Stephanie M. Lee in BuzzFeed News:

In the summer of 2013, Özge Siğirci, a young scientist in Turkey, had not yet arrived at Cornell University for her new research stint. But she already had an assignment from her future boss, Brian Wansink: Find something interesting about all-you-can-eat buffets.

As the head of Cornell’s prestigious food psychology research unit, the Food and Brand Lab, Wansink was a social science star. His dozens of studies about why and how we eat received mainstream attention everywhere from O, the Oprah Magazine to the Today show to the New York Times. At the heart of his work was an accessible, inspiring message: Weight loss is possible for anyone willing to make a few small changes to their environment, without need for strict diets or intense exercise.

When Siğirci started working with him, she was assigned to analyze a dataset from an experiment that had been carried out at an Italian restaurant. Some customers paid $8 for the buffet, others half price. Afterward, they all filled out a questionnaire about who they were and how they felt about what they’d eaten.

Somewhere in those survey results, the professor was convinced, there had to be a meaningful relationship between the discount and the diners. But he wasn’t satisfied by Siğirci’s initial review of the data.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done an interesting study where the data ‘came out’ the first time I looked at it,” he told her over email.

More here.

Samuel Moyn in the Boston Review:

For a long time, a faction of U.S. liberals shouldered the burdens of a fully inclusive social compact. They rightly indicted welfare-state compromises that served some and not others, and that served even the most privileged beneficiaries—white working-class men—only to some extent. Recognizing that the New Deal was a raw one for the neglected poor as well as African Americans and women, some liberals in the early and mid-1960s gave sustained critique to the structural limitations of New Deal liberalism and the Cold War geopolitics that framed the enterprise.

After 1968, disaster set in. Faced with the sins of Vietnam, the Democrats flirted with ending Cold War militarism only to double down on it. The critique of the welfare state, not the demand for its extension, prevailed. A toxic brew of white identity politics, a rhetoric of “family values” and “personal responsibility,” and, above all, anti-statist economics wafted across party lines. Fifty years later, Donald Trump is in the White House, embattled but victorious.

How did we get here? Much depends on how one narrates the path from 1968 to Trump’s election.

Mark Lilla’s book of last year, The Once and Future Liberal—a follow-up to his hugely influential New York Times op-ed “The End of Identity Liberalism,” published days after Trump’s win—has gone far toward defining the terms of that story. But instead of looking carefully at how liberal self-reinvention failed in facing down its scurrilous enemies, Lilla cuts off his enterprise in a dodge. Lilla thinks that U.S. welfare-state liberalism was doomed in the 1970s, when its neoconservative enemies rightly sounded its death knell. He goes on to report that the heirs of the raucous sixties, failing to reinvent liberalism beyond its prior statist limits, embraced the anti- and pseudo-politics of “identity.” For much of the book, indulging his Francophile proclivities, Lilla channels the moralist Alexis de Tocqueville, blaming our contemporary degeneration on a culture of narcissism, adding a whiff of the novelist Michel Houellebecq in unmasking the “real” legacy of the sixties as a journey into the interior. A cult of the self prospered as politics died.

More here.

Ted Nordhaus in The Breakthrough:

The winemaking facilities at Paolo Bea are not what you might expect.

Giampaolo Bea’s family has made wine in the region for almost 500 years. He is one of the founders of Italy’s natural wine movement and evangelizes his craft, claiming to make wines that represent as pure an expression as possible of the fruit of the vine, with as little human intervention as possible. No synthetic pesticides or fertilizers are used in the vineyard. No chemicals are added during fermentation. He makes wines of exceptional freshness, and his wines have garnered a cult following among natural wine lovers around the world.

But a primitive operation Paolo Bea is not. Bea’s son Giampiero, an architect by training, designed the state-of-the-art winemaking facility. Clad in handsome white stone, the building could easily be mistaken for a modern art museum. Passively heated and cooled, the facility houses four stories, with two floors bunkered into the clay soils to keep the wines cool. Gravity moves the wine from the warm upper floors, where the grapes are crushed and the fermentation is started, through a series of troughs, pipes, and tanks to the lower floors, where the sediments are allowed to settle and the wines finish their fermentation and are aged in oak barrels for up to four years.

Bea may forgo the commercial yeasts that produce a more predictable fermentation and use minimal sulfur dioxide, the preservative that winemakers use to stabilize wines for shipment and sale. But it would be a mistake to assume that Bea’s methods are not technological. If anything, making natural wines that are consistently palatable requires greater precision and control than conventional winemaking.

More here.

Scott Galloway in Esquire:

Over the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—or, as I call them, “the Four”—have aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history. Together, they have a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion (the GDP of France), a staggering 24 percent share of the S&P 500 Top 50, close to the value of every stock traded on the Nasdaq in 2001.

How big are they? Consider that Amazon, with a market cap of $591 billion, is worth more to the stock market than Walmart, Costco, T. J. Maxx, Target, Ross, Best Buy, Ulta, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Saks/Lord & Taylor, Dillard’s, JCPenney, and Sears combined.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Google (now known as Alphabet) are together worth $1.3 trillion. You could merge the world’s top five advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu) with five major media companies (Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, and Viacom) and still need to add five major communications companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish) to get only 90 percent of what Google and Facebook are worth together.

And what of Apple? With a market cap of nearly $900 billion, Apple is the most valuable public company. Even more remarkable is that the company registers profit margins of 32 percent, closer to luxury brands Hermès (35 percent) and Ferrari (29 percent) than peers in electronics. In 2016, Apple brought in $46 billion in profits, a haul larger than that of any other American company, including JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, and Wells Fargo. What’s more, Apple’s profits were greater than the revenues of either Coca- Cola or Facebook. This quarter, it will clock nearly twice the profits that Amazon has produced in its history.

The Four’s wealth and influence are staggering. How did we get here?

More here.

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

Several years ago, Tom Nichols started writing a book about ignorance and unreason in American public discourse—and then he watched it come to life all around him, in ways starker than he had imagined. A political scientist who has taught for more than a decade in the Harvard Extension School, he had begun noticing what he perceived as a new and accelerating—and dangerous—hostility toward established knowledge. People were no longer merely uninformed, Nichols says, but “aggressively wrong” and unwilling to learn. They actively resisted facts that might alter their preexisting beliefs. They insisted that all opinions, however uninformed, be treated as equally serious. And they rejected professional know-how, he says, with such anger. That shook him.

Skepticism toward intellectual authority is bone-deep in the American character, as much a part of the nation’s origin story as the founders’ Enlightenment principles. Overall, that skepticism is a healthy impulse, Nichols believes. But what he was observing was something else, something malignant and deliberate, a collapse of functional citizenship. “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue,” he would write in the preface to The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters, which was published by Oxford last year and quickly became a bestseller. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.” Further down the page, he would add: “I’m worried.”

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Kate Kallaway in The Guardian:

It is more than a year since Clare Wise, sister of the actor Greg Wise, died of cancer. She lived just down the street from the West Hampstead house her brother shares with his wife, Emma Thompson, and their daughter, Gaia. As Greg opens his front door and leads the way into his kitchen, one can see, within minutes, why he was such an indispensable carer to his sister during the last weeks of her life. Today, he has organised elevenses with good coffee and patisserie. As an actor, he is routinely cast as a reprobate (Mountbatten in The Crown a debatable exception). In life, he could not be nicer if he tried. And that’s precisely it: he does not appear to be trying – the charm is not fake. When I ask him how he is feeling about Clare’s death now, his eyes fill. “I’ve had very few days when I’ve not been actively doing something about Clare, be it probate, sorting out her flat, moving furniture – or just the book.” The book is Not That Kind of Love and is a shared effort, written by Clare and Greg. It is fuelled by wisdom and wisecracks, a story of brotherly, and sisterly, love. Clare was 18 months Greg’s senior (he is 51) and worked for the UK Film Council and as vice president of Universal Pictures. She started a blog in 2013 (although the first lump in her breast was found in 2007) and her take on illness drew a crowd – 96,000 hits (by 2015). No wonder: her style is gallant, funny, self-deprecating. It was not until June 2015 that cancer made its terrible comeback into her bones and Greg moved into her flat to take care of her and Grably (her attention-seeking cat). He also took over the blog when she became too sick to write.

Clare’s devotion to her brother (she described him as her “best friend”) is the book’s brightest thread. She relies on him to come with her to hospital appointments knowing he will charm the nurses, tell the right jokes, keep her going. And as to taking on the blog, Greg explains this was a practical decision to protect them from “endless phone calls, emails and texts” and Facebook messages. “It was our way of saying: ‘Please, please, leave us alone. This is what’s happening. Don’t panic.’”

…The big thing death teaches is, he believes, that life is unpredictable. The night before Clare died, Greg had no idea her death was imminent. He quotes from William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade – a “spectacular” book, published 30 years ago: “Goldman said the most important thing to know in the film business is that no one knows anything. We forget that. We never know what is going to happen.”

More here.

Megan O'Grady in The New York Times:

IN A LIVING room in Flint, Mich., Tiantha Williams’s son, Taylor, a bright-eyed 2-year-old in a cheetah-print onesie, is waking from his nap. On the television, commercials for class-action attorneys alternate with an ad for an early childhood intervention program: “Don’t wait. Evaluate.” Williams, an attractive 40-year-old woman, sits on the sofa with her mother, VanNessa, explaining how she first knew that something was terribly wrong with her tap water. “My mom’s dreads started falling out,” she says. “Then all of the house plants died.” Williams was pregnant at the time, and after she contracted listeriosis, Taylor was born two months premature.

I’m in Williams’s home with the artist William Pope.L for his “Flint Water Project,” an installation he did last September for the Detroit gallery What Pipeline. As we talk, a hose snaking from Williams’s basement sink through her kitchen and out the front door fills a 180-gallon tank sitting on the bed of a pick-up truck. Later, back at the gallery, which has been transformed into a Flint Water branded boutique, the water will be bottled by assistants wearing gloves and safety goggles and sold as art objects, with a Pope.L-designed label. It is a project that is characteristic of much of the artist’s work, a theatrical provocation that combines scathing satire with heartfelt activism. The labels feature a sinister image of the Flint Water Plant and reads “16 fl. oz. non-potable.” The reverse notes that the water may contain E. coli, lead, and Legionella.

The “Flint Water Project” began when the gallery’s owners, Alivia Zivich and Daniel Sperry, invited Pope.L to do a show in Detroit. It was Pope.L’s idea to turn the focus to nearby Flint, whose residents were exposed to contaminated drinking water beginning in 2014, after the city’s water source was switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure, triggering a public health crisis — 12 deaths resulted from a Legionella outbreak — that was ignored for nearly two years by Governor Rick Snyder’s administration and allegedly covered up by a number of state officials. Aimed at addressing the disintegrating bedrock of our presumed first-world privileges — drinkable tap water, an accountable government — the project has raised over $30,000 so far for the United Way of Genesee County and Hydrate Detroit. (What Pipeline reimbursed Williams by paying her water bill for two months.) In 2016, after the water was returned to its original source, the EPA once again declared Flint’s water safe, but no one here believes that to be true until the city makes good on its promise to finish replacing its corroded pipes. Meanwhile, the catastrophe continues to unfold in human terms: unsellable homes, more deeply entrenched poverty, and the mass lead poisoning of a generation of children, the cognitive consequences of which are still to be determined. Adding insult to injury, homeowners have had to continue paying for the tainted water — among the highest rates in the country — or face foreclosure. On our way to Flint, a grave Pope.L spoke of an increasingly Orwellian America; of the symbolic value of one troubled city (Detroit, in this case, about one hour from Flint) reaching out to another; of the things, small and large, that can break a community. But sitting on Williams’s sofa waiting for the tank to fill, everything else momentarily falls away, and we become a trio of parents simply trading stories about our kids.

More here.

Bob Boilen at NPR:

If a brain in a jar could observe the world, make sense of it and churn it into a batch of songs, it would make the album American Utopia. This brilliantly analytical album is from David Byrne — an American treasure, an artistic thinker and creator responsible, in part, for the some of the most memorable and distinctive music of the past 40 years. His albums and myriad other projects have been made possible by a lifetime of collaborators that include Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison of the band Talking Heads, his now four-decade friendship with producer Brian Eno and, more recently, with the artists St. Vincent and Fatboy Slim. American Utopia is billed as David Byrne's first solo album since 2004. But solo in his case doesn't mean alone; it means "Everybody's Coming to My House," the title of the album's penultimate track and an apt description of the record's cast of characters.

American Utopia's origins began with tracks from Brian Eno and it grew and morphed from there, bringing in other collaborators and musicians, including producer Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, King Krule, Adele), producer Patrick Dillett (Nile Rogers, Sufjan Stevens,) drummer Joey Waronker (Atoms for Peace, Beck), Isaiah Barr on sax (Onyx Collective) Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) on mellotron, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) on keys and electronics, singer and pianist Sampha and Brian Eno on keys, brass, whistling, robot rhythm guitar and more. The list of contributors is actually longer than this. But, suffice it to say, that inspiration for this record came from an awful lot of talent. The music is intense, it's playful and quite memorable.

More here.

Andrew J. Bacevich in the New York Times:

Steve Coll has written a book of surpassing excellence that is almost certainly destined for irrelevance. The topic is important, the treatment compelling, the conclusions persuasive. Just don’t expect anything to change as a consequence.

The dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, Coll is a seasoned and accomplished reporter. In 2004, “Ghost Wars,” his account of conflict in Afghanistan from the 1979 Soviet invasion to the eve of 9/11, earned him a Pulitzer Prize, his second. “Directorate S” — the title refers to the arm of Pakistani intelligence that covertly supports the Afghan Taliban — is a sequel to that volume, carrying the story up to 2016.

That story is a dispiriting one, abounding in promises from on high, short on concrete results. In December 2001, with Operation Enduring Freedom barely underway, President George W. Bush declared it America’s purpose “to lift up the people of Afghanistan.” Bush vowed that American forces would stay until they finished the job. In December 2017, during a brief visit to Kabul — unannounced because of security concerns — Vice President Mike Pence affirmed that commitment. “We’re here to stay,” he told a gathering of troops, “until freedom wins.”

Yet mission accomplishment remains nowhere in sight. Over the past year, the Taliban have increased the amount of territory they control. Opium production has reached an all-time high. And corruption continues to plague an Afghan government of doubtful legitimacy and effectiveness. For a war now in its 17th year, the United States has precious little to show, despite having lost over 2,400 of its own soldiers and expending an estimated trillion dollars.

More here.

I didn't even know this was a thing!

Melissa Beck at The Quarterly Conversation:

Carson has translated Euripides’s plays before, and in her introduction to her translation of Hekabe she describes how she keeps a file on her computer entitled “Unpleasantness of Euripides.” When I asked her what she has recorded in her document about The Bakkhai she said, not surprisingly, “That is a secret.” But this drama has a lot of unpleasant, disturbing moments, including Pentheus’s murder at the hands of his own mother. (Pentheus is tricked by Dionysus into dressing up as a woman and spying on the maenads, the female followers of the god, and is killed by these women, among whom is the king’s own mother.)

Scholars have debated for decades about what moral lesson or message Euripides intended to convey in his play. Is Pentheus’s punishment deserved or is Dionysos unnecessarily harsh and vengeful? Theories have ranged widely, from a claim that the drama mirrors a deathbed conversion of a poet who had previously rejected the pantheon of gods to an assertion that it is a commentary on religious fanaticism. In an essay entitled, “Tragedy: A Curious Art Form,” Carson states about Euripides’ dramas: “There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers.”

more here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

It is this ability to read closely in the interstices of culture that makes Beard such an invigorating guide. A case in point: she introduces us to the Edwardian artist Christiana Herringham, who travelled to Hyderabad to record the fading Buddhist paintings on the cave walls at Ajanta before they finally succumbed to age and bat guano. On her return to Britain she produced a lavish book containing exquisite reproductions of the best images, all worked up from her meticulous tracings. Exquisite but fallacious. For what Lady Herringham had imagined she had seen on the cave walls was the Indian equivalent of Renaissance religious art, and she set about filling in its gaps and ambiguities accordingly, using colours and shapes and narratives that would have made no sense to the original pilgrims.

Yet Beard makes it clear that Herringham was no cultural colonialist. She understood the religious significance of the art she was trying to save and, once home, was racked with guilt that she might have disturbed a holy shrine. What’s more, given her great support for suffrage and her founding of the National Art Collections Fund, which still saves paintings for the nation today, in another kind of historical narrative she would be held up to us as a heroine, a proto-modern on the side of the angels.

more here.

Eva Hoffman at the NYRB:

The past, in Poland, is not a foreign country; it is morality drama and passion play, combining high ideology and down-and-dirty politics. One recent manifestation of history’s significance has been the creation of several ambitious and architecturally inventive museums dedicated to central events and themes in the Polish past. Since the beginning of this century, four “houses of history” have opened in Warsaw and Gdańsk, attracting many visitors and contributing to the development of neglected neighborhoods. At the same time, the museums have inspired sharp controversies over such topics as freedom of cultural expression, the relationship of Polish to European identity, and interpretations of Polish-Jewish history.

At a time when Poland, with its unexpected hard-right turn and defiance of democratic principles, is once again a matter of European concern, these impressive institutions offer rich clues to the conflicts unsettling the Polish polity and the passions that historical disputes continue to arouse. Apart from undermining the independence of the judiciary and public media, the ruling Law and Justice party has now introduced a law making it a criminal offense to accuse the “Polish nation” of complicity in the Holocaust.

more here.

Ijlal Naqvi in Scatterplot:

Psychohistory is the mathematical social science from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series which can be used to predict important societal developments at the population level. My colleagues writing in this blog series have used Foundation as an illustrative example of structural functionalism for a sociological theory course and likened psychohistory to quantitative sociology. Elsewhere, Paul Krugman described it as an inspiration to his younger self. It is a series which is familiar to more than just the geekier social scientists – there are clearly plenty of us! – after winning the only Best All-Time Series Hugo award and selling many millions of copies. For good measure, the series was packed into the boot of the Tesla roadster recently launched into space.

As recounted in Asimov’s Foundation, psychohistory can be used to generate probabilistic predictions of future events, works with mobs and large populations rather than individuals, can only handle a limited number of independent variables, works best when freedom of action is heavily constrained, and only works when its findings are kept secret. In the opening of the book, Hari Seldon – the founder of psychohistory – tests the new hire to his research institute by having him calculate (in his head) the probability of the galactic empire’s demise within 300 years. The collapse of the empire will lead to 30 millennia of chaos, but Seldon wants to reduce that interregnum to 1000 years by judiciously guiding the rise of a new empire through the use of psychohistory. I argue against the possibility of psychohistory by drawing on concepts of emergence and meaning making, while also questioning the normative basis of such a social science and its usage.

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Susannah Gardiner in Smithsonian:

From a description of the print now, in 2017, it sounds perfectly traditional. A black-and-white etching on paper, an art form that has been around for 500 years. A portrait of a woman. In the background, probably some kind of domestic interior. A simple title, American Girl. But in 1974, when artist Emma Amos made American Girl, now in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the country was roiling with social protest movements—for women’s liberation, for Black Power, for LGBT rights, for Native American rights. Once-silenced groups demanded to be seen and heard. Artists supported these protests not just by marching and writing but through visual arts. Black artists discussed whether particular mediums or styles advanced racial justice.

Romare Bearden, for example, had worked for years in collage, partly as a way to give prominence to images of real black individuals. Debate simmered over whether it was acceptable to be an abstract painter, or whether black artists’ work “needed to be about the black experience in some way,” most likely by depicting black people, says Alex Mann, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings. Some artists at the time looked to Africa for inspiration and sought to create art for and about African people the world over. Others made work that was overtly political or radical, ranging from sculpture in the form of a Molotov cocktail aimed at Aunt Jemima to prints and posters calling for action.

More here.

Sam Haselby in Aeon:

Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is the moral or spiritual critique. This critique rejects Homo economicus as the organising heuristic of human affairs. Human beings, it says, need more than material things to prosper. Calculating power is only a small part of what makes us who we are. Moral and spiritual relationships are first-order concerns. Material fixes such as a universal basic income will make no difference to societies in which the basic relationships are felt to be unjust.

Then there is the material critique of capitalism. The economists who lead discussions of inequality now are its leading exponents. Homo economicus is the right starting point for social thought. We are poor calculators and single-minded, failing to see our advantage in the rational distribution of prosperity across societies. Hence inequality, the wages of ungoverned growth. But we are calculators all the same, and what we need above all is material plenty, thus the focus on the redress of material inequality. From good material outcomes, the rest follows.

The first kind of argument for capitalism’s reform seems recessive now. The material critique predominates. Ideas emerge in numbers and figures. Talk of non-material values in political economy is muted. The Christians and Marxists who once made the moral critique of capitalism their own are marginal. Utilitarianism grows ubiquitous and compulsory.

But then there is Amartya Sen.

More here.