Simina Mistreanu in Foreign Policy:

Rongcheng was built for the future. Its broad streets and suburban communities were constructed with an eye to future expansion, as the city sprawls on the eastern tip of China’s Shandong province overlooking the Yellow Sea. Colorful billboards depicting swans bank on the birds — one of the city’s tourist attractions — returning there every winter to escape the Siberian cold.

In an attempt to ease bureaucracy, the city hall, a glass building that resembles a flying saucer, has been fashioned as a one-stop shop for most permits. Instead of driving from one office to another to get their paperwork in order, residents simply cross the gleaming corridors to talk to officials seated at desks in the open-space area.

At one of these stations, Rongcheng residents can pick up their social credit score.

In what it calls an attempt to promote “trustworthiness” in its economy and society, China is experimenting with a social credit system that mixes familiar Western-style credit scores with more expansive — and intrusive — measures. It includes everything from rankings calculated by online payment providers to scores doled out by neighborhoods or companies. High-flyers receive perks such as discounts on heating bills and favorable bank loans, while bad debtors cannot buy high-speed train or plane tickets.

By 2020, the government has promised to roll out a national social credit system. According to the system’s founding document, released by the State Council in 2014, the scheme should “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” But at a time when the Chinese Communist Party is aggressively advancing its presence across town hall offices and company boardrooms, this move has sparked fears that it is another step in the tightening of China’s already scant freedoms.

But it has been hard to distinguish future promises — or threats — from the realities of how social credit is being implemented. Rongcheng is one place where that future is visible.

More here.

Dustin Illingworth at the Paris Review:

“If one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do,” the British writer and journalist Rebecca West wrote to a friend in 1952. “First, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writing well just can’t be forgiven.” West, ignoring her own advice, neither died prematurely nor blunted the fineness of her writing. As a young woman, she made her name with witty, digressive book reviews that were often wonderfully cutting. (On Henry James: “He splits hairs until there are no longer any hairs to split, and the mental gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness.”) She also wrote several novels and covered world events for prestigious magazines, including the trial of the English fascist William Joyce and the 1947 lynching of Willie Earle. Her final book, an idiosyncratic history of the year 1900, was published just before her death at the age of ninety. It was the capstone to a career that spanned almost seven decades. West’s true audacity was not merely “to go on writing,” as she put it, but to flourish in an insular, nepotistic intellectual culture that was largely hostile to women. She was ambitious, unafraid, and prodigiously gifted—in a word, sharp.

The literary critic Michelle Dean’s new book of the same name, a cultural-history-cum-group-biography, examines the lives and careers of ten sharp women, among them Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Dorothy Parker, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, and Zora Neale Hurston. What unites this disparate group, Dean claims, is the ability “to write unforgettably.”

more here.

Carrie Battan at The New Yorker:

If you need more proof that reality television and social media are this era’s greatest cultural incubators, look no further than Cardi B (born Belcalis Almanzar), the twenty-five-year-old Bronx native who has taken an unprecedented but well-documented path to pop-world domination. In 2014, while working as a stripper, she launched a grassroots campaign for her personality on Instagram and Vine, posting bawdy, unflinching videos in which she monologued about whatever was on her mind—unfaithful boyfriends, the indignity of backhanded compliments, the relative merits of ihop and Philippe Chow—in a thick New York Spanish accent. She sometimes wore nothing but a shower cap. “I ain’t gon’ lie to y’all, these terrorist attacks got my mental a li’l finicky. That’s why I been in the Bronx,” she said in one video, from 2015. “Keep me away from downtown. Ain’t nobody tryna blow up the hood. ”

These little gems of street wisdom got her cast in Mona Scott-Young’s VH1 reality series “Love & Hip Hop.” A chatterbox with a refreshingly unvarnished self-presentation, Cardi, in perhaps her greatest accomplishment, inverts the uses of the platforms she first called home: in her universe, social media and television serve as megaphones for candor and exuberance rather than for deception or artifice.

more here.

Peter Moore at Literary Review:

That Alexander von Humboldt was not dead by the age of thirty-five was a minor miracle. In 1794 he nearly suffocated while testing his miner’s lamp in a subterranean tunnel. The next year he subjected his body to such an extreme series of galvanic experiments that his doctor felt compelled to intervene. In 1800, among the ceiba trees beside the Apure River in Venezuela, he disturbed a resting jaguar (‘never had a tiger appeared to me so enormous’). On that occasion, Humboldt tiptoed to safety, but weeks later he almost paralysed himself while pulling on a sock contaminated with curare, the lethal arrow poison.

Humboldt’s narrowest escape of all, perhaps, came in 1802, during one of his series of high-altitude ascents in the mountains of Ecuador. Nearing a summit, he glanced down to see a bluish light glowing through the snow. He smelled sulphur. ‘He realised with a shudder,’ writes Maren Meinhardt in this evocative and perceptive biography, that he and his companion ‘were on top of the crater itself’. The only thing separating them from the volcano was a ‘thin bridge of compacted snow’.

more here.

Veronique Greenwood in The New York Times:

Outside the kitchen door at the Kuala Belalong Field Studies Center in Brunei, on a number of trees near the balcony, there is a nest of very special ants. They explode.

This colony was studied in depth by scientists who, last week in the journal ZooKeys, published an in-depth description of the newly named species, called Colobopsis explodens, including a portion of their genome sequence. Workers of C. explodens have a distinctive, rather foul talent. When their nest is invaded, they rupture their own abdomens, releasing a sticky, bright yellow fluid laced with toxins on their attackers. Similar to honey bees that die after stinging, the exploded ants do not survive, but their sacrifice can help save the colony. Exploding ants have been known to science for more than 200 years, and the special ability for which they are named was first documented in 1916. But since 1935, no new species from the group had been officially named and described. To do this, ideally one needs to collect members of all the different castes in the colony, from worker to queen, write a detailed description of their appearance, and give the species a Latin name, among other things, said Alice Laciny, a graduate student at the Natural History Museum Vienna who is an author of the new paper.

“We knew they existed, and we did experiments on them,” she said, “but it wasn’t described as an official species yet.”

More here.

Veronique Greenwood in The New York Times:

Outside the kitchen door at the Kuala Belalong Field Studies Center in Brunei, on a number of trees near the balcony, there is a nest of very special ants. They explode.

This colony was studied in depth by scientists who, last week in the journal ZooKeys, published an in-depth description of the newly named species, called Colobopsis explodens, including a portion of their genome sequence. Workers of C. explodens have a distinctive, rather foul talent. When their nest is invaded, they rupture their own abdomens, releasing a sticky, bright yellow fluid laced with toxins on their attackers. Similar to honey bees that die after stinging, the exploded ants do not survive, but their sacrifice can help save the colony. Exploding ants have been known to science for more than 200 years, and the special ability for which they are named was first documented in 1916. But since 1935, no new species from the group had been officially named and described. To do this, ideally one needs to collect members of all the different castes in the colony, from worker to queen, write a detailed description of their appearance, and give the species a Latin name, among other things, said Alice Laciny, a graduate student at the Natural History Museum Vienna who is an author of the new paper.

“We knew they existed, and we did experiments on them,” she said, “but it wasn’t described as an official species yet.”

More here.

Jay Keyser at MIT Press:

When the history of modern theoretical linguistics is written, Morris Halle will be one of its chapter headings. Together with Noam Chomsky, his influence was seminal in turning linguistics from a descriptive discipline in which taxonomy counted for much and explanation for very little into the first explicit theory of the defining feature of homo sapiens, the ability to formulate and express an infinite number of thoughts. In this respect, the revolution wrought by Morris Halle and his colleague, Noam Chomsky, was akin to the Galilean revolution of the 17th century. Both led to profound changes in the way scientists thought about their domains.

I first experienced this revolution when I was a young graduate student at Yale University. Morris, a member of the foreign language section at MIT, was giving a talk at an American Mathematical Society meeting in New York City. The year was 1959. Morris was 36 years old. His talk was on Verner's Law. The effect of that talk on me was electric. I had come from two years of very traditional philological study at Oxford University where I concentrated in Old and Middle English. I had one year of graduate study at Yale under the tutelage of scholars like Bernard Bloch. And here in New York I was listening to an approach to the study of diachronic linguistics that was as radical in its way as the Galilean program was to the neo-scholastics who preceded him. If Morris was right, then everything I had been taught was not just wrong, it was meaningless.

More here.

Amia Srinivasan in the New York Review of Books:

All men are created equal—but in what sense equal? Obviously not in the sense of being endowed with the same attributes, abilities, wants, or needs: some people are smarter, kinder, and funnier than others; some want to climb mountains while others want to watch TV; and some require physical or emotional support to do things that others can do on their own. And presumably they are not “equal” in the sense of demanding identical treatment: a father can give aspirin to his sick child and not his healthy one without disrespecting the equality of his children. Rather, all humans are said to be equal in what philosophers call the “basic,” “abstract,” “deep,” or “moral” sense of equality. We are all, in some fundamental sense, and despite our various differences, of equal worth, demanding, in Ronald Dworkin’s famous phrase, “equal concern and respect.”

For many of the founding fathers, the principle of basic equality was consistent with some people being the property of others; in 1776 the abolitionist Thomas Day remarked that “if there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.” A commitment to basic equality was also apparently consistent with “free” women being legally excluded from civic life. Today, the US’s commitment to basic equality is apparently consistent with not only enormous socioeconomic inequality, but also enormous inequality of opportunity, much of it still determined by race and gender.

The seeming compatibility of basic equality with gross material and social inequality has led more than one critic (Marx most obviously) to wonder if talk of being “created equal” is a hollow spiritual promise designed to placate those suffering from earthly misery. That basic equality is not such a hollow promise—that it means something substantial, and that it is crucial to our political morality—is the central thesis of Jeremy Waldron’s One Another’s Equals.

More here.