Companion Species

Catherine Pond in Avidly:

JaneBret Morgen’s Jane opens on a shot of Gombe. Culled from 140 hours of footage shot by Goodall’s ex-husband, photographer Hugo van Lawick, the movie captures Jane in her mid-twenties, lithe and excitable, her movements set to a lush Phillip Glass soundtrack. Morgen’s film suggests a dual love story: that of Jane as she falls in love with Hugo, and that of Jane as she falls in love with the chimps around Lake Tanganyika. The love affair with Hugo ends after they have a child together: he wants to be on the Serengeti; Jane can’t tear herself away from Gombe. But her love for the chimps endures. Though it seems obvious to us now, the movie highlights the novelty of Jane’s experiences: she is the first, ever, to live among the chimpanzees and record their behavior. After witnessing their great empathy, their ability to nurture and sympathize with each other, and their communal lifestyle, Jane believes the chimpanzees not only to be human, but to be better than human — not our companion species, but our superior species. Humans, she reasons, have war, and bloodshed, and an endless need to inflict pain and conflict on themselves.

Goodall is primarily concerned, in the early years captured by the movie, with a community of chimps centered around alpha male David Greybeard. The lone female of the group, Flo, captures Jane’s interest as well. For a while, Jane observes, interacts, and records the individual personalities of these spectacular primates. In the second half of the footage, though, tragedy strikes: Flo dies, leaving her children and the male chimpanzees bereft. And Jane witnesses something that undoes her prior understanding of the species: the male chimps devolve into violence.

By the end of their warring, one-third of the male chimps in the community lie dead in the river, limbs sprawled, as Goodall looks on with eyes the color of milk: glossy, tear-filled, she turns away from the camera. Her disappointment is far greater than if she had never assumed the goodness of the chimps in the first place: it is, in fact, not disappointment at all, but deep grief. I do not know what it was, for Jane, that restored her faith in the chimpanzees. I do not know how, after that blow, she regained her respect for them, but she did. Her love, though challenged, did not waver, despite witnessing for the first time the violence they were capable of, how in this way, too, they were like the humans she’d sought to avoid.

…In an excerpt from the 2015 New York Times article ‘Jane Goodall is Still Wild at Heart,’ author Paul Tullis describes Goodall’s realization in the early 90s that “there would be no…habitat” for her chimps “if poverty continued to force a growing human population to chop down trees for farmland and firewood. [It] convinced her that the chimps’ lot could not improve until that of the people living near them did.” Thus began “an abrupt career shift, from scientist to conservationist.” Suddenly, Jane’s work bridged an interesting gap.

More here.

Trust Your Own Heart, Write Your Own Story and Fight On

Amy Chozick in The New York Times:

DEAR MADAM PRESIDENT

An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World
By Jennifer Palmieri
180 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $20.

BookNot long after Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat to Donald J. Trump, her campaign’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, shopped around a book idea. “I was advised that if I didn’t have something juicy to share about Hillary, there wouldn’t be interest in me,” she writes in “Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World.” But, she adds, using Clinton’s frequent description of herself, “there aren’t any juicy things to share about Hillary because she’s a simple and serious person.”

In any other election year, an advice book from a high-ranking campaign official on the losing candidate’s side wouldn’t have much coin. But 2016 wasn’t like any other election year, and as it turns out Palmieri has plenty of wisdom — and even a little dish about Clinton — to dispense. In this slim volume, Palmieri neatly weaves her heartbreaking personal story of losing her sister to Alzheimer’s weeks after losing the election with lessons learned from her long career in Democratic politics and Mitch Albom-style wisdom (“When the unimaginable happens, imagine what else may be possible”). Palmieri had been President Obama’s White House communications director when she agreed to join the Clinton campaign. She (like most of us) thought Clinton would win and didn’t think her gender would be much of an obstacle, especially after Obama had broken racial barriers. Clinton warned Palmieri otherwise. Before the race started, Clinton “held forth for more than an hour” to recap each scandal, from the uproar in Arkansas when she resisted taking Bill Clinton’s name to the White House and her doomed 2008 presidential campaign. “She was as bewildered as anyone by the phenomenon of ‘Hillary Clinton,’” Palmieri writes.

More here.

The Chinese Typewriter: A History

Jamie Fisher in the London Review of Books:

Fish04_4005_01Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, The Chinese Typewriter is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat. The Chinese typewriter is ‘one of the most important and illustrative domains of Chinese techno-linguistic innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries … one of the most significant and misunderstood inventions in the history of modern information technology’, and ‘a historical lens of remarkable clarity through which to examine the social construction of technology, the technological construction of the social, and the fraught relationship between Chinese writing and global modernity’. It was where empires met.

Long before it could be a technological reality, the Chinese typewriter was a famous non-object. In 1900, the San Francisco Examiner described a mythical Chinatown typewriter with a 12-foot keyboard and 5000 keys. The joke caught on, playing to Western conceptions of the Chinese language as incomprehensible, impractical and above all baroque: cartoons showed mandarins in flowing robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise philosophical, rather than mechanical, questions. Technical concerns masqueraded as ‘irresolvable Zen kōans’: ‘What is Morse code without letters? What is a typewriter without keys?’ A Chinese typewriter was an oxymoron.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Scott Aaronson’s Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

6a00d8341c562c53ef01b7c95add22970b-800wiYou see, when Pinker says he supports Enlightenment norms of reason and humanism, he really means to say that he supports unbridled capitalism and possibly even eugenics. As I read this sort of critique, the hair stands on my neck, because the basic technique of hostile mistranslation is so familiar to me. It’s the technique that once took a comment in which I pled for shy nerdy males and feminist women to try to understand each other’s suffering, as both navigate a mating market unlike anything in previous human experience—and somehow managed to come away with the take-home message, “so this entitled techbro wants to return to a past when society would just grant him a female sex slave.”

I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic. Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, “and here’s what I’m not saying”—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them.

More here.

Wael Ghonim: Egypt’s revolution, My life, and My Broken Soul

Wael Ghonim:

1_1ioCMNzc4bDwYbAoQGCRdgIn July of 2013, my tears fell as the plane took off. For the first time in my life, I was desperate to leave Egypt, despite not knowing when I would be able to return. A few days prior, a military coup had toppled our two-year-old struggling democracy.

I had lived most of my life as an outsider. I never belonged to a majority. As a child, I was the Egyptian kid growing up in Saudi Arabia, and when I moved to Egypt at the age of 13, I became “the kid who came back from Saudi.” At 17, I became religious, and my family and friends called me an extremist. At 30, I was an anonymous activist–who barely knew any activists. And now, at 37, I’m the Egyptian who just moved to the US and is once again struggling to prove his worth.

My early childhood seems to have been contained in a sheltered bubble I went to private schools in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, spent most of my time at home, and my parents knew everything about my friends. But at the age of 14, I burst that bubble. I decided to leave private school and join a public one.

On the first day in public school, I was shocked. Our classroom had benches for forty students but we were over seventy. There was no fan, no AC, no ventilation. The school yard was huge, but not enough to accommodate the thousands of students.

In my third day at school, a fight erupted in the yard. Kids were throwing rocks randomly in the middle of the yard. I saw blood, knives, and swords. The screams of anger and the ambulance sirens were all that I could hear.

More here.

On Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems

51SC425XIyL._SX322_BO1 204 203 200_ (1)Vidyan Ravinthiran at Poetry Magazine:

In “On the Move,” the verse-rhythm is already more susceptible, and uncertain, than it seems. The commas in the first two lines quoted are marvelously controlled — a delight for the savoring ear — but they also register that “doubt” which is eventually strapped in and hidden (where the fitting of rhyme to rhyme is the poet’s own 
version of this process). Writing of Thomas Hardy, Gunn says his “poetry is almost always robust, never fretful or neurotic.” Yet, in this poem, the hidden neurosis is acknowledged. And we shouldn’t miss, in either the essay on Hardy or “On the Move,” the genuinely mitigating (rather than habitual) word “almost” — as crucial here as when it appears twice at the close of Larkin’s “An Arundel Tomb,” from which it tends to vanish whenever that poem is sentimentally quoted. The internal rhyme with “dust” and “robust” emphasizes the word: Gunn won’t wholly idealize his kinetic toughs.

Comparing this with the verse of his following books, we see how Gunn gradually learned to combine his rhymes with soft-hard meter. “In Santa Maria del Popolo” is slicker, less insistent and more insinuating — the syntactical distensions have become second nature. In 1965, Gunn collaborated with his brother Ander on the photo-book Positives (only “The Old Woman” makes the cut here); two years later, Touch appeared, containing the sequence “Misanthropos” (solipsism 
diagrammed, with a diamond-point chisel), and also the famous title poem.

more here.

Waiting for Steven Pinker’s enlightenment

35696171._UY2850_SS2850_David A. Bell at The Nation:

Pinker might also have to concede that, especially outside of France, most Enlightenment thinkers did not oppose reason to religious faith, as his book implies. They certainly did not consider forms of belief “generators of delusions” or consider a belief in the existence of the soul dangerous. He might have to admit that it was not just brave atheists, but devout Christians, above all Quakers, who were among the first who organized to fight the most barbaric European practice of all, namely slavery.

Historians know that there was in fact no single, monolithic “Enlightenment project,” and that the Enlightenment can be generalized about only with great caution. Throwing this caution to the wind, Pinker has taken his own 21st-century values and projected them back onto the intellectual scene of the 18th century. He has described his work as an “evidence-based take on history,” but by “evidence” he clearly means numerical data. Aren’t books evidence as well?

Meanwhile, Pinker fails to acknowledge how very closely his own radical optimism echoes some of the wilder—and more misguided—pronouncements about the human future from the Enlightenment itself. “The human species…is capable of…unbounded improvement…mankind in a later age are greatly superior to mankind in a former age.”

more here.

Le Corbusier’s Modernism in India

SubramanianiBalkrishna-DoshiSamanth Submaranian at The New Yorker:

Doshi was not alone in infusing Le Corbusier’s modernism with an Indian spirit. A small school of other architects—Charles Correa, Ranjit Sabikhi, Raj Rewal—joined him in this idiom between the nineteen-sixties and the eighties. The Indian state was still building itself out, so there were plenty of public commissions on offer, and the socialist temper of the times agreed with these architects’ interest in planning for utopia. They were displaced only a couple of decades ago, when the country’s economy opened up and a global design aesthetic blew in. Commissions now come from companies that seem to want their buildings to fit into a universal ideal of a central business district. The most ambitious government-funded project in decades—the design of Amaravati, a new state capital—lies in the hands of the world-trotting English starchitect Norman Foster.

India isn’t always a pleasant country for architects. “In some way, architecture has been associated with the country’s urban problems,” Gautam Bhatia, an architect in New Delhi, told me. “The housing is insufficient, the infrastructure is insufficient. When you have these problems, is it even ethical to worry about design? There’s a strange guilt the profession harbors.” Most architects, as a result, work on private commissions, Bhatia said.

more here.

Mary Gordon & Glenda Jackson Talk Poetry, Theater and the State of Feminism

Boris Kachka in The New York Times:

WomenThe novelist Mary Gordon, known for books like 1981’s “The Company of Women,” about a girl who escapes her sheltered upbringing to embrace rebellion in 1960s America, considers her lifelong admiration of British actor-politician Glenda Jackson a “romance.” Gordon was 16 when she first saw Jackson onstage, in the 1965 Broadway production of “Marat/Sade,” a philosophical investigation of the meaning of protest set during and after the French Revolution.

MG: How would you define yourself as an actor in the British tradition?

GJ: I benefited from that huge change in British theater otherwise known as [playwright] John Osborne. When I left drama school, the director said to me, “Don’t expect to work much before you’re 40, because you’re essentially a character actress.” And that was a very accurate assessment, because the British theater then was still essentially a middle-class world. Then Osborne wrote “Look Back in Anger” (1956), and the whole thing just exploded.

MG: I saw “Stevie” (1977) in the West End in London [starring Jackson as British poet Stevie Smith]. I adore her work, and she is just tough as an old boot. Funny, but looks at the darkest things. As Emily Dickinson said, “Tell the truth but tell it slant.”

GJ: I’m so pleased you said that, because I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson. The view of both Stevie and Emily Dickinson seems to be that here were these two solitary, depressed, lonely women, but they lived in these fantastic worlds!

MG: They’re great, greater than anybody around at that time. But their forms are small. And so, female gets defined as minor. Some of American women writers’ best work was done in the form of the short story: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford. I think what’s funny is around the same time that Emily Dickinson wrote, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

GJ: [Laughs] Well, we had a program, years I’m going back now. This woman went back to Oxford to speak at her college. There’d been a big upsurge in women going to university, but it was very rare that a woman had a first-class degree. So she asked her old professor why, and this professor — also a woman — said because their examiners are still in the main men, and they like a lot of flash and filigree, whereas women go to endless lengths of attribution and details.

MG: I teach at a women’s college, Barnard, across the street from Columbia, which used to be male for donkey’s years, and I say to my students, “Do not speak into your collar when you tell me your name. There are men across the street saying things of immense stupidity at the top of their lungs!”

More here.

Saturday Poem

Syntax

Occasionally a god speaks to you,
rutted tollway a flint knife breaching
gutted fields hung on event

horizon, clear cut contradiction
through soybeans and sheared corn: blue
pickup an orange blaze, white letters

blistered, boiling down to tarmac,
asphalt, sulfur fume cured by a methane
gas burn-off pipe, blue flame chipped

with white raising a buttress of weather
-burnt bricks, flaking wind
totem. We stopped to take some cargo

on, weighted October with a freight
of waiting snow traveling east, panic of
starlings startled from stubble husks

by a harvest moon dangled directly
ahead: drove into the pitted sphere, bloody
pearl punched in a sky just out of reach

(vanishing point retreating, peeling),
one of the yellowed streetlights
by now, dimming, diminishing. The road

says to perspective, wait.
.

by Reginald Shepherd
from Otherhood: Poems by Reginald Shepherd
University of Pittsberg Press

The Last Conversation You’ll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right

Mark Bittman and David L. Katz in Grub Street:

Bittman-nutrition-1.nocrop.w1600.h2147483647.2xIt’s beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we’re the only species that can be baffled about the “right” way to eat.

Really, we know how we should eat, but that understanding is continually undermined by hyperbolic headlines, internet echo chambers, and predatory profiteers all too happy to peddle purposefully addictive junk food and nutrition-limiting fad diets. Eating well remains difficult not because it’s complicated but because the choices are hard even when they’re clear.

With that in mind, we offered friends, readers, and anyone else we encountered one simple request: Ask us anything at all about diet and nutrition and we will give you an answer that is grounded in real scientific consensus, with no “healthy-ish” chit-chat, nary a mention of “wellness,” and no goal other than to cut through all the noise and help everyone see how simple it is to eat well.

Here, then, are the exhaustively assembled, thoroughly researched, meticulously detailed answers to any and all of your dietary questions.

Just tell me. Ethical concerns aside, which diet is the best: vegan, vegetarian, or omnivorous?

We don’t know, because the study to prove that any one diet is “best” for human health hasn’t been done, and probably can’t be. So, for our health, the “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst. That can be with or without seafood; with or without dairy; with or without eggs; with or without some meat; high or low in total fat.

More here.

THE GEEKS WHO PUT A STOP TO PENNSYLVANIA’S PARTISAN GERRYMANDERING

Issie Lapowsky in Wired:

GerrymanderingPA-TAThe morning John Kennedy was set to testify last December, he woke up at 1:30 am, in an unfamiliar hotel room in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, adrenaline coursing through his veins. He'd never gone to court before for anything serious, much less taken the stand.

Some time after sunrise, he headed to the courthouse, dressed in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, and spent the next several hours reviewing his notes and frantically pacing the halls. “I think I made a groove in the floor,” Kennedy says.

By 3:30 pm, it was finally time. Kennedy’s answers started off slowly, as he worked to steady his nerves. Then, about an hour into his testimony, Exhibit 81 flashed on a screen inside the courtroom. It was a map of part of Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, but it might as well have been a chalk outline of a body.

“It was like a crime scene,” explains Daniel Jacobson, an attorney for Arnold & Porter, which represented the League of Women Voters in its bid to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2011 electoral map, drawn by the state’s majority Republican General Assembly. The edges of the district skitter in all manner of unnatural directions, drawing comparisons to a sketch of Goofy kicking Donald Duck.

As an expert witness for the League of Women Voters and a political scientist at West Chester University, Kennedy’s job was to show how the state’s map had evolved over time, and to prove that the General Assembly had drawn it specifically to ensure that Republicans would always win the most seats in Congress.

More here.

Leaked: Cambridge Analytica’s blueprint for Trump victory

Paul Lewis and Paul Hilder in The Guardian:

2600The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

The document was presented to Cambridge Analytica employees in London, New York and Washington DC weeks after Trump’s victory, providing an insight into how the controversial firm helped pull off one of the most dramatic political upsets in modern history.

More here.

Friday Poem

In a Station

once I walked through the halls of a station
someone called your name
in the streets I heard children laughing
they all sound the same

wonder, could you ever know me
know the reason why I live
is there nothing you can show me
life seems so little to give

once I climbed up the face of a mountain
and ate the wild fruit there
fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
and I could taste your hair

isn't everybody dreaming
then the voice I hear is real
out of all the idle scheming
can't we have something to feel

once upon a time leaves me empty
tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
still I don't know your name

must be some way to repay you
out of all the good you gave
if a rumor should delay you
love seems so little to say

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink

Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy

Paul Voosen in Science:

SmileAs a teenager in the 1950s, Vaclav Smil spent a lot of time chopping wood. He lived with his family in a remote town in what was then Czechoslovakia, nestled in the mountainous Bohemian Forest. On walks he could see the Hohenbogen, a high ridge in neighboring West Germany; less visible was the minefield designed to prevent Czechs from escaping across the border. Then it was back home, splitting logs every 4 hours to stoke the three stoves in his home, one downstairs and two up. Thunk. With each stroke his body, fueled by goulash and grain, helped free the sun's energy, transiently captured in the logs. Thunk. It was repetitive and tough work. Thunk. It was clear to Smil that this was hardly an efficient way to live.

Throughout his career, Smil, perhaps the world's foremost thinker on energy of all kinds, has sought clarity. From his home office near the University of Manitoba (UM) in Winnipeg, Canada, the 74-year-old academic has churned out dozens of books over the past 4 decades. They work through a host of topics, including China's environmental problems and Japan's dietary transition from plants to meat. The prose is dry, and they rarely sell more than a few thousand copies. But that has not prevented some of the books—particularly those exploring how societies have transitioned from relying on one source of energy, such as wood, to another, such as coal—from profoundly influencing generations of scientists, policymakers, executives, and philanthropists. One ardent fan, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in Redmond, Washington, claims to have read nearly all of Smil's work. "I wait for new Smil books," Gates wrote last December, "the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie."

Now, as the world faces the daunting challenge of trying to curb climate change by weaning itself from fossil fuels, Smil's work on energy transitions is getting more attention than ever. But his message is not necessarily one of hope. Smil has forced climate advocates to reckon with the vast inertia sustaining the modern world's dependence on fossil fuels, and to question many of the rosy assumptions underlying scenarios for a rapid shift to alternatives. "He's a slayer of bullshit," says David Keith, an energy and climate scientist at Harvard University. ive Smil 5 minutes and he'll pick apart one cherished scenario after another. Germany's solar revolution as an example for the world to follow? An extraordinarily inefficient approach, given how little sunlight the country receives, that hasn't reduced that nation's reliance on fossil fuels. Electric semitrailers? Good for little more than hauling the weight of their own batteries. Wind turbines as the embodiment of a low-carbon future? Heavy equipment powered by oil had to dig their foundations, Smil notes, and kilns fired with natural gas baked the concrete. And their steel towers, gleaming in the sun? Forged with coal.

"There's a lot of hopey-feely going on in the energy policy community," says David Victor, an expert on international climate policy at the University of California, San Diego. And Smil "revels in the capability to show those falsehoods."

More here.