exporter of beloved music and film.

But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

More here.