Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins in The Guardian:

Since Donald Trump’s election, the American left has asked itself tough questions about what it must do to respond to his rise. An equally important conversation needs to happen over the future of the American right. In a democratic system based on alternation in power, the left has an interest in the kind of opponent it is confronted with. When the other side is captured by far-right populism, the damage to democracy can be great.

From that point of view, Christian voters are a constituency that can play a key role in moving the right away from the likes of Trump. Their overwhelming support for him at the polls was essential to his success, but it seems to be at odds with fundamental Christian principles. This suggests there is scope for a different kind of conservative movement in this country.

Christian democracy, a political ideology embodied by figures like Germany’s Angela Merkel, contributed to establishing stable democracies in Europe in the aftermath of the second world war. The US was often deeply supportive of this process, yet never cultivated an analogous political movement at home. Now that it is facing a serious institutional threat of its own, it can perhaps learn from what it has long preached abroad.

More here.

From Quillette:

Quillette: What are some of the classic experiments in psychology that you think an educated person should know about?

Steven Pinker: Where to begin? I’d cite studies of illusions and biases, to remind people of the fallibility of our perceptual and cognitive faculties. These would include experiments on visual attention by the late Anne Treisman and others showing that people are unaware of visual material they don’t attend to, together with any experiment on memory showing how un-photographic our recollections are (for example, Elizabeth Loftus’s studies on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, or even the low-tech study in which people are asked to draw a penny, an object they have seen thousands of times). Let’s add Slovic, Tversky, and Kahneman’s demonstrations of illusions in reasoning about probability and risk. Overconfidence and the Lake Wobegon Effect (everyone is above average). Cognitive dissonance and our self-serving rationalizations. The Fundamental Attribution Error — we overestimate the importance of individual traits, and underestimate the power of the situation. And the basic findings of behavioral genetics: that all individual differences are partly heritable.

Q: Who is the most underrated psychologist of the 20-21st Century?

SP: Judith Rich Harris, who was kicked out of the graduate program in my department (Harvard psychology) in the 1960s because she “didn’t fit the stereotype of a psychology grad student”), and after writing several textbooks, came out in 1998 with The Nurture Assumption, the first book on parenting and personality that took the results of behavioral genetics seriously. She showed that people (including psychologists) were deluded by the heritability of personality into overestimating the effects of parenting on personality, and that peers, not parents, are the primary socializers of children.

More here.

Michael Saler in The Weekly Standard:

Caution: Netflix’s Black Mirror may be hazardous to your health. This anthology series about the perils of modern technologies is one of the most captivating shows on television; with its talented casts, immersive worlds, and tricksy narratives, it approaches platinum heights in this new golden age of television. But be prepared to binge and cringe simultaneously, because it is also the darkest series being broadcast today. While laden with satirical humor, the often-harrowing episodes can leave an unsettling residue of anxiety.

The series premiered in Britain in 2011 with an episode, “The National Anthem,” that set the tone. An opinion-conscious prime minister is thrown into crisis when a popular member of the royal family (think Princess Diana) is kidnapped. Her terrified pleas for help are broadcast across the nation, together with the kidnapper’s condition for her release: The prime minister must have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television. The public ultimately supports this demand through their comments and “likes” online, driven as much by an unstated desire to witness the humiliating spectacle as by any concern for the princess. And it gets its wish. As the prime minister’s pained and sweaty exertions are broadcast, we see the viewers’ facial expressions change from amused disbelief to shock, disgust, and ultimately chagrin at their complicity in the dehumanizing spectacle. Those new to the series may experience a similar spectrum of emotions. “The National Anthem” may be the first episode, but it isn’t necessarily the best place to begin watching Black Mirror. Since it doesn’t matter in what order the shows are seen, the 2014 holiday special “White Christmas” or the third season’s “San Junipero” would each make a kinder—and more representative—starting point.

Black Mirror, which now runs to four seasons and 19 episodes, is unrelenting in its depiction of connectivity as a conduit for cruelty. A condemned murderer is repeatedly tortured in a privatized prison that doubles as a public attraction. A doctor with a malfunctioning brain implant meant to heighten his empathy to patients’ discomfort becomes so addicted to pain that he ecstatically slices off portions of his own body.

More here.

Jonathan Beckman in 1843 Magazine:

Jonathan Beckman in 1843 Magazine:

What Are Women Made Of

There are many kinds of open.
…………………………..—Audre Lorde

We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;

we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch,
sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root

and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
and lobe. We are hippocampus and exposed nerve

and cornea. Areola, pigment, melanin, and nails.
Varicose. Cellulite. Divining rod. Sinew and tissue,

saliva and silt. We are blood and salt, clay and aquifer.
We are breath and flame and stratosphere. Palimpsest

and bibelot and cloisonné fine lines. Marigold, hydrangea,
and dimple. Nightlight, satellite, and stubble. We are

pinnacle, plummet, dark circles, and dark matter.
A constellation of freckles and specters and miracles

and lashes. Both bent and erect, we are all give
and give back. We are volta and girder. Make an incision

in our nectary and Painted Ladies sail forth, riding the back
of a warm wind, plumed with love and things like love.

Crack us down to the marrow, and you may find us full
of cicada husks and sand dollars and salted maple taffy

weary of welding together our daydreams. All sweet tea,
razor blades, carbon, and patchwork quilts of Good God!

and Lord have mercy! Our hands remember how to turn
the earth before we do. Our intestinal fortitude? Cumulonimbus

streaked with saffron light. Our foundation? Not in our limbs
or hips; this comes first as an amen, a hallelujah, a suckling,

swaddled psalm sung at the cosmos’s breast. You want to
know what women are made of? Open wide and find out.

by Bianca Lynne Spriggs
from Poetry, April 2018

What Are Women Made Of

……There are many kinds of open.
…………………………..—Audre Lorde

We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;

we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch,
sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root

and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
and lobe. We are hippocampus and exposed nerve

and cornea. Areola, pigment, melanin, and nails.
Varicose. Cellulite. Divining rod. Sinew and tissue,

saliva and silt. We are blood and salt, clay and aquifer.
We are breath and flame and stratosphere. Palimpsest

and bibelot and cloisonné fine lines. Marigold, hydrangea,
and dimple. Nightlight, satellite, and stubble. We are

pinnacle, plummet, dark circles, and dark matter.
A constellation of freckles and specters and miracles

and lashes. Both bent and erect, we are all give
and give back. We are volta and girder. Make an incision

in our nectary and Painted Ladies sail forth, riding the back
of a warm wind, plumed with love and things like love.

Crack us down to the marrow, and you may find us full
of cicada husks and sand dollars and salted maple taffy

weary of welding together our daydreams. All sweet tea,
razor blades, carbon, and patchwork quilts of Good God!

and Lord have mercy! Our hands remember how to turn
the earth before we do. Our intestinal fortitude? Cumulonimbus

streaked with saffron light. Our foundation? Not in our limbs
or hips; this comes first as an amen, a hallelujah, a suckling,

swaddled psalm sung at the cosmos’s breast. You want to
know what women are made of? Open wide and find out.

by Bianca Lynne Spriggs
from Poetry, April 2018

Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian:

Sadly, the American dream is dead,” Donald Trump proclaimed when he announced his candidacy for president of the United States. It seemed an astonishing thing for a candidate to say; people campaigning for president usually glorify the nation they hope to lead, flattering voters into choosing them. But this reversal was just a taste of what was to come, as he revealed an unnerving skill at twisting what would be negative for anyone else into a positive for himself. By the time he won the election, Trump had flipped much of what many people thought they knew about the US on its head. In his acceptance speech he again pronounced the American dream dead, but promised to revive it. We were told that this dream of prosperity was under threat, so much so that a platform of “economic nationalism” carried the presidency.

Reading last rites over the American dream was disquieting enough. But throughout the campaign, Trump also promised to put America first, a pledge renewed – twice – in his inaugural address. It was a disturbing phrase; think pieces on the slogan’s history began to sprout up, explaining that it stretches back to efforts to keep the US out of the second world war.

In fact, “America first” has a much longer and darker history than that, one deeply entangled with the country’s brutal legacy of slavery and white nationalism, its conflicted relationship to immigration, nativism and xenophobia. Gradually, the complex and often terrible tale this slogan represents was lost to mainstream history – but kept alive by underground fascist movements. “America first” is, to put it plainly, a dog whistle. The expression’s backstory seems at first to uncannily anticipate Trump and (at least some of) his supporters, but the truth is that eruptions of American conservative populism are nothing new – and “America first” has been associated with them for well over a century. This is merely the latest iteration of a powerful strain of populist demagoguery in American history, from president Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) to Louisiana senator Huey Long a century later – one that now extends to Trump.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian:

For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.

No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.

As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”

For Marx and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together? Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.

More here.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future. Unable to pin down the state of these systems precisely enough to predict how they’ll play out, we live under a veil of uncertainty.

But now the robots are here to help.

In a series of results reported in the journals Physical Review Letters and Chaos, scientists have used machine learning — the same computational technique behind recent successes in artificial intelligence — to predict the future evolution of chaotic systems out to stunningly distant horizons. The approach is being lauded by outside experts as groundbreaking and likely to find wide application.

“I find it really amazing how far into the future they predict” a system’s chaotic evolution, said Herbert Jaeger, a professor of computational science at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany.

The findings come from veteran chaos theorist Edward Ott and four collaborators at the University of Maryland. They employed a machine-learning algorithm called reservoir computing to “learn” the dynamics of an archetypal chaotic system called the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation.

More here.

Sam Cooper in Global News:

Criminal syndicates that control chemical factories in China’s booming Guangdong province are shipping narcotics, including fentanyl, to Vancouver, washing the drug sales in British Columbia’s casinos and high-priced real estate, and transferring laundered funds back to Chinese factories to repeat this deadly trade cycle, a Global News investigation shows.

The flow of narcotics and chemical precursors — and a rising death count in western Canada caused by synthetic opioids — is driven by sophisticated organized crime groups known as Triads.

The Triads have infiltrated Canada’s economy so deeply that Australia’s intelligence community has coined a new term for innovative methods of drug trafficking and money laundering now occurring in B.C.

It is called the “Vancouver Model” of transnational crime.

More here.

Gideon Levy in the New York Times:

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I bade farewell to the Gaza Strip. In thrall to the great illusion, sweet and dizzying, that were the 1993 Oslo peace accords, I was sure that Gaza was about to be liberated from Israel’s occupation. The fate of that stretch of land mattered to me very much. There were nearly 700,000 Palestinian refugees there at the time, many already second- and third-generation. Most lived in camps, in disgraceful conditions.

Two decades later, Gaza is even worse off. The number of refugees there has almost doubled, reaching 1.3 million, out of a total population close to 1.9 million. Its residents are even less free. In fact, they have been under blockade by Israel — with help from Egypt — after the militant group Hamas took power in 2007. Unemployment has reached nightmarish figures: more than 46 percent overall in late 2017, and close to 65 percent for people under 30. Israel continues to tighten its hold, building an underground wall into the sandy soil to block tunnels that Hamas has dug.

This Friday, like the three Fridays before, thousands of Gazans faced offhundreds of Israeli soldiers across a fence. They are expected to gather again for more protests every Friday until May 15, the day that commemorates what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 — which meant the loss of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages.

More here.

Like You

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Roque Dalton
From Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination
Curbstone Press, 2000
translation: Jack Hirschman

Read more »

Like You

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Roque Dalton
From Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination
Curbstone Press, 2000
translation: Jack Hirschman
.

Como Tu

Yo, como tu,
amo el amor, la vida, el dulce encanto
de las cosas, el paisaje
celeste de los días de enero.

También mi sangre bulle
y río por los ojos
que han conocido el brote de las lágrimas.

Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.

Y que mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida,
el amor,
las cosas,
el paisaje y el pan,
la poesía de todos.
.
.

Barrett Hathcock at The Quarterly Conversation:

But now Richard Ford has written a memoir. To be sure, it is strange, almost an anti-memoir. The book consists of two halves, a recently written remembrance of his father and a remembrance of his mother, written shortly after her death in the early 1980s. The conceit of the book is that his parents are essentially unknowable and that they had a rich and fulfilling life before he arrived on the scene—that he came “between them.” His view is of the only child who sees the margin where his life ends and theirs continues on without him. The result is a memoir that is empathetic to his parents’ sovereignty as adults.

The best part of the book is about his parents’ life before he came along. His father, Parker Ford, was a salesman for the Faultless Starch Company who travelled around the south visiting grocery stores, demonstrating and hawking his product. For many of those early years his wife Edna simply travelled with him. They kept an apartment in Arkansas that was mostly a provisional landing pad and otherwise lived on the road out of hotels and diners, and the picture Ford paints is a pre-interstate-highway-system, responsibility-free bliss. “He and she—barely out of their twenties and exceedingly happy—handed out little boxed starch samples and cotton hot pads to the country girls, who were flattered to receive such gifts at a time when nobody had anything.”

more here.

Regina Marler at the NYRB:

The celebrated photographer Berenice Abbott, who began her career as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant in Paris from 1923 to 1926 and shot her first portraits on his studio balcony, does not appear in his four-hundred-page autobiography, Self-Portrait (1963). This omission was “rather dirty,” Abbott felt, even “bitchy,” and seemed to show that Man Ray was still miffed at her early success, as Julia Van Haaften recounts in her comprehensive new biography, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. Abbott and Man Ray had been good friends for years, meeting soon after her arrival in New York from Ohio as a journalism student in 1918; they were so close in New York, in fact, that Man Ray had asked if she would do him the favor of being named as co-respondent in his divorce case.

She had starved in New York and was starving in Paris when Man Ray hired her for his darkroom. It was Abbott’s idea. He had complained about his latest “know-it-all” studio assistant, and Abbott jumped in: “What about me? I don’t know a thing.” Her rapid learning surprised them both. “I liked photography. Photography liked me,” she recalled.

more here.